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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 415 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We are going to skip the usual bits because today we are joined by two of the executive producers of HBO’s remarkable and award-winning comedy series Veep. David Mandel serves as showrunner. Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars as Selina Meyer. It is such a pleasure to have you both here talking with us about your amazing show.

**Julia Louis-Dreyfus:** Thank you very much.

**David Mandel:** Thank you. Thanks for having us.

**Craig:** How about this? We are coming up in the world. I’ve got to be honest with you, John.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve had Alec Berg a couple of times.

**Craig:** Which is not great.

**John:** No, but I mean–

**Craig:** Not great.

**John:** But to have the better HBO comedy.

**Craig:** Well, so Alec Berg used to work in a three-part writing partnership with Dave Mandel and Jeff Schaffer.

**David:** A three-headed monster.

**Craig:** Correct. And as everybody used to say, Alec Berg was the worst of them. So we would always get the worst. And now we have – and I guess Schaffer is in the middle.

**David:** I mean, show 600 you might get Schaffer.

**Craig:** We’re working up to Schaffer. Working up to Schaffer. But now we have world famous television star Julia Louis-Dreyfus. And we have the greatest of all Mandels in Hollywood. Sorry Howie.

**Julia:** Hey, you know what?

**David:** I’m a fan of Babaloo. But anyway.

**Julia:** Mandel means almond. You know that right? OK.

**Craig:** It’s true.

**Julia:** I forgot to tell you that I took pictures of packaging at the grocery store where it said Mandel Mandel. Anyway, never mind. You can cut that part of the show out.

**Craig:** No, no, that’s staying.

**John:** That’s crucial.

**David:** Leave that in and let’s expand on it.

**Craig:** Mandelbrot.

**David:** Expand and sort of improv.

**Craig:** If you were fully Jewish, we had a little discussion of our Jewish provenance which happens when you’re discussing comedy. Mandelbrot is almond bread, right?

**David:** It’s kind of gross.

**Craig:** You know what? Like most Jewish pastries, disgusting.

**David:** It is a treat that is not much of a treat.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a treat relative to the things we’ve suffered as a people.

**David:** Like they gave it to us at Hebrew school and, yuck.

**Craig:** Here you go. Doesn’t this remind you of something good? But it’s not.

**John:** I hope that today we are going to talk with you guys about some things—

**David:** This is of interest to screenwriters, yes?

**Julia:** Yeah, really.

**John:** That do not include almonds. You probably don’t get asked so much about the process of writing your show and putting together your show, so we really want to dig into some process stuff. I want to talk about tone and likeability, which is a thing that Craig and I get hit on a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah. The number one complaint that I have about notes, whether it’s from a studio or a network, or when people ask us what do I do about this, the big complaint is my character is not likeable enough. And I always think like good, you’re on the path to success.

**Julia:** That note is a red flag to me. Likeability is overrated as a virtue. In fact, it’s not a virtue – certainly when it comes to writing comedy.

**David:** It’s blandness. It’s literally blandness.

**Julia:** Or drama for that matter.

**Craig:** Agreed. Agreed.

**David:** There was some executive back in the day in the Seinfeld days, not connected to Seinfeld, but the writers who had come from other shows and what not. And I literally don’t even remember who it was, but I just remember there was an impression of this person giving a note which was sort of like having listened to a script and then going, “Mm, I don’t like our guy.”

**Craig:** “I don’t like our guy.”

**David:** “I don’t like our guy.” And that was this sort of—

**Julia:** Oh, I know who that was.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll take that off the air.

**David:** OK. Fascinating.

**Craig:** But it is essentially a torpedo aimed at your work because the entire purpose of drama or comedy, and I think it’s particularly clear in comedy, is to underline the absurdity and the brutality of the human condition. And I’m not interested in doing that with people who are nice. I don’t mind people who are truly good. Those are interesting characters. Like Saints can be interesting in their own way. It’s like that line from Into the Woods, “You’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just nice.” It’s such a bad note.

**David:** They just want to round those sharp edges off. And like I said I just keep going back to blandness.

**Julia:** Well, also, I mean, very fundamentally if you’re really reading a good story or watching a good story, dramatic or comedic, conflict is what you need, right? Aren’t you looking for that? And how does likeability fit into conflict?

**David:** Yeah, conflict. And I would add to that and then choices. Choices based on who you are.

**Julia:** Right.

**David:** And if you’re just likeable or whatever, well then what are your choices? What are you faced with? And it just seems like it eliminates a lot of those things, too. Or at least interesting choices I guess.

**Julia:** Right.

**John:** Julia, can we start with you and start with the sharp edges of Selina Meyer and sort of where that all came from and the initial discuss of this character Selina Meyer, the idea of doing a show. Can you take us back, that’s 2011. What is that initial conversation about the show like?

**David:** It was drinks with Armando right?

**Julia:** Exactly. It was drinks with Armando. It was pitched to me that – he was developing a show about a female vice president who was miserable. So I thought, ooh, that sounds like, oh, I can’t believe that this is – immediately I was drawn to it conceptually. We were supposed to meet for a cup of tea or whatever, just to chat it up. Anyway, three hours later we’re still yacking and we got along really well and I was pitching to him in this meeting ideas about behavior and in that meeting a couple of things I pitched were then worked into the script actually that were fundamental. Like the bending of the spoon that was made out of cornstarch and so on and so forth.

And so we got along really well. I was familiar with his work because of In the Loop. I had seen the movie. I did not know The Thick of It, however, which was this series about parliamentary politics. And so then he wrote the script and he folded it in and then I remember getting this script and loving it. Although at that point they hadn’t made a deal with me, so I was like, god, I hope they’re – some of my ideas are in there and I hope they include me in this show. But anyway, they did. And it was fabulous.

**John:** A lot of our writers who are listening to this show, they’re going to be meeting with an actor. They’re going to be meeting with an actor who they want to involve in a project and it sounds like he had a general vision but he also included you in from an early stage.

**Julia:** Totally. Yes, exactly. This was his—

**John:** You felt like the match was right?

**Julia:** Yeah. And I grew up in Washington, DC. They’re in New York. But I was very familiar with inside the beltway culture. Too familiar really. And so – and also I’m active politically, so I’ve been on the campaign trail as a matter of fact. I had experience to bring to this, which I think was intriguing to him. But his style of making entertainment was really intriguing to me. Because the gritty quality of his work was something that I was desperate to do.

And then off we went and we made this pilot and we rehearsed for I want to say something crazy like two weeks.

**Craig:** Oh my god, what a luxury.

**Julia:** Oh yeah. Can I say, so much rehearsal for the pilot and then subsequent – I think we made six or seven more episodes, yeah, seven. And rehearsal for that as well. So it was just gobs of rehearsal, which was fantastic. And the cast that we put together were very adept at improvisation which was very important to Armando. He really, really wanted people who could think on their feet and work on script from an improvisational point of view.

**Craig:** It seems to me that there are some actors that writers understand instinctively they can partner with in this way. And then there are others that you can’t quite do it with. And I’m sure you’ve noticed this along your path, too.

**Julia:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** You know, some actors really are kind of receivers of stuff and they perform and they may have questions about it. But there is a writerly kind of actor. And one thing that’s always indicated that to me is an actor that has things to say about the other characters.

**Julia:** Yes.

**Craig:** That they understand everything actually comes out in relationships, not just me, me, me, but how does this work with the other person. And so early on I have to assume that you were talking with Armando not just about Selina but about everyone.

**Julia:** Oh yeah, completely. 100%. I mean, I was there for the casting of everybody other than Anna Chlumsky who had already been hired, because she worked with In the Loop, and so he was a huge fan of her. So she was on board. But everybody else we sort of went through the process and improvising and doing scenes in the audition with everybody who came through.

And in fact some of the people who didn’t get the roles as regular cast members subsequently came back as huge players in the show. Dan Bakkedahl, Brian Huskey, just to name a few.

**Craig:** You end up with kind of a theater troupe surrounding—

**Julia:** Correct.

**David:** And I know from talking to the guys that they had like – you know, Armando had done a lot of research and definitely sort of created these archetypes.

**Julia:** Tons. Yes.

**David:** But then obviously in the casting process the vision of what you think someone is going to be and then Tim Simons walks in and that’s not what you thought Jonah was, but then that becomes Jonah.

**Julia:** Well, Jonah was written as a tiny, I believe, balding, overweight guy.

**Craig:** Nailed it. [laughs]

**Julia:** Exactly.

**John:** So talk about that rehearsal and the improvisation part, because one thing I’ve heard about your show is that after a table read or during a table read there’s also an opportunity for the actors to sort of experiment. What happens in that process?

**Julia:** Well, just so you know, there was one way of doing it frankly with Armando and that worked really well, and then Dave come on board season five and that shifted. And neither one is better than the other, it just was a shift. And everybody was able to do it, which is great.

**David:** I think one led to another also in that—

**Julia:** Yes. Yes.

**David:** Because of the improv and the improvisational style of the early days which allowed I think all of the actors – this is just my take on it – I wasn’t there. But allowed the actors to imbue the characters with so much of their own stuff and really take possession of them. Then when you walk in in season five, I’m the first to say, a lot of the heavy lifting was done. And a lot of these characters were a lot more set in stone. And if you look at who the characters became in sort of season three and four they’re very different than who they were in one and two. Not in a bad way, but you can see in sort of the first season—

**Julia:** The evolution.

**David:** Everybody is a little similar. And then they start to find who they are.

**Craig:** And so you have the advantage of writing now for characters that the actors had sort of improved their way towards.

**David:** Yes. So I get this sort of slightly more – I shouldn’t say slightly – these more complete full-fledged people to play with. But I will say from talking with Armando who I spend a little bit of time with and he was just so gracious and wonderful with the handover and emailed and spoke on the phone and I flew to London. And then I think that first year I went to, he was getting an award at one of the comedy festivals – it must have been Montreal. And I went there and we did like a thing together there. And he just works differently. I mean, forget about who went first. He definitely experiments and looks to find things.

And one of the things I remember when I took over the show, it was like you have to have three editors. And I was like, OK. I don’t–

**Craig:** Seems like a lot.

**David:** Yeah. Seems like a lot. But you need three editors. And I was like, all right. And we hired three editors. And I worked with an editor and I finished a show and I went to the next set and I finished a show or whatever. And somewhere along the way I realized, oh I see, when he’s looking at all of this footage he is looking for stuff and he’s finding it in there. So he’s giving some notes in one edit room and moving to another edit room, and moving to another edit room. That’s just not me.

I am far from the most organized writer. I am a procrastinator. I have many, many bad habits.

**Craig:** We’ll get into those.

**David:** But at the end of the day the way I learned to write, which really from Seinfeld into Curb, you know, really Larry and Jerry but especially Larry, outline, outline, outline. And structure, structure, structure. And so I map the season out and it’s a pretty hard map. And things move from episode to episode, but when you look at our whiteboards, like at the end of the season it’s sort of like, oh no, no, no, it was all there. Do you know what I mean?

**Craig:** It was planned.

**David:** And so I didn’t quite need three editors. And obviously I think my scripts were certainly much more the script. But that being said, again, because I have these wonderful creatures, we would pick – maybe sometimes more pick and choose scenes to throw on their feet and try out and play with. And always good stuff came from that. And almost as a rule we always picked what I sometimes thought were the harder scenes.

**Julia:** Yeah.

**David:** And we always picked anything with you and Hugh. And you and Hugh scene was something we always almost took almost three shots at. We put it on its feet, did a big rewrite off of that and discovered so much stuff. Rewrote it, then put that back on its feet. At that point hopefully maybe even on the set. And then maybe a little fine tuning.

**Craig:** It would be a crime to not with those two together.

**David:** Yes. And so much, the physical – like a lot also the physical stuff that is never—

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** It’s hinted at in the script but it’s just not till you’re there that you get that kind of stuff.

**Julia:** Just to back up to the Armando process for a minute, when we were originally like in that first season and we were doing rehearsal and I just remember all of us were terrified. It was pretty scary. Because, you know, there was a script and we’d read it. And then he would say, OK, now just throw those out. Everybody come up. And let’s just – let’s pretend it doesn’t happen that way. Let’s pretend such and such comes through the door who wasn’t originally in the scene and needs this. And everyone was just sort of – it was scary.

But then after a while you sort of got used to it. And meanwhile writers are there taking notes furiously. And if anything works, you know, it gets folded into the stew. And this happened quite regularly. But that is to say it was also very written. So I don’t mean to imply at all that the show wasn’t written by the incredible writing staff. But it was just – we just came at it a slightly different way.

So the ability though to sort of think about a scene wholly was very much strengthened during that period of time. And it was something we could apply working with—

**David:** And I’m fascinated by that, but I would rather kill myself than work like – I just couldn’t even—

**Julia:** And by the way we tried it, didn’t we? We tried it like exactly that. That was not a good fit.

**Craig:** How was it for your anxiety level? Was it good?

**David:** Well, I’ll give you the [double] which was we read the first I think three scripts, or I can’t remember, I think we maybe didn’t read the third one. But we read the first two and we were scheduled to read three. I think it was like the Monday after they won the Emmy. And it was a goddamn disaster. And I know exactly what was wrong, but it was horrific.

And so then in a world where nothing was working we attempted our version of the Armando system because Chris Addison who had been a director in the old world and then we had him on that first episode sort of did—

**Julia:** Applied those same—

**David:** Applied the version. And to me it was just people marching in circles. I mean, I just remember going like blech. Because it was just like OK now you’re with a doctor. And the writers, the non-British writers, because three British writers had stuck around, but then I had put together this other team. And we’re all just looking at each other like—

**Craig:** What is this?

**David:** Yeah. And I knew what to fix. But for me it was just not it.

**John:** Now, back up though because both of you had worked on multicam. So in multicam traditionally the room has created a script. There’s a reading but you’re rehearsing over the course of that week. Isn’t that sort of the process that you’re getting to there where you’re trying a scene, you’re putting it on its feet, and writers are rewriting it?

**Craig:** Larry was pretty strict, right? In Seinfeld he was fairly strict?

**Julia:** Strict-ish. I mean, if we came up with shit in rehearsal and if it was good—

**David:** And you guys with Andy came up with a lot of business.

**Julia:** We came up with a lot of business.

**David:** Which became a lot of comedy that wasn’t necessarily in the script.

**Craig:** But it wasn’t, I mean, my understanding – like Seinfeld wasn’t like Curb for instance?

**David:** Well I was going to say no. Seinfeld had scripts. Curb has outlines. Although they are outlines that – and I always try and point this out. They’re like six, seven-page outlines that any writer worth his salt could take home and turn into a script in under 24 hours. It’s all there. It’s just not laid out. But it’s all there. And in some cases it’s all there plus we’ve got a couple of like secret things that we didn’t put in but we’re sort of saving for take three. So we’ve got even additional stuff.

But what I was going to say, just to back it all up somewhere, is the way Larry and Jerry ran the “writers’ room” is there was no writers’ room. Each writer was sort of individually crafting their episode, pitching their stories, and then being sent off. When Larry left Jerry rigged a sort of mini-version of the same system which was individual writers writing their episode and bringing it back in. And then in lieu of Larry and Jerry going through the script and sort of rewriting and making it better we did sort of a baby mini-room of usually Jerry, the writer, and then some combination of senior management so to speak.

But very much not the sort of group room write that I think has sort of—

**Julia:** That is the norm.

**David:** That has [ruined] the sitcom form in a lot of – you know, the reason that you’re not seeing multi-cams. But the process of, I guess, that week thing, it is different. This was really sometimes just wholesale just throwing things away and just going what if now you’re over here. I mean, I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But my one day of it, it was very loose.

**Craig:** Well it didn’t fit your—

**Julia:** It was very loose, but at the same time it was also not loose. It was a different, I mean, the looseness was important sort of fundamentally for a feeling of what you were doing. And it definitely informed, it was that gritty thing. So people talking over each other the way people do in life which you don’t normally see actually anywhere really.

**David:** Robert Altman movies.

**Julia:** Yes, exactly. Which I love. And that all stayed and we kept that in place. And in fact I would say when Dave came onboard and then moving forward from there, you know, sometimes I would say to Dave, “Is this feeling too written? We need to zhoosh this up, which is the word I use for it, which is to just mess it up, zhoosh it, make it—

**David:** Especially in that world of like take five. Everybody has kind of got it down. But it’s getting a little my line your line. You know what I mean?

**Craig:** Yes. Take the polish off. Go faster. My favorite direction of all time. Faster. Something about speed people start to lose a little bit of that sense of line-line. They will start to overlap. It will – I don’t know, I just always find that—

**Julia:** Speed can be really helpful. It can open up something that you didn’t realize. It really can.

**Craig:** It’s almost now you’re flying by the seat of your pants. Your instincts start coming out.

**David:** Seinfeld was crazy fast, and Curb was faster. And Veep was fast before I got there. And I think we made it faster.

**Craig:** Speed is wonderful.

**David:** I mean, I always think about like Billy Wilder, like One, Two, Three. You guys know that movie?

**Craig:** Yes, great movie.

**David:** Just boom, boom, boom, boom. And not only do we squeeze every ounce of air out of it in the editing room. Also by the way just to try and get more stuff in. But on the set I guess in that next step of the process which is when you actually get to the set, we’re getting it on its feet for the camera blocking. We’re making changes. And any hole that’s there, how do we jam another line in? And plus the realization—

**Julia:** Or behavior. Or behavior.

**David:** By the way, both. So there’s behavior here. And Richard is throwing a line away there behind her that she never hears. And it’s just all there. And we’re jamming it full.

**Craig:** Then you get that sense, and I love this in comedy. And it’s something that you can start to do on the page, but ultimately you do have to work together as a troupe to get it done. The sense of overabundance. We’re not short on jokes here. In fact, we have too many for you. If you miss something, good. Watch it again.

**David:** Watch it again. And every time people are like, oh, I have to stop and go back I’m like great. Fantastic.

**Craig:** That’s wonderful.

**David:** And in fact when we sometimes do these screenings, we’re always sitting near each other when the audience is getting to see it. And obviously it’s so fun when you do like a screening for a theater because that level of laugh is wonderful. But we’re always a little bit upset when they miss that second joke.

**Julia:** Oh, shit, they missed it. Shut up! Shut up!

**David:** They’re laughing too much at joke one and it just blew by them.

**Craig:** Good. Love it.

**Julia:** Yeah, totally.

**Craig:** Love that.

**Julia:** But it was also this idea too of things having an imperfect veneer over it. So, forgetting a line, or saying things wrong, or whatever, we carry – I mean, we just blow past it and maybe can use it because it seems real.

**David:** Right. If somebody screws up a line or stutters on it, Julia is more likely to make fun of the character in the scene.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Julia:** Yes.

**David:** Which then may become something but now all of a sudden she’s jumping down, whatever, I’m thinking of like Matt Walsh’s thing. Jumping down his throat. But it feels very real. The other thing, too, is – and again this ties into I think sort of the—

**Julia:** Sorry to interrupt. I think that’s where that aye-aye-aye—

**Craig:** Came from originally. Because he actually did it?

**Julia:** No. He just said something dumb and I just started making fun. [makes stuttering noises]

**David:** And then he said please don’t do that and then you’re off to the races.

**Craig:** That’s the best thing you could possibly hear. Please don’t do that.

**David:** But I was just going to say and then this sort of Veep sort of doc style, also the same thing to this messiness which is we are big and wide at times where other shows would be close. We are close but we’re on the other person. We’re on the reactions. Because so much of—

**Craig:** Where it’s at.

**David:** Exactly. It’s all reactions. And so that kind of stuff. Or obviously that moving camera thing where you’re getting a little bit of both.

**Julia:** Pieces of this.

**David:** And not necessarily ending the scene on a joke, or at least a joke-joke. Sometimes even just maybe an angry storm out that just sort of Peters out with everybody feeling—

**Craig:** Avoiding the traditional rhythm.

**David:** Yes.

**Julia:** Yeah. And we are always very careful, because we got burned a couple of times, actually I think just once, to get a hyper wide shot. Because the wide was our friend. And also in so doing I would add we got away with a lot of broad performance. Because if you’re hyper wide you can do it.

**David:** You know, and occasionally you have a line and you go, well, that’s feeling a little jokey, you pull back about ten feet it’s a lot less jokey.

**Craig:** No question.

**Julia:** Right.

**John:** Can we talk about Selina as the center character what she wants seems to drive everything. It drives the whole ambition of the series. But within every scene it’s so focused on sort of what Selina wants. The thing she’s trying to get someone else to do. Or that she’s hungry. Or that she needs this thing that’s in her bag.

**Craig:** [laughs] She’s hungry.

**John:** So as you’re writing scenes is that pretty much always top of mind. Sort of like what she wants, what each of the characters want in that moment, what they’re trying to do?

**David:** I don’t know if it’s specifically that. But I guess I’ll go macro for a second which is – especially in the first season Armando had sort of written it into this sort of exquisite corner which was the Electoral College tie. So, so much of coming into the show – and this goes back to when Julia and I first sat down with this idea of maybe I’ll come in and do this – obviously we were talking so much about Selina and really the bigger picture of just how badly she just wants the presidency. And so in some ways I can’t say that we’re sitting there going, no, no, it’s all about what she wants in any individual scene. But that paintbrush, even in the season where she wasn’t in the White House just drives everything.

**Craig:** She’s defined by her wanting.

**David:** Yes. Exactly. And that’s definitely something we’re just always thinking about. Plus, I guess just a general, again, this for me goes back to Larry, which is just every scene has to move things forward. Something has to move forward. You can’t just—

**Julia:** Masturbate for a while.

**David:** And in our first season—

**Craig:** What a shame.

**David:** Once we got going and we sort of rewrote those scripts and everybody was very happy and we solved it all and we went going we reshot one scene from the first episode which was a scene of – Selina had this giant stress pimple from the tie, sort of the way George W. Bush had gotten sort of his own weird boil thing. And we shot of scene of her with the doctor, the president’s doctor. A very funny actor whose name is escaping me right now, but he was really funny. And there was some funny weird energy between him and Tony Hale, being possessive of each other. And this very funny way that like a lot of fans thought—

**Craig:** They were into each other.

**David:** It was all to do that was wonderful. But the scene was sort of dead on arrival.

**Craig:** It didn’t change anything or move.

**David:** Yes. Exactly. And we ended up – and it was something that kind of slipped through the first time, because there was fun dialogue and stuff about the pimple and all that kind of stuff. Second time through and it wasn’t until like sort of again you sort of realize it watching it in the editing room it’s like we know how to fix this. And it was just like add three more characters and add some—

**Julia:** Other conversations.

**David:** Yeah. There’s a disaster in the Midwest.

**Julia:** Flooding or—

**Craig:** Which led to a background thing that’s going on.

**David:** Which led to a funny conversation about favorite disasters.

**Julia:** Favorite disasters is unbelievably irreverent to say the least.

**David:** And just a whole bunch of other stuff. And the doctor dialogue and her dialogue with him and the Tony stuff, none of that ever changed. It’s just now—

**Craig:** Takes the pressure off of that stuff to be funny on its own.

**David:** The fear of trying to continue to govern, to be presidential, to seem presidential. That all now comes into this scene. When it was just talking to the doctor you lost – even though the scene was in the Oval you lost that, again, that feeling of she is obsessed with how do we get through this tie. And those things all come through.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well it does seem like once you have a character that is defined by this wanting that you’ve learned something about her which is – it’s too limiting to say that a character really just wants to be president. That’s a person that just wants. Right? So that never goes away. We kind of have this sense that people that really want to be president are trying to fill a hole that will never be filled. So everything is trying to fill the hole and it will never happen.

**David:** And one of the great things, and again I think this connects a little bit to coming in in season five that maybe you don’t do in season one is coming into the show as a fan of the show, but also now it’s season five, again, some of the stuff we started talking about right in that first sort of – and there was a series of them. I feel like – I don’t know, two or three lunches. And it sounds silly, but a lot of those conversations just informed the three seasons we did together.

**Julia:** Totally.

**David:** We didn’t know how long anything was, but the journey, the losing the tie, then ultimately the idea of losing the tie to another woman. Then the notion that the show would transform yet again into former president of the United States and then into the window opening and her throwing things away. All of these ideas, I mean, were in those early conversations. And we were so simpatico about like what to do with this thing. But in there was this initial idea that ended up being the fourth episode of the season which was Selina’s mother who had been mentioned – and again the fan, I remember thinking about these things.

**Julia:** Mee-maw.

**David:** Mee-maw had been mentioned three or four times.

**Craig:** Mee-maw.

**David:** As this hateful character. And we sort of had this idea of like she dies. And now season five we’re going to start digging into where do these wants come from.

**Craig:** Right. What’s the origin story here?

**David:** Why is she like this with her daughter? Well I’ll tell you why she’s like this with her daughter. Because her mother was even worse to her. And what’s her relationship with her dad? Well she thinks it’s good, but why is she with so many shitty guys? Because it wasn’t so good. And you get this chance to kind of dig in. And I do think – and again, it’s not good or bad or better or worse, it was sort of I think the three seasons we did together we got to kind of dig into that stuff in a way and start to – I hate to say it was home life, but you got a little more into the characters.

**Julia:** And I apply that, too, to other characters on the show. We were able to dig into Gary Walsh’s life.

**David:** We met his parents.

**Julia:** Anna Chlumsky’s life. My god.

**David:** Mike having babies.

**Julia:** Amy Brookheimer. Yes.

**David:** All of these things.

**Julia:** It was fun to delve.

**David:** And it was just a chance to kind of, because that’s what – I guess I’ll simply say I was both – that was what I was interested in. And it was an opportunity to also make it a little different.

**Julia:** Widen it out.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because they had already done the stuff that you have to do first.

**David:** A thousand percent.

**Craig:** Because there’s no context for it.

**David:** The second episode can’t be Selina’s mother’s funeral.

**Julia:** Nobody gives a shit.

**David:** But four years in–

**Craig:** Nobody Gives a Shit. That would have been a great title for that episode.

**David:** You start to kind of go, oh, this is interesting. Yeah.

**John:** Let’s talk about the plans for this season. So the blue sky-ing of what’s going to happen this season. Because you could have had a plan for like these three seasons, but then there was a break and there’s a new president. A whole bunch of stuff has changed. So when it came time to really think about what are the episodes of this season what is that process like for you, for the two of you together? What was the discussion like?

**Julia:** Well the first big discussion was are we doing seventh season and out or an eighth season and out. And that took a lot of personal, you know, there was turmoil in our hearts and souls over that. But we made the right call because I should say we did have an idea if we were going to do another season what that trajectory was if we were to do a season eight. So then when we decided it’s a season seven it was a question of crunching those ideas into season seven.

**David:** And again a lot of this all just starts with us sort of either, just phone calls sort of in the offseason, or even occasionally an email. But usually leads to a phone call. And sometimes she’s calling me going I had this thing that was funny. This could be a Selina thing. And I’m going, hey, I’ve been thinking about this thing of like this. And so a lot of it just starts like that during the sort of maybe – during the editing process. When I’m editing and we’re seeing each other to go over cuts and stuff. But it’s free form ideas as these things do.

But I always – this is for me – I always like to – when I go into a season I like to kind of know what the first scene is and I like to know what the last scene is. And that last scene also secretly informs the first scene of the next one if that makes any sense.

**Craig:** Absolutely yes.

**David:** And so we started talking, again, about how do we end this, how do we figure this out. And I will admit in my own mind I was pushing for two. It’s a good job. I like it. I like working with these people.

**Craig:** Sure. You have a lot of debt. Gambling debt.

**David:** Gambling debt. But as the show often does it was like – it was like one of those things where you start putting it up and it’s like, oh, it’s one. And it just was.

**Julia:** Yeah. Story dictated it.

**David:** Yeah. So we talk through a lot of stuff. I start meeting with the writers. We have a lot of special guests. We bring in all these people. It’s almost like a little salon.

**John:** Let’s talk about some special guests.

**Craig:** I was one of them.

**David:** That’s right.

**Craig:** I was a special guest.

**John:** What did you talk about?

**Craig:** Ted Cruz.

**John:** All right, oh great.

**Julia:** Oh.

**Craig:** The worst politician in the world – well, second worst politician in the world.

**David:** Exactly. He’s looking really good now.

**Craig:** Let’s not get crazy.

**David:** But when Jonah became a congressman, when he won, and then we were going into the notion of what’s next for him, and it led to his sort of mini Tea Party revolt. And we were sort of definitely kind of stealing a little Newt Gingrich, a little Ted Cruz and whatever, we brought in the Ted Cruz expert. Because we had this idea that we wanted Jonah to be the most hated member of the House of Representatives. And so we thought the most hated member of the Senate would be a good reference point.

**Craig:** No question.

**Julia:** In its inception the show relied tremendously, heavily on research. So, in the very beginning we went to DC and met with this person and that person. I mean, you can’t believe it. It was like field trip after field trip, in the best way. And we all did it together, writers and cast. And this happened every season and then when Dave came aboard we did another Washington trip.

**David:** When I took over we did a Washington trip as well. We took all the writers to DC. We were in the White House at like nine at night. I mean, we were in the Situation Room at like 10:30 at night on a quiet Wednesday or something.

**Julia:** We spent a lot of time meeting with consultants and lobbyists and chiefs of staff. I mean, really just a ton of people.

**David:** And the nice thing is obviously people are fans of the show from both sides of the aisle. So we had Mitt Romney in after he lost. And he was fascinating, but one of the most fascinating things for me just story wise we sort of said to him like what’s it like to lose. And he definitely – we stole a couple of lines from him. We definitely took some things. But one of the best things he said was he talked so much about—

**Julia:** If you’re explaining you’re losing.

**David:** Yes, exactly. And we just put that right into the show.

**Craig:** Wow. If you’re explaining you’re losing.

**David:** There were little phrases. Anytime anybody used a phrase, I remember somebody said simple block and tackle politics. And it’s like Ben is going to say that. So you get little bits of dialogue that give you that authenticity. And then obviously you just get stories. So that for example the Pod Saves America guys came in and told us about Obama flying to the wrong airport. And we know that’s—

**Julia:** Done.

**David:** Literally opening scene of the season.

**Craig:** Can’t not do that.

**David:** Sorry, back to Romney really quickly. He talked so much about the comfort of this large and extensive family sort of giving him solace that it was so clear like, oh, Selina would have no solace. It was sort of like a—

**Craig:** They were going to leave her alone.

**David:** Yes. It was just like oh my god she’s going to lose her mind. And we started the season with the notion of her coming back from basically the looney bin. And in those things you just get these wonderful pieces of reality that go into the stew.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** Can we talk about the second episode which is the Aspen one, the Discovery Institute? What was the genesis of that idea? Just getting you out of the normal backdrops?

**Julia:** Well, I mean, because it’s a reality. These – what do we call them – retreat conferences led by billionaires.

**David:** Or you hear about these weekends in the Hamptons where like Kamala Harris is going to the Hamptons and she’s throwing a giant party.

**Craig:** Jeffrey Epstein used to attend quite a few of these.

**David:** I’m sure he was quite the guest.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Not anymore.

**David:** And so again these things come at us and it seemed like just again obviously an interesting thing and this is – I’ll throw this out which is we started with a ten-episode season that was so complicated from a production standpoint that the episode shooting went from six-day shoots with three cameras to eight-day shoots with four camera.

**Craig:** Four?

**David:** Four.

**John:** Four cameras.

**Craig:** What do you do with the fourth one?

**David:** Our DP David Miller, I mean, he found usage—

**Julia:** Killed it. He killed it.

**Craig:** To be honest with you I’ve never seen a single cam four cam.

**David:** It was incredible. And it allowed us to – especially now that the group was back together, so you’re in a table or an office scene.

**Craig:** That makes sense.

**David:** That fourth camera is picking up extra coverage.

**Craig:** Tables are the worst. The worst.

**Julia:** Yeah.

**David:** But not with four cameras. Four cameras makes it a little easier. But as it grew and we ended up going, OK, I think from a – I hate to say – budget reality we’re going to crunch the season a little bit. I think in retrospect I do wish maybe one or two of the people hadn’t been at that retreat and just maybe a little less of a – it was almost a bottle show. And that’s not a bad thing. But in a seven-episode season when I look back on it I wish it maybe wasn’t quite the bottle. I wish maybe – and again the perfect writer’s hindsight. I wish maybe we had moved Amy and Dan going off on the abortion into that episode, taking them out of. I think it was a luxury in a ten-episode season. Again, this is all hindsight.

**Julia:** It’s all right. It’s all right, Dave.

**Craig:** No, I think you should torture yourself over it. Forever.

**David:** I will. I will. Do not worry.

**Julia:** He is.

**David:** But again it came out of this reality. It came out of this notion of—

**Julia:** Money driving politics.

**David:** Trying to show money. Exactly.

**Julia:** Money. Money. Money.

**David:** Basically we have that line in there somewhere, Ben says to you, “You’re going to have money so dark it’s going to get shot going into its own apartment.” And that was, if you had to pick a line of what is this episode about, that is what that episode is about. It’s about the money and all of–

**John:** And setting up the season. It’s also going to be the Chinese influence and a lot of other things that’s going to happen. Basically asking the question is there anything Selina Meyer won’t do. And the answer is, of course, she will do anything she absolutely—

**Julia:** The China thing by the way was set up in season five.

**David:** We were setting that up in season five. I don’t think we necessarily knew obviously, well A, we didn’t know the Russians were going to interfere in our election. So I can’t say to you we 100 percent knew how it was going to play out. But all of that Tibet stuff has been a constant thing.

**Craig:** It worked out great for both of our shows in its own way.

**Julia:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What I did not predict was that the Russians would explode another nuclear reactor and lie about it.

**David:** And lie about it for about, what, eight days or so?

**John:** HBO did really well by you getting that to happen.

**Craig:** And then have Scandinavia detect it.

**David:** Again. Almost the same way.

**Craig:** Sort of embarrassing.

**David:** A little smaller.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**David:** But where I was going to bring this all back around to was, so, let’s back up. Summer 2017, yeah, Summer 2017 we mapped these ten episodes out. When I’ve got it on the board, maybe not perfect-perfect, but at that point Julia has heard most of it, but not all of it. And then she and I go through it together and she adds her stuff and we move some more things around. And then at some point we get HBO to kind of sign off on it. And then we start writing the episodes.

And I think we had read like three or four episodes when it was September and we won the Emmy and the next day—

**Julia:** Breast cancer arrived.

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** Yes, yes, yes.

**David:** And we ended up shutting down.

**Julia:** How do you do?

**Craig:** Hello, breast cancer. Welcome.

**David:** And I don’t want to gloss over that period but I guess jumping forward when we were shut down Trump enters the second year of his presidency and as I sort of think about it he got very comfortable. Like all of a sudden like if you go back to that period he really steps on the gas. The lies go up. The craziness goes up.

**Craig:** All of his minders have been eliminated one by one.

**David:** Exactly. And so year two is where he really goes crazy. And as bad as it was in that kind of like it can’t get any worse, it started to get a lot worse.

**Craig:** Every day.

**David:** Yes. Every day.

**Craig:** There is no bottom.

**David:** And so now as this is kind of happening and I can remember these feelings in January and I will also say it also ties into, I think January is when you – forgive me if I’m not remembering exactly right – but somewhere towards the end of January you kind of got a thumbs up on the chemo had gone well and things were good.

**Julia:** Yes.

**David:** So knowing all is well and we’re going to – I don’t know when we’re coming back, but we’re coming back, it’s like what is this show? So many of the staples of what we did and talked about–

**Julia:** The bad behavior. In the pilot episode the big scandal is she says hoisted by your own retard. That’s the pilot episode.

**Craig:** Yeah. That wouldn’t even be a blink today.

**Julia:** That’s nothing.

**David:** It almost cost her her career.

**Craig:** Right. And that’s nothing now.

**David:** And the construct of Selina being constantly hoisted on her own petard, or retard, is a constant throughout the show in a way that it affects her. But it just seems like consequences have gone out the window. The notion of this is how we are secretly, but in public we’re different.

**Julia:** Public we’re somebody else.

**John:** So all of these sort of Veep staples go out the window.

**Craig:** He’s blown them up because you can’t compete with him because he’s real and he’s worse than you’ll ever possibly be.

**Julia:** Correct.

**David:** And then let’s go further. Our incompetent staff seems like geniuses compared to who he hired and vetted.

**Craig:** And this kind of goes to an interesting thing about comedy, we’ll go back to unlikeable characters, unlikeable characters aren’t stupid characters. In fact, you need to be rational in some way to be funny. Your rational pursuit may be insane. In other words the thing you want may be crazy. And the depth you go to and the lengths you go to. But it makes sense at least internally.

**David:** Or at least you can function to realize I’ve screwed up.

**Craig:** Correct. You have a sense of shame.

**David:** And that can create fear. Shame and fear.

**Craig:** This guy would be the worst character in a show ever because he just makes no sense. He doesn’t remember anything he did. He feels no shame or guilt. He would be a C or D character. I mean, he’s not even – he doesn’t even have what Louie De Palma had in Taxi. Like every now and then Louie would have a conscience.

**Julia:** Yeah. He’s too broad.

**Craig:** He’s too broad.

**Julia:** He’s too broad.

**John:** And he’s running the country. Yeah.

**Julia:** Yeah.

**David:** So all of this happens.

**Julia:** Ugh.

**David:** And now we’re starting to be able to get on the phone every now and then a little more. And I remember having this conversation of like I’m worried–

**Craig:** How do we compete?

**David:** And we were worried even when he won, but we kind of got away with it because it was our she’s not in office season.

**Julia:** Right.

**David:** We had shot most of that season, we were in the middle of I think our sixth or seventh episode, the Georgia episode. I can’t remember the order. We were mostly through the season when he won. And when we aired that season thank god she wasn’t in office because I honestly believe had she still been president—

**Julia:** We would have had a real problem.

**David:** And we’d been putting up these episodes of Mike doing bad press briefings.

**Craig:** It would have been embarrassing.

**David:** Yes. We would have looked very out of touch. And so my fears were not just what are we, what is our relevancy, how do we not seem out of touch, how do we not seem old fashioned, but also how do you deal with this, because so much for us when we are mining interesting real political history we have distance. Even when we did the Florida recount, I mean, we had distance. And we’re living in this thing. So it was a full reevaluation of I guess taking a darker paint brush and just going if we’re talking about the quest for power and this is now the example of just this insane, insane quest for power, and if Selina Meyer truly was willing to throw away love at the end of season six, what else is she prepared to do? And where can we go? And also why should she lose? Because our original version of it was she was going to lose the presidency yet again and then eventually become a vice president to Sam Richardson.

And so why does she lose when horrible people all over the globe are winning?

**Craig:** Correct. In fact, yeah, that’s the trend right now.

**David:** And dare I say some sense that I guess maybe was wistful but now I don’t necessarily think is true which is I guess early on I had this vision sometimes that at night he went up to his room and maybe was a little scared or like what am I doing here, which I now no longer think that’s even possible.

**John:** Oh no.

**David:** But that inspired at least the notion of let her make these decisions and then suffer consequences.

**Julia:** The consequences. Right.

**David:** And so we changed – I don’t want to say we changed everything, because on a story point of like where we went and the things a lot of it stayed the same.

**Julia:** But actually certain fundamental things really changed. I mean, people got shall we say killed off episode by episode until at the end of it we’re—

**David:** We got very Godfather and Godfather Part II. Which is by the end the family ain’t around anymore. And this idea which was at the end of the season she would be with no one we knew. I mean, we knew them but none of the regulars would be with her.

**Julia:** None of the core group.

**Craig:** She’s killed her whole family.

**David:** Yes. And she has to kill Fredo. Because as we started to think of well what can she do that’s bad, talking about her passing bills and what not, or burning down a forest, it’s relationships. And so who is the person she would never – and you get there. But it was a process and a real journey. And then, of course, if we’re playing all this darkness how do we also keep it funny? So it got very brutal but it got very funny in a really dark way.

**Julia:** And it got pretty dramatic, too.

**Craig:** Which is why it all kind of comes together and ends well.

**David:** Thank you.

**Craig:** I mean, not for necessarily the character—

**Julia:** No, no.

**Craig:** But ending a show is really hard. I personally, I don’t care, I love the last episode of Seinfeld. I do. At least I think I understand what was happening there which was essentially the show was saying these people you’ve enjoyed all this time are terrible and they deserve justice. They deserve it. Because they’ve done terrible things. And I thought that was wonderful. It was like a great way of a show kind of accounting for itself.

**Julia:** I could never really get an opinion about that for myself. I had never had an opinion about the final episode other than I enjoyed making it so much. Which I did. But in fact I know it was a controversial episode for a lot of people, but I think we were sort of set up in such a way that people would be disappointed regardless.

**David:** It was sort of a Game of Thrones of its time.

**Craig:** It’s hard. It’s really hard to end something that is designed to not end.

**Julia:** Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**David:** At the time I remember thinking, or the one thing I took from it and sort of I guess applied to us, which was it was what Larry wanted. Forget everything else. It’s exactly what Larry wanted. And all I cared about was there was a moment sort of like as we were finishing the cut of like we really like it. And the rest will happen or not happen as the world goes.

**Julia:** Yes.

**David:** Both in every phase, just the stories, the outlines, first draft, second draft, on its feet, rough cut, locked cut. And kind of we like it.

**Craig:** You’re accountable to yourselves. That’s the most important thing. I mean, then you can defend anything because there’s nothing to defend. We like it. We love it. We’re the same people.

**Julia:** Yeah. We like it. I think it’s funny.

**Craig:** Right. We’re the people that made the thing that you love. And we love this. So take it or leave it.

**Julia:** Yay.

**Craig:** Exactly, yay. But as it turns out I think it’s considered one of the best series endings.

**David:** When people do like it, don’t get me wrong, it’s quite nice.

**Craig:** No one likes it.

**David:** I was prepared for—

**Craig:** Sure, of course.

**David:** Like I said, to me the two most important people were me and her. And then I kind of had like a couple of my high school buddies in mind. This is aimed at them.

**Craig:** And where was I in there?

**David:** You’re like number 36.

**Craig:** That’s not bad actually.

**David:** It’s not bad. I only know about 35 people though.

**Craig:** I know. That’s still, I’m OK with that.

**David:** But I mean, I don’t know, when you make something for the world, what is that going to be?

**Julia:** You can’t do that.

**Craig:** Well I think it worked out great. It is considered, and I think reasonably so, and well deserved, a really good ending for a series that had been going for years and also had gone through so many changes. Sometimes those are the hardest things to end. When characters have gone through these wild journeys. You saw with like Dexter was sort of an infamously poorly-received ending where he had gone like seven, eight seasons, and then just didn’t quite figure it out I guess.

**David:** I think one of the things that also again going back to like you get to build on what was there in the past, I think one of the things that has always helped Veep is that despite the show being called Veep she stopped being Veep in season three.

**Julia:** And they blew up the premise.

**David:** And yet it was completely different every year and yet it was always this woman who suffered from having been the Veep. And the notion of—

**Julia:** And how we ended. She gets to be president, but something is off, isn’t it? So, she will never be satisfied. She’s a fundamentally unhappy human being. And she thinks X is going to give her joy. But she’s wrong.

**Craig:** I mean, there is a wonderful irony in somebody who is miserable because they’re the vice president because the presidency is right there. And then they get it and they still feel like the vice president. Because there must be something more. And there isn’t. And that’s when you realize you’re kind of in hell.

**David:** The life of a writer.

**Craig:** Yeah. The life of a writer. Exactly. It never ends.

**John:** So it’s the end of this series, but it’s not the end of what you guys are working on.

**Craig:** Oh no it is. They’re done.

**John:** They’re done?

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**David:** Retired.

**John:** Retired?

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t think anybody – they’ve burned so many bridges.

**Julia:** Bonbons. Champagne. That’s all it’s about.

**Craig:** Actually sounds pretty good.

**John:** Julia, what will we see you in next? What’s the next thing we’ll see for you?

**Julia:** I don’t know. What do you got? I’ll do anything.

**Craig:** OK. Well let’s get to work.

**Julia:** I made a movie on the hills of Veep called Downhill which is a remake of Force Majeure.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Yeah. Love that movie.

**Julia:** Yeah. And I did that for Searchlight with Will Ferrell and, yeah, Faxon and Rash directed it. So I’m in post-production on that right now.

**John:** Amazing.

**Craig:** That’s a heavy—

**Julia:** Lift?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, it’s a great movie. But it’s really, that casting is fascinating to me.

**Julia:** I know.

**Craig:** I mean, I assume it’s not tonally similar?

**Julia:** Ish. Not completely.

**Craig:** Slightly funnier I would imagine.

**Julia:** Yeah. But, it is a dramatic film with comedic elements to it. But I would say it’s more drama than comedy. And it’s more comedy than the original.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Julia:** So that’s what I’m doing. And then trying to decide my next move. Maybe one of you boys has something I can do.

**Craig:** Chernobyl season two.

**Julia:** Yeah.

**John:** David, what are you working on next?

**David:** I have been gloriously taking a break and I will keep taking a break hopefully for about another month or so.

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**David:** I signed a deal with HBO and I obviously hope to create something. I’d like to start from scratch on something and then hand it off to some other schmuck later on about four seasons in.

**Craig:** Right. You want to Iannucci it is what you want to do.

**David:** Exactly. It seems like a really smart move.

**Craig:** And continue to collect money I would hope.

**David:** Oh yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

**Craig:** God, how do you get that where you don’t do anything and they give you money?

**David:** Or I’ll get Schaffer to run it.

**Craig:** Get Schaffer to run it. Of course.

**David:** But, you know, look, everybody works hard. I was fried when we were done. And I have just recently been able to put sentences sort of back together.

**Julia:** Yeah. It was a hard show to make. I mean, we were really wiped by it.

**Craig:** That makes absolute sense. But tremendous success with it and really when I say tremendous success the only kind I really care about is creative success, because I don’t think I own shares of AT&T. So, it’s really just the creative success of it. And it is so lovely to see – that’s why we wanted you guys to come on together. To see actors and writers working together in this way where they are both writing and they’re both weirdly acting also. It’s like it all gets sort of blended together in this lovely and unique mixture that ends up with something like this. Where there’s not another show like this. I can’t imagine another one coming along. It’s got its own fingerprint. And I think that’s why it was so successful.

**Julia:** I consider myself very lucky that Dave – or I don’t consider – I am very lucky that Dave came onboard because we had worked together before, but never this intimately. It was as if we always had.

**David:** Yeah. I mean—

**Julia:** From the get go, right?

**David:** You know, I use the word, I mean I call her, she’s like my writing partner. I say that. And I will say, and I think I’ve said this in an interview somewhere or whatever, but it’s true. And I can truly remember it, which was when you were in the chemo stuff and obviously chemo is chemo, whatever.

**Craig:** No fun.

**David:** I would occasionally email you but I didn’t want to bother you also. But I was so palpably aware of how much at that moment we actually spoke every day and then weren’t.

**Craig:** You missed her.

**David:** Yeah, I don’t know what else. I mean, it was crazy. And I just realized like, oh, like we’re not speaking and I was sort of just losing my mind.

**Julia:** Ooh.

**Craig:** That’s how John is going to feel about me.

**John:** One day.

**Craig:** I’ve decided that’s how he’s going to feel about me. And I don’t want to have to go through chemo for it. Honestly. I would love just a long flu, like a two-week flu. But towards the end of those two weeks—

**David:** He starts to really miss you.

**Craig:** He’s going to feel an ache.

**John:** As I cycle through guest hosts and eventually it’s like, you know what, it’s just not the same without Craig.

**Craig:** You know man? Have the flu again. It’s working out better. For you and me. I like it when people explain to you that something is working better for you when it’s not at all. But mostly me.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did today’s outro. If you have a question you can write into ask@johnaugust.com.

Thank you very, very much.

**David:** Oh my gosh, thank you so much.

**Julia:** Thank you.

**John:** And have a great rest of your season and a great rest of your vacation. I cannot wait to see your movie.

**Julia:** Oh god, I hope you like it.

**Craig:** I’m gonna.

**Julia:** You are?

**Craig:** Yeah. I decided. It’s happening.

**Julia:** Oh goodie.

**John:** One ticket sold. Thanks.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**Julia:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Veep](https://www.hbo.com/veep)
* [Julia Louis-Dreyfus](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000506/)
* [David Mandel](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0541635/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [The Shadows Casting Call](https://johnaugust.com/casting) John is looking for a 15-year-old blind actress for the lead role — please help by sharing this link with anyone who might be a good fit!
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Julia Louis-Dreyfus](https://twitter.com/OfficialJLD) on Twitter
* [David Mandel](https://twitter.com/DavidHMandel) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Julia Louis-Dreyfus](https://www.instagram.com/officialjld/?hl=en) on Instagram
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** Yes, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 414 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast it’s How Would This Be a Movie with four terrific stories in the news that maybe, just maybe, could become feature films. Plus we’ll be answering some listener questions about narrators, personal crises, and song titles.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** And Craig I thought we would do the questions up front because I always feel like we push the questions to the end and we may rush a bit. So we’re going to lead with the questions with the questions this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. We can really milk the answers. I love it.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do. But, I have news and a favor to ask of all our listenership. So, I’ll post a link here in the show notes, but I am trying to direct a feature film. I think I said this on the podcast before. Part of the reason why I’m not running for the WGA board again is I’m hoping to direct a feature film in these next two years. That film is called The Shadows. The central character in it is Abby. She is 15 years old. She’s smart, resourceful, anxious, and blind. That means I need to find a blind actress who is 15 years old-ish to play this role.

That’s not going to be easy. There’s not just a list of teenage blind actors who are ready to make feature films. So, if you follow through the link you’ll see I have a casting notice up that describes what I’m looking for. It has audition scenes. My hope is that we’re going to find someone who has probably never had the opportunity to act in a feature film before or television who will self-tape and present herself as the possible actress for this role.

But if I cannot find this actress I cannot make a movie. So, if you know an Abby or you think you might know an Abby the place to check out the information is johnaugust.com/casting. That’s where you go to see all the information and the audition scenes and stuff about self-taping of yourself to possibly be cast in this movie.

**Craig:** Good URL. Appropriate. So traditionally the way this would work is casting directors would be sent out into the world and they would cast a wide net and show up in malls and things, trying to just pluck out some diamond from the rough. But now we have these things. We have podcasts and Twitter and social media. So this is a great way to get the word out that you’re looking for somebody like this and I have to presume that there are tons of kids across the United States who are acting, or acting in school productions, or community theater who are blind who will hear this and say, yeah, what about me, John August.

**John:** Yeah, what about you?

**Craig:** What about me?

**John:** So classically the casting director would send out this notice and you might do searches in malls and such, but that’s not going to work for this very specific part. So ultimately there will be a casting director to help do all the other things, but if I cannot find this person it is sort of pointless to do anything more about trying to make this movie. So, this is not the first step. The first step was writing the script. But the second step is trying to find this actress, so that’s what I’m trying to do right now.

Ryan Knighton who was on the show once or twice, a fantastic writer, actually the reason why I met him was because I was writing this script. So that’s how long I’ve been working on this. This predates the Arlo Finch books. But now is the time where I can actually make this movie. So, if you can help me find this actress I’d be much obliged.

**Craig:** Now, here’s a question for you. Let’s say you don’t. Do you scrap the movie?

**John:** We scrap the movie.

**Craig:** You scrap the movie.

**John:** I don’t think you can make the movie kind of any other way. I’ll say that as I started writing this movie it was a real concern. Like is this an idea worth pursuing knowing how hard it will be to find the right person for this part. And I decided to go for it because it’s something I’d never seen before on screen and that’s really interesting to me. I want to make the movie I want to see most, and this is kind of the movie I want to see.

So, that’s why I wrote it and that’s why I’m hoping to be able to direct it.

**Craig:** Well, I think you will find someone. I can’t imagine that you won’t. That doesn’t seem possible. Sight is not required for acting talent. It’s just not. You know, I think of all the things that we do in our business and acting is so interestingly internal. In many ways I would imagine that there’s probably a lot of acting exercises where if you are sighted you close your eyes anyway and try and relate to somebody without the extra cues. So, I would be shocked if you don’t find not just one person but a lot of people. I think you will.

**John:** I hope so, too. And I do think it will be a process of working with this person to figure out a language for how we’re going to do the things we need to do and how to sort of best make this movie happen. If this were a supporting character we might not have the time and resources to make this all possible, but this is the central character and so it’s all going to be about figuring out the best way to make this movie. So, it’s going to be a very collaborative process.

**Craig:** No question. I mean, I’m just thinking ahead to the day you’re there and you’re shooting. I mean, other than figuring out how to assist the actor with hitting a mark. By the way, people probably don’t even know – a lot of people don’t know why this whole thing of the actor has to hit their mark even exists. It’s because film cameras and even the video cameras that we use now like the Alexa and so on and so forth, they don’t have automatic focus the way your iPhone does or an old school video camera because those auto focuses are actually very slow. I mean, you’ve probably noticed that when you’re shooting things that sometimes they’re blurry and then they get – well you’re not allowed to have any blurry ever when you’re making a movie.

So there is a focus puller whose job is to constantly adjust focus depending on how far away from the lens the actor who is being filmed is. So they measure where they are and if there’s a scene where they’re moving then during rehearsal we’ll watch them and then there is an assistant camera person, the camera assistant, who watches them and where they stop that person comes over and puts a little piece of tape down or a little bean bag. And the actor now has to reliably stop there each time because that’s a distance that the focus puller is relying on.

So I could see where if somebody was not sighted you would need to have a little extra assistance there to make sure that they didn’t fall short or go too far depending on their motion. But beyond that I think it’s probably the same as everything else, right?

**John:** Yes. So focus is one small issue. I’m sure they’ll be other things that come up. But I’m mostly just excited to meet this actor and see what she can bring to the part.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Now, Craig, you actually had an unexpected bonus episode of the Chernobyl podcast that just came out today as we’re recording this. Tell us about this episode. And I especially liked your little prologue to it.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you. Surprise episode. So this is my Lemonade. It’s a surprise. Well, we were talking and so the podcast was surprisingly popular. We didn’t necessarily imagine that Chernobyl itself was going to be quite as viewed as it was. And I really didn’t think that the podcast would be quite as listened to as it was. But it was. And that’s very gratifying. And Jared and I were talking and he suggested kind of a little bit of a bonus, OK now that the show has come and aired and has been viewed and occupied a space could we/should we discuss it.

And so we got Peter Sagal back and Jared joined us. And I think maybe a day after or two days after we recorded it all of a sudden there was this news story and, huh, a nuclear explosion in Russia that they weren’t telling us about. Well that’s familiar. So I did a quickie solo prologue and, yes, that is available this morning. So if you subscribed to the Chernobyl podcast you got a little ding on your phone this morning. But if you don’t it’s available on all podcast platforms in the known universe, including YouTube and Stitcher and all the other ones that John knows I don’t know.

**John:** And we’ll also put a link to it in the show notes so people can follow through there. Because sometimes people are meticulous and they delete subscriptions just so they don’t have old things sitting around.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you can follow through there. One final bit of news. There’s been an issue with the app, the Scriptnotes app for the premium listeners. Folks both on the Android side and on the iOS side have written in with some problems. So, if you are having problems with the app the general advice I can give you is make sure you’re using the most recent version of it. If you’re still having a problem write into the ask@johnaugust.com account and Megana can help steer you towards some resources or at least get reported to the actual folks who manufacture those apps to make sure that we get those bugs fixed. Sorry for anybody who is having problems.

**Craig:** Was the bug that somehow some of the money was going to me?

**John:** No. It was not a money flow issue. It was simply an authorization token.

**Craig:** So that bug remains is what you’re saying? The bug of money not going to me.

**John:** That bug – that is a feature not a bug.

**Craig:** [laughs] I am a feature not a bug.

**John:** You are a feature not a bug. Some follow up. Why writes in, “As a longtime fan of the show I believe you guys have made me a better writer. But that sadly cannot be empirically proven. My body weight however is easy to accurately measure. A few months ago I listened back to Episode 50, How to not be Fat. And John’s diet, slow carb, sounded really simple and easy. Having never attempted a diet before I went in with no expectations but the change was instantaneous. Now some four months later I’ve already lost over 30 pounds. So this is a thank you for helping me to not be fat at the very least.”

Craig, can you even remember back to Episode 50?

**Craig:** No, I thought we started at Episode 51. I don’t know if we even did this. What are these first episodes? They might be other guys.

**John:** I think this was like a random advice episode. I think this was maybe not a traditional craft and character arcs. But we did talk about it. I remember discussing it and back at that time I was doing this slow carb diet which is like the Atkins diet. It’s like all these things where essentially you eat fats and proteins and not a lot of carbohydrates. And it works. And at that point I was eating a lot of black beans and eggs. And you will lose weight if you do that.

I’m not doing that right now, but I’m sort of mindful of those things and I try not to eat a lot of carbs that I don’t need to eat. So, if you want to go back and do that, great. But we’re not really a good diet and health advice podcast.

**Craig:** No. Not at all. There are four billion of those. Listen to one of those waste of times. Because we would like to waste your time in different ways.

**John:** Yeah. But Why I’m happy for you that you‘ve lost this weight. I would encourage you to find other ways other than just a diet to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Because just eating alone is not enough.

**Craig:** Yes. Meth is not recommended. You will lose a lot of weight. A lot of weight with meth.

**John:** A tremendous amount. Because teeth – teeth are heavy, too.

**Craig:** Just the teeth alone.

**John:** Those last ounces, just pop them out one by one.

**Craig:** Yeah, man.

**John:** Tic-Tacs.

**Craig:** Meth. I mean, who doesn’t know not to do meth still?

**John:** My hunch is that some people who do meth – this is me talking with absolutely no expertise.

**Craig:** I like this. Go for it.

**John:** My hunch is that people who find themselves doing meth often don’t know they’re doing meth when they start doing meth or they’re coming from some other drug and when that drug is no longer available that’s how they’re ending up at meth. That’s just a guess. I’ve done no research or Googling before saying that.

**Craig:** Your theory is that no one is really sitting down and going, right, so I don’t have drug problems and I’m aware that this is meth. Let’s go. You’re saying that’s probably not happening.

**John:** I think that’s probably not the default pathway into meth abuse.

**Craig:** Well, meth. How about some questions. Should I start with Alison from Atlanta?

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Alison from Atlanta asks, “I’m in the planning phases of my screenplay and I’ve come to fork in the road about whether or not to use a narrator. I’ve heard the argument that it’s lazy writing as you’re telling instead of showing, which I understand, but some of my favorite movies or TV shows use narration really successfully. I feel like it could be especially useful when there is significant dissonance with how a character feels inside versus how they are behaving. Do you have any advice for when the narration is useful or when it detracts from the story?”

John, what’s your advice for Alison?

**John:** The only project I’ve had that I think has a narrator – I take that back. Two projects I’ve used narrators for. The first is Big Fish. The second is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In both cases they were really, really helpful. But let’s take a look at why. In Big Fish that narrator is sort of the voice of Edward Bloom, the storyteller who is bridging between the real world and the fantasy world. It starts kind of in the real world and drifts into the fantasy world. Helpful for that. Could you do the movie without the narrator? Yes. But it is useful.

Second movie is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which is very much a fairy tale, a storybook telling of this boy’s quest and Willy Wonka. In those cases, useful.

Those are situations where I think the narrator is helpful. Unfortunately we encounter so many movies and scripts where voiceover or narration has been applied in post. It was not part of the initial conception of the storytelling. And, wow, you can tell.

**Craig:** Yeah. Narration sometimes is a Band-Aid. But I want to say, Alison, when you say some of my favorite movies or TV shows use narration really successfully, that’s the answer to your question. Anybody who makes the argument that narration is inherently lazy writing, as you “telling instead of showing” is wrong. And you should tell them to their faces that they’re wrong. And that probably everything else that they say after that should be considered invalid. Because it’s the most ridiculous thing to say. Narration is a perfectly good tool if it’s used properly.

Like you, John, I have not written a lot of things that have narration in them, but I remember the first thing I wrote with narration was a movie based on a Philip Dick short story. This is many, many years ago. And it’s one of my favorite things that I’ve written, so of course it didn’t get made. But the hero was an immigrant who did not speak English. He was an Italian immigrant. He didn’t speak English. And the story itself had a kind of romantic fairy tale quality to it so a narrator felt appropriate. He was able to kind of fill in some things when the character was alone and wouldn’t necessarily be speaking in his own language. And if he did why would we subtitle. There’s a lot of weirdness in there. But it was mostly the fairy tale-ness of it that seemed to call for a narrator.

Similarly when you talk about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it is kind of a modern fairy tale. It is clearly taking place in a world that is a pushed version of our own. So the storybook aspect of it feels worth honoring and acknowledging. So, go for it Alison. If it feels right then do it. And if you’re doing it because it’s just convenient, or solving some problems, maybe not.

**John:** I would encourage people to think about the movie Clueless without Cher’s narration. It would be unwatchable. You would not like Cher in that movie if you did not have the ability to see inside of her head. And that’s really what it is. It’s honestly kind of like giving that protagonist a song in a musical. It’s allowing you to expose what they’re not saying to everybody else in the scene. So that may be another situation where you need to use it.

**Craig:** Correct. And if you think about Fleabag which is spectacular, all of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s little discourse to camera to us, that’s narration. That’s what that is. The fact that she’s filmed doing it but talking to us doesn’t change the fact that it’s narration. And we don’t mind it, we love it. Because it fits. It makes sense.

Goodfellas needs narration. Narration – probably the same exercise worth doing. Watch Goodfellas and every time the narration starts hit mute. It just won’t work. Or it won’t work as well.

**John:** All right. Nicole asks, “I live in one of the cities that was recently devastated by a mass shooting. As I’m sure you can imagine you the depth and breadth of emotion in the aftermath is sometimes overwhelming. I have an appointment with my therapist and we’ll work through it with her, but in the meantime I’ve got a draft due to a producer I’ve never worked with before. Normally I’m super responsible about hitting deadlines, but it’s really hard to get my head into writing comedy right now so I’m struggling to get pages out and I am falling behind. How do you overcome your personal life crises when you have to get your work done? Should I let the producer know that the draft might be delayed or wait and see if I can get back on track soon? The draft is due in about two weeks.”

Craig, what advice would you have for Nicole?

**Craig:** Well, first of all fantastic question. And I’ve been there. Happily I haven’t been there a lot. But when it happens it happens. And I think Nicole your sense that this is not mentally doable for you needs to be listened to and respected. Yeah, you could soldier through it but would it be good? And is it good for you?

When this has happened to me, when there have been incidents in my own life – I just went through one myself again with my family – where either someone is ill or there is a crisis or trauma that befalls you or around you or you just on your own without any cause slip into a clinical depression or an unmanageable state of anxiety it is absolutely fair to call people up and say I need two weeks, because I need two weeks. This is where I am. This the page I’m on. This is why I need the two weeks, without getting into super-duper detail. I will be back after those two weeks and then I will finish.

There are not many things that will work as well as a break. And what you don’t want to do is turn your work, your writing, the thing that you love and that you rely on into a burden or more fuel for dysfunction and misery. John, what do you think?

**John:** Your advice is absolutely correct. And what I would caution Nicole to do is not to wait until the actual due date to lob in that email or that phone call, because then it just looks like, oh, you just ran out of time and now you’re telling us.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, this is the time to reach out to that producer, even if it is a person you’ve not worked with before, and explain the situation. In this case you have – I don’t want to say the advantage – but because it’s a public event that everyone can see it’s pretty clear that there’s a basis behind this. That you’re not just making an excuse.

It can be tougher when it’s just your own thing. When it’s something in your own family that you don’t want to discuss. When it’s clinical depression coming up. When you’re having problems that can’t be sort of externally verified I know it’s scarier to reach out and make that call, but you got to reach out and make that call. And you need to do it before the time is up.

If you have an agent, manager, lawyer, someone else who is also on your side, a different producer if it’s about the studio, it’s worth clueing them in to just so that they have a sense of what you’re going through so that they can back you up a bit.

**Craig:** And you are working in a business that’s full of people that have all sorts of emotional issues and mental health issues. And after all you’re also working in a business that pedals emotion. That is our product. So the fact that you are a feeling person, that you have a sensitivity – that isn’t a bug, that’s a feature right?

You don’t have that thing that actors have where they can use their crisis to pump out tears on film or if they’re having a terrible, tragic day it theoretically could be turned to their advantage. Writing requires a lot of mental energy. It requires focus and attention. It’s spinning 12 plates at once. There’s a lot of logic going on. And then also all of that emotion. I think in general you will be met well by people. They will not say to you, “No, I want you to finish it anyway. You can’t take two weeks off.” Because at that point they’re kind of shooting themselves in the foot. What are they going to do, complain to you then when they get the script and don’t like it? You told them. You warned them.

Also, there’s really nothing they can do about it. You can just get sick for two weeks. If you feel, by the way, this is for anyone, that you’re working for people who truly will not get it, then lie. If somebody is so miserable as to not understand the validity of an emotional crisis then just tell them or having your agent or representative or manager tell them that you have a physical illness that is going to last two weeks. Because they can’t argue with that.

It’s a shame that sometimes you have to do that. But if somebody is going to be a total jerk about it then they forfeit their right for you to be completely honest and forthcoming.

**John:** I think that’s all true. The last thing I want to say is that just making that phone call or that email and telling them that this thing could come in late in my own experience has relieved so much anxiety on my side about the fact that I’m worried that I’m going to be late that it made the writing a lot easier. So some of what you’re actually feeling is the panic over a what if I can’t actually deliver this on time. And so by tipping them off that you may not be able to deliver this on time you’ve lowered the stress on yourself and you may actually be able to do the work that you need to do and be happy about the draft you’re turning in.

**Craig:** No question. Sometimes you say I need two weeks and they say sure. And then two days later you’re like I’m good. What you really needed was two days. And that’s the thing. You’re right. The worst feeling for writers is feeling that they have to write and yet they can’t do their best work. That’s a terrible feeling.

So, whatever you need to do to not have that feeling, do it.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** OK. So we’ve got one more question. This is from Seth who asks, “My question is about using a song as the basis for a movie. For example, if I decide to write a quirky rom-com about a grungy mechanic from the Lower East Side who meets a beautiful society girl from Central Park West and I call it Uptown Girl, do I owe Billy Joel a credit or money? I know that if the song is licensed that will cost. But what about the concept?” Well that’s an interesting question. Hmm, John, any thoughts on that one? We’ll be pretend lawyers for the moment.

**John:** We’ll be pretend lawyers. I think you’re in real jeopardy if you call that movie Uptown Girl. Uptown Girl is a title that everybody knows. It’s very clear that it’s inspired by that song. No, Seth, no. Don’t do it.

So, if a song inspires you, so if you wanted to do a movie about a mechanic and a society girl, you could do that probably pretty safely because it’s going to be generic enough that like there’s nothing in the song that you’re actually taking from that. But you call that movie Uptown Girl and you just put a giant crosshair on your back.

Honestly, if your movie has nothing to do with the song but you call it Uptown Girl you’re probably going to be getting some heated emails from some people who are not too happy about that. I don’t think that’s a safe choice. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree with you. I’m not sure where the legal line is per se, but you actually don’t want to find out. They’re going to make a problem for you. The point is that usually speaking the stories of songs in and of themselves aren’t really copyright – I mean, they’re copyrightable. Of course, lyrics are copyrighted. But the story inherent to those can be duplicated without fear of infringement.

For instance, I’m thinking of a good old story song like the Pina Colada song. Escape (The Pina Colada Song). So most people know the story of that ridiculous song. A guy gets tired of his marriage to his wife, so he is looking for singles ads, or I guess he writes a singles ad. Yeah, that’s what he does. He puts an ad looking for somebody who likes the following things, including Pina Coladas in the rain, and then somebody responds back and says, “I love all those things. Let’s meet.” And so he goes to a bar to meet up with this new woman that he’s going to cheat on his wife with and lo and behold it’s his wife. And then they laugh weirdly, which would not actually happen. In real life it would be a rocket ship to divorce.

But regardless, because it’s just bizarre, but the story of somebody looking to cheat on his wife and swiping right and ending up with his wife, anybody could do that. That idea is not intellectual property. If you call it The Pina Colada movie and he’s talking about Pina Coladas in the rain then oh yeah you’ve got a problem.

So I agree with you. I don’t see the point. I don’t really think the title Uptown Girl is so important to that concept anyway. If it’s the only attractive thing about that idea, well then you kind of are leaning on the Billy Joel-ness of it all and I would think he’d have a reasonable argument to make.

**John:** So titles we talked about before are – the whole process of getting titles cleared is complicated and there’s a whole division that sort of approves which movies can have which title. But it is complicated by songs. And I’ve been through several situations on movies and other projects where a title we would have wanted is a famous song. It becomes arguable like are we using it in reference to that song or not. It becomes complicated. Don’t call your movie Uptown Girl unless you’re making a Billy Joel related movie I would say.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. All right. Let’s talk about movies we do want to make. This is a segment we do every once in a while called How Would This Be a Movie where people send us stories that are in the news and we talk about them the only way we know how to talk about them is how do we turn these into narrative feature films or perhaps TV series. This time we have four of them because there were four really good ones and I just couldn’t winnow it down.

Different people sent in different things. I’m not going to credit who sent stuff through because in some cases it was multiple people. But they’re all compelling in different ways.

So let’s start with a podcast I listened to this past week. It is by Willa Paskin for Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast. She is a terrific writer and these are really well-produced episodes. I really loved listening to the whole podcast series. The one this week was about the soft serve wars. So the Mr. Frosty trucks both in Midtown, Manhattan but also in China and sort of the war of turf, of different companies competing, and break off groups, and the history of soft serve ice cream. I thought there was a lot of compelling stuff here. Craig, how did you feel about this as story material?

**Craig:** Well, it’s an interesting world. And it occurred to me you probably didn’t have this, right? I mean, where you were growing up in Colorado?

**John:** No, we didn’t have soft serve trucks.

**Craig:** Yeah. We had them everywhere. So on Staten Island, and this extends throughout New York in every part of New York, you would have these trucks. And there were two trucks that would come by. One was the Good Humor man. So he had the Good Humor brand of ice cream.

**John:** And Good Humor was hard ice cream?

**Craig:** It was. It was incredibly hard. It was the hardest of ice creams. It was so hard. And then there was the Mister Softee truck who would come by, and that was the soft serve. And frankly I did prefer the Mister Softee. It just didn’t come by as often. And they would play their songs. They had their little jingles. And we would get very excited and run after the truck.

So, right off the bat I think one of the issues with this is that it’s not necessarily a universal experience. The notion of this kind of turf war over this particular kind of product. It does feel a little niche to me. Obviously when people are trying to do it China studios get very excited when something may appeal to a Chinese audience, because they’re greedy. But I’m a little concerned about that.

The story though that this brought to mind, when you were a kid, John, did you ever read a book called The Push Cart War?

**John:** Called The Push Cart War. Yes!

**Craig:** Do you remember that one?

**John:** We said it at the same time. I do absolutely. And they had little pea shooters and they were shooting out the truck tires I believe.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I do remember The Push Cart War. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. It reminded me a lot of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, The Push Cart War is basically a classic story of the little guy versus the big guy. And the little vendors versus the big trucks. And in this case I could certainly see a kind of comedy – I think it would have to be a comedy – of competing ice cream vendors who are at each other’s throats scrapping over the last nickel and dime. And then they have to face a common enemy which is, I don’t know, suddenly a Starbucks or some massive corporation is taking over by sending their new things in which is better and bigger supposedly. So it becomes mom and pop, little guy versus the big guy, and maybe there’s a little bit of an allegory of the way that capitalism gets people on the lower rungs to beat each other up and leave a space for the big guy to just waltz in.

But I’m not sure – I’m a little worried about the whole ice cream aspect of it because I just don’t know if people in like you say Boulder or Denver are going to say, oh yeah, ice cream trucks. I think they might go, “Ice cream trucks?” That’s a problem.

**John:** Well let’s talk about that universality. Because even in the intro here I said Mr. Frosty rather than Mister Softee because I didn’t know that as a thing.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** That’s how little I knew about that. But I don’t know that this lack of universality really is necessarily a problem because I think, you know, I could imagine the start of this story very quickly setting up important it is for this community and really establishing the worlds. Because so many movies we see, like I don’t know anything about sort of how baseball mathematics works, but the movie is going to teach me how to care about that.

You know, there’s so many movies involve characters who are experts in things I don’t know anything about and that’s part of the experience of watching the movie. So I’m not so worried about the lack of universality in the sense of like places that don’t have ice cream trucks as long as I can establish why it’s important for these people who are selling ice cream and these people who are buying ice cream.

There were three kind of main threads and I think you’d have to pick one of them to make a movie. There’s the guys who are trying to start a Mister Softee business in China. And so that’s – you can picture that one. You’re trying to build something within a bureaucracy which is really complicated and you’re trying to explain to people what it is that you’re doing.

It was fascinating in the podcast talking about how McDonalds and I think KFC were the only places that were serving soft serve at that point and they had separate walk up drive-thru windows for just soft serve ice cream because it was so new and unusual there at the time they were launching. So China is one possibility and the rise and fall of that company.

Then the tension between the Mister Softee trucks and the competing brands within Midtown Manhattan. It’s probably a comedy. It’s probably like Adam Sandler is the godfather. Sort of a turf war kind of thing and it seems silly but these people are taking it really seriously. That section of the movie, I don’t know about you, but I got sort of PTSD trying to think about the logistics of shooting in Midtown Manhattan and how you’re getting all these trucks in Midtown Manhattan. The filming of it freaked me out.

**Craig:** By shooting in Toronto, of course. [laughs]

**John:** That’s naturally how you would do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But they’ll get the New York City tax credit. And finally the single character who is probably the most compelling and interesting is a woman they interview. She’s the ice cream woman who took over her dad’s route. He was a Good Humor man who then had a soft serve truck. And so she’s the – actually she doesn’t have a soft serve truck. She’s still selling traditional ice cream in Brooklyn.

She had a fantastic voice. She just felt like a really compelling character. For a single protagonist this woman trying to defend her father’s route feels like a through line. But I don’t know if any of these are compelling enough movies that I’m rushing out on a Friday night to see them.

**Craig:** No. I think it would require – I think you probably got closest with the idea of Sandler. Of a comedic star taking something that’s small like the Water Boy and making it into something epic. I mean, Tim Herlihy is a genius at doing stuff like that and I could easily see Tim writing a really funny movie that’s centered around Mister Softee versus Good Humor, which is just already I’m kind of giggling at it. It sounds like a funny idea.

So that’s probably the closest I would think to actually getting it made. I mean, this other last little component of this is that there is – for those of us who grew up in New York – there’s a lot of nostalgia to it. There’s a strange kind of connection to the past with those trucks when I see them walking around, even as an adult, and I would see the Mister Softee. The logo is like a cone that’s got soft serve but he’s got a face like in the cone. And just his face warms my heart. It just does. His dumb, stupid cone face makes me happy.

**John:** Yeah. I also got thinking about sort of what’s the color scheme, what’s the world, like what’s happening in the day. It got me thinking back to Do the Right Thing which is an incredibly hot day and sort of what it feels like to have an ice cream truck on that hot day and sort of like passing through these neighborhoods. What would it feel like and what does it feel like to be the guy on the truck? And it’s a cash business and so you’re always vulnerable that way. The staking out of corners. Even if it’s not done as heavy drama, it felt like there were dramatic moments in there. There were reversals. That felt interesting and I think doing it – probably knocking it back a few years and setting it period is helpful for that way, just because you get the benefit of nostalgia and a simpler time when we didn’t have Uber and Postmates and all the other things that got you your ice cream. You might be waiting for that truck to come.

**Craig:** All right. So we’ve decided. This is going to be set in the ‘70s or ‘80s. Tim Herlihy is writing it. Sandler is in it. It feels like it’s going to Netflix. Sandler has got that huge deal at Netflix. I’m in. I’m watching that movie. What do we get for – do we get money for this? Do you we get money when they? Yeah, you know what? They’ll have to send us money. Yeah. Money.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve made a lot off this.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** All right. So our next story is about Zimbabwe’s female rangers. It’s a story in the National Geographic by Lindsay M. Smith, photos by Brent Stirton. So this talks about an all-female wildlife ranger team, the Akashinga. And so they are the defenders of the animals within this region. It’s a non-profit international anti-poaching foundation. The Phundundu Wildlife Area is 115-square-mile former trophy hunting tract in the Zambezi Valley ecosystem.

We’ll summarize some stuff in here, but it’s worth clicking through for the photos because I thought the photos were actually one of the most fascinating parts of this. Craig, what did you take from the female ranger’s article?

**Craig:** Well, I thought that this was a chance to do something more than what it was. I actually – the value here to me is that it can be allegorical. And I do like these stories where it seems like, OK, this is pretty straight up. It’s about women who are fighting off poachers to protect animals. That’s a very nice thing. Who cannot like that? That’s very sweet. But in and of itself there’s the problem. It feels a little just saccharine. Right? Like, ah, cool, women are doing that. And they’re beating poachers. And everyone hates poachers. And they’re saving animals. Hooray.

But I think there’s probably an interesting story to be told underneath where these characters who are doing this are in their own way reclaiming something about their lives that was taken from them. This is not easy. Living in Zimbabwe isn’t always easy. That country has been under the thumb of Robert Mugabe, a dictator and a thug, for decades. And that part of Africa is a tough area to live. And being a woman in any part of Africa seems like it’s an additional challenge.

And so there is a chance to tell the story where it’s not just well-minded women go, you know what, we’re defending these elephants, but rather it’s women who have lost a certain kind of power or have been traumatized or who have been marginalized finding a way to reclaim some power and defend something of great value. And ideally – ideally – have a really positive portrayal of Africa, because we don’t get it a lot. We get a lot of Blood Diamonds. We get a lot of Ghosts in the Darkness or whatever that movie was with the lions. We don’t get a lot of this. And I think that’s really – that’s what you’d hope for.

And they do hint at this in the article. They point out that a number of these women have suffered trauma. They either were orphaned by parents who died of AIDS. Or they were victims of sexual assault or domestic abuse or abandonment. And so I think that’s where I would kind of come at it. And I do think actually this could be pretty cool. I could see this being a movie.

**John:** I could see this being a movie, too. And I agree with you that focusing on the women is clearly the way to tell this story. You want to see why they are doing this and why they are better suited for this task than men would be. And so the article does talk some about that in the sense of when they’re trained to do this they just do a better job, because they’re better able to work with the community. They have these automatic weapons but they don’t turn to those automatic weapons as sort of the first way to get a problem solved. And they work well together as a community, so that is crucial. I think that’s really the center of the storytelling.

In this short story we meet Sgt. Vimbai Kumire. So she’s one of the main women we follow in this story. But Enterprise World also meet Damien Mander. So he’s described as a “tattoo-covered Australian and former special forces soldier who has trained game rangers in Zimbabwe for more than a decade.” And he’s one of those characters who seems kind of interesting and compelling at the start, and yet I kind of don’t want him in the movie. My concern is that no matter what you try to do with this character he’s going to feel like the white savior guy. And that’s the thing I want to see least in this movie is the outsider who tells people how to do something.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So in focusing on this I’d want to find a way to tell the story honesty but that focuses on the women themselves and feels like it’s them solving this issue and not some outsider telling them how to solve this issue.

**Craig:** An alternative way to approach that is to accept the truth of it and then use that to address the white savior-ness of it. Meaning in reality this guy I assume was very useful and he helped trained them. But he’s not the one out there doing it. He’s not the one putting himself on the line. He’s not the one who is going to stay. This isn’t his country. And pointing that out I think is reasonable.

There is a limitation to the value of those people. But there is also real value to them. And that’s interesting. I think even a relationship – and I wouldn’t have it be a romantic relationship in any way, shape, or form – but a relationship between one of the leaders or a leading character of the women and him which is a relationship of mistrust and concern specifically for that reason. Because remember Zimbabwe was not always Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe was Rhodesia not so long ago. And the idea of addressing certain aspects of colonialism and asking how do we move forward and how do we live or work together with this behind us is an interesting one.

So there’s an alternative point of view to embrace it and face it head on. But I agree the one thing you can’t do is this old school thing of white guy shows up, teaches black people how to be better Africans, and then leaves. That’s – we don’t do that no more.

**John:** That’s not going to work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So I think what we’re both saying is neither of us want this guy to be protagonist or antagonist in the story. He can be a character in the story. He can serve a function, but he should not serve one of those primary functions because that is something we’ve seen a lot and it becomes – I just get the bad kind of goosebumps when I see that.

**Craig:** Bad bumps. Nobody wants bad bumps.

**John:** Nobody wants bad bumps.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Where does this movie go? Where do we see this kind of movie happening?

**Craig:** Well, this is a movie that if done at a certain level and a certain way could earn a theatrical release because it theoretically could be quite prestigious. I could see it being an award-y kind of movie depending on how it’s done. It could also just be a very down the middle obvious treatment of this material. With all of these movies it’s always more likely that they’re going to be done on a streaming platform because that’s the world we live in. There’s no superheroes in it. Nothing blows up.

But, there is still a space for independent film and even for major studios releasing independently made films that address issues like this, have really interesting casts. I think you can cast this really well. Now more than ever there are some awesome actors of African descent, both American and Caribbean and British. And, of course, African. So there’s a lot of really cool opportunities. I think it could actually be a theatrical movie, but it would need independent love I would think.

**John:** I think you’re right. I could see a Participant or sort of an outside financier being a key player in this to make it happen at a budget level where you can sort of get the production values you really want to see there.

I would say of all the movies we’ve done on a How Would This Be a Movie before it reminded me somewhat of the California firefighter story we read.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** About the female inmates who were California firefighters. In which you a have a setting and a world but you need to pick very specific characters within that story to follow. And we don’t have them quite yet. We have sort of a sense of placeholders for people who could be there, but we don’t have actual characters with journeys. And so any writer who is approaching this is going say like, OK, here is the backdrop, here’s the world. I need to create an entire story. I need to import a story into this or do the firsthand research to figure out what are the stories I can tell that actually have beginnings, middles, and ends and characters who go through transformations. Because we’re not seeing that in this story so far.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this may just be a matter of personal preference but I think I would rather see this movie than the firefighter movie, just because I find the subject matter more interesting and I get to see somewhere I don’t know and learn things I don’t know and be with people that I don’t know. And it’s not that I know those women, but I know California, I know brush fires, I know firefighters. A lot of this we have experience with it. It’s not foreign to us. And I’m attracted by things that are foreign because you learn more. I just do. I mean, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to do Chernobyl. It was not American. It seemed like an opportunity.

**John:** Here’s what’s also great about this story is that as you’re watching this you are aware that the danger to these women could come from any direction. So it could come from other humans in the world. It could come from animals. It could come from gunshots. It could come from poachers. There’s a lot of things that could happen and stand in the way or endanger any of the characters we care about in the story.

In the firefighter movie we’re afraid of the fire mostly.

**Craig:** Fire. Yeah.

**John:** And so we can see that coming. Where we can’t always see bullets coming. Or we can’t see that dangerous panther or tiger or anything else that’s potentially out there. So that’s an interesting difference with this movie. Our last How Would This Be a Movie comes from an advice column in The Cut as well. It’s the Ask Polly advice column written by Heather Havrilesky. This one is about a woman with severe mushroom allergies who becomes convinced that her in-laws are maybe trying to kill her. So it’s not just that they are insensitive to her food sensitivity. They seem to be finding ways to introduce mushrooms into things that have no business having mushrooms in them.

I loved the letter writer’s description, but I especially loved Heather’s response to how nuts this situation was. And she actually says that this feels like the pitch for a dark comedy on premium cable. And, yeah, it kind of does. It’s that idea of like are my in-laws trying to kill me. Maybe they are.

**Craig:** Yeah. Heather went ham, which I love. And she was right to do so. And the letter writer was so weirdly sweet about it and kind of underplayed the insanity of what’s going on here.

Now, look, we live in a world where people will say, “Look, I have this allergy to this thing,” and maybe there’s a little pushback kind of in the air, like a little silent pushback which is, ugh, everyone is allergic to something now. You can see people kind of groaning and rolling their eyes sometimes. Or if someone says, oh yeah, if you’re in a restaurant, “I want the surf and turf but instead of the lobster can I have this because lobster makes me slightly itchy.” You know, I understand there’s a certain kind of, I don’t know, self-indulgent griping you could do about people with allergies.

But the truth is that when somebody has a legitimately troublesome allergy it is life-threatening. It is terrible. As a parent it’s got to be absolutely nightmarish to be policing your own child and just every day wondering is this the day that somebody slips freaking mushrooms in. And the crazy part, the craziest thing, is when after it’s been made clear to her in-laws that she has been hospitalized over this and convulsed in an ambulance because of mushrooms they added mushroom powder to mashed potatoes at a holiday dinner.

What is mushroom powder? I’ve never even heard of mushroom powder. That’s literally poisoning. You are poisoning – you’re trying to poison her. And everybody knows it. And they say things like, you know, “Well, everyone except your wife likes mushrooms and we’re not changing what we eat for one person.” Oh my god. It’s not that she doesn’t like them. It’s that they’ll kill her. So, I think the deal is they want to kill this lady. They’re literally trying to kill her.

**John:** The fact that it seems like they want to kill her is what makes this so compelling. And I think it’s easy to feel sympathy for this woman and I find the husband character really fascinating. Like how much of a doormat is he that he’s not willing to stand up to his family for trying to kill his wife? That isn’t good. But it’s easy to imagine who that family is and how messed up that family must be and how tight that family must be to want to do this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I mean, this woman is an outsider marrying into a thing. It feels kind of great.

Now, this allergy by itself is not a movie. So, I think it’s suggesting a jumping off point for a movie, but there would have to be a lot of other things and this mushroom allergy is just like one sign, like a really clear sign of not just the undermining but the dangerous dislike that they seem to have for her. And that, you know, I think what’s relatable is we all kind of imagine that our in-laws don’t really like us, but to have it taken to the extremes is I think what makes it a movie.

**Craig:** Mushroom powder. So, one thing that I always try and remind myself when I read these things is we’re getting one person’s version. Now, it may be that this woman who is writing this letter and who is describing how her in-laws are trying to kill her with mushrooms, she could be awful. She could be an awful person. I’m not saying she is. But there’s a world in which she’s just a racist, nasty, abusive human being. And everyone reasonably loathes her.

Even then you can’t put mushroom powder in the mashed potatoes. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t mushroom somebody. You’re not allowed to mushroom people. There’s other ways to deal with them. You can’t mushroom them to death. That’s just wrong.

Is this a movie? No. It’s not at all a movie to me. I don’t think of it as a movie. I don’t think of it as a series. I think it could be an episode of something that’s kind of interesting. It could be a B-plot that you find out that somebody you hate is allergic to something and somehow mushrooms get – I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t think it’s a movie by itself. But I think the notion of are my in-laws trying to kill me – I think that is enough of a comedy idea that you could build something around it. I think there’s a tremendous amount more story you need to do there, but I think the mushroom aspect of it as am I crazy could work.

And a movie like Game Night comes to mind, where it’s just like it is funny but there is a real darkness underneath it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could do a movie where a woman marries a man and it’s one of those interesting paranoid things. And Game Night has a similar aspect to it even though it’s a comedy. There’s a certain paranoia to it. Where she discovers that her husband actually has been married three times before that she didn’t know about and all three of those women died. And so now she’s thinking – and we’re all thinking – oh, he’s a serial wife killer. But he’s not. He insists that he’s innocent and she keeps finding clues. And eventually the big twist is it’s not him. It’s his mom. She keeps killing his wives. That could be cool.

I mean, I’ve just given away the ending.

**John:** To me the pitch is more like right from the start you’re worried about the mother-in-law, but of course she’s talked down, well everyone sort of feels that way about their future mother-in-law. And there’s ups and downs, but when it becomes clear like, wait, something really nuts is happening then there has to be a further step there. There has to be something more than just like, you know, oh, she’s trying to kill me. There has to really go to sort of why they’re trying to kill her, or what it is about that.

So, figuring out what that is – figuring out what’s really behind the family – that’s probably the key to what makes this a movie versus an advice column.

**Craig:** I want you to know there is mushroom seasoning. And there’s some mushroom powder. It’s really rare. I mean it’s just not – it’s not really a thing. You’ve got to go way out of your way – way out of your way – to find like dried porcini mushroom powder or something. They’re trying to kill her.

**John:** They are trying to kill her.

**Craig:** Sorry, based on what I read. I am not accusing anyone of anything. But based on what I read it would seem–

**John:** We don’t know the real family’s name, so they can’t libel us.

**Craig:** Correct. It would SEEM that they are trying to kill her with mushrooms.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, of these four things we’ve talked through which do you think will become a movie and which are you most excited to see if it’s not the same answer?

**Craig:** The Zimbabwe female rangers.

**John:** I would agree with you. I would say that’s probably the most compelling story area. I can imagine some version of the comedy soft serve wars thing happening. That feels like the nostalgic space for that. But I’m probably most excited to see the Zimbabwe anti-poaching rangers.

**Craig:** If Tim Herlihy does agree to come onboard and do the soft serve thing, then that one. But only if.

**John:** Herlihy or bust.

**Craig:** Herlihy or bust. That’s my motto.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Game to Grow. So it’s this Seattle-based company and they use specially designed D&D experiences, modules and rulebooks, to help kids with anxiety and/or spectrum disorders relate to each other better and work through skills that they can use in real life. It seems great. So I have not met these people, the Adams, but I’ll put links in the show notes to an article about them, what they do. Also a Kickstarter for a thing called Critical Core which are sort of the slimmed down rulebooks that they use to talk through what they’re doing. But you look through this Craig and you’ll obviously recognize so many D&D things you love, but you’ll also recognize some things that are developmentally useful.

So there’s this one to nine scale of developmental capacities which is so true and accurate to sort of how kids process things which is basically how to think critically, how to cooperate going through stuff, how to plan ahead. All the things that you and I do all the time when we play D&D, which I think I probably got a lot out of playing D&D as a teenager, which is so useful and transfers so well to real life decision-making.

So it just seems like a great program, so I’ll tip people towards this and it’s something I’d love to see replicated in other places.

**Craig:** This is brilliant. And I love that the age range is so wide. So they’re looking at kids from ages eight to 20. So, this would certainly be relevant for one of my kids. And, yeah, I’m going to look a little deeper into this. For sure. This looks great.

My One Cool Thing this week is the National Puzzler’s League, otherwise known as MPL. The National Puzzler’s League is, like one hand there’s a magazine, The Enigma, that comes out with lots of puzzles in it. And they also have a national convention. This is not for your casual puzzler. I’m just going to tell you.

So I have friend Dave Shucan who is a brilliant puzzler and puzzle constructor and solver and he goes to the convention and he’s kind enough to say, hey, take a look at this puzzle that I did there. And they are awesome. They are really layered. When I say really layered I mean I tried explaining one to Melissa last night and she stopped me after about 12 words and said, “Please no more. I don’t want to hear anymore.” [laughs]

It’s layers and layers and layers. They’re beautifully done. They’re beautifully constructed. So I’m going to be joining the National Puzzler’s League and the membership for a year is a big whopping $23. I think I can do that. Online-only membership is just $15. So, yeah, I’m totally into that.

So National Puzzler’s League. If you want you can check it out at puzzlers.org and we’ll have a link in the show notes.

**John:** Fantastic. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Med Dyer. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today.

Short questions on Twitter are great. So I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the casting notice. So, again, if you think you might know an Abby, a blind actress who is around 15 years old, I’m looking for her. So you can go to johnaugust.com/casting to find out more information about that.

You can find transcripts there as well on the site.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, thank you for helping me figure out whether these things would be movies.

**Craig:** My pleasure, John. Let’s do it again.

**John:** Cool. Bye.

Links:

* [The Shadows Casting Call](https://johnaugust.com/casting) John is looking for a 15 year old blind actress for the lead role — please help by sharing this link with anyone who might be a good fit!
* [Bonus Episode, Chernobyl Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bonus-episode-with-jared-harris/id1459712981?i=1000446954276)
* [Scriptnotes Ep 50, How to Not Be Fat](https://johnaugust.com/2012/how-to-not-be-fat)
* [Decoder Ring: Ice-Cream Truck Wars](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2019/08/decoder-ring-explores-the-world-of-ice-cream-trucks) by Willa Paskin
* [Akashinga Women Rangers Fight Poaching in Zimbabwe Phundundu Wildlife Area](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/06/akashinga-women-rangers-fight-poaching-in-zimbabwe-phundundu-wildlife-area/) by Lindsay M. Smith
* [My In-Laws Are Careless About My Deadly Food Allergy](https://www.thecut.com/amp/2019/08/ask-polly-my-in-laws-are-careless-about-my-food-allergy.html) by Heather Havrilesky
* [Game to Grow](https://www.cnet.com/news/game-to-grow-the-dungeons-dragons-game-rescuing-kids-from-their-social-anxieties/?__twitter_impression=true), support on [Kickstarter here](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gametogrow/critical-core/description)!
* [National Puzzler’s League](http://www.puzzlers.org/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Med Dyer ([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_414_mushroom_powder.mp3)

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 413 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to try to answer the question how do you know when you’re ready to write that script. Then we’re going to answer listener questions about rewrites and polishes and whether writing a bad script could put you on a do not hire list.

**Craig:** Do not hire.

**John:** Do not hire!

**Craig:** Do not!

**John:** But Craig, most crucially in follow up, a question a lot of people have been asking – Craig, what’s up? Are you OK?

**Craig:** I’m OK. So the last podcast was the one that you did with – and I was supposed to be there but I couldn’t, essentially connected to this same thing – you did the mental health podcast which we’ll get to in a bit. But prior to that I had to drop out of the race, the Vice Presidential race, the sexiest of all political races, vice president, because of a medical issue in my family.

So, a little context. First of all, no one is dying. I think that’s important for people to know. But I do have a kid who has multiple chronic health issues and there was – I think maybe, ugh, I want to say literally the day after I said, OK, I’ll go ahead and run for vice president we got a call that he had to go into emergency surgery for the second time in a year. And it’s a complicated surgery. It’s not the kind where they poke three holes in you. It’s more like the kind where they make a big line and go Wee. So, good news is he’s recuperating quite nicely, but he does have medical issues that we have to be attentive to. And it seemed to me not only that I was not going to be able to have the time or attention to give to the race, but even worse my ability to serve effectively for two years should I win was fairly compromised because, you know, if this happens again, or if one of his other conditions sort of acts up and that requires attention, then I just won’t be present or able to do the gig.

So, for that reason I had to drop out. But, you know, good news – to be clear – no one is dying. But, you know, it hasn’t been a great month.

**John:** Yeah. Life is challenging at times. And you and I both had some challenges as things happen. So, we’re glad to hear that he’s doing better and that you’re doing OK.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes I am. And I really appreciate. There was a wonderful outpouring of support and people were very lovely, which was nice to see. And we should. We should try and be lovely to each there is a medical crisis going on in a family, but nonetheless it was nice to see and encouraging that, you know, we all know ultimately what matters in life. There’s layers of importance and rankings of importance. And this is one of those things that’s more important.

So, we’re in a pretty decent place, but I think it was the right call to make.

**John:** I agree. Now, you also had a very bright moment of news over these last two weeks. You won a TCA, a Television Critics Association award for Chernobyl.

**Craig:** I won. I keep wanting to give it a name, like the Taco or something like that. The Taca? And I wasn’t able to go to the event and here’s why: because I had to then go to – I’ve been doing a lot of back and forth traveling – my son is at school in Utah, so we were going back and forth over the last few weeks from here to Salt Lake City. And then we had to go from here to Upstate New York to get my daughter from camp. She goes to a performing arts camp. And part of that final weekend when you collect your kid is that’s the big show. And if there’s one thing that movies have taught us, John, is that not seeing your kid in a production makes you a bad parent.

**John:** Oh absolutely. I mean, if there’s a third act lesson there, actually it’s often a first act indication that this is a terrible parent. But then by showing up at the third act moment you’ve redeemed yourself as a parent. So in the magical father wish comedy that is our life you showed up.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, the problem was I knew that there wasn’t going to be a show soon after that one, so I could have just first-acted that one and then arrived for the next one. Like, look, daddy gets it. But, no, I chose to do the right thing and go to see my child perform and it was great. So Jared Harris was able to accept on our behalf.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Craig:** And so it was great. I mean, I’ve never won an award before, I mean, in Hollywood. I’ve won things like in grade school.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Won some Mathlete challenges and such. But, no, it’s lovely. It’s a nice crystal slab and I’m very appreciative. So thank you Television Critics Association. That was super nice. And, you know, either I’m getting killed by critics or they’re giving me lovely crystal slabs. I’m confused. But it was great and very honored to receive something like that. And, you know, hooray.

**John:** Hooray. One of the things you did miss out on was this mental health and addiction panel. So that was last week’s episode we aired it. It really was just a terrific night and I’m so happy that people who have been writing in – it seems like it was meaningful for them as well. So, we talked about what it’s like to write characters with mental health problems or addiction issues, but also what writers should look for in their own lives when it comes to those two topics.

People wrote in with some really great personal stories, which we won’t share here, but it was clear that it touched a nerve for a lot of people. So if you haven’t listened to the episode yet I would recommend you go back and listen to that. Also listen to Episode 99. We will keep talking about these things in the future seasons of Scriptnotes because it’s not a problem that gets solved once.

**Craig:** It’s not. And it’s also not something that shouldn’t be talked about. We just naturally avoid it as people and we shouldn’t. We should be leaning into it. We should not feel any sense of shame. I feel no shame about my emotional issues and my mental difficulties and the medicine I take. And we do need to talk about it because our business, and particularly for writers I think the process of doing what we do as writers and then as writers for screen in particular is emotionally difficult and at times it can be extremely stressful.

And it is no surprise that a lot of writers end up with substance abuse problems. A lot of writers end up deeply depressed. A lot of writers end up with a kind of chronic anxiety that they find difficult to manage. And these are the things we want to avoid desperately, right. You can’t avoid them necessarily, but at least you can manage them and we can help each other by talking about them.

**John:** Yeah. The screenwriter classically is stressed out and isolated which is not a great combination for mental health.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And so we need to look at ourselves and as an industry how do we do better for everyone who is facing those situations.

**Craig:** Precisely. And so, yes, we should keep talking about this and – and – John, I have an idea.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** You know so we do nice things for charities. Maybe there’s something we could do for a charity that is involved in this area.

**John:** That would be great. So, a charity that is focused on mental health. If there is a charity that is focused on writer mental health, even better. But we will find ways to do some sort of event that could be benefiting this. I will also say Hollywood Health and Society who organized this event, they’re great. They do a bunch of stuff. And so I hope this is the first of many of these kind of panels we do on different topics.

**Craig:** Yes. And I do hope that I’ll be able to be at the next one. I mean, weirdly enough part of why I wasn’t there was because of these chronic issues, one of which is a mental health issue. So it’s something that’s part of my family and it’s something that we deal with. And we are those people that aren’t embarrassed to talk about it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I guess that makes us special.

**John:** Aw. Another very special institution in Hollywood is Deadline. Deadline is the website that we all feel a little bit of shame every time we open because we know it’s bad for us and yet still sometimes we open it up.

**Craig:** I mean, sometimes it’s fine. You know, it’s not all bad. Although I still have like Nikki Finke like PTSD. Because it used to be like just her going bananas. And now, well, now they do things like what they just did to you.

**John:** So, we have complained on previous episodes where they’ll take stuff out of our transcripts and call it an exclusive. Like, oh wow, it’s an exclusive of a podcast that we just recorded and put out for free in the world. I put up a blog post this past week about the myth that the WGA is not negotiating. It was a 1,088 word post that really talked through pretty clearly my thoughts. Deadline thought it did a good job as well and so they took the entire post and wrapped it around in some double quotes at times with like, “August said.” Basically excerpting the whole thing but kind of making it seem like an article.

**Craig:** I mean, you can’t really excerpt it if you take all of it.

**John:** No. So I bitched on Twitter about that and I wrote to the writer, David Robb, saying I don’t think that was appropriate at all. I didn’t say copyright infringement, even though it’s clearly labeled as copyright. Because there’s such a thing as fair use and I want to make sure that fair use is protected and it’s such a crucial institution for dissemination of ideas and culture, especially in a journalistic context.

But to take an entire blog post written by another person and just put it on your site is not really journalism. And as a journalism major back in college if I had done this for a news story–

**Craig:** Oh good lord.

**John:** My professor would not have given me credit for that. It would have been a lecture.

**Craig:** They’re screwing with you now. I really feel like they’re kind of doing it on purpose. I actually had a conversation about this with Nellie Andreeva who works at Deadline. I was talking with her at one of these HBO media events. And she admitted that exclusive was not appropriate. And she said they actually had removed that when they saw it.

But I think that you’re making a really good point about the nature of reproduction. So fair use does say, listen, if there’s newsworthy value to it you can take some of it – some of it. Not all of it. Right? So if you’re taking all of it then I think you would need to do, for instance, so the New York Times or the Washington Post if they’re going to republish say a court document, which is not copyrighted by the way, they still put it kind of in its own little box. And they say, look, here’s the document. We’re not just going to quote the whole damn thing as if we dug it up ourselves and made editorial choices about what to include and what to not include.

I just think it is a violation of some basic principles of journalism and they shouldn’t do it. Also, how about this? Just put the link on there, quote a few things like a normal person would, and put the link on and say if you want to read the whole thing to.

**John:** Like Variety did. That’s what Variety did.

**Craig:** Yes. Like a normal – correct, because that’s normal.

**John:** They made a little summary and they linked out to the article. And so that’s kind of the minimum you could ask them to do. But here’s my probably bigger frustration is that the headline for it is something like John August Sees Long Slog Ahead for Agency Deal Negotiations. And “long slog” was in quotes. And I’m like I really don’t think I said that. So I took a look at my original post, I took a look at the actual post that they had put, and they added the word long and put it inside quotes as if I’d said long slog.

So when I complained specifically about that they took long outside of the quotes, so it was clearly just editorializing that it was going to be long.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s not right either.

**John:** That’s so wrong.

**Craig:** If you don’t call something a long slog they can’t quote you as saying long slog, nor can they describe it as a long “slog.”

**John:** Because you and I have both been through short slogs. That is a real thing where like, god, you’re grinding and you’re grinding and you’re grinding. It doesn’t mean it takes weeks. It means it’s just a really arduous process.

**Craig:** It’s tough. You can go through a slog of a negotiation for a project that they want to hire you for at a studio and it can be two miserable weeks of slogging. Where it’s back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. A long slog that’s months. That has a specific meaning. That’s not – I think they have failed twice in this regard.

**John:** So, and my frustration with this is that I got people who read – I tweeted out my link to my actual article on my blog and I got feedback from that. And then I got a whole different set of feedback for people who had seen the Deadline piece, not realizing there was a blog post, not realizing I had not said “long slog.” And I could tell they’d read the Deadline piece because it’s like you say it’s going to be a “long slog.” And I’m like, no I didn’t. I didn’t say that. Deadline did. And that’s the frustration, the degree to which it warps the conversation we’re trying to have.

**Craig:** Well, speaking of conversation, let’s have a conversation about what you wrote and your point of view, because I had a little bit of a different point of view on it, as I thought expressed by one of the great GIFs of all time. I thought I picked a great GIF.

**John:** I don’t know the source of that GIF. What is the source of that GIF?

**Craig:** I have no idea either. Nor can I even remember what words I typed into the search to get it. But it was so perfect because it was like – it wasn’t like bad it was just more like, hmm, I don’t know. It actually perfectly encapsulated my response. So, I wanted to kind of walk through it.

**John:** And I should say that my response GIF was Joey giving Chandler a hug from Friends.

**Craig:** So adorable. Nothing can keep us apart. I think it’s really important people understand this. Nothing.

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Although that one person on Deadline does want you to fire me. Oh no, they were on Twitter. Sorry. They wanted you to fire me.

**John:** I don’t think you can really be fired Craig. I just don’t think it’s going to happen.

**Craig:** You can’t fire me. I quit!

**John:** I’m going to stop paying you, Craig!

**Craig:** Oh man. [laughs] So let’s talk through. So do you want to sort of encapsulate your position, or you want me to ask some questions basically?

**John:** Absolutely. Let me give the very short version. We’ll put a link to the actual blog post, not the Deadline post here. I started by saying that I think it’s incredibly important that we have robust discussion of ideas and issues but as a union it’s important to have a common set of facts. And I didn’t feel like we were having a common set of facts on this idea of no negotiation. And that this idea that we weren’t negotiating had become something of a straw man, where it was just presumed at the start and then you could argue against this idea. You know, the WGA says we shouldn’t negotiate. Well, we should negotiate. And so I cited three candidates who are saying we are refusing to negotiate and then I walked through what was actually said at the time that we said we were no longer going to be negotiating directly with the ATA but negotiating with individual agencies, and what had changed in the meantime. What actually happened in the meantime.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that’s a very short summary of what I wrote.

**Craig:** Yeah. And your suggestion is essentially that the argument of the WGA refusing to negotiate is a bit of a straw man. And it is and it isn’t. So there is imprecise language there, no question. I guess we want to – my point of view is let’s talk about what is sort of the significant core of this complaint, even if the language is imprecise that the WGA refuses to negotiate.

The complaint is that the WGA refuses to negotiate in any effective way with the big four agencies that essentially, A, control the ATA, and B, represent the great majority of our membership. I don’t think there’s much of an argument there, is there?

**John:** I think there is an argument there. Here’s what I think is fair to say. That the WGA has said that instead of negotiating with the ATA that we wanted to negotiate with the agencies individually. Specifically in Goodman’s point he says, “The top nine agencies,” so the big four and the next five agencies. We want to focus on them. And so have individual discussions with those agencies.

So it is fair to say that we are choosing not to negotiate with the ATA, refusing – not negotiate with the ATA. And to the degree that you’re not negotiating with the big four because they are only agreeing to negotiate through the ATA. That’s not as well established. But it seems like their preference is to negotiate through the ATA.

**Craig:** Well, that’s where I’m not sure I agree on that. Part of the issue is you can say, listen, we don’t want to negotiate with the ATA anymore. We just want to negotiate with the individual agencies and that includes CAA and WME and UTA and ICM. But the problem is that when David Goodman makes that statement he is well aware – I think we’re all well aware – that because of the nature of the proceedings prior to that moment which is kind of nothing happening, they make a proposal, we do not respond in any way to that proposal. Then they come back. They unilaterally raise their proposal. And we say after some time we’re not negotiating with you anymore. That that was in effect a secession of negotiations. And that it was incredibly improbable that without some sort of significant change in something that the individual agencies would not then take David Goodman up on this invitation.

**John:** Can you wind back that last sentence? So you’re saying that it was improbable that any agency would agree to individually negotiate?

**Craig:** I’m talking about the big four.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** And the reason I keep talking about the big four is while we have signed some other agencies, I think it’s important to say that – unless I’m wrong about this – I don’t think we’ve signed any agencies that actually were engaging in packaging fees and affiliate production in any significant manner. Meaning we haven’t done anything to change anything yet. In fact, after about a half a year what we’ve done is essentially bring back a few agencies to the state that they were in prior to the action we took. I don’t really think we’ve changed much there.

**John:** I don’t think that is accurate or fair in terms of the agencies that we’ve signed and also just the packaging deals that have not happened as a result of this action.

**Craig:** So they were packaging?

**John:** Some of these smaller agencies were packaging. Verve was packaging. As I believe Kaplan-Stahler had a package on a significant property as well. So these are agencies who I think given their druthers would love to continue packaging.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** They’ve decided to not package in order to sign this deal.

**Craig:** I will acknowledge that. But I think in turn you would probably agree that none of those agencies were packaging in any significant way, or at least in terms of the percentage of shows that are packaged. They were responsible for maybe a cumulative total of 1%.

**John:** A much smaller percent than the big four. Absolutely. No argument there.

**Craig:** And so when we began this fight – look, when Chris Keyser came on our show and the three of us were in violent agreement that we needed to do something about packaging fees and affiliate production, the three of us were talking about four agencies effectively, because those four agencies account for the greatest majority, I mean, a vast majority of all of the packaging fees and packages that are implemented and all of the affiliate production that is implemented.

So, yes, we can absolutely say we have signed Kaplan-Stahler. Or Verve. But I don’t think we can say that we have effectively engaged in negotiations with the four agencies that are responsible for the problem that we are all really angry about. I think sometimes people think like maybe I’m on the agencies’ side because I criticize the way we’re handling things, but I’m actually – it’s because I hate the stuff that the agencies are doing that I criticize the guild because I want the guild to do better.

And now we have a difference of opinion of how to accomplish that, but I think I would push back on you in the sense of, listen, yes, there was some sloppy language there, but there is a decent point to be made that because of the way we have handled things we have yet to negotiate effectively, nor have we shown a great willingness through behavior to negotiate effectively with those individual four agencies.

**John:** I would say that folks who attend the WGA public meetings will get a sense of sort of where the strategy is currently and where it’s headed to. And that the big four – negotiating with the big four agencies remains a priority.

**Craig:** Well that’s good to hear. I mean, because I’ve been pretty consistent about this all along. That is where our victory is. Some people I think – I’ve seen some things where some members of our union seem to feel that we’d be better off without them and I will just continue to maintain that down that path lies peril for us. It’s not that we’re being deprived of their wondrousness. It’s that we may be subject to some anti-wondrousness. I mean, just this week I got a call about something and I was like, ugh, and it involved an agency – not CAA – which was my agency. One of the other big four agencies. That lit me on fire. I mean, I was so angry. I was just like pouring gasoline into bottles and shoving rags and I was ready man.

And then I’m like, OK, let’s just figure out how to deal with this and stop this. But it is infuriating. Some of the behavior that they engage in is infuriating. And I want to win. And the way I at least think about winning is that we figure out how to get them back from what they’re doing into a place where they’re actually advocating for us as clients.

So, I think you brought up good points. I thought that some of the people pushing back on you brought up good points. I think that as long as we keep our eye on this – what you’re saying is a priority – I don’t know how we get to this priority because there’s a lot of now anger between these parties and a lot of mistrust. But whatever can happen, hopefully it happens sooner rather than later.

**John:** All right. So let’s take a meta moment here to look back at the discussion we just had. And so you and I did not convince each other of anything, but we expressed our ideas and our opinions on sort of where things have been, where they’re going, and what the best course of action is. The degree to which we can model that behavior for other folks I think would be terrific. One of the functions I sort of see myself as a person who is not running for reelection is to remind people both in big rooms and online that we are remarkably lucky. That we are remarkably lucky that we are some of the most talented writers out there. We’re some of the most highly-paid writers out there. We’re the only writers in the world who get to have a union that gets to represent them this way.

So, we are starting from a position of just tremendous luck and luxury. And the fact that we have so many people who care so passionately about what the future is for all of us writers is great. And so let’s all approach this from a perspective of we may disagree on ideas and tactics and strategies, but the degree to which we can compassionately disagree and not question people’s motives but question people’s ideas, that’s how we come out of this in strength.

**Craig:** 100%. We should be able to stress test each other’s ideas on these things. And we should be able to do it publicly. I don’t think that asking why we are doing this or that in some way is going to damage our solidarity. Our solidarity at least to me is not a function of our allegiance to any given leadership. Because if it were our solidarity would have to kind of whipsaw back and forth depending on who just got elected.

Our solidarity is based on our willingness as members, even when we disagree, to follow our working rules and send in our dues. And what that means is when there’s an action like this one and we have a working rule that says you can’t go back to your agent until this is solved, you don’t go back to your agent. That’s where solidarity is. It’s not in agreeing with every single thing either Phyllis Nagy or David Goodman says. That would be – down that path essentially is just sort of a, I don’t know, a kind of a poverty of imagination and thought.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I do think you’ve put your finger on it that as we go through these things to the extent that we can avoid deciding that some people are just bad because they think a certain thing about a strategy we should – it’s a shame. Because I do feel like every single person that is running in this race, every single one of them, legitimately wants to do something that they believe is best for writers. Nobody is getting a payoff or a kickback or anything. I mean, there’s been some crazy allegations made. So, yeah, let’s just reduce the temperature a bit. And I think maybe give ourselves credit for being strong enough to withstand an election which we’re supposed to have anyway.

**John:** Yep. And honestly I would rather have some disharmony than apathy. And so many years we’ve had apathy where we’ve had to basically twist people’s arms just to get enough people to actually run for the board or to run for office. So, it’s a good problem to have that we have many people who want to do this unpaid job for two years.

**Craig:** I completely agree. And one of the downsides to the – you know, we never really had uncontested elections and then suddenly we did just because we couldn’t find people to run. And one of the downsides is you start to create a generation of members who are not used to contested elections. And we can be frightened by them, even. And we don’t want that for the very reason you’re saying. We want a good competition of ideas and as long as our members are following our working rules and going by the kind of action that we’re taking then we do have meaningful solidarity. We don’t need solidarity of opinion. We need solidarity of behavior. And that’s important. And I don’t think that we should ever put something like an election in the context of hurting our leverage or anything like that.

If an election hurts our leverage than our leverage is terrible. That’s how I guess I would put it. So, you know, hopefully yeah, people can kind of just be nice to each other because they’re writers. And we deserve that from each other.

**John:** Absolutely. All right, let’s do a final bit of follow up. Back in Episode 399 we sat down with a bunch of studio executives to talk about how they give notes and how they could give better notes. Steph Cowan wrote in, Craig would you read what Steph wrote for us?

**Craig:** Sure. Steph writes, “I was right in the middle of a what-am-I-doing-with-my-life-I’m-not-cut-out-for-this moment when I heard your episode Talking Austin in Austin with Lindsay Doran. At the time I’d been working in the theater industry developing new musicals for about eight years. I’d been told that I’m too nice and cared too much to be a commercial producer and that I’m better suited for the lit department of a non-profit instead.

“Then Lindsay Doran said something like as a producer I consider myself the guardian of the storytelling. And I teared up. This was exactly how I felt. It’s still how I feel. And to hear a successful, admirable producer say it was deeply reassuring. I felt that reassurance again when Craig said I think you’re told not to be vulnerable, addressing studio executives in Episode 399. He’s right. We are, in the Broadway world anyway.

“Knowing that showing our love for the story and the team is strength gives me hope that maybe I am cut out for this. It’s also very exciting for me to hear how to give more effective notes. I can’t wait to share this episode with my colleagues.”

John, this is great. Especially because Steph comes from Broadway and we love Broadway.

**John:** We love Broadway. I’m headed to Broadway soon to see four shows in a very short period of time. But my experience making a Broadway show is that there is that function of a producer in terms of being a cheerleader, in terms of being a person who is putting a giant hug around an idea which is still forming. It is really crucial. And so you look for those ones who can do what Lindsay Doran says and sort of be a champion and a challenger and a person pushing you to make the very best thing. So, it sounds like that’s what Steph was taking out of these two episodes.

**Craig:** You know what? I’m starting to think this podcast is a good idea.

**John:** Maybe so. Maybe you should keep doing just a few more.

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** Unless it turns out that we are wrong about the words of English.

**Craig:** Let’s find out.

**John:** “Hi Craig. I’m one of those Johnny Came Lately show listeners who have washed up because of Chernobyl. Sorry. I’m sure a bunch of people have already pointed this out but I just listened to a second podcast where you poured scorn on “heigth” specifically, characterizing it as a construction of illiterate youth. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is old school. It was good enough for Milton and it’s good enough for us, right?”

And then there’s a link, line 324 if you’re following the link in the show notes. “Cheers and thanks for a really well put together podcast.”

**Craig:** Well thank you anonymous writer. I’m glad you washed ashore as a result of Chernobyl. So, of course, I felt a little bit red-cheeked here. I mean, am I wrong? Is heigth a word? Maybe it is. If it’s good enough for Milton – that sounded like a pretty smart phrase.

So I went ahead and looked at the reference here which is, of course, to Paradise Lost, book two, line 324. And in line 324 it says, “In heigth or depth, still first and last will reign.” OK, that’s embarrassing. But I’d like to point out that five lines later it says, “War hath determined us and foiled with loss.” War is spelled with two Rs and foiled has no E. We don’t do that anymore. This is archaic. It is not applicable.

I mean, if we’re going to say that heigth is acceptable because it’s in Milton I guess we can start spelling war W-A-R-R. No. I reject this. I reject this.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. And you know what? For arbitrary reasons. Language can change. Language can grow, evolve. Absolutely. But if Craig says no, Craig can say no. And he’s just not going to use that word. He’s not going to use the heigth. He’s not going to accept it.

**Craig:** And I’m also going to continue to say that people are wrong. Unless, here’s the exception: if somebody randomly says heigth and I’m like did you just say heigth, and they said, “Well yeah, I know, but Milton,” I’ll say stop, you can do it. Just you.

**John:** So the Milton clause is what gets you out of it.

**Craig:** Milton clause.

**John:** The Milton clause. All right. Let’s do our marquee topic. This was inspired by a conversation with Katie Silberman two episodes back. Also I just saw Andrea Berloff’s movie The Kitchen and I had a Twitter conversation with Alison Luhrs who is a designer at Wizards of the Coast and she’s going to be coming on the show in a future episode. But they were all talking about the process of writing. Katie Silberman did all these pages in advance before she started actually writing. She would dialogue pages endlessly to do stuff.

Andrea Berloff was talking about the research she did for The Kitchen. Alison Luhrs was talking about these giant encyclopedias they built for these fantasy worlds that they’re doing for Match of the Gathering and for Dungeons and Dragons.

And so I want to talk just a bit about how do you know when you’ve done enough of that prep stuff and that you’re really ready to write. And Craig and I have different perspectives on this. We do different kind of advanced work. But I want to talk about how each of us feels like, OK, I’m ready to actually start writing scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this may be one of those things where we talk through it and ultimately what it boils down to is we each have our own finger print about this. And what it comes down to is when are you comfortable. When do you feel like you actually can do the good stuff? Which is finding yourself in that moment and writing out a scene and feeling really good about it.

And for me, and this has been this way for so long, I mean, it’s almost getting more this way: I really love to prepare. I love to know exactly what every scene is going to be and what happens in it, even though of course I can deviate. I’m one of those people that goes all the way basically to I need to know what the script is before I start writing the script. And I guess maybe in that regard I’m probably closer to Katie Silberman than I am to you I’m thinking.

**John:** Yeah. And I’m very much not that. But I think the kinds of things that I want to know are probably similar to things you want to know, it’s just that you’re actually doing a written down version of it and I’m just carrying a bunch of stuff in my head and not writing it down.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And why it’s relevant really for this season and this moment is I think you’re just about to start writing something new, or you have already started writing something new?

**Craig:** I’m about to start writing something new. Correct.

**John:** As am I. So this is top of mind for me. Also this is development season. So this is when new TV shows are getting pitched and people are starting to write them. So a lot of people are at this moment right now in town.

**Craig:** There’s still a season to these things?

**John:** There’s still a season certainly for broadcast. We’ve been through staffing and now the folks who are generally not in a room on a show are developing for stuff and they’re going out and pitching things to networks and studios. So that still exists.

**Craig:** All right. Well, good.

**John:** So let’s talk about the idea. And so for me before I start actually writing any scenes I want to know what is this movie or show, what does it look like/feel like if you sort of squint your mind a little bit. What is the shape of it? What category is it? What does it feel like? What does the music feel like? This is the time where I might start putting together a playlist of the music that feels like the show or the movie to me. I think about the trailer. I think about the one sheet. I just feel like pulling back far out, even not looking at specific story, what kind of movie is that. And I need to know that really early on and certainly before I start writing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Obviously I’ve just sort of given my thing away, but speaking specifically of that, that’s the big one. You can – I think anyone can start whenever they want, but after that. Because I think a lot of people think that what they need to start writing is an idea. And an idea, if it’s just the plot, if it’s just the log line, that’s actually not enough.

**John:** Oh not at all.

**Craig:** Not enough. If what you have is, ooh, what if a guy woke up and every day was the same day. That’s not enough. You need to know about why that idea matters.

**John:** Yeah. A thing we talk about on the show a lot is that many ways screenwriting is making a movie in your head and then writing the description of like that movie that you see in your head. And so if you don’t have the basis for sort of like what does this look like in my head, what does this sound like, what does it feel like, then you’re not anywhere close to really starting to write. So I suspect for Chernobyl you had done the research and you had a sense of like visually what does this feel like. What is going to feel like to be watching this show? And you have to have that early on.

And to me that comes before the characters. The characters are the next really crucial step here, but I need to know sort of what kind of thing am I trying to do and who are the characters who are populating this world. Not just my hero. I need to know what are the relationships between the central characters. Where would we find them at the start? Where would they get to by the end? What is the trajectory that they’re going through?

So even though unlike Craig I’m not going to do a full outline that’s sort of going scene by scene, I definitely need to know who are these people and what is the journey that they’re going to be going on through this block of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can see your guide posts along the way. So you understand no matter what’s happening, even if you’re not necessarily writing from a description of what the scene should be, you understand where you’ve come from and you understand where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re coming from and you don’t know where you’re going, that’s when screenplays start getting very purpley and self-indulgent and talky and flabby. I mean, I’ve seen this so many times where I just think they didn’t know.

**John:** They didn’t know.

**Craig:** They were just writing their way through a forest hoping that they would stumble across something. And eventually they do, but that’s their problem. I’m not here to go on your fact-finding mission. I’m here to go on a carefully curated tour of your deep dark forest. So, I mean, you can obviously find your way through those things, but you can’t show it to anybody until you’ve–

**John:** Yeah. And the thing is you can have your general idea, you can have your characters, but unless you sort of knew what is specifically the story of this movie, which comes down to a thing we’ve talked a lot about recently which is what is that central dramatic question, what is that central argument, what is the thing the movie or the episode of television is really about. And if you don’t know that going in – sometimes you can succeed honestly. There’s been stuff I’ve started writing where I didn’t really quite know what is that thematic thing that’s pulling it all together, but I had – even if I couldn’t say it aloud I had a sense of what it felt like. I had a sense of what I was going for. What space this occupied. And it’s the scripts that you read where I just don’t think you actually know where you’re going are the ones where they didn’t have a sense of that right when they started writing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, listening to you, what you’re not talking about is plot.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I mean, I think this is where people go wrong. They think they’re ready to write when they know what the plot is. The plot – first of all, I don’t even know how you know what the plot is unless you know the things that you’re talking about. Because at that point then you’re probably just creating something episodic and plotty with no purpose or meaning or anything greater than that.

You do need to do all this kind of internal psychological examination of why this story should exist. I mean, when you write a screenplay you are writing a proposal for some entity to invest tens of millions of dollars into its creation. Why? Why? Why would anyone do that to your thing? Well that’s the question you’re asking yourself now and that’s the question you need to answer before you start.

**John:** Yeah. At a certain point you are going to start thinking about plot. You’re going to be thinking about what are the moments. What are the set pieces? What are the moments in the story where things take a big turn? If this were a broadcast episode or pilot you’d be thinking what are the act breaks? Where are the moments where things really take a big turn, where are the cliffhangers in the story?

Before I would start writing I would have to have a sense of what are those big really visual things that are going to show what has happened in the story. So that’s where I need a sense of what is the world like. What is the world like at the start of the movie? What are the different sort of sets or places I’m going to be seeing over the course of this story?

I say this on the podcast a lot, but Susan Stroman, director of Big Fish, said she never wanted to see the same set twice. I don’t hold myself to that, but I definitely like her sense that we should not be coming back to the same place without there having been a change. Without something fundamental having been changed about the character or that place or the situation if we’re coming back to this thing. So what is the geographic journey of this story and what is the color journey through the story. What is changing about how this looks on screen as I’m going through this story?

I’ll have that sense pretty early on, generally before I’ve started writing any scenes.

**Craig:** This goes a little bit to that notion of the dialectic. You’re creating something and then it must change. There must be a constant change happening in storytelling. If you end up in that flat space or that circular space people will start to feel bored and for good reason. You’re treading water. You’re almost wasting time. I don’t know how else to put it. You’re literally wasting people’s time.

Good stories are narratives in which people’s relationships with each other, themselves, and the world around them are constantly changing. Every single scene exists in order to create a change. So you’re absolutely right. Coming back around to some place you’ve been before is only interesting if you’re different or that place is different. And the contrast is the whole purpose, right? So, these things need to be determined. If you end up just sort of noodling your way I think you probably will find yourself in that same diner having a similar conversation again.

**John:** Yep. Let’s talk about the dangers of starting too early. And starting the process of actually writing scenes too early before you have that stuff figured out. To me it’s that in the times where I’ve done it myself I outline my supply lines, like I get too far ahead of myself and I just haven’t built the infrastructure behind me to get myself forward, to get myself to this next thing. And so, man, I wrote a great first ten pages. Man, that’s a good first 30 pages. Wow, I have no idea how to get through the next 90. I didn’t have enough story figured out or I didn’t have enough figured out about how I was going to get from this point to a point I know I’m going to head towards later on. So outrunning myself is a real problem if I haven’t really thought through where stuff is.

I’ve often found myself where I have the right hero in the wrong story. I have the right story with the wrong hero. If I haven’t done that real thinking I might have smooshed these two things together but they’re not well suited for each other. And I would have been able to figure that out if I really thought through all those other things before I started writing scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also think one of the dangers of starting too early is inefficiency of storytelling. As you go through you will be incapable of writing tightly, meaning everything has been really carefully considered so that the audience has experienced a pure storytelling unfold in front of them, a kind of a pure storytelling unfold in front of them, rather than a meandering or a wandering about or any kind of circular motion. But rather everything has been carefully machined so that there is – we understand that scenes have transitions and that this scene is a reflection of a scene earlier. And that this moment recontextualizes that moment.

There is essentially craft going on. And part of craft is efficiency of craft. It’s no wasted space. No wasted cloth. No wasted movement. But rather an elegance as if this thing had landed whole and already told in your lap. And it’s hard to do that when you’re kind of making it up as you go.

**John:** Yep. Let’s also talk about the dangers of starting too late. And I don’t know if you’ve encountered this much in your career, but there have been projects where I kind of did all the prep work and I maybe overdid the prep work a little bit and by the time I started writing I kind of gotten past it. Where the thing that attracted me to it was no longer attractive to me and I was looking at this as a chore rather than a thing I was excited to write.

And so I think part of the reason why sometimes I don’t do the laborious preparation is that I’m afraid of falling out of love with something, or being distracted by something else that’s newer and shinier. I want to start writing when I’m still really attracted and excited by this property. There’s a passion to it. And sometimes if I’ve burned off that passion in outlines and other things, especially if I had to show them with other people, then the actual starting to write is no longer thrilling for me.

**Craig:** Interesting. Yeah, I can totally see that being a problem. Certainly I think one of the hallmarks of starting too late is you’re dealing from fear. Something is holding you – you’re afraid to write. I think a lot of times people abuse the pre-writing process, whether it’s outlining or research not to set themselves up for writing success but rather to avoid writing failure. They’re only valuable to set yourself up for success. They are only useful tools. They can’t forestall any trouble. So at some point you’re going to have to dive in.

For me, I do feel a little bit of a sense of exhaustion and completion once I’m done with a 50-page scriptment. But then take a week or two and then when you start writing what you find is – at least I find – that the act of now full creation of a scene is invigorating again. That rather than thinking about an entire movie and a whole series of movements and character changes and resolutions and reversals, all I have to think about is this one little short film. And that is – that kind of makes me fall in love with it all over again. And I get to do that without worrying that I don’t know what to do next, because I do know what to do next.

**John:** Yeah. That is definitely an advantage to that is – what’s ironic is that I’m a person who tends to write out of sequence. You’re more likely to write in sequence. You could write out of sequence probably more easily–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because any of those moments – you could take a moment from page 30 of your script and just write it because you know it’s going to fit back in. I will write something because it’s what appeals to me to write that day. So even within I think all of our suggestions about figuring out adequate preparation and that everyone is different, it really does come down to people ultimately recognize what they need to have done before they start writing. And you should try some different things to figure out what works for you so you actually get scripts written and finished that you are happy with.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, maybe a general rule of thumb is if you find yourself frightened while you’re writing, and scared of the dark, then maybe you should be putting more time in ahead of time. If you find yourself feeling a bit dry and a bit like a horse on a lead, then maybe you need to do less to start with so that you have a little bit more of a sense of play while you’re going. You just have to dial into yourself.

But listen to what your mind is telling you as you go. Because none of this is orthodoxy. It’s all really about what makes your unique brain put out its best work.

**John:** Agreed. All right, let’s take two questions. First we have Leslie from Australia. She writes, “I’m questioning my sanity because I’m currently in a disagreement with a producer over what constitutes a polish versus a draft and I’m hoping you can help shed some light on this. I was hired and paid to write a feature for this producer. He and his backer loved what I did. I gave them a couple free polishes afterwards to address some feedback we got from a mucky-muck in the industry and they were delighted with that, too.

“A second producer has come onboard and given his notes on what he thinks needs changing. The first producer and his backer now agree with him and they’ve asked me how much I’d charge for a polish, or as they put it, ‘A strong polish.’ I told them the changes they’re asking for amounted to a draft, not a polish, or even a ‘strong polish,’ whatever that is, but they disagreed. So, when I gave them a reasonable quote for a draft they rejected it. I would love to get your take on what a polish is versus a draft. I may be way off base – I don’t think I am – but I’m willing to be schooled.

“Also, I’ve never heard of the term ‘strong polish’ before. Is that even a thing?”

Craig?

**Craig:** That is not a thing.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No. No, no, no, Leslie. That’s not a thing. That is a term invented by con artists to get you to do more for less. I mean, that’s all that’s going on here. They want more for less.

Here’s a rough rule, because there is not a ton of super specificity about this. And when you say a draft, for those of us here we would probably call that a rewrite. In my mind a polish is something that happens in about three weeks, or less. And if it’s more than that, it’s a rewrite. That’s kind of roughly how it goes. So, that’s sort of what I would say. And then the question is how much can you do in three weeks? Whatever you’re comfortable with doing.

So generally speaking a polish would not be re-rigging the plot. It would be fixing some characters. It would be maybe one or two characters need some work on their dialogue. There’s two scenes that need kind of reinventing or reimagining. That feels like a polish.

If they’ve got systematic issues that they need you to address or want you to address, that’s a rewrite. And if they don’t want to pay for it they can gaslight you all they want. They can tell you it’s a polish all they want. They can invent new phrases like strong polish. But that’s gas-lighting. They’re just trying to get more for less.

**John:** So, Leslie, even if you were working here, even if you were working in this town with schedules of minimums and things like this, you would still be dealing with this question of calling this a rewrite, calling this a polish. Them trying to get you to do more for a little bit less.

WGA has specific terms for what polish means and for what a rewrite means. Polish involves character work and dialogue. Things that change story in a major way tend to be rewrites. But functionally Craig is correct when he says it’s really more about time. That’s what we think about when we think about a polish. A polish is a matter of just a week or two, three weeks. If it’s multiple weeks and a lot of work that tends to be a rewrite.

And so Leslie I think you were right to be suspicious and I’m sorry that this didn’t work out on this draft. But whether they called that a polish or a rewrite, they didn’t want to pay you money for it and that’s where I think it comes down to it.

**Craig:** Well they wanted to pay her something, just not what she deserves. And I’ll point out you’ve already done a couple of free polishes.

**John:** Yes!

**Craig:** So this is what happens. We are not rewarded for “good behavior.” We’re punished for it. They don’t look at you as somebody who has done them a solid favor and therefore they now owe you something. What they do is look at you as somebody that they exploited successfully and so they will continue to exploit you. That’s what bullies do.

Now, when it comes to capitalism that’s essentially what capitalism is. It’s economic bullying. And they’re going to do what you’re going to do. And so you’re going to have to stand up for yourself and say no. And based on the way you’re describing this I’m just wondering where the copyright for this rests. You’re in Australia. I don’t think they have work-for-hire there. You may have more leverage than you think. I think it’s time for you to get somebody else involved to help represent you with them.

You’ve probably seen a lot of cop shows where the job of the police is to convince their suspect to not bring a lawyer in because if they bring a lawyer in it’s going to be much harder to get them to spill their guts and confess. Well, this is sort of like that. These guys don’t want you to bring a lawyer in. So, bring a lawyer in.

**John:** Agreed. Do you want to take Justin’s question?

**Craig:** Justin from Hawthorne asks, “Hello Screen Wizards.” I like Justin. “I’m writing today to see if the tales of the Do Not List from Hell exist in present times. I’ve heard rumors of this list but I can’t imagine it to be true. I’m worried I might be on it and I’m praying that the years of hard work attempts to crack open a career as a screenwriter won’t be thwarted by earnest and possibly haphazard times when maybe I was too eager or submitted my material too early? If it’s real, can somebody who is on this list ever get off of it?”

**John:** So I provided some off-mic context for Craig because this Do Not List is apparently an idea that producers or studios or other folks in town have a list of like never hire this person, or like there’s a do not list. This person is a hack and don’t hire them.

I think individual people will have their lists of writers they don’t want to hire, but it’s generally because they worked with the writers and the writers were bad for them. You writing something that wasn’t good, it doesn’t help you, but it doesn’t hurt you for a long time. It doesn’t stick around. People’s memories are kind of short when it comes to stuff they didn’t like. If they read a script that they really like of yours, they’ll hire you on to do more things.

So, I would say don’t be worried about your early work. Always be mindful if you’re sending stuff out make sure it’s good and it’s professional and that it’s showing your best light. But if you didn’t, stop worrying about it. Instead worry about writing good new stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. When people read something that someone has submitted, an original or something like that, and they don’t like it, they throw it out. They don’t run to a special list called Oh My God This Person Wrote a Terrible Script. Because they know as well as anybody that somebody can write a terrible script and then four weeks write something wonderful. That does happen, right? Sometimes we’re working in the wrong genre. Sometimes for whatever reason it just doesn’t work.

John is correct. There are lists. First of all, there are lists. It’s important for people to know that. I’ve seen them. They exist. There are lists. And those lists are people that either a studio or a producer believes are well worth hiring and working with and they can make levels of them. I mean, the whole phrase A-list came from original list had A, B, C. And there are lists of, nope, we’re not hiring that person here. They usually don’t write that down because they don’t want to deal with any legal issues, but they are always on that list because there’s been a bad employment experience.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Not because they wrote a bad script. If the studio hasn’t paid for it, they’re not going to blame you for it, dude. Most scripts are bad. How about that? You’re going to be fine.

**John:** Yep. He’s going to be fine.

**Craig:** He’s going to be fine.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things this week. The first is a delicious cookie. It is the Oreo Thin.

**Craig:** I love those.

**John:** If you’ve not tried the Oreo Thins, they’re good and they’re so much better. And they’re crispier. So you owe it to yourself to try an Oreo Thin. Even if you don’t really love Oreos you’ll probably love Oreo Thins. They are terrific.

The second is a thin book. It is Monsters and Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide. It’s by the D&D people. And what I like about it is it’s designed for young middle grade readers and they’re smaller books. They’re hardcover, but they just have all the cool illustrations of dragons and owlbears and all this stuff. Basically art work that Wizards probably had sitting around and they found a good way to repackage it and write some new text. It’s written by Jim Zub.

**Craig:** Hold on.

**John:** What a great name, right?

**Craig:** I think Jim Zub is in the monster manual. I think I’ve faced off a crimson Jim Zub.

**John:** They’re nicely done and to me it feels like if I were a six-year-old kid who was obsessed with dinosaurs I would also be obsessed with these books because it’s dragons and cool stuff. There’s other books – Warriors and Weapons, Dungeons and Tombs. So if you have somebody who you want to give this kind of gift to who is not really ready for actual D&D it feels like a good starter thing.

**Craig:** You round the corner and see in the room a giant Zub. What do you do? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. So is a Zub one of the things where you stab with your sword and then your sword rusts away?

**Craig:** Probably. That seems Zub-like.

**John:** Zub-like.

**Craig:** It’s definitely Zub-like. Well, listen, you had two One Cool Things. I’m going to give our listeners a break and just say they deserve two One Cool Things. And also I didn’t have one.

**John:** That sounds good. So, Craig, I’ll give you half credit on the Oreo Thins because you also agree they’re good, right?

**Craig:** I have eaten them, so yeah.

**John:** All right. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael Karman. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. But for short questions, on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

People do recaps on Reddit so you can check the recap for this episode and a couple episodes back if you’d like. You can find the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, it’s good to be back with you doing a normal Skype show.

**Craig:** Very good to be back with you and we’ve got some really interesting shows coming up, so–

**John:** We do. I’m excited. And off-mic we’re going to talk about some big special guests.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Have a good week.

**Craig:** You too.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Myth of No Negotiation](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-myth-of-no-negotiation)
* Deadline’s “Exclusive” on [John’s Blogpost](https://deadline.com/2019/08/john-august-wga-long-slog-agency-deal-negotiations-1202662054/)
* [John Milton, Paradise Lost](https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_2/text.shtml)
* [Monsters Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide](https://amzn.to/31xMkk7) by Jim Zub
* [Oreo Thins](https://www.oreo.com/Thins)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael Karman ([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_413_ready_to_write.mp3)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/writing-about-mental-health-and-addiction).

**John August:** Hey this is John. Today’s episode comes from a panel recorded last week in cooperation with Hollywood Health and Society. If you want to see video from the panel there’s a link in the show notes. But realistically if you’re already listening to this audio you are fine. You don’t need to see the video. There’s no slides or anything you’re going to miss.

Now, Craig was planning to cohost this panel with me, but he has had a family medical situation, so I did this one solo. But I think Craig is really going to enjoy this episode, if he listens, which I hope he listens to it because he really will like this episode. We have a remarkable showrunner, Gemma Baker, we also have a medical doctor who can talk about the science of addiction. We have a therapist who can talk about young people and mental health. And we have a journalist who writes extensively on drug policy. It’s a really great group.

We talk about writing protagonists dealing with mental health and addiction issues, their impact on other characters, the responsibility of writers addressing those topics, and what writers need to keep in mind about their own mental health.

This episode pairs really well with Episode 99 if you want to go back and listen to that one.

Today’s episode was produced by Megana Rao, with music and editing by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks to Marty Kaplan, Kate Folb, and everyone at Hollywood Health and Society for putting together the event. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. I host a weekly podcast with Craig Mazin called Scriptnotes and we talk a lot about writing and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And as we talk about screenwriting we’re always trying to focus on specifics, like what is the specificity of this moment, what is the reality behind this thing? Why are characters doing what they’re doing? We will talk about the words on the page, but we’ll also talk about the experience of watching the stories that we’re trying to tell. And we’ll bring on guests sometimes to talk about very specific things that they wish we as writers could do a better job at.

We had Rachel Bloom on recently to talk about how we portray sex on screen and how we can portray sex more realistically on screen.

So when I found out this panel was happening I virtually threw myself in front of Kate to say like, hey, do you need a host, because I really wanted to talk with these very smart people about addiction and mental health.

Another thing we talk about on Scriptnotes a lot is structure, so let me talk a little bit about the structure of tonight’s evening. I want to start by talking about the experience of a character facing addiction or mental health challenges. Then talk about the characters around them, sort of how that character is impacting the world around them. We’ll then step outside a little bit and talk about how the stories we tell are perceived by the world out there and what is our responsibility, what are our opportunities as we’re telling these stories. And finally as we’re talking about addiction and mental health, how do we as creators have to be mindful of our own mental health? And things we can be looking out for for ourselves.

So that’s sort of the structure for the evening. There will be questions and Q&A at the end, so if a question comes up along the way remember it because we’ll get to that at the end. But I want to start by talking about how our characters come into our stories and I want to start with you, Gemma. So, Gemma Baker is a writer and producer and the co-creator of the hit CBS comedy series, Mom, a show lauded for its portrayal of addiction. She previously wrote on Two and a Half Men. She graduated from Tisch with a degree in theater.

**Gemma Baker:** Hello.

**John:** My question for you, so the two lead characters on Mom both have addiction issues. How early in the process of coming up with Mom did you know that this was a thing that you were going to want to explore?

**Gemma:** In the very, very beginning. So when it was first being talked about the idea was for the character to be a mom who has addiction, active addiction and drug problem. They knew they wanted – it was Chuck Lorre and Eddie Gorodetsky – and they wanted to do a show about a mom and they thought we’re going to bring in a mom. And they asked me if I thought that could be funny. And I just thought, well, if people don’t think that the kids are safe they’re not going to feel OK laughing. And so what if the character was in recovery? And you could root for her, because you knew she was trying to change. And so that was our starting point.

**John:** What was the starting point for your research into this? How did you find out about what recovery would look like and sort of where the opportunities were and where the challenges were for these characters? What was that research process like for you?

**Gemma:** I think one of the things that was really important for us was that a lot of times when recovery is portrayed, not necessarily now, but then it felt like it was dreary and that there was no joy and light and there wasn’t a lot of hope in the portrayal of it. And I think that that is what we felt was missing, you know. And that anyone who knows and loves someone in recovery knows that that’s such a huge part of it. And also so often recovery is the end of the story. You know, you watch a whole movie about addiction and it’s so awful and painful and heart-wrenching and then at the very end it’s like and then they got sober, the end, roll credits.

**John:** Sometimes they’ll give you nice little title cards.

**Gemma:** And then they got sober and it worked out.

**John:** Yep.

**Gemma:** And I think that recovery is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the story. It is having a chance. It is where it’s the beginning. And so we wanted to tell a story that started there. That was really important to us.

**John:** That’s great. Well let’s talk more about recovery. So our next guest, Dr. Corey Waller, is a nationally-recognized addiction expert and currently practicing specialist in addiction, pain, and emergency medicine. Through his work with the Health Management Associates and the National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs he has developed addiction treatment methods, provider training, and educational outreach delivered by that center. Dr. Corey Waller, thank you for being here.

**Dr. Corey Waller:** Thanks.

**John:** We’re going to be talking about addiction and mental health. And because you’re the actual doctor here can you help us get our terms straight. When we say someone is dealing with addiction what does addiction mean in a medical sense? Or what’s helpful for us to be thinking about when you use the term addiction?

**Corey:** That’s a great question and I think a lot of people misinterpret what addiction is. Addiction is not the presence or absence of a drug in somebody’s system. It’s the way in which they behave in obtaining and using the drug. And we actually define addiction based on nine very specific behaviors. That means they’re predictable. I mean, in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual we’ve identified nine specific behaviors associated with both drugs and/or a behavior like gambling that ultimately tell us whether or not someone has addiction. And we can use those behaviors and the presence or absence of those to determine how severe it is.

And so with that, that’s how we create our interventions and have done all of our testing to identify how to appropriately treat people at the beginning because they have predictable behaviors that we identify as addiction. And unfortunately those behaviors many times are misinterpreted as frustration or anger when in actuality they’re just symptoms of a disease. And so I think that’s the big piece around addiction is that it’s definable, it’s identifiable, and it’s not because somebody is mean or it’s not because somebody got drunk at a party. And it’s not because somebody used cocaine on a Friday. It’s what does that look like in their life in general and do they have control over that drug. Do they have control over their behavior when obtaining that drug? Do they try to obtain that drug over their safety or over the safety of their kids? Or do they lose their job because of the drug? These are the ways we define it.

And so many times that term is slung around in a pretty messy way. But medically we have very specific criteria for what addiction is. And we actually know more about the neurobiology of addiction than any other chronic brain disease.

**John:** So as we’re talking about terms, addictions can have a pejorative context. Like someone has – and we need to get past that. That’s the stigma thing we’re trying to get past tonight. But a word like addict – is addict a useful word or not a useful word? What’s helpful for us to be saying when we’re talking with somebody who is dealing with these issues?

**Corey:** Well person. If we just start with that. But in general people aren’t defined by their disease. We’ve gone really far to make sure that people with diabetes and cancer and other medical illnesses aren’t defined as their disease, because they’re a person with that disease. And the disease is a part of who they are, but it’s not how we define them.

So we don’t in a perfect world call them addicts. We call them a person with addiction. And then we can get very specific in healthcare terms. They have an opioid use disorder, or a substance use disorder. Terms like clean and dirty, those are terms that are utilized that have no medical connection whatsoever. Even like a urine drug test. They dropped “dirty.” I have doctors say that. There is no clinical terminology. What does that mean? It get mud in it? I don’t really know.

What we have to start doing is not taking on how the patient’s very self-stigmatizing language is utilized. And it’s used a little bit to combat the shame and the fear of this disease and not take that language and somehow weaponize it toward them. Because as people in healthcare and even just society in general, using a term like a person with addiction is just – it is what it is. And that’s where I think we should start.

**John:** And thinking about this as writers, as we’re coming up with character descriptions, we’re trying to describe what a character is like, if we use a word like addict that just stops us dead it’s very hard to see anything else around that character. We’re not seeing what they’re doing and we’re not seeing the choices they’re making. It’s taken all the agency away from that character. And so finding the right words to use feels really important.

The other part of our panel tonight, our discussion, is about mental health. Where are the overlaps between people with problems with addiction and mental health things? Is there a big crossover between the two?

**Corey:** Yeah. And so the crossover seems to really be identified in those with what we call adverse childhood events. So early life trauma. I ran a clinic dedicated to pregnant and parenting females. So we saw hundreds of females who had addiction while they were pregnant and all but two of those hundreds had a significant early life trauma, most of that sexual trauma. And so the early life experiences that occur to someone increase the chances of them having not only addiction but a co-occurring mental health disorder.

And that mental health disorder if not treated while you’re treating addiction will make the addiction unstable. And if you’re treating the mental health disorder on one side but not addressing the addiction you’re never going to get the addiction stable. So it’s a matter of most people who have addiction also have a co-occurring identifiable mental health disorder.

It’s unclear early in treatment if that’s going to be there after we stabilize them in treatment. And so you have to go through a pretty significant process. But quite honestly as you’ll hear, one side doesn’t necessarily talk to the other. You hear, “I treat addiction,” or “I treat only psychiatric ailments.” But rarely do those ships meet in the night. I mean, honestly, it’s crazy because that one book has all of the descriptions and a third of it is about addiction but then there are psychiatrists who are like, “Eh, I just kind of ignored that part,” and moved on. And then addiction medicine providers who don’t read the other stuff. So it’s very disconnected where it really shouldn’t be.

**John:** All right. Let’s keep looking for that crossover. Our next guest is Dr. Holly Daniels. She is the managing director of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, supporting 32,000 clinicians. She has worked as a clinician, teacher, therapeutic consultant for over 15 years, specializing in addictions, eating disorders, and other mental health issues using her extensive knowledge with treatment programs on university and college campuses to help young adults thrive. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from Sophia University. So you’re working with younger populations, what are some things that we as sort of non – older than college students – might not be aware of that are happening on campuses, college campuses and high school campuses? What do you see that we may not be aware of? What are the things that young people are facing?

**Dr. Holly Daniels:** Well there’s a really interesting dynamic right now in that our society as a whole has embraced talking more about mental illness in general and substance use disorder. And that’s really prevalent in the younger generation. So kids are actually talking more on campus about – even about their mental health issues, about having anxiety, about being depressed, and there’s more of a discourse. And I would say thank you to television and film, actually, for opening up a lot of that discourse. Kids feel more free to talk about it. But, you know, there is kind of that backlash of the more they’re talking about it and there isn’t really the science-based support to help them through it, right, there’s still a lot of issues with drug and alcohol abuse, you know, from age 10 up. And there really isn’t unfortunately enough support in our school systems or in our education system. And the education that they’re getting about mental health issues and substance use issues is coming from the media, right.

I mean, that is their discourse. The film and television and what they’re watching. And so sometimes it’s a really helpful education. And I don’t know if anybody has seen Eighth Grade, but I loved Eighth Grade by Bo Burnham which talked a lot about anxiety. We have shows like Euphoria which I’ll let us – maybe I’ll talk about that later. I have different ideas, I have thoughts, too.

But overall I would say the big positive is that, just like Corey was talking about, we really need to chance as a society and stop penalizing mental health issues and criminalizing substance use. And the great thing is when we can see those stories in television and film and we can see people having compassion and leaning in to support the people who are struggling that gives our young kids, our adolescents and our young adults, that model to be like, oh, if somebody is struggling I reach in and help. I don’t call them a bad person or say that they have a moral failing. I want to help.

And that’s actually really a hopeful thing that’s happening on campuses is that kids want to help each other. They want to be there for each other and that’s a beautiful thing.

**John:** Yeah. I definitely noticed that kids, teenagers, want to help each other but sometimes don’t have the actual skills to be helping each other.

**Holly:** Right.

**John:** And to what degree do we need to be aware of contagion or the sense of like a person with a challenge spreads to other – like how as a person who is dealing with young populations what are some things that we have to be aware of with teenagers? Are there are different things that happen with them?

**Holly:** Such a good question. And this is why the work that Hollywood Health and Society does is so important and being able to as film and TV writers reach out to experts to understand where that fine line is when you’re portraying heroin use, or when you’re talking about kids committing suicide. What are the things that you can do so that the visuals, right, are not more triggering than they need to be? It’s a fine line of we want to be able to talk about this, and we want to be able to portray it because that’s important. But we also don’t want to cause children out there to hurt themselves, right, or create an atmosphere in which they feel like it’s glamorized or it’s cool to self-harm.

**John:** So finding that balance between realism and glamorization is a challenging thing. We’ll keep talking about more of that tonight. But I want to introduce Zachary Siegel. He is a journalist who covers public health, mental health, and criminal justice. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, New Republic, Slate, Wired, and Politico Magazine. He’s currently a journalism fellow at Northeastern University, the university’s Health and Justice Action Lab where he has spearheaded the “Change the Narrative” project. He cohosts Narcotica, a podcast about drugs that’s informed by science, policy, and the lives of real drug users.

I have a rival podcaster on the panel. I’m not sure I—

**Zachary Siegel:** That’s OK.

**Kate Folb:** That’s why we put them as far away as possible.

**Zachary:** We’re hoping to steal this audio, too, for our own podcast so we’ll talk later.

**John:** All right. It all crosses over. Zach, could we talk about sort of your experiences with addiction and sort of the degree to which Hollywood and the things you saw in movies and television influenced the start of that, the progress of that, the recovery from that. What did you see as you were encountering it for the first time?

**Zachary:** Yeah, so I’ll try to keep this brief because it’s a long story. So, full disclosure, when I was about 17 had opioid use disorder as we call it now. And it really started with friends and I exchanging pharmaceuticals and really what happened was as a young, anxious, sort of nervous Jewish teenager trying to figure out what the world was like I took an opioid and finally felt normal. Like I finally felt OK. And it’s a cliché at this point, but it is really true. When most people take opioids they get kind itchy and constipated and they don’t really like them. When I take an opioid it was like, OK, the clouds have parted and I feel very, very comfortable, which can be a very dangerous feeling for a teenager.

And so that progressed and progressed and progressed, like all the way up to heroin use, but to not like [unintelligible] with that story because really I was just like watching movies like pretty zonked out five hours a day. It was not a productive time of my life. But I did watch a lot of media. So I can talk about, for example, like how maybe the first time I ever saw injection heroin use on screen was Basketball Diaries with Leonardo DiCaprio. And I think that had a huge impact on me and I wanted to be a writer and be in like sort of the beat scene in New York and that whole thing was very attractive. But, you know, the sort of delusion that has to be confronted is like people on drugs typically, you know, life is really hard and you can’t necessarily be productive.

Like I was not a successful writer when I was using heroin because I had to think basically in six-hour timetables where, OK, here’s one fix and where’s money for the next one. And to live in this sort of collapsed time where you’re very much encased by the next one and the next one. It was incredibly difficult. And so I can talk more about media, but yeah I do think the way that I consumed media and the things that I saw were very impactful.

It may sound random, but there’s a documentary called Methadonia produced on HBO. I don’t know if anyone saw this, but it was a horrific portrayal of a drug called Methadone. And just the quick facts, Methadone saves lives. It reduces someone’s risk of fatally overdosing by 50% or more. And this documentary however portrayed it so negatively and I think I was a teenager watching that before I’d ever really like thought that one day I might need this drug. But as the recovery process sort of unfolded for me and I didn’t wind up in a Methadone program I had to confront my own stigma about people who take Methadone because of that documentary.

So these things have – it’s just a huge responsibility to portray this.

**John:** So I thought we would start by talking about the experience of a central character in our story, so either a movie or a television show, who is dealing with an issue and sort of talk about the timeframe, the things, the challenges, what are the realities there so we can then think about how we are going to portray them and sort of what are the opportunities. And so my hypothetical character I want to introduce is a character named Jane. She’s 28. Boyfriend, not married. An alcoholic. And we can talk about where her alcoholism is. I use the term alcoholic. I probably should use a person dealing with alcoholism. But this is where the character is that we’re meeting. But we could meet her at many places along the spectrum.

So Gemma, you decided for your show to show somebody who is already in recovery. Corey, can you talk me through someone who is dealing with alcoholism where are some points along the way we might meet that character? What are the stages where we might meet a character who is grappling with it?

**Corey:** Well, I mean, a bar. Common location. So a couple of things—

**John:** The timespan. The stages of—

**Corey:** I know. So as we look at this, alcohol use disorder is the most prevalent addiction period. You add all the other ones together, it’s still not as many people that have alcohol use disorder in the country. So it is still the most prevalent, but it’s also the one that is more normalized. And so people can go to a bar and get barely able to stand or walk and we’ll call them an Uber and send them home, but we don’t think about that in the context of alcohol use disorder a lot. So somebody tied one on, or you’re hungover this morning, or that kind of piece.

But generally speaking the first time that we interact with them in a healthcare setting is going to be when they accidentally fall and break an ankle. Or they get picked up by police and are incoherent and show up – you know, I’m an emergency medicine doctor, I still practice – and so I’ll see people in the emergency department and that’s how I first encounter them many times is intoxicated. And just being intoxicated doesn’t mean you have an alcohol use disorder, but it starts to really add up a lot of those points that we talked about when you are intoxicated, and you fell, and you hurt yourself, and you ended up in the emergency department because of the intoxication.

So it’s not always just the homeless intoxicated person who shows up to the emergency department. The early part of the disease means that there are times in which things are stable. They’re still able to generally go to work. They’re still able to have an interaction. They’re still able to have friends and connections. And over time those things start to wane. So that first time that we get them is the best time to intervene because we generally have milder disease than if we wait this out.

And so this concept of they’ll come and get help when they’re ready, or this concept of rock bottom, basically means we’re going to see if they wash out through dying before we treat them. And so the times that we’re going to interact are going to be the times that they drunk dial mom at three o’clock in the morning. The times that their boyfriend confronts them because they’re frustrated about how they embarrassed them at these places. Or the boyfriend or significant other also has an alcohol use disorder and maybe they’re perpetuating this.

Those are the times that we’re more likely to make the biggest difference in someone are those early signs of addiction which is they’re missing work. And so I have a staff of 30 people and I was the chief of pain medicine for a health system, so if a doctor started having odd behavior I would pull them aside and have to be like, “What’s going on?” We are scared to do that in society. We’re scared to call people out because we don’t know how to do it many times. But an empathetic ear and somebody just saying I care about you, if you want to chat about this, really opens up the door for that early interaction to occur.

By the time I get them, I mean, the train has crashed at that point. This is a point where they’re either mandated by court or intervened by family or their life is in complete shambles and they have nowhere else to go. And that’s just too late. And so I think recognizing that 60% of people who at some point meet for an alcohol use disorder self-resolve.

So, I always use the anecdote of when I was in college I tried really hard to be an alcoholic. It just didn’t work. And that’s good for me, but that’s a lot of people. If you think about back in school and that the number of people who drank to the point of failing a class or missing class or failing out of college but then kind of bounced back, early in life – in adolescence and in early adulthood we have kind of resolution of an acute version of addiction. Now that is an increased risk for later that something may recur, but if you can catch them at that phase and really kind of work with them we don’t necessarily have to even label them long term.

I mean, I have a roommate who drank just as much as I did. He has a label of an alcohol use disorder. But I don’t. And we have the same trajectory in the end. So it’s just a matter of when you catch them. So I think early and it’s those little pieces where we find them the most. And that’s where they start to struggle with isolation which we find is the early form of kind of the fear and stigma they put on themselves. And from a character perspective, being able to portray that shame and isolation that occurs very early in this disease that is the path to the more severe version of the disease that leads to bad outcomes that I would see.

And so that guilt and shame keeps them – they hide. They start to drink alone. They start to separate from people. Go to different bars where they’re not going to be noticed. And it’s not a control issue. It’s a part of the brain. You know, we know exactly what part of the brain it is. It’s the default behavior for an input called cue associated relapse. And it’s not a decision like we think about. It’s not a pros and cons sheet. It’s a reflex once they’ve started using.

**John:** Gemma, he’s talking about self-stopping and sort of control. And we always as we write our characters we want our characters to – we’re sort of cruel gods aren’t we as writers? We’re always creating these challenges and obstacles for our characters to face. As you look at the characters you’re dealing with in your show how are you as a writer and as a writers’ room talking about characters’ awareness of the behaviors that they’re doing? Awareness of the problems that they are encountering for themselves? Because it sounds like any one of the characters we set off in our stories could end up in a very dark place. And yet you are mostly responsible for getting them back to a good place by the end of 30 minutes. So how are you talking about that in a writers’ room? How are you figuring out sort of how to get a character through these situations?

**Gemma:** Well, I think, you know, one of the things that sitcom characters are not known for is growth and change. So, but we have this amazing opportunity, and I think responsibility, to say that these characters, now we’re going into season seven, they have grown. They have changed because they’re sober and because they’re facing life in a new way and because they’re doing it together and because they’re using certain principles to change and grow.

And so I think that’s been really fun. When we feel like they’re starting to get stuck we’re like, oh, you know, that season two Bonnie, that’s not season seven Bonnie. Season seven Bonnie is going to handle that better. So we keep ourselves sort of accountable to that. We sometimes have the actual meeting portrayed. We have this device of people sharing. Also on a sitcom you don’t necessarily see someone just tell you where they’re at for two minutes, but we have that ability to do that because our characters literally are sharing where they’re at. And so that helps us to – they might begin their share thinking one thing and then hear something and get to another place quickly.

**John:** So the idea of a group meeting, a 12-step meeting, or some other place where people come in and describe what they’re going through, Holly could you speak to sort of what the role of group meetings is in Jane’s life. Let’s say that Jane is making progress. What would that meeting really be like and what are the things you don’t see that we might be showing better?

**Holly:** Well, there’s really huge power in group share. And that’s why the Alcoholics Anonymous movement has been so successful actually in helping a lot of people get sober and get better. And it’s a place where you can feel like somebody sees you and somebody gives you space to be who you are and be going through what you’re going through. And that is huge and that actually is what television and film does for us, too, right. When there’s a representation in a television show or a film of what we’re going through and how we can identify that’s just so very powerful and empowering.

And so when we’re working with people who are dealing with mental health issues or substance use issues definitely we want to employ groups and as an individual therapist I would definitely and do definitely encourage my clients to find a group and to utilize the group and the support of the group. But that is kind of on the recovery side.

And I did want to mention, and maybe you’re going to get to this John, but what I would like to see more in film and television is the group that the person is with while they are in their addiction, while they’re really struggling, because we are systems people. Right? We’re in a system. And there are always people who are enabling or ignoring what we’re going through, or you might meet Jane at a bar but then fairly soon you’re going to meet Jane in her room drinking by herself and she’s waking up and shaking and her boyfriend is going and buying her some alcohol because he wants to help stop the shaking. But he doesn’t realize that he’s actually perpetuating her illness.

And there are some really complex dynamics that go into the system that is supporting the person who is struggling to continue to struggle unfortunately. And that’s something that I haven’t seen really deeply portrayed in all of its complexity which would be really neat to see.

**John:** Zach, as you watch film and television and you watch individual therapists or you watch group settings what are we getting right and what do you think we’re missing? And what is the ideal role of the expert, the therapist, the person who is there to help the person. Again, I think we idealize them so much in Hollywood, but what is the real function of that person that you see?

**Zach:** Well, I think to, yeah, be scientifically and medically accurate and grounded as any expert in this field treating addiction should be. And that means oftentimes not sending people to Malibu for 30 days and pet horses on a ranch. Like that is not how we treat any other addiction or any other medical condition.

**Holly:** I used to work at one of those places so I take offense.

**Zach:** Sorry. And especially in terms of opioids which it’s on my mind a lot, there’s an overdose crisis, and I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to communicate health messaging with media by having a therapist say, “You know what? Actually you’re a perfect candidate for Buprenorphine. And let’s get you to the right doctor who can prescribe this drug and, you know what, maybe when you go to a recovery meeting or group share on Buprenorphine you might be stigmatized because within this community frankly they don’t often have most science-based approach to things like medication.”

So I think to see that play out in a narrative would be very powerful.

**John:** Well, I should say writers, we love conflict. So if there is a conflict that can be introduced that could be a useful thing. And do you–

**Zach:** This one has been going on forever.

**John:** Yeah. But I would say that most people don’t realize it exists.

**Corey:** Well, I think two pieces that I would pull out is, one, for our 28-year-old female character she’s prey in these settings sometimes. If you get into the wrong meeting and you’re very unstable in your disease people that are also unstable in their disease can be a predator in that setting. And so it can be very unsettling for that person to show up to that meeting to someone to seems to get them unlike their boyfriend or maybe unlike their parents. And they use that angle to actually connect themselves in a pretty pathological way. And I’ve seen that happen a number of times for females in recovery going to some meeting. So they need to find the right one, right? It can’t just be any random place.

And I think the other portion is to understand that everybody has their path to recovery. But at this point for opioid use disorder 12-step abstinence-based treatment is only 8 to 12% effective. Now, for alcohol use disorder it has a higher rate of effectiveness. But the research was done on generally speaking doctors, pilots, and lawyers of white origin, so when we start to think about what modalities we’re looking at and what the data looks like that data looks very clearly good for doctors, pilots, and lawyers, especially those that are Caucasian. It’s about 85 to 90% effective for alcohol use disorder.

But for the population that I see when I was in Camden or when I was in Detroit or Philly, wherever that is, that’s not effective treatment for them. But it’s also about timing and dosing. So thinking about somebody who is really unstable, that’s probably not the best time for that. We do find, however, when they need to reconnect that may be the perfect time to add something like that. So just recognizing that it’s not the default treatment for everybody. Most people get treatment outpatient. Most people don’t go to residential treatment. Most people get their treatment in an outpatient setting just like they would for congestive heart failure.

So sometimes creating less conflict with it, because there’s plenty of conflict in their life otherwise, so the treatment of their addiction doesn’t have to be the conflict point. There are so many other pathways because this disease is such a socially connected disease. It creates conflict in families. Conflict at work. Conflict in just going to the store and walking past beer. I mean, those are conflicts that are there.

So creating the conflict in the treatment sometimes stigmatizes the treatment. So I think that it’s a little lazy, to be honest, because it’s not the place where drama has to be. We know how to treat it. We have effective treatments. It’s pretty matter of fact. And we know how to know where they go. I mean, so that part of it and understanding where meetings are and what role they do play, it’s not the treatment. It’s just a part of a larger normal approach to treatment that we would take.

**Holly:** And if I may add to that, Corey, I agree. Not only is it a place where people could be preyed upon or, you know, but it also is a place that you actually don’t want to go into a group setting – to piggyback off what Corey said – until you really are stabilized internally. Because it might be very difficult and re-traumatizing for somebody to hear everybody else’s stories about their trauma. And when we’re talking about trauma I’m not talking about getting shot with a gun or run over by a car, I’m talking about complex emotional relational trauma we call that which goes back to the adverse childhood experiences which so many of the people struggling with substance use have.

And so you have to maybe work one-on-one with medication, get yourself stabilized, before you go into a group where you’re going to hear a bunch of stories about a bunch of other people’s really difficult times because that can be very triggering and re-traumatizing.

**Corey:** By the way, you guys portray – it’s the only show I can actually watch with addiction, to be honest.

**Holly:** Love your show, Gemma.

**Corey:** The rest of them are triggering to me, honestly, as a practitioner, frustrates me and gets me angry so I can’t watch it. But so this one is one that does it in a way that people in recovery they do well in those situations.

**Gemma:** Thank you.

**John:** And I think it’s because you’re offering hope. There’s characters who are dealing with a thing and it’s never going to be completely resolved. It’s not like the monster is ever fully killed. But they are able to have productive lives. And that’s obviously an early decision you’ve made that you’ve been able to keep up for eight seasons.

**Gemma:** Yeah. To be able to watch someone’s life get bigger. To have our main character. If I could go back in time in the pilot we said that she wanted to be a psychologist and then we quickly changed her into a lawyer. If I had a time machine and I would go back and just correct that one line in the pilot to say she wanted to be a lawyer. But I can’t, so we just ignore it. And pretend that her dream was always to be a lawyer.

And it was important for us to do that. It takes a while to become a lawyer and it’s hard to write becoming a lawyer stuff. But we’re doing it – and make it funny – but we’re doing it in real time because we hope that we are going to be on long enough to see that happen and to watch that whole process. And for her the ups and downs and the doubts and just showing up for all of it sober.

**John:** Cool. Let’s try and experiment with a different character. Carlos, 35, depression. And so this is a character who is dealing with depression. What things will we see outwardly as we’re looking at the character of Carlos that might tell us that he’s dealing with depression and help me figure out both his inner state, so what he’s going through, but what externally we would see for Carlos. What would be the things that we would be noticing? Holly, do you have a sense of what we’d see first?

**Holly:** Yeah. I think that, you know, it’s not totally unlike symptoms of substance use disorder in that you’ll see changes in behavior that suddenly Carlos isn’t around very much, or he made plans and he didn’t keep them, right, that his circle will notice. That he’s just not feeling up to doing the regular activities that he might want to do. And when it really progresses he might lose his job because he can’t get into work and he can’t get out of bed and doesn’t want to return phone calls. And maybe then when is confronted is able to like buck up enough to be like, “I’m fine, I’m fine, everybody don’t worry. I just need some time alone. Don’t worry.” And it really takes a supportive person in Carlos’s circle to say, “You’re not fine. Can we help you get some support?”

Because depression is one of those things. It can be a little bit under wraps. You know, people can be really struggling with depression for a really long time and still show up to life just enough that they’re not going to get into a car accident or break their ankle or do something that’s so big because of being high or drunk that it can really go under the wire for a long time.

And that’s what is so scary about it, too. And especially if Carlos starts to become suicidal. And most people who die from suicide don’t leave a note or give any signs beforehand. And so it really takes a community, right, to be around Carlos to say, “Hey, you know, this is the fourth time you haven’t come out and you usually came out with us and ate dinner every Friday night and now you’re not doing that anymore. What’s going on? And can we help?” Because Carlos can hide it for a good deal of time.

**John:** Quite a few people I follow on Twitter self-identify as dealing with depression and they’ll talk about medications they’re on. They’ll talk about the struggles that they’re going through. I admire them for doing it. Is that useful for them? Is it useful for everybody else? I always wonder the degree to which self-identifying as this can become an identity of being a depressed person. What is the current science and best thinking in terms of when a person who has depression is in treatment and is improving talking about it? What is the best way to interact with that character?

Let’s say Carlos has started getting some help. What do we do with Carlos? And what changes do we see with Carlos?

**Holly:** That’s a really good question. It’s a personal question, right? So sometimes the diagnosis can be really empowering and it’s something that you can share and you can say, “Omg this is what’s going on with me. I have this chemical imbalance and it is a disease and it’s an illness.” And so it’s a little bit freeing. For some people having a diagnosis is very shaming and it’s very difficult for them to carry that with them. So that’s part of our job as mental health workers to kind of be there with each individual and decide is this somebody who is going to feel empowered with the diagnosis? Is this somebody who is going to feel shame with the diagnosis and to be able to talk through all of that with them?

But for the most part I think it is, for the people I’ve worked with, it’s empowering. And it’s a way to build community because mental health illness and substance use disorder they are isolating. That is one of the things that happens is people become more and more isolated. So if you can say, “Hey, I’m struggling with this thing” and find other people in the community that say, “Hey, me too.” And you can have that back and forth and connection. It can be really a powerful help. Yeah.

**John:** Let’s point our discussion and talk about the community around Jane and Carlos and sort of how they’re interacting with family, with friends, with the medical establishment, with the police. What do those interactions look like? So we talked about earlier that Jane would come into a medical situation because she’d broken her ankle or law enforcement if she was drunk driving. There’s natural ways to do that. How would Carlos come into a medical community? How would he come into a law enforcement community? What are the interactions that we see with these characters as they’re doing their thing and the impacts they’re having around other people. Zach, what do you see as Jane’s – the circle that she was drinking with? The social circle that was helping her stay there. How do we portray them responsibly and accurately?

I mean, the people who are in some ways helping her stay the way she is.

**Zach:** I mean, I think it’s super contextual. And I think there’s one very recent example of a portrayal of depression is Euphoria. And in a recent episode of Euphoria, so Rue is the main character and she is so depressed that she has watched 22 hours of Love Island straight. And there’s this sort of ongoing, very painful experience of being too depressed to walk up to go to the restroom. And so her bladder begins to hurt and so I think one thing that was really interesting and somewhat playful there was that depression hurts. It’s not just an emotional/psychological pain. It is physical. Like if you really miss someone, like it hurts when they’re not around. And I think that having different ways of portraying psychological pain manifesting as physical pain could be an interesting thing to show onscreen.

**Corey:** I would say that the science backs that up 100% because the two chemicals responsible for depression are norepinephrine and serotonin, these two chemicals. Dopamine can play a place in one type. But those are also really important chemicals in pain. So, in theory if you have a low serotonin level and a low norepinephrine level you’re going to have depression. We find this really commonly. Interestingly, if I decrease those in the spinal cord that also makes your pain sensor higher. Everything hurts worse, literally.

So, when somebody has depression almost always they have physical pain. And it may manifest—

**Holly:** Which is why they want to use drugs.

**Corey:** Right. No, exactly. And here’s an opioid and I’ve just wrecked your life. So the pieces, there’s really hard science to back up physical ailments that go with anxiety or depression. The place in the body with the most serotonin is not your brain, it’s your gut. So this why we see nausea and stuff in people with low serotonin states because it’s not working properly. They don’t digest food properly. It’s one of the most common complaints I would get for patients with depression. They wouldn’t complain about being sad or crying. They would complain about their belly. And then when you dig into it a little more it’s major depressive disorder.

**Holly:** Especially for young kids, right?

**Corey:** Absolutely.

**Holly:** When a young child is dealing with a mental health issue they’re almost always going to tell you their stomach hurts. It’s a big thing to know.

**John:** Great. So let’s talk about a young child. Let’s talk about a young child dealing with depression or anxiety or these issues. What are the idealized perfect Hollywood parents and what are realistic parents that we’re maybe not seeing as much onscreen? Holly, what’s your take on those parents?

**Holly:** The perfect parent would say to their young child, “How are you feeling? Can you talk to me about what you’re feeling? If you can’t use words can you give it a color? Can you describe it in some way? All feelings are welcome here. We want to talk about all feelings. They’re important. Your feelings are important. And if you’re having some painful feelings, or if your stomach keeps hurting well guess what? We know where we can go and find some help and find somebody who can support you and help you feel better because as your parents we’re here for you, but we don’t have all the answers either. And sometimes we hurt, too. And so let’s go to the experts and find somebody who can help us out.”

**John:** That’s the perfect. That’s the dream. But let’s talk about more realistic things, because in real life parents don’t know what they’re doing. They’re busy doing lots of other things. They have jobs. They have other stresses. They are going through their other issues. On your show Allison Janney’s character is dealing with addiction herself and has a daughter dealing with it. So, and yet you’re trying to be a comedy. So, how do you find the balance of talking about these things and still finding the funny in there? And dealing with the fact that she’s not a perfect mother?

**Gemma:** We don’t have perfect parents on our show. No. I think that’s why people like it. I think it’s a relief. I think I don’t want to after I’ve made a mistake as a parent tune in and watch a perfect parent. Like that just makes me feel worse. Really just, oh, I could have done that and I didn’t.

I like characters that are flawed. That are trying but who fall down and make mistakes. And I think that that is where we find humor is in the trying. And, you know, we deal with a lot of difficult subjects. And those are the scripts that I want to write. Those are the ones that are so much fun, because there’s something to hold onto. And those are the ones where you can go into some really deep, painful places. I’ve always loved like a lot of sadness in my comedy, which did not make me a successful standup. But I found a place where it’s working.

But I think that’s – I don’t know, I think that’s the fun stuff to write. The pain.

**John:** And there’s also a lot of fear. I know as a parent there’s also a tremendous amount of fear. So it’s not that you’re just ignorant to what’s going on, but you’re also afraid of what’s going on. You’re afraid is this a small thing or is this a giant thing? Where does this all lead?

And one of the other fears is the cost of things. And so if we have a character with a child who might be having these issues what is the reality of going to get help? And so would they first go to their pediatrician? Would they then go to a specialist? How much of that could be covered by whatever insurance? What are the realities of someone seeking treatment for addiction or for mental health? Where does that money come from?

And Zach you may have some sense of this, too. You’ve done reporting on the realities of this. What does it look like right now in 2019 at least in the US for someone dealing with these things?

**Zach:** Well so there are too many uninsured people in this country. Too many people who are underinsured in this country. And I think getting into healthcare policy and portraying that rightly in an entertainment narrative would be quite difficult. But I do think that having conversations about insurance do work and is done. In 6 Balloons, did anyone see 6 Balloons? It’s like a day in the life of a heroin user played by Dave Franco and Abbi Jacobson from Broad City is his sister and they take him to detox which is kind of the wrong thing to do. Detox for opioids is not really a thing. But they take him to detox and there’s this whole rigmarole because insurance isn’t paying for it and they don’t have the right coverage. And then someone says, “Well, go down to this clinic. They might have the right coverage.”

And so I think that’s actually a very realistic run-in with the bureaucracy of American healthcare. And I think that’s actually very realistic because I think people do have a lot of trouble what’s in their provider, what’s out of their provider. I think health insurance adds a very complex layer to this. We can also get into parity insurance. It’s forced to, but sometimes doesn’t cover mental health as it should like they do with physical health. These things are separate and I think it’s very critical that we don’t separate these things. That they’re all part of hospital treatment and primary care and that these are all treated by doctors like this guy.

**Holly:** And when they aren’t treated by doctors, I mean I think there’s a very common experience that I’ve even had working with young adults, even in Los Angeles which is not the poor rural area where I grew up in that people, like adolescents and young adults, want therapy but their parents can’t afford therapy. And it’s like this lament, the young adult lament of like I want therapy or you’re 26 and you’re no longer on your parents’ insurance and you want therapy and you can’t find it. And it’s really sad. But this is actually – and I don’t want to get too tangential, but this is where the social media platforms actually can be a positive.

Because I’m not saying anybody should go get therapy on a Facebook group. The kids don’t use Facebook anymore. I don’t know what I’m what I’m talking about. But there are Reddit, I don’t know, listservs somewhere. Kids are able to find support groups. And I, through some of my clients, and I also have two teenagers, have been able to look into some of these online support groups and they’re not terrible. You know, the kids are like offering each other some support and some good advice. And it’s really interesting how the support that our community is offering is changing in this way because of social media. Social media is not all bad. There’s actually some really positive things that can come from it.

**Zach:** So I don’t go to AA or NA meetings, but Twitter is my support group.

**Holly:** There you go.

**Zach:** No joke. A bunch of my good friends on Twitter are in this room and we are always on it. And we’re working together. We’re part of something bigger. It’s really important to me.

**Corey:** For young kids, I had three in my clinic that were pretty recalcitrant and very difficult to treat. And I started playing video games with them on Xbox and we would play Halo and have a closed chat. And actually they told me everything there, but when I was in front of them as an old guy in front of them they didn’t want to say a word. They were clammed up. But when I game them my gamer tag and they came on and we literally sat down and played Halo, you know, in the evening sometimes I got everything from them. And then they would come in and tell me more there.

So it’s about building a connection, which means you have to break down these preconceived barriers with kids. And I think we don’t really build – we haven’t built a system for that. We’ve built a security for adults that we somehow adapted to kids and it doesn’t really work. I mean, I use this now even with my kids. When I’m on the road we play Apex and just can chat. And they’ll tell me more things.

So I think there are some things with gaming and social media and a new path that have real potential to make big change. And just kind of throwing those out there as nuggets for what connects to kids and allowing kids to inform that because the minute that they break down those walls they’re ready to talk about stuff. They don’t like where they are. They’re frustrated. They’re scared. They’re sad. They want to be successful. They want their peers to see them in a certain way and they hate that they’re being seen as this person. But the minute they’re that person they will fully embody it because they have this need to own it. Which many times can rapidly create severe illness. And so just figuring out these other ways that we can come at it would be really important.

**John:** Classically we talk about our protagonist, generally our hero who is – the character is going on a journey. The character who is changing over the course of the story. And there’s an antagonist. And sometimes we think of that antagonist as being a villain, like the bad guy of the story. But it sounds like what you’re describing really is a therapist as antagonist. The person who is helping the protagonist change, is causing the change. And so there can be friction there at the start, but ultimately you’re trying to get to a relationship there so that you can help this person get to the next place. That sounds like the nature of that relationship there. Great.

We are mostly talking about characters, but we are also writers who have minds ourselves. And sometimes deal with these issues ourselves. So before we get to questions I want to ask you guys – if someone is watching this from the Facebook stream or they’re here in the audience and they’re saying like, oh, you know what, I think this has made me realize that I may have a substance use problem, that I may actually have some mental health thing that I should be doing something about. What is the thing they should do tonight? Like what is the first step that somebody who is watching this or listening to this should be doing if they have that moment of awareness?

**Corey:** Don’t go to Google. I mean, honestly, this is the problem because at this point in time mainstream medicine is still really crappy at this. I mean, the vast majority of people aren’t really trained. It’s not mandated in medical schools for a doctor to be trained. I mean, I’m board certified and I’ve done it for over a decade. I feel comfortable in the neuroscience of it. That’s kind of not the average person who sees a patient when they walk into a hospital and there’s still this stigma that we have to break down.

And so what I would say for a person in here, first is get my LinkedIn and call me. I’ll hook you up. I mean, I know everybody who does this work. I mean, honestly it comes down to a provider being available to help a person in need, but more importantly a friend being willing to walk with them through this. And I think that’s one of the biggest pieces, and you talked about not only the character but the people around them. The thing I’ve never seen portrayed truly effectively is a non-family member friend having a truly empathetic connection with a person with addiction to help them take that next step. What we call the trans-theoretical model of change.

And moving them from this pre-contemplative state to actually going and get help. And it’s very simple. You look at them and you say I care about you and I have your back. Because they feel so isolated that they don’t do it. And as a physician when I say that in the emergency department it’s amazing the switch that flips in people when I’m treating them in a time of crisis to actually want to get help and kind of empty themselves a little bit at that point.

And so I think the biggest thing that I would say is I could give you the one-liner of go to the SAMHSA website, Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, and type in your zip code and it will give you providers. Or I could say go to the – if you feel unsafe. But find the person you trust the most and connect with them. And ask for them to walk with you through this. And they really will. That’s the first step. And then together you can start to find the pathway for treatment because it’s not predictable yet. We’re just now building these systems appropriately and that’s why these billions of dollars from federal government are coming in because the systems don’t exist.

It’s been kind of an on-your-own pathway. And so don’t let it be on your own. The first thing is to make that strong connection with the person you trust the most. And then start the journey together. And that can be a family member. It can be a friend. Whoever doesn’t trigger you and enable you, identify them. Not the person who just says yes to whatever you want to do. But somebody who cares about you. And I think that’s the first step that I would say for anybody in here who is struggling with this.

And you know what? 10% of you are. And so this is just a reality. And so that would be it. And honestly find me, call me, I’m happy to answer those questions with you. I still have my homeless population in Camden that I see that still calls my cell phone sometimes randomly.

**Holly:** And as the therapist I’m going to say if somebody feels like they might be struggling and they don’t know, if they are and they’re wondering if they should take that step to reach out to take a really deep breath, to love yourself, to understand that we are all experiencing pain and we’re all going through something and that it’s OK to be struggling. And that you deserve a good life and happiness and allow yourself to reach out for help. Because sometimes that’s the very first step that has to happen because the self-loathing is so great that people feel like they don’t even deserve to be able to ask for help. And that’s sometimes the biggest hurdle. Love yourself. Allow it to be – we’re all human. We’re all in this together. None of us really knows why we’re here, right? And we’re doing the best we can and it’s OK to be struggling and it’s OK to need help.

**John:** Zach as a writer you’re often dealing with the struggle of getting stuff down on the page. Is there any special thing you want to say about sort of the writing process and how it ties into these two things and the desire to recognize when you need help? Is there anything that’s different about that?

**Zach:** So I work from home and I joke that I’m a stay at home dad with no kids. And so it’s really nice that I have a partner, Logan. She gets home at around five. So I try to simulate as best I can a 9 to 5 job. Because if you’re writing it’s not 9 to 5 and it’s whenever you get an email or it’s whenever someone shares the doc and you’re in it.

So, I think because things are unstable and not exactly steady I would try my best – and this is just what helps me is get structure. I think – any writer I think is very obsessive. Reading the same sentence a hundred times and it doesn’t look any different and I keep reading the same sentence. I think there’s just part of the process that for someone like me who has had addiction that I have found a way to channel some of the obsessiveness that is part of addiction into something that I think is helpful and something that I think is useful.

Like I don’t really have a big writing process because journalistically things are just moving too fast sometimes to have a cup of tea and put on the right music. It’s like, no, it’s just like–

**John:** The deadline.

**Zach:** I’ve just got to go.

**John:** Gemma, now you get to work – you don’t have to work all by yourself because you get to work with a staff.

**Gemma:** Oh thank god.

**John:** But there must be some aspect of the caretaking that you guys are doing of each other and sort of watching out for each other. And there’s the whole production of the crew that makes your show. As a person who is managing these people how do you look out for these folks? And how does a writer on your staff, how could she feel comfortable speaking up if she’s struggling, if she’s having an issue? What guidance could you give to somebody who is on a writing staff, not yours necessarily? But in general what should they do if they’re struggling?

**Gemma:** Well first of all I mean in our room we get taken care of so well. Like we are fed and watered and coffee’d. Like over our hiatus I almost starved to death because I didn’t know how to get lunch. Sort of a joke but not totally.

**John:** I know it.

**Gemma:** So I think self-care in general is so important. And I think – I don’t know necessarily about other people, but I know for myself there’s a lot of gymnastics that I have to go through to get to the point that I can, I don’t know, find the funny, you know. And I’ve had to face a lot of stuff and deal with a lot of stuff on my time and get through that. Because if I don’t get through that I’m going to bring that – I’m just going to come into work and weep. And I need to find another way.

You know, so I do things every day. I try to meditate before work. I try to get some exercise in. I try to do that book, The Artist’s Way.

**John:** Five minutes–

**Gemma:** The three pages. I’m on week one, year eight. I’ve never gotten past week one. But week one is great because she talks about the morning pages. And I do that which is like the three – and if take a moment, and a lot of moments, 30 moments in the morning to do that. To just write down the voices in my head that are like you don’t deserve anything. You know, if I can just write that down so that I don’t bring that into the room I do so much better.

And my husband and I have a deal if I meet an untimely death that he will never read my morning pages notebook because he will so worry about what I was going through. But it’s just that yammering to get that out.

And then certainly if anyone in our room is going through something I think that we give them the feeling that they can come to us and that, you know, there’s a lot of trust that has to happen in a writers’ room. And you’re sharing your personal stories and experiences and some of them are funny and a lot of them are not. And you need to be able to trust that that is sort of a sacred space where that stuff isn’t going to get shared elsewhere. And the people in my room know me really well. You know, they know a lot. And there’s something wonderful about that. It’s also difficult sometimes because they know me really well. But I don’t know, it’s a very cool relationship.

**John:** Now usually on the podcast we would do a One Cool Thing, but for tonight I wanted to do a new segment called Please Stop. And so I asked everyone to prepare a Please Stop for something that they see in films and television that they wish they would not see ever again, or that people would cut way back on.

So, here’s my Please Stop. Can we please stop with the actual quantity of alcohol we see characters drinking in movies and TV shows? Because it’s physically impossible. You see these characters, I mean, this is really an appeal to writers and directors, but also like the prop people. Because people will drink these massive quantities. And we all know that it’s like tea or something in there, so they’re not actually drinking bourbon. But characters drink so much that they would be dead in some of these things.

So if we could keep an extra eye out for the actual volume of alcohol we’re having our characters drink that would be my appeal and ask to Please Stop overdoing the alcohol.

Gemma, do you have a Please Stop?

**Gemma:** Yes. Can we Please Stop when people are, you know, identifying in a 12-step meeting and they say, “Hi. My name is Bob.” And then everyone says, “Hi Bob.” That, I just, I don’t like it. I don’t like it. It’s so depressing and it’s so – I don’t know.

**John:** It’s cliché. Corey, what do you have?

**Corey:** I’d say the biggest one is Please Stop portraying someone who is in recovery from addiction as having a weakness inherently. And on the opposite side of that just to add to it, don’t portray people who decide not to use drugs or drink as lame. Because what it does is it portrays, one, that those who did drink and it happened to be the thing that made them feel normal for the first time and they develop addiction, but then they went through all the work and frustration and pain in that to get well. Treat them like they’ve overcome cancer because this disease has the same mortality rate.

So, as we start to look at it they have fought to get there. And they should actually be as someone who has really been through a battle and won. And it should be portrayed positively as like this is a person I want on my team because I’ve seen them fight a fight and win. But on the other side don’t make the dude who’s like, “Yeah, I’m cool, I don’t want a drink,” as like the lame-o that night. Or “I don’t smoke weed” is like boo, he can’t go to White Castle. Like I still go to White Castle, I don’t smoke weed. So it’s OK.

And so I just think those two pieces go together.

**John:** Both in our media but also in real life. I mean, a thing I often say is if someone says they don’t drink you don’t have to ask a follow up question. They’ve said, great, so they can have something else and let’s move on and have a great night. Holly?

**Holly:** Please Stop portraying mental illness and substance use disorder as anomalies. Almost 25% of people have a diagnosable mental health issue. I would say millions more have maybe a sub-clinical anxiety or depression issue. So, it’s a lot of us and it shouldn’t be like that character has a mental health issue, or that character has an addiction. It’s much more ubiquitous than that and would love to see a more realistic portrayal of that.

**John:** Zach, what’s your Please Stop?

**Zach:** OK. I would say to stop glorifying DEA agents and criminalizing the US/Mexico border.

**Holly:** Here here!

**Zach:** So just one thing, obviously DEA agents, like we make them look tough. And their job is futile and they’re abysmal at doing it. So, let’s just not make them cool people.

**John:** Thank you, Zach. All right. Sicario [as a comedy]. Now we have time for some questions. So if you have a question – a reminder that a question is a question. It’s not a story with a question mark at the end – raise your hand and I’m happy to call on you. Right here?

**Male Audience Member:** Well I guess this is for all of you. I’m just curious, I read Michael Pollan’s new book How to Change Your Mind, which I don’t know if you guys are familiar with that, but they start talking about drug addiction and the use of psychedelics and other drugs. I haven’t gotten all the way through the book yet. But I’m just curious if you’ve researched any of that or could talk about that for a second.

**Corey:** So the psychedelic research is kind of resurgent. There was a time in the ‘60s in which it was actually done quite a bit and looked pretty promising even then. I think that the research that’s now coming out looks equally as promising. So I think it’s about dosing and timing and you have to do science. And science is you have to identify whether or not if I give somebody this versus somebody who got a placebo, like a sugar pill, does it work in that scenario? Because we develop an idea of should I use this based on if nobody knows what’s happening do they do better. And if that’s the case then game on. I mean, there’s nobody really against this in medicine. Medicine is pretty straightforward. I mean, we just like to see a randomized control trial in a population we can believe by a scientist we can trust. And we’re like, OK, cool, this is great.

So, yeah, I think it definitely has a future. And in the mental health there’s a lot of research there where I think for depression and stuff looks great.

**Holly:** Absolutely. Depression, trauma, PTSD. It’s very effective, ketamine treatment and LSD micro-dosing. Very effective. And it’s hopefully going to just be allowed to be used more. Unfortunately it’s over-regulated right now.

**Zach:** One more DEA thing. It’s because of the DEA that we cannot research these drugs.

**Holly:** Yes. That’s true.

**Zach:** So let’s de-schedule these so we can actually research and see what kind of potentials they have.

**Holly:** Right.

**John:** Another question, right here.

**Female Audience Member:** I’ve been researching neuro feedback that people do. I did it as a kid and I didn’t realize I was doing it. I was just brought by my mom. But I just listened to a podcast about it and they claim that there’s no such thing as a chemical imbalance. And I’m confused by that because I currently take medication and it works great. And the neuro feedback I do not remember working at all for ADHD.

**Corey:** I’m a neuro molecular biologist at grad school, so this stuff is really interesting to me. So sometimes we oversimplify things to the point of being wrong. And it’s not necessarily an imbalance, because neuro feedback has very little to do with the actual neuro transmitter, the chemical, and more to do with actually building certain signal pathways. Because if you do neuro feedback you’re creating a default reaction to a cue. I mean, we know the lateral habenula. We know exactly what part of the brain we’re working on because it’s the default reaction to a cue that we’re trying to change. And so neuro feedback is I’m feeling anxious but let’s focus on your heart and see if we can decrease your heart rate during that moment.

And so that cue would be to switch from being anxious to thinking about this, which would then lay down new tracks. It would then lower your heart rate and decrease your anxiety. It’s not a chemical imbalance to be depressed because I may – it’s a chemical imbalance in the sense that for your brain the chemicals are a little bit out of whack. And whether that’s structure, or chemicals, we never know. Because some people have – like schizophrenia is a structural problem, not a chemical problem. It’s what we call arborization which is where over time your brain connects a bunch of nerves. And then it trims a bunch of nerves, too, so that you don’t have too many, so that your brain can communicate. So you can have internal thoughts while you’re having external thoughts.

If you don’t trim those branches then you can have internal thoughts way too loudly while you’re having external thoughts and you get a different voice. So it’s these changes in structure. So mental illness is not a chemical imbalance, unless it is, which in that case it’s a lower or higher serotonin. It could be structural or this. So it’s an oversimplification.

The heterogeneity of mental illness has a lot to do with trauma. Has to do with is it group trauma, meaning a whole group of people experience this versus an individual. It changes the whole dynamic of the brain is wired. So, oversimplification, but they’re also wrong because they became black and white. So if anybody is black and white in this space they’re wrong. It’s all grey. Because the science we know a lot, but we don’t know everything.

So if they’re not speaking in – if they’re speaking in absolutes turn it off, because it’s just wrong.

**Zach:** And pharmaceutical companies wrote the copy for chemical imbalance. Like it’s not a thing.

**John:** All right. A hand right there. Yes?

**Female Audience Member:** Thank you. The thing I’ve personally experienced a lot is somebody whose friends and family think they have an addiction or mental health issue but that person either doesn’t think they do or doesn’t want treatment. What does the ideal friend or family member do in that situation and how does that fit in the timeline of issues that we’ve been talking about?

**Holly:** Should bug them every day. Tell them they have to go to treatment. The people around them should spend all their time worrying about whether the person is in treatment yet.

**John:** Just badger, badger, badger.

**Holly:** Yes, badger, badger, badger. That’s what works. I’m good.

No, yeah, you know, grownups make their own decisions. And if somebody is not ready to get treatment they’re not ready to get treatment. And we have to respect that and live our own lives and take care of our own selves. But you can still be there in a way to say, “Look, I’m here when you are ready to get help. I’m here if ever you want to get help.” And you might want to say that every couple of weeks, but probably not every day, right? So that they know when they are ready to get help that you’re there. You can’t force anybody to be ready to go to treatment, right? Or to get any kind of help.

What you’re talking to, and I don’t want to get too complicated, is actually though one of the systemic problems of something that might keep somebody sick. Because there might be what we call enablers, and I hate that word, but it’s a good word, who are spending their entire lives worrying about that other person. Wanting to make sure that they’re OK. Resentful that they’re spending all their time worrying about the other person being OK. And in that system the sick person almost might want to stay sick unconsciously because they’re getting all that attention around them and there are these weird payoffs. So actually the healthiest thing to do is to step back, be your own person, you know, say when my loved one is ready to get treatment he or she will. And until then I’ll live my own life. I’ll be a model of setting good boundaries and living my best life. And as long as they know I’m here that’s all I can do.

**Corey:** And from a provider’s standpoint we use a technique called motivational interviewing which is basically a science-based interaction technique. It’s like The Force. It’s awesome. I mean, literally these are not the droids you’re looking for. I mean, you can get someone through just appropriate empathetic questioning, but it has rigid structure in the way in which you approach it. So, if you want to know the right way to say things that might help someone move through those stages of change and get ready faster rarely can a family member do this because there’s too much emotional connection and discourse.

**Holly:** Can be shaming, sorry Corey. It can be a little shaming.

**Corey:** Yeah. It can be, if overdone. But at the same time motivational interviewing is the basis for getting someone to start to slowly move through these stages of change. And it’s the language that should be mimicked if you’re going to try to portray someone who is kind of doing the right thing. Not overdoing it. But the basics of it.

**Zach:** A last thing I’ll add is if someone is actively using and they are not ready to stop it’s a good time for them to learn about harm reduction. It’s a good time for them to find out where the local syringe exchange program is, where they distribute in a naloxone, where someone around them can naloxone which reverses the effects overdoses which someone who knows how to do the proper breathing in case this person isn’t breathing. So there’s ways to keep this person safe and know that they’re cared for even though treatment isn’t on the table right now.

**Holly:** That’s a huge important point. If you have somebody in your life who has an opioid addiction or might have an opioid addiction get some Narcan. And will you explain more what that is? And you can get it at your pharmacy. You can ask your pharmacy for Narcan to be there. If there is an overdose you can help them stay alive.

**Corey:** Yeah. So an overdose is when the opioid or other substance, or a combination of substances, in fact most overdoses are not just opioids. They’re an opioid plus like a benzodiazepine like Xanax or Valium or alcohol on top of it. And it suppresses the breathing in the brain stem. And so when that occurs if that’s not reversed then the patient will die because you’re not breathing.

Narcan, or naloxone, which is a nose stray or an injection. In fact, what’s out in the public right now is just a nasal spray.

**Holly:** It’s easy.

**Corey:** It gets to the brain. It blocks the receptor that the opioid goes to and reverses that. So, what it does is it wakes them up and puts them into [floored] withdrawal, but it keeps them from dying. And that’s the important part. Because I can never get somebody who is dead well. So, we need to make sure that any chance that we have this. My seven-year-old knows how to deliver this. My nine-year-old knows how to deliver. They carry it in their backpacks. And I live in Ann Arbor, which is not really a place where you’re most likely going to find as much of this in density. But it should just be that ubiquitously.

So if I asked the question how many of you have Narcan on you, it honestly should be kind of everybody, because it is the one thing that literally is a life-saving drug that anybody can give that nobody is going to steal. It has no street value other than keeping somebody alive. And if I’m walking back to my hotel tonight, you know, you need to be able to give that.

**Holly:** Go to your pharmacy and say I’d like some Narcan or some naloxone and your pharmacist will help you figure that out.

**John:** There are going to be so many scenes with Narcan in these people’s scripts and it’s going to be great.

**Zach:** That’s good. That’s very good. More naloxone.

**John:** Question right here.

**Female Audience Member:** So, as you know what happens to people of color who have mental health or addiction is very different from what happens to white people in this country. And I’m wondering what you would like to see be different in the program that we have around race and mental health and addiction.

**John:** Let’s talk about both sort of portrayals right now and also reality, so we make sure that we are addressing both things.

**Corey:** The data is very clear that medicine is racist. I mean, very racist. Not a little bit. This is not unconscious bias. It’s racism. And so racism is shown to be systemic in even doctors of color. And so it’s not just everybody. It’s the field of medicine that is racist. And this has been well studied and it basically shows that if you are an African American female you are going to receive the least effective care that we can deliver as compared to anybody else. And the spectrum changes. So poverty and the appearance of poverty and color also put you even below that.

So the minute you come in and you code as impoverished or you code as African American from that culture, or you code as American Indian or Latino, you’re going to get worse care. And so that’s a reality and I think quite honestly is worth beating up in TV shows. Meaning this needs to be called out.

I have this conversation with my patients, because obviously they’re going to look at me and be like well what do you know about this. I’m a white male doctor. I can walk into a room and have immediate power without having done anything, right? That’s just a reality of America.

And so I think what I would love to see is how to actually have that conversation from someone like me and someone like that to cross that bridge because it’s crossable. It really is. But you have to call out the fact that the entire system is actually built against that population. And that’s a systemic historical problematic issue that we’re going to have to deal with. And until we really beat it up in anecdote and emotion and story it’s not going to change in the bigger picture. That’s a great question.

**Holly:** It is a great question. And something that I wish – we all wish – was more addressed in television and film, too. Because it’s just so empowering to make sure that there is representation in our media. Mental health wise, too. It’s really unfortunate that there is a bias within the system and there are also cultural biases, some groups are more prevalent to ask for help or reach out for help. And I wish that story was told more, too, because it’s really, really important.

**John:** Yeah. This panel is set up to talk about stigma and I think it’s also important as we do our research on these things make sure we’re looking at cultural groups and what are the stigmas about these specific things within that group that would cause different outcomes or cause people to make different choices, be it for getting help or other things. It doesn’t stop at sort of doing the research on what is the issue, but like what is that issue within that culture is crucial. And that’s why you have to have representation in your room to figure out what’s going on there.

I think we can take one more question. I didn’t anyone in the back, so I see one hand in the back. I can’t even really see your face, but I see your hand up very, very high.

**Male Audience Member:** Back to screenwriting, within the 12-step programs there’s actually a tradition in not talking about the 12 steps in radio, television, and film. So as screenwriters how do you approach that because you would want to be responsible to that. And like Zach said with the doc he watched that gave him an unconscious bias on wanting to take methadone, so if as screenwriters we do the best that we can, or don’t, like what is our level of responsibility? And is there a higher level to the networks and studios to oversee how we’re portraying these 12-step programs or recovery in general?

**John:** I can start answering the question, but I think we have very smart people up here who can also answer it. I think as screenwriters we’re always looking for that balance of what is realism versus what is the point that we’re trying to make. And what you’re describing is that sometimes the absolutely realistic version of what that 12-step program might be like might be divulging stuff that is not helpful for the community as a whole. So you may want to make some choices that are different.

You’re always going to approach the scene from what are you trying to do for that character. What is the essence of that scene for that character? And there may be ways to use the nature of that scene or sort of what’s the arc of that scene to get at that thing without revealing things that you don’t need to be revealing. Or getting into esoterica that’s not meant to be discussed. But what do you guys think? To what degree is talking about the specifics of recovery, or sometimes the specific of a certain kind of treatment where you can’t walk somebody through the whole thing and you’re going to be doing some short-handing.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a show I loved and in this final season Rachel Bloom’s character is going through a program and you can sort of squint and probably figure out what she’s going through, but they weren’t specific about the nature of the program. Is that an appropriate choice to not give it the name? Where do you guys land on this?

**Gemma:** Well I can speak to that. My understanding of that tradition is that it is not to break personal anonymity but not that you can’t discuss the program. So, that is a difference and we’re dealing with fictional characters. And to do it in a responsible way I think is definitely important. But I don’t think it breaks that tradition. And that’s sort of the stigma of recovery that I was sort of talking about earlier is something that is real and it gives people a sense that there isn’t hope and that if you seek recovery that your life is over and that you won’t find joy or happiness again. And I think that that is false.

**Corey:** It’s national security. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to divulge something that’s going to make every person with addiction suddenly worse. I think transparency is really important for all aspects of treatment. Both for addiction and mental health. And in that because the more we normalize these things the more likely it’s less stigmatizing. And I think hiding it and separating it and keeping it under the covers just continues to perpetuate that stigma about people who are in recovery and what these things mean.

And if somebody goes to a cancer support group then we talk all about that. In fact, that’s entire storylines of pathways for people in shows. So I think that with this it’s a step. It’s a pathway in their recovery. And sometimes and for some people it’s not a part at all. Some people it’s a big part. Some people it’s transient. And it just is what it is. So normalizing it as much as you can through the stories that you tell becomes really important for destigmatizing the treatment of addiction and not keeping things under wraps and scary in a sense.

**Zach:** Yeah. I just think anonymity, it’s important for people who want to protect their identity, obviously. But I do think we are in, like that book, The Traditions, I think it was written in the 1930s or the 1940s, and I don’t think these traditions are mapping super neatly onto where we are now as a culture in society, namely that when there was an HIV epidemic a saying was literally Science = Death. That was the slogan. And right now there’s an overdose crisis where 70,000 people are dying every single year. And I think that there’s a responsibility to not be quiet about that. And to speak up. And the more that people like me are in places like this and the more that there’s people who use drugs, people who are using drugs, we need to hear from them. And, yeah, so I don’t think they should be anonymous. But that’s just my take.

**John:** I want to thank our fantastic panelists for a very great night.

Links:

* [Hollywood Health and Society](https://hollywoodhealthandsociety.org/events/addiction-mental-health-breaking-stigma)
* [6 Balloons with Dave Franco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uF4XjvS_Z0)
* [Motivational Interviewing](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/motivational-interviewing)
* [Narcan](https://www.narcan.com/)
* Follow Corey Waller on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/rcwallermd).
* Follow Holly Daniels on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/drhollydaniels).
* Follow Zachary Siegel on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/ZachWritesStuff). Follow his project Changing the Narrative on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/hijaction) or using #ChangingtheNarrative.
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([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_412_mha.mp3)