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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:

* [Logitech K860 has Bluetooth!](https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/k860-split-ergonomic.920-009166.html)
* [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).

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 543 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

While it may sound like a normal John and Craig episode, it’s actually not. Craig and I couldn’t find a time to record together this week, so instead we’re recording two separate episodes in which we attempt to answer 40 listener questions.

I am going to tackle the first 20. Of course, all this wouldn’t be possible without our intrepid producer, Megana Rao. Megana, welcome to the show.

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

**John:** I say welcome to the show, but you’re actually always on the show. We can hear your laughter sometimes in the background, even when you’re not asking questions. Today you’ll be asking so many questions.

**Megana:** I’m ready. I’ve done all my vocal exercises.

**John:** Sounds good. Now next week you’ll be doing the same exercise with Craig, who will answer 20 more questions. I’m curious who’s going to have the better answers. I will be listening to this without having any exposure to it. It’ll all be a surprise to me when the next week’s episode comes out.

**Megana:** Yes, but it’s not a competition, because they’re different questions. I couldn’t bear to pit you guys against each other.

**John:** Also, we’ll have a Bonus Segment, as always. This week, Megana and I will discuss murder architecture, specifically how it relates to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Fresh. Basically, who are these architects and contractors who are hired to build these houses in which all you can really do is kill somebody? I really want to get into the backstory behind how these houses exist, because they’re really cool and cinematic, but they’re also not practical for things other than murder. It’ll be fun.

You and Craig, I suspect you’re going to discuss millennial stuff, because Craig is obsessed with you as a millennial.

**Megana:** I hope to represent us well.

**John:** Represent us, but not me, because I’m Generation X. You’re representing your people.

**Megana:** Correct.

**John:** Your millennial identity. Last week’s episode, we were talking about keyboards. Craig mentioned that he was incredibly fast typist, he was over 100 words per minute. I was joking that you were a slow typist. We actually took a typing test and found out that you are a faster typist than I am. What number did you get?

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

**John:** I had 62 words per minute and 100% accuracy. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the test that we used, so if you want to compare yourself to the Scriptnotes folks to see how well you did. The 100% accuracy, I did make some mistakes and then back up and fix some things.

**Megana:** It counts against your total time, so I think that’s fair.

**John:** I think it’s fair too. That’s with my current weird keyboard. I do feel like the typing test, obviously you’re looking at stuff and you’re trying to type what they’re having you type, but that’s not necessarily reflective of how I really type in real life, which is basically dumping my brain out onto a page, which I think could be a little bit faster than that.

**Megana:** Because this typing test was you had to accurately notate what words they were giving you, it wasn’t–

**John:** Yeah. If I wanted to write their words, I wouldn’t be a screenwriter. In our discussion of ergonomic keyboards, several listeners also pointed me towards the ZSA Moonlander, which is a very cool looking keyboard. I always wanted to try it out, because it does look neat. It’s one of these very split keyboards where your left half and right half are completely separate units that you can position however you want to position them. They look neat. I’m eager to try something. An advantage to it may be that it’s much more portable, because one of the challenges I have with my weird vertical keyboard is it’s a bitch to pack. It’d be great to have something I could travel with if I need to travel. I’m going to be traveling this next week, so we’ll see.

**Megana:** Do you normally travel with that keyboard?

**John:** I don’t. Normally if I’m just traveling, I’m just using my MacBook, which is fine for short times, but it’s harder for longer periods of time. The year I was living in Paris, I did have to travel with my big keyboard, and so I had to find a whole setup there for how I was going to make this work with the keyboard. It’s a fragile thing to be packing and traveling with this stuff.

**Megana:** It’s massive.

**John:** It’s massive. It’s big.

**Megana:** This thing’s gorgeous though. I hope you get it.

**John:** You’ll see it. It’s coming in about two weeks. By the time I’m back from my trip, it’ll be here and we’ll try it out.

**Megana:** Cool.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for all these questions. Usually on the show, the questions get pushed to the end of the episode. Now we’re going to start with the questions and go through it. You and I were both looking at the 72 Questions with Phoebe Waller-Bridge from–

**Megana:** Vogue.

**John:** Vogue, yeah. This will not be nearly as scripted, but hopefully we’ll have some good answers to questions that our listeners actually really truly have.

**Megana:** Cool. Are you ready?

**John:** I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m stretched. I’m limber. Let’s go for it.

**Megana:** We’re going to start with a short one. Steve asked, “Are Stuart Specials a bad thing?”

**John:** Stuart Specials are what we call when we get a Three Page Challenge that starts in a way where a situation, a scene has happened, and then at the end of the three pages, then we flash back to the real time. Essentially, it’s opened in a flash forward. I don’t think Stuart Specials are always a bad thing. They become a cliché in the Three Page Challenge.

Here’s an argument for the Stuart Special is that you’re giving the reader and viewer a taste of where your movie is headed to and what it’s going to evolve into, which may not be indicative of what the normal start of the movie would be. It’s attention-grabbing in that way. Go opens with a Stuart Special. That’s fine. It is a little bit of a cliché. Megana, as you’re reading through Three Page Challenges, do you find yourself avoiding any of them because they are cliché within our little domain?

**Megana:** I think that’s exactly it. I like Stuart Specials when I see them on screen, but when I’m reading through so many Three Page Challenges, I think I get frustrated because I feel tricked by the end. I’m like, “Where is this going?” because I only have the three pages.

**John:** When I see them in real movies, they can be really effective and it gives you a sense like, oh, this is where it’s headed. You’re also waiting for that scene to happen. Sometimes you can become impatient for that moment to happen, because you know it’s supposed to be there.

**Megana:** I also realized this as I was reading this question. I forget about the beginnings of movies a lot.

**John:** That’s fair too. A movie that’s doing well, a movie that’s setting us up well and going well scene by scene by scene, you forget what you saw before, and you’re really just in it in the moment, so therefore you’ll forget about the Stuart Special. Hopefully, it caught your attention, but it’s not making you think back to it. If you’re thinking back to the opening halfway through the movie, something’s not working halfway in the movie. Cool.

**Megana:** Sam asks, “I’ve encountered a lot of advice over the years about dealing with scripts that are too long, but I rarely see people talk about what to do when a script comes up short in length, like when a feature draft is 75 pages. I realize I might just write 75-page features, but I have a hunch that I rush through things. I’m a video/podcast editor as my day job, and I think my instincts to cut things down take over during outlining and writing. I have a hard time not going as quickly as I can from wherever I’m starting a script to the ending I have in mind. Do you have any advice for how to allow scripts to breathe or for how to take a short script and look for what might be missing from it?”

**John:** Sam, I think the real problem here is you probably don’t have a second act. I’m guessing that what you’re really writing is a first act and a third act, and you’re not really allowing a second act to breathe and develop and grow and change. By that, I mean you’re creating a situation and then you’re resolving that situation, without building and conflicts and other developments in between. I suspect it’s not that your scenes are too short, that you’re running too efficiently. It’s just that you’re not actually creating enough obstacles along the way for your story to finish. There’s nothing inherently wrong about a short script. I think we all love things that can clock in at under two hours. You are probably just not actually creating enough moments of conflict and development and suspense. You’re just not doing enough there. It really is probably an outlining phase problem.

Before you start your next project, really look at where are you starting, where do you think you want to end up, but where are the surprising things along the way that can happen? What are the detours that will be rewarding? Remember, you as the writer know where it’s all headed, but the audience shouldn’t know where it’s all headed. Really, what does the character want in the moment? How can you send that character down a road that makes sense for the character, that point, but is going to lead to new obstacles and new complications? I think you’re just probably missing beats. You’re just not letting yourself explore and enjoy the story the way that you want to in a feature film.

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

**John:** A couple things. I’ve talked on this show a lot about how I have a stack of index cards scattered throughout the house. If I need to write something down, like a note, an idea, a thought, I’ll just grab an index card and write it down and put it some place where I can find it again. If it’s in the middle of the night, I will take that and stick it by the bedroom door so that it’s there and I can take it downstairs in the morning and process it and put it in my notes of things to do.

I will also use the Notes app on my phone for things like casting lists or like, that’s a good idea for this person in this role. The Notes app is really helpful for that. We certainly share notes between me and my husband for things like the grocery list and stuff like that, stuff we want to be able to easily access and add to and share at any moment.

For things that I want to hold on to and I don’t have a thing to do with them right now, but I need to not forget them, I started using Roam, R-O-A-M. It’s called Roam Research, which is like a personal Wiki where you can just dump information. I’ll have broad categories of places where I’ll put stuff. It wants to enter everything into a daily view, so you can track what day you entered some stuff. Then it’ll have little category labels for things. If this is related to a project, I’ll just use that project category and dump in my notes for that. That’s how I’ve processed those individual index cards full of information, make sure I don’t forget those things. I don’t do a great job of going back through that, honestly, and remembering it, but I know it’s always there. It keeps it from being a loop in my brain.

I think one of the best things about taking notes is it just frees your brain from having to remember stuff yourself. The only way you can remember things is by looping it and keeping an active memory. Put it in that long-term memory, and then you don’t have to stress out about it.

**Megana:** Super helpful.

**John:** Megana, what do you use for your notes? I see you doing different things. What are you using right now for your notes?

**Megana:** I mostly use the Notes app on my phone, but it’s an absolute mess. I found a note on there the other day that just said “animals” and I have no idea what that means or why I wrote that. I will write things in the middle of the night or whatever, I have an idea, I’ll create a new note for it, but it’s not organized and it’s not functional in any way.

**John:** We don’t have phones in our bedroom, and so I don’t ever turn on my phone in my room. Having just physical paper is good, because it lets me get it out of my head, but it doesn’t invite me to do anything more with it. I can’t look something up in the middle of the night, which is really helpful for me.

**Megana:** That’s very cool. I’m going to try the index card thing.

**John:** If you’re reading a book and you need to take a note about something in a book, how do you do that?

**Megana:** I guess I take a picture of it on my phone.

**John:** Then do you do something with that picture or it just sits in your photo roll?

**Megana:** It just sits in my photo album.

**John:** I think using the camera as a memory tool, it’s so helpful and it’s just so handy, but it’s hard to doing anything with that after the fact. Now with the iPhone, you can select the text in a photo and copy it out. It’s a thing to do, but you have to actually remember to do that.

**Megana:** You can search by text now, which is cool, because I’m always quoting things that I read, but have no sense of where they came from, so that’s helpful.

**John:** It’s nice. If I’m reading a book and there’s something I do need to remember, I will grab an index card and just write it down, because the actual process of having to actually write it makes me think about it more and makes me think of the context of it. I will, again, try to just use paper when I can.

**Megana:** Do you ever annotate your books?

**John:** I’m not a person who marks them up a lot. I don’t underline or mark stuff up. You’ll see some books around the house where I’ve done that, but it’s really the exception. Are you a marker-up of books?

**Megana:** If it’s something I’m using towards my writing, then yes, but otherwise, not really.

**John:** Makes sense.

**Megana:** It’s a lot of effort.

**John:** I feel like I’m never going to see that again. I have that shame about not marking up books, because what I was taught in grade school and libraries is you just don’t mark up books. I always feel bad for the next person who’s going to get that book.

**Megana:** Exactly, or embarrassed that they’re going to think the things that I marked up were lame.

**John:** It’s always fun when I read a book on Kindle. You can see that a bunch of people have marked, have highlighted a passage. It’s like, oh yeah, I can see why everyone has highlighted that one passage.

**Megana:** I know, but I judge them for that. I’m like, oh really?

**John:** So basic.

**Megana:** Clint asks, “Since shorts move so quickly, I’d like your opinion on ways to do character development. It feels like there isn’t much time to develop a character. Should we strive for longer shorts of characters more the focus rather than plot?”

**John:** Clint, I wonder if you’re not thinking about shorts in the right way, because I think we talk so much on this podcast about character development and characters having wants and needs and going through a journey, and there’s this whole sense of leaving home and emerging transformed, and it’s all about a onetime journey that transforms a character. Shorts aren’t necessarily that. Shorts are often just a situation. Shorts are like short stories. They’re really describing what a character is experiencing. They’re like a snapshot in many ways, more than a full journey at times.

I think maybe you can ease off on your pressure to have this massive character development, because there’s not really a time or space for that. It’s not really what a short film is designed to do. A short film is more like a joke. It has a setup, development, and then a punchline, a delivery. That’s great. You don’t have to think about, oh, I need to make a longer short in order to have better character development. No. I think as long as you’re really exploring the question that the short film is asking and delivering a good answer, that’s really the goal.

What you may also be thinking about is how many characters you’re trying to introduce into your short film. I think some of the best short films are really constrained in the number of characters they’re giving us, so it can really follow one person’s short journey in it. You may not have time or space to have meaningful characters set up who are having real conflict with each other. Really, it’s about one character encountering a situation and getting through a situation.

**Megana:** I agree with you. I think maybe the expectation for a short is different. Even as an audience member, I’m not expecting to see character development. I just want to see something, a little slice-of-life sort of thing.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s a postcard rather than a full book.

**Megana:** 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 that you don’t own.”

**John:** I tend to think about music pretty early on in the process, because I’m really trying to figure out what does this movie feel like, what does this show feel like, what does it sound like. I will try to build playlists for myself in Apple Music pretty early on, just like, this is what reminds me of this movie that I’m writing. Those songs won’t necessarily make it into the soundtrack. They may not be part of the script, but they’re just giving me a sense of what this all feels like.

There’s a new project that I may be doing. I’ve already started pulling some songs that make me feel like, oh, I would love to see this in context of the show, or it just reminds me of what I want this to feel like. This is a composer that I think would be fantastic for it. This is a vibe that I think is fantastic for it. Pretty early on, I do think about the music.

Yes, there are practical concerns about what songs you’re going to actually be able to get or not get. That’s going to come down the road. I don’t try to stress out about that too much at the start. For my movie The Nines, I wanted some musical kind of numbers. There would be two songs that would be sung in the course of the movie. Quite early on, I knew those would be important story scenes and that we needed to actually license the rights and prerecord them and do all that stuff. That was great and that was exciting. That’s not the norm for most scripts you’re going to be writing for someone else to read.

I would say just use thinking about music as a way to help you build the world in your head, but also don’t let it become a time suck where you’re curating the perfect playlist for this movie that you’re never actually writing. All these kind of things can be distractions from the actual real hard work of sitting down and putting words after each other to actually build your movie.

**Megana:** I get to listen to that music sometimes when you and I are driving around or something, but are you sharing that with anyone else?

**John:** Generally not. There’s one project which I had a collaborator on, so he and I have a shared playlist for that. No, I’m not usually sending in a bunch of tracks along with the script to the studio. If it is generally musical, then of course we’re all listening to the same things or making sure we’re talking about the same songs. At this stage, I wouldn’t be sharing this with anybody else. For one project I’m working on, there’s a very specific vibe of music that I’m trying to do. I think it may make sense for me to put in links in the script to some examples of what this is going to sound like, because otherwise people may not really have a sense of what it is I’m describing. You’ve actually talked about one of your projects, you just put links in the pdfs to the songs, and that was helpful. I’ve done that with another project, on your suggestion.

**Megana:** Cool. I’ve never seen you reference a particular song if it wasn’t a musical in your script before, but I definitely feel that the vibe that you’ve created in your playlist translates.

**John:** In my script for Dark Shadows, Let the Sunshine In was an incredibly important song for one sequence. That’s a thing where I did script into the movie, like, this is going to happen here, but that’s really an exception for me.

**Megana:** Cool. Nick asks, “What are some of the ways seeing your work produced has influenced your writing style, particularly seeing actors perform your characters and their dialog, and possibly the questions they ask you about it?”

**John:** It is a big difference when you first see something actually happening in front of you. The first thing I had produced was Go. I remember sitting on set. We were shooting this scene which is no longer in the movie. We’re in this apartment building. I’m sitting on the floor outside of camera view and watching this first scene get shot. I was just so excited. I’m seeing these things happening. These words I wrote are actually now… Actors are saying them and it’s all happening in front of me.

Then you realize it all becomes small technical questions on the day. You approach the scene with this perfect idealized version of how it’s all going to be. Then when you actually get there, you realize there are a thousand compromises and some wonderful discoveries you make along the way, like, “Oh, I didn’t see that as a possibility. This is really great. I love that line reading they’re giving. I love how the director’s staging this thing.”

More importantly and more present are the compromises that are being made based on the reality of the locations you have, the time you have, who you have, the number of setups you can get into. I think a thing you learn over time is what’s easy and what’s difficult in production. The things that are going to be obstacles along the way could be the number of night scenes you have, the number of kids you have, the number of really complicated setups, the number of characters you have in a scene.

A thing I don’t think I realized was when I was just pushing words around on paper is that if you have a character who is not doing anything in a scene, it’s really tough for that actor to be present in a scene but not actually have lines or have a specific thing they’re trying to do. They just become dead weight there. When we’re reading a script, we don’t really notice it in there, but then you actually shoot a scene, you realize, oh wow, that character’s standing there and has nothing to do. That becomes a problem. That’s a conversation you end up having with directors and actors and finding business for them on the set.

A thing you also recognize once you’ve actually had things produced is recognizing that scenes that aren’t absolutely necessary will probably get cut, because there’s just this ruthless pressure to have everything build to the next thing and build to the next scene. If you have a scene that you really need to keep in there for tone reasons, for comedy reasons, make sure there’s a plot reason why it also needs to be in there, because otherwise, it’s in real jeopardy.

When you talk with actors about what they’re doing in the scene or what their motivation is, it’s important, as a writer, to remember that they are there to be the character, they are not there to be the movie. Always frame your answers in terms of what it is they’re trying to do right now and what is right in front of them and not what the scene is supposed to do or what’s happening in the movie, because they don’t know, they don’t care, that’s not their responsibility. Their responsibility is to their performance in this moment. That can be a thing that’s hard to remember, because you are the person who has this God’s-eye view on the whole thing. You remember why that character’s saying that line, because it’s setting up something down the road that doesn’t matter. What matters is why they are saying in that moment.

One of the things I think is really useful about being the screenwriter though who does have a God’s-eye view is sometimes there can be an instinct in a scene to make a little change. It doesn’t matter. It flows a little bit more naturally, but you know it sets up something very important later on. It echoes something later on. You may need to stop and say, “I get why you’re trying to do that. This becomes important later on for these reasons,” and you can have that conversation. That’s another good reason to have a writer on set, because you can sometimes point to things that they wouldn’t otherwise see.

The last thing I would say is that you’ll see in director Q and A’s about a movie that came out, it’s like, “Oh, I had this long scene, and then we decided that actor can just do it in a look. They don’t need all this dialog. They don’t need all this stuff.” Sure, that happens some. Often, you do need the dialog, or at least without that dialog you wouldn’t have gotten to that look. It’s recognizing that you are giving them things to say and stage directions to help create that mood. Sometimes they can cut things out, because we got it with a look. That doesn’t mean it was a failure on your part as a writer. It means it was a success that you were able to create a situation in which they could give a performance that didn’t need to have all the words you originally could’ve put there.

**Megana:** That’s super helpful. You and I both watched a movie recently where you could say all of the actors are in their own different movie. That’s a really helpful thing to keep in mind. Your point about having actors who are necessary to the scene reminded me of that Patton Oswalt clip in, I think it’s the King of Queens, where he’s in the scene but doesn’t have any dialog, and he just stands perfectly still in the background. Have you seen it?

**John:** I haven’t. That sounds great.

**Megana:** It’s amazing. I’ll include it in the show notes and Slack it to you. It’s so good.

**John:** That surprises me with something like King of Queens, because I feel like an ongoing show would have a really good sense of like, okay, we have to service all these characters and all these actors. They probably wouldn’t put somebody in the scene who didn’t absolutely need to be there. Sometimes they needed him for one line, which was coming at the very end. There are these wide shots that you can just see him there in the acts. It’s tough.

A thing you don’t appreciate when you’re writing scenes is how they’re going to be shot and how coverage is going to work, which is basically when the camera is focused on one actor versus another actor and when you’re in wider shots, when you’re in medium shots, and how differently it’ll play than the master shot that you’re probably thinking about as you’re writing the scene. Generally, we’re writing scenes to reflect reality, like what is actually really happening in this space. We’re not hopefully thinking too much shot by shot by shot by shot, but ultimately it is going to be shot by shot by shot by shot, and understanding that some things are going to change and feel different because of that. The rhythms and the tempos will change. That’s just the compromise we’re making for the media that we’re chosen to write in.

**Megana:** I’d love to hear you guys talk more about just the mechanics of characters entering and leaving scenes.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s put that on the board for a future episode, because entrances and exits are so crucial. We try to cut them as much as possible, because they can be shoe leather, but they can also be really essential when they need to happen. On stage, they have to happen, because bodies have to move on and move off. There’s a whole art to that. There’s a very different art to how we do it on film and television.

**Megana:** Great. Next question, Katie in LA asks, “I’ve been wanting your perspective on the intersection of parenting and art, specifically in regards to Euphoria. Do you watch it? Do your children? As a parent of a five-year-old, it gives me panic attacks, but as you are further along in your parenting journey, I’d love to know if it’s a thing for you and/or how you’re talking to your kids about it.”

**John:** As a parent of a teen, Euphoria also gives me panic attacks. Listen, it’s a show about high schoolers, which means that junior high schoolers really want to watch it. They want to watch it most. Yet it’s a show that’s really made for adults.

I want to both support the show in terms of it has its vision of showing high school life through a very different lens, and I want to support that vision, and yet as a parent I really wish the show didn’t exist. I can say that. I wish the show didn’t exist as a parent, not as a writer, because I think it is so dangerously attractive to exactly the teens who shouldn’t be watching it. It’s not trying to glamorize that life, and yet it is glamorizing that life, because these are ridiculously attractive people doing really dangerous things in this perpetual Southern California fog somehow. For all the reasons it is so attractive to teenagers, I think it’s also not a great thing for certain teenagers to watch. I think it can be really triggering for some kids who should not be seeing it.

Katie’s talking about she has a five-year-old. You can control access to media for a five-year-old. It’s much harder to control access to media for a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old who has the internet and who can find stuff, even if you were to put a password on your HBO Max account. That’s a real question. I think the issues of responsibility kick in there too. Yet I don’t want to take away their specific vision of somebody who wants to make this show about this experience. It’s just tough.

I have to hold both things, that I want the show to be able to exist, because it’s a show with an artistic vision and really great performances and all the things that are noble about it, and as a parent I don’t want it to be out there for teens who shouldn’t see it. It’s really hard to keep your teens from seeing it. I do feel like sometimes people who create things like this aren’t aware of how challenging it is to keep things from teens who want to see it. Megana, what’s your take on Euphoria? You’ve watched it.

**Megana:** I’ve watched it. I watched the first season. I haven’t seen the second season yet. I also don’t know if I’m ready for it. They are impossibly cool and hot. I could totally see how if I was in junior high school it would set up this expectation. I think kids are able to parse things out and know that that’s not reality, but it is a little bit harder to discern when you’re that age and you’re that close to it. I totally hear what you’re saying. That makes a lot of sense.

Jerry asks, “I’m intercutting between two scenes that happen at the same place, but at different times. This will be sustained for three and a half pages. Is it best to use slug lines in transitions or offer an action line detailing the nature of the transitions early on in the scene?”

**John:** The word Jerry wants is intercutting or intercut. What he can do, and this is common, you’ll see it in a lot of scripts, is let’s say there’s two basic scenes happening. There is a bank robbery happening and there is a scene in a diner happening. They’re happening at the same time. You’re intercutting between the two of them. They have some sort of play between the two of them, but they’re not the same scene. They’re two different spaces. Generally, you’ll set up one moment. The bank heist is happening, and we’re seeing what’s happening in the vault. That’ll be its own scene header. New scene header for INT diner day, and these two characters are having this meal.

Then at a certain point you say intercut. Intercut means both scenes are going to be happening. From that point forward, you can just use the scene description to talk about what’s happening in those moments. You don’t have to keep going back to scene header, scene header, scene header. For most situations, this will get you through it and it’ll feel nice and natural, because you’re not stopping the flow constantly the way you would be if you were throwing in scene headers all the time. It makes it really feel more like the sequence would be in the movie then just a bunch of scene headers on a page. Intercut or intercutting is your friend there.

At a certain point when you’re done with that, you say, END INTERCUTTING. That’s all uppercase, generally with a period, basically like, hey, we’re done with that sequence and now it’s time to move on. Then either you stay in one of your moments, in one of your situations, or you go to a whole new scene header for a new place that you’re going to end up.

**Megana:** I see. Would you also delineate when you are going to see a certain scene by using voiceover from the other scene? Does that make sense?

**John:** If it’s important that we’re not seeing the character on screen doing it, but that it’s a voiceover, sure, you put the VO after them. I think you would probably want to indicate, from Max side, Molly VO, they’re coming right towards you, or something like that. That’s a situation where you might want to try to make that more clear. In most cases it will just make sense. You can find ways just with scene description to have it make sense. We know who the characters are. We know where they are. You don’t need to hold our hand through it all.

**Megana:** That’s super helpful.

**John:** That was a good palette cleanser there. We can go back to something a little bit more challenging.

**Megana:** Enthusiastic But Not Ignorant asks, “I’m a mid-career mid-list novelist. I’ve written several books which have been published by commercial houses and well-reviewed in major outlets, but I’m not a bestseller. Now an established production company with a solid track record has made an option offer on my latest book, with the aim of making a limited series. My question is this. If I wanted to use this opportunity to get some TV writing experience, what is the best way to go about it? Should I ask to take a crack at the pilot on spec? Should I wait to see if something goes into production and try to get in the writers’ room? I want to be involved, but I also want to give this the best chance of success, which probably means allowing people who have actually done this before to take the reins.”

**John:** I love Enthusiastic, because Enthusiastic sees what they want, but also recognizes why going after what they want too aggressively may hurt the thing down the road. You’re coming at this from the right perspective. Congratulations on writing the books, and this book in particular which may go to limited series. Take that victory for what it is.

I think your goal now should be, how do I help this series be as awesome as it could possibly be? That is by being supportive and enthusiastic about the project, supportive and enthusiastic about who are they bringing to be the showrunner on this project, who hopefully you will meet with. Try to be that resource for them, so that they always feel like you’re on their side, you are that person who can help them achieve greatness with this.

I would not try to write this pilot yourself, because you don’t know how to do it. All the natural problems that are going to come up with writing this pilot are going to be amplified, because they’re going to be worried about you as a new screenwriter trying to adapt this thing. You could turn the same script that somebody else could turn in, but they’re going to judge it weirdly because you don’t have experience actually making the show. I think you should not try to write it.

I think you should offer to read absolutely anything, give enthusiastic, positive notes, really try to help the process, but not intervene very much in it, because I do worry that you’re going to probably derail it more than you’re going to help it. In success, then you have the opportunity to be more involved on the next project, and you’ll also read a bunch of these things, you’ll have seen how this all happened and how the sausage was made.

**Megana:** Would you recommend that Enthusiastic try to get into the writers’ room down the line? I hear what you’re saying about the pilot, but should they, I don’t know, try to position themself for any sort of writing credit on this project?

**John:** I don’t think that’s a great idea, because I think if you were going to be in the writers’ room on a project, there’s going to be this weird power dynamic between you and the showrunner, because you are the person who created the original material, and this is the showrunner, and if they’re changing things, people look, like, “Oh, is it okay that they’re changing this thing? I don’t think that’s a great idea.”

If people can write with other experiences where it’s worked out great, fantastic. I know on The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof and the guy who wrote the book The Leftovers, they did collaborate on stuff, and that sounded great. If the person who wants to adapt your book wants to adapt it with you, that’s great. That’s a fantastic dream scenario, but that’s not likely. It’s going to probably be a very special situation if that’s the case. I think Tom Perrotta is the man I was trying to think about for The Leftovers. Maybe that’ll happen, but I don’t think it’s going to probably happen in this case.

**Megana:** Got it. Francesco asks, “I’ve been watching the Dirty Harry series on HBO Max recently, as well as Bullet, and found myself wondering why we don’t get a lot of movies set in San Francisco anymore. In the ’60s and ’70s it seemed like a reasonable place to set movies, but in the last couple of decades, everything seems to be set in either New York or LA. The exceptions are biopics about people from SF, like Milk. Even a movie that was written and set in San Francisco like 500 Days of Summer ended up being switched to LA. Is there some financial or logistical reason for this, like San Francisco not offering good tax credits, or are cities other than Los Angeles and New York not considered relatable or interesting anymore? I ask about the lack of San Francisco-based movies because it’s my nearest big city, but I suspect if they were making Rocky now, it wouldn’t be set in Philadelphia. Thoughts?”

**John:** I think Rocky would still be set in Philadelphia. I think San Francisco is a weird special case that’s worth looking at. San Francisco, from what I understand from producers who try to shoot there, it’s just ridiculously hard to shoot there. It makes you recognize how much LA and New York City bend over backwards to make it comparably easy to shoot there. When it comes to permits, policing, neighbors, parking, basically the infrastructure within a town to make it simple to shoot a film there are just much robust in cities that shoot a lot. There’s a virtuous cycle where because things shoot here, it’s easy to shoot things here. Because things aren’t shooting in San Francisco, it’s harder to shoot things there. You don’t have the crew and equipment infrastructure, because there aren’t crews ready to go in San Francisco of a size for a big studio feature, because there aren’t people living up there who have been doing that all the time.

There are some logistical problems in San Francisco apparently also just because of it’s so hilly. Where you park the trucks is a real challenge. If you don’t have good cooperation from police and traffic and everybody else to move cars off the road, so you can actually park places where you need to put those big trucks, that can be a challenge.

That said, there are movies that are shot there. I’m thinking back to Diary of a Teenage Girl. Marielle Heller came on to talk about that. That was shot in San Francisco. Again, it’s a smaller movie. It has a smaller footprint, which makes a lot more sense for that. The HBO show Looking that I loved was also set in San Francisco, shot in San Francisco. They made it work, but I bet it was more challenging in San Francisco than it would’ve been here in Los Angeles. They made the choice to really do it in San Francisco, which is great for that.

I do think Rocky would shoot in Philadelphia. That was iconic for that movie, that place. You’re also close enough to New York City that you can pull in a crew from New York if you need to. It’s not that challenging.

When we made Big Fish, we were in Montgomery, Alabama and Wetumpka, Alabama. There was no crew, and so we had to pull people in from every place else. The city was really accommodating for us because we were the first big feature to come in there, but they didn’t have the kind of infrastructure that other places would have. We had to wing it. We had to spend money that we wouldn’t have otherwise had to spend, just because of the challenges of shooting in a place that was not used to filming.

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

**John:** I think Zoom pitches are here to stay. Right now in Los Angeles as we’re recording this, it’s safe enough that people could go back in the room to do things in person. I actually think they’re going to go back to doing stuff in person. All the meetings and the pitches I’ve had recently have been on Zoom, and producers and other folks who aren’t even in Los Angeles. It would be really impossible or very unlikely to get them to fly to Los Angeles to do this one pitch. I think Zoom pitching is here to stay. I think 70, 80% of pitches coming up will be Zoom pitches, at least for the next few years. It’s not just the pandemic. It really is an easier, better way to do some of this work.

Megana, you’ve been helping me out so much on pitching recently. I have these slide decks I need to use. We discovered it’s much easier for you to join the Zoom call as well and be the person driving the slides while I’m just talking. I’m not responsible for clicking forward and switching stuff from one input to another input. I think it does just make sense for pitching really. When you’re on Zoom, everyone can look at the same set of slides or everyone’s looking forward. You’re not having to pay attention to one person in the room or other people in the room. I just think it’s better, and I think Zoom pitching is here to stay.

**Megana:** All the things about, I don’t know, your bodily awareness you don’t have to worry about in a Zoom pitch, like, oh, this outfit I’m wearing is scratchy or I’m too hot in this room. You can control it, because it’s your house.

**John:** Megana, you’ve been pitching a ton, but you’ve only done Zoom pitches. You don’t really have the experience of pitching a project in a room, correct?

**Megana:** Correct, but I love Zoom pitches. They’re fun. I guess I’ve adapted to the Zoom of it all. I’m sure I would love in-person pitches too, because I like meeting people and chatting. I think the Zoom, and now that we’ve all gotten a little bit better at the logistics of sharing kino and the tech behind it, it’s become really seamless and everyone knows what to expect.

**John:** What I do miss about in-person pitching and in-person meetings, general meetings too, is I think you get a sense of whether you vibe with somebody better in person than you do on Zoom. That’s just a reality check. I remember very early meetings with Andrea Giannetti, who’s at Sony now, but back when she was at TriStar, she calls me into her office and she’s like [unclear 00:37:46] going through stuff and just get a sense of, oh, I get who you are. I don’t think I would have that same experience with her now on Zoom, just because a Zoom meeting is just much more functional. It’s not hang out and vibe and chitchat a bit. It’s different on that level. I will miss a little of that, but on the whole, we’ve had the chance to pitch to, as you saw, 12 places that would’ve been impossible to pitch if we were trying to do this in person.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh. That’s a great point. I’ve had a couple of generals that have been in person. From the logistics of meeting someone and figuring out who they are at the coffee shop or where to go in the office, all of that in-between stuff, I do think you get a good sense of your dynamic and who the other person is that you don’t via Zoom.

**John:** There’s going to be some function of in-person stuff for certain kinds of things, but if we’re actually going out to pitch a project and trying to pitch to 10 places in a week, Zoom is just so much better. I remember when we were trying to set up Prince of Persia, and Jordan Mechner and I were literally driving studio to studio to studio, and it was all like, could we get from this place to that place, or suddenly we’d have to go from Sony to Warner Bros.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** It’s tough. The folks who don’t live in Los Angeles are like, what’s the difference between Sony and Warner Bros? It’s an hour in bad traffic.

**Megana:** What else is nice is I feel like it frees up your day, because there are certain times of day in Los Angeles where no one should be driving. Now you can pitch at 4 o’clock and it’s no big deal.

**John:** There was a company who wanted to do Arlo Finch, and so I remember going out to have a meeting with them in Santa Monica. I liked them, but the fact that they were in Santa Monica made me really a little bit down on them as a place. Now, much less of a deal, because I recognize I would never be driving out to Santa Monica.

**Megana:** Moving on to Ben, Ben asked, “I finally got a job at a major film studio. I’m a receptionist/office coordinator. On my break, my boss’s boss’s boss saw me working on my script. We talked about story for a while, and as she was leaving, she invited me to send her a, quote, solid script, and that she would forward it to the head of the studio. I told her that I had just started on this script and I wanted to take my time. She said, ‘No worries. This is an open invitation. Take a year if you need. We aren’t going anywhere.’ My question is, can I really take a year? I’m worried that she’ll forget about her offer or she might move on to another studio or something like that.”

**John:** Ben, you can take a year. Don’t burn this offer too quickly on something that’s not great. Whatever you do decide to give to her, have some other people read it first and tell you, oh, this is good, because don’t give her something that’s not good, because it’s not going to help anybody. She says she’ll forward it to the head of the studio. We’ll see. She’ll forward it to the head of the studio if she really, really, really likes it. More importantly, she’s a person who could be a fan on your side, so that’s great.

It seems like Ben is back in person where he’s working, because someone’s walking by and seeing him do something. That’s exciting for Ben. That is one of the real advantages to being in person is that casual notice somebody’s doing something and have it work there. It reminds me of when I was an intern at Universal. I was responsible for really menial filing of paperwork and stuff. Doing my lunch breaks, I would type up my script. I had handwritten pages, and over the lunch break I would type them up on my little laptop in the commissary.

**Megana:** Aw.

**John:** Some people would ask to see stuff, and I just knew that I wasn’t ready to show this to anybody. It was nice that they asked. They could see that my goal wasn’t to be a clerk filist, my goal was to be a screenwriter, and they were rooting for me in some way, which was nice. You had more experience though with this probably recently with folks in your writing group and when they show it to superiors or folks they’re working with. What is the consensus you’re hearing out there on the street?

**Megana:** I agree with you. I think a year is totally fine. I think in LA there’s just a weird sense of time because we don’t have seasons. To me I wouldn’t even notice if someone sent something to me a year later. The other point that I was going to make is I think definitely have your friends or your writing group or writers you respect read it. A piece of advice that my friend Joey Siara from my writers group gives is, at a certain point though, if your friends have been reading multiple drafts, they’re no longer objective readers, and they’re your friends, so they can’t always give you harsh feedback. I think at a point like that, using something like the blacklist or having a third-party reader who’s not been invested in your project since the genesis of the idea is really helpful to get some more measured and neutral feedback before you send it to a professional like your boss’s boss.

**John:** For sure. [Unclear 00:42:37] next.

**Megana:** Mark from Tennessee asks, “Can you give examples of scenes that you wrote that you realized would be difficult to shoot and how you rewrote them to be more shootable and/or production-friendly without compromising the quality or purpose of the scene?”

**John:** Great, I can think of a lot of examples of those kind of rewrites. In the original script for Big Fish, there is a sequence about how Edward Bloom was born. It came from the book. It was this big mythological birth moment that happened. We got to Alabama, and Tim Burton said, “I just don’t have a place to shoot this. It just doesn’t actually work here. Can we do something simpler like he’s really slippery?” I’m like, great, he can be a slippery baby. It became a much shorter, simpler scene. Also, it got a laugh and it was the right kind of change. It was really a production change. It was a money, budget, couldn’t actually shoot it change, but it was a better change for the movie, so I was happy to make that alteration.

In Go, the original script, there is an additional character who appears in the third section. I always called her the Linda Hunt character. She’s a supervisor to Burke. She got written out because she had nothing else to do. It was logistical in the sense of we just couldn’t really afford the scenes, but also it just didn’t need to be there. It was a good cut. Then when we went back and did the reshoots for Go, originally the three sections of that movie branched off from different scenes. It was at the supermarket, but they were different scenes. That’s what kicked them off. It was recognized, oh no, we should go back to the exact same scene each time that jumps us off to the new place. It was this simplification there that really helped.

For The Nines, I think one of the things that was really helpful is we found a way to shoot LA for New York City. When we did the actual real New York City stuff, our footprint was super, super small. It was just me, a camera operator, and a local sound person. We didn’t have any trucks. We didn’t have anything. We could just shoot the New York exteriors we needed and sell that. We didn’t need to bring anybody else there to New York. A lot of the stuff that takes place in the New York section of the movie is all LA, including the New York jewelry district, just because our downtown LA can look like New York if you frame it right.

The other thing which was so crucial for The Nines was recognizing that usually when you’re trying to schedule a movie, you’re trying to schedule around locations. You’re trying to shoot out a location and move on to the next location so you don’t have to go back to a location. In this case, we had to optimize for what part of the movie we were in, and really it came down to the state of Ryan Reynolds’s hair and beard, because we were cutting his hair, we were coloring his hair, he had a beard, he had no beard, and so we had to optimize for that. Because we were shooting the main set as my house, we could shoot at my house, go do something else, come back to my house, go do something else, and so we could dress the house and do the house, just be really flexible in that location. That made all the difference, because the movie would cost so much more if we had to do wigs and other things to make all the rest of the things work so we could shoot out a location. That was a big factor.

The general things you’re looking for when you’re trying to figure out for production concerns are, does it have to be night. If it can day, it’s going to be just simpler. Can we not have children? Can we not have animals? Those are things that add complexity. If you can avoid those, you’re going to save some time and some frustration.

**Megana:** Can I ask you a question about this simplifying out the Linda Hunt character? I know that you worked on movies that are shooting as you are rewriting things. What is your methodology for that? I feel like my brain would explode.

**John:** That got dropped out before we had really even budgeted. We knew that that was going to go away. If you’re in production and you’re recognizing, okay, all these things are shifting… The Charlie’s Angels movies are examples of everything was shifting every day, and you had to figure out what we shot, what’s coming up next, what was public. You really just try and optimize for what is the movie we’re trying to make right now and not be too beholden on what the original plan was behind things. If there’s a simplification to be had, do it. If it’s not going to materially affect the story you’re trying to tell or the production value you’re trying to achieve, you do it. Things like if you have to move the crew from one place to another place, that’s a huge drag, unless it’s not.

An example in Big Fish is we were shooting in Montgomery, Alabama, and we would shoot exteriors at the river, but then if the weather turned or the light was not good, they could just pull up the trucks at lunch and move back to our stages, which was just this warehouse, and shoot stuff in the afternoon at the stages. Being flexible and recognizing what is the priority. In the case of Big Fish, sometimes the priority was let’s get really good light for these exteriors, and you could optimize for that.

**Megana:** Very cool. Moving on, Ryan asks, “Screenplay examples for instruction comes in waves. Tootsie, Star Wars, Casablanca. Which scripts from the last 20 years do you think should get, quote, taught in film programs?”

**John:** My first instinct was to say Aliens, but then I realized Aliens is more than 20 years old, which makes me feel so, so, so old. Listen, I think there’s so many great scripts to be picking there. A lot of indie films should also be higher up there. I think Booksmart is a great movie and does a really good job of its storytelling and character wants being explored and expressed, and it has a sense of fun and a sense of style, which is great. All Lord and Miller’s work is creative and fun and does really interesting things with audience expectation, so I’d move those up higher there. Wow, other great, recent movie examples…

I think the reason I was reaching back to Aliens is that was such a seminal script for how we’re writing action on the page, and I feel like it’s been duplicated so thoroughly and modeled so much in movies after that point that you could probably read any action film over the last 10 years and it’s still going to have some of that quality to it. Megana, I’ll throw this back to you. You’re newer to the screenplay format. Of the stuff that you’ve read that’s more recent, what do you think is going to be very teachable?

**Megana:** I guess a couple of other examples that I think seem fresher to me are The Wolf of Wall Street or Adam McKay movies where there’s just so much breaking the fourth wall and exposition done in a different way that feels new. Is that true?

**John:** I think that is also true. I think it’s playful with the format. You look at The Big Short and it’s how it’s getting that information out there. We’ve talked about The Social Network as being a really good movie to watch in terms of how it is telling a story, how it is using real life just as a springboard to make a very specific point about this environment. I think those movies will be on the short list.

It’s also worth noting that so many of the classic movies we’re pointing to, say like Tootsie, Star Wars, Casablanca, white guys wrote them, and so I think making sure that the canon that we’re teaching from isn’t just like, these are the white male screenwriters of that era. There’s really amazing films being made by filmmakers of all different backgrounds, and making sure that we’re not just teaching one kind of thing.

**Megana:** Totally. Eliza asks, “I’m an aspiring writer, and I’ve recently learned about the TV fellowship programs and decided to apply. Fast-forward to a month later and I’m bleeding out of my eyeballs and pulling out my hair.”

**John:** Oh no, Eliza.

**Megana:** That was so graphic. “The truth is I find TV spec scriptwriting to be incredibly hard. The number one tip that I’ve encountered is, spec what you love, but I love highly serialized shows. When I sit down and try to find some tiny crevice where I can maybe explore something further, say on a season of Killing Eve or The Morning Show, I run out of steam by the end of Act One. I just can’t for the life of me come up with a spec story that has legs long enough to travel for 60 pages, which lines up perfectly with what occurred in the preceding episode and what will occur in the succeeding episode.

“Writing a TV spec has been so shatteringly difficult that it’s making me question if I have potential as a writer at all. It’s supposed to be a straightforward exercise that amateur writers can use as a steppingstone to become professionals. In other words, it’s child’s play, right? Is this an indication that I should just pack up my stuff and head to the exit?”

**John:** Yes, Eliza, you should give up now. You should completely give up. No, Eliza, you have, I think, some wrong expectations. Let’s disabuse you of your wrong expectations. First let’s talk about what spec writing is for TV. When someone says a spec script when it comes to TV, they’re probably referring to this is an existing show, I’m going to write an episode of this existing show, not because they’re paying me to do it, but to show that I know how to write and that I could write a show like this. You write one of these things not because you’re trying to get hired for that specific show, but as a sample for you to get staffed on a show that could be kind of like it. If you’re writing The Morning Show and you’re hoping to get staffed on Bridgerton or something, you have the ability to do an existing thing.

These kind of spec scripts have fallen a bit out of favor. They were much more common when I was starting. Some showrunners really like them. I remember Mindy Kaling tweeting about how much she loves reading specs, because you get a sense of can this person write this voice, can this person really understand how this TV show works.

Useful exercise, but just understand that it has its limitations. One of the limitations that you’re encountering is that you really can’t try to fit your episode into the existing narrative and existing plot lines of a serialized drama that same way. You can’t make this be an alternate Episode 3 of Season 4. It’s just not going to work. Take that pressure off yourself. Instead ask, what is something you would love to see the show do at a certain point. Don’t try to be so serialized.

Find a way to take these characters and have them do something interesting that feels like it could be an episode of the show, it just wasn’t an episode of the show. The characters feel consistent with the universe of that original TV show, and yet they’re not trying to directly slot into something else that has happened in there. I’m going to reach back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You don’t have to make it fit into one season mythology or one big bad mythology. Just have it be something that feels like a classic, good episode of that show. Maybe if you’re going to do something interesting, take those characters somewhat out of their normal environment, put two characters together who don’t generally have opportunities to interact.

Do something that is both the voice of the show, but also stands out and is unique, so that a writer who may want to hire you, a showrunner who may want to hire you, says, “This person not only understands the show, but understands how to do something interesting with those characters and the elements that they’re given.

**Megana:** Totally. I think some of the expectations that Eliza has are a little too high. I don’t think anyone who is reading these fellowship applications is going to be tracking at one point in the season or the plot line this goes. They probably don’t even watch that show. They just have a sense of who the characters are or maybe they’ve seen an episode. I think that you’re absolutely right, and taking some of that pressure off will really help.

**John:** Don’t bleed out your eyeballs and don’t give up on this, because you’re trying to do something that’s really difficult, and it’s not a normal job at all. It’s not a normal thing to have to write an episode of a show you’re not getting paid to write, that you don’t have the writers’ room as a resource. You’re trying to do a weird thing, so just try the best job at it you can. I think honestly these kind of spec pilots make more sense for comedy. They show your comedy chops and your ability to write characters’ voices in a way that make more sense, which may be why I think so much of staffing has moved to reading original stuff rather than specs of existing shows.

**Megana:** I think specking what you love makes a lot of sense because you know the world of the show, but I’ve never specked something that’s a highly serialized drama. I wonder if that’s also making it harder for her. I wonder if there’s a procedural she likes enough that she could write a spec for.

**John:** That’s such a great point. It reminds me of that Ira Glass quote about, at a certain point you recognize you have taste, but you don’t have talent. She probably has really good taste when it comes to The Morning Show, so she knows exactly how it’ll all work and she knows what a great episode this is, and she’s comparing what she’s writing to the very best episode of The Morning Show ever, and not being able to see the process to get there. I do think picking something that she loves so much may be part of the problem.

**Megana:** Totally. Moody asks, “What’s the deal with streamers and residuals? For example, do the writers of a Netflix Original or another subscription-based streamer make close to what a writer for a studio is going to make with purchase and rental fees? Are residuals even relevant the way they used to be?”

**John:** Oh yes. The question of streamers and residuals is an ongoing one. It’s going to be inevitably a focus of negotiation for the next MBA negotiations. Let’s talk through the current state of, if you write something for a streamer, how residuals work.
The important thing to understand is right now it is a fixed residual. Let’s say you got story and teleplay on a credit for a one-hour that you write for Netflix. This is an example here. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the WGA document that talks you through how you actually calculate what these things are, based on the current deal. For this one hour written for Netflix, the residual base would be $29,657. That’s not money you’re getting right now, but that’s what’s called the base of it. That’s how much the residual pot is worth for that.

Then it depends on how big the streamer is. There’s this thing called subscriber tiers, which is by how many people, I think only in North America, are subscribers to that service. In the case of Netflix, it’s the highest tier because they have the most at more than 45 million subscribers. It’s called a subscriber factor. You multiply that original 29,000 by 150%, so it increases that. Working off that, there’s what’s called an exhibition gear percentage. Basically, each year, a percentage of that total money, you’re getting paid out as a residual. It starts at 45% in the first year. It drops to 1.5% in years 13 and beyond.
For this hypothetical show that you’ve written that you got written by credit on, you would be getting a first-year residual of $20,000, and then it would drop dramatically year after year after year until 13 years where you get 1.5% of that, or one 40th of that really is the best way to think about that.

It’s really hard to compare this residual to what you would be getting in cable or in broadcast, because cable and broadcast, they are generally not fixed residuals. There’s a fixed residual for the first rerun in broadcast, but really your residual in normal TV is based on a percentage of the licensing deal. When Friends sells, for licensing, there’s a certain amount per episode, and you as a writer get a percentage of that. An incredibly successful show like Friends, that licensing fee is huge and your residuals can be huge. A show that is not a big hit could be a lot less.

Right now the deal with the streamers is, probably for some shows you’re getting a little bit more residuals on it, because it doesn’t matter whether it’s a success or not, but for the big hits you’re getting really screwed. You’re not getting any piece of that pie on a giant hit. If you write Stranger Things, you’re still getting the same crappy fixed residual. It’s not great right now. It could be a lot better. It’s a reason why I think there’s going to be so much focus on trying to improve how we’re doing this and to really make the success of a given show be reflected in the residuals that a writer gets for having written that show. Did that make sense? I’m trying to talk through a lot of numbers.

**Megana:** It does. We’ll link to this WGA article, because it’s really helpful, these graphs, and then the calculations and the examples that they walk through make it easier to follow. It is surprisingly complicated. I didn’t realize how much these percentages dropped off year over year.

**John:** Yeah, I think it falls off a cliff. Some caveats here, we’re talking about high-budget subscription video on demand, which is what you call the expensive stuff made for something like a Netflix. There’s a lower-budget thing, which obviously the results aren’t going to be as good, and the calculations work differently. If you’re making a movie that is originally intended for a theatrical market, but then it’s released on Netflix instead of being released theatrically, in that case they have to calculate what’s called an [unclear 00:59:01] license fee, which is basically how much they think the movie would be licensed for if it were out on the open market. That becomes harder and harder to do as there are fewer movies out there who then are showing up on streaming later on. There’s ways to calculate it when it’s not clear that it was made for this market, but it’s complicated.

When you’re in one of those situations, you get the Guild involved to check on it, and the Guild is constantly arguing about how certain things should be counted, so it’s tough. Let’s say you have an existing show that is then licensed through a streamer. That goes through a more normal residual process, which is basically there’s a license fee, Netflix is paying a certain amount per episode, you as a writer get a percentage of that amount in your residuals.

**Megana:** I have a lot of follow-up questions. Is that why day-and-date release stuff that came out during the pandemic was more complicated? Did that affect drastically how writers were being paid for movies that were simultaneously being theatrically released and put on streamers?

**John:** The fact of the residuals to some degree had a bigger impact though on box office bonuses, which is one of the ways we get around the problem of not having backend participation or having a meaningful backend gross is that we say in our contracts, okay, when this film reaches $50 million in the US box office, I get a bonus check of this. When it hits $100 million, I get a bonus check of this. It’s a way of giving us a backend. If something’s released day-and-date, your box office is going to be greatly lowered because of that. The Scarlett Johansson lawsuit over Black Widow was really about that, which is basically she had bonuses in her contract that she was not going to be able to hit because they released the movie day-and-date theatrically and in theaters.

**Megana:** Got it. Cool. We have four more questions left.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Megana:** They’re pretty quick. Mattias asks, “Other than writing, what’s something aspiring writers who live in LA should be doing?”

**John:** A quick checklist of things you should do other than write while you’re in Los Angeles. You should see movies. You see a bunch of movies. See the new releases, but also go to things like the Academy screening series. Go to any sort of retrospective stuff. Those are great to see. Anything where there’s a Q and A afterwards, especially with the filmmakers, with the writers, those are terrific. Whenever the ArcLight reopens, they do those. Directors series at Film Independent is really good. I host some of those events. Go to festivals. Go to festivals like Outfest or the indie festivals. Volunteer to crew at one of these things. You’ll meet some people. You’ll see a bunch of movies.

Go to plays. Go to comedy shows like Groundlings. You’ll see stars before they become stars and see how all that works. Take a class if you feel like taking a class. Again, you’ll meet other people who are trying to do what you’re trying to do, and writers, which is always good. If you’re in LA, you should hike, because you can, because there’s just a ton of hiking around Los Angeles.

Make sure you’re exploring different parts of the city. It’s really easy to get stuck in your one little bubble in Los Angeles, but LA’s giant and there’s so much to do. If you’re in Silver Lake, make sure you make it out to the ocean every once in a while. Vice versa, if you’re on the West Side, make sure you’re hitting downtown and other parts of the city.

Crew on your friends’ films. Find films that need PAs and be a PA. Just get some experience on a set while you’re here, because there’s always so much shooting. Learn how to shoot something. Get a camera. It doesn’t have to be an amazing camera. You can do it on your phone as well. Write a short thing and learn how to shoot it, because that’s a skill you’re going to need to learn to have. Understanding how shot by shot by shot you put something together is crucial. LA is where film was born, so do that while you’re here.

Finally, there’s a bunch of events that are always happening in Los Angeles. It’s one of the biggest cities in the world. Go to concerts, go to museums, make an art date with yourself to get out of your apartment and see things and do things, because there’s no reason to stay trapped indoors in Los Angeles. Go out and do stuff. What other advice would you have for Mattias here?

**Megana:** I think all that’s great. It’s made me more excited to live in LA. I think also specifically do things that are not related to the industry or not going to help you in any way. I think working in the industry and living in an industry town is really overwhelming and sometimes just suffocating, and so having things that are completely separate from that is helpful, like hobbies like swimming or pottery or things where there’s no way for you to network or be thinking about anything professional.

**John:** Agreed.

**Megana:** Great. We have a question from Flustered. Flustered asks, “Later this year we’re shooting my first US studio feature. I’m not a total newbie. I have experience in my home country, but this film is definitely my biggest moment to date. I pride myself on being a pretty chill person. I’m used to working with actors. I’m someone who’s never really been into celebrity culture. People are people. That is, until they attached our lead.”

**John:** Oh, no.

**Megana:** “They booked someone who would have made my 16-year-old self fall out of my chair. What I want to know is how do we as screenwriters be chill? I’ve had a couple of meetings with him to discuss the character pass I’m about to do, and he’s been bloody lovely, of course, so I’m off to an okay start, but come production, I’d love to get a photo with him. Ugh, just typing that feels so cringe. I just need tips on professionalism, and if asking for things like a photo is crossing some invisible line. This is a total nonissue in the scheme of things, but I literally didn’t know who else to ask.”

**John:** Don’t ask for the photo, Flustered. Celebrate the fact that you are interacting with this actor in a way that they see you as a professional and that they are excited to have you on board as the writer of the project. Don’t be a fan. Don’t ask for the photo.
It can be hard to be chill around people who are really famous and who are rich and successful and just gorgeous and all these things that overwhelm you. I find it helpful to be specific and really focus on what is your job, what do they need, how do you help them get the best performance, what are they interested and into.

My first meeting with Drew Barrymore was about Charlie’s Angels, and we really could talk, really vibe on what is the movie that we are trying to make, what does it feel like. We could arrive at a shared vision for how the movie should feel. That was a really good experience. Yeah, she was very famous at that moment, but she was also focused on the work. It sounds like this actor is focused on the work too. Don’t make it a fan situation by asking for a photo.

Here’s when you’ll get your photo. You’ll get your photo at the premier, which will be fantastic, because you’ll be on the Red Carpet and get a photo together, or on set, or the stills photographer on set. There can be some fun way for you to get that shot that you really want, but really focus on the movie rather than the photo.

**Megana:** This is the perfect time for fake it ’til you make it.

**John:** 100%.

**Megana:** Rena asks, “Do you have any tricks for not falling into patterns and dialog? For example, I find myself using the word honestly a lot, and honestly, it’s getting old.”

**John:** Oh Rena, I hit the same situation, and I find myself doing things like that where I’m just like, “Oh my god, I used the word actually three times on a page.” The only thing you can do is just be aware of it, and when you see it, stop it. Having someone else read through it, having, honestly, Megana read through stuff and say, “You used this word twice,” is how you’re going to notice it. Then when you do notice it, you will find a way to stop yourself from using it so often.
Now, in terms of dialog, yes, you’re trying to make characters sound like themselves. I think what you may be noticing is that if one character says “honestly,” another character shouldn’t say “honestly” that much. If one character says “honestly” a lot, that can feel authentic, because individual characters should fall into loops where they do say things the same way and have the same structure to things. That’s why Jim Halpert sounds different than Michael Scott. People have the natural things they go to, the patterns that they go to. I think Rena’s going to be okay.

**Megana:** Yeah. Also, with a tool like Highland, you can Find and Replace and just search for those things once you notice them.

**John:** Absolutely. If you notice “honestly,” just do a find for “honestly” and see all the times you’re using it and see when you don’t need that word. “Honestly” is one of those things where it generally can just be cut, and it’s a stronger sentence without “honestly” in front of it. If you need a softener, just find another softener to get you into it.

**Megana:** I have a problem with my action lines where I’ll say “starts to” instead of just whatever the action is. I do a pass where I edit all those sentences.

**John:** Good plan.

**Megana:** Last question, Shewani [ph] asks, “How do you handle balancing writing your own passion projects versus pitching on assignments?”

**John:** That’s a good question. I don’t always balance it great, but I think I’m always aware of these are things that I want to write. I have a short list of projects that I do want to hit at some point, or either start writing or come back to. These are things that are just things that I own and control that I want to be my own stuff. Whenever I turn in an assignment for someone else, I will try to prioritize going to one of those passion projects for at least the time I have, while I’m waiting on notes back or whatever, just so I do get some time to spend with those projects.

In terms of pitching versus writing your own stuff, if I am pitching something out there, I still have a lot of free writing time. I’ll try to use that free writing time on my passion projects. Am I trying to pitch these passion projects? Sometimes. Sometimes it feels like this is the time to get that thing out the door and get people reading it, but more often, the stuff I’m pitching on is stuff that exists that I’m trying to get to the next point or I’m trying to either get the job or get this project, this book or other property, set up some place. I still have the time to go and write the new stuff that is for myself.

Basically, I would say recognize that your writing time is crucial and important, and if you’re not doing work for somebody else writing, make sure you’re doing that work for yourself writing. Megana, we got through 20 questions. Was it only 20 questions? It felt like 9,000.

**Megana:** I’m sorry. I hope that wasn’t me asking the questions, but yes, that was 20.

**John:** 20 questions. 20 questions done. Let’s see Craig Mazin beat that. Should we go on to our One Cool Things?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is this video by Paul Stamets, who is a mycologist. He studies fungi and mushrooms. He as a scientist developed this fungi that attracts ants and termites, and they eat this thing and they bring it back to their nest where it kills them. It’s a pesticide, but it’s a very specific, clever pesticide where they bring it back into their nest and it kills them, but also makes everyone else stay away from it. It’s very site-specific, which I think is a really good idea. His patent is expired. He got his patent 17 years ago. Patents expire.

What I liked about this video is he was describing how excited he was that this is now open for anyone else to use, that this is now in the commons and people can build products off of it. Also, he was never able to actually bring it to market. He could never actually find a way to do it. I liked his honesty about like, “I really thought this would be a great thing and revolutionary, and I couldn’t do it. Maybe somebody else can. Also, here are the challenges you’re going to have, because it doesn’t have this patent protection anymore.” I just really liked his approach to this thing he developed which was really cool, which was not successful commercially, but is still good for the world. It’s just a good mix of the open sourcing and public goods and the real challenges of capitalism all wrapped up into one little video.

**Megana:** That really fits with the ethos behind your work.

**John:** Fountain is an example. It’s a public good. It’s screenwriting syntax, which is good for a lot of people. It’s had some success, but it hasn’t revolutionized the world in ways I would’ve liked. It hasn’t been the ever-attracting mushroom that has destroyed other entities, but it’s had its own little, small successes.

**Megana:** Very cool. I guess thematically related, my One Cool Thing is Under White Sky: The Nature of the Future. It’s this book by Elizabeth Kolbert. She won the Pulitzer Prize for this book The Sixth Extinction. I haven’t finished it yet, but I think there’s nine different examples of ways in which humans have tried to fix certain problems that have happened in ecosystems or the environment, and now she looks at things 30, 50 years down the line, and how we are now trying to remedy the ways that we have interfered and caused greater problems in the environment. She looks at the Mississippi River and carp. I was just telling you this example about these pupfish that are in Devils Hole in the Mojave Desert. While that land has been protected, 100 miles away in Nevada they were doing nuclear testing, and how that has influenced this very specific species’ survival rates is so fascinating.

**John:** On the inspiring-depressing scale, where would you put this?

**Megana:** I was thinking about that before I recommended it, because I was like, it does depress me, but you know I love some dry nonfiction to get me to bed.

**John:** Oh yeah, me too.

**Megana:** It’s pretty bleak, because so far it doesn’t feel like we as humans can do anything right. If we do something that seems to temporarily help the environment or help the world in some way, this takes the long view look at it, and it’s like, nope, you actually messed things up far more than you realized. It is pretty bleak. It’s depressing.

**John:** I’ll add it to the list, but I think I have a few more cheery things to get through before I get to a mass bleak book.

**Megana:** Fair enough.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Thank you again, Megana Rao, our producer, for all those questions, and for everybody who sent in their questions. That’s so, so helpful. Our show’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Out outro is by Ben Gerrior. 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 am @johnaugust. 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 Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can also sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on murder houses. Megana Rao, thank you again.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, let’s talk murder and architecture, because you had encouraged me to watch this movie Fresh. It’s only a very mild spoiler to say there is a killer in this movie who has a really stylish house, a house like, oh, I would love to have this house. It’s a little bit remote. It’s not a creepy cabin. It has good, natural wood finishes and details. It feels nice. It also has a basement that is set up for murder, but not a grungy, grimy murder. It’s much more sophisticated. It feels like a spa. It’s like a spa where you get dismembered.

**Megana:** Like one of those places where you can get plastic surgery but you’re still at this retreat.

**John:** Oh yeah, completely. Like where she goes in Hacks.

**Megana:** Yes, exactly.

**John:** Like that. It’s all tasteful, all well-done. You might be chained to the floor, but it’s got good aesthetics to it. You got your stainless steel toilet. You got a little drinking fountain. You’ve got some things you need. Even the bars closing off your cell, they’re wood. It looks like teak.

**Megana:** It’s like Scandinavian.

**John:** It’s very Scandinavian, which is also a good tie-in to Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a Scandinavian thriller in which ultimately we discover this murderer who has this house. It’s like, okay, part of your house is just designed as an abattoir. It’s clearly set up to just slaughter people.

**Megana:** I re-watched that scene from Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He also has this whole setup in the basement where instead of a sprinkler system, it fills the room with gas and he has his own personal gas mask that he just attaches, I guess, when he climbs down the stairs. It’s just all part of the process. I feel like he must have rigged that, because how do you get a contractor to do something like that?

**John:** Are they just really good do-it-yourself-ers who just have really good skills for this, because I was thinking the main character in Fresh is an accomplished surgeon himself. I don’t understand how he’s doing all the work he’s doing as a surgeon and as a dismemberer of bodies and as really an entrepreneur. Also, he has clearly some facility with how to build concrete structures and these things. Assuming he does have a contractor and an architect, what is the cover story for why these rooms are being built this way?

**Megana:** It’s like, yeah, I need you to build these guest bedrooms with metal chains that are bolted into the ground.

**John:** Maybe the chains are something he could do himself, or he could have just one lackey in on it with him. The bigger construction things, you got to have a crew there. There’s stuff that has to happen. Even with the pretense of, oh, maybe he has this private surgery center, yeah, I guess, but I find it suspicious, or maybe I find it as an opportunity for a movie or a docuseries about the people who build murder houses, like a home-flipping thing, but it’s really about murder houses.

**Megana:** You’re someone who owns a house and has remodeled your house. My understanding is that any time you want to make a change, you do have to get a permit from the city. Is that true? Is that true for everywhere or just LA?

**John:** I think that’s why murderers are moving out of Los Angeles, because it’s the bureaucracy really. It’s all the permitting that’s really getting in the way of innovation and murder houses. You have other things listed here in terms of the aesthetic. Parasite, of course, a great example. There’s the whole basement in Parasite. Essentially it’s a bomb shelter, I get that, but also it feels like a murder hole.

**Megana:** Totally.

**John:** Invisible Man. Look at this house that he built, that also seems set up for devious deeds. In that case, I can’t remember any specific room in there that feels like, okay, this is just a room that could only be used for evil, but maybe.

**Megana:** He has that room where he keeps the suits. I don’t know what about these really ultra contemporary homes is so frightening. I think maybe it’s all of the glass and then the concrete.

**John:** That sense of it’s all transparent so you can see everything, and yet…

**Megana:** It’s so disorienting.

**John:** Yeah, disorienting. Everything’s being hidden. It’s hiding in plain sight in some way. Concrete does feel fairly industrial and brutalist and confining and soundproof. They’re always a little bit remote so no one can hear you screaming as they’re cutting you apart. I see here in the Workflowy you have other examples of things that are tied into murder architecture or really questionable, like why would you build this this way.

**Megana:** Correct. One TikTok sensation that our whole office was obsessed with was Samantha Hartsoe, this woman in New York who discovered a secret… I guess she was getting a breeze through her bathroom and so she discovered that through her bathroom mirror, her apartment connected to an entirely different apartment.

**John:** Basically she could take out her medicine cabinet and climb into this accessory hallway that went into a completely different apartment which was empty. Why would you build that accessory hallway? It was all just unsettling.

**Megana:** So unsettling. Then I have this other story in here. I remember when I was in college, I was reading this story, the headline was Ohio State Students Discover Stranger Living in Basement. In the article, it actually really warmed by heart, because I was like, this is so Ohio. These boys were living in this house on campus. There were 10 of them. Strange things were happening in the house, but because there were 10 of them, they just always attributed it to a different roommate. Halfway through the school year they discovered that there was a squatter living in their basement. In the most Midwestern turn of events, all of the quotes are, “He seems like a really great guy. We wish we could help him out. Would’ve loved to be his friend or get to know him, but it’s actually not okay for him to live here.” It’s so apologetic and accommodating. It was so sweet.

I texted one of my friends from high school, my friend Sean, and I was like, “This is so funny and this is so Ohio.” He was like, “Yeah, man, that’s my house. Yeah, I was living there. He’s a great guy. He’s a philosophy major just trying to get by.” I was like, “This is so funny and heartbreaking.”

**John:** It reminds me of the people who are squatters in the Hamptons. Off-season in the Hamptons, they’ll just pretend that they should be living in these houses, and live in places where they don’t actually have any right to be there.

**Megana:** If Craig was here, he would talk about the nature of higher education and how cost-prohibitive it is, but yes, it is very similar to that.

**John:** College is the problem. Which would probably end up on Room, because you think about it, Room, it’s not within the house, but this guy has a structure in his backyard that it’s just designed to hold these people in. It’s apparently soundproof. I’m trying to remember. It’s underground? Basically, you can’t easily get out of it. A similar thing happened in one of the seasons of Search Party, where there was a secret underground bunker room that was all soft and padded and where she couldn’t hurt herself. Again, I ask, who are the contractors who are building these things, and what do they think is actually happening? I just think there’s a, I think if not actually a docuseries, then at least a good Onion article about the contractors brought in to do this project and what they believed that they were doing.

**Megana:** I think that there’s maybe too much overlap, and we need to be more suspicious of doomsday preppers and murderers. I don’t want to miscast doomsday preppers, because it’s like, do your thing, but I think maybe we should just be a little bit more skeptical or ask a few more questions around some of those precautions.

**John:** 10 Cloverfield Lane is a great example. It’s both a survivalist prepper bunker situation, but also a creepy murder shaft. The two things do seem like they fit together. If you have gratings in your floor and the ability to spray down blood into the floor, I don’t think that’s normal doomsday prep. It’s just me. I think those should be some things that if it’s on the spec sheet for the construction project, I think you’d intervene there.

**Megana:** Not only are these people committing crimes or murder, but they’re also probably violating some zoning laws.

**John:** 100%. Got to be strict here. Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Patton Oswalt in King of Queens Scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2QE3JpWfTo)
* [ZSA Moonlander](https://www.zsa.io/moonlander/)
* [Compare Your Typing Speed Against ours here!](https://www.typingtest.com/test.html?minutes=2&textfile=benchmark.txt)
* [Phoebe Waller Bridge – 73 Questions with Vogue](https://www.vogue.com/video/watch/phoebe-waller-bridge-on-fleabag-british-humor-and-her-creative-process)
* [Residuals for High-Budget Subscription Video on Demand (HBSVOD) Programs](https://www.wga.org/members/finances/residuals/hbsvod-programs) from the WGA
* [Paul Stamets on Seven Mycoattractant and Mycopesticide Patents released to Commons!](https://paulstamets.com/news/paul-stamets-on-seven-mycoattractant-and-mycopesticide-patents-released-to-commons?mc_cid=5d4ff8f8e6&mc_eid=8952ca1075)
* [Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert](https://bookshop.org/books/under-a-white-sky-the-nature-of-the-future-9780593136270/9780593136270)
* [Murder House Architecture](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1506362648887136256)
* [Samantha Hartsoe’s TikTok NYC Apartment](https://www.tiktok.com/@samanthartsoe?lang=en)
* [Ohio State Students Discover Students Living in Basement](https://www.thelantern.com/2013/09/ohio-state-students-discover-stranger-living-basement/)
* [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 Ben Gerrior ([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/543standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/how-to-forget).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 519 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. I don’t have a cold but I sort of have a little bit of laryngitis, so we’ll see how I do this week, Craig.

**Craig:** Aww.

**John:** Aww.

**Craig:** Aww.

**John:** I really, I actually feel, feel fine. But just in case we suddenly cut out that’s going to be the excuse for why we’re not continuing the podcast.

**Craig:** You died.

**John:** I died.

**Craig:** From laryngitis.

**John:** Then John died. I went home to my home planet.

**Craig:** You went home to some planet. Megana, do you know what we’re saying there? Do you know that reference?

**Megana Rao:** I don’t.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s, it’s Poochie.

**John:** It’s a reference to the Simpsons. But while you’re googling that, today on the show, while there are many techniques for plotting out your story and really knowing your characters, only Scriptnotes will we teach you how to forget those things so you can write proper scenes. So that’s right. It’s a craft episode.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** So sharpen your pencils. Craig loves a craft episode.

**Craig:** I do. I do.

**John:** But first, Craig, we have so much news to talk through.

**Craig:** Let’s do that.

**John:** We have Scarlett Johansson and CAA. We got Netflix. We got The Wizard of Oz.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** We’ll also have a follow up on Spooky Season and IATSE. So, time permitting, we’ll also get to some listener questions because I know you love listener questions.

**Craig:** I do. I love them. I love them because –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have to do the least amount of work for them.

**John:** Mm-hmm. But you will actually have to do some work because in our bonus segment for premium members, we’re going to talk about fame.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Not the movie musical, which is fantastic.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Or the series, which is also good.

**Craig:** Loved it.

**John:** But what it means to be famous in the 2020s.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not great.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Spoiler.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s not great. Ah, but some good news did happen this past week, Scarlett Johansson and Disney reached an agreement on Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit about the box office bonuses she’s owed for Black Widow.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We don’t know what the actual dollar amount was. We probably never really will.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But everyone is happy and singing and joy has returned to the Mouse House.

**Craig:** Yeah, as was inevitably the case, it was –

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** This was always what it would be. The only question was, you know, like, how much is it. And we don’t know. And also I don’t care. That’s their business.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the good side is that an artist got taken care of. The bad side is these kinds of settlements actually don’t benefit anybody but individuals.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There is structurally speaking, for Hollywood, nothing has been resolved. But good news for Scarlett Johansson at the very least.

**John:** Yeah, I think the lawsuit did shine a spotlight on the need for us to be thinking about what we’re going to do and movies are debuting on streaming that were originally supposed to be debuting theatrically. So it got people to pay attention to it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. But we need systemic solutions, not a settlement after a settlement after its settlement.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That sounds great.

**John:** Now, while the Scarlett Johansson lawsuit settlement was probably inevitable –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I wonder whether the CAA acquiring ICM was inevitable. Did you see this happening before it happened, Craig?

**Craig:** Didn’t see it happening. Didn’t hear about it happening. Was absolutely shocked when I read it. Not shocked in a bad way, just surprised.

**John:** Yeah, I would say surprised but not shocked was sort of where I fell in. It’s like, oh, yeah, that’s the thing that could happen. But I hadn’t heard anything about it before. So then it happens, like, oh, well, this happened.

So ICM in the, in terms of writers, was the fourth biggest agency in town.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** CAA was the second biggest agency. So the number two bought number four.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** And so, they’re gonna merge them all together.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It has to go through regulatory approvals and antitrust.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But they’ll make it through that because it’s not bigger than the biggest one, so consolidation.

**Craig:** Yeah, sort of inevitable and I guess I just didn’t realize that it was gonna be these two agencies. So I guess now – are they changing the name or it’s just everybody is CAA now?

**John:** I think the plan is for everyone to be CAA –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I’m not sure it’s been announced.

**Craig:** I do like this quote that you put here in work notes from Ariel Emanuel. So Ariel Emanuel runs Endeavour. “ICM has not been what it used to be 15 years ago. I think what CAA bought was five incredible TV writers, a very good book business, and a very good soccer rep business out of Europe.” So obviously diminishing the purchase of ICM as best he could but what I kind of liked that he’s like, I think what CAA bought was like five people that generate like a billion dollars business and also a great book business and also apparently a great soccer business. I don’t know. Like those aren’t great things.

**John:** Let’s talk about sort of these five TV writers because it’s not like those TV writers are bound to ICM and are now bound to CAA. They can choose to go wherever they want to go. And as can any other client of ICM. No one is contractually obligated to stick with that agency, and move over to CAA. So everyone has these choices. Some of those clients will choose not to move over and they’ll go to other agencies, which is fine. For writers, ICM was much smaller than UTA was and we really – we talk about Big Four, but really, it was the Big Three plus ICM. If you were a writer at ICM, you’re now at a larger agency.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Assuming you’re making the transition. If you were a writer at CAA, maybe have a little bit more competition for some of those things, like, maybe a little bit harder to get attention there. But noticeably nothing changes with the WGA agency agreement. Like this new merged agencies still has the same cap on what they can do and what they can’t do. So it doesn’t really affect any of that?

**Craig:** Yeah. And I don’t really think that there will be much in the way of competition changes. You’ve always competed against other writers to an extent, for jobs and things. Whether it’s inter- or intra-agency competition, even within a single agent’s roster –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There are going to be clients that are competing for things. The squeeze, I think, though will be real. I would be surprised if I don’t think that when this sort of thing happens that everybody at CAA and everybody at ICM gets together and has a big party. I think a bunch of people just get pushed off the ship.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So when agents get pushed off the ship, so too do assistants, and so do, of course, clients. So it’s going to be interesting to see how the consolidation functions for everybody other than the people who are running the show.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But if I were UTA, I’d probably be looking around for a dance partner right about now.

**John:** Yeah, I wonder about that. I don’t necessarily know that they need to. I mean, because – would they look for a bigger dance partner? Or would they try to take a smaller person or do they even –

**Craig:** Smaller.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know if they need to, but they might.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So –

**Craig:** I could see that. But then –

**John:** Yeah, I could see it happening too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Consolidation is the trend.

**Craig:** It’s the way it goes.

**John:** Also this past week, the Academy Museum opened up. So this is a brand new museum on Wilshire Boulevard. I got to go to an opening, a preopening thing this past week. It’s really nice. People should go visit. If you’re in Los Angeles and you like movies, come visit the Academy Museum, because you’ll see cool stuff from the history of the movies, cool exhibits, artifacts, pieces of equipment, original costumes, all that stuff is really neat. There’s a really good Miyazaki Exhibit there right now. But I think I found especially cool, which I tweeted about was they had a whole room section for The Wizard of Oz, like sort of making The Wizard of Oz. And they had this page from the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz. And I had never seen the script for The Wizard of Oz. And this was kind of cool. So Craig, as you open up this tweet –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you’re seeing this photo –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What is your reaction to this script page?

**Craig:** Well, on the one hand, it’s amazingly similar to what we do now.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** The font is the same. The general layout is the same. There’s a scene number, which appears to be 319, possibly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is a rather – it’s on page 122.

**John:** The script’s long.

**Craig:** It’s long, but it’s at the end.

**John:** Yes. Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s about right. The margins are a little funky. And the action is actually sort of pushed to the right and also oddly centered. So it kind of – it’s hard to tell the difference between action and dialogue. But the characters names, which are not capitalized, are above the dialogue like we do.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There’s even a bit of parenthetical like Dorothy turns around, right there, you know, apparently, you are breaking that rule of don’t put action in parentheticals in 1939.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, yeah, kind of like weird to see the continuity of what we do today with what they did then.

**John:** Yeah, so what I check from this is like, while some stuff is different, and like the overall layout of dialogue and action is a little bit more how stage plays work than how modern screenplays work in terms of margins –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It really does look like a script, like you can hand this script to, you know, a director and he’s like, could shoot this page.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Like they would know how to do it. It’s completely normal and reasonable. Even stuff like the cut back to is over on the right-hand margin.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It really does feel like a modern script page way back in 1939. But some stuff has evolved and changed. And that’s okay. Things do evolve and change and things do move on. And the screenplay format was never handed down by the gods as like, this is how screenplays shall be. They’re just like, it was evolving and this was a stage in the evolution and pretty close to sort of where we ended up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I really dug it.

**Craig:** I do like a couple of things on the page and a specific one is medium, Glinda and Dorothy. And the other one is keep the camera on Dorothy as she follows Glinda’s directions. So as you can see, screenwriters have been directing on the page since the beginning of Hollywood.

**John:** Yes, they have been.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yeah, it was.

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** Also, famously, The Wizard of Oz was written by a zillion people –

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** On – a whole bunch of people worked through it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so, like, that’s not a new thing that’s happened either.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So –

**Craig:** It was also directed by multiple directors.

**John:** Yes, it was. And like the studio was super involved in every little phase of it. So, if you get a chance to go see The Wizard of Oz exhibit, fantastic. If all you can see The Wizard of Oz is this page and the original movie, you’ll have some sense of what the connection was between this is what started on the page and this is the final movie you saw.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** Also, this past week, Netflix put out a data dump, or at least showed some numbers on their biggest series and movies, like what is actually the top hits on Netflix, which I found kind of surprising, because they’ve always been so cagey about sort of like kind of what people are watching and what are the most popular things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But for some reason, they chose to put out some charts. So there’s two different charts we’re talking about. So the first is most popular series and films as determined by the number of accounts that have watched at least two minutes of that title in its first 28 days on Netflix. So you never see the whole thing. You had to watch at least two minutes of it.

**Craig:** So if you watched two minutes and then – oh, screw this, you apparently watched that show. Oh Netflix, come on.

**John:** Oh, Netflix.

**Craig:** Really? Two minutes.

**John:** So the second one is actually – it is actually a little bit more useful for us.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s a little bit more what we’re expecting.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So this is total view hours per title in the first 28 days on Netflix.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** So either and they could be longer things or more people are watching or people rewatching them, but it’s probably more what we’re kind of thinking, like, oh, this thing is really popular because people are really consuming it.

**Craig:** Correct, Bridgerton, very popular.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So Shonda Rhimes has done it again. You see a couple of things. And The Witcher, the first season was very popular.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But Stranger Things 2 and 3. Still rolling big time.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Those were kind of – so Stranger Things sort of peaked, I guess, in season two and three.

**John:** Well, season four hasn’t come out yet.

**Craig:** Oh, there you go. So I guess maybe season four will be even better, as true as would I know. I started to see them too.

**John:** I really, really enjoy seeing number seven on the top series –

**Craig:** You.

**John:** Is You Season 2.

**Craig:** What the hell is that?

**John:** So which was, of course, so You is that show that was on Lifetime that Lifetime canceled and – but Netflix picked it up and it became a giant hit on Netflix. And so –

**Craig:** What is it?

**John:** So You is a story – it’s a romcom about a serial killer.

**Craig:** Okay, I never heard of it.

**John:** Or sort of a stalker serial killer person.

**Craig:** I really never heard of it.

**John:** Yeah, it’s good. It’s pent actually. It’s nice.

**Craig:** Okay, so 457 –

**John:** Megana – Megana Rao, have you watched any of You?

**Megana:** Yes, I’ve watched a lot of it.

**Craig:** A lot of it. Okay.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Have you watched Ginny & Georgia?

**Megana:** I had a friend who wrote on that show. And so I did watch that, too.

**Craig:** Money Heist?

**John:** Money Heist is a big international hit. So –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think it’s Spanish and it’s done really well everywhere.

**Craig:** Looking at the films, we knew the Bird Box was this sort of Netflix film phenomenon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s Extraction?

**John:** Extraction is the Chris Hemsworth, Russo Brothers’ movie –

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Where he plays a guy who gets people out of dying situations I believe.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** The Irishman obviously was a big Scorsese movie. Kissing Booth 2 which I know my daughter was a big Kissing Booth fan.

**John:** Mm-hmm. 6 Underground was the Michael Bay, Ryan Reynolds movie.

**Craig:** Right. What Spenser Confidential?

**John:** That was Mark Wahlberg –

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Playing Spenser like the Spenser detective.

**Craig:** I like seeing Enola Holmes on here. That’s our buddies Jack Thorne and Harry Bradbeer.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve discussed Army of the Dead.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Tig Notaro thing. Charlize Theron and The Old Guard.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And Murder Mystery was the –

**Craig:** Sandler and Aniston.

**John:** Yeah, Jennifer Aniston.

**Craig:** Sandliston.

**John:** Yeah, Sandliston. So many of the top films are the big budget ones.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The sort of, like, oh, well, that’s a giant hit. I think it’s really fascinating with Kissing Booth 2 which was not expensive but had such an amazing viewership.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s just important to remember that sometimes on Netflix, the more money you spend doesn’t necessarily mean the more eyeballs you’re gonna get.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m just still giggling over the – if you watch two minutes you’re considered a watcher. Oh, it’s just silly. Yeah, pretty amazing though. I mean, Netflix has – this is their first kind of brief glimpse behind the screen. I’m still – I’m curious about this.

**John:** Craig, why? Why do you think they shared these numbers with us this week?

**Craig:** I think that the Netflix business model is curious. Where we are on our side of things, Netflix is fantastically successful. Everybody talks about it constantly. They make more content than anybody. Everybody has a subscription. That sounds pretty great.

On the other side of things, they do spend a lot of money, obviously, and I think they sort of keep spending more than they make. So some of this has to do with proving to the market that people really are watching stuff and it’s not just Netflix pretending, because there are no commercials here. So it really just comes down, I suppose, to subscriber retention.

**John:** Yeah. And that number they’ve always had to sort of disclose to investors to show like what their churn is and how much they’re able to grow. My theory behind why they’re releasing this information now is they feel Disney+ closing on their heels and obviously being indexed with the success that it’s become and they want to sort of show how dominant they are and how dominant they are worldwide, and so they have a new show, Squid Game, which is like, you know –

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s going to be their top, by far their top performer. It’ll top all these charts as they publish them now. So I’m guessing it’s just because they now have competition and they feel the need to sort of show how successful they are on their big titles.

**Craig:** Yeah, you might be right. I mean, they certainly now have really serious competition from multiple outlets and there’s more coming, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It seems like every day there’s another streamer coming on board. So you have Apple. You have Amazon. You have HBO Max. You have Disney+. You have Paramount+?

**John:** Paramount+ yeah.

**Craig:** Paramount+.

**John:** Yeah, all CBS shows. All your Star Treks. All your Survivors.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ve got Peacock.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Hulu. So now we used to have 500 cable channels. Soon we will have 500 streamers. So yeah, I don’t know why.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** This is above my paygrade.

**John:** So here is where I think it’s so fascinating is it shows that they actually do have all this data and they could share this data whenever they wanted to. So as we start talking about like maybe you need to pay, you know, folks, proper residuals for the things they do, it’s not hard for them to crank out these charts and they really do know how many people have watched what. And so –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the thing they can do. And that data is there and accessible. It reminds me of my One Cool Things from last week I talked about how in the music streaming business, how weird the numbers and accounting really were. And again, you can always learn from like what happened in music streaming to what’s happening here. Let’s make sure that as we look at these numbers, they really are kind of measuring what we want to measure, which is, how much is my work being used and exploited.

**Craig:** Yeah, and maybe that’s why they’ve been holding off for so long because they didn’t want people like, say, Jack Thorne and Harry Bradbeer to know that 190 million hours were spent on Enola Holmes. That does imply that they should get paid more for, you know, the next outing. And this is true for all of these things, you know, if you get paid nothing in residuals for, I don’t know, 6 Underground, well, what does that mean? Because 83 million people watched at least two minutes of it.

**John:** No, because –

**Craig:** I don’t know what that means. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what that means.

**John:** Because I was only a talking head and not an actual writer on Hollywood clichés, which debuted on Netflix this past week, I wouldn’t have gotten any residuals that I wrote anyway.

**Craig:** Oh, yes.

**John:** But the writers to that show, if it’s a huge success, I don’t know where it’s going to be a huge success, yeah, I want them to be rewarded for the hard work they did.

**Craig:** I mean, I have a legitimate question I wish I could ask Ted Sarandos dose in all seriousness. Why would they set two minutes as the thresholds for saying that an account has watched a series or film in terms of its popularity when I think that number is kind of a joke, right? I mean –

**John:** Yeah, that feels too low. It feels like you want – like 15 minutes is like you’ve sort of given it a try.

**Craig:** And I think it’s a failure. I mean, not one of these things is 15 minutes long. I mean –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you watch, I don’t know, two thirds of a movie, then I guess, you know, I would say you watched it, you didn’t bail out. And if you watched a single episode of a series, in its completion, meaning, you know, or 90% or more, then that’s a watch. What does this two minutes get you other than derision? It’s a very strange choice.

**John:** All right. Well, Ted can write in and tell us.

**Craig:** Yeah, Ted, explain this to us.

**John:** Why two minutes?

**Craig:** Yeah. Why two minutes, Ted?

**John:** Why two minutes?

**Craig:** Yeah, we’d like to know.

**John:** We got some follow up.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So last week on the show we talked about IATSE, which is the stage and theatrical employees.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** You can say all the bloodline folks who actually make our movies and TV shows. They are right now, as we’re recording this, in the middle of their strike authorization vote. So by the time you’re listening to this, we’ll, we may know the outcomes of this vote. So we are living in the past and you don’t know what the results were. They would have to achieve 75% on that vote in order to –

**Craig:** Oh, they’re going to.

**John:** Go on strike.

**Craig:** They’re going to.

**John:** I think they’ll easily hit that number.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s not surprising.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** We got a lot of good emails in. I want to highlight one from Dan. Dan writes that creatives like Craig often approach production as a crunch time to power through, and I definitely am guilty of this versus like, okay, we just sort of head down to get through this. It’s going to be exhausting but we’ll get through it.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And Dan points out that it’s easy to forget that the trials in production are not a temporary situation for your crew. We spend far more time there than anywhere else in our lives. And so, what’s a crunch time for us is just normal time for them. That’s an interesting perspective that I hadn’t really considered.

**Craig:** Certainly coming from features, absolutely, I think, writers and directors do view production as here we go, and then it’s over. Whereas crews are doing all year round. Now, running a television show, I can tell you now this is my life.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it is –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s no specific end in sight. I mean, obviously, there is an end in sight. I just don’t want to see what it is, but point being, we’re gonna be in production for a long time. And so, I now feel that life and it becomes all the more important to make sure that people are being, at the minimum, not bullied and not pushed around and not made miserable and not treated poorly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And ideally treated well.

**John:** Yeah. Dan also points out that script coordinators and production office coordinators, who are also IATSE, they are paid so little compared to other folks on a set. And so, he’s saying he’s paid really well but other folks are not, especially office workers. And that the production office coordinator is not an entry-level job. A multi-million dollar production literally could not function in a day without them. And some of them are making less money than a retail clerk, and that we as a union have never stood up for them until now. So, hurray.

**Craig:** That is a great point. And one area to take a careful look at are the places that are controlled by the people who control budgets.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** The people who control budgets are always looking for places to save money. That’s their job, I suppose.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But there are jobs that people like you and me don’t see, for instance, production. I’m not in the production office, because I’m on set or I’m on location. And those jobs there, that’s areas where there can be situations like this where they’re just being underpaid, and that’s why a union is so essential.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I hope very much that IATSE gets what they want out of this and what they need. And I would say – I didn’t say this last week. I want to say it now. This is my weekly message to Carol Lombardini. Carol, you don’t want to let this genie out of the bottle. If IATSE strikes, now they know what it means to strike. And they’re gonna feel it. And that’s a taste that you can get real used to. The Writers Guild talks about striking every three years because we’re kind of a strike-y union. We haven’t struck a lot during my time and John’s time. We’ve only struck once during our time. But prior to that, we struck multiple times. There was a run in the ‘70s and ‘80s where we’re striking every couple of years, because we liked it. And you don’t want IATSE to get used to striking, Carol. Give them what they want. You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to go down this road. I know you don’t want to go down this road. You need to take care of them. Also, what they’re asking for is ultimately about what is morally correct. And I can easily make the argument why wealthy feature writers don’t deserve another penny on the DVDs or whatever. Harder to make any kind of moral argument against what IATSE is asking for, these are people who have put their hearts and souls into this, a lot of them as Dan writes in, are being paid barely anything. You got to give on this one. They’ve got to.

**John:** Yeah. As we acknowledged last week as well, if a strike happens, it won’t shut down all production because there are –

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There are some places working under a different contract. And so, they’re like, it’s going to be a weird situation because it’s not like the whole, everything shuts down. It’s like, everything shuts down on certain shows.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But some shows made for HBO and other places that are on different contracts, which feels like an extra strange place for the AMPTP because suddenly some of their members are like not hurting me. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

**Craig:** Yeah. And again, this I think we mentioned this last week, this is about Netflix. This is flat out about Netflix. The amount of production that Netflix funds, therefore the amount of employment for which they’re responsible is very outsized, compared to everyone else. And yeah, it’s gonna have to – it’s gonna have to get fixed.

**John:** Also, last week, we discussed a murder that took place in a small town in remote Australia. Jason from Brisbane, Australia wrote in to say, “I was excited to hear that you were discussing the Larrimah story for how this would be a movie, but I was surprised to hear you were citing a Medium article by an American writer. The story was covered and reported by two Australian writers, Caroline Graham and Kylie Stephenson. They created a great podcast that came out a few years back and have just released a book.” So we’ll put links to both of those resources in the show notes for this episode. I didn’t know that they had written it. Basically, I think my first exposure to this story came from a reader who sent in the link to this article, but it’s great that there were some people on the ground during that first person recording.

**Craig:** John, I think this makes you a bad person.

**John:** Aye, yeah. That’s a moral failing.

**Craig:** You’re bad.

**John:** Bad.

**Craig:** Shame.

**John:** Oh, but I don’t feel nearly as much shame as you should –

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Because we got another piece of follow up.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Really follow up about your criticism of the autumn season.

**Craig:** Here they come. Here they come.

**John:** Uh, Megana could you chime in here?

**Megana:** Yeah, so we got this really thoughtful feedback.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Megana:** Megana notes. “When we were –

**Craig:** Oh.

**Megana:** When we recorded our bonus segment on fall last episode, I was at a farmhouse in Maine and I was cold and hungry, and got distracted by the thought of sweaters and stew. I want to make clear that the reason I love fall is Halloween, and if there’s any marketing campaign to blame for the popularity of the season, let’s just say the call is from inside the house.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**Megana:** “When I was five years old, the Fox Family channel which then became ABC Family, and is now Freeform launched its 31 Nights of Halloween programming campaign. So each night in October, they play a family-friendly scary movie. That’s when I was introduced to some of my favorite movies like The Addams Family –“

**Craig:** Great movie.

**Megana:** “Hocus Pocus,”

**Craig:** Fun.

**Megana:** “Aliens,”

**Craig:** Scary.

**Megana:** “Ghostbusters,”

**Craig:** Amazing.

**Megana:** “And … the Corpse Bride.”

**Craig:** Never saw it.

**John:** Ah, I know that one.

**Megana:** “And guess who has a writing credit on the Corpse Bride, ring, ring, the prince of Halloween himself –“

**Craig:** Oh, lord.

**Megana:** “Mr. John August.”

**Craig:** Oh, my god.

**Megana:** “Also, guess what movies my brother would steal the remote and flip the channel to you?”

**Craig:** He sounds cool. Which ones?

**Megana:** “That’s right. Scary Movies 3 and 4.”

**Craig:** Okay, your brother is awesome.

**Megana:** “So I just want to point out that if any institution is to blame for the rise of Spooky Season, it is not CBS –“

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Megana:** “Not Nancy Meyers. It is in fact Scriptnotes.”

**Craig:** I –

**John:** Wow, I feel like the mirror was just turned like back on us and you recognize like we are the problem.

**Megana:** Yes.

**Craig:** And also, we’re the solution.

**John:** Maybe we should just surrender to Spooky Season and just say, like, you know what, it’s great. I actually never really mentioned you Yuck Someone’s Yum, if people like it, great. It’s just, I find it a little too much.

**Craig:** Yeah, I, I don’t, I like Halloween, you know, and I just don’t like the phrase Spooky Season actually. I think I like the idea of what Spooky Season represents. I just want a different name for it.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But I’m sure everybody else agreed with me, right Megana? No? What?

**Megana:** I just think it’s rich as the co-architects of the situation that we find ourselves in, you guys are all of a sudden bowing out of Spooky Season.

**John:** Okay, co-architect is probably overstating our role on this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As just –

**Craig:** Just a little bit.

**John:** As small day laborers on the project of creating the Halloween complex.

**Craig:** I was young, I needed the work.

**John:** And by the way, Craig was mocking the Halloween complex in those two movies.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s exactly correct.

**John:** And really, by the time it got to Scary Movies 3 and 4, they were barely about like, you know, Scary Movies at all.

**Craig:** Not at all.

**John:** Where they? They were basically just like pop-culture movies. I didn’t – I didn’t see them.

**Megana:** But they’re still played all October.

**Craig:** Yeah, we, we were – Scary Movie 4 is where the wheels started coming off because Bob Weinstein was fully raging. But on 3, we kind of kept it to the ring, which was, which was the Scary Movie.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** And Signs, which was sort of a scary movie, and Saw. Saw actually was 4.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** So Saw was scary. Yeah, but then it got stupid.

**John:** The Ring is such a genuinely scary movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s still really unsettling for me.

**Craig:** It’s terrific, excellent.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. All right, let’s get on to our craft topic this week.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** And so set up for this, Megana and I went down to Howard Rodman’s class at USC. He’s teaching a graduate screenwriting class, and once a year, I go down there and talk with him as they’re going through their index cards on their films. And so, basically, they’re laying out all their cards on a table, and then in about 10 minutes they’re sort of pitching me the story and sort of pointing to the cards and sort of show where they’re at. And it’s a good exercise. But before we started, I wanted to talk about sort of their backgrounds. And so, two of the six were actors. They had come from an acting background. So we were talking about the way in which actors approach characters versus how writers approach characters, because actors have a very different understanding of sort of their motivation with the scene, because they’re hopefully just thinking about where they are in that moment versus the writer thinks about that character over the course of the whole journey.

And that really is the same situation with index cards versus the script you’re writing, because these index cards are sort of like a roadmap for the story that you’re gonna be telling. And you’re really figuring out, like, “What is this map?” Like, “Where are we overall going?” But characters, of course, are never actually, on the whole journey. They’re just in one scene. And they don’t actually know this whole map. They don’t know what is happening around them. So it’s this weird thing that writers have to do where we have to know so much. And then at the same time, forget it all, when we actually start doing the work of writing scenes. And so for this segment, I want to talk about how important it is to forget what you need to forget, and some techniques for sort of doing all of that memory loss as you’re writing.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s a really good point. I’ve never thought of it this way. But that’s pretty much what’s going on. You have to know everything. And then you have to pretend you don’t know everything. One thing that actors do have to do is both be the person in the scene and also take care of certain technical aspects that they are aware, have everything to do with the artificial nature of making a movie or television show. They are being a person. Also, they need to hit their mark. And they need to put their eye line slightly off from where they think they should put it because the camera operators asked for that. And they have to remember to pick the thing up with their left hand at this word.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there is this weird melding of authenticity and absolute fakery. And –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We kind of do the same thing, but in a different way. We do it in terms of scope, what we know versus what they know.

**John:** And if we’re not doing that job properly, we’re gonna end up with characters who are functional, but not real. They’re gonna work like robots. They’re going to sort of do the job, maybe of like, moving a plot along, but they’re not going to feel real in those moments. And that’s really what I want to talk about is like how do you get them to do their jobs without sort of making it seem like they’re just doing their plot jobs? How do they do that artificial stuff, which is like picking up that prop at the right moment and make them feel like, well, that’s what they just wanted to do at that moment?

**Craig:** Yep, exactly.

**John:** So let’s talk through the things you need to forget, like things you know as a writer going into a scene. So you know the theme, you know the central dramatic question, you know what your movie is about, you know what your story is trying to tell, you know what you’re wrestling with. You know all the characters’ secrets, you know why they’re there, what they secretly want, what they could do if they could do anything, you know what happens next. And you know what happens in the scenes that those characters weren’t in. And so you know we’re all – how all the pieces fit together. And these other characters in the scene, they don’t even have a sense that there is a puzzle to be assembled. I got a puzzle reference in there.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Because they don’t know what – they don’t know what the shape of this whole thing is. They’re just like one little piece and then they have no sense. They actually have a function overall. So you have to know all these things. And then you have to kind of forget them.

**Craig:** Yeah, and part of creating the narrative and the – let’s call it the overall picture, the big meta story –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where you’re looking down like the dungeon master and you can see everything is –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You have to design your story in such a way that it is really interesting to view from very limited points of view.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If everybody can see everything, if it’s, if you’ve built a big open building of story, and everybody sees everything, then it’s gonna be boring. There’s gonna be very little conflict. Mostly everybody will agree that they see what they see. They know what they know. And now what should we do?

But the more you design a funhouse for your characters, where they are seeing optical illusions, where they’re seeing things that make them think x, but truthfully, it’s y, and then we get to see them discover that it’s y, this is the fun. This is the fun part. This is the puzzle part. Everybody inside of your narrative should be able to see only what you want them to see. And what you want them to see should be very purposeful. It can’t just be what they happen to see. You get to shape things so that perhaps they get fooled, and the audience gets fooled.

**John:** Absolutely. And of course, that audience is the third important character here, because the audience is approaching any of these stories with a set of expectations. They have a sense of like what they think is going to happen next. They have information that the characters in the scene don’t have. And so, you’re always remembering as the writer is like, okay, the audience knows this piece of information, so therefore, I don’t want this character to say the same again because they already know it. So you’re always balancing, you know, where your audience is at versus where your character is at versus where you know the story as a whole needs to go. So you’re doing a lot of juggling here. And that’s why I’m just urging people to do is to do as much as you can just sort of forget that you’re juggling and just really experience this from inside the character’s point of view so that it feels alive and natural.

As I was looking at these index cards, they’re all laid on tables, that really was the god’s eye view. And I was trying to mostly focus on, is the shape of the story interesting. Are we actually moving from one interesting place to another interesting place to a new place? Does it feel like we’re progressing through time, through different locations that we’re actually on a journey that’s going to be meaningful, but the same time I wanted to be able to focus down and look at, like, this index card, this scene, is that going to be interesting? Is it gonna be interesting to watch as an audience? Would it be interesting for the characters who are in that moment? And you have to be able to do that macro and that micro looking at the same time when you’re thinking about the big stories. Like, it’s great to like lay out, you know, oh, this would be an epic journey. But are you creating an epic journey that’s going to have space for those fascinating moments inside them?

**Craig:** Yeah. Are you using your index cards to find your story? Or have you found your story and you’re just putting them on index cards? That’s what you ought to be doing. Because if you think your index cards are going to teach you what to do, you’re going to end up with a whole lot of index cards that suck. The work has to be done before you get the Sharpie out.

**John:** Yeah. So what can be useful about the index cards is like I don’t tend to card out a lot of things. But what can be useful about them is recognize that you just have too many beats or that you’re sort of doing the same thing too often, or if you stayed in the same place a little too long; that you need to keep moving. If there’s too many scenes that are kind of doing the same thing, great that you’re noticing this now before you’ve written those scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s a good organizational tool for sure. But when you have index cards, like John is looking at these index cards, and he picks up one of them and he goes, “Well, this one seems not quite interesting. It seems a little bit boring,” there is a big problem underneath that. Every person – every problem is a big problem in a story, when it comes down to story. If you’re looking at index cards, then the human being on the table is completely opened up. You’re looking at organs and bones.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If an organ is in the wrong place, it’s not just, oh, let’s move it over here. There’s something fundamentally not correct because the index cards and those beats should be a function of what your characters want, and should be a function of what your characters know versus what you want them to know or where you want them to be. Or, I really want a scene where this thing happens. If you ever say, I really want a scene where blankety blank happens, just stop, go for a walk, come back, and then think about what would be better for your characters instead of you, if that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah, and that overview thing actually come into play with one story I was looking at, and the writer pitched and did a good job pitching. But I said, “Okay, I’m looking at your cards, your story actually starts here. And I think you need to lose the first 11 cards and actually start your story here. Because you and I both believe in a first act that does a lot of work. But that first act was not doing the work to tell the rest of the story. And the actual interesting moment happened here. And you could have to start the story here and it be much more fascinating to learn about these characters in the middle of this crisis, rather than 30 pages, 30 minutes of other stuff, which is not actually going to pay off in the course of the movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s the reason why you do these cards is because you recognize, oh, I shouldn’t even write that stuff because that’s not actually going to help me tell the story that I want to tell.

**Craig:** Not necessarily good news here for those of you listening to the podcast, simply hearing us say this is not going to help you do it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You kind of just need to know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you won’t know perfectly at first. The more you do it, the better you get at it, until eventually you absolutely know. But it takes time and experience. So just remember as you go through this and we’re talking about what you should and shouldn’t do, you’re going to do a lot of the things that we would look at –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And say, “You shouldn’t have done that,” because we’ve been doing it for 30 freakin’ years, and you maybe haven’t been.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s totally normal.

**John:** Well, let’s focus now on that you’ve done your outline. And now it’s time to actually work on your script, and you’re in a scene. And let’s talk about how you forget all the other stuff you know when you’re in that scene. For me, and we’ve talked a lot about writing process, I need to sort of physically or sort of mentally place myself in that scene, in that location where the things are happening, look around and see what’s there and really center myself in the middle of that action, and not be thinking about, like, what just happened, or what’s happened next. It’s like what is happening in this space, who’s there, what do they want to do, who’s driving the scene and really feel that I’m live there in that moment. Because that’s going to keep me from wandering off and thinking about other moments ahead in the story or behind the story, and really focus on what wants to happen in this scene itself.

**Craig:** It’s essential. I’m a huge believer in the visual imagination of the space. I need to know what it looks like. I need to know how close they are together. I need to know if the lights are on or off. If there’s a fire in the fireplace, if it’s warm, if it’s hot, what are they wearing? And then, of course, I need to know what they want. And then I really try as best I can to imagine this conversation between two people and include all of the wonderful irregularities that happen between two people when they’re having a conversation. It’s weird. It’s awkward. There are stops and starts. There’s confusions. There is mistakes. We make conversational mistakes all the time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And most importantly, reaction. In your mind, as you’re imagining a scene, try and keep your eye on the person listening, not the person talking. And at that point, once you go forward, never stop asking this question, “What would a human being do here?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And what would this specific human being do in the context of what she or he wants?

**John:** Yeah. And so crucially, you’re asking that question, while at the same time half remembering and half forgetting what they actually – what you actually need them to do. And so, part of your job as the writer is to find ways to tilt your world so that they will make the choice that you need them to make, so that you can get to the next thing you need in their story. And it’s how you do that without feeling the author’s hand doing that, that makes a scene successful. That it achieves both the dramatic purpose within the scene; that it feels real within that moment. And it also gets you to that next scene, to that next moment that you need to have happen in your story based on your overall outline, your overall plan for it. That’s the challenge is that you’re constantly balancing this need for things to feel incredibly real. And the characters have agency and they’re making their own choices. That it’s not predestined. And yet –

**Craig:** It’s predestined.

**John:** They will. It’s predestined, because –

**Craig:** Well, yeah.

**John:** you are god, and you are setting sort of what is happening in this world.

**Craig:** That’s what we do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the trick of it all, the whole thing. Tchaikovsky definitely wanted to blow some cannons off at the end of the 1812 Overture. And he did, and I’m happy he did.

**John:** He would say, “Wouldn’t it be cool,” he’s like, “It’d really be cool if I shot, shot some cannons.”

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** But then then he walked away and thought about it.

**Craig:** Right, and then he was like, okay, I think what I need to do is think about the voices in the conversation and what would need to happen. If that is the eventuality, how does that become meaningful? How does it become this gorgeous eventuality that we didn’t see coming, but once it happens, we go, of course, everything has led to this moment. And all of the stuff before it makes the cannons good. The cannons aren’t good because their cannons. The cannons are good because of all the stuff that wasn’t cannons.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And that is why every screenwriter should listen very carefully to the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky not only because it’s amazing, but it’s also quite brief.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it is the closest you can get to two or three people talking in a room. That’s called three or four people –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Talking without anyone talking. And in fact, it’s all music. It’s wonderful.

**John:** Absolutely. Now, getting back to our techniques for forgetting. So you’re in the middle of a scene and how do you forget what needs to happen in the scene so it feels you’re germane for like the characters in that moment. Make sure you’re looking at one character’s want. Make sure you’re looking – either one character’s want needs to be driving the scene. An external pressure needs to be driving the scene. Some point of conflict need to be driving the scene. Because if nothing is driving the scene other than you as the writer need to get this piece of information out or need to connect these two pieces, we’re going to feel it. And we do feel it. And we can all think of examples of TV shows or movies we’ve watched where like, “Hey, that scene is just to connect these two things and it doesn’t serve a purpose,” you avoid that by actually setting yourself in that moment and really looking at like, what would this moment actually be rather than what you functionally need it to do.

**Craig:** That’s exactly correct.

**John:** Yeah. And stay curious. And just like I – some of my favorite scenes are the ones where I didn’t quite know what was going to happen. I knew sort of what needed to happen, but I really had no idea how it was going happen and I just let the characters start moving around and doing things. And sometimes they’re doing that and I’m sort of looping through my head. Sometimes it was like, as I was writing and a character said something or did something, I was, well, that surprised me. But if it surprises me, then it probably surprises the audience. And that moment suddenly feels more real. So just stay curious about these things that don’t follow your outline so methodically that it’s just doing the functional job it needs to do.

**Craig:** Yeah, try and apply the art of imperfection so that your characters aren’t speechifying, their lines aren’t perfectly formed, brilliantly clever, right on the heels of each other. We’ve all seen scenes like this –

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Where you might walk away thinking, well, how arch and interesting those two humans were, except that they don’t seem like humans at all, do they? They seem like two, I don’t know, Dorothy Parkers locked in a battle of overly-witted wits. We don’t want that. We want real people. And I’m mostly interested in what real people think and do and vulnerability, and make sure that you allow yourself to have your character sound or behave or act wrong, which is how we do it.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Because they don’t know they’re being filmed. They don’t know that they’re, that everyone is watching them do it. And that’s part of the joy of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. They also may not be brilliant at talking. They may sneeze in the middle of it. They may eat something weird. They may drop something. They may start laughing at a moment they shouldn’t be laughing. These are the things you want to think about. How can I just take all the weird artificial polish off of this and make it real.

**John:** And my last bit of advice, if you find yourself grinding ahead and you recognize, I just can’t, I can’t be thinking about the scene just as a scene and I’m only looking at it in the context of the movie, try writing the scene in a blank document. So try like not make it the next scene that you’re writing if you’re writing chronologically for fitting between two things, try just letting the scene be the moment itself and just start it in a blank document. Let it be its own thing, and then copy/paste it back into the document, your overall script. Yeah, you might need to tweak some things to get the transition and hand off to work. But I suspect you’re gonna have a better scene that feels real to itself if, you know, let that scene not have to squeeze in the middle of a long document you’re scrolling through.

**Craig:** Copypasta.

**John:** Copypasta, love it. Cool. So now we can forget everything we just talked about in terms of how to forget.

**Craig:** Great. Gone.

**John:** Let’s ask some listener questions. Megana, what do you have for us?

**Megana:** Great. So our first question comes from Gary, who asks, “Do you think that the lighting in the room where you’re writing affects your writing?”

**Craig:** No. Easy. No.

**John:** No. I think it does some. It depends on what I’m working on. I do like sometimes to be in an environmental space that actually kind of feels like what I’m writing. And so, if I’m writing something sort of dark and spooky, it’s kind of nice to have the lights be a little bit low. And something sort of creepy playing in the background. I often have like a playlist that sort of gets me into the mood for it. But I try not to be so, you know, freaky about it. Because I think you can so often make those excuses for like, oh, I couldn’t write today because the light was coming in the window wrong. No, you just move a little bit, just get the writing done.

**Craig:** The lighting in the room where I’m writing is the light that’s hitting me off of my laptop. That’s the lighting. It doesn’t matter, bright light, dark, whatever. It’s not to say that some people will be lighting-dependent. We’re all different. But for me, nah.

**John:** When I was finishing off work on the first Arlo Finch book, I was in France during a super heatwave, and I was writing these really cold wintry scenes and we were in this apartment without air conditioning, and we were just melting. And so, what I would do is I would play these – YouTube has these like these 12-hour tracks of like the environmental noises, and I played like this winter storm in my headphones. And it helped me sort of kind of feel cold and in that moment, even though I was in absolutely sweltering heat. So I think it can be good to trick yourself to some degree and sort of remember the environment your characters are in but it’s used for yourself. But no. Don’t freak out about your lighting.

**Craig:** Next, Megana.

**Megana:** Love Lauren from LA asks, “I received an email from a very big manager last week.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Megana:** “He said he enjoyed my work sent to him by a mutual connection and would like to help bring new opportunities to me. What exactly does this mean? And how should I respond? I can already hear Craig chuckling at my naiveté. I’m young with only a few years of experience on a small TV show. I’ve never had a rep and most of his clients are seasoned award winners. Eons ago in Episode Two, you mentioned managers help develop young talent. Is that what this is about? And if so, what does that entail?”

**Craig:** I’m not chuckling at your naiveté.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I am chuckling at you thinking I would chuckle at you. You don’t sound naive at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You actually sound very – normally what we get is, “I received an email from a very big manager’s brother’s niece and she said that, you know, he really liked the title that I told him that you wrote. Am I now an A-list writer?” You know, like, this is the opposite. And here’s somebody that’s working as a working writer with – I like that this particular person says only a few years of experience. So years of experience.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And somebody is showing interest in you. It’s quite likely that the big manager would not be your personal manager, if that’s where you are in your career. But big managers tend to employ other managers at their firms. And those managers are looking to develop younger talent. Of course, they are. If you don’t develop younger talent, then eventually you just become like the manager of very old people who proceed inexorably toward the grave. So –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I would actually respond and say it would, it would be wonderful to sit down and discuss how can we do that.

**John:** I a hundred percent agree with Craig. And this is only good news. So this manager reached out to you and this wasn’t you who sent it into a manager. And he says, like, whenever somebody reaches out to you because they read your stuff that you didn’t even send to them, that’s really good news. Good things could happen and come from that. So yes, follow up with that. Go in there and see what they’re saying. And it sounds like you don’t have anybody repping you at all right now, this could be a situation that you get a new rep.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** You should.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** Yeah. Megana, what else we got?

**Megana:** Half of One writer asks, “My writing partner and I have a question about WGA insurance minimums. Currently, a writer has to earn $40,854 a year to receive insurance. This means that if we get paid $44,000 for a treatment, or a non-original screenplay, we don’t qualify for insurance, because we only get $22,000 each. When it comes to paying us, we’re each treated as a half of a writer. But when it comes to insuring us, we have to make twice what a single writer would in order to qualify, which doesn’t seem totally logical or fair. I know the WGA has taken strides to improve the minimums for writing partnerships. But to be honest, we’re less concerned about that than not getting shut out of basic healthcare because we didn’t make twice as much as our non-partnered writer friends. Is there anything we can do about that?”

**John:** So, yes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you’re experiencing is a very real thing which I’ve heard for 20 years, and it sucks. And we’re the only sort of industry – I guess, there are some director teams that could hit this, but like, we’re the only part of this industry that tends to have a lot of teams, and teams split the money. And because they split the money, they fall below what they need to do to hit insurance. I know of married writer teams who will very cleverly divide the money in certain ways so that one of them gets coverage, and then the other one gets spousal coverage. There’s ways to do it. But what you’re describing is real, and it sucks. And often entering into fee negotiations, we’ve brought up partner issues and how we’re going to deal with this. And this is one of the things that does come up. To change this so that so writing teams can qualify for insurance at a lower level, or that they both can receive it, it’s theoretically possible. It’s just a matter of making that a priority in negotiations. And we’ll see if it can happen.

**Craig:** So here’s the issue. The issue is we have to pay for our own healthcare. When we say we have to pay for it, the companies are adding money in. But that’s the money we get. And the amount of money that the companies put in for the $40,854 minimum is not enough to cover a single writer’s health insurance for the year. Happily, we have lots of writers that make more than that. The people that earn much more are helping subsidize the people who earn less, and that’s a nice union benefit. If there are two of you together earning, let’s say, as you put $44,000, the problem is our joint health plan that is run by the Writers Guild and the companies together, they don’t even get enough money from that for one person, much less two. So the problem is simple math. And you’re absolutely right. It totally sucks. And this is one of the reasons why our entire healthcare system is failing everyone. And our negotiations have been essentially perverted for the last 20 years by this endlessly escalating series of healthcare costs. This is all we end up being able to ask for. And even though it does seem unfair, our system is vastly better than what the average American gets from their job, or from the government. So there’s really no answer here. The companies are not going to allow two people who are making a combined $44,000 and they’re not going to go for it.

**John:** The joint organization that runs our health plan, they’re not going to drop that thing because they probably couldn’t.

**Craig:** And I got news for you, we’re not going to ask for it either because we don’t want it. And this is the hard part. The Writers Guild doesn’t want to ask for that because if that happens, we will put ourselves, our health plan, in such a situation where we will really be in trouble. And then we’re gonna have to come back and give away more things that we want in exchange for just shoring up that part, and the healthcare overall will suffer dramatically. What we have to really watch out for these paper teams, those are vicious, where production companies put two writers together and force them to be a team, and then pay them this lower team amount, which is unacceptable. But unfortunately, half of one writer, I’m giving you the cold truth here, I don’t think this is going to change. And so, you and your writing partner need to concentrate on getting that number up, because that’s the only way you’re going to get there.

**John:** Yeah, so the two things you can do are get more money, just get yourself paid more so you’re both over that threshold and push for better healthcare system in the United States, because that’s really, that’s ultimately what’s underlying all of this is because everything that talks about sort of union healthcare is really because we don’t have a sensible system in the United States.

**Craig:** Yeah, in terms of probable outcomes, vastly more likely that you will just go ahead and make more money than fix what appears to be an unfixable system. So, yeah, sorry about that. But alas.

**John:** Any new questions on it, on down note, but thank you for everyone who sends me questions. We’ve got a whole big batch of them. So next week, we’ll try to crank through a bunch more.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s come time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I have two little things here. The first is a thread By Dylan Park, which I’m sure you saw, Craig.

**Craig:** I did.

**John:** Dylan was staffed on a military show, along with this other veteran, and this woman served in Afghanistan, had this amazing experience. And so, Dylan was brought in as a military expert, but this woman was like way ahead of him in a lot of levels. And then he started to suspect that she was not who she said she was. And so, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But I’ll put a link in the show notes to the thread, because it’s a very good read. It’s not Zola, but it’s a very good read.

**Craig:** Yeah, I loathe people who steal valor, that’s the phrase.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Stolen valor, they’re immoral. That is a deeply scummy thing to do. And I have no sympathy for anyone who does it. It’s hard for me to celebrate somebody ruining somebody else, even if he doesn’t use her name.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I mean, he could have just had one thing. I was on a show. And a lady came in and claimed to be this. And in fact, she was never even in the service. And don’t do that because I have been in service and we don’t do that. And here’s why it’s important to not do that. But the whole thing was sort of like, okay, here we go. I’m going to – and it was that there was a sort of sadistic delight in tearing her apart, which, you know, I don’t know, I just find hard to kind of – I don’t delight in those, I guess, as maybe I should.

**John:** Yes, I get that too. And I don’t think I was feeling like a celebration of this. But I know how frustrating it would be to be in that room with that person all the time, who you know you can’t trust and I feel like that writers’ room is a place of trust. And to have to be sitting next to this person who you just did not believe at all, I get why he was so frustrated.

**Craig:** Oh, completely and, and I mean no offense to Mr. Park, because he’s not – I’m not accusing him of doing anything wrong. It’s just a question of, I suppose do you like that sort of thing or not, but I completely agree. And pathological liars are a massive problem in Hollywood. We deal with them all the time. I am really – so I’m a fairly gullible person actually. I’ve had this happen a number of times where I’ve been talking to somebody and I’ve just been describing somebody else’s behavior and been so befuddled by it, and I can’t, I’m, you know me, I love puzzles and like the puzzle is not working, I don’t understand it. And they just look at me and they’re like, “They’re on drugs idiot, or they’re lying.” And I’m like, “What? Oh.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So –

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Oh. And so the thought that somebody would do this is just mind boggling. I don’t know if you saw this on the similar category of sociopathic people, a woman posed as an ASL translator.

**John:** Oh, God.

**Craig:** Did you see this?

**John:** No, I didn’t see this, but I know it. I know how awful it is.

**Craig:** It’s incredible.

**John:** I can feel it. It’s just – so cringe, oh, my god.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s super cringe. So she went – she volunteered her services to a police department actually.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they were like, “Oh, okay.” I mean, she wasn’t asking for money. And they had a conference about something and there she was off in the corner signing and basically quite a few people who speak American Sign Language wrote in to say that she was not speaking ASL at all. She was just gibberishing. And what did she think would happen? And similarly with this woman who was posing as this super soldier who had served in Afghanistan, what did she think would happen? I mean, you can’t get away with this stuff. I mean, I’m on it. See? There, I’m gullible. I guess people do get away with it.

**John:** Catherine Tate, a great British actress has a character who is that sort of like falsely confident person. Like, “Oh, I’m great at tennis,” and they’ll hit and that like she can’t play tennis at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s exactly that feeling. It’s like, “Oh, I know a little of this,” like, no, you should not be doing this, and, uh, the worst.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**John:** My other small One Cool Thing is an article by Amy Hoy called How Blogs Broke the Web.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm, was it on her blog?

**John:** You and I both had blogs.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you and – I think we started – were you in WordPress originally or were you in Movable Type?

**Craig:** I started in Movable Type. And then I went to WordPress.

**John:** Yeah, as did I. And the early days of the internet, we think about blogs, but there was a stage before that. So I’ll put a link in the show notes to my 1996 website. And so this article is really talking about sort of how websites originally like not time-based. They weren’t sort of that reverse chronological thing that blogs did.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** And but because the blogging systems became so popular, everything became a blog, because that was just the easy way to do it. And they all had that reverse chronological flow. And all of the internet sort of started to follow that. Because when you and I were first reading the Trades Online, it was Hollywood Reporter and Variety, and they were like the print versions. But then Deadline came along, and it was just a blog. And now it’s still just a blog. It’s still that reverse chronological flow the same way that Twitter is, the same way that Instagram is. And so, she makes a very interesting case for a weird kind of fluke of history that this blogging stuff came along and really changed the shape of like how personal news is delivered.

**Craig:** Yeah, it did break every – everything has broken everything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The web has broken everything, which is I think, what we’re getting into on our bonus segment, so I don’t want to, I don’t want to give anything away there. But yeah, you know what, the theory was great. Everybody gets a printing press in their own home. The result was an enormous amount of narcissistic horseshit in newspaper format. And it hasn’t changed. It was like, you know, when we were kids, did you know anybody that kept a diary when you were a kid?

**John:** I did not know a single person.

**Craig:** Like diaries were plot points on bad TV shows like, “Oh, my god, you read my diary,” like on The Brady Bunch, whatever. But I didn’t know anybody who kept a diary. And the reason people generally don’t keep diaries except for a very select few is no one is reading it. So you’re writing this description of yourself for nobody except yourself, which I guess is vaguely weirdly romantic or sad. But the purpose of the blogs was, oh, good, now everyone will read it. And it was all the same crap. You know what else is the same, every single day, John?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Deathloop.

**John:** Ah, good segue there. Nicely done. I mean, for an amateur that was a really good segue.

Because I know that Deathloop is basically Groundhog Day with a body cam.

**Craig:** And yet so much more.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Deathloop is a new game out by Bethesda. It’s specifically, well Bethesda is this publisher. It’s Arkane, the company that made the Dishonored games which I love. And I love Deathloop also. If the folks who made Deathloop are listening, I’m thrilled with this game. I think it’s incredibly – it’s so much more than the concept of, oh, it’s the same day every day, because that’s not what’s happening. In fact, everything you do changes what happens on the next time you wake up again. So you are constantly changing the world that you keep waking up in on that same day, but it may be – I learned a word, onboarding. So onboarding –

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the process of teaching people how to play your game and teaching people what the mechanics of it are and how to manage their resources and what things mean is really bad, I’ve got to say, I had no idea what the hell was going on for so long. And I finally just read a bunch of articles on the internet and go, oh, that’s what that is. It’s really bad. But once you know what it is, and you’ve read the articles on the internet, so boo on that front to Arkane and Bethesda, it’s amazing. So I love Deathloop. Excellent game. I’m currently playing it on the PlayStation 5. It looks gorgeous.

**John:** Yeah, it doesn’t exist on PlayStation 4, which is all I have.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** But maybe I’ll get a 5 at some point.

**Craig:** I think it’s time for a 5, John.

**John:** Maybe, maybe.

**Craig:** No. Definitely.

**John:** If I sell. If I sell something, I’ll buy that 5.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Inaudible.

**Craig:** What are you? Are you out of money?

**John:** I’m running really low here. So if you want to chip in some inaudible I’m good.

**Craig:** “If I sell something.”

**John:** No, I’m kind of –

**Craig:** Megana is going to get to work and her desk is gone.

**John:** She can pick it up the pawnshop.

**Craig:** Yeah. “Um, sorry, I needed a PlayStation 5. Sorry, Megana.”

**John:** And that is our show for this week.

Scriptnotes is produced by Megan Rao, is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Owen Danoff. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin sometimes, and I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find that at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up and become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the once we’re about to record on Fame.

Hey, Craig, I made it all the way through the podcast without losing my voice and I think my voice is actually stronger now than at the start.

**Craig:** Cut to: Oh, my god.

**John:** Thanks.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. This article is by Chris Hayes that we’re talking about. It’s from the New Yorker. On the Internet We’re Always Famous. What Happens When the Experience of Celebrity Becomes Universal? So this touches on a bunch of things. It never uses the word parasocial, but parasocial is part of that. It’s looking at sort of how once upon a time there were famous people and not famous people, but the boundaries between them are so much blurrier now. A normal person can become Internet famous all of the sudden. Things kind of suck. Craig, what were your takeaways from this article? What were you feeling as you were reading this?

**Craig:** This was characteristically brilliant from Chris Hayes. He’s a very smart guy. And I’m particularly pleased to see this work written this way just because he’s mostly known for being a talking head on TV. And so you would think, well, the talking head on TV would probably be in favor of talking head stuff. Nothing wrong with being – he’s an excellent talking head on TV. But this is a really well done piece. And it gets to the heart of something that I think is fascinating and important and I don’t know what to do about it and I think he doesn’t know either. Because by the time you get to the end of this I was not feeling hopeful.

And what he gets to is the heart of the fame problem which is that more and more people now can be famous, whether it’s famous briefly or not. But fame, which we always wanted to be a function of recognition, that is to say wide-ranged respect and acknowledgment and like has to turned instead into attention, which is just people staring at you and talking about you. And that is very different. And that so much of the dysfunction that goes on with a lot of the people that we see who are “Internet famous” is the dysfunction of people who are desperate for recognition and receiving instead only attention.

**John:** Yeah. I’m reading a book right now by Jenny O’Dell called How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. And she writes a lot about attention and really interesting phrasing that you say you pay attention to something, and really you do have to pay attention. Attention has a cost. And you are constantly deciding where you’re going to chip in those little dimes of attention and feed those meters to pay attention to a thing. Because also anything you’re paying attention to is by definition you’re not paying attention to other things around you. And so we’ve created this system in which we are constantly being asked to focus on this thing, this person, follow these people who we don’t know in real life, and we’ve created this situation where we’re just kind of functional rather than actual active participants in our lives.

It kind of goes back to our discussion of the note cards, the index cards, because it’s like we just have – we’re these characters who have a function. We’re supposed to be watching this thing, doing this thing, responding to this thing, being outraged by this thing and not being present in the moment that we actually are living in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I have enjoyed withdrawing from that for sure. But there is an interesting aspect of let’s just call it slightly famous. You and I, whether we like it or not, are slightly famous.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And there’s something that Chris says here because he’s also – well he’s famous-famous I would think. He’s not Brad Pitt. So he says, this actually kind of shooketh me as the kids say, I was shooketh. It says, “The star and the fan are prototypes and the Internet allows us to be both in different contexts. In fact, this is the core transformative innovation of social media. The ability to be both at once. You can interact with strangers, not just view them from afar, and they can interact with you. Those of us who have a degree of fame have experienced the lack of mutuality in these relationships quite acutely. The strangeness of encountering a person who knows you, who sees you, whom you cannot see in the same way…”

And what he goes on to say is we’re conditioned as human beings to care for people who care for us. That is the sign of a relationship. But one of the things that the Internet does or being on a podcast or anything is it creates these one-way relationships. So that when you do meet people and they have a response my feeling is always, I mean, it is this weird disorientation of feeling like I should be caring as much as they do, and yet how could I, I don’t know them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I become very awkward and I guess in a sense that’s probably good news because his argument is that for a lot of people the psychological experience of fame he says “like a virus invading a cell takes all of the mechanisms for human relations and puts them to work seeing more fame.” So that’s a terrifying thought.

**John:** It is. He also mentions that a basketball player like Kevin Durant can have an argument in DMs with just some rando. And they’re sort of on equal footing in that conversation which is just weird. It’s one thing to sort of put someone on blast in public which I think is a real problematic thing, but the fact that why are you spending your time talking to this person who you don’t know at all and there’s just a real imbalance. And it’s not necessarily in Kevin Durant’s favor for him to being that.

It is really strange. And at the same time I want to acknowledge that you and I with our little bit of fame, we know how useful it is at times. And so there have definitely been cases where like, oh, I want to ask this person to be on Scriptnotes. I know that if I follow that person on Twitter, if I were to decide to click the follow button they will get a notification that John August is following them. And they will click through and see who I am and they will probably follow me back and then I can DM them.

Is it a little bit weird? Yeah. But that’s just sort of the time that we’re in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t like it. I don’t. I definitely want people to see the things that I make. And I like that people listen to this show. I certainly don’t hold it against anybody or blame anybody for having what Megana has introduced us to is a parasocial relationship with you or with me. But it makes me uncomfortable because I feel accountable and responsible for other people’s feelings and there’s no possible way for me to be accountable or responsible to them. It’s just I’m not equipped to do it.

And I always feel bad in a way like I’m not enough, like if I meet somebody and they feel very strongly about – because they’re a big fan of the show or something and I’m always like, oh, thank you. And I just think you’re blowing it. You’re not saying anything good.

**John:** That’s the experience of Austin Film Festival to the hundredth degree.

**Craig:** Like what I do say here to be awesome? And I don’t know.

**John:** There’s a project I’m considering taking and doing, which is fascinating. It’s this thing I would like to do on many levels, but I am always weighing like, ugh, that is going to be a news story when I do it. And I can already feel what the Internet is going to say. And that sucks that my emotional and artistic decisions are all affected by what I think the Internet is going to say about it. And that is dumb, but it is the reality.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s certainly there. It’s a fear that never used to exist. I think that there have been some nice aspects of that fear. I think it’s probably people used to cavalierly do things that maybe they, you know, after reflection perhaps I’m not the right person to be writing this story or that story. But it is a fear. I mean, look, I’m adapting The Last of Us. The videogame community is not shy. They love and hate in equal parts and with equal abandon, which the love part is the wonderful part. And of course when I was talking with Neil Druckmann about adapting the show I felt the fear of what would be some anger and judgment. No matter what you do somebody is going to not like it, of course. You try and do the best you can. But you also don’t want to keep the Internet’s emotional state as the number one thing you’re taking care of.

The number one thing you should take care of is the work. And then people hopefully will love it. So my advice to you – if you were calling into the show I would say you must do the thing you’re afraid of. You must.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because you don’t want the Internet to win. And also the most important thing is it seems worse than it is. I feel like what happens is we read things and we think that everybody out there is like Alexander Hamilton writing at night like he’s running out of time. And writing these beautiful things like I have the honor to be your obedient servant letters. But here’s why you’re awful. But in fact they’re just smashing their fingers against a keyboard, very briefly, and immediately forgetting what they wrote and did. They’re on to the next thing. It was a nothing moment for them. They did not put a lot of time and thought into it. They’re just shit-posting.

And we can’t tell the difference on our side between the shit posts and the people who legitimately are deeply and perhaps aggrieved. So I would say to you you must do it.

**John:** Yes. The cave you fear to enter holds the answers you seek.

**Craig:** Yes. All right. Megana, do you have a sense of anybody having, now that you are on the show, you talk on the show, do you feel like people have parasocial relationships with you and how do you handle – have you had some fame moments?

**Megana:** I have had people say that they have heard my voice before. But I do not feel comfortable in a role where people recognize me necessarily.

**Craig:** Join the club. I’m right there with you. Which is probably, I don’t want to make a moral judgment about it, but it does feel like seeking fame for fame sake is the sign that something is wrong.

**Megana:** Yeah. And something I’m curious to hear you guys talk about is just like as writers I think it’s so important to have a private life and your private self and to really protect that. And I think for younger writers it seems like there’s a lot of pressure to be on Twitter and to have a really recognizable brand and voice. And it’s just confusing to me how to maintain like a public self and a private self with like nuance complicated feelings that I’d like to put into art and not constantly be generating content with.

**Craig:** Well, you said an interesting thing there which is a lot of people have their own brand now. But I do feel like that is almost counter to what it means to be a writer, to make yourself the thing and not the work the thing. There are some screenwriters that come along and feel a bit branded and they don’t seem to last. The ones who do the work seem to last. And I’m always going to counsel people to put the work first. And if the Internet feels like it’s getting in the way, if social media feels like it’s getting in the way, and if you feel suddenly like you need to be a kind of a person to get noticed or to be talked about then it’s time to step away. Because nothing will matter like a good script.

**John:** Circling back to the note card conversation, we were at this class at USC and they knew who I was coming into it, but they also knew who Megana was because they listen to the show. And that’s just an interesting moment because Megana is a more public voice on the show than any of the previous producers have been and that is interesting. They knew who she was.

**Craig:** It’s the dawning of the age of Megana.

**John:** That’s really what it is.

**Megana:** Well, it’s people saying that they’ve heard my voice before, but not necessarily that they like it. And so–

**Craig:** What? No.

**Megana:** It’s like when someone is like, oh, you got a haircut. And it’s like, yes, I did. Do you feel good about it? I feel OK about it.

**Craig:** Oh, I see what you’re saying. They simply say, ah yes, you are on the show. I have heard you. And then they don’t say, “And you’re great.” Or “I love you.” But this is exactly what Chris Hayes is talking about. You didn’t ask for that.

**Megana:** Or that I’m being rewired to just seek fame.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s exactly what’s happening. People start to rewire you and you begin to try and change your, OK, give them what they want. You know? You used to cook for yourself and people just showed up and started eating what you were cooking. And then suddenly everyone was getting angry at you about the burritos. Instead they were super into whatever the soup. And you’re like why am I caring?

**John:** Yeah. And it’s the same thing with Instagram or anything where you can generate likes is like, oh, which version of me tests the best and that becomes the version you post for.

**Craig:** Oh, my sinking heart.

**Megana:** Can I propose an antidote, because this is also something that I took umbrage with earlier in the show? As a lifelong diary-keeper I think it’s a helpful way to maintain that boundary and maintain a solid public self that–

**Craig:** You’re the weirdo. You’re the one that does it. [laughs]

**Megana:** I know. You just kept going on like weird, freak, yeah.

**Craig:** Bizarre. Probably not a real person.

**John:** Well, and to be fair though there’s always been a gendered quality to diaries.

**Megana:** Today.

**John:** It’s always been a thing that girls do. And even the little gay boys like me, not all of us kept diaries.

**Craig:** Wait, is that a little gay boy thing to do is to keep a diary?

**John:** It’s a little gay boy thing to do.

**Craig:** Is it like that, oh my god, do you know what – I still sometimes will watch just when I’m feeling a little bit low and I want to smile is the Saturday Night Live commercial with the well.

**Megana:** Wells for Boys.

**Craig:** Oh my god, the Wells for Boys is so freaking great.

**John:** Ingenious.

**Craig:** It’s so good. Everything else is for you. This is for him.

**John:** Back to your diary though, because what I think I hear you saying is that lets you actually articulate your thoughts that you would not actually share publically.

**Megana:** Correct. And work out things that feel messy that I think some people who don’t have that outlet turn to Twitter for.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** OK, well you made an excellent point. And I would definitely say that if there’s a choice between Q-testing and perfecting your brand on Twitter to get the most hearts, which infuse no actual love into your life, or writing a diary that no one else reads but you, I strongly would say definitely go diary. So, I’m with you on that. That makes a lot of sense.

**John:** Do what Megana says.

**Megana:** I have successfully changed Craig’s mind.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Again. This season of Scriptnotes is all about Craig’s changing. I like that for us.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think only Megana changes me. [laughs]

**John:** True. That’s fine. Maybe that was the missing thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** She is the antagonist to your protagonist.

**Craig:** Whatever studio executive says it sounds reasonable. That’s totally reasonable. Makes sense. Yeah.

**John:** Thank you both.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks. Bye guys.

**Megana:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scarlett Johanssen and Disney Reach Agreement](https://deadline.com/2021/09/disney-black-widow-lawsuit-scarlett-johansson-rsettlement-1234847437/)
* [CAA Acquires ICM](https://deadline.com/2021/09/caa-acquiring-icm-partners-1234844517/)
* [Academy Museum](https://www.academymuseum.org/en/) featuring [Wizard of Oz](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1443330652586143744) Script Page
* [Netflix Data Dump](https://deadline.com/2021/09/bridgerton-stranger-things-scarlett-johansson-netflix-ted-sarandos-code-conference-interview-1234845341/)
* Caroline Graham and Kylie Stevenson’s podcast [Lost in Larrimah](https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/lost-in-larrimah/id1377413462) and book, [Larrimah](https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/true-crime/Larrimah-Caroline-Graham-and-Kylie-Stevenson-9781760877835)
* [Twitter Thread by Dylan Park](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1443729354324779008.html)
* [How Blogs Broke the Web by Amy Hoy](https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/)
* [History of JohnAugust.com](https://johnaugust.com/history) and [John’s 1996 Blog](https://johnaugust.com/1996/)
* [Death Loop](https://bethesda.net/en/game/deathloop)
* [The Era of Mass Fame](https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/on-the-internet-were-always-famous) by Chris Hayes
* [Wells for Boys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BONhk-hbiXk) SNL Sketch
* [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/)
* [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 Owen Danoff ([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/519standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/creating-a-tv-comedy).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today on the show we have some clips with some bad words in them, so if you don’t want your kids to hear those words maybe listen to this one on headphones.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 508 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig and I could not get our schedules to sync up this week, but lucky for all of us we have a remarkable replacement in the form of Jen Statsky. She’s a writer-producer whose credits include Broad City, Parks and Rec, The Good Place, and my previous One Cool Thing Hacks, a series which she co-created. Welcome Jen.

**Jen Statsky:** Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

**John:** I’m so excited to have you here. So we’ve not really met in person I don’t think, maybe at a WGA thing?

**Jen:** Maybe at a WGA thing. But I think this might be our first in-person meeting.

**John:** It very well could be. So on Twitter I congratulated you on your show, but I think we probably retweeted the same things in the past, but that’s about as much as we’ve done together.

**Jen:** Yes.

**John:** Well today on the show I want to talk about how you got started and particularly how you got started in comedy because that’s a thing I know nothing about. And then I really want to dig into the form of single camera comedy, because Hacks is just great and Hacks and Broad City are both single camera comedies, but they’re very different. And I want to talk about writing those, writing towards act breaks, writing without act breaks.

**Jen:** Sure.

**John:** And we have the pages in front of us, so we have some scenes. So I really want to get very specific if we can.

**Jen:** I love it. Let’s get into it.

**John:** And you know who else has questions? Our listeners. I put out a call to the premium subscribers and they sent in 130 questions about comedy that Megana has sorted through. So, we will not 130.

**Jen:** Let’s do them. Let’s hit them all.

**John:** All of them. We’re going to knock them all out.

**Jen:** 130 questions.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for premium members I want to talk through the cat person discourse, so cat person which is that short story that everyone is talking about years ago, well now there’s an update to that, so I want to get your take on that.

**Jen:** It’s so funny that we are once again reliving cat person on Twitter. It’s all come full circle from 2017.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like there’s people who were in a coma all this time and they wake up and we’re still talking about cat person.

**Jen:** On one end of a global pandemic there’s cat person discourse, and on the other end of the global pandemic there’s cat person discourse.

**John:** It gets into those questions about like who owns a story. And we’re all sort of drawing from real life, especially writers. And I’ve run into situations where an event will happen and it’s like, oh, do I get that event, or do you get that event?

**Jen:** Exactly. I know. It’s a super nuanced conversation about art and who owns certain life things that have happened to people. So it is a really interesting conversation.

**John:** Cool. Two little bits of news and follow up to start with. First off, the WGA put out this pilot deal guide, which was kind of cool. So coming out of the agency agreement we now get all the contracts, and so we can see everybody’s contract and we can see how much people are getting paid for their deals, not just as writers but also as producers, and how much they’re getting paid to write pilots. And so they have all this information. The guild looked through 700 pilot deals from 2020 and 2021 to see what the averages were.

Jen, were there any surprises in here for you?

**Jen:** No, no real surprises. I mean, I think it’s so helpful to have this information out there. I’m just so delighted that the guild did this because you know so much of what happens is people get kept in the dark about what other people are getting paid. And in doing that it allows studios and networks to have all the power, because we’re not talking. We don’t know what our counterparts are making. And so just to have this information out there is I think wonderful.

I remember when the guild was asking for people’s contracts I had a couple of friends reach out and be like, hey, is it OK to send them this. And it’s like yeah it’s to help us, it’s not for nefarious purposes that the Writers Guild wants to look at your contracts. It’s all in the name of the information being out there and just being super helpful and give writers a stronger place to be in for negotiations.

**John:** Yeah. So if you have an agent or manager or lawyer getting your deal, great, they should have some of this information. They should have a sense of what this is. But this is a chance for a writer to say like, OK, this is above the median, this is below the median. If it’s below the median, why is it below the median? There could be a good reason. I mean, half of writers are going to get paid more. So, there could be a reason why you’re below median. But it’s helpful to understand. And if there’s a reason that you can solve about this, great.

**Jen:** Totally. Were there any surprises to you in looking at it?

**John:** I was happy to see that there were changes from 2019. So that a pilot script went up $17,500. That’s great.

**Jen:** That’s great.

**John:** And so that’s progress people are making. And the split between one hours and half hours is also good. So you deal for Hacks, was it a streamer at that point? Was it clear that it was always going to be something that was made without commercials and made for not a cable?

**Jen:** Yeah. It was always – the idea was always to go to the cable streaming places. Like we didn’t really ever entertain pitching this to networks. I and Mike Schur under overall deals at Universal Television, so it started out – we pitched to Universal and then kind of going from there we plotted out where we were going to take the show. But, yeah, in the very early iterations as Paul – my co-creators Paul Downs and Lucia Aniello and I were talking about this idea. We just always knew it had to be for streaming or cable. It’s just baked into the idea.

**John:** Great. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but it talks through sort of what broadcast network and streamer deals are like and you can see where things are at right now. And the good news is that it’ll keep going forward. So each year they’ll be able to put up an update to see what progress is being made, or if stuff is retrenching at all.

A bit of follow up here. Two episodes ago we talked about getting fired. Phil in LA wrote in. Megana could you tell us what Phil said?

**Megana Rao:** Yeah. So Phil wrote in and said, “I listened to Episode 506 where you discussed how to handle being fired. While bad communication isn’t limited to screenwriting, it doesn’t need to be the practice. In Episode 399, Notes on Notes, instead of accepting the status quo on notes you and Craig created a program to help producers learn to give better notes and fix communication issues. The same could be done on this issue as well. And industry build on relationships and communication needs a bedrock of respect. And important moments like firing need to have established norms.”

**John:** Yeah. My daughter just applied for her first job. She’s a high schooler. And so she applied for her first job and she keeps asking like when do you think they’re going to tell me if I got the job or didn’t get the job. And I’m like they’re never going to tell you.

**Jen:** Oh, you’ll never know. I’m still waiting to find out if I got a job at Jimmy Kimmel from a packet I submitted in 2008. So, you just never know.

**John:** Well you’re in a position now to hire people, or to fire people if you need to. So, what are some things that you’re thinking about in terms of communication outward with people that are either under your employ or want to be under your employ?

**Jen:** It’s a good question. I mean, I think when it comes to hiring, and especially firing, there are just difficult conversations that you have to have. And with the privilege of getting to be a showrunner, getting to be a show creator, getting to be the boss you are also taking on the responsibility of having difficult conversations. And so I think you can’t shy away from that. I think you have to say, OK, if this person is being let go we’re not just going to do it in an unethical way where we don’t treat them like a human being. We’re going to have a conversation.

And so it’s about being a human being and just treating that person like a human being and saying, OK, this is going to be a difficult conversation and it’s probably not what I want to do with my day to day, but I at least owe this to someone to talk to them about it.

**John:** Well from a writer perspective the golden rule really applies. You know what it would feel like to be ghosted or to be fired in a bad way. We can understand what that’s like. And so even though we may not be trained as managers, which is a whole separate issue, we do have a sense of what it feels like to be the writer who is not getting the full information. And so just being honest with the person and just being thoughtful and human with the person seems to be great progress.

**Jen:** I listened to you guys talk about it and as someone who works primarily in TV, not in features, I knew this as a fact but it is so fascinating that in features it does seem like you have to get so much more used to being fired than in television. Like in television, you know, maybe you work on a show for a season and they don’t ask you back, but even that doesn’t totally feel like firing. It feels like in features it’s a much more common occurrence that people have not figured out how to handle well still.

**John:** Talk to me about not being asked back. Because that is a different thing than being fired. And it doesn’t have the same negative connotation as being dropped off of something.

**Jen:** No, not at all. You know, I have friends who have run rooms and they’ve not asked people back the next season and it’s never necessarily because, oh, that person was bad and didn’t work. Sometimes you’re just like oh you know what going forward we found that the tone of the show is way more dramatic than we thought and so we’re going to try to hire some people with more experience in drama for example. And so that really just becomes looking at every single, the makeup of your writer’s room, who do you need, what are you feeling you need more of, what direction is the story headed, and who can help you serve that?

So a lot of times I think if someone doesn’t get asked back, like yeah sure there are situations where it was just a bad fit and that person didn’t gel with the room, but it doesn’t – like you said, it doesn’t have the same stigma. It’s not quite the same as being fired and told like, OK, you’re not doing this job again on Monday basically.

**John:** It also strikes me that with so many shows being done in mini rooms are being entirely written before anything is being shot, there’s not that same expectation that you’re going to be coming back season after season on a show. Because those people will not be available necessarily. So you’re just kind of assembling a team for one heist.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** And then you go off again.

**Jen:** Exactly. Like there’s so many shows now, so many opportunities. So you can’t really expect – like we have some wonderful writers who wrote on season one of Hacks, but they might get their own. They’re doing their own stuff. They might get a pilot. They might not be available for that reason. Yeah, it’s very much so one heist at a time, one season at a time.

**John:** Let’s talk about the staffing up on a show. So, this is a good transition between your role as a showrunner now versus when you were first starting up. You mentioned that you had submitted a packet to Jimmy Kimmel. What were your first jobs in the industry? What were your first attempts at writing in the industry? Because you were an intern also, correct?

**Jen:** Yeah. So long before I worked I was a kid who just was like obsessed with television. Reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show on Nick at Nite was like that’s what raised me. Because my parents kind of kicked the can down the road on that one. And so I was obsessed with television from a very young age. I didn’t really know that it was a job someone could do until maybe towards the end of high school. And then I realized like, OK, it seems like NYU has a very good film and TV program. I’m going to apply there. And I got in. And I studied film and TV there.

I went through the film and TV program which is actually more for directors, but pretty quickly learned that I did not like directing and only wanted to be a writer. And so at NYU the thing that was an incredible privilege of being at NYU was that you’re in the city during the school year so you can apply for these internships that people at other colleges can really only do during their summer breaks. So my senior year I interned at Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Saturday Night Live. Kind of found myself in this insane situation where I was going to 30 Rock six out of seven days a week as a 21-year-old because I was able to do, yeah, three days at Conan, three days at SNL, which was an incredible learning experience.

It was actually 2007, so it was an incredible learning experience which was then cut short because of the writers’ strike. So I got to also see how all of that stuff was going down.

**John:** Tell me like it was an incredible learning experience because they had set it up to be, or because you were doing something that you actually – were you being entrepreneurial about your learning there?

**Jen:** Kind of a combination. They definitely were very kind people who I think wanted interns to learn from being there. But I lucked into a very specific role at Saturday Night Live which was I was a photography intern, which made no sense because I have absolutely no photography skills whatsoever. But that’s just the department I ended up in. And in being a photography intern you are tasked with going down – at least this was how it was in 2007, I don’t know if it still is now – but we were tasked with going down on the floor and taking photographs of the dress rehearsal, like on the Friday, the day before the show on Saturday. And so I had like this firsthand front row view of the sketches being worked out, the actors running through them, the writers whose sketches it were being on the floor, figuring stuff out, what works, what didn’t.

And that was just so incredibly fascinating. So it was kind of a combo. Any time you’re in an environment like that hopefully your eyes are wide open. You’re listening and you’re just trying to take in as much as you can to learn. And then I also kind of lucked out with the position I got.

**John:** That’s great. So you were there to see the tension of sort of like these are the sketches we think are going to work. These are the tweaks we’re making. Just all of the stuff that gets cut.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** And you’re seeing the writers trying to save their things along the way.

**Jen:** Exactly. And just seeing firsthand what a high pressure environment it is. I mean, it’s been well documented, but that show it’s like really crazy that you are under that kind of time limit. And there’s a gun to your head and it’s like, OK, the show happens Saturday, figure it out. You’ve got to write 12 sketches or whatever it is. And they need to be done by Saturday by 11:30 and it’s Tuesday or whatever. And so that was also just kind of a good intro into realizing like, oh yeah, a lot of these TV writing jobs are super high pressure and can be really intense.

**John:** Were those writers on the show talking with you? I mean, I guess you were the photography intern at SNL, so you weren’t probably interfacing so directly with them. But something like Conan O’Brien did you have a role of actually working with them?

**Jen:** Yeah. SNL was like you said I was more in the photo department for that. But I remember at Conan there’s a long term Conan writer, I think he might be at Colbert now, this guy Brian Stack who is just the funniest, loveliest man and he would always come into the bullpen where the interns were and talk to us and say like how are you guys doing, and any questions we had we were able to ask. So like, yeah, you did mingle with the writers there a lot, which was amazing, because you’re getting to see the people doing what you hopefully – what you want to be doing. And so that was a great experience, too.

**John:** So you come out of these internships and NYU with a degree, but also hopefully some writing samples? What were you trying to do next after this experience?

**Jen:** I knew that I wanted to work in comedy. But I wasn’t quite sure what lane I wanted to pursue. And by that I mean I was taking classes at UCB. I was taking improv classes. I was taking sketch writing classes. I had some half-hour samples that I had written at NYU. But I was also doing standup. And that’s kind of an interesting thing about comedy is that there’s so many – if you are like I want to write movies, you’re like I’m writing movies. But if you’re more broadly like I know I’m interested in comedy and I want to work in comedy there are a bunch of different kind of paths you can dabble with.

And so I was doing a bunch of that and pretty quickly like the things that I was having no fun doing I realized like, OK, that’s not for me. I’m not meant to be a standup. That’s not going to happen. And so the way it happened that I got my first actual job in the industry is that when the writers’ strike happened and so SNL and Conan kind of shut down and didn’t really need interns for a bit there was a satirical newspaper called The Onion which I’m sure people are super familiar with.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Jen:** Which was like a huge touchpoint for me comedically. Like one of my first big comedic influence was The Onion. I just loved it. And I spent my last semester at NYU interning there because they at the time were doing web videos based on Onion headlines and articles. And so I worked there at The Onion and then as I graduated I just got a job in a coffee shop because had rent to pay and wasn’t sure the exact path I was going to take to make it in comedy.

But my two bosses there at the time, Will Graham and Julie Smith, they were tasked with running shows – The Onion did a show for Comedy Central and then they did a show for IFC. And these shows were happening at the exact same time, which was pretty crazy. And so they offered me a job of being their assistant and I took it. And so that was my first kind of real TV production experience.

**John:** These internships were clearly so important for you because you met the people who both inspired you but also gave you a job. So what advice do you have in sort of pursuing one of those internships and how do you land one and how do you make the most of it if you’re in one of those spots?

**Jen:** I think that’s a great question. You really just can’t underestimate what it means to be a kind, good person who seems happy to be there, which sounds like the most simple advice in the world, but I think sometimes people forget it. I think like treat those opportunities like they’re really great opportunities and work hard. And I think you will reap the benefits of it. It’s also a tricky thing because even in the ten or so, 13 years since I was doing that we’re having more conversations about what is free labor, are these internships totally ethical? So I also understand that you might find yourself in a situation where you’re like am I being taken advantage of.

But hopefully in a situation like mine was where I was being compensated in the form of school credit and I was treated with respect. I was able to I think work really hard and be available and engaged with the people I was working for and serve their needs and learn from them. And I think it led them to be like, OK, maybe she’s someone we should bring on in a more fulltime capacity.

**John:** What was the first thing you were hired to write, that you were paid to write for film or TV?

**Jen:** So the first thing I was paid to write freelance was actually Onion headlines. While being an assistant there I wanted to also be writing and so I asked if I could submit headline. And Megan Ganz actually who is a very talented writer who co-created Mythic Quest on Apple, she was an editor at The Onion at the time. And so I submitted to her and she gave me such helpful notes on why this headline works, why that one didn’t, and all this. And she kind of guided me through that.

**John:** Talk to me about an Onion headline. Because I have a sense of what it is, but it’s hard to break down specifically what it is. But is it really the order of words?

**Jen:** That can be one part of it, right? Like, oh, this needs to be more succinct. There’s too many words here. You can cut these ones out. Other times it would be like just the general premise of the idea. It’s like I kind of get the observation you’re going for here but it’s not clicking for me. Things like that. And then I eventually got hired as a freelance Onion headline writer. And so that was every week you submit Onion headlines and they send back, OK, here’s the 40 we picked and your initial would be next to yours if yours made it in. And then you don’t even know if they’re going to use them, but those are at least these the ones they’ve culled down they’ve picked that they’ve liked.

And then if they did eventually use them I think you got a $25 check in the mail. So that was my first freelance job, which again I loved because I just loved The Onion so much and I felt so grateful to be getting to write for it.

And then my first fulltime staff job was writing monologue jokes at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

**John:** So that was a job you probably went through a packet process?

**Jen:** Yes. That was a packet process. I was lucky enough to get a manager through a UCB class I took. The teacher very nicely said, “Oh I think my friend who is a manager would like your stuff, can I pass it along to her?” And he did. And to this day she’s still my manager. So through that I started submitting packets to late night shows. And, yeah, did a bunch of those that I am pretty sure I didn’t get the job for because I never worked at those shows.

**John:** In all those cases you’re submitting – you or your manager are putting this in and you just never hear back? For all you know they’re just going into a void?

**Jen:** Oh, you never, ever hear. Basically like, OK, SNL is looking for sketch packets. Conan is looking for monologue joke packets. And so you just do it and you send it out into the world and, yeah, you typically don’t hear.

I remember the monologue one for Fallon, it was like a weeklong, almost challenge or something. You would every night get sent premises and then you would have to send in your jokes either later that night or by the next morning. And you did that for like four days.

**John:** And you’re not getting paid for that.

**Jen:** No, you’re getting absolutely no money for that.

**John:** That’s why the WGA sort of stepped in there and said like, OK, you have to limit that.

**Jen:** Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it’s a good question. I’ve been out of the late night game for so long now. What is the situation with packets now?

**John:** So, here’s what happened. Both on the east, but also some on the west, we were getting these complaints about, OK, this has just become abusive. They’re asking for just tremendous amounts of just free labor to do these things. And even if that stuff is not making it into show, it’s just abusive.

**Jen:** It’s not cool.

**John:** It’s not cool at all. And so there are limits to sort of how much they can ask. And trying to get some standardization of like what packets really mean, so that you can theoretically submit a packet to more than one place, so it’s not all specific work to this. And if there’s real research involved at some point they have to pay you for like those later rounds, because some of these shows were having round after round after round you have to go through.

**Jen:** So crazy. Yeah. So unnecessary to make people jump through those hoops.

**John:** And it was clear when you talked to some of the people who were hiring it’s like they were just doing it because they were doing it. And it wasn’t actually helpful in their process.

**Jen:** Yes. That’s one of those things. And I do feel like in the late night world this happens even more than in half hour of like ways of doing things just get calcified and people go, “But it’s just because it’s the way it’s done. That’s how we do it.” Even on SNL they still stay up all night writing when I don’t know that that necessarily needs to be the process. It’s so good that the guild got involved to challenge these ideas of like, yeah, just because it’s the way it’s always been done doesn’t mean it’s actually cool to be doing to people.

**John:** Yeah. So it sounds like you knew in the general sense you wanted to write comedy, but you decided I’m going to try all the things and then decide from those things which things are not my things. So standup was not your thing.

**Jen:** Standup was not my thing. I am really not a performer. It is not where I shine.

**John:** So UCB was learning sketch writing.

**Jen:** Yes, UCB was sketch writing, which I liked OK, but I still wasn’t great at. And so what happened actually was around this time, I guess this was probably now 2010, before Twitter became a hell scape it was a place where people were just writing stupid jokes. And in a really cool way it kind of democratized comedy writing a little bit because anyone could just write a funny joke. And if it was funny enough a ton of people would see it and get retweeted. And a lot of people made their careers by doing that, which was cool.

And so I joined Twitter in like 2010 and started just kind of writing little one-liner jokes, which like I said there were things I wasn’t great at. I wasn’t great at standup. I wasn’t great at sketch. But I found that one-liner jokes I had a lot of fun writing those. And so I always tell people when they’re starting out in comedy like kind of follow the fun. The thing you’re having the most fun doing is probably the thing you’re best at.

So I just was doing that on Twitter and what’s funny is I had submitted – like I said I had submitted to Fallon many times. I had done that week-long challenge of sending jokes in every night, not getting any sleep, and never hearing back. But what happened was is A.D. Miles, the head writer at that time, learned of me through Twitter and then just sent me a direct message being like, “Hey, do you want to submit a packet for Fallon?” Which I was like, yes, of course, even though what I could have said is, “Yeah, I’ve done it hundreds of times. Just hire me off one of those.”

But they were actually looking for sketch writers at the time, so I had to a sketch packet. Got hired off of that. And then though quickly again since sketch is not really my strong suit I started also – even though it’s divided into up into sketch and monologue writers at that show, or at least it was when I was there, anyone is allowed to submit monologue jokes. You can just send them in.

So I started doing that and getting a decent amount on. And then it kind of became apparent, oh, this is more your skill set. We’re going to move you over to here. And then I became a permanent monologue joke writer for the rest of my time there.

**John:** What I hear you saying is that you didn’t go in saying this is exactly the kind of writer I am. You actually sort of discovered and you just tried a bunch of things. And then winnowed out the things that didn’t work. And so if people are listening to this at home who say, oh, I want to write comedy, maybe take a broad approach to what kind of comedy you’re writing and see where your natural strengths are.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** Rather than assuming I’m the person who is going to write this exact show.

**Jen:** Exactly. I think that when I started, you know, growing up, even though I loved – like Mary Tyler Moore was, again, a huge influence, I also loved SNL. And I think a big part of me was like oh I’m going to be a sketch writer for Saturday Night Live. That’s what I want to do. And I think if I had just tried to like force myself into that it would have been a much tougher path because, again, I don’t think my natural skill set, I don’t think sketch writing is something that I’m great at. And so by trying a bunch of different things and allowing myself to go, right, I’m having the most fun doing this thing, let me follow that, I think that’s the thing I’m best at, it allowed me to find what my path was.

And so, yeah, I think anyone starting out, especially in comedy when there are so many different ways to approach it, I think give yourself the freedom to try a bunch of stuff, and be bad at some of it. And just because you’re bad at one part of comedy writing doesn’t mean you’re bad at the other parts. You know?

**John:** Now, what’s the segue from Fallon to writing for shows, writing for Broad City, writing for Parks and Rec? What was the step in there?

**Jen:** So I was at Fallon for about 2.5 years, which I always say felt like 20.5. Not because of the people there. They’re lovely. But because monologue joke writing is so grueling. You basically – I think every morning by 11:30 in the morning I would have to have like five pages of monologue jokes written, something like that. And let me be clear. Most of them bad. They’re not good. It’s not a good five pages. But still you’re expected to produce this volume of stuff. And it’s all based on the news. And it really – I think the people who can do it forever, like I truly tip my cap to them, because it’s really challenging and it’s really hard. And especially as the world seems to be getting darker and darker it’s hard to write topical jokes based on the news. That really, really weighed on me after a while and I was gone in 2013.

So I really appreciated the job there because – I say it was comedy writing boot camp because I just had to produce so much material every single day. But pretty like towards the end of my time there, like the last year, I realized I think I want to tell longer stories. I want to explore writing for characters and characters that have arcs and just get into that. So I knew that half hour was the place I wanted to be.

And so I made the decision to just leave. I didn’t have my next job lined up, which I remember at the time people were like why are you doing this. But sometimes I think you just have to force yourself to make the move. So I left Fallon. My then boyfriend at the time, now husband, we moved across the country. Came to LA. I wrote a spec of, wow, this is going to date me. I wrote a spec Happy Endings. Do you remember that how?

**John:** It’s a good show.

**Jen:** Yeah, I loved Happy Endings. Very funny show. So I wrote a spec for that and that was my sample, because I think even back then half hour people were looking more for specs than original pilots. And, yeah, I got hired. My first half hour job was actually the show Hello Ladies, on HBO, which was co-created by Stephen Merchant and Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky. So that was my first half hour experience.

But that was a pretty short – it was like an eight-episode HBO show. One of those shows where you kind of are going to write everything in preproduction and then they’re going to go off and make it. And so towards the end of my time in that writer’s room I also came to know Mike Schur via Twitter. And he I guess, yeah, liked jokes I had written there. And then I think he read my spec, but I honestly think he also hired me based off of Twitter and just meeting me and being like, all right, she’s not a total crazy person.

**John:** So that was for Parks and Rec?

**Jen:** That was for Parks and Rec.

**John:** And again these are very joke dense shows. These are things where there’s expectation that there’s going to be a joke every 10, 15 seconds.

**Jen:** Yes. Totally. Yes.

**John:** So from there then back to New York for Broad City?

**Jen:** Yes. I did my first season of Broad City in between the last two seasons of Parks and Rec. It kind of worked out beautifully where I think the day we ended season six of Parks I got on a plane and went to New York and started the Broad City season two writer’s room. And I did that for a couple months. And then came back.

And then going forward Parks and Rec ended. I went on to a show, Lady Dynamite on Netflix. I did that in the interim. And then once The Good Place started I was always kind of – I was never again fulltime in the room in Broad City. I was always just writing a script from LA while they were in New York and giving notes on episodes and punch ups and stuff like that.

So I was very lucky in that I was able to be on The Good Place fulltime, but also be working on Broad City as well.

**John:** Great. So you’ve mentioned all the people who seemed to be involved with Hacks. So talk to me about where did the idea for Hacks come about and how did the three of you, but also Mike Schur and everyone else come together on this property?

**Jen:** So Paul W. Downs, and Lucia Aniello, and I, we met doing comedy in New York. Lucia and I were the only two women in this sketch group that was kind of like an offshoot. It was all people who had met at UCB. And then slowly but surely the sketch group stopped emailing us to come to the meetings and we both realized, OK, I think we’ve been let go from this sketch group. Cool.

But, we instantly connected and shared a sense of humor. And I loved her and I was desperate to make her my friend. And then she was dating Paul and was also comedic partners doing sketches with Paul. And same thing. We hit it off. And I was lucky to just kind of be in their orbit for a while. If they had sketches and stuff I would pitch jokes and they went and they made their movie Rough Night. And I was on set as a punch up writer for that.

And so we just always loved writing together and knew that we wanted to make something together one day. So what happened was Paul was doing a Netflix Characters special, which I don’t know if you guys have seen, but it was basically just a bunch of sketches he was shooting. I came along just to pitch jokes for them. And we went to Maine. We were going to a monster truck rally. So the idea for Hacks was born out of a monster truck rally.

Paul has a character called Jasper Cooch, whose catchphrase is Big Trucks. And he was being allowed to just host the monster truck rally in Portland, Maine. They gave him the mic even though – like he could have absolutely said there’s a bomb in here and caused and incredible panic. But they trusted him. And so on this road trip we met up in Boston and then we drove to Portland, Maine for this monster truck rally.

And I don’t know how we got on the topic, but we started talking about comedians, particularly female comedians, and women in the arts in general and how maybe they hadn’t gotten their due the way their male counterparts had. And how it’s just such a harder path for women, like how they had to keep their heads down and pound the pavement and put up with so much bullshit frankly while, yeah, for other comedians who were maybe straight white men, they didn’t have as hard of a path.

And so we just kind of started talking about characters like that. And wanting to tell a woman like that story. And that was sort of the birthplace of Hacks.

**John:** All right. So for listeners who haven’t seen the show yet, let me give you the briefest logline so you get some sense of what we’re going to be talking about today. Hacks is a limited series, well now it’s going into its second season, so it’s a series about a legendary Vegas comedienne who hires on a disgraced, young Hollywood writer to freshen up her act. And their relationship is alternately contentious, very contentious, and maternal. And it feels like it’s mostly a two-hander.

**Jen:** Yes.

**John:** And yet other characters have some storytelling power. So Paul W. Downs plays an agent who can drive scenes by himself. Marcus who is her COO can also drive scenes by himself. How early in the process did you know who the characters were and sort of what the shape of the show was going to be?

**Jen:** Well, I think you’re right that it is a two-hander. That’s very much so like in the DNA of the show. That’s kind of what it was born out of. It was this idea of, OK, what if it’s this woman who has been through so much and has so much trauma from what she’s done, but also amassed this empire, making so much money doing it. And then what if there was a younger woman who didn’t fully appreciate what this woman has been through and has also maybe like so many women like this, the younger writer has the story about her wrong. Because so often we get women like this, we get their story wrong. And something gets pushed in the media and people just blindly go along with it. And only in the last few years when we look at when like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton have we started to reevaluate these stories we’ve believed about women in the public eye.

And so that was kind of the genesis of, OK, they’ll be forced to work together and they will butt heads, but actually they both really need each other. And at the heart of it it’ll be a love story. It’ll be about these two women falling in love with each other through their friendship, through their working relationship, and how does that change them and what new places does it bring them to.

But then you also are correct to bring up Marcus and Paul’s character and Kaitlin Olson who plays Jean Smart’s daughter so wonderfully. We knew we wanted to fill out Deborah’s ecosystem, right? We’re very interested in the idea of people like Deborah who are empires. Like I said they have a very carefully curated ecosystem around them. They have enough money and enough power that they get to choose all the people in their world, and there’s a lot of people in their world whose job it is to only fulfill their needs and think about them. And so someone like Marcus, played by the wonderful Carl Clemons-Hopkins, we wanted to explore the idea of well what does it mean that Marcus has devoted his entire adult life to working for Deborah and building something up for her. And also taking from her this kind of workaholic attitude and how does he reckon with but is that fulfilling him, is that fulfilling his soul.

**John:** And it’s not into late in the series that we learn that he’s actually a fan. That he got the job because he was a super fan.

**Jen:** Exactly. And we just I think never wanted any one character to feel purely like an accessory, which is a challenge to do that because even though it’s streaming you only have so much time. You only can afford to shoot so many pages in a day. So it’s definitely a balancing act of trying to give – when it’s a two-hander but also kind of also an ensemble, giving the other players in the ensemble rich storylines that feel and grounded and interesting.

So, I hope that we achieved that because that definitely was our goal going into it.

**John:** Let’s take a listen to a scene. This is a scene from the pilot in which Deborah Vance is meeting with the owner of the casino who is trying to tell her that basically she’s going to lose her theater and this job that she has is going to be ending. Let’s take a listen to it, then I want to get to what’s actually on the page.

[Clip plays]

**Marty:** You know how I’m redoing the casino’s east tower?

**Deborah:** Oh yeah.

**Marty:** So the contractor double orders everything. And what the hell am I supposed to do with two tons of fertilizer?

**Deborah:** Dumb it on Steve Wynn’s doorstep.

**Marty:** Bingo.

**Deborah:** Marty, you set me up.

**Marty:** Deb, 2,500 shows. Now, I think it’s a Vegas record.

**Deborah:** It is.

**Marty:** Well cheers.

**Deborah:** Cheers.

**Marty:** And they’re naming a street after you.

**Deborah:** I know. Deborah Vance Drive. It’ll probably be a dead end with an abortion clinic on it.

**Marty:** [laughs] Now that the big show is all planned, maybe it’s a good time to talk about the future. You know you’ll always be a part of the Palmetto’s history. But maybe it would be good if you did a few less shows a year.

**Deborah:** Good for who?

**Marty:** Yeah. I need some marquee dates for new acts. Like Pentatonix.

**Deborah:** What the hell is that?

**Marty:** They’re a beatbox forward acapella group. They do medleys. They won the Sing Off.

**Deborah:** Who gives a shit?

**Marty:** I have two buckets to fill. Families and idiots in their 20s. The families want to see singing and dancing and the college kids want to spend a grand to watch a guy in a helmet hit play on an iPod.

**Deborah:** You’re forgetting about your third bucket. People from Florida. They love me. And my numbers are strong.

**Marty:** You’ll still be doing shows, just not Friday and Saturday.

**Deborah:** Oh, just the most important nights. Un-fucking-believable.

**Marty:** Deb. Why do you even want to do 100+ shows a year? It’s not like you’re having fun. I mean, you’re on cruise control up there.

**Deborah:** I fucking wish – wish I was on cruise control. I’ve been defense my entire career thanks to assholes like you.

**Marty:** Deborah, calm down. Please.

**Deborah:** Oh, what do you care, you own the place. The service sucks. Where’s my fucking doggie bag? I’ll take his, too. And the fork! There was a cockroach in my salad.

**Marty:** Shit. Comp everybody.

**Waiter:** OK.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Great. Let’s take a look at the words that are actually on the page. So this is starting on page 5. This is scene 114 of the script. There’s a lot of changes at the head of the scene. So the script starts with another conversation about being wealthy. It’s about a yacht and an infrared sauna. At what point did that change?

**Jen:** So what you see here on the page we did shoot. We came into it writing the scene like first thinking OK we need to set up what is the dynamic between Marty and Deborah. And the idea being, OK, well one they connect over rich people shit. So they’re talking about their yacht and infrared sauna and that. And then also as – spoiler – but I don’t think we have to worry about that, as the series progresses you see that they have romantic history these two characters. And so there’s also a line here where Deborah says, “Oh yeah.” He says, “Remember my first 70-footer,” talking about his yacht, “Remember that one?” She says, “Oh yeah, we had some fun on that.” And it’s kind of a coy moment where they’re alluding to their sexual history.

But as we got into the edit room it just felt like this is such a lesson in storytelling you learn time and time and time again. Get to the action, get to the crisis. Also, I think once we saw obviously Jean Smart phenomenal. Chris McDonald is incredible, too. Their characters feel so lived in from the moment they appear on screen. We realized like, oh, we overwrote. We didn’t need to write stuff to establish their dynamic.

**John:** You gave them a big onramp that they did not need.

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly. Trust your actors. Capable actors can communicate that even without words. It’s how they’re interacting with each other. It’s how they’re laughing at each other. It’s how they’re truly sitting across the table from each other. So what happened was is that in the edit we just realized oh their dynamic is clear. This is overwritten probably. Let’s just get right to the heart of the scene which is Deborah finding out your dates are getting taken away from you.

**John:** Great. So the lines we hear in the show, are those just looped lines that you threw in? Did you shoot alternates on the day?

**Jen:** We shot alts on the day. Because it comes in about the Steve Wynn stuff. One of the benefits to having Paul, Lucia, and I are always on set. I mean, Lucia and Paul direct, so they’re of course there. But the three of us are able to pretty easily rewrite on the fly. If we feel something isn’t working there’s three brains. We can huddle up, come up with something. And so that Steve Wynn kind of leading into it that just came from us at village being like all right let’s try this. And credit to Jean and Chris, too, because they’re so nimble and quick that they can have something thrown at them like that and knock it out of the park.

**John:** Great. On page 7 I want to call out some things you do here. So there’s a great moment early on page 7. So she tells a joke, Deborah Vance Drive, and then she writes it down in her notebook, which is just such a great little detail. Is that something you’ve actually seen in real life, or just something you created for this character?

**Jen:** Yeah. It’s something that I think comes from all of our lives. Like I have on my phone Notes app of just like if a joke or if I see something going into it and writing it. And I know on Broad City they had – I think it was a doc of convos we could have. Things we could just talk about. Things that would be funny to see Abby and Ilana talk about and we’d just go into the Google Doc. So that’s something that feels very true to – I mean, I don’t know if it’s all writers. Maybe it’s more specific to comedians, but just constantly observing things and not wanting to forget them so you write them down in your notebook or on your phone.

**John:** So this lunch is set up on the pretense of just like oh let’s get together, but of course he actually has news to deliver and it’s going to lead up to this argument here. A thing you do on page 7 which works really well is Marty’s dialogue is interrupted by a scene description line that is just actually Deborah’s action here. So Mary says, “Now that the big show is all planned maybe it’s a good time to talk about the future.” Deborah puts down on her drink. “What’s this?” in quotes. He presses on.

And so the “what’s this?” is a reaction that she can give. It’s a line that she can say just with her face.

**Jen:** Yes.

**John:** It’s such a great use of breaking up the dialogue here so that we can actually see what the shift is that happened here.

**Jen:** Yeah. It’s a great way I think to show that Deborah is incredibly perceptive and very smart when it comes to business. And so when someone is gently trying to guide the conversation and maybe sneak something by her it’s like, no, no, no, you’re not getting anything by Deborah Vance. Just come out with it, man. And I think Chris does a great job then of like shifting uncomfortably in the seat because he’s a little bit scared of Deborah Vance. So yeah.

**John:** Without that line in there the delivery of his whole thing wouldn’t work. You’re going to need to have some kind of break in there so to call it out in the text is great. You also on page 7 have “Beat” just as its own line as a sentence. And listening back to it she doesn’t actually take that beat, but it’s a nice – Beat is just used as a placeholder like there’s a shift, there’s a moment, there’s a little air here.

**Jen:** A little air to show that Deborah – and again it’s not really in the version that ended up in the final cut, but yeah to show that Deborah is trying to process this tornado that’s been thrown at her of like what are you talking about, I’m losing these dates. These are the most important thing in the world to me.

**John:** Moving on to the next page, here’s an example of I bet you shot all this and people don’t realize that in the edit you have magic scissors and you can cut anything out. So what was actually probably shot was she says, “My numbers are solid and presales from the holiday are on par with last year.” That shows that she’s savvy and that she’s on it. But you probably recognized you did not need the line, so you just cut back to him and her line disappears.

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly. It was really like – and I had been in the edit a lot on Parks and Rec and The Good Place, always for our episodes. Mike was super like, yeah, get in the edit and do stuff. But this was, running my own show, I was the most in the edit I’d ever been before. And I was just like oh yeah you can truly do anything in the edit room. So, yeah, we shot those lines and then, again, at this point the conversation is getting heated and they’re kind of speaking on top of each other. And so we just wanted to amp up the pace and the frantic energy of it, so it just made sense to lose those lines.

**John:** Now, the decision of when she actually loses her cool, and even when she loses her cool it’s kind of a performative losing her cool. She recognizes she’s doing this in front of a crowd and that she has power because she’s doing this in the crowd. You’re going, “This hits Deborah, then she explodes.” That’s done as scene description but then there’s a parenthetical, hitting the table, getting loud, really emphasizing that this is going to color her vocal performance in this next piece.

**Jen:** Yeah. We knew that this was the moment where we wanted her to lose it because someone like Deborah Vance being told you’re on cruise control, even though it is somewhat maybe true with regard to the quality of her material or how much she’s updated it, she is a woman who like we talked about has had to fight and claw for her position. And so the idea of someone telling her, especially a man telling her, you’re on cruise control is so opposite to what she believes about herself to be true, which is that she is a shark. She just keeps moving. She’s never on cruise control. She’s always fighting, and fighting, and fighting. And so hearing this makes her really lose her top. And yeah.

**John:** So this is a dramatic moment but you’re still in a comedy, and so that’s why you have the runner of the doggie bag coming back. And so can you talk about the shape of this scene and sort of how much did this change in the writing from its initial conception. Was this the scene you kind of always envisioned it to be, or how much did it change as you approached it?

**Jen:** This one I would say of all the scenes in the pilot this one changed quite a bit. We definitely reworked this one more than we reworked some others because it’s such a pivotal scene. It’s the inciting incident for this change Deborah is going through.

**John:** The series would not happen if this scene didn’t happen.

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, it was a lot of rewriting in terms of like we talked about at the beginning, OK, how much of their dynamic do you need to set up, do you understand who Marty is. I think we got a note at one point that like someone didn’t understand his role, that he owned the casino. So I think that’s where some of the Steve Wynn stuff came in from.

So we rewrote it a decent amount. And I think the beat where she grabs the fork and stabs his steak and throws it, like that came later. She always was going to freak out, but I don’t remember that – that was a later pitch. And, again, you’re also rewriting on the day. And I got to give a shout out to Jean Smart. That “I found a cockroach in my salad” line, that was improvised. She just yelled that as she walked out and we thought it was hilarious and we kept it in.

So this scene went through a lot of rewriting. It was always, OK, he’s telling her he’s cutting back her dates. That was always what was happening. So that never changed. But a lot of the pieces around that inciting incident did change.

**John:** Now the pilot is working on basically parallel tracks. So we’re seeing what’s happening in Deborah’s life, and what’s happening in Ava’s life. And as she’s going to Las Vegas to meet with Deborah about potentially writing for her. They finally meet at the end of the show at it does not go well. It’s a long scene, so we’re going to play just a smaller clip from it, but let’s take a listen to the actual interaction between Ava and Deborah.

[Clip plays]

**Deborah:** So why are you here?

**Ava:** Oh, well, obviously it would be a huge honor to work with someone like you, who has been working so successfully for so long. I mean, you’re a legend.

**Deborah:** Wow. A legend. So you’re a fan?

**Ava:** I mean, of course. Would I be here if I wasn’t?

**Deborah:** What’s your favorite joke of mine?

**Ava:** Man. You know. That’s so hard.

**Deborah:** Well it shouldn’t be. I’ve written over 30,000. Just pick one.

**Ava:** Uh…you know what? I would have to say that your TV show is my personal favorite thing that you’ve ever done.

**Deborah:** You mean my sitcom from 1973? You’ve seen it?

**Ava:** Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, I’ve seen clips.

**Deborah:** Clips? Wonderful.

**Ava:** Um, yeah. Well, you know, a lot of the actors on the show that I most recently worked on were standups.

**Deborah:** You know, I’m going to stop you right there. I don’t work with writers.

**Ava:** You don’t?

**Deborah:** No. Jimmy sent you against my wishes.

**Ava:** I’m going to kill him.

**Deborah:** No, I’m going to kill him.

**Ava:** Great. Well, this sucks.

**Deborah:** Yeah. Sucks. Well at least you didn’t waste too much time researching me.

**Ava:** I’m sorry. Did I do something to offend you?

**Deborah:** Other than walk those chimney sweep boots on my silk rug? Um, no.

**Ava:** Sorry, I didn’t realize it was a shoes off situation.

**Deborah:** Well it’s shoe-dependent. Thank you for your time.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Great. So they’re finally meeting. In the actual episode they start to meet and then of course DJ the daughter interrupts and so you see all of that drama happen and then they finally get to their discussion. This scene was clearly always going to be part of this first episode, because we have to get these two women together in the room. How early on did you know who Ava was in the show? Like who her character was?

**Jen:** I think pretty early on we knew, too. But that one was certainly more – we learned it more and more as we cast. You know, we had this incredible thing where Jean signed on to do the show and you’re like holy shit we’ve got Jean Smart, and then you’re like holy shit we’ve got Jean Smart. Who is going to be play opposite her that’s like 25 and can go toe-to-toe? Oh no.

So the casting process for Ava was really, really long and intense. We saw I think maybe over 400 women for it. Watched that many tapes. And it was always this thing of what Jean has, what Jean is so incredible at is she can in equal parts do comedy and drama. She’s so skilled in both. And so we knew we were looking for someone who also could do that. Someone who could tell jokes and realistically seem like a comedy writer, so someone who is in their bones funny and you believe that, but also can play the more dramatic parts of this show. And so they had to have some real acting ability.

**John:** So what were you looking at for this? Did you write up sample scenes? Or were they scenes from this pilot?

**Jen:** They were scenes from the pilot. So everyone auditioned with the initial Ava and Jimmy scene in his office where he’s telling her he can’t help her get her job and she’s kind of laying out her situation. So they auditioned with that and then they also auditioned with the Deborah/Ava meeting scene.

**John:** OK. So a version of what we just heard?

**Jen:** A version of what we just heard, yeah.

**John:** And that didn’t burn a hole in your brains? Because I’ve always been reluctant to do that because I don’t want to hear that same scene a thousand times and then actually have to deal with it on the day.

**Jen:** Totally. Mike Schur is a big fan of doing fake audition sides because that’s I think part of it. He does not want to hear the same scene over and over and over. And it definitely at a certain point did burn a hole in our brains. I remember just being like I can’t hear this Ava/Jimmy scene one more time. It’s not working.

So, but what was interesting is that there were a lot of really wonderful, talented women who read the part, but for whatever reason a lot of the times we heard the scene Ava just came off as pretty whiny and it was not what we wanted it to be. And then when Hannah Einbinder, who plays Ava, auditioned it just felt different with her reading it. She was like projecting the strength and confidence of a 25-year-old who thinks they know everything, but also there was some very obvious vulnerability right below the surface that felt like she was also accessing, which made Ava not feel whiny and made her just feel like a very interesting character to us.

And so I think what was helpful was even though we had to hear these scenes over and over and over and go through the process of like oh no this isn’t working, junk all the thing in our darkest moments, once we heard it with Hannah and certainly when we heard it in the screen test with Jean and Hannah reading it it was like oh this works. This absolutely works. Which I don’t think I would have felt that if they were dummy sides that weren’t actually from the pilot.

**John:** We had that experience on Go. As we were seeing a zillion actors for Go, and I started to question like did I even write something that is even castable. And then suddenly you get the actors like, oh, that’s Sarah Polley. I get it. It all works.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** And I wasn’t imagining that there was a person who could fill that.

**Jen:** There’s a certain chemistry that happens between the writing and the actor. And when it’s the right actor you’re going to feel it in your gut in ways that you’re not if it’s maybe not the right person reading it.

**John:** So Hannah Einbinder has the vocal fry of a 25-year-old. Did you hear that voice as you were writing this? And also her tendency to kind of stop in the middle of thought. You write with a lot of ellipses in her dialogue. Was that always part of the voice for it?

**Jen:** Yeah, I think we knew that Ava felt more like kind of a drier sensibility, so that was very baked into the character. I think there are a lot of ellipses, but then I also think that Hannah’s natural – she’s also a very talented standup and if you see her perform she has a very interesting, unique cadence, which is much slower than probably your average 25-year-old up on stage. And so it kind of like naturally lined up that way. But, yeah, that was always kind of – she was written on the page the way we imagined it.

**John:** Looking at the words on the page, on page 29 there’s some cuts here and I’m just curious when the cuts came or if they all came in the editing room. So Jimmy actually sent you against my wishes/I’m going to kill him/no, I’m going to kill him, but feel free to kick the corpse. It’s a joke. Did you try it and it didn’t stick?

**Jen:** So this scene, it’s I think a 7.5 page scene or something. It’s incredibly long. And so we always knew – we knew two things. We knew, well, this show lives or dies by the chemistry between these two characters. So, hopefully the chemistry you’re interested in watching them for 7.5 pages. And if you’re not we’re in trouble anyway. But then we also knew when we get in the edit we’re going to need to trim this down, but let’s just shoot it as is and then see where we’re at.

And so, yeah, that was this “I’m going to kill him but feel free to kick the corpse” line, it totally worked. Jean delivered it perfectly. It just felt like the scene was running a little long.

**John:** It’s a little bit of a detour also. It’s pulling attention to somebody–

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** Off the focus here. What happens in the rest of the scene is like we finally get to see Ava kind of monologue and actually have her voice and express her power which is ultimately what impresses Deborah. It’s so fun to actually see somebody sort of cut loose eventually, because we’ve seen Deborah be able to go off, but to actually see – it’s a strange place for an audience to be kind of rooting for both sides of the equation. Because it’s really a true two-hander we’re sort of seeing both sides of the story. And to see them go after each other was just sort of delicious. Just a nice job here at the end of this.

**Jen:** Oh, thank you. Yeah, I mean that was always by design that that was how the scene was going to end. That Ava would let loose and in letting loose and kind of they would start roasting each other the way comedians do and that is their love language. Jokes are their love language. And Deborah would be impressed by Ava’s ability that way. And, yeah, I think it’s written that way and then Jean and Hannah just perform it so wonderfully together. They have such amazing chemistry that we were very happy with how it turned out.

**John:** We have a ton of listener questions, so maybe we can do some speed rounding through some listener questions.

**Jen:** Love it.

**John:** Megana Rao, if you could get us started.

**Megana:** Awesome. Joel asks, “Standup comics seem to get far more freedom to go more controversial while TV writers have to be far more careful with jokes and topics. First, do you think that perception is accurate? And if so how do you find that balance?”

**Jen:** Interesting.

**John:** So standup versus sitcom writers.

**Jen:** I think that, sure, there’s probably a little more leeway given to standups because you are just one person getting on stage one night. You might say something controversial but on the flip side when it’s in a TV show it has to go through so many layers of approval before it actually makes it to air. So I think in the case of jokes that are seen as offensive sometimes I certainly think this when I see it, I’m like how did the – so the initial writer, then the showrunner, then the entire writer’s room, then the studio, then the network, like no one gave a note on this? There are lots of rounds that that could have happened.

I think if it is true that standups are allowed more leeway that way it’s probably because it’s just one person getting up on stage saying something one random night and it’s not going through so many levels of approval. But I have to say as a TV writer it’s not something I think about. I never think like, oh, I wish I could say this controversial thing but I got to get up at the Improv to do it. I don’t really think about, oh, can I get away with saying this or not.

**John:** The incentives are also different for the standup comic. And one of the episodes sort of goes into her trying new material and the standup guy who she confronts. And the incentives are trying to get the laugh, to keep the audience laughing is so different than in a sitcom situation. When it’s just you up on that stage you’re going to say whatever you can do. You just keep saying–

**Jen:** That’s a good point. It’s almost like it’s survival. You just need them to laugh, so you’re probably – who knows what you might say to get that to happen. Whereas, yeah, TV you’re crafting characters and you need to make sure that if someone is saying something controversial it better not be punching down or something that makes this person seem like a horrible person if that’s not the intention.

**John:** Because you don’t have to go home with that standup at the end of the night, but with a sitcom character you want to come back the next week and see that character again.

**Jen:** Exactly. Totally.

**Megana:** Awesome. Nora asks, “So many of my favorite comedies get better the longer they go on. And audiences tend to say stick with it, it gets really good. Why do you think many comedies are growers and not showers?”

**Jen:** I think that is really true. I think it’s – well I think it’s for two reasons. One is, and Mike Schur, again, my mentor and the man I credit with teaching me how to make television, is fond of saying I wish I could just throw out the first episodes of a show when you make it. Because the first eight episodes is kind of this sludge pile of figuring out–

**John:** Parks and Rec, those first episodes are rough.

**Jen:** Yeah. And I think Mike – he would be happy to admit that they were figuring it out. Especially in an ensemble comedy. You are figuring out how are all these characters funny. How are they funny with each other? How does that actor mesh with that actor? And so you are really figuring it out. And so I think when comedies start out maybe not as strong as they get as they progress, it is because the writers, the actors, the crew, everyone is figuring it out a little bit. Comedy, I think there’s chemistry to it. It’s intangible. And you’re trying to capture lightning in a bottle in a lot of ways. And so it takes a little bit of trial and error until you really get there.

And then I think the other reason that comedies feel they get better as they go on is like great jokes come from character. You know, yes, there are some lines on sitcoms where if you just saw them written on someone’s Instagram page you’d be like that’s a funny one-liner. But for the most part jokes are funny because they’re specific to character. Like a Ron Swanson joke can’t be put in the mouth of Leslie Knope or Andy Dwyer because they all have very different character games and world views. And it’s why you love them, because they’re specifically drawn characters.

And so I think when you watch a pilot you don’t know these characters. You don’t know their game. You’re learning them. And it’s the writer’s job to introduce you to them and that takes some time. And so I think as a show goes on you learn these characters, you love these characters, you know their games, so you say like, oh yeah, of course Monica has 11 categories for towels. That’s so her. But you don’t know these characters as well when you’re first watching a show. So I think the longer you spend with them the more you understand them and the more the things they say and do are funny to you.

**John:** You just used a term which I don’t use at all in features. Character game. So what is game?

**Jen:** So character game in comedy is basically like – and this is something that I don’t know in the streaming world if it’s as relevant, but character game is like what is their specific trait that they exhibit over and over again in behavior that is how they are funny. So for example Leslie Knope’s game, and you could say she has multiple games, but one game is she is type A crazy optimistic to a fault. She is like the craziest, hardest worker you’ve ever met in your life. And she does everything in her life 150%. And that is both endearing but also sometimes exhausting to her friends and coworkers. And so that’s the character game.

In the most simplest of terms, like sometimes the character’s game is they’re the dumb one. And that is what gets hit over and over again in their jokes and dialogue and what they do. And so it’s a term that gets used a lot in comedy and I think maybe as comedies become a little more – or at least some of them become a little more grounded, a little more real, maybe we say that less and less because the characters – at least when we were making Hacks like we want the characters to feel like real people, real grounded people.

We don’t all have character games in life. Some of us do. But it’s something that maybe we talk about a little bit less. But certainly in a more traditional comedy network sense you do talk about character game a lot.

**John:** So on the Scriptnotes podcast Craig’s umbrage is his character game?

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** He goes off and my desire to keep things moving along to segue, like this next question.

**Megana:** Leah asks, “In a previous episode Jac Schaeffer mentioned that she received good advice about staffing people in the room. Pick writers who offer something different from what she already had. Is there a type of comedy that is your strongest? And if so, what types of writers do you look for? For example, physical humor? Adept one lines? Etc.”

**Jen:** That’s a good question. That is really good advice for staffing a room. I think to look for people who fill in the gaps for you, who are stronger in things that you are maybe weaker in. Listen, I’m really good at formatting a script. I’m really good on the keyboard. That’s definitely number one maybe. I guess, let’s see, comedy wise probably I feel stronger in terms of jokes and one liners, like just sort of naturally where I come from from the monologue writing world. I think that maybe in jokes more than I think in story.

Story is something that, you know, I think the longer you work in narrative TV you get better at it, but that certainly wasn’t my strong suit when I started out. And so for example I think I’m always, like when staffing Hacks, looking for people who are really great with story. Really great with coming up with story. Coming up with twists and stuff like that. So, yeah, that certainly is good advice. That if you are staffing you want to find people who do things that you don’t maybe do as well.

**John:** This is an obvious point, but something just occurring to me now. A difference with Hacks is you have two central characters, two women who are telling jokes and are aware that they’re telling jokes because it is their business to tell jokes all the time. So there’s two characters who are aware that they’re funny, which is really unusual actually.

**Jen:** Yeah. Exactly. Most times in comedy people are funny but they don’t know they’re making jokes. And in this show, yeah, they know they’re funny. Making jokes is their business. It’s also been an interesting thing because I think when you write about comedians or comedy writers the bar gets set pretty high I think about how funny they need to be in their every interaction. And it’s funny because as a comedy writer, like I personally – the comedy writers who are constantly making jokes in every day conversation are the worst ones to be around. They’re pretty rough.

I, you know, I’m like – I am a comedy writer, but I’ve had so many people, like my hairdresser one time who shares some clients, some friends with me, and he said, “You know, everyone says Jen is so funny, but I don’t see that side of you.” And I was like, OK, cool. I think comedy writers, you think oh this person is playing a comedy writer they better be cracking wise every line. And that’s just truthfully not – it doesn’t feel like a realistic portrayal of a comedy writer to me anyway.

**John:** Yeah. Our next question was from Jay who asks…?

**Megana:** “What’s the correlation between being funny in person and being funny on the page? How does one get better at one or the other?”

**Jen:** Well, I mean, my hairdresser would like me more if I could learn.

**John:** It’s been my experience, too, is that like there’s people who are really, really funny, but they cannot write it down. They don’t have the ability to write in anyone else’s voice. Actually just something falls apart when they actually try to put it down on paper.

**Jen:** it’s really two different skills. And I think there are some people who are so wildly funny in person and also incredibly funny writers. That certainly exists. Someone like my co-creator Paul Downs is an incredible performer, so he’s so funny in that way, but then also a very talented writer. So it’s not like it doesn’t exist. But I think it’s hard. I think there’s no way to learn to be funny. You know, you either have it or you don’t.

So, what was the second part of the question?

**John:** How does one get better at one or the other? So like obviously people can – you went through UCB and so you learned how sketches works and you also learned some performance stuff, but it wasn’t your natural thing. And there’s going to be an upper ceiling to how good you are going to be as a performer, right?

**Jen:** Yeah. I think so. I think I could have taken a million more classes and they happily would have cashed my checks to do it, but I don’t think I ever – it is not in my wheelhouse to be a dynamic, incredible performer. It just isn’t. And that’s OK.

**John:** And we all know some really tremendous comedic actors who could not be any funnier, but they just cannot write. It’s just not natural to them.

**Jen:** Exactly. It is two very different skill sets. And sometimes you’ll find someone who has both, but it doesn’t always line up. And comedy writing is an interesting, especially TV comedy writing, is an interesting hybrid. Because when you are writing on a TV comedy you’re spending all your time in the writer’s room. And the writer’s room is just sitting around a table, breaking story together, pitching ideas, and then going through a script and pitching jokes for that script. I was shocked to find out my first narrative half hour job how little time you spend in front of a computer. When it’s your draft, you’re out on script, you’re writing the episode, but that’s pretty much it.

And so writer’s rooms are a very social place. You have to be comfortable sitting with five, six, seven, eight – back in Parks I think we had like 16 writers. A room of 15 other people and you have to get comfortable pitching your jokes out loud in front of all of them. And that was a real – again, for someone who isn’t a natural performer, and I’m not like an extrovert, that was a real challenge is to get comfortable learning like, OK, I need to just kind of be performing to pitch this joke for this character. So it is two different skill sets. But when you do work in TV comedy in writer’s rooms both come into play.

**John:** Yeah. On the feature side, if you’re pitching a comedy there’s not an expectation that you yourself are going to be hilariously funny in that pitch, but they need to believe that you actually know what funny is. And so if you’re a humorless person going into that you’re not going to get the job. That’s just how it works.

**Jen:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s tough. What else we got?

**Megana:** OK, a different Jay asks, “How many story arcs ahead do you and the staff have a feel for from the start?”

**Jen:** 1,012. No. There’s no set number to be honest. I think basically from the start what you’re more looking at is kind of, especially in a serialized streaming comedy, you’re looking at your tent poles for the season. You’re saying, OK, tent pole one, they meet, they clash. Then mid-season she’s going to quit, but she’s going to go on this bonding trip and learn more about her, which opens her eyes to new experiences and brings them closer. OK, another tent pole, her old LA life calls her back and she gets an opportunity that way.

You’re laying out the very big story points that you want to hit over the course of the season. And then you’re kind of filling in in between that all the little stories. And that is how it works like on our show, Hacks, which is a little more serialized. On more network TV shows, or even Broad City, those shows they were able to withstand a little more one-off episodes I think. So, I remember Parks and Rec like the beginning of every season we would have a writer’s retreat and part of your assignment for your writer’s retreat was to come up with ten episodes and you would just go to the retreat and then you pitch your ten episode ideas to Mike and we would write them all down on index cards and by the end of this retreat we would have this huge board of all the index cards of just crazy one-off episode ideas. Because a 22-episode network sitcom you have a little more leeway.

One that I pitched I remember was like Donna sends a tweet that she thinks is from her personal account but is actually the Parks Department account and it spirals. And that was just a one-off episode that we did that wasn’t tied to a larger arc. But because there are 22 episodes you had the time and space to do that.

And same on Broad City. Broad City we had much more ability to do kind of like one-off episodes that weren’t tied to a larger arc, even though we did on both Parks and Broad City you’re still telling longer arcs, but for something now like Hacks which is only 10 episodes, there’s less of a need to go, OK, we need to generate 500 episode ideas. It’s much more about these tent poles like I said of knowing where you want your character’s story to start, what’s happening in the middle, what’s happening in the end. And then filling in in between.

**John:** Well in the case Hacks in this first season you established stakes for both of the characters right at the very start. And so we know as an audience that by the end of this series we should have an answer to these fundamental questions about what’s going to happen to these two women.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** Which would not really make sense for something like Parks and Rec. That really wouldn’t make sense because the idea of characters leaving, it just wouldn’t track.

**Jen:** Yeah. And we did some stuff, like Leslie is getting recalled at the beginning of the season, what’s going to happen with that? So we certainly did that. But it was less central to the way the show was built.

**John:** Let’s try one more question from a listener.

**Megana:** Jerry asks, “I’ve heard Breaking Bad and Succession both described as comedies. Atlanta has had at least two horror episodes. And Insecure has had episodes that have brought me to the edge of tears. What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed in the form as of late and what do you see coming over the horizon?”

**Jen:** That’s a great question. And I agree with all those assessments of those shows. Those shows have made me laugh and cry similarly, too. I think it’s really honestly exciting to me. It feels like there’s no longer these strict parameters of like it’s a comedy so it needs to sound and look like this, and it needs to be this one way, and the tone always has to be comedic.

Something with Hacks we talked about all the time is like we wanted it to feel really grounded and we wanted it to feel like real life. And real life is equal parts drama and comedy and you’re switching in between the two tones in a matter of instance sometimes. And so what I think is so exciting about all those shows, you know, the question mentioned is like those shows all play with tone in such a cool way. They can be like, yeah, Insecure can be so funny, but then it also has these real grounded heartfelt moments that do make you cry.

And to me that’s so exciting. Like I want my art that I consume to reflect the real world I live in. And it feels like these half hour shows, or all these shows, not just half hour, are getting closer to reflecting the way the real world is in that it plays with tone and it isn’t just one thing.

So I love that shows are now able to do all these different things and it doesn’t feel like there’s hard and fast rules about what they can do. And as far as what’s on the horizon, I hope that trend just continues because I think it’s really exciting. And I think what’s in, I mean, maybe I don’t know if this is on the horizon, because I don’t know what the future of network comedy is, but maybe because these shows are so successful and people love them like maybe network comedies will also get to be a little more fluid with tone and a network comedy doesn’t have to like you know be just one thing. I think that was something Mike did with The Good Place in such a great way. That is not your typical network sitcom and he was given the chance to make it. And I think people were really excited by that.

So hopefully just kind of playing with tone and the rules and letting things be more fluid is something that will spread to not just streaming or cable but also network.

**John:** A thing I noticed about Hacks and Succession both is that they’re not very classically comedies, and yet the dialogue and how the characters are sort of presented are presented with a sort of comedic voice to them. Comedic things can happen in their universe and it makes sense for them do it. And characters talk in a way that I don’t want to say they feel like they’re written by comedy writers, but it feels like they’re writing at a pitch that can feel funny.

As opposed to something that’s done as a straight drama which just would never happen. And so you can basically take the same outline for a Succession episode and write it as just a true drama and write it as this. And the same things could happen in the scenes but it’s really just how characters are expressing themselves mostly that makes it feel like kind of a comedy.

**Jen:** Which is what I love about that show so much. It’s not just a straight drama. I love the comedic moments. And the specific character, again character games, that they kind of play with. I think that’s what makes that show so rich and run to watch.

**John:** All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. I have two short One Cool Things there this week. First is an essay by Zachary Zane that ran in the New York Times a couple weeks ago called You Are Bi Enough. And it’s just a nice way of looking, as we head out of Pride month, bisexuals always kind of feel like should I even be at this party. There’s that sense of like do I even belong here. Am I sort of stealing someone else’s valor for being in the room for this conversation?

And he does a really good job sort of laying out what to do if you’re a bi person who is in a mixed gender relationship and stuff like that. It’s just a really smart essay on approaching that.

Second is much more important for me personally which is that one of the things that has been hardest about the pandemic is it’s been impossible for me to get Caffeine Free Coke Zero, which is my go-to drink.

**Jen:** That is a tough one to find. I’m a Coke Zero drinker too and I never see Caffeine Free Coke Zero.

**John:** It’s really tough. So all the canned beverages took a real hit during the pandemic because there was not enough aluminum to sort of make all of our favorite sodas. But the niche drinks, like the Caffeine Free Coke Zero just became impossible to fill. So my two placeholders have been the Caffeine Free Diet Coke, which is OK. If you can find it, that’s great. And so Megana was able to find it this week. God bless you, Megana. But the other go-to for me has been I have a SodaStream and we always just use it for fizzy water. But they actually sell the syrups to put into it.

And so I was able to track down Caffeine Free Diet Cola syrup for the SodaStream. And if you use just under one ounce in a bottle it is a pretty good approximation of what Coke Zero should be like, what Caffeine Free Coke Zero should be like. So if you’re really jonesing for it – it’s not even really economically advantageous, because I worked it out and it’s $1.50 per liter which is not great.

**Jen:** Not great, no.

**John:** It’s not great. But I mean when you absolutely need it it’s there.

**Jen:** I love that you’re over here doing chemistry, too. You’re in your lab mixing.

**John:** One after another, I’m tweaking the formula to get it just right. And so I would say just under one ounce is what you need to make a perfect caffeine free diet cola.

Jen, what do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Jen:** My One Cool Thing is my favorite show that I watched over the pandemic, and honestly one of my favorite shows I’ve watched, which is a British show called I Hate Suzie. I don’t know if you guys have seen it.

**John:** I have not. Megana is nodding that she has.

**Megana:** Yeah, I love it.

**Jen:** It is co-created by Billie Piper who stars in it as well. And Lucy Prebble who is a phenomenal writer/playwright. She also writes on Succession actually. But this show is just so, so good. Billie Piper plays this actress who is like somewhat famous. She was like a pop star and now is on a zombie sci-fi show which is like seen OK. And then she’s up for this big career opportunity which is Disney is maybe going to hire her to play an “aging princess.” And so she’s very excited about that.

And right as this opportunity is about to happen her phone gets hacked and compromising photos of her leak. Her with someone who is not her husband. And it is just an eight-episode series. They’re all available on HBO Max. And it’s kind of this exploration of what it means to be a woman in the public eye. What it means to be – just modern womanhood in general. And the performances are just so wonderful. Billie Piper is amazing. It’s one of my favorite performances in a comedy of all time I think.

The woman who plays her manager and best friend, Leila Farzad, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, she’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful show that I feel like not enough people I’ve seen talking about. So, I’m doing the work.

**John:** We’ll start talking about it more.

**Jen:** I love it. Great.

**John:** Great. We’ll do it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Peter Hoopes. 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 I am @johnaugust. You’re on Twitter?

**Jen:** Yes, I am on Twitter. I’m @jenstatsky.

**John:** And we have t-shirts. They are great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. 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-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Cat Person and the discourse around Cat Person.

Jen Statsky, this was amazing. Thank you so much for coming in.

**Jen:** Thank you so much for having me. This was a real career highlight as a longtime listener.

**John:** Aw, thanks.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Jen Statsky. What was your experience with Cat Person before this? So you were aware of the original short story?

**Jen:** Yes, I was aware. I remember reading it back in 2017 and I remember being very struck by it because it came out during the #MeToo movement when I certainly as a woman and I think a lot of women I knew and globally were like reevaluating their relationships with men and interactions with men and just what kind of it meant to be a woman out in the world. And certainly a woman with a sexual life. And so I was very – I thought the story was – I remember reading it and liking it. And then was also was so – I was like, wow, this is like the first viral short story. I couldn’t believe how much Twitter was discussing it and talking about it. So, yes, I was very aware of Cat Person.

**John:** I remember when it broke as well. It was a New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian and it just spread everywhere. I think because it was a short story it wasn’t a huge commitment. It wasn’t like a book where you had to read the whole thing. You could sit down and read the thing and like, oh, that was really good. And what struck me as I first read it and it was a lot of part of the discourse originally was it felt like it maybe kind of wasn’t fiction. It felt like it was actually just an essay. It felt like it was a first person thing that she was writing about her own experience. And she said like, no, I’m not, it’s fiction.

The term auto-fiction came up there. The sense of like it felt like autobiography but it was actually fully fiction.

**Jen:** Yeah. And I mean I think partly is because it’s so well-written, or so confidently written that people found it hard to believe it wasn’t someone’s actual experience.

**John:** Yes. And that’s where we get to this week. So, this past week Alexis Nowicki, another author, wrote in Slate saying like, OK, well this is actually based on my own experience, even though she’d never actually met Kristen, the original author. And so we’ll put a link to both things in the show notes. This summary of what Alexis is writing is that she read this short story and everyone was texting her saying like, “This is about you, right? This is about you and that guy?”

And she’s like, yeah, but I never met this woman. I don’t understand how this could be the situation. And she eventually reached out to Kristen Roupenian who said like, yes, I knew that same guy. And while I’m not the person, you sort of are the person who is the other character in the story.

**Jen:** Yes. That must have been such a crazy – I found the essay by, it’s Alexis–

**John:** Nowicki.

**Jen:** Nowicki. I loved the essay. I thought it was really, really well-written and interesting. And she describes coming out of a movie and having like dozens of texts being like, “Is this about you?” People sending her the story. And that must have been such a bizarre, strange experience for a person to go through. And yet it goes into a really nuanced, interesting conversation about art and who owns the details of one’s life. Is it ever OK to just point blank take facts from someone else’s life and use them as fiction? It’s really interesting.

**John:** Well so often on the podcast we do a segment for How Would This Be a Movie and Craig is always arguing you don’t need people’s life rights because facts are facts. And the facts that Roupenian was using here are kind of facts. It was basically she didn’t know this person. She looked up and she had heard about this earlier relationship this guy had had and sort of imagined what this woman was like. And Googled and found real information about where she went to school and where she used to work and was just imagining what this life was. And imagined pretty correctly sort of how a lot of this stuff worked.

But it’s the issue of like nothing was illegal here, but where the ethical boundary is between sort of pulling that stuff in.

**Jen:** Yeah. I mean, I guess what was interesting to me and this Kristen when she did, if you read the essay, you’ll see she apologizes for this eventually. She says I’m sorry I should have taken some of the details and changed them so that it wouldn’t be so directly linked to you, which I do – as a writer myself I can’t picture, yes, it’s of course you don’t need someone’s life rights necessarily. You’re always pulling from different people’s lives and experiences. But I can’t really picture writing something and using such specific details that could easily be traced to a person and not just taking the extra step of changing them slightly so that person wouldn’t think it’s about them.

**John:** Yeah. People were pointing out that it’s always dangerous to be around writers because you never know if you’re going to be sucked into this, but in this case it’s dangerous to be around people who could be around writers.

**Jen:** Yeah. Right. There’s always a writer within a few degrees of connection to you and that’s really dangerous.

**John:** So a thing that I’ve always been aware of as I’ve been around writers is like events will happen, or somebody will say something or things come up. You were saying this before about Deborah writing a joke down in her book. Like as a funny thing happens, who owns that funny thing that happens? Who owns that moment?

**Jen:** I have friends who are standups who talk about this specific issue because they’ll go on tour together. And then when you’re on tour you’re living together. You’re going out to eat. You’re on the bus. And something crazy will happen and then it’s a race to who can craft the joke about it first. Who gets to tell it on stage first? It is a really interesting thing when creative people are together. Who has ownership over it? There’s not really a hard and fast rule about it.

**John:** I also – Dana Schwartz makes this point on Twitter that whenever there’s two people it always feels like you have to declare two sides. And it’s this or it’s that. And you can’t actually say that’s an interesting conversation about this thing. She was in the right, she was in the wrong. She’s trying to claim credit for something that she didn’t actually write. And it makes it more complicated than that. I’m not on either team here. I don’t think they should have teams. I don’t think we’re playing a game.

**Jen:** Right. Twitter always rushes to be judge, jury, and executioner, right? So someone always, yes, exactly, like Dana is saying has to be in the right and someone has to be in the wrong. And what I thought was so interesting about Alexis’s essay is that she wasn’t casting herself as the victim and Kristen as the villain primarily. I thought the essay was so well done because it’s a really nuanced, holistic look of like this very strange thing happened to me. I feel angry about it in this way, but I also see that this person has a particular experience of their own.

So I found it interesting that people didn’t take the hint from the essay which is like I’m not trying to cast, oh, this action was evil and this person should be condemned. I’m just working my way through this specific personal experience that happened and kind of exploring this conversation about art and the ethics of art.

So, yeah, that was interesting. Twitter is not great for nuance.

**John:** What’s also strange about this situation is that the third person in this relationship, so Charles who is the basis of the character, is apparently dead, which is dismissed in a single line and not explained.

**Jen:** I know. My jaw dropped when I got to that part of the essay. And then I don’t know if you saw this, but a lot of people – and again we have no idea – but a lot of people on Twitter took the extra step to say, oh, he killed himself. He must have killed himself because of the negative portrayal in this work of “fiction.”

**John:** I don’t think we know that.

**Jen:** We don’t know that at all. That’s just complete conjecture from people on Twitter, which again like rushing to try to put everyone into the category of villain and good person. It’s just so fascinating. But we have no idea how this man passed away. It’s very sad. It’s a very sad part of the essay and that both of these woman are left I think grieving this person is just like a sad bookend to it.

**John:** And there is theoretically a movie version of this, so the tie in to this is so Nicholas Braun of Succession is apparently supposed to be playing this character.

**Jen:** Right.

**John:** And so it just becomes complicated as reality and fiction and meta fiction overlap.

**Jen:** I don’t know what stage – do you know if they’re–

**John:** I don’t know where they are.

**Jen:** I wonder if the current writer is scrambling now to include this newest twist into the Cat Person saga.

**John:** The next Zola saga.

**Jen:** Yeah.

**John:** Thanks Jen.

**Jen:** Thanks.

Links:

* [WGA Pilot Guide](https://www.wga.org/members/employment-resources/writers-deal-hub/pilot-deal-guide)
* [Hacks on HBO](https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GYIBToQrPdotpNQEAAAEa) check out the pilot script [here](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Hacks-Script-It-Starts-On-The-Page.pdf).
* [Jen Statsky](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4278387/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/jenstatsky?lang=en)
* [You Are Bi Enough](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/opinion/bisexuals-coming-out-anna-paquin.html?referringSource=articleShare) by Zachary Zane for NYT
* [Caffeine Free Diet Cola syrup by SodaStream](https://sodastream.com/products/diet-caffeine-free-cola-4-pack)
* [I Hate Suzie](https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GX6MziQh41pYSwwEAAAK4) on HBO Max
* [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/)
* [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 Peter Hoopes ([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/508standard.mp3).