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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/holiday-live-show-2019).

**John August:** Today’s episode of Scriptnotes contains some explicit language. Also, for this live show we have three guests, one of whom uses sign language. So you’ll be hearing the voice of her interpreter. It will make sense in context, I promise. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** And my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is the Holiday Live Show 2019 for Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, tell the listeners at home where we are.

**Craig:** We are currently recording live in Hollywood – I was about to say that, live in Hollywood – live in Hollywood at the LA Film School.

**John:** It’s nice. So we do this benefit every year for the Writers Guild Foundation which is a fantastic foundation which does a lot of great work throughout the year. A question though for the folks here in this audience. It’s a very packed house. Do we have any assistants in the house? Oh my god, look at all those hands going up. That’s really nice.

**Craig:** Why aren’t you at work?

**John:** So, we have heard from a ton of assistants over this last couple of months, and so it’s so great to see so many folks here.

A tiny bit of news happened this past week. Verve, the agency, stepped up and decided to pay its assistants more, which is great. We are always happy to congratulate the folks who are doing better, so we don’t have to chastise the folks who are doing worse.

**Craig:** Yes. Although, well, I actually love that.

**John:** Because they’re not a bad guy.

**Craig:** I feel like that’s not the last.

**John:** I hope it’s not the last.

**Craig:** Of the important organizations that employ assistants.

**John:** Absolutely. So, hopefully we’ll be also applauding the second, the third, the fourth, and the 15th places that do step up and start paying assistants better. It’s certainly a goal for 2020.

**Craig:** And then we collect a little piece, just a little taste. Whatever your increase is, just, you know.

**John:** Is that called a Vig? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** A little something.

**John:** A little something.

**Craig:** You know, wet my beak.

**John:** It works out. Now, Craig, while we’re talking numbers, I think it’s important at the end of the year for us to sort of review our numbers and really take a look at where we’re at and sort of where we’ve been and where we’re coming to. So let’s take a quick look at the numbers here.

**Craig:** Statistics.

**John:** Statistics. So Scriptnotes, where are we at in terms of the numbers? You’re the guy who crunches the numbers, so tell us.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, I’ve worked real hard on this. We are currently at 430 episodes of Scriptnotes.

**John:** Nice. That’s good.

**Craig:** Yes. For which I have been paid zero dollars.

**John:** Not a cent.

**Craig:** We have every week an average of 80,000 listeners.

**John:** 80,000 listeners across the world.

**Craig:** 80,000.

**John:** We have listeners here from Germany, which is awesome.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Our staff is you, it’s me, it’s Megana, our producer, and it’s Matthew our editor.

**John:** Yeah, that’s good. Every week that’s what we get it done with, four people.

**Craig:** Although I do notice a former staff person here.

**John:** Aw, Stuart Friedel is here.

**Craig:** Stuart. You know, we used to talk about the Stuart Special, but it’s our Special Stuart.

Every week we receive on average 103 emails.

**John:** That’s a lot of emails. Megana is reading a lot of emails. So thank you for sending in–

**Craig:** 99 of them are stupid, but man, those four. Whew.

**John:** Some of them are good emails.

**Craig:** We get some winners. And, of course, we continue to provide transcripts for every single episode.

**John:** Every single episode. So transcripts are a way for people who can’t listen to the show to experience the show. Also it lets me Google to see how often we’ve mentioned Kevin Feige on the show, which is a ton.

**Craig:** Yeah. Weirdly. Mostly critical, so we’ll get into it.

**John:** Yeah. Now.

**Craig:** Because I want to commit career suicide.

**John:** That’s a good idea. All right, so last year at this show we were talking – the big thing was about all the mergers, so we had Disney and 20th Century Fox was merging. That was a big, god, remember that?

**Craig:** I do. For sure. That was crazy.

**John:** That happened. We had Comcast and AT&T.

**Craig:** Wait, I thought AT&T was Warner Bros?

**John:** Oh, I did make that wrong. Somebody else was buying out – it’s so confusing.

**Craig:** That’s Warner Bros.

**John:** Who owns who now?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** That’s the thing. We don’t know who owns who.

**Craig:** I’m pretty sure that that Death Star owns Bugs Bunny.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** So I got a little freaked out this show last year because I was worried like should we merge with somebody, because we could just be swallowed. So I was thinking we could merge with Pod Save America. I mean, that feels like a good, safe choice.

**Craig:** It’s a good show.

**John:** S-Town. S-Town is really popular. I mean, like there’s some problems with it, but it’s a popular show.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And then Dirty John. Really the serial killer thing.

**Craig:** Dirty John.

**John:** Yes. I could be a serial killer.

**Craig:** It’s the partner of Sexy Craig. Dirty John.

**John:** So ultimately though you convinced me. Craig, what did you convince me?

**Craig:** That we should stay indie, man. Because my indie cred is crazy. Yeah.

**John:** So this is to announce we’re not merging with anybody. We’re staying the same way we’ve always stayed.

**Craig:** Which is free.

**John:** Free.

**Craig:** With no ads. It’s sad that I have to look at this to tell you I’ve done 430 of these. We come out every Tuesday as you know.

Now, only the most recent 20 episodes are available freely to everyone. And generally speaking we didn’t do a lot of bonus stuff.

**John:** We didn’t. So we do have a premium feed. For the last couple of years we had a premium feed. And the premium feed has all the back episodes. It has bonus episodes. It requires a really janky app.

**Craig:** That app was jank. It was called jank.app.

**John:** So frustrating. At least like 45 of those 100 emails are about the app. And it’s confusing. Signing up for it was confusing. So we asked our listeners what would be better. And they said anything would be better. And so we’re making some changes here.

**Craig:** We like clear feedback, it’s our favorite feedback.

**John:** So people wanted things to be simple. People wanted to use their own player rather than the janky player. They wanted more bonus stuff. And they wanted all the back episodes.

**Craig:** I know what, let’s use Patreon.

**John:** We talked about Patreon, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** No, we didn’t do it.

**John:** So, here’s the problem. Patreon is simple, kind of.

**Craig:** Just like me.

**John:** You use your player. Great.

**Craig:** Just like me.

**John:** More bonus stuff.

**Craig:** Just like me.

**John:** The problem is we couldn’t get all the back episodes in Patreon.

**Craig:** Also just like me.

**John:** There was no way to do it. So, we ended up going with the folks who do Slate. So we partnered up with them. They didn’t buy us out, though. We’re still indie.

**Craig:** Indie, man.

**John:** Indie, man.

**Craig:** No sellouts here.

**John:** But this is Scriptnotes Premium. Scriptnotes Premium is now the thing. Simple. You can use your own player, whatever you use to listen to normal Scriptnotes in. Listen to it in this. More bonus stuff. And all the back episodes.

**Craig:** Now, as you know, I’m not great with this. So let’s say I have a way I like to listen to podcasts. First of all, let’s imagine I listen to podcasts.

**John:** Yeah, Craig who hosts like multiple award-winning podcasts.

**Craig:** I host them, but listening is–

**John:** I know.

**Craig:** So, let’s say I have my favorite app. But now there’s the thing. How do I get it to go to my favorite app?

**John:** OK. Three steps. First step, you join. You go to Scriptnotes.net. You put in your email address and your credit card. That’s it. There’s no password. There’s no username. Just those two things.

**Craig:** This is where the money comes to me?

**John:** You click subscribe. Then you can subscribe to the Scriptnotes Premium feed, any of the back episodes. We broke it down by seasons so you don’t have to download everything at once. Finally you just listen to it in whatever app you like to use.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That’s pretty cool.

**Craig:** That is pretty good.

**John:** Craig, you get confused sometimes about sort of how stuff works.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We made stuff even simpler. So you just put in your phone number and it will send you a link to how you actually install it in the app. So it’s pretty–

**Craig:** So then I just tell it what I want it to–

**John:** You don’t have to use Siri at all.

**Craig:** I text back, “I use this.” So I’m talking to a robot.

**John:** You tap a link. Can you tap a link?

**Craig:** I talk to a robot all the time.

**John:** Ha, you do. You tap a link. You tell it which app to install it in. It’s installed and it’s there.

**Craig:** This is fantastic.

**John:** And you subscribe.

**Craig:** Even I can do that.

**John:** So you get all the back episodes. All the new episodes. We’re going to do some bonus stuff, too. Craig, talk us through some bonus stuff that we might end up doing.

**Craig:** Well you know we like to do a deep dive every now and then on a classic film.

**John:** Absolutely. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Little Mermaid.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** What should we do first?

**Craig:** I’m thinking Die Hard.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think Die Hard should be the first episode we do. Let’s have it come out on Christmas.

**Craig:** Let’s. Shall we? Because it is a Christmas movie.

**John:** A couple other things. Scriptnotes comes out every Tuesday. Honestly, Megana gets it done on Monday. You get the episodes on Monday afternoon when she’s done.

**Craig:** That Megana.

**John:** And we’ll also try to do things like advance tickets for shows like this. Because we now have your email address, which we never had your email address before, which was weird. So that is the–

**Craig:** To recap, if I may. Nothing is changing about the classic Scriptnotes that theoretically you love.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Scriptnotes Premium does not require that weird, janky app anymore.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Huzzah. And there’s a bunch of new stuff, including early episodes and bonus segments. So that’s pretty great. And you can literally subscribe now to it, although again I just want to make it clear I get none of the money.

**John:** No, Craig will still get nothing.

**Craig:** None of it.

**John:** This money will pay for Matthew. It will pay for Megana. And honestly we probably need to hire somebody new because it’s just been a lot. So it will help us pay for–

**Craig:** The emails alone.

**John:** The emails on assistant stuff alone has been crushing. So, this is Scriptnotes.net. You can sign up for it on your phone right now. But no one in this room should do that because we are going to draw one ticket and that person is going to get a free lifetime subscription to Scriptnotes Premium.

**Craig:** Lifetime.

**John:** Craig, that box is right behind you.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Take a seat and draw one of those cards.

**Craig:** The price will go up yearly. So, ultimately this will be worth millions of dollars.

**John:** Now, technically I should say that this has no cash value. I think it’s something about a raffle, you’re not supposed to say–

**Craig:** I said a million dollars.

**John:** A million dollars.

**Craig:** It has absolutely no value. That’s a weird thing to say. We’re raffling off something that is absolutely valueless.

**John:** Worthless. Last four digits maybe?

**Craig:** Last four? Got your tickets out? 3-2–

**John:** Yeah, people sweating there.

**Craig:** You guys are going to walk out and leave. Raise your hand if you’ve got 3-2. Who has got 3 and 2 so far. Oh god, we’ve got to winnow this down. 7. I know. Who do we have left now?

**John:** Stuart Friedel has his hand up. If Stuart Friedel wins we’re drawing again.

**Craig:** Really? We so are. Stuart, with your fingers what do you have? You lost. Again. 1. Yes.

**John:** Sir, what is your name? James. After the show find me or find Megana and we will sign you up. All right. Hooray. That is the introduction of all this.

Now it is time for our actual show. We are so excited with our guests. We’ve had amazing guests in previous episodes. I’m sort of especially excited by this group of people we have. We have acclaimed writer-directors. We have acclaimed writer-actors. We have a person who created a whole cinematic universe. This is going to be good.

Our first guest is Lorene Scafaria. She is an actress, writer, producer, and director, best known for Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, The Meddler, and most recently for writing and directing Hustlers starring Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu, and Julia Styles. Welcome back to the program Lorene.

**Lorene Scafaria:** Thank you so much. Appreciate it. This is very nice and overwhelming.

**John:** Overwhelming in a person who has had a movie that has played everywhere that has gotten huge acclaim.

**Lorene:** Yes.

**Craig:** Still overwhelming?

**Lorene:** Yes. You guys are going to use big words and I’m not going to understand half of them.

**Craig:** We won’t be sesquipedalian I promise. Oh my god, I’m so sorry.

**John:** Lorene, I’m going to take a chance here.

**Lorene:** Oh god.

**John:** So April 2018 I was in the backyard of Dana Fox’s house. There was a benefit dinner thing. And I was talking with you about a movie that had just fallen apart. Was that this movie?

**Lorene:** Yes.

**John:** This is Hustlers. It had just fallen apart. You were really frustrated and heartbroken and I felt so bad for you. And now I’m so happy.

**Lorene:** That’s very nice.

**John:** That it got back together again.

**Lorene:** Yeah, thank you.

**John:** So Hustlers is an amazing achievement. On the show often we talk about How Would This Be a Movie. And this is something that’s based on and inspired by an article. Can you talk us through the How Would This Be a Movie for you? What was it about this story that was the first impetus of like, oh, I see how this could be two hours of amazing entertainment? What was the click for you?

**Lorene:** I mean, it was an incredible story. It was really compelling. I read the article that it was based on in the summer of 2016. And it just felt like a world that we haven’t really seen through a certain group’s eyes. We haven’t really followed dancers in a strip club in this way before. So, I was really just taken in by the world and the story and these characters who I think are often misunderstood.

And then there was a crime drama. And a friendship story. And it touched on so many themes I was really excited to talk about. Gender as it relates to the economy and women under capitalism. And all that good stuff.

**Craig:** And when you’re going through that article, the article is just facts. I mean, they create a bit of a narrative but mostly it’s facts. Do you instinctively start to go I’m going to use that, I’m going to use that. That I can’t use. This I got to change. How fast does that happen, that engagement as a writer?

**Lorene:** I would actually look back at the article every now and then just to see if I could read between the lines, if I missed something. You certainly have to embellish a lot. Have to add a lot. It’s obviously creating scenes and dialogue. But that central relationship between the two characters, in real life I think they were more like business partners and it didn’t run that deep, and it wasn’t that mentor/mentee dynamic.

**Craig:** Mother/daughter kind of.

**Lorene:** Yeah, mother/daughter. Whatever kind of love story that is being told. So, yeah, there’d be a sentence that would talk about Christmas. And I would think I can’t wait to see what Christmas looks like for these women. And then my own research, obviously, talking to strippers. Going to clubs. And speaking to people. That all informed a lot. But, yeah, it always felt like the crash, the financial crisis was kind of the end of act one and where to go from there. There is a rise and fall story. There are a couple different timelines. It jumps around. And it’s kind of a reflective story that Constance Wu’s character is telling to this journalist played by Julia Styles. So, there’s some back and forth there. And that was in my original pitch actually for how I would adapt the article.

**John:** Talk us through that original pitch. So is this an article that you found or someone came to you?

**Lorene:** No, it was sent to me by the producers, by Gloria Sanchez and Annapurna who was the studio at the time that was making the film. And they sent it to me. It was certainly not my job yet. And they wanted to know what my take was and how I would adapt it to the screen. So I went in for that meeting and, yeah, gave them my whole pitch and talked about why I thought it was an event movie at the end of the day, even though I thought there was a really nuanced conversation to be had and a very specific way to kind of see their world it felt like at the end of the day. You know, we were going to bring the club to the theater.

**John:** So in that original pitch how closely does that resemble the movie that we saw? So in terms of its central protagonist/antagonist relationship between the Jennifer Lopez character and the Constance Wu character, and in terms of the flashback structure. Did you have all of that when you walked into that room with those producers?

**Lorene:** I had a lot of it. I mean, I look back at my old notes and we stayed pretty true to what I originally set out to do, so that was certainly nice to realize with a large group of people. So, yeah, it was pretty similar. I knew that the journalist was a really compelling, important part of it, not just a device, but a very integral part of the relationship and the dynamic and the judgment that the audience sort of imposes on these women. There was a lot of that in there. And certainly a tone that I think that the tone was what was shifting a little bit. I think the concentration on that central relationship, that love story between them, that changed a lot.

There was an unreliable narrator in the article that I kind of hung onto for a little too long that no longer felt important at some point. So that was different.

It felt more like a story being told by these two different characters. And it was kind of pitting them against each other in a way. So I did a million drafts. The movie fell apart. We lost a home. We brought the script around town to everybody who hated it. [laughs]

**Craig:** Hollywood. Always with their finger on the pulse of America.

**Lorene:** Well, I think maybe a lot of them identified with other characters in the movie.

**Craig:** Huh. Do you mean Lizzo?

**Lorene:** Yes. That’s exactly.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Lorene:** So, yeah, it took a minute to find the right home and we were certainly questioning a lot. I kind of did this page one rewrite after we found this new home and kind of just smashed the script on the ground and opened up at title page and changed it to Destiny and Ramona, the two main characters. And then wrote this love story, this relationship. And, yeah, it was different. A lot of scenes came out of it. The training sequence that’s there. The sort of dynamic between them. That came out of it, that mother/daughter relationship.

But it ultimately wasn’t the right movie, so had to kind of smash it on the ground again and start from scratch.

**Craig:** And you get it to a place where you feel like you got it right. You do have a home. They have given you the funding. You have this great cast. And now I’m always fascinated by writer-directors, how did director Lorene handle her relationship with writer Lorene on a day-to-day basis?

**Lorene:** I did refer to the writer often as—

**Craig:** An asshole?

**Lorene:** An asshole. Yeah, painted us into a lot of corners. And wrote really something too ambitious. It was a $20 million budget which sounds like a lot but it’s not. It grew.

**John:** Oh. For listeners at home she was pointing at Kevin Feige at that moment.

**Craig:** Kevin earlier asked me if the budget for this was $20 million. So he has no sense whatsoever. None.

**Lorene:** And shooting in New York for what it was, so we had a seven-week prep, a 29-day shoot, and an eight-week director’s cut. It was all pretty brutal. Don’t recommend it.

**Craig:** That’s actually a great way to think of it. On any given day you had a plan. And when your writing your plan is perfect. That’s my perfect plan. And now you’re short on money, you’re short on time, you’re dealing with weather I assume occasionally here and there.

**Lorene:** Yeah. Actually out of those 29 days it rained 26 days.

**Craig:** Of course it did.

**Lorene:** Because it was April.

**Craig:** Yeah. So on those days how do you adjust without losing maybe the heart of what it was that you needed to do that day for that moment between those characters?

**Lorene:** I mean, it was certainly a race every single day to finish it, but those fights happened in prep. The cast wasn’t fully on board other than Jennifer and Constance before we got there. So that whole journey I remember there were days where they said like, “Well you don’t need to shoot anything on Wall Street.” And I was like I don’t know about that. I think that’s actually a pretty major part of this, something that we really need to see. So you make compromises here and there. But I think part of it was to go in with a really strong plan and to shot list everything. And to sort of continue to make the arguments that we wouldn’t need much in order to achieve this. We need these locations. We need this amount of hair, makeup, and wardrobe. We need to create a period piece. We need to capture the authenticity of this place. We need a real strip club. We need 300 extras.

**Craig:** Extras are surprisingly expensive.

**Lorene:** They’re really expensive.

**Craig:** Bob Weinstein, true story, once looked at a tent full of extras and then turned to me and said, “Do we pay them?”

**John:** No, Craig, they’re just there for the fun of it.

**Craig:** No, they’re slaves, Bob. Sicko.

**Lorene:** I’m sure they were.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re expensive.

**Lorene:** They are. They are. And, I mean, yeah, dressing them is expensive. And dressing them in 2007 clothes requires its own truck. And that truck costs money.

**Craig:** You could have just come to my closet. That’s what I’m in right now.

**Lorene:** Well that was just it. Eventually we kind of had to ask these guys to bring your own bad shirts.

**Craig:** No problem.

**John:** Now, Lorene because you’re here I get to ask you a question that struck me the moment I saw your film. Which is the moment that Constance Wu comes up on the roof and she sees Jennifer Lopez there in the fur coat is iconic. As you were filming it did you know this is the movie? This is the moment when people will gasp and recognize I’m in the hands of a master.

**Lorene:** Yes.

**John:** You knew it at that moment? You knew as you were shooting it?

**Lorene:** Yeah, Jennifer Lopez is in that outfit underneath that coat sitting on that rooftop.

**John:** To stipulate it’s absurd and absolutely marvelous. It’s such an iconic thing.

**Lorene:** Oh that’s nice. I mean, I say yes, obviously, just because we were in the throes of it and it was so exciting to finally get there. It was the first scene that I wrote in the whole script. I think the last thing we shot. Or second to last thing we shot. So they had already come full circle their relationship. They were so close by then so there was just that magic in the air. But, you know, a lot of thought went into it because I had thought this was the scene. This was the crux of the whole movie. The moment that Jennifer invites Constance into her fur coat. That really is the moment that everybody’s lives is changing.

So, yeah, it felt really, really important. The rooftop felt important. We built that sky light. That fur coat was a journey to find and to convince people that it was something that we needed. You know, just making sure they sat in the right position. I remember there was a moment where they were sitting next to each other and I was like crumbling inside going like, no, it’s not what I was imagining all this time. So, you know, we just found that rhythm. And, yeah, it felt magical.

Honestly, when she reclined with the cigarette that was not something that I had fully envisioned. That was something that just happened in that moment and I thought, yes, we need to cut to this. We need to – when we found that in the edit we first played it for people, it was this laugh out loud moment. And sometimes an applause break.

**John:** Oh yeah. In my theater people did applaud. That’s magic.

**Lorene:** That’s wild. That’s, obviously, but I credit Jennifer Lopez with half of that certainly.

**Craig:** And I’m going to bring up something from your past slightly.

**Lorene:** You guys.

**Craig:** No, but it’s – years ago when they would talk to you, they meaning the press, there was probably something that would come up a lot. Do you remember a name? A special kind of name that would come up frequently? Fempire. Do you remember the Fempire?

**Lorene:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** Back in the day female screenwriters were so rare that they had to give you a special name, like Seal Team 6. And it seems like without saying that we are where we should be, as one of the women that was there in the beginning for me, you know, where I was beginning you were beginning, how do you think it’s going in terms of progress? Bad, good, steady?

**Lorene:** Oh, it’s definitely not steady. I think it’s good and I think it’s muddy. And I think it’s like soup that we’re all kind of sitting in right now and trying to figure it out. So, I don’t know. I think a lot has improved. Obviously the last few years have shed light on a lot of bad behavior and we’ve rooted out some of that. But I think there’s work to do at the root, you know. I think there’s something to just speak to and have nuanced conversations about what the root cause is of all of this and how much of this is unconscious. And not just the broader strokes and the numbers which are important to speak to. But I think also there’s something about female stories and viewing them cinematically. And what does that mean? So there’s something to talk about, the percentage of female directors and all of that, but I don’t know. It’s like I want to get into it a little bit and get a little more nuanced about it. And not just that kind of black and white story.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** All right. It is time for a game.

**Lorene:** Oh, good.

**John:** We are going to read you a list of award shows. You need to tell us if it’s a real award show or if it’s a fake one that I made up.

**Lorene:** I’m so happy about this.

**John:** Now, here’s the twist. Several of these you’ve been nominated for.

**Lorene:** Oh, that’s torture.

**Craig:** So don’t screw those up.

**Lorene:** That’s bad.

**John:** We’ll start with the Gotham Award. Real or fake?

**Lorene:** That was real. I was really there.

**John:** Yeah, Hustlers was nominated. Marriage Story won. Chernobyl lost.

**Craig:** Lost. I like that she got nominated and I got lost. It was the same thing.

**Lorene:** I didn’t win. You lost. I just didn’t win.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I lost hard. Viewfinder Award.

**Lorene:** Fake.

**Craig:** Fake. It’s so fake.

**John:** The Hollywood Film Award.

**Lorene:** That sounds real.

**John:** It is real. Kevin Feige and Victoria Alonzo won this year for Avengers: End Game.

**Lorene:** Hey, congrats. That’s awesome.

**Craig:** How about National Film and TV Award?

**Lorene:** You know what? This, I’m not kidding, I am so confused because I saw one tweet, only one, that said Jennifer Lopez won.

**John:** You’re right.

**Craig:** She did.

**John:** It is from the UK and she did win.

**Craig:** It’s real.

**Lorene:** OK. But I only saw one tweet so I was like this could be someone just playing a trick on all of us.

**Craig:** That’s a pretty generic name for an award, I got to say.

**John:** Hollywood Critics Association Award.

**Lorene:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. You are nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Female Director.

**Lorene:** Oh, thank you guys so much.

**Craig:** Houston Online Film Critics Association Award?

**Lorene:** Yes.

**Craig:** No.

**Lorene:** Oh.

**Craig:** No, there is no online critics association.

**John:** They merged them. So it’s all one critics association, online and print in Houston.

**Lorene:** What do you mean? Now what is it?

**Craig:** It’s just Houston.

**Lorene:** Houston. Just the city of Houston.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** The Golden Globes.

**Lorene:** Oh, I am wracking my brain. They are very real.

**Craig:** Deeply real.

**John:** Jennifer Lopez is nominated. Craig is nominated, Chernobyl for four Golden Globes.

**Lorene:** Oh my gosh. Craig! That’s amazing. Four.

**Craig:** Well. Golly. The Rose Door? The Golden Rose?

**Lorene:** Why are there are two names.

**John:** It’s French.

**Craig:** I’m just translating it for you. The Rose D’Or. D’Or. Door. The Golden Rose.

**Lorene:** I mean, it sounds real just because of all this fanfare. But I’m going to say no.

**Craig:** It’s absolutely real. Chernobyl won two of them.

**Lorene:** Congrats.

**Craig:** I got two Golden Roses, my friend. I’m a double-roser.

**John:** The Satellite Award.

**Lorene:** That’s real. And that was the only thing I’ve ever been nominated for before Hustlers.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Nice.

**Lorene:** We got one of those somewhere.

**Craig:** OK. The Palm Dog Award. Palm Dog.

**Lorene:** No. No, no, no.

**Craig:** It’s real.

**Lorene:** No.

**Craig:** Yes it is. It’s a yearly alternative award presented by the international film critics during the Cannes Film Festival. And this year it went to Sayuri for her performance as Brandy in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

**Lorene:** So it’s for dogs?

**John:** It’s an award for dogs.

**Craig:** It’s for dogs.

**Lorene:** We had a great dog in Hustlers.

**Craig:** Not great enough.

**John:** Something to shoot for, Lorene. Something to shoot for.

**Lorene:** You have no idea.

**Craig:** Step your shit up, Lorene.

**John:** Lorene, the Annie Award?

**Lorene:** Real.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Animation.

**Craig:** Animation. AARP Grownups in Film Award.

**John:** That’s AARP.

**Craig:** I say AARP.

**Lorene:** Hell yeah. It’s real.

**Craig:** It’s totally real. Jennifer Lopez nominated for an AARP award, which should be pronounced the R-P.

**John:** The Spotlight Award?

**Lorene:** Yes.

**John:** Yes, real. Jennifer Lopez won for Hustlers. Palm Springs International Film Festival.

**Lorene:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** The Dorian Awards.

**Lorene:** I mean, that can’t be real.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** Location Managers Guild Awards.

**Lorene:** No, no, no.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Chernobyl won.

**Craig:** Yeah, we won.

**Lorene:** Really?

**John:** They did.

**Craig:** Our awesome location manager, Jonas Spokas. Great job, Jonas.

**Lorene:** Wow. I might have to boycott, because we had a great, great–

**Craig:** Not great enough. Saturn Awards?

**Lorene:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. Of course.

**John:** Aladdin was nominated for a Saturn Award.

**Craig:** Well done Aladdin.

**John:** Finally, the last one here. The BRAs.

**Lorene:** It’s real.

**John:** It is real. It is the Black Real Awards. An annual awards ceremony hosted by the Federation for Augmentation of African Americans in Film. Hustlers is nominated.

**Craig:** You got a BRA.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Lorene:** I didn’t know that. I got a BRA.

**Craig:** You got a BRA nom.

**John:** Lorene Scafaria, congratulations on your film. Congratulations on all the nominations and the awards.

**Lorene:** Thank you. It’s been nice.

**John:** I’m so, so happy for the journey that’s come from that backyard at Dana Fox’s house. I’m so happy your movie is out there in the world. It’s so damn good. Lorene Scafaria.

**Lorene:** Thank you. That’s very nice.

**John:** Craig, introduce our next guest.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m so excited. I was lucky enough to meet Shoshannah. We were doing a panel at the Television Academy, a place that up until recently would have had me removed by security. Shoshannah is fantastic. She is an actress and a writer, known for her roles in Jericho, Weeds, The Hammer, and Supernatural. You left off my favorite, Another Period. Spectacular on that show.

She currently stars in This Close, a dramedy series about two deaf best friends navigating their 20s in Los Angeles. Shoshannah co-created the show with her actual best friend and fellow deaf writer-actor Josh Feldman. Spectacular work. Shoshannah Stern, come on up.

**Shoshannah Stern:** I’m disappointed that you have the mic because I want to make – drop the mic. I never actually used a microphone in my whole life, so I wanted to drop it once.

**Craig:** It turns out they’re expensive actually.

**Shoshannah:** I’m sure it is.

**John:** Shoshannah, a thing Craig and I were talking about this afternoon, your show is fantastic. And impossible to watch.

**Craig:** Not because it’s hard, because you can’t find it.

**Shoshannah:** Mm-hmm. Yep.

**John:** So your show is made for Sundance Channel, but it’s hard to find on that. Sometimes you find it on YouTube. Is it frustrating to have made something–?

**Shoshannah:** It’s on YouTube?

**John:** Sometimes.

**Shoshannah:** I mean, I hope it is. I hope it is.

**Craig:** It is not.

**John:** So my question, so many of us are making shows for streamers, for other places, and I’m so happy they made your show, but it’s frustrating that you don’t know if someone is going to be able to watch your show. As you’re writing this, as you’re putting it together is that a worry for you?

**Shoshannah:** It was. I think I’ve made my peace with it, so there’s only so much you can really do – that’s really in your control. And I think it’s like as a woman and as a deaf person creating a show, you know, we’re just reminded that there is no precedent for it. And you sort of have to prioritize what you have to worry about and sometimes you can’t because you just kill yourself over it. So, one of the things that I, you know, unfortunately yes it’s impossible to find the show. But the reason why that happened is because we actually made it for Sundance Now, which is a streaming service for AMC. And then we re-aired it, the first season on Sundance TV while we were shooting season two. I guess we just showed up and we were shooting it and they said your show is doing better than anything. So, we’re like, great, all right. So they were like we’re taking it. And I said, oh, OK, cool, great.

And I thought it would be cool because then I thought people would be able to find the show by just clicking, flipping through their channels, and they might happen across it, and they would find it. Because on Sundance Now you had to buy it, you had to purchase it, in order to find that show.

So, apparently it is now just impossible to find.

**Craig:** It’s very upsetting to me because I – so you said, “You got to watch my show.” And I said, you’re right, I do have to watch your show. And there’s one episode of the new season that’s available online for free. And so I watched it and I was like this is a great show. I mean, I legitimately got into it immediately and I want to watch the rest of it. So, I kind of did ask you to bring me a USB of bootlegged episodes of the show.

**Shoshannah:** You said that like I know how to do that.

**Craig:** I know.

**Shoshannah:** Biggest Luddite ever.

**John:** A question for you. So we were talking with Lorene about how she was pitching Hustlers. What was the pitch for This Close? When you were describing the show to people how were you describing it?

**Shoshannah:** We kind of had to pitch it three times, but in three different iterations. First of all, the idea with my writing partner Josh was about a deaf woman and her hearing gay best friend. And I think I was just so conditioned to seeing a deaf person on screen with a hearing person, a hearing scene partner, a hearing foil, really. You had to have a hearing foil. A deaf person always had to have in order to explain this is my life and it’s different than yours. So really that was what we were used to seeing on the screen.

So we pitched the show that way. And with one production it seemed like it was going pretty well, better than it had in the past. And then finally at the 11th hour they came to us and said, “You know, it’s a great show but we don’t really get why your character has to be deaf. Does she have to be deaf?” And I was like, well really I tried to explain the rationale and I couldn’t tell them. I needed to show it to them. So, I was like, OK, fine, cool. That’s where we’re at.

And we decided just to do it ourselves. It was in that hour that we made a decision over happy hour. We were just like we should just do it ourselves. So we decided to do that. And then just like why don’t we just go balls to the walls and make both of the characters deaf. Because we felt at that point like no one is going to do it anyway. So Josh said to me, “But who is going to play Michael if we do that?” And I just looked at him like, um, and he gave me an expression like, o……kay. And I looked at him and said, ah-ha, that’s who is going to play it.

**John:** Now, Shoshannah you are an actor. You’ve been acting for years. But Josh was not an actor. He was just a writer. And so he does great on the show. And you guys have a wonderful chemistry. Did you know it was going to work from that initial moment? Was there any fear whether the two of you together could work onscreen?

**Shoshannah:** No. I didn’t know. We were just drunk.

**John:** All right. That’s perfect.

**Shoshannah:** I think I just knew that if the show were going to work that it would have that chemistry. And I just felt like we needed to see two deaf people on the screen and if we’re going to have two deaf people and at the heart of show it’s about a friendship and my friend is sitting right here across from me at happy hour. So yeah.

**Craig:** That story kind of mirrors I think in a way the tone of the episode that I watched. The only episode that is available.

**John:** I watched the first season.

**Shoshannah:** Because it’s impossible to watch. Yes, I am aware of that.

**Craig:** Correct. We will keep re-traumatizing you about that.

**Shoshannah:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** No problem. But the show does a beautiful job of tone shifting. It is funny and it is also very, I don’t want to say serious, it’s earnest at times in the sense that it’s real. It’s not a sitcom but it has no problem with somebody fainting and dropping out of screen, which is hysterical in that particular moment because it’s set up beautifully. So, I’m just curious how you guys maneuver that – it’s a very difficult thread to maneuver. You don’t get too broad. You don’t get too sugary. You find this interesting way to move back and forth without feeling like the tone is jarring and the shifts are jarring.

**Shoshannah:** Mm-hmm. I don’t know.

**Craig:** You got drunk again?

**Shoshannah:** Well, yeah. Sure. That’s the answer. We’re drunk pretty much every day during filming. No. I think we just wanted to write things that felt real to us. And we also knew what we didn’t want to write. What we didn’t want to see. I think we knew more about what we didn’t want to show than what we did initially. We wanted to show characters that are centered, not have it be about them being deaf. I felt like that was my problem with the characters that I’d seen before on the screen. Characters that I’ve played to be honest. But the reason why I started writing with Josh is because I had an awful, awful audition and it’s hard to find truth in a character that’s written from somebody else’s perspective about what they think your life is. And you’re trying to find truth in something that’s actually not truthful. So, especially it’s hard when the character is written as a mantle, you know, to carry, you know, like Jesus. You know, Jesus you’re just carrying. I represent all deaf people in the world. It’s impossible.

You can’t write one female character that represents all of the women on the planet. And so there are characters that are underrepresented, misunderstood, and that often happens – it happens more often than we know. So we wanted to write situations that were messy. You know, that were in the gray areas. Deaf characters are messy, too.

**John:** Can I ask you about process? Because we’ve talked to other writing teams who write stuff together. What is the process with you and Josh? Are you in the same room together writing? Do you write an outline and split up? What is the process for you guys going through a script?

**Shoshannah:** Josh and I have a very odd process. You know, it’s sort of what the fuck are they thinking is the process. And that works for us. So we sit in a room and we outline it together. And once we have the outline we go off and we write our own version, each of us, of the script. On our own. Separately. Completely. A complete version. A to Z. And people are like, wait, a complete version on your own, separate from one another? Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s what we do.

So we go off and do that. And then we merge together again, which just means that one of us sits at the computer and the other person is breathing over their shoulder pretty much and says, oh, I like this line better than that line and we kind of merge our two versions together and we submit that. And we get 5,000 notes on it. And then we do it again.

**Craig:** Do you have some epic fights because, man, that sounds like it’s good fuel for arguing?

**Shoshannah:** You know what? Never.

**John:** That’s what a gay best friend will do.

**Shoshannah:** There you go.

**Craig:** It’s true.

**John:** Now, we have a game to play and we would love for the two of you to help us out with this game. So this is something that Craig actually introduced at the last show and Craig set us up.

**Craig:** OK. So this is a game that I originally – it was originally a puzzle that I included as part of a puzzle hunt that I did with David Kwong at the Magic Castle that you attended. And Lorene were you at that one? You were at the one before. Shoshannah, are you a big puzzle solver/crosswords? Oh, OK.

**John:** She’ll be good at this.

**Craig:** And we’re going to have you come to the next one then. So the idea here is – well each of us, we’ll all do this in turn, we read a movie quote and we have a contestant trying to figure out what the quote is.

**John:** We actually have two contestants. So we pre-drew the contestants. Can you come down here to this microphone and re-introduce yourself?

**Craig:** Come on down contestant one and two.

**John:** Hi Zoey. I remember you from before. I’m sorry I forgot your name.

**Zoey:** It’s OK.

**John:** Do you watch a lot of movies?

**Zoey:** I watch some.

**John:** You watch some movies. That’s probably all you need for this competition. And behind you is another person coming up to the microphone. So Lauren and Zoey. Here is what’s going to happen. We are going to read a quote aloud from a movie, except that Craig has–

**Craig:** I’ve basically just created literal versions of these quotes. You’ll get it from the start. Shoshannah is going to do number one because she said earlier that she liked it, so I’m going to let her do number one.

**John:** Fantastic. All right. So Shoshannah is going to give a quote and you need to figure out – so whichever one figures it out first raise your hand and then you’re going to say what the actual real quote is. All right.

**Craig:** OK. So you’re ready to do number one.

**John:** No one yell out in the audience.

**Shoshannah:** I am finished in a good way as a result of our relationship.

**John:** I am finished in a good way as a result of our relationship. Do either of you – Lauren or Zoey, can you name this famous movie quote?

**Female Voice:** I’m really bad at this.

**Craig:** You complete me.

**John:** You complete me. That is what we’re going for. You complete me, from Jerry Maguire.

**Craig:** You got it. This is going to be bad.

**John:** This is hard, Craig.

**Craig:** I mean, that was the easy one.

**Shoshannah:** We have to work together.

**John:** Craig, try the next one.

**Craig:** I’ll do the next one. Strike it from your memory, JJ, or whatever nickname you go by these days. This neighborhood is largely populated by immigrants from Asia’s largest nation.

**John:** Any – all right? Yes, Zoey.

**Zoey:** Forget about it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.

**Craig:** Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.

**John:** All right. One to nothing right now. We will say first to four.

**Craig:** Malodorous tokens of authority. None are in our possession, nor are they necessary. Therefore I’m not obligated to display them as such.

**John:** Do either of you know this?

**Craig:** Audience?

**John:** It’s the we don’t need any stinking badges.

**Craig:** The audience is pretty good. I got to say. All of them together are a little bit better than the two of you.

**Female Voice:** Yeah, this is embarrassing.

**John:** Lorene.

**Lorene:** OK. None of us came ashore on this famed Massachusetts boulder. Rather we were injured by the boulder metaphorically.

**John:** Well let’s try it one more time. Laughter was high.

**Lorene:** None of us came ashore on this famed Massachusetts boulder. Rather we were injured by the boulder metaphorically.

**Female Voice:** Just give it to the audience.

**Craig:** Audience. That’s your Malcolm X right there. OK, Shoshannah do you want to do number five?

**Shoshannah:** The primary directive of this melee association is that the existence thereof must be denied.

**Craig:** The primary directive of this melee association is that the existence thereof must be denied.

**John:** So melee – it’s a very D&D word.

**Craig:** Is it?

**John:** It is a very D&D word. It’s a melee round.

**Craig:** I think of it as a French word myself.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** It means fisticuffs. Nothing?

**Female Voice:** Sorry.

**Craig:** Audience?

**Audience:** First rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.

**Craig:** Again, the audience a little bit better than you guys, I got to say.

Female Voice: It’s pretty obvious afterwards. It’s like you’re standing up here, but then when they say it you’re like, yes, it makes sense. But they’re not standing.

**Craig:** We’re not accepting your excuses. No, no, no.

**John:** No, no, no. Zoey and Lauren, what you guys can’t see is I see a lot of people are like moving their mouths as if they’re talking with the crowd. They really didn’t know.

**Craig:** All right. How about this one. You got this one. They got this one. Ready? Don’t turn away.

**Female Voice:** I want to watch.

**Craig:** No, that’s called cheating. Look at me. Here we go. You’ve got this. Early salutations, country once known as French-Indochina. Early salutations country once known as French – oh, they’re just blatantly cheating now. Go ahead. Go ahead.

**John:** Go ahead. Say it.

**Female Voice:** Good morning, Vietnam.

**Craig:** Yes, good morning, Vietnam. Yes! Yes! I do love this one. Lorene, do you want to do number seven, or the next one?

**Lorene:** Explain your grave nature. Explain your grave nature.

**John:** I have the answers and I kind of don’t get this one.

**Craig:** It’s a hard one.

**Lorene:** Explain…

**Craig:** The speed with which you just gave up was remarkable. Audience? Why so serious? OK. Shoshannah, would you like to do this one?

**Shoshannah:** Man whose last name is synonymous with sharply defined, my condition is unwell.

**Craig:** Hmm. Man whose last name is synonymous with sharply defined, my condition is unwell.

**Female Voice:** Oh.

**John:** One person got it.

**Craig:** Audience? Yes, just you?

Female Voice: I don’t feel so good, Mr. Stark.

**Craig:** Yes, Mr. Stark I don’t feel so good. OK, you guys are dismissed. You did a great job.

**John:** Hey, hey, thank you very much for playing.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Craig, I think this was actually a really good moment for everyone in this room in defining sort of like what you’re like and what I’m like. Because you picked something that was wildly too difficult for this.

**Craig:** No, I’ll tell you what’s too difficult. It’s the bonus question.

**John:** All right. Bonus question. See if the audience can get the bonus question.

**Craig:** Audience, this is for all of you. And this is a TV quote. And I’ll help you out. It’s from a show currently on the air.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So I’ve limited it to 14,000 television shows.

**John:** Including This Close.

**Craig:** Weirdly that one is not, because we can’t find it. OK.

**Shoshannah:** Oh, you’re killing me. Oh, my heart. I’m stomping on it.

**Craig:** Sanctified female parent splitting in two like a road. Clothing for a torso. Round objects. Sanctified – you got it? Holy mother forking shirt balls. Nice work.

**John:** Well done.

**Craig:** That’s my kind of guy right there.

**John:** From The Good Place.

**Craig:** From The Good Place.

**John:** All right. Thank you for participating in this game. Craig, thank you for putting together this game.

**Craig:** No, no, the hell with them. I’ll make it harder next time. I’m going deeper.

**John:** All right. Our next guest, Kevin Feige, has been the driving creative force behind the Marvel cinematic universe. In his current role as producer and president of Marvel Studios Feige is hands-on producer who oversees Marvel Studios’ feature film productions, whose 23 films released have all opened at number one at the box office. And collectively grossed – that can’t be right – $23 billion worldwide.

**Craig:** $23 billion dollars. That’s the same budget – oh, no, you said million. I’m so sorry.

**John:** $23 billion dollars. And you have Black Widow coming up next. Kevin Feige, you are the person who has been mentioned most on Scriptnotes without ever actually appearing on Scriptnotes.

**Kevin Feige:** Is that true? Why is that true? I want to know.

**John:** Tell him, Craig.

**Craig:** We actually like you.

**Kevin:** Oh, phew.

**Craig:** It would have been weird if it had been like, here we go. You’re like the Final Draft guys. Oh, that was a great one. Kevin, we were talking earlier, and I have an interesting question. I think it’s an interesting question. And maybe you don’t have the answer, but you have such a unique job. And I’m sure that while you have your own kind of definition of what it is, is there anybody else in Hollywood that does the job that you do? Or is it separate and apart from what everyone else does? Because that’s how it seems to me.

**Kevin:** I produce movies and I oversee movies. And I think there are a lot of people that do that. I think there are a lot of creative producers out there, many of whom I work with at Marvel Studios, who do what I do which is try to shepherd projects to the screen. The nature of the Marvel element of it, which is fun, and which gets a lot of the attention is the interconnectivity of them which is fun and which early on – I’ve been at Marvel almost 20 years. August of 2020 it will be 20 years, which is almost half my life, not quite.

And for the first six years at Marvel we worked with – we were the IP holders that didn’t have a lot of contractual control, but on the other studio films, on the Fox Fantastic Four films and X-Men films and Daredevil films on the Sony Rami Spider Man films. But I was around and wanted to be in the room where it happens as they say and be a part of the brain trust.

I’ve forgotten what the question was now.

**Craig:** This happens all the time.

**Kevin:** Oh, nobody does it. Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re different, right? I mean, it feels like you run a studio of a kind.

**Kevin:** Yes.

**Craig:** But you’re also a producer. But you’re also planning all of the movies. You are kind of an interesting hub it seems.

**Kevin:** I’ve been a part of maybe ten Marvel movies by the time we became Marvel Studios. And we knew with Iron Man 1 one of the things that could set us apart, because we didn’t have the “A-list” characters, was that we could start interconnecting them. Like the comics did.

**John:** We talk a lot to showrunners on our show, and your job is kind of analogous to a showrunner in that you have a bunch of things that have to continue. So it’s not just this one episode, it’s how it’s going to fit into this greater pattern. The knock we sometimes hear when some of our showrunner friends come on is that like, oh, but you didn’t know what you were doing, or you were vamping, you were making up as you were going along. To what degree as you’re starting Iron Man 1 did you have a sense of where you wanted to be three movies in, six movies in, nine movies in? And how much could you anticipate what the plan was?

**Kevin:** It’s a nice balance. It’s a nice combination of knowing exactly where you want to end up, but changing the ways, being open to changing the ways that you get there. And when we started Iron Man 1 the goal was very simply make Iron Man 1, and also the Incredible Hulk which we were doing at the same time. Go from being fully responsible for zero movies a year to we have to deliver two by summer of 2008. And that was an amazing experience of being like, you know, you take it for granted. I think people still take it for granted that when you see a poster in a movie lobby and there’s a release date on it the movie is coming out on that release date. That is not a given. There are a lot of people that have to work to make that happen.

And there was one terrifying moment during Iron Man 1 where I went that’s us. We’re the ones responsible for making that happen. And the dream was always because we’ve got thousands and thousands of comic books that you make a movie that succeeds and the reward is you get to make another movie. That’s always been the viewpoint that I’ve had. Let’s succeed so we get to do another one. And that was very true with Iron Man because we would not have been a studio if Iron Man didn’t work. And Marvel would have lost the film rights to ten of its characters.

So, we knew midway through Iron Man 1 around the time Sam Jackson agreed to come do a little cameo for us in a tag that we wanted to get to Avengers. That we wanted to do those first five, six films in phase one. After Avengers we started building out towards what became End Game.

**Craig:** So you have this interesting combination of fear that you won’t even be able to hit a release date for your one movie, but you’re planning for like five movies. And I like that combination. But you did have, of course, the benefit – I was a Marvel kid growing up. There’s Marvel kids and there’s DC kids. I guess there’s some kids that are bi-comical or whatever. But I was a Marvel kid. And there was this big book that was like the Marvel compendium of characters.

**John:** Oh yeah, it’s great.

**Craig:** I would just flip through it and there were so many. There’s so many. And so you have this interesting possibility. But I want to read you something. This is I think the first time we brought up, this is without even mentioning your name, but the first time we kind of brought you up. This is all the way back in Episode 44. July 6, 2012, Ah. Remember that?

**John:** Oh my gosh. What a different world we lived in.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Back then Craig didn’t have an Emmy.

**Craig:** I would trade everything.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah.

**Craig:** Everything. OK. So John said, we were talking about Avengers I believe had just come out at that point. And John said, “Joss Whedon was kind of a risky director to pick for that movie. The director hadn’t made anything of that size and that scale. But other studios aren’t going to learn that lesson. They’re just going to learn that it was big and therefore it’s good. Whereas Marvel is smart. Marvel is smart. But that’s not the only lesson to take from that.”

And I said, “No, the lesson to take from that is hire a director and a writer, in this case it was the same person, with a specific point of view and a proven track record with an audience. And have him deliver the goods as best he can. That’s a risk worth taking. It doesn’t always pay off. But to me that’s so much more interesting of a risk and so much more potentially rewarding than the other way of thinking about it with I guarantee you is going on right now where people are sitting around going, ‘OK, please list for me at my studio here all the various heroes we have, create a team for them to be on, and do our version of the Avengers.’ And I guarantee you that that is going on.”

And John says, “Yeah.” And then I say–

**John:** I say yeah a lot.

**Craig:** And I say, “And all those movies are going to be annoying. And people are going to smell it.” It does seem like people have tried to copy the model of what you do. Is there any hope for any of them? I mean, legitimately would you say to them, “Please, no, you’re never going to get there. Or yeah, there’s actually a way for you to do this with any of your stuff?”

**Kevin:** Well, first of all I compliment the transcript because it clearly comes in handy that you do that on every podcast. That’s impressive. The truth is as I just said we set out to make a movie. We didn’t set out to make a universe. We happened to be making movies based on our comics and our comics are an interwoven universe thanks to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and the whole team there that came up with what may be the longest running fictional narrative ever. So it didn’t seem revolutionary to me that I worked at Marvel Studios and wanted to try to emulate what was in the comics. But I wanted to do it slowly because I wanted to make movies. And I wanted to make a lot of movies. And make a lot of different kinds of movies, which is why our first ones were a technological thriller/sci-fi Iron Man film and a crazy outer space Norse god film and a WWII film leading up to – and a monster movie – leading up to The Avengers.

Because what was always cool about Avengers to me in the comics wasn’t that it was a bunch of heroes together, that it was a bunch of heroes that I cared about from other stories interacting with one another. So, I always say we never set out to make a universe. We set out to make movies. And that’s still true today. We set out to do individual stories that have the fun of, a bonus sometimes, of interconnectivity. But we spend as much time going it’s too much. The movie has to stand on its own more, in the development process. The movie has to stand on its own more.

**Craig:** I mean, essentially your advice is stop doing the thing that you people are doing. Because what they do is they start by saying here’s a bunch of our IP, which is a phrase I hate anyway, and let’s make a universe out of it. Absolutely backwards.

**Kevin:** When I started working at Marvel people used to talk about IP and I slowly got the nerve to ask what is IP.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**Kevin:** What are you talking about?

**Craig:** It’s sad. People talk about IP – the first time I heard it I was so depressed. But I think of this as art. And you guys are talking about it as intellectual property, like a product. Same thing when I heard franchise. I was like, ugh, now they’re like McDonald’s now. Now everyone says franchise they’re like, yay, it’s our favorite franchise.

**John:** You will have writers, directors, there’s filmmakers you want to work with. People are coming in to talk with you about doing movies based on your characters, based on movies you want to make. What is it that clicks with you about a certain person to do a certain project for you? What is it that you say when that person comes in the room that makes you say like, OK, that is the right person for me to bring onto this project? What are the things that work for you?

**Kevin:** It varies. I mean, we always start – we don’t have open auditions, so to speak. We don’t have people coming in and going here’s this character, would you make a movie about this character, would you make a movie about this character. We internally at Marvel Studios decide what movie we want to make, kind of what the movie is. So Thor, we decided we wanted to do a third Thor film because we love the character and we love Hemsworth and we thought there was great potential there.

But we knew we wanted to break the mold a little bit. And I was on the set of Age of Ultron talking to Hemsworth and he was in his full regalia for a big sequence. And he was saying, “May – what are we doing for the next one, May? What are we doing?” And I said, well, the truth is on the first Thor, Thor was blond hair, a red cape, and a hammer. Now Thor is you, Chris Hemsworth. So we can smash the hammer, we can rip off the cape, we can cut off the hair. So that started leading us into a general direction of what we wanted to do with it.

It was Taika Waititi that turned it into what we all know and love as Thor: Ragnarok with those elements. And we wanted to put The Hulk in it. And so we have these discussion documents that we call them, share them with writers or filmmakers, and then have them come in and pitch us a better version of it that sometimes is very similar and is sometimes totally different but way better. And that begins the then two to three year process of working together intensely.

**Craig:** You guys are drawing from this enormous base of what I consider to be literary work. I mean, comics are drawn, they’re illustrated, but I always read them. No one says I looked at a comic today. I read it. And because we’re writers and this is a show about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, you know, I’ve had this interesting experience in television and I know you guys are getting into television in a huge way where as a writer they say you are the author here, go and create something. In features, traditionally, the writer has just sort of been a widget. And then the director is viewed as the author.

At Marvel because you seem to be kind of in the, like I said, the hub, in the middle, how do you – and this is not a trap. Don’t worry. They won’t attack you. Feel free to, by the way, if he answers wrong. But how do you balance the authority of the writers and directors that you employ because you do employ a lot of the same ones over and over like Marcus and McFeely and the Russos, etc.

**Kevin:** Yeah. That’s the perfect case example. And, again, it varies person to person of course. I don’t think writers are widgets. I think that they make the whole thing possible. And when you find great writers like Marcus and McFeely who are willing to dedicate their art and their talent to projects you love and want to do, it’s amazing. And that’s why we got to Infinity War and End Game is because of those two.

You know, we were in either post on Iron Man 1 or prep on Iron Man 2 when we were taking meetings and first met Marcus and McFeely to do what became the first Captain America film. And the relationship with Marcus and McFeely and Joe and Anthony Russo is great. Yes, the Russo brothers are the directors of that film, but the authors of the film are the four of them, myself, Trinh Tran, Lou and Victoria from my team at Marvel who spend years together in a very relatively small conference room with more index cards than you’re ever seen in your entire life, putting together those movies. So it does vary.

When you find writers that are as authorial as Marcus and McFeely you keep them around and the directors will listen to them. When you have writers that you’re just starting out with and it doesn’t work, then you find another writer. That can happen with filmmakers, too.

In television, though, it is different as we’re learning. Because we’re trying to do our shows as close as we can to the way we did our films, which is to say it’s one filmmaker on the entire series. And one head writer on the entire series. They have a room because there’s so many–

**Craig:** So many scripts to write.

**Kevin:** Yeah. Although that was the understanding going in. There have been a few moments where that needs to be clarified that in the writer’s room the writer is overseeing much of it. On the set, the director is overseeing it. We haven’t gotten to post yet on those two projects.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s going to be fun. I would like to just come by to watch that. I don’t want to watch what’s on the screen. I just want to watch the people in the room.

**John:** So you’re now moving into a new phase of things. At the end of Avengers: End Game a lot of the characters and the relationships we built up are done and now we’re moving into a new phase. Is it weird for you that you’re both in this moment, but you’re also many years ahead? So is it hard for you to sort of flip back and forth to like, oh that’s right, the rest of the universe doesn’t know that this is a thing that’s happening? Do you find yourself–?

**Kevin:** Only when I’m speaking in public like this is it hard to realize, oh, it’s not 2023 yet so I can’t talk about that. But when you’re in it, no. And, again, like with Iron Man 1 the movie that comes out next gets the most attention. Because sort of nothing else matters. So in that case right now it’s Black Widow. And the primary focus is Black Widow, even though we have another film in production, another film about to go into production, two series in production, another one about to go. What comes next is the focus.

**Craig:** I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up Scorsese-gate. But I don’t want to just—

**Kevin:** Is he here?

**Craig:** Yes. Huge fan of our podcast.

**Kevin:** How many times have you mentioned him?

**Craig:** Way less than we’ve mentioned you.

**John:** That tells me a lot about our show.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Which kind of feeds into this question. Because it’s not so much what he said, but rather what I find interesting is that the movies that you guys make have—

**Kevin:** What he said. And what he said again. And what he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about. And what he said again.

**Craig:** I see you’re not at all sensitive about it.

**Kevin:** OK. I understand.

**Craig:** That aside, so you’re not the only one that I traumatize. I like to do this to everyone. Except Lorene. So, your movies occupy an outsized place in global culture from the time that you started with Iron Man to now. They have made an impression on the world. And they are now interwoven with just our global culture. And I’m kind of curious, rather than talk about what’s cinema and not cinema, because I don’t even know what that word even means. I’d rather just ask you where do you think Marvel films sit in our culture. What do you think they actually mean to people?

And is that what you want them to mean? Or are you airing for a kind of changing place in our culture?

**Kevin:** I think in ways that are both flattering and not flattering over the past decade the word Marvel has come to mean blockbuster movie. Blockbuster movies, “blockbuster movies,” that have a genre spin to them, or have action to them, or have visual effects to them have been the dominant form of box office entertainment my entire life. And that’s why I wanted to make movies. Those are the movies – I’m going to listen to your Die Hard episode on December 25. That movie I loved. And I remember thinking this is the best regular movie I’ve ever seen. And what I meant by regular was there was no time travel, there was no space, there were no aliens.

Because that was my primary – there were no super heroes, no super powers.

**Craig:** Best regular.

**Kevin:** Best regular movie ever. So those have always been the dominant, or maybe just to me, maybe just to my focus. In terms of place in the culture I never, ever think about it. I think about making movies that I always wanted to make with people that I’ve always wanted to work with. And make the movie that we would want to see.

And we have eclectic tastes. And the great thing about the Marvel comics is you can sit down and go, yes, we want to make an Iron Man movie, we want to do another Hulk movie. But we could also say I want to do a WWII movie. We want to do an outer space adventure. I want to do a time travel movie. I want to do a heist film. We want to do a ‘70s political thriller. We want to do a story, which is shooting now, about immortals who have been on earth for years.

All of those genres exist within the Marvel comics. And you can find them and flesh them out. And, again, Black Widow is our 24th film that Marvel Studios has produced in my almost 20 years. We want to keep doing different things. Disney+ has allowed that with the series that are also very different than things we’ve done before. So having the platform to continue to do lots of different types of movies that are shared by two things. One, they originated at some point in our comics. And, two, they have a genre element/sci-fi element to, which I enjoy in movies.

**John:** Kevin, will you come back on Episode 800 and talk us through how the next couple phases went?

**Kevin:** We will see. We’ll see if the references go down between now and 800. Yes.

**Craig:** I think you’re saying you want to keep being mentioned.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do.

**Craig:** Not a problem. Keep making those movies and we will keep praising them.

**John:** All right. We also do a thing on our show called One Cool Thing where we talk through small recommendations. Craig, did you remember One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do. I have a One Cool Thing. I’m an enjoyer of the Twitter. And lately a little bit of an issue with Nazis. Just I encounter them and I say things to them. And they get upset. And so I find myself getting into arguments with Nazis, which is generally bad. But one of the upsides is you start to figure out who the Nazis are.

**Kevin:** Nazis are not your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** No.

**Kevin:** To be sure. Sorry.

**Craig:** Not since forever. But every now and then you run into a head Nazi, like the head vampire, and just like in movie mythology if you can kill the head vampire – if you can kill the Night King all – all – of the dead people go, right? So I encountered a head Nazi the other day and I was like I’m going to block her but I also want to block every one that follows her.

And there is a way to do it.

**John:** Oh, tell us.

**Craig:** It’s called Block Chain. Ah, amazing. So, it’s an extension that you can use in a Chrome browser. So, you know, that’s the only thing you use Chrome for. That’s fine. And you put in the person’s name that you want to block and you also want to block everyone that follows that person. And it’s smart enough to know that it shouldn’t block any of her followers that you follow, because sometimes people follow weird people to see like I’m going to keep tabs on that Nazi, which is fucking bizarre, but regardless. And this particular Nazi had about 80,000 followers.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Well, she probably had 400 humans and a whole bunch of Russian bots. But regardless, they all got blocked. I just watched the number – it was incredibly satisfying. So, if you do manage to run into a Nazi here and there, block chain. Spectacular.

**John:** Nice. My One Cool Thing is a very simple little thing. It’s called AI Dungeon. Some people here may have tried it. It’s an AI thing that generates, sort of like a text-based adventure like Zork. Did you ever play Zork? Ah, yes, you played Zork.

**Craig:** I played ever InfoCom game there was.

**John:** And so what’s clever about it is you’re doing the same things like, you know, look at door, pick up thing, but it’s all using AI. And so you can tell it to do anything and it will change whatever is happening around it to sort of fold that in. So if you said teach Craig to dance it will generate stuff like, you know, you start playing some music and Craig starts dancing.

**Craig:** So if I said pick up knife it will just say, ah, there’s a knife there.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Great game. I’ll play that.

**John:** Tonight. Kevin Feige. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Kevin:** I was given this question early and just did nothing but give me anxiety and go what am I going to give – what’s one cool that that’s going to be interesting. Because I knew you guys would have something super cool and interesting. Nazis.

**John:** Nazis.

**Craig:** And AI.

**Kevin:** And I got in my car on the way over here and put on the album I’ve been listening to time and time again and thought, oh, I’ll just say that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Kevin:** Even though it might not sound like the coolest.

**John:** Was it MMMBop?

**Kevin:** Much more obscure than MMMBop.

**Craig:** That’s Kevin Feige.

**Kevin:** There was a documentary called Bathtubs Over Broadway that has an accompanying soundtrack about industrial musicals. And I like to listen to the soundtrack of industrial musicals from the Bathtubs Over Broadway documentary.

**Craig:** Oh wow. That’s awesome.

**Kevin:** That’s a cool thing that I’m enjoying right now.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** Thank you very much. Shoshannah Stern, do you have something you would like to recommend to our audience here?

**Shoshannah:** Yeah. I do. But it requires a backstory. So my daughter is four and three-quarters. And I had an unplanned C-section, which I did not want to have. But it happened very quickly. And I asked if in the OR if I could see her. And they said, yeah, sure.

But at the last minute then I was in the OR and I couldn’t see her. This was the first time that I was really responding to having a physical reaction to sound. Because I heard her cry and I knew that it was my baby and I couldn’t see her. And I had some kind of attack of some sort and I was seeing all of the doctors standing around me looking at me. But I could only see their eyes. I couldn’t read their lips. I couldn’t see anything because they were just looking at me with these masks. And there was this sound but I didn’t know who was talking.

And I just was like, I screamed, “Stop. You’re crucifying me,” because of the IVs and I couldn’t sign. So I was just like grabbing at the IVs. So they brought me my baby. Yes, they did. Thank god. But I was like wow, it’s kind of fucked up to be a deaf person in that situation.

So two months ago the FDA approved a brand new kind of a mask where there’s a clear plastic area on the face mask so that deaf people can actually look and see the lips moving of the people who are wearing them.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**Shoshannah:** I won’t have to go through that fucked up situation again. Or a fucked up situation like that ever again.

**John:** Lorene Scafaria, top that.

**Lorene:** Why?

**John:** [laughs]

**Lorene:** Dolly Parton’s America Podcast.

**John:** Dolly Parton’s America. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Almost as good.

**John:** Almost.

**Craig:** Almost as meaningful.

**Lorene:** Humiliating. It’s really good.

**Craig:** Is it that good though?

**Lorene:** Nope.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** And that is the end of our show. So we want to thank our amazing panelists. Lorene Scafaria. Shoshannah Stern. Kevin Feige. Our producer, Megana Rao. Megana! Our editor, Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** And of course this is all in service of the Writers Guild Foundation and the Writers Guild Foundation has supported us in putting this event on. So of course we want to thank Enid and Dustin and all the volunteers from the Writers Guild Foundation.

**John:** Tonight I want to extend an extra special thanks to our amazing interpreters, Elizabeth and Robby. Thank you very, very much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you to LA Film School, especially Hunter and Jared for tonight.

**Craig:** And finally we’d like to thank you. Our listeners. And a reminder that you can sign up now at Scriptnotes.net. This is why we’re ad-free. You can sign up now at Scripnotes.net. Scriptnotes.net for the Premium Feed. Happy Holidays and good night.

**John:** Happy Holidays everyone. Thank you all very much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you.

We have someone lined up here at the microphone.

**Male Audience Member:** Just to say thank you. This is amazing. My question is to Kevin. But before I do I want to say to the ladies thank you. As a writer-director you guys are an inspiration. Thank you.

**Lorene:** Thank you.

**Male Audience Member:** Kevin, last year at the Produced By Conference I asked you about Ms. Marvel movie and you said you’re going to focus on the Captain Marvel and then you’re going to introduce. Now it’s going to Disney+ with Bisha attached to it. I was wondering if you’re ever going to bring it to the movie world or maybe with Wolverine or something. What are the future–?

**Kevin:** That’s two different questions I think for me. We shifted to Wolverine. Ms. Marvel is coming to Disney+. Yes, Bisha is our head writer on that. And, yes, the intention with that character very much is to introduce her on a Disney+ series and then bring her into the films. And everything we’re doing at Disney+ will start to go back and forth between the streaming service and the movies. Some characters like Falcon, Winter Soldier, and Wanda Maximoff and the Vision and Loki will go from the big screen to Disney+ and back. Some characters starting with Ms. Marvel will be introduced on our Disney+ series and then go into films.

**Craig:** I honestly thought he was asking about Lorene. I heard Wolverine, I heard Wolverine. I think he’s suggesting that Lorene direct.

**Male Audience Member:** Why not?

**Lorene:** That’s what you’re here for. That kind of pressure.

**Craig:** Just putting that in the world. Put it in the universe, see what happens.

**John:** Hello, welcome.

**Male Audience Member:** My question is for Kevin as well.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Male Audience Member:** So you said the comics gave you a good framework for the interconnected narrative. But I’m sure there’s some points where you were at a fork in the road deciding to adhere or to depart from what was already given to you. Can you talk about some specific examples and some of the harder decisions you’ve made and how you decided whether to stick or to depart?

**Kevin:** Well it’s always that decision of how close do you stick to the comics. The comics are both inspiration, sometimes very specifically, sometimes generally. Marcus and McFeely had the task of Civil War when I decided that now was the time to do Civil War. And it was a great comic and ten years before we were developing the movie reading the comic month to month. It was published. It was amazing. Going back and looking at it, it did not apply. It took place, as all the comics do, in the narrative of that moment of the comics’ universe. Did not match up hardly at all with what the Marvel cinematic universe was. But the general idea of Iron Man and Cap representing two different sides of a theological argument was the inspiration. And Marcus and McFeely and Joe and Ant fleshed that out based on where we were in the cinematic universe. So that’s one where it was very specific, even taking the title from a comic, storyline, which we rarely do. But really that was a jumping off point.

**Craig:** I don’t want to stereotype the group that’s waiting, but—

**Male Audience Member:** I got you, Craig, don’t worry about it. My question, not actually directed to Kevin at all. I’ve never heard of any Marvel movies. But I know that there’s this whole Pay Up Hollywood thing. And something that’s very new. And the question that I have to John and Craig is where does accountability come into play? Obviously this is a very difficult city to make it in. And everything that we’ve heard is I can’t afford $1,500 rent. OK, well maybe you need a roommate. I can’t afford to put fuel in the car. Well, you have a car. That sounds pretty nice. And I can’t live off $50,000 a year. Well, there’s seven million people who make that happen.

So, where does accountability come into play?

**Craig:** I have an answer for you. Before I ask people who are making $50,000 to be accountable I’d like to ask the people who are making $50 billion to be accountable. I am, listen, I’m a parent. So I’m always thinking about how to make sure that my kids understand the value of hard work and the value of responsibility. But the fact is that the people who do these jobs, and we know them, and we’ve seen them, are not being treated fairly.

You can extend the argument of accountability down to anything. Well, you’re eating. I mean, a sandwich is a good thing. So, if you get a sandwich a day you should be happy. At some point, right, it’s a slippery slope. So the point is it’s not about subsistence living. It’s about being treated just reasonably.

**John:** I have a related question. A related question and answer here. So I say that accountability is useful for thinking about it in terms of you can’t direct it back at the person who is asking to be treated fairly to say like so often implicit in the answer is, well, I suffered when I came up through this scenario so it’s not – it’s the same for you.

There’s two problems with that. First off, it wasn’t the same. Second off, just because it did happen that way doesn’t mean it was ever right. And that’s a thing that we learned out of #MeToo. It’s a think we need to be talking about now.

The second thing I want to stress to all of us, and as we go into 2020 to be thinking about. It’s great news that we have a higher hourly wage happening in some places. You don’t pay rent with hours. You pay rent with dollars. And so we need to always be thinking about what is the dollars that people are making every week that is going to make it possible to live in Los Angeles. And for people who are coming to Los Angeles with this dream of moving to Hollywood and working in this industry, so they know what dollar figure actually they need to be making in order to stay and survive here. Because equity of access is the first step before we get to equity of outcome where the people who can come to this industry can actually afford to work in this industry and go up the ranks and thrive and write movies for Kevin Feige.

**Craig:** Yes. Absolutely. And I would also say that there is a temptation to think that tough love gets results. That deprivation makes people work harder. It doesn’t. As it turns out, treating people fairly and with respect will get more out of them. I do believe that. And this is a general philosophical mistake I think we make.

And so this is something that we’ve been talking about on our show a lot. And we’ve been talking to agencies. Obviously Verve made a big announcement about this. After we stop talking to the agencies I very much want to start talking to the studios about this. So we’ll be coming. We’ll be coming. But not now.

**John:** Not now.

**Craig:** Not now.

**John:** This is a fun night.

**Craig:** Thank you for your question.

**Male Audience Member:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Thank you. One last question. A lot of pressure on your shoulders. You’re wearing the mantle of the final question of the night.

**Craig:** And surely this is for Shoshannah or Lorene.

**Lorene:** The Hustlers cinematic universe.

**John:** Oh, I want to see that universe.

**Male Audience Member:** This is actually for all three of you. I just wanted to ask very simply what when either you’re going to your computer and you’re trying to break a scene, or you go into your writer’s room and maybe you’re trying to break a film, or a TV show, or you’re on set and you get this wonderful inspirational moment from one of your actors and it inspires a story idea, what are some creative rituals that you do before you go onto set, the writer’s room, or your computer just to kind of get those creative juices flowing? What are some places you go to to get some inspirational ideas from?

**Craig:** Shoshannah, you want to start?

**Shoshannah:** Sure. It’s really simple, but I just put my feet on the ground just to carry my weight evenly on my two feet, fold my hands. I’m not so much praying but I’m just feeling the flow. And I just try to remind myself that I’m grateful to be in this moment, right here, right now, doing what I love really. I just center myself and then do it. You know, whatever is blocking me or whatever I feel might block me I let it dissipate. I just let it go away. It’s not a very interesting answer. Sorry.

**John:** Oh my god, that was fascinating. That’s your ritual, too, right?

**Craig:** I mean, she’s kind of better than all of us.

**Shoshannah:** Say that again. I didn’t quite catch that. I didn’t hear it.

**Craig:** You heard me. I liked your first answer better which was I go with Josh to a bar and we get drunk. I think that’s truer.

**Shoshannah:** Maybe.

**John:** Lorene, do you have any go-tos?

**Lorene:** Yeah, I mean I think in my soul I think trying to reframe things like instead of saying I have to do something it’s saying I get to do something. So trying to remind myself of that at the beginning of a day, or a task. On a set I try to have three or four beverages first thing. I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before lunch and then a peanut butter and jelly sandwich after lunch. And no lunch.

**Craig:** That is so weird.

**Lorene:** It’s so weird. They got me a big cake on my birthday on Hustlers. It was shaped like a giant peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Humiliating. 41. So, yeah. Those are silly rituals, too.

**John:** Kevin, any rituals for you?

**Kevin:** I have relatively severe OCD that I could give you lots of rituals that utterly a waste of time and worthless and I wouldn’t recommend at all. But the notion that I have to keep in mind a lot is when there’s a lot of pressure, when you can’t think of an idea, when there’s a story problem and it gets very frustrating and I’ve pulled all of my hair out already, but you’re realizing no, no, this is a good thing. I remember being an intern and being jealous of anybody there that was employed. Anybody there that had a job. And I would hear them complain. And there was always stuff to complain about. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with complaining.

But I remember being like if I was there I wouldn’t be complaining. So, wherever I am now if I start complaining or start getting – it’s not even about complaining. It’s about just getting agitated. You realize, no, this is – exactly what Lorene said – that we get to do this and we’re very, very lucky.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** That’s a great final answer right there. Thank you.

**John:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Thank you to our incredible guests: [Kevin Feige](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0270559/), [Lorene Scafaria](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1032521/), and [Shoshannah Stern](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0998074/), for joining us! And thanks to Robbie Sutton and Elizabeth Green for interpreting the show.
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 44: Endings for Beginnings](https://johnaugust.com/2012/endings-for-beginners)
* [Twitter Block Chain Extension](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-block-chain/dkkfampndkdnjffkleokegfnibnnjfah?hl=en)
* [AI Dungeon](https://www.aidungeon.io/)
* [Bathtubs Over Broadway Soundtrack](https://www.bathtubsoverbroadway.com/)
* [FDA Approves Transparent Surgical Masks](https://www.theclearmask.com/product)
* [Dolly Parton’s America Podcast](https://www.npr.org/podcasts/765024913/dolly-parton-s-america)
* [Kevin Feige](https://twitter.com/kevfeige) on Twitter
* [Lorene Scafaria](https://twitter.com/LoreneScafaria) on Twitter
* [Shoshannah Stern](https://twitter.com/Shoshannah7) on Twitter
* [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) and Intro by Matthew Chilelli ([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/scriptnotes_ep_431.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/minimum-viable-movie).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hi y’all my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 423 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Often on this podcast we ask How Would That Be a Movie, but today we’re going to ask an even more fundamental question: Is that a movie? We’ll try to lay out the minimal requirements for a motion picture, which you may want to consider as you set out to write.

We’ll also be answering some listener questions and, of course, following up on assistant pay.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** But first, Craig, you are headed to Austin for the Austin Film Festival. Can you talk us through your schedule?

**Craig:** Sure. What an exciting schedule it is. It’s jam-packed with stuff. [laughs] It’s really not. It’s one of the lightest schedules I’ve ever had and I’m incredibly appreciative for it. Friday morning is my first thing and I guess it’s probably the most substantive thing I’m going to do. It’s called On Writing Chernobyl: A Conversation with Craig Mazin. I don’t know who I’m talking to. It just says me. What is that?

**John:** It could be a conversation with yourself?

**Craig:** It will not be.

**John:** I think you should do the Frune voice and just be interviewing yourself.

**Craig:** Well that’s not a bad idea actually. I can totally do that. What’s the story?

So, that’s going to happen with someone talking to me, I guess. And then that night at 10pm roughly, depending on just how tipsy we are I’m going to take the stage in the big Driskill ballroom with a bunch of other fantastic guests – really, really good ones. You’re going to want to show up, as always, for a free-wheeling live episode of Scriptnotes. So always fun when we do it there. It’s very raucous. We’ll take lots of questions. Do lots of answers. Tell stories. Laugh. Enjoy life. And record it all for posterity.

**John:** Excellent.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then I’m going to be introducing Dan Weiss and David Benioff at an awards luncheon where they’re getting an award. So I’m putting together the world’s snarkiest speech as we speak. And also on Saturday night I will be one of the judges judging the finals of the Pitch Competition which is in a big bar and it’s–

**John:** I went to that last year and it was really fun. It was sometimes hard to hear people as they were pitching, but the vibe was really great. So, I really enjoyed it last time.

**Craig:** It’s a good vibe and as always I’m relied upon to be, you know, Johnny Tough Love, I guess.

**John:** Mm-hmm. So I’m looking forward to hearing what happens. I will not be at Austin Film Festival this year at all, so I will only know when I hear the audio for the assembled episode, so enjoy. People are going to be there live and in person seeing stuff and it could be so raucous and so un-broadcastable that only by being there in person will you really get the full experience.

**Craig:** I think it will be broadcastable. It may not be an episode you like. [laughs]

**John:** But that’s fine.

**Craig:** It will be broadcastable. It will be sound waves.

**John:** There will be sound waves that can be transmitted through the Internet.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Nice. Last week we talked about the WGA and videogame awards. We got a couple emails in. One was a listener who wrote in with a sound file, which I always love when people sort of record themselves. So let’s take a listen to that.

**Anthony Johnston:** Hi John and Craig. Anthony Johnston here. Just wanted to point out something you didn’t mention regarding the Writers Guild dropping the videogame award. The reason some years only saw a minimal amount of entries is because only games written by people who were either full guild members or had joined the Game Writers Caucus, which John mentioned, were eligible. The problem with the caucus is that the only thing your yearly sub gets you is the ability to be considered for that award. Well, and a copy of the magazine. But, you know, come on.

But it doesn’t even count in any way towards full guild membership as I found out a couple of years ago when I wrote my first screenplay for Hollywood. I understand why the guild doesn’t want to give out awards to non-members, of course, and that’s their prerogative. But it’s not like game writing is covered by a different guild. And this all speaks to those concerns you had about them simply not reaching out to games writers in a meaningful way.

I’m on the Games Committee of the British Writers Guild and our annual award is given to the best written game, regardless of whether the authors are guild members or not because from our perspective the award is about advancing and promoting the field, not the guild per se.

Anyway, I’ve ranted about the lack of unionization in games many times before and I won’t get into it again, but suffice to say this latest action by the WGA certainly isn’t helping. Thanks for listening. See you later.

**John:** To start with I want to stipulate that I would like him to narrate a bunch of nature documentaries because he has a fantastic voice.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** And I want to hear him talking about geese and other things and small woodland creatures having fun.

**Craig:** But the geese doesn’t see the predator nearby. Sneaking up on her and her loved ones. Something like that?

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Do we even need him anymore? Or can I do it?

**John:** He’s actually better than you.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** And that’s a high bar.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** So let’s get into the substance of what he’s actually talking about which is that this videogame writers caucus is a thing you have to join in order to be considered for an award, but you get essentially no benefits other than being eligible for an award, which feels like a fundamental flaw in that system. But I do want to point out that the British system is different also because it’s not truly a union. The British Screenwriters Guild is not a union in the same way that we are a union. They’re not representing employees. They are a bunch of people who work in the same industry but they are not a labor organization. So they’re not quite similarly situated.

Craig, what did you take from his discussion of this topic?

**Craig:** Well, what he’s shining a light on is that the entire decision to award videogame writers was a scheme to try and see if we could advance the organization of videogame writers into the Writers Guild. So what the Writers Guild did was they created this caucus category. A caucus category in the Writers Guild essentially means, meh, you’re not actually a member of the Writers Guild. But we’ll waive some magic fairy dust on you. You give us some money. And you become eligible for things like these awards. But over time what happens is the videogame companies realize that there’s actually like he says no actual significant benefit or upside to being in this caucus. It doesn’t apply to your membership in the guild for other things because you’re not doing anything that’s covered under a Writers Guild contract generally speaking.

So, the entire point of it just sort of collapsed pretty quickly. But my feeling is if you’re going to give awards to videogames in an attempt to say, “Listen, one day we’d love to have you in our fold. Could we unionize your shop?” Do it.

There’s no need to – I agree with him. Don’t pin it all on some meaningless Writers Guild caucus membership because then the awards don’t mean much anyway. And in fact what it seems like has happened is they’ve said not enough people are paying us the caucus money so nobody gets an award. I think we should acknowledge that we don’t represent videogame writers, but we have given the award so let’s continue to give the award and start talking to the employers. That’s kind of the point, right? That’s the job.

**John:** Yeah. Organizing any new sector is incredibly difficult, so trying to go out and actually organize these folks is a difficult thing on a very long term basis. And so a concerted effort by the WGA over many years, maybe you could make some progress. But it is going to be difficult because videogame industry is not – while the work is actually very similar to sort of what we’ve been doing, it’s not concentrated in the town the same way. It’s diffuse. There’s a lot of challenges to doing it.

So, a person could also argue whether the WGA is the best organization to being going after trying to organize videogame work. I don’t know. But it was good to hear his perspective from somebody outside of our videogame industry.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, when it comes to any kind of writing employment I tend to think that the Writers Guild is the best union option available to anyone that writes, because well we do the best job of defending the writer’s right to credits, defending the writer’s right to residuals, I think we have the best guaranteed minimum salaries. So I’m always interested in that. I do think that you’re right. It’s a hard thing to organize any shop. If the guild spends ten years trying to organize a videogame shop and it fails, or five years and it fails, at that point for the guild to say, “Listen, guys, we’re not going to do the Writers Guild videogame awards anymore because none of your employers are willing to talk to us and you guys aren’t signing cards, so it’s enough.” At that point I don’t really think the videogame writers would have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to complaining. But they haven’t tried that. As far as I know they haven’t done any of that work. They’ve just handed out awards and then one day they were like, “Meh, you’re not giving us our caucus money anymore.”

It’s not a great look. I’ve got to say. I’m just going to continue my theme on this. I don’t think it was a great look. I don’t think it was handled well. And, you know, I think they should reconsider. I really do.

**John:** Let’s end this topic on some happy news. The folks who work at the LA Times have a new union. So that’s a thing that happened this past week. So the LA Times employees are now under a union, which is great news.

**Craig:** Who covers them? Is there like a newscaster–?

**John:** I think it’s its own special new union. I have no sort of great insight to it, but it’s a thing that happened just as we were starting to record. So that’s exciting.

**Craig:** That is exciting. And just to be clear when I said that our union is the best at representing writers what I mean is representing writers – those writers who do work for screens as opposed to just print.

**John:** Yep. Exactly. All right. Let us get back to the topic of assistants, which has been a big thing this past week, past couple weeks. And so much has changed since the last episode we recorded. After we recorded the hashtag #PayUpHollywood came out. There were a lot of new anecdotes that were being shared along with that hashtag. LA Times, Variety, Hollywood Reporter all ran stories on the issue. I know I had a lot of private conversations, I suspect you have had them as well.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** With writers, executives, other folks who are thinking about this as an issue. We’ve gotten a ton more emails in, including some emails that reference friends of ours who are not doing right by their assistants. So, that’s interesting and awkward.

**Craig:** Oh? OK. I haven’t seen those.

**John:** All right. So we’ll forward some of those onto you.

**Craig:** Do I want to see those? [laughs]

**John:** I think you do want to see those. I think it’s good for us to see all of these things. But this week has also got me thinking back to my own time as an assistant. I did a blog post about it. And so I was describing how one of my first jobs in Hollywood was as an assistant. It was just after film school. I was working for two very busy producers. I did all the classic assistant things: answering phones, reading scripts, making copies. No one makes copies anymore.

And I said in that blog post that I thought I was making $550 a week. I ended up editing it back out and putting a footnote there saying I’m not sure it was $550. I couldn’t actually find any pay stubs or tax records. But I was able to make enough money to pay rent. I was able to buy groceries. I could see all the movies I wanted to see. And I could write on nights and weekends. It was enough. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was enough. And that was my two years in assistant-dom and then I was able to transition out of that.

And Craig you had a similar experience as an assistant right out of college, right?

**Craig:** I did. I didn’t quite have the leg up you had, because you were coming out of the Stark program. So it makes sense that your first gig probably would be a little bit better pay than mine. I didn’t know anybody and I wasn’t coming out of film school. So my first job in Hollywood, my salary was $20,000 a year. And so I did a little math using just a standard inflation calculator. $20,000 in 1992 is the equivalent of $36,600 today. OK, well as it turns out that’s not far off from what a lot of assistants are making when you just look at kind of a $12.50 or $15 an hour rate, and a typical 50-hour week or even more. It’s sort of settling in around there.

So, what’s the difference? Well, first of all, I don’t want to pretend that I was living high on the hog. I was not. I also had student loans I had to pay off and all the rest. But here’s the huge difference. I shared a two-bedroom apartment with a friend of mine and that two-bedroom apartment was in North Hollywood. And the rent was $700 a month. So my rent was $350 a month in 1992. What is that in today’s dollars? It is $640 a month. No, I think Megana is on the line, right?

**Megana Rao:** Yeah, I’m here!

**Craig:** OK. And Bo is with us, too. So, Bo Shim is my assistant and Megana Rao is not only our producer but also your assistant. So, I’ll ask you Bo, $640 a month would get you what right now?

**Bo Shim:** [laughs] I don’t even know. Like half of a studio?

**Craig:** Half of a single room? So you’re like bunking with someone in a single room?

**Bo:** Like a dorm.

**Craig:** A dorm. I checked. And the rate of rent increase in Los Angeles has far outstripped the rate of inflation. So essentially even though people are being paid similarly to how they were paid when I first started in 1992, their expenses are dramatically greater. And that is why the current situation is not at all tenable.

And I have to tell, John, based on what I’ve looked at here I don’t know if I would have been able to do it. I don’t know if I would have been able to move to Los Angeles and get a job and work as an assistant because I didn’t have any other source of money. There was no money coming from my family. Plus I had loans to pay off. I just don’t think I could have done it.

**John:** Well, we’re lucky to have two assistants on the line who have done this. And so let’s turn this over more to Bo and Megana to talk us through their path into the industry and becoming assistants. And if you guys can tell us how you started as assistants and how you sort of made it work. Can we start with you, Bo? What was your route from college into working with Craig right now?

**Bo:** Right. I graduated from NYU in 2016 and I took a more traditional route of working at an agency, kind of staying put and seeing that as a stepping stone for my next job. And I think that’s a lot of people working there. Not everybody wants to be an agent, but all the jobs out there require one to two years of agency experience. So, I did that for about two years. And when I started it was I believe $12.50 an hour. A non-negotiable rate of $12.50 an hour. And after about two years maybe it was like a dollar raise. And then by the time I left in the last couple months they bumped it up to $15 an hour.

So I know firsthand working in that environment. And I have to say of course I wouldn’t have this job right now if I wasn’t present at that place and working that job, and that’s why most people work there is for the opportunities that you’re exposed to. But that was kind of my path to working for Craig Mazin.

**John:** Now, Megana, you took a different route. So talk us through how you went from college and where you were at before you came to work as an assistant here.

**Megana:** Yeah, so I had a much more untraditional route. I graduated from Harvard in 2014. And then worked in tech. I worked at Google for about four years before I made my way out to LA and started working for you. So, I sort of had a very different introduction to the workforce than Bo in that immediately from day one I felt like I was very fairly compensated and just felt really valued by Google. I felt like they were investing in me and they really wanted me to grow there.

And, yeah, I think last week we sort of talked about that villainous HR person who said lower wages inspire people to get better paying jobs. And coming from working in a place where that’s absolutely the opposite case I do not think that that’s true. I think that being fairly paid made me feel inspired by the work that I could bring to the company.

**John:** So one of the things you’ve had to do over these last two weeks is go through a tremendous amount of mail that came in. I know you’ve also been sharing it with Bo. Can you give us a sense of what you’re seeing and talk us through the issues and sort of where we’re at in this conversation right now as you’re reading more about assistants and assistant pay in Hollywood?

**Megana:** Yes. So we have been getting a ton of emails. So thank you to everyone who has been writing in. I think one of the biggest issues that we probably will not be able to get into today but has been a big theme has been the mental, psychological, emotional abuse that a lot of these assistants are dealing with every day on top of their low wages. And I think that makes sense, because we sort of started this conversation in the wake of hashtag #MeToo and this is just another reckoning with the institutional failures that have gotten us to this place.

And on a more positive note I think people are feeling more validated and seen by the hashtag #PayUpHollywood and the coverage that’s been in the trades and the LA Times. And I think there’s been a sort of unification that’s been really exciting.

I got this one email from Christine that I’d love to share. She says, “I listened to your recent Scriptnotes episode on assistant pay and I teared up in my car because it hit close to home. Being a child of refugees I decided to go the safe route after college and pursue a stable and predictable career that would please my parents. But one that was also creative adjacent to please me. So I went to law school with the hopes of practicing entertainment law. I decided not to go that route after I did legal internship at a movie studio and discovered that the young and hungry attorneys in the legal department were working as glorified administrative assistants for $20,000.

“This was in 2001 and law students were taking out more in student loans per year, $26,000 per year, then the annual before tax salaries of these ‘entertainment lawyers.’ I didn’t know how they paid their rent and their student loan repayments until it finally dawned on me. They were trust fund babies. And that’s when I decided to become a litigator instead.

“18 years later and here I am finally trying to do the thing. It has taken me this long because my family had no money, no connections, and the risk of entering a career where I would have to ask my parents for financial help when they were also struggling was too shameful for me to contemplate. It took me nearly 20 years to gather the resources where I can now carve out free time for myself to write. This year I wrote my first screenplay. I literally couldn’t afford to do it as a career, so now I do it as a passion project.”

So, the reason I wanted to highlight this is because I wanted to bring it back to another reason that we were so compelled to take this on as an issue is that these really high barriers to entry are literally keeping the pipeline from being filled with any sort of diversity in Hollywood. And, Bo, I know you had experience working in the business affairs side, so I don’t know if you want to speak to Christine’s experience at all.

**Bo:** Yeah. I was working in business affairs and so a lot of the assistants there in that department went to law school and were bar’d and it was crazy to me that they were getting paid the same as someone who – I mean, no one really should be getting paid $12.50 an hour, but they were getting paid the same across the board.

**Megana:** Yeah. So I worked on Ad Words which was sort of the biggest, most corporate, and like least sexy part of the company, and I think because of the way that I was paid I was really inspired to do good work and to put my all in the company. And so it’s sort of wild to me in Hollywood where the impact of your work is so tangible in these productions that, you know, I would think that if you’re a creator or a showrunner and you have this vision that you would want to – you would want to have people around you who are doing their best work to help you execute your ideas and that you’re empowering them to be able to do that on their projects and that they’re not worried about how they’re going to pay for their lunch.

**John:** Yeah. So even working on this Ad Words team they were still treating you like you were a valuable person in the company and not just a body in a chair?

**Megana:** And I think something that they say all the time at Google is we don’t just hire you for the job, we hire you for Google. And I think that in the traditional sense of the pipeline for like a writer’s assistant to a staff writer that also holds true. You are hiring assistants so that you can grow them as writers and people who will become creators eventually. And it seems like something there has just been broken recently.

**John:** So, Bo, working at an agency what is the trajectory to rise up through the agency? I always hear about the mailroom and then you’re on a desk and then eventually you become an agent. Was that at all interesting to you? Or were you mostly coming in there just to learn about how the industry worked?

**Bo:** For me it was really just about learning the landscape and the business side of the industry. But if you did want to be an agent the steps are essentially you’re in the mailroom, and then you’re on typically two desks, possibly more, and then you go back down to the mailroom. And then you come back up and you’re on another desk until then you’re promoted.

So, I knew that I didn’t want to be an agent. And a lot of people are there to kind of just get the experience and hopefully use it as a stepping stone for their next job. And that’s what I observed.

I do think like – and not just this job in particular – but it is really helpful for someone to take you under their wing and really vouch for you. And that’s really an important aspect of being able to rise up the ranks. And it’s really hard, especially if you’re maybe not coming from a background where you’re familiar with the industry or you have connections, or you necessarily have the aspects that someone who staffs a producer, who staffs an agent, who staffs a director. I think they try to foster an environment where you felt like you were supported, but it felt more accessible to certain people as opposed to others.

**Craig:** I mean, are we dancing a little bit around the whole white guy thing right now? Because it does seem like – because here’s my concern. I’m going to tie it back to the money issue. Because the money issue makes it so that the most likely to be at these desks are people who have external support of the kind that I didn’t have, and John I don’t think you had either. You’re going to get a higher percentage of people that are white males. Or I suppose white females. But the point is not people of color. Just because we’re just going on statistics, economic statistics in the United States.

So is there a sense of a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where people take people under their wing. They’re looking for people that, I don’t know, remind them of themselves. I mean, we know how this sort of works with representation. Is there a sense that it’s harder for people of color in these places? They’re getting hit twice. They’re not getting paid enough and the kind of path to rise is even narrower for them than it is for their white coworkers.

**Bo:** Yes. Definitely it’s a factor in being able to enter this arena in the first place. And then I think there’s definitely unconscious or conscious bias when it comes to people looking at assistants and being like, oh, well that person – I don’t know, we talk sports and we jive and naturally there’s a way to bond. And I do think it kind of affects the way that you’re able to have those relationships and have a level of comfort so that you can kind of ask for things. So yeah.

**John:** It sounds like we’re talking about what is an assistant worth. And sort of like the worth of that person. And some of that comes down to the money that you’re paying them. So if you’re paying them a good salary you’re valuing them in a certain way. But valuing them and acknowledging their worth is also how you’re treating them and how you are – whether you’re treating them in ways that have some quality of mentorship that you’re actually going to be able to see them advance through the industry. And it doesn’t sound like these people working at agencies, but also people we’ve talked to who have been working with producers are really getting that experience.

Last week we had someone write in really pleading that if a showrunner is going to hire someone on as an assistant read their stuff ahead of time and be honest with them about whether there’s any chance to be moving up onto the staff, because you don’t want to be spinning your wheels and wasting your time.

Let’s transition to talking about some of the solutions or next steps that folks who’ve written in to us have suggested. Megana, can you get us started with what are people thinking we might want to be looking at in terms of fixing these problems?

**Megana:** Yeah, so you know I think there’s so much momentum and excitement. People are throwing out ideas of strikes and legal action that they can take. And I think an interesting thing that’s come up is having the protection of a union.

So, Marcia wrote in and she said, “Unlike most of the other types of members in IATSE, the overwhelming majority of writers’ room assistant aspire to ultimately do a different type of job – become writers. That is covered by a different union, the WGA. This means that writers’ room assistants like myself are transitory members of the IATSE. We intent to leave IATSE and join the WGA as soon as the opportunity presents itself. As a result, IATSE doesn’t have much reason to look out for the interests of writers’ room assistants since we don’t have much of a future in that union, or at least we hope not.”

And she also points out that IATSE 700 represents the Editors Guild in Hollywood and they have both editors and assistant editors. And she asks if it makes sense for writers’ room assistants who are on their way to becoming writers should also be a part of the WGA in some capacity.

**John:** So what Marcia’s suggesting here does on the surface make sense. You have writers’ room assistants who are very, very close to that screenwriting process. They’re part of the generation of TV shows and they ultimately want to segue into becoming writers so they would be joining the Writers Guild. And it feels really futile to be joining this other union for a time when you don’t really want to be a part of that union.

One of the challenges I think of unionizing assistants overall is that most Hollywood assistants don’t want to be career assistants. So a union makes a lot of sense if that is your chosen profession. But very few of the people who are in those jobs right now do they want to be doing this for 20 years. They’re not looking for a pension as an assistant. They’re looking to move into the next thing. So it’s worth talking about.

I don’t know that it solves the overall problem of assistants who are not in writers’ rooms. Because the WGA wouldn’t be able to cover them. But it’s always worth looking at sort of is there some organized labor way of addressing it.

**Megana:** And I think another big theme that’s been coming in, is that in the idea of taking a sort of legal route to addressing these issues–I mean, what do you do when people in HR and bosses are violating the actual laws in place? And asking people to do illegal things? So, Bo, do you want to read us what Greg wrote in?

**Bo:** Yeah. Greg wrote, “I assisted a showrunner who had two pilots shooting concurrently on location. We worked on one from Monday to Friday and then the other from Wednesday to Sunday. They also shifted the two production hours so they overlapped as little as possible. This meant I was working at least 16 hour days, seven days a week, covering showrunner assistant duties on both shows. To make it worse, they had me script coordinating both shows.

“When the studio production executive saw my time card she came to me saying I couldn’t work this much overtime. I said those were the hours I worked. She told me that they couldn’t approve it. I told her that I expected to be paid for every hour of work and that I was happy to cut back hours going forward. But she would have to talk to my boss, the showrunner, since I don’t control my schedule.

“She tried to tell me that I just couldn’t put down that kind of hours. She was talking around the illegal act of not wanting to say she wanted me to lie on my time card. She even suggested I was lucky that they were taking me on location. I told her that if she prefers she could find three inexperienced locals to do three of the four jobs I was doing. And I could easily work a regular schedule. She went to the showrunner saying I was being insubordinate. I was lucky the showrunner backed me up and even asked me if I wanted to continue working the overtime or hire more people. I made the choice to take the overtime.

“The point here is that the production executive at the studio was bullying me and had I not had the confidence of having done the job for years they would have probably succeeded at stealing from me.”

**Craig:** This is not at all shocking to me because John you and I both know that when these people – people who are pay masters at the studios – are dealing with us they’re also jerks. I mean, partly they’re professional jerks, right? I mean, not all of them are jerks. Don’t get me wrong. But a lot of times they will be really aggressive because the whole crux of their job is pay these people as little as possible. Well, if they’re doing that to us, you can only imagine what they’re doing to somebody like Greg who is apparently being held accountable for his hours while having no authority whatsoever over them. He’s being ordered to work. By the way, no one should be working that much. That’s insane.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely insane.

**John:** Absolutely insane. The whole sidebar conversation that nobody should be working that many hours.

**Craig:** Correct. And this production executive should have seen that timecard and called the showrunner immediately. But how dare she call this person and say essentially I’m not paying you for this, because I don’t want to. Tough. Talk to the showrunner. Tell them, hey, you can’t do this anymore. And what really lights me on fire is the amount of money that we’re talking about there to cover what is essentially the discrepancy of one timecard between what she wants it to be and what it actually was is not significant to that company. Guaranteed.

**John:** It’s less than one visual effects shot on either of those pilots.

**Craig:** Thank you. So she spent time browbeating this person and chiseling them down for what? For what? I mean, if you don’t want this to be part of your culture then cancel it as part of your culture by going to the showrunners and saying don’t do that. By the way, showrunner, whoever you are, don’t do that anyway. I mean, I’m sorry. You need somebody to go to you and say hey this is a problem before you go, oh yeah, I guess that’s a problem? Do you not understand how the world works? That people can’t work 16 hours a day, seven days a week? Why would you ever put anyone in that position in the first place? It’s wrong. Hire more people. Hire more people. And pay them a fair wage. There you go. There’s a big plan.

**John:** On previous episodes we’ve talked about there have been legal cases that have challenged things, especially on interns. So there was the Black Swan case we talked about. There’s another Viacom case. Where there were unpaid interns who were being asked to do work that should be paid work. There probably is a lawsuit that could be taking situations like Greg’s and especially when they’re actually being instructed to fill out false timecards where you are stealing money from employees. And that is what a lawsuit like that would look like. And if I were a studio or an agency or an employer who was listening to this I would be concerned about that because those things can happen and it probably should happen.

So I’ll be curious whether any of that stuff comes up in this next period of time.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I suppose that’s what happens when you don’t have the wherewithal to be a decent human being and do the right thing in the first place. Now lawyers have to get involved to force you to do the right thing. But I have to look at these situations and say to myself the people that need to be talked to are the people that are employing. So the showrunners who employ these folks, the agents that employ these folks, the studio executives that employ them, the HR people. All of them. This has to come from the absolute top. Somebody at the top who sets the tone for everything has to sit them all down and say, “I’m sorry. I’m not going to be the head of a company that does this to human beings. I’m just not. I don’t care.”

And look I understand. Sometimes we’re going to have employees that aren’t good. Sometimes you’re going to have employees that steal, or break stuff, or are incompetent and will need to be fired. I understand. I get it. I’m not, I don’t know, I’m not a hippie. I’m just saying if you’re going to hire people you can’t work them 16 hours a day, seven days a week. You have to pay them a fair wage so that they can live there. And you don’t want a situation where the only people that can work for you are people whose moms and dads can send them checks. It’s outrageous.

**John:** All right. Well let’s assign some homework for some of our listeners. So, this is sort of a challenge to the showrunners, writers, executives, or agents who are listening. This would be a great week to take some time to figure out how much your assistants are actually being paid and how that translates to take home pay. It’s a great week to ask are these assistants paying for health insurance out of their own pocket. How are they covering health insurance? How are they getting to work? Literally what are some of their expenses in terms of showing up there and in showing up there how do they have to be dressed. Are you being realistic about the expenses it takes to be doing the job that you’re having them do? And what are your company’s rules about overtime? How are you avoiding Greg situations where people are working these insane numbers of hours?

So, my challenge to everyone who is listening who is an employer, please do take some time this week to really figure out what you are actually doing. Because I don’t want to mistake ignorance for malice. I don’t want to sort of ascribe some evil intent when it’s really just people who aren’t paying attention to how much they’re paying and how expensive it is to live in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** And I would also just advise anyone who feels themselves falling into the trap of saying, “Well, that’s what I got paid when I came in.” Just please understand if it was longer than 10 years ago, they’re getting paid less effectively because expenses have outpaced inflation. Your argument is not valid.

**John:** Anyone who says, “It’s always been that way,” is ignoring two things. First off, it’s always been that way doesn’t mean it was ever right. Second, it’s always been that way ignores how much more expensive it is to live in 2019 than whenever they’re comparing it back to. So, stop with it’s always been that way. It doesn’t mean it was right. It’s always been that way for there was sexual harassment and other things that were always happening that way. It was never right then and it had to stop. So, enough of that argument.

I’m curious, a couple things that have come up that I’ve seen on Twitter. People talk about like some folks are sharing their information along with their name, but I think a lot more people are scared to come forward and sort of put their name to things because fears of reprisals. Fears of it being held against them. Megana, have you seen people who have been writing in express that sentiment?

**Megana:** Definitely. And a lot of people who have been writing in, you know, are very scared that we’re going to use their information because a lot of them have signed NDAs and have experienced really vindictive employers who have jeopardized their career in certain ways. And also terrorized them while they were working for them. But you know people have been suggesting a town hall or some sort of way to express what they’re feeling in a public way and to be around other assistants and actually like feel that people are listening to them. But I think it’s just a difficult situation because these are the people in Hollywood who have the least power.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. I would say that honestly an assistant’s name is actually far less important than the employer’s name. So, you know, if you want to keep your anonymity I fully support that. 100%. Look, your business is your business, right? Now obviously we’re trying to address something here. I’ve got to be honest. I’m not sure our general problem is that we’re short on evidence. In other words, ICM knows exactly what they pay their assistants. And now we know exactly what they pay their assistants. There’s no problem with that. Finding places and people and saying, “Look, I worked for this person. This person whose name is this pays their assistants this.” That’s valuable.

And it’s not like they can really get away with claiming that it’s a bunch of crap because people have pay stubs, right? So eventually you can show a paystub. But I don’t actually think that it’s super important for people to hang their name out there because I get it and I think the bigger piece of information is who is paying not enough.

**John:** I think this would be a great week for an employer to step up and say, “We’ve read through, we’ve looked at stuff, and we are now as a blanket policy raising the minimum we’re paying to anyone including our assistants to this figure.” And if it is a livable figure I think you get a lot of good publicity out of it. And especially if you really are backing it up with some program or some system that is encouraging upward mobility and not just sort of grinding people.

**Craig:** That’s who we change this. And I am all for assistants getting together and talking and sharing because you need to feel heard and you need to feel seen. And when you are in a jam situation a lot of times you start to feel like maybe it’s only you, or maybe you’re crazy, or maybe you’re just a whiner. And it’s really good to be able to share that stuff with other people and get perspective. But if we want to change this business what we need is someone powerful who runs a big company who listens to this and says, “I would like to be the first hero and do this.” And I hope we do get somebody. I mean, step forward, look at your numbers, and do it.

Please do it. And you know you can do it, by the way. Absolutely affordable. You know, I mean, it’s easy enough to look at some of these companies and say, all right, CEO shave 3% off your yearly income and it’s handled.

**John:** Yeah. Megana and Bo, thank you so much for coming on the show but also for all the work you’ve done this week sort of organizing and figuring out this massive information coming our way. So thank you both very much.

**Megana:** Thank you both for letting us on.

**Bo:** Thank you.

**Craig:** All right, now back to work, both of you. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And also I’m not paying for the amount of time that you were on this. This doesn’t go on your timecard.

**Bo:** But I did puzzles today.

**Craig:** Nope. [laughs]

**John:** All right, let’s segue to our main topic for today. I’m calling this segment Minimum Viable Movie because it was two weeks ago I went into a class at USC. Howard Rodman teaches a screenwriting class. And once a year if I can I go in and talk with his students. And they have their movies broken out in index cards. And they lay out their cards and they talk through their movie. And it’s a really useful exercise, I think both for them but also for me talking through what do I actually think is a movie and how movies work when they’re just broken down on cards.

And in some cases these were clearly very talented writers who had interesting things to say, but I challenged them on is that actually a movie. There was one writer who I said you’re entering an interesting story place, but what you’re describing sounds like a musical without songs. That so much of what she was aiming to do was going to be unspoken. There was no way to actually get to what was interesting about what was happening inside those character’s heads. So in a musical you could expose those things. In a movie I didn’t see how she was planning to do it and she couldn’t articulate how she was planning to do it.

So, I thought you and I might take a few minutes to talk through what you actually need to have in order to have something that is a movie idea versus a something else idea.

**Craig:** Well, I understand that when you are young and maybe you’re in a program like that one over there at USC that you might have a tendency away from what we would call conventional narrative and conventional movie. And you may be thinking of more independent fare of the sort that occasionally is dubbed mumblecore. And there are movies that are seemingly unrestrained by narrative demands. And those are cool. It’s just that, you know, if that’s what you’re aiming for go and do it, but you’re probably not actually – you don’t really need to spend all that money at USC at that point. I really do believe. Do you know what I mean?

There are great lessons to be had.

**John:** I actually wanted to draw a big enough circle to include the mumblecore movies which are genuinely movies, but some things are – there’s things that people try to write that aren’t even that. And they may even write a full screenplay, but you read the screenplay and you’re like, yeah, but that’s not actually a movie. Because you and I have both had that experience where we read a script that’s not very good, but we can say like, oh, but that’s definitely a movie. I see why that’s a movie.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Or other things that are actually well written, but like it’s good writing but it’s not a movie. And so I want to try to distinguish those two things. So, my first question would be is there a story. Is there a beginning, a middle, and an end?

**Craig:** Boy, this must have been some class over there. [laughs]

**John:** Well, here’s what it is. I’m not pushing for any one specific narrative theory or a thing that has to happen. It’s much less dogmatic than even sort of your Scriptnotes lesson when you talked through how to write a movie. But is it actually a story or are you just describing a situation? Because there are short stories that are really kind of just it’s a portrait. It’s a steady, still state of a thing. But there’s not forward movement. So that forward motion is a crucial aspect I think of a story that wants to be a movie.

**Craig:** Agreed. And I think probably it’s an essential building block of these things that the end be relevant to the beginning. In other words, you can have a beginning, you can have a middle, but if you end somewhere that has really nothing to do with the beginning it’s not actually an end. It’s just where the movie stopped. And that doesn’t count.

**John:** Nope. Is this a story that wants to be told on a screen? And by that I don’t mean it has to be on a giant screen. It doesn’t have to be projected. I’m not talking to classic feature film. But ask yourself is this idea really better as a book, a graphic novel, a stage play, a videogame, a VR experience. And that’s a question I ask myself when I had the idea that ultimately became Arlo Finch. I had all this stuff but I was like it’s not really a movie. And then I realized, oh, it’s actually a middle grade book series. That’s what it really wanted to be. But if I had tried to force it into movie shape at the start it really wouldn’t have worked.

And so I think it’s always worth asking is a movie the best way to explore this narrative, bunch of things that are interesting to you. Or is there a better way to do it? If it doesn’t have to be a movie, then it probably isn’t a movie.

**Craig:** Especially when you are contemplating a story that is very internal. If something really is living primarily in someone’s mind it’s probably a book.

**John:** Yeah. Books are great at that. And in Arlo Finch in the books I can go into Arlo’s head and really see what he’s thinking. And that is going to be very challenging to do in any screen adaptation. So ask yourself how externalized are character’s thoughts and motivations and ambitions. If they’re really internal then you kind of are writing a musical without songs and that’s going to be really challenging to do.

I’d ask is the story you’re trying to tell familiar to the point of being cliché. And so it’s absolutely fine to write within a genre. We’ve talked about how much we love rom-coms. But if you’re just stringing together the genre’s tropes then that’s not really a movie. There’s probably not a compelling reason to make that movie or a compelling reason to watch that movie. You have to really challenge yourself like given all the choices of things I could watch would you actually choose to watch that movie. And that should be a requirement before you’re going to spend months of your life writing this script.

**Craig:** I agree. I also think that if you are contemplating a story that is executed primarily through really big conversations you may be in trouble. I see this all the time. I think people sometimes have very meaningful conversations in their life and they think that’s a movie. It’s not. Generally speaking the stories of movies are pushed forward not by conversation but by events. Choices. Things that crash into people. Whatever it is. There are conversations and some of them are amazing. But movies that are just trying to mirror some conversation you had in your life will generally never be as interesting to other people as they are to you.

They kind of aren’t movies.

**John:** I would challenge you to look at the central characters in your story and are they compelling? Are they genuinely people you want to watch for two hours? And importantly does the action of the story happen because of things they do, or does the story happen to them? If it’s happening to them it’s unlikely to sort of really work as a movie because they’re just a cork sort of bobbing down the river as it goes down. They should be driving the action to some meaningful degree. And in driving the action classically you want to see them change.

I’m willing to go with characters who don’t change. I want to draw a really big circle around the kinds of things that can be OK to write as movies, but you have to have some characters. If you don’t have characters that are compelling to watch that make you want to stay with them for two hours – antiheroes, heroes, whatever. We’re not asking for likeable. Just compelling. Then you probably don’t have a movie.

**Craig:** I agree. And I think sometimes what happens with newer writers is they are in love with a kind of story. Maybe they come up with a great idea. But what they do is replicate their experience of enjoying movies. They create characters that are watching the movie that they’re in.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that is no bueno. We’re watching the movie. That means the character is the movie. The character can’t be watching it along with us. That’s just dreadful.

**John:** Nope. The last challenge I’d put for people is do you as the author have something interesting to say about this topic or this narrative space that you’re describing. Because if it’s just going to be another manifestation of this thing then sort of why. What is it you are bringing to this that is different than other people are bringing to this? What is it that really makes this movie a unique expression of this kind of story? If you don’t have that then it’s probably not the thing you should be writing next.

**Craig:** Yeah. I completely agree.

**John:** Cool. So with those caveats, again, I don’t want to make this sound like we’re against small movies or mumblecore or intimate ones or things that don’t fit a very classic Hollywood architecture. I’m all for experimental whatever. But in the experimental things that you’re trying to do is there are real reason why this thing should exist? Maybe it’s like some sort of video installation piece that doesn’t have to have plot or story or anything moving forward. That’s great. That’s terrific. But that’s not a movie you would be writing as a screenplay.

**Craig:** Could be a song. Could be an album. Could be a painting. There’s all sorts of ways to express yourself. Moving images on screen, whether it’s television or feature films, is really specific. It’s a very specific art form that some stories are perfectly suited to and others not at all.

**John:** Yep. All right. We’ve got two questions here to answer. Tom asks, “Have you done anything on developing and defining the concept of a franchise in TV and how that’s evolving? For example, take a classic procedural show like Chicago Fire or NYPD Blue. The traditional franchise of that show is the story of the week, usually with significant stakes. Yet it increasingly feels like the real franchise in TV shows is the interweaving of serialized relationship dramas between the characters. That’s what you keep coming back for week after week. Do you and Craig feel that the story of the week franchise model still drives television?”

**Craig:** Well, it seems like it’s been driving television for the network for quite some time. I mean, Dick Wolf, obviously our friend Derek Haas is the creator/co-creator of Chicago Fire. But that falls under the Dick Wolf empire. And he also has Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: CVS. And Law & Order: IBB. And so on. And I assume that they do this a lot because it boosts ratings. It’s a good ratings event for network TV.

I mean, I get it. Networks are still pounding out 22 shows a season, you know. I mean, that’s a lot. You’ve got to give people some curve balls in there to keep them excited and keep them coming back. I don’t think this is at all the model for streaming or cable. I mean, generally speaking I don’t know of any streaming or cable property that is kind of a standalone story of the week type of show. They’re almost always serialized to some extent or another. And sometimes they’re even anthologized like American Horror Story.

So, yeah, I think it makes sense. It’s a network thing because networks have way more shows to put out there. And, hey, in return they get way more eyeballs. You got to tip your hat.

**John:** I look at the progression of the hospital show from the old ones which were incredibly straight procedural. Like you could watch them in any order and it would make sense. You have a show like ER which is largely procedural, but there was some ongoing stuff that happened week to week. And so relationships would develop and change. But if you just dropped in on an episode you could follow it completely. Grey’s Anatomy is much more the soap opera model of relationships. Like that is what you’re really focusing on. While there is medicine there, you move forward.

I think it ultimately comes back to what is the expectation of the audience as they start watching that show. Are they expecting to have ongoing relationships with these characters that grow and change that the interplay between them is really meaningful? Or are they looking for just a simple thing happens. Like the classic old Star Trek episodes you can kind of watch them in any order because it is an alien of the week that is really driving the plot of a given episode.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s about expectation. And I do agree with Craig that what we’re seeing on premium cable and streaming and even increasingly now on network is much more about the relationships between the characters and not the this is the plot that is introduced at the start of the episode that will be resolved by the end of the episode.

**Craig:** Yeah. In fact streamers or at least when you look at Netflix they seem so utterly disinterested in the old model of get to this many episodes so that you can syndicate. That they will routinely cut off shows after three seasons no matter what. Because they’re just like, meh, people are still watching it, they like it, but let’s just stop spending money on it and let’s put something else in. Because the old way, the network way of doing things was, OK, you’re a production company. You’re going to deficit finance a show. It’s going to go on a network, meaning you’re not going to get in the license the network pays you it’s not enough to pay for the cost of making each show. So how does this make sense? Syndication. How do you get to syndication? You need a minimum of 100 episodes. So your show has got to be enough of a hit that it can last all that time.

Well, if you’re a streamer and you’re making your own show and putting it out there and there’s no syndication to have, it just endlessly syndicates on your own platform, cut it off. Actors are asking for too much money? Cut it off. Make a new thing. That’s where we’re going.

**John:** It is. All right, Paul writes, “I know spec scripts for TV shows are a thing. But I just finished a spec feature script for a film franchise that I definitely do not have the rights to. But I think it’s a good script and I wanted to show it to people. Is this the sort of thing that agents or whoever would be willing to look at? Or will they roll their eyes and say, “Ugh, fan fiction,” and toss it?”

So, before we answer Paul’s question, spec is such a weird term because it means a different thing in television than in features. So just as a refresher a spec script in television is a script that I write for an existing TV show. So I wasn’t hired to write it, but basically I could write a spec Chicago Fire. It’s not designed to actually be shot as Chicago Fire, but people can read it as a writing sample. So specs in TV are really writing samples.

A spec in feature is something you’re writing with the intention to sell. So you hear about a spec script selling, that is a feature thing basically.

**Craig:** Yeah. And part of the deal with that is that at least traditionally because the kind of television show you’d write a spec script for does churn out episodes and should theoretically be out next year and the year after that. And you usually write spec scripts for well-established, well liked shows. There’s a chance they could buy it. I mean, they need more episodes. They’re always going to need more episodes. They hire lots of writers. But if you’re talking about a movie, a film franchise, and just side note I hate the fact that we are all using this word “franchise” now. Like some soulless goon came up with this franchise thing to stick on top of art. It makes me nuts.

Franchises are McDonald’s, OK. But whatever, fine. We all lose. So, people have this film franchise and they’re not necessarily looking to you to write a script. They’re not going to make one or two or 12 this year. They’re going to make one every three years and they’re not looking for outside writers to deliver those. There’s just not the demand.

So, right off the bat it’s a little questionable. It is at best a sample for something. You’re never going to get full credit for it unless it’s wildly subversive. In other words, if you write a spec feature in a well-established series like Fast & Furious but it is entirely the opposite of what you would expect, it’s like one quiet evening and it’s drama and there’s no car chases whatsoever and that’s the point is that you’re being clever, maybe that would attract some eyes and people would go, oh, this is a creative individual.

But, yeah, I think mostly you’re just not going to get the credit you should because you’re borrowing other people’s characters. You’re borrowing other people’s scenarios. And you’re bothering other people’s tone. You will probably get quite a few rolled eyes and people saying, “Ugh, fan fiction.”

**John:** So, yes, I agree. You potentially could get some fan fiction knock back. I will say that when people write scripts intending them to be writing samples it is a moment for some wild swings. And so those wild swings are the things that end up on the Black List that ends up getting attention or ends up getting passed around. So if you had a great idea for a mash up of Fast & Furious and the Marvel movies that couldn’t exist in the real world and you chose to write that, you would write that knowing that this is never going to be a thing that actually sells, but some people might really dig it and it might get you some meetings. It might get you an agent. It might get you started.

So it’s not not worth your time. But understand that you’re never going to be able to sell that thing. But you’re also not going to be sued over it. They’re not going to come after you for writing a script like that because you’re not selling it. It’s fine to do that. You’re going to be OK doing that.

And it is a little bit more like what classic TV staffing was like is that I was writing a spec Frasier episode, not because I was even trying to get hired to write on Frasier, but I might want to be hired on Mad About You or some of the other shows that were staffing at the same time. So it’s an example of like can I use other people’s characters and write those voices.

Mindy Kaling on Twitter recently was talking about staffing for her show and she was like why doesn’t anybody write spec scripts anymore. Like I love reading specs of existing shows because I know the voices of those characters and I can see very quickly whether you can actually write the voices of those characters. And to her it was more helpful to see like not that you had a brilliant original voice of your own, but that you could actually write the voice of these other existing shows.

So it goes back and forth. There’s reasons why both things exist. But I would say to Paul if he has the compelling idea and he probably also has some other original things he’s written and he wants to write this thing that he can’t actually sell, maybe.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m a little concerned that that’s your one thing. If you’ve got three things, and that’s one of them that’s fine. But if your one thing is that I’m concerned that you are doing fan fiction and that you aren’t capable of doing a script without that kind of Hamburger Helper. So I would challenge you, Paul, to do a script without the Hamburger Helper. See how you do.

**John:** Agreed. All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. I actually have two this week–

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** But they’re both music related and it was a good week for music for me. The first is Taylor Swift did a Tiny Desk concert for NPR. It’s the ongoing NPR series where they invite in musicians and they perform a little concert in the NPR offices. What I liked about hers was not so much the performance but her talking between the songs. So there was no interviewer. She was just talking about writing the songs. And she talked about this one song Lover which was the title track on the album just sort of came to her all at once and it was the fantasy of like, oh, she sat down at the piano, the whole thing was there. She didn’t know where it came from. And she was like well that will be the title track. Like it all just works. But sometimes you show up at the piano and it just doesn’t work and that’s when you fall back on your craft to try to figure out how stuff fits together and how to make the thing work.

And it was just nice to hear somebody in a completely field talk about what I often experience. There are those moments where it just all flows so naturally and you don’t even know where it all came from. And other times when it’s a lot of craft and it’s a lot of pushing stuff around and making it work.

So, I’d encourage you to take a look at that. The second thing, Craig, I think you’ll appreciate.

**Craig:** I love this. I read it. I gobbled it up.

**John:** Seth Stevenson at Slate wrote a piece about The Terminator theme. And we’ll play this here so you can hear what we’re talking about. As you listen to it [music plays] it’s striking but a thing I used to do with my daughter in the car is as the radio was playing I’d ask her what count is this song in. And so she’d clap her hands and she’d figure out whether it was four, or three, or six. And very quickly sort of be able to figure out music tends to be three, four, six. Every once in a while you’ll get something really fancy. You’ll get like a take five, which is in five-four.

As you’re listening to this Terminator theme what time signature is this? And so you can try to count in four but it doesn’t work. You can try to count it in six, and it doesn’t work. And so there’s ongoing debate about it. So Seth Stevenson was able to go to the composer to actually talk to him about what happened. And the reason why it’s in such a crazy time signature is because of how it was actually made and sort of the state of looping software back in those times. And basically he couldn’t make the times match up right so it ended up in this impossible time signature that would be very hard for an orchestra to play for example.

So I thought it was just a great example of math and music and movies, so a combination of all the things we love.

**Craig:** They run it through carefully and come up with 13-16. It’s in 13-16. So, really what’s happening is it’s in a weird decimal of a four. I mean, whatever 13 divided by four is. What is that?

**John:** 12 and a fourth. Four, four and a quarter. Basically there’s an extra quarter.

**Craig:** Extra quarter note.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s so weird. It is a bizarre – it’s like so if you were to express four-four time in 16ths then it’s just 16 number 16. Easy. And three-four time is 12 over 16. So, 13 over 16 is almost in three but there’s a little extra bit. It’s like a tiny little extra bit in there. It is bizarre. You would never do it on purpose.

I mean, I love weird time signature stuff. I mean, if you want to look at some crazy time signature stuff Here Comes the Sun has some wacky crap that happens in it just for a few measures here and there. Led Zeppelin pulls out a nine-eight at one point I think for The Ocean. And then we have Solsbury Hill in seven-four, which is always fun. I like the songs in seven. And seven is really just alternating four and three I think. This is where musicians will probably get angry at me, but that’s how I kind of think of it.

**John:** Yeah. So take a look at it. Take a listen to it. I like that Seth Stevenson had a question and actually tracked down the composer to find the answer.

**Craig:** Yeah. Beautiful. Wonderful job. Well, you know what. You had two. That covers me. I feel great.

**John:** Good. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Thanks to Megana and to Bo for their help this week.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tyler Adams. 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 or assistant emails.

For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. You can also download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, thanks so much for a jam-packed episode.

**Craig:** Thanks man.

**John:** Cool. Bye.

Links:

* [Austin Film Festival Schedule](https://austinfilmfestival.com/festival-and-conference-aff/2019-full-schedule/)
* Taylor Swift [Tiny Desk Concert on NPR](https://www.npr.org/2019/10/16/770318649/taylor-swift-tiny-desk-concert)
* [What Is the Time Signature of the Ominous Electronic Score of The Terminator?](https://slate.com/culture/2014/02/the-time-signature-of-the-terminator-score-is-a-mystery-for-the-ages.html) by Seth Stevenson
* [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 Tyler Adams ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_423_minimum_viable_movie.mp3)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/plot-holes).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 384 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to talk about plot holes and why sometimes you’re better off leaving them than trying to fix them. We’ll also be answering listener questions about things that screenwriters notice that normal people might not. And sequences and outlines and sort of where to fix those problems when they come up.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. So it’s pronounced plot holes and not plotholes. It looks like plotholes.

**John:** So I was looking at the word plot holes and I realized today, and maybe I’m just dumb and never noticed it before, it’s based on pot holes, like pot holes the holes in the street.

**Craig:** Is it? Is it?

**John:** I bet it is. I bet that is the derivation of the word.

**Craig:** You think, because to me even if there weren’t pot holes there is a hole in your plot. It makes sense. You might be right. I don’t know. Who can answer this question for us?

**John:** I think John McWhorter can answer this question for us.

**Craig:** Oh, god, I would love to have him on the show. You know I’m like obsessed him?

**John:** You are. Because he’s also obsessed with musicals and you guys are pretty much separated at birth.

**Craig:** Musicals and language and language usage. He’s the one that turned me on to the whole – what is it – I can’t remember the word he used to describe it, but it’s the thing where people will add an “ah” at the end of a word to indicate emphasis, like No-ah.

**John:** Yes. Stop-ah.

**Craig:** What are you doing-ah?

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** It’s that extra little shwa, that little shwa.

**Craig:** So weird. Anyway, he’s a genius.

**John:** He’s a genius. We also have news. So our news is about three upcoming events.

**Craig:** Wow, that’s almost too many.

**John:** The Princess Bride, January 27 at 5pm. So, I think the rules are that the doors will open at 4:30 in which case WGA members can go in and get their seats. At 4:45 everyone is free to get their seats. The movie will start at 5pm at the WGA Theater. And then afterwards we will discuss it in a very classic let’s take a deep dive on this movie, except we’ve just watched this movie. So, that is the plan for January 27th.

**Craig:** Awesome. I think that’s going to be – and it’s going to be fun. And it’s in celebration, of course, of the great William Goldman. I happen to love the movie. I think most people do love the movie. It’s one of those movies that a lot of people sort of memorize, but I love digging into these things and finding these little bits and bobs that are just so gorgeous that make it work the way it does.

**John:** I agree. We have a live show coming up in Seattle. It’s long been rumored. It now actually has a date. It is February 6 at 7pm. It’s going to be at the Northwest Film Forum. There’s information in the show notes about how you get tickets, if there are tickets, or if you just show up. We’re recording this ahead of time so I don’t really know what those rules are, but Megan will have the information and those will be in the show notes. But we look forward to seeing Seattle on February 6 at 7pm.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s going to be fun. I love Seattle.

**John:** Seattle is great. I love it, too. Finally, this second Arlo Finch book comes out in February and there’s a launch event February 9 here in Los Angeles at Chevalier’s Bookstore. It is at 12:30pm. And you should come see me and I will sign your books. It’s your first chance to buy the book in Los Angeles. And you can come. I will probably read a chapter from it. And I’ll offer answers to questions that might come up. So come, bring kids who might be able to read the book, but also just come and say hi because I’ll be there and I’ll happily sign your book.

**Craig:** I mean, I kind of feel like when people see you in real life there’s a little bit of squealing now.

**John:** There might be. A little bit. I might spark joy for certain people.

**Craig:** For certain people.

**John:** Certain people. Not all the people.

**Craig:** No. Select people.

**John:** Select people. I’m going to segue into sparking joy for just a second because I blogged this week. I don’t blog very often. And I’m going to spoil who actually said this. There was a project that I was considering doing, it was a pretty big project that would be more than a year of my life to do. And I had a phone call about it and I was thinking about it and Megan, our producer, asked me, “But does it spark joy?” She’s using the Marie Kondo phrase. And I ended up blogging about this. And I thought it was actually exactly the right question. Because when I admitted to myself that while I admired the project and I was intrigued by it, it didn’t actually bring me joy. And if I were to lose the project I wouldn’t really feel that sad. It was a good signal to me that I probably shouldn’t pursue the project. And so my new thing when I’m considering a project is asking myself if it sparks joy.

**Craig:** It’s a great idea. And I’ve been going through this a lot myself. The danger is that sometimes if you’ve been working for a while without concern for joy sparks, you know, you’ve been working because it pays well, or because you felt it would kind of move things forward to a place where you could work on things that are just joy-sparkers, then you almost are unfamiliar with how to measure your own potential joy in something. The other issue that I have always, and have always had, is my joy, my spark of joy, will always be followed by a spark of panic.

So, I love something, I’m so excited about something, and I can’t wait. And then about two days later I’m suddenly suffused with dread. That this thing that inspired joy in me is now this dead thing. Just lying in the street like a big, I don’t know, dead side of beef and I want nothing to do with it. This goes on all the time – this may just be me.

**John:** No, it’s not that way. There’s instantly a kind of regret, like once you’ve gotten the thing, it’s the dog who is chasing the car and finally catches the car. It’s like, oh no, oh no, is this really what I want?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was recognizing that if I had caught this project I might not really want the project. And I remember a conversation with you, this was off-mic so it was maybe before we were recording an episode, there was a very, very big property that was coming into your universe.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And you asked my advice – you don’t often ask my advice – but I said the equivalent sort of thing is like but do you really want to be writing blank project? And is that a dream of yours? And you’re like, oh no. Then that’s your answer.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. You know, it’s funny. I asked a few people advice on that one because I was really unsure of my own instinct I think. Because it seemed a little crazy to say no. And I asked Rian Johnson as well and I got, I think, halfway through the title and he just went, “No.” And by the way that’s the kind of advice I like. So it’s just like, oh good, you’re not actually even giving me advice. You’re just providing me the comfort of your certainty. I like – thank you. That’s really nice.

But that’s a great example of something where it seemed to me that I would not experience joy. And, in the end, you’re not simply protecting yourself. You’re actually also protecting everyone else. Because in the end they are relying on you to carry them through this incredibly important phase, writing, with your passion. And if you run out of it they can smell it pretty quickly I suspect.

**John:** Yeah. So I want to circle back to one thing you said is that at certain points in your career that question of like does it spark joy is not going to be the most important question. The most important question at certain points in your career is will they pay me money, is this a paid job I can take and actually deliver. And so I don’t want to sort of skip over that because that is such an important part of your early career is chasing all those projects and landing those projects even if they’re not the ones you really love. And you have to fake that you have that spark of joy on a lot of projects to land those projects. That is totally valid and true.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What I think we’re both recognizing though is sometimes you can get so caught up in chasing things you start realizing like, oh wait, I shouldn’t be chasing these things anymore. I should actually probably doing the things that are meaningful to me.

**Craig:** Exactly. You know, John Gatins has such a great term for this, because he recognizes that there are times when you write things that you are in love with and then he says there are those other jobs that are Geisha work. And I love that. It’s Geisha work. Meaning it’s not just tawdry. It’s not this kind of empty thing. There’s an art to it. There is a care. There is a craft. There is a loving attention. But it’s not love. It’s Geisha work.

**John:** Yeah. It’s Geisha work. Let’s get to some follow up. So Joel wrote in to say he was hoping we could do some follow up on something we mentioned in a recent show. “In Episode 383, John while discussing the film Mortal Engines, said something like, ‘They set themselves some interesting story challenges.’ I found that an intriguing idea because I often wonder how much of the work that people do can only be appreciated by fellow crafts people. Can you name some other films or TV shows that fall into the category of interesting challenges that might go unnoticed by the general public?”

And I thought it was a good question because there definitely are things which we talk about in terms of like, oh wow, that was a really hard thing to try to do, and you might not notice that if you’re just watching the film. Some things which occurred to me that I saw, things with very limited dialogue because as a screenwriter if there’s not much dialogue it can be very hard to externalize ideas. And so *A Quiet Place* has very little dialogue in it. *The Hush* episode of Buffy has very little dialogue.

Likewise, shows that have too many characters or movies that have too many characters. So the first *Charlie’s Angels* is a huge writing challenge and I don’t think people noticed that enough that you have three characters who each have their own storylines that have to fit into the bigger storyline. They still have their villains. There have to be twists and reveals. So to keep all those balls in the air is a real challenge that you wouldn’t have if you had a single protagonist.

You worked on the next Charlie’s Angels movie, so you encountered the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s definitely an interesting thing to keep those balls in the air because you feel, well, I think if you’re doing it responsibly you feel an anxiety when a particular character hasn’t spoken in a while. And I think we talked about this in the last podcast. And you also feel an anxiety if the characters have these little arcs that are either too small or too out of whack with the other characters or not interlacing with the other characters. So there is a lot of craft that goes into that stuff.

That said, I would rather write a movie with a group of three or four “normal” people than another spoof movie where one of the biggest challenges in writing spoof is your characters have no internal life whatsoever. And there’s never a moment where anyone just stops and thinks. Ever. It is excruciating. It’s like taking away – we say to people you’re going to run, just remember to breathe. And with spoof it’s like you’re going to run, also you can’t breathe. Not allowed. It’s really annoying.

**John:** No breathing is possible. Another movie with a lot of characters which I think screenwriters really acknowledged was a real challenge was *The Big Short*, because *The Big Short* you have a ton of characters who have to give really important information. They need to feel like real people because in some of the cases they are based on real people. And yet you don’t have time to sort of give meaningful inner lives and challenges that are going to be resolved in a normal way. So it’s making sure that those people feel like they have weight even though they’re not going to do normal movie character things over the course of the two hours.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in those movies, too, you have a certain challenge of instruction. If a movie does this well, or if a show does it well, you don’t notice. That’s kind of the hallmark of these challenges is that when it’s really nailed you don’t even realize that they’ve done something incredibly hard to do.

I don’t think when people first saw, I don’t know what the first Disney animated movie was that had that multi-plane technology to it, but I suspect that they didn’t realize just how difficult it was to get that small bit of depth, that little bit of parallax motion. It was enormously difficult. And that’s a sign that they did it well.

**John:** And so I think narratively sometimes we don’t recognize that like, oh, there’s a lot of work happening to make it feel like – so you don’t notice that this thing is happening in front of you.

**Craig:** Which is good, because I mean in the end that’s a big part of our job is making it look like nobody did a job. You know? But it can be tough. Certainly when I see a movie like *The Big Short* I really admire the way that they went about instructing us, but instructing us in such a manner that they knew confidently we would understand.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And that was pretty great.

**John:** I could have put this under limited dialogue, but shows and movies with limited characters can be really challenging. So, Castaway. So often you have to externalize Tom Hanks’s thoughts, and so you create Wilson, you create other ways to sort of get us into his head even though he has no other character to talk with. So, if it had been a book then we could be just directly in his head. Because movies don’t let us do that, they have to find ways to externalize those thoughts.

Same with Gravity. So much of Gravity is just Sandra Bullock. So how do we know what she’s trying to do, what she’s feeling, what the next thing is for her? That’s a real storytelling challenge. In addition to all of the technical challenges of making that movie, the storytelling challenges are great in a movie like Gravity.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then Alfonso Cuarón’s latest, Roma, is a similar kind of thing in a weird way because even though there’s plenty of characters and there’s plenty of dialogue, your central character is not a classic protagonist and it’s kind of from her point of view, but it’s also kind of from an omniscient point of view. It’s a really – he created really fascinating challenges for himself in how he was letting us into this world. It’s almost the place is more the protagonist and we’re following a character but not necessarily seeing the world through her eyes. And I thought it was brilliantly done, but a really difficult choice.

**Craig:** You know, it occurs to me that a lot of the challenges that you’re describing in live action are things that animation has a very easy time with. For instance, expressing internal thoughts. *Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse* was able to kind of create a little bit of a new animated language so that you could see and hear people’s thoughts as they desired. But then of course in animation the problem is just making someone take one step is incredibly painstaking.

**John:** Lastly, I think the thing to talk about is movies that involve animals or children. So there are huge production challenges with animals and children, the number of hours they can work, or sort of the trainers that do that. But when you think about those as a writing challenge it’s how do we get in the head of this dog that is in front of us or this young character who may not be able to speak, so so much is going to rely on us looking in their face or their eyes and what we’re setting up about the world around them, how people are interacting with them. The order of events is going to be dictating our understanding of who these characters are. And those are narrative challenges that you probably don’t recognize until you actually have to do it and you see what the work is on the page to get you there.

**Craig:** I mean, just a simple thing like a drama in which a child witnesses a terrible event. Well, can they be there on that day? Will they actually see the terrible event? If not, how will they know what to say or do if they don’t know what the terrible event is? Do you describe it to them? Are you the first person to describe to a six-year-old what sexual assault is? These are real issues that people tangle with all the time when they’re making movies or television when you’re dealing with children because children are being asked to portray other children who have gone through some sort of trauma, sometimes. Not all the time.

**John:** A classic example is Kubrick on *The Shining*. And so he knew he was going to have these horrifying images. He also knew he was going to have this young kid. And so he would have conversations with the young kid about like, so, you’re seeing this thing. He wasn’t describing what the actual cutaway shot was going to be, but the thing that would get the kind of reaction that would be appropriate to intercut with. And that’s a thing you do all the time. You do as-if kind of substitutions for those things.

You can’t do that with a dog or a cat. And so you have to figure out what you’re going to do to get you into that place.

One of the biggest writing challenges I had was a movie that was never made called Fenwick’s Suit. And the central character in Fenwick’s Suit is this suit that comes to life. And so I had to think about like, well, how are we going to know what the suit is thinking? It has no face. It has lapels which can sort of function like ears. We can see its general body language. But it was a real challenge. And it would have been a challenge for the director and special effects people, but like to show that on the page was really tough because he couldn’t talk to anybody. And so I had to be able to find sentences that would describe exactly what the action was he was trying to do and how people would understand that.

**Craig:** Well, you know, that’s something that we might be able to help you with post-facto when we start talking about breaking rules. Because I’ve been thinking about that very topic a lot lately.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s get to Jim’s question. Do you want to take that?

**Craig:** Jim writes, “I’m 82 nonlinear pages into a script that features seven notable characters. Altogether they’re split across either three or four threads within the story. I’m trying to tie everything up while giving the characters their appropriate exposure and screen time. Would you, John August, have any advice from a technical standpoint on the best way to map out stories like these? Do we know how they tackle the stuff on Thrones?” He means Game of Thrones, by the way.

**John:** Game of Thrones. Talking the lingo.

**Craig:** Jim, go ahead and say Game of Thrones next time.

**John:** Just a few extra syllables. So, I would say the script that Jim is describing is probably an ensemble piece, there’s multiple characters doing multiple things. They may be in different timelines. It may be more like Go. It may be a more straightforward thing. But he’s describing a situation where different characters have different goals and different agendas and we’re not following a single character through the whole thing.

I think this is a situation where you’re using cards or a whiteboard or some other form of visually displaying who all the characters are and what they’re trying to do and figuring out where they intersect. Because if you could pull back and take a look at it you might see like, oh wow, this character doesn’t have enough to do. It’s not feeling rewarding. And you might be able to find some good balance between the characters.

The toughest thing you’re going to probably find in getting all these storylines to fit together nicely is that every time you’re cutting from one character’s storyline to another character’s storyline that it really feels like progress and that you’re not just like putting a pin in that and going off to someplace else.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m sure I don’t know the Game of Thrones writing process, but I’m sure quite early on in the breaking of stories they’re really thinking about like, OK, what is it going to be like to have these two scenes back to back and how is one scene going to inform the next scene? Might they switch some things around in post? I’m sure they do. But in breaking the script they’re always thinking about like what is it going to feel like to go from this character’s storyline to this character’s storyline and what are we gaining by making that cut right there?

**Craig:** They’re also making episodic television and it sounds like Jim is maybe making a feature because he’s 82 pages into a script, singular. So Game of Thrones can just simply stop following a character for two episodes. They can just stop and then they can come back to them later and sort of catch up. In a movie, not really. You can’t just stop. I mean, you can take a break. It’s a small break. But then you’ve got to come back.

So, one thing to ask yourself, Jim, is does your script actually feature seven notable characters or does it feature four notable characters and three sort of notable characters? Can you compress? Obviously if you can’t compress then you have to kind of stack your characters in terms of importance and complexity. Maybe character six and seven are just sort of thin, maybe a little bit more types as opposed to full people that require a lot of attention.

But the best way to map out stories like these, I believe, is to map them out the good old fashioned way from the point of view of your protagonist, or if you have a dual protagonist, two people, what they want, what they need, what’s wrong with them, what do they have to become. How does your plot help them or hurt them? And then these other people involved need to be looked at as allies and enemies and obstacles and assistants.

**John:** Absolutely true. And if you are doing something that is sort of more chapter-based, like *Go* is chapter-based, do that for each section and really think about like, OK, who is the equivalent of the protagonist in that section and what is their arc going to be over the course of that section. But if it’s a movie there’s going to be an expectation of progress that gets you to a certain place.

Unless you’re doing The Big Short, like we talked about before, and that’s a real challenge. And in that situation maybe you’re not worrying about sort of the balance of the characters and who has the most screen time, but are we telling the overall macro story well enough and am I using the characters that I’ve picked to tell that story as well as I can.

**Craig:** Exactly. John, do you want to see what Cade from Boise, Idaho wants to say?

**John:** Cade from Boise, Idaho writes, “Today I came across Episode Three—“

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Episode Three. Way back in the vault.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** “In which you discussed the process of outlining. I’m writing a spec TV show for which I recently finished the outline but there are oh so many problems with the story. I don’t know how deep I should go revising based on an outline. What are the things you look for to rework at the outline stage?” Craig?

**Craig:** The outline stage is the story stage, so you don’t stop until you feel quite confident that the story makes sense. That it holds together. This is if you are kind of outline conscious and I am. Some people don’t really like to outline and their process is one more of discovery. But for me I’m a big outliner and this is the time where I get to acid test the story before I go through all the effort of writing the script.

So, if there are so many problems with the story you’ve got to take a step back, ask yourself why, and then maybe start again. It’s just an outline, right? It’s just index cards. You haven’t built a house that you realize now is leaning slightly to the left and you have to demolish the whole thing. It’s just index cards. Don’t be afraid. Do it. Just start again.

**John:** So here’s what’s confusing about the term spec. And so what Cade is referring to as a spec TV show probably means an episode of an existing TV show for which he’s writing an episode for which he’s not being paid. So basically if he was writing an episode of *Game of Thrones*, a spec episode of *Game of Thrones* means it’s an episode of Game of Thrones. Versus a spec script in general means a script that there’s no underlying material. It’s confusing and we should have picked different words, but that’s sort of what it means.

So, I think particularly if Cade is writing a spec episode of Hawaii 5-0 that outline has to be tight and flawless and it needs to completely make sense because that’s a show that is entirely based on the plot of the episode. And so if the plot isn’t making sense on an outline level it’s not going to make sense in the finished script version. So, fix that now.

The outline phase is great for tackling logic problems, for like this just doesn’t make sense. It needs to make sense that way. The outline is not going to get you to sort of the more subtle emotional problems. That may not really become clear at the outline level. So, don’t kill yourself to write the perfect emotional outline because that’s just not the finished thing. And sometimes you’ll find in the development process if you are writing outlines for people they keep pushing for all this emotional detail that just doesn’t make sense on an outline level. So be mindful that you’re not trying to fix problems that just can’t be fixed in that medium.

**Craig:** Yeah. You certainly can’t achieve the emotional complexity of the screenplay. There’s no question about that. What you can do with an outline I think is build and investigate the function of the emotional pieces, like the big gears. If this person feels this way and then this happens and then they end up with that person does this make sense that they would feel the following? Would we feel something there? Has the story and the interactions between these two led to a moment that would create a feeling? That’s something that you could probably figure out from an outline and during outline. It’s certainly something I work on in outlines.

But the deeper stuff, yes, at some point you can just simply remind people, well yeah, you know, this is an outline. And for yourself as well, if there’s a little thing that’s kind of bugging you about it, sometimes you just let that go because in the writing you find a solve.

**John:** Let’s get into our feature topic which is plot holes and I think that ties in very well to this issue of outlines versus the finished product. So let’s talk about what plot holes even are because I think there’s a wide range of things we could describe as plot holes. But for today’s conversation, I’m going to go to the Wikipedia definition, which is of course the definitive definition of anything should be a community-generated webpage somewhere.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** They define, “In fiction, a plot hole is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story’s plot. Such inconsistencies include such things as illogical or impossible events, statements or events that contradict other events in the storyline. The term is more loosely also applied to ‘loose ends’ in a plot. Sidelined story elements that remain unresolved by the end of the plot.”

Another definition of it which I found, there’s a site called MoviePlotHoles.com, and their tag line is where suspension of belief comes to die.

**Craig:** Well at least they know who they are.

**John:** Yes. And so basically what we’re looking for when we’re talking about this conversation of plot holes are things in the finished product that just feel like, OK, there’s a mistake there and this mistake could bug people. And we’re going to get into whether it’s worth trying to correct this. But in a perfect world, I guess, these things would not exist and sort of where they come from, let’s talk about sort of the general shapes of them and sort of what you do as you encounter plot holes.

**Craig:** Yeah. And these are the things that drive us crazy as writers, of course. They are, fair warning to all of you out there who want to be professional, they are also things that studio executives and producers and actors and anyone on set are very capable of seeing immediately. There are things that no one else sees that we do. A lot of times people say, “Why don’t we just move that over there?” And everyone goes, “Yeah, why don’t we?” And then there’s one person in the world, the writer, going, “Oh god, you don’t understand what you just did.” But everyone – everyone – can see plot holes and they will come at you with them.

They will come at you. There will be a third assistant in the costume department will walk up to you and say, “By the way, I have a question for you. Does this make sense blah-blah-blah?” And you go, OK, it does. Here’s why. But you think – see, everyone feels entitled to discuss what they perceive as a potential plot hole.

**John:** Yeah. And so sometimes these are things which wouldn’t have been reflected in the script anyway, but they do have a bearing on story. So for example like that character was carrying their gun in this scene so why don’t they have their gun now? And so these are things where it’s the props department is going to be – as they’re reading through the script is going to be asking that question at every point so that they are not creating these plot problems.

We’re going to focus on it from the script level, but know that every department is going to be thinking about this and trying to make sure that they’re consistently logical. So, it’s not just your responsibility, but you’re going to get blamed for it. So, let’s talk about what this is.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes.

**John:** So, general categories of plot holes – I would define one is problems of information. Which is when characters have knowledge that was never passed to them. So somehow magically they know something that the audience knows but it’s never quite clear how they learned it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Related is characters who don’t know something which we know they should know, or they seemed to know before, or they knew last week. There’s a show that I love very much but one of the characters is a doctor and yet she doesn’t seem to know some very basic things which is frustrating.

**Craig:** Like where the heart is?

**John:** Yeah. And so it’s like – or like they encounter something which is like but we already saw you do that, so this is not a new thing for you. This should not be a challenge for you at all. So, anyone in their position should know how to do that thing. So that’s a problem with information.

Often you find problems of time and geography, so multiple days seem to pass or didn’t pass and it wasn’t quite clear – the timelines just don’t match up. There are eight day weeks. Something is grossly wrong here. The sun never sets or it sets twice.

The plot relies on two things happening simultaneously but the characters couldn’t have anticipated those things were going to happen simultaneously. There’s like a coincidence that just doesn’t make sense.

This is the thing that bugged me all the time on *Alias* which is a show I genuinely loved, but Sydney Bristow could somehow fly to Asia and back in the course of a day. She has supersonic teleportation powers.

**Craig:** Yeah. No one is really good about that, are they?

**John:** Yeah. And I think this is a Too Fast, Too Furious, my friend Nima will correct me if I’m citing the wrong Fast and Furious movie, but there’s an action sequence that’s taking place on a tarmac where a plane is taking off and it’s like a 17-minute action sequence and the plane is moving the entire time. And so that runway would have to be like 40 miles long.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, just to like – is that a plot hole? We’ll get into that. It’s a thing you have to suspend your disbelief in order to get there and some people can’t suspend their disbelief.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that there’s a line between, you know what, we’re just going to break the rules of reality to achieve something, and a plot hole which is we messed up. We actually legitimately screwed up here. They shouldn’t be able to do that inside of the logic of our own. You know, in Fast and Furious the logic of that world, the physics of that world, you could have a really super long runway and time is elastic.

But, you couldn’t have something in the Fast and Furious world where somebody simply didn’t know something that they knew 30 minutes earlier and we saw them know. You can’t have a character see someone and then later say honestly, “I’ve never seen them before.” That’s a plot hole.

**John:** That would be a plot hole. Or like they can’t change a tire. You know what, that’s going to come with it. You’re going to be able to change a tire.

And some of what you’re talking about is like, you know, your movies bend the world in certain ways. So Charlie’s Angels, like physics was sort of optional. They could do things that – it was heightened and so you had to sort of go with the heightened nature of it. Many years ago I wrote an article about *Spider Man 3* called The Perils of Coincidence and I’ll put a link in the show notes to that because there are premise coincidences which are – you get one of those for free. Like almost every movie relies on some coincidence that’s why this story is taking place now. But there were so many coincidences in Spider Man 3 that I needed to sort of acknowledge that like stacked together they form a plot hole because no, no, no there’s just too much happening here. It’s just all too arbitrary that these things all happened in the same time.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you put too many together it starts to take on the meme of a plot hole because what I think we presume even if we don’t presume it deliberately is that plot holes happen because the writers got stuck and needed to do a thing and didn’t know how to do it without breaking something. And that is also why I think coincidences stack up. We presume it’s because the writers needed something to happen and they didn’t know how to do it without breaking something.

**John:** Yeah. And in general, we’ll get into fixes later on, but anything you can do that your hero is actually creating the situation gets you out of that coincidence problem.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If something happens because of your hero, then it’s just not random. Or if it something happens because the villain, then it’s not random. So just finding ways to match character motivation to events gets you through most of those situations. Or, if it’s still a little unlikely, you buy it more because you saw a character do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. And generally that works in your favor because it feels like it’s tightening things up. It is creating a sense of harmony and the audience gives you credit for it.

One of my favorite kinds of plot holes is the kind that negates the need for the entire story to have happened at all. I love these. And I’m just calling it problems of over-complication, because I don’t know what else to call it. But the idea is that your plot needs to exist so that your movie exists, but it doesn’t need to exist for the actual events of the movie or the goals of the movie or the character. And one of the classic examples is a movie that you and I love that we have talked about many times on the show and that’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. And it goes a little something like this.

Once Indiana Jones discovers that the Nazis are looking in the wrong place because they don’t have both sides of the medallion, all you have to do at that point is nothing. Just do nothing. They will never find it.

Now, you can argue, of course, well he’s compelled to find it because he wants to see this thing. It’s part of who he is. And that makes sense. But the movie never really says that, so like in a perfect plot hole address somebody would say, “That’s it, we’re done. Let’s go home.” And he says, “No, I can’t. I just can’t.” And then you would say, OK, at least the movie understands that that’s a thing, right? But what they went for in Raiders was no one is ever going to comment on that, let’s just keep going, as if it makes sense that we’re still trying to stop the Nazis who have no idea and never will know where this thing is.

And I love that. I just kind of love that.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say this problem of over-complication often ties into villain plots and villain plans because there’s so many action movies particularly where – or thrillers – where if you step back it’s like, wait, was that really the easiest way to get a million dollars? That was really complicated. There are so many simpler ways to do that that wouldn’t have involved most of what we saw in the movie, but then you wouldn’t have a movie.

And so you can try to sort of lay the track to make it clear why it needed to happen this way. But sometimes in trying to lay that track you are making the answer more important than the question in many ways. Like make it seem like, oh, this is really important. Like, no, no, I was just trying to explain it away. In trying to get rid of the problem you actually made the problem worse.

**Craig:** This comes up I think all the time. When you are in development and the studio or the producer spot a plot hole, their instinct which I think is a normal human instinct is to pave it. Let’s fill the hole. But as writers we understand that that is a treacherous at to undertake because in filling that hole or fixing the hole, patching it over, you can create a problem that is actually worse than the existence of the hole in the first place.

**John:** Yeah. So, before we fix all plot holes let’s bring up a couple more issues of why these plot holes happen, because it’s not enough to say like oh this was a plot hole, but like where did that come from? I think probably the biggest cause of plot holes in movies is like there was a scene or there was something that addressed that issue and so what you see in the final film doesn’t make sense but that’s because something got cut or changed in the process. So either scenes were reordered, which is why the timeline doesn’t make sense, or they just took something out and that is the reason why this happened.

An example I found online was The Lost World: Jurassic Park when the T-Rex is on the ship, he’s in the cage but all the people on the ship are dead, so how did he kill everybody and then get back in the cage and lock the door? And the answer apparently is that there was supposed to be this velociraptor stuck on board and there was a whole scene and it just got cut.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That happens. And that’s a classic thing and you and I both have movies where like there really was an answer there, but the movie was running long, that wasn’t an important scene, it got snipped out. And so whether it’s timeline problems or some logic problems or like how that person got that piece of information, where was that phone call, we never saw that phone call, it’s because it wasn’t interesting and therefore it got dropped.

**Craig:** And I would argue that maybe 80% of legitimate plot holes that you spot in movies are not the writer’s fault. They were addressed or dealt with and then either there was a legitimately good reason that a scene had to come out of the movie. It was infected with a bad performance, or it just seemed to not really be what the audience wanted at that moment in the movie. Whatever the reason is, it had to go. And so everyone watches a movie and presumes that every single piece of film that was shot is in the movie. It’s not even remotely the case.

And I would say also there are times when the problem – in movies in particular – the problem is that the director made a mistake. Directors change things all the time in features because they are entitled to by our system. But occasionally, oh so very rarely, they do so in a capricious manner that actually does overturn an apple cart and cause a plot hole to occur.

**John:** Yep. It can be a situation where, oh, I really wanted this scene to take place at night rather than daytime, because it’s going to look better in this location. And maybe that makes perfect sense and maybe it truly does look better, but if these people are supposed to be on two sides of a phone call and they’re in the same time zone, why is night in one place and daytime in the other place? That happens all the time.

**Craig:** Happens all the time. Or, you know what, I want this guy to stand here when he sees him come in there because it looks awesome. And then later the writer watches and says, “Um, if he’s standing here and they’re standing there, neither one of them can see this third person that they’re both supposed to be noticing.” So there’s a plot hole now. We saw them not see that person and later they’re going to say how they saw that person in that place. Plot hole. Yeah.

**John:** Plot hole. Another reason plot holes happen I think sometimes, especially in series, is when it’s a moving target and so Harry Potter is the classic example. They started filming the movies before the books were all finished, so there’s some things which show up in the books that don’t quite match up to things that are going to happen later on in the books. They sometimes have to explain around that. So even though JK Rowling was involved in both, she was ultimately more responsible for making logic happen within her books and she didn’t necessarily know that that one thing that was happening in movie two was going to be a very difficult thing to pay off later on. The rules of where you can apparate. And they would need to do some things – they would need to make some choices that weren’t going to be paying off later on. So, characters could show up in places that didn’t make sense or an adaptation might establish one relationship that is not actually the same relationship in the books.

So the moving target of it all is a real problem. So you see that in both series but also in movie series.

**Craig:** It is a shame that series and movie series and television series that do this well I think get extra penalized when they stumble.

**John:** Yeah. True.

**Craig:** I mean, JK Rowling created this remarkably consistent world over seven books. Very few what you would call plotty mistakes. You may not enjoy a certain aspect of her plotting, but it was well thought – it was really carefully well thought through and done.

Similarly Game of Thrones, right? I mean, they have all these characters. They’re all interlocking/interlacing. And then, OK, so there’s one scene where a dragon shows up somewhere a little too quickly and people lose their mind.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they are relying in a sense, they become comfortable with the notion that they’re in good hands. That the show is going to take care of them. And so when you have a movie that’s a little more fast and loose with things no one really cares. They’re just like, meh, you know, it’s fine. It’s all good.

**John:** Yeah. Finally, I would say that some cases the reality would be either not cinematic or would be really gruesome. A thing I found online was pointing out that like when *Ant Man* is tiny, when he punches people, the force with which he would punch people would be more like a bullet. It would rip flesh and bone. So it shouldn’t knock somebody down. It should rip through them. And they could choose to show that in *Ant Man* movies. But that would be gory and disgusting, so they don’t do that.

Sometimes the expectations of the genre steer you towards certain solutions that aren’t entirely logical but are logical for the kind of movie you’re making.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the physics of all of it is absurd. They will play around and say, “Well, you know, we’ve got the physics of him doing this,” but you look at it and you go if you are going to jump from there to there, or if you’re going to push off and fly from there to there, you will create this massive crater under you because for every action there’s an equal–

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Like when there’s a moment in one of *The Avengers* movie where – maybe the first one – where Tony Stark is falling as regular Tony Stark out of his skyscraper and then the suit catches up to him and he turns it on and repels upwards about 20 feet above people. And I always think they’re dead.

**John:** They’re dead.

**Craig:** They’re dead. Forget even heat. Even if you have a heat-less thing, the fact that it is stopped that amount of acceleration means that they would be crushed. Crushed.

**John:** Yeah. Crushed.

**Craig:** Crushed.

**John:** All right. So let’s take a look at fixing plot holes. If we have identified plot holes let’s fix some of them.

So getting back to that earlier question, the outline stage is the perfect place to notice some of these plot holes and fix them before you start writing. You will do yourself so many favors if you recognize like, oh, these things are supposed to be simultaneous so therefore it needs to be daytime both places. Or how would she get from this place to this place? If you are outlining this is a time where you will catch a lot of those things.

The third Arlo Finch I outlined much more extensively than previous ones and I did save myself probably a week’s worth of work of torture about how to fix some things because, oh, on an outline I can see this is going to take this amount of time. I can fix some of these problems before I write the problems.

**Craig:** A hundred percent. I don’t have problems when I’m writing a script that are torturous for me ever because I’ve already tortured myself in the outline phase. And I will. I will walk around for weeks trying to solve a problem because it feels wrong and it’s so brutal. But then when you solve it you feel great. And you know you’re going to be OK when you write.

Don’t think for a second when you’re outlining that the cleverness, brilliance, beauty of whatever it is you are imagining is going to be able to overcome the plot hole that it is creating. It will not.

**John:** Nope. It will not. Another general piece of good advice I’ve tried to implement in sort of everything I’ve done, especially when I’ve gone and done rewrites on things which you’ve sensed some plot holes there is whenever possible take away the question rather than trying to pave over it.

So, don’t have a character give an answer to something. Try to preempt the question so the question is never asked. So the audience will never ask that question. And so there was a very complicated thing I was doing that involved time travel and I needed to have a character quite early on establish one rule that took away 90% of the questions that would come up. And so, you know, if you can eliminate questions it’s much better than answering them.

**Craig:** And this is an area I think people who come in to rewrites have an unfair advantage over people that have written before them because when you come into rewrite you have license to say, “You know the solution here is to just get rid of this entire thing. Everybody apparently has fallen in love with it and is dancing around it like it’s the golden calf, but it’s destroying everything around it. It’s creating this need for endless explanations and bendings and contortions to justify it and cover up the damage it’s causing. How about you just get rid of it? And then you have problems whatsoever.”

Nothing feels better than a movie that moves in a nice, clean, elegant way without ever stopping you in your tracks to go, wait, wait, hold on, what? Nothing.

**John:** Nothing. Another good solution sometimes if you are looking at a cut of a movie and there’s a plot hole is to always ask yourself could I solve this with a single shot. If a single thing was there and inserted would it take care of it? And this comes from the women who edited one of the *Star Trek* movies. They were talking about how there was a thing they were encountering in one of the movies and they just pulled out their iPhones and shot one shot and it’s actually apparently in the movie but it solved an issue. It was like a cutaway to a thing, I don’t know if it was a sign that said something, but it made it clear like, oh, it connected some pieces. And sometimes it’s just a single shot or two, three really quick shots to get you over that hump so like, oh, that thing happened. Basically I’m asking for what is the simple solution that gets you through it so you don’t have to explain more.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think that sometimes what you can do is take a look at the plot hole you have and ask yourself does it even have to be a hole? Maybe this is plot help. Because let’s say – for instance I’m working on something right now and in the story I got to a point where I thought you know what would be very helpful story wise in terms of establishing rules, boundaries, difficulty is if a certain thing were true. The problem is that that thing feels a little plot holey. So, I thought about it for a while and then I thought, OK, I’m going to have somebody say this like it’s true. And I’m going to have the character question it. And in the end we’re going to find out that it was a lie. But I get all of the benefit of having it.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** And the lie also made sense, like why this person lied about it. And then you’re the winner. The plot hole suddenly is not a hole at all.

**John:** Yep. So the TV Tropes people will call that a Hand Wave, but it’s actually a very specific Hand Wave. So Hand Wave is when somebody says something that distracts you from the problem and it makes the problem go away. And it sounds like you did an Advanced Hand Wave which is it was distracting you but then ultimately it paid off that the character was lying. So, brilliant. And that’s why you win all the awards.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s yet to happen, but I did essentially have the character express what I thought the audience would be expressing at that moment which is you know what you’re saying doesn’t actually make sense. And somebody going don’t worry about it, I’ve thought it through, trust me. Which I think for an audience they go, OK, if the character on screen that I’m identifying with is questioning this the movie is aware. This will be explained at some point. And it is.

**John:** Yeah. A related term which Jane Espenson will use, you’ll see in TV Tropes, is Hanging a Lampshade, which basically is like having the characters call a thing out and point out the unlikely nature of it. Basically saying like this is one of those premise kind of things that this is – you got to give me this one, because without this the story doesn’t make sense.

**Craig:** Right. And what you are playing is a psychological game with the audience. You’re saying to them please beat me up a little bit less over this because at least I’m admitting it. I’m not trying to fool you. I’m not insulting your intelligence. I’m just saying, “Hey look it’s happened.”

Now, it is not even close to being as good as not being there.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But it is preferable to suggesting to the audience that what you just told them makes sense when it clearly does not.

**John:** Agreed. Final bit of advice on plot holes is often you are better off just ignoring them. And so rather than trying to fix them it’s acknowledging that some things that a certain percentage of your audience will point out as mistakes, most of your audience will never notice and trying to fix it will actually cause more damage.

We said before when you try to fix things you can sometimes call more attention to them and the audience will assume that that patch is more important than the actual material around it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And fixes often just feel like fixes. You and I are probably particularly attentive to looped lines, ADR. We’re looking at character B, but character A says something even though they have their back to us. And it’s clearly just a line that was thrown in there to address some problem. Sometimes it can be done really well and it’s seamless and smooth. But, man, sometimes you just really feel it.

**Craig:** Well, best option is get rid of plot hole. Second best option is turn plot hole to your favor. Third option is fill plot hole somehow. And you’re right, sometimes it’s better to just leave it be, depending on the size of it.

The danger, and you will see outside people – non-writers – do this almost exclusively is you decide that the way to fix the plot hole is to layer it with other stuff that solves the immediate logic problem. It’s as if they’re saying we have a problem right now not in the movie but in this room that we in this room don’t believe this moment. What can we say in this room to solve “that problem?” And you can come up with something, but it stinks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And therein is the danger. Because you can begin filling these things only to realize you were in it and you’re burying yourself under these layers of solution that have absolutely nothing to do with good storytelling, emotions, intentions, theme, adventure, feeling. They literally exist only to answer some dumb question. And if you even sense for a second that’s what’s happening, stop immediately.

**John:** Yeah. You and I have both been in rooms with filmmakers who have made really good movies and a lot of movies who do get tripped up on really frustrating things that they should not be getting tripped up on and are asking for solutions to things that aren’t problems. And that is just really disheartening but it’s also the reality. And so you hear them, you talk through it, you try not to fill the perceived plot hole, but actually design a path that’s not going to take them where they see that plot hole and we’ll still deliver the movie to where it needs to go. It’s really frustrating.

**Craig:** It is. And this by the way is actually one of the more annoying parts of writing anything. Because we are attempting to create a simulation of reality and reality is really complicated. And also reality is reality. So, it is not here to deliver narrative excitement or drama on any given day. It’s here to just function the way it normally functions. So what we’re doing is doubly hard. We’re trying to create reality and we’re trying to create reality on a crazy day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so therefore we want crazy things to happen on the crazy day. But when crazy things happen in reality they happen in accordance with reality. It’s incredibly frustrating. Reality is slow. It unfolds in real time. People aren’t changing in the middle of it. Sometimes there is no particular challenge. It doesn’t care about our storytelling needs. And so we have to figure out how to tell a story in a matrix that doesn’t care about our needs as writers.

**John:** Absolutely. Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. What’s yours?

**Craig:** Great question, John. Very, very simple thing that I find myself using constantly. And I don’t know if you do. It comes with the iPhone. It’s the Measure App. Have you used it?

**John:** I’ve used it only once or twice. I always forget that it’s there.

**Craig:** Exactly. You always forget it’s there. Many, many times I’ve gone hunting around my house looking for the tape measure, looking for a ruler. In fact, the Measure App is better than both of those things. The Measure App, which takes about I would say 15 seconds to kind of get going because you need to move your phone around to let it orient itself in space and time, allows you to just place a dot anywhere you want and then you just start walking. And it’s just making a line on the screen using your calendar to lay the dot of the line over reality, AR style. And then when you reach the point where you want to know, OK, how far is this from my first dot, you hit it again, and it tells you.

You don’t need another person at the end with a tape measure. You can measure anything this way. It is incredibly useful. And I don’t think it existed until this recent iteration I think of iOS, or nearly recent. So, I use it all the time and I think now that I’ve put this bug in your ear you will too.

**John:** I probably will use it more and more. My belief is that some version of it existed from a third party developer and then Apple just made their own and Sherlocked it. But I agree it’s a really well done thing.

My One Cool Thing is an article in Lifehacker by Nick Douglas called Install These Apps on your New Mac. And it’s just a list of the apps you should maybe consider putting on your new Mac. And I liked it because I use most of these apps and it’s a convenient way for me to show some useful things that people should try to put on their Macintosh and at least experiment with.

So obviously we use Slack for everything around the office. Dropbox is essential for me. I feel like we need to do a little sidebar on Dropbox at some point because I see people who use Dropbox but they don’t use it to its maximum capability. So I think we’ll save that for a special topic bit. I cannot imagine my life without Dropbox.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, neither can I.

**John:** If you use multiple computers it is just–

**Craig:** Essential.

**John:** Incredibly important.

**Craig:** And we all use multiple computers because at the very least–

**John:** Our phones.

**Craig:** We have a phone and a tablet at a minimum, right? Or a phone and a laptop. So, they are computers and I was very happy to see my beloved 1Password on there as well.

**John:** Oh yeah. Crucial. And so I only was aware of this article because he uses Highland2 for writing and so that was the little new alert that showed up. But I thought the whole article was good. So, anybody who uses Highland2 for their main writing is clearly a genius and so therefore you should take all his other suggestions to heart.

Craig, you have a change in your life that you wanted to talk to our listeners about.

**Craig:** I do. I have a big life change coming. I have been in my office here in Old Town Pasadena for I think seven years.

**John:** Your office is terrific. I love your office. It feels old fashioned in the best way.

**Craig:** Well, I need a little bit more space for some things that are happening. And I love this part of Los Angeles. This is Old Town Pasadena. I found a new office just a few blocks away that is even more kind of old school and nifty and LA detective circa 1938. And so I need to help the folks who have this building, I need to help them rent the place that I’m leaving. So, hey, do you want to rent Craig’s office? You can.

If you are in the market for an office in Old Town Pasadena, it’s about 500 square feet. It’s got two rooms, separated by a door. You could do worse.

**John:** You could do worse.

**Craig:** So if you’re looking for something like that go ahead and email us at ask@johnaugust.com. And we’ll connect you up with the folks that are showing the office. I will not be in it, so don’t expect to see me there, but that’s sort of the good news. You won’t have to deal with me.

**John:** It’s very, very good news. And it is a beautiful office and I think it would be good for a writer or writers who wanted to use it for offices, but it would also be good for like a psychologist or somebody. Because it has a front waiting room and then a closed back office. So it’s good for that.

**Craig:** Exactly. It can be all sorts of things.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Llonch 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, or requests for Craig’s office space.

For short questions we’re on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com, which I think will be redesigned by the time this episode comes up. We did a big relaunch of the site. So if it’s not up Tuesday when this drops, it will be up shortly thereafter. It will look nice. I think you’ll like it.

**Craig:** It’s going to be a whole new johnaugust.com?

**John:** It’s pretty different, so I think you’ll enjoy it.

**Craig:** No, I don’t like change.

**John:** No change at all. So here’s one of the things I’ll say one of the goals. Because Scriptnotes posts are so big it just looked like a site that was only about Scriptnotes. And so Scriptnotes have their own column but they’re not the main topic of the site.

**Craig:** Hmm. Feels backwards to me. I think it should be all Scriptnotes with a small, tiny digital ghetto for whatever your personal musings are. But, yes, I believe Scriptnotes – I have a new vision. Somebody must own Scriptnotes.com I assume, right?

**John:** They do. Yeah.

**Craig:** Jerks.

**John:** Jerks. But on johnaugust.com you’ll also find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can find all the back episodes at Scripnotes.net. And you subscribe there and you get all of the back catalog episodes. The first 381 episodes of the show. And the bonus episodes.

**Craig:** I mean, what a deal.

**John:** What a deal. Thank you for another fun week.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Join us for the WGA’s [Princess Bride screening](https://www.wga.org/news-events/events/guild-screenings) on January 27th.
* [The Seattle Live Show](https://nwsg.org/events/) is on February 6th!
* You can now [preorder Arlo Finch in the Lake of the Moon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/162672816X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) or come to the [launch event](https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/john-august-2019) on February 9th.
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 383: Splitting the Party](https://johnaugust.com/2019/splitting-the-party)
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 3: Kids, cards, whiteboards and outlines](https://johnaugust.com/2011/kids-cards-whiteboards-and-outlines)
* Plot Holes on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_hole) and [TV Tropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotHole). You can find examples at [Movie Plot Holes](https://movieplotholes.com)
* [The perils of coincidence](http://johnaugust.com/2007/perils-of-coincidence)
* [Measure App](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbLe4rHQI_I) on iPhone
* [Install These Apps on your New Mac](https://lifehacker.com/install-these-apps-on-your-new-mac-1831687258) by Nick Douglas for Lifehacker
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [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)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch and Jim Bond ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_384.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 377 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is out sick today, but luckily we have two remarkable screenwriters to take his place. And today on the show we’re going to be talking about the second draft, and hopefully offering some practical tips for your first big rewrite on a project. Then we’ll be digging into questions from the mail bag.

To help us out we are welcoming back the writers of The Invitation, Ride Along, and the upcoming Destroyer, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi.

Matt Manfredi: Hello.

Phil Hay: Hey John.

John: You joined us on Episode 244. My first question for you is what did we talk about in Episode 244?

Phil: We talked about our motion picture The Invitation.

John: You did.

Phil: We talked about reboots and preboots.

Matt: Oh yeah.

John: Very nice you remember. And do you remember the specific term that we were trying to suss out?

Phil: It wasn’t preboot?

John: It wasn’t preboot, but preboot is really close to it.

Phil: It was pre-imagining?

John: Requel.

Matt: Requel.

John: Was the word of the day.

Matt: It didn’t catch on.

Phil: Clearly it’s dead.

Matt: Preboot really still has a chance.

John: Preboot has a good chance. I think we’re all pulling for preboot. I think I’m working on a preboot right now.

Phil: Is that right?

John: Yeah.

Phil: You’re keeping it alive. There’s hope.

John: Before we get started today, some news on Scriptnotes land. We have our holiday show December 12th in Hollywood and Zoanna Clack of Grey’s Anatomy is a guest. Pamela Ribon of Ralph Breaks the Internet. And Cherry Chevapravatdumrong of Family Guy and The Orville will be joining us. Plus, Phil Lord and Chris Miller of Lego Movie, Lego Movie 2, Last Man on Earth, Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It’s a remarkable lineup of guests.

Phil: Great lineup, John.

John: Great lineup.

Matt: Murderer’s Row.

John: Murderer’s Row. Come join us in Hollywood December 12th. It’s a benefit for The Writers Guild Foundation. You can find tickets. Just click on the link in the show notes or go to wgafoundation.org.

Phil and Matt, we have some follow up on previous episode stuff. I’m hoping you can help us out here because Craig is gone so we’re going to pretend that you guys are all the way caught up on all your back episodes of Scriptnotes. I asked in a previous episode whether other industries had a way of dealing with endless pitches. And sort of like when you go in to pitch on a thing like 19 times. Have you ever encountered that situation?

Phil: We have tried to really limit that recently, but I think everybody has encountered that. You know, where the goal posts sort of keep moving and the existence of the job itself starts to become in question.

Matt: And early, I mean, like especially starting out you pitch to the lowest person on the totem pole and you work your way up, and you work your way up. Or sometimes even worse, they pitch it all the way up and it just gets bastardized and bastardized.

John: Yeah. It’s bad. So specifically we’re trying to get to the situations where like you’ve gone in like 10 times to pitch on a project and it’s just not clear whether they’re ever going to do anything on this.

So I asked on the podcast whether people had suggestions from other industries about how they deal with these situations. So two people wrote in. Chris wrote in to say that she works as a production manager on commercials and she says, “Whenever we audition actors they need to fill out an initial Exhibit E, an audition time card. Depending on how long they are kept for an audition or how many auditions they are called in for, they are entitled to some payment.”

So we’ll send a link to the SAG form for Exhibit E. So there’s some record of how many times they’re going in on a project and if they are held for longer than a certain period of time they have to be paid for that audition.

Would you want to be paid for a pitch?

Phil: I think that regardless of me personally it actually sounds like a pretty feasible idea to – wasn’t there a concept way back in the old day, something called approach money or something like that? I feel like I’ve heard a term where it’s just saying we are officially asking you to come and basically “do a prototype for us,” which is your pitch, and we’ll pay you a very modest amount of money to do it, but we are paying you.

And so, you know, if we call you in for a second time we’re going to pay you again. I mean, I’m sure there’s a million reasons that people don’t want to do that, but the amount of labor that goes in to trying to get a job is so significant that, you know, I’m not writing those checks but I think it would be extremely helpful and useful because it would also make sure – I mean, it would increase the odds that there was something at the end of that process. That they’re going to invest even a small amount of money means that they think it’s headed somewhere.

Matt: I wonder if it’s past a certain point. You know what I mean? As a freelancer, essentially, I feel like the initial pitch is part of my job. I want to get the job. I’m essentially auditioning for the job. But once I’ve gone in, we’ve discussed our take, this is what I would do with the project. Once we get past a certain level, I don’t know what that level is, it does seem like some kind of thing would be–

John: Yeah. I mean, as we talked about in No Work Left Behind, this idea of making sure you’re not leaving written material behind after a pitch, so often we hear that writers lose the job to no one. Basically they just decided that there’s no – like that idea wasn’t a very good idea and so we’ve wasted everyone’s time trying to do this.

Phil: Thank you for proving to us that we shouldn’t ever spend any money hiring anyone to do it.

John: And so if there were some cost to actually having done that search process, you know, I think you could rein that in a little bit. We look at these mini rooms where they bring in a bunch of writers to crack an idea. They have like a piece of IP and they’re bringing in five writers to work for a month to try to crack that stuff. Those writers are at least getting paid. There’s a thing there. Intellectual labor is being rewarded. So, it feels like there’s some way to be thinking about that.

Phil: Well, and there’s a structure in place, right, so that there then can be rules. And there can be – maybe this is what complicates it – the ownership of the material. What are you selling when you take that money? So maybe that’s maybe the rub. But, yeah, I think that increasingly we’ve been talking – we talked about this a lot that just the job of the screenwriter now – the job of your typical screenwriter includes so much unpaid time that is very – it’s intense work.

Matt: I think it’s expanded. I think it’s a lot worse than it used to be.

Phil: Yeah. I agree.

John: I think even the nature of what a screenwriter is supposed to be doing has changed so much even in the 20 years I’ve been doing this is that screenplays have evolved into this thing which is not just a plan for making a movie but is really like a kind of marketing – it’s a vision document for what this is. It’s like a director’s reel but in a printed form.

Phil: It’s interesting. Yeah. Because we all came up with an edict that someone taught us, which is saying every draft is a sales piece. You’re selling to someone. You’re selling to first the studio or first a producer, then you’re selling to an actor, you’re selling to a director. But it does seem like you started selling now constantly. The organization, the principles by which this thing is going to be in the public you’re starting to sell within the screenplay itself.

John: A way you might get there, so Philip in Hamburg, Germany wrote to say that he works in advertising in Germany where pitches have gotten very competitive and big. Sometimes it’s two to four weeks fulltime to meet the deadline for the pitch, costs up to $100,000 in man hours, all of it for free. “So we managed to improve the situation. Companies are now starting to increasingly pay a pitch fee which often doesn’t cover all the costs but it’s something.” So he says, “The way it changed was for three things.” First, they made the clients aware of the situation and asked for the money. Because sometimes the clients really didn’t know how long it was taking or sort of how much they were spending on it. They got stronger together. So there’s an association for creative agencies. We have the WGA. And they started lobbying on behalf of the topic.

And finally they just started saying no. They would actually decide not to go in on a pitch because they didn’t feel like – if they weren’t going to get paid for pitching they would just politely say no. And so as writers, I mean, sometimes we’re spending 10 hours, 20 hours, more getting a pitch ready or going to talk about a movie, but it’s the directors who actually weirdly have it worse. Sometimes those directors who are trying to land those jobs because they’re the ones who have written in to say like, you know, I’m spending two months developing this reel to sort of promote myself as a director for this and I’m not getting those jobs. So maybe that’s the case where if they really are curious about that director, they need to be sending some money that director’s way to build that reel or to build up that proof of concept.

Matt: Yeah. And Phil gets at a point earlier, like if they do pay you for a pitch, a writer for a pitch, where does that come in terms of work for hire, in terms of chain of title? What is then owned? You know what I mean? Like it gets into a–

John: Yeah. But if they’re not actually taking a written document then maybe it’s not so bad. Basically if they’re paying for your time and they’re paying you for your time to meet you to talk about stuff, maybe that’s–

Phil Hay: Also there’s such a cultural–

Matt: It’s like a roundtable. You know?

Phil: There’s a cultural issue at hand which is the – and I think it’s always been weirdly baked in – but it seems increasing where there’s a sort of resentment toward paying people to do something creative. You know that there is a baked in societal kind of like wanting to get away with just kind of taking that work. Or just saying, I mean, in the world of kind of freelancers out there in the world that classic thing of like well what is the payment? “Well exposure.”

John: Of course.

Phil: For exposure. And so there’s that component, too, where I think in a way it’s not hard to imagine a slightly different society which says, yeah, of course, you should be – if you are attempting to create something or you are using your labor at their request to come in and potentially then be hired to create something complete that would make sense.

But I think we do have this cultural idea that there’s kind of a resentment toward that work.

Matt: There’s also something that my wife experiences. She designs book jackets. And if you’re designing a book jacket and it just doesn’t work out for various reasons you get a kill fee, which is like half of your fee. Do you know what I mean? There is something past a certain point where if you don’t get the job there’s essentially a kill fee as opposed to on the front end.

John: Obviously as writers we’re paid for our words, but we’re also valued for our time, and so making sure that we get the value out of that time is crucial.

Phil: And you also have to really peer through the language to figure it out, because so often we hear like – now we’re fortunate to be in a position where we say, OK, if it’s going to be multiple people then we’ll just back out. You can hire one of those other people, but we’re not going to spend the time to go in and do all this work.

John: So you’ll ask?

Phil: Yeah. We will ask. And we’ll kind of make sure we ask and then make sure our agents ask and make sure everybody is asking because there’s also all these way around. You hear so many times, I’m sure John you’ve heard it many times, “Well we really want you. Believe me, we really want you for this. We just need the – just give me something. And then I can just force it through. But we just have to as a formality.” There’s always something behind that.

John: Yeah. There was a project recently where I assumed I was the only person going in. And it wasn’t until I actually had landed the job where I talked to other folks like, “Oh yeah, I was up for that. I pitched a couple times on that.” I had no idea. So I felt really great that I got it, but also it was like, wow, I just assumed that I was the only person you were talking to.

Phil: We once ran into in the lobby of a studio we ran into Craig. And we were like wait a minute. And Craig was like, “Wait a minute.” And then it turned out to be for different things, so it was OK. But for a second we were like hold on.

John: Hold on. So, these are jobs that you’re going in to pitch on, things that already exist and you’re trying to land. But increasingly you guys have been making your own stuff. And so you were here last time to talk about The Invitation. Your new movie is Destroyer. And let’s listen to a clip. Phil, can you set up this clip we’re about to listen to?

Phil: This is an encounter between Erin Bell, who is the lead character, played by Nicole Kidman, and her teenage daughter Shelby who she has a very fraught relationship with. And this is sort of a scene of honesty between them.

[Clip plays]

John: Great. So that is a really quiet moment, because I was trying to find some big shouty moment, and there clearly is a tremendous amount of action, but that action has no words that would actually make sense on a podcast.

Phil: We’d like to try.

John: So, the reviews are fantastic. Raves. And so most of them talk about how great Nicole Kidman is and Karyn Kusama who directs it. But I had to dig pretty deep to find one review that really emphasized the script. But I did. I found it. So it says, “[John speaks in Spanish.]”

So guys, that’s pretty amazing.

Phil: That is amazing.

John: So what Maria Fernandez is saying is that beyond Nicole Kidman’s remarkable performance and a very solid cast, the most impressive thing about Destroyer is the sophistication of its scripting and its mise en scène.

Phil: Right on.

Matt: All right.

Phil: Well I think what’s interesting that we’ve encountered, you know, Nicole has made this point many times, and Karyn makes this point many times is to us there definitely is a natural tendency to – what Nicole does is truly astounding to me. I mean, it’s a performance that I am so blown away by just as a person watching it.

Matt: And she’s in every scene of the movie.

Phil: She really is.

John: It’s entirely on her back.

Phil: And so I understand and love that that attention is there for her. But if you ask Nicole and you ask Karyn, I think to all of us the character is the story, is the direction, is the performance, is the story, is the direction, is the performance. That they are all completely unified. And this character is, you know, for us the whole movie also for us flows through this one character and she is the focus of everything. And so to me it’s one of the most unified movies that we’ve ever been involved in because of what I just said. It is this story of this person who we tried very hard to give every dimension we could as a human being.

John: So, let’s talk about sort of how you conceptualize, pitch, write, set up a movie like this movie. Because this isn’t a thing where you’re going in. There wasn’t a book. There wasn’t an anything. This was an idea. And so where does the idea for this character and for this world become a thing that you guys do? At one point does Karyn become involved? And how do you say like this is the next thing we’re going to do? What is the process of saying, OK, we have this character and this world, this is the movie we’re going to make? What is that process?

Matt: We had just finished up The Invitation. And we were thinking of what the next thing we were going to do is. And we had this idea that had been kind of marinating for like 10 years. And it was this structure for a cop movie. We had all these scenes that kind of supported the structure and we were just kind of like – it’s kind of a complicated structure so we would pick it up and put it down.

John: Now you said you had these scenes and these ideas, so how much had been written versus just like kind of note carded or sketched?

Matt: Notes, like little notes documents.

Phil: And really like conversations more than anything else.

Matt: Conversations. We had spent so much time discussing it. And then finally, so we kind of knew the general direction of it, but we kept running into a wall until we discovered – and maybe it seems obvious – but until we discovered the character of Erin Bell who was going to populate this world and her relationship with her daughter. And when we actually outlined it and put all the cards up on the wall, I mean we knew it was going to be for Karyn, and so we brought her in, took her through the outline. Kind of like half-pitched it to her. And she gave some ideas. And then we were just off to write it. And that was kind of – from there Karyn started making her look book and stuff and she was kind of off to the races. And so on a kind of parallel track while we wrote the script.

Phil: There’s a lot of simultaneity to how we do these movies, you know, the ones that we do together where while we’re writing the script Karyn is doing all that, and our composer Teddy Shapiro is already writing music based on the script. And Plummy Tucker, the editor, is one of the first people to read the script, so she already kind of has it in her head.

And it’s kind of a unique and kind of amazing way to work because then we also get to the point – and another wonderful thing about Nicole is that, and Karyn, is that the script is the script when we get to shooting the movie. And they both are real believers in the screenplay. And that the answers are in the screenplay for whatever questions come up. And then we’re there as writer-producers. We’re there to provide context, to write new things if necessary, but it’s kind of a very organic and simultaneous process with these movies which have been so gratifying for us to be able to do that.

John: Stepping back, you said the idea, the Erin Bell character was what made these collections of things really pop. And so the 10 years where this was just bits and pieces, was it the character that wasn’t holding the thing together? What was it that changed? What was it that putting that character into the situation? Because was it always written for a woman that was kind of like Erin Bell but not specifically Erin Bell? Or was it a story that was missing a central character? What was different about it 10 years ago?

Matt: I think it was a story that was missing a central character. And we knew the beats of the story and the structure is kind of tricky. And so we would kind of puzzle over that without having the central character.

Phil: So it was really more like we had–

Matt: A puzzle.

Phil: Yeah. We had pieces of a puzzle and we had things and feelings and certain interactions that we could kind of see from one side in a way. And then we had a feel, this kind of feeling that was driving it, the kind of restlessness of a ‘70s noir in a way. And then it was like – when it kind of occurred to us it was kind of in conversation. Then we brought it to Karyn and we started talking and realizing who Erin was and how specifically she couldn’t be to us a woman “filling a man’s role or wearing a man’s clothes” basically. The story had to be about this woman who had this relationship with her daughter, had a very specific relationship with the world that was a relationship as a woman. And that’s kind of what made it necessary for us or essential for us. You know that thing when you’re writing where you know there’s something you like about it but it’s not ready yet. And something has to make you just light up. And that character and the opportunity to write someone and knowing that – the other thing that’s so great about getting to work with Karyn is we know where it’s headed. So we know that we can write this character and that Karyn is going to receive that in its fullness and so we can try and go for it and take swings and do all of that.

John: You didn’t feel like you had to make any safe choices.

Phil: Exactly.

John: Or round any corners or over-explain something just to make sure, to protect yourself and to protect the script. You didn’t have to have those extra lines that were in there just so in case–

Phil: Exactly. And that becomes so crucial because for Nicole she said a few times that she really responded to the mystery of this character and that there’s one line that basically tells you everything you need to know about what she suffered as a kid, a line about that she was burned with cigarettes by her mom and that she had these brothers who were just this kind of feral pack living by themselves basically. And to Nicole, she said like that was everything I needed and that’s what inspired me and more detail, more exhaustive archeology of her psyche would have not – that doesn’t inspire me. So it’s interesting. And that’s always – everything you write you’re looking for that balance. And it’s so great to not have to do anything because you’re worried someone is not going to get it, or you’re worried that they’re going to kind of – it’s going to go off the rails because some critical thing is not obvious enough. You know?

John: Right now, I’ll ask the question separately, how many projects are in your head that are sort of where this was over the last 10 years which are sort of like bits and pieces? How many different movies or other things do you think you have? Phil, I’ll ask you first.

Phil: OK. I can think of three off the top of my head that are in the sort of like, yeah, an idea. Sometimes there’s just a title on a notecard in the far corner of our corkboard that I don’t even know if Matt explores over there. He’s probably got his other corner with his stuff.

John: Matt, how many are on your list?

Matt: I think I have three as well. I mean, three that really like–

Phil: Maybe they’re the same. Or maybe we have six. We have to consult afterwards.

Matt: There are three that are kind of nagging at me in the same way. And, you know, like with both The Invitation, but more so because I guess we took longer with Destroyer. I was like we’re going to write this, we need to write this, I just don’t know when it’s going to be, but we’ll get there.

John: I always found that I’ll have a whole bunch of ideas that are sort of swirling around and every once and a while you think of the idea or basically the idea makes you think of it so that you don’t forget it. So like, oh that’s right, I do have that thing. And then eventually they’ll sometimes conspire and sort of gang up in ways. If we combine our efforts, John will have to think about us more.

Phil: That’s right. Exactly.

John: I didn’t intend for them to be the same project but they became the same project. It was like, oh, this is a way to get his attention.

Phil: They’re like we’re fighting for our lives here. We have to do something.

Matt: They wormed their way into other projects. You’re like well this could just be overlaid right on that.

John: 100%. And people often ask are there things that get cut out of one movie that you put into another movie, and like usually you can’t do that.

Phil: No.

John: There’s been little bits of an action sequence where they didn’t shoot that–

Matt: Yeah, we’ve done that.

John: In general like everything is so clear and specific once it’s been written down in some form. But these little ideas that are kind of floating around, they’ll try to get themselves into whatever I’m writing at the moment because they want to exist. And the only way they can exist, the only way they can be out there in the world is if they get me to pay attention to them and somehow get down on the paper.

Phil: Yeah. I think that happens a lot with little like – I mean, there’s something in Destroyer that’s a very specific story from when I was a kid and it just had been rattling around for a long time. And it’s just like one of those stories that I’ve told many people many times. And it sort of found a home in this movie, very unexpectedly. It was just sort of like, oh wow, that weird incident actually is a version of what we need in this movie right now. So, sometimes it’s something from life. And sometimes I think like, at least for me, I just needed to grow up more to understand what the thing was or to – or I needed to have a kid to be able to write that movie.

But I think it’s interesting what you say about you’re trying to keep – they’re trying to keep themselves alive out there in hopes that you’re going to find them again.

John: Writing a movie by myself, I’m sort of all the characters and I’m fully inside. I’m the camera into this world and I feel myself in all the different characters. Are each of you individually feeling that? Are you guys dividing up a sense of who is more what person in a movie? Is there any split that way or are you both fully inhabiting all the characters in scenes?

Matt: Usually both inhabit them. But every once and a while we’ll be working on something and there will be a character who is in maybe three scenes or something. And we don’t write in order. We just choose a scene that appeals to us and gets us motivated.

John: You’re the only other writers I talk to who do this.

Phil: Really? I can’t believe this. It’s like the greatest revelation that ever happened to me.

John: Okay, so let’s sell this to the world so people know that there’s more than one way to do this. I will write whatever scene appeals to me and I will skip over a thing I don’t want to do. Whatever scene appeals to me I will totally write.

Matt: Absolutely. I mean, in Destroyer it helped me get to know the character of Erin better because she is quiet and picks her spots and is watchful. And so one of the first scenes that I took a crack at was a scene where someone is really talking at her over and over and over again. She doesn’t have much to say, and so you’re thinking like OK well how does she have power, how does she have agency in the scene when she’s just kind of listening. And so I got the voice because I was writing out of order, you know what I mean?

Phil: And I think that it really changed everything for us I think because if you outline meticulously enough and you know where things are beginning and ending, it’s such a difficult thing to write at all, at least for most of us.

Matt: However you find your motivation.

Phil: Exactly. If you can get actually excited about a scene, go for it.

John: Totally.

Phil: And trust that you’ll find a way. And sometimes those scenes, like we learn so much just by the process of us splitting up the scenes. So Matt will say I really want to write this scene. And sometimes I’m like, oh, I really want to write that scene. So, wow, that’s a scene – obviously there’s something going on there. Or there’s a scene where Matt says I want to write and I say, thank god, I don’t actually think I know what to do with that scene, or vice versa. And you kind of go through and the scenes you gravitate toward tend to be the islands that really are the movie, so you’re kind of teaching yourself what the movie is. Those scenes tend to be the ones that change the least through the process, like those first maybe four or five sequences, because they are just like – that’s the tone, that’s the character, that’s the style. And you can use those then as touchstones.

You know, you’re writing, you refer back and then you also learn – you get to those lonely, sad little scenes at the end where no one wants to writes them and maybe they don’t need to be written.

John: Absolutely.

Phil: They haven’t earned a place in the story. And maybe you just can skip them.

Matt: And maybe the scene that introduces your character is much better informed by a scene that you’ve written earlier.

Phil: Yes.

Matt: But to get back to your question, sometimes because we’re jumping all around there will be one more scene left with the character who is in maybe three scenes. And I realize, oh, I’ve read Phil’s stuff and he’s done the other two and I’ll be like, OK, well you seem to have a handle on her voice or his voice, so why don’t you do that, and I’ll work on–

Phil: There’s sometimes, yeah, where in something like Destroyer, too, which is kind of an odyssey in its structure so she encounters all these people and some of them come back and some of them don’t. You know, there’s sometimes where I look, we talk through the character and I just know, OK, Matt just has a feel for this person’s voice, this one character. And like he’s saying, so great. You take the first shot at all that stuff. I’ll take the first shot at this stuff. And then once we get to that it’s usually pretty congruent. We’re so molded together at this point and we have the same instincts, so it’s rare that we see one another’s scenes and say, hmm, the voice sounds wrong. The voice almost never sounds wrong to either of us. There may be other questions. But that’s also the product of working together for 25 years or something.

Matt: And if we’re each writing a scene with the same character we’ll trade. Whoever is finished first will look at it and be like, OK, well I see what you’re doing here. I think we are on the same track.

Phil: Put this tremendous line that I just thought of in and we’re good to go.

John: I’m never going to write a screenwriting book, but if I do a chapter I’ve just come up with right now is how to be your writing partner.

Phil: I love that.

John: Because it’s that sense of – there are scenes you want to write and scenes you want the other guy to write. So write the scenes you want to write and leave your writing partner, which is your other self, to write the other scenes. And that’s why you write things out of order because write the scenes that are most meaningful for you to write and don’t worry about the other ones until you get to them.

Phil: Exactly. Because – and also often – we always know the ending before we start writing a script. Always. In great detail.

John: It’s one of the first things I write is the ending.

Phil: Yeah. And in some cases – I think I knew that about you actually – and in some cases in really extreme detail. I’d say with both Destroyer and The Invitation that was true. We absolutely knew what the end had to be for both of those movies. So we tend I think a lot of times to write the beginning of the movie much later in the process. We have the ending, we have these islands, you know, it’s different for everybody.

But, you know, you come up and it’s perfectly logical to think, well, I start on page one and I just keep going. And if I’m having a bad day I just fight through it. And I really don’t believe in that. The liberation that you feel when you realize I want to write a scene. That’s incredible. How did this happen?

Matt: I think it helps with the outline, too, because then you’ve got this scene and once you get to the place where you like it, you know, oh, well we’re actually going to need a different kind of scene to support this, or something else is going to have to follow this because of what we discovered here. And so it almost – I’m not going to say it – like everyone talks about second act problems, but we’ve outlined it like that, but we don’t really think of it that way. And so it doesn’t really occur to us in the same way.

John: Yeah. Also, by writing those scenes out of sequence those big marquee scenes you’ve figured out like you know what your in and your out is on those things. And so the scenes that are supporting those you might figure out like, OK, well I’m going to need to slope into that scene in a different way or get out of that.

Phil: Exactly.

John: You know what your in and your outs are.

Phil: And they can have a gravitational pull under those scenes. And so the other scenes I can picture how they orbit around that scene as opposed to a linear way.

John: So you’re not going to have nine talkie scenes back to back.

Phil: Exactly.

John: There will be a quiet thing before we get to this big long dialogue thing.

Matt: I think there was one movie, I don’t remember which project it was recently where Phil and I were both like I think we need to write the first act. I don’t know if it was Proof of Concept or something, just so we can – maybe it was the tone was different. I forget what it was. But we did it and then once we saw what it was we’re like, OK, now let’s try to bounce around.

John: We got a tweet question which was from Keith Hodder. He said, “Tips for approaching a second draft? Even with index cards I’m finding it tough to navigate the skeleton of the first draft. Feeling stumped. I revisited the transcript for Episode 199 but it mostly focused on the emotional toll of the second draft and being uneasy with seeing the original vision change. I have notes and I’m cool with them, but I’m unsure how to structure the second draft in terms of a game plan.”

Guys, do you have some suggestions on tactics and strategies for approaching a second draft, a successful second draft?

Phil: This is where I look at Matt, and I hope Matt does.

Matt: I would say, I mean, we tackle like what we want to tackle first. I mean, usually with a second draft if there’s big scenes that have to be changed or added we do those and then we go through and do all the little things. If it’s a character issue that needs to – the character needs to fundamentally change or we need to learn more, we map that out. The bigger scenes to tackle first is what we usually do.

Phil: Yeah. I think that’s true.

Matt: Is that helpful at all?

John: It’s helpful. For me, like I always make sure like you’re saying that I have a real game plan. This is what I’m going to try to do with this. And so I may have gotten other people’s notes, but that’s not really like how I’m going to do it. I’m looking at sort of like this is what’s going to need to change for me to do this. This is my checklist of things I want to make sure happens. And I’ll almost always start with a new document, and I’ll copy and paste in the stuff that I need from the old script but I won’t try to just work through the old script.

If it’s a significant amount of changes I’ll copy and paste the scenes in and sort of bullet point the stuff that’s brand new to write in there, but I find if I’m working on an existing script I end up just polishing stuff and I won’t do some of the big machete work that I sometimes need to do if I’m still working in that same file.

Phil: That’s interesting. Yeah, I think that we tend to keep the document, but then we’re very freely – you guys have talked about this before – we create the depot and just very freely grab scenes so that you don’t have to worry about it and throw them in that so that they exist, but they’re not in the script.

But what you were saying, I realize is so helpful not only internally for us, but sometimes we actually share this with our partners, is a written plan. A document that says here’s the plan. We’re going to cut these three scenes. We’re going to go through the entire script through the lens of this character and we’re going to make sure she is here by this point of the script and we’re going to fix this relationship and we have a new idea for a scene that’s going to go between this scene and this. And just kind of the process of just doing that is helpful.

And it also has been helpful when we’re – especially in movies where we’re like trying to head toward production the people kind of can envision what we’re doing and so we’re not “shocking” them when they get the draft back. But we are–

Matt: Sometimes as you know the note isn’t the note.

John: Yes.

Matt: What it really means is we don’t like this. This character isn’t working as opposed to like this scene. And so by kind of giving them something back it kind of creates a new notes document in a way that everyone agrees on. So now everyone feels included and heard and we’re all going forward toward now this new thing that is the new notes document.

Phil: Yeah. And I think for the listener that would, you know, just as an internal process I think that is really helpful to just write out your plan and maybe even write out your feelings about it. Write out how you feel about what’s going on in the second act that’s really bothering you.

Or the other thing I find useful is to go back to – and it goes back to this sort of islands concept – go back to listing, for yourself, what are the scenes that absolutely this movie.

John: Yeah.

Phil: What is this movie? Period. And then anything else can be – has to arrange itself around that. And I think that’s helpful to just keep your kind of self together when you’re approaching the second draft.

John: What Matt pitches about the document, what’s good about sending through that document to your collaborators is it reminds everybody what the actual plan was. Because they may have forgotten what their notes were, what they talked about in the room. But if you say like this is what I’m going to do, they can respond to that. But even if they don’t respond to that when you turn in that draft they may still not love it. There may still be new issues. But at least to see this is what he said he was going to do. This is what he did. They can see the work that you actually put into it.

Phil: Yeah. And they also might be able to tell you like, oh, wait a second, I see that you’re planning on changing this part. I really love that. I think that’s so important. Can we find a way to modify that so it still fits? And so it’s wonderful when you have people fighting for things that they like in the script. And that’s what I always find just in any notes process. When I am asked to give notes to someone or to come up with a plan for someone, like that’s what’s helpful. There’s this sort of idea that you’re supposed to, it’s just this cage match of awful brutality, where I think it’s like hearing what is really the thing and what’s really great that just orients you.

Matt: When we’re talking about a script with somebody and giving them notes and ideas, sometimes you find it through the discussion. So like if you think of a studio notes document which is a list of questions, they’re kind of looking for something. And it might not be there yet and so you have to work through it as opposed to like take that in silence, go off and do it. You know what I mean? It takes a lot of discussion sometimes.

John: Yeah. So the response document is sort of continuing that discussion and so it may be a way of getting that down on paper. Some questions from listeners. “I just read your blog answering a question about sending a script to an actor. I have written a script in which the actor’s name is in the title and he would have a role. What is the best way to get it to him? Do I send a synopsis to his agent? The script to his agent? Do I send it to his agency care of the actor? How do I get this actor to read my script?”

Good lord.

Phil: Wow.

John: Yeah. So Being John Malkovich or something.

Phil: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s any different than any other script I guess would be the main thing because I think who knows. There might be actors out there who would be so curious to see that they’re being portrayed in a script that if they just caught wind of it they would want to check it out. I wonder if it would be harder to get an agent to give that to their client depending.

John: The right actor I could see being sort of curious enough about it, like if you’re writing a Michael Ironside feature, totally.

Phil: Oh yeah. Get it to Ironside. Now.

John: Get it to Ironside. Nothing better than Ironside. If it’s a megastar that you’re going after it’s going to be a challenge regardless. And I think there’s always the worry do you look like a stalker.

Phil: Yeah. It’s a rare – and that’s the thing. You’re taking such a big swing. And I’m usually also – I’m very fond of the idea of taking a big swing. Like you might as well. So in a way that’s really bold. And if you have the goods to back it up then you have the goods to back it up. But you have to be aware that you are definitely – you’re also making it impossible to make a movie without getting that one person. And in any movie if there was ever a script that we wrote that was like if this one person isn’t going to do it it will not exist, that’s pretty rough.

John: I will say that most times when you see an actor’s name listed in the title of the script it wasn’t because they really thought that one actor was going to do it. It’s because it’s a way of signaling what’s unique about the script. It’s a way of getting attention for the script. It gets on a list. It gets passed around the Black List because everyone says it’s really funny. This wild sex comedy with Wilford Brimley. There’s something about it that makes people want to pass it around.

Phil: Yeah. That’s interesting. And that may be in fact – that may be the point. It’s hard to know where this person is headed. But that idea of if it’s the right name it’s going to make somebody more likely just to pick it up.

Matt: I think sadly though if you’re not going through traditional channels, like if you’re not doing this through your lawyer or manager or agent the cold approach just is so rarely successful I think.

John: I think you’re right. Chris writes, “I’ve introduced a doctor into my script who has a fairly important role and I’m wondering what is the best way to write her action and dialogue? Wendy versus Dr. Patterson. Her first name seems more economical and she asks one of the main characters to call her by her first name, so it would be consistent. But is it confusing to go with her first name, or does it lose respect?”

So, you guys, what is your basic guideline for a character name for a doctor character. It says it’s an important character, so probably not the principal character.

Phil: Yeah, I would say if it’s not the principal character you use Doctor because I feel that just is doing a lot of work for you. And whether you call that character Dr. Johnson or Dr. Wendy, you know what I mean, you can actually say some things about the character.

Matt: Also it seems important to the writer that we continually know that this person is a doctor. So even if Dr. Wendy comes over to your house late at night it’s like, oh, it’s interesting because it’s Dr. Wendy.

John: Yeah. I would say in terms of the character cue, like the character name above dialogue, it’s weird to put the Doctor there unless it’s actually sort of part of the joke or part of just reminding like, oh, that person really is a doctor. There are characters in scripts where I’ll have like, you know, Mrs. Van Owen and I’ll keep that Mrs. there because Van Owen by itself you might lose her gender. You might sort of forget who it is if that person hasn’t shown up for a long time.

Phil: Sounds like a police sergeant.

John: So that’s reasons why you might want to keep the Mrs. And every script is going to be different, but the decision to go with the character’s first name versus their last name really tells us a lot about sort of how personal they are with the main character and sort of where they fit into the world. It can be confusing to have a lot of first names. It can be confusing to have a lot of last names. So finding a balance is important.

Phil: Yeah. I think it’s actually a really great question because it is another opportunity to teach people about those people and the tone of the thing. And I think for example in Destroyer the character–

John: Is it Bell or Erin in the character cue?

Phil: Erin Bell. She’s written as Bell always.

John: I was going to guess it was Bell.

Phil: It is Bell. And she’s never written as Detective Bell. Whereas other detectives that appear in the movie are Detective Kudra. That’s how they’re referred to. And also there are some honorifics. It’s funny, it’s easier to write Det. Kudra than it is to write Officer Kudra. Like you have a scene with Officer Kudra, Officer Kudra. You wouldn’t do that. I think you would just call them Kudra. And Doctor is a similar thing. You can write Dr. and that actually just to your eye – you’re used to seeing that. And if you’re spelling it out you think it’s like maybe it’s a drug dealer or something like that.

Matt: If they’re always functioning in the capacity of their job, Doctor, but if the main character is a doctor.

Phil: It’s actually sort of funny. Can you imagine a romantic comedy the person that’s their job is a doctor, but they’re just referred to as–?

Matt: Because they have a Ph.D.

Phil: Dr. Rehoboth. And they’re just falling in love. It’s the story of Steve and Dr. Rehoboth falling in love.

John: I guess an important thing to remember is that we’re talking about the words that you’re seeing on paper, but that’s not the same experience as what an audience is going to have in a theater. And so always be thinking about like, OK, I’m writing this on this page but what’s going to be seen on the screen is going to be very, very different. So, if we’re not going to be thinking of that character as a doctor with that line that they’re saying, don’t put the Dr. there. If it’s really all about them being the doctor we’re going to be seeing them in a lab coat. Putting that Dr. in front of their dialogue will help us remember sort of the context for all this stuff.

Matt: Yeah.

John: Last question is probably a simple one. Gary from Orlando writes, “Is there a preference for using the term montage or series of shots? From what I understand they both convey a similar visual but I would like to know from some pros which they use and how they use it.” Do you guys use the word montage? Do you use series of shots? How are you indicating a series of bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum?

Matt: I think more often than not we write “series of shots” only because – and this is just idiosyncratic – like montage to me in my mind is Love Story, you know what I mean, or like a romantic.

Phil: Someone is dancing and singing into their hairbrush when you use the montage going on. Which is delightful.

Matt: It’s obviously not just that. But series of shots, for some reason it just feels–

Phil: It’s tonal actually. There’s times when we’ve used, we’ve definitely used both, but I think Matt is right that it’s like series of shots. And then usually we do series of shots. Or often for us it’s more something like “Images – Colon – Dash – this image – Dash – this image – Dash – this image.”

Matt: Also, montage to me sometimes feels like we’re cueing music.

Phil: And it feels meta to me. It actually feels like removed when I see “Montage.” I feel like I’m now just watching a movie and I’m not inside the thing. And the immediacy seems less to me. I mean, this is all idiosyncratic. Other people might feel differently. But I think that’s probably why we lean away from calling something a montage and just like if we can not even labeling it, or just getting the little–

John: Yeah. A lot of times I will drop out either term. It will just be clearly a series of shots and there will just be slug lines of what it is you are seeing and it gets the same effect.

Matt: Yeah. Or just bullet points.

Phil: And then later we have to put the slug lines back in because the line producer is yelling at us.

John: “I need the slug lines.” I think the other thing that ruined montage for me was to American World Police you need a montage. And so then you hear that word enough and you’re like, OK, I’m [crosstalk] that kind of development.

Phil: It changed history in so many ways.

John: I forgot to warn you because Craig wasn’t here about One Cool Things. Did you guys come prepared with One Cool Things?

Phil: I know this show.

John: He knows the show well.

Phil: Front and backwards. I know it.

John: Phil Hay, will you start us off with a One Cool Thing?

Phil: I have One Cool Thing that I’m so sad that Craig is not here for this because it’s baseball oriented.

John: Oh my.

Phil: And Craig and I really share a love of baseball.

John: How do you have time for baseball? Baseball just feels like it’s just time to follow a thing that I just can’t care about.

Phil: John, that’s OK for you. Well, I coach baseball now. I coach my son’s baseball team, so it has kind of become the thing that I’ve arranged my life around. And so it’s reawakened my love for baseball, which I’ve always had. So there’s this Twitter, what do you call it, Twitter handle, a Twitter person, a Tweeter.

Matt: What’s up, old man?

Phil: Oh, god, I know. Called Pitching Ninja. It’s @PitchingNinja. And it’s a guy named Rob Friedman who is a pitching coach. And he has collected these incredible little gifs. It is a gif, is it jiff? I’m still getting older and older.

John: I say gif. There’s controversy, but gif makes much more sense.

Phil: So he’s collected these. He’s overlaid different pitches from the same pitcher. So if you are at all interested in baseball, if you play baseball for sure, but if you just love baseball and the kind of weird – there’s definitely parts, some of these images that crossover into kind of beautiful art. These incredible almost like mechanical drawings of the human body doing something incredible. So @PitchingNinja is my One Cool Thing.

John: Very nice.

Matt: Very nice.

John: Matt, what you got?

Matt: I was thinking about it because I knew this was coming and first it was going to be my six-foot iPhone charging cord which is really–

John: So it’s a long charging cord so you can sit on the coach.

Matt: Yeah, or at a hotel, or anything. I mean, that is One Cool Thing.

Phil: We’re not going to say it’s not cool.

Matt: No, but my daughter had a bake sale today.

John: Oh nice.

Matt: And she has this girls group and they are raising money – they were raising money to support the bees. And the organization it went to is called Backwards Beekeepers which is a Los Angeles group of treatment free bee keepers and they support feral bee colonies. So I’m giving them a shout out. People out there trying to make the world better.

John: Yeah. Bees. Bees are good.

Matt: So we saved them.

John: Yeah. You saved all the bees. One bake sale is all it took.

Matt: No one needs to do anything.

John: No colonies are collapsing.

Matt: Last year they saved the rhinos, so we’re good with those.

Phil: What’s next?

Matt: I don’t know.

John: The universe. My One Cool Thing is a show called Great News. Did you guys watch Great News?

Matt: No.

John: Not enough people watched Great News. So it was an NBC show that lasted two seasons. It was canceled after last season. But it showed up on Netflix. And so I knew of it in a general sense. And so it’s executive produced by Robert Carlock and Tina Fey who did 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Same music by Jeff Richmond. So it feels like it’s in that universe.

It is a workplace comedy that takes place at a television station. It’s 30 Rock-ish. It’s Mindy Project-ish. But it’s created by Tracey Wigfield who also plays a character on the show and it is delightful. And so it’s a show that I wish was still on and was making much more episodes. But they’re all there on Netflix. And so I think in a weird way it’s probably more successful seeing it all together as a block because it does build on itself in a really nice way. So it was a good little half hour comedy if you want an extra Tina Fey/Mindy Kaling style comedy. It’s there. It’s on Netflix. It’s called Great News.

Matt: Sounds good.

Phil: So nice when you discover something like that. Just thriving in the wild.

John: Tracey Wigfield, you made a good show. So I’m hoping she’s going to make other cool, good shows.

Phil: Right on.

John: That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Davis. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com.

That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

If they want to see your movie they should go to see it in theaters on which day?

Phil: If you live in Los Angeles or New York City you can see it on Christmas Day.

John: So December 25th in New York/Los Angeles.

Phil: And then in the following weeks more and more cities. It will be everywhere on January 25th.

John: Great. But what if they are in Australia or what if they’re in London?

Phil: I don’t have – London will be January 25th. And it is actually being released all around the world. So if you tweet at me and you want to know where it is in your country I promise I will look it up.

John: How can they tweet at you? What is your handle?

Phil: It’s @Phillycarly.

John: Yes. There will be a link in the show notes. Matt, do you have a Twitter handle?

Matt: I’m @mattrmanfredi.

John: I also recommend that you follow Matt on Instagram because he takes photos of trees and bushes and pipes that he finds that are beautiful.

Matt: Yes. Manfredeus, like a Roman emperor.

Phil: Or an international conglomerate that is a front for political conspiracy.

Matt: Yes.

John: You can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scripnotes.net. That’s where you can listen to Episode 199 or whatever episode you were on before where you talked about The Invitation which is also still great and available where you find movies.

Phil: Right on.

John: And people should see that movie because it’s really, really good. I really–

Phil: Thank you, John.

John: And I think I’m going to be hosting some sort of Q and A with you guys at some point for Destroyer.

Phil: We have many of those coming up.

John: I’m excited to watch it with you guys and talk to you about it. Guys, thank you so much for coming in.

Matt: Thank you.

Phil: Thank you, John.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Tickets are on sale for the Holiday Live Show!
• Thanks for joining us, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi!
• Episode 244: The Invitation, and Requels
• Commercial actors can get paid for excessive auditioning
• Destroyer is in US theaters December 25, 2018
• @PitchingNinja
• Backwards Beekeepers, and having a 6 foot charging cable
• Great News, created by Tracey Wigfield
• T-shirts are available here! We’ve got new designs, including Colored Revisions, Karateka, and Highland2.
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• Phil Hay on Twitter
• Matt Manfredi on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Outro by Luke Davis (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.