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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2017/from-writer-to-writer-director).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 300 of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. 300 Craig. That’s just amazing.

**Craig:** I mean, we sort of blew it because we had that big live show that ended up being 299, but in a way that’s us, isn’t it? We’re not numerologists.

**John:** We’re not. I actually had some big plans for the 300th episode, which I talked you through, and it was going to be so much work that it did not end up happening because other life things interfered. But 300 is still good. And this is a really good 300th episode. Today on the show, we have Chris McQuarrie here to talk about the transition from being an A-list screenwriter to being an A-list writer-director. So, it’s an incredibly relatable episode. I mean, it’s really for all of the A-list screenwriters out there who are thinking about what is my path to being an A-list writer-director. Chris McQuarrie can talk you through that.

**Craig:** Yeah, our 300th episode is speaking to fewer than 300 people. [laughs] That’s how I look at it. It’s for like about three people.

**John:** Yean, three, four.

**Craig:** Four, tops.

**John:** Depends on the day. But it was actually a great conversation. So, when we get into it you’ll see that it ends up being mostly me and Chris because of just time zone problems. But he gets into some really fascinating stuff about just, you know, he had some peaks and some valleys even after his career sort of got going. And we talk about that. And I think there’s actually a lot of really relatable stuff there about being the person when stuff falls apart. And putting stuff back together. And that’s a valuable lesson.

**Craig:** Chris is – I was sorry to miss a good chunk of that. Chris is a very good friend of mine and one of the most infuriatingly smart people I know. I feel like I serve a similar role for him in that we make each other crazy, but we’re the sort of people that like making each other crazy, and so hours will go by where we debate absolute nonsense and everybody around us just gets very tired and bored and leaves. And we like that. I just have the greatest respect for his abilities. And he is an excellent articulator of the interior life of the writer. So, I’m looking forward to this discussion as much as perhaps the three or four people to whom this applies are listening, looking forward to it at home.

But he’s terrific. It’s hard to believe that it took us this long. You know what? We’ll have him back on for Episode 600. How about that?

**John:** That’s a very good idea. So, a lot has actually happened since you and I were on the Skype together. You did a live show which was fantastic. I actually got to listen to that live show as I was on my bus on the way over to meet with Chris. And it was just great. So, thank you again for a great show. Thank you to Dana Fox for filling in for me. But Rian Johnson and Rob McElhenney were terrific. And people asked smart questions, or at least the questions that made it into the edit I heard were smart. So, thank you to everybody and thank you to Hollywood Heart for hosting us there.

**Craig:** Yes. And by all accounts we did in fact achieve the goal, which was to raise a pretty good amount of money for Hollywood Heart. So we felt really good about that. They were very happy. Dana was wonderful. Just did a great job. I’m going to go ahead and just say if I croak, she gets my gig.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sounds good. So if there’s Russians out there planning to do things, know that we have a backup in Dana Fox.

**Craig:** There are Russians out there planning to do things. I just don’t think this one is high up on their list.

**John:** No, they got a long, long list.

**Craig:** They got a long list.

**John:** But listening to that show, it was fascinating because you were recording it on Monday night and while you were recording it at the other side of the hill they were still negotiating the WGA contract. And we did know when that episode was being recorded whether or not we would be on strike or if a deal would be reached. And the deal was reached and huzzah. So, it went past the midnight deadline, but they kept talking, and there is now a deal that is up for vote by the membership.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s up for vote by the membership, which means it’s going to be our deal. We’re not going to turn it down. And by all accounts it seems like a pretty good deal. We are actually going to have Chris Keyser, the former president of the Writers Guild and one of the co-chairs of the negotiating committee come on the show. I believe he’s going to come and record with us next week. And he’s going to walk us through it. And he’ll walk us through as much as he can. I mean, ideally he’s going to explain the deal itself to us and how that works. And hopefully he can also give us a little insight in how the actual machinery of the negotiation worked, up to a point. Because of course there are certain things they can’t really talk about, you know, because leverage is a delicate manner. You don’t want to necessarily give away all of your secrets. But I was thrilled with the outcome, certainly.

**John:** I was thrilled with the outcome, too. And one of the things which hopefully Chris will be able to explain to me, because I have a hard time understanding it as a person who writes mostly for film rather than for TV is there’s a change in the definition of how many weeks of work can be ascribed to an episode. And he will talk us through that, because that has a lot to do with the changing way we’re making television and he’s making one of those shows that is in a changed model. So he’ll hopefully be able to talk us through that as well.

**Craig:** That’s the most important change, I think. And it has ramifications not only for the way writers are compensated and how much money they make, but also our pension and healthcare. It’s one of those ripple effect changes. So, yeah, we’ll definitely get into that with Chris.

**John:** Another bit of follow up. Two episodes ago I asked listeners for their advice – what advice would they give to a time traveler whose time machine broke down? You remember this Craig.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** Like you had some basic ideas of stumbling up to a person and asking, hey, what year it is. And seeming like a crazy person. Our listeners, once again, prove themselves to be the best, smartest people in the universe. So, already they started pointed me towards like, you know, OK, here’s how the stars change, so therefore you can figure out based on the shape of the Big Dipper. But they had some more specific things. So I wanted to get into a few of those.

Logan Rap wrote in to say, “If you have your iPhone with you, you can have an offline version of Wikipedia that’s only text but then you have a pretty good sense of history. And that would probably help you out. And, of course, your iPhone would also have a compass. It would help you sort of figure out geography around you.” He also suggested a Wild Edibles app to help you find the 200 edible plants in your area to help you figure out sort of how you could survive. So, if your time machine is broken but you still have a phone, that’s potentially helpful.

**Craig:** OK. Yeah. I mean, I can see that. Personally, I would mostly be using that offline Wikipedia to find out the most painless way to kill myself. As we already pointed out, my strategy is curl up right away.

**John:** Yeah. Perhaps they have like a Poisonous Plants app you can download, so you can figure out what is the quickest, most efficient poison plant you can find that would do it for you.

**Craig:** But that doesn’t – I don’t want any cramping.

**John:** That’s true. Because poison we’ve learned can be incredibly painful.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You want something quick. Honestly, use the compass to find a cliff and jump off of it.

**Craig:** But then I got to deal with the whole falling. I don’t think you quite understand how cowardly I am. I don’t think you’ve gotten it through your head yet. I need a beautiful, quiet, lovely sleep that just, yeah. My time travel nap.

**John:** I get that.

**Craig:** Oh, you do? You’re like, no, no, I understand exactly how pathetic you are.

**John:** I think we all want a nice gentle death. But if a nice gentle death doesn’t come, I just feel like the bungee-less bungee jumping would be a pretty good way out. Because I’ve bungee jumped. And bungee is tremendously fun, especially when you don’t die. But if you’re ghost smack at the end. Eh.

**Craig:** I don’t know. No one really to ask about it is there?

**John:** No, there really isn’t. Renee wrote in to point out that since the earth is 70% water and it’s only had a breathable atmosphere for a small portion of its existence, the chance of my broken time machine landing me someplace where I would survive even minutes are incredible small. So, that was despairing.

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** But she also had a good suggestion. That if I ended up around humans and I couldn’t figure out who these humans were, a portable DNA testing kit could be really helpful. And so once again if I had something kind of like a medical tricorder, I could probably do some DNA testing to figure out what group of humans I was around. That would help sort of narrow it down.

**Craig:** It’s stretching the definition of useful, I got to say. I got to say.

**John:** Yeah. Finally, I want to single out some things that Rich wrote. And so he wanted to point out that for all we know we are surrounded by lost and confused time travelers. So think about how many beggars you’ve seen in your life. How many of them are time travelers? How often have you stopped to give them time travel advice? If not, why not? What could hurt? You could approach that guy and say, hey buddy, today is Friday April 28, 2017. And you’re currently located on the corner of Alameda and Prime in Los Angeles, California, United States of America. I hope that helps you, in case you’re lost. Have a nice day.

**Craig:** I don’t think Rich has actually seen any beggars in his life.

**John:** You don’t think that Rich is guessing correctly about sort of how – you don’t think that the US homeless situation is mostly a result of failed time travel.

**Craig:** It’s the result of failed something. But not – you know, generally speaking homeless people aren’t shy about asking you for things. So, like what year is it – I don’t think they’d have a problem with that.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s fair. You know, I think it’s probably a very small subset of the people you see–

**Craig:** [laughs] Probably.

**John:** The people you see who seem confused in life are just time travelers. There could also just be shy time travelers who aren’t in the right place, but they just don’t kind of know how to ask. And so I would say even sometimes here in Paris there have been times where like I kind of needed to ask a question, but I have just no vocabulary for how to actually ask that question. So I just let the question go unasked and therefore unanswered.

**Craig:** Was the question on the order of where am I and what year is this? Or was it more like, where can I find a place that sells Diet Coke? Sorry Coca Light.

**John:** Oh yeah, Coca Zero is my go-to.

**Craig:** Coca Zero.

**John:** Everywhere sells that. But more on the order of, like for instance, I had to call in to make a doctor’s appointment. And that is one of the worst, most frustrating things. It wasn’t actually even a doctor’s appointment. I needed to call to get the doctor on the phone to ask her a question about something. And they didn’t speak English. And it was just beyond my vocabulary level to actually get through that. And a phone call makes it tough, too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s challenging. So, in some ways aren’t we all shy time travelers at times?

**Craig:** No. In no ways. [laughs]

**John:** That was a reach, even for me. But time travel actually played an important role in this next bit.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** With Chris McQuarrie. Because we went through a lot of different times to try to find a way that we could meet up together to all have a conversation. So, me and Chris in person, because Chris is here in Paris shooting Mission: Impossible 6. And you were going to Skype in. And it kept getting moved because their schedule kept changing and they’re shooting French hours. And so a new time was set and you were not there at that time because of this time and math and stuff got changed and you didn’t get the email.

So, Chris and I spoke for most of this time by ourselves, but then you were there for the last part of it. And so people are going to listen to this conversation with me and Chris, but then Craig gets to join in about three-quarters of the way through. And stays with us through our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** And I emerge in the most Craig way possible.

**John:** Yeah. You’re just suddenly there.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** And to make it extra jarring, we only have the backup audio for the last few minutes. So, I honestly don’t know how we’re going to edit it. So, Matthew, have fun. But we’re going to enjoy this conversation with Chris McQuarrie. It was really great and fun to talk about what he was doing and literally he was coming straight from the set of Mission: Impossible 6, so it was fun to see literally what he was doing that day be reflected in the conversation that we had. So, enjoy this.

Chris McQuarrie is a screenwriter whose credits include The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Jack Reacher, and Edge of Tomorrow. He’s also written and directed The Way of the Gun, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and the upcoming sixth installment of Mission: Impossible, currently filming in Paris.

**Chris McQuarrie:** That’s a very good introduction.

**John:** So, welcome to Paris. How far are you into shooting in Paris right now?

**Chris:** We are I believe four weeks in.

**John:** That’s a long time to be shooting in Paris. I’m guessing this is a globe-trotting movie that doesn’t all take place in Paris?

**Chris:** No, it does not. But I was determined, unlike the last movie, to spend more time in one location. I went back and I looked at the first movie, which started in Prague, and realized that they’re in Prague for the first half of the movie. So, I sort of pulled back a little bit on the globe-trotting. I think in Rogue Nation I think we might have been in six countries in the first ten minutes of the movie.

**John:** And if you hold to this production schedule, how many countries will you have reached before you’re done shooting this movie?

**Chris:** We’ll only be in three countries.

**John:** That’s great. There’s economy there.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** You’re saving the studio money.

**Chris:** Sorry, no, that’s not true. We will also be – we’ll be in four countries. There’s a little piece in Germany.

**John:** So I think I remember speaking to you after your first directing gig. You did Way of the Gun, and I remember a very specific story you told me in a van on the way up to Sundance where you were talking about dealing with a prop guy about the bags of money and how much would those bags of money weigh. Like the reality of that much money.

**Chris:** Yeah. That was a Benicio del Toro question. Benicio asked me how much does $15 million weigh. Which I had just arbitrarily picked that number. And Benicio was always asking a lot of questions like that. And it was in the middle of a very busy day and I thought, “Who cares?” And he said, “I care. I’m going to have to carry it. So how much does it weigh?” And in the script it was a bag. It was like a suitcase with $15 million in it. So I went to the prop guy, Ian, and I asked him how much does $15 million weigh? He said, “Oh goodness. OK, I’ll come back to you.”

So he came back and he said, “As you have it in the script, $15 million in tens, twenties, and fifties. I’m assuming that it’s even amounts of those three denominations. It would fill 27 printer paper boxes and weigh something like – it was like 1,200 pounds or 1,500 pounds.” It was huge. It was a van full of money. And I said, oh god, we can’t do that. So, how about thousand dollar bills? And he said, “I knew you’d ask me that. They don’t make thousand dollar bills anymore.”

**John:** They don’t.

**Chris:** There was a time when they made them. And, in fact, they’re so rare, they’re worth more than a thousand dollars. And I said, OK, how about hundreds. And he picked up this huge duffel bag, like something you would go skiing with and said, “Each one of these contains $5 million in hundreds. And I suggest you reduce the amount to $5 million and we just make it the one big bag.” And I said, no, I got a better idea, let’s make it – let’s keep it $15 million and then let Ryan and Benicio figure out how to carry it. And that revolutionized the sequence at the end of the movie when obviously the sequence became all about two guys, three bags of money, and every time you get shot in the arm it costs you $5 million because you can’t carry the money.

**John:** That’s why I wanted you on the podcast today. Because it’s that difference between what you wrote as the screenwriter and what you actually encountered as a director. You had one thing in your head as you were writing that scene and you wrote a number in there, the $15 million was a fascinating number. But it wasn’t important to you as you were writing that like what does that actually look like, because that’s a director’s problem.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** And then once you became the director, you had to really dig in on what that was going to be like. And you found an interesting answer because of that problem the screenwriter had given you.

**Chris:** Yes. And I still do that quite a lot. I still run into things where you just sort of cavalierly throw something out there and then the rubber hits the road and you realize, oh, that doesn’t work at all. Or even things that we very carefully plan. Right now, this chase scene that we’re shooting in this movie. We went and picked all these fabulous locations. And planned this whole chase scene. You previs everything out. And then you put Tom Cruise in the location in a car and he drives through so fast, the location is gone in like ten seconds. And so we’ve learned over the course of shooting this sequence when we get to a location we say, “Well the plan is not going to work, because if we do what we plan we’re just going to blow through here. So we have to kind of think of ways to…” But instead of slowing Tom down, we figure out more creative ways to shoot it.

**John:** So this is in your – coming back to a Mission: Impossible film. So you actually had a sense of what it was going to be like the first time. As you came back to write this movie, did your writing change because you had gone through the process of directing one of these beforehand?

**Chris:** Absolutely. Well, my process changed over the course of three of them. Because I did a rewrite on Ghost Protocol. But my rewrite was an onset rewrite. I came in about ten weeks into a 17-week show. And they had a lot of the action, but the story – it was things like that. Things that had been presented and now suddenly reality was hitting that stuff and it just wasn’t gelling. So when I came to the second – the second time I came in, when I came in on Rogue Nation, I said let’s take all the lessons we learned from that movie, let’s have somebody else write a screenplay and I’ll come in and fix it. And Mission: Impossible kind of has a mind of its own.

That script just blew up as soon as we started making small changes to it. It completely fell apart and we had to then write a whole new script. On this movie, I swore I wouldn’t start a movie without a finished screenplay. And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. But, one of the things I learned from that movie, I developed a much more acute sense of what you were going to cut out of the movie. You start to feel a sense of this – I like this scene, but I can easily cut it out of the movie, so I probably should because I definitely will.

And Rebecca Ferguson’s character is back in this movie and her introduction in the movie was originally this page of dialogue when Ethan runs into her at this event. I also am working with a new cinematographer. And we kept talking about shooting things in longer takes, oners, less editing. And I realized that the scene that I had written for the two of them forced me to cut back and forth. And I was very frustrated in the last movie that every time people started talking, it eventually – the movie just stopped and turned into–

**John:** Coverage.

**Chris:** Shot of – just coverage. Just coverage, coverage, coverage. And I thought how do I get out of that. I want the camera to feel lighter. I just want the scenes to feel lighter. So, I realized this scene between Tom and Rebecca was going to just drag me down into coverage. So I started taking away the lines of the scene that weren’t necessary. And one by one I cut away every line until there was nothing left in the scene. And what happens now is Rebecca just bumps into Tom. Tom sees Rebecca. Rebecca sees Tom. And they have this whole moment. There’s a whole story between the two of them and there’s another person standing there. And she can’t say what she wants to say. He can’t say – and they just behave the scene.

And it was really liberating. So we’ve gone in and done a lot of that. We’ve just sort of chipped away.

**John:** That type of change that you’re talking about, is that a change that happens to Chris McQuarrie screenwriter who is there sort of watching the scene in rehearsals? Or at what point? Or was it still the conversation with your cinematographer that you realized I’m just not – as you’re talking through the scenes, like wow, I can’t actually shoot this scene I want to do. So, I’m going to send this back to the screenwriter and get a revision? Where in the process did that kind of change happen?

**Chris:** That happened from the conversation I had with Rob Hardy, I said I want to do a very different Mission: Impossible. The franchise relies on a different director every time. That’s what it’s sort of become known for. And so I want to maintain that, even though I’m coming back. And to that end, I’m going to defer to you on certain things. And Rob said, OK. I said, so how do you like to shoot? He said, “Well, I tend to shoot pretty much on a 35 and a 50mm lens. Everything.” Which terrified me, because I tend to start at 75mm. And so 30 and 50 I reserve for very specific things. He shoots everything. He covers scenes in it.

What was really interesting was on our second day we were shooting this car chase and we were into the hood mounts on the car chase. And Rob pulled out the 100mm lens. And the 135. And he was sort of shocked to find himself compelled to do it.

**John:** Because we don’t have people who necessarily are going to know the differences between these – the long focal length and the short thing. So, the shorter the lens, that feeling of being very close in their space, in a way, but it’s also the longer lens flattens things, makes people look better. There’s reasons for both type of lens.

**Chris:** If you look at a Tony Scott or a Michael Bay film, they’re all shot on long lens. If you look at a Sidney Lumet film, it’s all shot on wide lens. A wide lens, like a 50mm, is sort of like the human eye. And a 135 is a very long, very sexy lens that really blurs out the background and makes you very, very present. And, of course, you have to get very far back from somebody just to shoot them in a close up. It’s a very intimate lens.

**John:** It’s the real version of the iPhone 7 Portrait Mode, where it’s blurring out the background for you.

**Chris:** That’s exactly right. Well, actually, Portrait Mode in the iPhone 7 is like a 75mm lens. That’s kind of the effect that it gives you. What Rob and I have been doing is – he’s pushing me into wider lenses and the movie is pushing him into longer lenses. And both of our styles, we were determined to come to this with a specific style. And the movie and the action have just said, no, you’re going to do this. But it makes you more aware when you’re writing a scene. If I get into coverage, I’m going to have to start using the 75, because it just makes a nice close up. But if I don’t include a lot of dialogue in that scene, if there’s just behavior, then you actually want a wider lens. And suddenly your movie looks different from the last movie you shot.

So that’s what we’ve been kind of doing is I’ve been taking away the writing, the explicit writing in my storytelling. Again, I was determined to have – in Rogue Nation, in the middle of the movie, there’s a huge data dump. You know, they’ve had all these misadventures and now in the middle of the movie you have to explain why everything that has happened up to now is happening. I was determined not to do that this time. There’s no getting away from it. It’s right on page 60, characters start explaining why were you there and why did you do this and who are you loyal to. But we found ways to do them more elegantly, shorter scenes, to have a little more fun with it.

**John:** Now, if you were just the director or just the screenwriter, there’d be a conversation between the two of you, but there’s just you. So who else do you have these conversations with as you’re trying to figure out the narrative lenses through which you’re going to make these choices? I mean, who are the other people?

**Chris:** Well, obviously Rob Hardy, cinematographer, and first and foremost Tom. And Tom has a very distinct sense of what Mission is. He has a very distinct sense of what Mission isn’t. And Tom communicates in emotional terms. He’s not a guy who comes in and says, no, you have to do this in a Mission: Impossible movie. In fact, the only thing you have to do in a Mission: Impossible movie is Tom has to get a mission somewhere in the beginning of the movie. That trope is kind of the thing that differentiates Mission: Impossible. That’s really his only rule.

**John:** That’s sort of the contract with the audience you’ve made is that there’s going to be a mission assigned at some point.

**Chris:** Yes. And we have a really fun one at the beginning of this one which we’re very excited about. And it takes you in a direction that it hasn’t quite gone before. We’re quite excited about that. But then also getting back to your question, the other actors. The way the movie tends to come together, there’s a pretty good idea what the story is and what the screenplay is. And we hire actors with an idea of where their character is going. But what Tom and I like to do is work with the actor and on the set start to say, “Well, I’m feeling more of this from you.” For example, Vanessa Kirby’s character in the story started as one thing, and during our conversations, not even rehearsals, but costume fittings and props and things like that we started to play with is your character this – is this a good character or is this a bad character? Is it a character we like to see being bad, or is it a character we want to see get her comeuppance? And we played with all these different shades of the character until we found just who she was. And then on the first day we shot with her, that all proved to be wrong.

And Vanessa just found this beautiful tone that she played with Tom. And now I know how to write the rest of the movie.

We’re also very fortunate in that as long as we’re in Paris – we’re here for almost seven weeks, I only have three dialogue scenes in Paris. Everything else is action. All of the – the interior action in Paris will be shot in London. And what that allows me to do is play with the characters on a very, very, very minute scale and start to find what the movie looks like and know that, oh, I don’t have to explain what happens in this scene until the end of the summer when I’m in London. So it allowed us to sort of prioritize what did I really need to know in Paris before I left and what does that tie me into. And what we’re always trying to do is leave ourselves as many outs as possible.

**John:** So while you’re shooting this stuff, you are also cutting. There’s somebody who is getting all this information and cutting. So you have an editor who is working on this and–

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** He or she is giving you some sense of what this movie is looking like and feeling like. Are you going in to watch those cuts of sequences along the way?

**Chris:** Not at this stage. Eddie Hamilton, who cut the last movie, and who cut both Kingsman movies, really brilliant editor, is in London, because he was finishing up Kingsman as this movie started. He’ll join us in New Zealand and then I’ll be back in London. But he calls me – if there’s something particular that is missing from a scene and he knows we’re still at that location, he’ll call me and say get a close up of this, or this thing was out of focus. But for the most part Eddie just calls and says keep shooting.

**John:** Great. Go back ten years ago and did you think you’d be directing big blockbuster movies?

**Chris:** No.

**John:** You were a writer of big movies and I thought you were at the apex of writing those big blockbuster movies. And I sort of assumed you’d keep doing that. So I was surprised that you ended up wanting to do – wanting to direct them. What was the change?

**Chris:** Somebody asked me. I think really it was – well, I directed The Way of the Gun in ’99 in the hopes that The Way of the Gun would be a stepping stone that would – I tried to do what Rian Johnson did with his career. I was going to direct the little movie, and then a slightly bigger movie, and a slightly bigger movie until I got to direct the big movie I wanted to direct. And that first movie was not successful. You could even go so far as to call it a tremendous bomb.

I guess it’s not a tremendous bomb only in that it wasn’t a big enough movie to be considered a tremendous bomb. [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely. I have one of those, too.

**Chris:** Yeah. But people really reacted quite angrily to it. No matter what I did over the next seven years to get another movie off the ground, I couldn’t. And I was working on two fronts. I was working as a rewrite guy and I was writing my own stuff, trying to get it made as a director, and was getting nowhere.

And it wasn’t until Valkyrie when I let go of something that was mine to direct and opted to be the producer on that movie. And as a producer, I learned so much more about both writing and directing then I ever did writing and directing my own movie.

**John:** Talk about the difference. Because when you’re doing Way of the Gun, you had the responsibilities for everything. So we talked about the bag of money. You’re dealing with all the department heads. You’re making those thousand choices a day, which always sort of terrified me about directing. But what was it about producing a big movie like Valkyrie, because it is just a fundamentally different beast for making a smaller movie like Way of the Gun? What was the change in Valkyrie?

**Chris:** Well, yes, the size and scope of the movie and also dealing with Tom Cruise, who at the time I did not know, and couldn’t safely assume anything about him. And so my intention was to take a producing credit for having put the movie together. But not actually go make the movie. I really didn’t want to do it. And Paula Wagner, who was still with Tom at the time, was running United Artists, which was the studio making the movie. Paula took me out to lunch to tell me they were making the movie and said, “Now, I understand you’re producing the film.” My intention was to say, “Well, yes…”

**John:** But you’re really going to do that.

**Chris:** Yeah. But no, I’m not… – And I sensed immediately how I answered that question would have a profound effect on my career. And instead of saying no, I said, “I am now.” And she said, “Good, because I’ve been on set with Tom for the last 25 years. This is the first time I won’t be able to be on set with him. So I want you to be there as Tom’s guy. I need somebody to be there day to day with Tom.”

And so I found myself very suddenly thrust into this position, which I had never anticipated. And Tom quite graciously took me under his wing. And he understood that my relationship with Bryan Singer was such that I could communicate with Bryan more effectively and probably with more force than Tom could. It allowed Tom to have a very comfortable relationship with Bryan. He never had to push Bryan. All he had to do was create with Bryan. And then he would come to me and say, “Hey, here’s what I think we should be doing.” So Tom and I worked together very well on that movie. And that sort of translated into the next thing, and the next thing.

The next job was we worked on a draft of The Tourist together, which is how I ended up on that movie. He dropped out of The Tourist and then called me up to Ghost Protocol. And he called me up to Ghost Protocol after reading Jack Reacher, which was not something to which he was originally attached.

**John:** And Jack Reacher was a project you adapted from the book originally?

**Chris:** Yeah. Don Granger, who was also at UA, and who had been at Cruise-Wagner before that, he’s at Skydance now. Don Granger saw the writing on the wall. Saw that UA was not going to be a going concern. And he said I’ve got this series of books at Cruise-Wagner and I think this is the best prospect at getting a franchise made. So, he offered me the movie and I said I’ll do it on the condition that the studio offers me the movie to direct. I’m not going to ask for permission to direct movies anymore. I’ve been doing it for ten years and getting nowhere. And they did. So I handed Tom that script to read as the producer. And he called me the next day and said, “Script is great. I need you to get on a plane and come up to Vancouver right now. We’re working on Mission: Impossible and I need your help.”

So now I was thrust into a very big movie, bigger than Valkyrie, and it was a movie that more than halfway through the show was in a critical state of confusion as to what the story was. And having worked on Valkyrie and having had that crash course in moviemaking, I now understood, OK, here are the resources I have. Here are the scenes that have been shot. Here are the scenes that haven’t been shot. Here’s the sets they haven’t built. Here’s the sets they haven’t struck. Here are the roles that they haven’t cast yet.

And so I had to make a puzzle out of things you had and things you didn’t have yet. And I could only reshoot what I still had sets for. Like sets they hadn’t torn down. And it gave me this sort of creative puzzle to solve. My first six days of my one week on the movie – I was originally only supposed to go for a week – my first six days were just meeting with department heads and saying, OK, well these are the sets you still have. Can I get rid of this set? Can I move these resources somewhere else if I have this idea? Is there something you can build? And so that really gave me, without ever having to stop and think about how daunting the task was, it gave me this fundamental grassroots understanding of how those big movies functioned. So that when it came my time to do it, I had a slightly better – I had a better understanding of the allocation of resources. And it’s very interesting that that career trajectory is the exception and not the rule. For me to have made an $8.5 million movie, didn’t make another movie for 12 years. That was a $60 million movie. With Valkyrie in the middle, which was like $70 million. But I wasn’t directing. And that the budgets continued to get bigger over time, now what you have is a guy directs a $5 million. The studio says, “Hey, that movie cost $5 million, made $60 million. Let’s give him $100 million and he’ll make a billion.”

That’s a very, very, very hard turn for a lot of filmmakers to make. And now I have another career, which is coming on to those movies and supporting that director and saying, OK, so now you’re making your big movie, here’s what’s important. Because what happens with a lot of those guys is they haven’t gone through the trial by fire where they realize there’s only so much reinventing the wheel can take. They’re still coming at it like an indie filmmaker, but somebody has given them $200 million and a giant franchise. They don’t really want to believe that they’re making mass entertainment and they struggle against that. And I’ve seen two kinds of filmmakers in that. There are the filmmakers who very quickly listen to reason and adapt and survive. And then there are the ones who just their movies get taken away from them.

**John:** Yeah. We can think of the ones whose movies got taken away, or the really bad scenarios there.

**Chris:** Yeah.

**John:** So, if you are coming in to be a director whisperer on a project, at what point is there a realization that there’s going to be a problem? Like are they bringing you in right when that person is hired on to say like this person is going to be a consigliere to you? Or it’s like something has gone horribly awry and now let’s get Chris McQuarrie there to help?

**Chris:** There’s a sweet spot I call 4-in and 4-out. If you’re four weeks out from shooting, or four weeks into shooting, you’re in this zone where you’re so freaked out you’ll do anything the doctor says. If you’re any deeper into production, you kind of get entrenched and you get blinders on and you’re afraid to change anything. And if you’re too far out, you’re afraid to change anything because you think, oh, it’s too daunting a task. And there was one movie in particular that’s coming out. I’m very interested to see it. I won’t say its name. I begged the director not to go in the direction he was going. Because I really did believe in the material and I thought it was wonderful. And there was one specific plot element that completely degraded the main character of the film. And I said if you just take this thing away, your movie will become really powerful.

But there was a visual idea. Either it was clearly an obsession with this particular idea, and there was a refusal to recognize that this very idea that gives you one visual aspect of the movie is going to tear the movie down. And he said, “Well, it’s just too much work.” And I said, “You’ve got nine months. You don’t realize how many times you can reinvent this movie.” And more importantly, because of the movies I’d worked on, I come into a movie like that and say, “I’m not going to change anything about your movie. I’m not going to change the sets. I’m not going to introduce new characters. I’m going to take the resources you have and kind of reconfigure your movie to give it a more emotional journey.” Because that’s really all I care about.

It took me a long time to learn that. I was an information guy. And it was what I was telling the audience. I was a writer who was all about dialogue. And I’ve since learned about emotional drag. That’s my catchphrase.

**John:** That 4 weeks in/4 weeks out thing is really interesting because you look at these filmmakers who are coming from – like you and I on our first movies, like those were four weeks, you’re almost done with your movie on a $5 movie.

**Chris:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it’s a very different thing. But you know we’ve both also been involved with these movies that just shoot for forever. And you and I both have helped out on those movies where you come in where the train is already running, but generally if we’re coming in as a screenwriter we’re just there to fix sort of the visible screenwriting problems. And so we’re not doing the thing of what you’re talking about with Mission: Impossible where you actually had to sort of talk to all the department heads and really get their buy-in.

A couple times we’ve had guests on the show, Drew Goddard, or Damon Lindelof recently, who talked about the big opportunity, the thing that changed everything was coming into a project that was in crisis. It was, you know, the TV show that was going down, that didn’t have any more scripts. In this case it was a movie that was sort of swirling around. And that’s also been true in my career. It’s the editing rooms where they couldn’t find the movie that I could come back in and actually really help.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** And those are the moments. And if you haven’t had both the courage to step up when those things happen, but also the education to sort of know what are the right questions to ask, you know, how to push for the best thing. It can be really daunting. And if I were that filmmaker that you’re coming in to help, I would be scared to ask for help. Because that’s an admission of failure. That’s an admission that someone made a mistake in hiring me to do this job.

**Chris:** Yes. It’s the moment in Terminator when he says, “Come with me if you want to live.” You walk in and you say to that director, “Here’s what’s happening on your movie and here’s what’s going to happen.”

There was one director in particular, his movie is in trouble, he was four weeks in. There was going to be a big change. The script was going to be gutted. There was a lot of panic. And I said, “Can I just go in and talk to him for half an hour before you guys all come in so that he doesn’t feel like I’m the studio hatchet man?” And I have had that happen, too. I have had studios try to sort of manipulate that. They try to position me as being the hatchet man and I won’t do it. I’ll go to bat for the director every time.

So I walked in and I told him here’s what’s going to happen. They’re going to come in and they’re going to say these are the things we want in the movie. And a lot of them are ideas that I have suggested for how to fix your movie. I’m going to strongly urge you to say, “I’ve heard everything that Chris has suggested. I don’t like any of it. I don’t think any of it works. But if you think that’s what the movie needs, I look forward to seeing how it turns out.” I said, what you will then do is you will put the responsibility that has been placed on you onto the producers. And the producers will feel that you are working to make their movie. The studio will feel that you’re working to serve what they ultimately need served. And he didn’t do it.

And we had another meeting and half an hour before I went in and said, “Now remember, just say this, and the pressure will come off of you.” And he didn’t do it again. And eventually everything he was afraid would manifest itself manifested itself. And I don’t even think by the time he was through the process he even recognized that his movie had sort of been taken over. His worst nightmare sort of happened. That was the other thing. When you’re talking about working on those movies on those – those movies that are falling apart, you have an emotional detachment that you wouldn’t have if it was your own story.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Chris:** You’re able to come into it and say, “Well, there’s a clarity that I have on everybody else’s movies that I will never have on my own movie.” I’m dying right now in the middle of Mission: Impossible, trying to figure out the turn on page 70. I know what happens in Act Three. I just can’t – know what’s supposed to happen, but I can’t quite figure out how to get there. If it wasn’t my movie, I would parachute in and just be like, oh, you just have to do this, and you know, and it’s just so much easier when it’s not your baby.

**John:** Can I ask you, a thing that’s happened to me over only the past few years where I will get on something that I will get stuck and I just can’t get past it. And I would never ask for help, but I have started asking for help. And so like just this last week with this book I’m doing, there was this one thing that I couldn’t get to work. And I was like you know who would actually know the answer to this thing, my friend Lisa. She will know the answer to this. And so I just called Lisa and I described the situation. And she absolutely had the answer. Do you call anybody? Do you bring anybody else onto–?

**Chris:** I call everybody. I’m going to call you right after this. [laughs] I have specific people that I call all the time. And we all kind of get stumped together. Because the problem with something like Mission, the action is dictating the narrative. And I was determined to change that on this movie. And I started with that. I started with more of an emotional story for this character and more of a character arc within it. It’s definitely more of an emotional journey for Ethan Hunt in that movie. But then the action comes in. And the ambitions of that action, so there’s a sequence at the end of the movie which is fabulous. It’s never been done. It’s all photo real. It’s going to be incredible. You then have to create the contrivances for that sequence to happen. And then there’s only a few locations in the world where you can shoot that sequence. So suddenly you find yourself going, well, I have this resource and that resource, and I have to put them in my movie. Why are they in my movie? And now I’ve got to explain that.

So suddenly you find yourself writing. And you know how it is. Especially when you’re writing for studios, you get to a place where you go, god, it would be – I know what I should write. If I didn’t have to turn right here and I could turn left, I’d know where this movie would go. And that is kind of the – that’s the thing you’re always struggling.

**John:** You’re trying to find a way to finesse it so it feels like it’s a natural turn, that it’s not just – and now we cut to a new sequence, because we all know the directors who would just like, OK, this is my big – on the wall here I have all the different sort of sequences and like find a way to connect them all together. Go. And those are the jobs I despise and ultimately get out of because I don’t want to just be the person who is stringing those things together.

**Chris:** Oh, it’s soul-sucking work. It really is.

**John:** It pays well, but it kills you. And you’re always just…

**Chris:** Yeah.

**John:** You’re responsible for just creating a trailer for the moments that are happening in front of you. It’s maddening.

**Chris:** Yes. Well, it’s funny you say that, because that’s another thing that we think about now. That since just before Rogue Nation, the lesson I learned, having had fights with the studio about the marketing of Jack Reacher, my first meeting on Rogue Nation I just went to marketing and said, “Tell me what to do, tell me what you need so that I’m not fighting with you.” And that has evolved for me. So that in this movie, Tom and I have a rule, you give marketing one shot a day. Every day you get a trailer shot. It’s like doesn’t matter–

**John:** That’s great.

**Chris:** And you look at it and go, yep, that could be in a trailer. OK, send it away. And then they’re happy. They’re invested in your movie as opposed to you’re fighting them. But we also know that movies like this need lines like, “You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond.” You know, you just – I don’t know what that means in the context of the rest of the movie. I don’t ever particularly feel that he is a kite in a hurricane in that movie. But the sexiness of that line in a trailer is really effective. And so you develop a sense for where those lines might go in a movie. And we have little placeholders.

There’s a scene between Tom Cruise and Sean Harris in this movie and we have a blank space there were it’s like that’s where we know the villain is going to say something that is going to communicate the story of the movie in that one sound bite. I never really thought that way until this franchise.

**John:** Well, if you think about people who run TV shows, they have to think about this episode of television that they’re making, but they have to be thinking of the whole series. They have to be thinking of like how am I going to keep this thing on the air. And it sort of sounds like part of what you’re doing is that realization that you’re responsible not only for this two hours of entertainment, but you’re responsible for this giant ship that is going to be sailing through its berth and the success of that. And so it’s not just these two hours of film, it’s everything around it. It’s this universe of marketing around it that you also have to be aware of. And from an early time. You can’t just like make your movie then get involved with the marketing.

**Chris:** Yes. And what is Mission. It’s the life of whatever this thing is, so that your movie leaves it so that another chapter in the franchise can exist. And I guess that’s where jumping the shark comes in. You know, you worry all the time. Am I taking this in a way that it can’t go? And we had a big conversation about tone. Because Brad Bird really changed the tone of the franchise and Rogue Nation embraced that tone completely. At the beginning of this I said to Tom, “I don’t think we can do that three in a row. I think now it’s going to become cute. I think we need to take it another direction still.” And we did.

But now we find ourselves going, you know, are we going where Bond went where Bond became–

**John:** Dark and serious.

**Chris:** Serious. It’s another kind of tone. Which, by the way, has not hurt their bottom line at all. They’ve really found their place. But we can’t go there. We were sort of laughing because we were looking at Rogue Nation and saying, “Well thanks, Bond, for not doing that anymore, so we’ll do it.” Now we’re looking at it and going, “But we can’t keep doing that.” We suddenly hit that same wall and understood why Bond went the way they did. And we’re at this kind of emotional crossroads with the franchise saying well how dramatic can you take Mission? It’s not going to a dark place. It’s going to a more emotionally dramatic place.

**John:** When we were making Charlie’s Angels, when we started making the second one, I talked to the team and I described it as like I really want to approach this as we made an amazing pilot and now we’re going to make that first episode of the TV show that actually – of the series that really is the series. Where we sort of learned everything from the pilot and now we’re going to make the most amazing one. And we didn’t. Spoiler. It was as much of a trouble and more so than the first one.

But that was sort of the fantasy. You want to be able to make the sort of movie series. Marvel is able to do it remarkably well. DC, yet to see whether they’re going to be able to make a franchise-y series out of the things they’re trying to do. But it’s laudable. You understand why people want to do it.

**Chris:** Well, DC has a tough road to hoe because they’ve got to do something different than Marvel. Marvel has staked a claim so strongly in a very specific tone. And Marvel has Kevin Feige, who is not a traditional studio head. He’s not a traditional producer. He is a producer of the old school. That’s what producers used to be like in Hollywood. They were the guys who came in and said this is the movie. I guess the closest analogue in something other than comic book movies is somebody like a Scott Rudin who really he owns the material and he is a filmmaker in his own right and has specific control.

Warner Bros has to do something to differentiate itself from that. And what is that? There’s Christopher Nolan’s Batman, but that’s not a universe. That’s one character. Whereas Iron Man and the Marvel universe sort of set the tone for all those other movies. I mean, if you had told me even a year before it came out that Captain America would work as a movie, or that Thor would work as a movie, that I’d find those characters appealing, that I’d actually find Captain America one of the more appealing characters in the Marvel universe. I just would have laughed at you. And we had grown up seeing so many bad attempts inn these really cheesy TV movie ways.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen some of those Captain Marvel movies or–

**John:** They’re amazing.

**Chris:** Oh my god. Oh my god. So, it will be very interesting to see how DC defines themselves.

**John:** So, switching just for our last topic here, we just finished the negotiations for the WGA and so there’s not going to be a strike.

**Chris:** Thank god.

**John:** What would have happened if a strike had occurred while you were making this movie? Like what do you do?

**Chris:** Well, we had an emergency plan in place, assuming that if there was going to be a strike. On the day that the contract ran out, we were hedging our bets and saying there will probably be a ten-day extension. There wasn’t the feeling that it was acrimonious and that a strike was just going to happen that moment. So, I had a friend who is a writer friend of mine who I have worked with on other movies and he was on deck. And if there was an extension, he was ready to get on a plane, fly out, and during that ten days we were going to generate as many pages as we possibly could. And then we figured the lights were going to go out.

**John:** So you get past your page 70 thing. You just have something you can shoot at page 70.

**Chris:** You had to have something you could shoot.

**John:** Our friend Aline Brosh McKenna calls that the Rocky Shoals. It’s that point where the movie is transitioning from sort of one thing before it becomes that third act.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** And it’s often a challenge in scripts, but it’s often a challenge in cuts. So I sympathize.

**Chris:** Yeah. It’s funny, on the last one, that wasn’t the problem. On the last one it was how does this movie end. I know the ending of the movie quite vividly. I don’t know – there’s this weird middle bit that’s happening in London. And I know what the last five pages of it are. I know there’s a confrontation that Ethan has at the end of that, which is this scene that I really love. And what happened was when we sensed that the strike was coming, I had all of these action scenes that had been storyboarded and worked out and in many cases prevised, but no one had ever written a page of those sequences.

There was something like 30 pages of material that existed in concept. We were building sets and rigs and all sorts of things. I just didn’t have them in script form. So I had this friend – the storyboard artist called him and said here’s everything we’re doing. And he took that 30 pages off of my docket. He wasn’t creating anything, but he was writing it in script form so that I could more quickly rewrite it. And he wrote this one scene, but not in any way, shape, or form the way I would have shot it, but inspired this idea where I was like, oh my god, I’ve got this really fun idea. So we know what that sequence is now. Or at least we know how that sequence ends. I just don’t know how it begins.

**John:** One of the things that was a big topic of the WGA negotiations was the move to shorter seasons and sort of how writers were being held for a very long time on these shorter seasons. And their writing fees was being applied against producing fees. But we see also a change happening in features where there are these mini rooms where they are bringing together a bunch of screenwriters, some really high levels, some newbies, and they’re working through a giant property. So they’ll take–

**Chris:** Transformers.

**John:** Transformers was an early example of that, where they’ll say, OK, we’re going to spend four weeks and figure out Transformers and generate, you know, a TV series and three movies and we’re going to figure out what this all is. Where do you see yourself fitting into that universe?

**Chris:** I believe you can create all of the Transformers stuff you want. You can build out the whole universe. You can finish all the screenplays. It goes back to the very beginning of the conversation we were having. When the rubber hits the road, that’s all going to change. They’re going to call you. They’re going to call me. They’re going to call Drew. They’re going to call somebody in at some point and go, “None of this works. It was all great in theory, but we just suddenly…”

An actor drops out. Or the budget changes. And things happen. What I try to impress upon writers going into it now, I believe the future belongs to the writer-producer. That is not to say you have to be named a producer on the movie. But that you need to be able to function on a level where you are – you need to understand editing. You need to understand elements of physical production. The more you understand that, the more valuable you will be to those people. The more you’re selling yourself and not your writing.

Writers right now – and I did it for a long, long time – tend to believe I’m going to write this script and the script is the commodity. It’s not. It’s your ability to write a script that is the commodity. The truth of the matter is, if everybody could write they’d do it. They wouldn’t call us. The fact that the strike was going to happen and had people nervous, if we went on strike, movies just – nobody would write it. It’s a lonely, miserable, very difficult particular skill.

And everybody thinks they can do it. I think the same way everybody feels like playing guitar looks like it would be easy.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. Yeah, just pick it up. Just strumming.

**Chris:** Well, yeah, you teach me the basics. You teach me a couple of chords and I’m like, oh, this is very easy. Then show me Van Halen and say do that. And, by the way, do it with two weeks before you’re going on stage. In those writer’s rooms and things like that, this thing with the television seasons that they’re dealing with now. The nature of television is changing and it created a really prickly situation in this atmosphere with the strike.

I can see the studios looking at it and saying, “Well, yeah, now there are only ten episodes. There used to be 22 and now there’s ten. Why should we pay you more if there’s only ten?” And we’re saying, “But wait, you’re taking us off the market for this much time.”

The studio’s argument is going to be, “Go and create your own show.” It’s going to thin the herd out. It’s going to define who those writer-producers are. And I think what it’s going to do is it’s going to shape writer’s opinions of themselves. Writers have been trained to believe that they are simultaneously necessary and totally dependent. That you can’t make a movie without a screenplay, but I can’t get my screenplay made unless you buy it and validate me. And now you’re at a place where you can be more a part of the process.

Here’s the dirty little secret, and it’s something you know better than anybody. A lot of directors don’t know how to direct. They simply don’t know how to do it. They have some specific skill or some specific vision, or a team around them that helped them, but of great many of them don’t really understand the fundamentals of storytelling as much as they understand some specific visual style.

As a writer who understands editing, you will be invaluable to that director. You may not get the glory. You may not get the credit, but if those things aren’t important to you, if being valuable is what’s important to you, you will always work. And that was really the big change for me in my career. I wanted very much to be in control of my own destiny. And by letting go of that control, my destiny has become that much more in my control.

You were asking me at the beginning, you know, how did you – did you ever expect that you would be directing these blockbusters. I very distinctly remember when I was trying to get Valkyrie made, and I thought Valkyrie was going to be a little movie, no one would read it. It didn’t matter who I was or where I came from. They’d hear it’s about the German generals who, and they were done. They didn’t care.

When Bryan Singer attached himself, people were then offering to make it without having to read it. And I had a very painful realization which was I’ll never be at the level to direct the things that I really want to do. Booth and Valkyrie and The Last Mission and things like that. All my history stuff. Because I’m never going to direct X-Men. And X-Men gets you to a level where you can step down to do a Valkyrie. I’m just never going to get there. So I let go of that dream. And in doing that I became a producer on Valkyrie, which led to rewriting Mission: Impossible, which led to Jack Reacher, Edge of Tomorrow. And on Edge of Tomorrow, Tom said, “You should direct the next Mission.”

So I never aimed for that target. I just showed up at work saying how can I help you make your film. How can I help you make your movie better? And not worrying about where the path was taking me. And at the beginning of this process, there was a thing in the press the movie fell apart. The movie was shut down for a while. It was shut down over contract stuff. And when it did, I felt this very strange relief. First, I was freaked out, for a minute. But I remember hanging up the phone. I got the call and I was in New Hampshire at a friend’s house, where we visit them in the summer, and I was in the same room that I had been in ten years to the week when Bryan Singer called and said he wanted to make Valkyrie. And my career took off again.

And I thought to myself, wow, that was – I’ve been working with Tom for ten years. We’ve made nine movies in ten years in some capacity. I’ve worked on nine movies with him. That’s a pretty good run. You can’t take that for granted. That part of your life is over now. Because Tom is going to go off and do something and I’m going to go off and do something else. And who knows when our stars will align again.

And for those two weeks, I was looking at a completely different life for myself. So that when Tom called me back up two weeks later and said, “Hey, we’re back on,” I went, I don’t know. I don’t really know about it. I’m not sure that’s what my future is. I had gone back to London to pack up my apartment. Because I had moved my family back to LA. My girls were in school. Two weeks into school I get the call that we’re back. And he goes, “Let’s go for a walk and we’ll talk about it.” We go walk around Hyde Park. It’s one of the reasons Tom loves London. He can just go out and walk places and everybody is very respectful.

And we talked all about it. And my apprehension and sort of the catharsis I’d been through. And he said, he goes, “Look, you’ll do whatever you want to do. You want to make this movie, make this movie. You don’t want to make it, don’t make it.” He goes, “I’ll always work with you. We’ll work on something else together. This is a go movie. That’s all I’m going to say. I don’t know what else you got going on, but this movie is going.” And that’s a really hard thing to achieve. And he was right. The other stuff that I wanted to do wasn’t immediately happening. Still isn’t happening. So, I got back on the train.

And now when I go to work in the morning, there’s days you get up and you don’t want to go. Don’t want to go to set. You’re not ready to face the material. And that the lesson I’ve learned is the days that I don’t want to go turn out to be the best days. Those are the days where you’re just like, “I don’t know what to shoot, and I don’t know how to do it.” And you find yourself creating this shot. And it builds, and builds, and builds. And you end up just starting with a problem and you walk away from it, just shot by shot, having created one neat little moment in your movie. That’s just a great feeling.

And the fact that these movies afford you the opportunity to do that on such a grand scale is really, really fun.

**John:** Comparing that to your life as a screenwriter, there are definitely days where you or I, we don’t want to sit down and write that thing. It’s almost always torture to actually get me at the computer.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** But at least with the director, you have a call time on the sheet. Like someone is going to pick you up and take you there. And then you’re going to be responsible for those decisions. And that’s terrifying and there are definitely days I don’t want to get in the van, but once you’re there, there’s a whole bunch of people there who are there to help you. And there’s at least some plan for what you are supposed to do. There was some assignment you were given. Like this is the thing that is theoretically on the call sheet. So, we got this location, we got these people, it should be something like this. And you can figure it out.

And, you know, some of my favorite days in directing were things had gone horribly wrong, or there’s a rainstorm and it won’t match cut into anything else, but we have to shoot this. It’s the only day on this location. And you just make it work. It’s going back to remembering like, OK, what is this actually supposed to be about. What is here that we can use to do this and how can we sort of make this problem seem like a solution?

**Chris:** Screenwriting is pushing a rock up a hill. And directing is running downhill with the rock behind you. [laughs] That’s really what it is. It’s going, and it’s going to crush you if you don’t run. But, also, the other night we were – I think this was in our first or second week of shooting. We were at the Grand Palais. We had this big sequence at the Grand Palais. We had all these extras. And extras in France get paid quite a bit of money. So, you had to pick and choose what nights you had a lot of extras. And finally we were shooting outside the Grand Palais. There’s a scene where Tom and Vanessa Kirby and another character come – and Henry Cavill all come running out of the Grand Palais.

And there’s a big event inside. And that night there’s 150 extras. And we put the camera in front of the building and Tom and Vanessa and Henry come walking out and they’re just like three people and 150 extras barely – it’s just deserted. And you came from this big event inside to suddenly – it’s so big. There was nothing you can do.

And the cinematographer loved the building. And he said, “But this is great. This is a great shot of the Grand Palais.” And I said, “But it’s deserted. How do we make 150 people look like a thousand people?” And instead of shooting the outside of the building looking in, we went inside the building and put a long lens on the camera and created a narrow funnel of people. And had the actors rushing through the door with all the extras coming towards you. And it turned into this – the fun of it was we were shooting Mission: Impossible, but we were making an independent film. Where like I only have 150 people. What do I do to make this shot big?

And we had the best time that night. That was like really one of the more fun attacks we had. It was great.

**John:** So, at the end of our podcast we often do a One Cool Thing where we recommend one thing that people should check out. My One Cool Thing this week is a new tool from Google called AutoDraw, which is actually just madness and wonderful. So, it’s just a sketching program, but you can just freehand draw with the cursor and draw something that looks like a terrible horse and it will provide good line images of a horse, or it will guess basically what you’re trying to draw and give you a much better version of it.

**Chris:** That sounds crazy.

**John:** It’s just our modern computers doing smart things. And so it’s just Autodraw.com.

**Craig:** I’m going to stump AutoDraw. I guarantee you. I’m that bad. I have the drawing skills of a stroke victim. There’s no way. I’m going to try it. I’m going to try it. I’m going to try and draw a horse and I guarantee you it’s going to send back, “We’re you thinking of a transaxle? We’re you thinking of a pill?”

**John:** It pulls up along the top a bunch of images that sort of could be like what you’re trying to draw, so at least you get a sense of like what it thought you might be trying to draw. Like earlier today I was trying to draw a skeleton, but it kept giving me like lobster people. And it’s like, you know, I could see why they thought I was trying to draw a lobster.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, lobster people are certainly more frequently drawn than skeletons. So that makes sense. I think I’m going to try this and Google is just going to direct me to a site, You May Be Having a Stroke. And that’s useful.

My One Cool Thing this week is a game, a little tiny game. The best games for your phone are the little tiny stupid ones that do one thing. They don’t try and do a whole lot of things. Remember Dots, remember that one? Where you’d make the square with the dots? Did you ever play that?

**John:** Two Dots, yeah.

**Craig:** Two Dots. There you go. Two Dots. That was fun because it was incredibly simple. Well, so these folks have come up with a game called Zip Zap. I hate that name. I hate it. But, the game is so brilliant. It’s the simplest thing. You have basically – they’ll show you a couple of little girders. They look like little Lego type girders. And one of them if you tap on the screen – no swiping. Swiping does nothing. If you tap on the screen, you can make one of them contract in a certain way. And the whole point of this is to just move this thing around towards a goal.

It’s so simple. And at first you’re like, this is great, because I’m good at it. And then very quickly you’re like, oh, god, oh no. But it’s all brilliant. The level designs are all brilliant. And it’s the kind of game where you can just – it’s very level-based. I’m on like 3-16 right now. Great time waster. And it’s free.

**John:** Yay. We like that. I actually made it to the third screen of Zip Zap and gave up because it got to be really maddening. There’s a lot of times where like you’re trying to flip it in a certain way and then you’re going to – it’s like my daughter flipping the water bottle stuff. It just drove me crazy after a while.

**Craig:** Is your daughter doing the spinner thing? The Fidget Spinner?

**John:** The Fidget Spinner has not made it to France yet. And thank goodness.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s here, buddy.

**Chris:** The thing I was going to tell you about is the Fidget Cube.

**John:** Oh, he’s got the Fidget Cube.

**Craig:** Oh, Fidget Cube. Yeah.

**Chris:** Somebody had just given me this as a gift. Here is the Fidget Cube.

**John:** Can I get a picture of you holding the Fidget Cube to prove we were here?

**Chris:** You can take a picture of me holding the Fidget Cube. Somebody gave this to me on set and I had read about it as–

**John:** It was a Kickstarter, yeah.

**Chris:** And like most things on Kickstarter, I go that looks cool. That’ll never get made. And sure enough, it did. Somebody gave this to me on set and it has been with me every day since. And when I’m nervous, which you quite often are on the set, you’re just – time is getting more and more horrible and you’re just getting agitated, I am constantly playing with this thing. And it’s actually quite satisfying. Have you seen one of these?

**John:** I haven’t seen it in person. But I’ll play it.

**Craig:** The Fidget Cube, I think wasn’t the initial application for people with ADHD?

**John:** Yeah. But we all sort of have something.

**Chris:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, no, no, McQuarrie has it. There’s no sort of.

**Chris:** I don’t know what you would describe what I have as.

**Craig:** It’s advanced. It’s AADHD.

**Chris:** But my problem isn’t the hyper activity part. I don’t think you can call me hyper active. I’m actually hyper lazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what you have? You have Attention Deficit Hypo Active Disorder. So you don’t move around, but you also don’t have an attention span. It’s perfect. Actually that’s a perfect director thing because you sit in your chair, but then you’re like show me something new.

**Chris:** Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

**John:** I meant to ask you, are you shooting French hours while you’re in Paris?

**Chris:** We are. Yes. The ten-hour days, you mean?

**John:** Yeah. Is it as amazing as everyone says?

**Craig:** Love those.

**Chris:** Well, we’ve always done it. We did it on the last Mission: Impossible as well. We were in London, but shooting French hours. It’s great. You don’t lose that momentum that you do with breaking for lunch. And an hour is really two hours. You don’t think about it in those terms. The difference is that when the day is done, most days I get in the car and I have real energy all through the day. I get in the car to drive home and I am unconscious before I get back to the hotel. You just feel like you’ve been in combat. You’re just drained.

But then when you wake up again, then it’s very hard to get to sleep. It’s really – it’s quite unusual.

**John:** But you came from the set right to recording a podcast, so thank you very much for doing that.

**Chris:** Yeah. But this thing is engaging. Sitting down and talking about ideas and talking about movies and stuff like that, I could stay here till four o’clock in the morning. It’s when I walk out this door, halfway up the steps I’m going to pass out.

**John:** All right. That’s our show for this week. As always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you an outro, you can send a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions. For short questions, I am on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Are you on Twitter?

**Chris:** I’m on Twitter.

**John:** What is your Twitter handle?

**Chris:** I am @ChrisMcQuarrie on Twitter. And Christopher McQuarrie on Instagram.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Chris:** Although I’m not kind of doing all that much on Twitter anymore, because it’s become – I put pictures on there, but Twitter has become a very angry, militant place.

**John:** Yes.

**Chris:** Everyone is an activist.

**John:** Craig goes to war every day.

**Chris:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Every day. Every day.

**Chris:** When you make a comment, you make a joke about the global marketplace and are accused of being a racist, it was time to [unintelligible]. So now I just put pictures on Twitter. And I find that Instagram is a much more–

**John:** Nice and calm.

**Chris:** Welcoming place. And I think because it’s not words, it’s images, that’s much more. Anyway.

**John:** Anyway. We are also on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. But don’t look us up individually because I don’t friend anybody on Facebook.

You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. And that’s also where you find the transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs.

You can find all those back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

Chris McQuarrie, thank you so much for being on the show this week. This was amazing.

**Chris:** Thank you. And how cool that we’re doing this in Paris?

**John:** It’s in Paris. I live here.

**Chris:** Because you live here. Paris is fantastic. You’re an ex-pat.

**John:** I am an ex-pat for two more months.

**Chris:** Awesome.

Links:

* [Chris McQuarrie](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003160/)
* [Valkyrie Official Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YppIQUiE9Y)
* [Mission Impossible 5 – Rogue Nation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onq_miYqUXU)
* [AutoDraw](https://www.autodraw.com/)
* [Zip Zap](http://www.kamibox.de/zipzap)
* [Fidget Cube](https://thefidgetcube.co/?gclid=CjwKEAjwxurIBRDnt7P7rODiq0USJADwjt5Da6-oLQ0gMOen21lE4tKuCYRXxEeJL4lTGVx1pKASohoCcF3w_wcB)
* [Chris McQuarrie](https://twitter.com/chrismcquarrie) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [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_300.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 297 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we’ll be looking at the future of James Bond, script-reading robots, and the realities of overhauling a movie in the editing room. But first, we have quite a bit of follow up.

**Craig:** So much follow up. Let us follow it up. Two weeks ago, Malcolm and I answered a listener question about ellipses in dialogue. And you’d think, John, that that would have gone smoothly. But, no, no.

**John:** No. There were pauses.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there was an issue. And the issue was raised by big shot movie director, former Scriptnotes guest, friend of the podcast, friend of me and you, Mari Heller. And this is what she wrote. “I totally disagree with Craig.” John, I’m tempted to just end the follow up there.

**John:** That basically does it. On any issue, she probably disagrees with you.

**Craig:** Probably. And I feel like it’s going to happen a lot. But no, she says, “I totally disagree with Craig. Craig said that actors don’t worry about the punctuation of a line and it won’t affect the rhythm of their performance. I just finished working on a movie with two wonderful actors, who had a lot of respect for the script. Often we would get into conversations about how the script was written and where the punctuation was guiding them. They took each clue laid out as a guide and tried, unless we decided to dismiss it, to follow the breadcrumbs that the script gave them.

“What’s more, when I got into the edit I realized the editor was also using the details of the script as a guide in creating her assembly. If a beat were indicated, or it was written that an actor hesitated or trailed off, she went to great lengths to find takes that matched the script. I believe when we write scripts all of our choices, like punctuation and parentheticals should be viewed as clues for our collaborators about the rhythms we intend.”

**John:** All right, Mari, thank you so much for writing back with us. First off, it sounded like you had a great experience with really dedicated actors and editors. I would say that your experience has not been classically my experience. But, Craig, I’d love to hear what you think.

**Craig:** I agree. I think this speaks very highly of Mari and her cast and her editor. More often, what I find is that people will come to me – this actually happens all the time – people will come to me and say, “There’s a mistake. There’s a problem.” “What?” “Blah, blah, blah says so and so’s name like they know them, but they haven’t yet met.” “Yes they have.” “No they haven’t.” “Yes, see, here. On this page.” “Oh, you know what? When we did it that day we did it a little differently, so they didn’t meet.” “OK, fine, I understand. However, the script is full of clues.” It’s full of them.

Editors, in particular, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve sat in an editing room and watched something and I’m like, well, why not just do it this way. And they’re like, “Ooh…” and I said, “You know, that’s the way it is in the huge binder next to your keyboard that has this clue book.”

So, the truth is what is Mari is describing is like writer heaven. People are actually paying attention. I guess what you and I were saying about punctuation is given the general state of affairs where people don’t, it’s probably not that much of a thing. But, yeah, ideally it would be.

**John:** Yeah. So, I do like your description of punctuation and parentheticals being the clues that you are leaving to the next people to touch your thing. And it’s great that she has the ability to not only direct this project, but also hire really smart people who are looking for those clues. So, congratulations once again Mari Heller.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yep. So I was there for the first part of that episode and we addressed a listener questioner about why there was so little non-penetrative sex in movies and TV. Basically where are the handies and blowies? And so while we were having that discussion we left out like one really obvious movie which was Moonlight, which features a very crucial handy there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a mistake.

**John:** We weren’t thinking clearly. We were recording this late. I was in London. I lost a microphone. But there is an obvious Oscar-winning movie that has a non-penetrative sex moment that the whole story hinges upon.

**Craig:** It’s an Academy Award-winning handy.

**John:** Yeah. It’s quite a good one. And just a few days later, like this is always the situation where like the minute you notice something you start to notice it everywhere. So, I was watching an episode from this season of The Americans and Keri Russell’s character receives oral sex in a way that I had not seen certainly on TV before, and it was actually completely on story and on point. So, I would like to once again congratulate The Americans on being a fantastic show. And just put a spotlight on my own ignorance to these acts that are in these shows that I’m just not seeing.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, this is probably going to happen, right? We say that something doesn’t happen and then of course it happens. We just didn’t see it. We missed it. Or sometimes we do see it and then we just forget about it. Really, I’m arguing that we just end the podcast. We’re so close to 300. How great would it be if we just ended it at 299 and we’re like, Nah.

**John:** Yeah. There’s days I definitely think about that. Just going out in a blaze of glory.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. 300 podcast episodes is like having 300 wins as a pitcher. That’s a big thing. I think that that gets us into the podcasting Hall of Fame automatically.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s sports metaphors all over the place.

**Craig:** You’re always lost when I do this. It’s wonderful.

In a previous episode, John, we talked about movie clichés for expressing shock or bad news. Zack from New York writes, “I’m proud to say that I splashed water on my face today, possibly for the first time ever. I did not receive bad news or experience something terrifying. But I did take a 20-minute nap on my couch and woke up discombobulated. After staring at the wall for a few minutes, I went into the bathroom and threw water on my face. I think it half-worked. I’m awake enough to write this email, but still sort of discombobulated. However, I’m out of ideas.”

**John:** What I love about Zack’s email is that it’s so present tense. It’s right about this is the moment I’m experiencing right now. And I like that he thought of us first in that moment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I just want to salute Zack for writing in to ask@johnaugust.com to let us know that he splashed water on his face, which we had singled out as a movie cliché that no one does in actual life, but it seemed to sort of help Zack in this moment. So, again, just like with handies and blowies, we’re often wrong.

**Craig:** Oh, god, are we ever. Well, what about this whole situation with you and Lindelof?

**John:** Oh, it’s the worst. So, Damon Lindelof and I talked about the notion of idea debt and we thought like, oh, we’re being clever. But you know who else was clever? Chekhov.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, he was pretty good–

**John:** A little writer. A little writer named Chekhov. So, this is what Chekhov wrote in 1888. So, for the record, that was before we recorded the podcast episode.

**Craig:** Just a little bit, yeah. Just a little before.

**John:** Chekhov wrote, “Subjects for five big stories and two novels swarm in my head. One of the novels was conceived a long time ago, so that several of the cast of characters have grown old without ever having been put down on paper. There is a regular army of people in my brain begging to be summoned forth, and only waiting for the word to be given. All I have written hither to is trash in comparison with what I would like to write.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s Chekhov.

**Craig:** I mean, that is succinct. It’s beautifully said. He did really put you to shame there. And Damon. I think the both of you should feel bad.

**John:** We do feel a little bad. I want to also single out Jason who wrote in with that Chekhov quote to make us feel a little bad. But also I do want to thank everyone on Twitter who said that it was one of the best episodes they’d ever heard of the podcast. So, Craig, at some point–

**Craig:** I’m going to read it.

**John:** If you were to listen to it or read it–

**Craig:** I’m reading it.

**John:** You might enjoy that episode with Damon Lindelof. Finally, we often do segments about How Would This Be a Movie. So, in Episode 214 we did an episode about the French train bros. These were the three American tourists in 2015 who prevented a terrorist attack.

**Craig:** We’re calling them bros? [laughs]

**John:** Well they’re bros. They’re three guys traveling through France. They’re bros.

**Craig:** I guess. Sure.

**John:** They prevented a terrorist attack on a train from Brussels to Paris. They overpowered a guy who had an AK-47. So we said like, well, this could be a movie and Clint Eastwood agreed. So this last week it was announced that he is going to be making a movie based on the book The 1517 to Paris: The Trust Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Heroes, which was written by the eponymous American heroes, along with a guy named Jeffrey Stern. The screenplay version is going to be written by Dorothy Blyskal, and from what I looked up it seems like this is going to be her first screenwriting credit. So, congratulations Dorothy. You answered the question How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s one that people will see. You know, boy, I wish I could be on a Clint Eastwood set. I’ve just heard so many amazing things. You know, just the speed. We’ve all heard the stories. I wish I could see that. I’m not going to be able to.

**John:** Are you? Is there some sort of secret thing where you actually will be able to see that?

**Craig:** No, no, never going to be able to there. I’ll just be in my office reading about it. Well, that sounds exciting. I think that will be fun.

**John:** It will be fun.

**Craig:** You know what? I’ve had enough of follow up. I think follow up is done.

**John:** Follow up is done. So, if we were a podcast ahead, like musical interludes, then we would put the music here and then move on to the next thing.

**Craig:** Follow up is done. Yeah!

**John:** So the big feature topic which we obviously have to talk about this past week because everyone on Twitter wrote to us about it. And follows ScriptBook. Well, what is ScriptBook? Well, back in Episode 232, so it’s kind of follow up, we talked about ScriptBook and I actually remember this conversation. I remember the setting of this conversation because I was in Australia at the time and we were talking about this sort of ridiculous AI thing that would read through the scripts and figure out how successful this movie would be. Basically it had digested a bunch of screenplays and it was pitched towards financiers to help them figure out is this a movie to be investing your money into.

But this last week, someone else decided to use ScriptBook and it didn’t go as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, Franklin Leonard over at the Black List worked out some sort of deal with the ScriptBook people where he was offering to his customers an opportunity to get their analysis, the ScriptBook analysis of their script, in exchange for $100. And it did not go over well. You know, he put it out there. And seemingly put it out there in good faith. It certainly wasn’t anything he was requiring people to do. If they wanted to use the other parts of his service, which you and I generally quite like.

Boy, it just didn’t go well for him. I mean, certainly both you and I felt that ScriptBook was stupid, and fake, bordering on completely useless. And therein is the problem. Because there’s two ways of looking at it. One way is this is potentially useful for people. And the other way is this is absolutely useless.

If you believe the former, then you can see where, OK, he’s offering a product. You either like it or you don’t. But if you believe the latter, if you believe it’s truly useless, it starts to feel a little bit scammy. Like you’re selling me snake oil. And I personally do believe it is utter snake oil.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And a lot of other people seem to agree as well.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the minute sort of the word got out about it, you and I were on a long email thread with Franklin about it, but there were also threads on Reddit and there was a lot of sort of hubbub on the Internet about what this was and what it was doing. So, I think we should sort of spoil the punch line here by saying that Franklin has pulled the product, so it is no longer a thing that the Black List is offering, and so we will put a link in the show notes to his original explanation for what the product was and then his email out and sort of his letter about sort of why they were removing it and why he listened to the community and pulled it out of there.

So, I want to talk about two things, which is that question of like is this potentially useful. Like in a perfect world, if this were free, is this a thing you would want to exist in the world? And then the concern of like, well, is this a thing that we feel like screenwriters should be paying $100 for?

Let’s talk about in the perfect world where it’s free, Craig, did you see any value in the product?

**Craig:** No. None. Well, net zero value. Because where there may be little bits of possible potential usefulness in the free version of this, there’s also potential problems that it causes. And that really was the biggest issue for me. So, you know, some of the stuff you go, well, I guess the AI is saying that my predicted genre is half sport and half drama. It’s a sports-drama, but how did I not know that? Um, there’s a predicted MPAA rating, which again really what it comes down to is it’s telling you everybody knows what G is and everybody knows what R is. So, then somehow tell us if you’re PG or PG-13. Nobody in the world cares about that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is stuff about your character likeability. That to me is just dangerous. Because you might think, oh, my character is not likeable enough. Nobody – what – no, that’s not how it works at all.

Predicted target audience. Absolutely useless to you. The marketing department will tell you what the predicted audience is. And then there’s production budget. Potentially useful if you were maybe trying to produce this on your own. Or you were maybe considering to whom you ought to submit the work. And you know, OK, well these people are looking for movies in the $10 to $20 million range. Well, ScriptBook tells me that my script has a 46% chance of being in that range, which ultimately isn’t really very useful either. Because nobody is going to make a budget based on what ScriptBook guesses. They’re going to make a budget by breaking it down and making a budget.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. So, in the show notes we’ll link to a file that the Black List put up which was a sample report for Fences, the Academy Award-nominated script from this past year. And so as you look through it, it’s a nicely presented report. It’s three or four pages long. It talks about rating, genre, the Script DNA, character sentiment, character likeability. I had concerns with all of these things for the reasons that Craig laid out.

Where I think this is actually interesting was there’s this grid where it shows movies that this is like. And I think the axes as they’re labeled are really unfortunate. So it says Audience Rating, in this case from 3 to 10. And creativity from 0 to 1. So looking at this you would say that well Fences is more creative than Hope Springs, or Sideways, but it’s less creative than The Iron Lady or The Verdict. And it’s also more creative than Beasts of the Southern Wild, which seems kind of remarkable.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** So, that was troubling to me. And yet if I were to take away the lines and the axes and just say like this is a cluster of other movies that feel kind of like this, that I could actually see being somewhat useful. Because I would never think of Fences as being like Milk or like The Iron Lady, but in a way that the people who like Milk would probably also like Fences, or the Iron Lady, that actually seems to make some sense.

So that is reasonable to me. And I was actually a little bit impressed that the AI was able to match these up to some degree. Now, I would love to see it matching Identity Thief and seeing what are the movies around that and see if it actually has a good sense of what that is. I thought that was somewhat interesting. But I don’t think it’s $100 interesting for an aspiring screenwriter. I don’t know what an aspiring screenwriter who is putting a script up on the Black List gets out of knowing that it’s like these things. I don’t see how that’s actionable information.

**Craig:** It isn’t. And it’s also information that you as a human are layering your own insight upon. Because the truth is we don’t know – you can say, well, Fences is – I guess in a strange way Fences and Milk are somewhat related. Are they? Really? Well, they’re both dramas. They’re both about adults. They both take place in cities. They both have middle-aged men kind of at the center of it. But, are they really? I mean, I guess anybody could just – at that point you could just say any movie with people like that and go, oh, that’s interesting. I guess those movies are sort of like…

Fences and Sideways are nothing alike. Nothing, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** But I would say they are both in terms of who they are appealing to, I think they’re actually more common than you might necessarily believe. Though the fact that it recognized that Fences was potentially an award movie seems interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But again, we don’t know. We’re looking at exactly one example. So I don’t know how much to read into this. But I found that at least interesting. I put the T in there for Aline.

**Craig:** It is vaguely interesting. But anybody who just scrolls through a list of award movies, right, you have Fences. That’s based on a brilliant play. So you’re making an award movie. Just run through a list of award movies then, I guess. I mean, this is not – I don’t understand these metrics. So you have this creativity metric and, well, you could say Fences and Milk are equally creative sort of, I guess whatever that means. But apparently Raging Bull is less creative than Hope Springs. What?

**John:** I don’t know what that means.

**Craig:** Wait. The Usual Suspects is less creative than Malibu’s Most Wanted. That’s right. Let me say this again. That’s the Jamie Kennedy movie, I believe, where he’s – isn’t that right – where he plays a rapper?

**John:** I think it is. Yes. He’s a rapper.

**Craig:** The Usual Suspects – here are the movies that are less creative than Malibu’s Most Wanted: The Usual Suspects, Cool Hand Luke, Heat, Michael Clayton. [laughs] What? And The Avengers.

**John:** Yeah. The Avengers and Catwoman down there at the bottom there.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. Computer, you’re wrong. And Malibu’s Most Wanted shouldn’t be on this. It makes no sense.

**John:** It should not be on there at all.

**Craig:** I also don’t understand the vertical axis of Audience Rating. So, how do we have the audience rating exactly for Cool Hand Luke? What audience? I mean, the audience of over 30 years? Or then? Beasts of the Southern Wild less creative than The Blind Side. And, I mean, I don’t understand this.

**John:** I don’t understand it either. But here’s what I would say zooming way back. I mean, is it clear that there are AI things that can actually find patterns where we wouldn’t see patterns? Absolutely. Do I think this is a case where the kinds of patterns it is finding are going to be useful for the target audience of this service? No, I don’t. I just don’t think that sticking Milk and Fences close to each other on a graph is helping a writer. And a lot of people seem to feel the same way.

So, let’s segue to the scamminess of it all. Because you and I both know and like Franklin. He’s a smart, good guy who is not scammy. And so in our conversations with him, we wanted to sort of make it clear that this felt scammy, but we didn’t think he was scammy. And that we were concerned for him and for the brand because that’s not the way we want to see him out there in the world.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. And he did the thing that people so rarely, rarely do. He listened.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** He listened. I mean, Franklin is a humble guy. He’s a business man and he’s an aggressive business man, but he’s not afraid to say, OK, I made a mistake. And in this case what happened was it wasn’t about you or me. We hadn’t talked about his involvement with this on the air prior to his decision that he made to remove it. But he listened to writers on Twitter. He listened to writers on Reddit. Keith Calder, a good producer, who really went after it on Twitter I think made an impression. And he said, “OK, you know what, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t like this. I did. And I thought people would like it and I think some people still could get use out of it. On the other hand, I hear you. So, we’re dumping it.”

And that’s a big boy grown up thing to do. And in today’s world, it is a rare thing. And so–

**John:** It is. Yeah.

**Craig:** I had a lot of respect for that. And, you know, again, you and I, we like the other part of what Franklin does, which now that we’ve gotten rid of this thing, that is what Franklin does. We like him. He’s our friend. And I think that his general service is a good one. So, it looks like we’re back to a good situation.

**John:** Which is a very good thing. All right, next topic is the battle for James Bond. So, this was – I’m going to link to an article from the New York Times by Brooks Barnes. I’m sorry, Craig.

**Craig:** You know, Brooks Barnes, I had to correct him the other day. He wrote an article about the strike and referred to the long strike of 1998, which did not exist.

**John:** Did not happen.

**Craig:** Oh, Brooks.

**John:** So I can’t verify that all the facts in this article are true, but I will say that in a general sense it raised an interesting issue of what happens when you have a franchise that is essentially a free agent. So, that’s James Bond. When you see a James Bond movie, the opening credits are United Artists, MGM/United Artists. But that’s not actually who releases it. And so for the past four James Bond movies they’ve been released by Sony. But that contract is up. And so now five different companies are competing for the right to make that next James Bond movie. The companies being Warners, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Sony, and Annapurna, which is the little small label that mostly does fancy award movies.

So, that’s kind of an interesting and unusual thing to happen in Hollywood is to have this franchise sort of up for grabs.

**Craig:** It is. And it’s sort of up for grabs, because the truth is they’re not really going to be making it. What they’re going to be doing is giving MGM/UA the money or a big chunk of the money to make the movie, and then they’re going to be advertising the movie and distributing the movie. And therein is the problem, because when you actually look at the way the deal has been structured, if we’re to believe what Brooks has said here, there’s not that much profit really coming back to you. In huge success, you’ll make a pretty good amount of money. You won’t make as much money as say they’re making off of Get Out, because your profit is capped. It’s seriously capped.

So what he describes as under the previous agreement, and I can’t imagine in a bidding war why the new agreement wouldn’t be even more favorable to the Bond folks than the previous one. But, in the previous one Sony paid half of the production costs. So, you pay half of what it costs to make the movie. That’s just to make the movie. And in return for that, you get one-quarter of certain profits, once costs are recouped. That’s probably the certain costs there for those things may involve taxes and insurance and things like that. And obviously, you know, you’re only getting your share of the ticket price and so forth.

**John:** It’s also unclear if Sony is releasing this internationally, like what distribution fee do they get to charge for their distribution services. The math behind this can be very, very complicated.

**Craig:** Extremely. Yeah.

**John:** So it’s not a matter of the film itself becoming profitable. They’re getting money in at every step of the process.

**Craig:** Well, they’re putting money in and they’re taking money out all the time. So, you’re right. For instance, they’ll say, well, we’re going to spend $60, $70, $80 million of the total marketing spend. We’re going to be accountable for that. So we’re spending $80 million. But we’re going to charge you $20 million in marketing fees. So it’s always this weird game. But in the end, here’s the truth: all these people want it because it’s kind of a sure thing. And there is the potential for many more movies. We live in an interesting time.

So, you say to a studio, “You have a choice. Roll the dice on a $20 million movie. It will either make $4 million, or it will make $120 million, but there won’t be another one. Or, make this movie. You will make $30 million off of it. And you can do five more of them. And each one will make you $30 million.” They’re going to go for that second deal all day long.

**John:** Yeah. I think so. And I think it’s as much about the psychology as the actual dollars coming in. So in think about it if you are the head of one of these studios. If you make the Bond movie and it just does OK, no one is going to call you an idiot for making the James Bond movie. It was a safe bet and everyone is going to acknowledge it was a safe bet.

Also, you are keeping the entire machinery of your studio engaged to do it. I mean, one of the weird things about a studio is you have these whole departments that have nothing to do unless you give them a movie to work on. And so a lot of times when studios are in crisis it’s because they actually don’t have a movie. And so they have these huge divisions that have nothing to actually do. So this is a thing to do. It’s a reason to keep all those people employed doing their jobs. Bond is one of those few kind of known brands that whether it’s a fantastic James Bond movie or a just an OK James Bond movie you know you’re going to clear a certain bar with it.

**Craig:** That’s correct. And you know that you’ll have the right to attach one of your other movies’ trailers to that, because studios can do that where they’re like, OK, if you run this movie you have to at least run our trailer with it. And you know that you’re going to be attracting a certain amount of talent which then if the relationship goes well you might be able to transition into a different movie, filmmakers. You’re keeping people close.

The difference with Bond is the people that control Bond are notoriously protective of it and really they do it. You actually don’t really do anything when, as a studio, other than you sell it and you distribute it. So you’re not really getting much back. It’s an interesting thing that all of these studios are so into it. I mean, it just goes to show you that they make more money and they make it more consistently than we know.

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Craig:** Because if they can make consistent money off of this arrangement, and they want to do it again, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. They’re doing OK.

**Craig:** They’re doing all right.

**John:** Let’s look at some of the other reasons why you don’t want to make the Bond movie or why you don’t want to chase it. It has a limited upside. So, you’re capped at sort of how much you can get out of it. Including you’re capped on this movie that you’re making, but down the road if like let’s say you reinvigorate the Bond franchise, well another studio could make the next movie. And it’s like you’ve helped them, but you’re getting nothing for having helped them. So, that’s a concern.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You have limited creative control because the Broccoli family controls it so tightly. Also, you’re weirdly forced to make it. Like, let’s say you get the script and got the director and you’re reading this and you’re like I don’t want to green light this. You have not choice basically. You have to green light this. That’s part of the deal you’re making right now. So these guys are pursuing the rights to Bond, but they’re not looking at a script right now. There is no script right now, I assume. They’re just talking about the idea of making a Bond movie. Maybe with Daniel Craig. Maybe not with Daniel Craig. So, it’s a mystery. And they’re on the hook to make it kind of no matter what happens.

And, finally, there’s an opportunity cost. So, if you’re making the Bond movie, that’s another movie you’re probably not making, either because you don’t have the resources to do it, you know, money wise, or there’s just not a slot in your schedule for another movie right now. Which for some of these studios is probably a good thing, because they’re just looking to do the minimum it takes to sort of keep them in their jobs.

**Craig:** Well, I think that the – you know, it’s so interesting when you talk to people that run studios, one of the things that I’ve heard from a number of them, and it’s very sad actually is that they never really have any moments of victory and joy because when they make these movies, and this is a perfectly good example, they run a spreadsheet and they go, “Well, we are expected to make between this amount and this amount in terms of profit.” The movie is made. It comes out. It either hits that target or it doesn’t. Maybe it exceeds it somewhat. Usually doesn’t.

So, let’s say they have predicted that the movie is going to be quite a success and it’s going to make them $80 million in profit. Two years later, someone says, “OK, yeah, you did it. Check. You did the thing we asked you to do.” There’s no dancing around. There’s no big “oh my god, it’s a huge hit, wow.” Because that implies that they are all just guessing. They’re not.

Unfortunately what also happens is if you miss that target on the low side, the studio bean counters and overlords will say, “Hmm, well, you’re going to have to make it up on one of these other ones.” So even when you exceed expectations, even that triumph is muted because really somebody is going to say, “Well, all right, you should bank that because one of these other ones might miss.” Either way, by the time we get to see the movies it’s like an afterthought for them, because they’ve already priced it and thought about it. And, in fact, they’re now worried about what’s coming out two years from now. And you never get to enjoy it.

**John:** I think if you’re a studio executive, maybe you’re trying to build a hand of three different kinds of suits. You want the guaranteed hits, like the things, you know, Fast & the Furious 9. And, yes, there’s already a spreadsheet for how much that is supposed to make, but you want to be able to hit that thing and hopefully exceed it. You want a couple of cards that are just like they could break out. They have low expectations but they have possible of a lot of upside. You want the Get Outs. The things that could become a Get Out.

And, finally, you want a few of those things that could win awards, because if you’re looking at whether you’re going to be able to reup your contract in a few years, I think you want to be able to show all three things. That you’ve done the expected hits, some surprise hits, and you’ve also gotten the studio some awards. And that’s a lot to try to manage.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is. And I don’t envy them. Honestly, I don’t. I know right now we’re in a bit of a contentious period between writers and the companies, but in terms of the people that I know and I work with, I don’t envy them their jobs. I’m sure they don’t envy me mine. I think everybody that isn’t a screenwriter is horrified by the thought of having to write a screenplay, and I don’t blame them.

But, that’s a difficult gig. And it’s scary. And there’s so much that’s not in your control. That’s the part that’s hardest for me to get my mind around, because you know at the very least we have this wonderful period where we’re in control. And it’s when we’re writing. They never really have that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a strange part of their job is they seem to be the decision makers, and yet they don’t have ultimate control of the thing they’re trying to do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Before we wrap this up, let’s take a look at some other franchises and just look and see where they fall on sort of this matrix, because the James Bond is like one of the most free-agenty kind of things out there. At least in terms of how MGM partners up with a different company every time.

But Terminator strikes me as a similar situation, because that was made by Carolco way back in the day. It keeps I think passing through different sort of financiers who own the rights to it, but it could end up different places.

**Craig:** It has a home now.

**John:** OK, where is it now?

**Craig:** It is at Skydance.

**John:** OK. Well, Skydance I would sort of count as sort of an MGM type situation where they’re a place with a lot of money, but they are not – they don’t have their own distribution deal.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They just distribute through somebody.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But Marvel for a while was sort of like the James Bond situation where they have a bunch of properties and some of them are at Paramount, some were at Fox, some were at Sony. Spider Man was at Sony. Ultimately they all ended up over at Disney, except for the X-Men universe at Fox, and for Spider Man at Sony. But even then they sort of reached back in and sort of reinvested in Spider Man. But for a while they were doing what James Bond was doing. They could move their movies from studio to studio.

**Craig:** They could. And then they got purchased by Disney. So, once Disney bought them, you can see there is just a general effort now to hold all of that in. And the only ones that are left straggling out there are the X-Men, so you have the X-Men part over at Fox, and you have Spider Man at Sony, which they are now co-producing. I don’t know how long that X-Men – I think the deal with the X-Men is they keep it if they keep making X-Men movies, or something like that. I read something like that.

**John:** That’s my understanding is like they’ll keep making X-Men movies because that’s how they keep their rights to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Finally, Star Wars was for a while Lucas Film owned it, so Fox distributed it. But I think Lucas Film really owned the first three prequels that they made, and now of course Disney owns that whole franchise as well. So, again, sort of bringing it in house.

**Craig:** And Disney has been kind of brilliant about this, you know. They just buy the whole company, you know. So, you can negotiate with MGM/UA about the rights to distribute James Bond movies. But if you really want a James Bond movie, just buy MGM/UA. Right? The problem is that’s all they have. They have that. They have the Bond, right? And Bond is very narrow. It’s a fascinating franchise. I’m a huge Bond fan. I’ve seen them all. But it is a very narrow franchise. There I don’t believe there has ever been a Bond spinoff. The entire point is you have James Bond. And then you have a couple of villains that repeat every now and again. Your Blofelds. But there’s a new woman that comes in each time. She comes in, there’s sex, she leaves. Next movie. You know, you have a character like Felix Leiter who is a CIA buddy. No one has ever gone, you know what, now there’s a Bond universe where we’re going to have a movie just about Q and we’re going to have a movie just about Felix Leiter. I’m sure they brought it up at some point or another. But as far as I can tell, nobody on the Bond side of things seems interested in that. So–

**John:** I do remember speculation about Halle Berry’s character being spun off from her movie. Jinx, or whatever her name was.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There was talk of that, but none of that ever came to pass. And it does feel, I agree with you though. Like if another person were to come in and buy that whole franchise, if they bought out the Broccolis for some reason, you would see a universe being formed. Because we know a lot about that universe and it feels like there’s something more you could do with that if you had it.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know like if they had an extended Bond universe, you know the movie I would want to write?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** I would want to write the movie of M. Young M.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** And how M is a spy and it is WWII. I would do a period piece. And sort of the early days of spying and the creation – the notion of why you create the Double O. There’s a great story to be told about why you decide as a person and as a government we need an agency where certain people are allowed to murder. Not shoot in self-defense, or be a soldier on the battlefield. Just kill someone. That is a fascinating question. Licensed to Kill.

**John:** Absolutely. I also think you look at some of the classic villains and, yes, they are people who are up to their own – they have their own plans and devices, but like there’s an Elon Musk-y kind of character who is sort of right on the border between a villain and a hero who could be a fascinating centerpiece to a movie. Who ends up doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. There’s something great about that kind of character as well.

**Craig:** And there is really room there. There’s room there. But for now–

**John:** For now it will be Bond. Our next topic was also suggested by many of our listeners. So, this past week there was a video put out by Nerd Writer on recutting Passengers. Basically proposing the question of what would happen if you did a major cut on the movie Passengers where you sort of limited it to Jennifer Lawrence’s point of view, at least for part of the movie, so she wakes up first. So essentially like she wakes up and Chris Pratt’s character is already walking around the space station. And you and she don’t know that he woke her up deliberately.

And, Craig, I don’t know. Have you seen the movie?

**Craig:** No. But I know the story of the movie. And so I understand the purpose of this change. I’m not really sure – I mean, it would be different.

**John:** It would be different.

**Craig:** I don’t know if the people’s primary objection to that – I mean, no matter how long you delay it, at some point you find out that he woke her up and then you’re asked to believe in their romance. And that seems to be the problematic part for people.

**John:** Absolutely. So, I think it’s an interesting idea. I enjoyed the movie, but I think my problems with the movie were sort of the problems of they had to work really hard to sort of keep Chris Pratt likeable, even though he was doing an unlikeable thing, and it sort of strained under that weight. So, this would be a way of addressing that. But I don’t want to actually get into so much the creative solution proposed here, and just talk about what would happen and what does happen when you are facing a movie and you have this idea for a massive restructuring after it’s already shot.

So, let’s say that you saw this movie before it came out and you were the studio executive, or you are the producer, or the director, and you say like, “I think I want to try this thing.” How would that actually come to pass and what are the realities of trying to implement a change like this?

**Craig:** Well, the first thing that has to happen is a general decision about the scope of the work. Because they’ll make a movie, they’ll test the movie, and then they will discuss – let’s just presume it doesn’t go well, OK? So, the question now is what are we talking about here. Do we need a couple more jokes in the movie? Do we need this one scene that would help improve that? Should we fix the ending? Or, do we have something fundamentally huge going on here and we need to do a lot of work? We need to do two weeks of shooting and shoot a lot and recast a couple of parts?

So, first triage.

**John:** Yeah, and a triage moment only happens if there really is a disastrous test screening. If people really just do not like this movie. And I don’t think that was the case with Passengers. My suspicion was, from people I’ve talked with, the movie tested pretty well and the movie was like pretty well and they were surprised by the reception it got, which wasn’t as strong as they’d hoped.

So, I think you would have to have that bad test screening. The studio panicked. The producer panicked. You have to have a director who is on board with making big changes, or a director you can replace.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Those are the only situations in which you’re able to do big things. But, you’re often doing small things. And so what I will say is that even after a good test screening, you are talking about recuts, reshoots, looking for things that aren’t working, finding your jokes. That happens all the time. And I’ve never worked on a movie that hasn’t had changes based on those early screenings and people’s reactions to them. So, but what’s not common, and you and I have both been in situations where they have done the big recut, that is sort of an emergency all hands on deck. You’re really talking about big brand new ideas. Like, what if we were to rethink how this all works?

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’ve done that. I’ve done that. And it’s hard. It’s hard because first of all it’s a rare thing for the people who are involved in the creation of the movie up to that point to continue to be involved. So, we have a huge problem here. We’re probably going to need a different director to come in and do this work. And we should bring a different writer in to come in and do this work, otherwise we’re at risk of repeating the same mistakes, plus there’s just a lot of emotions and defensiveness. And it’s understandable. It’s a mess.

So, when I come and do this, I sit – I watch the movie. And then inevitably after that there is a discussion of here are the things we just can’t do. We can’t change this. And we can’t change that. We have this much that we can change. How should we best do it? So, it is a very tricky puzzle. This is very Rubik’s Cubey. Figuring out how to fundamentally change a movie without touching a whole bunch of it. And it’s rarely perfectly successfully. It can make a huge difference. And it does. I mean, you can see it in test scores. They run the movie and they’re like, my god, look at the difference.

And I always think, well yeah, but there’s still something just – this movie is still just not right. It’s alive. Very tough to do.

**John:** Yeah. When I come into these situations, I always sort of start with like what is actually working. Are there moments of the movie that actually work that sort of suggest the movie it wants to be? And oftentimes it won’t be at the very start of the movie, it’ll be some moment in the middle where like, OK, just for a moment there you kind of found what the movie was. And it’s possible just through cutting and through moving stuff around, you’ll be able to find more of that movie and sort of get us to that place. But in general I find you want to let the movie be one thing rather than the three things.

When a movie is really not working, it’s trying to do too much at once, and it just loses its focus and its tone. It’s just not a consistent experience. So figuring out what that experience should be is really important.

The first Charlie’s Angels was notoriously a very chaotic production. It was chaotic in post as well. But I remember when I came back in on that movie, one of the first things I really worked on was the opening title sequence, which shouldn’t seem that important, but it was really helpful for setting the tone.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** We’d shot all these scenes, but figuring out what it felt like and sort of what the right kind of goofy was. And so I was sitting with the editors working on do the wipes across and make it feel like the TV show in ways that are fun and right. And once we got that and sort of got that locked, we could sort of step back and say, OK, let’s look at the rest of our scenes and see how we can be a little bit more like that in our style, and that was really helpful.

But ultimately there were reshoots. There were simplifications of logic. They were getting rid of things that didn’t need to be there. Classically, World War Z is a movie that had a much, much bigger ending in its original form. This big assault on Moscow. And the movie did not want to be that. The movie ultimately wanted to be a more intimate movie with Brad Pitt and his family and his own survival. And so that was that whole new third act that Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard had to figure out how to do.

**Craig:** And Chris McQuarrie.

**John:** Chris McQuarrie as well. So, it’s a bunch of hands on deck, really smart people. Looking at what’s there. Looking at what was great, which there was a lot that was great in the first two-thirds of World War Z. And finding a way to carry that through to the end, in that case incredibly successfully.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, those situations are not – thank god – common. It is more common that what happens is – I did this recently. You watch a movie and everyone says, “Here are the things that we’re kind of getting back from the audience on some spots.” And I’ll say, yes, I had those same reactions myself. So that’s good news. It means everybody is kind of in agreement.

Maybe all we need to do here is add a line. You know, so two people are talking and maybe this person says something that just isn’t quite right. It’s causing confusion. So, let’s just have them record a new line and we’ll just be on the other person’s face. And it’s just one line and suddenly that all makes sense now.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** The disruption of experience through poor logic is so dangerous and happily, typically, easily fixable. My least favorite call is come and make the movie funnier with some lines. That’s not going to work.

**John:** Yeah, to try to joke it up. And that will never work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** What I think you’re describing though when you’re adding in a loop line to sort of make something clear, is you talk about people being on the ride or off the ride. And it’s like when did they fall off the ride? And they fall off the ride, they fall off the – they stop believing in the movie when enough things just don’t add up for them. When they start getting confused and sort of confused and annoyed and then they just check out. And so if you can keep them from checking out, if you can keep them engaged, and curious about what’s happening next, you’re probably going to keep them at least somewhat of a fan throughout the rest of the movie.

It’s those moments often in a first act, early in the second act, when people kind of give up on your movie. And if you can keep them from giving up, you’re going to be able to make a lot of those things which weren’t working are suddenly going to feel a lot better.

**Craig:** Exactly. And this is somewhere where a new person coming in is of great help. Because when you’re there from the start and you’re making the movie, you have certain things that you believe. Making a movie is essentially making a million guesses. And you may make almost all the correct guesses, except for two. But, the audience is saying we don’t understand why she’s saying this now but before she said this. And you say, well, it’s because of blah, blah, blah. Right? And somebody else will say, “Well, I didn’t quite get that. I think maybe somebody should say that.” But the people who have been involved, sometimes their feeling is, “But that’s just so on the nose.” Because in their mind it’s in there already. And a new person can say, “It’s kind of not.” And so this is one area where I know it’s going to grate you, because it sounds like it’s on the nose, but for the audience it’s not going to feel – it’s going to actually be interesting, because they’re not getting what you have.

When you do these jobs, you’re actually – this is where being a feature writer feels great, because everybody is, I think, incredibly grateful to the writer who comes in at this point and helps.

**John:** 100 percent. So, let’s wrap this up by talking – go back to Passengers. And so let’s say this is an alternate history version of all this, where they saw the first cut of Passengers, and it wasn’t working. It was sort of like the final movie. And they said like, “You know what? We have this idea for a wild experiment.” What they would actually do next? And we live in a time of wonderful digital editors, so a lot of what the video suggests trying to do, you could actually just do. You could do that in your non-linear editor. I don’t say Avid anymore, because people yell at me when I say Avid.

You would actually chop it up and if there were things that didn’t make sense, you would put in little cards to explain what would happen in this moment. But it’s a day or two to sort of build that cut of the movie and sort of see what it feels like. And maybe it feels great. It certainly would change a lot of your experience of the movie. And then you would have to get buy-in. And that’s where I think they would have a hard time with this radical rethinking, because suddenly your two big movie stars you’re paying $20 million each, they’re not playing the same characters they signed on to in the movie. And they may love it. They may like it a lot more. But suddenly you’re going to be sending them out there in the world to promote this movie which wasn’t at all what they thought it was going to be. You may have already put out a teaser trailer that promised this romance, but the movie that you’re cutting sort of feels more like a thriller.

That can be a real problem as well. So, it’s not honestly as simple as just like, we’ll make the best movie. Make the most compelling movie. There may be reasons why you can’t do some of the things you want to do.

**Craig:** That is precisely why I get frustrated with things like this. Because there is an implication that we out here are just smarter than you. You dumb-dumbs couldn’t see, but we can.

Almost always, no offense to the people that make these videos, they are not thinking of something that we haven’t thought of. Almost always, it’s been thought of and tried and didn’t work with audiences, or it’s been thought of and tried and rejected by the very large number of competing powers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The one thing that people don’t quite understand is it doesn’t matter if something is right. If the movie star, who is going to promote this movie, doesn’t like it. And you may say, “Well, hold on a second. Before we just surrender, can’t we…” And I just want to put my hand up and say, “You’re describing my life. You’re describing my career. That’s half of my job.”

Half of my job is to figure out what to do and get people to agree. The other half is to figure out what to do when the one person who we really need to agree doesn’t agree. Now what do I do? That’s the world we live in. This is collaborative. And some people have an enormous influence on the work.

Sometimes you wish they wouldn’t. But that’s the deal.

**John:** All right. Enough of recutting movies. Let’s go to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing, I actually have two. I’m cheating. My first is a newsletter put out by Quinn Emmett, a friend of the show. It’s called Important, Not Important. And it’s just a weekly recap of the things you may have missed in the news, but also sort of other headlines. Sort of a little bit deeper than what you could get on Twitter.

I find it delightful. I’ve been reading it for months. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

The other thing I loved this week was this Brazilian artist named Butcher Billy. And what he does is he takes a serious of ‘80s pop songs and he reimagines them as Stephen King book covers. And so if you click through the link in the show notes, you’ll see what I mean. Like Careless Whisper or How Deep is Your Love. There is a Light Never Goes Out. It’s sort of like if you take those titles, they actually can be really good Stephen King books. And so he does the artwork for what that Stephen King book would be. And I just thought they were delightful.

So, I always love sort of reimagining things. I love the unsheets, the sort of make believe posters for movies that we’ve all seen and loved, so I thought this was delightful.

**Craig:** This is pretty great. I’m looking at it right now. That’s cool. Love the font.

My One Cool Thing is Pinball Arcade. Are you a pinball fan, John?

**John:** I’m not a big pinball fan. I’ve never been good enough at it to be a big fan, I guess.

**Craig:** Well, here’s your chance to get good. So, pinball is one of those things that actually they can simulate now brilliantly. So, you know, there’s an app and you can play lots of pinball games. But the cool part is that they’ve gone and licensed and recreated a whole bunch of real pinball games, including maybe the best pinball game ever made. Which was the Addams, Family, the pinball game–

**John:** I remember the Addams Family pinball. I have played that.

**Craig:** It’s great. And so it’s based on the movie from the ‘90s, which in and of itself was based on a television show, which itself was based on the cartoons. And it’s fantastic. I play the Addams Family pinball game every day. It’s so much fun.

By the way, John, do you know what?

**John:** Tell me what.

**Craig:** The Addams Family would actually be a pretty great movie for us to do a deep dive into. It’s so well done.

**John:** It’s so, so, so good. I just love The Addams Family. I love the second Addams Family almost more. The whole camp thing is fantastic.

**Craig:** Amazing. Amazing. In fact, maybe we should do the second Addams Family movie.

**John:** Maybe we should do Addams Family Vacation. And we sort of know Paul Rudnick on Twitter.

**Craig:** I know. You know what? We should get Paul Rudnick to come on the show and talk about it. Oh my god, is he brilliant.

**John:** He’s really good.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** Circling back to the pinball game. I will say that one of the things I do love about real pinball games is they’re hot. The lights are actually hot. They have a warmth to them that I find just delightful. They smell a certain way. They have a heat. That is a good thing about real pinball machines.

So, I’m sure they cannot duplicate this quite as well digitally, but still.

**Craig:** They can’t. There’s actually a very interesting – so they’ve had pinball simulators for years and years and years. But the Addams Family only recently, because the rights situation was a nightmare. The game – they had to get clearances from the Addams’ estate. They had to get clearances from Paramount, which made the movie. They had to get clearances from Raul Julia’s estate and from Anjelica Huston. And from – just literally everybody whose voice was in it.

Then they had to go get clearances for the music that was in it. And they wanted to do everything correctly, you know. And they did. Finally they did. So now you can play it.

**John:** Fantastic.

All right, so I will not get to see you at the next Scriptnotes, because you are doing a live show. So you are doing a live show this coming Monday. This episode is out on a Tuesday. On this next Monday, you are recording a live show in Hollywood at the ArcLight. I’m so incredibly jealous for you to hang out with Dana Fox, and Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** A guy named Rian. Well, we have Rob McElhenney who is good.

**John:** Oh yeah. He’s good.

**Craig:** And then we have Rian Johnson who is whatever.

**John:** Just whatever. Delightful.

**Craig:** They can’t all be winners.

**John:** He’s a talented photographer.

**Craig:** [laughs] He’s a good photographer. So, those of you who are still looking for tickets, we have a few left. So, this is – I think it’s a 400-seat auditorium and we’re getting pretty close to 400 at this point. So you better rush.

If you go to HollywoodHeart.org/upcoming, then you can buy tickets. The event is May 1 at 7:30pm in Hollywood at the ArcLight. This is all for charity. Hollywood Heart is a wonderful charity that our friend John Gatins is very involved in. Oscar-nominated John Gatins. And the price of the ticket is $35. And we apologize if that seems a little steep, but again it goes entirely to Hollywood Heart.

Once again, I make nothing.

**John:** Yep. I don’t even make anything on this one.

**Craig:** Even you. [laughs]

**John:** Even I make nothing on this.

**Craig:** God, you’re so rich.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. So, as always, we are produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Big thanks to both these guys because we recorded late this week and they killed themselves to get this out. So, thank you guys.

Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But for short questions, on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We’re on Facebook. Just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes.

Craig, I think the word iTunes is going to go away. I think we’re going to stop saying iTunes.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** Because I think they’re actually going to get rid of iTunes as a concept completely. My prediction is WWC, they’ll say like Goodbye iTunes. Because they actually got rid of iTunes Podcast and now it says Apple Podcasts. I think they’re just going to call it, I don’t know, Apple–

**Craig:** What are they going to call it?

**John:** Something else.

**Craig:** Whoa. Weird.

**John:** Whoa. But if you’re on iTunes, or whatever they call it next, just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

Craig, thank you for a fun show. Have a great show on Monday. I will look forward to good reports.

**Craig:** Thank you, sir. We’ll do our best.

**John:** Cool. Thanks.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Damon Lindelof](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0511541/)
* [The Leftovers: Final Season Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9w0sz5y83k)
* Jessica Abel on [Idea Debt](http://jessicaabel.com/2016/01/27/idea-debt/)
* [How I Got Out of Idea Debt](https://medium.com/@heyjohnsexton/how-i-got-out-of-idea-debt-124d3cdc4031) by John Sexton
* [Occupied](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QWC_DZj0HE)
* [City Girl](https://thehairpin.com/sarah-ramos-explains-how-she-gave-life-to-city-girl-the-rom-com-she-wrote-at-12-years-old-addd405b56b0)
* John Hodgman’s [Only Child](http://www.maximumfun.org/dead-pilots-society/episode-2-only-child-written-john-hodgman)
* [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))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/stranger-things-and-other-things).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 266 of Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we will be looking at the Netflix series Stranger Things and the writing choices that made it work so well. The WGA elections are upon us again, so Craig will tell you who to vote for. Finally, we will be tackling four recent articles in the news and asking our favorite question: how would this be a movie?

For the first time, all the stories we’re looking at come from listener suggestions, so thank you.

And, Craig, we’re back.

**Craig:** We’re back. You are currently in Europa.

**John:** I’m in Europe.

**Craig:** We are now separated by how many hours? Nine?

**John:** Nine hours. So it is nine in the morning as you’re recording this. It is 6PM as I’m recording this. I guess that’s our first bit of follow up. At the last episode, I was about to get on a plane to Paris. And I didn’t chicken out. I did it. So I’m now here. I’ve been here 10 days. It’s all going really well.

**Craig:** That’s fantastic. And you at 6PM and me at 9AM, we should be roughly the same amount of tired.

**John:** It should be. I’m about ready for some dinner, and then some winding down, and heading into bed. And you’ve got a whole day ahead of you.

**Craig:** Yeah. But also probably ready for wine and a wind me down. I like to wake up and immediately start winding down.

**John:** One of the things I found challenging about being in Paris this time is usually when I’m here it’s vacation, so like, sure, let’s have wine at lunch. Sure, let’s have ice cream every day. And actually living here, that’s not a sustainable lifestyle, at least for me. So, I’m having to learn how to pace myself. And what living in Paris John is like versus vacationing in Paris John.

**Craig:** God, you know, I never thought of that. But it’s true. You’re in a different country and you think, all right, well, it’s the weekend. Let’s go do four things until we’re deadbeat. Eat way too much. And then have somebody clean our room. Nah. That ain’t happening.

**John:** Exactly. There’s none of that. I’ve had to learn how to do very basic Parisian things, like go to IKEA to buy the desk I need that I’m recording this podcast at. I’ll be sure to include a photo in the show notes of the desk setup I got, because I had to buy a children’s desk, because all of the desks are too big. I could only use a child’s desk in this apartment.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Your little, little child’s desk.

**John:** I’m a little child.

**Craig:** Is it the [Sturmfuhrer]? Is it the–? No, what is it called?

**John:** It’s the Pahl desk. It’s the P-A-H-L, but with a circumflex – not a circumflex, the two dots above the A. The Pahl desk is what I have.

**Craig:** Pahl.

**John:** So, you know, I had to go shopping for school supplies. I’ve had to do lots of really normal Parisian things.

**Craig:** And how are you doing language wise? Are you hanging in there?

**John:** I’m getting by. It’s slowly coming back to me. So, I can get by in French, I’m just not a natural French speaker. And so the goal is to be able to sort of answer back more smoothly as people talk to me. But people can speak at me full speed and I can usually understand what they’re saying.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Yeah. It’s pretty good. For folks who are kind of familiar with Paris, there are all the Arrondissements, which are sort of confusing. They’re laid out like a snail. The easiest way to think about where I am in the city is you know how you see those tourist photos of people near the Eiffel Tower. There’s like a great big lawn and they’re usually taking a photo where it looks like they’re pinching the Eiffel Tower or plucking the Eiffel Tower through forced perspective. You know all those really annoying photos?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I live right near where all those people take those annoying photos. So, that’s who I see every morning as I cut through the park.

**Craig:** Every morning you see Tower pinchers?

**John:** I see Tower pinchers.

**Craig:** God. You start yelling at them out your window now.

**John:** Tourists!

**Craig:** Go back to your country! Swine!

**John:** Swine!

**Craig:** Because, you know, French people speak English, but with a French accent. I don’t know if you knew that? That’s what French is. It’s accented English. Yeah.

**John:** Very true. Well, actually, you know the British accent is just American English and they just change a little bit.

**Craig:** Yeah. They make it silly.

**John:** They make it silly. Yeah.

Two episodes ago we had Peter Dodd on, the UTA agent. And he said that agents read the Nicholls finalists, but they don’t necessarily read the semifinalists and quarter-finalists. And he said there are thousands and thousands of semifinalists. Greg Beal from the Academy wrote in and sort of gave us the real numbers. So, here’s the actual numbers of how many semifinalists there are.

So, he said, “In a single year, the most Nicholls semifinalist scripts ever was 140.” Which is a lot of scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “That means in the history of the competition there’s approximately 3,000 screenplays that have been semifinalists but were never finalists.” So, considering that some writers might have had two scripts, that’s at least 2,000, 2,500 people who can say like I was a Nicholls semifinalist. So that’s a lot.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

**John:** But he also sent a list of the people who were the semifinalist but not the finalist, and there’s some really good names on that list. So, I thought we would end on an inspiring note and say who some of those people are. Names like Michael Arndt. Ava DuVernay. Mark Fergus. Vince Gilligan. Gavin Hood. David Levine. Damon Lindelof. Josh Marston. Melissa Rosenberg. John Spaihts. Frank Spotnitz. Meredith Stiehm.

So there’s a lot of really great writers who were semifinalists but not finalists. So, that’s encouraging.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the implication – I don’t think Peter’s implication was if you don’t become a Nicholls finalist, and you only are a semifinalist, you’re never getting an agent. I think his implication was you’re probably not getting an agent because of the Nicholls. The script may find its way to him some other way. Or, you may write another script that is more attractive that people find you via. But, you know, our general thesis in that discussion that contests are perhaps overrated and the notion that writers have that contests are their ticket to the big time is probably more of a myth than a reality.

**John:** I think there’s also a correlation versus causation thing here. The fact that those writers who I listed there were finalists, well, that was because they were really good writers. And they were successful because they were really good writers. But, being a semifinalist was not the cause of them becoming successful. It was a correlation because they were already really good writers.

**Craig:** That is the rule that is overarching all of this stuff. Because, in the end, if you’re good enough to be a finalist, you don’t need to be a finalist. You’re good enough to be a finalist. It’s one of those things. Somehow or another the good should be borne out. And the cream should rise. And great scripts will be found. So, I guess the advice to people is to think, you know, everything good that might happen because of this script will happen because of this script. I am not trying to use this script to have something else happen. And that’s the thing that makes the good things happen.

**John:** Yeah. The good writing is the good writing. That is the ticket.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** We had a question from Andrew in Maryland. And so he was good enough to send in some audio. So, let’s take a listen to what he asked about that episode.

Andrew: Hi John and Craig. I’ve been a faithful listener since the early days of Scriptnotes and have always found the podcast entertaining and extremely helpful. However, I was deeply discouraged by two episodes – the One with the Agent, and Sheep Crossing Roads. It seems you’re saying there is really no hope for those of us who love screenwriting but live in other parts of the country and world.

I have a hunch the burning questions on the minds of your listeners not in LA are what does this mean for us. If we can’t move to LA, do we just hang up our spurs and write novels? I have a young family, so it’s not feasible for me to move to LA anytime soon. Should we even bother pressing toward our goals of becoming career screenwriters? I would love to know what you think we should do, if anything. Your faithful listener, Andrew from Maryland.

**Craig:** Well, this is a question we get all the time. And the answer, Andrew, is no. We’re not saying there is really no hope. We’re saying there is little hope. But then again, there’s little hope for people here. [laughs] You know? I mean, the deal is, I think I’ve said this before, if it’s a million-to-one shot in Los Angeles, and it’s five times worse in Maryland, then it’s a five million-to-one shot in Maryland. Those are all terrible odds.

So, you know, the problem of course is you have to think that you’re the one in the X million. And then do what’s best. But, it’s tough. We can’t sugarcoat reality here. It’s tough.

**John:** I wonder though if there’s a reality that we don’t actually appreciate, because we just haven’t found the writers who have actually broken in from outside the system. So, we have so many people who listen to the show, including working professional writers. I’m wondering how many of them actually broke in from some place outside.

So, basically they were Andrew from Maryland, and they wrote a script that somehow got the attention of people here. And now they’re working as a screenwriter or as a TV writer. So, if you’re listening to this and you are a working writer who started someplace else and got it all to work sort of from Andrew’s situation, could you please write us and let us know. Because we’d like to talk to you. I don’t know a lot of writers who have had that situation, but it must happen. So, write in to us. Write into ask@johnaugust.com and we’ll try to get your story out there. Because I really feel for Andrew.

**Craig:** Yeah. I do, too. I would say if you are in New York, excuse yourself from this exercise. That doesn’t count. But the only one I know of is Diablo. I don’t know anybody else that kind of just shot in here from a non-New York or California, or Southern California location.

**John:** Yeah. Gary Whitta doesn’t live in Los Angeles, but I think he might have been living in town when he started working.

**Craig:** You know what? Let’s also excuse London. That’s a great point. Because London has its own industry, and they make their own films. So, I would say, because we do get a lot of London writers who come over here because they initially work on London productions.

**John:** Like Kelly Marcel.

**Craig:** Right. Like Kelly Marcel. Well, there’s a ton of them. I mean, Tess Morris. And Kelly Marcel. And Gary Whitta, I assume, is a London guy, because he sounds Londony to me.

So London doesn’t count. New York doesn’t count. I’m going to accept every other place in the world.

**John:** Great. So we’d love to hear your stories if you have been able to start a writing career in film or television from someplace other than Los Angeles, New York, or London. Write in. Let us know. Because we could be wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re often wrong. We love to be wrong.

**Craig:** I mean, John is often wrong. I don’t recall ever.

**John:** Yeah. We cut something out of this segment just now.

**Craig:** John was literally wrong seconds ago. [laughs]

**John:** One thing I’m not wrong about is Stranger Things, which is a terrific show on Netflix.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Even in France, I am Segue Man. I’m l’homme de Segue.

**Craig:** L’homme de Segue. [laughs] Stranger Things, so, so much fun. Who doesn’t like this show? Nobody doesn’t like Stranger Things.

**John:** I found one person on Twitter who I follow who doesn’t like it. And he could be wrong. Craig, I was just so happy you watched it, because I watched it a couple weeks ago and I thought, well, Craig won’t watch it because Craig watches nothing. And then you surprised me by watching it.

**Craig:** Well, my wife said, “You’re going to watch this show now.” And I said, OK. That usually works. When the boss tells me to watch, I watch. And, frankly, what’s great about my position vis-à-vis watching TV is to me TV is the greatest medium of all time because I only watch the absolute best of shows. That’s it.

I’ve seen Breaking Bad. I’ve seen Stranger Things. And Game of Thrones. That’s what TV is to me. It’s an amazing machine.

**John:** It must be so intimidating when you try to do television yourself, because you assume that everything on TV–

**Craig:** How is that possible?

**John:** –if you turn on any random channel, it’s going to be just a masterpiece.

**Craig:** Actually, I weirdly assume that television is nothing but advertisements and then Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, and Game of Thrones. How else do they fill their day?

So I was talking to Mike Birbiglia the other day, and I said you’ve got to watch Stranger Things. Because, you know, and I hate telling people watch a show, because I know how I feel when people tell me to watch a show. And that’s basically angry.

But it goes down so smooth. It’s like drinking chocolate milk. It’s just, fooop, it’s in you. It’s so easy to watch. So easy to watch.

**John:** Now, there’s a good chance that some of our listeners have not watched the show yet. So, what we’re going to do is Godwin, when he listens to this episode, he will note the timecode of when we start hitting spoilers and then he will give you a timecode for when we’re done. So you can just read in the show notes about what you should skip to.

Obviously we have chapter breaks, but if you’re listening to this on a player that doesn’t have chapter breaks he’ll also give you the timecode so you can jump to the next segment if you don’t want any spoilers.

But I think on the whole we’re probably not going to go too spoiler heavy. We’re mostly just going to celebrate the things it did really well.

We could talk about the casting. We could talk about the production design. The terrific direction by the Duffer Brothers. And Shawn Levy who also stepped up and did a great job as well. But I really want to focus on the writing, because what I thought was so remarkable about the show is it took this premise, which to me felt like if we could have a Stephen King book, or an early Steven Spielberg movie, and do it as an eight-hour show, what would that feel like. And they pulled it off so geniusly. They were able to take that idea for a story and break it out over eight episodes in a way that didn’t feel tedious or padded. I was just really impressed by how they managed the control of information, the reveals of character details. It just all felt like it was of one piece. And so it was smartly done.

**Craig:** Well, you can see how much planning went into it. And this is a good lesson for anyone writing anything. I do think certainly for people writing films. But when you look at these limited series, an eight run series like this, it’s just a long movie is what it is, right, broken up into bits.

And what they did so wonderfully was carefully ration out information in such a way that you never felt under-informed, nor were you ever over-informed. You just wanted more. And that is a tricky balance to strike.

**John:** One of the other realizations I had is that this show, because it was dumped all as a block, you got to see all the episodes in one sitting if you wanted to. There wasn’t that week-to-week fan engine of curiosity or theories about who this character was or what was really going on. I think they knew from the start, because they were doing this for Netflix, that a person might watch the whole thing all at once. And they built it in a way that was rewarding if you were to watch it all at once, and didn’t feel like it was a show that you had to watch one week at a time.

**Craig:** I actually loved the fact that it didn’t come out one week at a time. Maybe a little counterintuitive, but because you may think from an executive point of view, a Netflix point of view, we have a problem here: if we dump all eight episodes of the show out, and this is a mystery, with multiple reveals throughout, what’s going to happen after day one when people just go online and start saying, “Here’s what happened. Here’s how it ended.”

In fact, in today’s culture, I feel the opposite is true. I feel that people respect that and don’t do that anymore. What they don’t respect, however, is the time in between time-lapsed episodes. So, if you do release an episode once a week in the traditional way, between your Sunday and Sunday, you have a week of people going bananas online attempting to explain things and guess.

So it’s like watching a movie with somebody next to you constantly whispering saying, “I think I know what’s going to happen. I think that that means this. I think that this is going to happen.” And you just want to kill them. And I don’t like that over-analysis, the interstitial over-analysis that goes on. So I love that this thing just went bloop and nobody had a chance to post endlessly long, boring theories about what you were about to see.

**John:** Agreed. So let’s take a look at what might have been on their whiteboard as they were mapping out these eight episodes. We obviously don’t have time to dig into the individual things on each individual episode, but what are the big macro notes as they were figuring out who the characters were, what was going to be revealed about each character in which episode, and sort of how the flow of the eight-episode season was going to work.

So, we start with episode one. The whole thing centers around the disappearance of a boy named Will Byers. And so Will Byers is obviously a key character. His mother is a key character. His brother is a key character. His best friends are key characters. And so we’re going to need to establish all of them.

We need to establish all of them. We need to establish the town. We need to establish the sheriff who is going to investigating his disappearance. That he’s not just a functional investigator, but he’s actually a flawed hero kind of character himself. And then there’s one other family that’s going to be very important. And so it’s his best friend, and his best friend’s sister. The family to some degree we’ll get to see. Am I leaving anybody else out of that initial sort of tableau?

**Craig:** The only other thing that you get early on is they establish a villain. They establish something dangerous and murderous that we can’t see. And they establish a bad guy with very stark white hair.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s also in the first episode that we meet the girl we’ll come to know as Elle. We first meet her on the run. She goes and she sneaks into a diner. She meets the owner, a guy named Benny, who seems like he’s going to be a useful, important, sympathetic character. He gets killed off very gruesomely. Let’s you know this is the kind of show where people will die suddenly. And that her life is in real danger.

By the end of the first episode, we’ve connected Elle with the boys. And we’ve pretty much established what the show is going to be like. That the engine of the show is the girl and the boys, the cops, Joyce, the mother played by Winona Ryder, searching for her son, and the bad guys.

**Craig:** Yeah. And what they’ve done is set up a bunch of questions. These are good burning questions, but we’re not overdosed on them. Question, what is in that laboratory? Question, what is the dangerous thing that kills a scientist in the laboratory? Question, it seems like that’s the thing that came after young Will Byers, but instead of killing him, young Will Byers just vanishes. Where did he go? Why would it do that?

And, lastly, the strange little girl, who we presume probably comes from the same lab, I guess, this girl doesn’t talk, and she seems somewhat traumatized. What’s the deal? All great questions. And not too many. Not not enough.

**John:** Exactly. And I thought it was very important that they show you that, you know what, we’re going to connect threads. This is not going to be one of those shows where people are going to be working in parallel forever. The girl is going to meet the boys by the end of episode one. And it feels, OK, you see what the shape of this is going to be by the end of episode one.

You get a sense of what the series is going to feel like. So, episode two, Barb – who is everyone’s favorite character – she is Nancy’s best friend. I should have explained that this is essentially a John Hughes movie that’s happening kind of in one frame of this. And it’s about her virginity. It’s all very kind of classically ’80s teen stuff, played pretty straight, although I would say some of that stuff goes a little broader in a kind of fun way.

But Barb is just this amazing character who disappears at the end of episode two. Joyce sees something climbing through the walls. This is where the supernatural things have started to intrude into our world. And so it clearly isn’t just the mystery of the disappeared boy. This is something that’s going to keep going on, and people are going to keep being in danger from these supernatural forces.

**Craig:** Right. And, again, for every bit – and this is what these guys are really good at – every time they gave us answer, they would then give us another question.

So, they give us an answer about this girl, Eleven. One answer is that, yes, she is from the hospital, and yes, bad people are chasing her, and no, she’s not a bad person. She’s a good person. But we also learn that she can move things with her mind. How? And yet still more questions. And she gives, I think, the boys the ultimate question at the end of this episode when she attempts to explain to them where Will is.

And she does it by taking – silently, no words – she shows that – they are all on their little Dungeons & Dragons game board. And then she flips the board over, puts Will on the back of the board, and puts him near a monster.

So, that’s a ton of questions. What the hell does that mean, right? But it was great. We learned a lot. And then they’re like, uh-huh, did you enjoy that information? Here comes more questions. Same thing with Barb. Barb vanishes. We get a little bit of information. There is some blood involved. And then she’s gone again. And someone has taken a picture – Will’s brother has taken a picture. So there’s a little bit of evidence now of something. And we also have this wonderful story of a mother who we all believe, and no one else believes, and that’s always just fun, you know. That’s just fun tension for us.

**John:** Absolutely. One of the things so crucial here is as an audience we are basically caught up with the characters. So, Eleven obviously has more information than we do. The bad guys have more information than we do. But everybody else is basically where we’re at. In some cases we have more information because we’ve seen multiple perspectives on things. But we’re never given a lot more information than what the characters themselves have. And I think that’s part of the reason why we can relate so well to the characters because we understand their confusion and frustration because we are confused, too.

We’re really wondering what’s happened. We’re wondering whether Winona Ryder is crazy. We’re wondering what the next best thing is to do.

The boys are great, but they’re also cocky and confident in a way that really helps propel the story. And I feel like other probably older, more rational characters, might have taken a step back and really looked at it more objectively. I love that they just went for it. And because they were kids, they just plowed right ahead.

**Craig:** That’s the gift here. And it’s a great writing lesson. When you have something that’s a problem, you can easily convert into an asset. It’s a problem like to say, well, a policeman or a 30-year-old will look at this in a certain way and just grab this girl by the shoulders and say I’m going to have you now explain to me carefully.

But they don’t want that, so they use 12-year-old boys, who are Labrador puppies. And that’s so much more fun. Similarly, you have a moment in this episode where we see a flashback from Elle where she is remembering her past life with this white-haired villain character played by Matthew Modine. And he’s having her thrown into a little solitary confinement cell. We don’t know why. We don’t know why she’s having just that little scrap of a memory. We don’t know why she won’t speak.

But you know what we do know? She’s clearly been traumatized. And so they’ve taken this problem – why isn’t this person telling us everything she knows – and made it an asset. She’s traumatized. She can’t. It’s very smart.

**John:** Plowing episode, episode three, we see Joyce communicating with Will, but also Will’s body is found, which was a big shocker. That was sort of a – if this were a week-to-week episode kind of series, you would be stunned by that having happened. At the end of the episode, his body is pulled from the lake. After watching that episode, we took a break. We didn’t watch it anymore until the next night. And I thought for a while like, oh, so I guess he really is dead and maybe it’s a ghost. I mean, it really does change your perspective on the things you’ve seen up to that point, because you’re expecting like, oh, well, they’re going to find him somehow because he is somewhere. His spirit is somewhere. They’ll find him. His body will somehow come back.

And the answer is no.

**Craig:** This was the only thing where I stumbled a little bit because at this point in the show they have setup Elle as a kind of moral and informational authority. She’s right always. And she has superpowers and she’s been there. And she’s already told them he’s not dead.

So, the part of the show I liked the least was the character of the three boys, it was the skeptic character, because there was no damn reason for him to be skeptical. Once she closed a door with her mind, yeah, I’m in. I’m in. You clearly know what you’re talking about. And the fact that she literally got them to hear Will’s voice very briefly through a walkie-talkie and similarly Will’s mother is experiencing a kind of communication with Will through lights, which is really beautiful and interesting. So, I never believe for a second that that was actually Will’s body.

And I was shocked that even one of the boys believed for a second that that was Will’s body. Regardless, we have certainly more questions. Even if you don’t believe that that’s Will’s body, and I never did, why is there a fake Will’s body in the lake? [laughs] That, to me, is a really good question. And if the obvious answer is because people want to fool you into thinking he’s dead, the question is but why. So then they know where he is. We also – we get an answer to Elle. That this man put her in – that flashback – he put her in solitary confinement because she refused to use her powers to hurt a cat.

But what comes out of that, which is so – then this other question is why is he making her hurt a cat? And why does she call him Papa? And what is going on? You know, you want to know. And what is the extent of her power?

That’s the other thing that’s so interesting, you know.

And then, lastly, the creature who has made little hints that maybe he could come into our world, now very clearly is showing that it can come into our world. And so there is now the question of the threat will this happen again.

**John:** Yep. I was a huge fan of both Alias and Lost. They were great shows. I watched every episode of both. But one of the challenges those shows had is because they were longer series, and because they had to go on for multiple seasons and the creators didn’t even know how long they were going to be going on in some cases, the mysteries, the little things they would seed, you weren’t sure when they would pay off or if they would pay off.

Going into this series that was eight episodes long, I could see things like Will’s body, is that really a fake body. What’s going on here? And I knew like, you know what, it’s eight episodes. I have a strong hunch that it’s going to pay off. And I think I gave the creators a little extra pass on some things because I knew that they only had eight episodes and that there was a plan for it.

I always felt confident that they knew both where the whole series was going, but also how they were going to structure the information within the episodes. And that’s a very tough thing is how do you make this one hour really enjoyable, but also be a great puzzle piece for the whole eight episodes.

**Craig:** 100%. And, you know, look, I like the genre of serialized mystery. I really do. But when it isn’t closed ended, it inevitably turns bad. I loved Twin Peaks. I loved it. But at some point it became clear that they were in a space where they were not writing backwards from an ending. And that’s a dangerous thing, because theoretically you’ve lost all sense of unity. And a mystery, unlike other serialized shows, like action shows, cop shows, procedurals, a mystery has an ending. And so it is a dangerous thing to write an open-ended mystery.

You eventually will run afoul of setups that don’t pay off. It’s inevitable. And so, yes, I would not have started watching this if I didn’t know that it had an end. Wouldn’t have done it.

**John:** Once you know who killed Laura Palmer, there’s no reason to keep watching Twin Peaks. It’s not entirely true, but you can’t frame Twin Peaks as who killed Laura Palmer and expect us to watch after you’ve revealed the answer to who killed Laura Palmer, or sort of a murky half-answer to who killed Laura Palmer.

**Craig:** It’s like listening to a song, and the song has this interesting build, and there’s going to be a reveal. I’m listening to the Pina Colada song. And what’s going on? He’s taking out a personal ad. He’s going to cheat on his wife. He’s going to meet her in a bar. And she walks in and IT’S HIS WIFE. But, what if it weren’t? What if it’s like, well, and she didn’t show up, so I’m going to try a different thing. And now I’m going to try to meet another lady. And this song is never going to end.

No! End. [laughs] End. You know? And that’s the problem. Twin Peaks, once Laura Palmer’s murder is revealed, you begin to realize they’re vamping. This show has now turned into vamping. And nobody wants to watch vamping. Nobody. Unless you’re going to like an improv show, and then give me a three-minute sketch and get off the stage.

**John:** Yeah. Challenging. There will be a new series of Twin Peaks coming on Netflix soon. So, we’ll see if they’ve learned that lesson.

**Craig:** I hope they have.

**John:** All right. Quickly powering through, episode four, the boys really contact Will, so that’s the radio episode. We connect Nancy with the monster through Jonathan. And that’s the first time you feel like, oh, these different characters who aren’t really interacting about the monster, everyone is starting to have the same kind of information about things.

It’s also where we reveal that the body was fake. And so you can sort of feel like, OK, all of these threads are coming together in the way that a Stephen King novel, like those threads would start to come together, like in The Stand, or these things where you’ve been following these separate people doing their separate things. Now everyone is starting to understand that they have a common enemy, and they’re coming together.

That continues in episode five. That’s where Hopper sees what’s going on. We establish the geography of our world and the other world and how one is the shadow of the other.

We see Nancy cross over. And we also see Elle in the depravation tank in the flashback. And you see like, oh, that’s how she does her thing and establishing that’s probably how the monster got in.

**Craig:** Yeah. So you start to see an acceleration of answers here. Episode four isn’t really giving us too much new information, other than that Will is definitely alive, and that body is definitely a fake. So episode four was a little bit of a holding pattern, although it did have some fun character stuff with Elle and the boys. Because, remember also, while they’re telling the story of information and mystery, they’re telling a love story between Elle and Mike.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And it’s an adorable love story. They also in episode four, they begin to relieve you of some of the burden of frustration. It’s a small town. There are six or seven characters. All of them know things that would help the other one, and they’re not talking, which is normal to create tension. But at some point you can’t keep it up. And in this episode they say no more of that; let’s start connecting our dots together. That really happens in episode five where everyone is sort of now becoming one big team.

But what’s great about episode five is it also gives you a huge answer. And that answer is what the hell is this other place? We don’t quite know until they very clearly show Nancy actually entering it, and then coming out. And then we go, oh, I get it. It is like upside-down our world. I get it now. I get exactly what’s going on.

And all the way back in episode two when she flipped that board over and stuck his little figure on the back of the board, that was actually incredibly accurate.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So, you’ve gotten all of these really interesting bits of news, and you also now can position Elle’s origin story. We know that she has these powers. We know that she started by being used by the military to listen to spies. Now she’s going to be helping to kill spies. But while she’s in that zone, right, she was never meant to contact this creature. She was just traveling this other dimension to help spy, but while she’s in there she discovers this bad, bad thing.

**John:** Yeah. And that bad, bad thing follows her out. So, in episode six we learn more backstory on Elle. We learn about how she came to be. We learn why she calls the man because Papa, because her real mother was part of this secret government program. They did acid and tried to do sort of psychic experiments. She was pregnant with Elle during that time. So, this man who she calls Papa probably raised her. And that is all very, very troubling.

So, it’s not just a name she’s given him. She actually sort of does see him as a father figure. If I have a qualm with sort of how some stuff played out, there was opportunity to see some real affection between the father and the daughter figure, and it was never there. And I don’t know if they just sort of ran out of time, or they decided it was not a thing they wanted to see. But I didn’t have a sense of Frankenstein’s love for his monster, or any of that really manifested through the end of the show. Do you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** I totally agree. And part of it is that Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Elle, is such an extraordinary actor that she was frankly more convincing than everybody else at any given time. When she’s crying out to Matthew Modine, our villain, and crying for his saying Papa, like please don’t hurt me and put me in, you know, don’t punish me, I believed that it was the anguish of a child not to someone that she was scared of, but somebody that she loved.

And I needed – I’m so with you – I would have loved to have seen that he had some of that for her. And instead you mostly just get that he’s kind of a stock government sociopath. And I would love if he’s – the implication is he’s no longer with us, but if he does return in season two, that’s something I would love to see explored.

**John:** I agree with you. If I have any other fantasy wishes for a scene that wasn’t able to fit in here, Winona Ryder I think is terrific in the show, but she has to play sort of one emotion, and she gets to dial it between nine and 11, which is sort of the panic/anguish of a mother who has lost her kid. If she had a flashback, had some other moment to give us some other flavor of who she was. If they’d given us a little bit of whatever her and Hops relationship was back in the past, that would have been fantastic. Because I missed seeing another flavor of Joyce, who in this show only gets to be panicked mother.

**Craig:** True. But I will give Winona Ryder all the credit in the world. What a difficult task. You have to be basically completely strung out and realistic as a woman whose son is gone and who everyone is telling you is dead, and yet you believe he’s not dead. You deny the fact you’re going crazy. You’re talking to him through your lights. You’re crying all the time. And I believed her. And that was amazing.

I could easily see that in the second season she kind of goes through a Sarah Connor transformation. Like Sarah Connor in Terminator was basically damsel in distress. Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 is transformed by the experience of Terminator 1 into this ultimate hard-ass warrior, which I love.

**John:** Yeah. I think I just wanted Winona Ryder to have her Emmy reel. And I wanted one more scene for her Emmy reel there, which would have been great.

**Craig:** Well, she’s got some good ones. I’ll tell you the one that I would put in, which I loved. It’s such a little scene, but she goes to the store where she works. We’ve never seen her actually working her job. She just goes there, confronts her boss–

**John:** And takes stuff. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. She needs two weeks advanced pay. And she needs a telephone. And she needs a pack of Camels. I mean, that was great. So well done.

**John:** All right. So episode six, we got our backstory. Episode seven is where everybody comes together. So essentially all these characters who have been in different spaces, they’re now all under literally one roof. We’re in the gym. They’re building this giant bathtub thing so that Elle can float and find where the missing boy is. It was nice.

It was a thing that you sensed needed to happen at some point. Like everybody had to get together and be working together to do things. And there was still conflict between the different characters. Each of them had some slightly different agendas, but they were all generally on the same page.

We also could really feel the ticking clock that the bad guys were out there and they were going to find them sooner or later. So, everything was coming to a head.

**Craig:** Yeah. And good writing lesson here. When you need to create obstacles for your characters, try and create them out of elements of the world that you have organically put in there that nobody would expect would then become an obstacle.

So for instance, we have these flashbacks where we’re seeing how Elle first contacts this other dimension and a monster. And to do that, they’re putting her in this isolation tank. And we don’t really understand why, although it seems pretty quickly like, OK, it helps her concentrate and it helps her access her full power. How smart then for them later to say, oh, if we’re going to win the day, we need to reproduce that with her as good people so that it becomes this fascinating obstacle that no other show would have ever had.

We need to fill a bathtub up with water and salt. And how do we do it. How much salt do we need? And where are we going to do this? Very, very smart. It’s a really good lesson, I think, to take the things that you have, that only you have, and turn them to your advantage.

**John:** Yeah. Being specific rather than being generic. And then finally we get to our eighth episode. And the series has basically promised this from the start. We will go in and we will save the boy. And so Hopper and Joyce go in to save Will Byers. And it’s all cool. It’s all actually really well done. And so we have the tension of them being in this other world, whether they’ll get to the son in time. We have all the bad guys in the real world. We have the monster crossing over to face the boys. You knew that had to happen, but you weren’t quite sure how it would look, or where it would take place.

I mean, the boys at the very first episode, they’re fighting this monster. And now they’re fighting the monster for real. So it was nice to see it all coming together.

**Craig:** Here’s where all of our big spoilers are. It was not at all surprising to me that she sacrificed herself to destroy the monster and save Mike and the boys. That seemed inevitable from the start. I love my Christ figures so much, so when I see one walk into a movie I think, well, you’ll be dead. And that’s fine. Although, of course, in Stranger Things fashion, you get all of these answers. And the day is done, and then more questions are raised at the end to tease you ahead for the second season.

Maybe she’s not dead. And maybe Will Byers isn’t exactly OK. And the good questions to keep us posted for it.

Now, it’s interesting, when I watched it, it didn’t seem to me like a series that needed to continue with those characters, by the way. I could easily see a second season where it’s an entirely different story with different people.

**John:** And they haven’t promised one thing or the other, have they? So, there’s no guarantee they’re coming back.

**Craig:** They have implied, actually, so let’s talk about Barb for a second. So, Barb, the perfectly pitched friend character, the Jiminy Cricket character for Nancy, who’s saying don’t sleep with the boy just because he’s cool – and accurate. She disappears. She’s discovered to be dead on the other side, so that’s sort of the stakes for Will. That helps us know that Will is in legitimate jeopardy on the other side.

That’s really all that ever happened with her. Her mom answers the phone at one point. We never see the mom again. People on the Internet were a little upset. I mean, hold on to your hats everyone: the Internet got upset. Because they felt that she had gotten a short shrift.

Some of the anger came from the corner of gender/queer politics. That she was probably gay and another gay character died. Although, I don’t see why they thought that, just because of her haircut? I mean, I didn’t get that jump. I mean, look, from a writing point of view, Barb existed so that we understood that Will Byers could die. That’s why she existed as a character. But they did say that they heard some of the criticisms about Barb and that Barb would get some kind of justice in season two, which implies a continuity here, yes?

**John:** Not necessarily. It could be a more metaphorical justice. Like basically the bad things that were done to her will be avenged. Or that maybe Nancy will go out there and take down the bad guys. So we’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** I leave it to them. But let’s talk about what’s next for them, because I don’t know the development process on Stranger Things, the first season, but I suspect they pitched the pilot. At some point they wrote up a document that was sort of what we were describing. It’s basically the talk through what happens episode by episode. And I’ve had to do those kind of outlines. Craig, you probably had to do the same kind of thing for the HBO show you’re doing, right?

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And so the kinds of things we’re talking about today, really the broad strokes about what’s happening in a given episode, after you sell a series you’re going to be writing up that document. And that’s the kind of thing you’re going to be talking about with the people who are writing the checks for your show about what’s going to happen in given episodes. And sometimes there’s negotiation. I don’t know sort of what degree they had to wrestle over what things were going to be happening in which given episodes.

But those documents exist before there are ever scripts. And so they’re very important places for planning the big broad strokes of the story. And I thought in those broad strokes documents, I don’t know if they’ll ever be published, they were really good.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I would love to see their show bible. We call it a show bible. Because inevitably things change. I mean, it’s funny. I’m in the process right now of conforming my – so I’ve written two episodes of the HBO thing. And they’ve asked me to kind of go back now and make changes to the bible to reflect how things changed in those first two episodes, because as they’re talking to other broadcasting partners, they just want all the materials to match up. And things do change. And I’d be fascinated to see where they kind of deviated from their plan, their initial plan.

But I suspect that the big points, in concrete. Have to be, or else I’m not sure how you survive writing a show like this.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. So if you skipped over our discussion of Stranger Things, please go back and listen to it when you’ve had a chance to watch the show, because we thought it was great. But now let’s get to the WGA election. And Craig will tell you who you should vote for.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll do my best here. This is what we call an off-year election, so no officer candidates this year. It’s just board members. We’re losing a bunch of incumbents, a bunch of good incumbents. I’m sorry to say we’re losing some feature writers. We may soon find ourselves with a board of directors that has no feature writers on it. It’s just horrifying to me.

Regardless, here’s who is running. Matthew Weiner of Mad Men fame. Glen Mazzara of Walking Dead fame. Zoanne Clack, who is medical doctor and a big TV writer. Jonathan Fernandez, who is an incumbent. Chip Johannessen, who is incumbent. Marjorie David is an incumbent. Courtney Ellinger, I’m not familiar with. Ligiah – I think it’s Ligiah Villalobos who interviewed me and Chris Morgan one evening at the Writers Guild. I can’t remember what it was about. Ali LeRoi, who is a big television writer. And Patric Verrone, evergreen Patric Verrone.

Look, some of these people I don’t know. But I figure probably the better thing is to say who I do know and who I definitely support. I definitely support Glen Mazzara. Glen is fantastic. I can’t believe he hasn’t been on the board yet. He’s hugely active in the Guild. He’s incredibly active in the showrunner’s training program, which is of vital importance. He is a great guy. He is super active in diversity efforts at the Guild. And he’s a practical, smart dude who listens. I love Glen. I love, love Glen. He’s terrific. So, please do vote for Glen.

I don’t know Zoanne Clack, but she’s a medical doctor and I just feel like people that – unless they are–

**John:** You know who else is a medical doctor?

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Dr. Ben Carson is a medical doctor.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I get it. But, see, she’s never said anything cuckoo like Ben Carson. And I’ve got a good feeling about her. Medical doctor. Also, it just seems like she does seem to have approval from a wide swath of people in the Guild. So, I am supporting Zoanne Clack.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Jonathan Fernandez, incumbent, terrific guy. Very, very pragmatic, again. Good and moderate and smart. We should absolutely get Jonathan Fernandez back on the board.

**John:** So I know Jonathan Fernandez from the picketing group. Back at the last strike, he was part of my picketing group. We picketed in front of Paramount Pictures. Every morning at like 5:30 in the morning. And so it was a small group of us and he was one of them. And since that strike he’s been sort of my go to person to ask questions about like, hey, what’s really going on here with these issues in the Guild. He’s very smart about younger writers and sort of the struggle of actually bringing home enough money that you can afford to be a writer. And so he has TV experience, feature experience. He seems like a great choice to get back on that board.

**Craig:** For sure. I can’t really speak to any of the other ones. That doesn’t mean they would be good or bad. Except for Patric Verrone. And Patric Verrone actually finished in ninth place in the last election. So, theoretically he should have been not elected. But one of the people who won an office position was Aaron Mendelsohn who was a board member. So there was a board member vacancy which meant they took and filled that position with the ninth vote getter, which was Patric Verrone.

I want to point out how extraordinary this is. Patric Verrone was the two-term president of the Writers Guild and he is so un-liked that he couldn’t finish in the top eight of board member elections last year. There’s a reason for that. He is a very, very smart guy. He is completely misguided on Guild politics. He has always been completely misguided on Guild politics.

He has one gear. And that gear is in moderation as a virtue. And Patric Verrone’s time is over. It should stay over. And he should find something else to do. So don’t vote for Patric Verrone.

**John:** Craig, I will guarantee you that I will not vote for Patric Verrone. So, if you are a WGA member, you got an email this last week that invited you to cast your ballots. So, do cast your ballot. It is important.

What Craig was saying is that this is an off-cycle election, so this is not the election where we also elect the president and do all of those other things. But these are quite important decisions you’re going to be making, because these are the people who are going to be taking us into this next negotiating cycle. So they’re not the negotiating committee, but they’ll be setting some of the agenda for going into that, so it’s important because it’s always important. And let’s pick some good people this year.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s important, too, that we have voices on the board who are actual voices. My experience on the board and my experience since in dealing with board members is that nine times out of ten board members do what they’re told to do. They’re told to do by the officers and they’re told to do by the executive director. And they have unanimous votes. And what they quickly become is large, boisterous discussion group that spends an hour or two yammering about stuff and then voting as they’re told. And we don’t want that.

We actually want a group that probably doesn’t spend as much time yammering to hear themselves speak, but also doesn’t rubber stamp things. We want thoughtful, independent, specific voices who are setting policy for our union.

**John:** I would agree with you. So, Craig, I’m looking at our recording time and it’s clear that we are not going to be able to get through these How Would this be a Movie. So what I propose to do is there are four different things we were going to talk through. And since we know what they are, let’s do that for our next episode. And we can actually put the links to these things in this week’s episode so people will see what they are, and they can read ahead.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And actually know what they are. So the four things we want to talk about, first is Florence Nightingale and The Woman in Disguise. It’s a story by Joseph Curtis writing for Male Online. It’s about Dr. James Barry. And, no spoilers, but Dr. James Barry had a very interesting life. And that was a submission by listener Craig Mazin, who occasionally listens to the episodes.

**Craig:** Rarely.

**John:** The second one is The Perfect Mom, submitted by Brett Thomas in Sacramento. It tells the story of Gypsy, this girl with a litany of debilitating diseases. An incredibly inspirational story of a mother and a daughter who really struggled against a million possible odds. And the community that supported them. And, wow, things go dark. Things go very, very dark.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, the story we’re going to have you read is by Michelle Dean writing for BuzzFeed. Our third one was submitted by Rachael Speal. It’s about an amateur sleuth. This is 12-year-old Jessica Maple. Her home was burglarized, but this pre-teen took it upon herself to find the scoundrels and bring them to justice. So, we’ll give you an article that is from ABC News that you could look at for that.

The final one, and it’s maybe kind of good that we’re pushing this back, because new pieces are still coming out and I haven’t read all of it, was submitted by Phil Hay who is a screenwriter friend of ours. One of the writers of The Invitation who was on a previous episode. This is called Revenge in Irvine. It’s a series of stories in The Los Angeles Times about a PTA mom and drugs and accusations. And it seems just great. It seems like a Desperate Housewives kind of story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s wild. Yeah, this guy, Christopher Goffard, is the writer. And I think he’s done four segments so far, and maybe two more coming out. I’m not sure.

**John:** So by the time we’re recording our next episode, maybe everything will be out and we can discuss the whole thing.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** I thought it was just fantastic. So, we’ll have those up for next week we’ll discuss them. So if you want to read ahead, go read ahead.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** All right, time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is oddly related to something we discussed. It is Angelo Badalamenti explaining how he wrote the Laura Palmer’s Theme for Twin Peaks. It’s so great. The music for Twin Peaks is so incredibly important for Twin Peaks. So it’s Angelo Badalamenti sitting at his piano with David Lynch as David Lynch is basically trying to evoke this feeling in him and Angelo Badalamenti is creating the music that matches that feeling.

It’s just a great description of the process for trying to create any piece of art, especially a piece of collaborative art. So, I really loved it. How he worked with composers. It’s one of those really strange things where you’re trying to describe something that you can’t really describe, so you end up using a lot of poetry, a lot of just imagery to try to evoke something. And yet it’s the responsibility of the composer to make that be music. And it worked out so brilliantly here.

So, I recommend everybody watch this.

**Craig:** Such a great theme. I mean, that theme song does so much to help you watch the episode that comes after it. The Game of Thrones theme song has a similar thing. It just puts you in a certain place, in a certain mood. There aren’t a lot of themes that do that for me for television shows. But, I mean, look Twin Peaks came out when you and I were in college and I can still, you know, I can hear it.

So, awesome. That’s excellent. Well, my One Cool Thing, how could it not be HD 164595? Now, HD 164595 is a star. And it is kind of flipping people out a little bit, because it may be the first time that we’ve actually picked up a signal from space that may not be natural, but rather alien-made.

So, this is our Contact movie story here. And so what they’ve done is they’ve found these particular kinds of spikes of signals that seem like they could be artificial. And it happens to be the case that this star is very much like our sun. It’s really close to the size of our sun, so it seems like maybe it’s in that Goldilocks zone for a nearby planet.

And so they’re now pointing all their stuff at it. Pointing all their stuff at this thing.

Now, to put some – to put a little damper on it. There is one possibility that this is not at all extraterrestrial. One of the things that’s concerning is that the frequency matches military frequencies. So, what we may be picking up is ourselves and we may be picking up some classified military signals from some satellites bouncing back that we just didn’t know were there. And, of course, no one is going to tell them.

But, I don’t know, because the thing is the Russians picked this up first, and now we are looking at it. If it’s not the Russians, and it’s not us, maybe it’s an alien.

**John:** It could be. Now, in the past when they found these strange signals, sometimes it became part of a revelation of other things out there in the universe. My understanding is like pulsars or quasars, one of those, like we thought at first that signal is too regular, too perfect, that must be the alien contact. But it turns out like, oh no, there’s actually these rotating stars that do cool things.

So, if nothing else it’s worthwhile to explore interesting things to see what’s there. Same situation with that star where it looks like there’s stuff circling it that could be something that people built.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tabby’s Star.

**John:** It may be nothing, but it shows us that there’s something we don’t understand about how stuff around stars can form. And so that’s useful to pointing out telescopes out as well.

**Craig:** They did say that if it is artificial, that it is of such a nature that this would be a very, very advanced civilization, because of the strength and the type of signal that it is. So, I’m always reminded of this thing that Neil deGrasse Tyson once said. He said that on our planet we have, I think, 99% genetic overlap with chimpanzees. And so it’s that 1% that make us so much smarter than chimpanzees and account for everything that we’ve done to our planet and all of our technology that chimpanzees don’t do. And if we meet an alien species and they’re just 1% different than us, which is really close, but their 1% is to us that we are to the chimpanzees, we have a problem. [laughs]

So, you know, hopefully they’re nice, if they are real.

**John:** Well, I think the encouraging thing is as a world we function very well together, because we have very sensible leaders who really think through about all the possible repercussions of every action. And so I’m sure we would be completely reasonable and act in a very unified manner about these kind of situations.

**Craig:** What we’re going to do is we’re going to build a wall. And these people from HD 164595, they’re sending rapists. They’re sending murderers. We’re going to build a wall, folks. It’s going to be the greatest wall. And they’re going to pay for it. [laughs]

**John:** Totally going to pay for it. With their advanced technologies, they can pay for it.

**Craig:** That’s right. From 94 light years away, they’re going to Venmo us a payment for the wall.

**John:** Yep. It’s going to be nice.

So that’s our show this week. Hey, it worked.

**Craig:** It worked!

**John:** All the way across the ocean and the whole US, we recorded the episode. The show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from John Venable, and oh, it’s a good one.

So, if you have an outro you can send it to us at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the great place to send your experiences if you are a working writer in film or television who started someplace else and actually was able to start a career not living in LA, New York, or London. We’d love to hear from you.

But we’d also like to answer your questions like the question we answered at the head of the show. So, send those to ask@johnaugust.com.

Short questions are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. You can find the show notes for this episode, including how to skip over the Stranger Things information at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about three or four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. You can also find them on the Scriptnotes USB drive and on the Scriptnotes app which is in the App Store. So, Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Have a great week. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [John’s desk in Paris](http://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/JohnsDesk.jpg)
* [The Nicholl Fellowships](http://www.oscars.org/nicholl)
* [Stranger Things Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWxyRG_tckY)
* [WGA Election](http://www.wga.org/news-events/news/press/2016/2016-final-board-candidates-announced)
* [Florence Nightingale and The Woman in Disguise – suggested by Craig Mazin](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3750328/Top-army-doctor-told-Florence-Nightingale-performed-successful-caesarian-hiding-amazing-secret-WOMAN-disguise.html#ixzz4ISGE4GUd)
* [The Perfect Mom – suggested by Brett Thomas in Sacramento](https://www.buzzfeed.com/michelledean/dee-dee-wanted-her-daughter-to-be-sick-gypsy-wanted-her-mom?utm_term=.taGexxnz2n#.hsy0PPR1WR)
* [Amateur Sleuth – suggested by Rachael Speal](http://abcnews.go.com/US/jessica-maple-atlanta-girl-12-solves-robbery-police/story?id=14341277)
* [Revenge in Irvine – suggested by Phil Hay](http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-framed/)
* [Angelo Badalamenti on writing “Laura Palmer’s Theme”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgXLEM8MhJo&app=desktop)
* [HD 164595](http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/30/health/seti-signal-hd-164595-alien-civilization/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by John Venable ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/Episode_266.mp3).