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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/on-losing-a-parent).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 479 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we talk about losing a parent onscreen and in real life, with a look at the emotional journey and some practical advice for navigating it. We’ll also talk about managing all the little scraps of paper with ideas written on them and answer some listener questions. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will talk energy including the controversial opinions on nuclear energy from that guy who wrote Chernobyl.

**Craig:** What a dick.

**John:** Oh, that’s you. Craig, that’s you.

**Craig:** [laughs] More controversial opinions for that guy. Great.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll hear from Howard Dean and I’m excited to get into this.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I got into an argument on the Internet with Howard Dean. What are the odds?

**John:** That’s a good choice. He’s a screamer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But first in our outro to last week’s repeat we raised the question of how filmmakers and money folks were going to feel about Warner’s decision to put their 2021 slate day and date in theaters and on streaming for HBO Max. And Craig what was the feedback?

**Craig:** Well, the feedback from the filmmaking community was fairly negative I think.

**John:** I would say not great, yes. Blindsided was a thing.

**Craig:** Right. The feedback from the people out there in the audience seemed to just be a bit of a shrug.

**John:** Yeah, feedback from my friend Nima was like, “Oh, thank god,” because he wanted to see these things and not get Covid.

**Craig:** Shrug to positive I think was the – and, yeah, the corporation appears to be going with the people who pay for it. So there’s the [unintelligible].

**John:** So Christopher Nolan, the writer-director of the Batman franchise and a lot of other big Warner tent poles, his quote was, “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find they were working for the worst streaming service.” And it’s interesting. It’s that sense of not only were they blindsided, it’s just like I thought I was working for a movie studio and, no, I’m actually working for a streamer.

**Craig:** I have to say that that’s just a bit silly. I mean, the part where he said, “Look, we thought we were making a movie for movie theaters and it turns out we were working for the worst streaming service,” it’s the second part of that sentence that just feels a bit petty. They’re not the worst streaming service at all. And I’m not saying that just because I have a show on it. That’s just sort of ad hominem.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The fact is that Christopher Nolan is kind of part of why this happened. It was a little strange that he was the guy who was out front saying this because it was his insistence that Tenet be released theatrically in the middle of a pandemic where a lot of theaters were shut down. That was the thing that kind of made everybody else look around and go we can’t afford to release these movies theatrically when theaters aren’t either open or a viable appealing destination for the consumer. So that’s why we’re in this spot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That just was very confusing to me. One thing I noticed was that what we heard were a lot of directors talking about the sanctity of film. We didn’t hear from a lot of screenwriters, which I thought was fascinating. I know that some of these guys are writers as well. But there is very much a – this is, again, you and I coming out of the feature world we know this kind of director protectionism that exists. And I think a director exceptionalism. And they are very, very much about this. And I understand it. And if you make a movie for theatrical exhibition and it turns up on TV earlier you do feel like somebody broke your painting. I completely understand it.

**John:** It’s a natural way we think about it, because they really perceive they are making a movie for a big screen and people will watch it down the road other places, but they’re making this for the big screen.

Now, let’s talk about the money side of it because I think more than even the decision to put these things not just theatrically it’s the concern about like, wait, what happens with like the money we were supposed to be being paid.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So as I raised last week, you know, you and I in our deals will often have box office bonuses. So when a movie hits $100 million, $150 $200, we get a check cut to us, and it’s just a very clear thing that happens. Actors, the same thing kind of happens. And so what happens when the box office is essentially zero or close to zero because they’re also being released on streaming? That is a huge concern and it doesn’t seem like Warners really reached out to anybody to warn them this was happening.

So with Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot sort of got bought out of this. They clearly made a deal and they sent money her way. But what is going to happen to the other 20 movies that are going to be slid to streaming? That’s going to be just a real mess.

**Craig:** Yeah. The decision that they made was just about as hard of a decision as you can make in this kind of situation. Because if they do warn everybody and give everybody a head’s up and talk about it then they have a revolt on their hands before they can even to it. And we’ve seen that before where people announce a thing and then unannounce a thing. The Academy did something sort of similar. I can’t remember what the rule change was but there was an announcement and then an unannouncement. And you can pretend it’s because you thought about it some more, but really what it makes it look like is that you got held hostage by some people and lost.

I think that’s why they did it the way they did it, because they knew that people would freak out and they needed to just do it. And probably just from a very mile high corporatist sort of view of things I guess as a corporation they probably did what was best for the corporation there, because people will move on and they’ll forget about this. They will watch these things.

I’m bummed out because I do want to see these things in a theater. So what do I do? I mean, I want to see Dune in a theater.

**John:** You go see them in a theater. So that’s the thing.

**Craig:** I’ve got to wait.

**John:** They’re not being pulled out of theaters. It’s basically saying–

**Craig:** Well, yeah–

**John:** –worldwide they are being released theatrically.

**Craig:** I’m pulling myself out of theaters is the problem. So what I need to do essentially is wait. I know that Dune is sitting there watchable. And I have to say, no. I want you to see this in a theater, so wait until your vaccinations have come through and everything feels safer. And then go see it in a theater. Hopefully it’s still there. It’s going to be hard.

And, you know, it’s not permanent. I think that some people think this is permanent. I don’t think it’s permanent. I do think there’s going to be a permanent kind of change to the way movies are put in theaters. What kinds of movies are put in there? Who owns the theater? How many theaters there are? Hard to predict that. But the theater isn’t going away completely.

**John:** Yeah. I have a movie in production at Warners that I hope comes out in 2022. And I hope comes out in theaters. And I still believe that it probably will, because I still believe that’s probably the way that this movie and the company who made it makes the most money and sort of generates the biggest bubble of excitement for it. So, we’ll see. This show will still be on the air then.

**Craig:** I’m with you. I’m with you. These things were designed to be this way. So, yeah, but it’s kind of a bit of a lost year. So the movies that are in this year, you know, when I was a kid I used to collect pennies because, I don’t know, because I didn’t have a videogame.

**John:** There was no Internet, yeah.

**Craig:** Or the Internet. So I collected pennies. This is how pathetic it was. And so we’re talking in the ‘70s and I would routinely find pennies from the ‘30s and ‘40s. And there was one year I believe it was 1942 – the penny people will be angry at me if I blew that – where the penny was not copper. I mean, pennies aren’t that very copper anyway, but it wasn’t brown. It was silver. It was steel-colored because they didn’t have the copper to use. That year they needed it for the war. So, the mint just said we’re not doing copper pennies this year. We’re doing nickel-looking pennies. It was a year. We’re in the nickel-colored penny year. That’s where we’re at with movies.

**John:** All right. Well let’s continue our discussion of this nickel penny year with sort of my news of the last week. So last Friday, right as we were about to record last week’s show, my mom’s health took a sudden turn and just after midnight she died. And so my mom was 84. I wrote about this on Twitter and on the blog and on Instagram, so I won’t recap sort of everything there. But my mom, so everyone knows, she loved Jeopardy! She loved keeping tabs on what everybody was doing in their days. She had this remarkable memory for names and relationships. And so this was just another sort of terrible thing about 2020. She didn’t die of Covid but I wrote that she died within Covid. It was all the appointments that sort of got pushed back, her heart and her kidneys were failing and we just didn’t know. And so when a small infection took her to the hospital everything collapsed really, really suddenly.

Craig, you went through losing your dad earlier this year. I don’t know the circumstances behind that, but again, not of Covid but sort of in a situation where you could not be there with him the way you normally would be with a passing parent.

**Craig:** Yeah. That was the hard part. So it wasn’t anything sudden like it was with your mom. And I think obviously when it is sudden I can only presume it is worse. It’s not easy when it’s not sudden, obviously, but my dad had been sick with stage four lung cancer for about a year. So we had all prepared ourselves. And it’s a strange thing to have a kind of pre-mourning. And then you kind of come out of the pre-mourning into sort of acceptance which you think maybe is just like the acceptance that follows the loss itself. It’s not.

So, it was definitely a Covid, yeah, I guess what did you say, it was within Covid because I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t get there. I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t be there. We did talk a lot on Zoom, which was nice. And it was also odd to see day by day him getting worse. And the only thing about it that I think is positive and I think I mentioned this on the show before is that when we do have this memorial service for him it will be many months after he died and we will all be able to laugh a bit easier and not be so wounded, which I think is a nicer way to go through a group memory of somebody, or at least I hope it is.

**John:** Absolutely. So my dad passed away when I was in college and the conversation that I was never able to have with my dad really informed Big Fish. So the deathbed scene in Big Fish is really that conversation that I wish I’d had with my father. We had the memorial right afterwards, and so all the emotions were still really hot, and it was challenging.

Obviously there’s a good reason to do funerals right away, but there’s also a good reason not to do funerals right away. I don’t know if this is going to be the best case scenario, but tomorrow is the Zoom online thing for all of her friends. That remoteness can actually be a little bit nice for that. And then later this summer when it’s safe to travel we’ll go there for the actual funeral and body stuff.

But I wanted to talk about this because losing a parent is such a staple of movies. And so often the movies we write, the movies we watch, our protagonists lose their parents. They lose a parent or both parents. Sometimes that happens kind of in act zero before the real story has begun. Often it happens in act one. Sometimes it happens in act three, sort of in a Big Fish kind of way.

And so I want to talk through losing a parent on film but also in the way that I always keep pitching that people are the protagonists of their own life to talk about the experience both in reality and onscreen, where the parallels are and sort of best ways to navigate that both as real life people and as the characters that we’re writing.

**Craig:** Great idea for a topic. Obviously a difficult one, especially when you’re right in the middle of it like you are. But one thing that I’ve come to discover about being a writer is that when somebody in the family dies everybody turns to you and says, “So you’re writing the thing, right?” I’ve written a lot of eulogies. When Melissa’s dad died I wrote the eulogy. Her mom is not doing well. I will write the eulogy. My dad, my grandfather, my mother, whoever it is in the end I’m always the one doing that. So you start to get a kind of practice at it.

But what you’re doing inside of the movie is very much about being as honest as you can about pain. It’s a very difficult pain to get your finger on. You start to understand why people used to say broken heart. I mean, obviously it’s not a broken heart, but something in that general space does feel broken. It’s the weirdest thing. And I suppose we can move through our lives questioning the general wisdom of what psychosomatic pain or illness is like, but grief is the ultimate undeniable psychosomatic pain. And figuring out how to experience that inside someone else’s skull is hard as a writer. I don’t mean difficult. I mean it’s hard. It hurts to do it.

**John:** Absolutely. When I wrote the deathbed scenes in Big Fish, I’ve talked before, it was kind of method acting. I would bring myself – I would sit in front of a mirror. I would bring myself to tears. And then I would write the scenes. And so it feels that way because I was feeling that way as I was writing them. And it does sort of carry in there.

The episode that we had on the boards that we didn’t end up recording last Friday and sort of punted because my mom was dying was about weddings. And we will get to that episode down the road. And when I was prepping up that episode it really occurred to me that there’s no such thing as a wedding scene. There’s a constellation of scenes that become a wedding. There’s all the different little things that are parts of a wedding. And the same thing happens with death or losing a parent. It’s not just the deathbed scene. It’s not just the funeral. It’s a whole bunch of scenes. And let’s start with talking about the lead up to it, because you’re talking about losing your father and you had a year’s runway. You didn’t know how long the runway was going to be but you knew there was time. And the same when I lost my father. It was cancer and we knew that there was a set period of time. And you could track sort of where you were at in it and you were going through these stages. And you could have all these conversations.

Versus this last one with my mom was much more sudden. But even in that suddenness of it there was still a progression. I remember on that Friday when I texted you saying like, hey, I think we’re going to need to cancel this, my conversations the day before were about sort of like, OK, so she’s in the hospital, her leg is better, we need to transition her to a rehab place so she can sort of get her strength back. And so it was all the stuff of trying – anticipating a new normal. And so there was really a misdirection I guess I would say. The same way you would write a misdirection in a story, life was misdirecting me in thinking like, OK, it’s going to be challenging to get back to normal, but here’s how we’re going to get back to normal. There’s a plan for it. So this is figuring out, OK, the real problem is going to be how do I keep her safe in Covid. How do I find a rehab place that’s going to get her better but is also not going to get her sick?

And so it was all about that. And then over the course of the day of that Friday it was talking with one doctor. Oh, we need to see her make these improvements. And then every phone call I would have later that day something would be going worse, and worse, until you realize like, oh wait, we’ve actually crossed into a really bad place. And the language that they’re using has changed. That sense of there was a cascade happening. A collapse. And you start to recognize that where you thought you were was wrong. You had sort of the wrong assumptions about things.

So with your father or with my dad when they passed away that was stretched over months. In this case it was over hours. But that same process was happening. And as a character experiencing that I had to – I kept trying to catch up to where we were at. And so often the emotions I was feeling were happening really live. It’s that moment where like I was trying to ask a question to the doctor and I can’t because I’m literally holding back tears. And I didn’t start the conversation anticipating I would get there.

And that’s so often I think the kind of emotion we’re looking for in writing these scenes is what does it really feel like to be there in that moment.

**Craig:** It is the reason we have drama in the first place. If we don’t die we don’t have drama. And the way that we struggle with this is why we have stories about triumphing over the impossible. It’s why we have stories about things surprising us, looking better, and then looking worse. Looking worse, then looking better. It’s why we have stories about people meeting and falling in love so that they can say goodbye. All these things. Everything. All of it is because we’re mortal. If we’re not mortal we don’t need any of this. Our movies become incredibly boring. We don’t even have movies at that point. I don’t know what we do.

This is the root of all of it. Everything we do to make people feel things, even to make them laugh, because there’s nothing funny either if you don’t die, because there’s nothing absurd. All of it is because of this. So, the ways that people can die are almost analogous to the different kinds of genres that we use to get at this essential human condition.

You were in an action movie and I was in an independent film. But it was the same ending. Just like action movies and independent films, you know what I mean? At some point–

**John:** Eventually the credits roll, yes.

**Craig:** Eventually the credits rolls. That’s exactly right. How you get there, how frantic you are, how confused you are, all of that – the kind of heroic efforts, all these things. As a writer when you are in the specific moment of the ending it’s obviously about the person who is not going to die. Because you’re talking to people who are not dying. Or at least aren’t on the verge of death, most of them. You’re talking to people who are going to have to deal with people who are dying. And that’s what we’re there for is to unravel that mystery.

And movies like Big Fish put their fingers right on the nerve. And those are hard. They’re hard for me to watch. You know, Terms of Endearment is hard for me to watch. Bang the Drum Slowly is hard for me to watch because it hurts, you know. And there wasn’t much in Chernobyl, you know, even though a lot of people died, really it all just got focused in on one woman and her grief. And it was so awful that in the end, I mean, she loses a husband and then she loses a baby. And I just didn’t have her say anything. I just looked at her. And that was basically all I could do. Because it’s too hard.

**John:** But let’s contrast Chernobyl to sort of us and our parents and conventional ways is that Chernobyl the world is upside down. It was an extraordinary situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So people were trying to do their jobs but like they really weren’t even clear sort of what they were dealing with. As I was having these conversations last Friday I was always mindful that I’m talking on the phone to a stranger, a specialist, who does this every day.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so there’s just such a mismatch in terms of like where I’m at – this is an extraordinary event in my life – and this is absolutely ordinary life for them. And I was so grateful that they were so kind and considerate. They were clearly feeling emotion based on what I was feeling. But this was every day for them. And so imagining writing these scenes, you know, you have to play the reality of what it feels like to be the person who is freaking out but also the reality of the person who is just doing this on a daily basis and who has to confront these things all the time.

I found myself always asking what do I do in this situation, like what are the next questions I need answer. What are my choices here because they saw this all the time and this was a once or twice in a lifetime situation for me.

**Craig:** Yeah. And because there have been four million examples in movies and television of people coping with the death of a loved one there are four million well-trodden roads. So, part of the kind of – I don’t know – creepy part of this is that you also have to continue to be as creative an artist as you can. Your job is to figure out a way to express this incredibly common thing in a way that is not untrue and yet also not shopworn.

And it’s hard. Because there are a few moves that we tend to do. We tend to go through the standard Kübler-Ross stuff. You know, we’ve seen a lot of examples of denial in film. We’ve seen a lot of examples of anger. That stuff is always true. It’s the actual dramatization of those moments and it’s interesting how few stick in your head over time in life as just these things. I mean, I still think about Esther Rolle throwing that glass dish on the floor and going “damn, damn, damn.” Because that just – it felt so true to who she was. Look, it wasn’t anything special in the sense of like it was just she was in denial, she accepted it, but she was holding back all of her emotions. Then it all came back over a tiny thing and it just worked. And so we have to kind of figure out how to find those real moments even after we’ve experienced them, which is that awful part of our job. Get as close as you can to human emotion and human authenticity but also stand apart and run it through quality assurance.

It’s at times unpleasant.

**John:** It is. And I think there’s also – we have to acknowledge that because these are events that are only going to happen a few times in people’s lives you have no time to practice them. And so instead what you’re doing is you’re looking at other representations in film and TV for how you’re supposed to feel and how you’re supposed to react and sometimes those are not particularly good or helpful guides for how to do this.

So, let’s maybe wrap up this conversation with some practical tips for sort of like how to actually negotiate this in the real world and real life. Because I definitely have learned a lot about sort of how to deal with the practicalities of losing a parent while you’re in the middle of it and then we can also offer some tips for sort of like how to deal with the grief and the feelings and everything else that sort of happens after that.

The first thing I would stress to you is that if you think about yourself as the protagonist in your own life story the characters that you would write would not necessarily act rationally. So you can’t be too hard on yourself if you’re not acting rationally. Because sometimes you could recognize like that’s not the smartest thing I could have done. It’s like well of course not because you’re dealing with an extraordinary situation.

What I found to be really helpful as I was talking to people during the lead up is I would write down people’s names so I could actually go back to my notes, but also talk to them using their names of who was and so I could refer to them as well and communication was so crucial talking with my brother about what I learned, what’s happening next, what the decisions are, how I’m feeling, asking how they’re feeling. A thing that ended up being really important was I had medical power of attorney. We also had wills and sort of living will stuff. Having those in Dropbox was incredibly helpful because I could just send them through immediately and talk to the doctors when my mom wasn’t available to do so.

And in that whole process I certainly recognized it’s not privilege but facility – I had the ability to talk to doctors sort of on a peer kind of level just because of being sort of a white guy of a certain age. It became very easy to level with them about certain things. And I feel like a younger person might not have that experience, or even like talking on the phone to strangers to sort of get stuff. But I recognize that some of these things that were like well that’s straightforward for me would be very difficult for other people.

So, to always acknowledge that it may not be simple for you to do some of these things which I was saying like, oh, it’s just easy to do those things.

**Craig:** I mean, all of that is good advice. It doesn’t make it easier, but it certainly prevents it from getting harder. And I think probably the most important thing you said there was the first thing which is you’re going to be in a state. Not like we’re excusing bad behavior but you’re not going to be at your best. And if you are somebody who is used to doing things on your own, being a perfectionist, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work through the pain kind of person maybe don’t. Because it’s not going to work. And you are allowed to – well, it’s like my wife’s classic bit of advice for expecting moms. If you’re standing sit, and if you’re sitting lie down. That’s basically – that was her thing. Just relax. Because this is hard.

**John:** Yeah. Melissa also is a big advocate I know of self-care. And just recognizing that you need to take care of yourself in addition to taking care of everything else in the world. And so part of my self-care for this was e-mail – and so before I sort of tweeted anything or Instagrammed anything I emailed you and a bunch of friends, I Bcc’d a bunch of friends to say, “Hey, listen, this is what happened. This is where I’m at. I’m OK. But I’m just taking this whole week off to just be sad. And so if I don’t return your emails right away or phone calls right away don’t be worried. This is just what I’m doing. This is what’s going on.” And that helped.

**Craig:** Yes. And here’s some advice for people who get those emails. If you haven’t been through this before and someone emails you something like this, read the email, feel for them. If you want to say something back make it incredibly short. And then leave them the F alone. Because there are times where people suddenly want to just insert themselves in your life I think because they think that it’s helping and it’s not. They just want to be all over you. And you don’t want anybody near you and the thought of having to care-take somebody else’s feelings while I’m falling apart is overwhelming.

So just know nobody – when somebody tells you something like this what they’re not saying is “come over, cook my food, let me cry on your shoulder, listen to me, tell me about how you lost your dad.” They don’t want any of that. They just want you to know and then make some small tiny gesture so that they understand you saw it. And then that’s it. That’s it. That’s all they need.

They’ll ask. If they want something specific they will ask.

**John:** Yeah. And if you want that stuff, ask for it. It’s absolutely fine to say that. So I was trying to make it really clear. I think I said in the email, “I don’t need flowers or gifts. There’s so many better places to donate your money. So if you feel like donating money donate to anyone, that’s great. I don’t need it.” And so I was so happy with how little stuff came into our house during the week.

**Craig:** I’m so with you on that.

**John:** Which was really good.

**Craig:** Same thing. And seriously when I say don’t send stuff, it’s not like wink-wink. I mean, don’t. Do not. It’s going to be a huge bummer. I personally find flowers incredibly depressing. Who are these for? I don’t understand flowers honestly on a good day.

**John:** I really don’t either.

**Craig:** So on like a bad day?

**John:** I think flowers are pretty but–

**Craig:** I don’t get it. Why are you sending me plant material? It’s just so weird. Is this like a comment? I don’t understand it.

**John:** Last thing I want to end on, so I spent the week letting myself be sad and sometimes it’s hard to just allow yourself to be sad because you feel like, wait, I’m not feeling sad right now so I’m doing this wrong. And I tried to just be really mindful of like, OK, I’m sad because of this thing. I’m going to actually let myself be sad in this moment and sort of like experience it and sort of think about what it is and what it means and I was quiet through it.

But I tried to never perform sadness. Because I think sometimes when you’re not feeling an emotion you feel like oh well I need to be feeling this emotion. I need to get myself to that state. You don’t. And there were also times this week where I just felt like tremendous relief. Because while this was relatively sudden at the end I would say all of 2020, since the pandemic started, has been – one of my biggest sources of anxiety has been my mom has been in this senior living community and it’s like she’s in a boat and the ocean is poison. And I’ve just been so worried that some of this poison would get into her boat and she would get it and she would die.

And it’s been such a source of stress and anxiety. So, this last week as I felt some relief, like oh, I don’t have to worry about that anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Was good. And it’s OK for me to feel that as well. And so I think too often I think we get from the movies we watch and the TV shows we watch that the sadness and grief you feel is all one thing after a death. And it’s not. It’s a whole swirl of things happening at once. And that’s OK. So just not sort of limit yourself to feeling – don’t just color your week with one crayon in the emotional crayon box. It’s not going to be that way.

**Craig:** It is not. And in fact the first thing I felt and the first thing I suspect most people feel is relief. Because the process of watching someone die or being near someone dying or even remote Zooming with somebody dying is brutal. It’s absolutely brutal. It’s the long goodbye. And I don’t like goodbyes. And it hurts. And you’re saying goodbye to somebody and then you’re like but I think maybe I’m seeing you tomorrow. I don’t know. And the last conversation you have with them is hard.

And then when they die you’re relieved because it’s over. First of all, they’re not in pain anymore. You know, my dad was in pain. And so that part is good. And also for yourself you’re like, OK, so this process that we were managing, that does require management, is over. The things that I pressed pause on don’t need to be paused. I’m going to keep them on pause for a while longer, but the point is that there is regular life returning. Essentially the beginning of the end of your grief happens once they die because that’s when your grief, the post-death grieving really begins. So that’s how you know it can end. It’s the weirdest feeling.

And for me I grabbed onto those moments of relief as best I could because don’t you worry the sadness is going to jump at you from behind like a dingo and get you and get you when you’re not looking. And then you cry it out. And then you get back to life. But the thought that you are not supposed to feel any kind of relief or even a sort of strange joy at the fact that this miserable process has ended is crazy. Of course you should. Of course you should.

You get to start getting back to stuff. When I die my greatest wish is that everybody feels awesome about it and gets right back to life. It’s going to be hard for some people I assume. Hopefully for a little bit. But the point is I don’t want anybody moping around. I wouldn’t want that. My dad wouldn’t want that. Your mom wouldn’t want that, either. Nobody does.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Nobody does except like people who have real personality problems. But, you know, allowing yourself to actually be relieved that someone died seems – it just seems counterintuitive and in fact it’s intuitive. So I’m glad you had that experience and that recognition. It’s a good thing because I think a lot of people put themselves on a shame hook when they feel it.

**John:** Yeah. The last thing I should acknowledge is that you and I are both talking from the perspective of folks who are established in our lives and so a parent dying doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of our lives. If you’re losing a parent or someone in your life when you’re in a more vulnerable position it’s all going to feel different because then you have all the anxiety about your own future. And so you and I we’re lucky that we didn’t have those things. And so we weren’t worried about ourselves and how the world was going to function without them because we knew it could.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a whole different deal. No question.

**John:** All right. Let’s do a palate cleanser and talk about a completely anodyne topic.

**Craig:** Anodyne. Nice.

**John:** Hey, Craig, when you wake up in the middle of the night or it’s 11 o’clock at night, maybe you don’t go to bed until quite late, but you have an idea for something, you need to jot it down, where do you jot it down?

**Craig:** I send an email to myself. I’ve got my iPad on the nightstand and I send an email to myself.

**John:** Great. And how detailed is that note? Is it a full sentence? Is it multiple things? How much do you have to capture in order to have captured that idea?

**Craig:** I just have a general sense of how much I need so that in the morning when I read it I go “I understand, I recall the salient details of this thought.” So it’s not full text, but I fill it in where I need it filling in.

**John:** So it’s a cue to help you remember that thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so back in the olden days I had a little notebook that I would keep beside the bed and I would jot that down. And it wasn’t particularly helpful to me because that notebook was always in one place and that’s not where I actually needed the note. So what I’ve taken to doing this last year which has been really great is I just have a big stack of blank index cards and I’ll make the note on the index card and I’ll set it by the door, by our bedroom door, so that it goes downstairs in the morning. Because we don’t have any electronics in our bedroom so I can’t send myself an email. But I’ll just write it there.

And I found it to be really helpful because it gets it out of my head. So I feel like I don’t have to keep rehearsing it to remember it. I don’t have to actively try to remember it because I know I’m going to remember it because it’s on the card. It’s going to be behind the door. And it’s been a real game-changer for me this year in terms of both making sure that those ideas stay captured but also letting me get to sleep and not worry that I’m going to forget about the idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have been doing this less and less. What I have found over time is that very few things that I think of and think, ooh, I should remember that are ultimately worth remembering. They are kind of actually on an even playing field with all the other ideas I have. It’s just that because I’m not near something in the moment or I’m actually writing or at my desk or near an index card by my bulletin board I think, oh my god, if I forget this then…

Sometimes you can inflate the value of those things simply because you’re not near the spot. There are very few things that kind of survive that filter. So sometimes I’m constantly running scenes and dialogue while I’m driving. I do this all the time where I’ll just start improving scenes between characters based around a situation I know I need to write. And sometimes they’ll say things and I’ll just be like, oh, that’s really interesting. And then I’m like, eh, I don’t know. It’s fine. I’m not going to write it down. Whatever. If it comes again it comes again. But it’s not like mind-blowing.

So I’ve become a little less grabby about those things. It’s only when I think I’ve solved something that I need immediately that I will do this. Like tomorrow I need to write this thing. Ooh, I’ve figured it out. I’ve got it. This is going to be helpful for me. Then I’ll write it down.

**John:** For me it’s both the capturing and sort of the to-do list of it all. So it tends to be much more the thing I want to write tomorrow. And I do think about you, Craig, because you’re definitely in the showrunner sense of that gathering phase. I do remember in times where I’ve been running TV shows where you’re sort of in filter mode where everything is sort of out there and you have to sort of process it. OK, this goes in, this doesn’t go in. And so there’s probably so much happening in your head at any given moment. But I guess it’s all in service of one very specific show, so it’s not quite like…

Tell me, do you feel that you’re in this filtering mode where like you’re having to make a bunch of choices about sort of what you see in daily life makes it into your show, or are you well beyond that point now?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, we’re pretty well outlined. And, you know, into the writing. But every scene to me represents what you just said. In every scene where are they. What does it look like? How much light is there? Are they sitting on the floor? Are they standing? Is there a chair? Is there dilapidation? Does it look good? And then that’s before I even get into what is the scene even about really. I know what the plot is. But what’s it about-about? And whose perspective is it from?

**John:** What’s the hook? What does it hang off of?

**Craig:** Yeah. How is this conflict going to play? All the stuff that we talk about on this show. All that stuff. There’s four billion decisions that have to be made. The longer you do the job the faster you can start winnowing out stuff you know you don’t want to do.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** And the quicker you can get to an instinctive thought of that feels interesting, I’m intrigued by this, I want to do that. But I’m always in that mode. It never stops. Ever.

**John:** And one of the things I will say that’s helpful about doing these cards is I would say a third of the time I’ll see the card in the morning and like, no, that’s a dumb idea and just rip it up. And that also feels really good, too. That’s a natural part of this process.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** In the light of day that’s not a good idea.

**Craig:** That’s a classic I had a dream, it was amazing, and no it’s not. It sucks.

**John:** No it’s not. Hey, let’s answer some listener questions. Let’s introduce our producer, Megana Rao, who has a collection of questions for us to tackle.

**Craig:** Hi Megana.

**John:** Hey Megana.

**Megana Rao:** Hi guys, how are you?

**Craig:** You know what?

**John:** We’re doing OK.

**Craig:** That’s right. [laughs]

**John:** Doesn’t have to be great. Doesn’t have to be terrible. It’s just like doing OK.

**Craig:** Yeah. How are you, Megana?

**Megana:** I’m good. Our queue has kind of filled up so I have a lot of questions I’m excited to ask you guys.

**John:** Great. Let’s go for it.

**Craig:** We’re ready for you.

**Megana:** So Laurie asks about paying gigs. And she says, “I’m not a member of the WGA but I’ve been getting paid work on non-WGA products for more than 10 years. In the past I’ve had long conversations with prospective clients only to find out that they wanted me to work on spec. So now when prospective clients ask for a meeting I ask upfront something like, ‘What’s your budget for the project?’ Is that rude or inappropriate? When is an appropriate time to ask whether a gig pays and how should a writer do this?”

**John:** It is absolutely appropriate to ask whether a thing is paid. And implicit in that is to what degree is it worthwhile to take a meeting just to take a meeting so you have a relationship so you sort of can feel a person out and see whether you like them. I think it’s reasonable to take a meeting, to take a general, even if it’s just to take a discussion about a specific project. But within that first meeting or in the follow up to that first meeting you got to know whether this is a thing where they’re going to be paying you or if they see this as a spec thing. Because you’re trying to make a living at this. This isn’t just art for you. This is also hopefully your livelihood.

**Craig:** My guess is, could be wrong, but my guess Laurie is that there are certain projects that you would be willing to do on spec. Because otherwise you would just sort of say upfront when people reach out to you, “FYI, before we go any further I don’t work on spec, so if that’s OK with you then let’s keep talking and discuss.” But there may be some things that you might consider working on spec. So, I guess one way to approach it, Laurie, is to just say upfront, “Before we get into it is this a project that is work on spec or is it a paid writing assignment?” Just in the beginning, I think, to know.

I’m not sure why or how you can even have fruitful discussions with people if you don’t know the most basic fundamental term of the arrangement which is are you paying me or not. It’s just a very different kind of conversation.

**Megana:** I guess for sort of newer writers who are having more casual conversations do you have any advice for approaching that with someone that you’re friends with and maybe this is like their dream project and they expect you to help them because you’re kind of young, because you’re all sort of helping each other create their dreams? There’s sometimes that pressure. And I guess do you have any tips for navigating a conversation with someone who is sort of your friend?

**John:** And Megana I’m sure you’re starting to encounter this because Megan McDonnell, your predecessor, I definitely remember having conversations with her about this where there’s people that she’s talking with and it’s just not really clear sort of where the boundaries of these things are. Like to what degree are you just peers kicking around an idea versus like, OK, are we developing this together?

Maybe give it like a one-hour kind of rule where you’re happy to discuss something with somebody for like an hour or so, and then after that point you need to have a conversation like is this is a thing we’re trying to do together as an actual project that we’re going to work on together. Even if it’s a spec-y kind of situation where we’re really doing this together, or are we just sort of shooting the shit? And it’s good to have those discussions early on. And so maybe give yourself an hour of conversation before you really raise that idea.

Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. And I think Megana it’s really important for everyone in their 20s to recognize that once they’re out of college they’re not that young. I know it sounds young, but it’s not that young. You are an adult in every possible way. You can walk into a Bevmo, buy yourself a fifth of vodka, and walk out. You are now an adult.

**John:** I love that as Craig’s litmus test of are you an adult. Can you buy vodka?

**Craig:** Can you buy vodka at a Bevmo? I don’t know whatever definition there is. You are now an adult. So you actually have to start treating yourself like an adult. That means in part that you have to have a healthy respect for your own time, your own energy. There can be value in youthful people getting together and using all of their exuberance and fresh energy and their availability, because the establishment world hasn’t yet gotten their hooks into them, to build things together. But that is a business.

When you have these discussions with people you’re talking about a business. And when you look around at the people who have gone ahead and succeeded in things they’ve done so as businesses. What we’re doing as artists is the business of art. And when two artists or two people that want to make movies together, one is a producer, one is a writer, whatever it is, when they start talking John is absolutely right. At some point relatively early on, like an hour in stop and go, “Before we go any future, because we’re adults,” this is the point where you’re starting to hook up with somebody. You have to bring up protection. Who is handling the contraception here?

That’s literally what’s happening. It’s a contraceptive discussion. What are we talking about actually? Let’s now discuss consent, protection, contraception, all of these things. Because that’s how serious this stuff is.

And this is why we get so many questions for so many years that are literally the equivalent of people going, “I had sex with someone and now I have both a baby and gonorrhea.” And you’re like, OK, we can try and help you a little bit with that, but the time really to have thought about this was before the sex. So, that’s kind of what I feel like people need to realize they’re adults now. And so am I getting paid is fundamental. Who are we to each other, are we partners, or am I just somebody you’re talking to?

There are people who just want either because they are users or they’re just ignorant they think they can just take what you give and then walk away, which is exactly by the way what happens with some people and sex. And so you got to figure out who am I dealing with here. Who am I sleeping with exactly? A guy that’s going to be here tomorrow or a guy that’s going to leave literally five minute later? That is our lives.

So, adults.

**Megana:** Yes, so in the same vein, speaking up for yourself and having difficult conversations, Laura from Wellington, New Zealand asks, “I’m a relatively new unestablished writer and recently wrote a feature spec that caught the interest of a producer team. It’s a story that means so much to me and I worked my ass off getting them a quick rewrite they requested. But as soon as I signed an agreement with them they became slow to respond. It’s now five months later and they haven’t sent me notes or done anything with the project. When I ask if we can work faster they tell me to be patient and that things in Hollywood are always slow.

“My manager told me there’s not usually language protecting writers regarding timeliness of producers and agreements. Should there be? Or I guess why isn’t there?”

**John:** All right. There’s a bunch of stuff happening here. So, first off, it’s great that you wrote a spec that people like, so count that as a win. You did a rewrite. Great. Now you’re in this holding pattern and it sucks. And it’s common and it’s terrible. Your manager is not advocating for you as well as they should be. I can’t tell you how to make those producers do something more quickly. I think my biggest push for you is to acknowledge that it’s a thing that’s happening and be writing something else because you’re not going to be able to speed up those producers.

Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** Well, I’m curious what this agreement is. You say you signed an agreement with them. My suspicion is that what you signed is some sort of option agreement where they have the right to exclusively bring this property around to potential buyers. So, whether or not you’ve been paid some small fee for that exclusivity or not, option agreements almost always have a timeline involved. There is a terminus. Your manager told you there’s usually not language protecting writers regarding timeliness of producers and agreements. That is wrong.

It’s not a little long. It’s completely wrong. That’s part of what options are.

**John:** Yeah. An option is for the exclusive right to represent something for a certain period of time.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Likely it was a one-year-option they had that was renewable in some way.

**Craig:** There’s the timeliness. So, if you are – so you’ve now dealt with slow-to-respond five months later. Now, if you’ve signed a one-year-option that means you’ve got seven months to go. At this point I don’t think you need to do anything with them. I think John is right. You always want to just sort of be preparing the next thing. But remember, you own this. You didn’t sell it to them. I hope. I don’t think you did. You just signed an agreement. I’m not sure what that means, again. But if it was an option, they don’t own it, you do. They are renting it. And they get booted from their apartment seven months from the date you ask this question, at which point you pick more carefully the next time around. Or, just, hell, take another flyer for a year. Either way, this doesn’t last forever.

But you’ve asked them and they haven’t responded or done anything. And that’s it. Maybe not the best manager in the world. And I always feel like – I feel bad, because a lot of people are writing in. They’re not established writers. They have managers. I always say your manager is being stupid.

I just want to be clear. My first manager was also stupid. Everyone’s first manager is stupid, because that’s why they’re your manager. Do you know what I mean? Like if they were great they wouldn’t be representing you, because you’re not established yet. You know?

**John:** Yeah. But here’s one thing that manager can be doing, and let’s make sure your manager is doing this. That thing that you optioned to those producers, it is still out there to be read as a writing sample. So that person should be getting you meetings with other people who can hire you and actually pay you money to do things. So, the fact that somebody optioned something doesn’t make it invisible to the rest of the world. It’s still – people can still read. And people can be meeting with you about other jobs. So, do all that other stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. Just keep doing what you’re doing. Look at your calendar. Circle the day when that option expires.

Now, if you’ve sold it to them meaning like you took a bunch of money and they bought it, then they own the copyright. At that point just forget it man. It’s gone.

**John:** It’s gone.

**Craig:** It’s gone.

**John:** Megana, thank you for these questions.

**Megana:** Thank you both.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Megana:** Great advice. Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an artist. His website is Beeple Everyday. Mike Winkelmann is a visual artist in South Carolina and Craig click through this. I think you’d really dig it.

**Craig:** Taking a look.

**John:** This idea of doing new art every day. Literally every day of the week he’s creating a new really cool piece of art. And a lot of them are sort of heavily stylized science fiction-y things, or they have Trump in them. But I just love his Beeple style. I also just love people who make something and post something new every day.

**Craig:** Trump and them. That’s pretty great. I do like that. Science. Oh yeah, look at that. This is fascinating. So it looks like a kind of typical Thanksgiving dinner but in the middle of the table instead of the traditional turkey there is a very large representation of Buzz Lightyear’s head. It has been sliced in half lengthwise and brains and goop are pouring out of it. And everyone is sort of just, I don’t know, they seem happy. It’s very strange.

Oh, and here’s a guy, yup, OK. Well, I’m not going to describe that one because I don’t want to do the Not Safe for Work thing. It’s good.

**John:** Anyway, I love the artwork style. Sometimes it’s nice to see cool pictures. So click through this. Beeple is the site.

**Craig:** Nice looking stuff, Beeple. I have two – two – One Cool Things. Because sometimes I have no One Cool Things. So today I went with two.

**John:** Yeah, so making up for it.

**Craig:** OK. So first thing nerdy. Second thing arty. First nerdy thing, solid state batteries.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So this is a big deal actually. If this works, this is a big deal. We all know that we’re trying to transition away from fossil fuels. Part of that is vehicles that run on batteries as opposed to petrochemicals. Obviously batteries also need electricity generated by some means. But if we can find really good batteries it will ultimately be better for us than the petrochemicals. The issue with the batteries we have now, which are kind of liquid battery cells, is that they can only take so much charge and they take a long to charge. And eventually they wear down and stop taking charge.

The Holy Grail has been the solid state battery which is chargeable incredibly quickly. So for instance the Tesla, if you want a full charge of a mostly emptied-out Tesla, it’s going to take you a couple of hours on a regular high speed garage charger. The solid state battery in theory can charge to 80% full in 15 minutes. That is a game changer.

It’s also not combustible. Batteries, large assemblies of liquid battery packs when impacted tend to light on fire. And a lot of people think that’s a problem with electric cars. It’s actually a problem with gas cars. I don’t know why they’ve missed that fact that driving around with all liquid fuel is way, way worse. But whatever.

So there’s a company called QuantumScape and it is founded by a guy named Jagdeep Singh who has said basically we’ve figured out the solid state battery problem. It’s been a problem. They’ve been trying for 40 years to make one of these solid state batteries work. These guys say they have figured it out and they have published data which indicates they’ve figured it out. It’s not to say they really have. Sometimes people just say stuff.

But this sounds like it might actually work. And if it’s correct, well, it’s a game-changer. And in fact some people like Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla and Tesla cofounder JB Straubel sit on the board of directors. It’s backed by Volkswagen. And, yeah, seems like it might be the real deal. So this could actually make a massive difference in electric cars, electric trucks. Because getting to electric trucks would be a massive improvement for our climate.

So, anyway, hurrah, so hurrah for QuantumScape if they figured this out. OK, second One Cool Thing. I have seen a movie that is so good.

**John:** Craig doesn’t see very many movies.

**Craig:** I really don’t.

**John:** So you saw a movie.

**Craig:** I really don’t. We’ve been watching movies. So we don’t have the kind of limited amount of episodes that would allow us to have just one director on our first season of The Last of Us. We need multiple directors. So I’ve been watching a lot of things. And, you know, I like the weird directors. What can I say? I like weirdos. Like Johan Renck. He’s the ultimate weirdo. My beautiful weirdo. And so we get sent this movie called Saint Maud. I think it’s been seen in some festivals. It’s waiting for a theatrical release when, again, theatrical release is possible.

It was written and directed by a woman named Rose Glass, which is the best name by the way.

**John:** Yeah. Rose Glass. You can’t do better.

**Craig:** Because it’s sort of like Rosé Glass, but also it’s like George Glass from The Brady Bunch. Rose Glass.

**John:** But also like rose-colored glasses.

**Craig:** And rose-colored glasses.

**John:** Classically looking at something optimistically.

**Craig:** Every way you look at it Rose Glass is a great, great name. So, I watched this movie and I am blown away. It is one of the best movies I have ever seen period, the end. And you know I don’t do this. I don’t do this. It’s astonishing. And this is not a spoiler. The last few frames of this film may be the best final frames of any film I have ever seen. And I’m saying frames. It’s astonishingly good.

And so I’m telling you about this movie, Saint Maud, now so that when you do finally have access to it you run, run, run as fast as you can to it. It just got nominated for every freaking British Independent Film Award possible. That was just a few days ago.

So, I reached out to Rose Glass’s – I can’t stop saying it, it’s so good – I reached out to Rose’s agent. And I said, hey, you know what, I don’t know if this is something that Rose Glass is interested in doing, episodic television, but I have to tell her about how great her movie is regardless. And that agent said, “Ooh, this is so cool. I listen to your podcast all the time.” So I said you do? Because, you know, I forget. So I was like well that’s nice. That’s awesome. I feel good about that. And then she said, “I will absolutely forward your email to Rose Glass.”

Rose Glass writes me. And Rose Glass not only is just a lovely person, I can just tell. And very, very kind of – how should I say this – she’s uncomfortable with praise, which I love, so I just kept doing it. She also is big Scriptnotes listener and said in fact–

**John:** Oh, that’s great.

**Craig:** –that she listened to quite a bit of it when she was struggling with some rough patches while writing the script for Saint Maud. And so the circle is complete. Not that we really did that much. We just talk once an hour a week and she’s – I mean, legitimately I think Rose Glass is a genius. I think she is a genius. And I don’t do that thing where everyone is a freaking genius. Like oh my god, you parallel park so well. You’re a genius. No you’re not. Mozart was a genius. Whatever.

Rose Glass has made a genius film. I cannot wait to see what she does next. Cannot wait. Even if she does nothing next, I’m pleased. That’s how much I loved Saint Maud. That’s how astonished I was by the film Saint Maud.

So, Rose Glass, I hope that this has made you squirm in your shoes and throw your Air Pods to the ground in horror. Because I think you’re the bee’s knees.

**John:** That’s excellent. And that is our show for this week.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced, as always, by Megana Rao. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Heidi Lauren Duke. 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. We have t-shirts and they’re 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 the transcripts.

There you can sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting where we talk about things that are interesting to writers.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and the bonus segments like the one we’re just about to record on energy. Craig, thank you for the show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John, and thank you, Megana.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** OK, so Craig, it’s been established by the song that you are smart. You’re also a person who has done a lot of research on nuclear energy and other things doing Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** This last week I saw that you got into an argument with Howard Dean.

**Craig:** As one does.

**John:** The former presidential candidate and big democratic person. Over nuclear energy. So, tell us your belief in terms of how nuclear energy should be in the mix for America’s energy future.

**Craig:** Sure. So energy production is always going to be a bit of a double edged sword. Because it involves the transference of basic fundamental and powerful physical forces, the harnessing and storage thereof, and then the controlled release thereof. There’s always a cost.

Right now the vast majority of energy that we produce on this planet comes from fossil fuels or at the very least there is – it’s possible that maybe only half now, I’m not quite sure what the actual amount is, but I guess I can say safely our reliance on fossil fuels has been incredibly damaging to the planet. And so much of our infrastructure is embedded deeply in the usage of fossil fuels through gasoline and through coal, oil, etc.

We are looking for what we call clean renewable energy all the time and we’re trying to figure out how to do it. Solar and geothermal and hydroelectric.

**John:** Wind.

**Craig:** Wind. These are all great things. They’re particularly great for places that have those resources to harness the things. They’re particularly great for places that have the ability for the government to sponsor that research and put it in place. Maybe not so good for developing nations where there’s just a deep cost buried into it and people need power now. And then there’s nuclear.

Why would the Chernobyl guy be in favor of nuclear because of Chernobyl? So here’s what we learned from Chernobyl. That to make a nuclear power plant explode you have to do so many things wrong. And I mean so many. And that includes starting with a terrible design for a nuclear power plant, which they did. A design so bad, and I made a point of this in the show. I really did. A design so bad no one else in the world even considered it. That’s how bad it was.

The reason they built that reactor in the Soviet Union was because it was both cheap and of enormous capacity. In addition it also bred plutonium which they could use for their weapons program. In short it did all of the things they demanded it do without any of the safety advantages that every other design had. So they made a terrible decision to start with. And even then dozens of those reactors ran without exploding for decades.

They also didn’t encase them in a containment building. So it was really designed to go poorly. But in the West we don’t build those. There’s like a vague cousin to the Chernobyl reactor that exists in Canada, vastly, vastly safer than the one in Chernobyl. It’s not even close. I mean, it’s just much, much, much, much better.

So, what is the benefit of nuclear? The benefit of nuclear is that it has zero emissions. Zero. There is no carbon dioxide put into the air. In fact, nothing is put into the air except steam. Nothing. And I don’t mean radioactive steam. I mean just steam.

What is the downside to nuclear power? Obviously you have to carefully regulate it. It’s expensive to construct initially, although then just runs for decades generating massive quantities of power, again, with zero emissions. And then there’s waste. What do you do with the nuclear waste?

Now they’re actually getting better with nuclear waste. But really the balance of it comes down to this. Either we deal with the risk of handling waste safely and responsibly or we’re not going to make it. I really believe this. I don’t think we are going to be able to figure out solar, and geothermal, and wind, and hydroelectric in time, in the capacity we need, to stave off/permit climate disaster. I do not think it is possible.

If the world invested in a carefully and thoroughly globally regulated nuclear power industry we can. I believe that. And Howard Dean doesn’t. [laughs]

**John:** Disagreed.

**Craig:** Yes. Which is a very common thing – I mean, I’ll just be a little generational about it. I think boomers are really scared about nuclear power. And I think–

**John:** Because they lived through Three Mile Island.

**Craig:** Three Mile Island is an example of why we should have nuclear power. And here’s where I’m going to get a lot of angry tweets and I don’t care. Three Mile Island was a partial meltdown. That is terrible. That is terrible. And it happened because of a series of mistakes which were terrible. And the amount of radiation that was released into the air was approximately similar to a dental X-ray because the containment structure worked.

And this is my point. That that – the worst nuclear power plant accident we’ve had, that was what happened? The amount of people that have died just in coal mine fires dwarfs that. Just coal mine fires. I’m not even talking about what’s happened to their lungs, or what’s happened to all of us from pollution and smog and all the rest of it. It’s not even close. It’s not even close.

**John:** All right, so I’m going to offer not really a counter argument, but sort of a corollary argument. So I’m going to link to this post by Max Roser from Our World and Data. This has been circulated around a lot, so other people may have seen it. But definitely worth a click through. And it starts with a chart that shows what are the safest and cleanest sources of energy and coal, oil, natural gas, biomass are dirty and dangerous. And coal by far the most.

Hydropower, nuclear energy, wind, and solar are a lot safer. And I think the reason why we perceive nuclear energy as being unsafe is because we have examples, vivid examples, of it failing spectacularly. And that’s what we see in our heads.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Whereas the deaths from coal and oil and other stuff are much more invisible. So, that is partly generating why Howard Dean is so scared of it.

The next chart down though as you scroll through it, you look at the price of electricity, and they figure out the price of electricity based on how much does it cost to both build the plant and provide the power for it. And it’s interesting to see over the course of decades how these prices have changed and no surprise prices for like natural gas have gone down as new technologies have come online. But the price of solar has plummeted in a way that is just – it looks like the chart has broken.

It went from really – in the main episode you were talking about solid state batteries. And it’s that kind of thing where to produce that first one that was on a satellite that went out into space was incredibly expensive. And now they’re just so cheap. And photoelectric solar cells have become so effective and so cheap. It falls into a thing called Right’s Law which is the more – as you double capacity, as you double experience in making a thing the price plummets. And so a lot of our things scale for it. It’s kind of like Moore’s Law but for general productivity.

My house has solar panels. We have been generating all our power for a long time. But if we were to sort of replace them with the new generation of panels, these are like ten years old, we would be selling even more electricity back to the city of Los Angeles. That’s how good photoelectric solar cells have gotten.

So, I think it makes a strong argument for, you know what, we should be looking at how we’re replacing fossil fuels overall. I do think that some combination of solar and wind and some really cool breakthroughs in geothermal will all be part of it. I’m also willing to have nuclear energy be part of this as well.

The price of building nuclear power plants has gone up, but partly because we just don’t build them very often. It’s one of those things where if you make a plan for how you’re going to build them and you just start building them it will become cheaper to build. And so there may be a way to do that. The same way that France where I used to live has nuclear energy and our electricity costs are so much lower in France.

**Craig:** France is the poster child for responsible nuclear energy. You’re right. I mean, we have solar panels as well and solar is getting better. There’s no question. Solar has yet to be challenged by I guess what I would call, OK, you’ve opened up a restaurant and you’ve gotten really good at being able to serve your customers and then someone comes to you and says, “Oh, so now you need to serve a thousand people a day.” Scaling it is, you know, we’ll see. We’ll see if it can scale.

But we know, right now, we have a zero emissions solution. And I understand that people are concerned. And it’s a little bit like air travel and that classic you’re more likely to die driving to the airport than getting on a plane. Absolutely true. But you’re also far more likely to survive a car crash than a plane crash. And so our minds overemphasize the disastrous nature of a single failure and terribly underestimate the value of how absurdly rare that failure is.

There have been what I would call two massive nuclear power plant disasters. And one of them, Fukushima, was terrible and I think a good case could be made for the relocation of places like nuclear power plants from areas that are specifically in line for natural disasters like tsunamis. But of course the Catch-22 is the further we go the more likely those natural disasters are, because of climate change.

There are also so many lessons that we learn, just as we do from plane crashes. Remember when we were kids and planes would crash all the time. Literally all the time. Jets would crash constantly. And now they just don’t. They just don’t. It’s kind of amazing. And there’s so much more air travel than there used to be, by the way. Just crazy amounts more.

So every time something like this happens we learn. We don’t learn anything from Chernobyl other than why it’s important for a political system to not be pumped up with nothing but lies, which perhaps people will apply to our situation now. I mean, because nobody builds that stupid reactor. It’s just dumb.

So, I agree. I think a combination of those things is required and I think people are going to have to just get over certain things because there is a monster at the door. And we really can’t be arguing over whether or not deadbolts are harder to turn than other kinds of ways to bar the door. We need to shut the door to climate change. This is one of the best ways.

**John:** With multiple locks.

**Craig:** Multiple locks.

**John:** So, what I do want people to take away from this though is I think there’s an assumption that solar is not quite ready yet or there still needs to be researched done. It’s like there really doesn’t – the current solar technology can be deployed at scale pretty well in a lot of places. And so I think the third world is actually a place for solar in a lot of places because it’s going to be hard to build a nuclear power plant. It’s not going to be so hard to build regional solar. So that is a good case to be made for that.

And to recognize that it doesn’t have to be either/or and we don’t have to wait for a breakthrough. We don’t have to spend a tremendous amount of time researching how we’re going to do this thing. We can just do it. And there may be good ways to re-deploy some of the expertise we’ve had for extracting oil from the earth to figure out how to do geothermal better. To do geothermal you have to dig incredibly deep and run pipes. And you know what? That’s kind of how you do oil. And so there may be ways to sort of use our existing companies and corporations and expertise to find new ways to do things, especially for something like geothermal where it’s useful because the earth is always hot.

**Craig:** The earth is always hot. And that is what’s so annoying is that we have this enormous ball of – this gigantic fusion reactor in the sky called the sun, and then we have this massive roiling ball of lava in the middle of our marble, that’s the core, and we can’t seem to figure out how to use any of it. So, solar is great.

And when we talk about just the statistics of safety, I like this chart that they put together which is deaths per terawatt hour of energy production. So for every amount of time you get to create this much energy from this substance how many people die? Solar is the lowest. 0.02 deaths per terawatt hour of energy production. Wind, 0.04 deaths. Nuclear, 0.07 deaths. So solar, wind, and nuclear, and hydropower, water, are all relatively the same absurdly safe methods.

Hydropower does put out some CO2, whereas nuclear, wind, and solar do not. Nuclear puts out the least, by the way, the least. Nothing puts out less CO2 than nuclear.

Now you look at coal. 24.6 deaths per one terawatt hour. That’s not 24 times what nuclear energy is. It’s not 240 times. It’s 2,500 times more, ish. It’s ridiculous. Orders of magnitude. What are we doing? What are we doing?

**John:** We’re trying to protect coal worker jobs. And so, you know what, let’s build some giant–

**Craig:** No.

**John:** –let’s build some giant nuclear plants in coal country and let them sort of work building that than doing dumb stuff.

**Craig:** Or just give coal workers $80,000 a year. I don’t care. Just give them $80,000 a year. This is your income. You’ve earned it from working in freaking coal mines. So for the rest of your life we’re going to give you $80,000 a year which is a rounding error for one department in the Pentagon. None of this makes sense.

We’re screwing the world up so fundamentally. You know what? I’m going to make a show about a world that’s been screwed up. I’m doing it.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** Doing it.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Doing it.

**John:** I think it’s a winning idea. I think it’s going to be inspiring.

**Craig:** I’m folding it in. I’m folding it in to The Last of Us. I have to figure out how to make that.

**John:** Call it The Best of Us. Call it The Best of Us.

**Craig:** No. Because there are no the best of us. We’re terrible. God, we’re so dumb. We’re so dumb. We’re the smart ones on this planet? Oh man.

**John:** Dogs.

**Craig:** Nothing, I couldn’t say anything worse about dolphins than this. We’re smarter than them.

**John:** [laughs] Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

 

Links:

* [Christopher Nolan Rips HBO Max as Worst Streaming Service Denounces Warner Bros Plan](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/christopher-nolan-rips-hbo-max-as-worst-streaming-service-denounces-warner-bros-plan) Kim Masters for THR
* [Did QuantumScape Just Solve a 40-Year-Old Battery Problem?](https://www.wired.com/story/quantumscape-solid-state-battery/#intcid=_wired-homepage-right-rail_35658516-6d30-45d5-a730-6073773577d4_popular4-1) by Daniel Oberhaus for Wired
* [Rose Glass](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/dec/09/saint-maud-leads-british-film-independent-film-award-nominations)
* [Beeple Everyday](https://www.beeple-crap.com/everydays) by Mike Winkelmann, a visual artist in South Carolina
* [The Cost of Solar has Dropped Spectacularly](https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth) by Max Roser
* [Geothermal energy is poised for a big breakthrough](https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/21515461/renewable-energy-geothermal-egs-ags-supercritical) by David Roberts
* [Craig vs Howard Dean](https://twitter.com/clmazin/status/1335086888919519232)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Heidi Lauren Duke ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/479standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/only-the-interesting-scenes).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 450 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll discuss my proposal for the most essential and most difficult practice every screenwriter needs to follow. We’ll also be talking about set pieces, virtual rooms, and juggling multiple projects. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will revisit our general advice about moving to Los Angeles given the pandemic.

Craig, I’m so excited to have you back. Because last week you were gone. You were off on a secret mission.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We can’t quite say what that secret mission is yet, correct?

**Craig:** No. We cannot say what it is yet, but the secret mission is coming to fruition and everyone will know soon enough. And let’s not raise hopes. I have not cured any viruses in the news. So just want to be clear about that.

**John:** Absolutely. You’re not the 83rd vaccine.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You’re something smaller than that. So somewhere between like you turned in a draft and cured COVID-19. Somewhere in that range.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s something that ultimately will be able to be shared with everyone.

**John:** Yeah. So we had an episode that was already on ice that we pulled out and Sam Esmail was gracious enough to come back and record a little wrap around. It was nice to have another New Jersian in your stead.

**Craig:** Got to be there.

**John:** So he does remind me of you in certain ways. And you will never go back and listen to the old episodes, but the conversation we had was really interesting because he’s a person who really wanted to be a director and started writing because he realized he needed to write in order to have the material he wanted to direct. So he really did everything he possibly could to avoid writing. And then it turns out he’s a really good writer.

So, it was a very different perspective getting into the writing craft than most of the guests we’ve had on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m trying to see where he’s from in New Jersey. The name of it is not popping off to me. I don’t know if it’s like southern, or northern, or wherever the hell it is.

**John:** What is it about people who are born in New Jersey and identifying the small little town they’re from?

**Craig:** That’s what we have. So New Jersey in a way that a lot of northeastern older states do has divided itself into tiny, tiny townships. So there are some cities in New Jersey that people know of, like Trenton or Princeton to a lesser extent, but then there are a ton of tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny townships, each of which generally has some sort of English-y Revolutionary kind of name.

**John:** So my mom was from Matawan.

**Craig:** Matawan, which is very close–

**John:** Or Red Bank.

**Craig:** Yeah. So Matawan and Red Bank are both very close to where I was. I would often bowl in Matawan. I would go bowling there. So I get it. Let’s see, Sam is from Gloucester. Oh, I see where he is. Yeah. That’s a weird part of New Jersey. [laughs]

**John:** Doesn’t even count.

**Craig:** Well, it’s Southwest New Jersey, which we think of that more as–

**John:** It’s the New Mexico of New Jersey.

**Craig:** It’s Delaware. It’s Pennsylvania or Delaware. It’s not like Jersey-Jersey to me. I don’t know what it is. It’s a weird Jersey. I was very Central New Jersey. I’m Katie Dippold New Jersey. I’m your mom New Jersey. Michael Gilvary, our D&D buddy, also from I believe Red Bank.

**John:** So our international listeners or basically anyone who grew up west of the Mississippi, all of northeast geography is just a big mess. They’re these tiny little pieces that sort of get lost in the puzzle. We just have no idea what you guys are talking about. So we said like Pennsylvania or Delaware, you could just be making that up. I have no idea how all those things fit together.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re from the part of America where every state is really large and mostly square.

**John:** Yep. We like straight lines.

**Craig:** Yeah. We like squiggles.

**John:** All right. Let’s do some follow up. So we’ve been talking on the show about the origin of the modern screenplay format and how it evolved from being more like a shot list to the literary document that we’re kind of used to. This week my former assistant, Matt Byrne, who is a writer on Scandal and many other shows, he wrote in to say, “I was listening to your very helpful back to basics episode. There’s a world in which the live reading of a screenplay is a huge consideration in the writing in television. These are often cold reads in rooms of actors and executives and department heads, none of whom have seen one word of the script. So there’s a different literary approach and criteria to the script form borne out of the immediacy of all of that, rather than one that’s handed in to a studio or a producer who might be reading it on their office sofa, or on the iPad by the pool. So the stakes are high because you’re in this room and it’s more like live theater. So, it’s a test of every aspect of every scene which requires some cozying up to the audience and some hand-holding of your actors and a fair amount of show person ship over all. So there’s a lot more directing on the page, both with camera and performance indicators, as well as over-communication of scene direction in regards to tone and pacing and all the rest.

“So all this is way more than the holders of classic or minimalist screenwriting rules would be comfortable with. It sets a certain expectation in television scripts that may be kind of strange when you’re being read by some of these shows who are used to their own scripts having a lot more detail in them than what you’d naturally think.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I can certainly see where this would be the case. And it brings an entire other topic to bear which is these readings. Script readings are a part of our business. They’re a part of what we do. I hate them. I’m still not quite sure they’re actually useful. I’ve done so many of them and I’m racking my mind to think if I believe they’re useful at all. I think that the benefit that you can get from a seated reading with your cast is minimal compared to the damage that can be done which is not only serious but likely.

**John:** All right. So I’m going to spill the tea on two different readings I’ve had of scripts and one that was incredibly helpful and one that was incredibly destructive.

**Craig:** Ooh, yum.

**John:** So, a helpful one was on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – actually, I have two good examples. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Big Fish. Big Fish was a chance for everyone to get together. We were in this room in Alabama. It was a chance to sort of see what the whole movie felt like kind of all together with this great cast. Get everyone’s accents kind of in the same universe. And so people weren’t giving their fullest performances, but it gives everybody a chance to get together and see what the whole movie felt like, especially the parts of the movie that they weren’t in at all. Because none of these actors is going to have a great chance to sort of see what the whole shape of the movie is.

Actors tend to read the scenes that they’re in and really kind of focus on that. So they may not really know how all the pieces fit together. So, when you have one of these readings you know that everyone has read the whole script at least once. And that sounds like a very low bar to clear, but that is really important. So, Big Fish that was super helpful.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory we had all of these young actors. It was great for them to all be in the room and sort of get over their nervousness about Johnny Depp and sort of get past that. It was really good. Johnny did not really perform, but he sort of got through all the words. And that helps.

**Craig:** There’s the issue, isn’t it.

**John:** Yes. But here’s the counter example. Here’s a case where I thought the table reading did a disservice was on the first Charlie’s Angels. We all got together in this room. We were super excited. We worked really hard on the script. We were very excited about sort of getting together. The three women had really formed a good relationship at this point. And there was one supporting actor who had been cast who I had not met with who just decided I think deliberately to tank his performance and cause a panic so that we would focus on his storyline stuff. And I thought – to me it felt like a deliberate choice and I’ve kind of despised this actor every moment since that point.

So that was a case where a power play happened in that moment and it was really frustrating.

**Craig:** Yeah. Here’s the thing about these – I like this ad hoc topic, by the way. The issue that I have with the table reads is let’s say it’s going really well. That in and of itself can be misleading. Just because somebody is being really funny in the room on that day reading it does not mean they’ll be funny on screen. In fact, the room tends to reward the broader performances. And then what happens is other actors start getting broad to try and get the same laugh or something, because they’re getting feedback.

Executives are often swayed by that sort of thing when they shouldn’t be. And there is no sense of intimacy. The room is completely leveled. Everybody is exactly the same distance from the “camera.” So, there is no subtlety allowed. That said, what then occurs is that good actors or insecure actors, doesn’t matter which, will often tank these performances. Sometimes they tank it because they’re trying to do something, right? Because they’re being naughty. But I think a lot of times they’re tanking it because they don’t recognize this as the thing they do well. And they do not want to be judged for it. They don’t know how to do their job in that room, so they don’t do any job at all.

I cannot tell you how many times I have witnessed not just good actors but huge movie stars, award-winning actors, just mumble everything into their hand the entire time. Because they don’t want to be held accountable to this table reading and they’re going to give you nothing. And their understanding is you’re not going to fire me over it, so beat it. And because of all of that I just never know what I’m supposed to learn from it.

Honestly I don’t know if I will do it again. I don’t know if it’s necessary. I just don’t. I think it’s something we do because we’re supposed to do it, we feel like we have to, but I’m not sure I want to anymore. I mean, we did one for Chernobyl and it was – honestly, I think we would have been better off just keeping that day and having a little cocktail session for everybody, where everybody can meet each other and get to know each other and talk to each other if they wanted about character. Or ask me questions or anybody questions. But the reading which went swimmingly well ultimately didn’t really give me information. It gave me non-information.

So that’s my rant on those things.

**John:** All right. So, two topics. First off, Mike Birbiglia, friend of the show, this is part of his process. And so as he’s working through the script he will bring his actor friends together and he will do a reading of the work sort of in progress. That to me is a little bit different than what we’re talking about. When we are talking about these live readings it’s generally right before you start production. It’s sort of that kind of last look before you get started in production.

And the same reason why it can be dangerous for us as writers, it can be an enticing opportunity for producers and other people to muck about with things. And so when they see that after really not performing all that great they might try to swap that actor out, or ask you as the writer to make a change for the sake of that actor. And that is the real issue.

I’ve also been in situations where you sort of plead with an actor to go in and just do the reading, it’s fine, you already have the part. And people have lost the part that thought they already had once they don’t live up to the expectation in the reading. It sucks. And there are actors who are really good at these situations. And there are actors who are kind of only good when you stick a camera in their face and they’re just not good in groups.

So, pros and cons.

**Craig:** You put your finger right on it. Like the studio or whoever is doing network, they’re saying well this is what we do and it’s purposeful. And so then it happens. And then they come to you afterwards and say, “We have drawn a conclusion from the purposeful thing we’ve done.” And it’s very hard to say to them, yes, except it’s not purposeful, therefore your conclusion isn’t valid and we shouldn’t have done any of this. We’ve learned nothing. This is a terrible scientific experiment. Because it is. It’s just bad science.

Like we use rats because in some ways they resemble humans in certain process and pathways, but in others they don’t. We try not to use rats for the things that aren’t applicable. This would be a non-rat test. It just doesn’t make sense.

**John:** An actual screen test where you have those actors in front of a camera, even if it’s not the real sets and everything, would be a much more accurate reflection of what kind of performance you could expect from the actor than this table reading situation.

**Craig:** 100%. And the truth that nobody wants to acknowledge, but it is true, is that the table read that matters, the moment where you kind of get a sense of whether or not you’ve chosen well and the words are working, is on the day and particularly the first week. Because 400 decisions are made that first week based on what you’re watching. And nobody wants to think about that because it’s scary, but it’s true. That’s when you start to learn things. That’s when you can fine tune things. That’s when you can make adjustments. Because at last you’re looking at the thing you’re supposed to be doing, not some other thing you’re not.

**John:** Yep. A topic which we’ll try to get to in future episodes is there were a bunch of pilots that were in production when the pandemic hit and everything had to shut down. It’s been so fascinating talking to friends who have these half-finished pilots. Because they are trying to cut together their half-finished pilots and the TV season is still kind of happening and so these things are being picked up or not being picked up based on how many days of shooting they were into their schedule. And some shows had put all their big meaty action stuff at the top and other stuff hadn’t happened yet. It’s a really strange situation for these shows caught in this bubble.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And in some of these cases that table read which they may not even really want to have is the last experience networks and studios have with the show they had envisioned.

**Craig:** Well, it’s useless. I wish I could just convince them all it’s useless. I mean, unless there’s something specific that a showrunner or screenwriter can glean – repeatedly and reliably glean – they shouldn’t do them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They just shouldn’t do them.

**John:** All right. To a new topic–

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Virtual rooms. So last week on the show I asked listeners to send in their experiences with virtual rooms and we heard back from some writers as well as assistants. So Megana has been going through the emails that have been coming in and also just reaching out to folks to sort of see, hey, how is life in these virtual writer’s rooms?

So, a couple things we heard back consistently. One is about the issue of the whiteboard. And so generally when you’re breaking a series and episodes in a TV writer’s room you have a bunch of whiteboards up and that’s how you’re planning out season arcs, character arcs, what happens in this episode. There’s a lot – you’re just looking at a lot of whiteboards. And that’s the general planning process for stuff.

So different virtual rooms are trying different techniques for how they’re doing that stuff. So, a shared Google doc is a really common way people are doing it. There’s other corkboard type software that people are trying. One writer wrote, “This room has been really tough because there’s no quick way to bring up a character’s season arc. Usually we can all just look at a board. Now it’s like a ten minute ordeal.” So you’re used to being surrounded by this visual information and you just don’t have it the same way if you’re all sharing a Zoom call.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if I were running a room I would probably make sure that all of my writers – I would just send out tablets, iPads or whatever. And that tablet would just be for a shared view of a corkboard. So, whatever is on Zoom is on your laptop, that’s fine. But then you have this other thing you can just glance over at just the way you would in a room that’s separate, so you’re not switching back and forth between things. Because I imagine that’s where it gets a little dicey.

**John:** One of the things we’ll say at the end of this is we mostly heard what’s challenging. What I’d love to get to in the next couple weeks is some shared what are best practices. What are rooms finding that’s really useful? Because we’re kind of all in this together.

So, let’s continue with what’s challenging right now. The challenge of social cues and when to speak. Because when you’re in a room with physical people it’s pretty easy to announce that you kind of want to say something, or if someone is talking too much it’s easy to sort of make it clear that, OK, shut up a little bit.

Someone wrote, “It’s really hard to gauge how the room is feeling or how someone is responding to a pitch.” And when we say pitch, like when you’re pitching a joke, or a take, or how to approach this scene. “Can’t read anybody’s tells or body language. Makes it really hard to fall into a rhythm. I still love everyone in my room. It’s a really open, really great room. But still tough getting into a groove because it’s all virtual.”

Another writer says, “Even when you’re on a conference call you’re still very isolated. When there’s a great pitch you’re happy but it fades pretty quickly because you just can’t feel everyone else’s excitement.”

**Craig:** Well, I can absolutely see that being an issue. And I don’t know what the answer. I’m excited to hear if somebody solved that. I mean, you know, I’m such a weird lone wolf that it never – it doesn’t come up that much for me personally, but I can see that being an issue.

**John:** Now with Mythic Quest you were in the room on that first season some. Have you been in any virtual rooms since everything got broken apart?

**Craig:** Not virtual rooms. I did come back and do some early room work with the team to set up season two, which obviously we had to hit pause on in terms of production. But since that time I have had a number of sort of smaller discussions with Rob McElhenney or Megan Ganz or David Hornsby. So there have been further discussions, but they haven’t been a full big room type of thing.

**John:** There’s no online version of sort of what would have happened in that room?

**Craig:** For me, no. They may very well have been having those. But I’m a little bit more of a–

**John:** A sniper?

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. That’s the most charitable version of it. I’m sure they would be like, they’re more like–

**John:** Ruiner of dreams.

**Craig:** Well, he shows up early, gets us all whipped up to do something incredibly ambitious and difficult, and then never comes back.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s sort of my thing.

**John:** Another thing Megana heard a lot about was exhaustion. Someone wrote, “I think the one thing people don’t talk enough about is how we’re exhausted all the time in a virtual room. We’re much more tired than you usually are in a normal room and I think it’s because when you’re in a room breaking story together you feed off each other’s excitement. You get energized by a good pitch.”

And I think that’s also a general problem with video conferencing I’ve noticed and other people have been pointing out is that you kind of feel like you’re always on when you’re on a video conference. You don’t know when someone is watching you or not watching you. So that constant sort of readiness which when you’re in a room full of people you sort of have a sense of when you can sort of slink back and when you can sit forward. It’s just different when you’re on a video conference all day.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this interesting psychological thing where if I’m in a room with somebody, let’s say we’re all having a kind of television room like setting. So maybe ten of us are sitting around a table and we’re talking and one person is kind of just like looking down at their pad and doodling a little bit, but they don’t seem uninterested, this is how they’re thinking. You can just tell, you know what, they need to go somewhere and think for a bit. I understand it because they’re doing it in front of me which means they know I see them doing it and we all get it.

And when we’re on video I think sometimes people look and they see somebody not paying attention or perhaps doing something else and they just think, oh, they think they’re getting away with this but they’re not. And it’s a different vibe.

**John:** Yeah. It’s also I think exhausting because when you’re waiting for your time to speak you’re sort of always cued up and it’s a little bit harder to know when to break in and when to be able to get in on things. There have been a lot of video conferences I’ve been on lately where I haven’t said a word the whole time. I’ve basically just been muted the whole time. And it wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say, but I didn’t have something that was so compelling to say that I felt like I’m going to try to break into the conversation flow or digitally raise my hand. I’m just going to be an observer in this conversation.

And that’s where you lose people because in a writer’s room you’re paying those people for their time and their brains to be able to speak up and contribute. And it’s challenging in these situations.

**Craig:** Particularly in comedy where when you’re in a comedy room it’s inevitable that there’s going to be a moment where some sort of riff magic occurs and there’s sort of a rolling pile of pitches and ideas and lines and thoughts as people are growing a concept. And inevitably two or more people will be speaking at once. And your ability to process that is actually quite good. You can hear multiple things happening. And overlap is part of the fun of it. Unfortunately given the way the technology functions overlap is a disaster on video conferencing. And inevitably one person wins out. Sometimes you think you’re not being heard and you are. But most of the time a bunch of people are just gone. They’re obliterated. And so you’re not getting – OK, sorry, I didn’t hear, what was your pitch? And then you’re like, oh god, it really wasn’t – it’s already dead.

I can see it being a real issue.

**John:** Lastly, the question of whether these virtual rooms open up opportunities for writers who are not in Los Angeles. So we’ll get a little bit more into this in our bonus topic for Premium members, but a couple people have reached out on Twitter saying like, “Oh, great, with virtual rooms I don’t have to move to Los Angeles. I could still stay in Chicago. I could stay wherever.”

And to me – I hear you laughing.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** I think it’s a little early to be going for that. Because virtual rooms are a stop gap for now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And while I think there’s things that studios love about them, and the ability to just stick people together and get scripts out of them, there is still some correlation between the room and physical production. And once physical production resumes you’re going to want to be able to communicate between those two environments. And so these virtual rooms may be good for short seasons that can be pre-written and figured out ahead of time, but for something like a Chicago Fire I don’t know that it’s really going to be realistic that that one writer is living in Florida the full time. I just don’t know that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** It’s not. It’s just not, because of the aforementioned things we’re talking about. There are certain things about rooms that work really well in person. The whole function of a room is to collaborate a number of individual minds into one large hive mind of narrative invention. And so what we’re doing now is the best we can do, but it’s not what we want to do. And all the people in these virtual rooms were in the non-virtual room prior. And they will return to the non-virtual room.

I do think that we are going to see more and more meetings held this way.

**John:** And as we said if I never have to drive to the west side at 5pm I won’t be grateful to the pandemic, but I will be grateful for the technology that allows me to not drive to the west side at 5pm.

**Craig:** Yeah. The comfort level has increased dramatically. So whereas if I had said before, “Hey, Casey Bloys, I definitely want to have this meeting with you at 4:30, but I don’t want to drive. I don’t feel like driving. You’re not worth it. [laughs] So, we’ll video conference instead,” he would be like, “What? That’s kind of a dick move.”

But now if I’m like, hey, would it be OK if we Zoom’d it anyway just because we’re all good at it now? And hopefully he would think that that would be OK. Not that I don’t want to – I mean, there’s certain times where I’m happy to go to Santa Monica and then those certain times are between 11:30 and 1:30. And that’s not it.

**John:** Yeah. This next week I’ll be going out with a pitch and here’s the pros. So we’re doing this all virtually. We can go to a lot of places. The list is probably longer because we can visit those places virtually, which is true and is good and that’s wonderful. But it is going to be exhausting. And just because we could stick four of these things in a day because I’m not having to drive around town, I don’t think it’s a good idea to be doing four of these in a day.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s going to take a lot of my week to do this pitching, but I’ve gotten better at it. And we’ll talk about this on a future show, but with experimentation I’m much better at being able to show slides and be able to talk and do stuff. And so it’s required some rehearsal, but it’s been interesting.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Yeah. Last thing that an assistant noted is that while many of these virtual rooms do have a writer’s assistant who is responsible for gathering up the notes from everything and doing all the standard thing a writer’s assistant would do, they generally don’t have writer’s PAs anymore. And so that’s like a whole job that’s been lost from most of these rooms. Because that writer’s PA was largely responsible for the lunch order. And that lunch order goes away because there’s no lunch.

Some shows are actually giving a $75 credit to writers to make up for the free lunch that they would be getting. But that doesn’t pay for that one person who used to be employed.

**Craig:** Yeah. I got to say that’s a tough one to sort of justify. I do think that anyone running a virtual room would be well served by a mechanism by which people who are not necessarily there to contribute steadily, like for instance a writer’s assistant who is mostly listening and writing, can signal the showrunner there’s something important or worth saying. A little light could go on. That would be helpful.

**John:** Yeah. What I’ve seen some people do is you text to the person who is running the meeting to say like, hey, I have a thing. And so they can sort of naturally fold that in and it doesn’t have to be a public raising your hand of things. So, I’m sure – that’s exactly the kind of thing I’d love for people to write in to us with sort of their suggestions for best practices for virtual rooms. Because even though this is a stop gap, we’re going to be living with these for a number of months. And so as we get better at doing this stuff let’s share the knowledge to everyone else who has to do one of these rooms.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. All right. So now to our marquee topic for this episode. So after 450 Scriptnotes episodes–

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** We’ve been discussing our advice on screenwriting and sort of what the process and the craft is like, but this last week I had an insight. So, like a lot of writers most of my insights come right when I’m trying to fall asleep. And so what I’ve taken to doing recently is I have a stack of index cards beside my bed and if it’s something I need to remember I just write it on an index card and stick it by the door so I remember it in the morning. But it just gets it out of my head and onto a card.

And so here is what I wrote down. Craig, only the interesting scenes.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s what I’ve been doing wrong. Goddammit.

**John:** So basically a fundamental piece of advice I wanted to offer to all screenwriters is only include the interesting scenes. And that sounds so incredibly obvious, but it’s actually really challenging. It’s probably the most difficult thing I’ve told people to do on this podcast. Is because as a reader we can tell when we’re not interested, but as a writer sometimes you work really hard to justify why those uninteresting scenes need to stay in your script. And so I want to spend a few minutes sort of wrestling through the problem of uninteresting scenes.

**Craig:** It’s a great idea. And I think that it’s a very common thing for new writers to think that the movies that they see, their experience to those movies psychologically is that there are three or four scenes that make them go, oh my god. And the rest are sort of filler in-between. And so that’s how they approach the writing. What they don’t understand is that everything gets diminished in that sense and every scene in the writing must be important, compelling, and significant. And four of them must be really huge.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah. And so here’s what we’re not saying. We’re not saying every scene in your script has to be like on a 10 out of 10 and sort of like the most compelling, most dramatic everything you’ve ever seen. You do need ups and downs and peaks and valleys. And these scenes need to be interesting in different ways, so it’s not just banging that drum as hard as you can in every scene. But to not give you permission to include those scenes that are boring. And so let’s talk about what boring or uninteresting scenes mean.

So, these are scenes where I don’t care what the characters are doing or saying. Or scenes where nothing is happening. Or probably more subtly, things are happening but they’re sort of exactly the things I expected were going to happen. So, two scenes ago I could have told you this scene is going to happen and this scene happens exactly the way I thought it would happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A classic mistake of characters telling each other things that I already know.

**Craig:** Oof.

**John:** Oof. Scenes were there’s no emotion, no excitement, there’s no emotional engagement between the characters in the moment. And really from a reader’s perspective any moment where I’ve stopped leaning in. Where I’ve stopped being curious about what’s happening in this moment and what’s going to happen next. That’s a sign that this scene is actually not interesting.

And here are the common excuses for how we’ve gotten to these scenes. As a writer I know that I need to go from X to Y. That there’s a thing that needs to happen and so like, OK, well, I’m just going to bite the bullet and have it happen here.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** My hero needs to learn this information. I’m setting up something great. That’s probably the most insidious trap. I know this is not the best moment but it’s a path that’s leading me to something else.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** These are justifications we make for including uninteresting scenes. But they’re not good justifications.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have to have an inner, like a little guy on your shoulder, a little lady, not the devil, the angel one. But the angel one is saying, “Hey, that’s not enough.” Because there’s just a certain thing, like you say, listen, I know that I want her to go to this store and buy this thing. Because she’s going to give this thing to her husband later. And I need her to buy it because I need her to see her make that choice. That’s not enough. You just have to know that’s not enough. There has to be something else happening in that scene, in the background, or to her, or in her relationship with the person selling it to her. Something has to happen to make me go, whoa.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or else it’s not enough. And you just have to know that.

**John:** Absolutely. So, here’s the problem when you include these uninteresting scenes is that if you have one boring page in your script that’s potentially one boring minute in your movie. One boring minute is a really long time. If you’ve ever sat in an editing room looking at one minute of film, oh my god, it’s so long. And when you suffer through one boring minute you’ll do anything you can to cut out of that minute or sort of get rid of that minute. You will do savage things to sort of get rid of that terrible minute. And the reason why you try to get rid of it is you’re breaking the social contract you have between the audience and the movie, or between the writer and the reader. And that contract is that if the viewer/the reader gives you their full attention you will make it worth their while. And for that minute you are breaking that contract because it’s not worth it for this minute to be sitting there. And if it becomes another minute or another minute you’ve lost them. They’re not coming back to your story. You’ve failed to engage them.

So often I think the trap is that we keep thinking about the function of a scene without worrying enough about the actual form of the scene. And good scenes have to do both. They have to be these beautiful, ornate, attractive pieces of architecture that actually still also meet their needs. Their bridges that sort of get us from this moment to that moment, but are actually interesting to walk on while we’re walking on those bridges.

**Craig:** And also someone is going to have to spend all day shooting it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And it’s going to get cut. You’re absolutely right. There is a shaken faith that occurs. When you watch a scene in a movie and you feel like you just didn’t need to see it, or in your mind you went somewhere. Then what’s happened is you have removed a bit of trust from the filmmaker. And you’ve withheld it. And the good ones, the good scripts, the good shows, the good movies, they make me feel so comfortable. When I watch something from Vince Gilligan or Peter Gould and Thomas Schnauz like Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad there is not ever one minute where I think, “Mm, is this going to work? Or why am I here? Does it…?” I just trust them. They have earned my trust because they’re never boring. They just don’t put in boring scenes.

And I like to think of things, because I think that interesting has to be the default setting, rather than saying that something isn’t interesting I just say it’s now boring. It’s binary. Either you are actively drawing me in or I’m leaving you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So these people maintain trust with us. And when you fail to do that. And certainly as a reader I’ll tell you it’s even worse. Because when you’re watching something, well, all right, fine, I’ll just keep watching it.

**John:** Yeah. Inertia will just keep you going for a while. And you have to actually work pretty hard for me to get to like, “OK, I’m giving up on this thing.”

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** But reading? Reading is so much more work that like if I have any excuse to not flip a page I’ll stop.

**Craig:** Well, even if you have to read it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You will just accelerate. You will accelerate and the kind of speed read will turn to a skim will turn into barely a flip just so that you can justify saying that you read it. But you cannot go through those experiences with those things. And it’s why when I’m going through my work or when I’m working on something with someone else and I’m going through their work I am meticulous and it’s something that I got drilled into me violently by Scott Frank and gently and gingerly by Lindsay Doran, but it was this notion that there is not fine enough view to improve things toward interest. Get as granular as you can. Be as ruthless as you can. It’s never good enough. That’s not a thing. You have to finish that scene and go, no, no, no, everyone get away from it. This is correct. Leave it alone. This is good. Moving on. That’s what you’re always aiming for.

**John:** So here’s the challenge that I would like to propose to our listeners is to take one of your scripts and go through it scene by scene and ask yourself, and be honest, is this scene interesting. And does this scene in and of itself not just sustain your interest but also actively interest you. And hopefully many of your scenes you’ll put a checkmark like, yep, this is interesting to me, this is interesting to me. I really want to see this scene. And not just because it’s in my movie, but because I think this is an interesting and a good scene and this is compelling to me.

But for the scenes that don’t get the checkmarks, then you really need to think about what is the hard work that is going to need to happen here. One of the first options is could I just cut this scene all together? And a lot of times you probably could. A lot of times you’re putting that scene in there because you feel like it has to be there, but there’s maybe a way to not include that scene.

But if the function of that scene is necessary, like a crucial bit of story needs to happen, then you’re going to need to really look at like well what are the obstacles keeping this from being an interesting scene or how can I reimagine the scene in a way that is actually interesting and compelling. So it doesn’t become one of the worst scenes of my script but it becomes one of the best scenes of my script. And really try to rise to that challenge on every scene in one of your screenplays.

**Craig:** If you run into trouble and you think to yourself I’ve got a problem, this is a load-bearing wall. It’s just a boring wall. Then your job is to think how could it not be? And it’s actually a wonderful writing experiment to say, right, this is otherwise an incredibly mundane, boring scene. Now what can I do to make this exciting? Here’s a very simple thing. In any scene if somebody in about 10 seconds in cuts themselves on the neck and is spurting blood but has to complete the scene, this is now a much more interesting scene.

Now, you can’t do that all the time, nor should you. But there are all sorts of things that recontextualize the action of things to make them terrifying, or funny, or compelling, or weird. All of those tools are at your disposal. You don’t need to throw it out because you’re bored by it inherently. You need to ask why is this not yet really a scene. It needs to be its own movie. What if that’s the only scene you can show people? Make it better.

**John:** Yeah. A thing we’ve said on the show many times is that in the really great movies that I love you can take any scene from that movie and sort of plant it in some fertile dirt and it would grow into the shape of that movie. It basically has the DNA of the movie in every scene. And so that is a thing we’re talking about. There’s a quality of what’s in this scene or this sequence. You can go as granular as you want to get to. But within that little bit of movie is the whole essence of what the movie is about and what the movie feels like. Tonally how it all engages and what the engine of that film is.

So, you can feel free to write in with examples from my own work that sort of don’t meet this threshold where I have uninteresting scenes in my script. And go for it. But I do think that at least the movies I’m best known for there are not uninteresting scenes that have made it through to the final cut. And I think that’s because I’ve been pretty ruthless with myself over the years about not sticking in those scenes that are just perfunctory, that are just sort of complacent to get to the next thing that needs to happen. That they’re not just little lulls between the big moments. They are hopefully all engaging moments along the way.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you definitely want to hope that that’s your goal but that is what you achieve. You are usually aided by any number of collaborators who are there to watch and consider and advise. The movies that I had the least tolerance for any kind of wiggle room or lack of lean in were the spoof movies I did. They are relentless. They are sprints. And so you start running, you start telling jokes, you do not stop telling jokes until the credits roll. Period. The end. No space. No time. No breath. No pause. They are typically 80 minutes. Sometimes they’re 80 minutes including credits. I mean, because you’re compressing essentially a movie and a half into one. Because there’s no air. It’s brutal.

It’s also a great exercise, but it’s a miserable exercise.

**John:** Now, contrast that with Chernobyl which has fair moments of air. There’s moments which are not pressure cookers.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Especially in the middle episodes. But it’s always consistently interesting because you’re always concerned for those characters, curious about what’s going to happen next. You see characters approaching things with different energies and with different motives. And you’re curious how it’s all going to work because you’ve set up the things and you’ve created these moments that are all going to work. But in setting up those moments you didn’t just plod along and bore us with why these characters are on the path they’re on. Each of those scenes that got to us the place were also interesting.

**Craig:** Well, thank you. I mean, I hope so. And there’s certainly moments where you can be visually poetic and that alone even if it’s not advancing the story in a specific way, it is imparting a feeling. And it’s imparting a feeling effectively. So those are moments in the editing room where you really watch and you go, yeah, that’s great. That’s beautiful. Let’s keep that.

Sometimes the best way to approach stuff is to fake people out. People love to be fooled. This is why we love going to magic shows. And comedy shows are just magic shows with your mouth. That’s all they are. You’re just fooling people.

For instance, there’s a shot in Chernobyl Episode 3 I think where we see a bulldozer just rumbling along. And it’s like, OK, well it’s a bulldozer. And then you reveal that the bulldozer is essentially bulldozing crops in exactly the same formation that a harvester would be harvesting the crops. So there is an irony and there’s a punchline. There’s a visual punchline.

And you can actually get quite a bit of points I think from people when you get them leaning towards, oh this is being boring, and then you go, surprise. There was a plan. They like this.

**John:** Yeah. My One Cool Thing to set it up and spoil it, the first 12 minutes has no dialogue. And yet it’s really compelling and interesting, and partly because you’re waiting and wondering when is somebody going to speak. And yet it works really well. So it doesn’t mean that everything has to be chock-a-block pacing action suspenseful. It’s really about what is going to keep people compelled and interested in what you’re doing.

**Craig:** I agree with you.

**John:** That’s nice to hear once.

**Craig:** Once.

**John:** Once. Once or twice. The last little bit of advice I’ll have along this line is that a lot of what we’re talking about is sort of going through the script that you’ve already written or the script that you’re writing in front of you. This mindset is also helpful when you’re conceiving of the pitch or describing the project to other people. I’m thinking about a recent project that I was working on and they came back to me with this well what if this, what if that. And they had all these things which were thematically yes. I get why they’re going for that. But I could answer and answer really honestly, “I don’t know how to make that interesting.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there’s nothing wrong with that idea. But I could tell you as the craft person who actually has to do this I don’t think I can actually make that compelling in the moment. And I was able to win some of those discussions just by sort of being honest about I don’t know how that’s interesting. And that’s really how when you’re conceiving of a project from the point of view of how will those moments along the way be interesting that’s helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really hard for people. Because anything is possible before something is done. And there are all sorts of examples. We talked about this in our How to Give Notes thing about you can caught up in this example sickness where you’re like, well, in this movie it wasn’t boring. Well, yeah, but in this movie they didn’t do any of that. OK, well but in this movie they did. And you’re just like, yeah, each one of those movies wanted to be the thing it wanted to be. And this one wants to be the thing it wants to be. And the person who knows that is me. So, just quiet. Just be quiet and let me do the thing that I do. And then we can all discuss. And we’ll have this discussion many, many times. But until you sort of see it all in one you may think that you need more than you need, or you may think that you need less than you need.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s segue to more than a scene, a sequence. And this is a discussion on set pieces. This came up because last week I was talking with a TV writer. She was out pitching a feature. It was an open writing assignment. And the producer said they wanted to hear two or three set pieces for this comedy. And she was asking me basically what do they really mean by set pieces? Because coming from a TV perspective she had a certain idea of what a set piece was. And set piece is something that you’ll hear us talking about in production because it’s generally a big thing to do in production, like there’s a whole discussion of how we’re going to handle the set piece. But also in narratives we use the term set piece. So I thought let’s have a quick discussion about, Craig, what do you think of when I say a set piece?

**Craig:** Well in feature comedy it means one thing. A set piece means a comic sequence that is self-contained with a premise. And then it plays out. So, simplest example I can think of right now is in Bridesmaids they go to a bridal shop and they all have food poisoning and it plays out. That is a set piece. So it always has a premise. The premise drives action through. There is always some sort of setting. And then the jokes escalate. It is not a joke, but multiple jokes.

Set pieces in comedies can sometimes be fights. They can be action sequences that are funny. They can be a situation like that. We had a set piece in Scary Movie – I mean, Scary Movies are mostly set pieces. Brenda played by Regina Hall dies and there’s a funeral for her. And a fight ensues at the funeral that escalates and gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and bigger. It ends up with electrocutions. That’s a set piece.

So, premise, escalation, play it out.

**John:** Yeah. So set pieces are little mini movies within your movie. And when Craig says beginning, middle, and end, that’s it. Because there’s a whole arc to them. Another way to think about it is if you just saw that set piece excerpted on YouTube it would make sense. So, independent of knowing who the characters were at the start and who they are at the end, you can get a sense of sort of what’s happening there.

A musical number from a musical will tend to be a set piece. Because there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s a flow to it. There’s an arc to it. And so when this writer was saying well what do I need to be able to pitch in terms of set piece, you need to describe what that action is. So what Craig was describing with Scary Movie it’s like if you were pitching that moment you would say like, “So we’re at this funeral and this happens,” and then you show what the escalation is and sort of how it wraps up. And what the producers are asking for are two or three examples, set pieces, that would match the overall premise of this open writing assignment.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And it’s not complicated, but I will say that I remember hearing the phrase “set piece” when I was hired with my writing partner to work on our first movie, which did end up having quite a few set pieces in it. It was a movie for Disney. And I had no idea what the hell they were talking about. I just didn’t know what it meant. I’d never heard it before. I did not know. I thought it meant something that had to take place on a set. Which wasn’t a bad guess.

**John:** No, not at all.

**Craig:** But also wrong.

**John:** But wrong. All right. Let’s answer some listener questions. So, two weeks back I was posting on the blog about getting things done in a pandemic which is a to-do list of sorts that I fill out every morning and I sort of plan what my work is going to be that day. And I found it really pre-pandemic but it’s also been very useful during the pandemic. So, I’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

Adam wrote in to say, “I spied an Easter egg of sorts on the peek page of your to-do list. You have eight writing projects. I’m super curious how you manage so many projects at once? Firstly in terms of servicing the scripts and other filmmakers and your time and focus. But also in terms of expectation and exclusivity from those paying you. Is it understood that writers have many projects on the go, or does it have to be explicit in contracts? Or perhaps it just comes with a career progress and a studio has to deal with an in-demand writer being on many projects at once?”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So, what Adam is describing is on my to-do list I can sort of fold back and it will show just a reminder list of these are all the things I’m kind of working on, the things that are in my head. And so if I’m thinking like what else do I need to work on I can look at this little peek page and it’s like, oh that’s right, I need to be doing that thing for Arlo Finch, or whatever. So it’s a reminder of like, OK, these are all the irons that are in the fire.

So, first answer is I’m not writing all those things at once. And some of those are in different stages of progress. Some of those projects I’ve been working on for like 10 years. And, you know, small progress is made at a time. In general I’m working on one thing, one paid assignment at a time. And the exceptions will be if I’m delivering a draft and I’m pitching something else, or something is handed in and I’m just doing the rewrite on something else. But I’m not on the clock for two people at once with very, very rare exception.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that’s basically how it goes. Here in my office we have a whiteboard with the various projects that are in play. They’re in different stages. Some of them will be getting done. Some of them have been done but I may need to go back and revisit for another thing. But they’re different kinds of things. And, yeah, every now and then you have to kind of do a little bit of double duty. It happens. But generally speaking you just try and – you’re going to be hired for more than one thing at once. So there’s this classic thing where everybody – they’ll call you and say, “We really want you to do this.” And I’ll say, well, I can’t because I’m doing this. And then they say, “Well, just, you know, like you can squeeze it in and just do it while you’re doing that.” And I’m like, well, here’s the thing. Will you be OK when I do that to you with something else that somebody else tells me to squeeze into your thing? And they say, “No.” [laughs]

And I say well there you go. I try and be – the good news is if you hire me then you know I will be doing your work responsibly and professionally. Yes, every now and then someone calls me and says, “I need a week on something,” and I’ll go, all right, I can hit pause on this, do a week, come back. It’s not the end of the world. No one is going to cry foul. Everybody understands it’s the way the business works. But, yeah, we balance lots of things but in the moment we are traditionally working on a thing.

**John:** Yep. Absolutely true. So when I was doing the Arlo Finch books, during the time I was in a draft on those Arlo Finch books I was really just doing Arlo Finch for that whole time. If I needed to do a week on a project or fix a little thing on Aladdin I would do it. But in general I was full time on that. There’s one big writing project, but there’s always a lot of little things that sort of stack up. And the reason why I keep those on my list, and some of those were place-holder like fake code names because I did recognize that I’m putting this on my blog so people are going to see what’s there, some of those are things that are kind of in the pitchy kind of stage. And I just need to remember that I have to move the ball forward a little bit on that because this is an animation project that is going to take five years anyway. So I have to be making some forward progress on that or else it will never happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** Do you want to take the question from Chris?

**Craig:** Yeah. Sure. Chris writes, “In terms of No Work Left Behind, I’ve always understood this to mean don’t leave pages in a pitch meeting after you’ve run through the thing. Don’t give executives a reason to pour over a document that they will almost certainly find fault in or obsess over some minor detail. But as I watch the WGA video and hear you guys discuss it on the pod…”

Oh, god, you know I hate it when they say pod.

**John:** Yeah. Pod Save America.

**Craig:** Birbiglia says pod. I know. Everyone says pod.

**John:** It’s the worst thing Pod Save America has done.

**Craig:** I know. I know. And everyone calls it the pod. Ugh. I’m going to fix it. “But as I watch the WGA video and hear you guys discuss it on the podcast, I’m curious if I’ve been misunderstanding the concept. Does No Pages Left Behind also apply to the development process with producers? For years I’ve sent pages to producers in order to show them where my head is at or use as a conversation starter. Has this been a mistake? Should I only work up a pitch verbally from now on?

“Example, I’ve been trying to zero in on the strongest pitch for a spec pilot I wrote. I’ve been working with the producer for a while refining the script, batting around ideas via email, and trading documents back and forth to clarify the thinking. But after hearing your renewed call for No Pages Left Behind, that is to say no free work, I can’t square how best to proceed. Should I tell him that from now on no more pages? We’ll only discuss verbally? Should that be the rule going forward? I want to be on the right side of this, especially if I’ve been doing it all wrong. But I want to make I sure I [grock] it 100%”

Grock. Great–

**John:** Yes. Great word.

**Craig:** I think from like the ‘50s, ‘60s, Robert Heinlein kind of thing. It is. It’s Heinlein. Oh, Nailed it.

**John:** Heinlein.

**Craig:** It’s Heinlein. 1961. So it means to like really get something.

**John:** Yeah. To know and to love all at once. To be water brothers or something.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** All right. No Writing Left Behind. So, I was one of the champions of this back in my time on the WGA board. Here’s what it means. First off, it does mean the first thing we’re talking about which is when you go on a pitch don’t leave your pages behind and don’t email the pages behind. Keep things in a verbal realm to the degree it is possible. Just don’t give them pages, because when you give them pages it messes things up for you and for every writer after you.

Now, in situations where you’re developing a spec thing, it’s different than an open writing assignment or for anything where you’re going in to pitch on their property. You own all of this. And so if you choose to write up stuff you own the things that you’re writing. So if it’s helpful for you and your process to write that stuff down and to share it with these producers who you’re going to be taking this out on the town and the pitch with, OK. I still think there are some problems with that. I still think the basic problems of you are potentially making a lot more work for yourself is there. But, it’s still your thing. So you don’t have to worry about getting micro-noted on all this stuff or them falling out of love with your project because of little obsessive details. Because you still own the whole thing.

So you can do whatever spec work you want to do. You can write that whole script. You can write pitch pages. You can sell a treatment if you wanted to. If that is helpful to you, you can do it. But what No Writing Left Behind means is when you’re going in to land a job don’t be giving them writing because writing is what they should be paying you to do.

**Craig:** And I think that’s probably the best way of thinking about the rule of thumb. If you’re supposed to be getting paid for this writing prospectively then you should be paid for it. You shouldn’t give it to them. You’re not supposed to be paid for the prospective spec writing. That spec is going to be purchased. That’s literary material that would be purchased and then you will be employed to rewrite it and expand it and develop it and write more episodes.

But when it comes to a company that’s saying, yeah, we’re looking to hire somebody to rewrite this or to write that, then you’re supposed to get paid to do that work. So don’t give it to them for free. Period. The end.

**John:** Do you want to take the question from Zander?

**Craig:** I do. Zander asks, “In our post-COVID world, Hollywood is starting to experiment more and more with VOD and Premium VOD. News outlets state that Trolls World Tour has earned an estimated $100 million to date in PVOD sales. My question is what do these numbers mean? How do they compare to box office revenue with respect to how much money goes to the studio versus how much money goes elsewhere? And what does this mean for screenwriters and residuals?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** These are all good questions. So, Zander, first I’ll say $100 million to date, that’s good I guess. I mean, considering it was a choice between zero and $100 million I think Universal is really happy with $100 million. There’s a reason why they’re not putting the Bond movie on VOD right now because they know they can make more money theatrically. But for some of the projects that were originally theatrically going to be released and now they’re going to Video on Demand, you see that they’re ones that they were kind of on the bubble about whether they were going to be big hits and it felt like the right choice to bring them home. So I get why some of those movies are going that direction.

In terms of how much does that compare with what a studio would be getting from a movie theatrically versus on home video, a useful way to think about it is the movie theaters take about half of the money that comes in. It really varies on what weekend you’re looking at, but a lot of money does go to the theatrical distribution part of it. So the studio gets maybe half of those dollars back in. As opposed to this Video on Demand, they’re getting a tremendous amount of that money back in. And they’re not getting all of it, but a lot more of it in. So they’re getting more money in.

But, if this movie had been released theatrically it would still be making a ton of money once it was released on video anyway. So, basically they’re cutting off one of their revenue streams in order to get this money just on the Video on Demand.

So, there’s no magic way to sort of compute how it’s all going to work.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ve got a little bit of a weird teeter-totter going on here. Because John’s right. If it goes into the theaters that is a primary exhibition. They make a certain amount of money. Basically they split that 50/50 with the movie theaters. And then there is this secondary ancillary viewing market that will be on Premium VOD. They’ll generate a certain amount from that from repeat viewing, which is a very common thing. Rentals, and purchases, and so on and so forth.

One way of looking at it is, well, they just did really well on the market they were going to be doing really well on anyway. John’s right. Instead of a 50/50 split in Premium Video on Demand it’s probably more like 80/20, I think. So the studio is getting about 80% of that money. So that’s great. But now let’s look at the other side of the teeter-totter. To put movies in theaters is expensive. The marketing costs are vastly higher. If you’re just running it on Premium Video on Demand there’s a certain kind of built-in marketing effort that you can use on your own platform.

So, if Warner Bros now has HBO Max. If Warner Bros wants to put out a movie on PVOD instead of on – they may have some special way to promote it on HBO Max. And then you can go ahead and make this special purchase. My guess is the marketing costs will probably not be as big.

So, you can see where maybe there’s some cost savings there. And of course it costs money to actually make and distribute the stuff. Even though it’s all digital, there’s a whole physical process of servers that send files and yada-da-da-da.

So, hard to say. Hard to say. But we can answer this part of your question. What does it mean for screenwriters and residuals? Well, to the extent that we may be getting cheated out of residuals from movies not being in movie theaters, the answer is no impact at all. We don’t get residuals for that. We don’t get residuals for movies airing in theaters. We don’t get residuals for movies airing on airplanes, oddly enough. The only way it will impact us negatively is if a lack of theatrical exhibition somehow reduces the amount of sales on Premium VOD.

But I got to say I’m skeptical of that. See, it may be that the studios ultimately end up not making as much money in this model, but I think we – writers, directors, and actors – will probably make more. Because more people will ultimately have to purchase this through PVOD or VOD. There is no primary [residualous] exhibition availability. So, we’re going to get residuals on all of it, instead of just some of it.

Now, I can absolutely see the companies coming back to us and trying to get rid of that. I can smell it. But at least for now I think this probably works better for us.

**John:** So, a couple of clarifications on Trolls World Tour is an animated movie. I believe it was probably made under a non-WGA contract. So there were not–

**Craig:** Yes. That’s different.

**John:** There were not WGA residuals for that regardless.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Here’s where it gets tricky in terms of residuals is that the movies we’re talking about were initially intended to be theatrical movies that because of the COVID-19 they ended up debuting on Video on Demand. If these movies are set from the outset, or if they are sort of retconned into being like, oh no, we always intended to release this on Video on Demand, or on Disney+, that is a big factor and a big distinction. Because suddenly the metrics for what you get paid if the movie debuts on Disney+ versus debuting theatrically could be a lot. And so if it’s not available anyplace other than Disney+ that is potentially really challenging.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, at some point I’m going to publish my residuals from Aladdin so people can see sort of what I make off of Aladdin, but I make really good money off of residuals of Aladdin because it was the theatrical movie that then had this life on iTunes and all the other places you can see it. And now it’s on Disney+. And those formulas are pretty good. If this movie had been debuting on Disney+ I would have made a tiny fraction of those residuals. And so that is the downside of these movies not coming out theatrically.

**Craig:** Yeah. We just don’t know. All we can do is rely on the companies’ greed. Right? So what Disney won’t do is make an Aladdin movie and put it on Disney+ for free for its subscribers. They’re never going to do that. Because they’re losing money. They know people will pay for it. Right?

So, there is a PVOD model where it’s over-the-top of what you would get through your normal subscription fee. And that will not go away. Especially if it’s a primary exhibition. They’re just going to say, look, if you want this it’s going to cost you $4. And people will pay the $4.

Look, the truth is this may get decided anyway just by reality. We don’t know how this is going to shake out. I’ve always been rosy about movie theaters and their prospects. I’m less so now. And the fact that this movie did so well just on PVOD is – it’s an eye-opener. Let’s put it that way.

There are movies that will still require those huge runs. But, that is an eye-opener, I got to say.

**John:** Yeah. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Let’s see. I have two One Cool Things because I’m sort of saved up from previous weeks. The first is Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Boltcutters which is just a remarkable album. So this is coming weeks after its debut.

**Craig:** Ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies. Ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies.

**John:** So here’s what I want to talk about with Fiona Apple’s album is that it’s a remarkable album, but I would also say that you could give it a Tony award. You could give it other awards, too, because as a character study, as something written from the point of view of a character who is kind of at their midpoint and headed towards the third act, it’s just a fascinating portrait of sort of who she is. And so if you look at it as like if this were on stage and it was a one-woman show I would just give her all the awards. Because it really is just remarkably well crafted in terms of its storytelling. I thought it was remarkable as a piece of performance, independent of how musically wonderful it is.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it’s terrific. It’s on heavy rotation in my house. That’s for sure.

**John:** Yeah. The other thing I want to recommend is a movie End of the Century by Lucio Castro. And I don’t want to spoil too much about what actually happens in it. It’s a gay film. Two guys meet in Barcelona. And as I said in the setup the first 12 minutes there’s no talking. And you’re sort of waiting for people to talk.

What I admired so much about this movie is essentially it’s just a three-hander. There’s only three characters in the whole movie who speak. And yet so much happens and there’s so many interesting questions being raised by it. And again it’s a movie that feels like when something is only a two-hander or three-hander you think like well could it just be a stage play? But this one could not be a stage play. And I thought it used cinematic language really, really well.

So I would recommend you check out End of the Century which is on iTunes and other places where you can rent it or buy it.

**Craig:** You guys have spent time in Barcelona, right?

**John:** Oh, Barcelona is amazing. Love it.

**Craig:** It’s a pretty magical city. So I have two One Cool Things also. I have got Two Cool Things. First, this is a little bit of a follow up from a prior two-time One Cool Thing for me. Nate Carden who is one of the crossword constructors and I think kind of one of the editors and supervisors of Queer Qrosswords, which is a pack of crosswords that are made by LGBTQ+ crossword constructors and generally built around LGBTQ+ themes. And a packet that you generally purchase by contributing to various charities that’s for LGBTQ+ causes.

Nate is saying, hey, given what’s going on right now we are happy to send people both packs of Queer Qrosswords, because there’s two of them, each one about 15 puzzles I think, without them even needing to donate if it’ll just help them weather the isolation. So if you are a little strapped for cash, you can’t quite make those donations, but you do want to fill your time with some fantastic puzzles, including two puzzles by my favorite puzzle constructor, Mark Halpin, then just get in touch with Nate and the Queer Qrosswords folks at queerqcrosswords@gmail.com. And they will send you your packets.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** And then secondly hooray there is a new game from the Rusty Lake people. Rusty Lake has been one of my Cool Things before. There’s a new game out by them called Samsara Room. It is a very classic kind of Rusty Lake game. It is creepy, eerie, funny, disgusting. All the things it’s supposed to be. But above all bizarre. I’m enjoying it. I feel like I’m probably close to the end of it. I’m already a little sad. But it’s excellent stuff. And it is available now for iPhone or iPad and maybe for Android. But I don’t care. Samsara Room by Rusty Lake.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week. So stick around if you’re a Premium member because we will be discussing whether you should move to Los Angeles given the pandemic. But otherwise Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** You know it.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Ben Grimes. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. I’ll say that the folder of outros is getting a little bit sparse, so I feel like there’s people who are home who could maybe make us some more outros. We’ll happily take those in. If you have an outro, send us that link at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send your longer questions like the ones we answered on the show today. But for short questions on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you find the links to things we talked about. You also find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net. That’s how you get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Craig. So this is a chance to revisit longstanding Scriptnotes advice which is our general advice has been at a super point if you want to be working as a film or television writer you need to move to Los Angeles because Los Angeles is sort of like Nashville is for country music. It’s just where stuff is sort of centered. So, New York is also possible, but really Los Angeles is where most of the stuff happens.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** But Kara wrote. She says, “I’m well poised to break into the film industry. I’ve written and produced an independent feature which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.”

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** “Written several pilots and screenplays and I’ve developed an authentic relationship with several folks in the industry. The rub is I don’t live in Los Angeles. I live in Chicago. I’m particularly interested in writing for TV and as you know the vast majority of writer’s rooms are in LA or they have been. So, I’m finally moving to LA and not on my own. I’m bringing my husband and two young kids with me. Because of this there’s been a lot of planning. My husband is a professor and he got a year-long sabbatical so we can all be together. I found a great school for my kids where they could go to school with their cousins, because my brother and his family are in Los Angeles. And we’ve worked out the finances so that for a while we can spending savings where we’re not going to want to go in debt.

“I thought I was being so smart but now with COVID it’s starting to feel like this is a dumb move. With virtual writer’s rooms and no definitive quarantine end in sight should I just stay put and save the money and the heartache and moving kids until we know more? Am I playing my hand too early? My stomach is in knots that I’m wasting our time and resources heading to LA now. You’ve both been diehard proponents of the need to be in the Los Angeles area, or at least Craig has been, so do you still stand by that, or does this feel like something that’s going to change the dynamic of where people need to be?”

**Craig:** Oh, now my stomach is in knots.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, this is a lot of responsibility. [laughs]

**John:** It’s a lot of responsibility here. What should Kara do? Kara is a filmmaker whose movie is available now. It seems like she’s very hirable.

**Craig:** Well, OK, so let’s take a look at some of the facts. And then we’ll deal with some of the premises. Here’s a fact that we know. Kara has written and produced an independent feature that is streaming on Amazon Prime and she’s done that without being in Los Angeles. So, it’s not that she is prospect-less. However, the implication that I’m getting is that she with her several pilots and her several screenplays and authentic relationships with folks in the industry it feels like if she were here that she would probably end up in some rooms or be meeting with people face to face, etc., and not kind of being her own cottage industry out there in Chicago.

So then the question is has COVID changed all that? First of all, Kara, congratulations to you not only for what you’ve done so far but also how carefully and thoughtfully you’ve planned. This is rare. It’s particularly rare among the people that ask us questions. A lot of these people are like I’m a lawyer, but I’m bored, should I just dump it all and move my wife and 12 kids? And I’m like, no, don’t.

But it sounds like you’ve really thought this through and that’s great. You know, obviously spending savings is scary, but again it feels like you guys have thought this through. Yes, there’s no question that COVID has thrown everything higgledy-piggledy. The issue with moving now is – for instance, I’m here in Los Angeles, I have no idea when my daughter is going back to school. She’s in 9th grade. 9th grade is almost over, question mark. Don’t know. Don’t when school is – the last we heard maybe school starts back up in July. So even that is entirely up in the air.

So, it may be that at the very least you might want to hit pause until we know what the hell is going on over here and you can even start having meetings.

However, I will say that I still maintain that once this is over things will go back to the way they were to some extent. Virtual rooms will not take over. There will still – almost every show you can think of will still have a room-room. And if they’re allowing people to pipe in virtually it’s because they know those people from real rooms.

So, I don’t think that in the long run there’s going to be a newly viable path for people that didn’t exist pre-COVID. I don’t think that. At least not for a long time. What do you think, John?

**John:** So, I agree with you that I think long term she’s going to be better off being in Los Angeles. I don’t think she’s going to be able to stay in Chicago and be a television writer long term. The three to five year timeline is not appropriate for this.

What I will say as I looked at people’s responses to the COVID-19 epidemic the people who impressed me most are the ones who are data-driven and who are basically saying given what we know these are the scenarios and this is how we’re going to move from this phase, to this phase, to this phase. And I think Kara needs to have that same mindset as she’s planning for this. And basically thinking like what are the benchmarks that I would need to cross in order for me to know like OK now is the time to pack up and move to Los Angeles.

And traditionally in a non-pandemic world she was probably thinking in terms of school years with her kids and stuff like that. And really basing on sort of how normal life works. But we’re not in normal times right now. And so there could be a scenario in which you’re moving in the middle of the year or the middle of the semester or whatever and that is going to have to be OK because that’s the situation we’re in.

So, I would say you independently and you with your family figure out what are the thresholds that would make you feel OK about moving to Los Angeles in terms of what things are like in Los Angeles. And you have your family here who can also give you some sense. But there’s no sense I think in moving your kids here to go to school virtually in Los Angeles schools. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. And I don’t think you would be meeting face to face with people in Los Angeles in the next three to six months realistically.

So, you could be kind of virtually moved to Los Angeles and be doing all the stuff that a writer who is trying to be hired in Los Angeles would be doing from Chicago and maybe don’t even tell people that you live in Chicago, or just make it seem like you’re in Chicago temporarily because of whatever. But I don’t think it has to be a limiting factor for you overall right now.

So, what I think Craig and I are both probably agreeing on is that at some point it will still make sense for you to move to Los Angeles. This is not that point right now. But you need to be thinking about what thresholds make sense for you to be moving here.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, in a way Kara you are as much in Los Angeles as any of us are right now. I mean, if there’s a way for you to start for instance having talks to agents and managers and lawyers that you are going to be having out here, well they would occur the same way, whether you are next door to those people or in Chicago. You’d be Zooming. So, it seems like maybe you can do that until this all gets settled. I would be concerned – I know that part of the trick here is that there’s timing. Your husband has a yearlong sabbatical. I don’t know if that’s something that can be rejiggered. I don’t know if he can hit pause on that. Because a year seems like it would be a pretty good amount of time for all of this to settle down and for you to have some clarity about what comes next.

But if he can’t, then maybe this is also an opportunity for you to figure out how maybe long term there may be a different employment prospect for him in Los Angeles. I mean, he’s a professor and there are plenty of amazing schools out here. I don’t know. All I can tell you is moving now seems – I mean, I’m feeling so stressful about it listening to you talk about it. I’m getting sweaty.

**John:** Honestly, as I do the introspection here I’m just trying to think of how do you even – even the process of going to look for an apartment would feel really stressful for me right now. Because I’m sure there are vacancies, but there’s not going to be a ton. And just going to meet with landlords to see places, it all feels like a really strange time to be doing that stuff. Because everyone is sort of frozen in place. And so it’s hard to sort of do the things would be challenging otherwise, or especially difficult right now. So that’s why I don’t think this week or next week or next month are probably going to be the right times to try to do this move. Even though the summer would seem like a natural time to do it, I don’t see that happening.

Craig, I’m also thinking about stepping aside from Kara for the moment, our general advice to people who’ve – you know, young people who just graduated from college who would classically be moving to Los Angeles, I’m usually the guy like, yep, yep, come on. You know, it’s going to be a tough time but come on and do it. I’m a little less enthusiastic about people trying to move here this summer to get started simply because the unemployment among these entry level jobs is going to be so high for such a long time that it’s going to be especially hard for new people to get their foot in the door here.

**Craig:** Look, we’re currently at depression levels of unemployment. Now, obviously that’s artificial. It’s not because everything went out of business and no one has anywhere to work. It’s because the businesses have temporarily closed their doors. But that still means it’s hard to just support yourself while you’re trying to do this other thing. I mean, I’ve always said make Plan B your Plan A. And then you won’t be writing scared. You’ll have money in the bank. You’ll be able to pay your rent. Harder to do that now. Harder to do.

It is a difficult thing to make a decision like I’m going to pick up and move, especially when you have a family. So, to finally breakthrough all of the fear and worry to get to yes is so momentous and so difficult and exhausting that when you finally do it and say yes it’s nearly impossible to un-yes it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I can see how that would be very distressing to have to un-yes the yes on this. But that may be what’s required. And if there’s any way to take some comfort in it it’s that this is a once in a lifetime event. God, I hope it’s a once in a lifetime event. And honestly the world is rarely thrown upside down this quickly and this dramatically. But it is a big deal. So, I think you have a ready-made excuse here to maybe take the easier path. I don’t know how old your kids are. Sounds like they might be on the younger side.

**John:** Yeah, she says two young kids.

**Craig:** Two young kids. I mean, their world is stressful, too. And in the best of circumstances moving is stressful. Leaving your friends and going somewhere new. It’s an entirely different climate. A different state. It’s all stressful. And then you do it on top of all this stuff, it just seems like maybe you can let yourself off the yes hook on this if that’s the hook that you feel like you’re on.

**John:** If Kara’s husband does still need to take the sabbatical this next year, an opportunity I could see is that if he takes the greater part of the daytime parenting responsibilities and Kara has the opportunity to just write her ass off that could be a very useful way to spend this year is for her to really focus on getting that writing done, taking all those virtual meetings she possibly can so that she’s in a really good place to kick ass in Hollywood when she gets here.

I do want to segue back though to the idea of like the general like college grad who would normally be moving to Los Angeles about this time of year. If I were in your shoes I would probably look for what is the unique situation happening in 2020 right now that I am well qualified to engage in that’s not Hollywood. So, this feels like a great time to get virtually involved in any of the relief efforts, in any of the political campaign stuff. There’s going to be people who can really use smart twenty-somethings who can work for no money. And just get some experience doing that. Because I feel like moving to LA right now is not going to be a great experience.

**Craig:** Yeah. I got to go with that.

**John:** Yeah. All right. Sort of bummer news for a bonus topic, but I mean also hopefully helpful. So I think we’re happy and proud of Kara and she is right in that we would normally be saying pack up the car, Kara. Come on out here because this is your moment. It’s just not quite the same with this situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it’s wait. It’s not don’t. It’s just not yet.

**John:** Yeah. Make your plan, make your thresholds, and come when you cross those thresholds.

**Craig:** How about life, huh? You know, you plan, you plan, you plan.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** What can you do? [sighs] Heavy Jewish sigh. That’s my new thing. Instead of actually doing it, I just say it. Heavy Jewish sigh goes here.

**John:** End of episode. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] This entire episode can be called Heavy Jewish Sigh.

Links:

• Getting Things Done in a Pandemic
• Fetch the Boltcutters
• End of the Century
• Queer Qrosswords, email the team at queerqrosswords@gmail.com
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/other-things-screenwriters-write).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 437 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, sure, we’ll talk about screenplays, but we’ll also focus on other things that screenwriters write, including outlines and treatments, because Craig you and I, we’ve been doing a lot of that recently.

**Craig:** Good lord have we.

**John:** Then we’ll be answering questions from listeners just like you. And in our bonus segment Craig and I are going to discuss the Myers-Briggs personality test. And we will reveal which four letters tell everything you need to know about us.

**Craig:** Uh, I don’t know why anybody listening to this show hasn’t kicked in the whatever it costs to get these bonus segments. They’re better than the show. They’re the best. [laughs] They’re really better.

**John:** Sometimes they are really quite delightful. So, if you want to sign up for these it’s obviously at Scriptnotes.net and you can get in on all the bonus action.

All right, a little bit of news. I’m doing a criminal justice panel called Beyond Bars: Changing the Narrative on Criminal Justice. That’s February 26. This is one of those special little panels that will hopefully livestream, but if you want to be there live in the audience you should come to it. So, I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s going to be me and some TV showrunners and some criminal justice experts talking about our portrayals of the whole system on screen and what the realities are and how we can do a better job making those things match up.

So, it’s sort of a companion piece to the mental health and addiction panel that I did last year.

**Craig:** And where is this panel taking place?

**John:** It’ll be at the SAG building, so on Wilshire.

**Craig:** Got it. Got it.

**John:** Pretty small space. So a lot smaller space than what we do for our live Scriptnotes shows. But if you want to come see that that is available to you on February 26.

**Craig:** You know what I wish in terms of follow up and news and all the rest, I will there was something you could tell us about Highland 2.

**John:** Oh, thank you. I was even going to omit that for this week, but now I’ll say it.

**Craig:** No, I refuse. Say it.

**John:** A couple shows ago I talked about student licenses. So if you are a student who needs to use Highland 2 we do have the capability of adding your whole school so that if you have a .edu address for that we can sign you up for that. You need to give us the contact information for your program or professor. I didn’t really explain very well this first time. I’ll try to explain better now.

But you can send us an email at brand@johnaugust.com. That’s brand@johnaugust.com. Say what program you’re in, but most importantly who the instructor is who teaches your writing program so that we can contact them and they can actually send out the form for signing everybody up. So it’s not just like a “hey I’m a student, give me the license.” We actually need to get your program signed up so we can see that you genuinely are part of that writing program.

**Craig:** On behalf of the public school district in my town of La Canada, I’m curious do you also offer this to public school districts, for high school maybe?

**John:** At this moment we don’t because we need to have somebody who has a .edu address. And high school kids generally don’t. College kids generally do. So, if we can expand at any point down the road we will, but it’s kind of a manpower problem. We need to actually verify who these people are.

**Craig:** I was thinking more of like the schoolwide thing, you know. If a district called you and said we want to purchase a school license.

**John:** Oh yeah. That’s very doable. And that’s already doable sort of in existing plans.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** Totally possible.

**Craig:** All right. Great.

**John:** Let’s segue to the main topic today which is the stuff that we write that is not screenplays. So we’ve talked a lot about screenplays obviously over the course of 400-and-a-zillion episodes. All the words on the page. The format. How to best convey things. But this last couple months I’ve found myself having to write treatments for things. And I’ve sometimes written a treatment for myself which is basically a set of notes, a plan for how I’m going to attack a movie. But this was the first time in a decade that I’ve had to write a treatment that is being turned in. It is like the plan before the plan for the movie. And I found it difficult to write. I found it difficult to convey some of the stuff I would normally be able to do in a scene in just paragraph form, especially when it comes to conveying the inner thoughts of characters. Why they’re doing what they’re doing. A sense of tone. The comedy. The decision about when to move into italics for suggestion of dialogue.

I found it kind of a frustrating form. And you’ve done a little bit more of this than I have, so I wanted to talk through why we write outlines and treatments and sort of best ways to use that document form to convey the movie you hope to write.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Because I’ve written a lot of treatments and my treatments are very scriptment like. The last one I wrote I think was about 70 pages. And so I believe in them, but I also find them painful for so many reasons. But ultimately a good pain.

So, I’ve done it all for all sorts of things. And it’s not something that is necessary unless you’re being commanded to do it as a condition of employment, which is rare.

**John:** Is rare but actually the thing I’m doing right now, one of the steps was a treatment.

**Craig:** Well there you go. Then you’ve got to do it.

**John:** And so to have a document that is going to be judged based on how well they can understand the movie in this was new for me.

**Craig:** Well, then this is a good opportunity for us to kind of talk about some best practices and some techniques that make things a little bit easier. And also some tips and tricks, because there are some pitfalls. You can get trapped inside of a treatment pretty easily trying to achieve an effect that ultimately is not really achievable inside that format.

So, I guess maybe the first thing to sort of ask is how do you even define one of these documents.

**John:** I think that’s a great place to start, because I would say you scale up from sort of a beat sheet, to an outline, to a treatment, to a scriptment. And the first time I ever heard the term scriptment was in relation to James Cameron who writes these very long, sort of 70-page scriptments that actually do have some dialogue in there and are almost – if you squint you can sort of see the screenplay in them.

But let’s start with that smallest form. Do you have any different levels of document that you would describe?

**Craig:** No. And the truth is I’ve never done a beat sheet because once I start thinking that specifically then I’m already kind of writing an outline.

**John:** I would define a beat sheet, and these are much more common in procedural television, but I would define a beat sheet as not necessarily single sentences but really kind of bullet points that sort of talk through these are the moments in the story, especially in television leading up to act breaks to sort of show you – it’s almost like just the index cards of how you would get through the story. And so they’re very minimal and you’re just sort of looking at the big actions that happen there, or the big reversals, the big moments.

An outline is a much more flexible term, and you’ll see things that I would describe as really kind of a treatment but they call it an outline. An outline is, to me, a much more – a better fleshed out version of the beat sheet that actually shows – tends to show scene by scene, definitely sequence by sequence how you’re getting from point A to point B, what is introduced where, the callbacks to things. It’s a longer document. So to me an outline is probably a 10-page document. What are you thinking?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, outline is basically a very thorough beat sheet, where you’re not just saying things like “police station, they interrogate the suspect.” And outline would say “Police station. This person and this person interrogate the suspect. They want to know this. She says this. They’re not sure. They decide to go talk to somebody else. Next bit.” That’s kind of like how you would scale up I would imagine from beat sheet to outline.

**John:** I find outlines very difficult to read if I’m not actually familiar with the story itself. I’m thinking back to an arbitration I did a year or two years ago and where one of the documents in it was an outline. And I would say it was 15 pages. And it was almost incomprehensible. It was very hard to follow bullet point to bullet point, paragraph to paragraph sort of what was happening. It was in this weird middle ground where it wasn’t kind of telling the story. It was just sort of saying – it was just giving the scene without enough of the transitions and segues between moments to really help me understand what movie I was watching.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I find outlines to be in a kind of useless no man’s land. I mean, I understand the value of a beat sheet. It’s this minimal organizational tool. It’s sort of the equivalent of continuity. So when you’re making a movie or a television show and you’re in editorial at some point someone will generate a continuity which is just literally a list of scenes in order with their numbers and the briefest description of what happens in them.

But as a plan, an outline kind of falls in between. It’s almost like so if a beat sheet is the plan for tonight is chicken with rice and string beans, an outline is chicken, butter, parsley, string beans, this thing. But there’s no instructions of like how long do you cook, how do you cook it, are there any other ingredients. When? It’s just not enough. It’s not enough to be anything.

Once I decide – this is personal – but once I decide to flesh something out it’s going to be a treatment or a scriptment. Those are really where I find myself living.

**John:** So this project I was writing this treatment for was going to be one of those longer form things. And so I wasn’t stuck in this sort of no man’s land. I really was sort of writing up the whole thing. I really looked at it as this is a prose document that is describing the movie that you’re going to be watching. And so it’s not trying to be an approximation of the screenplay. It’s really describing sort of sequence by sequence this is what’s happening in this sequence but told in really prose form. And when I needed to use dialogue I would move into italics, which is sort of a common choice. Then it always becomes awkward when you have two characters who need to talk to each other. Generally one person is in italics, one person is not in italics. It’s not perfect. But it works.

The other thing I will say about this treatment that I turned in, it had a lot of preamble that was not filmable material but was really talking you through this is the world, these are the characters, these are the challenges, this is what you expect, this is what you don’t expect. So there was quite a bit before we actually got to the story part of the treatment which is a luxury you generally don’t have when you’re turning in the screenplay. You don’t have five pages to talk through the plan for the thing. You’re actually delivering the actual object itself.

**Craig:** And how many pages did that – you’re describing this as a treatment.

**John:** This whole treatment was 26 pages altogether.

**Craig:** Perfect. So this about makes sense to me. To me, the only difference between a treatment and a scriptment is that in a treatment you are prose-ifying the plan for the movie, but you’re not saying everything. You don’t have to explain every transition or every tiny little thing. You can compress a couple scenes into one descriptive paragraph about the sort of thing that happens. For instance, if there’s a battle you can kind of summarize the battle and explain what matters. And as scriptment you’re doing it like a script, where you just now will say everything. Every moment, every little detail, every little transition. It’s all being spelled out in prose.

Prose is more efficient than screenplay to an extent. Although what I suspect is that I probably have written more words in the 70-page scriptment than I am in the 110-page script because in a script it’s just the description is, I don’t know, it’s just a little bit more efficient. And dialogue is a little punchier.

So, do you have to do – there’s no reason to do a scriptment, by the way. I’m one of the few people that does them. I guess James Cameron is one of the other ones. They’re a bear. It’s just that what happens with me is if you said to me, “Hey, I need you to write the classic 25-page treatment,” I’d start and I’d end up with a 70-page scriptment. Because that’s just kind of how my process goes.

**John:** Yeah. It was everything I could do to stop myself from doing that and to actually not keep expanding, keep expanding, keep expanding from the inside-out, but actually sort of limit myself to, OK, in this section, about ten minutes of screen time, it’s going to be about this much page count in my treatment and I’m not going to keep expanding and keep expanding. It was a real danger at certain points.

**Craig:** I mean, the benefit of the scriptment is, well, there are two main benefits. One I think is pretty much a wash with the treatment. The other one isn’t. Both a treatment and a scriptment will provide your collaborators with a very clear picture of your intentions. It’s very hard for them to say afterward, “Why did you do this? Or why did you do that?” You told them you would. It was incredibly clear, in fact. They can disagree. Meaning they can read your script later and go, “OK, we know you said you would do that, and you did it, and we now realize we don’t like it.” That’s fine.

But they can’t be surprised. The benefit, the special benefit of a scriptment, is that you are that much more prepared to write the script. The script becomes that much easier because you’ve kind of written it. You haven’t written all of it. There’s all those wonderful nuances and bits and bobs that come out in scene-crafting. But you’re never wondering, well, OK, now how am I going to get from this to this? Every question has essentially been answered. And so the writing becomes a little bit more of an extension of the scriptment as opposed to just starting up a new process.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk some pros and cons here. I would say a con for the treatment is that as a screenwriter you don’t have all of your tools. Like you don’t have your ability to easily do dialogue, to do transitions, to do a lot of – the film craft of this is not available when you’re just doing sort of prose form. And so you don’t get all the magic you get in writing a screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** An advantage I would say though is as I head in now to get notes on this I’m probably a little less protective of what I’ve written because it’s not sort of the finished versions of things. And so it will hopefully be a conversation about this is what I’m trying to go for in this scene, this thing that is not fully written yet. So, while it’s frustrating that I cannot give them the full version of what that scene would be or what that sequence would be like, it’s going to be very easy to change my plan for it based on their feedback and their reactions and get the director’s input into these moments before we’ve even written the scene.

**Craig:** No question. There is a rigidity that is implied in a scriptment. That said, what I have discovered is that producers have no problem blasting through that rigidity.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** But the nice thing is even then revising a scriptment as I just did last week is also relatively academic. Because so much of what is there is there. And even when they are saying, well, OK, it seems like a better version of this would be this, or we would prefer if this would happen, that it’s all still within the context of the scriptment. That they’re sort of subconsciously working within the framework that you’ve created. They are aware that there are certain things that if you knock down are a much bigger deal. That is an added benefit of the scriptment. It is a little harder for them to fall into the trap of “we’re making a small thing, a tiny suggestion,” that in fact would unravel the rug. They kind of can see that it would unravel the rug, and so they’re a little more crafty about how they’re going to approach things, presuming that they want the script done within some reasonable amount of time.

**John:** Also, you can talk about the story as a story rather than the execution. So you can talk about this is why we think this is not going to work. Or this is why we’re not happy with how the story is tracking here. As opposed to we are not happy with the dialogue you wrote in this scene. And so it is a chance to sort of focus on story without the question of is the problem what happens in the scene or is the problem the words that I used to describe the scene.

**Craig:** For people who might be hearing a strange noise it’s in my office. The heat system sometimes does this little rattle-y thing. It’s a very old building. This building is like from 1908.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve not been to your new offices yet, but based on everything I’ve heard on my side of the microphone I think it’s like a steampunk kind of collective place.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** And that there’s artists and people living together in this big giant space. And they sometimes have a drum circle going.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. We all wear top hats with goggles on them. And–

**John:** A lot of unicycles. A surprising number of unicycles.

**Craig:** Unicycles powered by little flamethrowers. Yeah, that’s how it is over here. It’s very steampunk. Steampunk is the nerdiest of nerd stuff.

**John:** I love how nerdy it is.

**Craig:** It’s so nerdy.

**John:** I mean, I don’t enjoy it for myself, but I really enjoy that people enjoy it so much.

**Craig:** Like do you like science fiction? And Victorian England? It’s such a weird combo. Anyway, you were talking earlier and you said something interesting that I kind of filed away that I wanted to circle back around to. And that was the issue of comedy. It is very difficult to be funny in a treatment or an outline or certainly a beat sheet. To the extent that I don’t really try too much. The only kind of comedy I will ever try and include in a scriptment is if it’s the kind of comedy that could be neatly encapsulated in a three-sentence exchange between two people.

But beyond that you can just sort of vaguely say an insane thing ensues, or something like this, and describe it. But if you’re trying to get laughs with this thing you’re going to be sorely disappointed. And you probably will risk seeming a bit sweaty.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree. Both of the things I’ve been writing in treatment form recently have been comedies. And there’s moments in which like I’ll put in the right line that sort of indicates what the tone of the dialogue is. But more I think I’m indicating like these are funny elements that will be together. Like you can see why these characters in this situation will be funny and what the specific moments are that can happen. But I’m not trying to get you down to the granular joke level, because it’s just not the right medium for it.

**Craig:** Yes. And, so balancing out the fact that comedy is really difficult, one thing that’s actually very easy to do in a treatment or scriptment, which is very helpful I think for us as writers to both prepare for ourselves and also share with our collaborators, is subtext. Because there are things that characters can be thinking. And as you know from writing a novel prose is brilliant at letting us know what someone is thinking. Whereas in movies and television, the entire point of the process is for us in the audience to discern what someone is thinking through their behavior, their choices, their performance, and so we write toward that. We write to create subtext.

A treatment or an outline or a scriptment allows you to make that subtext clear. So nobody has to wonder what someone is thinking. They know because you’ve told them. Now, whether or not you execute that correctly in the script, who knows. And rewriting is always necessary. But there can be a discussion about intention. Because what happens is a lot of times is without this step, without the treatment or the outline, you turn in a script, it comes back, and they go, “Well we don’t like this scene.” Well why? “Because she’s being mean.” And you go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, she’s actually being gray. See, here’s what’s going on. And I thought that was clear. It wasn’t clear to you. But this is what’s going on. This is how it should be done on the day. And they go, “OK, OK, OK, we see that, we see that, we see that. Got it. Got it. Got it. Maybe you could just throw another word in or something just so we…” Because people get confused and draw the wrong conclusion all the time. I do it as a reader, too.

Scriptment kind of helps pave the way for that.

**John:** Yeah. Because you essentially can cheat in that the scriptment form doesn’t have the same rules in that you can only write what can be seen or heard. You can sort of veer into character’s thoughts to make it clear why they’re doing what they’re doing. It comes with the territory there. It’s nice.

**Craig:** Absolutely. So, it is an exhausting process. I find it very exhausting. And I had to do two of them recently for complicated reasons. I mean, not one and then the same one again, but rather two different ones, but somewhat related. And it’s exhausting. It is as exhausting as writing a screenplay.

But it is really helpful. It is the kind of I think most useful homework you can do. It will always save you from fundamental problems of not knowing where you’re writing to. I think some people get concerned that it may limit them somehow. That it will limit their imagination. But my response to that is always twofold. One, once you’re writing the script if you want to deviate from your scriptment or your outline, do it. And, two, you are perfectly free when you’re writing the scriptment. In other words, you can’t argue that it’s restraining or anti-imagination. You’re using your imagination when you’re writing that. It’s just a question of when do you start making decisions. Do you start then or now? I personally like to do it before I start writing the script because writing a script is really hard and I get very anxious when I have no clue what’s coming next.

**John:** Yeah. See, I’m generally not a planner ahead. I generally start writing the script without any sort of detailed outline or treatment going into it. So this will be the first time I’ll be doing that based on my treatment. And I will say I am looking forward to the fact that some complicated decisions will have already been made about like how I’m going to get all these things together. That’s great.

But thinking back to Arlo Finch, you know, with Arlo Finch I started the first book with a pretty detailed plan. The second book I didn’t go into it with a specific plan for how I was going to achieve all the things I wanted to achieve. And I really loved that process of discovery. And I discovered the villain who I thought was going to be the series villain was not the series villain and there’s a whole different character. And so I respect that like my not having a very good plan going into the second book probably freed me up in some ways.

But then in the third book I did end up writing an outline and it was helpful. So I’m saying I guess it really does depend on your situation, how much time you have, and sort of which way you work best.

**Craig:** I’m not surprised that that’s how it went for you. Because if you think about it, you planned chapter one, you planned act one. And you planned act three. And then act two you let yourself roam around a little bit. And that makes sense to me actually. The areas where you get the most screwed when you kind of don’t know what you’re doing is in the beginning and in the end. And it’s only because, look, the inherent risk to full-on freedom, the kind of freedom that comes with the fog of war, of not knowing necessarily right off the bat what comes next, the cost is that you may suddenly realize, oh god, I’ve literally written myself into this terrible corner.

If you’ve planned your beginning and you’ve planned your end, then I think makes total sense – give yourself some license to roam around in the middle.

**John:** I agree. At some point we will have Michael Arndt on the show. Michael Arndt I think is still in the process of this movie that he’s written that I think he’s directed several versions of along the way. He is the ne plus ultra of what Craig is describing where by making a plan and then sort of building on a plan and building on a plan and building on the plan you can make something hopefully terrific. So, we’ll get Michael on the show at some point because I’m curious to see – he’s probably the most extreme version of this process.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s a big planner, isn’t he?

**John:** He is. All right. Let’s get to some questions. And the first question is actually about that planning. So Michael writes in, “I’m wondering how long the Chernobyl bible that Craig delivered with his pilot was for his development deal. I’m about to start pitching an historical series with a similar scope. And I’m curious to know what kind of deal my reps should be asking for and what kind of document was sufficient for the pickup.”

**Craig:** OK. Good questions. So I’m looking at it right now. And it was 65 pages. The 64 pages included, let me just give you a sense of it so you have a basic sense of the range, an overview, which was basically a mission statement. This is why I’m writing this. And this is ultimately what it’s about. Then were a number of pages that were about the characters. So the main characters would each get their own page and a description. And then the sort of sub-characters, secondary and tertiary characters would maybe get bundled onto a page together. And then each episode would get its own outline. And those outlines were not scriptments.

So, I’m going to pick a random episode. Episode two is about 12 pages.

**John:** And these are paragraph pages. And your paragraphs are five to nine sentences maybe?

**Craig:** Well, you know me, I’m a big white space guy. So typically the average would be three I would say. So I like lots of white space. I also would include photos to kind of help people have references as I was talking through things. And so that was it. I kind of did it that way. And laid it all out in that regard.

Now in terms of the deal, the deal that I made which I think was fairly standard was that I would provide them with a show bible, and then I would provide them with a pilot script. That’s kind of what they do. I think that’s pretty standard. I mean, Michael I’m not sure if you’re going to places like HBO or streamers, or if this is a network thing. I don’t know. Probably not network because you’re saying it’s a six-hour miniseries, so I assume it’s like an HBO kind of thing. That’s basically what you’re going to get. I mean, that’s how they do it.

Now, I had never written a show bible before. I asked Carolyn Strauss to get me an example. She sent me one. And lo and behold I did mine much longer. It’s just what I do. So I’ve written the longest show bible ever and probably ruined it for people after me who are going to be like, “Well, you know, Craig’s show bible was…” Sorry. Sorry other writers.

**John:** I do hear other folks who are doing shows for streamers find that they are being asked to write a bunch of additional stuff that was sort of not in their original contract between delivery of the pilot script and the decision to actually pick up the series. And that can be incredibly frustrating. And that is a situation which you do want to stand up for yourself and say like, “OK, I’m doing this because it’s helpful for me, but at a certain point you need to start paying me for the things I’m writing.”

It sounds like your show bible was already part of your contract which is great, which is how it should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And honestly it’s all about get the show or don’t get the show. And I’m going to do that anyway. I mean, it’s just part of my process regardless. So the thing about the term show bible is it’s incredibly flexible. It can be, I suppose, whatever you want it to be. I saw one sample that was like five pages long. And I’m like I don’t know how this is a bible per se. So it’s really what you make of it. Just like same in features. Same deal.

All right. Next question. Anonymous writes, “I have a short film that I’ve birthed.” Oh, I like that. “I hired a writer.” Wait, so did you birth it or, OK?

“I hired a writer to write a 14-page script and now after a year of revisions a team of people are helping produce the film on a very small scale. A producer came onboard to help, non-paid, and they are insisting that you can’t have the word ‘I’ in the title. Apparently they are OK with the letter ‘I’ but not the word “I.” They say you are asking the audience to be in the position of a character before knowing anything about them. They have taught screenwriting in college and won screenplay competitions and apparently this is a big sticking point for them. Am I missing something? Is there filmmaking gospel that I missed about the word ‘I’ in titles? I am Legend. And I, Tonya seemed to do just fine. I acknowledge the word ‘I’ sounds weird in a title but I think the uniqueness helps it stand out. And there is some logic to using I am blank based on our story.”

John, this is a puzzling question.

**John:** It is a puzzling question. So, Anonymous, you are not crazy. It is absolutely fine to use “I” in the title. The reason why I picked this question and put it here is because it comes down to the issue of what is rules and what is taste. And the producer has certain taste, and the producer does not like the word “I” in a title. That’s fine. That producer can have that opinion. That does not make it gospel. It does not make it right. You can freely debate that person on whether “I” can be there. But there certainly is no rule.

And people have tastes. People have opinions. And I remember on Charlie’s Angels one of the producers was really obsesses with – she wanted to see the Angels eat to make sure that it was clear that for all the physical activity that they’re doing they do actually eat food. But didn’t want them to eat food in a messy way. And she had a problem with any sort of like Carl’s Jr kind of messiness. And I get that. That’s taste. That’s not actually a story point. It is just her taste and her opinion. And when you are bringing somebody in on your project you do want their taste and their opinion. But it does not mean that you always have to follow it or treat that as being gospel.

**Craig:** Yeah. First of all, Anonymous, if you hire a writer to write a 14-page script I just want to caution you to not write into a screenwriting podcast and say that you have a short film that you birthed. My problem with “I” is that. It’s when you say I’ve birthed. How about you and the writer birthed it, since the writer wrote the 14-page script.

But that said, you say a producer came onboard to help, nonpaid. So I’m not really sure what that means. But what you’re describing that they’re doing is this – it’s called appeal to authority. Rather than expressing their opinion as an opinion, they say it’s not an opinion because, A, I have taught screenwriting in college, and B, I have won screenplay competitions. Well, that in fact represents zero authority I’m sorry to say to that particular individual. Also, this is art. It has nothing to do with authority whatsoever. Either it’s good or it’s not, depending on who you are and where you’re standing and how you see it.

No, there’s no rule. And anybody that starts to do stuff like that needs to go away. Especially when they’re tossing out rules that you know are wrong. I mean, you just know that’s wrong. How is this person walking around in a world where this is plenty of stuff that has the word “I” in it and thinking that somehow you’re going to be fooled? That’s the part about this that I find vaguely sociopathic.

**John:** Yeah. That they’re holding onto their opinions so strongly even despite evidence to the contrary.

**Craig:** Right. Like clear evidence. And they presume that somehow you won’t unearth it? You will.

**John:** Oh no! They have IMDb.

**Craig:** Wait a second. Before I say what I’m about to say, do you have or have you ever heard of the Internet? You haven’t, great. So you can never say “I” in a title. Yeah, no, that’s just silly.

**John:** Not true. Salvatore from Australia writes, “Listening to Episode 436 with Liz Hannah you mentioned that the writer should always focus on what their own unique perspective is when writing a project. But what exactly does that mean in this context? I’ve heard that a lot but I’ve never actually heard it defined. For example, what did Craig recognize as his own unique perspective in the Chernobyl disaster? Was it the theme that lies always incur a debt of truth? In other words, how do I answer the question of why should I be the one to tell this story?”

**Craig:** Those are two different questions.

**John:** OK. Different questions. But let’s try to answer both.

**Craig:** Yes. So, you have one question, Salvatore, which is what does it mean to have a unique perspective on something. And then the other question is why should I be the one to tell this story. There is no answer to the second question. Nobody should be somebody to tell any story. You want to, you are compelled to, you feel a need to. It would give you artistic pleasure to do so. That’s why. I don’t believe in this kind of notion that one person or another is specifically anointed by fate or the universe to tell a particular story.

What is your unique perspective? The way your mind works. That’s it. Meaning when we say that to people what we’re really saying is do this the way that feels instinctively beautiful to you. Don’t do it the way you think other people do it or would want you to do it. So, when I sit down and I think I’m going to write something like Chernobyl, what I don’t do is go and watch a bunch of other limited series based on historical events and go, OK, oh, that’s good, I should do it like that. Or obviously I wanted to do it like this, but they do it like that. I should really do it like that.

No. I just follow my gut. So that’s what we really mean. Every writer has some sort of instinctive understanding of what they want to do. And that’s the part that you provide that nobody else can. So, let that be your loadstone.

**John:** Yeah. Salvatore is asking about unique perspective. I think what we tend to look for is unique vision and unique voice. And those are things you can find in writing, both writing on the page and sort of what the ultimate thing is that gets made. But it’s sometimes easier to think about that in terms of other media. So like with a composer, like composers have very distinct styles. You could imagine sort of a Danny Elfman score on this movie versus a – I cannot pronounce Craig’s Chernobyl composer, but–

**Craig:** Hildur Guðnadóttir.

**John:** They would be very different approaches. And they have different ears, different visions, different voices when it comes to how they are going to do their work and do their art. And so it’s a question of like what are you brining about your art and your perspective, your vision to this material. And that’s why Aaron Sorkin writing about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is going to be very different than Craig writing about that or me writing about that. There’s different things that interest us and there’s different things we’re going to highlight. It’s just going to be a different thing.

And so you are inevitably going to be coming into a project with all of your priors. All your history. Your tastes. Your fears. That is going to make it unique. I think what Craig is arguing is don’t try to minimize what makes you unique in order to write the version of the movie that someone else could write, because that’s pointless.

**Craig:** Exactly. That’s exactly right.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to take Breton Zinger?

**Craig:** All right. Our next question is from Breton Zinger, which is awesome.

**John:** It’s a great name.

**Craig:** I want to be Breton Zinger. Breton Zinger writes – this is not a question. This is an order. “You should do a segment on how to be productive writing wise while traveling. I always have grand plans to get X, Y, and Z done, and then I only get X started.” Yeah, what do you think? You’ve done a lot of traveling. I’ve done a lot of traveling. How do you manage this?

**John:** A recent thing I’ve started doing while traveling, and I went to Korea and Japan, and I had very long flights ahead of me. And so a thing I’ve started doing which I really recommend for everybody is you know you’re going to have two, five, 13 hours on a plane. That’s great time where no one is going to interrupt you. While we’re in the plane before we’ve taken off I make a list of here’s all the things I want to do on this flight. And that’s stuff I want to actually accomplish, but also I want to watch that movie I’ve been meaning to watch. I’ll go through and figure out what movies are on the seat back that I’ve not seen yet that I do want to see.

I have books and it’s like I want to read two chapters in this book. So not just the stuff that I have to get done, but the stuff I’ve always kind of wanted to get done. Because to me there’s nothing more dispiriting than having spent 13 hours on a plane and realize like, oh, I got kind of nothing done in that 13 hours. Or I played games on my phone that I could have done anywhere.

So, I try to make that time really productive. And so whether it’s travel, whether it’s jury service, whether it’s some other thing where you have a block of time that is uncommitted, use that time.

The other thing that I’ve been much better about in the last few years, especially with writing the books, is that I need to have at least an hour of uninterrupted writing time every day. And so I claim that with my family saying I’m going to need this time. And so I can go downstairs to the lobby. I can go somewhere else. But I need to be uninterrupted for one hour to do my work. And that’s been great. And I’ve actually been pretty productive during breaks because I’ve sort of blocked off that time.

**Craig:** Those are all very strong notions. Yeah, long flights are nice because you actually get so bored that the notion of doing work becomes attractive.

The one thing to keep in mind, Breton, is that when you are traveling you’re going to be more tired than you normally are. So I think possibly just lower the expectations. There’s possibly going to be some jetlag. Also, you’re traveling, so that means you’re probably there for some purpose. To see things, or do things. So you’re going to have less time and your mind is going to be a little more distracted. And also the writing is something that is contextualized within your normal life at home and you’re not in your normal life at home.

So, I would say also give yourself a little bit of a break and maybe don’t make grand plans to get X, Y, and Z done. Since you only get X started, how about next time just make a plan, a non-grand plan to get X done. And see if you can do a little bit more on X, and then you don’t have Y and Z staring down at you going, “You suck.” And see if that works. If that works then maybe next time you could do, OK, do X and start Y. Just manage your expectations. It’s hard.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed. Patrick Tebow writes, “During the Three Page Challenge section of Episode 434 you two briefly touched on the use of pictures in a scene, such as when a character looks at a photo on a desk. Is this prop and avoid at all cost kind of situation? Or is it mostly a problem when a picture is used as a cheap way to start a conversation between two characters?” Craig, what do you think? Is it always a bad idea to be referencing a photo or a picture in movies?

**Craig:** It’s mostly always a bad idea.

**John:** I agree with you.

**Craig:** I never want to say anything is always wrong, but somebody using a photo to start a conversation between two characters, that’s easily avoidable. The bigger issue is when a character is alone and looking at a photograph. Because that’s a cheap way for the people making something to externalize a thought. I need to know that they miss mom. Or, you know, the classic one is some guy picks up a photo and it’s him and this woman and he’s sad. And we realize that she’s either dead or left him. And it’s just pretty tropey. It’s pretty clunky. And it’s kind of incumbent upon us to come up with interesting new ways to do that. I think at this point in 2020 pulling the old staring at a photo thing is going to feel a little soap opera. A little The Young and the Restless.

**John:** I agree with you. Because I’ve never actually had the experience of wanting to pull out a photo and stare at it. It’s just not a thing I’ve ever done. And I don’t believe it. The movie 1917 which I enjoyed very much does have that as an element. I think it gets away with it to a larger degree than you’d expect because it’s set up in the plot and also because we have an expectation that these soldiers actually would have been carrying those photos with them and it’s a prop that is actually handed off and sort of useful story wise in the course of the movie.

So I believed the characters more when they are referencing photos because that’s a thing that soldiers do.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. So if it’s appropriate to the time then it makes total sense. I mean, but if you’re telling a story now you’re right. I mean, I don’t look at photos ever by the way. That’s a whole other side conversation. What’s happened to our culture with photos, I just don’t understand it. I mean, do you ever just sit there and start looking through old photos?

**John:** No, I look through Instagram to look at other people’s photos.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** Photos are about what’s happening right now, not about history.

**Craig:** Right. So that’s also insane, by the way. So it’s all crazy. But when people are like we have to get a photo of ourselves I’m like, OK. Why? Are we going to – I mean, I’m becoming that guy who is like, fine, I’ll do it, but will this ever be looked at again? Why are we doing it? It’s so weird. Anyway.

**John:** Let’s do one last letter. This is from Mark who is actually Mike. So this is the guy who wrote in saying that he is moving to Los Angeles and wanted advice and people wrote in with advice. His real name is actually Mike. We changed it to Mark because we’ve sort of gotten in the habit of changing everyone’s names unless there’s a real reason to keep their real name because of all the assistant stuff we’ve been doing. We just don’t want to accidentally put people’s real names in things. But his name is actually Mike even though we called him Mark early on.

Craig, would you read this for us?

**Craig:** Yeah. This is his update. He says, “Thank you so much for airing my question about moving to LA. I’d also like to thank the listeners for their fantastic advice. I especially appreciate how widely the advice has ranged from esoteric to practical. Passion, enthusiasm, patience, and consistency will still with me for years. But don’t write at home and get a California driver’s license are going to be equally useful.

“Here’s my update. I landed yesterday after a hectic month of packing my Brooklyn apartment, quitting my job, and using up every last drop of healthcare I could squeeze out of my employer-sponsored plan.” Oh America. “It’s a huge relief to finally be here. All I’ve seen of the city so far has been the freeway from LAX and the two-block radius surrounding my North Hollywood apartment.” Ah, that’s where I was.

“And I can’t wait to get a car so I can continue to explore. I’m heading to a D&D game tonight.” What? This guy is amazing. “And I’m hoping to meet a bunch of fellow nerds and writers. Would it be possible for you to put me in contact with Eric from Episode 432? If he’s comfortable sharing his contact info with me I’d like to reach out regarding writer’s groups. Thanks again for your time and everything you do. I’m hoping to make it out to a live event soon. Best, Mike.”

Well that’s, I mean–

**John:** That’s lovely.

**Craig:** He sounds like us.

**John:** He does. So I did put him in contact with Eric. Eric wrote back and said, “Sure,” and so they are going to be talking about a writer’s group.

**Craig:** Three months later we’re going to be doing a How Would This Be a Movie. Eric has murdered Mike.

**John:** [laughs] Wouldn’t that be fantastic? So it’s really two outcomes. Either like the same way that Megan McDonnell was hired to write Captain Marvel 2, it could be that Mike was hired to write another Marvel movie, or he killed Eric.

**Craig:** Or Mike and Eric met and fell in love. And then just started doing crimes like–

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Just like Bonnie & Clyde. Listen, there’s a lot that we can do with this.

**John:** It’s a ripe story area.

**Craig:** We really got to see how this turns out. This is exciting.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a Reddit thread called r/imsorryjon. It is told from the perspective of Garfield, sort of. Basically it’s a re-imagination of Garfield in which Garfield is a Lovecraftian monster who kills and possessed Jon Arbuckle and does horrible, horrible things. It is a dark, disturbing thread to go down. And I just greatly enjoyed it. I just love appropriation of cultural elements and twisting them into wild shapes.

I particularly like this idea that Garfield is sort of one of those lantern fish that sort of like lures people in. So I would just say if you want to see some disturbing Garfield imagery I would point you to this Reddit thread.

**Craig:** I mean, yeah, I do want to see that. How could I not want to see that? My One Cool Thing this week is a person. And I don’t know if you know him, John, but I certainly do very well. His name is Scott Silver. Scott is a screenwriter like you and I and Scott is nominated for the second time for an Academy Award. This time around it’s for co-writing Joker with Todd Phillips. He was also nominated for 8 Mile.

And I just want to call him out because I think a lot of times what ends up happening, especially when you’re writing with a director is that suddenly the other writer kind of starts to disappear a little bit for whatever reason.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And weirdly the reverse happens in television where I notice that suddenly – like Johan just started disappearing from things. And even sometimes people would say “Chernobyl director Craig Mazin” and I would have to be like, no, for the love of – let me right it and tell you why that’s not true.

But Scott has been doing fantastic work forever. He wrote and directed Johns. That was his first movie, which is a really cool movie. He wrote 8 Mile. And he also wrote The Fighter which is awesome. And now Joker. And so he’s had a very long, very productive career. And he’s a terrific guy and an excellent writer. And so I just thought, yeah, I’m going to give this guy a little extra love because, you know, a lot of times when this stuff is going on you can get easily overshadowed by the actors, and the directors, especially in features. And so my One Cool Thing this week is Scott Silver.

**John:** And also Scott is an east coast based writer as well I believe. Right? He’s not living in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yes. He lives in Manhattan.

**John:** Fantastic. So, again, you can run your career from wherever you choose to live. Easier in Los Angeles, but definitely doable in New York.

Stick around if you’re a Premium member because we will be discussing the Myers-Briggs personality index. But otherwise that’s the end of our show.

Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with production assistance this week by Stuart Friedel and Dustin [Box]. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Launch and Jim Bond. 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 like the ones we answered today.

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 transcripts. And a reminder, of course, sign up for Premium membership at Scriptnotes.net to get all the back episodes and our bonus segments. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** OK, Craig. When did you first hear about the Myers-Briggs type indicator?

**Craig:** Many, many years ago. It was I think literally when I met Melissa. Because–

**John:** So college?

**Craig:** College. Because her parents were super into it.

**John:** So for people who don’t understand what we’re talking about, it is an assessment, it’s a test, it’s a short three to five minute test you take where you answer a bunch of questions and then it scores you. This is back in the days of pencil and paper when I was doing this in college. It scores you and you get a four letter code that sort of indicates your personality type.

So there’s four criteria. There’s four sort of characteristics. And it comes out to be a grid of 16 personality types.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this is all based roughly on Jungian stuff. Jung, how will I say this as charitably as possible, was wrong about a billion things.

**John:** As was Freud.

**Craig:** Correct. But that’s the point. They were early. They were wrong the way that a lot of people thought the world was flat and yet they were brilliant. So, Aristotle did not know that the world was round, but he’s a pretty brilliant guy. So they were, you know, at the forefront of things. Did Aristotle not know that the world was round?

**John:** I don’t think he–

**Craig:** I don’t think he did.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well we’ll put that in the hopper for a later discussion. But so, you know, he had these theories, this kind of collective unconscious and these archetypes and these things that meant something to all of us. Regardless, out of that comes this fascinating way of analyzing personality. And unlike a lot of other ways of analyzing personality which basically come down to asking you are you a this kind of person or a that kind of person, Myers-Briggs uses like a quad-axis formula where there are four different scales. They are binary scales. You go this way or you go that way. So for instance you are extroverted or introverted. The words don’t always mean what they mean colloquially.

What’s fascinating about this is that they take the results of those four things and then analyze each combination. There are 16 in all. And out of the combinations of these things they make inferences which aren’t necessarily intuitive to what the individual parts of the collective four letter descriptor is. But for whatever reason when they look at it and combine those four things and assign this, OK, if you’re this, this, this, and this, you’re going to be this. It’s kind of right. It kind of works.

**John:** It’s kind of right but it’s also kind of right in the way that horoscopes are kind of right sometimes.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Or your astrological sign or a lot of other things that feel like this does apply to me as opposed to the other criteria. So, we’ll put a link to one of these tests so if people want to test for themselves to see what the score would be for their personality type. You told me that you came out as an ENTJ?

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah.

**John:** And so when I took this test in college I also came out as either an ENTJ or an INTJ. Anyone who knows me that I’ve become much more extroverted over time. So, that I became an E over time. When I took the test last night I came out as ENFP, which was different. But honestly I think I messaged you the actual scorecard I got. I was very close to the median on all of these things, and so it really was not a strong thing. Like answering one question slightly differently would have changed my score. So I think I probably am very similar to you on a lot of these things.

Judgment versus perception. I would perceive you to be strongly judgmental. That sounds negative and loaded, but you do tend to have very strong opinions on things.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it’s not in the Myers-Briggs model, judgment is not necessarily like I’m judge-y.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s rather – and neither is perception more like, oh, I notice lots of things. In the Myers-Briggs model judgment is basically about, well, frankly it’s related to what we were talking about in the main episode about scriptments. Judgment is really about planning, and being decisive, and you’re preference if you are more towards judgment is liking things to be a bit more clear-cut and decided. You don’t do well with a general sense of not knowing what’s going to happen. Uncertainty is not your friend.

Whereas people who are more towards the perception side of things, it’s a little easier for them to adapt to changing circumstances. They’re OK with a kind of I’m not really sure what I’m going to do next. I mean, really what it comes down to is are you the kind of writer that likes to know the next scene or are you not. And that’s kind of cool actually.

**John:** That does describe the difference between you and me. It’s that I am a little bit more on the seat of my pants. We should I think say that mental health professionals don’t use this test.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So it really is a thing that is interesting for lay people to do and explore. Have you ever tried to use anything like this for the characters that you’re writing?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nor have I. But I do feel like it’s the kind of thing where aspiring screenwriters might that that, oh, this will be a great insight. I suspect there are tools out there that will help you figure out the personality types for your characters. And I just do not think it would be a useful way to spend your time on thinking about your characters.

**Craig:** Not even remotely. Because ultimately what it is is there’s 16 of them. So what are we saying? There’s only 16 kinds of humans in the world? Not at all. It really is just a general sense of how you – the only useful aspect to this as far as I’m concerned, other than just vague curiosity, is that it might help you feel a little bit seen and a little bit normal. Because there’s a description of who you are and it’s kind of cast in the most positive light.

For instance, I think in our society we tend to view extroversion as a very positive thing. You’re a people person. Whereas introverts are a bit suspicious. They’re shy. And maybe they’re afraid. And what Myers-Briggs says is neither of those are two. Extroversion/introversion are simply defined as what energizes you more, being around people or not? And that’s a very positive way of thinking about who you are.

So that part is really helpful. And in that sense it’s fun to do.

Should you use this for writing? No. Should you go to those sites that are like if you’re this type you want to marry that type? No. [laughs] That’s nonsense. That’s all just nonsense.

That said, if you are with someone, as you and I are, not just by the way with our spouses but with each other, and you’re involved with people, and you’re–

**John:** You have relationships in work relationships, in friendships, everything.

**Craig:** Exactly. And you’re kind of curious why when you relate to a certain person there are some times where there are conflicts or confusions, doing this could actually give you a little bit of insight. And by insight really what I mean is understanding and empathy. You go, OK, they actually do see the things a bit differently.

So it’s easy to say, ugh, the problem with that person is they’re so rigid. They’re always just trying to quickly decide what we’re doing next. They’re not open-minded. And the other person could say, oh my god, that person literally doesn’t plan ahead or think of anything, they’re just improvising constantly and it’s just this mush. Well, those are negative ways of thinking about those things but there are positive ways of thinking about those things. And I think this helps you do that.

**John:** Yeah. And the degree to which those could be complementary traits for the other person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In terms of thinking about this with your characters, as I was going through the questions yesterday I would say that some of the questions are worth asking of the characters in your story. So, I would say I don’t think it’s a good idea to come out with what is the four-letter score for this character. But asking question about like does this person seek out parties and social interactions, or does this person want to sort of retreat and build up energy for themselves? Is this person quick to make a decision or want to gather everything in before making a decision? Those are useful metrics that could apply to some characters in your script. And especially if you’re looking at the protagonist in your script and how he or she works then you might decide, OK, you know what’s going to be great and frustrating for this character in this comedy that I’m writing is a person who is going to do the opposite. And that is probably a useful way of thinking about some of these traits in terms of the characters we’re writing.

**Craig:** Yes. It is a really good way to interrogate your own personality bias that may be getting imposed on your characters. Especially if people say all your characters sound the same. Well my guess is then they all sound like you. And so you have a way of thinking about things and suddenly all of your characters are. So taking a look at the ways other people think about things, not as deficits or failures but rather simply as differences might help you expand some things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For instance, one of the axes of the Myers-Briggs test is sensing versus intuition. By the way, their words are terrible.

**John:** I think they’re bad choices. Because it’s not like sensitive is more sensitive. It’s actually relating to does it have to have data or you’re going on gut feeling.

**Craig:** Yeah. They didn’t pick great words. But regardless, the sensing side of things are people that are rather detail-oriented. They’re somewhat literal and practical. They like to deal with concrete stuff. And the other side, the opposite on that axis is intuition. These are people who are more conceptual. They’re more abstract. They like to know what the overall theory or big picture is. They like to know what’s the point of this as opposed to how does it function. There’s an interesting dichotomy there.

**John:** I’m not sure it quite is a dichotomy though. That’s [unintelligible].

**Craig:** Right. It’s kind of an arbitrary thing that they’ve done. All of it is arbitrary, honestly. But it is a nice way to challenge yourself when you’re writing your characters to say, wait, if they’re all sounding the same is it because they’re all kind of super detail-oriented people? Where’s the person that gets frustrated with that and just wants to know why and how? Just big picture this for me, I’m a dreamer, I’m a conceiver, I’m an imaginer. Whatever it is. Just nice ways to get out of your own head. Weirdly I suppose the tool is designed to get into your own head. But I like to think of it as getting out of your head.

**John:** So, as I was doing research last night another sort of test that’s done in a similar way is called the Big Five personality traits. So OCEAN is the model they have on call. And those five characteristics are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m neuroticism. All of it.

**John:** Yes. 100%. And I bring it up just because in the traits that the Myers-Briggs is looking at, those aren’t the only meaningful traits that help define how we react in the world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I would say just if it’s helpful for you to look at it that way, great. But that’s not going to give you a complete picture of why someone does the things that they do.

**Craig:** No question. This is just I think more than anything it’s food for thought and a fun party trick to do when you’re – I mean, when I would sit and do this with Melissa’s family, half of the discussion was, “Wait, you say you’re a blah-blah-blah? No you’re not.” The other problem with this is that usually these tests are, well, they’re asking you a question and you’re answering it. But we don’t always know what we are.

**John:** 100%. And you’re imagining one scenario in which you remember, oh that’s right, I left that party early. But that other time where I stayed out till 4am. Wait, so how do I answer this?

**Craig:** Correct. Sometimes people also – they think that one way is better than another and so they answer that way.

**John:** Totally. My personality type is that I want to ace the test.

**Craig:** Well there you go. So then you’re starting to min-max this thing.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I think you do, min-maxing the Myers-Briggs. We’re nerds.

**John:** Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you John.

**John:** Bye.

* John will be part of the [Beyond Bars: Changing the Narrative on Criminal Justice](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/beyond-bars-changing-the-narrative-on-criminal-justice-tickets-91710373195) panel on February 26th
* Contact [brand@johnaugust.com](mailto:brand@johnaugust.com) for information on [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/) for students and educators
* [Outlines](https://screenwriting.io/what-does-an-outline-look-like/) and [treatments](https://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-treatment/) on screenwriting.io, and some examples in the [johnaugust.com library](https://johnaugust.com/library)
* Scriptnotes, episodes [436](https://johnaugust.com/2020/political-movies), [434](https://johnaugust.com/2020/ambition-and-anxiety), and [432](https://johnaugust.com/2020/learning-from-movies)
* Reddit’s [r/imsorryjon](https://www.reddit.com/r/imsorryjon/top/?t=all)
* Scott Silver on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0798788/?ref_=tt_ov_wr) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Silver)
* The [Myers–Briggs Type Indicator on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator) and an [online test](https://www.16personalities.com/)
* The [Big Five personality traits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/437standard.mp3).