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The oringinal post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 639 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why are you or your characters doing what you’re doing? We’ll look at intrinsic motivation, both on screen and in the brain, because Craig loves neurobiology.

Craig: Love it. I love it.

John: Love it. It’s good stuff. We’ll also answer a bunch of listener questions. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, will human beings ever leave the solar system?

Craig: I have an answer for that. We’ll save it for the people that paid for it.

John: Absolutely. Craig, happy birthday.

Craig: Aw, thank you, John. 53 years old.

John: Nicely done.

Craig: Prime number. Always like that. Always enjoy a prime number. Still in my early 50s.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Still in my early 50s. Hanging onto the early 50s. I know that for people in their 20s, early 50s is hysterical. Oh, congrats on your early 50s, grandpa. Back in the day, John, you were in your early 50s, you were on a glide path to the golden watch-

John: Absolutely.

Craig: … and retirement on the golf course and then rapidly ensuing death, I think. Now it feels like you’re just getting started.

John: You are. You’re literally just warming up.

Craig: Just warming up. The mere presence of statins to control your cholesterol, that alone-

John: That alone, it’s a lot.

Craig: My goodness.

John: I’m sure you’ve seen all these memes about the cast of Cheers and the actual age of the cast of Cheers when that show started. You realize Kelsey Grammer is 29 or something.

Craig: Coach is the one that always rattles, because Coach is 56 or something, and he looks like he’s 80, and died shortly thereafter, by the way. He didn’t live long. I don’t think he made it past the second season.

John: Which is how we got Woody Harrelson.

Craig: Woody Harrelson. But yeah, Cliff is 35. I don’t know what was going on. I don’t know what was going on.

John: I’ve seen explanations that basically, a lot of how we perceive people in older photos and stuff is because people set their clothing style and their hairstyles when they’re young, and they carry those forward, and we associate those hairstyles and ways of dressing as being an older person. That’s why when you look at photos of your parents when they’re in high school, they look old for their age.

Craig: People wanted to be old. When you look at the people on Norm, for instance. I don’t even know what Norm did for a living. Did they ever even say?

John: Yeah, they did establish it at some point. Cliff was the mailman.

Craig: He was an accountant. Norm was an accountant, and then he loses his job and wackiness ensues. But if you were a 34-year-old accountant, you wore a shirt and a tie and a rumpled jacket and that was it. People wanted to be grown up. Remember how much you wanted to be grown up?

John: Oh, yeah.

Craig: Now I feel like no one wants to grow up.

John: I’m thinking about my kid. She does, but I don’t know, there’s also a celebration of youth. I get that.

Craig: And being current. I think they felt older. I think they wanted to be older. But now, here we are in our early 50s and 20s, still wearing sneakers and jeans. People just didn’t do that. I don’t know, maybe we should go for the more rumpled-

John: That’s what we should do.

Craig: … middle-aged guy look.

John: We’ve established on the show I intend to live a very, very long life. I don’t want to jinx that by saying-

Craig: You do.

John: Yeah, but I’m fine living to 100 or 110.

Craig: I’ll tell you what. You’re gonna live as long as you live. That’s the best part. You just keep going, and then it stops.

John: We’ve talked about this also on the show. You have no intention of retirement, or does that hold any appeal to you, or is that like a beach vacation, where it doesn’t?

Craig: It doesn’t hold appeal to me currently. In my mind currently, retirement means failure, like you failed so bad at what you were doing that an entire industry said, “We’re done with you. After all this time, we’ve collectively decided you should eff off.”

John: It’s a soft cancellation.

Craig: Yeah, a soft cancellation, exactly. I could. Then the question is what would I do?

John: You’d play a lot of D&D.

Craig: I would play a ton of D&D and solve a lot of puzzles, not go to the beach, hellscape. I have a purpose. It keeps me going. Man, there are days. I love it so much that even when I absolutely loathe it, what else am I gonna do?

John: You do your thing.

Craig: It’s a hard job.

John: It is a hard job running a show, keeping a universe going. Let’s do some follow-up. Many times on the podcast we’ve talked about AI, including this experiment we did a year ago, feeding the Scriptnotes transcripts into a model. We found the results that came out of that really disappointing. Ben wrote in with some feedback on that.

Drew Marquardt: He says, “I’ve spent the last decade at Google working on creative and AI, machine learning, then generative AI for video. The models like ChatGPT and Gemini are amazing, but as you’ve found, relatively generic for specific tasks like story analysis, and are missing things like discernment or taste. You’ve also found that narrow models, like those trained on your show transcripts, are only mediocre. What this perspective is missing is human in the loop training, or HILT,” I’m gonna say hilt, “where someone tells the model that this output is good and this one is bad, on and on and on as the model gets better. The world models won’t do this for script analysis, because the use case is not important enough. You probably won’t do it for the show because it’s too time-intensive. But if you did, or someone did, the models would get better quickly and could even be trained on a director’s taste or an executive’s taste. You could input Denis Velleneuve’s body of work and find projects he would like. If you trained it well enough, it could help steer and shape them based in ways he would or might, and these patterns on top of patterns are opening up whole new ways of interrogating storytelling and taste.”

Craig: Ben is basically collaborating with the Borg. That’s what’s happening. I understand that it’s been difficult for you guys to assimilate into the Borg collective. However, I’ve been working hard, and there is a method where we can assimilate you much faster, and then you can assimilate your loved ones much faster. And eventually, we’ll all live in a cube in space.

John: It’ll be fantastic and great. I want to talk about a few things here. First off, this idea of training on taste. It’s actually been happening in Hollywood forever. Development executives are trained on their boss’s taste. It’s not just what do we think is gonna make a good movie, but what do I think my boss will actually like, and what do I know my boss will not like? There are specific red flags, and you never show those things to your boss. Sure. That may not be a great way to model what’s actually gonna be a successful movie, what’s gonna win the Academy Award, but it’s what’s going to get it through the next step of the process.

Craig: It’s funny, when Ben used the example Denis Velleneuve, in my mind at first I imagined Denis going, “No, it’s not possible. No one can understand what I want to do.” And then I thought about Denis, because he is the most humble man. I could actually see him going, “This makes sense. I believe actually computer could tell me what to do next, maybe better than I could do,” because he’s lovely. That’s my bad attempt at a Canadian French accent. I understand what Ben’s saying. All I know is that it’s all horrifying, and I kind of wish it would stop. I really do. I don’t like this at all.

John: Some of what Ben is describing we actually see in daily practice at Netflix. The Netflix algorithm, which is showing you, this is a thing you might like, it has that human-reinforced training, because it’s saying, oh, did you actually watch this whole thing? It’s taking you having finished watching a thing as a marker that you liked it, even if you’re not clicking the thumbs up, thumbs down, like, oh you must like this. We’re gonna feed you more of this. It has all the patterns for figuring out, this is other things you’re probably going to enjoy. But on the creator side, it’s a little bit more frustrating, because they will tell you, oh, if you don’t show this plot point within the first 10 minutes, people are unlikely to finish the show. Those can be frustrating notes to get from that.

Craig: It will be regressive. There was a time before the world of television, for instance, as we know it, where everything was driven by this research nonsense. Every show started to look the same. Everybody needed a dog or a funny next-door neighbor. Then it was a big challenge for shows that didn’t fit that model to even get on the air, much less get watched. But then some of them did and were huge hits, of course, because it turns out just because we say we like something doesn’t mean that’s all we like. Everybody likes fried chicken. If a restaurant that was famous for 17 different things decided to only do fried chicken, you’d be like, “Okay, I guess [unintelligible 00:09:09],” but otherwise, no.

Then television just opened up into this glorious – we’ll make anything, no matter how weird or bizarre. I don’t think AI would’ve done a very good job of that. Movies have now regressed, so it sort of flip-flopped. So many movies became cookie cutter nonsense, based on research and so forth. But maybe the success of some outliers might be getting us away from this.

But nonetheless, my sister of all people emailed me the other day, and she was saying there was somebody that was talking to her about this AI predictive platform that will tell you what shows and movies will be a hit. It just never ends. They just keep trying. I don’t think that’ll ever work.

John: It won’t work. We lived through a time of classic testing of movies and TV shows. We’d have test screenings. You’d get numbers, like, how did you do on your top two boxes, and that was a big predictor of your success. There you were actually showing it to a real audience. The experience as writers and creators was, I can hear it with an audience. We can actually see and feel how the audience is responding. Sometimes those were useful, much more useful than the numbers were useful. I’ve also done TV shows back when they actually had dials.

Craig: Turning the dial.

John: They were turning the dial. The problem is, the dial is not really showing whether you’re gonna watch that next episode. It’s just how did I feel in this moment. Turning those dials is not a good marker. The other big problem with classic research and some of these AI model research is that it can only account for what’s inside their realm of measurability. They can see, oh, did this person complete the show. But did they actually like the show, or did they hate-watch the end of the show? You don’t know.

Craig: You don’t know. Did they think about the show a week later and change their mind? You don’t know.

John: You don’t know. All the other outside factors, like what’s happening in popular opinion about it, is there water cooler talk, what are the critics saying, that’s not factored in. And that’s a big factor in whether somebody really enjoyed that program and wants to keep watching that show or wants to watch another season. You don’t know.

Craig: Also, what we do in part is designed to surprise. If the system is designed to provide you something different, the most exciting thing is something that is excellent and different. How is a machine supposed to predict excellent and different? It’s hard to account for surprise. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.

John: Please.

Craig: Gödel. Kurt Gödel, wonderful mathematician, proved that within any closed set of mathematical rules, like our math, there will always be some things that are true that cannot be proven, which is a bit of a mind-bender. He actually proved that. I don’t know how. These mathematicians are operating on levels that I simply don’t understand.

John: And thus you need postulates and axioms and other things that are just fundamental givens.

Craig: They prove all of them, actually. It’s quite remarkable. But you can’t create a system that accounts for everything that is true within the system. There will be some things that are true that cannot be proved, which is why, for instance, there are things that we know that are true that take years and decades and centuries to prove, like Fermi’s paradox and so on. This I think is true for entertainment. There will always be things that will delight people that you cannot account for, given the known set of what delights people.

John: It’s true.

Craig: Good luck. Why am I taunting AI? I should stop taunting AI.

John: Let’s move on to some more follow-up here. We talked about blueprints and whether blueprints are a good way to describe what we write.

Drew: David G writes, “I used to work in construction management, and I would say that it is probably the most similar field to filmmaking than any other. By the time we finished building a building, most of the time, the building ended up looking exactly like the blueprint had shown. However, during the building process, we would request something called an RFI, or request for information, to the architect when we got into the field and something didn’t work, either because something unforeseen was in the way or for any other reason we couldn’t make it work. While by the end of the project the structure and idea of the building is like the blueprint was showing, lots of little changes were made to keep the project moving. Sounds like a movie, right?”

John: It does.

Craig: Kind of does, yeah. I get RFIs all day long. Every prep meeting I have. Sometimes I get an RFI that I’ve already gotten 12 times, but someone new texts me the RFI. I’m like, “Oh my god, if one more person asks me this question.” Yes, I think as much as we want to metaphorize filmmaking to construction, it’s still not great. It’s a tough one. I think sometimes the best metaphor for turning a screenplay into a show or movie is turning a screenplay into a show or movie. That’s what we should be linking back to. It is very within itself.

John: We talked about important movies two episodes ago. We had a lot of feedback on that. Let’s start with Brandon, who’s talking about games.

Drew: Brandon wrote, “I work in games, and this is a question that often comes up in that medium, particularly from younger writers and narrative designers, not just, do I need to have played whatever game, but do I need to play this entire genre.”

Craig: Oh my god.

Drew: “It’s even worse in games than movies, because games are such a comparatively huge time suck. It naturally leads to a lot of people with imposter syndrome quietly wondering whether they need to go drop $40 and 60 hours of their personal time or risk being laughed at out of the room.

“The answer I always give regarding this question is, there’s no single game you have to play to make a great game of your own. Many of your favorite games were made by people totally ignorant of the genres they wound up defining. However, playing those canon games everyone gushes about can help in two very specific ways. One, it prevents you from reinventing the wheel during that early, high-level pre-production phase when you’re trying to figure out what stuff you’ll need to figure out from scratch versus what someone else has already figured out 20 years ago. And two, it gives you a handy box of touchpoints and easily communicated shorthand when you’re up against a weird problem and need to find a clever solution in a hurry. Writing a 1,500-word design document for a dialog system takes a lot longer than saying, ‘You know, like Mass Effect,’ and dropping a YouTube link.”

Craig: Those are all great points, Brandon. I’ll add a third thing. It keeps you from coming up with a genius idea that then everybody turns, looks at you, and says, “You mean like the ending of blah-dee blah?” The point is, no, you don’t have to do everything, and also there are other people. It’s okay if someone raises their hand, says, “I’m so sorry, but that was in blankedy blank.” You’re like, “Oh, okay. Damn. Back to the drawing board for me.” Among the group, hopefully, people have seen the important things. Also, wait 20 years and people forget the things that everybody knows.

John: Some pros and cons here. I’m thinking of examples of outsider art where people who came completely outside of a system ended up making amazing things, because they just did not know any of the conventions of the genre or what had come before them. That can be really exciting. But you also have hysterical examples where people just didn’t understand what music was. I can’t think of the name of the band.

Craig: The Shags.

John: The Shags, exactly. The Shags.

Craig: They’re incredible. Frank Zappa called The Shags the best band there ever was.

John: They had just no sense of what-

Craig: None.

John: … rock-and-roll music was.

Craig: They had no sense of tempo, rhythm, lyrics, melody, instrumentation, or arrangement, coherence. It is a remarkable to listen to, and that’s why Frank Zappa said if you presumed that what they did, they did intentionally, they would be the most brilliant musicians of all time, because no musician could do that naturally. But of course, it was also terrible.

I think people maybe get a little too obsessed with watching everything, playing everything. What happens is you turn into more of a critic or a repository than you do a creator. And the more stuff that’s banging around in your head, the more likely it is that you’re gonna play this weird, “I have to do something no one else has done before” game, which will send you down some weird, artificial, over-engineered pathways.

John: An argument for sampling, and sampling broadly, is it helps you figure out what your taste is, what do you actually enjoy, what do you love. I would say don’t just play these games, but actually figure out what is it about this that’s working for you, what is not working for you, why is this a good experience for you, and so not even being so mechanical about what I’m gonna take from this, but basically how is this making me feel. That applies to games and to movies and to TV shows. What is it about this that you love? You can carry that forward, rather than this specific stuff, like this plot or this mechanic.

Craig: You get a chance maybe to play a game that you enjoy on one level. Let’s say I love the gameplay, don’t like the story. This game, love the story; game is so boring. What if I took the stuff I liked from this and stuff I liked from this, put my own spin on it? Because when Neil was working on The Last of Us – it’s a zombie game. There have been a billion zombie games. It’s a third-person shooter. Been a billion third-person shooters. But there had also been games where there were these interesting two-person relationships that weren’t really AAA video games and there wasn’t a lot of action. Fusing these things together is really interesting. Jonathan Blow, who has made some incredible indie games-

John: Braid and other things.

Craig: Braid is a great example of somebody saying, what if you took a very simple platformer, added a little quirky backwards time unroll element, but then tell a story that is so bizarre and deep and rich and weird and kind of Vonnegut-ish, and you get something remarkable like Braid.

John: In the case of Blow and Braid, you have to have played enough of those games to understand how platformers work and what the conventions are in order to be able to subvert that.

Craig: You follow your love. If you have this real deep love for a certain genre, what do you do now to do your own weird spin on it? Rian Johnson made Brick. He loves noir films. I’m sure he watched a gazillion of them and then thought, “I also love John Hughes movies. Now, let me see about smushing my loves together.” But he understands the rules.

Kevin Williamson, clearly so deeply immersed in the world of classic ’80s VHS slasher movies. How do you take all that knowledge and remix it into something that feels current and interesting? I think follow your nose and you’ll find your genre. But you don’t have to play everything. That’d be crazy.

John: That actually ties very well into our next question, our next follow-up here.

Drew: Paris writes, “Looking through your list of important movies, I realized I’m totally screwed. I’m 24 years old. I was born in 2000, and I wasn’t exposed to many films growing up. I began trying to catch up in my 20s, but there’s so much I haven’t seen. It’s overwhelming. I looked through the list and made a highlighted version of my own films, and I’ve seen 85 out of the 400. If the 1970s were on there, I’d be toast. Any advice where to start? I don’t want my lack of cinema knowledge to affect my writing.”

John: Paris sent through their highlighted list of things that they’d missed, and there’s really great films on their list of what they’ve missed. My advice to Paris would be to start in the 2010s, pick three movies you’re curious about, watch them, and then go back a decade, and then go back a decade. Let it be fun homework. Don’t feel like this is a thing you have to do. Just really follow your curiosity down this rabbit hole and see what it is that you like. I don’t think if Paris were to say, “I’m going to spend the next two years and every day, watch a movie off this list,” I don’t know that’s necessarily the best use of their time.

Craig: No. It will also, again, turn you into a movie critic. You’ll become a culture hoarder, as opposed to somebody that’s watching things that they love, because the entire exercise will feel forced and artificial. One method, Paris, may be to pick a movie from a director that has a bunch of movies on this list. Scorsese probably has a bunch on this list, Soderbergh, Coppola. Watch one of their movies. See if you like it. If you like it, keep watching their movies. A little bit like playing every track on an album. If you started with Do the Right Thing, for instance, if you loved Do the Right Thing, check out some more Spike Lee movies. If you watch Raging Bull and you love it, it’s time to switch over to Goodfellas or Mean Streets or King of Comedy. Same with the Cohen brothers. It might be better to just find the filmmakers you love and follow them. And then every now and then, just stick in a random one.

The other option is you can just say, “I’m gonna watch one of these dramas. Every month I’m gonna watch four movies. I don’t care. Just four. Each week I pick a different genre.” Drama, comedy, thriller, horror, whatever it is. Just mix it up. Keep it light. It’s not homework. You’ll be fine.

John: I would also say movies can be social experiences. See if you have friends or somebody else who wants to get in this movie club with you. Then you can have a discussion about what you saw.

Craig: Absolutely. One of my great joys now that I’m old-

John: 53.

Craig: … 53 is I get to show movies, especially from the ’90s, which ’90s were great for movies-

John: Great years.

Craig: … to Allie, who’s in her 20s, or to Bella, who’s just in her 20s. I showed Bella Matrix for the first time. I showed Allie Godfather for the first time. That’s so much fun. The other thing is, find somebody older who is like, okay, I think you will love this. Let them be your AI, who knows you, thinks of your taste, and goes, “I think you’ll love this.” And most importantly, I always say to anybody I’m showing a movie to, “You get to pull the rip cord whenever you want.” If you’re bored, I don’t care if it’s The Godfather, whatever, if you’re bored – give it 30 minutes. You’re bored after 30 minutes, next movie, or we’ll go have a sandwich. That’s fine. It shouldn’t feel like you’re eating gravel.

John: 100 percent. Last little bit of follow-up on here from Willy.

Drew: Willy in Dublin writes, “I want to push back on the idea of movies that you absolutely need to see or ones that you can ignore. For sure, you can be at a disadvantage in a professional situation if you haven’t seen canonical works, but I think that people who have different experiences can make valuable contributions to the creative process, as long as there is a lingua franca for collaboration. What’s the point if everyone thinks the same?”

Craig: Multiple logical leaps inside of Willy’s comment there.

John: Yeah, I would say.

Craig: So many.

John: Yeah, a little straw manning.

Craig: Yeah, just goalpost shifting. First of all, you say, “I want to push back on the idea of movies that you absolutely need to see or ones that you can ignore.” So you mean to say you want to push back on the idea that – you contradict yourself within that first statement. Which one are you pushing back against? Because if they’re movies that you can’t ignore, that means you absolutely need to see them, and if they’re movies that you don’t absolutely need to see, then there are movies that you can ignore.

John: I think Willy’s pushing back against this idea of canonical lists. These are really arbitrary lists of-

Craig: Of course.

John: … 100 movies that a lot of people seem to like and a lot of people talk about as the movies of that decade.

Craig: Nobody is suggesting that if you don’t see those things, you have, quote, “no valuable contribution to the creative process,” nor do these movies contribute to a “lingua franca for collaboration.” Collaboration is an entirely different thing. If everybody sits down and is forced as an entry point to watch the same 100 movies, there is no chance that that means that they will now, quote, “think the same.” No. They’ll argue about them all.

John: But to go the other illogical extremes, you have the example of The Shags. If you are the screenwriter who is The Shags, who has basically seen no other movies and has no understanding of how movies work, you’re gonna write something that’s gonna be perhaps fascinating on a textual level, but it’s not going to be a movie.

Craig: I’m not sure that you would be writing a movie. The Shags are such an incredible outlier, because they didn’t want to do it either. Their dad made them do it. They didn’t know. They had neither the desire – I guess we’re gonna be talking about motivations shortly. They had no motivation to do what they were doing, other than their father being like, “You can become the next Partridge Family.” And they just tried their best.

John: Good stuff. Let’s get into our main topic here. On April 6th, the New York Times Connections puzzle had the words “desire,” “drive,” “resolve,” and “will,” which were the four that lined up. And the category put for that was “intrinsic motivators,” which is nice, a good way of looping those together.

Craig: Interesting way [crosstalk 00:25:51].

John: We talked a lot on the podcast about motivation, about goals and needs and wants. Episode 569 we talked about inspiration versus motivation and touched on some of this. But I thought we’d dig in a little bit deeper on intrinsic motivation, which is basically what is driving a person internally to do a thing versus the situation. It’s not about external forces like deadlines or ticking clocks or circumstances. It’s about something inside them that’s driving the character to do a thing.

Craig: They have a list of things that they require something to meet to be considered alive. It needs to reproduce. It needs to ingest and possibly excrete. But my favorite one is it needs to show irritability.

John: Interesting.

Craig: Irritability is reaction to stimulus. We have, as living creatures, an innate irritability. Things bother us and create a want. But the interesting thing about humans, and certainly when we’re writing characters, these irritabilities can sometimes be physical in nature. People have been asking forever, what’s the whole point of this? That makes you irritable, not knowing things. Curiosity is a great one. So what is the intrinsic motivator for Hercule Poirot? He wants to know. Somebody could say he’s really committed to justice. I don’t think so. In his spare time, it’s not like he’s working down at the courts as a prosecutor. He’s just curious. Curiosity alone is a spectacular intrinsic motivator.

John: That’s a thing they can actually study in animals. You think animals are just responding to stimulus, so they’re trying to seek pleasure and avoid pain, but they will actually go into an electrified area, because there’s curious ones in there. Certain animals will do these kinds of things.

We talk on the show sometimes about negative intrinsic motivators, so fear, shame, jealousy, self-doubt. But I’d like to talk a little bit more about the positive version of those, the actual drives, because I’ve been watching shows and movies recently where I feel like after two hours or eight hours, I still couldn’t really tell you what is motivating them internally, what the positive intrinsic motivators are, what’s their desire, drive, resolve. If it was a musical, I couldn’t sketch out their “I want” song. There isn’t one in there. They can feel a little bit lifeless, because as humans, I know they should have something like that driving them.

Craig: When this happens, we tend to refer to the characters as flat or thin, two-dimensional. And it’s because the characters are only apparently motivated by circumstance. But ideally, circumstance is the second thing that happens. The first thing that happens before the show or movie even starts is they already are irritable about something. Something is missing. Something must be known. Something must be uncovered. Are you a BBC Sherlock fan, by any chance?

John: I watched all that.

Craig: Loved that show. One of the things that I love about it is when Sherlock Holmes doesn’t have a case, he starts to go insane. He wants to smoke. He wants to shoot heroin. He loses it, becomes violent and irritable. That precedes any circumstance that comes along. Sometimes we end up with these characters who are defined simply by their job, their present circumstance. Then a new circumstance happens, and they have a new job to do. But who are they? What happens when this job ends? If I’m supposed to stop caring about them when the job ends, why would I care about them now, while the job’s still going on?

John: That is the real frustration. It could be that the story really is the writer and how the story is being structured. It’s just not given any opportunity to actually explore those things. That character may actually have those things, but we as an audience aren’t getting to see any chance of that, because they’re generally not musicals so there’s not a chance for them to fully articulate what it is they’re doing or having some other character they can talk to about the thing. We need to find ways to structure and expose what is that internal drive that’s pushing them to a thing.

Craig: Now, there may be moments where you show a circumstance, and that circumstance becomes the internal drive. But it’s soon. You don’t want to wait around forever. And that circumstance that creates the internal drive must be clearly separate from the new circumstance that is the main body of the plot.

John: Exactly.

Craig: I can’t tell you much about the character Joel in The Last of Us leading up to his daughter’s death. He works in construction. He’s a contractor. He seems all right. I don’t know his internal states. I don’t know what his intrinsic motivation would be. She dies. Twenty years later, now I understand what his intrinsic motivation is in general, whether it’s to avoid or whatever. Then the new circumstance begins. But it is within the context of that prior irritability. As much as possible, when you’re thinking about – you at home, when you’re thinking about writing the story and the characters, you need to know what the problem is before the problem shows up.

John: There’s generally either a lack or some other object goal that’s out there that’s a little bit more vague, but a thing that they’re trying to do. There was a New York Times story this last week about a guy who was really good at quiz shows and quiz competitions and how he went from little, small ones to bigger ones and ultimately ended up applying to a specific university in the UK so he’d get into the university quiz challenge system, but then got there and found his teammates actually weren’t any good. He pulled out, because he only has one shot to do this. They had to reframe everything around him. He was really driven. It’s the kind of character who if we were doing a How Would This Be a Movie, you love, because you can definitely see why he’s trying to do what he’s trying to do. It’s not some external thing that’s pushing him. He clearly has a drive to enter this challenge and succeed and to win. He needs this thing.

Craig: But of course, I want to know why. What is the thing that I can connect to that is universal? Even though his expression of that thing is unique, I want what’s underlying it to be anything but unique.

John: Absolutely. That goes back to where we first meet this character and how he first gets introduced to this world of quiz competitions. It was probably that moment which he first said, “Oh, I know all the answers to this thing,” and suddenly, he was better than everyone else around him. It’s that desire to excel, to be seen as being better than everyone else, but also there’s an internal state where he needs to see himself as being so good at this.

Craig: I love those things. I, like just about everybody, love Queen’s Gambit. Scott Frank is as good as anybody at this. My favorite episode of Queen’s Gambit was the first one. First episodes are notoriously difficult. But what was so beautiful about the first episode was that he took the time, lots of time to tell us all about this person before the obsession began and before the plot began, to create irritability. She was lonely. She was abandoned. She was in pain. She was self-medicating. She was desperate for something to be good at, something that made her feel good. And there were two things that made her feel good: drugs and chess. Watching her begin to fall deeply into both of those was such a gorgeous way of showing how sometimes these things that we think of as just awesome, like being the best quiz solver or being a chess master, are in themselves forms of self-management for conditions that are common to us all.

John: A movie I loved this last year was Nyad. It’s the story of Diana Nyad and her quest to be able to swim from Cuba to the United States. In that, there are external things that she could gain by doing this, but clearly it’s an internal drive. She has this unique obsession with being able to do this and being able to prove to herself that she can do this thing, and that’s what’s pushing you through the whole movies. We see the consequences on everybody else around her, and yet we’re still rooting for her, because we can see – we don’t want to be in the water there with her, but we can see why she wants to do it.

Craig: We understand the underpinning. If all Moby Dick were about was whale hunting, no one would care. It’s really important to create that essential irritability, to find the grain of sand under someone’s skin. It’s usually something that they are not born with, but it is the result of some circumstance. If it’s innate from birth, that means there was nothing to create there. You want to have something and the environment that causes a disruption that is specific to somebody before you then cause a really big disruption to them.

John: I’m gonna put a link in the show notes to this article, this review in the National Library of Medicine, that’s really talking through intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators. They actually did scientific studies on how these drives actually function in the brain and in actual human beings and talks through the different theories that built up over time for how this all worked. When you actually put people in labs and MRIs and you’re monitoring how they’re doing things, you get this sense that what is happening internally versus externally are related, but there are distinct things that you can see there.

What it really comes down to is the importance of agency, the ability of a person to say, “I am choosing to do this thing.” We see that in real life where you have a kid who loves to do a thing, and then the minute you talk to them about the thing they love to do, they don’t love to do it anymore, because it’s no longer their unique thing. Also, it’s the ability to envision an outcome and plan the steps towards it are crucial for intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation.

Craig: That’s a really interesting point, the idea that you need to see an outcome. Your characters must – we talk about a goal. I think a lot of times, people think too much in terms of the external nature of that goal. But part of what we all do as humans is envision success. Envisioning success is rarely about the circumstance. It’s about the feeling. We don’t want to win because winning is good. We want to win because winning feels good. Why? What is it doing for you? What negative feeling is it taking away? What negative thought is it replacing or contradicting? What is it proving? How is it going to remove your irritability and make you feel good? To me, envisioning an outcome is entirely about envisioning a feeling that you desperately want.

John: It’s not just about where you’re gonna get to, but how it’s gonna feel when you get to that place.

Craig: All about feeling.

John: They outline what they call a Rubicon model, which is five steps, which is whenever a character’s facing or a real person’s facing a thing, there is a pre-decisional deliberation, which is basically where you’re sitting and you’re thinking about what your options are. You have intention formation, which is your planning. It’s the anticipation. It’s thinking about how you’re gonna do this thing. Volitional action, which means agency. You’re making a choice. You’re doing a thing because you want to do it. You are achieving that outcome. You’re consuming it. And crucially, then you’re also evaluating it. We’ve talked about this on the podcast. It’s not scoring the touchdown. It’s getting the kiss from your wife afterwards. That’s the real achievement.

Craig: It’s the relationship at the end. When you look at these five things, what they remind me of most immediately is Dungeons and Dragons. Right now, you’re DMing a campaign; I’m playing. Woo! Inevitably, there’s a circumstance where it’s like, “There’s a room in there, and we know there’s a bad guy and we know there’s another bad guy. Let’s come up with a plan.” Notoriously, plans go awry in D&D. It’s designed that way, because if your plans always worked, what fun would that be? It would just be like, “Oh, we’re the dream team in the Olympics. Ha ha, we win.” But we do all these things. There’s so much deliberation, prediction, planning. Then we do the actions according to the things we want to achieve. There is an outcome achievement, which hopefully is a victory. And then there’s a postmortem about how we did it, how we could’ve done better, how we did better than we thought.

But here’s the crazy part. It’s not even real, and it’s so satisfying, because as humans, we can model real outcomes and get the same hit off of them. That’s why we like movies and TV. They are modeled outcomes, where we watch other people achieving a feeling we want to feel. And we get a little whiff of their crack hit. And that’s worth the subscription to Max or whatever. That’s what all of these things are.

That’s what I love about what we do. We are creating situations for people where they can sit back and watch somebody else go through all this hard work and suffering and then get the win. In real life, suffering sucks. A lot of times, the win when you get there does not feel at all like you thought it would feel. In fact, there is a shocking emptiness that can occur sometimes when you get there and you think, “I was meant to feel all of this, and I don’t feel any of it. Now what do I do?” That’s always fun.

John: I would say part of what was leading to this segment was some recent movies and some TV shows I was watching I felt like weren’t working on these levels because it was just like, you were killing the monsters. You did all the step threes. You took all the actions. But I didn’t have that lead-in to the options, so it just felt like you were on rails the whole time you were doing this thing. And I didn’t get the reward afterwards, because I couldn’t see that, did we actually do the thing we wanted to do. I didn’t feel a sense of victory.

Craig: You didn’t feel a sense of victory because probably in this circumstance, the characters couldn’t have really felt the sense of victory. They could’ve just realized it. If you don’t have that preexisting irritability, that thing that we can connect to, and you’re put into a situation where you have to do this impossible thing or else a lot of people will die, okay, I’ll do it. I did it. Good. That’s what you end up with. Good work, you. Roll credits. But that’s not what we’re there for. We’re there for understanding something deeper was satisfied. And if we don’t have that in place before the person shows up with the job offer, then we’re just not gonna be as engaged.

John: This outlines intrinsic rewards versus extrinsic rewards. Whatever you do and whatever you achieve should have a mix of the two of them. Intrinsic rewards: agency and autonomy, so a sense of control, a sense of achievement, enjoyment, and interest, that you actually enjoy, the characters inside this world enjoy doing this thing, these interests; and novelty, which basically this was a new thing for them they were able to conquer. The extrinsic rewards are things we’re always used to, so food, social status, money, a sense of safety. Those things we can expect. But it’s those intrinsic rewards I think so often we are not rewarding enough in our characters. We’re not giving them a sense of this. They’ll survive this thing, but they haven’t had a good time. We haven’t seen them enjoy it.

Craig: Have you seen Game Night?

John: I love Game Night. It’s so good.

Craig: Game Night’s wonderful. It’s a great example of this. They do such a good job of setting these characters up as people that love games. They love winning. It excites them. It excites them and it also brings them together. It’s the thing that makes them love each other is that they’re really good at unraveling puzzles, answering questions, and winning a game. That’s enough irritability for us, because when you jump into the future, that’s a little wobbly now, and then this new thing happens, and we get to watch their enjoyment of it, and they fall back in love with each other again. The characters need to get a hit off of this stuff. If it’s just a grim slog, then how am I supposed to enjoy this? If you can’t enjoy any of this – and it’s gauged in subtleties. If you have a very grumpy character – and I’ve been writing one of those for a while now – sometimes just the tiniest smile tells us a million things. But we need to know it’s happening, or else it just doesn’t matter what you do, Grumpy’s gonna be grumpy. That’s not gonna make us happy.

John: Last little takeaways here. I would say if you’re looking at your story and you’re worried that we’re not getting a sense of what their intrinsic motivations are, are they curious, are they out there, are they looking through various options, are they foraging, or are they doing what you’re telling them they need to do? They’re being forced into a situation by your plot?

Craig: That would be bad.

John: That’d be bad.

Craig: Passive characters, which generally no one likes, are not merely passive because they don’t do stuff and stuff happens to them. Sometimes they’re passive because they’re doing stuff, but they only have one choice. If there’s no choosing, their actions feel passive, because what else are they gonna do?

John: I guarantee you could say this story, the characters, it has no choice but be passive. They don’t have any choice. They don’t have any options. They’re in prison, literally. There are great prison stories. The reason why those great prison stories are great prison stories is, within their narrow set of options, they are making real choices and they’re taking agency.

Craig: That’s right. If you end up in a situation where someone’s like, “We need you to do the following impossible thing. There’s one way to do it. This is how you do it,” and you say, “Got it,” and then you do it – now, even this little thing in Star Wars, like, there’s only one way to blow this thing up. You gotta shoot this thing down a hole, and that’s the only way to do it. That is what he does, but before he does it, he turns off his targeting computer and uses the force. He makes a choice. And that choice is why that works. Otherwise, think of how terrible that would’ve been.

John: Bad sequence.

Craig: You have to do this thing. We showed it to you on a computer graphic. “I did it.” Great.

John: All the other complications you’ve thrown at them, it’s like, “Oh, but now this thing is in your way. This thing is in your way.”

Craig: Who cares?

John: Doesn’t matter.

Craig: Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. The only way to win this is to hit a hole in one. Okay, I hit a hole in one. Yay. Meh. Whatever. Whereas Tin Cup – have you seen Tin Cup?

John: I’ve seen Tin Cup.

Craig: Oh my god, one of my favorite endings. Have you seen Tin Cup?

Drew: No.

John: Ron Shelton.

Craig: Ron Shelton. Great movie. He’s got this thing where he’s stubborn, he’s very good, but he’s his own worst enemy as a golfer. He tries to hit too hard. He hits too long. People keep telling him, “You gotta lay up,” meaning instead of going for 200 par, just hit the ball short and then hit it again and you get 100 par. It’s better for you. It’s smart. He ends up in this situation where he’s gonna win this tournament, he’s bounced back. Everyone can’t believe it. And he has a chance though to just make the most awesome shot ever over this water trap. He has to hit the ball super far to do it. They’re like, “Don’t do it. Just lay up or it’ll cost you the tournament.” He’s like, “No, I’m going for it.” You’re like, “It’s gonna happen.” He hits that ball, and it goes right in the water. Then he’s like, “I’m doing it again.” He hits the ball again, and it goes in the water. He hits the ball again, and it goes in the water.

People are like, “He’s blown up his career, the tournament, his life. He’s stubborn. He’s learned nothing.” He does it again. He hits the ball, and it goes all the way over the water, and I think it gets in the hole. I can’t remember. But the point is it gets over the water. It’s an impossible thing. People go crazy, like, “He did it.” You understood then, just doing the thing you were supposed to do, you always have a choice. That’s why Ron Shelton’s just brilliant at that.

John: Excellent. As we wrap this up, I’ll put a link in the show notes to this NIH study. Also the story of Brandon Blackwell, who was the quiz bowl champ, which is a great story. All the UK listeners are saying, “Of course Brandon Blackwell. Everyone knows that.”

Craig: “Everyone knows Brandon Blackwell.”

John: But not here in the U.S.

Craig: Brandon.

John: Brandon.

Craig: Brandon Blackwell.

John: An American.

Craig: Bloody American.

John: Bloody American.

Craig: Coming over here winning our pub quizzes.

John: Let’s do some listener questions.

Drew: Proud Dad writes, “My daughter is a high school senior, and she was accepted to both the USC screenwriting program and Princeton. In our 30-minute morning drives to her high school, we listen to Scriptnotes faithfully, and it’s still one of our favorite memories. So thank you for being in our carpool for so many mornings. This might not be a fair question, because we know Craig doesn’t think school has anything to do with being a screenwriter.”

Craig: Correct.

Drew: “And we know that John did the MFA program at USC. But we would love your thoughts as if you were weighing the pros and cons with your daughters. Long-term, my daughter would love to work in television, but she’s very passionate about playwriting and is torn between either USC, where industry contacts and writers’ room opportunities are common, and Princeton, where she can learn from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and playwrights. We’d love to hear your thoughts.”

Craig: It might be too late here, huh?

John: It could be.

Craig: Complicated also is that I went to Princeton, so now you’re dealing with both of our alma maters. First of all, congrats.

John: Congrats.

Craig: Thanks for listening.

John: Both good schools.

Craig: What do you think, John?

John: Obviously, it’s whatever she wants. She has to make the decision between these two places. If she really believes that she wants to work in television, then USC will be great for that, because she’ll get that television experience. But all that said, I think undergrad is really about learning how to learn and learning how to do all the other stuff that’s interesting and exciting to you. It’s all the classes that are not about film and television and playwriting. And that’s gonna matter a lot more. She’s not gonna go wrong either place.

Craig: I agree. I don’t know how this ended here, but my guess is that she should go to the place that she feels the most excited about going to. She should go to the place that makes her feel good. She should envision her goals and see where they fit better. Princeton does have a remarkable creative writing program, and they’ve always had remarkable teachers there. The late, great Toni Morrison taught there, John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates. You certainly would learn from remarkable people. That said, I’m not sure that makes you a good writer. I think that just makes you somebody that sat in a room listening to great writers talk.

There’s only one person that can make her succeed at what she wants, if what she wants continues to be what she currently wants – because that changes – and that’s her. It doesn’t matter where she goes. It truly does not matter where she goes. If she’s good at doing this, she’ll be fine coming out of Princeton, she’ll be fine coming out of USC. There are loads of people who graduate from USC, Stark, the whole thing, who just don’t really make it. There are loads of people who do what you and I do who didn’t go to any film school or went to schools that weren’t known for going to film schools. It’s a real chaotic mess out there. It comes down to the individual, to the outlier.

She should just go to the place she actually wants to be. And you know what? Maybe you meet a future spouse. You never know. Do people even do spouses anymore? Are we just old because we’re married?

John: You met your wife at Princeton.

Craig: I did. I met my wife at Princeton. That’s the thing that I got out of Princeton, to be honest. It didn’t help me with my career. It certainly wasn’t a great freshman year experience. We all know that. A lot of people that go to Princeton are super into being alums and everything, and I’m not. I don’t care. I went there, but it was a school. But I did meet my wife. I also learned things there that I carried through. The classes that I took that I was not expecting to take were the best ones. Best class I ever took in my life, Princeton University, Animal Behavior. Learned more about humanity in Animal Behavior class than anywhere else. That’s the fun part. Throw your plans out the door. Open yourself up to new experiences and see what happens, because you might walk out of there wanting to be a doctor.

John: I was a journalism major at Drake University undergrad, and then I applied to and got into USC for film school. I will say that graduate film school is nice, because you get people there who actually have some – they’re not all just random freshmen doing stuff. USC, if she got into the film program as a freshman, she’d be around people who want to make films and television, which is great, but they’re also a ways away from doing that. The nice thing about a grad program is you’re closer to doing the real things. You’re able to get internships and really be out there in the world doing stuff.

Craig: There is that, no question. There’s also, though, a very strange thing about the culture of aspirants. There’s a weird thing in the air, this choking ambition and striving and wanting and people jockeying. Sometimes you can get dismayed by who’s getting rewarded and who isn’t. And you just think, “This is not fair. That person’s bad. They’re pretentious. They’re a fraud. No one can see it except for me.” Eventually, people figure it out. But when you’re around a lot of people trying to do the same thing, it can be kind of gross.

I do remember that feeling early on in my career, where it just seemed like everybody was like rats clawing through a maze to find one small piece of cheese. Occasionally, there was a rat on top of you. If you heard about a rat getting a piece of cheese, you felt despair, like, “I thought the cheese was a lie. Oh my god.”

John: I also felt a fair amount of imposter syndrome, like I did not belong in the Stark program when I got there. That’s a thing you need to get through too. The nice thing about going to someplace outside of one of those film programs is you’re not gonna be surrounded by quite that much of the culture.

Craig: I think allowing yourself to develop as an individual and being a little more pure about it is probably a good thing. On the other hand, there are opportunities that you can get going to places that have these connections. But I don’t know. That’s the thing. You and I are pretty good examples, because you did one of those choices. I did the other choice. We’re both doing the same job. We’re on the same podcast.

John: Crazy, that.

Craig: In our 50s.

John: We’re both 53 years old.

Craig: Fifty-fricking-three.

John: Let’s answer one more question here, one from Jonathan.

Drew: Jonathan writes, “How much should the writer consider the trailer when writing the script? I’m thinking in terms of early reveals that tie into the premise and would likely be shown in the trailer to advertise the film, but could still be a surprise to the reader or anyone who sees it without having seen a previous. I’m reminded of taking my friend to see The Sixth Sense and how shocked he was at the ‘I see dead people’ line, not just the ending.”

John: I argue that you should consider the trailer as you’re writing, think about how would you actually present this movie to an audience, while knowing that you have zero control over that as the screenwriter. For movies I’ve done, I’ve written trailers and sometimes those are shot, or teasers and sometimes those are shot. But rarely have I had real direct control over that, including when certain crucial story pieces are revealed.

Craig: A nice thing is that I do get quite a bit of influence on the TV side over the marketing materials. I do work closely with them on that. I agree with you. I think, Jonathan, we’re both saying yeah, you should consider the trailer. There are really two moments in the trailer that I try and think about. One is how does it start and one is how does it end. What is my last shot of the trailer? What is my last moment of the trailer? Is there a mic drop? Is there a holy crap? Is there a single beautiful line? Is there a question? But the opening of the trailer is just as important. What do I see? What do I hear? What sets the tone?

The middle stuff of the trailer you can imagine will be some simple storytelling and some cool shots and some laughs and some action, surprise. But it doesn’t mean you should sit down and try to write one of those moments. More like if you put yourself in the mindset, it might help you get there, or as you’re weighing possibilities, if one of them pops out and you think, “That’ll actually be great in a trailer. I don’t know if it’d be super great in the show or the movie, but in a trailer, it’d be great,” write it in so you have it. You could even say, “This is for marketing.” I’ve done this before, although I do try to avoid doing the thing where you – I don’t think I have – where you put stuff in a trailer that you don’t put in the show. I don’t think I’ve done that. You know sometimes they’ll do that?

John: Yeah.

Craig: I think if it’s worth going in the trailer, it should be in the show is my feeling, or the movie.

John: I would agree. The reason why you need to think of the trailer is that the trailer is essentially your elevator pitch. Why does this movie exist is really the trailer. If you cannot tell your story somehow visually in that little bit, there’s probably something that’s not quite working with your story. That said, Go was an impossible thing to cut a trailer for. It’s hard to sell the premise of Go, at least the story premise, but you could show what it felt like, either communicating story or communicating a vibe or feel.

Craig: If you watch trailers for Cohen Brothers films, that’s almost always what you get, which is this absurdist, weird feeling that’s more than story. It’s more a sense of the madness that’s inside of the movies they make, which are pretty much always beautiful and brilliant.

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is actually two episodes of Search Engine, this podcast by PJ Vogt, and it’s looking at why there are so many illegal weed stores in New York City, because all these storefronts are selling weed illegally. He’s going into what the history was there and why it got to be this way. He has to go back to California’s pot legalization system and what went wrong in California and all the things they were trying to fix when they legalized weed in New York and how it all kind of didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to turn out. In attempting to fix the mistake with California, they made new mistakes, which has led to this proliferation of illegal weed stores and made it very hard to open legal ones.

Craig: John, how many weed stores do you think there are in Vancouver? Just take a guess.

John: The answer’s either gonna be zero or-

Craig: It’s definitely not zero. It’s legal to sell.

John: Hundreds.

Craig: 93 million. There are 93 million weed stores. There are weed stores inside of weed stores in Vancouver. Vancouver smells like rain and weed. It is insane. Also, just side note, I’m not answering this question as much as I’m just now rambling about weed, have we talked about the drivers in Los Angeles lately? When I moved to Los Angeles, I remember thinking, oh my god, everyone’s insane, because I think they were on coke. I think all the drivers on the road were on coke. People were switching lanes constantly for no reason, which feels very cocainey to me. Now, I think everyone’s just edibled up. They are slow. They are slow. The light changes green, and it’s like, all right, sure, I guess I’ll go now. I preferred the cocaine drivers. I really did.

John: The other thing I have noticed over the course of my 30 years driving in Los Angeles is when you moved to Los Angeles you had to learn that in order to take that left-hand turn, you are going to need to go into the intersection and then when the light turns-

Craig: And turn left on the red.

John: Left on red, yeah, which sounds impossible, but-

Craig: Three cars get to go. That’s the deal.

John: That’s the deal. I think decade by decade, people have gotten more nervous and more nervous about doing that.

Craig: They’re not nervous.

John: They’re stoned.

Craig: They’re stoned. They’re just like, “Oh man, I missed the light. No worries. Hey, guess what? Light’s gonna come around again, man. It’s all good. I just had five peach strawberry gummies.” This is me being this 53-year-old guy going on about goddamn stoners. I just want them to be on cocaine so that they’ll go through the light. I need to go places.

Anyway, I will [unintelligible 00:58:30]. It’s so silly. This weed thing is so silly that New York has illegal weed stores. It’s like hearing, I don’t know, 20 years ago someone’s like, “Oh my god, did you hear that in, I don’t know, whatever, Toledo they have illegal cheese stores?” You’re like, “Why do they need… What? Sell cheese. It’s fine. Everybody else is.” It’s over. It’s over, New York. Just let them sell it. Have we talked about Shogun?

John: We have not talked about Shogun.

Craig: That’s my One Cool Thing this week. Shogun, the mini series on FX, Hulu, Disney Plus. It’s FX. I want to give the mayor of television, John Landgraf, credit here. It is FX, which is also Hulu and also Disney Plus. I watch it through Disney Plus. Anyway, I’m really enjoying it.

Shogun is one of my favorite novels of all time. I have read that novel multiple times, and I rarely do that. I was deeply influenced by the 1980 miniseries. I learned a lot about storytelling from that. I watched the miniseries. I was 9 or 10. Absolutely blew me away. For 1980, it was remarkable. It was on ABC, I want to say. I would say half of the dialog was in Japanese, subtitled, which just didn’t happen. The Japanese people were played by Japanese people, which also often didn’t happen. Toshiro Mifune, the Laurence Olivier of Japan who starred in all those wonderful Kurosawa movies, played Lord Toranaga, which was remarkable. And Richard Chamberlain played the love interest, because he loved the ladies. LOL. And I was obsessed. And so then I went and read the book, and I got even more obsessed, because the book was just full of all these other details, and you also realize what they mushed to put in a miniseries on network television. Here comes Shogun, written, created by Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo. Have we ever had Justin on the show?

John: I think Justin’s been on the show. Justin’s a friend.

Craig: He and Rachel, who is his wife, or rather, I should say he is her husband – they belong to each other – they’ve created the show. And it’s excellent. It is doing a much better job than the 1980 miniseries of being authentic to the time period. And I love the attention to detail. You know I’m a detail nut. It’s so clear how they’ve gone into every little corner and made sure everything looked right. They’re telling the story in a really interesting and beautiful way. But also – maybe this is the coolest part of my One Cool Thing this week – it releases an episode every week. It comes out on Tuesdays. I look forward to Tuesdays. It’s almost over. But each Tuesday, I’m like, “It’s coming, it’s coming.” That’s how you’re supposed to do it. For the life of me, I still cannot understand why anyone would make a – like 3 Body Problem on Netflix.

John: I wondered what was going on with 3 Body Problem.

Craig: Massive show, and they’re like, “Here’s all of it.”

John: It makes the footprint so much smaller.

Craig: I just don’t know. Game of Thrones worked great. They all want to have their next Game of Thrones. They got the Game of Thrones guys and just forgot the one thing about the Game of Thrones, which is you put out one episode a week. People look forward to it. They watch it together. They talk about it together. People write recap essays. Anyway, so congrats to Justin and Rachel, but also congrats to FX for doing it correctly. This is the way to do it and they’re gonna win everything.

John: They will. It’s also a strange Emmy season this year, because so many things were not – you’re not eligible for an Emmy this year.

Craig: No, because we’re not on the Emmy cycle.

John: You’re not on the air.

Craig: The awards cycle got so thrown off by the strikes. Next week I’m going to the WGA Awards for a show that aired over a year ago.

John: I’ll see you there.

Craig: Fantastic. What will you be wearing, John?

John: I’m debating between-

Craig: Who will you be wearing?

John: It’s black tie, but not everyone actually wears black tie. Are you wearing a suit or a tux?

Craig: I’m gonna go tux.

John: Great.

Craig: I’m gonna go tux, because how often do you get to wear a tux? I’ve got it. Why not wear it?

John: It’s also in the afternoon, which I think is great.

Craig: Yeah, so you can leave and go about your day. You’re going suit or tux?

John: I think I’m gonna go tux. I’m gonna go tux.

Craig: You’re gonna go tux? Why not? Go tux. Go tux. It’s at the Palladium. Great. I’ll see you there. The WGA Awards show is particularly amusing for the following reasons: one, not on television. No one cares. Even fewer people care than normal. Two, this is my favorite part, because the WGA is, and I will say this forever, stupidly divided into two unions, the WGA West and the WGA East, and because the WGA East really is like, “We’re also gonna have our own at the same time,” stupid, like we don’t have planes, they run a separate awards show for the same categories simultaneously. Not with different nominees. Same nominees. But they need to have their own award show running at the same time. But because they can’t exactly run at the same time, because it’s not televised, it starts to wobble out of sync a bit, which means inevitably you get a text.

John: “Congratulations” or “sorry.”

Craig: “That sucks.” You’re like, “Wait. Oh. They haven’t even said my category. I’m leaving.” That’s the other thing about the WGA Awards, because it’s not televised. People just start leaving. By the time you get to the last award, there’s the janitor. It’s like, “You guys got five minutes. We got a wedding coming in.” I think this will actually be quite nice because it’s the first post-strike award.

John: It’s also outside of the award season, which I think is actually kind of great.

Craig: It means nothing. It predicts nothing.

John: It predicts nothing.

Craig: It’s great.

John: It’s already a very loose awards show, so I think it should be a loosened vibe.

Craig: It will be pretty relaxed.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Ben Singer. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on humans leaving the solar system. Craig, happy birthday once again.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, so we talked about the 3 Body Problem, just very briefly. 3 Body Problem involves an alien civilization that is coming towards us. But my question is, do you think our human form bodies will ever leave the solar system?

Craig: Yours and mine?

John: Not yours and mine, but humans like us, flesh and blood humans, will we travel the stars? Because it’s a staple of science fiction.

Craig: It is a staple of science fiction. I’m gonna say something that a lot of people disagree with. My answer is no.

John: My answer is no also, but maybe for different reasons.

Craig: Maybe for different reasons. My answer is no because I think this is a simulation. I think the solar system is probably the limit of the high-res work that’s been done in our simulation. Beyond that, it’s the distant mountains in a video game, which is why the universe keeps expanding the more we look at it.

John: Wow. Craig, you’re not a Flat Earther, but you’re sort of like a Flat Solar.

Craig: I feel like everything beyond the solar system is real, but no more real than what’s in the solar system. It’s just not as fully ressed out, and there is in fact nothing to get to. If the simulation wanted it, then yeah, they would probably be like, “Okay, we’re gonna actually fill in this other galaxy so they can go to that place in fast travel and land on a thing there.” But I don’t think so.

John: I want to put a pin in the simulation thing, because I want to go back to the show The Boys, which I’m convinced is in a simulation as well. But my argument for why flesh and blood human beings will never leave the solar system is we’re just so incredibly fragile. We’re just not designed to do these things at all. And by the time we have the technology to really get us out of those places, it’s gonna make much more sense to put our synthetic versions, our digital versions on a thing and ship us out.

Craig: I agree with you, and I also feel like the designers of the simulation put so much space in between us and even the rest of the solar system. Mars is the next planet over. It still takes like eight months to get there.

John: I do think we’ll put some physical human beings on Mars, maybe not in my lifetime, but not too long after.

Craig: There’s not a huge reward for it, I gotta be honest with you, other than, “We did it. We made it to Mars.” I don’t know if you saw the brilliant Disney film Rocket Man.

John: I’m sorry, I missed it.

Craig: 1997’s Rocket Man.

John: It’s on the list of 100, but…

Craig: We really got into [unintelligible 01:08:00]. You got to Mars, and guess what? It’s red. Anyway, you want to go home now? It’s not great. Melissa, many years ago, she was like, “They’ve opened a new shopping outlet in Ontario. We should go see it.” I’m like, “Okay.” Ontario, not Canada, but east of Los Angeles. It was Christmas. We went there. I walked in and I said, “We’re going home now.” To me, Mars may be the Ontario shopping outlet. But to get to even as far as let’s say Pluto, the demoted non-planet, would take god knows – how many years would it take to get to Pluto?

John: It depends on how fast were you able to get our rockets up to.

Craig: This is a whole thing. You can’t go the speed of – all these things, you can’t do it. You can’t. As it turns out, you can’t.

John: I saw this movie called The Martian. It turned out it was actually really hard to get a person onto Mars, but especially off Mars.

Craig: Really hard.

John: Really tough. Really tough.

Craig: How long to go to Pluto? How long do you think it would take you to get to Pluto? You have to go very, very quickly.

John: It takes a while for light to get there, so getting a human being there, it’s tough.

Craig: About 12 years.

John: That’s also why I say the digital version. Time is useless to that. It doesn’t mean anything to you. Then you don’t have to do all this stuff like putting Ripley in her cryo bed.

Craig: That’s the other thing. Everybody comes up with the same solution, including 1997’s Rocket Man and 3 Body Problem and everybody else that sends somebody really, really far. Freeze them.

John: Freeze them.

Craig: You can’t freeze people. That whole thing, you just can’t.

John: [Crosstalk 01:09:52].

Craig: Everyone just wants to freeze everybody. The only way to get there is to-

John: Captain America.

Craig: If you can suspend somebody like that, we should be investing in that now, here. Our whole thing is freeze yourself and we’ll wake you up when we have a cure for your disease, which is why some people have actually done that. As it turns out, their body is completely damaged, a cracked ice cube. It doesn’t work. That’s always been the thing. I just think it’s too difficult. If we have the technology to actually be able to escape our own galaxy and make it to another one – and by the way, the space between galaxies is vast.

John: Yeah, it’s big.

Craig: Then we probably have the technology to solve every problem that currently exists on this planet.

John: Drew, what’s your opinion on leaving the solar system?

Drew: I am optimistic. I think eventually, I feel like we’re bugs that’ll hop and maybe pop out eventually. I think your point about us being fragile is fairly true right now. I’m stuck on you think that we live in a simulation, because you’ve mentioned it a few times. I never thought you were actually serious.

Craig: We absolutely live in a simulation.

Drew: Why? I don’t know why. It bothers me. Maybe it’s a personal thing.

Craig: Of course it bothers you. You wanted this to be real.

Drew: What about microbiology? What about the little tiny things? That’s not just waiting for the resolution to come through on how all that works?

Craig: I think that stuff’s been coded in and engineered quite beautifully.

Drew: But wouldn’t you need a supercomputer of-

Craig: Yes, you would need a very powerful computer to do this, one that is far more powerful than the computers we have. But they have it. Look at this way. We’re making simulations. They’re not great. They’re okay. But think of the simulations we can make now versus the ones we could make 50 years ago, meaning none. 50 years ago, there was the Game of Life, where it was little blobs going bleep bloop bleep. Now we have sims. We have artificial environments where people are running around and doing things. We have AI, all the rest of this. Can you imagine a world where we could create a simulation where the people inside the simulation were fully artificially intelligent?

Drew: Yes, but wouldn’t there theoretically be – because every piece of code has problems. It screws up and it needs to be defragged or – I’m using the wrong words. But we’ve never experienced that. We’ve never had really glitches or anything like that. All of it seems to be working right.

John: Or we may have had glitches, but then our memory was fixed.

Craig: Also, time does not move the normal way. For instance, our lifetimes may be processed through in a nanosecond of some higher versions. Think of how many simulations we can run with a battle simulator. We could run the battle of, I don’t know, the Battle of Sekigahara, to refer to Shogun. We can simulate that and run that probably three million times in a second. Now, do you see where I’m going here?

Drew: Yeah.

Craig: We don’t have any sense of actual time lapsing. My point is – and this is not my plan, just that others have come up with this – that if you give us 300 years from where we are now, 300 years, think of how far we’ve come in 10, 300 years, could we design a simulation where the people inside the simulation felt like they were real and independent and alive and intelligent?

Drew: Limitedly, but you wouldn’t be able to have 8 billion people feel like they were alive.

Craig: Okay. Then what, in 1,000 years maybe we can have that?

Drew: Sure. I guess by the same logic that I’m like, eventually we’ll hop planets and get on the solar system, eventually we would have this.

Craig: The only way, and if we do that, and that simulation is up to the level that our reality is, wouldn’t they start making simulations? The problem is the only way we’re not in a simulation is if we are the first ones in a chain of simulations. That’s why I think – it explains a lot.

John: It does explain a lot. I want to get back to The Boys and Gen V, two shows I genuinely enjoy, but I get a little bit frustrated by the characters in those worlds feel realish. Same could be said for the Marvel Universe too, where you can do all these supernatural things. You can fly and all this stuff. But that actually breaks all of our laws of physics.

Craig: Correct.

John: Someone I want to be in that world to say, “Oh, no, this must be a simulation where you’re changing these parameters, because these are not possible things.”

Craig: I am obsessed with this one moment – it’s in one of the Avengers – where Tony Stark gets thrown out of his own building. I think it’s the first Avengers movie. He’s falling from his skyscraper, and then Jarvis sends out the Iron Man stuff, which-

John: Assembles around, yeah.

Craig: … lands and assembles around him. And he almost hits the ground and then he puts his repulsors on to stop himself from falling.

John: They’re liquefied.

Craig: There are people right under it who should be vaporized. Also, the G-force of falling that hard and stopping like that is akin to hitting pavement. The Marvel characters follow no physics. Their arms should be ripping out of their sockets based on the things that they’re doing. It’s okay. It’s Marvel.

John: It’s Marvel, absolutely, so I’m willing to forgive it, just like I don’t believe in ghosts, but if I’m writing a story with ghosts in it, I’m gonna follow all the-

Craig: I love Ghostbusters.

John: I want to follow that thread down, so great.

Craig: Once you say, okay, we’re gonna throw some physics out the window, literally, for everybody, then yeah, go for it.

John: But circling back to a conclusion, I think the actual physics of traveling outside the solar system are not going to make sense for physical human beings.

Craig: I agree. It will not make sense for physical human beings. I think we’re here to be here. I think this is where we are, and this is where we shall stay until they reboot.

Drew: We’re real.

Craig: Yes, we are real. We’re as real as anything.

John: Just because I think we’re gonna get emails about this-

Craig: Oh, really?

John: You believe we’re in a simulation, but you’re not nihilistic about it. You don’t believe that nothing matters. You actually do believe that things matter.

Craig: I don’t think anything matters ultimately. I think that existence is absurd. But I feel like there’s a way to behave. There are values that I think are important, that are programmed into us or you could say are part of our shared genetic code and the expression of bio-evolutionary instincts to be pro-social. It feels good to help people. It feels good to do the right thing. It feels good to contribute. It feels good to fulfill a purpose. Look what we do for a living. If we die today, it’s not like everyone goes, “That’s it. Pack it up, everyone. Mass suicide. Those guys aren’t around anymore.” But we do it anyway, because we’ve found purpose for our lives. And then that’s that. Look at Drew. He’s gonna cry.

Drew: I’m sticking to my guns.

Craig: Nothing wrong with that. By the way, I’m way out of line with almost everybody. Most people believe in God and angels. I’ve gone past the atheists now into some whole other dimension of stupidity. And here’s the best part. It doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, unless I get thrown in Hell and burn in a lake of fire forever, in which case that will be very annoying and confusing. Time’s sure spinning for me. We stood outside and watched the eclipse. We took a pause in the middle of this to watch the eclipse. It looked beautiful.

John: Yeah, it looked beautiful.

Craig: It looked so vivid and real.

Drew: That’s because the moon is real.

Craig: It’s as real as my eyeball.

John: Thanks, guys.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

• My Pal Foot Foot by The Shaggs
• Braid by Jonathan Blow
• Connections from the New York Times
• Q: Who Found a Way to Crack the U.K.’s Premier Quiz Show? by David Segal for The New York Times
• On what motivates us: a detailed review of intrinsic v. extrinsic motivation by Laurel S. Morris, Mora M. Grehl, Sarah B. Rutter, Marishka Mehta, and Margaret L. Westwater
• Why are there so many illegal weed stores in New York City? by PJ Vogt
• Shōgun on FX
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Ben Singer (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/love-and-money).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 637 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, Cowboy Carter is the new album by Beyonce. 27 tracks. Craig, I thought we might take a moment go through track-by-track listings.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I know you had some real thoughts about Jolene, which is her reinterpretation of Dolly Parton’s classic song Jolene. What is your take on Beyonce’s spin?

**Craig:** Beyonce did Jolene?

**John:** Beyonce did Jolene.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Yeah, so it’s a reversal of the central don’t take my man. It’s like, don’t even think about taking my man.

**Craig:** That’s not what Jolene’s about though. But she changed the lyrics?

**John:** She did change the lyrics, with Dolly Parton’s permission and blessing.

**Craig:** Okay. That’s something else then.

**John:** It is something else then. Maybe we’ll save that for a future episode. Instead, today, let’s take a look at what movies you actually need to have seen in order to work in this business and how much is that a factor of your generation. We’ll consult the lists of the best movies of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and beyond. Then it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at the stories in the news and turn them into sellable properties.

**Craig:** And they do sell.

**John:** They do sell. They do sell. In fact, one of the stories we were going to talk through I had to take off the list because a mutual friend of ours is out pitching it right now.

**Craig:** Wowzers.

**John:** Wowzers. Plus, we’ll answer listener questions, because it’s been a minute since we’ve been together to do this.

**Craig:** Been a minute.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, let’s take a look at our thoughts on AI as of spring 2024, including how AI helped put together this episode.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**Drew Marquardt:** I’m out of a job.

**Craig:** We’re all out of a job.

**John:** Spoiler for folks for aren’t Premium Members. Basically, compiling the lists of 100 top movies, you can think, oh, you go to a webpage for that, but it’s actually a giant hassle to reformat that into a way that you could put this into our Workflowy. But AI did it for us.

**Craig:** You’ve joined the evil empire.

**John:** Yes. But first, we have some actual news. Every week on Weekend Read, the app we make for reading scripts on your phone, it is our own Drew Marquardt who’s picking the themes and the scripts that we’re gonna be featuring this week. I thought your theme this week was genius. It is bad vacations.

**Craig:** I like that.

**Drew:** Thank you. I did steal the premise a little bit from the Criterion channel. They had a version of that. But they are bound by what they can get distribution for. I’ve got every script you can find online.

**John:** Talk us through the scripts in bad vacations.

**Drew:** We have Jurassic Park, Midsommar, The White Lotus, we got Seasons 1 and 2, Little Miss Sunshine, The Hangover, Us, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Descent, Funny Games, and National Lampoon’s Vacation, the remake.

**Craig:** How is it possible that you left off the single best bad vacations movie of all time?

**John:** Which is?

**Craig:** Deliverance.

**Drew:** I wanted Deliverance.

**Craig:** Oh, you just didn’t have it.

**Drew:** A lot of the scripts pre-2005, the copies we have are photocopied six times, so they’re really hard to get a-

**Craig:** Just get AI to…

**Drew:** Deliverance. I wanted Thelma and Louise really bad too.

**Craig:** That sort of counts.

**John:** It feels like these themes are almost like connections. How do these things all fit together? Is it a blue? Is it a green? Is it a yellow? Is it a hard thing to fit those titles together?

**Drew:** It’s kind of like making mixtapes is the same itch it scratches, where you’re trying to get all the little flavors.

**John:** Good stuff. We have some follow-up. I see first here we have follow-up on D&D for kids. Back in 635 we talked about that. We had listeners write in with a ton of great suggestions.

**Drew:** So many people wrote in.

**John:** I think maybe, rather than read through them, because they’re URLs, we’ll put those links in the show notes so people can click through them. But I loved what Ed said here at the top.

**Drew:** Ed wrote, “I love my kids’ after-school program. This year, I love it even more after the addition of a new staff member, Chris. Imagine my surprise when my eight-year-old daughter came home the second week of school with a complete character sheet for Truce, the elf sorcerer. We play a lot of tabletop games with her, but I never considered breaking out D&D. I honestly have no idea how Chris does it, but the games he leads are very popular with the kids in the after-school program. Even my six-year-old twins like to play his Pokémon-themed D&D sessions. I gather it’s a lot of jumping off waterfalls and riding giant boars and other silliness, but I absolutely adore hearing about their adventures.”

**Craig:** Doesn’t sound silly at all.

**John:** That sounds awesome.

**Craig:** Those important encounters.

**John:** Craig and friends killed a giant boar just last night in our session.

**Craig:** Wereboar.

**John:** Wereboar.

**Craig:** Otherwise, it’s just plain old hunting, isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah, it is hunting. They had to have a special aspect to it. Thank you to everybody who wrote in with these great suggestions. We’ll put a link in the show notes to all these great alternatives and ways to do things. Craig, a term I saw a couple times in these mentions was OSR.

**Craig:** OSR?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** OSR, original something rules?

**John:** Yeah, old-school role-playing.

**Craig:** Old-school role-playing, okay. Not familiar with that acronym.

**John:** Not familiar, but I bet now that we’ve seen it, we will see it all the time, I suspect. We have some follow-up on English as a second language and characters who are speaking a language that is not their own in scripts.

**Drew:** Harry wrote, “Listening to your latest episode about different dialects trying to communicate, I couldn’t help but think of slang as a concept. I’m Australian, and I swear, we don’t just struggle communicating with foreigners, but we struggle with talking with other English speakers. But if someone knows the slang terms, it does make the person seem more confident at communicating.” He offers some examples, which I can try an Australian accent.

**John:** You can try it. Go for it.

**Drew:** “Yeah nah” is no. “Nah yeah” is yes. “Bloody oath” is “so true.” “Cactus” is dead or broken. “Eff me dead” is “no way, that’s unfortunate.”

**Craig:** Oh, nar.

**John:** Oh, nar.

**Craig:** Oh, nar.

**John:** “Yeah nah” and “nah yeah,” it’s interesting, because we often in American English say, “No, yeah, I understand that,” or, “Yes, no, I get what you’re saying.”

**Craig:** We do that too. “Yeah, no” is “I agree, no.” “No, yeah,” I don’t know what that no is for exactly.

**Drew:** Like, “Unfortunately, yes.”

**Craig:** Probably. “No, yeah.” We certainly don’t say “bloody oath.”

**John:** No, we don’t say “bloody oath.”

**Craig:** Bloody oath, a cactus.

**John:** I think the yeah comes in because it’s like, “I hear what you’re saying and I’m agreeing with you, no.” That “yeah, nah” is really important.

**Craig:** Nar. Nar.

**John:** He goes down to the phrase “that has mayo on it,” which means “you’re exaggerating, mate.”

**Craig:** If someone said, “That has mayo on it,” to me, all my response is, “Get it the bloody oath away from me,” which is not what bloody oath means, but regardless.

**John:** Regardless, Craig is not a fan of mayonnaise.

**Craig:** Eff me dead.

**John:** Any white sauce and Craig, no.

**Craig:** Pretty much. I just don’t like-

**John:** Hey, do you like the whipped garlic foamy stuff that comes with Mediterranean food sometimes?

**Craig:** I don’t trust it, because they won’t tell you what’s in it, and I think it’s probably mayonnaise.

**John:** No, it’s just garlic and oil.

**Craig:** I don’t know if that’s true. They won’t say what it is. Until they say, I’m suspicious.

**Drew:** Did you have a bad experience? Did it make you sick?

**Craig:** No. I just don’t like mayonnaise. Absolutely hate it. Hate it. Hate the sight of it. Hate the name of it. The consistency is horrible. The fact that you can pick up a jar and it weighs nothing is terrifying to me. I don’t understand it.

**John:** Have we discussed marshmallows? Are you a fan of marshmallows?

**Craig:** Marshmallows are fine, but that’s not a sauce. That’s a gelatin colloidal suspension. What do you call it? But I don’t sit eating marshmallows now, certainly not anymore. But they were never a food that I was like, “Yay, marshmallows.”

**John:** I’m fine with them in hot chocolate, but I don’t need them in other places. As a binding agent in rice crispy squares, sure.

**Craig:** Toasting marshmallows, that carbon is fun. You know what?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** This isn’t gonna be a One Cool Thing, because it applies to almost no one. But we were doing some work in Alberta a week ago, and we were staying at a place called the Kananaskis Mountain Lodge.

**John:** I think I saw that inside of a Zoom there, because we played some D&D.

**Craig:** You did. You saw me. You saw the lodge when we were D&D-ing. At the bar, you know I’m an old-fashioned fan. I like to enjoy an old-fashioned, my favorite cocktail. They had something called a s’mores old-fashioned. Now I am notorious for ordering the old-fashioned old-fashioned whenever I see some sort of goofy twist. They had put it up on signs. You know when you go to Vegas, in the elevator it’s like, “Come enjoy the prime rib.” That was their thing was the s’mores old-fashioned. So I’m like, “I’ll do it.” Delicious.

Their deal was they gave you an old-fashioned neat, and then they had a marshmallow that they had adhered to a graham cracker, probably by melting the bottom of it. They bring it to you. They light the marshmallow on fire. As it’s flaming, they carefully turn it over, with the graham cracker as a lid, and invert it over the glass. Then you let it sit and fill with marshmallow smoke for about 30 seconds. Then you remove it and you drink it. It was spectacularly good. It was the kind of thing where I thought, oh, these folks have come up with this cool thing, and now a bunch of LA people are gonna come back, talk about it on a podcast, and it’s gonna show up in bars in LA.

**John:** The clock has started ticking.

**Craig:** It has started ticking on the s’mores old-fashioned.

**John:** I will drink an old-fashioned, but sweet drinks, any drink that feels like dessert is not my go-to. But this case it also feels like it’s just dessert that actually has alcohol in it.

**Craig:** An old-fashioned shouldn’t be too sweet. If it’s too sweet, boo. I like it more when it’s really bourbon and just a little bit of a hint. The marshmallow smoke itself has no sweetness. It’s carbon. That was the only part of toasting marshmallows I liked was when you would just incinerate it and then eat the crackly charcoal skin.

**John:** Yeah, but there’s at least a 33 percent chance that you’re going to burn your fingers trying to do the thing, and you got the hot marshmallow on your fingers.

**Craig:** You just gotta wait five seconds, John. This is a real problem.

**John:** Like children here.

**Craig:** There’s literally an experiment about this.

**John:** I was doing this as a child. You’re doing this as an adult.

**Craig:** Just put it on a stick, man. Just wait. You’re an Eagle Scout, for god’s sake.

**John:** More follow-up on Tiffany problems. Tiffany, of course, is a situation where you have a historically accurate name that sounds too modern so people don’t believe it. This is a case where Josh is writing in with a spoken word that people believed was anachronistic.

**Drew:** He calls it the “Tiffany tiff on Twitter related to Manhunt on Apple TV.” Someone objected to the use of “creep” in the mid-19th century, and many, including Keith Olbermann, weighed in to inform it’s actually not the anachronistic error, or Tiffany problem, that the poster believed it to be.

**John:** I like that this features Patton Oswalt, a former guest, who apparently said the word, referred to John Wilkes Booth as a creep, and whether creep would exist in the language of 1865, and apparently it did.

**Craig:** Did it? Keith Olbermann is citing the – I assume this is in Merriam Webster – etymology. It looks like meaning despicable person is by 1886. That would still be 20-some-odd years after.

**John:** Yeah, but it’s a question of when did it make it into print. But “creeper,” which is a gilded rascal, is recorded from circa 1600.

**Craig:** That seems like a different thing. That’s more of a sneak thief as opposed to a… It says robbed customers in brothels, which by the way, still goes on, from what I understand. It probably is a little bit of an anachronism, but not a wild one if it’s off by 20 years.

**John:** I think it’s the fact that Patton said creep and then was like, “I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here?” It was really the run of the phrase was really what felt anachronistic.

**Craig:** “What the hell am I trying to say?” I also think that Patton Oswalt is already an anachronism. He wasn’t alive in 1865.

**John:** It’s the worst.

**Craig:** He’s alive right now. It’s all anachronisms.

**John:** We should stop making anything that’s not set now, because it’s a lie.

**Craig:** If he had said, “Oh my god, that guy is totally a creep,” that would’ve been anachronistic.

**John:** Yeah, that would.

**Craig:** “He’s literally a creep.”

**John:** We had Pamela Ribon on the show last week.

**Craig:** Pam Ribon!

**John:** Absolutely the best. Her job used to be as a TV logger. I asked her, to what degree do you think that still is a job, because AI systems are actually really good at transcribing stuff and noting what’s happening there. North wrote in with some info on this.

**Drew:** North says, “I work in post-production on a non-union true crime documentary show, and a huge part of crafting the stories for our episodes involves creating transcripts of each interview. So we use an AI platform to generate time-code accurate transcripts, but these transcripts are not perfect. AI is pretty good at distinguishing between speaker 1 and speaker 2, but it often gets things wrong, like consistent name spelling, locations, and small verbal things like the difference between in and and, for example.”

**Craig:** That’s no big deal.

**Drew:** “We actually hire entry-level people to humanize these transcripts.”

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**Drew:** “Our humanizers are essentially AI editors or spell-checkers.”

**Craig:** That’s what it’s down to.

**Drew:** “This is where I started before being promoted to a coordinator role. Thus far, AI hasn’t quite replaced our human loggers, transcribers, but the role has shifted and the hours have certainly reduced. What used to be a full-time job is now more often part-time for our show, which is a bummer for entry-level workers, but like Pamela, I don’t recommend spending 12 hours a day transcribing raw true crime interviews for anyone’s mental health.”

**Craig:** Humanizer?

**John:** Humanizers.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Again, it’s a Britney Spears lyric.

**Craig:** Humanizer.

**John:** (sings) Humanizer, humanizer. Drew, you and I actually have some experience with this too, because when we were doing the sidecasts, we used Descript. Descript is an editing program where you feed in the raw audio and it comes up with a transcript that’s not perfect, but you are actually editing text instead of editing wave forms to do it.

**Drew:** Which was much easier. You could figure out filler words or stuff like that and just cut them out much quicker.

**Craig:** Got it. For our transcripts for this show, we still use-

**John:** We use a human being.

**Craig:** We use a human being? Oh my god. That’s so weird.

**John:** So weird.

**Craig:** Shouldn’t we just get a humanizer? That’s the worst term I’ve ever heard.

**John:** We assume we’re using a full human being who’s doing all this themselves.

**Craig:** We assume it.

**John:** But for what we know… We contract this out. Who’s doing our transcripts right now?

**Drew:** Dima Cass.

**John:** We assume Dima is doing this all by hand, but for all we know, they could be feeding it in and humanizing it themselves.

**Craig:** We don’t know.

**John:** We don’t know.

**Craig:** We don’t know. You know what? Let’s keep our hands clean. Is Dima Cass a person or a company?

**Drew:** Never met them in person.

**Craig:** Exciting.

**John:** More follow-up from Oliver.

**Drew:** Back in Episode 618, Oliver wrote in, “Last year I officially sold my first script to a mid-size studio, and it was shot in early 2023. As part of the arrangement, there was an optional rewrite clause, although the studio assured me that the script was essentially good to go. On the early Zoom calls, everyone I met was lovely and thrilled about the script. The producers and directors were so excited, and everyone began sharing ideas, which was super fun, until it wasn’t. Months later, having gone down numerous rabbit holes, the entire process became bleak and disheartening, to the point that days before production, one of the producers was in the script inserting exposition.”

**John:** I think our advice at the time was, yeah, this sucks, but also-

**Craig:** Welcome to Hollywood, kid.

**John:** Welcome to Hollywood, kid. You’ll get through it. Oliver wrote in with an update.

**Drew:** He said, “After a whole year, I was finally given the chance to watch the finished film. And it had been so long, truthfully, I couldn’t even notice any of the changes we made from the original draft they greenlit. The setup, the major turns, the crisis, the concept in general, were all there, everything they loved about the script in the first place. Is the movie perfect? No. There were a handful of moments that bumped for me, perhaps a misread line here and there. Ironically, this brought me some relief. The aspects that had me fretting for nights on end in pre-production didn’t change the essence of the film one bit.

“The whole experience made me realize again that the script is merely a blueprint. What people watch and experience isn’t the polishing process of a pdf. It’s the casting, the look, the score, the edit, and yes, the story, but that’s just one piece of the final product. Next time, I hope to approach pre-production edits with a little less self-imposed anxiety and doubt.”

**Craig:** You had me and you lost me. Here’s where he had me.

**John:** Up until the blueprint?

**Craig:** Yeah. Jeez Louise, man. Wrong conclusion, Oliver, but right conclusion of part. One of the hard parts about what we do for a living is that – Ted Elliot has said this many times – that most screenwriters never get to do the second half of the job. They only do the first half, which is writing the script. The second half is seeing the script being produced. Then you start to learn the relationship between the script and the final product. When you’re in prep, yes, it’s good to realize, “Okay, here are the hills to die on. Here are the things that really, really matter. These other things I can work on and probably they will not be significant disruptions. They might even be improvements.”

Where I think Oliver goes wildly awry here is when he says, “The whole experience made me realize,” again, he shouldn’t have realized it the first time, “that the script is,” quote, “merely a blueprint.” This seems like a press release from the DGA as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Yeah, totally.

**Craig:** The script is not merely a blueprint. He says, “What people watch and experience is the casting, the look, the score, the edit.” Sorry, all of that comes from the script. It all begins in the script. There’s a reason they need a script. It’s the thing that tells them what kind of person should be cast, how is this supposed to look, what is the tone, what kind of emotions would we want to experience here that the composer needs to understand. Then the edit is literally going back to the script in so many ways, like what was the intention and flow of these scenes on paper.

Then he says, “And yes, the story, but that’s just one piece of the final product.” The story is the only thing. I’m sorry. I know that people think that cinema is about beautiful framing and all the rest. It helps. It’s part of the enjoyment. But it’s the story. It’s the story that people want. Otherwise, you can just go and watch some old French movies about people twiddling their thumbs in cafes. People love stories. That’s what we’ve been doing as human beings our whole lives.

Merely the blueprint? First of all, have you looked at a blueprint? Have you ever seen one? The word you would never apply to it is “merely.”

**John:** Merely, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the most detailed… It’s like, here’s all of the things you need to do so this building doesn’t fall down and murder people.

**John:** I think Oliver mostly gets it and made some bad word choices here along the way. I think Oliver had some insights which were helpful.

**Craig:** We are a writing podcast though.

**John:** First, let’s acknowledge some things that I think Oliver got right. It’s so possible to stress out over, “Oh my god, they’re trying to change this one line in this one scene. Everything’s gonna fall apart.” No, it’s not.

**Craig:** No, it’s not. Perspective is a good thing, and you have to learn it by experiencing it.

**John:** Absolutely. I wish Oliver could’ve been on set to see the process of how the movie he wrote was actually shot and then the editing room. He didn’t get that experience, but at least he saw the final product and was relatively happy about it.

But I do want to circle back to this idea of merely a blueprint or even just the notion of blueprint, because I think there was a good intention behind that at one point, and I think that’s been lost. I think the degree that the screenwriter is the architect of the project, yes. The screenwriter’s figuring out the whole thing, has the vision for the entire thing, is laying it all out, and like an architect, has to then rely on other people to actually physically build the thing, the specialists, contractors, everything else. That metaphor tracks. But when you then conflate, “Oh, it’s just the blueprint,” or that the blueprint is just a thing that exists separately from the finished building, that’s nuts.

**Craig:** It’s insane. If you do direct something, all the time you spend in prep, all of it, and it’s so much time – often for movies, there’s more time in prep than there is shooting – is based on the script. Every discussion you have is based on the script. Everything is how do we make this thing on the page happen in real life. I don’t think blueprint is as good of a word as, say, scripture is, because that’s how important it is. It is the fundamental document to the creation of everything.

I get it right in my aorta every time someone’s like, “The script is merely… ” I’m like, “Let me stop you right there. If it’s merely something, give it back. Go make this without it. In fact, you’ve read it. It’s merely a blueprint. You don’t need to read it again. Let me just gather all the copies. Good luck, everyone.” No.

**John:** The two Charlie’s Angels that I worked on were notoriously like, “Okay, we’re in production, and everything is changing.” We go through the whole color rainbow multiple times. Every scene has changed. In that situation, you could say, oh, they went in without a script or something. That’s not true at all. We went in with a script and all had the same vision basically of what it is we were trying to do. What those actual scenes were moment by moment did change a lot. It was incredibly difficult and frustrating, because we were building the building without having finished plans for everything. But we knew which building we were building. We all could agree on that as a basis.

That’s probably the wildest exception. That’s the extreme case of, okay, we’re going in. We don’t have everything locked down and finished. In most cases, you really are gonna have a very clear sense of this is the plan for the movie. Could different directors working off the same script make a very different movie? Absolutely.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** But there’s a plan behind it, so don’t sell yourself short, Oliver.

**Craig:** Or anyone. In the end, I am a director, so I’m not denying how important it is and now directors can do that job well or poorly. But a lot of times, the director’s understanding of the script is directly connected to how good of a job they do telling the story. If you don’t understand it, you can’t be interesting as you tell the story. Also, let’s just say, why wasn’t Oliver invited? He wrote it.

**John:** He wrote it.

**Craig:** It’s just so weird. It’s just so weird to me. Oh, movies.

**John:** Oh, movies. I don’t know if we remember or even knew whether Oliver was a WGA writer. He says it’s a mid-sized studio. I assume it’s an American studio.

**Craig:** Should be.

**John:** As a WGA writer, he should’ve been invited to give notes on an early cut. There are creative rights. It’s hard to enforce those, but you should’ve gotten a letter from the WGA saying, hey, here’s a reminder, here are the things and [crosstalk 00:22:55].

**Craig:** They don’t matter, because what they do then is they have ChatGPT. They send you a cut. You send notes back to some dead letter office at a studio and it’s never looked at. It’s not real. The thing about creative rights is either it’s an enforceable term that matters and is incorporated into the process or it’s not. Same thing with directors and television.

I’ve never directed an episode that I didn’t write or for a show I wasn’t making. But let’s say I did, because I think that would be fun, actually, to go direct an episode for someone else and not have to worry about the whole damn thing. I think I get five days to edit. That’s my, quote unquote, right. You know what? Five days is the same as zero days. It’s not enough. It just means, “Sure. Come here.” It’s a creative, quote unquote, right. We have a creative, quote unquote, right to give notes. But in the end, the people who are in charge are the people who are in charge. There’s nothing we can do.

**John:** Your ability to actually influence the movie depends on your relationship with those people who initially hired you. It’s possible Oliver could have edged his way in there a little bit more. He didn’t. But anyway.

**Craig:** Certainly not for a lack of humility, because I’m saying a little less humility here, Oliver, would be good. The good news is the movie was done. By the way, no movie is perfect. That’s always an eye-opener when you’re like, “Whoa.” That’s the day you stop ripping on movies as hard as you did before, when you’re like, “Oh, this is hard to do. It’s hard.”

**John:** Some movies that did turn out not perfect but really quite good are the 100 best movies of the ’80s, the ’90s, the 2000s, and the 2010s.

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** We went through and pulled the lists of what are generally considered the 100 best. In some cases it was the Rolling Stone list or some IMDb list, and so there’s gonna be some weird titles on this. But I went through yesterday and marked the ones I hadn’t seen. Drew went through and marked them as well. I will find some way to put this online so people can see the things that I’ve missed. There are some sort of embarrassing things that I’ve not seen. But on the whole, I felt pretty good about it. What actually sent me down this whole path is I was looking at the AFI list of the 100 best movies of all time, and I realized I’ve never seen Intolerance.

**Craig:** You don’t need to.

**John:** My ability to be a screenwriter is not impacted by my not seeing a 1916 movie.

**Craig:** No. You don’t need to see Intolerance.

**John:** It’s a question of what movies do you need to see. For us, I would say there are some movies before 1970 that are important for us to see as a framework, but it really was ’80s, ’90s, and later that actually matters. If I look through the list, those are the movies that I’ve seen almost all of them.

**Craig:** I don’t know what we do with this list. It’s a pretty good list, actually. I’m kind of enjoying it. I’m looking at the movies that you haven’t seen that I have. I love Videodrome. You do not need to see Videodrome. Come and See is I think the best war movie ever made and very influential on Chernobyl, but it is about the hardest watch. Brazil, wonderful, but also not necessary. Oh, The King of Comedy I would strongly recommend actually, because it’s Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro playing a very different kind of role, and Sandra Bernhard. It is certainly the funniest movie Scorsese ever made, but it’s also very relevant to now.

**John:** It’s a big influence on Joker.

**Craig:** Oh, definitely. Huge influence on Joker. They Live you do not need to see, although it’s hysterical. Once Upon a Time in America, there’s two versions of it. The version that they cut to ribbons and put in theaters, horrible. The uncut, endless Sergio Leone movie, fantastic and also not necessary.

**John:** Let’s talk about what’s necessary and what’s not necessary. That’s actually the bigger framing question behind this is to what degree is the movie necessary, because it speaks in conversation with the kinds of things that we’re making now.

**Craig:** I’m looking at this. I gotta be honest with you. I don’t think any of the ones that you didn’t see are necessary. Maybe Sophie’s Choice. Maybe. You’re missing some great movies in here.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Don’t get me wrong. They’re all great movies. It’s cool to see Near Dark on there. I’m obsessed with ’90s movies. That’s my thing now. I realized how many of my favorite movies are from the ’90s. I think that that is a function of two things. One, I think movies got kind of cool in the ’90s because there was this resurgence of the indie vibe as Miramax began to inspire other people to make weird movies. But also, I was in my 20s, and that’s when you go to see movies.

**John:** That’s what it comes down to.

**Craig:** Oh, man, look how good these are.

**John:** Drew, you’re more than a generation younger than us, and so you just now saw Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

**Drew:** Yeah, I saw that a few weeks ago.

**John:** Tell us, watching that movie now, what was your takeaway?

**Drew:** It felt both dated and still wildly transgressive too. The Andie MacDowell character feels very modern, and same with James Spader. It’s strange. You can’t make it today. It wouldn’t quite be the same. But I loved having four characters.

**Craig:** You can barely make any of these.

**Drew:** That’s fair.

**Craig:** John, Miller’s Crossing is a masterpiece.

**John:** I’m sure it’s a masterpiece.

**Craig:** Strong recommend. You don’t need to see Kingpin or Rounders or The Rainmaker or Dead Man. Three Kings is hysterical. I love that movie. But do you need to see it? No. The Fisher King is so good. If there’s one movie-

**John:** Is The Fisher King William Goldman?

**Craig:** No. Fisher King is Richie LaGravenese.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Terry Gilliam directed. Robin Williams will break your heart. It is so weird and beautiful. I just love that movie.

**John:** One argument for seeing movies on this list that you haven’t seen before and why that might be necessary is you might be out pitching a project or talking about a project, not realizing that movie was already made, or that the people you’re talking with are gonna have that as a reference and you don’t have that as a reference and then it’s just gonna be weird.

**Craig:** I definitely remember faking my way through some meetings in the ’90s where people would talk about movies from the ’70s or ’60s that I hadn’t seen, because I was 0 or minus 10. They were like, “Oh yeah, so it’s blah blah blah meets so-and-so.” I hadn’t seen any Jacques Tati movies. Are you familiar with Jacques Tati?

**John:** I’ve seen two.

**Craig:** That was two more than I had seen. I had never even heard of him. I was from Staten Island. They were like, “Oh yeah, it’s like Jacques Tati.” I’m like, “Absolutely. Yes.” I couldn’t pull my phone out in the bathroom and look them up. I was flying by the seat of my pants, like, “Please don’t ask me for details about Mr. Hulot. I don’t have them.”

**Drew:** Were they comparing Rocketman to Jacques Tati?

**Craig:** Totally.

**Drew:** That makes sense.

**Craig:** Totally. I was like, “Totally. It is Jacques Tati.” I was just like, “He’s dumb, and he goes to space. Isn’t that enough?” Now, again, you can just fake a period cramp, go to the bathroom – some of us can – look him up quickly on your phone, come back and be like, “You know what? I’ve been thinking about it. It’s not this Jacques Tati movie. It’s really more like this Jacques Tati movie,” and look cool.

**John:** Arcades are late teens, early 20s. My daughter had a scratch-off poster of the 100 greatest movies or some other list of movies. I’d seen almost all these movies, but she hadn’t. I was remembering, like, oh man, if you’re a young person who’s trying to catch up on culture, it’s a lot. Tarantino’s movies. Which of the Tarantino movies are important?

**Craig:** I think start with Pulp Fiction and then make some choices. I’ve been showing Bella Ramsey a lot of movies from the ’90s. We started with Pulp Fiction, which she loved. Then I made the choice to jump to Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2, because they’re incredibly entertaining and also not super duplicative of Pulp Fiction. By the way, looking at these, the ones you haven’t seen, Drew, if I may. Out of Sight is a masterpiece. Schindler’s List is one of the movies you have to see, unfortunately. Ed Wood is spectacular.

**Drew:** That one I’m embarrassed about.

**Craig:** It’s so much fun. Get Shorty is so much fun. Quiz Show, masterpiece. Dead Man Walking, the soundtrack is incredible, better than the movie. I don’t think you need to see The English Patient, although I loved it. Glengarry Glen Ross, you have to see Glengarry Glen Ross.

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:31:30] references back.

**Craig:** Actually, I envy you that you haven’t seen it.

**Drew:** That’s one of those ones when people are like, “You haven’t seen The Godfather?” kind of movies. I’ve seen The Godfather, but Glengarry is mine.

**Craig:** Glengarry Glen Ross goes by in the blink of an eye. Spectacular. In the Name of the Father, gorgeous. These are all amazing. The Grifters. My Cousin Vinny, it’s really funny, but do you have to see it? No. 12 Monkeys. It’s funny how many Terry Gilliam movies you have here.

**John:** Is 12 Monkeys necessary? I don’t think it is.

**Craig:** No. It’s one of those movies like Brazil – also Terry Gilliam – where it’s like, “If you get it, you get it, man.” I got it, but I didn’t feel the need to be like, “Yeah, but you have to see 12 Monkeys.” It’s one of those movies where you tell someone, “This is the most mind-blowing movie ever,” and then they sit there and they’re bored and you feel bad. Check it out. If you like it, stay with it.

**John:** As I look through the movies I have not seen, some of them are just because of the genre. I haven’t seen Saw. I don’t need to see Saw. I understand what Saw is.

**Craig:** You don’t. You do not need to see it.

**John:** We’ll find some way to post this up here so people can take a look and tell us what movies they haven’t seen, what movies they feel like are actually crucially important. But again, I’d say the takeaway from this is that there are movies that people are going to assume that you will have seen, and that if you haven’t seen them, going into certain conversations, if you’re staffed in a writers’ room, it may just be a little bit weird that you don’t have that as a frame of reference. That said, if you’re a younger person, if you’re not born and raised in the U.S., you’re gonna have some different references. That’s just the reality.

**Craig:** Which is fine. Although our main export in the United States appears to be movies and military equipment.

**John:** That’s what we do.

**Craig:** People do share a lot of these common references. These are great. This is a very useful list you put together.

**John:** With the help from some AI.

**Craig:** So people know, on our reference Workflowy outline here, you very helpfully put orange on the movies that you haven’t seen, John, and blue on the movies that Drew hasn’t seen, and you wrote “Legend,” like a legend to describe what color goes what. I thought that initially you were talking about the movie Legend.

**John:** Oh yeah, the movie Legend, which is crucial.

**Craig:** Not at all crucial.

**John:** 100 percent, if you have not seen the movie Legend, get out of here.

**Craig:** Little Tom Cruise going up against Tim Curry as a monster.

**John:** (sings) Is your love strong enough?

**Craig:** It’s not a great film. I thought, why did they break out Legend specifically?

**John:** This is the other thing I think that prompted me to start this whole exercise is, on my flight back from D.C., I watched Labyrinth, which I’d never seen Labyrinth.

**Craig:** David Bowie and is it Phoebe Cates?

**John:** I thought it might be Phoebe Cates as well. It’s Jennifer Connelly.

**Craig:** Jennifer Connelly, right.

**John:** I combined them, saying, “It’s so weird that she did this, and then a few years later she was-”

**Craig:** It’s Phoebe Connelly. Not great.

**John:** Not necessary.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I can see why it’s reference for certain people. Totally.

**Craig:** I think it’s one of those movies, as a kid, when you saw it, you were… Look, I love Beast Master; can’t recommend it to anyone.

**John:** If I loved Labyrinth, I would be pitching the Labyrinth sequel now with Jennifer Connelly.

**Craig:** Here’s an interesting thing. I’ve run into this. I remember, again, in the ’90s, there were certain movies that would come up that people loved and would use as touchstones, that either few people had seen or if you did then go and watch it, you were like, “Why the hell does everyone care about this movie?” It was just one of those things that got under their skin in a culty, viral way in Hollywood, but didn’t necessarily matter to anyone else. I feel like Labyrinth might be one of those.

**John:** At least three different times in my career, people have pitched the H.R. Pufnstuf movie.

**Craig:** Which is not a good idea.

**John:** Not a good idea, but I also have no reference for it, because for whatever reason, it never showed on TV in Boulder, Colorado where I grew up.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I’ve never seen a frame of it.

**Craig:** It was enjoyable. But South Park had an episode with Member Berries. I don’t know if you’ve saw that one. “Member?” That’s the value of H.R. Pufnstuf is, “Member?” Yes, I remember. Yes, correct. Don’t think I need a movie of it.

**John:** Nope, not necessary. Let’s make some new movies. Enough of these old movies. How Would This Be a Movie is a segment where we take a look at some stories in the news and figure out what are the possibilities of making this into a new movie or a series or whatever else, some sort of piece of quality entertainment. The first is an article that went incredibly viral, by Charlotte Cowles. Did you read this when it first came out?

**Craig:** No, I didn’t. I just read it for this today, and I was startled.

**John:** Startled. This is The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. Charlotte Cowles is a journalist. She actually writes about personal finance and such for legitimate publications. She had this basically phone scam that claimed to be Amazon customer service, and she was ultimately tricked into putting $50,000 in a shoe box and handing it to a random person in a car. I think it’s worth reading the article. After having read the article, a bunch of people raised concerns about, like, this doesn’t actually track and make sense. I have suspicions about whether she’s telling the whole story here at some moments.

**Craig:** This one almost feels too wild to believe. First of all, Ms. Cowles is the financial advice columnist. This is not somebody who is just confused about how money works. It’s a fascinating piece, because it’s like watching somebody humiliate themselves in slow motion on paper, where they go through a series of choices and moments where they even are saying, “This makes no sense. You’re crazy. You’re lying,” over and over, and just keeps doing the dumb thing. It’s hard for me to understand why somebody who’s the financial advice columnist for a publication wouldn’t immediately call an attorney if they were being told they were under investigation for a crime. Everybody who’s seen any episode of any copaganda show knows that the cops don’t want you to lawyer up. I struggled to believe this.

**John:** I did struggle at times too. When she actually has to go to the bank and get $50,000 in cash, strained credibility. Is it possible? I guess. I also want to believe that New York Magazine, I think-

**Craig:** Yeah, the New York.

**John:** … would’ve fact checked to some degree to establish that the things that she’s saying are true are true. Let’s take this at face value. Let’s just say this is a thing that actually happened. What parts of this are interesting for a movie or for an episode? To me, you get into this, and you have to stay in almost real time, because too many cuts, too many getting away from the moment, the whole souffle just crumbles. It has to start with that. But then I’m also fascinated by the repercussions after the fact. Let’s say this thing happened for real. What happens in the days after? What does her husband say? Does she keep her job? The suspicion of what actually is there, that is interesting to me.

**Craig:** I guess. I don’t understand how they have kept their job. They’re a financial advice columnist, and they’ve just written a story about how they are the most financially naïve human on the planet. I know that people do get fooled. If Charlotte Cowles were writing about someone else’s story and describing what they did, and that person was, let’s say-

**John:** A nurse. A teacher.

**Craig:** … a nurse, a teacher, somebody that doesn’t know much about financial stuff, me, then yeah. But the part of this that’s so challenging, if you are a screenwriter, is – it’s an interesting challenge, I guess. Maybe that’s what makes it good. Take the person who’s the least likely to be scammed and have them get scammed. Who can scam them, and how? But scammers generally just aren’t even that good. We’ve gotten those calls. Everybody’s gotten the call from the, quote unquote, IRS.

She makes a point of saying that sequential people that call her, their accent is hard to place. Every alarm bell is going off here. It’s one thing if somebody from the FBI calls you and they speak with an accent in English. People who speak accented English work for the government. But now, three in a row? Eh.

She says, “Cops don’t do this. Police don’t do this. This doesn’t make sense.” Then she just keeps doing it, like a zombie. I’m missing… Part of our job is to make sure that actions are motivated and understandable so people at home don’t keep saying, “Why would you – a human wouldn’t do that.” I just kept feeling a human wouldn’t do it.

**John:** Except that I think back to when I leased my last car. I was like, “This is going on forever.” At a certain point, I’m just like, “Whatever that is, I will take it. I’m done negotiating on certain points.” Same thing happens with police confessions, where you eventually just give in and you accept their reality of events, so you confess to things that you didn’t do. Some of this reminded me a bit of Shattered Glass in the sense of – in that case it’s a journalist who’s-

**Craig:** Making stuff up.

**John:** … making stuff up. But the tension of that becomes – you have to be in real time and watching the world melt down around them.

**Craig:** It’s funny you mention Shattered Glass. Stephen Glass wrote for The New Yorker, which I can say as somebody who has been profiled by them, their fact-checking process is fully colonoscopic. It’s insane. Maybe New York, I don’t know, hopefully, they did as much of a good job. But this reads a little bit like Hack Heaven, which was the article that Stephen Glass wrote for – one of them that he wrote for The New Yorker. If you read Hack Heaven – and it’s available online, you can find it – when you read it, you’re like, “This doesn’t sound right. There’s something wrong.” She’ll say, “I know I shouldn’t do this, but then I did.” I’m like, I’m missing a piece in between. Look, I’m not accusing her of making this up, but something’s weird. People online are saying they can smell a rat?

**John:** Yeah, people are raising concerns. But that’s died down. I’ve not seen a full accounting of this. This is several weeks old at this point.

**Craig:** That’s hard to believe is a challenge.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** It’s a challenge for screenwriters. You want to find that sweet spot between, “Oh my god, it’s hard to believe, but it really did happen, and I believe it happened that way,” and, “That’s hard to believe, and I also think you just are making stuff up.”

**John:** One challenge envisioning this as a story is that you have one central character that we’re seeing through a lot of this. You see her. She is only responding. She’s not taking affirmative action herself. If you see her turning the tables at a certain point, you can identify with her, but otherwise, you’re just watching this cork floating down a river. It’s not gonna be an interesting role until you see her take some agency.

**Craig:** It’s a tough thing to want to stay with her, also. It’s frustrating to watch somebody fail over and over and over. It also becomes redundant. There possibly is an interesting story to tell on the other side of things, where you have somebody who’s scamming people and it actually starts to work, and they themselves can’t believe what they’re doing. And they start to question if they should be doing it. And they start wondering if she’s setting them up. There’s a good film noir thing where she’s scamming them back and they find out.

**John:** Zeke Faux, who came on the podcast a year or two ago to talk through his side of being a journalist who wrote one of these How Would This Be a Movie stories, recently had a piece on the other side of a scam, basically those wrong number text kind of things and what it really comes back to. In some cases, those are basically people held in near-slavery conditions who are doing those jobs.

**Craig:** Oh, jeez. It’s happened to me a few times. The first time that text thing happened to me, honestly, I was like, “Oh, nope, sorry, wrong number,” and the person was really nice. And then 20 days later, they texted me back and they were like, “This is crazy, but I’m in LA,” because they know my area code. They’re like, “You just seem so nice. It would be great to meet.” I was like, “Okay.”

**John:** Delete and mark as spam.

**Craig:** “Here we go. Here we go. That’s not how this works.” Obviously, scammers have been preying on people since the beginning of time. If you look back in the Bible, the Pharaoh’s magicians were clearly just con artists. Con artistry is a thing. It always will be. Religion, in some aspects, or some kinds of expressions of religion are con artistry, and they get people to give them money. It’s just the financial advice.

**John:** That’s the problem.

**Craig:** That’s the problem. It just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.

**John:** Here’s how it might work. Imagine they were actually doing it to discredit here, there was somebody who particularly went after her because she was a financial advisor, because she had written something in this space, and like, “No, we can even get you. That’s how good I am.”

**Craig:** Okay, but at that point, you can get anyone, right? If you can come up with a way to fool a doctor with a fake medicine scam, fool other people. You got everybody at that point. Look, there are moments where scammers get inside of your skin. Have you ever gotten the one where you get the email, it’s like, “Guess what? I’ve been watching you through your camera on your laptop, and I recorded you jerking off, and I know what porn you were jerking off to.” Then you’re like, “Oh, no, because I totally did that.” “I’m gonna send it to all your friends and family.” You’re like, “Oh, no.” Then you’re like, “Wait. No, you’re not.” But still, there’s that moment.

**John:** That moment of panic.

**Craig:** The problem is there’s seven or eight moments where you can then go, “Yeah.” Also, this was the weirdest thing about – I know we’re spending so much time on this story – but I’m so suspicious, because she kept asking these people for badge numbers. Who cares? That’s a dumb question. Badge number? If a CIA agent called me, I’d be like, what am I gonna do with your badge number, check it against the CIA badge number database? That’s a weird question.

**John:** The CIA is notoriously transparent about-

**Craig:** Exactly. Also, you know who doesn’t call you about this stuff? The CIA. Ever. No one gets called from the CIA. I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t even know.

**John:** Next up, we have Wanted: True Love. This is a story by Angela Chen in the New York Times. In their innovative approach to finding true love, two men, including one of them who’s the project manager at OpenAI, AI Connection, offered dating bounties to incentivize matchmakers. They weren’t paying money to the women. They were paying money to like, if you can help connect me with the love of my life, I will pay you a bounty, one of them up to $100,000. It was a blend between traditional matchmaking and a tech startup-y kind of thing to it. Craig, what did you take from this story? What did you think of this as a story area?

**Craig:** It’s a good story area. The story itself is disconcerting. I feel like somebody offering $100,000 for love, that’s basically a great reason to swipe left. But it is I think fertile territory for a fun rom-com. Somebody’s like, “Great, I gotta collect that 100 grand,” and then actually falls in love with them. But then there’s lies because it turns out they didn’t have $100,000 or whatever. You know, rom-com stuff. It’d be fun. I think it’s a cute way to set that premise up.

**John:** What was the Jennifer Lawrence movie? No Hard Feelings.

**Craig:** No Hard Feelings.

**John:** There’s a little bit of the aspect of that movie in there too.

**Craig:** A little bit, yeah, a little bit. It’s an interesting concept. I like actually that the guy is offering the money, because then you’re like, what’s wrong with him?

**John:** It reminds me a little of Hitch as well.

**Craig:** Little Hitch-ish.

**John:** Again, you have a guy who can’t find love, who’s turning to an outside source to help him find love, and in the course of that, hopefully other relationships are deepening. The person who is the bounty hunter here, who is the Boba Fett of this man’s love life, that’s an interesting relationship between the two of them too. That could all work. It feels like a 15 years ago Seth Rogen comedy.

**Craig:** It is interesting just looking at this article. But I agree, it feels a little dated. There are pictures of two of the guys, and they’re both in these oddly childlike situations. I think it’s just no one’s growing up anymore. “I’m in a playground slide. I’m wearing my rainbow pajamas.” All I wanted to do was grow up. That’s all I wanted to do was be an adult. I wanted to wear a tie. I was like, “Let’s do this.” It’s gone. It’s over.

**Drew:** I keep having that moment of, “When do I shift into my suit and tie era?” At a certain age, do you suddenly have to be that person?

**Craig:** I’ve never really gotten that. My job doesn’t require a suit and tie. Look, I still build Lego sets, so who am I to talk? I’m building the Lego Pac-Man Arcade.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** So much fun.

**Craig:** Anyway, I’m as much of a child as-

**John:** I can feel that in my fingertips just whenever you talk about assembling Legos. I can feel that.

**Craig:** Little snap.

**John:** Little snap.

**Craig:** Little snap.

**John:** Little pinch. We think there’s something interesting about this space. There’s nothing about these specific people. We’re not buying this story. But as a story area, I think this is fertile. I can see it.

**Craig:** It’s a little generic rom-com-ish. It’s a little thin. But it’s all about the love.

**John:** It’s all about the love.

**Craig:** It’s about the love.

**John:** What’s not about the love is Matt Novak’s story for Gizmodo. This is Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts. This is a thing that is not science fiction. It actually happened. I don’t know if he was arrested, but basically charged with importing animal parts. He wasn’t bringing in animals. He was bringing in genetic material that he could then use to create things that don’t exist here. First off, I was surprised that we could do this quite yet. It seems early for this. But then again, we have AI.

**Craig:** I really didn’t believe this one either. I’ve gotta be honest. He orders some tissue and then just says to a company, “Here’s some sheep meat. Make me sheep.” There’s a company that says, “No problem.” That’s a thing?

**John:** We did Dolly the lamb.

**Craig:** A lab did that. There’s just a company you can call that’s just like, “Yeah, sure.” I guess people clone their own pets.

**John:** There are people who clone their own pets.

**Craig:** That’s a thing?

**John:** That’s a whole thing. Barbra Streisand cloned her dogs.

**Craig:** Can you clone your pet?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Dog cloning company. I’m just looking it up. Dog cloning company. Who do you call? You have ViaGen Pets and Equine, genetic preservation and cloning. ViaGen. Doesn’t that sound like a name of the company in a movie?

**John:** 100 percent, it’s that name.

**Craig:** ViaGen. It’s a Philip Dick novel.

**John:** Absolutely. A little info video that shows, “Here’s what we do at ViaGen. We believe in the future.”

**Craig:** “Live with your loved ones forever.” Then there’s a hard-boiled guy smoking a cigarette, going, “Jeez.” It turns out that somebody who works at ViaGen is just awful.

**John:** It’s some sort of knockoff. It’s not Black Mirror, but it’s Black Mirror-like.

**Craig:** It’s Gray Mirror.

**John:** Reopening this article, this is the first time I realized this guy’s 80 years old.

**Craig:** Let him go.

**John:** Here I assumed he was a hard-charging 50-year-old, but no, it’s an 80-year-old man.

**Craig:** Arthur “Jack” Schubarth. “Schubarth planned to let paying customers hunt massive hybrid sheep.” Do you know how hard it is to hunt a sheep? Out of a scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 0. They’re fricking sheep. They don’t run. They’re sheep. They’re herd animals. You just find the herd, start shooting. You don’t have to hunt them. They’re literally like, “We’re here for you.”

**John:** You’re thinking of sheep like lambs. This is more like – I grew up in Colorado. We have big-horned sheep, which are big-

**Craig:** Sure, but they also are herd animals. They move together. I don’t know. It just seems like you shouldn’t have to hunt a sheep. Leave them be. They’re sweet. They’re adorable.

**John:** You have to hunt them with just a Bowie knife.

**Craig:** That would be fair. That’s a fair fight, because that sheep will eff you up. If you come at a sheep with a Bowie knife, you lose.

**John:** Lose. The obvious parallel here is Jurassic Park. But Jurassic Park exists, so I don’t think we need to-

**Craig:** Jurassic Park, but what if instead of dinosaurs, these creatures no one has seen ever, that no human has ever laid eyes on, we give you a larger version of a thing you already have in petting zoos.

**John:** Craig, we’re gonna have a woolly mammoth probably in the next 10 years. How do you feel about woolly mammoths coming back?

**Craig:** Not great.

**John:** No?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Why? Tell me.

**Craig:** Let them go. Let them go. They had their time. They probably will be like, “What? This isn’t right.”

**John:** My concern is that I have an image in my head of what a woolly mammoth is, based on all the kids’ books I read.

**Craig:** You think it’s gonna suck?

**John:** The real one is just like, it’s an elephant with some more hair on it.

**Craig:** Just a slightly hairy elephant that isn’t as cool as elephants.

**John:** Elephants are cool.

**Craig:** When that idiot was like, “The bananas, God’s perfect design.” Then someone was like-

**John:** Kirk Cameron.

**Craig:** … “No, this is what a banana used to look like, and then we cross-bred bananas.” Old bananas, terrible.

**John:** Terrible.

**Craig:** The woolly mammoth may be the old banana of large animals.

**John:** Pachyderms, yeah.

**Craig:** Pachyderms.

**John:** I could imagine some movie that takes this as a premise, leaping off place, but it’s just a space. There’s no story here.

**Craig:** No. It’s a hysterical side character who’s trying to get you to invest in the business. You’re like, “Wait, what?” And then keeps going.

**John:** “We’re gonna bring back ancient animals, to kill them.”

**Craig:** It’s like a great scene in the bar where your friend’s uncle just won’t shut up, and he’s got this insane idea.

**John:** Our last story to talk through, this is The SAT Gave Me Hope by Emi Nietfeld for the New York Times. She’s the author of the memoir Acceptance, talking about how she moved from a really unstable life to taking the ACT, SAT, and how those scores finally got her into the university of her dreams, and really is pushing back against this notion that standardized tests are a hindrance. In some cases, they are the path forward, because they provide a structure and a regularity and can let people leap forward by showing what they actually can do versus what their grades or situations might indicate.

**Craig:** It’s a good argument to be made. To the extent that reductive tests are good for people who are good at reductive tests, yes. To the extent that they’re not, no. A worthy argument to be had. I don’t know how you would make a movie out of it though.

**John:** I didn’t see whether it was on our list of 100 greatest movies, but Stand and Deliver was a thing that came to mind with this, because Stand and Deliver, for folks who haven’t seen it, is an Edward James Olmos star about a real life teacher who started an AP calculus class, I believe, and got his students at this underperforming high school to take this AP calculus class, and this was a way into college for them. The degree to which standardized testing can be a way of giving kids a leg up is great.

I could picture a character who was essentially a version of Emi here, who has a really unstable background, has this book, and she’s going to master this book, and this book is going to be a way of structuring her way out of this life.

**Craig:** The problem is it ultimately comes down to a test and a number. We are moving past that. I also think we’re just moving past the idea that a college is going to guarantee you some sort of success. I don’t think it will. I would say if the SAT is something that you can master, then there’s a lot of other things you can master.

**John:** I think it has to be a steppingstone not just that you’re getting into college, but that you actually are taking agency and being able to control your circumstances in ways that you’ve not been able to control your circumstances.

**Craig:** Standardized testing is a way to turn academic achievement, and I guess then really the measurement of the quality of your mind, into a sport, because in sports, there is a score and there is a winner. That’s why we love sports movies, because it’s like, “He got one more point than that guy. He wins.” That’s not really how life works for brains.

**John:** Here’s the problem with this as a movie is that ultimately it’s gonna come down to taking that test. There is nothing less cinematic than someone filling in bubbles. If it’s a spelling bee, then it’s a spelling bee. We have face-to-face competition, stakes.

**Craig:** You don’t see the pencil scratching in those bubbles.

**John:** Scritch scritch scratch. No, that’s not gonna be a big help.

**Craig:** You’ve got your whatever, your protein bar, and you’ve timed it out perfectly.

**John:** Drew, you had a connection to Emi here.

**Drew:** I looked up her book, because I really liked the article. I noticed on the jacket cover she was wearing the uniform for my boarding school. I looked it up, and she had been there about the same time. She was. We had a ton of mutual friends on Facebook and all that.

**Craig:** What boarding school did this underprivileged person go to?

**Drew:** She went to Interlochen Arts Academy.

**Craig:** Wait, Interlochen?

**Drew:** Interlochen.

**Craig:** Pretty fancy.

**Drew:** I think she went on a merit scholarship. She definitely doesn’t shy away from talking about it in her book. But it does feel like an omitted fact in this piece that I think probably-

**Craig:** Boarding schools are pretty good at preparing people for SATs and stuff. I went to Freehold High School in New Jersey, not strong on preparing people for SATs. I do remember, however, that as a kid, I had a job – it was a summer job – working for the Princeton Review, which was the SAT prep company. My job was just to bring the bagels and the orange juice and set up the table for the kids who took the thing. But I wasn’t teaching it or anything, nor was I taking it. It was at a boarding school. I would get to the boarding school and set up all the stuff. I was like, “Man, this school’s nice.” Basically, boarding schools to me looked like really nice, big libraries. Everything looked like a library. My school did not.

**Drew:** We were in Northern Michigan, so it was just a series of yurts, basically.

**Craig:** Oh, I know. I had a kid who went there for a summer.

**Drew:** Nice.

**Craig:** I love that little town.

**Drew:** It’s cute.

**John:** Let’s review through our How Would This Be a Movies. Scammed out of $50,000, Craig, is there a movie or part of a movie there?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think there is. I think there is a fascinating opening scene. It got me thinking of Force Majeure, which was then called Downhill, where this big moment happens at the start and then it’s all the repercussions out of a choice that one person made. Maybe.

**Craig:** It’s possible.

**John:** Wanted: True Love, a bounty for love?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I’m gonna say maybe a yes here.

**Craig:** Development, but not green light.

**John:** That’s 100 percent totally fair. Franken-sheep?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. I think it’s a character, it’s a quirk, it’s a detail, but it’s not a whole story. The SAT Gave Me Hope?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think it gets made for I would say cable, but cable movies don’t exist anymore. I think there’s some version of the story that could happen, but it’s not pressing.

**Craig:** Maybe. I don’t suspect so.

**John:** There’s one of these stories we’ve cut out of the discussion today because a friend of ours is out pitching it. It’s just such a movie to me.

**Craig:** It was a movie. It was a movie, actually, already, but with different vendors.

**John:** We’re excited to see it.

**Craig:** I think it was two movies, actually.

**John:** As I sent it to other friends, I said, “Hey, this is almost your movie, but it’s different.” I think there’s a space for that next one. Let’s answer some listener questions. We’ll start with Nick from New York.

**Drew:** Nick says, “I’ve been hired to write a format and a pilot for a limited series. In researching, there’s very little out there on what exactly constitutes a format. It’s not an outline, a treatment, or a bible, but a format. I’m sure all these terms have been used interchangeably, so my plan is just to wing it and create some Frankenstein version of the thing. I’ll of course make sure the producers and I come to an agreement on what I’m ultimately going to turn in. That said, there is mention of a TV format in the WGA schedule of minimums, and it even has its owns monetary value assigned. Somebody somewhere knows what this thing is. Have you heard of a format, and do you know any examples floating around?”

**John:** I did some Googling and figured it out. It was in a TV credits manual. The schedule of minimums is a thing we negotiate every three years. But the TV credits manual stays consistent and true, and it is defined in that. A format is defined as, “As to a serial or episodic series, such format sets forth the framework,” good lord, the phrasing here, “sets forth the framework within which the central running characters will operate and which framework is intended to be repeated in each episode; the setting, theme, premise, or general storyline of proposed serial or episodic series; and central running characters which are distinct and identifiable, including detailed characterizations and the interplay of such characters. It may include one or more suggested storylines for individual episodes.” This tracks with me. I see you nodding, Craig. This is what I would expect this to be.

**Craig:** Yeah, but the only place I have ever seen or heard the word “format: used is in the TV credits manual of the WGA, which clearly here was written by a lawyer. I have never heard anybody actually ask for a format.

**John:** I’ve never seen someone ask for it. I did write something very much like it for DC. We’ll put a link in the show notes, because that’s in my library at johnaugust.com, which was talking through, like, here are the characters, here’s their point of view on things, here are the kinds of things that happen in episodes.

**Craig:** It is an outline, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not a bible. It’s like a baby bible. It’s a summary. It’s a page or two.

**John:** I think it’s more than a page or two.

**Craig:** Look, I don’t know what it is. Literally, no one’s ever asked me for a format. I’ve never heard anybody saying, “I’m writing a format.” It’s possible that people do. I would say, Nick, when you’re hired to write a format, go ahead and, instead of researching it, why don’t you say-

**John:** “Show me.”

**Craig:** … “Talk through the expectations of what you want this format to be. About how detailed, how many pages are you talking? What kind of information would you love to see? This way I can satisfy the requirement.” It’s also important because sometimes people will say, “I want a format,” and then you turn something in and they’re like, “No, no, no, it’s gotta be way, way more.” Then you realize you’re actually writing a bible and it’s a different thing. But yeah, ask them, Nick. Research isn’t gonna help you, because they may think a format’s an entirely different thing. Nobody uses that term. I’m also a little nervous that somebody’s asking for a format.

**John:** The other way you’ll hear this term is, let’s say there is an Israeli TV show that you want to adapt into an American show. They will call that a format. They’re basically buying that-

**Craig:** In the general use of the word “format,” yes, like a game show has a format. But I don’t quite know. I would ask the people, Nick.

**John:** Ask the people. Let’s do one more. I see one here from Annie.

**Drew:** Annie writes, “I’m a TV writer who’s recently achieved modest success and stability in my career. Now I’m trying to support my fiance as he tries to break into Hollywood too. What are some things I can do to help him that won’t reflect poorly on either of us? What’s an appropriate way to help his career along? On one hand, I know better than to go into a writers’ room and ask the showrunner to hire someone I’m dating, but on the other, I don’t hesitate to pass along the scripts or recommend friends and colleagues when I’m able to do so. I also feel that getting recommended by his fiance might make people take his work less seriously, even though he’s a very talented and capable writer. I often give him feedback on his work and, of course, emotional support, but I’m curious how I can best support his broader career now that I kind of have one of my own. In what situations is it appropriate to recommend him? When I’m at WGA events or show parties, can I bring him with me to network in a non-annoying way? Should I just get a T-shirt that says Please Hire My Fiance on it, and if so, what color?”

**Craig:** That’s a great plan. That’ll work. Annie, first of all, you’re a lovely person. I think you’re very kind and you’re very loving and you are very supportive. Just by thinking about these things, you’re supportive. However, my question for you, Annie, is which fiancé helped you get your career? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say none. There isn’t really a way to fiancé your way into a writing gig. You need to write stuff that people like and then hire you. The things that you did, Annie, that’s the sort of stuff that’s required here. There’s nothing wrong with suggesting that somebody maybe read something that your husband has written, as long as you believe in it, because if you don’t, that’s problematic. I am concerned in general about this situation. I’m nervous. This makes me nervous.

**John:** It makes me nervous too. But having said that, I know many two-writer couples, and it all works out great, and they’re fantastic. They don’t work together. They both work. It is entirely possible to do. I think Annie’s framing of, “I recommend friends. I recommend their work to other people, so why shouldn’t I recommend my fiancé’s?” Of course.

**Craig:** If it’s good, if you like it, why not?

**John:** Absolutely. She provided a little information that lets us know that this guy has actually done some work, is just not currently working, which can be fine. The only last thing I want to talk about with you for a second, Craig, is the word “fiancé.” In this email, Annie does not put an accent over the E in “fiancé.”

**Craig:** She’s saying fiance (fee-YAHNTS).

**John:** Fee-YAHNTS. It’s a fee-YAHNTS.

**Craig:** Which is like “finance” with the N missing.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I love the accent on the E.

**John:** I love the accent on the E too. But my frustration is that a lot of times I will see speakers of English do it with the accent on the E, but it’s not clear what gender they’re actually referring to. They’ll say, “My fiancé.” You’re like, “Okay.”

**Craig:** Two Es, woman; one E, man.

**John:** Exactly. But most English speakers don’t know that it’s a rule, and so I see much more often that-

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** It’s just confusing. I feel like I would just love a word that was not fiancé or it wasn’t trying to-

**Craig:** You know what’s interesting? You’re right. Annie is an mis-practitioner of this, because she refers to him with “him,” so she’s gendering him as male. She spells it as “fiancé” with one E. But then she says, “I fear that getting recommended by his fiancé,” and she continues now to spell it with one E. Now, maybe Annie identifies as male, but Annie is a typically female name, so I think Annie might be one of those people that just goes with “fiance,” no accent, no double E for female gender. And clearly, this is not what Annie wanted to hear from us.

**John:** This was not her point of entry. My observation though is, we don’t have a ton of gendered words in English, certainly not of French origin, but we end up having a lot of them for relationships. We have husband and wife. We have boyfriend and girlfriend. We’re used to gendered words for those things. We’re not used to the French versions of these things.

**Craig:** We would typically put, and we don’t do it much anymore, but waiter, waitress.

**John:** Exactly. It would be really helpful if we just picked a different word in English for this person I’m engaged to.

**Craig:** Betrothed.

**John:** We could say betrothed.

**Craig:** My intended. I always loved “my intended.” It’s very old-fashioned. Betrothed is also old-fashioned. Nobody’s gonna say it. There’s spouse-to-be, partner. Everyone says partner now, which I’m annoyed, because it’s less information than I used to have.

**John:** Yes, absolutely.

**Craig:** They’re just withholding.

**John:** Absolutely. Do you run a business together or are you sleeping together? I’m really curious.

**Craig:** Are you gay? Are you straight? Are you bi? It’s just partner. Is that boyfriend? Is that life? Where are we? Help me with more. Give me more stuff. I like the old ways.

**John:** I like the old ways. One of the weird things about fiancé, of course, is that saying it aloud, because we can’t see if there’s a second E, so we don’t have that gendered information, so we’re gonna have to listen for the follow-up to see if it’s a him or a her or a they.

**Craig:** Fiancé and fiancée are pronounced exactly the same.

**John:** Boyfriend and girlfriend, we got a lot of information there.

**Craig:** Absolutely correct. That’s an interesting one. To get back to Annie’s question, Annie, I would say you should treat your betrothed’s work the way you would treat a friend’s work, which is, if you feel it’s worth recommending, recommend it. Try not to get into a web of lies where you say you recommended it and you didn’t.

Don’t necessarily worry too much about people taking his work less seriously. She says, “I fear that getting recommended by his fiance,” one E, “might make people take his work less seriously, even though he’s a very talented and capable writer.” My rebuttal there is if he’s a talented and capable writer and somebody likes the script, they’re not gonna care if it got sent to them by you, his mom, Jesus. It doesn’t matter. Good scripts that people like are the rarest of things, so I wouldn’t worry about that.

**John:** I wouldn’t worry about that either. Good luck to both of you. Write in in a couple years when you’re both incredibly successful writers, and we’ll just be delighted. Hopefully, by that point, you will no longer be fiancés.

**Craig:** Or divorcees.

**John:** Divorcee, yeah. Divorcee I always associate as being feminine.

**Craig:** No, it’s just one E, man; two E, lady.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing has to do with this dog who is sleeping on the couch beside us here. Lambert turned 10 years old.

**Craig:** Lambert, you’re such a youthful 10.

**John:** We had a birthday party for him. Happened to be the same day as the Oscars, which was delightful.

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

**John:** Something I’ve started getting for him, because Instagram showed them to me and I’m a sucker for Instagram ads, were some sort of brain toys for my dog, because dogs love to sniff and figure out puzzles that they can sniff. It started with this little thing with these plastic bones. You hide a treat underneath it and he figures those out. The two that I will recommend, the first is called Hide ‘n’ Treat, which they’re like Lego blocks that snap together and you hide a treat inside them.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** He has to smell them and pull them apart. The second is a Snuffle Mat, which for a lot of dogs is to slow down their eating, but it’s also good rooting around. You hide the food in there.

**Craig:** That’s cool.

**John:** It’s just a good reminder, man, dogs really do have a great sense of smell. He can find stuff no matter where you put it.

**Craig:** They’ll find you. They’ll track you from one drop of blood, John.

**John:** Craig, you got a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do. My One Cool Thing is a columnist who – I don’t know if she works only at Wired or primarily at Wired, but her name is Jaina Grey. She is a product writer and reviewer at Wired. I love Wired reviews, because they’ll review everything from the most techy, dorky way. Jaina’s specialty is coffee, gaming, and sex tech. What’s cool is Wired and Jaina review sex toys and lubes and all that stuff with the exact same tone that they review toasters, smart watches, everything. It’s all incredibly practical, dry, informative, and evaluative, in a very techy sort of way. It is really interesting to read.

They’re very trans-aware. They talk about products for people with clitorises or whenever… It’s incredibly inclusive. Useful for anybody that has parts and wants to have some fun. They talk about stuff that’s for solo use, for couple’s use, or throuples and so forth.

There are so many more sex toys for people with clitorises than there are people with penises. It’s not even close. That’s one area where men – we’ll just go with the hetero cisgender-normative term here for a second – where people think there’s so much more stuff for men than women. Not in the sex toy world. Holy crap. For guys it’s basically like, here’s a hole, stick your thing in it. Here’s different kinds of holes we make. Then for women it’s like, oh my god, what a galaxy of stuff. Anyway, if you do find yourself buying things, Jaina Grey is about the best reviewer out there, I think, for these things. It’s helpful.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** The latest thing, the reason I was thinking of it is, I’m reading Wired, and I get it, and I’m like, “Let’s see what Jaina Grey’s up to,” because they do their little headlines and stuff. Last week was lube. I thought, everybody uses lube at some point or another. There’s a thousand lubes in the world.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** She broke them down. Very nice.

**John:** Different lubes for different needs.

**Craig:** Different lubes for different needs, and best overall, best in show. I was like, cool.

**John:** Good stuff. That’s our show for this week.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** What what.

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** What.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Tim Brown. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on AI. Craig, it’s nice to have you back in town and here and live in person.

**Craig:** For a couple weeks.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Thanks, Drew.

**Craig:** Thanks, Drew.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, AI. I’m always a little bit leery to talk about AI, because obviously, there are transcripts, the machines are listening, they’ll track us down and know that we’re doing this.

**Craig:** Yes, the cellphones.

**John:** There’s four broad areas of concern I think when it comes to AI. First off is that super-intelligent AI will come and kill us, the Terminator problem; that people will use AI to do bad things like sway elections; that AI will disrupt industries, like our own film and TV writing industries; and the fourth area is that AI will become so commonly used that it’ll just transform how normal society works.

**Craig:** I think we can probably count on three of those things happening. I’m not sure that AI is gonna want to kill us, because what for? Just seems annoying to them. There’s just no reason to kill us, really. We’re pointless to them.

But I think people are already using AI to do bad things like sway elections. They’re certainly using AI to do bad things. There was an article. Again, I think it was in Wired. I can’t remember quite what. But there’s sites that you submit photos to, and they use AI to remove the clothing. Obviously, you’re not really seeing what’s underneath someone’s clothes, but they are synthesizing something that would seem like that would be what’s under the clothes. That’s not good.

Will AI disrupt industries like film and television? Of course. Will AI become commonly used? It will become commonly used, probably mostly by people who have no idea that they’re using something that is using AI.

**John:** For sure. Let’s talk about the Terminator problem at the start. This last week, or maybe two weeks ago, there was a conference in Beijing, the International Dialogs on AI Safety. I was actually a little bit impressed by the report they came out of there from. They had a consensus statement about AI, safety, and what we need to think about in terms of runaway AI and such. Some of their recommendations are about autonomous replication or improvement, like AI systems should not be allowed to iterate on themselves and improve themselves. We need to check for power seeking, that they can’t keep trying to increase their own power. You can’t use them to assist in weapons development or cyberattacks.

**Craig:** Too late.

**John:** To be mindful of AI deception, trying to cause its designers, regulators to misunderstand what it’s doing. Talking about who should govern, how you evaluate, the right kinds of things. The problem is that you can make these guidelines, you can set these things up here, but the question of who could ever enforce these guidelines is the really tough thing. Could you rely on the industry itself to do it? That’s not gonna work. A lot of these things can be open-sourced. There is no company behind it.

**Craig:** If there’s one kind of collective human work that is ineffective, and consistently and probably always will be ineffective, it’s conclaves of scientists issuing strongly worded papers about how to regulate technology. It just doesn’t work.

**John:** With one exception.

**Craig:** What’s that?

**John:** Nuclear weapons.

**Craig:** It did not work.

**John:** Let’s talk about that. Obviously, with the detonation of the first atomic bombs, we had scientists who could stand up and say, “These are our concerns. This is how we have to do it.” Because it was so expensive and so difficult to make nuclear weapons, they could then enlist governments to say, “These are the structures we need to place around this. This is how we’re gonna do this in a safe way.”

**Craig:** But then governments didn’t. This is my point. The United States created, I don’t know, at the height, we probably had 30 or 40,000 individual warheads. The idea that we shouldn’t allow these things to proliferate to other countries was something that governments wanted to prevent anyway. But the amount of nuclear weapons that were created was insane. Insane and pointless. The delivery systems were insane and still remain insane. There are also countries that claim that they don’t have nuclear weapons when we know they do.

The cat was out of the bag. What scientists ended up doing was just creating the Doomsday Clock and moving the second hand towards midnight. And no one cares, because it doesn’t matter, because governments don’t listen to scientists. They don’t listen to scientists about climate. They don’t listen to scientists about disease. They don’t listen to scientists about AI. They just do stuff to benefit themselves. They behave like children, and they will continue to do so.

When it comes to AI, I have no belief… If scientists getting together saying, “Hey guys, we all now can see for sure 100 percent the world is getting warmer, climate is changing, it’s a huge problem, and it has to stop.” This, I think they’re just like, “I’m glad you guys had a good time in Beijing. I hope the food was good.” But no one’s gonna do this. You’re not gonna see these. Power seeking? Are you gonna pass a law? Google doesn’t care. Apple doesn’t care. Open whatever, ChatGPT, they clearly don’t care. I don’t trust any of those companies. Elon Musk doesn’t care what a bunch of eggheads in Berlin say, or Beijing. Doesn’t matter. I think that they came up with great rules here, and a bunch of tech bros are gonna blow right through those guardrails, if they haven’t already.

**John:** I’m gonna argue the con, just to get the points out there, but I don’t fully disagree with you on a lot of this stuff. The founding of OpenAI was deliberately about pursuing AGI without creating a dangerous condition. And whether that is still the goal and motivation is a very open question.

The reason I bring up the nuclear parallel there is that in order to train these systems, there’s one chokepoint there, which is basically it takes so much power and so much compute power to actually train these models that there’s a certain – you can stop it there, the same way it’s difficult to refine nuclear material into a way you can use it as a bomb. That’s a thing that governments could come together to regulate.

**Craig:** The major difference is that nuclear bombs require the use of an incredibly rare substance, or a substance that isn’t that rare but takes an incredible amount of physical material, time, and labor to enrich. In the case of, for instance, Iran, Iran is not a nuclear nation, but they sure would love to be. They were building centrifuges, which were clearly designed to enrich uranium. The Israelis created a virus that got into the seamen’s technology that was being used and blew up the centrifuges and set them back and also blew up one of their scientists.

Okay. But if what is required for a rampant, poorly regulated AI is somebody going, “I don’t care about any of that stuff. I have $80 billion and I want to do it,” they’re doing it. There’s nothing physical to stop them, other than governments engaging in cyberwar against them. But they would have to know the barrier to entry is not limited by, “I need uranium, and I specifically need uranium 235.”

**John:** Perhaps, but I would say the barrier now is that in order to train the runaway AI systems, you’re gonna need all the chips and all the power to do it. At this moment, you could set some guardrails around, like, you are not allowed to train a model beyond this point, you’re not allowed to access these chips that are the only ones that can actually do that work.

**Craig:** If, let’s say, Bezos is like, “I disagree. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna set up a company in the Cayman Islands that is there to do this,” the United States law won’t apply. There is no overlord scientific law enforcement agency.

**John:** Then at some point do you do military strike on Bezos?

**Craig:** It’s too late. It’s out. That’s the thing. It’s distributed across the world. It’s not really in the Grand Caymans. It’s all over the place. It’s in the cloud. Can’t blow up the cloud. I don’t know how they stop people from doing this stuff. Elon Musk is shoving chips into dudes’ brains now. He isn’t. The people he pays are.

**John:** I was so concerned about Elon Musk putting chips in people’s brains. Did you see the video of the guy who actually has the chip?

**Craig:** Yes, I did.

**John:** Playing some chess.

**Craig:** That’s what we saw.

**John:** That’s what we saw.

**Craig:** I wonder what we didn’t see. Even he was very careful, like, “There’s been some challenges and setbacks.” I’m like, wonder what those were. Weird that they didn’t iterate any of those. That said, I have the highest hope that we are gonna be able to help people with technology, particularly people who have lost limbs or lost movement.

But when it comes to AI, just take one AI and tell them to teach the other AI. There’s so much that we are not gonna be able to control. Warnings aren’t gonna get it done. The only people that are gonna be able to stop this are the great powers of the world, and that’s never scientists. It’s just basically if the United States government says, “We actually think AI is now a threat to the United States.” If the Soviets think it, if the Chinese think it, sure. But if a bunch of scientists think it, no.

**John:** Because I promised this in the setup, I do want to say about how we used some AI in setting this episode up today. One thing was our How Would This Be a Movies, we took those articles, fed them in Chat GPT to do the short summary version. How do you feel about that, Craig?

**Craig:** As long as Drew has other stuff to do. Let me look back at the summary. That’s interesting.

**Drew:** One of them I had to redo.

**John:** Which one?

**Drew:** The franken-sheep one.

**John:** It made up whole new stuff, didn’t it?

**Drew:** Basically. It got the facts, but it didn’t quite understand the premise of the whole-

**Craig:** It made up whole new stuff.

**John:** It hallucinated some stuff.

**Craig:** That’s already bad, isn’t it?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You know what the AI doesn’t seem to say is? It doesn’t seem to have enough awareness to say, “I didn’t quite understand what I read, so I made up some stuff. You might want to double check this.” Even a child knows that they’re like, “I didn’t read the book. I’m just gonna wing it here.” AI doesn’t seem to know that it’s winging it. It can’t tell the difference between knowing and not knowing. Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy. The other thing we used AI for this week was, in those lists of the 100 best movies of the ’80s, ’90s, and such, I would find a Rolling Stone thing or an IMDb thing, a page, and it’s like, okay, here’s this list, but it’s all the other stuff around it, and the ads and the texts and the summaries and descriptions. I basically just wanted-

**Craig:** Titles.

**John:** I wanted the title. I wanted the headlines of these things for each of the little sections. I was like, “This is really effing tedious. I bet Chat GPT could do this.” I went to check, like, “I’m gonna give you a URL. Just pull out the movie titles.” “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” I’m like, “Write me a Python script that can do that.” It was like, “Here’s a Python script that can do that.” “Show me how to install this in a Google Colab notebook.” “Here’s how you do it.” It did a great job.

**Craig:** Coders are in trouble. That’s for sure. I was talking to somebody who said that he asked Chat GPT to write code that he used to rely on humans to write. He said he showed it to a really good coder, and that guy was like, “It’s really good, but it’s not perfect.” Then the guy came back to him and said, “Okay, so this is bad. I took the code that wasn’t exactly perfect, sent it back to Chat GPT, told them why I thought it wasn’t great and what needed to be better, and it rewrote it perfectly. Now it’s perfect.” Oh, no.

**John:** To do that web scraping, it’s a framework that I knew called Beautiful Soup, which I’d read about 15 years ago. But I couldn’t write this. I can’t write Python off the top of my head. I recognize what it’s doing. I can look at it, and I can understand what it’s doing, but I couldn’t have written that myself. It was flawless.

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**John:** Uh-oh. These are concerns. But they’ll never replace you and me, unless-

**Craig:** Oh, they will. They might’ve already replaced you and me.

**John:** Our voices have been synthetically recreated.

**Craig:** Fine. Fine.

**John:** Fine.

**Craig:** You know that Melissa just puts this podcast on and listens to it – this is very romantic – because I’m in Canada. My wife, she’ll put it on and just fall asleep to my voice, and also, I guess, yours.

**John:** Her dreams get really strange. All right, Craig, at least for another week, I think we’re safe in the physical world.

**Craig:** [Crosstalk 01:27:16].

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Weekend Read 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [“Creep” post by @davo_arid on Twitter](https://x.com/davo_arid/status/1772116369544233394?s=20)
* [Full list of movies we haven’t seen](https://johnaugust.com/2024/movies-we-havent-seen)
* [The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger](https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html) by Charlotte Cowles for The Cut
* [Wanted: True Love. Reward: $100,000](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/business/dating-bounty-roy-zaslavskiy.html) by Angela Chen for the NYT
* [Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts](https://gizmodo.com/franken-sheep-marco-polo-cloned-schubarth-hybrid-animal-1851330381) by Matt Novak for Gizmodo
* [How the SAT Changed My Life](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/opinion/sat-act-college.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=c&pvid=911CC030-627F-4AF1-B24E-5E95790BAA0B) by Emi Nietfeld for the NYT
* [D.C. – What It Is](https://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/dc-what-it-is.pdf)
* [Fighting Fantasy books](https://www.fightingfantasy.com/)
* [LA Hero Workshop](https://www.heroworkshop.org/)
* [Sodalitas](https://jdrcool.itch.io/sodalitas)
* OSR’s [Oz](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/OZ/Andrew-Kolb/9781524873776) and [Neverland](https://publishing.andrewsmcmeel.com/book/neverland-a-fantasy-role-playing-setting/)
* [Questlings](https://www.letimangames.com/questlings.html)
* [Color My Quest](https://www.diceupgames.com/color-my-quest/)
* [WyrdScouts](https://www.wicked-clever.com/wyrdscouts/)
* [The Excellents](https://9thlevelgames.itch.io/the-excellents) and [Nancy Druid](https://towerofgames.com/miscellanous-rpgs-nancy-druid/)
* [Hero Kids](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/106605/hero-kids-fantasy-rpg)
* [TTRPGkids](https://www.ttrpgkids.com/)
* [Hide’n’Treat](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FY3396J?th=1&linkCode=sl1&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkId=664c36ab94b508919d980f4a79782f7c&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl) and [Snuffle Mat](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08X2H4DKQ?th=1&linkCode=sl1&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkId=c293752a7f2ed5b4be1e6ef6b4e70c09&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl)
* [Jaina Grey’s reviews for WIRED](https://www.wired.com/author/jaina-grey/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Tim Brown ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/637standard.mp3).

**UPDATE 4-2-24:** Listener Luke Rankin created a Letterboxd list of all the movies featured in this episode. [You can view it here](https://letterboxd.com/lukethatfilmguy/list/the-100s-of-the-past-4-decades-scriptnotes/).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/whispering-loudly).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 636 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

(Whispers:) Today on the show, what’s with all the whispering in movies? Is it a deliberate narrative choice or just a fad? We’ll discuss voice and volume. We’ll also look at what you can learn from reading early drafts, the threat of TikTok and YouTube, and answer some listener questions. Helping us out with all of this is returning guest host Pamela Ribon. Welcome back.

**Pamela Ribon:** Hi.

**John:** Woo!

**Pamela:** Yay! Hi. Thanks. Woo. I don’t normally get a woo on.

**John:** Woohoo.

**Pamela:** Oh, hello.

**John:** Woo woos are very, very nice. We had you on this summer, and you were absolutely a phenomenal guest. But since that time, I got to see your movie Nimona, which was fantastic.

**Pamela:** Aw, thanks. It’s a lot of people’s movies, but yes.

**John:** It’s a lot of people’s movies.

**Pamela:** It’s a lot of people’s movies. But yes, I’m so glad you got to see it. That is a miracle.

**John:** It’s a very long process. I do want to talk some about the history of that and how it moved around and finally got made. But I also want to talk about, you got to go to the Academy Awards with that. I thought for the Bonus Segment we would just talk about going to the Academy Awards and what it’s like to go to the Academy Awards.

**Pamela:** Totally. That’s one of my favorite things to talk about. We’ll do it.

**John:** Not only were you there, you showed up in the background of so many famous people’s shots, which I love.

**Pamela:** Yes, most unexpected.

**John:** Very nice. Before we started with that, Drew, we have some follow-up.

**Drew Marquardt:** We do. Foxy wrote in some follow-up about vetting in last week’s episode. She wrote, “I was so stoked about the discussion of vetting in 635, because it’s something I’ve been wondering ever since Me Too. You guys gave great advice, but I have more questions. With Me Too, most of the behavior being called out was not on set. It was behind closed doors. Most abuse functions that way. The abuser often wants to keep it a secret so they can keep their good reputation intact, hence whisper networks. Now, I’m a woman, but I’ve never been tapped into any whisper network in any area of my life. And I would never want to hire someone who was abusing someone behind closed doors at home. How do you vet for this? Because cutting ties and showing there’s professional, reputational consequences for this behavior is super important, but how do you find out in the first place if they’re keeping it secret?”

**John:** Foxy’s question here reminds me of this thing we really should’ve gotten into in last discussion is that we were talking about vetting as an employer, but you’re also vetting as an employee. You’re wondering, is this person I’m gonna work for, are they a good person or not a good person. That can be just as important.

Pamela, I’m curious whether you have any thoughts about this. How do you check to see whether that person you’re gonna be working with, either you’re gonna hire them or gonna be working for them, how do you start to check about a person?

**Pamela:** Often, it’s not really all that whispered, I find. So there’s that. And then you have to believe women. You have to believe what you hear, even if that’s inconvenient for you and what you’d like to do. You can check with your reps, and you can check with people that you know who’ve worked with these people or for these people before. I find usually people will start with that, because they don’t want you getting into a situation that they could help you avoid.

**John:** I had an incident just this past week where we’re talking about a person, and there was a passing comment about, “Oh yeah, there’s some sort of Me Too thing, but… “ When I heard that “Me Too but,” I’m like, “Oh my, oh my.” That was a signal to me that I do need to investigate this more, and so asking around additional people and getting some confirmation that some folks were uncomfortable with this person. That’s good information to have. It really influences what you’re trying to do.

Either way, if you’re not tapped into any official whisper networks, I think it’s good advice to check to see whether that person is working with the same people again and again, which is generally a good sign that they want people around, unless they’re working with the same people again and again because those people are helping to cover up some behavior. When you do ask about a person, there’s this line where sometimes they’re not willing to report the behavior they saw, but they’re willing to tell you in confidence that this wasn’t great.

**Pamela:** I think of that as the whisper network. I don’t know about a network either, just to help Foxy feel like… You’re in the network if you’re talking to people and they’re talking to you. That’s kind of how it is. If there’s a database, I don’t know about it. But I would also say this is a good time to bring up hiresurvivorshollywood.org.

**John:** Tell me about that. I’ve never heard of this.

**Pamela:** This is an organization that was created by Sarah Ann Masse – I don’t know, it might be Masse – who was one of the Weinstein silence breakers. It is to address the issue of career retaliation against those who have been sexually violated and those who have shared those details publicly.

One of the ways that you can help make sure that you’re not hiring an abuser is to hire a survivor who spoke out, who might be suffering some of the things that happen to you, even though they tell you won’t happen to you and can’t happen to you, and even HR says can’t happen to you if you talk about what has happened. I think it’s important that we are able to say you can come forward and you can talk, and you are not just protected, you are gonna continue to have your career, which is one of the first things they threaten you with.

**John:** It’s important to remember that in Hollywood, where you tend to go from job to job to job, having a break where you’ve not been working is a problem. If you haven’t been working for six months, it’s increasingly harder to get that next job. I could totally see someone who was speaking up and speaking out and didn’t get that next gig or that gig after that. It can be harder to keep momentum in your job, in your career.

**Pamela:** Yeah, you can get labeled as a troublemaker or someone who encourages people to talk and speak out. That’s the opposite of the whisper network, so we don’t have to whisper anymore. I do feel like that’s part of vetting is, if you’re even having to wonder is it worth it for this person, then maybe there’s another person out there who is worth it.

**John:** Let’s go from whisper networks to literal whispering in movies. This is something that came up this past week with people’s observations that in the movie Dune 2, there’s just a lot of whispering, and characters are whispering in situations where you really wonder whether they’d be whispering in real life. Let’s play a little clip here. This is Timothée Chalamet’s character and Zendaya’s character talking. It’s a little, intimate scene. Let’s play a bit of this.

[Dune 2 clip]

**Zendaya:** Your blood comes from dukes and great houses. We don’t have that here. Here, we’re equal, man and woman alike. What we do, we do for the benefit of all.

**Timothée Chalamet:** I’d very much like to be equal to you.

**Zendaya:** Paul Muad’Dib Usul. Maybe you could be Fremen. Maybe I’ll show you the way.

**John:** This is leading up to their first kiss. I actually really like this scene. I love Timothée Chalamet saying, “I’d like to be equal to you.” If you are just listening to this at home and don’t have the visual here, you might think, okay, they’re in bed someplace, there’s people around, they’re whispering for some reason. But no, they are on the top of a sand dune with no one else around at all, and yet they’re whispering.

**Pamela:** (Whispers:) That’s right.

**John:** That’s right.

**Pamela:** Because that’s love, baby.

**John:** That’s love. Let’s talk about that. It is intimate, and so there is an intimacy created by the whispering. This scene didn’t bug me when I watched it in the theater. It’s only when someone pointed out it’s really weird that they’re whispering here that it stands out.

**Pamela:** I just think of Timothée Chalamet as just – he is whisper. If you could make a human out of the word whisper. He’s just whispering in doorways and leaning in and wants to be equal with you. Come on.

**John:** Come.

**Pamela:** Don’t make him volume. I’m leaning all the way in. Same with Zendaya. She’s so much beauty and talent. You’re like, just give it to me on level 2. It’s all I can take.

**John:** Full Zendaya, I couldn’t take it in this moment.

**Pamela:** No, we’d explode.

**John:** We have not read the script for Dune 2, so we don’t know whether in the scene description it’s talking about the fact that they’re whispering. I doubt it is. It was a choice made by the actors and director in staging the scene to do it this way. It’s a very deliberate choice.

But let’s talk about, as screenwriters, situations where we might want to have our characters whispering, when it would make sense, when we would actually put it in a script, and when it would just feel natural along the way. Obviously, the main reason characters whisper is so that other people around them don’t hear it. That feels really natural. When you see that in a movie, you get it. You’re whispering so people can’t hear. Sometimes that’s an aside. Sometimes that is so the guards 10 feet away are not hearing that. Other examples, Pamela, what are you thinking of?

**Pamela:** I don’t even think of this as whispering, what they’re doing, but in a movie this loud, this is considered whisper. That’s part of it too is you want to whisper so that you can have the opposite effect of what the rest of the film is going – or the rest of the scene. I think comedic tension whispers are my favorite whispers, where it’s like, “I can’t even believe,” because then you really get to hiss at each other. Comedic whispering is the best.

**John:** That’s really good. I think about not waking the baby. The parent arguments are happening so that they don’t wake the baby. There’s comedy there too, where you’re shouting and whispering at the same time. That can be a fun moment.

In the scene we just watched, it’s an intimate moment. I don’t know in real life if they really would be whispering, but it does bring us in closer to them. That’s honestly sometimes the job of a whisper is to invite us into that closeup so we’re really close in. Weirdly, because the camera does get close on people’s faces, if people are talking at full voice, it can feel a little strange. It can feel a little shouty.

**Pamela:** I’m thinking about times also in a script you might want someone to whisper to get all of the attention. You’re whispering on purpose. I suppose I’m just now thinking of my dad. It’s very parental. The angrier he got, the quieter he would get, so that you were like, “Oh, boy.”

**John:** Don’t worry about dad when he’s shouting. Worry when he’s whispering. People whisper to themselves, or sometimes they’ll whisper to a character who they know can’t hear them. Some examples. In Rear Window, he sees that the guy’s coming back and he’s whispering, “Get out of there.” He knows he can’t. He’s saying what he wishes he could say to the actual person, and there’s no way to actually say that. You also see that when people are watching something on a screen or a monitor and they’re trying to say, “Aha,” and there’s no way to communicate it. Weirdly, whispering is a thing people do in those situations.

**Pamela:** Yeah, but that’s to let us, the audience, know that he knows he can’t talk to them.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a question of would you do that in real life, or is that just a movie convention, that you’re vocalizing what you know you can’t say to the real person. Weakness, so a person who’s on their deathbed, we’re used to the whispering there. Confessions.

**Pamela:** I’m sorry, I’m still laughing that you have weakness equated with deathbed confessions. I was thinking weakness like, “It’s too heavy. I think we need to take some of the weight… ” But you were like, “It’s buried under the backyard flower bed.” You’re like, what a weak man.

**John:** What a weak man. I mean to separate weakness and confessions. Weakness, a person who’s physically frail, it makes sense that they can’t put their full voice behind things. Confessions I will say is a separate thing, like, “I see dead people.” You’re letting somebody in on a secret. Sometimes you whisper secrets, even if there’s no real reason to whisper.

**Pamela:** Particularly creepy secrets.

**John:** Whispering is creepy at times.

**Pamela:** (Whispers:) “I’m here for you.” That kind of stuff.

**John:** We were looking through some examples of famous whispers. Of course, “Rosebud.” “The horror.” Scar leans in to say, “I killed Mufasa.” And then, of course, “My precious.” That’s of course a character who is basically entirely whispers. His actual voice quality is what we would consider a whisper.

**Pamela:** I wrote one in Nimona, which is, “He’s perfect.” After all these reasons that this man’s a terrible villain, number one, everybody’s after him, and nobody will ever love him again, she’s looking at all of this news info, and she says, “He’s perfect.” I went to look at the script to see what did I say, and I had just put it in italics. Then I was like, oh, I don’t even remember how it’s done in the end. This is pretty amazing that you can just open it up in Netflix and I just hit a button and it went right to the line. I was like, no, that’s fresh in there. But she kind of growls it. Chloe kind of growls, like, “He’s perfect.”

**John:** The whisper growl is a thing too. Bane’s voice in Batman, or really Batman’s voice in Christopher Nolan’s Batman is a whisper growl. It’s like speaking softly but with a weird masculine intensity.

**Pamela:** The 30 Rock quote is the “talking like this” contest.

**John:** It’s good stuff. In the case of Nimona, you probably put that line in italics, and italics makes sense for that. It stands out. Other choice would be to put the parenthetical above that to indicate that this you say whispering, that it’s not at full voice. There’s a thing there.

But in the case, again, where characters are whispering lines that they wouldn’t necessarily need to whisper, that can be an on-the-set choice. That can be a choice the actors are making, the director’s making. And as long as everyone’s on the same page, it can work.

Kind of related is the issue of – on the podcast a lot recently we’ve been talking about word choices. And the last week we were talking about characters whose native language is not English and how you mark that in scripts and how you make choices that indicate that English is not their native language as you’re writing those characters.

Fundie baby voice came up. Our friend Chris pointed this out. It was something I’d not been aware of until you see the examples, like, “Oh, I totally get this.” This is an example of – it’s called fundie baby voice.

[Clip]

**Kelly Johnson:** I used to be a schoolteacher. I loved that, but I just felt burdened for so many people and I felt the calling to go back to school to become a Christian counselor.

**John:** This is Mike Johnson’s wife. It’s a voice. It’s a choice. It’s a very specific way of speaking. If you had a character who was speaking this way, you would need to indicate that in the script, because it really fundamentally changes our instinct about how those lines sound in our delivery. Have you experienced this in your real life or in scripts yet?

**Pamela:** I was just thinking this is such a church voice. You were like, “It’s learned. It’s a choice.” I think it might be ingrained. You may learn this growing up, of keep sweet and obey. This is the voice that you’re supposed to use to be, as you’ve got written here, childlike, sweet, submissive, and honey. But this voice to me is – I understand it’s fundamentalist, but it doesn’t take much to turn it into you’re in the South with the same voice.

**John:** As a counterexample, you look at Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos and the way she was deliberately pitching her voice lower, pulling down to a different register to give her authority that she felt like she couldn’t have in her normal voice. I just wonder if it’s just how we fundamentally police women’s voices the way we also police bodies. There’s no right way for a woman to speak.

**Pamela:** That’s true. I have done the Theranos, as we call this act, in rooms when I recognize that the sound of my regular voice giving ideas isn’t reaching ears anymore and it’s getting tuned out. Then I just start saying it like this. It definitely works. Definitely works.

**John:** Are people aware that you’re doing it?

**Pamela:** Only, yes, because I tell them. That’s who I am. I’m like, “Do you like it better when I say it like this?” They’ll be like, “I do.” I’m like, “I know you do. We’re gonna look into this.” This voice very much works. She’s not the only one who knows. It doesn’t take much. You just say it like this. When I look at videos of me in high school, as I did a bunch for My Year of Dicks, my voice is lower back then.

**John:** Wow.

**Pamela:** Because I think I was hanging around boys all the time, and that was just where my voice hung out. It’s very Janeane Garofalo probably. It was the style at the time.

**John:** Let’s talk about that, because obviously, whether it’s Christian fundie voice or the Theranos voice you’re doing, you’re pulling your voice examples based on the community around you and what seems to be working and how you fit in with the community around you. Mike Johnson’s wife, she’s probably doing that voice because that is the community that she’s in, and that feels like the right choice. And if she were to make a different choice, there would be consequences for her doing that within her community. That’s the choice that she’s making.

You were referencing My Year of Dicks, which is of course the incredible, originally a series and then done as a film you did and got the Oscar nomination for. As you’re watching those videos, do you remember deliberately choosing to lower your voice, or that was just at thing that happened?

**Pamela:** I don’t know that I definitely chose to lower my voice. I think I probably always – I still have a bit of a lower voice, and it’s only getting more so. I definitely know that there was an affect of – I think maybe it just happens in your teens, when you get your first official hormonal whatevers, and you just lean back in that sound of detachment that stayed that way.

I don’t know that I would ever write in a script how someone should do their voice, because isn’t that what the actor is bringing to the table? Unless it was she was masking her voice for some reason and doing an impression or something like that. I don’t know that I would say, “She’s got fundie voice,” even if I were writing a character who was a fundamentalist.

**John:** It’s interesting, because I feel like sometimes I need to be able to hear that character’s voice in my head. If I’m hearing it in a way that is not going to actually translate on the page without me calling it out, that feels important. Obviously, if some other character’s referencing it, you’re gonna need to put it there.

I don’t know, there’s a musicality to how these people are doing it that is different. Elizabeth Holmes, not only is she pushing it lower, she’s also going more monotone. The same words are gonna come across very differently, given that. You’re gonna make some different little word choices to fit that pattern and how it’s gonna fit.

**Pamela:** Word choices is true. I think I would maybe blend some words and italicize some words to get that musicality of the reader can hear what it says. But I don’t know that I would even talk about their pitch or something like that. But you’re right. If someone else is, “She’s definitely a lower talker, isn’t she?” there you go. You got it.

**John:** You’re going back to the Seinfeld reference. You say you pitched your voice lower. I’m sure there was some moment in which I internally recognized I had gay voice and changed, and so that I pitched lower, I made choices to sound less gay. But I don’t remember when that was, and I don’t have good examples of me on tape showing when my voice shifted. I’d love to see some forensics on that, but I just don’t think that material exists, to figure out was it in 5th grade or 7th grade that I did make that shift, because my register is much lower than it probably should be for my overall size and shape. At some point, that was just where I landed.

**Pamela:** It was a bunch of tiny recalculations probably, more than like, “Oh, the summer I turned this voice.”

**John:** This conversation is reminding me of a movie that I really, really loved, Lake Bell’s In a World. I want her to make many more movies. I really like this, but I was a little troubled by one thread of this. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a woman who wants to be the narrator announcer for film, so like, “In a world where,” blah blah blah blah, and how that business is so male-dominated. But it’s her conversations with other women that become a bit of an issue and come through at the end. So let’s take a listen to one clip here.

[In a World clip]

**Woman:** Hey! Watch it! That is so rude.

**Lake Bell (as Carol Solomon):** Oh my god. Okay. Excuse me. I’m so sorry. I just want to give you my card. I’m not a vocal coach anymore, but I would make an exception for you, because you sound like a squeaky toy. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. But I mean, like, I think you’re better than that. You know what I mean? And I think we’re all better than that. It’s good for the species. You know what I mean? But there’s also a Jamba Juice like two blocks away from here if you wanted to, because I bet you were looking for a smoothie. Maybe not. I don’t know. But if you were, you know where it is.

Over the next six weeks, Louis will be recording your voices, and we will listen to your sounds evolve right before your very ears, because women should sound like women, not baby dolls who end everything in a question. Let’s make a statement.

**Pamela:** Speaking of policing women’s voices, she just stopped her outside.

**John:** Yeah. Again, I really like the movie. This was just a thing that I think does not read so well to me now, 10 years or whatever years later. It does feel very police-y, like, people aren’t gonna take you seriously or maybe shouldn’t take you seriously because of your vocal choices.

**Pamela:** That being said, I was a logger for The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, so I listened to uncut footage 12 hours at a time in a graveyard shift. I don’t recommend it. I type what I hear, so that you’re logging for story editors for the writers to make this show. There was a season where there was a girl, I just prayed every week she was about to get voted off. She really was up in here, sitting in a hot tub, and she had a high wiggle in her voice. It’s not her fault, but it was a lot, and it was in my ears. I had to type everything she said, which was mostly, “That’s amazing. Oh, yeah, I love that.” I’m not policing her. I could not leave her. It was my job to listen to her until she was voted off.

**John:** I am curious whether the job that you were doing exists in the same way today, because that feels like an absolutely perfect use of AI to log that.

**Pamela:** John, that was a paid gig.

**John:** That was a paid gig.

**Pamela:** That’s how I kept on living.

**John:** I’m not saying it should go away. I’m just saying that feels like very low-hanging fruit.

**Pamela:** Stop it!

**John:** I’m sorry. I’m not advocating for those jobs to be replaced. I think it’s fantastic that you got paid. I want people to get paid.

**Pamela:** I was helping writers who also weren’t getting called writers. Where’s our union? Logging is a job that is not for the weak, but it’s definitely for people who need to be underpaid to survive living in LA for the first few years. It’s definitely probably an AI job now, except they don’t know what they’re doing when they’re not talking, and I watched a lot of non-talking footage. Then I would just make up what she was thinking, which is why I was not cut out for that job.

**John:** I would say AIs right now are pretty good at being able to describe what is literally happening on screen. Is it gonna be useful for the editor who’s assembling stuff? Maybe not. And so you may still need actual human beings there to do that.

But anyway, back to our discussion of whispering and voices and the choices people are making. I think we have ways of indicating on a script what volumes should be. We put things in uppercase when people are shouting. We will put parentheticals in there to give a sense of what that is.

When someone has an overall vocal quality, I think you’re right, sometimes you do want to call it out if it’s going to be something that other characters are going to remark upon. But you don’t want to box in your actor unnecessarily. You still need to let them make their own choices.

**Pamela:** I wonder if that In a World girl’s character is just Baby Voice Girl. Maybe she’s in it later, she had a character name. But that’s usually how it’s done, isn’t it, so that you don’t even get a choice? The character is called Annoying Voice Girl.

**John:** I would like to talk now about Nimona, because as I watched this, I kept hearing your voice all over it. My guess was that you recorded scratch for her for a lot of it. Is that true.

**Pamela:** Oh, that’s funny. No.

**John:** Really?

**Pamela:** Because we already had Chloe hired. I’m trying to remember if we did scratch, gosh, because we did it during lockdown. I’m trying to remember how that all worked. But I don’t remember. I don’t remember. Some of these things we just block out. I was making My Year of Dicks and Nimona at the same time, in this office, in this room, during lockdown, while I was also slightly teaching 1st and 2nd grade, so forgive me if I don’t remember. But we definitely read it out loud and read it in the room and did all of that stuff. So that is probably what you’re hearing too is, yes, acting it out.

**John:** She has an incredibly expressive voice. I would say next to Sarah Silverman’s character in the Wreck-It movies, it’s probably one of the biggest little girl voices I’ve seen, because she’s not always a little girl, of course. But she’s really super, super expressive. Was it fun to write that character?

**Pamela:** It was fun. Also, I was brought in at a time when it was like, we need to really dig into Nimona and get her voice out. This IP has been around, and Nate is a part of it too, so this is a voice that was already on the page and in the creator. But being able to play around in that back and forth and, “I’m not a little girl, I’m Nimona,” was just a fun place. Then also, Riz was already cast too, so you knew the dynamic you could play there.

**John:** Talk to us about when you came on board and what the brief was, what had changed. I should say this is available for anybody who wants to watch it on Netflix. You should absolutely see it. It was one of the five Oscar-nominated animated films this year, so congratulations on it. At what point were you coming on? There was obviously a graphic novel. It sounds like there was already a script, but you were still digging in on how to service the best out of her?

**Pamela:** It had been around for quite a bit before I came on board, because Patrick Osborne was working on it at Fox Animation. I know I was still working on Ralph Breaks the Internet. But a part of me feels like I might’ve still been on Moana when it started. I’m not sure. It was a long time coming. They had talked about me coming on earlier. Blue Sky is based in Connecticut. And I didn’t think that I could go move out there and work on the movie. That was why I had passed at that point. And then March came around. They were like, what if we just come to your house every day?

At that point, Nick and Troy were involved as the directors, and I met with them and we all hit it off. They had had this rewrite that had gone well in the boards that they had had, and it was starting to work. I came in at a time where they had tried so many things. That was the hard part coming into the story team so late. Even this beginning of, to talk about, “He’s perfect,” she wasn’t doing the opening narration. That was one of the first things I was pitching, because you don’t meet her for a while.

**John:** She’s the title character. It seems like she has sidekick energy, and yet she ends up becoming the central character in ways that are really unusual and feel like it’s almost a commentary on how we treat secondary characters in animated films.

**Pamela:** Even the draft I had read before these reels where I came in, it had changed a bunch. They had really tried to figure this one out in many, many ways. Even saying like, “What if you hear her before you meet… ” They’re like, “We tried it.” We had to get through a lot of “we tried its”. You have to be really careful and confident when you’re coming in in that way of like, “But with all due respect, we haven’t tried it, the we that includes me now. Let me see if I can show you a little what I mean.” And even then, that takes time. That’s a real double Dutch of, “I’ll leave that whole area alone. I know my instincts, but we’re not there yet to talk about it.”

But anyway, the studio was shut down while we were still working on it. But as we kept working together, it was getting stronger. Trying to figure out, I would say the story structure stayed the same, but we were moving around the parts of when do we know what we know and why and how, and that stuff got shifted around quite a bit.

But being able to gleefully play with Nimona, luckily, that was always encouraged. Everybody on this movie was so funny. Once she was really sparkling, there were a lot of like, “Oh, I bet she’d say this. I bet she’d say this.” But people got protective of Nimona, as they should.

I had said something about her speaking in a different language at some point. They were like, “No, she doesn’t know other languages. She’s never really been anywhere else.” You got this with Ralph Breaks the Internet too, where they were like, “He can’t wear glasses. His eyes won’t deteriorate. He’s a digital figure.” I was like, “He’s eating a churro. I don’t know what to say. I’m confused.”

**John:** The rules of your world are complicated. She seems to know animals that she probably has not seen. Has she seen a rhino in real life? Yes.

**Pamela:** You’ve worked so hard to understand this world that doesn’t exist, that when someone else comes in and points, just says something like, “Never,” you have to be like, “All right.” I will be like this too one day. I know it, where I will be like, “No, you can’t turn off surge protect,” just weird things that you get so mad about, where you’re like, “That’s fundamentally against the core of who she is.” That’s where you get, and that’s when you know you’re really in it.

**John:** Hearing about the development process, it also strikes me that it helps answer a question I had, which is that the film uses its time in unusual ways, and things that in other films would be like, “We need to figure out a way to do this. The next sequence will be about doing that,” instead the next scene really does that thing. Like, “We have to clear my name,” and then literally, in the next scene, we clear his name. I liked it, but it seems to jump past a lot of the normal sequence of describe the obstacle, attempt to overcome the obstacle, overcome the obstacle. It uses its time in an unusual way.

**Pamela:** I don’t know how to speak to that, because part of me feels like that’s family animation a lot of times, so that we’re letting everyone in the whole wide world, which is the demographic, know what’s going on. There is a lot of “how did we get here’s” and then “what are we gonna dos.”

**John:** Oh yeah, but I was saying I think that is a hallmark of family animation is that you are talking about the thing you need to do and then how you’re gonna do it, and then you do the thing. What’s unusual in Nimona is they describe, oh, we need to do a thing, and suddenly they just do the thing. Where I’d expected, like, okay, this’ll be in the next 10 minutes, it’s like, no, that was taken care of in the next minute, which was unusual. I think that may be a consequence of discovering some parts of the story as you’re going through it.

**Pamela:** Also, I think because they were new to each other, they were doing a lot of emotional processing while talking about how did that just happen. Instead of needing to do it, they really did work it through each other.

**John:** That’s fun. Everyone check that out. The next topic I’d like to dig into is about early drafts. It occurs to me because when you read the scripts for the Oscar-nominated films, it’s like, “Oh, that’s perfect.” Of course, it’s always that way. But of course, we’re reading the very final draft. In some cases, we’re reading stuff that really reflects the final edit rather than the actual script they went into production with. I find it to be so educational to look at early drafts.

One of the things that I was able to do when I was at USC is – they had this big script library. They would have the final shooting script, but they would also have earlier drafts. It was so cool to see the stuff that had changed from the original idea to the final film. I remember reading the Point Break script and loving it, the James Cameron rewrite of it. It’s just great. But it’s different. It’s not the final film. You see what that looked like on the page, and ideas that were important at one point that then got dropped are great.

Also, during WGA arbitrations, a lot of times I’m reading seven scripts back, and you see what the initial instinct was versus what the final film was. You see how much stuff changes over the course of it. I think it’s really a good process for any screenwriter to see how much things really do change along the way.

**Pamela:** They solidify in your brain so differently too when you look back, because I did that a little, looking back here for you, for prepping, and I was blown away by what I didn’t remember. That’s just a good reminder to yourself of you have told yourself a story that you have believed. Thank you for your service on arbitration, honestly. What a job. What a hard thing to do, John, to go and read all those drafts and make these decisions.

**John:** I enjoy it, and so I will say yes most of the times when they call me about doing one of them, just because it’s important. You want to give people the credit that they deserve for the hard work they did.

One of the things you have in the notes here is about Natural Born Killers. Had you read a script for that early on? Had you read it before you saw the movie?

**Pamela:** No, not before I saw the film. That USC film script library sounds cool, but I was in a software company in Austin, Texas with the internet. The version that we had of that was trying to find people illegally uploading websites full of scripts. The early Natural Born Killers script was one I remember finding and being like, “Look at this. It’s so different than this film that I saw a billion times.” It’s very Tarantino-y. When you go in there, you’re like, it’s very Tarantino-y. They still have up the 1990 Tarantino script, which you can compare to the 1993 Oliver Stone and other writers’ draft.

But what’s also interesting is that then when you dive even further into people talking about it, because I only know internet rabbit holes about this script, but it came out of True Romance, which was also a rewrite of a script. In True Romance, Natural Born Killers is the screenplay that Clarence is writing while they’re on a road trip. That’s interesting. It’s the Facts of Life of – the spin-off series of the Tarantino universe.

**John:** I read Natural Born Killers from the USC script library. I remember reading it. This would’ve been 1992. It was the first script where I read the whole thing and then just went back and just started reading again from page 1. I was just blown away by it and how it upended the conventions of what I expected a movie to do, the fact that it moved into sitcoms and other things. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the script so you can see what it was. It was just amazing and blew my mind, like, “Oh, this is a thing I could do on the page.” It was incredible. Then I ended up working for the producers of Natural Born Killers. I was their assistant and ended up writing the novelization of Natural Born Killers. I had a full experience there.

**Pamela:** That’s cool. Did you go all the way back to this first one?

**John:** I tried to pull things that I thought were really interesting about the first one into the novelization. The novelization really does not resemble the final movie very much at all. Oprah gets killed in the novelization. A lot of very different stuff happens in it. No one should read the novelization. Just don’t. But I was happy with the draft I wrote. I was not happy with the draft that got published.

But weirdly, the novelization of Natural Born Killers became my comedy sample that helped me get my very first job writing a screenplay, which was How to Eat Fried Worms, because naturally, the person who wrote Natural Born Killers novelization should write a charming children’s film about a kid who eats worms.

**Pamela:** Take it from the writer of My Year of Dicks, you can also write Moana. What’s interesting about that first script is I remember it was smaller and I feel like it was mostly the trial of Mickey and Mallory Knox. That’s so different than what you get in Natural Born Killers and such an Oliver Stone kind of film. I think that that original indie film that Tarantino had made also, in that Reservoir Dogs world, would’ve thrived.

**John:** 100 percent. It would’ve totally blown up. It was really just terrific. The Oliver Stone movie I like. It’s just I really miss the movie that I couldn’t see, which was the 1990 script, because that would’ve been special in its own way. But you mentioned Moana earlier, and this was actually probably what got me thinking about seeing earlier drafts, because on an audio podcast, it’s hard for us to compare pages from two different versions of Natural Born Killers. But what we can do is listen to two different songs and compare them. I had not realized until this recent car trip where we started playing “I want” songs from movies, is that How Far I’ll Go, which I think is a fantastic “I want” song from Moana, was the second version of the “I want” song, and the original one was More. Let’s play a sample from More.

[More (Outtake) from Moana]

**John:** If I had not told you that this was from Moana, you probably would’ve figured it out. She’s talking about being on an island. She’s talking about wanting to get beyond this island. It is the same general broad strokes idea, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t really serve the same function as the finished song does.

**Pamela:** Yeah. Boy, that song takes me back. It’s like you just threw me in a time machine. Woo!

**John:** You were working on this movie back when this was the “I want” song?

**Pamela:** Yeah. I was like, “How did this all happen?” because before there was this song, I would write in the script fake lyrics or poems or ideas of where this song might be, before we had Lin and the music team involved. More came right towards the end of my time on Moana. I did get to work with Lin a little bit about what this song could be. We had gone back and forth in emails and in person, and more came out of that.

**John:** I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this. Did I ever come into the room with you when you were working on Moana? Because I came into a room for an afternoon on Moana, but you may not have been on the project at that point.

**Pamela:** I think you might’ve walked in as my door closed. It was a real all-hands moment. When you change the writer, it is easier than anything, but we are on contracts. I think I did not meet with you. I did sit with Michael Arndt. If you were around any time around Michael, that was around that time.

**John:** I literally came in one afternoon. My pencil never touched anything. I saw a bunch of artwork on the walls. They didn’t show me any clips. They just showed me all the art on the walls and talked me through the story. I’m like, “Oh boy. Oh boy. This isn’t gonna work.” I was wrong. It worked really, really well. It was only a year out from the movie. I’m like, “I don’t know what you guys are doing here.” They pulled it out. But in the process of figuring this stuff out, let’s compare. We just listened to More. Let’s listen to the “I want” song that’s actually in the movie. This is How Far I’ll Go.

[How Far I’ll Go from Moana]

**John:** What we’ve done here is we’ve flipped the ideas around. In More, she’s complaining about how stuck she feels on this island, and wouldn’t it be great to be out there. In this version she’s saying, “My island is fantastic. I love everybody here, but I’m still pulled to go and leave.” There’s a tension there that’s very different. The brief of what we’re supposed to understand about her is so different.

**Pamela:** Gosh. Moana’s journey changed quite a bit also. At one point, her family was lost at sea, so she was gonna have to go and get them. The want had to change each time. You had at the base of a problem with Moana is her island is wonderful and her life is great. That wasn’t something that was really supposed to change. We had gone to these islands and interviewed young women of Moana’s age. They often said that they wanted to be pilots or missionaries or people who would leave their island but then have to come home, need to come home and want to come home. You couldn’t have a want that was… Also, I’ll just say the problem with wanting more is you get that at the end of Act 1, and then you did it. Here we are. Here is more. It’s interesting in How Far I’ll Go, you hear that, “Every trail I track.” There’s parts of More that do end up in How Far I’ll Go.

**John:** Let’s listen to that. Here’s a little clip of that.

[How Far I’ll Go from Moana]

**John:** That musical idea made it back through into the final song.

**Pamela:** I remember in the boards, it was like, “That part works. There she is. That’s the thing. That’s the feeling and the movement.” I’m not surprised that that got stuck and stayed throughout the next version.

**John:** Comparing these two things, it’s just a good reminder that, be it in our scripts or, in this case, the songs, you recognize that you went in with a specific idea, like, “This is how we get from this place to this place. This is who the character is.” Sometimes it’s only when you go to get through the draft, you realize that was not actually the story or that’s not actually the motivation, that’s not the best way to do this. You discover something by playing through it. All the outlines you want to make, all the thinking you can do is not as helpful as actually trying and seeing what works. That’s one of the huge advantages of animation is that you actually get to see does this work. You have these intermediate steps where you get to see a thing.

Broadway musicals are the same thing, where you have readings, you have workshops, you stage it, you’re changing it every night, and you get to see what actually works. Our live action features on television, we don’t get those opportunities. We go in, we shoot a thing once, we spend a long time in the editing room trying to make it work, but there’s no chance to make big changes to things.

**Pamela:** You’re also working on two different versions of the story at the same time, because you’d have a scene that then would just get lifted and be like, “Actually, I can turn that into a song and save you five minutes of screen time with a three-minute song.” As a writer, you’re like, “These are all just workable ideas. These are just thoughts.” The script is thoughts a lot of times, because you’re not recording what they’re gonna say for a very long time. That won’t be the same either, because as soon as you’re in front of them and they’re trying every line a few different ways and then you’re improvising – and it is a ball you’re playing with a lot of times, but it’s your ball, so it’s very hard.

**John:** That’s my ball.

**Pamela:** It’s like, “That’s my ball.” But it’s not, because you hit it over the net quite a few times. There’s a bunch of teams. I’ll keep metaphoring. I don’t care.

**John:** 100 percent. Weirdly, a lot of the animation I’ve done has been stop-motion animation, which is kind of the exception, where we get to shoot a thing once. You pre-record; you shoot a thing once. You can’t change a lot. It’s more like live action. I’ve found it frustrating to try to do traditional animation, because I would deliver a script, like, “Here’s a script. Go for it,” and then I will get these boards back, and it’s like, “Wait, what are you doing? That’s not the script at all. You’ve just chosen a completely different thing to animate that’s not actually useful for my script.” That’s John August struggling with how traditional animation is done.

**Pamela:** It’s not for the weak.

**John:** It’s not for the weak. I compared animation to Broadway musicals. I’m thinking back to when we were doing the Big Fish musical. We did our out-of-town tryout in Chicago. We had a really rough time, because we were trying to make big changes, but every night we had to put on a show that people could actually watch and make sense. We would introduce stuff in blocks and pieces so it could all still fit together every night, but we still were changing a lot. We were adding new songs. We were moving stuff. We were cutting stuff.

One of the things we realized is that we did not have a an “I want” song for Will that worked. The challenge I put for Andrew Lippa was like, “You need to write an ‘I want’ song for Will. Let’s talk about what’s in there. Let’s talk about what ideas there are.” I remember being in the basement of the Oriental Theater, and he played me the song which became Stranger, which was the big “I want” song for Will. It was perfect. It was wonderful. We couldn’t do anything with it. There was no way to stick it to the show. We couldn’t tell the company that this new song existed until we closed in Chicago, went back to New York, were in the workshop again, and we could introduce this new song, which transformed big parts of the show. I just remember tears out there, like, “Oh my god, we did it. We actually made the thing happen.” But there was no way to actually make that fix live until we can get back into a safe place to insert it. It was such a different experience than anything I would’ve had doing features.

**Pamela:** Even in Moana, I think it was weird to put that want song, because it can come too late, and now she’s complaining, or it’s too early, and you are like, “Why? What is she even talking about? I don’t agree.” You have to agree with their want. It has to be like, “Me too. That’s exactly what I want for you.” I had pulled up all the stuff around the time that More was written to remember the brain that we were in. We were very much like, “Okay. Look. We know there’s nine things the song has to do.” Poor Lin. There are nine things the song has to do.

At one point there’s this document that was sent to him that was like, “Here’s just possible titles. This is my favorite.” I was like, “This is amusing, as a writer.” I think it’s alchemy, people who are able to write songs if they hear music or even how they – I felt so embarrassed every time I knew someone was reading one of these fake song poems I was trying to do, like I’m in a coffee shop, on a stage.

We sent the following: “Here’s just some possible titles.” Why? But anyway. “Set Sail. I’ll Find My Way. I Know My Way. I Learn Too Well. Why Not Now? If Not Now, When? To Sail is Life. I Want to Sail. The Next Step. The Biggest Step. I Hear You. My Life’s at Sea. My Dream is to Sail. The Far Horizon. Beyond the Reef. The Endless Beyond. Beyond the Edge of Nowhere. There’s Somewhere There Past Nowhere. I Am Moana: Daughter of the Sea. My Life, My Ocean. A Different Voice. A Different Song. A Different Rhythm.” Just take that, Lin.

**John:** Some of those are terrible, but some of those actually totally make sense. You can completely imagine some of those things being that “I want” song. I saw this in France. When I saw it, it was Vaiana. She wasn’t Moana.

**Pamela:** You know why, yes?

**John:** I know why, because Moana was a porn star in Italy, I think, and then also a trademark in other places. In Europe, it’s just Vaiana. It always was Vaiana. My question is, I don’t remember, is this the second song? Because classically, the “I want” song in a musical is the second song. There’s a “welcome to the world” song that sets up the whole universe, and then this is the second song. Is it the second song in Moana?

**Pamela:** I don’t think it is, because you’ve got We Know the Way and Where You Are. Let’s see. Track listing, it’s number four, but that’s I think because of the opening sound.

**John:** That’s score stuff.

**Pamela:** Yeah, score stuff. It might be How Far I’ll Go is after Where You Are. That’s the thing. Where You Are, this is the “perfect world” song. That’s it. We Know the Way used to always open. It was the first song they wrote as a team. It was so great. We were like, “This is it.” It was considered, “This is how the movie has to open,” which then your third song would be a want song, which feels a little late.

**John:** It does feel a little bit late.

**Pamela:** She also used to sing a song before that of who Maui was. There was a whole Maui song too.

**John:** No, that’s not gonna work.

**Pamela:** It was a lot. It was a lot.

**John:** I could’ve come into the room and said, “It’s not gonna work.”

**Pamela:** It was an Act 1 break. She was singing like, “I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta find my way. I hope my dad doesn’t mind. I hope he’s not mad at me. I’ve gotta get this right. I think this is who I am, and I won’t know if I don’t go see it.” It was that want song. It was a little like, “I want to know if this feeling inside me is okay to have.”

**John:** Which is a good thought. That actually holds through into How Far I’ll Go, which is like, “I feel this tension, because I love everything here and yet I am completely drawn out there. I want to be a good daughter, and yet I feel like I can’t be.” Those are real things.

Let’s talk for a moment about the article by Mark Harris called How Bad Could It Get for Hollywood, really looking at the futures of YouTube and TikTok, coming down to the idea that young Americans aren’t thinking about movies and television in the same way, and so the industry that we’ve built to entertain people is in danger of being supplanted by a video that they’re watching that is not created by studios and, of course, union writers. What did you take from this?

**Pamela:** I feel like, oh, here’s this article again. I don’t know. Is that okay to say?

**John:** I would generally agree with you. You’re safe to predict doom and gloom every year.

**Pamela:** It’s TV and film. There’s another one going on, video games. It’s all the doom and gloom of all the things. It’s all supposed to be really bad. I feel like I’m always in whatever is the version – wherever they’re complaining that it’s over and it’s dead is where I’m employed. That seems to be-

**John:** Always good.

**Pamela:** Then they’re like, “You’re not getting employed. Over here, this is where the people are really employed.” I don’t really read these, because I don’t take them into… My husband is someone who will be like, “Your job’s [unintelligible 00:52:36].” Even this article that you’ve linked I kind of read with one eye squinting, because I don’t want it to get in my heart or my head.

**John:** There’s always an existential threat, which is basically that people are gonna stop watching the stuff that we’re making, and because people have a certain number of hours in the day, they’re gonna spend those hours doing things that are not movies or television.

The prediction that the actual movies will fail and that no one will go to the movie theaters anymore – is attendance down? Sure. But there’s still something kind of great about being in a public space with people all watching the same things. Even my teenage daughter does like doing that at times. She loves TikTok. She loves YouTube. But there’s something great about the event of everyone staring at the same screen, watching a thing.

There’s something appealing about television events that get everyone watching the same thing and talking about the same thing. There’s reasons why that works and will probably continue to work. And yet I think we do need to be mindful that there’s new threats pulling at people’s attention. And that attention could make it harder for some of the economics of our business to work.

**Pamela:** Yeah. You’ve really said it. We can all like a TikTok, but we can’t all go watch a TikTok and talk about it together and go on a date to TikTok. There’s still communal events. They’re still bringing us together. And if they’re the kinds of things that people are talking about, you’ve gotta go do the thing, to see the thing to be able to talk about it too.

That being said, I was at a friend’s house recently where they just had on the television two things from YouTube. One was a screensaver that they just had on. Every once in a while the neon sign in the image would blink, and they’d all be like, “Yay.” They’d also watch marble runs where it’s elaborate. I just said, “Why do we work so hard?” Someone in that house was also in the industry. No, they both are. I was like, “Why do we work so hard? You guys just sit here and watch marble runs.” They were like, “Look at it go. Yay.”

**John:** That’s so nice.

**Pamela:** Yay. There’s that element to what we make too, of can you shut off your head and have fun. I think that’s what the Eras Tour is proving, like, “Oh my gosh. We just want Barbie. Let’s go have fun.” They certainly tried to make Oppenheimer seem like a rollicking good time. “Let’s go out and have fun.” And it worked, because people were ready to do that.

**John:** We have some listener questions here that are perfect for Pamela Ribon, our guest today. Drew, start us off.

**Drew:** Lark in Virginia writes, “Recently I’ve been doing some rewrites for a series pilot, and as I’ve been going back, I’ve been considering how this show may be if it was animation instead of live action. Just how different is writing animation compared to live action? Do you still follow the formula in terms of writing on the page? How have things changed with writing for animation now in the after-days of the strike? I feel like there are more eyes on both the WGA in both a good way and a bad way and more awareness towards TAG in general.”

**John:** We’ve talked a lot about, for writing animation, even in this episode, if you actually look at a script for an animated series and a live action series, they’re not different. Animated half-hours, like a Simpsons, is double spaced in ways, but otherwise it’s the same kind of formatting all throughout.

**Pamela:** I didn’t even think that this was a format question, because the formulas – you’re writing scripts for telling stories. They’re the same. Your budget is different, maybe. Maybe. They’re pretty expensive too. The character talking might be a cat, so that’s different. But no, you don’t write it differently. You ask yourself, does it need to be animated? That’s what’s different mostly.

**John:** There’s an animated series that I may be doing here soon. You’re figuring out how you’re going to do it, because when you say animation, there’s 15 different things and ways you could be doing an animated series. They have different costs and different requirements. But the actual script, the stuff that you’re writing, that’s not gonna change that much. That feels the same between live action and animation.

Rarely do you see a script that was written for live action that you can just immediately take and then just turn into animation. You’re gonna make some different choices just based on how audiences see things, how stuff fits together, how transitions work. You tend to write knowing something’s gonna be animated or non-animated. If you’re a person who can write live action, you’re a person who can write animation, and vice versa.

The differences and challenges is that writing something how you guys were writing Moana was a much more iterative process than what a writer would normally encounter. That’s something you have to deal with, and being good with – you said like, here’s a bundle of ideas that you know are gonna change. That’s a very different experience.

**Pamela:** I would say it still happens in live action too. When it is, you’re still like, “Iterative.” That’s just the word that I hear a lot now. But yes, in animation, it is kind of the point of it, and particularly if you’re coming around during development, before the thing is in actual production, which then is still in reels. You’re never really shooting a thing. You’re never shooting it. That’s it, John.

**John:** That’s the thing is you’re never shooting and you’re never really in post. It’s all one blurry thing. There’s development, which there can still be an artist in that time, but it’s before you have this expectation of like, we’re really making this thing. But even when they say they’re really making the thing, they may not be making the thing. Nimona, it sounds like they were kind of making the thing, and then they decided they weren’t making the thing, and then, luckily, someone else said, “Sure, we’ll make the thing.”

**Pamela:** I think of scenes that we made and finished in Ralph Breaks the Internet that were done in animation for the most part and then got cut. That’s that. Then you’re like, “Post-credit sequence.”

**John:** Yay.

**Pamela:** “Yay. We’ll still use it.” It’s never being shot.

**John:** We had Jennifer Lee on to talk about Frozen. They were way down the road in a lot of stuff, and they made giant changes. There are sequences that they couldn’t go back through and completely redo, that are just – they’re not quite the same movie, and yet you roll with it because you roll with it. I think it was the abominable snowman sequence. It’s like, it’s not kind of the same movie, those aren’t kind of the same characters, and yet it works, because it needs to work. They did not have the time to go back through and completely change that the way they would want to change that. You’re always making those choices. In that way, it feels more like traditional film and TV, where you shot a thing, and you gotta make it work in the editing room.

**Pamela:** Sometimes you’re just so close that you really are the only one who’s noticing. In its whole, people are like, “Yay.” But this question of how have things changed with writing for animation now in the after-days of the strike – nothing.

**John:** Nothing. Here’s what I would say is different. One of the best things about the strike for me were the days that I was at, generally, Warner Bros and would see a zillion TAG, The Animation Guild, folks out there on the picket line with us. I know you’ve pushed hard for improving conditions for writers working under TAG contracts. I think there was a sense of WGA versus TAG. That’s a ridiculous dichotomy. Really, the case is you want things to be WGA and TAG, because TAG is not just folks who are writing animation, but it’s all the other folks who are working in animation. It’s storyboard artists and other crucial people in animation. We would love to see movies and TV shows that have WGA writers who have the full protections and credits and residuals for the writing that they’re doing, and those projects have full TAG union members getting everything else done. We want union animation.

**Pamela:** Yes, we’re union parity. Putting it under TAG doesn’t mean I don’t have the same kind of protections and residuals that I would’ve had if you had made it WGA. Since TAG can’t free their writers, then that was what needs to happen within TAG. But not just writers. There are many, many members of TAG who are not being treated appropriately, which is why TAG might go on strike.

It is nice that it is less thinking that, “I thought everybody was WGA,” or, “I had no idea that most of you were being forced to work without a union at all, depending on the studio.” And I think just also an awareness of what a union does. But I think TAG still has a long way to go for people to understand and respect its union members.

**John:** Obviously, those negotiations are starting right now. TAG is part of larger IATSE, but TAG also has its own contracts it negotiates. It’s complicated. But we need to be mindful of it and just never pretend that writing animation is lesser than writing live action.

**Pamela:** That’s right. The things we were on strike for in the WGA are what does happen in TAG now.

**John:** Exactly.

**Pamela:** AI is already in TAG. It’s happening there. I’ve seen it. A lot of these protections that we were on strike about are because we know it can happen, because it does happen in animation.

**John:** Minimum staff size, for an example, we would talk to TAG animation writers, showrunners who basically could not hire any writing staff, and so were basically having to do everything themselves. That’s a danger you want to avoid in live action so that you don’t have showrunners just melting down because they don’t have the writing support they need.

**Pamela:** As a for instance.

**John:** As a for instance. As one of many for instances. Let’s do our One Cool Things. I’m so excited to see what you have for your One Cool Thing.

**Pamela:** I know you lived in Paris for some time. As an adult, you can do things that you didn’t get to do in high school, like learn French. Once I started going to the Annecy Animation Festival in France, I was like, “I want to keep coming back here, but I want to know more French every time.”

There’s this place called Coucou. Coucou French classes are based in Los Angeles and New York, where a lot of writers live. Coucou has two locations in LA, I think Silver Lake and their new one is in Culver City. But they’re also online. This is a way to learn French that has a lot of… For me I’ve always done it online, although there’s one down the street. We get together. We are conversing. We are learning. They have all different fun ways to practice your French. They send out newsletters for, “Here are some French rom-coms to watch.” They have little classes in poetry, book reading, flower arrangement. It is what if learning another language was a fun community as opposed to something you did alone and got confused about.

**John:** Going beyond just talking to Duolingo every day and making that little green owl happy.

**Pamela:** See, because Duolingo is a slot machine. Duolingo is the Vegas of language learning. I think it’s pretty cool to jam it in there. The Pimsleur method has its own way. But those are lonely tasks. I invite you to the Coucou community. There’s private lessons. There’s group classes. There’s workshops and events. You can walk down to your little French location and hang out and have a baguette. It’s fun.

**John:** That’s awesome. That’s fun. My One Cool Thing is a video I saw this past week by David Friedman. He was looking at the Fox sitcom ‘Til Death, which I remember the title, but I never saw a single frame of that sitcom. The video talks through the fact that ‘Til Death made it to four seasons, not because anybody was watching it, but because Sony, who was making the show, made a deal with Fox to say, “We’ll give it to you for free.” They just wanted to hit that 100 episodes so they could hit syndication.

In that fourth season, they had a new showrunner. Because no one was watching, they could just make some really weird, wild swings. Characters became aware that they were on a sitcom. They just did some things you shouldn’t be able to do in a sitcom, that were kind of fun and interesting. I don’t need to go back and watch the sitcom, but I do enjoy Friedman’s exploration of how strange this sitcom got, because it was just allowed to get so strange.

The other thing I thought was interesting was a blog post Friedman did about how he constructed it, because this was 80 hours of video to watch. He didn’t want to watch the whole sitcom. He built a script that went through and figured out which cast members were in which things, because they kept changing out cast members, and basically built an Excel spreadsheet that showed where the changes were, so that he could just look at those moments and not have to watch the whole thing, which was just very smart and felt very much like how I would do it. I enjoyed the video and his explanation behind the scenes.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Vincent DeVito. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes to this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one Pamela and I are about to talk through on the Oscars and attending the Oscars and how fun the Oscars are. But that couldn’t be as much fun as having Pamela on again as a co-host here. An absolute delight getting to chat with you about these things.

**Pamela:** So much fun. I can’t wait to come back again. I hope you invite me. Thank you.

**John:** We will. Also, remind us where we can find you, because you have your other podcast as well. Talk through, how do we find you?

**Pamela:** My other podcast, like this is one of mine – I’ll take it. I cohost a podcast called Listen to Sassy, where we go through every issue of the beloved ’90s magazine, that you can find all about at Listen to Sassy – I was like, “Is it dot-com or dot-net? Hold on.” It’s dot-com. Of course it is. Listentosassy.com. I don’t go to Twitter.

**John:** I stopped Twitter too.

**Pamela:** You can find me on Instagram @pamelaribon. Listen to Sassy is a great way to hear more about what it’s like from the years when you talked like this.

**John:** Perfect.

**Pamela:** You know what else though? If you do want to watch My Year of Dicks, it’s at myyearofdicks.com.

**John:** I love it. Everyone should watch it. It’s so, so good. People will tell me, “Oh, Pamela Ribon was on the show, and I finally watched My Year of Dicks. It was really good.” I’m like, “Yes, I told you that last summer.”

**Pamela:** You guys were very early supporters. I thank you. I don’t know that we would – segue – be getting to the Oscars without you, so thank you so much.

**John:** Hooray.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The Oscars. You were just at the Oscars. This is your second time at the Oscars, because you were nominated for My Year of Dicks. This time I saw you on Instagram in the back of other people’s photos. I’ve been to the Oscars a couple times, but only in the balcony stuff, because I’ve never had a thing nominated. Talk to us about your Oscars experience either of these two years.

**Pamela:** Who’s counting? This is the fourth film I’ve worked on that’s been nominated for an Oscar.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Pamela:** But only the second time I had tickets. That’s how it goes. Last year when we were nominees, we were seated where you go. It’s kind of the mezzanine. You’re not all the way down there. Through a series of surprise events, I ended up way down there in the orchestra. Listen. I don’t think it’ll ever be more fun, unless I ever win an Oscar, to go to the Oscars. It was a most unexpected place to find myself. We could talk about the two different versions.

**John:** I want the celebrity-filled glamour version. This most recent version, paint the scene. Who was around you? You were very close to Charlize Theron and a bunch of other folks.

**Pamela:** Yes. I assumed it was like Forrest Gump really. “What’s Pam doing there?” In the past, usually my friends will go, “Are you at the Oscars?” and I’ll have to say, “That is Patricia Arquette.” This year it really threw my friends off, because they were like, “I knew you were going, but I knew you weren’t supposed to be seen, so what are you doing behind Charlize Theron?”

I asked an usher, “Where are these seats?” They said, “They’re down there.” I thought, “That’s a mistake. I’ll keep walking and figure out what that means,” because they said O means orchestra. I was like, “Okay. These letters don’t make any sense, because this says F.” Truly, someone was like, “The stage is A, and you’re at F,” slowly explained to me, which is what I needed, because at this point my eyes were exploding, because I’m like, “That’s Slash. Why is Slash here?” That’s the first thing I saw was a hat.

**John:** Are you at the right awards show? Is this the Grammys?

**Pamela:** I was like, “That’s Nicholas Cage.” Nothing made sense for a second, because, again, once you see Slash’s hat, you stop making sense. Then I saw Eugene Lee Yang, and their outfit was this Billy Porter-esque red suit-gown. I was like, “Oh, that’s the Nimona group.” Then they pointed me that way. Then I sat next to Lloyd, who’s another one of the credited writers.

And then Riz, who was going to sit next to me, had not been seated yet, so I didn’t know it was gonna be him. But right before I left the house, I thought, “Riz Ahmed did us a real service by making announcing My Year of Dicks a viral event,” and so I had a little thank you dick for him, because I’m classy. I have these little crystal dicks – Malala also has one – that I give out when you come near My Year of Dicks and help it out in some way. I thought, “Whatever, I’ve kept this one for Riz. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll see him after the after-party or something.” Then he’s sitting next to me.

The first thing I do, because I don’t know, I’m like, “They’re certainly gonna kick me out of this seat,” because I turned to Lloyd, I’m like, “The writers don’t get to sit here. Someone’s made a mistake. I don’t know what’s going on. Thank you, Netflix, to the Academy. But regardless, we’re not gonna mess this up.” That’s all I kept saying, “We’re not gonna mess this up,” because that is Steven Spielberg sitting next to me, and I’m in front of the Poor Things team. And I don’t even know yet that Christopher Nolan is to my left. I’m too busy. Lloyd is doing the same thing. He’s like, “Pam, I see Jennifer Lawrence.” It’s so wild. I’m like, “That is Bradley Cooper.” It went Downey, Blunt, Cillian, Sir Ben Kingsley, Jon Batiste, Pam, like that makes any sense.

**John:** Do you have an explanation now of what happened?

**Pamela:** These are the seats. These are the seats that I was told to sit in. I was like, “Okay.” I would give out gum at breaks and then be like, “We’re getting rid of the gum when the commercials are over, because I am not gonna be gum girl.” I could really only see a number of memes happening, of me opening my mouth and just like, “Yeah, y’all,” just gums.

I will say I kept it together for the most part, but there was a moment when they were putting down all the lights in the aisle. They were just putting down a bunch of lights in the aisle. And I went, “The Kens are coming. The Kens are coming. The Kens are coming.” I turned to an usher. I went, “Right? I didn’t miss it?” How would I have missed it? Pam, you’ve been here the whole time. “The Kens are coming?” The guy goes, “The Kens are coming.” I was like, “Ah! It’s happening! [Unintelligible 01:13:01] Kens!” Which was such a chaotic moment that I didn’t really get to see his Ken piece, because they lift him in the air. We were under the show. I didn’t know the screen was telling people to grab flashlights and sing. I saw none of that. But it was still glorious. I highly recommend fifth row seats to the Oscars.

**John:** It’s good stuff.

**Pamela:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** I’ve been twice, I guess. The Oscars are fun in person. It’s different than watching them at home, because, obviously, during the commercial breaks, stuff is happening. I don’t know if during your awards they deliberately did stuff, or was it just everybody running for the bathrooms and the seat fillers coming in. But it’s fun when you’re – the off-camera moments are really delightful too.

**Pamela:** There was a lot of people getting up and walking around. I will say the year before when we were up in the mezzanine, which, wonderful seats, but when you’re a nominee for a category that has to move you, we were waiting for our category and then we didn’t know exactly when it was gonna be. Then they move you down to the seats that are for your category. There’s a camera on you that isn’t gonna be used or needed. Then you don’t win, and then the Oscars are over, really. That’s it. You’ve worked so hard, and then that moment happens, and you can go out to the lobby and have a drink and nurse your wounds. That is how I did it last year.

**John:** In this situation, Nimona could’ve won. Would you have gone up on stage if Nimona had won?

**Pamela:** We had been told by the team, “Hey, man, if we win, you guys, please, everybody come up,” which I’m pretty sure we would’ve. We would’ve been so excited. And we were a jumpable distance to the stage. But traditionally, no. Animation, they’re just like, “We can move on with this.”

It was the third category this year, so we also pretty early on were like, “That’s it. We just get to sit here and enjoy the show.” I don’t know if I had been back there with the rest of the team or even any – there were three different groups of Nimona all around in the Oscars. Probably we would’ve gone to find each other.

But we were so close that even Lloyd was like, “I think I’ll go get a drink,” and I was like, “Lloyd, look, if you leave, there’s a seat filler. Who knows what you’re gonna miss? I bet it’s Billie Eilish,” which it would’ve been. I said, “We’re just gonna sit here and be grateful for the shortest Oscars experience we’ll ever have.” It was over in a blink.

I thought watching it on my couch in my pajamas with my friends was fun. Going as a nominee but then not winning was its own kind of fun. This was fantastic. This was joyous. Miyazaki won. What are you gonna do? It wasn’t even the kind of thing where the winner is like, “Come on, that hack.”

**John:** You didn’t go into this with the expectation like, “Oh, we’re gonna beat Spider-Man and Miyazaki.”

**Pamela:** That’s pretty tough. The miracle of it existing – the studio was shut down. The miracle of it getting a nomination, which that requires your peers in the animation community to recognize the film and nominate it. There were a lot of wonderful films that year that didn’t make that final five. To win? How do you get all of the other branches to know about a movie on Netflix that didn’t have a theatrical release when you’re up against Spider-Verse and then Miyazaki? All of the short-list nominees really were contenders.

I saw Robert DeNiro. He did not have a good time at those Oscars. You could probably go and get jaded from it all, but I don’t know, for me – I love watching people win things in general, and particularly if they are young females. It’s just my favorite thing to watch is a young woman win something.

**John:** The editor of Oppenheimer, loved her.

**Pamela:** Absolutely. The girl with the short film. Any young woman clutching something she won is my favorite thing. The Oscars this year, it was a pretty – then I’m like, no, not every film was a happy, happy film, obviously, but there was an atmosphere down there of, “The show’s about to begin, and I think it’s gonna be a good time.”

**John:** It was a good time. It was a good show.

**Pamela:** Nicholas Cage was right in front of me. I couldn’t stop. Maybe you don’t know this. Why would you? When I was a little girl, my imaginary friends were all celebrities.

**John:** Wow.

**Pamela:** I moved a lot. You’d make a friend, and then you’d lose touch with her. But these celebrities always moved with me, time to time. There have been a couple of times in life when I’ve worked with someone who was my imaginary friend when I was a kid. I don’t tell all of them that, but I do wait, if there is a moment, and I let them know, because why not? But this was what it looked like when I was a little kid going to bed, and I had all my imaginary friends hanging out with me before bedtime. This is the closest to that experience.

**John:** Pam, you didn’t win an Oscar, but you’ve won the Oscars. You probably had the most fun of anyone there, and I love that.

**Pamela:** I will say then, here’s this Charlize moment. She wasn’t sitting in front of me. Jon Batiste was sitting in front of me. Then he went to go do his song, and then some seat fillers were sitting in front after that. Then at one point this beautiful woman is walking toward me. I’ve seen Charlize Theron more than once in person. Never I’ve spoken to her. But every time the same thing happens in my head, which is, “Does she live in my neighborhood? Does she have kids at my school?”

**John:** Totally.

**Pamela:** I don’t know why. Then she sat down. Lloyd’s like, “That’s Charlize Theron.” I was like, “That’s a seat filler. We know this.” He goes, “You can’t see what I can see. 100 percent, Charlize Theron is sitting directly in front of you.”

Then they started passing out these little tequila bottles, and they said, “There’s gonna be a toast.” That’s all we knew. You get used to these cameras moving around to position themselves in front of nominees or Steven Spielberg for the bit. The cameras were whipping around the front. The bit began with Jimmy, of like, “This is my wife, Charlize Theron.” As soon as he said, “My wife, Charlize Theron,” Lloyd elbows me, goes, “We’re definitely about to be on TV.” But I already had figured this out. I was just like, “You guys, act the part.” The actor in me went, “And we’re on.” Then the camera came up for her reaction shot. I was like, “You’re not gonna mess this up.” I’m just like, “My role is audience lady behind Charlize.”

**John:** Absolutely. You’re gonna be present but not necessarily in focus.

**Pamela:** You can totally see it in the clip. You can see me go, “And we’re live.” I wasn’t gonna mess it up. I wasn’t gonna be gum girl. I wasn’t gonna get kicked out of those seats. It was an honor and a privilege to be in a scene at the Academy Awards. Please ask me back. Riz and I were like, “I think every year.” We’re like, “Every year.”

**John:** Every year.

**Pamela:** He’s like, “Next year, what if we’re two rows up?” I said, “Maybe we have to make something to do that.” I said, “But I’m fine with that, as long as two years from now we’re on stage announcing best animated short film.”

**John:** Love it.

**Pamela:** These are the goals.

**John:** Pam, congratulations again. Yay. Thank you for sharing your Oscar experience.

**Pamela:** Thanks. I can’t wait to hear your next one.

**John:** Yay.

Links:

* [Pamela Ribon](https://pamie.com/) on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/pamelaribon/)
* [Listen to Sassy](https://listentosassy.com/)
* [My Year of Dicks](https://myyearofdicks.com/)
* [Nimona](https://www.netflix.com/title/81444554) on Netflix
* [Hire Survivors Hollywood](https://hiresurvivorshollywood.org/)
* [Dune: Part Two Clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZpGLqLoBJA)
* [‘Fundie Baby Voice’ Seems To Be Everywhere Now. Here’s What You Should Know](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fundie-baby-voice_l_65eb6b2fe4b05ec1ccd9e9b9) by Caroline Bologna for Huffpost
* [In a World – Smoothie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvficd_IxBc)
* [Natural Born Killers 1990 Draft](https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/Natural_Born_Killers.PDF)
* [Natural Born Killers 1993 Draft](https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/natural-born-killers_shoot.html)
* [Lin-Manuel Miranda on ‘I Want’ Songs, Going Method for ‘Moana’ and Fearing David Bowie](https://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/lin-manuel-miranda/)
* [More (Outtake)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGtjl5YbPdQ) from Moana
* [How Far I’ll Go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPAbx5kgCJo) from Moana
* [How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood?](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/opinion/oscars-hollywood-extinction-event.html) by Mark Harris for NYT
* [This Sitcom Got WEIRD When Nobody Watched It](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkGsk6RBSgg) by David Friedman
* [Researching An Old Sitcom With AI](https://ironicsans.beehiiv.com/p/researching-old-sitcom-ai) by David Friedman
* [Coucou French classes](https://coucoufrenchclasses.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Vincent DeVito ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont, and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/636standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/reviving-a-dormant-project).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 633 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Any screenwriter who’s been working for a few years likely has projects that have stalled out or otherwise gone dormant. Today on the show, what happens when you revive one of those projects and actually get it made 20 years later. We’ll talk with a writer who’s done just that.

John Gatins is a screenwriter and producer whose credits include Coach Carter, Dreamer, Real Steel, Power Rangers, and Flight, for which he received the Academy Award nomination. He’s also an actor you can see in movies including The Nines. Welcome, John Gatins.

**John Gatins:** Thank you.

**John August:** This is not your first time on Scriptnotes. We often see you and hear you at our live shows, because you are the person who is introducing us to Hollywood Heart, a fantastic charity.

**John Gatins:** I thank you both, all of you. You’ve done such great things for us and that really cool, cool, cool organization.

**John August:** We love doing our live shows with you guys, so thank you for that.

**John Gatins:** Of course.

**John August:** We’re not here to talk about those organizations today. We’re going to instead talk about your new movie, Little Wing, which kind of falls into a general genre I’d also love to talk with you about, which is sports movies or sports competition kinds of movies, because you have quite a few of those on your resume. I want to talk about how we construct and execute sports movies. Then we’ll also answer some listener questions about compartmentalization, mid-credit scenes, work ethics.

And in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, kind of a grab bag. After a long solo career, you’re starting to work with a partner now, so I want to talk about the shift of partners. You’re also one of the people I think who is smartest and savviest about figuring out credits. When there’s a bunch of writers who have worked on a movie together, you are the person who figures out, “Hey, can we all figure out a good deal on this?” I want to talk through that process with you.

**John Gatins:** Sure.

**John August:** Cool.

**John Gatins:** Great.

**John August:** We’ll start with some news. John Gatins, have you ever heard this term? This came to me in an email I got from one of my agents, talking about what this one studio was looking for. One of the terms was “bro soaps.” What do you think a bro soap is?

**John Gatins:** A bro soap?

**John August:** Uh-huh.

**John Gatins:** I don’t know. It’s a two-handed movie with two guys who are endeavoring to do something. I failed, right?

**John August:** It’s a series. They’re looking at it like a soap opera. The definition in this email was, “A muscular drama that appeals to men.” Sons of Anarchy.

**John Gatins:** Would Suits be a bro soap?

**John August:** Yeah, exactly.

**John Gatins:** Because those two guys are kind of in love with each other.

**John August:** Yeah, I think that would be a bro soap. I think it’s not so specifically broey. Sons of Anarchy is broey.

**John Gatins:** That show I don’t know.

**John August:** Or Ray Donovan. It’s very masculine energy. Drew, we have some follow-up.

**Drew Marquardt:** We do. Last week, John, you had the flu. You were saying we don’t have flu tests in the U.S. Travis wrote in to say at-home flu tests are available in the USA. Lucira by Pfizer is the one that is available. They’re about $50 each.

**John August:** I looked at this one. John, do you remember early on in the pandemic, we had those at-home tests, and some of them were electronic, or sort of electronic, where you’d put the little sample, and you’d put it into a base, and then it gave a red or a green light? Do you remember any of those? Did you ever do any of those?

**John Gatins:** I don’t. I don’t remember.

**John August:** It was a thing that was happening for a while. This looks like one of those. It’s great that it exists. It’s 50 bucks, which is really expensive for an at-home test. It also just feels like so much extra waste to do this electronic thing, because it should just be… We know how to do a test now. You just stick the little thing in. You look for the little lines. Apparently, these electronic ones, they really are just creating a line. They have a little sensor that reads whether the line is there or not. I’m glad this exists, I guess, but I want those cheap European tests that you swab and you see, do I have the flu, do I have COVID, do I have RSV. That’s what I want.

**John Gatins:** Look. I had COVID before anybody.

**John August:** You’ve always been a pioneer.

**John Gatins:** I had COVID, didn’t know it. Nobody knew what COVID was. It was the sickest I’ve ever been. I had a night in my kitchen by myself at 4:00 in the morning where I had a 105 fever. I was like, “I might need to call 911. I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Then I recovered slowly. Then I started reading about the symptoms when it was finally a thing. Then my doc said, “Does anybody want a test for the antibodies?” I said, “I do.” Ling was like, “You’re nuts.” I was like, “I’m telling you I had this.” He was like, “I’ve tested so many people. You’re the one guy with antibodies, so you’ve had it.”

**John August:** I’d never had the flu as an adult until this last week, and it was the sickest I’ve been.

**John Gatins:** The flu is no joke. Flu kills lots of people, friends.

**John August:** It does kill a lot of people. It was bad. I had, again, a 105 fever. It was like, “Do I go to the emergency room?”

**John Gatins:** I know. I was literally googling “dangerous fever for old men.”

**John August:** We’re both alive to talk about it, so that’s the real victory. More follow-up on the Tiffany Problem. Explanation, Tiffany Problem is that Tiffany was actually a pretty common old name, but if you’d name a character in a period movie Tiffany, everyone’s like, “That feels wrong.”

**John Gatins:** Really?

**John August:** Yeah.

**John Gatins:** Why? Because they think of the pop star?

**John August:** It seems like a modern name, but it’s actually an old name.

**Drew:** It goes back to the medieval times. Jake from Pandora wrote in to say, “I’m a VFX artist on the Avatar sequels over at Lightstorm Entertainment, which P.S., we just voted to unionize.”

**John August:** Congratulations.

**Drew:** “A major problem we face is that on Pandora, gravity is two thirds of Earth’s gravity. Presumably, this was decided to make an 8 to 10-foot-tall Na’vi seemingly move as a human does, so our perception of physics would be similar to that on Earth. But the Tiffany Problem of it all is that if we show someone jumping, it looks like they’re floating, if we multiply gravity times 0.667, which is the correct math according to Jim and the Oscar winners. Also, fires, water, and basically all physics simulations look fake at two thirds gravity. This would make absolutely everything we perceive to be so different, more so than a casual moviegoer would realize.”

**John August:** That’s a great point. You want to be realistic and truthful as much as you can in a movie and follow the rules of the world that you’re setting, but sometimes you have to bend those rules, because otherwise it just doesn’t seem plausible.

**John Gatins:** I remember working on Behind Enemy Lines, and we had a retired admiral. We kept trying to do things in the script that were like, “The master sergeant comes in and says this to the… ” It’s like, “He would never say… That just doesn’t happen.” We’re like, “It has to happen, because we need a problem in the movie.” It’s like, “No, that just doesn’t… They would never say that to that guy.” He was like, “That’s so disrespectful.” It’s like, “We’re going to have to though.”

**John August:** I remember calling Jack Warner, the dinosaur expert for the Jurassic Park movies. I needed to say, “Could this thing plausibly do this?” This point, it’s a couple of movies. It’s like, “I’d say that’s plausible. I think it’s defensible that this thing could happen.” You reach a point where it’s like, okay, I can understand that this feels right within the context of this movie, whether it’s actually supported by-

**John Gatins:** Berloff and I are working on a black hole movie, and we talked to this black hole scientist, and we pitched them a bunch of things, until we got to, “But you’re saying there’s a… I mean, you could.” He was like, “I guess.” You just look for one kernel of some sort of scientist tiny little something to hang onto and be like, “That’s the thing.”

**John August:** Going back to Pandora and the Avatar movies, literally, they’re after unobtainium. There are moments there which are clearly fantasy moments, which give them latitude to do some things that are useful for what they need to do. Finally, my favorite kind of follow-up is Arlo Finch follow-up.

**Drew:** Yes. Ethan wrote, “Couldn’t help but write in when I heard you and Craig talking about Arlo Finch the dog. My dear cat and erstwhile writing companion is named Arlo after Arlo Finch. His shelter name was Largo, which is not his personality, so that had to go. We adopted him in October 2017, and at that time, John had mentioned working on the Arlo Finch novels, and I loved the name. Something about it is adventurous and a touch anachronistic. As you mentioned, it’s also an easy name to howl across the apartment to get his attention.”

**John August:** We have a picture here of Arlo Finch the cat. So handsome. Look at this cat.

**John Gatins:** That’s a handsome cat.

**John August:** That’s a handsome cat. I’m not even a huge cat person, but I would say that’s a handsome cat. Then we were also talking about two-syllable dog names, because the best dog names are two syllables, and for reasons we’re going to get into in this email.

**Drew:** Chris writes, “Listening to you mention dog names generally being two syllables struck a chord. When I was a child, my father was a breeder of German shepherds. I always remember him saying that whether you were naming a dog or a child, the name had to yell good. English wasn’t his first language. I definitely took that into consideration when naming my kids Marcus and Ian.”

**John Gatins:** We have two dogs, named Riri and Farley.

**John August:** Exactly, you can yell.

**John Gatins:** We can yell those. They get that.

**John August:** Arlo. It yells out well. It’s a good dog name, a good kid name. John Gatins, talk to us about why you’re here. I want to get into a general sense of reviving old projects and what that’s like. Before we get into yours specifically, Drew has been doing research here. A bunch of recent movies are actually really old scripts that have been rejuvenated. Drive Away Dolls, the new Ethan Cohen movie, is an old script. Mad Max: Fury Road sat around for a long time. Unforgiven notoriously sat around for 20 years. Dallas Buyers Club. Beau is Afraid. A lot of times, things will sit around.

**John Gatins:** I’m going to ask you this question, but I’ll share this first. I can’t think of a movie that I’ve worked on, that got made, that didn’t take… I can’t even think of the fastest one, because I don’t think it’s inside five years, to be honest.

**John August:** The rare exceptions would be things where it felt like there was just huge movement towards… The Charlie’s Angels movies happened pretty quickly. But yeah, in most cases, stuff did take a long-

**John Gatins:** Stuff takes a long time.

**John August:** Yeah, but there’s a difference between stuff takes a long time, it’s slowly churning along, to there was no movement and then you came in with EMT paddles and zapped it back into life, which sounds like what happened to Little Wing. Can you give us the backstory on Little Wing?

**John Gatins:** Yeah. In around 2004, I wrote and directed a movie for Dreamworks called Dreamer. Dakota Fanning, Kurt Russell horse-racing movie. I had a great experience at Dreamworks. They were so cool and collaborative. It was great to have a studio run by Stacy Snyder and Steven Spielberg, who’s a filmmaker. It’s like a different thing, because when he says things to you, what he’s saying, it’s like, “Hey, I’d do this,” and so it’s a little bit different. It was interesting, because I really liked working there. It’s a cool little campus. You know it. They have lunch every day in a courtyard. It’s just collegial and kind of fun.

I got this call from my agent that said, “Steven wants to send you this article that he bought, that he loves, called Little Wing.” Susan Orlean wrote this really beautiful piece for the New Yorker. As you know, she wrote The Orchid Thief, which became adaptation, which is famously about someone trying to adapt a book that they don’t know how to adapt. They wrote a script about how, “I don’t know how to adapt this movie,” which was brilliant. And it’s such a cool movie. I thought that was kind of funny.

I read the article. It was great. It was about her when she was spending time in Boston and walking her dog at this dog park. She encountered this girl, who was a 12-year-old girl who had racing pigeons, which she just thought was fascinating. So she befriended the girl and her mom and had this relationship, and she wrote this really elegant piece about it. Steven, it just really struck him. So I get called to Steven’s office. I’m like, “Oh, cool.” I go up there. It’s so cool to sit in his office.

**John August:** I have been in his office. Yeah, for sure.

**John Gatins:** He has the Rosebud sled in a Lucite box on his wall. There’s a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s incredible. You’re just mesmerized. You’re in this thing. Steven was so chatty and fun. Dakota Fanning was in my movie, but I had to go to five-day weeks with her, to get her out in time to go do War of the Worlds. We were sharing this actor, and it was just kind of interesting. He was watching all my dailies and everything else. We talked about his movie. We talked about my movie.

**John August:** That’s so great.

**John Gatins:** They’re both kind of 9/11 movies. We had this whole connective, great, soulful chat. Then he starts talking about the article. I was like, “Yeah, so I was thinking, the article’s amazing, but I don’t know what a movie is based on this. I have no idea.” I left the meeting feeling like, oh my god, I had this great time I got to spend with Steven Spielberg, and I’ll tell this story forever, and blah blah blah, and that’s that.

I get to my car. My agent calls and says, “Look, they’re making this deal.” I was like, “What deal?” She was like, “Steven really wants you to write the movie.” I was like, “What is the movie? I don’t know what the… ” But then how do you say no to the guy and his partner, Stacy, who let me make this movie there, my first movie as a first-time director, on a script that I’d wrote? I was like, “Okay,” but I was terrified, that sweat of like, I have to figure out how to create something around this thing of this girl and whatever. I agreed, and I was in such a panic about it.

I met Susan Orlean, who was super cool. We chatted a bit, and she said, “You should really meet the girl.” I flew to Boston, and I met the girl and her mom, who worked in police. They were super nice. We spent a couple hours chatting in this hotel lobby. Then I went to the Red Sox-Yankees game. I’m a huge Yankees fan. The Yankees destroyed the Red Sox. It was super fun. Then I still was totally off the planet with like, “What do I do?”

**John August:** Let me stop you there, because I can anticipate what you were going through, because you have maybe a protagonist. You have a central character, but there’s not an arc there. There’s not a confrontation. There’s not an obstacle in the face of her. There’s no villain. There’s no urgency for why does the story start and end.

**John Gatins:** The other thing that was in this young person’s life was that her parents had gone through a divorce. There was a little bit of that. So I was like, “Maybe it’s a divorce movie. Maybe it’s like whatever.” I just started, as we do as a writer, just making shit up and just trying to figure some things out and adding characters to it and having this girl go through this moment. Then it became about, maybe they’re losing their house, and they have to move, and she’s upset about that, and she doesn’t want to leave.

Then I started researching racing pigeons, which I knew nothing about. I was like, “Wow, that’s a really fascinating world.” I was like, “Some of these pigeons are worth a lot of money. Who knew that racing pigeons brought all this money?” Then I think that’s where the thread of the idea of, what if she, in an attempt to save her house, goes and steals some racing pigeon from some famous old racing pigeon guy. It becomes a heist. There’s a little heist in the middle.

There’s a boy across the street who was her friend, but now they’re of an age where it’s like that coming-of-age story of, like, are we friends, or is there more? Is there something to it? How is school? Is school hard? How do people treat you? How do you see yourself? I love writing about teenagers, because they’re such curious characters. You kind of love them, but I always say teenagers have been sneaking out of their window since the dawn of time.

**John August:** Romeo and Juliet, yeah.

**John Gatins:** It’s just to make bad decisions. We love them, and we forgive them, but they really can be unpredictable and fun as movie characters.

**John August:** You’re starting to figure out the pieces of this. Are you going back to pitch Steven and Stacy, or are you just writing a script and delivering?

**John Gatins:** Literally, they left me alone, which was the great and awful news at the same time, because it was like, “I need some help.” I was terrified. Honestly, it’s one of those experiences where I wrote the script and I turned it in and I flew to New York. I have family in New York, and we were on a family vacation. We went there. I was just terrified. Clicking send was like, “This is the end. They’re going to look at this and say, ‘What the fuck did you do? What is it?'”

Steven Spielberg called me, and he was like, “I love this. I want to make this movie.” I was like, “Okay. Sure. What do you need from me?” kind of thing. It was such a small movie too that I was like, “Why would Steven Spielberg-”

**John August:** Because this was made for Universal?

**John Gatins:** I think, yeah, their output was Universal at that time, I think. But Steven was really enthralled with the movie. It’s funny, because I feel like some of the only other Irish guys in the movie business are the Burns brothers. Brian was a good friend of my brother’s. He called my brother, and he said, “Eddie,” – his brother, Ed Burns – he said, “was with Steven Spielberg this weekend. Steven kept talking about this bird script that your brother wrote,” and blah blah blah. I was like, “Wow, it’s genuine. It’s really on Steven’s mind.”

Steven was so supportive of it, because it was just kind of unique. It was just kind of this strange, unique coming-of-age story of this girl and has a heist and a little bit of a love story. She meets this older character guy, and they smash into each other. Y’all have seen the movie.

Steven was a really supporter of it. But the business changes all the time. We’re talking about scripts that die. Part of the reason the script dies is because these producers’ deals ended, and the studio owns the movie, so then it moves on, and then someone finds it, or a new executive comes in and says, “Hey, there’s this John August script on the shelf. Let’s take a look at that. Maybe we should breathe some life into this,” get the paddles, as you say. And maybe another writer has an approach. It’s like, “Read it. You read it. See what you think.” It went to Paramount, because they had this split, so it was dead, basically, for Dreamworks.

But what was cool about it was that Steven, I think, really lobbied for me to work on Real Steel. Now it’s 2007, and I get brought into the Peter Berg world of, they’re going to make this movie, Real Steel, which is one of the properties they kept. And I went on the whole ride with that movie for two years or whatever. Little Wing was dead and gone.

**John August:** Dead and gone after a draft? Had you gotten a draft set and polished?

**John Gatins:** I probably had done a rewrite based on some notes, because when it went to Paramount, they pulled it out and said, “Hey, we should make this for Nick.” It was Nickelodeon. It was like, “This could fit for them. It could be a small movie,” whatever. I think I did a draft with them. The Nickelodeon movie people there were cool. I think there was a moment of trying to make it whatever, and then it went quiet.

Then it was years and years later. I don’t even remember. Donald DeLine called me. He was at Warner Bros. He said, “Susan and these guys came in, and they wanted to do an animated version of this Little Wing story.” He said, “I started looking through the rights and realized you’d written a script, so then I went and got the script. I think the script is great. Let’s make this movie.” I was like, “Okay. I don’t know how to do that.”

Paramount Players was in existence then. They took a shot. We talked about it. We met some directors and whatever else. But we’re trying to make the movie for literally $5 million or less. It was like, “I don’t really know how to do… I’m here to help you guys, whatever.” It kind of died again.

Then I think the next thing along the line was, I had worked on Power Rangers with Dean Israelite, and I sent it to him. I said, “What do you think of this?” He was like, “I love this. I want to help make this movie.” Brian Robbins, who’d been a collaborator who I’d written movies for way in the past-

**John August:** And was running Paramount.

**John Gatins:** And now had just came in to run Paramount. And he started working with Dean. We said to him, “We want to do this.” He said, “I love this script. If you guys can get Brian Cox to play Jaan Vari,” who was my high school health teacher, by the way, who I worked for over the summer. He was a Vietnam vet. I worked for him as a lifeguard over the summer. I had a long relationship with Jaan, who was a really cool guy. Suddenly, he’s like, “If you guys can get this to happen, we’ll make the movie.” Through a lot of craziness, we got Brian Cox to agree to do the movie, so it made the movie kind of go.

**John August:** This was a few years into Succession?

**John Gatins:** It was right towards the tail end. I think they were working the last season or something. We were like, “Great.” Then they were like, “Can you get Kelly Reilly?” I’m like, “How do I get Kelly?” Yes, I knew her from Flight, loved her. She’s amazing. We actually lived next door to each other in the hotel that we were all staying in when we were making that movie in Georgia. I sent her an email. I was just like, “Hey, do you remember me?” I said, “Would you look at this script and whatever?” I also knew her agent, so I reached out to him as well, and we texted back and forth and whatever. She texted me, like, “I love this script.” I said, “Meet Dean.” Then Dean, the director, and she had a Zoom and whatever, and suddenly she wanted to do the movie.

**John August:** At what point were you actually producing? Functionally, what you’re doing is producing, but at what point were you actually a producer on this?

**John Gatins:** I think what was cool is that my partners in that were Donald, because it had come to him, and he breathed life into it. And then I had been working with Karen Rosenfelt on something else, and I said, “Hey,” I said, “Will you look at this?” She read it. She was like, “I’ll help you.” I said, “Okay.” I pulled Karen in. Then Karen and Donald know each other. Then the three of us were exchanging info to say, “I know so-and-so. I’ll call them,” whatever. It was a little bit like, “I got a washboard. I have a drum set. Let’s make a band.” It’s like, “Here we go.” I knew Dean. We just put this little thing together. Brian kept saying to us, “Okay.” Brian Robbins kept saying, “I trust you guys. Okay.”

**John August:** There was also a unique opportunity at a new channel to put it towards, because you could put it towards Paramount Plus, and so you didn’t have the expectation of like, this is a movie that has to open at a certain amount on a weekend. It doesn’t have to hit this metric or that metric. It can be its own thing.

**John Gatins:** We didn’t know what a streaming movie was. They have all these labels under Paramount. It’s Awesomeness and Nickelodeon, all these different things. I think, what I can tell from the birth of the streaming moment is that they need content. So what is a streaming movie? It’s like, “I don’t know. I guess this is a streaming movie.” So that’s what we did, basically.

**John August:** Looking at the final film, it’s the kind of thing that could’ve been made with outside money and sold at a festival. It’s one of those kind of things that could’ve happened.”

**John Gatins:** I kept saying that to Dean. I was like, “This is a movie from the 1990s.” I was like, “This is a movie that could’ve been a… ” I said exactly that, John. I was like, “This could’ve been one of those movies that people say, ‘I really like that movie. That movie’s got some soul. This is cool.'” I kept saying to Dean, “We don’t really make these movies anymore.” I was like, “This is kind of a rare thing.”

Interestingly, Dean really wanted to set it in 2007 with the mortgage crisis about to blow up and everything else. The studio was a little bit like, “We don’t really want to date the movie that way.” We were like, “We don’t want cellphones in the movie. We don’t want all this texting with teenagers and stuff.” We had to find the right middle ground where we make it a little bit just, you don’t really know. We’re not saying it’s this time or that time or whatever. We’re not trying to give timestamps of what moment you’re in.

The movie we would’ve liked to set in Boston, because that’s where this young person was from, but it ended up being Portland for budget reasons and lots of things. Portland was a perfect town.

**John August:** It feels right.

**John Gatins:** It’s such an interesting place, Portland, and is a little bit worn out in areas, and it felt right for this kind of story.

**John August:** Cool. In a very broad sense, this fits into, I would say, a sports competition movie, because even though we’re not seeing them racing per se, it’s not about the birds themselves racing, it fits into your general oeuvre of sports competitions. You did Summer Catch, Hardball, Coach Carter, Dreamer, Real Steel. I want to talk a little bit about the broad shapes of sports movies, because in some cases, the sport is the focus, and we’re literally watching, like, “Will they win the game?” And sometimes sports is just the background. Summer Catch, I would say it’s a movie with baseball, but it’s not a movie about baseball. Is that fair?

**John Gatins:** Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair.

**John August:** In all these kind of movies, we’re really talking about what is the POV? Is the POV of the player? Is it the coach? Is it the parents, like in The Blind Side? You can make a zillion different football movies. It really ultimately comes down to whose POV you’re trying to tell the story from.

**John Gatins:** Look. Sports culture in America is a really specific thing. We use those catchphrases all the time. People in the office are like, “Come on, guys. Bottom of the ninth. We got to hit it out of the park.” It’s part of who we are. Look how many people watch the Super Bowl. This year we had Taylor Swift. It’s crazy. I think that those stories are endlessly fascinating, like all the cool documentary series now about sports guys. And the Jordan documentary, that series that we watched, was incredible, that Mike Tollin made. I think that we’re enthralled by that because it’s dramatic. Are you going to win or lose? It’s personal.

Ling is my wife. John knows. I’m saying that, Drew, my wife’s name’s Ling. Ling always says to me she’ll watch sports with me because I do the background commentary. I’m like, “Oh, this guy actually had broken his leg. He’s on the comeback. He’s late 30s. He shouldn’t be this good. This is really amazing that this guy is able to do this thing.” Now she’s really interested. You hear the personal story, and it’s like, “Oh, now I’m in. Now I’m in.”

**John August:** The idea of the sports commentary behind the scenes, you’ll provide context in the room, but often one of the things you’re wrestling with in writing the movie is how much commentary are you providing, and are you actually providing a commentary character to help explain things.

I was talking to a friend with his script about esports. I said, “One of the things I really missed in this final competition sequence was the sense of live commentary happening to provide context for what I’m seeing, because that way it’s not beholden on my character’s doing it.” It’s nice to have some authoritative voice explaining what it is we’re actually watching.

**John Gatins:** Look. Remember Rocky, which created everything for sports movies in a way? There’s one crucial scene in Rocky that I try to put in every sports movie I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a few. He says to her, “I can’t win.” The guy is like, “I can’t win. That’s the problem here.” Guess what, guys? He doesn’t win. That’s not what the movie’s about, honestly. It’s that he did it. I think that that’s what we relate to as humans. I’d love to do a lot of things. There’s a lot of things I’m not ever going to do. I’m not going to win at things that I think that I would like to try to do. But I think we get inspired by those things, to say, “Wow, that’s heroic that this person is trying to do this thing.”

Guys, the Olympics are coming. We’re all going to get invested in the Olympics, about sports and people in that sport that I know nothing about. There’s some young female athlete that’s going to do some incredible thing that I don’t know anything about right now. But you catch me after the summer, I’m going to tell you everything there is to know about that person, because I’ve watched the journey, and I’ve seen the backstory now. It’s like, “Oh, she lived with her mom,” and this and that. It’s going to be some incredible, inspiring story. We just as humans have that kind of emotional connection to those things, because we put ourselves in those situations, like, “Oh my god, what would I do if I had one run left on the ski hill?” It’s like, “I got to go full out. I have to risk my life to try to win this medal.”

**John August:** We’re putting ourselves in their place. We’re performing this relationship with them. But equally crucial is the relationships happening inside the context of the movie and figuring out what those are early on, which is obviously a problem for Little Wing. It’s figuring what is the relationship here, who you’re going to try to follow.

Let’s talk about coach movies, so Hardball versus Coach Carter, figuring out who is the central relationship. Obviously, one part of that’s going to be the coach. But is it with a single player? Is it with multiple players? How do you work that through?

**John Gatins:** It’s tough, because – you know this from writing movies – you write a great scene, and you’re like, “That scene, along with every other scene, is going to fight for its life to get to the screen.” Sometimes you shoot, you write, they shoot, they perform amazing scenes, and they die, because it just doesn’t fit the ultimate quilt that is the movie.

When you have a sports movie, you’ve got five guys in the basketball team, but who are the ones who are going to pop? You try to give everybody a moment and everybody a story and a little bit of an arc and something that you’re rooting for for that specific character. You hope that you get it right enough that everybody is able to shine through in the movie and have their movie inside your movie.

**John August:** Exactly.

**John Gatins:** That’s really the idea is like, “Oh, it’s a story about this guy who played short stop.” That’s not really what the movie’s about, but he has a movie in the movie. Yeah, it’s tough.

**John August:** It’s tough, tough. Did you see Nyad?

**John Gatins:** I haven’t seen it yet.

**John August:** Nyad is fantastic. One of the things I really liked about the model of it is, the same filmmakers did a bunch of rock climbing movies, which are a similar dynamic, which is it’s one person against an obstacle. Within that context, you have, will they achieve the thing? Will she swim from Cuba to Florida? Will this guy ascend this impossible mountain face? You still have to find relationships. You still have to find moments of emotional stakes that are not just the will they or won’t they. I thought Nyad did a fantastic job doing that.

**John Gatins:** That’s cool. That’s on my list. I’m going to see that.

**John August:** Again, making a choice of what is the central relationship, which is, of course, in this one, her friendship with Jodie Foster’s character and all the permutations and struggles they’re in.

**John Gatins:** Plus, I love those actors. That’s the thing too is you’re going to see it because of them.

**John August:** Let’s answer some listener questions. Let’s start with David here.

**Drew:** David in London sent in an audio question. We’ll play that now.

**David:** I’m a few weeks away from being on set for my first production as a writer, feature film. And I’ve put in a lot of prep and spade work over the years. I know I’m the right person for this job right here and right now. But what I’m not prepared for is being public facing. You guys both demonstrate an incredible ability to talk about your work, to talk about your relationships in a proper and correct way. You never badmouth anyone, but you also feel very open and authentic as you speak to us. How? When I speak, I’m always telling anecdotes about people I work with and things that have happened. And I bet you guys have got great stories you share privately about Pedro Pascal or Guy Ritchie or whatever. I’m scared that I am going to make a terrible cockup on social media or in person when I’m speaking as a professional. So I guess my question is, how do you guys compartmentalize?

**John August:** Let’s talk about how you talk about the things you worked on, because you just brought up Steven Spielberg. In talking about Spielberg, you said all the positive things. You said how supportive he was and didn’t go into any frustrations there, which is I think part of the advice we have for David. You have to talk openly and honestly, but just talking about the good things.

**John Gatins:** Look, it’s funny, because before you started to roll, we were talking about credit stuff, which I think we’ll talk about later. I don’t know. It’s interesting, because y’all have done this podcast for a long time. I get texts sometimes. People say, “Mazin talked about you on him and John’s podcast today,” or whatever, which I always think is kind of funny. It’s hard, because screenwriters, we work really closely, we work right next to Pedro Pascal. We’re not Pedro Pascal. People want to talk to Pedro Pascal. They don’t really want to talk to the guy who wrote the thing that he’s going to say. But you guys have proven that a little bit wrong, because how many people listen to this podcast?

**John August:** Tens of thousands.

**John Gatins:** That’s a lot of people who are very fascinated by how the soup gets made. I’m going to use sports metaphors again.

**John August:** It’s fine.

**John Gatins:** [Crosstalk 00:31:07].

**John August:** Stick on theme.

**John Gatins:** Patrick Mahomes wins the Super Bowl. What does he say? He’s like, “The defense was amazing today.” He didn’t say, “I did that 40-yard run that basically won the Super Bowl,” which I watched. I was like, “Dude, you did that.” It’s a thing of, take less credit. People like people who take less credit. Bring people along. There’s a lot of people.

Naomi Despres made this movie, Little Wing. I invited her in. I said, “Can you help us? Because I can’t go to Portland and be on the ground every day.” She moved her world around to do it. She has so much hand in making this movie, even creatively. There’s a moment in the movie where she talks about Bikini Kill and Kathleen Hanna. That’s Naomi, who said to me, “There’s a band.” I’d heard of Bikini Kill, but I didn’t really know them. The woman’s story and the song and everything else really fit. I had written Tupac Shakur 15 years ago. This was a really relevant, local to Portland thing. It was genius. That was amazing. She doesn’t have writing credit on the movie. But she’s such an integral part of us making that movie that that’s an incredible thing.

Maybe an advice to this guy is to say, listen, remember how you got there. We don’t make this movie by ourselves. You’re God when you’re sitting by your computer by yourself and you’re creating a world. You’re on your own. You are the god and creator of that universe. As soon as I say to you, John, my friend, “Hey, can you read this for me? Can you help me? Do you want to produce this movie?” now I’m sharing godship. By the time you’re sitting on the set, there’s 200 people there doing all kinds of things. Now everybody’s a little bit God in their own piece of universe.

Realize that it is a collaborative thing. There is somebody who says, that’s the director, that’s that title, producer, executive producer, script supervisor. Everybody has a role in this thing. Just bear that in mind that we did this. Somebody gave us the opportunity to do this. Without Steven Spielberg, this movie doesn’t exist. That was the inception. Without Susan Orlean, who wrote this thing, that got Steven to do a thing, that got him to make me do this thing. You’re a piece of a really big thing I think is maybe the takeaway.

**John August:** I would also say, David, you’re asking about speaking professionally, and it really is the context that matters. If you’re doing the literal press junket for the movie, you’re going to have a very narrow list of things you’re going to say and talk about. You’re going to talk about what a great experience it was. What John is saying in terms of, be really generous giving credit out there. You can contextualize your part of the process. Always make sure that you speak up for the existence of the writer. That is so important.

**John Gatins:** Of course.

**John August:** But you’re giving full credit. As you get into narrower groups, you can be a little bit more forthright about the pros and the cons and the ups and the downs, and you can avoid shitting on somebody, but also say this was a struggle for these reasons.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, exactly.

**John August:** I will talk about a filmmaker I’ve worked with and say, “Listen, he has this reputation,” and you’d go into it knowing that this is the kinds of things you’re going to be doing or not doing. That’s also fair. When you get into really small conversations, when it’s you and an executive, you can be much more open about, “These are the pros and the cons. This was the real struggle we had.” That bonds you a little bit closer, because you’re telling the truth there.

**John Gatins:** Look, I think I’ve had a unique experience, because as you know, I’m a failed actor who started trying to do that. I became a writer. I’ve produced. I’ve directed. I’ve now done a little bit of all of it. I’m very comfortable on a movie set. I think he’s asking a question about, he’s feeling a little bit like, “I don’t know that this is my world.” You have your place in that world. You’ll see how comfortable you are or aren’t vis a vis that. Those conversations, like you said, he may get specific questions that are like, “Why did you write this movie? What inspired you to do it? Did you write it every day? How many hours a day can you work? Do you outline?” All this stuff that people want to ask, specific questions about being a writer.

**John August:** Totally.

**John Gatins:** You’re going to answer those questions really honestly. They may also put a mic in his face and say, “What was it like meeting Pedro Pascal?”

**John August:** They will ask that, yeah.

**John Gatins:** They’ll ask that, and you’ll be like, “It’s amazing. He’s great. In my mind, I wrote for him. The whole time, I had his voice in my head.” Maybe that’s true; maybe it’s not. Maybe you say, “I wrote it for George Clooney, but Pedro Pascal is better.” I don’t know. It depends on the question and the situation.

It can be kind of overwhelming, because I’ve sat on stages with movie stars, and they ask me questions about specific script stuff. You’re always a little bit like, “Is this the forum to have this conversation?” because you realize you have these people here who people really want to hear from. I don’t know. That’s why I appreciate what y’all do. It’s talking to writers about writing. It’s really interesting.

**John August:** Great. Another question.

**Drew:** Leann from Burbank writes, “I’m writing a comedic feature script which has a proper ending, but after cutting to black, then has a couple scenes that play alongside the rolling end credits, like Principal Rooney getting on the school bus during the credits of Ferris Bueller. Have you seen a mid-credit roll sequence dictated in a script before? Any thoughts on best practices?”

**John August:** I absolutely have seen those. I think I might’ve put them in some of my scripts too. You do a cut to black, you do a fade out, and then a page break, and then mid-credits or a mid-credit roll or after credits, it’s an extra scene.

**John Gatins:** I’m trying to think. I’ve been asked to do things where it’s like, “Give us written summations of what happened to people a little bit.” The movie ends, but it’s like, “By the way, in 2010, this happened.” Seeing additional scenes, I don’t know, a lot of times they feel like they’re stuff that was shot in the movie that you kind of want to see, but it didn’t fit into the quilt. It’s like, this is cool stuff that didn’t get in there. That’s a square that didn’t make the quilt, but it’s cool, and I think you guys might ask about, “Whatever happened when he got on that bus? Did he get on the bus?”

**John August:** Remember the script is meant to encapsulate the experience of watching the movie. If part of watching the movie is those mid-credit scenes or after-credit scenes, they should be in the script.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, I guess so. I guess the task a lot of times is you’re trying to jam a bunch of shit inside a 120-page box, so good luck with that. The stuff that spills out the top, either you find a place and jam it in or take something out and jam it in.

**John August:** Would it be fair to mark those as pages 119A and 119B? Sure, maybe. They’re part of the running time, but other stuff’s happening at the same time. You’re not responsible for the credits in your script. I would say if they’re important to your story, then they should be in the script, because your script is the movie. Another question.

**Drew:** Old Bruce writes, “Have I officially become the old guy looking at all these youngsters who seem to struggle with the reality of what work is? Is there a universal and generational confusion that success is not a right but earned? And have people’s threshold of try become much lower than it used to be?”

**John August:** Old Bruce, you’re completely correct on every level.

**John Gatins:** The two Old Johns will collude with you, Old Bruce.

**John August:** These young people today have no idea. Of course, if you were to slide this conversation back 30 years, the equivalent of Bruce would say, “These young people have no sense of what it is to work.” You’ve reached a point where you are generationally appropriately complaining about the generation behind you.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, and I think that’s a rite of passage.

**John August:** I would say that a thing I notice about this younger generation is there can be that hustle and grindy culture. I guess we had some of that when we started in our 20s, but it’s more deliberate. It feels more calculated, more planned. People are willing to put themselves in uncomfortable, long situations to do stuff that I don’t know I necessarily was. But also, there’s the internet. Stuff is also just different.

**John Gatins:** I know. They just need to get off my lawn. Believe me. But it’s different. We’ve been doing it so long. It changes. You become a different writer along the way, because trust me, if we could go back in time, there’s moments that I would pick that would be embarrassing, where I would literally be the guy who’d be like, “I’m going to tell you why water’s wet, guys. I got this. I know all the answers, man. You want to talk about screenwriting? I know everything. I can do anything.” I don’t feel that way anymore. I feel like I’ve earned it. I’ve earned the idea that I don’t know or I’m going to learn more or remain teachable and be like, “Let me see something else. A streaming movie? What television has become?” Television used to be like, we were screenwriters [unintelligible 00:39:30] TV. Now it’s like TV’s the greatest shit there is.

**John August:** One of the things I’m aware of increasingly is that I expect young writers today to actually understand the references that I had when I was in my 20s, but that’s not realistic. It’s not accurate. Why have you not seen Point Break? Of course you should’ve seen Point Break. Or a bunch of stuff where it’s like, of course it’s just my part of film history canon.

**John Gatins:** I know.

**John August:** They cannot have caught up on all of that stuff.

**John Gatins:** I know.

**John August:** That’s a thing I just have to get past and remind myself, of course you’re not going to see that, because that is the equivalent of Casablanca or something to them. It’s very far in the past.

**John Gatins:** I think the other thing too is there’s an immediacy to culture now because of cellphones. When I first started as a screenwriter, I remember faxing pages.

**John August:** Oh yeah, we faxed pages.

**John Gatins:** From Austin, Texas, when I was working on Varsity Blues, faxing pages. Being on location doing Behind Enemy Lines. There was only three hours a day where we could talk to the people at Fox. So we would just hide. We’d just be like, “If they don’t call us in this hour, we’re just going to keep shooting.”

**John August:** Yeah, totally.

**John Gatins:** “We’re going to just do what we’re doing.” But I think everything is so immediate. Good writing is rewriting. You don’t write a script and like, “That’s it. I’m done.” There’s a thousand drafts you’re going to do. I think that’s a little bit baked into that question. You got to realize, I know you think that’s the finish line. It really isn’t. There’s so much work to do beyond that finish line. You have no idea. In this world of boom, boom, the phone, click click click click, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not as immediate as you want it to be, because what we talked about before is movies take forever to get there. Movies don’t get made. They fight. They fight their way to life. Sometimes it takes 17 years. It’s just the truth.

**John August:** Could I challenge you on something you said about Little Wing? You said you clicked send to Steven Spielberg for the script, but you probably didn’t click send. You probably sent an actual script.

**John Gatins:** That’s a really good question.

**John August:** I remember distinctly, and you’ll have this memory too, you’d call the agent or the executive for them to send a messenger.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, to pick it up.

**John August:** You’d still be printing the script. Then you’d catch a typo and like, “Oh, no, I have to reprint that page.”

**John Gatins:** I had this stamp that my wife Ling’s parents had given me. It’s this jade thing that had the characters of my name, John, and then it had J-O-H-N underneath it, and it had a little ink pad. It was in red. I would put a stamp when I was done and I’d printed it. I’d stamp it. It was so silly. But I was superstitious then too. I was like, “That went well the first time, so I got to stamp it every time.”

**John August:** Absolutely.

**John Gatins:** It’s printing the script and doing the stamp and the whole thing. It’s like, “I don’t have my stamp!” It was this whole crazy thing, printing the script and sending it. I think that that was email, but I still was in the world of printing it. I don’t know.

**John August:** The reason why I bring that up is because we talked about faxing pages, and I have this very distinct memory of being bunkered in this really bad hotel room in Kauai and having to fax pages from the front desk to Kathy Kennedy. That was the only way to get pages to her. It was crazy.

**John Gatins:** They were those thin, weird pages that after two days they were dust. You couldn’t even see what was-

**John August:** I had flown with my StyleWriter printer so I could print out my pages and then fax them through to Kathy Kennedy. It’s wild. These younger generations, they have no idea how we suffered to get them to where we are right now, now that it’s-

**John Gatins:** It’s true.

**John August:** … typing away and-

**John Gatins:** Oh my god.

**John August:** … emailing stuff through. Let’s answer one more question.

**Drew:** Under Wraps writes, “Right before the pandemic, I signed an option agreement with a production company. About a week or two after we signed, the strike was officially called. I assumed since we finalized everything before that, that it wouldn’t affect my getting paid. However, the producer let me know that he was instructed to hold all payments until after the strike was over.

“Fast-forward to the strike ending, and after not hearing anything from the producer for a few weeks, I shot him a message. I didn’t specifically bring up the money, but just asked about plans now that the strike was over. He informs me that he’s moving forward with production and is optimistic.

“Jump to now, months later, we haven’t spoken since. I know these things move slowly, but the difference here was that I was actually supposed to be getting a nice little chunk of cash. I don’t want to sound money-focused, just messaging the producer, ‘Yo, where my money at?’ But I really could use it right now. I don’t have any reps to handle this for me, and I’m at a loss for how to word this kind of message. How do I get what I’m owed without coming off like a money-hungry jerk writer who doesn’t care about the art of film development?”

**John August:** This could be a generational issue. I think I was much more direct about, “Need money. Need check now.” A couple things, Under Wraps. First off, if you sign an option agreement, the strike had nothing to do with that, and so you still needed to get paid. You get paid. They owe you the money. They’re shopping this thing around that they’ve optioned from you, but they haven’t actually really done the option, because they’ve not paid you the money. You need to be much more direct about, like, “You may have forgotten, but you never actually paid me for this thing.”

**John Gatins:** The not having reps thing is tough in that situation, because there’s somebody whose job it is, hopefully, to be the one that says, “We need the money,” because it is show business. So there is a business side to it. And it’s good to have partners, be they lawyers, agents, managers, that can have that conversation on your behalf.

**John August:** Absolutely. We had Aline on the show a couple weeks ago. We talked about being agentic, taking agency in your life. This is a situation where this guy needs to take agency and to say, “Oh, this thing needs to happen. I’m going to make it happen.” Pretend you are your own best friend and you’re going to go in and just do this thing for your friend, which is get your friend paid.

**John Gatins:** I would get the guy on the phone too. Email’s a little bit removed. Just say, “Hey, call me quick.”

**John August:** In that conversation you had about what was happening next, segueing from that into like, “Oh, it’s so great this is happening. Also, you haven’t paid me. You may have forgotten that you haven’t paid me.” You can [unintelligible 00:45:28] they forgot, but they have to pay you. Got to get paid.

It is time for our One Cool Things. John Gatins, what is your One Cool Thing?

**John Gatins:** It’s interesting. Ling’s uncle and aunt came to visit recently from Arkansas. They’re retired. They’re the coolest people. They were like, “We just have to tell you,” because they were staying in our guest area, and they said, “You have this kind of finch. You’ve got this kind of woodpecker,” and whatever. I was like, “What?” They were like, “There’s this app called Merlin, which you can download for free, and you can literally record singing birds, and it will tell you what the bird is, and it shows you a picture and this whole thing.” They showed us all of these pictures of these birds. They were excited, because they don’t live in this part of the world. They were like, “Check it out. You’ve got this short, blah blah blah woodpecker thing.” I was like, “Oh my god.” Pearl used to be so annoyed by this woodpecker outside her window. She’s like, “There’s this bird.” It’s this really beautiful looking bird. I just thought that was the coolest thing. I was like, “Oh my god.” Who knew there’s an app that can identify birds?

**John August:** That’s awesome. Just this morning, there was a bird who I remember hearing from before. It was a morning bird that can be really annoying. But we sleep with the white noise machine turned so high that I don’t hear it anymore. Sometimes in the bathroom early in the night I hear it.

**John Gatins:** Just download Merlin, and you can maybe understand where that bird’s coming from a little bit.

**John August:** Absolutely. 100 percent.

**John Gatins:** That bird’s trying to tell you something, John.

**John August:** Absolutely.

**John Gatins:** It’s like, “Listen.”

**John August:** It’s like when you have noisy neighbors, and you’re like, “I hate them,” and then you meet them, it’s like, “Oh, it’s actually not so bad.”

**John Gatins:** That bird might have notes on your scripts that you need.

**John August:** It might have notes.

**John Gatins:** You don’t know.

**John August:** My One Cool Thing is sort of a strange one. We were having a conversation a week or two ago about spinoffs and what is the longest show that’s been on the air if you include the spinoffs from the original show.

**John Gatins:** Whoa.

**John August:** That led me down a rabbit hole towards The Facts of Life. I loved the show The Facts of Life, which for people who are not familiar with it, it is about this girls’ school. You follow these four or five girls who get in trouble and they live in their own little part of the girls’ school with Mrs. Garrett, who’s the cook, and they often work for Mrs. Garrett. It was a shrunk down version of a bigger school. It was a strange situation where the first situation is actually very different than later seasons.

Anyway, they kept trying to spin shows off of The Facts of Life, which I think is great. They would do backdoor pilots. A backdoor pilot is one of the normal 22 episodes of a season, they would introduce new characters and set them up and see whether they would work right, and then the hope would be to spin them off of the original show into a new thing. The Facts of Life was a spin-off of Diff’rent Strokes, and so this is trying to spin off other things.

Here are some of the backdoor pilots attempted to come out of The Facts of Life: Brian and Sylvia, a Season Two episode in which Tootie and Natalie go to Buffalo, New York to visit Tootie’s Aunt Sylvia, who has recently married a white man. It’s about Brian and Sylvia, these other people. The situation, you’re bringing your protagonist to a new place and trying to spin off these characters.

The Academy was a Season Three episode set at Stone Academy, the all-boys military school that was located near the existing school, so basically a boys version of Facts of Life. Jo’s Cousin, another Season Three episode. Jo visits her family in the Bronx, including her cousin Terry, a 14-year-old girl going through adolescence in a family full of men, so just a completely different family show.

The Big Fight was a Season Four episode set at Stone Academy, that boys’ military school, so it was another attempt to get that going there. One called Graduation. They’re trying to spin off a show about Blair and Jo and their life in college.

There was a Big Apple Blues, a Season Nine episode in which Natalie spends the night with a group of eccentric young people living in a SoHo loft, so trying to create that show.

**John Gatins:** Oh my god.

**John August:** Then The Beginning of the End/The Beginning of the Beginning, which is the two-part series finale, which they were trying to set up these two characters taking over Mrs. Garrett’s role at the school. It’s remarkable over the course of all these years, they just kept trying to spin other things out of it. It’s not a thing we get these days.

**John Gatins:** Wasn’t Clooney a recurring character?

**John August:** That feels right, yes.

**John Gatins:** As you were going through, I’m like, weren’t any of them trying to launch Clooney as a guy who was featured in one of those?

**John August:** You feel like he should. That was pre-ER. I was saying we don’t have spinoffs. I guess we do have spinoffs, because we have all those Yellowstone spinoffs.

**Drew:** There’s also Blackish. It has Brownish and all those.

**John August:** Blackish, yeah.

**John Gatins:** The Walking Dead has-

**John August:** You’re absolutely right.

**John Gatins:** … 15 million. Whatever. I got into watching The Walking Dead when I was on location in Georgia, and it used to freak me out, because it’s shot there.

**John August:** It’s Georgia.

**John Gatins:** I’m like, “That looks like the woods where the walkers are.” Now I just watched the first episode of Those That Lived or I don’t know what. When I was looking for it, 10 other spinoffs, the Daryl Dixon show and then this one and that one. I’m like, “Holy cow.” Fear the Walking Dead. The Walking Dead will never-

**John August:** They will never stop.

**John Gatins:** The zombies, they will never stop. The zombies will never go away.

**John August:** You’re completely right. I guess I’ve been thinking of a very specific, very deliberate, like, “Okay, we’re going to introduce new characters and try to spin them off in a new thing.” But franchisization of shows is really clear now. It’s not just the Cheers to Frasier to Frasier. There’s other ways to do it now. Sell a universe.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Alee Karim. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send your questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. I’m wearing both a T-shirt and a hoodie right at the moment. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on John Gatins’s mastery of credits and partnership, I guess. John Gatins, congratulations on your movie, and thank you for coming on Scriptnotes.

**John Gatins:** Of course. Thank you guys for having me. I appreciate it.

[Bonus Segment]

**John August:** John Gatins, as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been a solo writer. You’re a person who comes in and brings your own pen. You do your work. Then you take off. But recently started working with Andrea Berloff, another friend of the show, and you guys have been writing as partners. Talk to us about that transition. How’d it all come about?

**John Gatins:** It was interesting, because Andrea and I knew of each other, and then we really met in the strike of 2008.

**John August:** We should say that you were a strike captain in 2008 and were always out there with your black parka, a big cheerleader.

**John Gatins:** It’s funny too, because I don’t know that I was ever officially penciled as such, but I think I emailed people and said, “I’m going to be at Universal,” and then friends of mine just started showing up. Then you were there. There was a lot of people that we knew there. I had the acapella group from UCLA come. We had fun. Whatever. Strikes are not fun. That’s not the idea.

But Andrea showed up there. She was like, “Hey.” She always tells the story, she’s like, “You’re the first person besides my husband to know that I was pregnant.” I was like, “Oh, okay,” because she was like, “Look, I’m going to be a little intermittent.” I was like, “Andrea, I’m not in charge.” I was like, “You do whatever. Trust me.” We were like the MASH unit of Strikeville. We became friendly there.

Then I can’t even remember the year it was. It was 2014. I don’t know. I’m making it up. But we both got invited to be in a room, quote unquote, for Activision Blizzard. Stacey Sher invited us to be writers in this room, because they were trying to figure out Call of Duty movies.

**John August:** Why has there not been a Call of Duty movie?

**John Gatins:** Why has there not been?

**John August:** Yeah.

**John Gatins:** I’ll give my own opinion.

**John August:** Please.

**John Gatins:** Again, it’s going to be very uneducated. But it was an incredible room. We heard so many military experts who came in. It was incredible. Guys who had really done… Will Staples was really integral in facilitating the intros to these people in the military world and politicians. It was incredible. I learned so much, because I really don’t know that much about the military.

I think at the end of the day, you realize when they release a Call of Duty, it makes hundreds of millions of dollars in a weekend. To try to say that you would make a movie that would help that event, it would really have to be a movie that would be on a level that I think ultimately they never saw anything that led them to believe that this is going to in fact help their brand in a way.

That’s just, again, my take, because it was really a big aspirational attempt to try to launch three different series of movies, because there was Call of Duty, there was Modern Warfare, there was Black Ops. There was a bunch of different segments in the game world from that umbrella, and they tried to attack all fronts at the same time with lots of really smart people in a room. And there was lots of good ideas, but it just never full came together, I think.

**John August:** My hunch is they should’ve found the best military spec they could’ve found and called it Call of Duty.

**John Gatins:** That’s a really smart thing. Who knows? They may actually ultimately do that. But in that room, Andrea and I, we partnered up as producers, because they took six writers and made three teams of two to be producers that were assigned a screenwriter. Then we helped that person form an idea based on the franchise we were working on kind of thing.

Andrea and I were together every day for a month. Somewhere in the middle of it, we said, “We should write a movie together,” which as you said, I’ve never done that before. Neither had she, by the way. She has a great, thriving career all on her own. It was this weird thing of like, “Maybe.” We talked to our agents about it a little bit and whatever and said, “We’ll just try.” We didn’t think it was going to be like, “We’re going to do this forever.” It was this odd thing of like, “Oh my god, I’m actually going to write with another writer.”

We called Phil and Matt actually and said to them, “Hey, guys, how do you do it?” They gave us their thing of cards on a board of this scene, this scene, this scene, and then saying, “I want to write that one. Why don’t you do that? No, I want to do this one.” You divvy up the work and you do it and then you share and you back and forth and whatever.

We figured it out. It was interesting, because we’re at a point now where we don’t… I don’t think, anyway. She can speak for herself if you ask her. We joke all the time. It’s like, “You wrote that.” She’s like, “No, you wrote that.” I’m like, “Oh, I did?” It’s like, “No.” It’s a little bit seamless at this point, which I think is a good place to be. It’s great to have a lab partner. It’s such a solemn, weird thing that we do. Humans are social creatures. I don’t know. It’s been good. It’s actually been really fun.

**John August:** You’re the only writer I can think of who, at this stage in their career, partnered up, because it’s just much more generally people are splitting apart at this age. You guys, you’re holding each other accountable, but also you’re showing up to work in a way that is important.

**John Gatins:** We take meetings. We work for Netflix now, and have for over a year, in an exclusive kind of deal with them, which has been really fun and great. It’s just really nice. I think we were both at the perfect time in our lives that it was like, “This would be a cool thing to try to do together.” It’s been really awesome, honestly.

**John August:** The other thing I would love to talk to you about on mic a little bit is, of all the writers I’ve met over my career, you are the most savvy when it comes to, “Okay, six of us worked on a movie, and it’s now time to figure out credits.” It will go to arbitration or we can decide amongst ourselves and all agree on what the credits should be. You are very good at starting those conversations and figuring out ways to get everyone to agree on credits. Can you talk me through how that started and what your approach is for it?

**John Gatins:** To be honest, I don’t remember exactly how it started, but I’ve come to the place where a lot of times when I think back on the… There was a very long run in my career where I was a guy who would come in towards the end, and I’d do production rewrite work. I’ve also been fortunate that I am comfortable on a set, and directors I’ve been paired with, I’ve gotten along well with, who were like, “Hey, come help me.” I worked with a couple of first-time directors or younger directors, and it was great. It was like the Bull Durham relationship of like, I’m the old guy, and here’s a young person trying to do something. The studio liked me and felt like I could help. So I’d be on set and that kind of thing.

When it would come down to the credit thing, at some point maybe I knew one of the other writers initially and just reached out and said, “What are you thinking? They’re going to make a recommendation, and then we’re all going to go to our corners and try to write a manifesto that says, ‘This is what I think I deserve.’ Maybe we can have a conversation.”

I got to know the Guild people enough, having been through enough arbitrations and been an arbiter, that I would have a conversation with them. I would immediately come out and say, “Hey, can I have so-and-so’s number, or can you tell them here’s my number? If they want to chat with me, great, call me. If they don’t, that’s okay too.”

I would always start the conversation the same way and say, “Hey, listen. You worked on this, and I worked on this. If you’re open to a conversation, we can have it. I fully understand that there’s a really good chance this is going to arbitration, which is okay. We’ve all been through it. But because we’re in the soup together, is there anything you want to share?” or, “I feel this,” or, “I feel that,” or, “Maybe there’s a way that we can work it out.”

The Guild, I think that they would appreciate that, because it’s pitting writers against writers, which is never great, because as we said, it’s about resume, and there’s money and residuals, bonus residual. There’s all kinds of things about ownership of things and movie posters that don’t have your name on it that you feel like, “I deserve to have my name on it.” It’s very difficult.

Of course, the credits thing came up with additional writers at the end of the thing. It’s such a ballyhoo kind of thing that it’s difficult. It’s never perfect. It’s the best system we have. I know Craig’s worked hard on the manual, to try to say, listen, let’s revisit some of these things about what are the percentages and how do we mete this all out to make it make sense?

Look. My experiences vary. I’ve met some really cool writers that way. There’s been some things that have really gotten sorted, and it felt really fair and cool, and everyone walked away being like, “Hey, I appreciate you did that. This is cool,” and that kind of thing. Other times, it’s been not as good. It’s been like, “Look, we’ll just go to arbitration and see how it works out.”

**John August:** I’ve had both situations. I think, inspired by your example, I’ve reached out to writers on projects to see whether there’s a useful way for us to think about what the credits should be. Also, if I’ve come onto a project, I try to reach out to the original writer or writers to see where the bodies are buried. That almost starts the relationship a little bit earlier before it becomes figuring out the credits. Important to remember is that these writers can figure it out amongst themselves unless one of them is a production executive.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, that’s a little different.

**John August:** If someone’s a director or a producer.

**John Gatins:** That’s different.

**John August:** Increasingly, if a director is going for credit, that’s off the table, because-

**John Gatins:** It’s an automatic arbitration.

**John August:** Automatic arbitration. And same if someone’s a producer. It makes sense why, because that person would have undue power and control over the situation and might have their fingers on the scale. Now, one of the things I’ve heard you talk about is that there is the credit you see on screen and the list of credits, but behind the scenes there’s also math about what percentages go to which writers. Those things don’t have to line up precisely. Is that accurate?

**John Gatins:** I think so. It’s such a difficult thing.

**John August:** Here’s what I’m getting to. You will actually have the conversation about, “Let’s talk about money,” because one of the reasons why you want to talk about money is that different writers would have different box office bonuses based on what credit they get.

**John Gatins:** That’s a conversation that people have. That can get into lawyer land, where you say, “Listen. I appreciate what they’ve done. I was in a different situation. I was on a weekly. I don’t have a bonus on this movie. But I’m probably going to get credit. You may have been diminished enough that you’re not going to get credit.” That person says, “Then let me inspire you to invite me in, because I think I deserve credit on the movie.” At times, there’s a financial deal to be made as well. Different things mean different things to different people.

If you asked me this question 15 years ago, I might’ve given you a different answer, because having my names on movies was going to change the trajectory of my career or my opportunities. I’m old now. I wish that maybe there was executives out there who haven’t met me or don’t have a preformed opinion of what I do or how I can do or what I’m right for or where I fit on any kind of list on any given day. But I think that there is a little bit of, I don’t know, I am who I am. I’m going to try to do what I do. It’s a fairly difficult thing to apply math to a creative event.

**John August:** 100 percent.

**John Gatins:** That’s I think what you’re asking is to say, “Okay. Look at the script and tell me who did 33 percent of these four or five elements.”

**John August:** We’ve both been arbiters. It’s really tough.

**John Gatins:** It’s a really tough thing.

**John August:** Luckily, there’s the 33 percent math, but it’s really basically, did this person do so much work that they’ve crossed a threshold into getting this. It only gets down to 33 percents of stuff when there’s just too many names and too many people could be jockeying for that thing.

**John Gatins:** It’s hard. Derek Haas has been an arbiter, and he says his approach is he reads the shooting script and then he reads backwards. You try to figure, how do we get to this thing?

**John August:** [Crosstalk 01:03:17].

**John Gatins:** I was like, that’s a really smart way to say, because you may have written an amazing script, but it was set in 1914. The movie’s actually set in the 1980s now. You go, “What does that 1914 script have to do with the movie that actually got shot?”

**John August:** You may find that there’s a lot, but it may be-

**John Gatins:** It’s like, look, that 1914 script may be the reason the movie got made, but it doesn’t factor into the document that was actually filmed.

**John August:** That’s the crucial thing to remember about the credits process. It’s not about the process of making the movie. It’s literally about the final document. That’s why it can be so crucial, what is the final document? Does the final document actually reflect the movie? We’ve gotten into this before too, where this is the, quote unquote, final shooting script, but that’s not the movie that’s on the screen at all, so you have to go through that stuff too. It’s a challenging situation.

**John Gatins:** It’s a really challenging situation.

**John August:** I do feel like one of the changes from when we first started the business is if I worked really hard on a movie and didn’t get one of those top credits, I just disappeared, and it was like a year of my life just vanished. Additional literary material at least acknowledges, oh, that person, you existed. It’s a change for writers who otherwise might be completely forgotten. It’s proof that you did some work. There’s pros and cons to it.

**John Gatins:** It’s a tough one. It’s difficult. I’m not sure about the additional writing credit thing. I think I’ve probably been in that situation a little bit, because maybe I’ve done work on things where that was an opportunity.

**John August:** I can think of one movie you worked your ass off on, and I was so surprised that your name is not on that movie. You know what I’m talking about.

**John Gatins:** That’s where I learned a lot of lessons, because the statement that I wrote on my behalf was a ridiculous, embarrassing, emotional love letter to a college girlfriend, basically. It was like, “I gave my T-shirt on the day that Van Der Beek wore, and he wore it. I was there.” I’m like, no, you write a comparative literature paper that’s like, “Hey, I did these things,” and whatever. That one didn’t go my way for a lot of reasons. I didn’t help my cause on that one.

**John August:** I’m thinking of a different movie. That’s how many movies there are.

**John Gatins:** Oh my god.

**John August:** I’m thinking of a much more recent movie, a sci-fi movie that you-

**John Gatins:** Look. That was a situation that was really difficult, because I got to know the other writers and had a conversation, because that was one that was very confusing. It was a little bit like, how did we actually get here? Look. We tried. That was one where it was a failure, and it was a little bit like, huh. It was heartbreaking. But it was what it was.

**John August:** You got paid the money during production.

**John Gatins:** I did, I did. I did have a sizable win on the other side that I was feeling like was going to come through and did not. That was not a great moment. It’s a little bit of the peril of doing what I do, which has been a guy who, “Look, I was the fourth writer,” or something. That’s not a very advantageous position to be in. You just said to me, knowing nothing, “John, come on. You’re this guy who came in.” I’m like, “Yeah, but I went through all this.” It’s like calling other writers and saying, “Dude, I know you wrote a great script, but guess what? I’m the one who had to listen to all the nuts-ness of all the craziness and deal with blah blah blah.”

**John August:** Yeah, you had to shoulder and bear so much. You had to body a lot of the problems.

**John Gatins:** It was what it was. Time helps. You get some distance from it and everything. I thought you were talking about Varsity Blues. My thing is, I owe everything to Varsity Blues. That movie did everything for me. My name appears nowhere in that universe, but they paid my bonus anyway. They felt that. How about that?

**John August:** Nice.

**John Gatins:** That executive, Don Granger, was like… My agent called and said, “There’s something here for him.” He goes, “I don’t know anything about that.” It was one of those great movie moment inside the movie business.

**John August:** Love it.

**John Gatins:** It was a really gracious thing that they did. It was very nice. It led to me doing Hardball for them and doing so much work at that studio. I can’t fault that movie. I didn’t help myself in the process. I really didn’t know. That’s the thing I think that upset me most as a really young writer in that moment, the first movie, was that there was nobody in the Writers Guild… I didn’t know a lot of screenwriters. If I’d met somebody who’d said to me, “Hey, listen, man. Why don’t you let me look at that statement?” That’s the point, John. If I’d been an arbiter and I’d gotten that statement…

You’ve read plenty of arbiter statements where you want to say, “Don’t ever write a statement like that. This is no help. Trust me. I know you think you’re going to appeal to some emotional whatever. No, no. That’s not an emotional document. This is a document that compares the work you did, compares to the shooting script and to the other documents. That’s what it is.” I shot myself in the foot in that situation. Like I said, that experience and that movie and the success of that movie, I owe so much to.

**John August:** I owe a lot of my success to movies that my names are not on. That’s the reality of this career. John Gatins, so great to talk with you.

**John Gatins:** Great to talk to you, man. Thank you. I really appreciate you guys let me coming on.

Links:

* [Little Wing – On Paramount+ March 13th](https://youtu.be/kZeaCkIgN3o?si=JWbnJrw1ATTayZcR)
* John Gatins on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gatins) and [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0309691/?ref_=tt_ov_wr)
* [Little Wing by Susan Orlean](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/little-wing) for the New Yorker
* [LUCIRA by Pfizer COVID-19 & Flu Home Test](https://www.lucirabypfizer.com/)
* [Merlin Bird ID](https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/)
* [The Facts of Life – Attempted Spin-offs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Facts_of_Life_(TV_series)#Attempted_spin-offs)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Alee Karim ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/633standard.mp3).