Search Results for: index cards

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/bad-behavior).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi folks. Today’s episode may feature some strong language. So if you’re listening with your kids you may want to stop that. Or put some headphones on.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 353 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be discussing the hot new trend of firing assholes off television shows and speculate about what happens next. Then we’ll be answering listener questions on feature comedies, biopics, and shopping agreements.

**Craig:** That’s great. You know what’s funny, John, is that those folks who are listening to this heard me just warn them that there might be some strong language. And then you immediately say asshole, which I like. You know, let’s just get right to it. We’re going to say asshole a lot today.

**John:** Yeah, we are. Because people have always been assholes and I think we’re calling them on it more now and we will discuss that trend of calling people assholes.

**Craig:** Wonderful.

**John:** But first some follow up. So back in Episode 348 we discussed the Elif Batuman story for the New Yorker about Japan’s rent-a-relative business. And we wondered How Would This Be a Movie. And the answer is someone will hopefully find out because they’re going to try to develop it as a series it looks like for Anonymous Content, Paramount TV, and Conde Nast.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t get it, personally. I mean, I do, but I don’t. I mean, the part that I get is the part where they think, “OK, this is sort of a good inspiration for a show.” The part that always puzzles me is why people feel the need to go get the rights to things. So I’m of two minds about this. One mind is that there are some things about these individual stories that people find really attractive and so just to close the loop on things and be safe and smart they go ahead and they get the rights. But another part of me, frankly the majority part of me, thinks it’s just general media company laziness. They feel like it’s not real unless they’ve purchased a thing to make it real. I just don’t see what the point of buying some of these things is.

**John:** I understand your concern there. I will say that by these companies coming together to say like, “OK, this is a real thing that we’re going to develop” — it gives them ownership – at least some sort of intellectual ownership, not even real legal ownership, of that idea space. And sort of scare somebody else off from trying to do something that’s like that in that space, because they are first out of the gate with the announcement saying we’re going to try to make this as a show.

I think also the idea of trying to do it as a show is a good one. I don’t remember whether we talked about that as whether it’s a movie or a TV series, but the more I think about it I think it is a TV series idea because it’s the ongoing relationships you form with these families, sort of like The Americans, you see people dropping in and playing different roles in different scenarios. That could be very cool.

**Craig:** It absolutely could be. And I think you’re right. That sometimes there is a certain claim-staking value to purchasing some of this material. But there is a flip side to that coin and that is that sometimes companies will do some stake-claiming with – I won’t say it’s like this where there was an article that was published, but rather there’s a book. So someone says, “OK, so-and-so is writing a book about blankety-blank.” And it’s a lot of times with big authors and big books they will pre-sell the film rights. So the book is going to be published in a year but we have the rights to it and we’re going to start developing something.

But meanwhile the writer is still working on the book. Well, actually that happened with Chernobyl. A little bit after I set Chernobyl up, which was just based on my own research. There’s no individual book that I said, “OK, we’re going to purchase this book and make a show of this book.” Another company and another producer, fairly well-known, very reputable producer did this kind of thing where he bought the rights to an unpublished book and then they sort of waited. They had to wait. I guess for the book to be done.

Meanwhile, you know, our show is shooting. So there is a little bit of a danger to that. Sometimes I think – and the only reason I bring it up is because it cuts against us, meaning you and me as writers, and anybody else out there as writers, this thing where companies are constantly buying material, sometimes when they don’t need to, diminishes our individual rights as writers.

So, I don’t know, I guess I’m just saying wouldn’t it be nice if these companies saved a little money and maybe afforded the actual writers of these things a little more credit.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about that credit, because I think what you’re alluding to is that because this is going to be based on preexisting material there are scenarios in which whichever writer comes in to actually do this may not have the degree of rights to the property that they would otherwise have, such as separated rights. They might not have the ability to control spinoff sort of materials. Even if they were to hold onto some of those things, they just have less hand in the project overall because it’s not their thing, it’s the studio’s thing. And that is a power imbalance that will affect the whole project going forward.

**Craig:** It will. And I am constantly struck by the arbitrary nature of the birth of things in this business. And simply by a quirk of, “Oh, I happened to mention it to someone, well now they’re the producer of it.” Or they happened to read this article that no one needs to buy, because we’re not talking about using any actual elements from the article other than the things that are public record. Now they somehow will make more money than the writer who actually does the work.

There’s all these strange things that happen at the beginning of the inception of projects. And I do think that as writers going into the next decade where the, I think – I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say that the demand for content will continue to increase – we have a lot of power that we give away simply by not paying attention in the very beginning. That’s all I’m going to put out there.

**John:** Yeah. But I don’t want to undercut a thing we’ve said often on the show which is that the idea is not the thing. The execution is the thing. Well, this is a situation where the idea kind of is the thing and like they’ve chosen to put a lot of value in this idea or this notion of like, OK, it’s a rental family thing, and these people have bought this idea but not the execution. So it is just a really dangerous precedent that we’re sort of starting to set.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, look, the interesting thing is that these folks bought this idea, but you and I could write this idea ourselves.

**John:** 100%. Yeah.

**Craig:** So like what are they buying? That’s the weird part, you know.

**John:** They’re buying air.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re buying air.

**John:** It’s tulip fever. On previous episodes we’ve talked about outlines and whether we outline and sort of what applications we use to outline. Folks have written in with their suggestions for things that they use for outlining and so I thought we’d talk through some of them. So, we’ll start with Workflowy. That’s what Craig and I are looking at right now. It’s how we do the outlines for the show. I use it sometimes for outlining for creative projects. I don’t use it a ton. What I like about Workflowy, it is a shared thing, so Craig and I are looking at the same document. We can update it in real time. That is genuinely useful. And it’s pretty minimalist. Like it just works the way I sort of expect it to work. So, I do like it for that.

But listeners wrote in with some other suggestions, so I thought I’d read through them. And we’ll have links in the show notes if anything is interesting to you.

The next one down here is called Gingko. So I tried that this afternoon. It’s weird. So it’s a web app. You create things on the left hand column. They can branch out into things on the right column, and then the third column to the right. And things can nest together. I never really got it. It could be a thing where you spent some good time with it and it becomes feeling very natural. But it did seem like a lot to learn right off the bat. And sort of a strange way of doing things.

**Craig:** So many of these things are – what’s the word–

**John:** Skeuomorphic?

**Craig:** That’s what I’m thinking of. Skeuomorphic, right? Where we’re doing digital versions of real life things, like index cards. And so this one looks very much like, here, we’ll give you index cards without index cards. But you know what I also have? Index cards.

**John:** You have actual physical index cards.

**Craig:** Which are wonderful.

**John:** So the next thing we have on our list is Cloud Outliner Pro. This is a Mac app. There’s other versions of it, too. This one looks a lot like Workflowy, except it’s actually genuinely a Mac app. It seemed fine. The controls for it weren’t as intuitive as what I’m used to in Workflowy, but I’m sure you get used to it. It seems fine. If you want an application that just does the outlining stuff.

**Craig:** I got to be honest with you. “It seems fine” is not enough of a recommendation for me.

**John:** It’s not a glowing recommendation from me.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So if you want a really powerful one, an app I’ve used a couple times and I keep trying to love and I just have never fully fallen in love with is OmniOutliner Pro. It’s from Omni. And they’re a great Mac developer. This one is like our Workflowy. It’s like a normal outline, but it actually has columns. And so you can do complicated things with columns across. So you could have like this is the scene, these are the characters who are in that scene. I’ve tried to use it for that purpose before and it’s always felt like too much application for when I want to try to do this.

Someone recommended just using Pages and just using the bullets on Pages. When you’ve done outlines have you done them in Word before? How have you done that kind of stuff?

**Craig:** I do them in Word. And Word has kind of an automatic numbering system which you can format as you like. So, you can – sometimes if I’m doing a true-true bare bones outline I will do a kind of Roman numeral – I guess you’d call it a legal outlining system where you start with a number, then you go to a letter, a Roman numeral, a small letter, and whatever. So I can do that. But typically I’ll just do one, two three. A list, essentially. And it automatically formats that for you. It’s pretty simple to do.

And I do like that because if I go back and stick something between two and three it knows to make three and everything after a bump up one. You know, easy.

**John:** Yeah. And so Highland has a similar feature. So Highland automatically does lists for you, so if you add something between it will renumber the list and sort of make that all work. It’s totally doable and you can use the header formats to sort of break out stuff if you wanted to. But it’s probably not what people are talking about with outlines where you can just drag stuff around simply. That’s a thing that we can do in Workflowy which is really helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah. Workflowy is great, it’s just a little too minimalistic for me. For whatever reason I do like numbering things. I don’t know why. When I’m doing things on index cards, I mean, my proper outlining is to actually – I have a little template that I made for myself in Word that is an index card template. And I have a font that’s like Sharpie font, which is very comforting. So I just type them. I just type them and print them. It’s old school.

**John:** Are you laying those out on a table? Are you sticking them up on a wall? How are you doing those?

**Craig:** Ah, OK, so, folks at home prepare to envy me, if you don’t already envy me. Years and years ago, now we’re talking 15 years ago, when I first met David Zucker, we were in his office in Santa Monica working on Scary Movie 3. And he had this wonderful thing on his wall. It was this corkboard, but then it had two hinged wings that could close in. And the front and back of those wings were corkboard. So you essentially had six corkboard surfaces that could fold in and open up. And this, in fact, was the same corkboard that they were using for Naked Gun.

So he and Jerry and Jim had been using this – they had it built. And years later when David moved out of that office and just was working out of his home, this thing ended up in storage. And I was like I want it. And we got it out of storage. It was like in some lockup in Compton somewhere. And so we got it out of storage and they just gave it to me. And I have it and it’s in my office. So I have the Naked Gun bulletin board and I use it constantly. It’s the best thing. I don’t know what to do – if it should ever fall apart, I think I’ll just retire.

**John:** Oh, that’s charming and sad. So you have your big special corkboard. You know, when I’ve needed to use the actual physical thing I’ve not found index cards to be especially helpful. I’ve done sometimes just like on a big table. You can just lay them out there and that can be helpful. They don’t stay put that way, which is sort of the advantage I guess of a corkboard. But like a TV room I will just use a whiteboard. And just whiteboard and markers. And that’s honestly how most TV is put together is just on a big whiteboard and that’s another good way of doing it.

**Craig:** By the way, do you go horizontal or vertical?

**John:** I go vertical.

**Craig:** So do I. And guess what? We’re the weird ones?

**John:** Oh really?

**Craig:** Because everything I see, early on there were some skeuomorphic – I’m not saying it right, but I don’t care – apps where you could – it was like little index card/corkboard apps. And they would–

**John:** Final Draft still has that.

**Craig:** OK. They would default to horizontal. And for instance when Tom Schnauz, sometimes Tom will publish on Twitter a picture of what the index cards for a particular episode of Better Call Saul looks like. All their progression is horizontal.

**John:** So it goes left to right, then left to right, then left to right?

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’m a big top to bottom kind of guy.

**John:** Yeah. That feels weird to me. But everyone has their own way.

**Craig:** I know. But our way is right.

**John:** Our way is right. The last thing I will point people to, and Craig click the link on this because I’m curious what you think of it, it’s an app called Causality that someone had recommended. It looks just like a lot of app. And so if you thought OmniOutliner was too much, this is a thing that’s trying to actually build your screenplay in a way and there’s a timeline view.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** It’s a lot of app.

**Craig:** Oh my god. This is like they’ve basically tried to Avid a screenplay. So like a stripped timeline with bricks. I hate this sort of thing. I apologize. I’m sure it is a wonderful app for a lot of people. I just look at these things and I think I’m further away from my story than ever. Now I’m into something else, this graphical representation of it. I’m adding layers between myself and the thing I feel. I don’t like it.

**John:** Yeah. You’re a long ways away from the writing in something like this.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And so for all my criticism of Final Draft, at least you are looking at the screenplay.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This you’re looking at some just bizarro representation of what this thing would be. But you will know that there are templates you can download for it that build in Save the Cat, so that’s useful.

**Craig:** Is it? [laughs] I mean, this just seems like an amazing thing for bad screenwriting professors, which is nearly a redundancy, to use in a class to enforce some sort of rigid thing. It’s very pedantic looking. None of this is at all necessary when what you really need – and this is the most unsexy thing, and you can’t monetize this – is inspiration, talent, and either a pen and a pad or just–

**John:** The most basic way of just getting text onto a surface.

**Craig:** Right. And even if you want to just say, look, I think formatting is important to me ultimately. Then you’ve made the app for everyone. Highland 2. Here’s the cheapest solution that totally works. You can write in normal text. It turns it into a properly formatted screenplay. What you need is some kind of inspiration/understanding of how to tell a story. None of this stuff – I guess my point is I feel like if you need this, it’s probably not your business.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe so.

**Craig:** Probably not for you. But, look, I am notoriously a dick. So, there you go.

**John:** I’ll leave this segment on, outlining apps. Definitely use the thing that works for you, I just feel like in general minimalism is going to be your friend and a thing that gets you thinking about the sequences of your story and not about the technology behind it is going to be helpful.

What’s useful about some of these apps is that they’re freeform enough you can just drag stuff around and drop them the same way you could with index cards or something else. You can sort of see what the layout of your stuff is. But if it’s anything that to me is skeuomorphically trying to create Craig’s index cards is probably going to be worse for the process. Because you’re spending your time figuring out how to use the app and not figuring out how to structure your story.

**Craig:** I agree. The one thing you definitely don’t want your goal to be is a pretty outline.

**John:** Oh, a beautiful outline. Yeah.

**Craig:** Worthless. Absolutely worthless.

**John:** Color-coded. Good tags.

**Craig:** Feh.

**John:** Feh. All right, let’s get to our feature topic. I’m excited to get into this.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** So over the past few months something kind of weird and unprecedented happened in TV at least. Is that two, actually three networks now have decided to let loose the stars of their popular series and fire them not because of sort of money or contract demands, which is the classic things, but because of their behavior. So first I guess we had Jeffrey Tambor who was booted from Transparent. We had Clayne Crawford who was knocked off of Lethal Weapon. So Fox agreed to pick it up but with a different star attached. And then this last week Roseanne booted from her show, or the show was canceled at Craig’s request, because of her racist tweet.

**Craig:** I think I did it. [laughs]

**John:** You did it. So, I want to talk about a couple things. First off, am I right in thinking this is actually something new?

I mean, that is in previous seasons the networks would have just hunkered down and made their way through it because the show was successful and they were just going to pretend they didn’t see it. And if it is new, then what’s changed? What are the reasons why we’re seeing this now in 2018 where we didn’t see it in 2017?

**Craig:** Well, it’s sort of new. I think that there have been incidents in the past. Is it Isaiah Washington? Is that his name?

**John:** Yeah, yeah. And I was thinking of him and I was also thinking of Charlie Sheen.

**Craig:** And Charlie Sheen. There have been incidents in the past where networks or producers have terminated stars of hit shows because of their bad behavior. I think what has changed beyond the culture around us, I mean, certainly since the – we are living in a Weinstein era. I guess we’ll call it a post-Weinstein era. That is an enormous difference.

I think the fact that we have a president who is also a many time accused sexual assaulter and also notorious and factually-proven liar has created a lot of sensitivity about these things. And thirdly there’s Twitter. And we now have a situation where you can’t get away with saying things the way you used to before simply because they weren’t noticed. I mean, Roseanne has been saying crap like this for years. Years. Which they knew. And people generally just sort of didn’t know. Or if it happened it happened and disappeared. That doesn’t occur anymore. I don’t think that’s a thing you can do now.

**John:** So the three stars I mentioned, they all had sort of different trajectories. And it’s worth maybe looking at what the commonalties are and what the differences are. So Jeffrey Tambor, there were specifics, sexual harassment allegations against him, but also increasingly just being a dick kind of problems that were surfaced about him, when he was let loose from Transparent. Clayne Crawford, it wasn’t a sexual harassment thing I heard about so much but just that he was the problem on set, or he was a significant problem on set and was an obstacle to actually making the show that they needed to make.

And Roseanne, the final firing line was over a tweet she did. And I think if you were to dial back five, 10, 15 years, these same people could have been in those positions but I think you’re right. There wasn’t Twitter to either let themselves – they couldn’t hoist themselves up by their own petards. They’d have to go through some other media platform to get it out there. So, they say something to a reporter and that gets reported, or they’re caught on TMZ doing something. But there were buffers between this. And Twitter has sort of taken away the buffers.

And in some cases, you know, it’s probably the case of Jeffrey Tambor, people are more willing to speak out because of sort of a Twitter culture that says I’m going to share my story about what actually really happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there was a time, too, I think in our culture where people were simply more naïve about how this stuff worked. And networks and studios took advantage of that. They would get rid of people for being huge problems. But they would do it under the guise of their character dies and it’s a bit of drama and then that person says, “Oh yes, I wanted to pursue other projects.” They would lie. So they were just lies.

A bit like, you know, in the ‘50s when a young woman had an unwanted pregnancy and needed an abortion then she would take a holiday or something. Go overseas to visit someone. And then would come back later. There was this weird Kabuki theater that people would do because there was a shame around these things. And everybody bought it. Or maybe they didn’t, I don’t know. But we don’t do that anymore. We don’t need to. We don’t have shame about those things. And similarly for people on television – I don’t think anybody would those excuses anymore. We’re too savvy. I think the culture is too savvy. I mean, remember when you and I were growing up nobody ever talked about box office. Now everybody looks to see what a movie has made by Friday at noon. Because we’re just movie and TV savvy now.

**John:** Yeah we are. So, let’s think about whether it’s useful to draw a distinction between a person who is a difficult and a person who is an asshole. Because you and I have both worked with difficult people, and sometimes it’s worth it to deal with difficult people because they are genuinely talented and they’re not actually mean or bad people, just they are a lot to handle.

And so there’s been people I’ve worked with and people will call me to ask like, “Should I work with this person in the future?” And I will tell them these are the problems you’re going to run into and here’s why you need to decide whether that’s worth it to you. But if someone is asking me is this person an asshole, that’s a different conversation. That’s like this is a bad person who will make your life miserable and will hurt people around you.

I’ve always felt pretty free to speak up about that, but I feel like overall we’re more empowered as a town to be talking about that just in the last year or two. I feel like those conversations are coming much more to the fore.

**Craig:** No question. And it is an important distinction to make. Because it is inevitable that you will work with people that are “difficult.” Everybody’s difficult is different. Sometimes people are difficult simply because the relationship with another person is just not a good fit. So one person may say, “Oh yeah, so-and-so is difficult to work with,” and another person may say, “Oh, no, they were a dream.” That can happen.

Also, “difficult” sometimes is a function of just a person’s way of doing their job, but they’re not trying to be malicious. They just are puzzling. Actors in particular can be difficult in that I find some incredibly gifted, wonderful actors may behave in ways that are illogical. They may behave in ways that are seemingly hypocritical and yet they don’t recognize it. They may say and do things that seem counterproductive or self-destructive. A lot of it is connected to fear and feelings.

And yet if you get through it and survive that process what you get is wonderful work and you understand that that person is being difficult because they don’t know how else to get where they need to go to give you a good performance. And that’s their job.

But then on the other side of that line is abusive behavior and mean behavior which is –- whether it’s part of their process or not — I don’t think is going to be tolerated anymore. And this is sort of the discussion that was going on around Arrested Development the last week or so.

**John:** Absolutely. So I didn’t dive too deeply into any of the articles but it was the question of if you’re doing a group interview and this topic of Tambor comes up, how do you respond in a group interview to the reality of what’s in front of you? And his behavior in relation to everybody else who is in that same room. That’s tough. And it doesn’t sound like people nailed that conversation.

**Craig:** Well, I listened to it and I actually was really impressed by everybody. I know people gave Jason Bateman a really hard time and he went out and said, “OK, I might have flubbed that one,” or he said, “I did flub it.” But I actually thought that there was a very grownup conversation going on about performance and acting and the different temperaments involved in acting. And the fact that the work product of acting is ideally a true emotional expression. Requires actors sometimes to go to strange places inside of themselves psychologically. It is naïve to expect that that will not have some sort of bleed through for some people when you’re not in between action and cut.

But I also thought that it was a very reasonable response to say, “Yes, until you are hurting other human beings,” and at that point we have to protect humans. It’s not fair. There is ultimately, I don’t think, an even balance between treating humans decently and getting a good performance. I’d rather that people just be treated decently. There is no single actor in their genius ability that to me justifies them being cruel to other people.

So, I thought it was a really interesting discussion. Note, this was not about the accusations of sexual harassment against Jeffrey Tambor. This was about Jeffrey Tambor’s behavior, essentially being verbally abusive and being a dick during the shooting of Arrested Development in some prior seasons.

And lastly I will say that it is my experience that a lot of times when we hear that someone is a bad guy, or a bad woman, and then I meet them in person I am sort of stunned by the fact that that is not the case, at least for me. And there are other actors, men and women, who are held up as paragons of virtue, good guys and good ladies–

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And then I meet them and I go, “Oh god, no, you’re awful.” There is one person in particular I’m thinking of who is sort of lauded for being wonderful and my personal experience is that this person is a monster.

**John:** Yep. And that’s why you have some of those conversations before you cast somebody in a role. Ideally just know like, “OK, you’ve worked with this person before. Is there anything you want me to know about them?” And that’s why you talk honestly about sort of what’s going on there.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also I would just add that the person that I encountered and went, oh god, this person is a monster, you know, then I asked other people, “By the way, do you know—“ And everyone is like, “Oh yeah, no, of course. This ironically incredibly famous person is also ironically a terrible human being but we all just quietly move about our day.” And that part is shocking.

**John:** Again, I wonder if it’s worthwhile to distinguish between one blow up and a pattern of behavior. So, I was thinking back to Christian Bale’s notorious blow up on the set of Terminator Resurrection and all the brouhaha over that, versus if Roseanne had tweeted this one time and had never tweeted anything else like this I don’t think she would have been fired. If that had been one tweet, and that was the one tweet, I don’t think this show would have been canceled.

I think there’s a difference between a long pattern of behavior and sort of like this one-time blow up that people do look at very differently. And the decision to get rid of her was like, “OK, we’ve crossed that line and we’re never going to go back to a place of normal sanity. We’ve got to cut our losses and run.”

Do you see a difference between the one-time and the pattern?

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, we are human. Every single person on this planet has had a bad hair day, you know. Everybody has lost their temper at some point. Everybody has done something that they regretted. Everybody has said something that they wish they hadn’t said. We’ve all had moments where later we feel ashamed of how we acted and then we make amends. We apologize. First of all, Christian Bale’s thing, I was on his side. Because I’m still angry about the fact that a DP goes behind an actor while the camera is on the other actor. So Christian Bale is trying to do a scene looking at another human being, and meanwhile behind that human being is a guy moving the lights around while they’re shooting. That’s crazy. So I actually understand that blow up. I mean, yes, any individual blow up when you start to listen to it it becomes unhinged and a little scary because that’s what blow ups are. That’s what anger does. And Christian Bale I believe apologized later, because that’s how it goes.

That’s different. The people that I have found scary aren’t the ones that have had moments and then come back to you and say, “I’m sorry about that.” The people that I find scary are the people that have no idea that they’re being cruel and in fact cruelty is sort of their method. They live in a weird space where they show up angry, they continue angry, and then they leave angry. And while they’re there they’re just mean. And mean in ways that make no sense. Those are the people that I just find terrible.

**John:** Yeah. That’s where you start to look at the, like, this person may be a psychopath test.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** These are the people who cover their walls in pictures of predatory animals. They can fake human emotions but not actually demonstrate them. That is a real thing and you will see some of those behaviors.

But I want to talk about though these three examples we gave were all TV examples and there’s a difference I think with what we put up with in features versus what we put up with in TV. I think because TV you’re coming back for another season, you’re going to have to keep working with this person. Versus in features at least to this point we’re like “OK it’s only a month. It’s three months. We can get through this.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “And so we just suffer through with this person and hope to never work with that person again until the movie is a huge hit and then we’re making the sequel.” That is an interesting thing and I’d be curious to see the first movie that fires a lead actor and just says like, “OK, no, you’re horrible, you’re gone.” I mean, Kevin Spacey is sort of an example of that because when they reshot all that stuff, but I’m curious what the first like while a movie is happening we’re just like “OK, no, we’re done, go away.”

**Craig:** Well, it doesn’t have to necessarily be an actor. For instance Bryan Singer was recently fired from the Queen biopic because of terrible behavior. Now, of note, Bryan Singer has been accused of terrible behavior practically for every single movie he’s directed in the last ten years, or more. So, again, it does seem like things are changing. The tolerance for this sort of thing is starting to drop to zero.

In the case of Roseanne, yes, if this had been the only time she had ever tweeted something like that then I suppose there would have been interventions, tears, apologies, the Ambien excuse may have possibly held a little bit of water. But the nature of it was so outrageous and so disgusting that I just don’t think it would have ever been able to continue even if it had been a one-time thing because there is a difference between a blow up where you are so dedicated to your work that you become enraged at inefficiencies or things that keep you from doing your job and incidences where you express thoughts or opinions or feelings that are just repugnant and completely out of line with the experience you want people to have when they watch your show.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s worth pointing out was that Roseanne’s issue wasn’t about her being a bully on the set. It was about things she was saying off the set that were just abhorrent. And that was one of the first times we’ve seen that. So it wasn’t about what she was doing on the set. It was something unrelated that was causing her to be nixed from it.

So the last thing to sort of talk about, we talked about actors, we talked about directors, but some writers are notoriously assholes. And there’s been writers who have been famously fired or had big scandals that happened because of how they were running their writer’s rooms. Not so much on the feature side, because we’re not sort of in control very much, but there’s writers who are in control who are out of control.

One of the things I find so fascinating and frustrating is that we are one of the only places in the world where someone with no management experience is suddenly expected to manage a staff and be able to do all these things with no training and sometimes very little support around them. So I think it’s not a wonder that some people’s worst instincts come out in those situations.

**Craig:** Yeah. And to complicate matters further, what I said about actors is also true for writers. We’re emotional people, like all humans, but on top of it we’re doing something that is specifically emotional by design. We write and create these things. We do it with emotion. We do it to create emotion. And then we are, in television at least, placed in charge of the process to bring this about. And when things are different or don’t work right or are frustrating it is natural then to have strong emotional feelings about it.

And I think ultimately the best advice for all of us in these situations is when you have those responses, those strong emotional reactions, go have them quietly somewhere else. Have them to your heart’s content alone so as to not dump that on other humans. And then when you have calmed down and are able to be a little more dispassionate, come back and address the cause. Because you can fix things quite easily if you’re not enraged or frightened, you know.

It’s the anger and the fear in the moment that never – you might get what you want right then and there just by screaming or shouting or throwing a tantrum or being angry or afraid, but in the long run you’re damaging yourself, you’re damaging human beings around you, and you’re damaging the show.

**John:** Yeah. When you Hulk out you just destroy things. That’s what you do.

**Craig:** Hulk Smash.

**John:** Hulk Smash. All right, let’s smash our way through some questions. We will start with Mark. Mark writes, “What happened to feature comedy? It’s one of the genres I specialize in. Even though I’ve gotten positive feedback on my script from a variety of sources, people keep turning me down when I go in to pitch. In general the explanation is since comedy is no longer doing well in theaters they are only looking for small budget indie style comedies or ‘high concept’ bigger budget films with star talent attached. And, unfortunately, I fall somewhere in the middle of the scale.

“After doing research it does seems to be true that only dramedies like Bick Sick or Lady Bird or star vehicle comedies seem to be opening in theaters lately. And even then the numbers seem to be declining. Meanwhile, mid-budget comedies in the vein of Superbad, American Pie, and even something like Zombieland seem nowhere to be found as far as I can see. Is this reasoning just an excuse for executives to turn my scripts down, or is it true the feature comedy landscape is actually changing or declining?”

Craig, you write in this space. Tell me about it.

**Craig:** I don’t agree with this argument. Yes, it is true that there used to be more comedies because there used to be more movies. And it is also true that of the reduced amount of movies that now exist, we’re talking about theatrical films, a greater percentage of them are franchise movies which tend to be action films, super hero films, etc. The smaller movies a lot of times are mini-budget horror movies.

So I’m just looking at 2017 and so right off the bat I see Girls Trip. So when we talk about what he says, “Original mid-budget comedies in the vein of Superbad, American Pie, and Zombieland seem nowhere to be found as far as I can see,” it’s staring right at you right there. Girls Trip worked. And there was The House and there was Jumanji which I thought, I mean, it’s a larger thing but it was definitely a comedy. The made Chips which, OK, maybe didn’t work, but again in that same zone. There was Snatched.

Anyway, point is they do make comedies. Kevin Hart makes one a year as far as I can tell. So, they absolutely make these. Melissa McCarthy makes one to two a year as far as I can tell. It has always been the case that comedies are driven by comic stars. When one of them kind of comes out of nowhere then that person becomes a comic star and they keep making movies with that person.

I don’t think anything has changed other than the fact that they make fewer movies in general. If you get turned down when you go to pitch, you’re pitching to the wrong people. I mean, I don’t understand this. You go to pitch a screenplay for a comedy and the person says, “Oh, comedy is no longer doing well. We only want small budget indie style comedies or high concept bigger budget films,” who is sending you into these rooms?

**John:** That does feel weird.

**Craig:** Either you’re in the wrong rooms or they’re kind of just lying to you and really what they’re saying is, “We just don’t want to buy that.”

**John:** Yeah. I can see that. Another comedy that I really loved quite a bit was Game Night of this last year.

**Craig:** Yeah, Game Night, there you go.

**John:** Which was delightful. And, again, mid budget. Stars Jason Bateman. It’s the right kind of thing for what we’re describing.

I think they do still exist. I think Craig is correct that it’s mostly because we’re just making fewer movies overall, so in making fewer movies we’re making fewer of these comedies. I also do wonder is the kinds of comedies we’re talking about, even Game Night, even Girls Trip, as a script you could also make that as that lower budget thing, too. So I’m not sure you’re necessarily – unless it’s Jumanji where it literally is that expensive of a movie to make, or some of the other Kevin Hart things like Central Intelligence that requires a certain budget and scale, a lot of those scripts are going to look the same whether they’re kind of low budge or medium budget. So, write those scripts and if people want to make them they will make them.

And the reason they become mid budget is because they add on some stars and enough of a production value that it just costs that much and they shoot it in Atlanta. But otherwise it’s not that different of a thing. So, keep writing those scripts. And also I’d say writing those scripts is also probably a good way to get staffed on the many, many comedies that are shooting these days for TV.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they’re also making comedy films for TV, you know, Netflix for instance does this sort of thing. But, yeah, I think that there’s still plenty of life in the let’s call it $30 million comedy. Plenty of life there.

Christina from Malibu writes, “What is your opinion on postscripts at the end of a biopic? Are they necessary? Appreciated? Expected? Can they take away from the story you just told?” John?

**John:** They largely drive me crazy. Basically like we’re going to tell a story up to a certain point, and then we’ll roll some cards and tell you the rest of it. I tend to find them very frustrating. Sometimes they work when they’re done well.

What does drive me crazy on biopics is when they show the real people. It’s like, you know those actors you just saw, well these are the real people and this is what they really look like and isn’t that great? That drives me crazy. I can’t explain why it drives me so crazy, but I don’t want the illusion broken by showing me the real person at the end. It makes me nuts.

**Craig:** Well, do not watch the very, very end of Chernobyl, which is going to have a very long postscript only because there’s just so much to say.

**John:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** But are they necessary? Are they appreciated? Are they expected? I don’t know. I mean, in a movie where you just spent 90 minutes or two hours and you’re a trapped audience member and you can’t go, there’s a limited amount of time there at the end. Basically people are incredibly patient for the first 20 minutes of the movie and I think they’re generally incredibly impatient in the last 20 minutes of a movie. And reasonably so.

So, whatever you say at the end should be quick, I think, if you are talking about people in a theater. For television at home, I mean, I think everybody can – it seems to me like it’s sort of information on demand, you know? The more you want to know, well, it’s there. And if you don’t want to know it, you just hit pause and go to sleep. You’re done. So that’s kind of my feeling about it. It’s sort of up to you. And the good news is it’s something that you can decide very, very late. I mean, you do need to know what it is you want to show at the end if you’re going to be putting up cards. You need to plan for that visually if you need to shoot stuff. But the actual decision of how much you want to put there and why, you know, that’s late – that’s a late sort of thing to worry about. And there’s chances to do it or not.

**John:** The one thing I would urge Christina to think about is that the card should not be the end of your movie. So basically the central dramatic question of your movie shouldn’t be answered by the card at the end.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Your movie has to answer the question at the end. If there is an extra beat that is meaningful or poignant or is very helpful for the audience to know after that, basically sort of how much longer this couple lived at the end, great. I can see the argument for that. But you have to really end the story as the movie and not as the card at the end.

**Craig:** No question. The cards really do have to have a little bit of irony to them or they have to be extra credit. Essentially if you love this story, and you love all this stuff, here’s some more that would be cool for you to know. But beyond that, yeah.

**John:** Cool. Tony writes, “I was wondering what your thoughts are about shopping agreements. I’ve adapted a novel I co-wrote and a small production company here in Australia is offering a shopping agreement, giving them the rights to represent the screenplay for 18 months. From what I can see on the intertubes, the agreement I’ve received is pretty standard to others out there, but I’m curious how effective these agreements are.”

**Craig:** I mean, pretty standard sort of thing. How effective are the agreements? I’m not quite sure how to answer that. I mean, what you’re really asking I think is how often do people that sign shopping agreements end up actually selling something, and the answer is I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter. Let’s say I gave you the average. Let’s say I told you that 0.5% of the time it works. What are you going to do? Cancel it? Of course not. You want to be the 0.5%.

So, I wouldn’t worry about any of that. Generally speaking if you want to work in this business and you’re starting out you need to make friends with uncertainty because that’s what you got.

**John:** Yeah. So to define terms here, a shopping agreement would be Tony making a deal with this production company saying that for this period of time you can be essentially the producer, the creative financial partner behind this thing as they go out and try to find more money to raise to actually make this project. They’re kind of standard. If you’ve looked up other ones online that would be good.

I would say that your trust and faith in this production company is worth as much as the actual contract is. And so hopefully you’ve done your research to figure out what else have they actually made. What is the reputation they have for things? You’ve talked with them about what their actual goals and intentions are with the thing.

I haven’t done a lot of these shopping agreements. The closest we came was a project that Jordan Mechner and I did together, which was to be shot in Asia, and we ended up partnering up with this small Asian production company which was trying to find the larger financing. It was fine. But, you know, it’s not a thing that Craig and I are doing on a regular basis. It’s a thing that happens more in indie finance things or things that are using a lot of international financing.

**Craig:** Correct. Nate writes, “Recently your colleague Josh Friedman was fired as showrunner on his TNT series Snowpiercer and was replaced by Orphan Black creator Graeme Manson. Friedman was hurt when Graeme failed to reach out to him and he said so on Twitter. What is your opinion on proper etiquette? Was Josh justified in making this public?”

All right, John, what do you think?

**John:** So Josh is a friend. I don’t know Graeme at all. I’ve known Josh for a good long time. And I knew Josh as he was headed off to make Snowpiercer and I know that he had a vision for the show and was not at all happy to be replaced on the show. And I think what I respect about Josh is he actually sort of openly communicated his feelings about how it all happened. Because there’s a tendency we have is to buckle down and pretend that everything is OK and that it’s all just fine and good and that’s just the way it goes. And it’s not always well and fine and just the way it goes.

And so Josh has been – back even from his blogging days has been just very up front and honest about sort of how it feels to be doing this job. And so I get that.

I would say overall protocols for when I come on to a project to replace somebody, when I am replaced by somebody, that reaching out, that conversation is good and helpful and just lets the person know where all the bones are buried. Just that little bit of a blessing to go forward. But it’s not always easy.

I can very much see it from Graeme’s side as well. I don’t know what the real situation was. I don’t know how bad things got or sort of who was saying what. I know it’s hard to sort of come in and make that first phone call to the person who just got let go. But I think I am mostly with Josh in the sense that it sucks. And I think it’s good sometimes to acknowledge that it sucks publicly because otherwise it seems like it’s all happiness and success in this town. And if you don’t talk about the failures people get even more distorted views of how the industry works.

**Craig:** I agree with that completely. And that part is very admirable. We should talk about our failures more than we do because it is a huge part of our lives. For many writers, probably most writers, it’s the majority of their careers is failure. Because this is a tough business and the odds are brutal. It’s why, for instance, when the critics ripped me open for Identity Thief that’s why we did that show, because I wanted to talk about that specific kind of fail. I mean, the movie was a success happily, but critically it was a failure. So I wanted to talk about that.

Look, that to me is – protocol wise I feel like our failures are ours. We own them and we are free to talk about them and I encourage that. And I think it’s wonderful – anything that avoids shame about that is wonderful.

However, I don’t take swings at other writers in public just as a matter of course because, again, I feel like even if another writer flubs it or blows it – and I certainly support always reaching out to writers. That’s something I’ve always done.

I just don’t like making other writers the villains. I feel like this business is brutal and a lot of times we just don’t know what’s going on. There are times when people are hired and someone says, “Listen, if we can’t keep this show going the following 150 people lose their jobs. We need you to keep it going. And for the following reasons we are asking that you do not have contact with the person we just fired.” Well, that’s a tough spot. And then it becomes tougher when you can’t respond and someone is taking swings at you in public.

Now I don’t know if that’s what happened. It may be as simple as that in fact it was just kind of poor etiquette. I don’t know. But because I don’t know – and because I generally think that taking swings at writers and taking swings at their work is not good for us as a community, that’s something that on that front I think it’s better etiquette to refrain from that sort of thing. But I certainly feel for Josh completely. And so as much as we can show empathy for each other I’m in full support.

**John:** So I don’t want to go back through the whole Twitter timeline right now to see who said what exactly, but my recollection is that Josh was talking about his situation and how he felt about not getting a call from the person who is replacing him. Is that taking a swing at the guy who replaced him? Kind of, but like there’s sort of no way to even talk about it without acknowledging that he hasn’t had any conversation with the guy who is taking over the show.

One thing I should say is that Josh and I actually developed a show together. So we did a show at Fox that didn’t make it past the pilot. And it was heartbreaking, but I’ll tell you that it is so much nicer to have a script not go to pilot than to go to pilot and not get picked up, or go to series and last a few episodes. The more you’ve done on a project, the more fully emotionally committed you are to something and it’s just devastating when it doesn’t go forward.

TV is just this crazy thing we make where we’ll shoot 30 shows and four will make it to the air. And there’s just so much buried labor in making TV.

**Craig:** It is an awful situation. And these things do happen – they don’t happen often, but they do happen. And they can be very upsetting. They should be very upsetting. I mean, to be asked to leave something that you love and care about is hard. And it’s happened to all of us. And it is very, very hard.

I’ll tell you what I do with writer etiquette and it’s just my way of etiquette. It’s not the right way, it’s just my way. I love to give positive examples. So I like to talk about how I feel when a writer calls me, or how writers react when I call them. Because I think that’s helpful. And then I also will from time to time I will send a private message to somebody who I think is doing it wrong. And certainly not in this case. Not Josh. I don’t think he did anything. I’m talking about other writers occasionally do things on Twitter and I go, “Oh no, no, no, nope, nope, nope. No.” And then I send them a little note. I’m like an old guy now, so I can say “I just don’t think that’s good for us as a group.” And I’m polite about it. And it has nothing to do with me, so I’m just an independent observer. I’m just saying this isn’t good for us. And every single time I’ve had that conversation it’s gone well actually.

I think a lot of times it’s just that we don’t see it. We miss it. And we’re human, right? We make mistakes. But we must protect each other and take care of each other. And when we fail to do so it’s weirdly even more important to figure out how to take care of each other while we correct each other. I think that’s just generally my feeling about these things.

**John:** Yeah. I’m sure I’ve said it on the show before, but I’ve become good friends with screenwriters who I only met because either I was replacing them or they were replacing me. And we had that phone call to talk through stuff. And it was fantastic. So, it’s just a way to do that. And especially in the age of Twitter now it’s much easier to reach out to somebody, even if you don’t have the mutual contact, to just chat about things and wish them well and let them know that you are there to listen if they have things they want to tell you about the baby that you were raising for those past months.

**Craig:** I mean, how often do you read something, have a reaction to it like, “Oh my god, this person has reported a story, they have been wronged, this other person is a jerk.” And then maybe you meet that person, or you meet somebody that knows that person and you hear a different story and you go, “Oh, OK, that’s not what I –“ that’s pretty common. And all the more reason I feel like there’s rarely any practical good that comes from this sort of thing in public. Far more practical good comes from it in private.

However, the big difference is the stuff we were talking about earlier. The abusive stuff. So now we’re not talking about etiquette. We’re talking about people that are bad people. They’re abusive. They’re hurting other human beings. Then I think actually we do ourselves a disservice by not talking about it in public.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s where it gets dangerous.

**John:** It’s tough. And I think for far too long we’ve just assumed that saying nothing is the best approach and maybe a thing that’s happened over the course of the last 18 months is we’re starting to realize if we say nothing things will just continue.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s true.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a card game called No Thanks! I’m not even sure who first recommended this card game to me, but it’s really good. It’s by this guy Thorsten Gimmler. And the idea behind it is you are sort of bidding to not take cards. And in the bidding you are putting these chips on the card that shows up. And eventually you’ll decide like, oh you know what, I’m just going to take this card and get all these little chips. It’s a very clever mechanic and I’ve never seen it in any other game before.

It’s good for like three to five, maybe six players. But we really liked it, so it’s become a new Friday afternoon game here around the office. So it’s No Thanks! It’s by Thorsten Gimmler.

**Craig:** Excellent. I also have a little game this week. It’s the third chapter of a series that I enjoy called Faraway. This is an app on iOS and maybe it’s for Google, but as we all know I don’t care. And Faraway is sort of a puzzle solving game. John, did you play The Witness by the way, or I guess it’s just Witness?

**John:** I never played it. I know what it is though. It’s by the same guy who did Braid.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Jonathan Blow. Excellent game. The style of puzzles in Witness are I guess more complicated versions of what you see on Faraway, but it’s a very fun game. It goes through pretty easily, but inside each level there are three little hidden pieces, notes essentially, and finding two of the notes is usually very, very simple. Finding the third note is very, very hard.

I tend to like games that add little collectible hunts. It’s just an interesting little mechanic that makes me happy. So anyway, Faraway 3. Pretty cheap little game in terms of cost. But fun.

**John:** Nice. Cool. Well 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 the great Jon Spurney.

**Craig:** The great Jon Spurney?

**John:** It’s a pretty great outro, so he gets the great for this one.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place to send questions like the ones we answered today. On Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. That’s a great place for little short questions we can answer.

You can find us on any place where you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there you can leave us a comment or a review. Those help.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. For all the back episodes you can go to Scriptnotes.net. For $2 a month you can get all the back episodes. There’s also an iOS app that will let you listen to them easily.

We still have a few more of the 300-episode drives. Let us know if you want us to make more of those because we were encountering situations, especially overseas buyers will say like it’s cool to get the drive but the import taxes on the drives are incredibly expensive so is there another way to do it. So we’re thinking through that. Let us know on Twitter what you’d like us to do about the drives, or the situation for that, because we might just go to a purely digital version of that. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, I mean, because somebody can go and buy themselves a little thumb drive for $20 and then download just our archive right?

**John:** Yeah. So we’re thinking about maybe we could break them up into either 50-episode or 100-episode chunks that are like still manageable for downloads. We’ll see.

**Craig:** What will be the most profitable for me?

**John:** The most profitable for you would be anything. Really nothing would make any difference for you.

**Craig:** Right. Right. OK. Interesting. Interesting. Great.

**John:** Now, Craig, if you want to negotiate a split on this we can? Tell me what more you’d like to do on the show to ensure its profitability.

**Craig:** I feel like I do so much, you know, just in terms of personality labor.

**John:** Oh yeah. For sure.

**Craig:** Just like my glowing personality has a value.

**John:** So going back to Kevin Hart, so I went to the Survivor Finale which was great, because Jeff Probst who is a Scriptnotes listener invited me to come to the finale. And it was fantastic. But Kevin Hart shows up at it to promote his new show. And I really wonder about the business model of Kevin Hart’s new show, because it’s this competition show where it’s this silly thing where you’re racing across these obstacles and the other team is trying to knock you off these obstacles. Sort of like American Gladiators but with like–

**Craig:** Regular people?

**John:** Regular people doing American Gladiators. And he’s a charming host, he’s wonderful, but how much are you getting paid? What is the split that gets Kevin Hart to do that show?

**Craig:** So much money.

**John:** So much money. So like you, Kevin Hart has that sort of personality plus is what he gives.

**Craig:** So true.

**John:** He is the intellectual property. He’s the emotional property. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** Kevin and I go back. We go all the way back to 2008.

**John:** Was he in Superhero Movie?

**Craig:** He was in Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4 and Superhero Movie.

**John:** So you directed Kevin Hart.

**Craig:** Yeah, I did. I don’t know if Scary Movie was his first movie, but it was close to his first movie. We hired Kevin because he came in – remember, he came in for like a fill in for a table read.

**John:** That’s so great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s great. And he was small back then. But he’s grown so much.

**Craig:** Well, he’s still physically small.

**John:** But now as a force of personality.

**Craig:** I have loved watching the rise of Kevin Hart so much because just to close the circle, let’s come full circle on our theme. Kevin is such a good guy. He’s always been such a good guy. He’s always been a gamer, up for anything, hard-working dude. Doesn’t get any like ego in the way. And he’s good at what he does, obviously. He’s just a delight. Kevin, every time he would walk on set, every single time he would go, “OK, it’s magic time.” That was what he would say every time. I loved that. He’s the best. I love Kev.

**John:** And the minute we stop recording we’re going to talk about all the actors who are not good people. Bye Scriptnotes!

**Craig:** By the way, I know, exactly. I made a mistake. I said 2008. I meant 2003. Sorry, Scary Movie 3 was in 2003.

**John:** Wow. We’re old.

**Craig:** So Kevin Hart’s first role was in a movie called Paper Soldiers in 2002. I don’t know what that movie is. But his second role was in Scary Movie 3. So that’s how far back me and Kev go.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. All right, that was a good show.

**John:** Good show. Thanks.

Links:

* A [series](http://deadline.com/2018/05/series-japan-rent-a-relative-business-in-works-anonymous-content-paramount-tv-conde-nast-entertainment-1202397497/) is in development based on Elif Batuman’s New Yorker [article](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/japans-rent-a-family-industry) about rental families.
* Some listener-recommended outliners include [Workflowy](https://workflowy.com/), [Gingko](https://gingkoapp.com), [Cloud Outliner](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cloud-outliner-pro/id1024917449?mt=12), [OmniOutliner](https://www.omnigroup.com/omnioutliner) from Omni Group, [Pages](https://www.apple.com/pages/), [Causality](https://www.hollywoodcamerawork.com/causality-videos.html), and good old index cards.
* Some recently fired examples include [Roseanne Barr](https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/roseanne-canceled-abc-1202824211/), [Jeffrey Tambor](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/jeffrey-tambor-officially-fired-transparent-wake-harassment-claims-1085236), [Clayne Crawford](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-lethal-weapon-clayne-crawford-fired-20180514-htmlstory.html), and [Bryan Singer](https://variety.com/2017/film/news/bryan-singer-fired-bohemian-rhapsody-1202630247/).
* A [question of etiquette](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/fired-snowpiercer-showrunner-calls-replacement-an-idiot-not-reaching-1112964) regarding replacing another writer
* [No Thanks!](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013FAC4FK/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), a game by Thorsten Gimmler
* [Faraway 3](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/faraway-3/id1336928392?mt=8), a puzzle game for iOS
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/scriptnotes-live-homecoming-show).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode of Scriptnotes has a few bad words. So if you’re driving in the car with your kids, this is the warning.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are…

Crowd: Interesting to screenwriters.

**John:** You’re so good.

**Craig:** So good. Yeah. You guys remembered three words. Congratulations.

**John:** Craig sometimes doesn’t.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true. Look who we have back, by the way. After a year. You know, you’d think you wouldn’t miss him, but you do. You do. It was really great to get you back.

**John:** Well thank you very much. You guys did two live shows without me. You did the Austin show and you did the LA show. They both worked. But I’ll be honest…

**Craig:** Well, I think they were two of our best shows ever.

**John:** All right. I will tell you that honestly there was an aspect of me that wanted them to be successful, but not especially successful. I wanted there to be some crisis like, oh, like John is irreplaceable.

**Craig:** I get that. But it didn’t happen. They were actually amazing without you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Completely without you.

**John:** Yeah…that’s…yeah.

**Craig:** You had nothing to do with them.

**John:** Yeah, so that was a little sad.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll see how this goes.

**John:** Yeah, this could be fine. I was involved in more of the planning for this one, so you might notice things are a little bit more —

**Craig:** Planned.

**John:** Yeah. So a couple things about today’s show. We have three amazing guests. We’re so excited to bring them up. But we also have some audience participation stuff. We’re trying something brand, brand new. So as you came into the theater tonight, you were handed a ticket. That ticket will become important later on. So don’t lose that ticket. I love that everyone is pulling it out right now. That’s so awesome.

**Craig:** I just found out about the ticket thing. I literally saw tickets in the front and I’m like, oh, are you guys raffling something? And they said, “You’re doing a thing.”

**John:** Yeah, we’re going to do a thing.

**Craig:** And I didn’t know.

**John:** So at some point there will be a bowl and people will be drawing things out of the bowl. It’s going to be very, very exciting. But one of the things I love about live shows with guests is a chance for me to learn something about things that I don’t really know. Craig, you’re doing a TV show now. You’re starting that process. I’ve done some TV shows in the past. But we’re not TV people.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We have TV people with us tonight.

**Craig:** Three of the best. Three of the best.

**John:** Let’s just get to it. Let’s bring these people out. Our guests tonight. First off, Wikipedia says Megan Amram is an American comedian and writer. She became well known after 2010 through her Twitter account, where she posts one-liners that make use of subtle word play, absurdism, and dark humor. She was a staff writer for the Disney Channel sitcom Ant Farm, NBC’s Parks and Recreation, and Children’s Hospital. Someone needs to update her Wikipedia profile. So you guys can do this in the audience tonight. To include that she’s also written on Silicon Valley, and The Good Place, plus, most crucially —

**Craig:** Oh, we’re going to save what that is.

**John:** All right. There’s a secret connection here. Let’s welcome Megan Amram.

**Craig:** Megan Amram. Should we invite up — just get everybody all at once? Merriam-Webster defines — no, Wikipedia says Thomas Schnauz is an American television producer and television writer. They forgot he’s also an excellent director. His credits include The X-Files, The Lone Gunman.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Not as popular. Night Stalker. Even less popular. Reaper. Watch this now. Breaking Bad. And Better Call Saul. Tom Schnauz.

**John:** So, finally, I think this Wikipedia entry was actually updated this afternoon, because it changed from when I first emailed it to him. Wikipedia says Matthew (Matt) Selman is an American writer and producer. After two years of failed spec scripts, he was hired to write an episode of Seinfeld in 1996. Selman then joined the writing staff of The Simpsons where he has remained, rising to the position of executive producer. He has also co-written The Simpsons’ movie, The Simpsons’ ride. Simpsons’ videogames. And the names of many of the entrees at the Universal Studios Springfield Food Court.

Most importantly, he was also the host of the single episode of Duly Noted, the Scriptnotes after show. Matt Selman, come on up.

**Craig:** Short lived. Welcome, Matt.

Well, I’m exhausted after that.

**John:** It was a lot of chatting. So, we are mostly feature folks. And so we’ve done some TV over the years, but neither of us have really worked in rooms. And a lot of the stuff that you guys are doing is in rooms. So I wanted to start tonight by talking about rooms and sort of how rooms work in television. So, Megan, can we start with you? For a show like The Good Place, what was the process of figuring out this is how we’re going to do this series for TV? Like when do you come in and when was the room put together?

**Megan Amram:** The thing that’s amazing about TV is that it’s like little movies. It’s a really fun way to think about it. Just like a 30 to 60-minute movie might be helpful.

**John:** I like that you’re keeping it really basic for us. That’s nice.

**Megan:** I am not a television writer. I just am a fraud who came here.

So, I started on season one of The Good Place, which we just finished writing and shooting our second season, and which will air in the fall. And I have only really been in 30-minute comedy rooms, so add that to my Wikipedia please when you update it.

**John:** Someone in the audience, get on that right now.

**Megan:** I’ll Venmo $10 to whoever updates my Wikipedia right now. But we — I can speak for my shows. We start for what might be one to two months with very broad strokes where we just want to figure out where the season begins and ends.

**Craig:** And how many are we talking about in the room?

**Megan:** Anywhere from six to ten people. We might start with a smaller — we started with four people this year and just sort of sketched out what we were doing. But my show, if you haven’t seen it, is sort of a science-fiction comedy show, which is very specific in tone and we really unlike a comedy show where maybe you just want to do different refillable comedy episodes every time you tune in, we wanted it to really have an overarching story that had a beginning, and a middle, and an end. So, we wanted to figure that all out before we started breaking specific episodes.

**Craig:** Over how many episodes?

**Megan:** 13. So both seasons we knew the beginning, and the end, which our season that just aired had a big twist in it that we all — all the writers knew and were really trying to lay in to every episode.

So, yeah, so we start very broad and then work into what are 13 ways to split this up in comedic episodes. And then we get into the actual like what are scenes, what are people saying in it.

**Craig:** And your show is — Good Place is 30 minutes. It’s a half-hour comedy. In my mind, I think that when I consider the room for that, or I consider the room that Matt runs for The Simpsons, and then I think about what Tom does, that maybe it’s not that different. Am I wrong? I mean, you have an hour-long show. It’s not a comedy. I mean, there are comedic elements to both Breaking Band and Better Call Saul, but is it a similar process regardless of genre?

**Thomas Schnauz:** It’s actually very similar, except for the fact that we do start off, we talk big picture for a month or two about what’s going to happen in the series, but we don’t stick to that. We put up ideas on the board. We have a corkboard and we have index cards and we write all these ideas and we post them up. But then we go episode by episode and we don’t stick to that plan because our characters drive us through what happens next. And we will veer off wildly from that initial two-month planning if something interesting happens.

I mean, the one I always note is in Breaking Bad we had this big train heist and we had all these for Jesse Pinkman was going to be the big drug king pin. And then somebody came up with the idea that this character Todd shoots a kid on a motorbike, which changed everything. So, the thing is —

**Craig:** What, Jesse could have been a huge drug kingpin?

**Thomas:** That was something we talked about.

**Craig:** He never got a break. Ever.

**Thomas:** I know. That was something we talked about. And it just — once you come up with a different idea, a better idea, you just go with that. So we don’t stick to any game plan. Wherever the characters take us, that’s where we go.

**John:** Now, Matt Selman, you’re running really a brand new, fresh show that has like no history. There’s no set idea about a Simpsons episode could or should be. So it’s just, the same, it’s a whiteboard. Anything can happen. Arcs from episode to episode. Huge changes.

**Matt Selman:** I mean, you’re super right in that unlike your shows there’s very little continuity on The Simpsons. And to me the show is like Groundhog Day where you reset to the beginning. It’s a normal kind of blue color family. They’re troubled but love each other. And then you take them on an as crazy an adventure as you can get away with over that 20 minutes and 40 seconds you have. So, we don’t do a lot of season arc planning or —

**Craig:** Or planning.

**Matt:** Or whiteboard using. But, you know, like the thing that all these shows have in common is the most important thing is the breaking of the story. And, you know, you have X amount of time to do it. You have these creative people to do it with. How can you get the job done and have it be a satisfying story and then not down the line think of some awesome thing where a kid kills someone on a bike and it could have been so much better.

**Craig:** Right. You don’t have that issue.

**Matt:** You want to do it, but then you don’t want to think of something — you don’t want to miss out on an awesome other idea, which is always lurking. Oh, what if there was some better way to do it?

**Craig:** And you guys do 20 — ?

**Matt:** We do 22.

**Craig:** And so you do 13? Breaking Bad is, I’m sorry, Better Call Saul is — ?

**Thomas:** Better Call Saul is down to 10 episodes a season.

**Craig:** So 13 was like, oh god, I can’t even handle.

**Thomas:** Pretty much.

**Craig:** And you’re still cranking out 22. How big is your room?

**Matt:** 22-episode payments every year.

**Craig:** That’s true. That’s pretty sweet. That’s hundreds of dollars a year.

**Thomas:** We’re not about the money. We’re about the art.

**Craig:** Yes. Of course. Of course. Yes. But how many people are in your room to handle that workload?

**Matt:** We have two rooms. I run a room. And our real showrunner, this guy Al Jean, the iconic Al Jean, runs another room.

**Craig:** So if someone is in your room, are they being punished?

**Matt:** Well, there’s different schools of thought for that. Let’s just say we’re here now. We both have our, well, you guys tell me what you think. I’ve worked on one room for one show for my entire life, but I’ve worked with different room runners, myself included, and I’ve found that every room runner — when you run a room, you’re sort of like a screenwriter by yourself and everyone else has to be part of your brain and your process, however functional or dysfunctional, is kind of projected out onto the creative collaborators. And so that can be good or bad.

So when I run the room, I feel like the rewriting has my problems, which is that I just want to get it done with and get a version and, oh, we’ve just got to get something down and then we have to go back and realize it wasn’t awesome and have to do it again. Like that’s how I write by myself and that’s how I force my room to do it. And I wish I could improve but I can’t.

But, and I’ve seen other showrunner, room runner guys who are super tortured and, you know, progress is slow. And then his or her torture becomes everyone’s torture. I mean, do you guys feel that is accurate?

**Megan:** Yeah. The psychological petri dish that is a writer’s room is very fascinating. About how someone’s neuroses can just infect a ton of people at once.

I’ve worked for a bunch of a different showrunners. My showrunner on The Good Place is Mike Schur who is incredibly good at his job.

**Matt:** He’s kind of like the best in the biz, right?

**Megan:** Yeah. He’s pretty much the best, if you’re listening, Mike. But he —

**Craig:** If you’re listening, man that employs me. You’re the best.

**Megan:** Yeah, you’re really good.

**Craig:** You’re amazing.

**Megan:** But he’s very even-keeled. But what Tom was saying about how you sort of have to look at every type of idea and then you pick a path and you just do, and the thing about television, unlike movies, is that you also just have to finish it really fast, usually, and then it has to be on TV. And you just can’t change it. So, I think something that Mike is really good at and I’ve seen other showrunners who are both good and not as good at is just being like, “This is the idea we’re doing. And maybe we’re going to think of something really good in like six months, right before it airs, and you can’t feel bad about it. You just got to let it go. That’s what it is.”

And so I think it is a very interesting skill that’s not necessarily writing exactly. But it’s listening to all of your collaborators and making a uniform product. But then also just being like, you know, we’re doing our best and that’s what it’s going to be.

**John:** Tom, what’s your experience with showrunner’s processes and sort of how that makes the room work? And I don’t know how big the room is on Better Call Saul.

**Thomas:** We have seven writers, I believe, and then Vince is sort of coming in and out right now because he’s working on another project. But Peter Gould is running the room. Best guy in the business. I know he’s listening. He takes so much credit for your success, also.

**Craig:** So we’ve got a genius Al Jean, we’ve got the amazing Mike Schur. We have the wonderful Peter Gould.

**John:** Peter Gould, a former Scriptnotes guest. You weren’t there for that show.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Yeah. An Austin show you weren’t there for.

**Craig:** Oh. Well I didn’t even know.

**John:** You didn’t listen, so. You would never know.

**Craig:** No. I don’t listen to podcasts.

**John:** So Peter is running this room. And so — ?

**Thomas:** We, I feel gross, because you’re talking about how much pressure it is to get the show. You have to just pick an idea. We spend so much time. I mean, like three weeks an episode. We will break seven episodes before we start filming. So if we make a mistake somewhere along the lines we’re like, oh, we can go back and fix that and change things. So AMC affords us a ton of time and we’re very lucky. Unlike a lot of other shows where it’s you got to do something. We’re in the room, get it on the air. We’re very lucky that way.

**Megan:** Yeah. We’re just like, “Fuck it. Just get it out there.”

**Craig:** That’s the Megan I know. You guys did 13 a year on Breaking Bad?

**Thomas:** Breaking Bad, there was the strike year they did only seven or eight.

**Craig:** That was the shorter one.

**Thomas:** And then 13 up until the last two seasons. We did eight and eight.

**Craig:** Interesting. Because this is a new thing, right? So Matt is still working in the old way of doing things, and there aren’t that many shows left even now it seems that put out 22 episodes a year. And it does seem like it has transformed everything. And so John and I, we don’t have the experience of the room. But what we’ve been watching is as the time that it’s required to make a season of television shrinks, essentially, and the desire of studios to want to pool writers together more and more to write movies, there is a weird kind of —

**Matt:** Well, movies are turning into TV and TV is turning into movies. In that your show is essentially a giant movie that they make every year that they show in 10 chunks. And you right them, you shoot them, you edit it, and that’s a giant movie. And, you know, there’s I’d say a little lot of cinematic universe out there from the Harvey Universe, that a bunch of writers are breaking those —

**Craig:** I would love that.

**Matt:** Little Lot of Dot Hot Stuff. They’re breaking those stories.

**Craig:** Lots of Casper, the Friendly Ghost.

**Matt:** And they’re writing those movies to be giant TV shows that come out every two years. So, there’s a crazy —

**Craig:** They hate us. You can feel it from them.

**John:** Absolutely. There’s a true antipathy. People listening at home may not be able to see, but the audience here can clearly see.

**Craig:** The TV people hate us.

**Thomas:** I mainly hate Craig.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Then mission accomplished.

**John:** Let’s talk about this shift to shorter seasons and what it means for reality of like working in this business. We just did an incredibly wonky episode that just aired as we’re recording this today which was about the WGA deal.

**Matt:** I listened to it.

**John:** Yeah. God bless you.

**Matt:** In the car. [Crosstalk]

**John:** It was super, super wonky episode. But so if you’re doing 10 episodes or 13 episodes, what is the rest of your year like? Because, Megan, are you doing other stuff when that show is not on the air?

**Megan:** Yeah. I have been writing during — it’s an interesting thing where a show might write for half the year now, so you can sort of write for two different TV shows. So, I wrote for The Good Place season one and then on my break I wrote for Transparent, which is coming —

**John:** I’ve heard of that show.

**Megan:** It’s hilarious. It was a very different type of show than I’d ever written for before.

**Matt:** Right. A different showrunner’s psyche extrapolated on a group of people.

**Megan:** I mean, I do feel super lucky, because I’ve written for Transparent, and Silicon Valley, and Parks and Rec, which I would all call those as far away from each other as you possibly could be in a comedy room. But —

**Matt:** She’s working for Ballers next season, by the way.

**Craig:** That would actually —

**Megan:** Yeah. They don’t know that yet. I’m just going to show up and be like —

**Craig:** I think that would be welcome change for ballers. I really do. By the way, I don’t think we’ve told people about our thing. We should probably tell them. Should we tell them about our thing?

**Megan:** Oh yeah, definitely. It’s going to add a lot of rich, layered irony into this conversation.

**Craig:** So you know how Jewish I am? I’m so Jewish, you guys. So, I did the 23 and Me thing. Have you guys done 23 and Me? Yeah, OK. Nobody is as Jewish as I am. I’ll tell you that right now. 98.5% Jewish, or something like this.

So, I was out one night with a group of people, including Megan, and I was boasting about how Jewish I was. And she’s like, no, I’m more Jewish. And —

**Megan:** No, I’m more Jewish.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s my impression of you. So, she said well let’s share your thing with me so we can see if we’re related, ha, ha, ha. And I said, OK. And so I did it and then I went up to go to the bathroom. And when I came back she was looking at me like this. Because we’re related.

**Megan:** Yeah. 23 and Me, I’m only 28% Jewish, so I —

**Craig:** Not even, 128% Jewish.

**Megan:** Yeah, it’s crazy. But 23 and Me told us that we were distant cousins. And we could have guessed that.

**Craig:** Made so much sense. It made so much sense.

**Megan:** Genetics are amazing. And Jews run Hollywood. Is that cool to say? Oh yeah, let’s get applause for that.

**Craig:** Not really a secret.

**Megan:** Now this feels funny and scary at the same time.

**Craig:** I know. It’s turning into a Boys Scout rally. Jew-S-U. Jew-S-U.

**John:** So, Tom and Matt, all three of us —

**Craig:** Here comes the adult. [laughs]

**Megan:** Really good segue.

**John:** All three of us are bald. So, I mean, there could be, yeah, balding. Matt has the most hair of the three of us.

**Matt:** Yeah, but it’s not good.

**John:** No. It’s not good. To steer us back away from genetics to television showrunning, my question for Tom is if you’re only running 10 episodes of this show per year, what is this writing staff doing the rest of the year? Because you want them to come back ideally for the next season, but they could be off on another show? What are the decisions about that?

**Thomas:** I mean, because we spend so much time on every episode, it takes up a pretty good hunk. But then when we get into production the writers will go to set and be in Albuquerque for the episode and some of us get to direct, which is awesome. And then we’re involved in postproduction. So it really fills up a lot of the year. But then people have other projects that they work on.

**Craig:** You know, in speaking of other projects, I’m kind of curious because so much of your careers, really I think exclusively for all three of you, you have been working in television. Is that accurate? So not to try and drag you over to the feature side, but have you ever thought about writing a movie? I mean, on the one hand everything that bothers you about being a room goes away. There’s no other people. There’s nobody else telling you what to do or what to say. On the other hand, you’re alone. And on the other side of it, even in success, you don’t have the kind of power that you do in television.

**Thomas:** I got into writing because I just didn’t want to be around people.

**Craig:** Right.

**Thomas:** And I started writing features. And I got into the Guild because I had a feature option back in the ë90s for Mark Johnson and Paramount Pictures. And that sort of got me out of my regular job and into writing. And then when I ran out of money living on the east coast, I thought I’d try television. And luckily it kind of worked for me.

**Matt:** Luckily Charles in Charge was hiring.

**Craig:** Great show.

**Thomas:** And one of the things I did during this break, I wrote a feature for Disney. So, we’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** All right, so you you’ve done it.

**Thomas:** Yes.

**Craig:** Now, OK, let me drill a little bit deeper. What did you think? I mean, just honest impression?

**Thomas:** It was a project that Vince Gilligan and I did together.

**Craig:** So you weren’t completely alone.

**Thomas:** Wasn’t completely alone. No. So we wrote it. And it’s been hands-off. And it’s just sort of going through the — they give us a few notes and we did them. So, it’s been pretty painless so far. They’ve been great.

**Megan:** I hope Disney is making like a super hardcore drug movie with you and Vince Gilligan. That would be amazing. Like a kid dies on a bike. [laughs]

**Thomas:** Goofy is the way he is for a reason.

**John:** I like that Goofy backstory. That’s really crucial.

**Craig:** Like the totally normal dog-man.

**Megan:** The gritty reboot of Goofy.

**Craig:** Like he was perfectly fine.

**John:** We are mostly feature writers, but a lot of people that we talk to they say, oh, should I write features, should I write for TV. We always say write both. Write whatever you most want to do, whatever you most want to see. But there’s a lot more jobs in TV than there are in features.

So, if someone is lucky enough to get into the room to be on one of your shows, what is a good interview and sort of if they get hired what is it like being the new person in the room on a TV writing staff? What are some tips you would have for getting in that room and also staying in that room?

**Matt:** The first thing is like hide your fear. Because you’re super scared you’re going to suck and be fired and everyone is going to think you’re dumb. But, hide it. Because your neurotic, primo, first-timer energy is sucking me down. And I speak for all showrunners when I say that.

**Craig:** Why did we have him on the show? So brutal.

**Matt:** I don’t want to get your energy, worried that you didn’t have a good day where you got a joke in. I’ve got a show to make, guys. Which is not really how I feel, but there’s a —

**Craig:** That is how you feel.

**Matt:** But there’s a giant kernel of truth to that in that you are just there to be super positive and be super helpful and not be a butt kisser, but really it’s not your job to save the day or be the hero. It is your job to just be a little bit of what John and I were talking about earlier, gravy. As a staff writer, you are just delicious gravy. And if you can make the show a little bit better and not suck it down with like needy first time energy, which I know is probably now accelerating the likelihood of you showing that. I mean, have a glass of wine before like Craig does. Or take a pill, that’s fine.

That’s my main first-timer’s note. You’re just there to be super positive. You’re just there to help. And don’t make it about you, because no one is thinking about you. They’re thinking about, oh god, please let this be a little bit good.

**John:** Megan, some thoughts, because you’ve been on numerous — ?

**Megan:** Yeah. I’m now rethinking my entire career and every experience I’ve had in a writer’s room. But I do agree, which is like the thing I was going to say is pretty much the same thing which is like —

**Matt:** But meaner.

**Megan:** But way meaner. I think that you just have to have the right attitude and what Matt said about you’re not there to save the day is true. It’s like you’re also there to learn and to understand the show you’re making. To understand the dynamics in the room that already exist. And therefore that you’re not shooting down the pitch of the boss. But also there to be, I think, like there’s a difference between a staff writer who gets up before work every day and writes 30 jokes before they get in and then a staff writer who is late every day and doesn’t seem like they want to be there.

You can really tell when someone wants to be there, aside from their innate skill in the room. And I think like on the shows I’ve been on, you can be pretty forgiving of their comedic prowess if someone is just there with the right attitude and is trying to learn as much as they can and is really trying to show up.

**John:** Did you actually write 30 jokes before you would come in?

**Megan:** I know that sounded, well, yes. I did. I’m like, well —

**Craig:** Well, I feel like you have the comedic prowess, so you can just be a dick.

**Megan:** Thank you so much.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**Megan:** But, no, no, no. I’m like a nerd. The people on the podcast cannot hear my hair flip, but it was very funny.

**Craig:** We’ll put in some indication.

**Megan:** Thank you.

**John:** Matthew, add a swoosh effect for that. That would be —

**Megan:** I mean, like when I got hired on Parks and Rec I was very young and was extremely nervous I was going to get fired all the time.

**Matt:** Hide it.

**Megan:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I hid it, obviously, and I just cried a few times after work. But I kept it together great while I was there. Everyone was so nice there. I just was very nervous all the time.

**Craig:** This is really just very damaging advice. I mean, you’re hurting people.

**Megan:** I love to cry. Just cry in the right places. That’s really the advice I have for you.

**John:** If you close the bathroom stall, make sure no one can peek inside and see you crying.

**Craig:** Just remember, some of your legitimate feelings are ugly.

**Megan:** Get a really nice car to just let loose in.

**Craig:** Get a crying car.

**Megan:** Yeah. Get a crying car. It could even be a second car.

**Craig:** Tom, do you cry a lot at work, in the car after?

**Thomas:** No, I don’t. I’m a man, Craig.

**Craig:** You seem incredibly well-adjusted.

**Megan:** Oh, that sounds awesome. Good for you.

**Craig:** So basically the people that do the dark and disturbing shows are actually incredibly well-actualized. And the funny ones are sick.

**Thomas:** Yeah. I mean, I feel incredibly lucky. I mean, we laugh every day. We’re probably not that funny. We’re just sitting around laughing like idiots. But, you know, everybody has a great attitude. And I think the most important thing, if you get in a room, being positive is not shoot down other people’s ideas. Because there will be bad ideas. I will pitch horrible ideas. The boss will pitch horrible ideas. You have to have a safe room. You have to be able to have the freedom to say something so stupid that it might lead to something good. And it happens all the time. So I think don’t ever when somebody pitches something say, “Boy that sucks. That’s never going to work.” Be positive. Find a way to find another idea.

**John:** A question about the credit for an idea. So, when I’ve been in rooms, so I’ve been in rewrite rooms where we’re taking a script, and someone will suggest something that’s not quite right, and then somebody adds something to it that actually feels like a better idea. But then it gets weird. Like whose idea was that really? How does that manifest in a room that you’re going to every day?

**Matt:** That’s the skill is to like — maybe it’s Zen or maybe it’s Judaism, but you let it go. You just let it go. Once you’ve been doing it long enough, you only care that it’s good. And you project that energy. I only care if this is good. It’s not about me. At all.

**Craig:** That is definitely Zen. It is not Judaism. But I agree with it.

**Matt:** Zen-Judaism?

**Craig:** No. It’s just Zen-Zen. Yeah.

**Matt:** And it’s like a little bit of — maybe a good experiment would be like on every staff writer’s first day be like make them run the room. Like you’re in charge. Here’s the pressure. And all of a sudden it’s not like did I get a joke in or did people know that I said the thing that turned into the thing that turned into the thing. Oh, they don’t know I said it! It’s like, that’s Judaism.

**Craig:** That’s Judaism. Right. [laughs] It’s so true.

**Matt:** It’s just the freedom of how can we make this excellent.

**John:** Now, at some point, you will have discussed the idea, you will have broken the story, and somebody has to go out and actually write that. So, any advice for the person who gets assigned now go off and write that episode? What is that like both on a half hour and on an hour show?

**Megan:** I think this goes for probably any show, but like on the shows I’ve worked for once you get to the stage that you actually would go out to write, you have like a very specific outline that everyone on the room has worked on for weeks usually. And I have seen it before where someone has gone out and just changed the whole thing and that’s not a good thing to do. It’s like we worked on this so that you could go and have fun with it and put your own dialogue and spice to it.

**Matt:** Yeah. Your own funny serials in the background.

**Megan:** Yeah. But it is — I think — just one more. I also think one more thing to add off of the “don’t shoot down other people’s stuff” as I’m thinking about it. It’s like I guess I thought this was intuitive and for most writers in a room I think it is. But there’s a way that you can offer up criticism in a constructive way where you pitch a replacement. And it might not be the right thing, but it at least is like you are sort of only allowed to shoot down someone’s thing if you do it with a pitch in its place. And I do think that that maybe is helpful to keep in your mind. You might have a problem with something, but it’s sort of not very polite to just be like, “That’s bad.”

**Craig:** Well, instead of saying no, you’re saying, “Or…” And it follows from —

**Megan:** That’s beautiful, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megan:** That’s poetry.

**Craig:** We deal with, we don’t have these other writers that we have to have that conversation with, but we have to have that conversation with producers and with studio executives. And I think sometimes writers think, well, if I’m just talking about it with studio executives or producers, I can just tell them no or argue, because we’re not in a creative partnership. But I’ve always felt like whatever skill you’re using to improve things in the room with human beings that are writers, it’ll work with producers and executives as well.

I mean, nobody wants to —

**John:** No, that’s not really true though. Because the difference is like there are writers in the room. And so the writers all understand like that you have to be able to do the work to do it. These producers and these studio executives, they don’t really understand sort of why those things are there.

**Craig:** No, no, I understand that. But my point is that the same manipulation that Megan is talking about applies to all stripes of humans. And really what it comes down to is Matt’s admonition to leave your ego out of it, which is the hardest thing because — I understand like, Matt, one of these folks is going to go on and be the — they’re going to have their first day in a television room. God help them if it’s yours. But hopefully it’s —

**Matt:** No, no, I’m super nice. I feel bad for everybody.

**Craig:** There’s no chance of that. But they’re going to have their first day —

**Matt:** I once let this guy go for two years before we all had to tell him we hated him.

**Craig:** That’s Christ-like.

**Matt:** And he’s now more successful than anyone on this panel.

**Craig:** That’s what I was hoping for.

**Matt:** Sadly.

**Craig:** You know, you’re Buddha-like. They’re going to have that first day and they are going to feel like if I don’t let them know that I was here, then I wasn’t even here. And it’s totally normal. But if you work on leaving your ego behind, it works on everybody, I think. Honestly it does. Unless, well, maybe not Tom. It might not work on Tom.

**John:** So, Tom, do you have any new writers on Better Call Saul? Or are they all veterans of — ?

**Thomas:** We have one new writer this year.

**John:** So, when he or she came in, is there a way to get that writer up to speed or get that writer comfortable?

**Thomas:** No. She just kind of jumped in feet first. And we just started talking story. You know, Peter interviewed her beforehand and sort of probably gave her an idea of what to expect. We didn’t do anything special for her. We just started the room as always.

**Craig:** Remarkably well-adjusted.

**John:** Far too well-adjusted.

**Craig:** It’s like disturbing how well-adjusted. Like, Matt, do you even recognize that sort of thinking?

**Matt:** Our show is like the crazy outpost that everyone kind of forgot about. And we have long beards and palm fronds and rattan everything. Like the crazy Roman outpost that — so new writers show up with their shiny armor, like let’s make this Roman army great. And we’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s how you do it.

**John:** Matt, one final question for you on The Simpsons. One of the challenges of a show that’s been on for 900 seasons is that so many things have been done. So, how often in the room someone is like, “Well what if we did this,” and that thing has already been done on the show? Is that a limiting factor?

**Matt:** Well, the ship has sailed a long time ago about not repeating ourselves. Like emotionally, we’ll do the same stories they did in season one every season. There aren’t that many combinations of father-son/mother-daughter/brother-sister/husband-wife/disappointment-jealousy-guilt-revenge, you know, alienation, etc. etc.

There just aren’t that many combinations. You just have to put a fresh coat of paint on it that you’re excited about and maybe you have fresh insights that you’ve had in your life that you can insert along the way. Like now that I’m an old married guy, like I’ve given Homer a lot of my husbandly observations I’ve put in his mouth. And I wouldn’t have been able to do that when I first started. But now — so Homer actually got a little wiser, as did I. [laughs]

But, so yeah, it’s a weird challenge. But Springfield just holds up a mirror of goofiness to America as it like finishes dying. And like so we don’t really run out of stuff. Like I always get excited about new stories. And it’s always fun. And that’s always the best part is the beginning of the first day of breaking the story when you’re excited about it. And then you have to make it work, and that’s hard. But to me like the first two hours of a story breaking where you’re just kind of burning off all the hot ideas that everyone has is like the best part of any show breaking experience.

**John:** Excellent. That’s a great transition to the first new segment I want to try on you guys. So, often on the show we’ll do How Would This Be a Movie, where we take stories in the news and figure out how could make these into a movie. So this variant I want to call How Could This Be Funny. So we’ll take things that are terrible kind of in the world and look at it like if this came into the room like how would we massage the idea so it could fit into a comedy that we want to make, or something funny, or in the case of Better Call Saul comedic-like moments.

**Matt:** Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul have high comedy moments, by the way.

**John:** They’re funny folks.

**Craig:** Legitimately funny.

**John:** All right. Our first topic. So, a few weeks ago a sheet of ice the size of Delaware broke off from Antarctica.

**Craig:** That’s funny.

**John:** Yeah. So, that’s thrown out there. Who wants to jump on that ball? Let’s make that funny.

**Thomas:** Like a funny TV show?

**John:** It doesn’t have to be the premise of the whole thing. It could be the premise of an episode. How do you do this as a plot point?

**Thomas:** Like if the sheet is played by Kevin James or somebody?

**John:** Exactly. Yeah.

**Thomas:** Gets a hot wife.

**Craig:** We’re off and running.

**Thomas:** I think this writes itself. This is an easy one.

**Megan:** Yeah, I instantly went to like kids’ movie place where the ice sheet is trying to find its way home. And it’s just very cute.

**Craig:** Awwww.

**Megan:** It’s not funny.

**Craig:** No, that’s sad.

**Megan:** It’s sad.

**Craig:** And I assume as it finally does make its way home and it sees its parent ice shelf it begins to melt and die.

**Megan:** Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** Or maybe its parent melts in front of it.

**Megan:** And then it farts. And then you win them back.

**Craig:** I think we nailed it.

**Thomas:** This was actually the Disney movie that Vince and I are writing.

**John:** Yeah, sorry.

**Matt:** It’s called Unfrozen.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Next topic.

**Matt:** But like, no, I think that’s a good — sometimes the way you make something funny, as you guys well know, is what is the emotion behind. And the emotion is funny. And drama, and sadness, and rejection, and failure are funny. So if it were a Simpsons’ thing we would think what if this thing were heading for Springfield and Lisa wants to get it back because she cares about global warming. And this sounds like bad spec script. But Mr. Burns wants to harness it for his own personal super ice box. And cover it with sawdust and make like old timey thing.

So you just think like what are the characters’ unfunny, true, heart-full feelings and then the comedy comes, well flow, ice flow, much more naturally.

**Megan:** Gorgeous.

**Matt:** I said that to him.

**John:** To me, I was wondering if there was a sense of like that chunk of ice is sort of its own country sort of floating out there in the world. It’s a new land. So there’s some sense of people go there to claim we are in a new place because we claimed this ice for ourselves. There’s a universe where you could set a show on that ice drift.

**Matt:** Great. That’s awesome. But that’s shrinking, so they know there’s a finite time that you get to live in a fresh society.

**Craig:** Right. And then who gets to control the ice.

**Megan:** I feel like Gwyneth Paltrow gets to. Like she starts a Goop offshoot where people go and like cleanse their skin on the pure ice, or something. Yeah. And it’s just her on one tiny little ice flow as it’s melting.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** I’d watch that. I would watch that.

**John:** Our next How Could This Be Funny. Donald Trump, Jr. Just Donald Trump, Jr. You have him as a character. You can do anything you want.

**Craig:** Or Hitler. Pick one or the other.

**John:** That character. Introduce him or that type of person into a story. Like what does he give you as a character?

**Matt:** Well we have a joke coming up on a show about a guy named Kenny Hitler, which we wrote before the election, and we’re just like this Kenny Hitler guy doesn’t seem so bad. What are his views?

**Craig:** Kenny Hitler.

**Matt:** But everyone, I don’t know, you guys — I don’t want to hog it. You guys are funny.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, there is kind of an interesting show about the son of a tyrant. I mean, extrapolating slightly here, but the dimwitted son of a very powerful sociopathic man, trying to please his evil father. Like he’s just inherently sweet and nice and keeps screwing up because of that.

**Megan:** Well the way people keep talking about this 40-year-old man as a boy.

**Craig:** I know!

**Megan:** Is like the funniest thing to me. It’s so absurd.

**Craig:** But don’t you also think —

**Matt:** If we live.

**Craig:** Kind of true? Like normally I would say like, OK, why are we making this ridiculous excuse, except I kind of feel he is child-like. That picture of him sitting on that true. So sweet.

**Megan:** Yeah. I mean, he’s like Billy Madison.

**Craig:** Right.

**Megan:** Which is a hilarious TV show.

**Craig:** Like if Billy Madison was like lopping off the heads of giraffes and stuff.

**Megan:** Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** I’d killed a giraffe. Made a lot of money.

**Matt:** Yeah, you did that. They killed a real giraffe for that movie.

**Craig:** Four giraffes. It was four takes.

**John:** It strikes me that he’s almost like an anti-Leslie Knope character. Like he’s trying to please somebody who’s completely unpleasable. But he’s just doing it in all the wrong ways. And there’s something really kind of sickly endearing about that kind of guy.

**Megan:** He’s like a very earnest super villain, I guess, is like what the opposite of Leslie Knope is. He only understands very few things about the world, but he wants them all to be like the worst versions of them.

But it’s very hard to make this funny, because it just is the news. It’s like you’re just watching.

**Craig:** It’s funny already.

**Megan:** Man-boy with all of the animal heads is, I don’t know, the Vice-President or something. He like gets to be something big.

**John:** From NBC News, a large-scale scientific review has found a 40-year plunge in sperm count, specifically in men from North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. And the reason may be associated with common factors in our daily lives. So, sperm count drop.

**Megan:** I’m hearing a lot of cucks. You’re talking about cucks abound.

**Craig:** Cucks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a pretty good title for a show.

**John:** Cucks.

**Megan:** I can 100% guarantee that’s a show already in development.

**Craig:** Cucks, for sure.

**John:** Sperm count drop. Matt Selman? Is it low T? What are we talking about?

**Thomas:** Let me just say that this is actually true. One of my NYU projects was about the Nazis — Vince acted in my NYU short. I have the tape somewhere where he was the only person who didn’t drink the water supply and was the only one who had enough sperm to populate the town. And he was the milk man and he would go around visiting people.

So, I’ll have to put this tape online.

**Craig:** He was the milk man?

**Thomas:** He was the milk man.

**Craig:** When did you go to college?

**Thomas:** This was the ë80s.

**Craig:** What century was that?

**Megan:** Was that a double entendre?

**Thomas:** Yes. I have memories of milkmen in my life.

**Megan:** Just wanted to make sure.

**Matt:** I mean, all sperm is pretty much comedy gold, as is masturbating. You know, all that stuff is pretty funny. But like isn’t there already a comedy version of that called Children of Men? That was pretty funny, right?

**Megan:** I think about Children of Men all the time. And I also think about the suicide kids in Children of Men, which were very funny to me. Just watch that movie and laugh. You should all go watch it again. It’s very funny.

**John:** Hi-larious.

**Craig:** I think that all of these infertile people is kind of sad. I don’t think it’s funny.

**Megan:** No, I think it’s what Tom is saying is only like the stupidest guys, like Donald Trump, Jr. types, have the sperm count, and then they have to repopulate the world.

**Craig:** That’s getting funnier.

**John:** We’re getting closer to Idiocracy there. That sense of like —

**Matt:** Idiocracy not funny anymore.

**John:** No.

**Matt:** Children of Men, super funny.

**Megan:** It’s a great time.

**John:** Let’s go out on a risky one. OJ Simpson will be paroled soon. How is that funny? Go. OJ Simpson himself or a person in his situation, who was in jail for a long time who is now released.

**Thomas:** If he tripped and fell into an industrial-sized juicer and was just ground up into juice.

**Craig:** It’s ironic.

**Matt:** Well, what’s weird is now thanks to people like Megan, everyone is a professional comedy writer in the great egalitarian world of Twitter.

**Craig:** What the fuck?

**Megan:** I deserve that.

**Craig:** No you don’t.

**Megan:** This is our dynamic.

**Matt:** What, I called her a people, that’s what she is, right?

**Craig:** Is there anyone left in this room you will not abuse?

**Matt:** No. I mean, what’s weird is like The Simpsons will try to do takes on modern — we’ll kill our animators to do some like Donald Trump in the news Simpsons-y thing. Comes out like six days after the dumb thing happened and it’s already been done 50-hundred times the day of.

**Craig:** Right. There’s no more topical humor that’s possible.

**Matt:** So all the OJ-ish stuff, everyone in the world is like amateurishly and professionally writing goofy like OJ Does Find the Real Killer. Right? He’s innocent. He found him. Or her. That’s a take, guys.

**Megan:** Nothing is funny —

**Craig:** Well, we’re trying to not do the bad idea. Like, yes, there could be something in that.

**John:** Yes. Or —

**Craig:** See how useful it is? It is poetry, Megan.

**Matt:** I deserve to be “No, or.”

**Craig:** No. Or…

**John:** Another way to approach that would be to look at sort of like what’s changed in the time that he’s been in jail. And so he comes out into a world in which things are just different.

**Megan:** He never saw Avatar. He gets out and he’s just like, wow, the effects. Gorgeous. [laughs] And then you just watch all of Avatar.

**John:** Yeah. He’s just sitting at home in his 3D glasses.

**Craig:** That’s the best way to rewatch Avatar is to watch OJ Simpson watching Avatar.

**Megan:** This is the movie. He gets out. You get ten minutes. He gets home. Cracks his knuckles. He’s like what’s on TV? It’s Avatar. And then you just watch the four-hour cut of Avatar.

**Matt:** No, but it’s like when you’re a parent you can’t enjoy things, but you can enjoy seeing your kids enjoy things for the first time.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Right.

**Matt:** So we would just take OJ around and show him new stuff. Like does he know that Caesar salads have chicken now? He probably does.

**Craig:** Makes me feel so young again, to bring OJ to these things.

**Megan:** I bet Brentwood has really changed. There’s like a Yogurt Land there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like you drive by the house, it’s like, wow, the house has a whole new number. They repainted the house. Isn’t that so crazy. It’s so weird. I was just here and now it’s changed.

**Megan:** He can watch the OJ show.

**John:** That’s got to be weird.

**Matt:** Watch OJ watching the OJ show. Swimming pools are controlled by apps now? Check it out, OJ. West side humor.

**John:** All right, we’re going to try one other brand new segment. All right, so on a recent of Scriptnotes, there was a listener question about is it OK to use an actor’s name in a character description. So the thing was an Aubrey Plaza type. And Craig is it OK to say an Aubrey Plaza type?

**Craig:** I don’t think it is OK.

**John:** I think it’s wrong to say an Aubrey Plaza type, because that’s unfair to Aubrey Plaza. You know Aubrey Plaza.

**Megan:** Yeah. She would hate that. No, I don’t know.

**Craig:** But an Aubrey Plaza type would hate it. I mean, the problem with the Aubrey Plaza type is that you should just write a part that Aubrey Plaza would want to play if you want to write an Aubrey Plaza type.

**John:** Absolutely. So I thought let’s not just have it be a piece of advice. Let’s make a game out of it. So this is a game we’re going to play called An Aubrey Plaza Type. So this all modeled on a show called The $25,000 Pyramid. Show of hands, who has seen Pyramid? Who knows how Pyramid works? Oh, that’s more than I would have guessed. So, on $25,000 Pyramid they would have these celebrities and these normal people who are partnered together —

**Craig:** Normal people.

**John:** Normal people.

**Matt:** Normal people?

**John:** We would have these great Americans and these terrible celebrities paired together and they would have to get the other person to name this list of words. And so in this case this is going to be a list of famous people. And so we’re going to do sort of the thing where you’re trying to get someone to think Aubrey Plaza without saying Aubrey Plaza. This is going to make more sense if Craig and I just try this. So let’s just try this.

**Craig:** Oh man, all right.

**John:** Oh man. So here’s what it’s going to be. Craig, you stand there.

**Craig:** I can do that.

**John:** And I’m going to stand here. And we’re going to put a name up on the board and I’m going to have make you think of who I’m going to describe.

**Craig:** Using screenplay description?

**John:** Only screenplay description. So something you would see after the character’s name. So you can say an age, you can say male or female, because obviously the name would have it.

**Craig:** Hot but doesn’t know it.

**John:** Hot but doesn’t know it. It’s OK to give the character a name if it suggests something about the character that’s helpful. Craig would like you to not use a character’s race.

**Craig:** Yeah, no race.

**John:** No race.

**Craig:** And I kind of almost want no gender, but it’s hard because pronouns will get in there. What about age? Should we allow age?

**John:** Oh yeah, age is fine?

**Craig:** And can you say Interior or Exterior, please? I’d like to know where they are.

**John:** Yeah, if you really want to you could do that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** OK. Let’s give this a shot.

**Craig:** I worked really hard at putting this all together, John.

**John:** Yeah, so let’s give this a shot. So let’s do our first demo here. So, Craig has no idea what’s on the board.

**Craig:** That’s right. Interior?

**John:** I’m not giving that. I’m just giving you sort of what’s in the parenthetical afterwards. 40s, glasses, a woman, tired of all your librarian stereotypes. Smarter than everyone else around her. But too kind to point it out. She’s surrounded by dummies.

So, see here’s the problem. Craig doesn’t watch anything, so I’m really at a disadvantage here.

**Craig:** Keep going.

**John:** Let’s see.

**Craig:** Is this INT. Library?

**John:** No, let’s say INT. Newsroom.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** INT. Newsroom. Amanda —

**Craig:** Peet?

**John:** No. But you’re on the right track. Amanda Jenkins, glasses, tied of the librarian stereotypes.

**Craig:** Right, doesn’t like them.

**John:** You’re not going to get this one. So there’s also the option of pass. You can say pass.

**Craig:** Pass.

**John:** So, now you try and do one for me and see how this goes.

**Craig:** Great. OK, she’s a woman, 40. No.

**John:** The answer to that one was Tina Fey, by the way, for people at home. That’s going to be confusing to people. What would you have said? How would you have gotten him to say Tina Fey?

**Megan:** That was great. Like a wry smile.

**Craig:** Oh, a wry smile would have helped me.

**Megan:** She’s the only person who wears glasses. How did you not get that?

**Craig:** I was going to say, that’s just a piece of wardrobe we can put on anyone. All right, John, EXT. FIELD. DAY. Spaceship. Pursuing a man. 40s. Very athletic for his age. Running hard. Spaceship shooting lasers at him. He dodges left and right. Incredible. And just before they get him, he turns around, fires, blows up the spaceship and he’s like, “Whoa.”

**John:** That would be Will Smith.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s how you do it. We would have also accepted Tom Cruise.

**John:** Yes. So you’re going to see there’s some of these people who like you have two choices. Either one of those are acceptable. So, Craig was doing a little bit more scene work, which I think is awesome. I was thinking more just the inside of the parenthetical after.

**Craig:** EXT/INT. I’m all about it. Oh, you mean like a really long parenthetical. Like the name and then blah, blah, blah.

**John:** Yeah. Either one works. Whatever you guys want to do is fine because we’re done with this. Now it’s your turn to do this. So, what is your name?

**Steven Fingleton:** My name is Steven Fingleton.

**John:** Steven Fingleton, are you up for this?

**Steven:** I am well up for this.

**John:** All right, Steven Fingleton is well up for this. One crucial thing here is that Craig and I are going to be the judges if someone is cheating. You’re going to have 60 seconds on the clock to see how many you can get through. One might be great based on how we’re doing. Whoever gets the most is going to win a special prize. We’ll announce the special prize afterwards. Steven, would you rather give or receive? That’s how they say it on the show. Would you rather give clues or receive?

**Matt:** Now it needs the E for Explicit warning at the beginning.

**Steven:** I’m going to against my usual preferences and I’m going to give.

**John:** All right. Great. This is awesome.

**Craig:** I like this guy.

**John:** He’s a good guy.

**Craig:** He’s cool with who he is.

**John:** Ticker time, and on your mark, get set, go.

**Steven:** Exterior. Beach. Running. An Adonis of a man. Perfect.

**Megan:** Craig. David Craig.

**Steven:** He jumps into a sports car.

**Megan:** Michael Cera. Tom Cruise, he was already up there. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

**Craig:** Keep going.

**Steven:** And he’s on his way to run for president because there’s nothing he can’t do. He looks impeccable in a tailor cut suit.

**Megan:** The Rock.

**Craig:** Nice.

**Megan:** Yes! Nice.

**Steven:** She’s an incredibly adorable, funny woman.

**Megan:** Emma Stone.

**Steven:** Who —

**Megan:** Me! OK, keep going.

**Steven:** Who does not fit the classical stereotypes of what a woman should look like —

**Megan:** Tilda Swinton.

**Steven:** And she’s totally cool with that.

**John:** We’re extending to two minutes just based on reality.

**Megan:** Like what age? What age are we talking about?

**Steven:** I would say 30s, 40s.

**Megan:** Claire Danes.

**Steven:** Very short. Absolutely not —

**Megan:** Oh, the woman from Poltergeist. Zelda Rubinstein.

**Steven:** Pass. Let’s pass.

**Megan:** Very short. Pass. Sorry.

**Steven:** OK. He’s a funny looking guy. The sort of guy who would play himself in a movie if he was an actor-type comedian.

**Megan:** Danny DeVito. Funny-looking guy.

**Steven:** And he’s always hanging with his group of friends —

**Megan:** Seth Rogan. Yes! OK.

**Steven:** Interior. Mall. Day.

**Megan:** Oh god.

**Steven:** A mall cop is looking for trouble.

**Megan:** Oh, Kevin James.

**John:** No, wrong Kevin.

**Megan:** Kevin Hart.

**John:** All right. We’ll give it to you. Yes. All right. Well done. Congratulations. Very good.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** The woman from Poltergeist is the best possible answer.

**Megan:** The only short person.

**Craig:** She’s the greatest.

**Megan:** Yes, she was amazing.

**Craig:** She was amazing. Was. All right.

**John:** Can we help her with the one she missed. So I was going to say like a human cannonball. She’s —

**Megan:** This is a woman? A short woman?

**Matt:** Everyone is afraid to say a certain thing. I mean.

**John:** A heavyset woman.

**Matt:** I mean, we’re all friends. We’re everyone’s friends.

**Megan:** Melissa McCarthy.

**John:** Melissa McCarthy, yes.

**Craig:** I watched him sweat his way in avoidance. She knows she’s a bigger girl. She knows that. There’s no big deal with that.

**Matt:** Great personality. The best. Her personality is so good.

**Craig:** You’re a bad person.

**John:** So I counted three successful ones there. Is that correct, audience. You guys were keeping track. Three? Tom Schnauz, so he is going to guess. Tom is going to give. I’m going to put two minutes back on the clock.

**Thomas:** This is going to be horrible. OK.

**John:** And go.

**Thomas:** Very handsome super hero type.

**Male Voice:** Oh, I already saw this. Chris Evans, Chris Pine, or Chris Hemsworth.

**Craig:** How did you see this?

**John:** How did you see this?

**Male Voice:** It flashed up real quick.

**John:** All right. Skip. Go ahead. Reset.

**Thomas:** Older — can I say Quentin Tarantino type?

**Craig:** Sure.

**Thomas:** Older Quentin Tarantino type, very wise.

**Male Voice:** Hank Azaria.

**Thomas:** You don’t want to win this, do you?

**Male Voice:** They look kind of similar.

**Craig:** Hank Azaria in all of the none of Quentin Tarantino movies.

**Male Voice:** Samuel L. Jackson.

**Craig:** Yes!

**Thomas:** Older guitar-playing hippy, pot-smoking, laid back dude.

**Male Voice:** Willie Nelson?

**Thomas:** Actor type. Laid back dude. Dude.

**Male Voice:** Oh, Jeff Bridges.

**Craig:** There we go.

**Thomas:** Older action hero.

**Male Voice:** Michael Keaton.

**Thomas:** May be capable of doing his own stunts.

**Male Voice:** Jackie Chan. Your hints are too good.

**Craig:** But no one is saying Interior or Exterior.

**Thomas:** Interior, no, Exterior, Heaven.

**Craig:** Yes!

**Thomas:** God type. Actor. Very wise. Will do voiceover work.

**Male Voice:** Morgan Freeman.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** All right. One more.

**Thomas:** Deep voice. Sexy. Conqueror of planets. I don’t know — I’ve never seen his movies.

**Craig:** That’s clear.

**Thomas:** Pass. Journeyman actor type. I don’t know, super hero.

**Craig:** You’re not getting the Iron Man job.

**Thomas:** Just gave it away.

**Male Voice:** Downey.

**Craig:** Exterior. Robert Downey. I’m trying to spice this up.

**Thomas:** This is the longest two minutes of my life, by the way.

**John:** This is challenging. So I counted at least four solid ones there, including some skips. Well done, sir.

**Male Voice:** What was the skip?

**John:** We skipped over Vin Diesel. Thank you.

**Craig:** Now the fun begins, as America’s darkest writer faces off.

**Matt:** No, I’m not dark.

**Craig:** I’m not dark.

**John:** He’s not dark. Let’s see who gets partnered with our Simpson’s executive producer.

**Matt:** I have kids. I’m a good man.

**John:** Hello and welcome. What is your name?

**Christie:** My name is Christie.

**John:** Would you like to give or receive these clues?

**Christie:** I will give.

**Craig:** All right. I’ll take this.

**Matt:** This is going to be bad.

**Craig:** I’ll give this to you.

**Matt:** Hi, Matt. Nice to meet you.

**Christie:** I’m not a writer.

**Matt:** That’s all right. I’m barely one. I’m not either.

**John:** All right. And start.

**Christie:** OK.

**Matt:** Adam West.

**Christie:** Woman. Pretty. Older actress.

**Matt:** My wife. Meryl Streep. Glenn Close.

**Christie:** Drives a bus.

**Matt:** Sandra Bullock.

**Christie:** Yes. OK. Attractive man.

**Matt:** Me.

**Christie:** Yes, super hero, again.

**Matt:** Christopher Reeve, before the accident.

**Christie:** Funny superhero.

**Matt:** Funny Superhero. The Hulk guy? The guy who plays the Hulk?

**Christie:** No. Completely covered in a mask but still sounds good.

**Matt:** Man, I’m bad at this. Pass.

**Christie:** OK. We’ll pass. He will cut you. Makes great sequels.

**Matt:** The guy who plays Wolverine.

**Craig:** Yes!

**Christie:** Oh, she’s amazing. Perfect actress —

**Craig:** Let’s see if he could get it just from that.

**Christie:** Another superhero. Beautiful.

**Matt:** Ben Affleck.

**Christie:** Woman.

**Matt:** Oh, a woman.

**Christie:** Young. Blockbuster.

**Matt:** Gal Gadot.

**Christie:** Yes.

**Matt:** Israeli. Dismissive in that Israeli way.

**Christie:** OK. Trump impersonator. SNL.

**John:** I’m going to rule this out. This is actually just becoming celebrity.

**Craig:** This was always going to become celebrity. You know that, right?

**John:** So try to give a character description that will make you think about this person.

**Craig:** Like you’re writing a script.

**Christie:** OK, good-looking when he was younger, not so much now. Funny.

**Matt:** Say it again?

**Christie:** Good-looking when he was younger.

**Craig:** That’s accurate.

**Matt:** Michael Douglas.

**John:** Is that still accurate? True to the character.

**Christie:** Is still very active.

**Matt:** Robert Redford.

**Christie:** Good impersonations.

**Craig:** Your character does good impersonations.

**Christie:** Funny. He’s a funny guy.

**John:** And stop.

**Matt:** I fail.

**John:** Thank you so much.

**Craig:** Alec Baldwin.

**Matt:** Commanding. Commanding businessman.

**John:** How would we have gotten to that last one?

**Matt:** Most confident man in the room. I still wouldn’t have gotten it.

**Craig:** Alec Baldwin: Well, actually, I thought that you were on to something there. Because, you know, this was a guy who was once incredibly good-looking, but he’s older now and he’s settled into his frame. There’s a wit and a charm in his eyes.

**Megan:** Interior. His frame. Settled right in.

**Craig:** Already working. It’s what cousins get.

**John:** So there was supposed to be actually an educational point to this. It’s not easy to come up with these descriptions that in one sentence make you think of, oh, that actor, without saying that actor. Or to cite these other credits. But if you sort of search for it you can find like bearish would be good for Alec Baldwin, or sort of that most confident man in the room.

**Matt:** I believe, I’m dating myself. The pilot for the show Just Shoot Me had little character slugs, the beginning, and the one for the main lady was think Janeane Garofalo. You know, Laura San Giacomo, she took the money.

**Craig:** Just the last thing she was expecting on her drive to wherever she was going was to hear some guy take a shot at her over —

**Matt:** That’s not a shot.

**Craig:** She’s like listening to a podcast someone told her about. Hey Laura, check this out.

**Matt:** Here’s the only good piece of advice you’re ever going to get tonight. Take the money. Anyone ever gives you the opportunity, take the money as opposed to like the creative thing where you express yourself.

**Craig:** I don’t think these folks were not going to take the money.

**Matt:** The money. Always the money. I’ve had opportunities to take risks, and I always pick the money.

**John:** One show your entire career. Yeah. All right, we actually have some business to wrap up. We have to figure out who actually won that thing which we just did. I think our second person.

**Matt:** Second guy.

**John:** Second guy had the most.

**Thomas:** What did I win?

**John:** Oh yes, what did you win? You have a choice. You can have me and Craig read a script you’ve written, or you can get an automatic pass into the Three Page Challenge. So, afterwards find us, tell us which one you want. And we will give you either of those things.

**Craig:** Well wouldn’t the script one be better automatically because it’s all the pages.

**John:** It’s all the pages, but maybe he doesn’t have the whole script.

**Craig:** Oh, and maybe he stopped at three.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe it’s short.

**Craig:** I hope it’s that one.

**John:** But thank you to all three of our people for being brave enough to actually come up here. That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** I think if we ever do this again, stronger judging. I think we need to buzz people on —

**Craig:** Well you can’t have me judge anything. I’m a child. You know that.

**John:** But like Taboo, where you press the little buzzers and it scares people. Oh yeah, you said those words. Yeah.

**Thomas:** Wait, after this you’re going to keep doing this game?

**John:** In hell we’re going to keep doing this game again and again.

**Craig:** There’s literally no chance.

**Matt:** I think it’s a great game. I think it would be good. You’re always doing projects, John. Why don’t you put together an app or a home version and Kickstart it.

**Craig:** There’s going to be a discussion about the game, obviously. There’ll be a post mortem over the game. I won’t be a part of it, obviously.

**John:** That is our show for this week. So, as always, we are so lucky to have a great listening audience, but to have them in front of us is an extra special treat and it’s so nice to be back and seeing your faces. And I recognize a lot of faces, too, which is crazy.

**Craig:** We should say who we are supporting, right?

**John:** So we’re here because of the Writers Guild Foundation, which does great work on behalf of writers, and not just writers who are currently in the guild, but writers who are aspiring to become —

**Craig:** Veterans.

**John:** Well, yes, it makes it sound like people who are aspiring to become veterans.

**Craig:** No, they are veterans now.

**John:** They are genuinely veterans. Or children. Programs for kids.

**Craig:** Oh great.

**John:** Yeah. They do all sorts of stuff. We help the organization. We don’t really know much about them. But we do know that Chris Kartje and the volunteers who helped put it together tonight are the best, so thank you so, so much as well.

We need to thank the people here at the Writers Guild Theater. This was a last minute substitution, so thank you guys so much for letting us be here. We want to thank our amazing guests. You guys are phenomenal.

**Craig:** Yes. Amram, Schnauz, and Selman. What a law firm.

**John:** Our show, as always, is being cut by Matthew Chilelli, but he’s cutting it from Japan. So he’s moved to Japan, but he’s like cutting it overseas now, which is awesome. So thank you for that. And our amazing intro came from John Spurney. So, standard things. If you have an outro, we have a whole bunch of Rajesh Naroth ones, which are fantastic, but we need more awesome outros. So, write us an outro and we’ll put it on the show.

Guys, you were fantastic. Thank you so much. Have a great night.

**Craig:** Thanks you guys.

Links:

* Megan Amram on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Amram), [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1689290/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/meganamram)
* Thomas Schnauz on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Schnauz), [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1041475/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/TomSchnauz)
* Matt Selman on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Selman), [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0783468/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/mattselman), and as host of [Duly Noted: The Scriptnotes Aftershow](http://johnaugust.com/2016/duly-noted-lets-talk-about-episode-259)
* [Massive Iceberg Breaks Off from Antarctica](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/massive-iceberg-breaks-off-from-antarctica)
* [Donald Trump Jr.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_Jr.)
* [Sperm Count Dropping in Western World](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sperm-count-dropping-in-western-world/)
* [O.J. Simpson Wins Parole, Claiming He Has Led a ‘Conflict-Free Life’
](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/oj-simpson-parole.html?_r=0)
* Thanks to the [Writers Guild Foundation](https://www.wgfoundation.org/) for hosting us
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [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/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([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_311.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/logic-and-gimmickry).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 309 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we will be standing at the whiteboard to look at how story logic in our scripts may function. And then we’ll sit down to tackle some scenes and look at a few tricks to keep them interesting. And if we have time we may even answer a few more listener questions.

**Craig:** I love those.

**John:** Sound good Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think everything you just said sounded fantastic. No notes, John. No notes.

**John:** No notes. Fantastic. I love those. Before we even get started, yesterday as we were recording this the Emmy nominations came out. And I want to rant just for like maybe two minutes about Emmy nominations.

**Craig:** Go.

**John:** Not about any person who was nominated or not nominated, but the whole idea of snubs. I am so frustrated with the concept of snubs, that people who did not get nominations should feel especially bad or weird. That we need to single out the shows that did not get nominated. I find it incredibly frustrating. And I don’t know, how do you feel about that, Craig? You don’t care about awards at all, do you?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t, but you are touching a certain nerve here. And that’s — it’s not enough to say here are a bunch of people that have put their hearts and souls into making things. And when I say a bunch of people, I mean everybody that made something that year. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to pit them all together, make them compete, pick five of the best ones, then make them compete on television. And then one of them wins. It’s not enough for that. Apparently, also then you have to talk about who you said — no — you don’t get it. I’m snubbing you. No.

And now obviously no one is really actively snubbing anyone, but it’s just the media. Yuck.

**John:** Yes. So the problem I have with snubbing is like snubbing implies intention. That you deliberately did not invite someone to the party. A conscious choice was made. But, of course, a group of people all voting independently cannot make a conscious choice as one body. They can simply choose certain shows, but they cannot deliberately exclude somebody.

And so when I see intention applied to any group of voters, I find it incredibly frustrating because all people have is their own individual things. So the whole idea of snubs just drives me just really bonkers. If you’re going to make a list of other great shows that didn’t get nominations, I guess that’s fine. Because if you’re trying to single out that The Leftovers is a brilliant show, fantastic. But if you want to make us feel about The Leftovers, or feel like The Leftovers was less good because it didn’t get on that list, I’m angry with you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. And I think this is really just a manufactured story to sell clicks. That’s all. I mean, the whole thing, look, award shows of course exist to sell advertising. They don’t exist to actually award people. I mean, if you wanted to award people you would just do it I suppose. But primarily this is a business and they’re selling ads and they’re making money off of a show.

The secondary predatory business of making money selling ads off of things that talk about the thing that makes money from selling ads, that’s the industry that creates the snub. And people click, oh, because you know, ooh, someone in Hollywood got a snub. First of all, snub is a great word. Love that word. Just the sound of it is lovely. Snub.

**John:** It is nice.

**Craig:** Snub.

**John:** So that’s my bit of frustration. Let’s get to our actual real show. Some follow up. Our live show is coming up super, super soon and we have another guest to announce. Liz Meriwether. She is the creator and showrunner of New Girl on Fox which is entering its final season. She will be joining me, and Craig, and Megan Amram on July 25 in Hollywood. There are still some tickets left as we’re recording this. I don’t know. I need to check in with the Writers Guild Foundation to see how many are left. But if you would like to come join us, you should come join us in Hollywood for that special night.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So July 25, 8pm. Come there and see us. Talk with these two incredibly talented writers about sort of whatever. We don’t have an agenda yet.

**Craig:** No, but I will say that Liz is fantastic. Obviously I’ve already talked about Megan, my cousin. But Liz is great. You shouldn’t miss this, honestly. This is great. And it doesn’t matter if you write features or you write television. These are just two very smart people who are going to have I think tremendous insight on what’s going on. You know, I like the fact that we’re getting younger guests, also. You know, not that there’s anything wrong with bring Larry Kasdan on every now and again, but younger writers, they’re plugged in. They know what’s up.

**John:** Well, I mean, Liz Meriwether is younger than we are, but she’s also been running an incredibly popular TV show on Fox for five season now, six seasons now. So, she knows more than we do about things. And that’s my favorite kind of guest is someone who knows much more about something than I do.

**Craig:** 100%. Otherwise it’s just the two of us sitting in judgment.

**John:** Yeah. But that’s also good. But it’s not as exciting.

**Craig:** I kind of like those. Actually, those are my favorite episodes. [laughs] Yeah. I like those.

**John:** All right, so our first main topic today is about story logic. And this came up this week because so I just got back from Paris. I’ve been super jet-lagged. I’m over most of my jetlag. But this past week I went to a book signing for my friend. Julie Buxbaum has a new book out. It just came this last week, called What to Say Next. And she did a reading at the Grove, at the Barnes & Noble at the Grove. And it was my first time going to one of those events. It was cool to see how that all works.

And I was talking with another author there who was describing her new book and it’s a middle grade title. And she was wrestling with the mystery, she said. And she was talking about sort of the story logic. And we’ve been focused so much on character and motivation and other things in recent episodes, I thought we might step back a little bit and talk about the things that actually are just kind of plot. It’s the way in which pieces of information get out there and sort of how the overall shape of the plot and story work, which is sort of not always exactly driven by what the characters are doing. It’s sort of decisions that the author is making way ahead of time.

And that can be just puzzle work. It can actually a very different kind of process than sort of the writing on the page. So, today I want to talk a little bit about the mechanics and specifically one thing that I find incredibly frustrating and I think if we can focus on it you can often solve a lot of your story problems this way. Which is the difference between coincidence, correlation, and causation. The three Cs. And how you can use them to your best benefit in your stories.

**Craig:** Well this is going to be good. I mean, I will take a little something you said there and expand on it slightly. When you say it requires a slightly different way of thinking, I think it requires a completely different way of thinking. I mean, there’s this creative work that we do that’s rooted in a certain empathy. We create a human being in our minds. We must empathize with them, walk in their shoes, see the world through their eyes. Imagine how they react to the things that we throw at them.

It’s very emotional and it’s very empathetic. A lot of times we think of that as the creative meat of what we do. But then there is this other stuff that’s math. Story logic and the creation of the hardware of a plot is math. And it is a puzzle and it is a different part of your brain. I think it’s one of the reasons why so many people want to do what we do and yet so few ultimately get there. Because you can’t just be good at one of these things. You have to be good at all of them. And if you can’t quite get your hand around how to machine a plot, you end with a mess. And it is strangely the first thing that people will pick on when they walk out of a movie or they turn off a television episode. They say, “Why did that even have to happen? Couldn’t that person just have talked to the other person and then the show wouldn’t have happened?”

They notice it every time.

**John:** There’s a TV trope called Refrigerator Logic, which is as you step away from a movie and you’re getting something out of your refrigerator you’re like, wait, why did that happen? Like there’s things that sometimes will glide past you when you’re actually seeing the story up on the screen. And then later on you’re like, wait, that did not actually make sense. And so let’s talk about how those things can actually make sense.

And what you’re describing really is the different between — we talked about that metaphor about being on the train. And so as the writer, you’re responsible for like what you’re seeing out the windows, but you’re also responsible for being way up high and seeing where the train track is going. So as you’re laying out where that train track is going, you have choices about what branches and what decisions the story will make. And I was thinking back to a post I did ten years ago on the blog called the Perils of Coincidence. And that came after I watched Spider Man 3.

And Spider Man 3 is not a great movie. And there were some significant issues of coincidence where a bunch of things just had to happen in exactly a certain way. People had to be there at the same moment when this other thing was happening in ways that felt really, really unlikely. And so in that post I sort of broke through these are the coincidences. Here are some maybe ways they could have gotten out of those coincidences. Because when you see coincidences, you can always imagine at the outline phase. Like if they were turning in the treatment for that story there were a bunch of words like “at the same time, accidentally, luckily, unfortunately, meanwhile.” Those are all really signals that something is going on where it’s convenient for these things to happen but they’re not actually causing the other things to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You always get I think one coincidence in a story that can be kind of fundamental. And so a fundamental coincidence to me is like, well, in Spider Man it’s Peter Parker gets bit by a radioactive spider. Anyone else could have been bit by that radioactive spider, but then it wouldn’t be Spider Man. So the audience will always give you that one sort of fundamental coincidence.

In Die Hard, John McClane happens to be in the tower when the bad guys take over.

**Craig:** Where his wife is. Yeah.

**John:** Where his wife is. Yes. But they’ve already established that he’s there because his wife is there, so that all makes sense. If his wife happened to be in the same building, that would be too many coincidences. But it made sense because they were all kind of bundled together in one thing. You wouldn’t have the movie if you didn’t have that kind of fundamental coincidence.

And usually that movie will spend its fundamental coincidence very early in the first act. Like page 10, page 20, page 30 at the latest. It’s interesting watching the new Spider Man, which I won’t spoil, but they use their fundamental coincidence incredibly late in the story. And it was surprising but I think actually really effective. So when you see the movie you’ll say like, oh, wow, OK. And because the rest of the movie works so well they’re able to spend that coincidence quite late in the story and that was exciting.

**Craig:** The notion of coincidence and making things convenient is correct and it is connecting to the convenience of the writer. I think this is why people find it dissatisfying. It’s cheating. I mean, we want to watch these things unfold in a way that is surprising and fascinating to us, but after we are surprised we go, oh, OK, that was — that feels good. I like that this happened. I understand why it happened. It makes sense. I just didn’t see it coming. That’s the fun part.

With straight up coincidence, what the audience feels is you wanted to do a thing, or you needed to do a thing, so you just jammed it in. We don’t mind that first big coincidence because we understand that it is necessary for us to enjoy a thing. I mean, really the first coincidence of any movie is that we have shown up to see it. That’s — you know, so we’re OK with like, OK, we showed up to see your movie. You go ahead and do a thing.

But then the joy of the story is that there aren’t these things that are happening that just cheat. Because what’s the point then? We in our lives do not recognize the drama around us and the things that concern us as deriving largely from coincidence, even though I think strangely it’s probably true that most of the crazy things that happen in our lives are the result of coincidence. But the things that we’re mostly interested in, the passionate affair, the decision to steal, falling in love — these things feel volitional to us and they feel like they are arising naturally from the circumstances around us.

So those are the dramas that we like. We’re not so interested in stories where someone is walking down the street and a piano falls on them. It’s shocking, but there’s not drama to that. It’s just like, oh, how odd.

**John:** Yeah. It is. It’s surprising. And, oh, he happened to be there at that moment when the piano fell on him. And in real life sometimes the piano does just fall on a random person. But usually when we see an unexpected event or really any event, we expect there to be a cause. We expect there to be a relationship between these two events happening that is either causal, like one caused the other. It is correlated, like some outside force caused both events to happen. Or if neither of those things make sense, then it truly is coincidence. I think in the real world we tend to ascribe causal relationships to things that often are coincidence and that’s a real problem.

But in movie logic terms, these are our universes. And so we shouldn’t have to rely on coincidence for most of the work of our stories. So, if we’re not going for coincidence, we’re looking for causality. We’re looking for A causes B. Ideally, something we’ve seen already in the story has caused this effect. And now we’re in this situation and whatever the characters are doing in the situation, ideally your lead characters, not just the villains, whatever they’re doing is causing the next thing.

We talk about actions and consequences. Causality is about consequences. It’s about what this chain of events is leading to next. And how our characters are responding to that and changing their own circumstances.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does seem to me that part of the danger of what we do, the negative impact of what we do, is that we make such a big deal about very dramatic, very extreme events being caused, being purposeful. There are no coincidences, right? In life, almost all these things I think are coincidental. And then we try and put causation — every conspiracy theory that you see out there in some way or another is attempting to make sense of what may be coincidental. Sometimes there are conspiracies. We seem to be currently in the middle of one. But largely, no.

But in movies and TV, well, hey, what can we do? This is what we crave is this sense of causation. And when you think about movies — The Godfather is an incredibly complicated movie in that it’s got dozens of characters, and a lot of moving pieces in the machinery of the plot. A lot of hardware there. But everything is caused. And it all starts with a very simple thing. Someone shows up and says, “I have a business proposition.” It’s not even a coincidence. “You’re a business man. I have a business proposition.” And the Godfather says, no, I’m not interested.

And from that begins a series of caused events. And it is so satisfying to watch. Someone makes a choice. If you don’t give me what I want, I will do this. I did it. I just saw what you did. I’m now going to do this to stop you. And so on and so on. And it builds, and builds, and builds. Everything is caused. And I think it’s important when people are laying out their plots, they at least start from a place of everything — everything that happens here will be caused. Everything.

There are ways to fudge it here and there. But I think that’s probably the best ambition you can have for the machinery of your plot.

**John:** And one of the dangers here is you can fall into a trap of thinking like, oh, this is mechanical. This is a Rube Goldberg device where like once you set this ball rolling down the ramp everything will happen. In some ways that is accurate. But you want it to feel like all the characters are making individual choices that are leading to the next thing. So you don’t want just one series of events kicks off and the characters are just, again, we go back to this metaphor of being on rails. They’re just being dragged through the movie.

It needs to feel like they have volition, that they have the chance to make their own choices. But the choices they make will cause the next set of circumstances. And that can be really tricky to do.

So let’s talk about how you do that. So if I’m standing next to this writer who is working on the mystery of her story, what is some advice that we can give her to tackling the mystery of her story? Well, I would say that if you have the luxury of having a TV writing staff, that’s largely what they’re there for. So, when you see a TV room together, you know, sometimes yes they’re pitching jokes, they’re pitching storylines, they’re pitching ways to get through a scene. But a lot of what they’re doing is figuring out how are we going to get from this, to this, to this, to this. Like what are the natural causes and effects of these things.

**Craig:** Now, if you’re on your own, as I typically am — in fact, as I have always been — I think a general best principle is to start thinking about how you want to end. Because if you don’t know how you end, the danger that you will begin creating this bizarro plot to get from point A to where you eventually end up is high. If you know where you’re going to end, you can machine your plot. And remember, the point of machining the plot is not to be obvious, but rather the opposite. To be surprising. The surprises are not random. They are not derived from coincidence. They are carefully constructed. They are paying off in a satisfying way what you’ve set up.

You can’t really do that well if you don’t know where you end. So I think if you have your ending, you can create that causal chain with interesting reversals and surprises and twists and back and forths so that everything feels sort of meaningful. It is also important if you find yourself laying out your plot and suddenly there are a lot of, well, bends in the pipe. You know, a lot of strange things where you’re going, well, I got to do this so I can do that. Stop. Always stop. You may think you can get away with it. It’s just going to get worse and worse. It’s going to become byzantine.

Sometimes what happens is we fall in love with the notion that something is going to happen. And the problem is what’s come right before that something that we want to happen isn’t leading directly to the something we want to happen. So what do we do? We jam it in. We create a coincidence. Or even worse, we put in a bunch of scenes in between those things so that it will kind of get there naturally, but now there’s bloat.

Sometimes you kind of have to cut the throat of the thing that you really, really, really wanted to do because it’s not laying in properly. It may be able to happen later, but it may be the wrong thing. Your story will want things to happen naturally and then you are going to want things. And you kind of have to get your ego out of it a little bit and let your stories’ wants take precedence over yours.

Because I’ll tell you this. This the last chance you have to be clean. Outside the gate are the barbarians. That’s a little uncharitable to the people that are trying to help us make our movies. But I will tell you, for instance, Identity Thief, after I wrote my second draft, or even my first, there was a note — and it wasn’t really a note. It was sort of an order. “We want more villains.” And I don’t know why. To this day, I’m not really sure why.

And, you know, I did my very best to say that’s not — I don’t think we should. And the response back was, “Do it.” And so I did it. And it created so many coincidenty poor plotty mechanics. That stuff just — and you know, look, happily I don’t think anybody goes to a movie like that for the exciting villain plots, and yet it hurts every movie. Every movie. When there’s obvious bends and kinks because something that doesn’t belong has been put there. And nobody quite has a sense of what does and doesn’t belong to a movie that has not yet been shot than the writer does. I wish people would listen a little more carefully when the writer says that doesn’t belong.

It’s one of our Spidey senses.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk about what the actual process might be for you’re the writer working by him or herself and you’re trying to figure out these plot mechanics, the story logic, before you start doing your draft ideally. So, different writers have different approaches. Some make a simple outline. Some use index cards. Some will write out a treatment.

What I would say though is no matter what your process is, if you’re describing it to somebody — basically if someone is looking at the cards with you, or if you are sharing your outline with somebody, watch out for when you’re saying these phrases that signal, OK, there’s something convenient happening here. That it’s not necessarily natural to what should be happening in the story. So when you find yourself saying “at the same time, meanwhile,” which means that you’re cutting away to something else, or “just then,” those situations — they’re unlikely and you can’t have so many unlikely things in your script.

You’re going to be running into problems if you’re saying those kind of phrases a lot.

One of the other things to really be mindful of, and I think this is partly what happened with what you described in Identity Thief is sometimes there’s mechanics happening in the story that won’t be immediately obvious to the reader and therefore the audience. Like there’s behind the scenes stuff that’s happening. And one of the real challenges for writers is all that hidden machinery has to make sense, even though it won’t surface till later on.

So, what the villain was doing those three weeks, or like why that person showed up at that point. Maybe you have a reason for why they got there. Maybe you’ll even be able to say the reason why they got there. But the minute they sort of showed up there or something happened that was not visible to the audience, that’s going to be a surprise. And figuring out how you’re going to balance what the audience knows versus what the audience is going to find out later on can be really tricky.

And so whenever I have stories that aren’t just one main trajectory that can be a lot of my planning work is figuring out how do I make it clear to the audience. Like these people were doing these things in the background. You just didn’t see them. But here we are now and the characters are doing these things now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just continuing the Identity Thief case, there was one villain — I know, that’s crazy, right? I wrote one villain. What? Anyway, and very early on, in fact, the first time we meet Melissa McCarthy’s character, she’s on the phone with that villain and he’s upset. And she’s lying to him. And then later on when she and Jason Bateman’s character finally confronted each other and he’s kind of got her where he thinks he wants her, the bad guy shows up. It’s natural. She lied. We know she lied. He never got what she said she would send him. And he’s here. That makes sense. Meh. You know.

**John:** Well, in doing that, that initial conversation, you set the expectation that we would meet him and that he would show up. And you’re paying off that expectation. So that does not feel surprising to an audience. And it feels like, OK, this is a thing I expected to have happen. I’m happy that it’s now happening. I’m a smart person because I expected it to happen and therefore it is happening.

**Craig:** It was caused.

**John:** Yes, it was completely caused. It was not just a random fluke.

And even movies that I think are really good, like this most recent Wonder Woman movie, there will be some coincidences in there. And that’s OK. And if the movie is working really well you don’t notice it so much. A coincidence in the new Wonder Woman movie, which is not really spoiler at all, there’s a moment in the story where Diana first uses her bracers and sends off the shock wave. And like, wow, she has sort of supernatural powers.

She heads off and then like literally two minutes later while she’s standing on the cliff, Steve Trevor’s plane comes crashing down. Why did that happen at the same moment? Well, because it was convenient. There was nothing about her doing the bracers that caused his plane to fall. It just happened to happen at the same moment.

We go with it because it’s sort of the mythology and it feels OK and appropriate, but it is a big coincidence that it’s happened at the same moments. They literally coincided in ways that weren’t natural.

**Craig:** Exactly. And, look, when you’re writing, that may be where you end up. But it’s always worth in a moment like that to say am I avoiding a problem or am I avoiding a gift? Can this thing that just happened cause that thing? Wouldn’t that be satisfying? Now, it may not work. You may not be able to make sense of it. Or if you try, it may cause other problems and a ripple effect. And then you abandon it. But try. You know, I think sometimes what happens is these things happen, they emerge, and we get scared and try and run away from them when we should be running toward them.

**John:** Yep. Absolutely. Every problem is an opportunity. So take advantage of those opportunities as they come up. All right, let’s go step away from our whiteboards and go into our actual scenes. And you had a suggestion for the topic of gimmickry and the creative little tricks you can sometimes apply to keep scenes interesting. Take it away.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a little dangerous to be talking about this, because I always worry that people are going to go wee and start throwing ketchup all over their food. But these things can be great. I was thinking about it because I’ve been watching Fargo, the television series, and I should mention that one of the things that Fargo does that’s interesting is they make a little bit of a religion of coincidence. You can get away with a lot of coincidence if your show basically says around here coincidence happens all the time. Sometimes it happens to make things worse. Sometimes it happens to make things better. But that’s kind of the world we live in. We live in coincidence world.

You know, Tarantino lives in coincidence world.

**John:** Absolutely. He just happens to be crossing the street and getting hit by the car.

**Craig:** Exactly. And we’re like, yup, that’s what happens in Pulp Fiction world. That makes sense. Totally.

So, gimmickry. Sometimes you find yourself writing a scene and the general conventional way of laying things out feels a little meh. Feels a little boring. I don’t mean to equate conventional to boring, because sometimes conventional is the absolute best way to tell a scene and it is fascinating. But there are times when you’re going to want to, I don’t know, throw a little glitter on.

So, I just thought of a few of these things that we can do and at least by codifying them we know that we have these tools in our belt. And the first one is kind of radical — I mean, I guess they’re all radical in a way. Change the arrow of time. And we generally think of time as moving forward and it is linear, but of course we have seen lots of movies and lots of TV shows where things move out of order. Sometimes they move backwards. Sometimes we see something that should have happened before the thing we just saw happening after the thing we saw. But we get it.

Do you remember how in Out of Sight he did that interesting — Soderbergh and Scott Frank did that interesting trick of editing and scene design where you had Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney falling in love but we found out about it out of its time in the movie. It was just fascinating the way it worked.

There’s nothing wrong with that. You just got to be careful when you do it. It needs to be purposeful. It needs to evoke something. You can jump time in little steps. You can also jump time in big steps. You can have, you know, a scene where two people are talking at a place and then one of them turns around and it’s 20 years earlier and now they’re children talking in that place. You can do these things. You just obviously have to have a reason why.

**John:** Absolutely. And as the screenwriter, you need to make it clear on the page what you’re doing. Because some of these effects will be really obvious in the film, but will be really hard to see on the page unless you’re upfront with the reader about like this is what’s happening. And you don’t have to explain why you’re doing it, but you have to explain like what it’s going to look like and feel like if you were watching the movie. That you’re acknowledging that you’re jumping this thing. Because when you’re just reading 12-point Courier it’s easy to sort of miss and get confused by these sort of sleights of hand.

**Craig:** Yeah. Similarly, if you change the arrow time, you can kind of change the nature of space by splitting the screen. When we think of split screens, I guess what immediately comes to mind are just bad sitcom split screen kind of jokes where one person is talking on a phone and the other one is also on the phone. And it’s a split screen. Wah wah.

But split screens I actually think can be incredibly valuable when you’re trying to create tension. So, I’ll go back to Tarantino, again. Because, by the way, Tarantino the most — he goes bananas with these gimmicks and he uses them so well. There’s a moment in Kill Bill where we see that Uma Thurman is in a coma and also we see Darryl Hannah’s character coming down the hallway with a syringe to kill her. And he splits the screen. And there’s something beautiful about watching a demon essentially stalking down a hallway. And then at the same time watching this completely helpless human being. And the tension just rises because what he’s telling us is there’s no chance she’s going to open that door and our hero won’t be in the bed. She’s going to be in the bed. You see her, right there.

You can also split the screen where you see the same thing happening from two different angles at the same time, which is a fascinating thing, because in one angle somebody is walking out of a car and they’re walking into a store and they’re quite happy. In the other angle, just because of the nature of the camera, we see that someone is watching them. And they don’t know.

It is the sort of thing that I think screenwriters should be thinking more about because when we don’t there is a danger that the director will. And I don’t mean to say that like directors are bad at it. They’re not. But if the gimmick is only directorial, it will feel more gimmicky. When it is connected to an emotion or a feeling or a purpose, which is our domain when we are writing these things, I think it can be terrific.

**John:** Yeah. You’re describing using these tricks to really enhance or underline the emotion or the story point you’re trying to get there. So it is better for the gimmick. The gimmick is just not there on top of what you’re otherwise seeing. It’s not a conventional scene with a gimmick applied to it. It is a scene that is better and unique because of the gimmick. And once you see it with a gimmick, it would be hard to imagine that scene without that moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think when some people watch these movies, I think critics fall into this trap a lot. I don’t mean reviewers. I mean analyzers of film. They will tend to see these things as style. They will tend to see them as visual style. But when we connect to them, it’s not because they’re visually stylistic. It’s not the aesthetics. It’s what it tells us about the people involved and how it makes us feel. It is actually again an extension of character. And an extension of the empathetic connection that we have with the people on screen.

There’s another thing that happens quite a bit and I think when we watch it we don’t realize how radical it is. And that’s just bending or even breaking reality itself. Sometimes somebody should just talk to a dead person. You can have a scene where somebody is just sitting in their bed and they say out loud to the ceiling, “Oh, Edith, I wish you were here. What should I do? I don’t know what to do. I’m lost without you.” Boring.

Or maybe Edith is just there. The beginning of The Iron Lady did this beautifully. Meryl Streep plays an aging Margaret Thatcher. And when we meet her she’s talking to her husband, played by Jim Broadbent, and the two of them are having the most mundane typical breakfast conversation. And she’s telling him, “You’re putting too much butter on your toast.” I mean, you have no idea that he’s actually dead. He’s not there. He’s not there. And then you realize, oh, he’s not there. Wonderful.

You can also bend reality by just freezing the entire world except for one person. And, of course, there’s the typical breaking the fourth wall, which is always a trickier proposition. But I guess my point is you have the ability to do things that are beyond the pale of what we experience in our everyday lives in terms of reality. And you just have to make sure that there’s an in and an out. And that once we get out of it, we know we’re out of it.

That’s the key. You can surprise people. You don’t have to tell them you’re going into it. You just have to let them know that it happened and now you’re out.

**John:** Absolutely. And it’s the kind of thing which you probably try to do relatively early in your film so you get a sense of like this is the kind of thing that happen in your movie. Because if you do it quite late, then it feels like, wait, you’ve broken the rules you’ve set. There’s a social contract you’ve signed with the audience and now you’ve broken that contract.

And always be mindful of, you know, you are defining your characters and their actions on the page, but you’re also defining the character of the movie. And so the kinds of choices you’re making in terms of the gimmickry, the stylistic choices you’re making, that’s the character of the movie. That’s what your movie feels like.

And so as long as it’s consistent with what the movie feels like, you know, the way that Tarantino movies feel consistent with a Tarantino world, it’s going to be — it’s going to feel right. It’s going to feel like something that can happen in your world.

But if you’re completely straight drama and then suddenly you try to pull this thing at page 80, I think the audience is going to rebel and quite understandably for your not following the basic rules you seem to have set for yourself.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, every time you do this, you are breaking the tone one way or another. In 500 Days of Summer, everyone slips into a musical number. That is a gimmick. And believe me, I don’t use gimmick as a pejorative. I use it as what it is. It’s an exciting, dazzling way of attracting people’s attention. We know, OK, this is the kind of movie where that can happen.

So later when they break reality, again, and show us two simultaneous evenings, expectations versus reality, we understand that can happen here. And it’s all right. Similarly when we watch Kill Bill, the fact that suddenly the movie switches into animation, acceptable. There are also moments sometimes where the break in the tone is OK because the movie is silly. There’s not a lot of gimmickry, filmic gimmicky in a movie like say Woody Allen’s Love and Death, which is one of my favorite movies. I mean, it’s broad. It’s very broad. It’s very silly. It’s wonderful. He doesn’t really mess around with reality too much. But then it does.

Then there’s a sequence that turns into a silent movie, into a silent film, which is hysterical and amazing. But you have to be aware of what John is saying here, those of you at home. Your story has to be able to survive this. And just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

Gimmickry is amazing because it frees you. It gives you like these — like we used to have the box of crayons. I had the box of 16 crayons and someone showed up and they’re like, “I have the box of 64 crayons. I have seven more blues than you do.” OK. Well, gimmicks, those are the extra blues and the extra reds. It’s the big box of crayons. They tend to make us feel more creative. When you read them in scripts, they tend to make the read feel maybe more sophisticated or ambitious. But even then, that is kind of a gimmick. Because it only is ambitious and creative and advanced when it works.

So, do it if it makes something better. Don’t if it doesn’t. Just know that you can.

**John:** Absolutely. The bigger box of crayons will not make you a better artist. They will just let you do some things that you couldn’t otherwise do easily. And that’s important. That can be useful. And I think by limiting ourselves to the simplest things, sometimes you’re able to tell simple, and true, and very strong stories. There’s a reason why you may want to not use the gimmicks, not use the full set of tools that you could use.

But, there’s certainly circumstances where you want to try to do those. And I think those are great. And quite a few of my films have used some of those fancy crayons. Like my first movie Go. It restarts time twice. There’s scenes that you see from multiple perspectives. You ultimately recognize that there’s quite a bit more going on than you first thought. And that’s great.

My movie, The Nines, is sort of nothing but a bunch of crayons melting all over the screen. And it’s very deliberately playing with your expectations of what is the difference between these actors and these characters. And is there any real underlying reality behind all this. It breaks its tone. There are musical numbers. There’s reality stuff happening in there. Melissa McCarthy is playing herself. It’s a very different set of expectations than you would normally have going into a movie.

But that’s not the only way to tell a story. And I don’t try to apply as many effects as I can to every movie. Like you have to be very judicious and see what is right for the story you’re trying to tell.

**Craig:** And I think you’ll know. That’s the thing. There’s a certain sense of satisfaction. There’s a feeling, oh yes, you know, this feels so much better than just the usual way. You know, I remember Todd Phillips and I were like struggling with how to do a flashback. Like, oh, here’s a flashback scene. I was like, yeah, well, I don’t know. And then the notion that in Alan’s mind they’re all children and to do it with children, that’s a gimmick. But it made so much sense and suddenly it was a joy to write. It was exciting. You know?

And I feel like, OK, if we are chaining our hands to the keyboard and going, OK, here we go, blah, blah, blah, then it’s probably going to be a similar experience for the audience. When you get excited and it just flows, then you know you’ve got the right gimmick. But again, word of caution, most of the time it will be flowing and feeling great with no gimmicks at all.

**John:** 100% agree. All right, Craig, let’s try to answer one or two of these questions in our mailbox.

**Craig:** Let’s try, you know. Let’s try.

**John:** We have audio, so let’s first listen to Kate from Phoenix, Arizona, who wrote in with a question.

Kate: My question is about interviewing experts to create more realistic stories. The script that I’m writing deals with a crime and the legal consequences. Although I have a respectable working knowledge of these procedures for a lay person, I can tell it’s not enough. I need to find a cop and a lawyer to interview to get the details right. I found some people online who are more than willing to consult for a sizeable fee. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, but my wallet does. Do you have advice for finding and interviewing experts? Once I find them, is it customary to have them read the script and point things out? Or ask about procedures piecemeal?

Also, for a Murphy’s Law type of situation, if I change story elements based on what they say, can they claim some kind of story credit? That’s sort of the point of asking in the first place, to change the story and make it better. And I’m not opposed to giving credit if it were fair, but I would prefer not to share the story credits if I can help it.

Are there measures I should take to protect the intellectual property of my own work?

**John:** Well, that’s a great question. I don’t have perfect answers for Kate, so I’m going to preface this by saying I bet some of our listeners have good resources they might point Kate towards in terms of finding the cop and a lawyer who she could talk to.

But I can offer some general guidance which is, no, you should not be paying anybody. And, no, they should not be trying to take story credit. What you’re doing is just asking people about their jobs. And you’re asking them how they do their work and asking them some theoretical questions. That’s not story credit. You’re nowhere near that. So, anybody you’re talking to who would want to try to get that from you is not the right person for you to talk to. Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah, no question. There’s not going to be any payment here. I’m doing a project right now that has a lot of research involved. It’s more research than I’ve ever done for anything in my life. And I’ve talked to all sorts of people. But I specifically had to talk to a cop when I was working on Identity Thief, because I wanted to find out how does this all work, and how do you go through your job and deal with this stuff. If you call, I think if you just call, Kate, you say you’re from Phoenix. Call Phoenix PD up and just say, “Listen, I’m a writer. I’d love to sit down and interview an officer or a detective. Would you have somebody willing to talk with me for a half an hour? I just have questions for a story I’m writing.”

I would be shocked if no one said yes. Everybody wants to talk about their job. Everybody wants somebody to get it right. I think people are interested in being a part of something like that. I don’t think there’s any issue with credit because they’re not writing anything. They’re talking to you and you’re taking notes.

You certainly can give them an assurance that you’re not going to use their name. That you’re not going to use anything that’s identifiable to them. And if you are recording the conversation, that the recording will not be played back for anybody other than yourself. That it’s only for research purposes. But I think by and large if you just ask, same thing with law. If there’s an area of law. I mean, you must know somebody that knows somebody that has a lawyer. Have that person ask their lawyer. Who would be a good lawyer who might want to talk to you about this? Somebody sooner or later is just going to say, “I’ll do it,” because people generally want to help.

**John:** They do. So I think Kate’s social network is probably bigger than she realizes. So if she just goes on Facebook, throws it out there like, hey, I’m looking for any cop or any lawyer, does anybody know somebody? Somebody will know somebody who knows somebody who is going to be willing to talk with you about this.

Before I left for Paris, I was in an Uber. I was actually headed to Kelly Marcel’s house. And our Uber driver was from a country who was exactly the right person I needed to talk to about this project I was writing. And so I just started up a conversation with him and said like, hey, this is really crazy but would it be OK if I called you and asked you more questions about the country you’re from and when you came to the US. And he said, of course, that would be fine.

And so you will bump into people in your real life who are going to be helpful and will get you through that kind of thing. I was also years ago I was in upstate Maine doing research for this other project that never got made. And I was staying at this little hotel and whenever I would meet somebody new I was like, I would ask them about their job and I’d say like, hey, do you know anybody else who has lived here since 1970? Did you know any people who are old timers here? Because I’m trying to find out information. And so over the course of three or four days I was able to talk to ten different people about sort of what Maine was like in the 1970s. And it was great. It was fantastic. And it didn’t matter that I had credits or didn’t have credits. They were just like, well, somebody wants to know, I’m happy to talk to you about it.

So, you will find somebody who has the information you need. And if your listeners have other good suggestions for first places that Kate should look, we welcome them.

**Craig:** I talked to a detective at the Beverly Hills Police Department when I was doing research for Identity Thief. And he was describing how they work and how you deal with law enforcement when you catch them. And how you have to deal with it as a victim. And he was great. And when it was over, and I was leaving, he said, “Oh, by the way, what happens to the thief at the end?” And I said, well, I haven’t written it yet. I’m just in the research phase here. But I think she’s going to go to jail. And he said, “She should die.” [laughs]

And I said, what? And he goes, “She should die. These people are terrible.” And I thought, you know, I guess if you deal with the consequences of identity theft every day, day in and day out, and deal with the victims of it day in and day out, that’s probably how you would feel. That makes sense. Yeah.

**John:** So, useful advice for real world, but probably not useful advice for someone writing a comedy about an identity thief.

**Craig:** By the way, also, something to keep in mind, Kate. Reality is fantastic until it is not helpful. And then it is not fantastic. Especially if you’re doing something that is essentially a fictional dramatization of things that needs to be informed by reality. You know, use what helps.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s do one more question. This is Jason from Los Angeles.

Jason: I’ve been living in LA for eight years and I just haven’t been able to break into the business the way I want to. I write consistently. I rewrite. I get notes from trusted friends. I rewrite some more. I’ve made short films. I’ve gotten into a few festivals. I recently posted a script to the Black List. And while all of these things have absolutely helped me to develop and hone my craft, they haven’t opened any industry doors for me.

I’m 33 years old. I’m married. So, jumping into something like an unpaid internship at a production company or spending five years in a mailroom doesn’t seem feasible for me. Which is why I’m considering doing something both of you have often opposed, and even more often with great umbrage. I’m considering going to a writing consultant. So, what I’m not considering doing is going to some online “guru” who has 12 tips for this and eight surefire techniques for that. No. What I’m talking about is basically a teacher. Someone who is all over YouTube. I’ve seen their ideas. I’ve seen them talk about their ideas. And they’re sound. They sound legit. It’s someone who has video testimonials on their website from current writers who are currently working in the business who are staffed on TV shows.

And I’m considering this for the same reason someone might consider hiring a tutor. This is a person outside my circle of friends who owes me nothing, knows their stuff, and best of all can give me notes face-to-face that can help me improve my script. I’ve looked into the cost and one year of meetings would run me about $3,500. Now, that’s not nothing, but it’s also not my life savings.

At this point in my life, that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable amount of money to try something new that can help me get where I want to go. Because what I’m doing right now hasn’t.

So, John, Craig, please tell me: am I crazy?

**John:** Craig, is Jason crazy?

**Craig:** No. He’s not crazy at all. He’s not crazy in the slightest. That’s why the industry of people that take money from folks like him is thriving and well, because they’re not preying on the insane. They’re preying on the sane and they’re preying on people who are scared and to some extent desperate. And I understand it. I mean, Jason has been at this for a while now it sounds like.

And he has a life. He’s created a life for himself. I assume he has a day job. Somehow he’s paying the bills. I completely agree that when you’re 33 years old and you have this life that you set up for yourself, starting in a mailroom or an unpaid internship doesn’t make any sense, and also it’s not necessary to be a writer or a director. It’s necessary if you want to be an agent or studio executive, I suppose.

So, no, Jason, you’re not crazy at all. But I’m glad that you did this — I’m glad you recorded this question because you get to listen to yourself back now. And I want to ask you — who do you sound like? Because to me, I’m concerned that you sound like the guy that’s about to lose money. And the reason why is you’re grasping at straws and I think you know you’re grasping at straws here. It’s not impossible that spending money on some outside help like this might help you improve your script. I think it’s highly unlikely it will help improve your script to the point where suddenly all those doors that have been firmly shut will fling open.

I don’t think it kind of works like that. I am concerned that after all this time it may just be that you don’t write or direct the sorts of things that the rooms you want to be in welcome. You may be a different kind of writer or director. It’s also possible that you’re not supposed to be doing this at all. I have no fear saying that. I know it is upsetting to hear and it’s particularly upsetting if next week you sign on and sell your movie and make a billion dollars and win an Oscar. Then I look like a dumb-dumb.

And I know that that’s the dream. So, I guess my advice to you would be this: think twice. $3,500 isn’t your life savings. It’s also $3,500. Think about who is asking you for that money and why they want it. Think about the nature of Hollywood. Think about predators and prey. And ask yourself if this is what’s right and best for you.

Generally speaking, as you know, I think it’s not. But, I also am aware that when I say these things, they are of no great assistance to somebody that’s trying to get one of those doors open.

John, what do you think?

**John:** Yeah. What I like about Jason, he already is thinking twice. In deciding to write into us and record his question, he is thinking twice. And he’s recognizing all of the sort of pitfalls ahead of him. So, he’s sort of done a lot of our work for us. And he’s further along in the process then somebody who says like, oh, maybe I’m going to start writing a script and I’ll hire this consultant.

So, I’m trying to step back and think about if I had $3,500 and I wanted to spend that $3,500 to improve my writing, what might I do? Well, I might take a class. I might take a UCLA Extension class. I might do something else that would sort of get me in a place where I’m around other people who are writing, who can help me focus in on what I’m doing. And so by that structure, I can’t say it’s the worst use of your money.

But I don’t know anything about this person he’s really going to. He says this person has YouTube videos, has a track record. I guess. Before I would give this person any of my money, I would want to know who has been using this person and what would they actually say. And the good thing about the Internet these days is you will find somebody who has had an experience with this person, positive or negative. Find out what that experience actually was. Because I don’t want you spending your money on just some charlatan who promises things.

I know that early in my career I was lucky to have some people who would read every draft of my stuff and would give me notes and I genuinely did get better doing that. Some of them were teachers. Others were producers who were trying to get my work on the screen. And I did get better. And so while I wasn’t paying them directly, or I was paying them indirectly through the university, it did help.

So, this could help you. I’m just concerned that it’s not the right person. I’m worried that you’re going to be writing in a year from now saying like, “Oh you know what guys? I spent that $3,500 and it was not the right choice. And I’m not any closer to what I want to be doing.”

**Craig:** Well, there is another negative outcome here. I mean, Jason mentioned that the person has testimonials on their advertising, and of course they do. The question isn’t whether or not people enjoyed working with this particular consultant. The question is whether or not this consultant got them their ultimate goal, which was to sell their screenplay or be employed to write another screenplay. And that’s not just sell it to some marginal player. There are a lot of those. But sell it to the kind of company you want to be in business with. Right Jason?

What these people do necessarily requires them to be good to you. When I say good to you, I mean, warm and fuzzy and encouraging because they want you to come back and keep paying them. They are actually less reliable, I think, then your friends in that regard. They will tell you, “Listen, this script has tremendous promise. You have tremendous promise. You can make this great. And you can get everything you want. Work with me. I will get you there.”

They will say that probably no matter what because that’s what’s going to make them the most money. And there are people who after a year or two will say, “I’m going to — I will gladly give you a testimonial because you’ve made my script better and you make me feel good in a world and business that otherwise makes me feel terrible.”

But $3,500 is a lot of money for that. And that ultimately really isn’t going to get you what you want. So, be careful of that praise. And be careful of that encouragement. They probably won’t say to you, “Hmm, I read it. This is no good. And I can’t help you with it. I don’t want your money.” You know?

The whole business is soaking in a certain kind of conflict of interest.

**John:** Yeah. It occurs to me listening to Jason’s question is that I feel like over the course of our 309 episodes we haven’t done a great job of introducing listeners to people who were sort of similarly positioned to Jason who made it. And there are some. And I’m thinking of a friend now who I can’t believe I’ve not had on the podcast who in his middle 30s, late 30, sort of finally got it started and finally got staffed on a TV show and is now running his own show.

It does happen. And because it’s rare doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. And I want to have him on the show to talk about sort of what he did and sort of the choices he made. And what he would do differently. Because he might have better advice for Jason than you or I would because we started at such a different time.

So, in hearing Jason’s question I’m recognizing that there’s probably a group of our steady listeners who we’ve never really directly addressed with how it can work. We’ve always sort of given them negative advice in a way. Like, you know, don’t do these things rather than like these are the things that actually work for people. So, that’s going to be a goal to get my friend on the show in the next couple of weeks.

**Craig:** I think that’s really smart. Because, you know, we do want to help. Obviously we want to help, because we’re trying to help people who are writing. And we’re trying to help them write better. And happily we don’t take — well, John takes their money hand over fist. I don’t get anything. But we don’t have much in the way of saying, “And we also want to help you get that job.”

We keep hitting this thing of write a great script, you’ll get the job. But, there are some practicals. It would be great to hear from somebody who has gone through it, especially somebody who is older than the typical right out of college “here I am, I want to be a writer.”

I will say that Jason sounds incredibly nice. He just sounds like a good guy and that makes me nervous. I’m nervous because sometimes it’s the good ones that end up getting fleeced the hardest.

So, you know what, Jason, talk to your wife. She knows you better than anybody. I guarantee it. I guarantee it. You say to her — I got to think of a good name for Jason’s wife. I’m going to go with Marissa. “Marissa,” so close to my wife’s name. Anyway. “Marissa, tell me something because I don’t trust myself on this issue. Does this sound like a good idea? Should I do this? Should I not do this? Give it to me straight. I know that you love me either way.”

I hope that’s true about Marissa

**John:** Yeah, you never know. Never assume how other people’s marriages work.

**Craig:** You’re right. You’re right. Like he may call in next week and say, “Well, I’m divorced now. I asked her. And apparently that was the only excuse she needed to just pack her stuff up and, yeah. So…and now I have half of that $3,500.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh, community property. California state law.

**Craig:** Ruining lives one podcast listener at a time.

**John:** Let’s move on and go to our One Cool Things before we wreck anymore havoc in the world.

**Craig:** Great idea.

**John:** My One Cool Thing this week is the bus. Which bus? Well, really any bus. But my whole year in Paris, one of my revelations was that as a tourist I was always taking the Metro to get from place to place, because Paris has a Metro, so why are you not taking the trains.

What was so great about this last year is the busses are actually fantastic. And I was always sort of scared to take the busses because I didn’t quite know where they were going, or how to use them, or how it would all work. The huge advantage, the huge change, is that Google Maps now has all of the busses in the map directions. So if you are someplace, you want to get someplace, Google Maps will tell you get on this bus, it’ll take you to the place. And it was fantastic. And the busses in Paris were great. And so convenient. And while I was on my bus I could do my Duolingo and it was a great experience.

So, coming back to Los Angeles I vowed, you know what, I’m going to start taking the bus more often.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So this last week I took the bus to Beverly Hills. It was fantastic. And Google Maps worked just as well. And so the busses in Los Angeles are not bad at all. And people are always kind of afraid of the busses and they shouldn’t be. They were the same as the busses in Paris. It got me where I needed to go. It was easy and delightful. It was cheaper because I didn’t have to park my car in Beverly Hills. So, just try the bus. It sounds so simple and obvious because obviously I grew up taking the bus in Boulder. But a bus in the big city can be really great. And if people took the bus more often, I think they would be surprised.

**Craig:** It’s true that the thing that keeps me from the bus is just general fear of where the hell I’m going. Because these busses pull up and I just don’t know the bus system well enough. Like in New York, I’m here in New York right now, that’s why this microphone sounds weird, I take the subway all the time. I take the subway everywhere I can take it. And it’s really clear. I know exactly where it’s going. And they’ve got letters on them. And they never change. And that’s that with those.

And then the busses come and they have these letters and numbers. And I just get confused. I get confused.

**John:** You know who does know? Your phone knows. Your phones knows everything. And so Google Maps, you punch it in, it will tell you exactly when that bus is coming, when to get on it. It’s great and convenient. And also because you’re not underground you don’t lose service, so you can actually do things on your phone. It’s great.

So I would just recommend people try the bus. If you haven’t tried the bus in years, take a bus sometime this month and see what it’s like.

**Craig:** Following this podcast, bus murders, up by 30%.

**John:** Ha-ha. Always the best.

**Craig:** I mean, let’s face it: our listeners are easy marks. Well, I’ll continue with the transportation theme of One Cool Thing. Hyperloop One.

**John:** I saw that. They tested.

**Craig:** And it was successful. It worked. Now, they were testing — was essentially like a chassis, like a little sled. It wasn’t the full car where you can put people. And it wasn’t at full speed either. They talk about being able to go up to 700 miles per hour. In this case, the test I think was just 70 miles per hour. But it worked. They have a tube. It’s a vacuum. And they got maglev. And it shot down the track and it worked.

So, at least you’ve got this first theory into practice mode and I got to say the way that people are jumping on board with this thing, it feels like it’s going to happen. It legitimately does not feel like bunk.

You know, look, obviously I know that what do they call them, Super Trains? What do they call the — bullet trains? Bullet trains are real. I know they’re real. I’ve ridden on a bullet train. But when California said we’re going to spend billions of dollars to make a bullet train I thought no you’re not. It’s not going to happen. You’re going to spend billions of dollars, but we’re not going to have a bullet train. And we don’t.

We have spent billions of dollars. There’s no bullet train. This thing feels like it’s going to happen. And if they can put it together, they’re saying you can get on board in Los Angeles and be in San Francisco within I think 50 minutes.

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. And that’s 50 minutes without going to an airport and getting in the line. It’s just hope on a tube and you’re there.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll hope. Yeah. I mean, we’re in a weird time when we have all these amazing things that can be happening even while the world seems to be falling apart. So, it’s going to be a real race to see which future we end up in.

**Craig:** I do believe the world is essentially separated into two tribes at this point. Builders and tearers-down. And builders, the one advantage that builders have is that they’re ingenious. And the one advantage that tearers-down have is they are indiscriminate. They’ll just tear — if it’s standing down, they’ll tear it down. They don’t care.

**John:** Yeah. Just swing that crow bar and you can just knock things down.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah. They’ve certainly got inertia on their side, don’t they?

**John:** They do. Gravity works. They have all the stored energy in there. They can just make things fall.

**Craig:** Exactly. And what’s the — entropy. They have entropy. Inevitably, the tearers-down win.

**John:** Well, in the end everything becomes dust. But it’s just how cool things can be before they all become dust.

**Craig:** Before the universe ends in heat death. 100%. Yep.

**John:** As we wrap up, I will remind people that the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide is available. It’s the first 300 episodes of the show, plus all the bonus episodes. People recommend which things you should check out. So, if you’re new to the show and you want to dig into the back catalog that is a great place to start.

You can listen to those episodes on the new USB drives. So you can go to store.johnaugust.com and get one of those USB drives. They are lovely and sturdy.

And that’s our show. Our show is produced by Carlton Mittagakus.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** 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. We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts. Look for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a review.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And next week, same time zone.

**John:** Oh, so nice.

**Craig:** So nice. See you then.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-homecoming-show/) for the July 25th Scriptnotes Live Homecoming Show, with guests [Liz Meriwether](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Meriwether), [Megan Amram](https://twitter.com/meganamram) and more!
* [Julie Buxbaum’s What to Say Next](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553535684/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Fridge logic](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) on TV Tropes
* John on [The perils of coincidence](http://johnaugust.com/2007/perils-of-coincidence)
* The [Fargo TV series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fargo_(TV_series)) makes a religion of coincidence
* Gimmickry used in Kill Bill with [split screens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWI4G9PB31c) and [animation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQM0klOXck8), in (500) Days of Summer with [musical numbers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tJoIaXZ0rw) and [alternate timelines](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fL94BTrFhs), when [talking to the dead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7xeK76cwA0) in Iron Lady, when Love and Death [becomes a silent film](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEETZTs795U&t=0m48s), and when [flashbacks become childhood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLk9y0RZSGo) in The Hangover 2
* [Go](https://www.amazon.com/Go-Katie-Holmes/dp/B008Y6YKEE/) and [The Nines](https://www.amazon.com/Nines-Ryan-Reynolds/dp/B00164LTUO/) on Amazon Video
* [The LA Metro System](https://www.metro.net)
* [Hyperloop One](https://hyperloop-one.com/) and its [successful first test](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15958224/hyperloop-one-first-full-system-test-devloop)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [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/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([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_309.mp3).