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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-minds-eye).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 615 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what are you seeing when you read or write or remember? We’ll talk about the importance of visualization for screenwriters, and the fact that some very successful writers can’t do it. We’ll also be answering some listener questions on choosing a medium and directors demanding writing credit. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what’s it like getting what you always dreamed of? We’ll discuss the pros and cons of answered prayers.

**Craig:** Oh, my. Answered prayers, oh, okay. We’re into the power of prayer on the show now. I like it.

**John:** Answered Prayers was I think the famously unfinished or unwritten book by Truman Capote. I always loved that as a title.

**Craig:** Apparently, his prayers to finish were not answered.

**John:** They were not answered. A little bit of a news hook this week. An article was in the Hollywood Reporter this past week talking about Marvel changing its whole television model, moving the way that they’re doing their series from the features division to an actual television division and really treating the TV shows more like TV shows. Craig, what did you make of this?

**Craig:** It was a little bit like reading about a restaurant that said, “You know what? We’re not going to make spaghetti anymore using beef. We’re going to use pasta.” Their method was… Look, I’m sure they felt it worked for them or that it was going to work for them. I think sometimes when a company is very, very successful, it can begin to embrace the delusion that everybody else is done and their way is always better, and sometimes break things, move fast, break things.

In the case of the way they were doing their television, it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working creatively, I don’t think, for a number of those shows, by their own admission, it seems. It also wasn’t working procedurally for the people that were working on the shows, neither writers nor directors. It was kind of good to see, but also a little bit like, yes, you mean you’re going to move to the way that the rest of us do it? Yeah. It works.

**John:** Yeah. Some of these changes will be actually calling the head writer the showrunner and making it clear that they are more the person responsible for the overall creative direction of the series, which makes sense. People always talk about television is a writer-driven medium. Thinking about the series not just as limited series, special events that have to work like movies work, but also thinking about the season-to-season, ongoing longevity of a series, it just makes sense.

**Craig:** To be clear, even though some of this is about empowering showrunners to be showrunners, the prior system wasn’t particularly great for directors either. Hopefully, this turn towards the normal will reap benefits for everybody involved, and of course for the audience too. Marvel is capable of making outstanding stuff. I have every reason to believe that this will go well for them.

**John:** I hope so too. Obviously, a lot of these things happened before the strike. In the story, they talk through some of the challenges these series were having and the issues they were facing with the way they were trying to make the stuff. It’s also worth noting that some of the changes that are going to be just put in place by the new Writers Guild contract would’ve had an impact anyway. In terms of going from a mini room situation to an actual writers’ room, that transition is different now. It’s more contractually mandated than it was before. If you’re going to make changes, this feels like the right time to make changes.

**Craig:** I suspect that the pause gave them a chance to evaluate, more than anything. Just having a few months to stop and say, “How are we doing this? And why are we doing it this way again? And why aren’t we doing it the other way that other people are doing it?” must have given them a little bit of perspective that they didn’t have before. It is helpful that we have new terms that will help them as they move towards the normal. But like you, I suspect the move towards the normal predated the contract.

I’ve never worked at Marvel. We’ve had Kevin Feige on the show. He’s a terrific guest on our show and obviously an incredibly powerful guy who’s overseen one of the most successful runs in Hollywood history, period, the end. I’m only talking secondhand, but my understanding was that there was this sense that it was the executives that ran the show. I find that the most valuable television executives not only don’t run the show, they’re not interested in running the show. What they’re interested in doing is being an advocate for their audience. More than anything else, their job is to say, “We’re supposed to reflect our audience’s taste. Here’s what we think about what you’re doing. Here’s a suggestion we have, a request we have, a question we have.” That what they’re best at. I don’t understand a world where executives are running shows. That’s not what they’re supposed to do. Seems like they’ve made the correction there. Very pleased to see it.

**John:** Obviously, a challenge with what Marvel was trying to do – and I’m sure they’re going to still be trying to do it, but maybe a little less a mandate and a focus – is their movies and their series were supposed to dovetail together in very specific ways. Things would be set up in a movie that would then pay off in a series and then go back to a movie. That’s really challenging to do. Dates shift. The needs shift. You’re trying to make each individual project the best it can possibly be. That’s very hard to do when they all have to fit together in a specific, magic way. I would not also be surprised if there’s going to be less of a focus on making sure everything pays off from this series to that movie to this next thing. Just that may not be the best way to make the best individual projects.

**Craig:** I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this, but when has that ever stopped me?

**John:** It never has.

**Craig:** Never has. I feel like the universeness is smelling like a relic of the 2010s. I think as we are progressing into the 2020s, the whole extended something universe, it just feels kind of done. I don’t think the audience needs it. I think what they want is a good show or a good movie, really. I don’t know why everybody feels the need for everything to be interlocking that way. Yes, it helps you promote things, but nothing seemed to help the ones that didn’t work. I think just something good is good.

**John:** Good is good. Marvel was not the only entity making mistakes, apparently.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** In this bit of follow-up here, we get to learn that actually, even I can make mistakes.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Drew, can you help us out with this?

**Craig:** No, no, no. Don’t do this to me.

**Drew Marquardt:** Eliza writes, “On occasion, John misuses reticence and reticent. In the recent replay of Episode 463, John says, ‘Just to get over people’s initial reticence to read this different kind of scene description.’ Although reticence can seem like a fancy way to say reluctance, it’s not. Reticence is a reluctance to speak or share of one’s self. The words sound and function like cousins, but just like cousins, they are not interchangeable. Since John is so wordily wise, I couldn’t let him continue this spread of linguistic misinformation. But no one’s perfect, not even Duo SN.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Eliza’s absolutely right. She’s right. I looked it up. I went back through the transcripts, and not only did I use it in 463, Episode 569 I said it wrong. I said, “I wonder if some people who would otherwise make shows are reticent to do so because they are just not social people and don’t want that responsibility.” I was using it as a synonym for reluctance. Instead, it is a very specific instance of reluctance. I’ve learned my lesson.

**Craig:** I want to say that I knew this and declined to say anything out of just the milk of human kindness. While I don’t think I’ve made this particular error myself, I also did not catch it when you said it. It just sort of flowed, and I didn’t notice it. By the way, if I did, here’s a question for you, John. Let’s say you do misuse a word. Do you like it when people correct you, or are you like, “Just shut up. Leave me alone.”

**John:** In a podcast situation that is fully editable, I think it’s fair for us to make those corrections. Occasionally, we will make those corrections, if a misstatement of fact. I’m glad to know that I was using this word incorrectly, and so I’m happy to have that be fixed.

A thing I’ve noticed about podcasts, listening to a lot of podcasts, is a lot of time you hear people use a word that they’ve never actually spoken aloud, like a word they’ve typed a lot but they’ve never actually spoken aloud, and they will mispronounce it. I find that fascinating. Sometimes I will look it up. It’s like, “Oh, that is an alternate pronunciation, so maybe it’s valid they did it that way.” But in many cases, they clearly just-

**Craig:** They didn’t know.

**John:** … didn’t know how to use the word in practice.

**Craig:** I’m not going to say I like it when people correct me, but I appreciate when they correct me. What I’ve noticed is, when people do correct me, I remember that correction much more vividly and reliably than I would if I, say, read it in an email. I still remember the screenwriter Stephen Schiff telling me that I was using comprise incorrectly. It’s very common to say, “This is comprised of blankety blank blank blank. This sandwich is comprised of peanut butter and jelly.” But in fact, comprise is a transitive verb. “This peanut butter sandwich comprises peanut butter and jelly.”

**John:** Comprises.

**Craig:** It contains peanut butter and jelly. I didn’t know that. He corrected me. I was like, “What?” He is correct. I’ve never forgotten it. I use comprise correctly all the time now.

**John:** I hear that, and also, I do wonder if it’s comprises and is comprised of. I bet if you actually were to look it up, “it is comprised of” is such a common usage that it’s become almost default usage. While I agree with Stephen Schiff that this is the actual, correct way to use it, in modern usage it’s not that. You and I, we haven’t fully given up on, but we’ve softened over the course of our 10 years of doing the podcast… You and I, over the course of the last 10 years, have argued about begging the question, and I’ve just sort of given up trying to point out when people are using it incorrectly.

**Craig:** It’s just me and Peter Sagal left now on that mountain, fighting hand to hand. I will never. Never! But yes, these little-

**John:** It’s always fun when you get a chance to use begging the question properly. It’s just delightful.

**Craig:** It is, and then no one knows what you’re talking about. There are certain orthodoxies that I think are just enjoyable unto themselves. Certainly, I guess this is unlike Stephen Schiff, if I hear somebody say, “It’s comprised of blankedy blank,” I don’t say anything, because I don’t know them. Stephen knows me, so he knows I’m going to enjoy it. But a lot of people are like, “Just shut up.”

**John:** I think what you’re pointing out though is, it’s pedantic if you don’t know the person. If you don’t have a relationship, then pointing it out is pedantic. If it’s Craig or Drew, you talking to me, saying, “Oh, John, you’re actually using the word incorrectly,” that’s not pedantic, that’s actually delightful and helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Great.

**John:** Craig, back in Episode 612, you talked through your diabetes diagnosis, and we have some follow-up on that.

**Drew:** James writes, “My mother was diagnosed with diabetes later in life than you, and no one thought to check out the state of her pancreas. Unfortunately, her doctors assumed it was type 2, and consequently, they missed discovering its underlying cause, which, unfortunately again, was pancreatic cancer. It might be worth listeners being aware of this. The people are getting fat and lazy narrative is too often relied upon.”

**Craig:** I am so glad that James wrote in about this. I am kicking myself, because when we talked about my diagnosis, which is this adult-onset type 1 diabetes, one of the things I failed to mention and should’ve mentioned is that there are two typical causes of certain elevated antibodies. One is type 1 diabetes, and the other is pancreatic cancer. In fact, we had to check that out for me to make sure that that’s not what it was. I don’t know why it slipped my mind, but it is absolutely true that it’s going to be one or the other, typically, when you have these certain elevated enzymes. Pancreatic cancer is brutal. It’s just a killer.

James has put forth one of the best arguments for antibody testing when dealing with evidence of diabetic pathology. I don’t care what age you are. If they tell you that you are prediabetic even or diabetic, you have to talk to them about testing these antibodies to see if indeed you are type 2 diabetic or if you are either type 1, which is a different treatment, or if you have hopefully what would be a very early stage of pancreatic cancer. Sorry to hear about what happened to James’s mother. I am terrified to imagine how many people this has happened to, but I suspect a lot. A lot.

**John:** One more bit of follow-up here.

**Drew:** Christopher writes, “I appreciated your openness in sharing your story about diabetes. It resonated with me, as I was also diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder as an adult, and similarly, only after a thoughtful doctor ordered proper testing. The diagnosis changed a great many things, but many months after life leveled out and I started feeling like myself again, I realized I was now one of around 27% of Americans who have a disability. And I mention this only because I didn’t hear you use that particular D-word during the conversation.

“I realize that being a straight white man with an invisible disability is complicated, but still, that shouldn’t be a reason to deny or minimize your experience. In my case, I initially dismissed the idea of being part of the disabled community, because I had always considered myself perfectly able-bodied and physically fit, and it felt incongruous with my identity to change that as an adult. I took great inspiration, however, from your episode with Jack Thorne. His advocacy motivated me to make some overtures to other disabled individuals to see if it was a place in which I fit. What I found was perhaps the most accepting group of people who I have ever encountered. None of them ever questioned my place among them or seemed dismissive of one’s struggles relative to another’s. We were all in it together.

“Publicly being willing to identify as disabled is a big step, and I’m not sure if you fully realized that when you volunteered the information about diabetes, that this is part of what you are doing. Going forward, it might feel a little ridiculous to say things like, ‘I am a disabled person,’ or check the accompanying box on standardized employment forms, but I encourage you to do so whenever possible. Put simply, when you identify as disabled, you naturally encounter more disabled people. You share stories together, and everyone’s experience is better off for it. We learn from and support each other most when we directly engage. You have already always demonstrated empathy in your work and a desire to be inclusive, so you should allow others the courtesy and opportunity to extend the same to you as well. Thanks for being so brave and sharing your experience with the Scriptnotes audience.”

**Craig:** Christopher, fascinating. I must admit, when I saw this statement here, the first thing I thought was, is it a disability? Obviously, we know diabetes is a disease, but is it also a disability? I went to the Googles, and the Googles sent me to the American Diabetes Association. And they have a page that says the following. “Is diabetes a disability? The short answer is yes. Under most laws, diabetes is protected as a disability. Both type 1 and type 2 diabetes are protected as disabilities. People with diabetes can do any type of job, sport, or life goal.”

That got me thinking about what Christopher was saying, because there are some bioethics here. Disability we can look at as a binary question, which I think is sort of the way Christopher is approaching it. Either you are disabled or you’re not. I’m saying all this to explain why I didn’t use the word disability. It wasn’t even a choice. It just wasn’t something that seemed in my brain to align with what was going on. It may be because I don’t necessarily see it as a binary, but more as a continuum. There are places you get to where, yeah, it’s a thing. Look, if I’m walking around with an insulin pump and I need time at work to go and change the pump or replace a tube, yeah, then I’m a disabled person who needs an accommodation to do my job. People around me need to be aware of that.

The question is, right now, given where I’m at, should I be checking that box, as he says, or not? The balance here is, am I going to be taking resources or opportunities from someone else who has a more impactful disability than mine, because there are some disabilities that are more impactful than others.

My instinct is, currently, Christopher – and I appreciate what you’re saying, and I thank you for it – but I don’t think that I’m comfortable checking that box yet, because I don’t need to. I don’t think I need any accommodations right now, and I’m very wary about taking them from somebody else who does. If anyone says, “Look, I have a disability. I want to check the box,” check the box. I have zero problem with that. But I guess this is mostly me explaining why I didn’t say it, because I don’t necessarily think I’m there yet. What do you think? This is a tricky one, John. What do you think?

**John:** I think you’re right that it’s tricky and that it’s hard to have blanket advice here. Looking back at Episode 530, we had Jack Thorne, and he was talking about how as somebody with an invisible disability, he’s had it hard to speak up for himself and advocate for himself. Then he’s really talking about the importance of having a disability advisor as part of a production, just to make sure that anybody who’s involved in production, be it cast or crew, feels like they have a person who they can go to, to talk about the accommodations they may need or to help them think ahead for a production going forward, which is great and smart. In the UK, they’ve been able to enact some of those rules, which is great.

I hear you, Craig, in terms of, I think the choice of how you identify is a personal choice. It applies to disability, but it also applies to many other issues. The fact that you have a diagnosis doesn’t necessarily, to me, mean that you have a responsibility or a requirement to identify as that diagnosis. I just want to make sure that we always leave space for people to say what they want to say about their situation.

**Craig:** Look, I have no doubt I’ll get there. Clearly, I don’t have any shame about it, because I talk about it on the show, nor do I think anyone who has diabetes, type 1 or type 2, none of them should have any shame. On that front, I agree. If Christopher’s point is you shouldn’t be ashamed, shame shouldn’t keep you from identifying as disabled, I completely agree, 100%. There may be other things, but shame is not a good reason. You do not need to feel shame about having any disease or disability.

**John:** Pulling back a little bit, I think your ability to publicly identify as what you want to identify as feels like a fundamental right. I just want to make sure that whether we’re talking about disability or someone’s gender, sexuality, or ethnic background, you are going to present yourself in the world a certain way, but you also should have some measure of autonomy in what you are saying about yourself. I just want to make sure we always leave space for people to be themselves and to speak up how they want to speak up. I honestly hear you, Craig, too, in terms of you don’t want to pull resources away from folks who may need more accommodation than you. It’s tough.

**Craig:** I certainly want to do my part to protect the workplace for people who need accommodations, but we do live in a world with limited resources and limited opportunities. I think we all understand if there is special consideration or opportunity for people of a certain class, I think we all understand that that protected class, that’s about helping people who really do need the help. It’s not simply about helping people who satisfy some superficial criteria. Steve Wynn, the guy who owns Encore, did he die?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I can’t remember. I think he died. But he was blind.

**John:** He was blind.

**Craig:** Did he need special financial accommodations? Probably. He was a billionaire. Yeah, I’m sure he did. Should he be getting grant money and such? I don’t think so. I think it’s reasonable to do a needs analysis, especially when we’re dealing with limited resources for a lot of people.

**John:** Agreed. Our last bit of follow-up is related to Episode 610, where we talked about what do studios actually do.

**Drew:** Mallory writes, “How do successes like Sound of Freedom and the Taylor Swift movie figure into the major studios being the only route to successful distribution?”

**John:** These are two examples of movies that were made outside of the traditional studio system. I guess Sound of Freedom was actually made inside the studio system, but then that got released outside of the studio system. Of course, the Taylor Swift movie is making a bazillion dollars. It was just self-financed and put together. I think there have always been those oddities of things that were just done outside the system, but when we’re talking about alternatives to the studio system, it’s really about an ongoing basis, not just one-off projects.

**Craig:** First of all, Sound of Freedom, the success is in dispute, because-

**John:** It’s a real question of how many people were actually in the theaters watching that versus buying tickets.

**Craig:** That’s right. Hard to say exactly. But yeah, there have always been these strange things. In the case of Taylor Swift, she really is an independent film studio. She has enough money to finance… I think it was $20 million budget. What that means is that she can finance anything and then release it however she wants. She’s also her own studio, because she can advertise and promote her own material. She goes on tour, and that’s how that works. Taylor Swift is her own business empire. That makes sense that she can compete with movie studios.

The major studios are not the only route to successful distribution. I don’t think we’ve ever said that. There are independent studios that do it. There are one-offs. We find them notable for a good reason, because they’re rare. Really, I guess the position that I’ve had, that I’ll maintain, is that major studios are, generally speaking, the most effective and most prominent way to distribute a film.

**John:** Yeah. In that episode, we talked about how, obviously, the studio is bankrolling things, but they’re also providing the marketing function. They’re providing the collection of funds function. Sound of Freedom, it made a lot of money. Did it actually pull that money back out of theaters? That’s going to be a little bit more challenging for them, because they don’t have the next movie coming down the pipe to say, “Okay, we’re not giving you the next thing until you pay up what you owe us.” Same with Taylor Swift. Apparently, it’s a deal with AMC Theaters, which was probably the bulk of the incoming money. But shaking that money back and bringing it home will be more challenging for her company than it would be for Sony, because she has no next thing coming out.

Obviously, the Sound of Freedom marketing function and the viral way they were able to make that happen was exactly perfect for their movie. Taylor Swift is her own marketing machine, so she didn’t need that function of the studio.

**Craig:** Correct. And she was smart, because what Taylor Swift, who is overtly, apparently a savvy businessperson, understood was that distributing the movie through a studio was going to cost way more than it would earn her. Way more. The studio’s cut is massive. Why do you need to go have a bank finance the purchase of your car if you are a billionaire and you want to buy a car? Don’t. Just buy it.

**John:** Just buy the car.

**Craig:** Just buy the damn car.

**John:** Our marquee topic this week stems from a series of tweets that John Green, the bestselling author, put out at the start of the month. He’s the author of The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska. Some of these books have become movies and series. His tweets read, “It’s baffling to me that some of y’all see stuff in your mind. You see it? The way your eyes see? I always thought visualize meant thinks of the words, ideas, feelings associated with the thing, not actual visuals. This may be why I’m so often wrong about what’s behind a particular cabinet in our kitchen, even though I’ve lived in this house for a decade. I also cannot tell you the layout of a room unless I’m in that room and looking at the layout. And I have no sense of direction. None.”

Somebody writes in the Twitter thread, “So when you’re reading, does it turn into a movie? Can you see the characters?” He says, “No, it’s just text. Very occasionally – I count the number of times it’s happened on one hand – I will suddenly feel as if I can glimpse something visually that’s in a story, but 99.99% of the time, it’s just text. Is that unusual?” And it is unusual, but it’s not actually unprecedented. It’s actually more common than I thought.

We’re not a science podcast, so aphantasia as a condition is not a thing we’re going to go into much detail about. But it’s hard for me as a writer to envision myself being able to do my work without being able to visualize. I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about visualization as part of our process.

**Craig:** It’s an incredibly important part of my process. I can see how if you were aphantasic, being a novelist wouldn’t necessarily be problematic. The reason we who write for screen I think really do rely on our ability to visualize is because somebody’s going to have to actually make it.

Also, we are writing things for people to portray and act in three-dimensional space. Where are they standing? This is the great Lindsay Doran question that she would ask all the time when I wrote a script with her. Where is he standing? Where are they standing? How big is the room? How do they get from here to here? Describe the space, because there are going to be a thousand meetings where someone is going to have to figure out how to build that thing. The more you can see…

You may not be able to put every detail down on page. First of all, it’s not advisable to do so. Second of all, you just won’t have the room. The more you know, the more you can answer the question, and also the more internally consistent the work will be, because a scene is written in a space, and the scene follows the rules of that space. It doesn’t just change in the middle of the scene. For me, not only is it important, but it’s kind of essential. If I can’t see the space, I can’t start to write the scene.

**John:** 100%. I think one of the reasons why people may not immediately click to that in terms of screenwriting is because we’re not describing the whole space. Sometimes we are more, but sometimes it’ll be a slug line. It’ll say interior house, this, and it may give a little painting of what the space is like. But even if I’ve not put out all that scene description there, I have to, in my head, know where this scene is.

The first step of writing a scene for me is literally creating the space in which the scene happens, figuring out roughly the layout of the room, wherever this is, putting people in that space, figuring out their general blocking, and only then do I start being able to observe what are they doing, what are they saying, what is the movement, how does it all work. I call this looping in my head. I’m just seeing the scene play out. I can’t imagine writing a scene without that. If I’m doing a surgical rewrite on someone else’s script, I do need to build that space out in my head, or else I can’t do it.

It may have been Aline who said it first on our podcast, the joke that the screenwriter’s the only person who’s already seen the movie. Yeah, I’ve definitely already seen the whole thing before I’ve put it down on paper.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, I’ve seen it. This is this thing that’s happened to me a thousand times. When I get to a set or a place, everything’s always the other way. I don’t know why.

**John:** 100%, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s always the other way.

**John:** The phone is on the wrong side of the bed. How could you not know that?

**Craig:** It is so routine that I just laugh, and everyone’s like, “Wrong side?” I’m like, “Yeah.” Obviously, it’s not relevant. If it were relevant, I would make a point of it. The episode with Bill and Frank, I had their house in my head. This was the entrance. That’s where the dining room. That’s where the kitchen is. When you walked in the front door, the dining room was on the right, and then the kitchen was through the door, past there. And when I got their plan, they had put it on the left. They put it on the left for a reason. I couldn’t remember what it was. It had to do with something and building and blah blah blah. Every time without fail. Without fail, every single time. I think I’m very good at visualizing things, but I visualize them in the opposite direction from everybody else. The chirality is off.

But yeah, it’s essential. It’s just essential. Also, visualizing spaces allows you to write beyond the limitations of dialog. It gives you what are actors looking for, how to use the space, how to move through the space, picking objects up, what does it smell like, what is the humidity in the air, what do they lean against, can they tap their fingers on something that makes a sound, all of these things that you could do. None of them are there and accessible to you as you’re writing a scene if you can’t see the space. For what we do, I think it’s essential.

**John:** You said at the start that as screenwriters, obviously that visual thing is so important, but in writing the three Arlo Finch books, I would say that visualization was just as crucial to me, the ability to not only see what Arlo’s house was like and what the layout was and know where everything was in that place, but also what it sounded like, how the floorboards squeaked, and in the book, what did things smell like, what was the texture of stuff, how did things taste. In my head, I can do all those things. I can create tastes that I’m not experiencing. I can create smells that I’m not smelling. That was really important for me in writing those books, to just really ground you in what those spaces were, which in books have more than just what you see and what you hear. John Green is a very successful novelist who’s done all this without the ability to do that.

He’s not the only very successful person who has this condition. Ed Catmull, who’s a big Pixar director and animator, he has that same kind of mind blindness. Some very successful architects have it too. That doesn’t seem possible to me. Just me thinking about how my brain works is that these very, very visual people can’t see things in their head. They actually have to do it on paper to see the thing. That’s true. Clearly, the condition is a spectrum. They have a rating here from one to five. We’ll include it in the show notes. It’s not a disorder. It’s just a situation, like left-handedness. It’s not anything is necessarily wrong. It’s just that most people can visualize, and some people can’t.

**Craig:** Oh, I think there’s something wrong with lefthanded people.

**John:** Yeah, disaster.

**Craig:** Something needs to be done. We gotta get our country back, John.

**John:** This is just a wild theory I’m going to throw out there, and maybe somebody has tested this. I don’t feel a particularly compelling need to rewatch movies. Given a choice between rewatching a movie and watching a new movie, I’ll always watch a new movie. I wonder if some people who compulsively rewatch movies, it’s because they actually can’t see the movie in their head, and so the only way they can experience the movie is actually watching the movie, versus me, I can pull up any scene in one of my favorite movies and I can see the picture. I can tell you exactly what it is. I remember what direction characters are facing. A person who doesn’t have this visualization ability, it’s not just they can’t imagine new things. They can’t pull up memories of old spaces and times.

**Craig:** That may be true. If The Godfather comes on, I’m watching it, most Tarantino movies, and I can remember them. I can play them back. I can play back the entire scene where Samuel L. Jackson is yelling at Frank Whaley. I know where everyone is. But I still like watching it, because it’s fun.

**John:** I do wonder if down the road, algorithms will be able to figure out who is aphantasic, because it seems like the word choices we’re using and how we’re describing things ultimately may reveal… The same way they could figure out that Robert Galbraith was actually JK Rowling. I do wonder if there are certain patterns in people’s usages that will point to what’s actually happening inside their heads.

**Craig:** This is the next frontier, interfacing directly between our brains and the hardware that our brains have devised and created. I don’t know if I want to stick around for it or if I want to check out. I don’t know. The next few years are going to be nuts.

**John:** Ryan Knighton, a friend of the show – he’s been on a couple times – is a blind writer. He once had vision, but he lost his vision in his early 20s. I do notice that in talking with him and emailing with him, he uses visual words all the time. He was like, “I see what you’re saying. I’ll have a look.” He’s still using those things. I haven’t talked to him about this recently, whether in his writing he’s still seeing things in his mind, or if it is just all metaphorically seeing things rather than actually visualizing stuff.

**Craig:** I’m sure we have blind listeners. I’m curious. If we do have blind listeners who have been blind from birth, so they’ve never seen, I suspect they are doing some kind of internal visualization. Not all of them. Maybe some of them are also aphantasic. But what is happening for blind folks when they visualize things? Are they visualizing them based on the heard description or the read description? Curious. I’d love to know.

**John:** It’s good to see. Related, also there’s the phenomenon that some people don’t have internal monologues. They don’t hear things in their head. Sure. Again, there’s nothing wrong, but it’s just really unusual. I can’t imagine not being able to preview a conversation, not being able to have some ongoing chatter in your head.

**Craig:** I don’t actually hear it, hear it, but it’s there.

**John:** For sure. Let’s get on to some listener questions. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Oh, I feel the umbrage clouds on the horizon on this first one.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Drew:** Greenhorn writes, “I’m a repped screenwriter but rather in limbo at the moment, since I’m switching reps, and I don’t have the appropriate person to speak to right now. A few years ago, I was introduced to a second unit director who has worked on some big movies. He’s looking to make his directing debut, so I pitched him a few ideas. One of them he loved, so I worked up a four-page outline and was in touch with him through that process. Indeed, he gave some feedback along the way, but to be frank, his contributions were minimal. The idea, title, characters, story, and set pieces are all mine. And indeed, every word on the existing document was written by me. As far as I understand, I am therefore the writer. All this writing I did pre-strike, by the way.

“He called me last week to say he just pitched the idea verbally to a major studio who love it and who want to see the outline. But he’s saying that he’ll only pass it on if I say he co-wrote it. This doesn’t feel fair, let alone true. From the conversation we had on the phone, I know that he’s doing this out of fear of the studio buying it from me and then just hiring a more experienced director to replace him.

“I’ve told him that the solution to this is for him to just option the project from me. I also told him that it isn’t fair for him to try to claim co-writer credit. He has responded petulantly and with a hostile tone, doubling down on his claim to being co-writer. And more worryingly, he said he’s now pitched the idea to another studio. But even though I’ve asked him, he won’t say which. I’m now concerned to protect my idea, since it’s the kind of high-concepty, laugh-out-loud kind of idea which you can imagine suspiciously resurfacing at a studio a little later down the line. And there’s no paper trail if he’s pitching verbally and indeed refusing to tell me where he’s pitching. So my questions: am I right to deny his claim to co-writer credit? And short of getting a lawyer on the case, how best do you reckon I respond to him while I don’t have a new rep yet?”

**John:** Greenhorn, a couple things to do right away, and then we can also probably back up to more general advice. I thought Greenhorn’s suggestion of, “You could option it from me, and that’s a way to attach yourself more fully to it,” that makes sense. He should’ve said yes to that. But he didn’t say yes to that. Now you’re concerned that he’s going to, having gone out to pitch this to different places, he’s going to try to set up this idea without you. That seems kind of like a thing he might try to do. This is a time where you actually need to make sure your outline, your four-page thing is actually… I would say actually register it with the Copyright Office, which we don’t often say. But you do need to protect yourself here and make sure that it’s clear that this really was your idea. You also have all the emails back and forth between the two of you. It sounds like there’s emails. That’ll also be in your defense. But you don’t want to be going into this planning for a lawsuit down the road. You want to stop this now if you possibly can. Craig, I’m curious what you think he should be doing right now.

**Craig:** Right now, we’re dealing with crisis management. Let’s jump in our time machine first and talk about what should Greenhorn have done. You pitched this idea that you had, and then you wrote an outline. Now, by the way, we’re not talking about an idea. Now we’re talking about a unique expression in fixed form. Now we have-

**John:** Literary material.

**Craig:** … literary material. “He just pitched the idea verbally to a major studio who love it.” I don’t believe him, by the way. Don’t believe him. I’m just going to say that right away, Greenhorn. Do not believe that.

**John:** He’s lying to you in other ways, so he’s probably lying about this.

**Craig:** “Verbally to a major studio who love it and want to see the outline.” They love it? Really? “But he’ll only pass it on if I say he co-wrote it.” Now, at that point, Greenhorn, I would have lawyered up, right then and there. I wouldn’t have offered options or anything. I’m like, “That’s it. You’re out. You’re done. Bye,” because he didn’t co-write it at all. That’s not what he did, nor do I understand why he needs to.

Greenhorn, your theory is that he wants to do this so that they can’t kick him off the project. They kick writers off of projects way easier than they kick directors off. They kick writers off of features on a daily basis. They hate kicking directors off of features. So, no, that’s not going to help him at all. At all. This is just lame. It’s not even a discussion, by the way. It’s literally not even a discussion. I’m sure he is petulant and hostile. Don’t care.

He’s a second unit director, so what do I know? I know then that he does not have experience necessarily developing material with writers as a first unit director. Second unit directors, by the way, are incredibly important, and the best ones are remarkably skilled, so in no way am I undermining what they do. They are necessary and amazing, but they do what they do.

**John:** We should say for our listeners who may not know, second unit directors generally, particularly on bigger action movies, they are filming a lot of this stunt work. They’re doing a lot of stuff that doesn’t involve the principal actors doing the main scenes. Every action movie you’ve seen has had an amazing second unit director doing that stuff. In television, they’re also doing a lot of pickup stuff for things that aren’t being hit by the main unit, so they’re crucial to things, but these are not people who are generally doing big storytelling scene work kind of things.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you go to a movie and you see a big car chase, all the shots where they’re cars, so not inside the car… Mark Wahlberg’s inside the car. The director, the first unit director is directing Mark Wahlberg inside the car. He’s going, “Whoa. Huh.” All the other stuff, zoom, ram, rah, crash, smash, that usually is the second unit director. Second unit directors sometimes are also stunt coordinators, because they are shooting fight sequences and things like that. The guys that went on to make John Wick were stunt coordinators who operated second units and then moved up to make John Wayne. It can happen, but it sounds like this particular second unit director does not have experience working with writers developing things, because if he did, he wouldn’t have said any of this.

Now, John is right, you should submit your work to the Copyright Office, and then you should call a lawyer. Now I know you say, “In short of getting a lawyer in the case,” but this is the frustrating part, Greenhorn. Sometimes I feel like John and I have a medical show, and people write in and say, “I’m bleeding out of my butt. Short of going to a doctor, what do you reckon I do with this?” You’re like, “I think you need to go to the doctor. You’re bleeding out of your butt.” You’re sort of bleeding out of your butt here. You need to go to a lawyer. It is going to cost money, but do you care or not?

The bottom line is, look, if you read about this thing happening in a newspaper, you can call a lawyer then and say, “Look, I’ve got this thing.” Then the lawyer will be like, “Great. Okay. I’m taking this on contingency, because it’s going to work, and we’re going to get money.” Or you can do it now. Personally, I would do it now. If that guy happens to be listening to this, if Greenhorn’s account is accurate, dude, act like you’ve been there before. This is ridiculous.

**John:** I would suspect Greenhorn’s lawyer will send a letter to this second unit director saying, “Stop misrepresenting your involvement in this project. To clarify, you did not write any of this project, and do not represent yourself as a writer on this project, and maybe don’t contact my client again.” There’s no salvaging this relationship. Greenhorn, I wouldn’t worry about trying to make good with the second unit director. You’re not going to end up in a happy place with this guy.

**Craig:** No. Also, to be clear, this guy is trying to sell property he doesn’t own. Once you start thinking about this like property, you can realize how offensive this is. He was like, “Hey, I want to be a car racer,” and you’re like, “Great. I like building cars. Here’s my plan to build a car.” Then he’s just going around going, to car companies, “I have a car that I made.” No. No. It’s not yours.

**John:** There are producers who are pitching projects they don’t own, but they are producers pitching projects they don’t own, and they’re not trying to claim that they are the co-writer on the project. That’s where they overstepped.

**Craig:** Correct. Also, producers that are pitching projects that they don’t write, generally speaking, have the consent of the writer. I’m not aware of any producer that’s going around there pitching IP that they have no association with. That’s just scumbag stuff.

**John:** There are a lot of scumbag producers who do that.

**Craig:** I guess that’s true. They’re scumbags.

**John:** Here’s the thing. They’re scumbags. This is a scummy thing to do.

**Craig:** Yeah, so lawyer up.

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** Sorry, Greenhorn. Lawyer up.

**John:** What else we got, Drew?

**Drew:** Ripley writes, “One struggle I continually have is what medium to write in. I feel with any idea I have, I can see how it would work as a cartoon or a horror feature or a comedy series. I’ve so far written a sci-fi comedy feature, an animated pilot, and a scattering of mostly drama shorts. I’m currently working on an idea that I’m on page 20 of and am still not sure what it is or should or will be. I suffer from ADHD and am often paralyzed with decision. I can see how a hundred different ways could work and never know how to narrow it down. Do you have any specific advice for this dumb issue?”

**John:** It’s not a dumb issue. I think a lot of people struggle with… I’m re-framing your question. It’s like, I don’t know what project I should write. Really, what it comes down to is you have a general story area, but you’re not sure what specific version of it you should write. That’s a really common situation. I think you just need to let yourself sit for a second, really think about what do you want to write. Is there a genre that particularly speaks to you, that you really enjoy writing, that you actually feel connection to? Is there something you’ve always wanted to try that you’ve not had a chance yet to do, that you want to experiment with? The things you write for yourself can truly be experiments. They’re a chance to take a flyer and see what works. Don’t be afraid to do that. Just try to be deliberate in your choices.

**Craig:** I think that’s excellent advice. I would only add this. Sometimes we struggle with the quantity of possible decisions, because we’re making the decisions kind of backwards. You have an idea, and then you say now, could be a cartoon, could be a horror, could be a comedy, could be animated, could be live, could be drama. Okay, sure, it could be a thousand things. We all have the same thousand things, so what’s the difference between people who are migrating firmly towards one thing, as opposed to you, Ripley, who are just like someone at Cheesecake Factory going through that massive menu, is that you are trying to stick that on top of what you’re doing. But it really shouldn’t be a decision. It should be a therefore.

You think about your idea, and you think about what the point of that idea is and what you’re trying to say with it and who you’re trying to reach, who you’re trying to talk to, and how you want them to feel. You think about all those things. As you think about them, it should begin to emerge that it would be best as blank. Anything that you and I have done could be a cartoon or a live action. Literally, Chernobyl could be a cartoon if you want it to. It wouldn’t be good, but you can do it. We make our choices for reasons. I think that’s the key is you need to figure out what it wants to be by asking what it is.

Sometimes the decision paralysis, and I’m not discounting the fact that you have an additional challenge because you have ADHD, but beyond that additional challenge, the reason you’re asking us is because you feel like, “Hey, I can get there.” I believe you can too, if you dig a little bit deeper into what exactly the thing is about. Then I think maybe you’ll have more clarity. I hope you will.

**John:** I agree. Looks like we have time for another question here.

**Drew:** Taylor from Arkansas writes, “I wrote an eight-page script that is part of an anthology feature film. The film is in post, and the producers are in talks with multiple streamers to buy it. I am not part of the WGA yet, and I cannot find on the WGA website how I should receive credit or maybe points. Any insight would be appreciated. To clarify, I wrote this script specifically for this film. These are not preexisting short scripts or films pieced together.”

**Craig:** Just to be clear, Taylor, at least this is how I’m reading your question, the project itself is a WGA-covered project. It’s just that you’re not in the WGA yet, I think.

**John:** Possibly. It’s not entirely clear from Taylor’s question. Let’s take that as the premise, and then we can modify at the end if we need to.

**Craig:** Taylor, you’re trying to figure out essentially how to qualify for full WGA membership, and indeed it works on a points system where certain kinds of work earn certain amounts of credits, like tokens, kind of, towards membership. And once you hit, I think it’s 24 of those, boom, you become a current member in good standing for, I think, seven years.

There is a manual that you can find on the WGA website, and we can, I’m sure, find a link for that that does show that. But you can also call the Membership Department at the WGA. They are there to help, because what you’re writing is a quirky little thing. It’s part of an anthology feature. Okay, so does this qualify as a short? Are you credited instead for the time you are employed? You need to call the WGA Membership Department and ask them this question, and they will give you the full answer.

**John:** Yes. Thinking about this project, whether it’s a WGA project or not a WGA project, your question of how you’re credited on the film is going to be relevant. I’ve seen anthology films where in the end, they list the different segments and then the writer and director of that segment and what the crew is, and they treat it like this was a bunch of shorts all put together. They may be an appropriate way of crediting writers in this project. Alternately, they could choose list all the writers together.

If it’s a WGA project, what’s going to happen is it’s going to be a list of participating writers, so you’ll be one of the participating writers in this, and then figure out how to assign credit. It’s tough in an anthology. Even having been on that committee, I’m not quite sure what the consensus decision would be, how they’re going to assign that credit. My guess is this is ultimately not going to be a WGA project, but we’ll see where it shakes out.

**Craig:** If it’s not a WGA project, then it doesn’t matter, Taylor, how much work you do. It’s not going to earn you towards membership. If it is a WGA project, the good news is, your credit credit, meaning written by or not, is actually irrelevant.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s just employment. The question is, were you employed under a WGA contract? Even if you’re not in the WGA, if it is a WGA project, you have to be employed under a WGA contract. Let’s say that’s a yes. Then the next question is, what was the structure of that deal? Were you paid for time? Were you paid for a draft? Were you paid for a polish? What were you paid for? And then lastly, how long did that run for? Did you do two polishes? Did you do three rewrites? All of that stuff ultimately gets processed by the Membership Department.

Since we’re missing a whole bunch of details here, easiest thing would be for you to call the WGA. But don’t call them if this project is not covered by the WGA, because then it’s sort of like calling… You might as well call the US Post Office. We will have no more information or relevance to you if the production company is not signatory to the Writers Guild.

**John:** I would ask the producer or whoever it is who’s making the film whether it’s a WGA project. Also, take a look around as to who the other writers are. If none of the writers involved in the project are WGA writers, I think it’s a good guess that it’s not being done under WGA contract.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a series of, I think they’re originally TikToks, but I saw them on Instagram reels, by this comedian named Bonnie. I don’t know her last name. Her handle is Boobie Klapper, which is-

**Craig:** That was my handle.

**John:** That was your handle. The premise of these videos, it’s a class in teaching product packaging. It’s in that form where she’s talking to camera, but then she’s also playing the other two characters in this class. They’re really good. I’m going to play one little clip here so you get a sense of what this feels like.

**Bonnie:** Next on the list we have chips. They come in large bags, so most people aren’t going to eat the whole bag at once, and any exposure to moisture in the air will cause them to go stale. What are we going to package this in, you guys? Dylan?

**Bonnie as Dylan:** A resealable bag?

**Bonnie:** Good guess, Dylan, but no. Ruth?

**Bonnie as Ruth:** A non-resealable bag so that everybody has to buy other tools specifically designed to seal off the big gaping hole at the top?

**Bonnie:** That’s exactly right, Ruth. We want to create a headache so universal that an entire market of products emerges to try to address it. Well done.

**John:** She’s done this as a series, as an ongoing series of things. I just like the form of it. It reminds me of the Ikea cashier kind of thing. It’s just creating a premise and a situation, and the little three-man sketches are just the perfect way to manifest them. Loved it.

**Craig:** Excellent. My One Cool Thing is the most mundane One Cool Thing I’ve ever had. But John.

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** I bought a whole bunch of socks.

**John:** You deserve socks.

**Craig:** I deserve them. I’ve always been just like, buy the white socks. I’m trying to spiff myself up. I want some colored socks. Dress socks are too thin. I don’t like the way they feel. They go too high on your leg. I like a comfy sock, but I also want a splash of color, John, so what do I do? I go to Uniqlo,Uniqlo in the Beverly Center, but they’re all over, of course.

**John:** They’re everywhere.

**Craig:** In the Beverly Center, they have a wall of socks, 5,000 different colors. The specific kind of sock, it’s called Uniqlo Colorful 50 Socks. I don’t know what the 50 stands for. Gotta be honest. Maybe they have 50 colors. I don’t know. Don’t care. They’re cheap. They’re comfy. They come in every possible color you can imagine. I bought a big mess of them. Secondary One Cool Thing. I get all these socks. I’ve never been to Uniqlo. By the way, I haven’t been to the Beverly Center in like 20 years.

**John:** Now that you’ve moved to our neighborhood, you’re closer to the Beverly Center.

**Craig:** There you go. I’m in there with Melissa. We bought our socks. She got something. I got a hoodie. All right. Great. So we have all of our stuff. Where do we go check out? Oh, no. All they have is self-checkout. That’s all they have. I’m like, “Ugh.”

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I have all these socks, because there was a deal where if you buy four pairs of socks, it cost $8, something stupid, which is great. We’ve got to scan all this. There’s a guy waiting there, and he goes, “Oh hey, have you used these before?” I’m like, “No.” He goes, “Okay. You just dump all your crap into this huge white bucket that’s connected to the machine, and that’s it.” John.

**John:** Amazing.

**Craig:** I am still freaked out by this.

**John:** Does everything have an RFID tag, which is how they know what it is?

**Craig:** No. They’re fricking socks. Here’s how the socks are packaged. There’s a sticker on them that you can peel off. Then there are these two little metal brackets to hold the socks together. That’s it. There’s nothing.

**John:** Does the sticker have an RFID [crosstalk 00:55:42]?

**Craig:** No. It’s a fricking sticker.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Sometimes you could see inside, oh, there’s some sort of… No. I don’t understand what this machine is doing. We dumped in 20 pairs of socks, a hoodie, and a bra, and it somehow knew exactly what was in that bin instantly.

**John:** That’s incredible.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** I’m terrified.

**John:** When I was in Boston a couple weeks ago, I did buy something at Uniqlo, and the checkout was a hassle and a pain. I’m happy that they found some way to do it.

**Craig:** Get thee to the Uniqlo in Beverly Hills and try out this technology. It’s pretty remarkable. My One Cool Thing mostly is the socks, but secondarily-

**John:** Mostly the socks.

**Craig:** … the magic bin that knows what you bought.

**John:** I’m debating on how I think about this, because we mostly have white socks. We mostly wear white socks, and so we don’t have to match them. As we do laundry, any two socks are their pair. With colored socks, you do have to match the pairs. It’s not a huge hassle.

**Craig:** It’s really not. It’s really not.

**John:** I’m excited for your socks. You deserve colorful socks.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Han Lundberg. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You will 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 the weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. Someone actually wrote in specifically about the new Scriptnotes University hoodie and how much they love it. I’m so happy people love the hoodie. 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 getting the things you always dreamed of. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Great. This had a prompt. Drew, somebody wrote in with a question for us.

**Drew:** Yeah, a photojournalist wrote in. She wrote, “Craig talks about his career and how he knew he could do something like The Last of Us but didn’t know or imagine he would ever be given the opportunity. I think about myself in a different industry. I spent years, jealously, I hate to admit, watching other people do what I wanted to do. I looked at their work and thought, ‘Just put me in, coach. I can do it.’ Then one day, while I was standing in the middle of a river, photographing migrants as they crossed into Mexico on their journey north, I had a realization that after 10 years of hard work, I’d made it to the opportunity I’d always hope I’d be given. And for a moment, it was like getting a case of vertigo, like glancing down while you’re extraordinarily high on a very dangerous mountain climb and suddenly realizing where you are. Can y’all talk about if you ever had that moment and how you emotionally reassured yourself so that you didn’t suddenly lose your footing and tumble back down from where you came?”

**John:** Oof.

**Craig:** Heavy.

**John:** I have a lot of stories, anecdotes, and related feelings about that. I became successful pretty early on in my career. I got my first movie made. I definitely remember walking up to set for the first day of Go! and thinking, “Wow, there’s all these trucks around. Oh, these trucks are for my movie. Oh, crap, I’m making a movie.” I felt like I wasn’t worthy to be there, and overwhelmed that I was going to be found out. There’s definitely a lot of imposter syndrome, and then realizing, “Oh, no, actually, I do know how to do this. This is going to be fine. This is going to be okay,” and a series of those sort of steps, like being on set for my first TV show and all those issues, being around famous people and being in those rooms and realizing, “Oh, this is sort of the dream. This is what I’ve always wanted. It’s kind of what I thought it would be, but also just a lot of hard work.” Craig?

**Craig:** It’s an incredibly common thing, and I think if you don’t experience it, you might be a sociopath. It’s pretty normal to think, “Wait, I’m the thing that I was dreaming of being. If I was dreaming of it, then I shouldn’t be it. That’s why it was a dream. Now what do I do?”

There’s a couple of things that hopefully will help. One is, at some point you begin to realize, I haven’t changed at all. The key is, like you said, “Okay, I had made it to the opportunity I had always hoped I would be given.” That’s a great way of putting it. What you didn’t say, and I’m glad for it, photojournalist, is, “I became a success.” You’re the same person. The circumstances around you are changing.

But one thing that’s happening is a re-balancing of the karmic scales. You’re being evaluated in a different way. Sometimes it’s not fair. Particularly early on in our careers, we can be discounted. Later on, we may be over-counted. There’s this thing that happens where suddenly you can do no wrong, until of course you do. Then it’s important to remember again, I haven’t changed; the circumstances have. The way the world evaluates you is not necessarily your worth. It almost always isn’t. It’s important to remember you’re the same person. That’s good news. What it means is what you were doing then, which they might have looked down on, came from the same brain as what you’re doing now. Keep that continuity in mind.

I run into this all the time when I’m doing interviews for press for our show. I can’t tell you how many times, a million, someone has said, “You used to make comedies, and now you do this. What? How? What? How?” I’m like, “Okay, here we go again.” See, have you never met anyone? You never met anyone who was a funny person who also felt sad sometimes or got angry or about something or had moments of seriousness? Do you think that Jim Carrey walks around all day like he’s in Liar, Liar? What? What do you mean? We hold multitudes with ourselves. But it’s hard for people. I understand why they ask me this question, because they evaluate us by what we do and then imagine that we had to change to do this thing. We did not. They did. They had to change.

Just reconnect with the consistency of who you are, and the fact that when you were doing the things that you were like, “I’m doing this for money. I wish I could have better opportunities,” that you did that work well enough to get you into this place, where people are now giving you the opportunity to do this. Just keep doing the work. Keep growing. Always be humble. Always remember you can get better, always. Study the people that do what you do, and do it so beautifully that you love it.

And never lose that excitement for other people’s good work. That’s so important. You see somebody else crushing it. Okay. You said you used to be jealous. Fine. But now you are where you are. Stop being jealous. Start appreciating it, because it makes you better when you see these things. It makes you better. You learn. It inspires you to up your game, which is fantastic.

Then don’t worry too much about the fact that you are, like you said, on a very dangerous mountain climb. You’re not. There is no mountain. There is just this long walk that we begin when we’re born, and we end it when we die. The walk is going well for you. Keep walking. Keep looking at it.

**John:** In the initial setup for this, I said answered prayers, that sense of, oh, you had this wish, this hope, this dream. You were a protagonist in the story. You had this vision of what you wanted to achieve. In that vision of what you want to achieve, you probably had markers and milestones and, “Oh, if I’ve done this thing, then I will have made it.” In the case of you as a photojournalist, if you’re being hired and sent off on these assignments to do these things, that’s great. In the case of people who want to make movies and TV shows, you’re on set, you’re at the premiere, where you have those pinch me moments.

The same way Craig was saying you’re still the same person, I think one of the dangers is that in that vision, in that prayer you put out there, you were going to achieve these things, and in achieving these things, you were going to be happy. You were going to feel good about yourself. You were going to feel like you were worthy, that life would be good. I think one of the things you notice over time is that the most successful people you end up meeting in their fields aren’t necessarily the happiest. In many cases, they are not happy. We know many very successful people who are kind of miserable.

There’s a certain thing that happens when you’ve achieved that success and, “Wait, I should be happy, but why am I not happy?” I can point to all these things that I have achieved, and yet I still feel like a miserable failure.” I think you’ve got to make sure that you are aware that some success, financial success, career success, the accolades of others, they feel good. They’re useful, but they are not going to fundamentally affect your own self-perception or your ability to feel good about yourself, and in some cases, that kind of success can only emphasize and magnify those feelings until you become kind of monstrous. Just be aware of that too. Success is not going to make you happy. That’s a crucial thing to remember.

**Craig:** It’s not going to change you fundamentally. It’s not going to cure your shame issues. They will still be there. Everything that John just said is really important to understand. We, especially in American culture, imagine that there is a win. It’s not really that way. Here’s the best news, I guess, is that when you become a success at the thing that you are compelled to do, because I assume, photojournalist, there are days where you’re like, “Oh my god, it’s hot, and I don’t want to go out there,” but also, “Oh, if I see that, I got to get my camera.” Okay, there’s the compulsion. That’s the way I am with writing. That’s the way John is. You’re compelled to do this thing. When you achieve a certain amount of success, it becomes easier to pursue your compulsion. It doesn’t become happier. It doesn’t become simple. You will still have moments where it hurts. You’re going to be doing it anyway, and now it’s gotten easier to do, because you can focus more on it. You don’t have to worry as much about other things, like paying the bills, being kicked out of a house, food, medicine, health care. Those things get solved by success, so that you can concentrate on the work you do.

With success also comes opportunities to work with better people. Working with better people is the instant Hamburger Helper to doing better work. Let’s say I get a call from Martin Scorsese. I haven’t, by the way, and I’m stunned. But let’s say he did, and he’s like, “Craig, I want to make a movie with you,” in his fun, fast-talking way. I would get better as a writer working with Martin Scorsese. How could I not? That’s exciting. There are all these benefits to success, but none of them include happy. That’s not the end result here.

**John:** Looking at this last paragraph here, she writes, “For a moment, it was like getting a case of vertigo, like glancing down while extraordinarily high on a very dangerous mountain climb and suddenly realizing where you are.” What I hear in that is also fear of loss, loss aversion, like, “I made it to this place, and now it’s all perilous, because I could fall from this high of place. I worry about losing it all.” I definitely see that happening among some of our peers. They’re really worried about, “If I don’t maintain this pace, if I don’t maintain this level of success, it’s all going to come crashing down.”

I think over the course of our 10 years, we’ve tried to be consistent about saying, “Listen, be ready to be successful. Here’s some things to be thinking about when you actually achieve some financial success, when you achieve some career success, but you can’t let that paralyze you, and you can’t get stuck or trapped in this way of thinking.”

Craig, that’s one thing I want to commend you for is that you were a successful comedy writer, you weren’t happy doing it, and you said, “Listen, I’m not going to worry about losing my status as a comedy writer. I’m going to do some other stuff here and scratch the itches I actually really have.” I would say the same to Photojournalist. Don’t worry too much about losing what you have. Keep thinking about the kind of work you did to get to this place, how do you keep that work going.

**Craig:** All true. I guess I’ll finish with my one last bit of, I don’t know if it’s advice, but commiseration, one human being to another. When you arrive at this place that you’ve imagined arriving at for so long, you can also get depressed, because there is no cake. The cake is a lie. If you have something to dream about, that is warm and comforting and exciting. If you get there and, as John suggests correctly, it doesn’t make you instantly happy, it doesn’t change who you are, transform you from inside, you can get depressed, because suddenly you start to wonder, what’s the point of all of this? We are trained to have a destination. There is no destination. If you think that you have, quote unquote, arrived, and then you look around and go, “Wait, is this it? It’s a lot like when I hadn’t arrived, just better hotel rooms,” that’s normal. You have to mourn the loss of that childlike hope.

Then on the other side of that hopefully brief spell, there is something better, which is an acceptance of the way things are and that the work itself is, he said cliché-ably, the work itself is the reward. That’s the reward. There is no other reward. Hopefully, we have helped a little bit there, photojournalist. We’re certainly very proud of you. Keep walking your walk.

**John:** Indeed. Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [‘Daredevil’ Hits Reset Button as Marvel Overhauls Its TV Business](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/daredevil-marvel-disney-1235614518/) by Borys Kit for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Episode 530: The One with Jack Thorne](https://johnaugust.com/2022/scriptnotes-episode-530-the-one-with-jack-thorne-transcript)
* [John Green Tweet](https://x.com/johngreen/status/1708515024275189884?s=20)
* [Discovering aphantasia](https://austinkleon.com/2023/10/03/discovering-aphantasia/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) by Austin Kelon
* [Aphantasia – A Different Kind of Blindness](https://leelefever.com/aphantasia-blindness/) by Lee LeFever
* [Here’s What It’s Like To Not Have An Internal Monologue](https://www.bustle.com/wellness/does-everyone-have-an-internal-monologue) by Caroline Steber for Bustle
* [WGA Membership Department](https://www.wga.org/the-guild/about-us/contact-us/departments/membership)
* [Boobie_Klapper](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cwv-uusPR5D/) on Instagram
* [Uniqlo Colorful 50 Socks](https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E434187-000/00?colorDisplayCode=62&sizeDisplayCode=027)
* [Uniqlo RFID Automated Checkout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqPfYnVKwGI)
* [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 Han Lundberg ([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/615standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-premise).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 610 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what is it even about? We are discussing the premise, the very foundation of story, upon which we construct our takes. We also have a ton of follow-up on AI and language, listener questions, and more. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, it’s back to school season. We’ll reminisce about pencils and notebooks and what we do and don’t miss about being in school.

**Craig:** Oh my god, that’s like, we’ll reminisce about penny candy.

**John:** Ah, indeed. I love it.

**Craig:** Pencils and notebooks, what?

**John:** A preview for our listeners, I have such distinct olfactory memories, actually, of back to school season, like the smell of glue and paste and when you open up a new thing of Mead paper and the notebooks. I love it all.

**Craig:** Listen, it’s going to be a Gen X fest.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** We’re gonna talk you through all the pink erasers and-

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** … the little plasticky zip-loc pencil holders that would go on your three-ring binder. Oh, we got it all, my friends.

**John:** Yeah, plus the new jeans that are really too stiff when you’re first trying to break them in.

**Craig:** New jeans. Hey, guess what? Jeans used to be made out of the same stuff they use to cover old boats.

**John:** Now they use them to make the new WGA T-shirts.

**Craig:** That’s right, exactly. They use that now to punish us, in our hair shirts. Yes, all true, all true.

**John:** It’ll be fun. We’ll start with some actual news. In the headlines this week, there was a ruling saying that AI-created art is not copyrightable. This was a bid. Stephen Thaler is an artist, a person who made something or had his machine make something. He wanted to register it for copyright. The copyright office said, “Nope.” The judge in the case said, “Yeah, the copyright did the wrong thing. That is a no from me, dog. You cannot say that is a thing that you created that is going to be subject to copyright.”

It is interesting. There’s been a lot of little moments that have come along this way. I’ve testified on the WGA’s behalf in terms of our perspective on copyright and AI. It’s going to be an interesting area to follow over the next couple years about whether things that are made by AIs can be copyrighted and in what circumstances.

**Craig:** I think Stephen Thaler, I believe he owns some sort of AI business. I don’t think he’s an artist in and of himself. I could be wrong. Maybe he considers himself one. To me, this was a slam dunk. There is no reason to imagine that AI would have copyright production, any more than there’s a reason to think that AI would have freedom of speech protection. AI is not a person.

If there’s one thing we know, that I think we can all agree on when it comes to the Constitution – and copyright is enshrined in the United States Constitution – it is that the people who wrote it were writing it about people and did not imagine, predict that there would be artificial intelligence. There wasn’t even a cognate for it.

Sometimes people point out that the Second Amendment was written at a time when guns needed to be loaded slowly with a rod and powder and that the founding fathers did not foresee assault weapons. True, but there were guns. At least we know, okay, so there was a gun. Guns have gotten crazy. All right, we can discuss. There were no computers, no calculators. There wasn’t even an adding machine. There was nothing. Copyright is for people.

I did read the decision. Sometimes you read these things, and you can just tell that the judge is like, “Oh, come on. Really? No.” It was very much a no. I foresee that that will continue. I cannot imagine that this would survive in challenges. I don’t care who’s on the Supreme Court. I really don’t. Unless the Supreme Court is entirely made up of people that own AI businesses, I just don’t see how anybody could ever argue that AI-created stuff qualifies for copyright.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to the pdf of the decision, which is great. People should read through it. The article I’ll also link to talks about some of the other challenges to copyright that have come up over the years. Of course, you and I, Craig, we both work for corporations, and corporations are retaining the copyright on the things we do, because we are doing work for hire. I think that was part of Stephen Thaler’s argument here is that the machine was essentially work for hire and the same kind of principle should apply here.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** What I argued in front of the U.S. Copyright Office is that copyright was initially intended to protect… There was always a human author. It was always about the authorship. While the final copyright might transfer to somebody else or transfer to a corporation, it was originally intended to protect that author and that author’s expression and to foster more expression from authors. That is not a thing that a machine knows or wants to do.

**Craig:** No. Work for hire was about commissioning work. You could commission it from people. Again, there was no understanding or conception or ability to foresee that you could commission work from something that wasn’t alive.

For instance, nobody would’ve argued that if somebody had, I don’t know, a loom that could operate itself, that that would be creating works of art. Player pianos, interestingly, created all sorts of issues around copyright. That led to a whole understanding of mechanical copies and things like that and how mechanical copying was in and of itself a derivative of copyright.

We do not commission work. I think work for hire and the commissioning actually started in, I don’t know, prerevolutionary time with silversmiths, people like Paul Revere, I suppose.

**John:** It’s all Paul Revere’s fault.

**Craig:** They would come up with a design and say, “Listen, you work in my factory. I do all the silver stuff. Come up with a design of something. I’ll make a bunch of buckles. I’m going to own the buckle copyright if you want to work here.” That became the way that functioned.

You cannot commission something that is not alive, because you can’t pay it. It’s not a thing. So work for hire requires payment. It requires employment. You cannot employ something that isn’t alive. That’s not what employment is. Employment is paying a human for a thing.

**John:** The use of technology has also come up in copyright over the years. As photography came to be, they had to decide, a photograph taken by a camera, is that copyrightable, and is it to the person who took the photo, and if it’s to the person who took the photo, does it apply to the monkey who takes a photo. There famously was a monkey who took a selfie. Who owns the copyright to that selfie?

**Craig:** What courts have found is that humans causing something to be created is an essential part of copyright. If a camera falls off the back of a truck and the take a picture button gets hit, and it takes a picture, welcome to public domain. No one caused it to be created.

Animals cannot cause something to be created in an intentional sense, or at least in the sense that we say is necessary for copyright. No, selfies by animals, pictures by animals, paintings by elephants, none of it can be considered copyrightable, nor can a human say, “I am causing an animal to create something. Therefore, I should have the copyright on this.”

**John:** Where I think the decisions will ultimately come down, and it’s trying to draw that line of, when a human being uses AI programs to create a work of art, or to create anything that would normally be subject to copyright, where is that line, where it’s like, okay, that human gets the copyright claim. Caselaw will figure that out.

**Craig:** That’s a real thing. That’s happening now, and to the extent that there are elements in there that you can say are unique. This is the key. People need to look at some of the language underpinning all of this, but the most important word is “unique.” Unique work expressed in fixed form. Unique is key.

If people are using AI to make something, but the AI elements that they’re employing are not unique, it’s gonna be very hard for them to qualify for things, because other people can… It’s just basically, you’re remixing chunks of stuff that somebody else has created.

**John:** While all culture is remixing, how you’re doing it and the things you’re using to do it with does matter.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. You can remix to the extent that, okay, I’m gonna write a song that’s gonna hint at a little phrase that was in this piece of music and maybe do a variation of something else, and it’s unique.

What you can’t do on your own, just because, is do Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys, and then not have to deal with the fact that you’re using copyrighted works that you are remixing. That is gonna be a mess, because AI itself can’t really exist without the input of stuff that somebody made.

**John:** Craig, on this listening session, I gave my little testimony, but then I also got to listen in as other people gave theirs. This was an interesting thought experiment, which is gonna not even be a thought experiment soon. This will come up, and it’ll become an issue.

Let’s take a game like Red Dead Redemption. You would agree that the company that makes Red Dead Redemption can copyright the material that’s in Red Dead Redemption. Someone wrote all the stuff that’s in there. There’s an ability to protect that material, correct?

**Craig:** Yes. Rockstar commissioned a lot of people on a work-for-hire basis. Rockstar owns the copyright to Red Dead Redemption. Correct.

**John:** Imagine a future version of Red Dead Redemption where the dialogue and situations that occur within Red Dead Redemption are not the product of people writing things, but instead of AI generating, in real time, within the game itself, those scenarios, the dialogue, what’s happening, creating characterizations. Would that material be copyrightable by Rockstar Games?

**Craig:** It would, because Rockstar is creating a derivative work of their own copyrighted material.

**John:** Okay. Defensible, but also challenging to protect in certain ways. If it wasn’t IP that was clearly already owned, then you can imagine scenarios in which there is, inside a computer game, new material being created, and a real question, a live question, of whether that material created by AI is protectable.

**Craig:** They would have to be able to show that their AI… Let’s just call it a black box. You put stuff into the black box. Stuff comes out of the black box. They would have to show that they only exclusively fed the black box stuff that they had 100% intellectual property control over. At that point, I don’t see how you can argue that the black box somehow undoes that.

Now, if they say, we’re gonna put in all of our stuff, plus we’re also gonna feed the black box 30 Westerns, now you got a problem. Then I think they can’t. That’s where it gets interesting. I think it’s actually, weirdly, not that complicated, as long as you understand how copyright works and what you can and can’t do and what it means to own something. Either you do or you don’t. If you don’t, you can’t half-own it. You own it or you don’t.

**John:** Other news this last week, Disney is releasing on Blu-ray Disc… Blu-ray Discs still exist, apparently.

**Craig:** Yes, they do.

**John:** Mandalorian, Loki, WandaVision, and some other titles. Just notable because you don’t hear about Blu-ray or DVD releases that often. There’s always that concern of shows will disappear off their services, and then no one will ever be able to find it. This is a counterexample, where these things are so popular that Disney recognizes, people will pay us money for these things that have special features on them, and they believe they can make a buck on it. What’s your reaction to some stuff coming out on disc?

**Craig:** Just last week I received my 4K and Blu-ray copies of The Last of Us on DVD.

**John:** Fantastic. Talk to us about that and also what is the sales pitch for a consumer. Why would a person want that, versus watching it on HBO Max?

**Craig:** Quality. It just simply comes down to playback quality. It doesn’t matter how fast your internet connection is. Let’s say it’s maximum speed. It still doesn’t matter, because in order to put the signal out in an efficient way across the world, every streaming service has to compress the image, and the sound to some extent, much less. Really, the image has to be compressed in such a way that it’s deliverable.

When you are getting 4K in particular, but also Blu-rays, it’s just higher resolution than what you’re getting over a streaming service. 4K would be the maximum resolution. In fact, technically, we didn’t even shoot the season in 4K. We were going to shoot the next season in true 4K. Then we went through an HDR process, and it gets up-ressed, and magically, I don’t know, something happens.

**John:** Probably AI.

**Craig:** It’s probably AI.

**John:** It genuinely is probably AI. It’s pattern matching to figure out what the missing pixels would be.

**Craig:** I have no idea. It’s probably more algorithmic than AI. The bottom line is, there’s no reason to buy any of these things unless you really want to see it at its best, which of course, as a cinephile, I do, for certain things.

Also, as our screens get bigger at home, the flaws of streaming will become more and more evident. You would think that as time goes on, speeds would get faster and faster, and therefore the ability to send something through at full resolution would be closer and closer. But the problem is because everything is now going through the same pipe. They have to feed that pipe across the world to billions of people. It’s gonna be a while, I think, before we have that kind of infrastructure. Owning these things on DVD at full resolution is as close as you can get to permanency, as long as they keep manufacturing the equipment to play them back.

**John:** That’s gonna be the question. We do have a Blu-ray player, but we got it specifically because Stuart Friedel, formerly Scriptnotes podcast producer, has purchased, for my daughter, a Blu-ray copy of Freaks and Geeks, because she’d never seen Freaks and Geeks. He got her a Blu-ray copy, and we realized we don’t have a Blu-ray player. We got a Blu-ray player so she could watch Freaks and Geeks. I think she watched an episode.

**Craig:** Stuart got you a gift that ended up costing you a lot of money.

**John:** It did. It did. It cost us a lot. This news that these titles are coming out on disc, I’m excited for those creators and showrunners and everyone who worked on them, because they know there’s some permanent copy of this, which years from now you can look back at, which is fantastic. Reflecting on my own experience, it’s been two or three years since I’ve played anything off of a disc. It’s just the reality. I don’t know what your experience has been.

**Craig:** Similar. I think that where home video on DVD, VHS, used to be this enormous market, at this point, it’s more akin to the way laser discs used to be, something that people who really care about image quality purchase. It’s more of a niche marketplace. It is a little bit of a prestigious kind of, “Look, you can even own it for yourself at full la da da da.” That’s terrific, but as you note, this is not something that they do for everything.

Luckily, I’ve had it for Chernobyl and for The Last of Us, because when I was writing movies, there’s DVDs for all of those things, because there was DVDs for everything then. So far, I haven’t written anything that could theoretically be disappeared off the planet, or as the kids would say, yeeted, or you know what? I don’t even think they say that anymore. I bet yeeted is 10 years old now.

**John:** Yeah, it’s moved on. It’s a historical term.

**Craig:** Yeeted got yeeted.

**John:** If you’re listening to this podcast 10 years from now, and we say yeeted, and you don’t know what we’re talking about, or you do know it, and Craig was wrong, and it did come back, please write-

**Craig:** It’s going to come back.

**John:** … to future producer, Adam Middlemarch, and tell Adam what happened.

**Craig:** Now we have to comb the hospital records for an Adam Middlemarch being born.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Find him and just be like, “You have been chosen. It is your fate.”

**John:** “You have been chosen.”

**Craig:** “You will fulfill your destiny.”

**John:** We have some follow-up. Drew, talk us through. This first one, I’ll tell, his name is Adam Lisagor, because it’s hard to guess how you would pronounce that name. He’s a very smart writer, actor, producer, director person and a friend of mine. He wrote back about our conversation on large language models in 607.

**Drew Marquardt:** Adam Lisagor writes, “To Craig’s question of why we don’t like hearing our names over and over again, prefer using pronoun variables for comfort, my best guess is it’s a mix of two things. First, it’s a conservation of energy. Naming something with specificity requires effort, and naming something with generality requires less effort. We’d prefer to just not have to think so hard.

“Second, conservation of cortisol and our limbic system’s threat detection, because usually, hearing your name is a signal that something needs your attention immediately, can induce panic, like a new email alert tone. When there’s context, your name can be a really nice sound. When there’s less context, it causes stress. That’s my best guess.

“But I’ve been thinking a lot about why we would choose to use so many permutations of words to convey an idea instead of always trying to stick to the same words as the path of least resistance and best communication. I guess the best answer is that’s what makes us human. We derive so much joy from infinitely combining and recombining the elements to new and surprising outcomes, even at the expense of efficiency, even when it causes miscommunication. I guess that’s why writers write. When you find exactly the right new permutation of words, the link you can create with the receiver is that much more powerful. I’m not high right now.”

**John:** Two basic points here. The first is his pronouns argument, is that we use pronouns not just for simplicity, but also because it’s just more comfortable, because you’re not calling the person out every time by name. You don’t ring the bell as hard when you use the pronoun. Is that striking you as all accurate?

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t buy the conservation of energy theory. When we talk about where we live, we don’t say, “I live in town,” although I suppose I say, “I live in the city.” There’s things that we refer to specifically all the time.

I do think that there’s something to the notion that your name is an attention grabber. Attention, what we know, if you keep ringing a bell over and over and over, it just starts to disappear. Our brains can’t handle repetitive alerts like that. Yes, that makes sense. It takes a little bit of the edge off of that. I agree. I don’t think he’s high right now. He might be high right now.

**John:** As he wrote this email, he probably wasn’t high. His second point is about basically, our language could be simpler. We could choose to speak in simpler words. We’ve definitely seen examples of cases where you’re limited now to 115 words you have to communicate. You can get it done.

There’s a game we played in the office a few weeks ago called Poetry for Neanderthals, where you can only use single-syllable words. It’s difficult, but it’s very doable to get your point across. The ability to mix things up and really surprise yourself and everyone else around you by how you’re stringing words together is what makes language delightful.

**Craig:** Agreed. I like your observation there, not-high-at-the-time Adam Lisagor.

**John:** We have some more follow-up on Esperanto.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** I love Esperanto.

**Craig:** We can’t kill this topic any more than we can kill the fake language Esperanto. It just keeps coming back.

**Drew:** You’re going to get a couple knocks on this one, Craig.

**Craig:** Of course I will.

**Drew:** Mark F writes, “One point that pricked up my ears was Craig’s reference to Esperanto being an aspiration of recent vintage. I just happened to be reading about Esperanto in the wonderful book, Humanly Possible, a historical overview of humanism by Sarah Bakewell. She includes a chapter on Ludwik Zamenhof, who originated Esperanto in the 1870s, with the ambition of making a universal language that would break down barriers and help promote a more humanistic civilization across cultures.

“An incredible part of the story is that Zamenhof developed the language as a teenager, but before he was able to work on introducing it to society, his father locked away all his language notebooks, to force the young man to focus his energies on studying to become a doctor. He was sent to Russia to study medicine, but when he returned, he discovered his father had actually burned the notebooks, at which point he started over and rebuilt the language from memory. Amazing.”

**Craig:** I’m really on board with his dad. I think Ludwik Zamenhof’s dad was spot-on.

**John:** Craig, this is the first time I knew that Zamenhof had worked on this as a teenager. That teenager idealism does still ring through in the language, in Esperanto. I’ve of course picked it up a couple times. It’s on my Duolingo little things I can study. It is clever in many ways. It’s so ambitiously unambitious in a way. It’s almost an example of how few words do you need, because it has a limited vocabulary by default, but it’s logical in ways that are all really appealing. No one is ever going to speak it in a meaningful way, because it’s just-

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** There’s not gonna be any native speakers of it, and so therefore, it’s never going to catch on. I still find it delightful.

**Craig:** Regardless of when Esperanto was originally conceived and then burnt and then reconceived, culturally it did seem like it had a moment in the ’50s and ’60s and then rapidly went away. I’m sure there were lots of moments along the way, between 1870 and when it finally… Although again, it will never end. Esperanto is the Ayn Rand of languages. It’s just one of these things where it’s like, guys, it doesn’t work. Let it go. They won’t go.

**John:** Like communism. There’s never been a true communist country.

**Craig:** Exactly, nor will there be. There’s a reason for that. Now all the Marxists are gonna write in. Guys, it’s not gonna happen. Let it go.

**John:** But maybe like Marxism, you can say, what is it that’s fascinating about this idea, and how can you apply it to actual, real places where real people are living? Here’s my generous take on it. Looking at Esperanto and while it did work, it probably got a lot of people curious about how languages actually really do work.

That probably could’ve started a whole generation of folks who were more curious to learn about the actual languages that people out there in the world are speaking, and the quest for what is the universal grammar that’s underneath all these languages, like what is it about our brains that is causing us to create the same patterns again and again and again, and why languages broadly work in very similar ways, when we can imagine that they could work, that they just don’t work.

**Craig:** That is remarkably generous.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** I don’t think Esperanto did a goddamn thing.

**John:** People with the little green stars, Esperanto speakers.

**Craig:** Esperanto speakers, yes, they can all talk to each other at the world’s most boring conference.

**John:** We will have universal translators very soon. Arguably, we have them right now in that-

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s called English.

**John:** Also, what’s on our phones right now, those translate features are really good.

**Craig:** They’re really good. They are really good.

**John:** It’ll become less important. Our last bit of follow-up here is about lingua franca, and it really pertains to this.

**Drew:** Chris writes, “As a fellow language nerd, I enjoyed Episode 607, but I have to correct Craig’s assertion that the term lingua franca derives from the fact that French was once the common language for international communication. In fact, lingua franca was spoken throughout the Mediterranean, where Europeans came into contact with people from the Middle East and Africa, for whom Franks was a general term for Europeans. Lingua franca was the language of the Franks.

“Scholars argue quite a bit about whether lingua franca really qualified as its own language or was more of a pidgin dialect, but in any case, the languages to which it was the closest were Italian dialects, not French. Some version of lingua franca was still spoken in North Africa into the 19th century, but a Frenchman would not have understood it.”

**Craig:** That is fascinating. I did not know that. Lingua franca is a combination of Italian and French and other stuff, but yeah, I guess more akin to Italian than… It’s its own language. It was the Esperanto of its time, except that it emerged, I presume naturally, as, Chris says, a pidgin dialect as opposed to-

**John:** Yeah, which is when you have people who can’t speak the same language have to figure out how to get along, you get a pidgin. Then if their kids speak that as a creole, which is a more formalized version, a new language is formed.

I want to defend you here, Craig, because you were talking about lingua franca in the way that we typically use it, rather than the historical terms, because we now talk about lingua franca as being the actual default or the bridge language in a place. English is a lingua franca for a lot of places, where it’s just like, the British language is the common language that people speak. If we throw in that Wikipedia link there.

**Craig:** Again, you’re being very kind. I think I just screwed up, because I’m pretty sure that, it sounds like, I can’t remember exactly, but I probably said something like, “Lingua franca, which comes from French, because that was the language of diplomacy,” which it was. I’m sure I referenced the Olympics and the fact that they constantly would repeat everything in French in the Olympics for some reason. It made sense in my brain, but I was wrong.

This is the kind of thing that… I have to say, some people don’t like people like Chris at parties. “Well, actually… ” But I do. By the way, I also appreciate that Chris did not use the word “actually,” even though I’m sure Chris really wanted to. Thank you, Chris.

**John:** He said “in fact,” which is the gentleman’s “actually.”

**Craig:** Could be a she

**John:** Absolutely. 100% true. I don’t know why I jumped to that conclusion.

**Craig:** Because you are a-

**John:** I’m a monster.

**Craig:** You’re a monster. You’re a cancelable monster. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate the correction. You are completely correct. I was entirely wrong. Now I know something that I can bother other people about.

**John:** I love it. Hey, Craig, let’s talk about the premise. Our marquee topic here in the weekly Inneresting newsletter, which is sort of the print version of Scriptnotes, Chris Csont had picked an old blog post I did back in 2016, where I was responding to something that Michael Tabb had written for Script Magazine.

In that, Tabb was talking about how a premise is the core belief system of a script and the lifeblood of a story. I was arguing, “What you’re talking about seems great. I really wouldn’t call that the premise. Greek scholars might call that the premise, but I would really say that is the thesis, that is the dramatic question.”

I wanted to talk with you, Craig, about what we mean by the premise, what we mean by a thesis, and really what we mean when someone says, “What is your movie about? What is your story about?” Because that about is really two very different things. It can be about what is the TV Guide’s synopsis, it can be talking about that log line, or it could be like, what is it emotionally about for the characters within, what is it about for the writer, what is the purpose behind the work. Sometimes when we have challenges talking with people about their work, I think sometimes we’re really not understanding what we mean by “about” when we ask, “What is this about?”

**Craig:** This is a great question. I tend to answer as follows when people say, “What’s your show about? What’s your movie about?” I’ll say, “What it’s about is blah blah blah, but what it’s really about is blah blah blah.”

What it’s really about, that’s the theme, that’s the central dramatic question, whatever vocabulary you want for that. What is it about to me is the plot premise, what’s happening, literally what’s the basic, simple thing of what’s happening in your show. What it’s about, it’s about the nuclear disaster that happened. It’s about a guy that has to take a girl who might have the cure for worldwide plague from point A to point B. It is the hardware premise, because that is the very first thing that will hit people’s eyes and ears when you put a trailer out, for instance, or a teaser.

**John:** That sort of log line description, for The Martian, is an astronaut stranded on Mars has to find a way home. That is a good example of, it’s explaining what the problem is and what the quest of the movie is. It feels like, oh, how would you do that? That’s intriguing. It feels like there’s a question mark to that.

Sometimes we’re talking about the story area. What is your movie about? It’s about Hawaiian indigenous rights. Great. Or it’s about fatherhood, which is a broad, general theme, but fatherhood is not a central dramatic question. It’s not a thing you’re necessarily grappling with.

**Craig:** I try and avoid topics as a premise, because a topic just is a topic. Okay, it’s about indigenous rights in Polynesia. Okay, that’s a topic. That can be a term paper. It could be a nonfiction book. But what is the premise of the movie or show?

**John:** If it’s about a tribal leader leading a revolution against some other people for indigenous rights in this one Polynesian island, that is specific.

**Craig:** A premise has occurred. We need to know what some big, huge thing is happening. Typically, it’s the big, huge thing that happens very early on that is the thing. Most people, by the way, out there in the world, the vast majority of the audience, will never get past that “what’s it about” when they’re telling other people what it’s about.

When we’re talking about this with potential people, to buy it, act in it, direct it, write it, whatever it is that we’re trying to get somebody to do when we’re communicating this within our industry, it’s very important to know the both what it’s about, because if it’s super high-concept, people may get very excited, like, “Whoa, these three guys get together to fight an outbreak of ghosts in Manhattan? Very high concept. I can see how that movie… It’s a comedy. Okay, got it.”

Then what’s it about-about? Then maybe in a circumstance like this, there’s very, very little. It’s about somebody going from being cynical to a believer. That’s cool. But there are other situations where, what’s it about, it’s about one baseball game of no importance, that happened in 1976, between two teams that weren’t even in contention, for a pennant. But what it’s really about is da da da da. Then you’re like, “Oh, this is fascinating.” We need to know both. It’s very important.

**John:** Not only do you need to be able to communicate both, you need to really deeply understand both. I was on a phone call yesterday with a young writer, talking about her project. Her two abouts didn’t really match up, because she could tell me both abouts. I just didn’t think they were fundamentally compatible. That’s really the heart of our conversation.

She was doing a period musical about a young woman trying to get over a breakup and move on. Okay, I see that as a plot premise, I guess, and her inner emotion. But what it’s really about is this writer’s own feelings of exile after being forced to leave the country.

I said, “Okay, I get those two things separately. I don’t see how you’re drawing the connections there. Okay, that feeling of exile and loneliness, sure, but I don’t see how those two things are going to tie together with everything else you’re describing here. I think maybe you’re going to have to honestly change one of your abouts, to get something that’s actually going to be writeable. I think the reason why you’re struggling is you’re trying to write two different incompatible movies. I think that’s why you’re finding it so difficult to have scenes that actually resonate and have a story that feels that it gets you to a meaningful conclusion.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s so important. There’s only one reason for the plot premise to exist, and that is to ultimately convey, in some form or shape, the “what it’s really about” premise. But there’s only one reason for the “what it’s really about” premise to exist, and that is to live inside of the “what happens” premise. They are connected, inherently.

Typically, we will think of a plot premise first. But the very next job should be, “Okay, but what would that serve? What could I learn or note or be fascinated by, even if it’s incredibly simple? What sort of thing would make this interesting once I have absorbed the reality of what it is?”

The opposite is also true. If we’re like, “You know what? I really… ” A lot of people start things with their own experiences. “I had an experience where I’ve lost somebody, and I experienced grief, and I want to write a story about grief.” Okay. “But also, one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was skeet shooting. I want to write about grief, set against the world of skeet shooting.”

Your common love of things is not enough. They are not purposefully reflecting each other. They are simply living side by side. One has to purposely reflect the other. They must serve each other. It must make sense. Otherwise, like you said, you’re just going to have one thing floating on top of another, and nobody wants that.

**John:** If you have that inner premise and no external premise, the inner premise could be a great poem. You can just have free-floating feelings and analysis of questions. It could be an essay. But it’s not going to have characters and a story that can actually get you to a place, because that’s the social contract you’re making with an audience is that, if you’ve given your attention, I will tell a story that will be meaningful, and it will take you on a journey.

There’s not gonna be a journey if it’s just, “This is what I think about a thing.” If you just have a central dramatic question or this feeling you want to explore, that’s not gonna be a movie. That’s not gonna be a story. That’s just a thing. Maybe it’s a song. But that’s all you got.

**Craig:** Yeah, precisely. We sometimes get a little reductive about this stuff. That’s why I don’t like the whole pitch contest thing, even though I’ve judged them. It boils things down to only thinking about these premises like polishing these premises to sharp edges and points when they don’t need to be. They don’t even need to be interesting. The premise can be utterly boring if the “what it’s really about” is fascinating, and vice versa.

God knows how many times I’ve said it. We talked about it at length in the How to Write a Movie episode of our podcast. The “what it’s really about” of Finding Nemo is so banal and so dumb fortune cookie, it’s almost giggleable. But it’s what’s perfect about it, is that you sometimes want to take something that’s so simple and obvious and then explain it through the most remarkable premise, plot premise, so that you finally get it.

It’s weird. Sometimes the simplest things just fly right over our heads, because they’re so cliché, they don’t even sink into our skin. We need to be reminded through fascinating plots and vice versa. Sometimes the simplest plot is what you need to absorb something that’s very complicated.

**John:** Absolutely. I can think of many films I love, including many great indie films, where you look at the description, you’re like, “That’s not enough for a movie.” You Can Count On Me, it’s a woman’s sort of shiftless brother moves home. It’s like, is that it? There’s not a lot of plot, story to it. It’s terrific, because it’s actually exploring the rarely asked questions about how adult siblings get along and what the nature of that relationship can and should be. Both are good things. I’m saying, don’t freak out if they’re not equal weight for you. But they have to serve each other, no matter what.

There’s a project I’m hoping, whenever the Strike is resolved, to take out. I am genuinely very, very excited about the movie poster premise of it all and what you’re gonna see in the trailer, but even more excited about the “what it’s actually really about” of it all. Those two things I think are gonna marry really well together. I’d say I’m excited by the flashy, what’s in the trailer of it all, but I’m really excited to write the deeply what it’s about, if I get a chance to do so.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** We’ll hope.

**Craig:** That’s true. We have to hope. I don’t want to just go presume that it’s gonna be fantastic. I agree with you. First of all, we have to… You said, “Whenever the Strike ends.” If the Strike. Let’s just say if.

**John:** Oh, come now.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** Craig, no.

**Craig:** Craig, no. Craig. Craig.

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** Craig. No, I believe it’ll end.

**John:** It’ll end.

**Craig:** Everything ends, John.

**John:** Everything ends.

**Craig:** Everything ends.

**John:** The heat death of the universe.

**Craig:** That’s right, John. One day the Sun will devour us.

**John:** Memento mori. Remember that you will die.

**Craig:** Craig.

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** Craig, no!

**John:** Memento mori!

**Craig:** Craig, no! We should do some listener questions. We’ve probably built up quite a few.

**John:** We have. Drew, start us off.

**Drew:** Our first one comes from Johan on Twitter. He writes, “Hey, John and Craig. Is the whole starting a script with FADE IN actually just a myth? I think I see it in like 5% of the American scripts I’ve read through the years. Seems like a huge waste of space. Cheers.”

**Craig:** “A huge waste of space.”

**John:** Craig, do you write FADE IN?

**Craig:** No, but does it really seem like “a huge waste of space?” It’s one line. Who cares?

**John:** It is one line, but also, it’s the first line. If your first line is a useless line, I’d say get rid of it.

**Craig:** Look, I don’t use it. I think it is superfluous. Also, not every film fades in.

**John:** No, it doesn’t.

**Craig:** Often, you just start with a boop, where you just pop in. You don’t need to start a script with anything there than INTERIOR, EXTERIOR, blah-dah-dee blah, or even not.

**John:** Or not that.

**Craig:** You could start with just we hear a bunch of sounds or whatever.

**John:** Or just an image, because it’s not even clear where you are.

**Craig:** Exactly. That said, it is not “a huge waste of space.” It is precisely line. You can absorb it.

**John:** Absolutely. Now we’re gonna get all the people who are so angry at us. It’s like the CUT TOs and the we hears and the we sees.

**Craig:** I like that. Do it.

**John:** Do it. Write in.

**Craig:** Let them fight.

**John:** Waste our time. Waste Drew’s time, because he won’t put it in the outline for us.

**Craig:** It seems like a huge waste of time. What’s next?

**Drew:** Patrick writes, “Apart from supplying the budget, what services do the studios actually provide during the production of a movie? If you got the money elsewhere, as per your billionaire episode, would you still need to work with the studios? Equipment, studio space, crews, cast, post facilities, marketing companies, etc, are all available elsewhere, right? Are studios just glorified banks? Is it all about the distribution?”

**John:** Aha.

**Craig:** Cutting right to it.

**John:** He’s challenging the fundamental premise of the studios.

**Craig:** I think he’s confirming the fundamental premise of the studios.

**John:** Craig, you can talk us through. Also, Drew just graduated from the Stark Program, so he’ll have a perspective on what studios do. Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** I think Patrick’s put his finger on exactly why we do use them. Studios are, in fact, a combination of a distribution facility, a bank, and an advertising agency. That is what they are. The rest is what we do. But what they do is they pay for it, they advertise it, and then they put it out. That’s it. That’s what they do.

**John:** It’s easy to confuse the fact that they have physical lots where you can shoot films, and they obviously have some equipment there, and they have facilities there for doing post. But of course, Craig and I will both tell you that so often, a show that is for CBS will actually shoot on, like, Universal stages, because that’s what was available. It’s not like they’re always shooting their own things on their own lots. They do that wherever they could do it.

There are, of course, lots of movies that were made completely outside of the system. There are independent films and other things that are sold after they are produced, to a company that distributes them. But it’s that distribution function and marketing function that’s really, I think, the heart of why there still is a modern American studio system.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are stages everywhere.

**John:** Everywhere.

**Craig:** There are post facilities everywhere. Sometimes when things are independently financed, you take away the bank aspect of the studio, but you’re still maintaining the marketing, the advertising aspect, and the distribution aspect, which is why independent films are constantly looking to get distribution from studios. That’s sort of how it goes.

**John:** We talked about Legendary Pictures. Legendary, it’s kind of a studio. They definitely have money. They do their own development of stuff. They can put stuff in production. They have money to put stuff in production, but they’re not a distribution company. I’m sure they have a lot of sway in the marketing, but they don’t have unilateral control over the marketing of things.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** They partner up with other companies for distribution. Drew, any insights that you have from having just completed the Stark Program and knowing… You’ve had a studio management course recently.

**Drew:** You guys have nailed it. I think marketing and distribution is obviously so key. I think it seems so easy for indie producers or indie filmmakers or people outside the studio system, that we would be able to jump in, and the idea of, oh, you can get some money together and make a movie. But without that distribution… Marketing costs, I think it’s a million dollars per 100 screens, just to try and get you to the place where you’re gonna break even on that money.

Then I think for people, for writers and for artists, it becomes an institutional check too. You can try and make a career outside of it, but I’m not sure. I think you need to have that to have a certain longevity.

**John:** Maybe so. One point I want to make about distribution is you need an ongoing distribution program. Basically, you can’t just spin up in a distribution company once, to distribute one movie, and then wind it all back down.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** You need to have ongoing people who do that, not just so you have the expertise to do it, but also, to collect the money that you made in those theaters, you have to have another movie coming out, so you can say, “Hey, deadbeat exhibitor, before we give you this next movie, you gotta pay us what you owe us.” That historically has been an incredibly important part of why studios who have spun up and done one or two or three years of movies have failed, because they couldn’t get the money back in, because they didn’t have the ongoing pipeline of product.

**Craig:** Money goes out instantly, comes back slowly. You also need a library to keep you afloat. You need to have the ability to absorb that slow return. Also, when it comes to distribution, there is a leverage when you’re dealing with…

Let’s just deal with theaters, which are having a nice little bounce-back. Hooray. There’s a limited amount of theaters. Do you want Batman? Yeah, you do want Batman if you’re a theater owner. I need you to also take this thing. You get to where, as if you just have this thing, and they’re like, “We don’t want to show that.” I don’t have a Batman to make you show it.

You’re absolutely right. There is a reason why the only new studios that are appearing are from companies that are already enormous. Really, Netflix was kind of the only one to emerge without having been a legacy studio or a preexisting massive entity, like Apple or Amazon. But even then, Netflix has absorbed an insane amount of venture capital. It is a massive endeavor to start one of these things from scratch. The war field is littered with the bodies of companies that tried and failed.

**John:** We’re phrasing everything in terms of movies, but the same thing happens in TV. If a studio has a TV show that they’ve made, that they want to then sell around the world, they need to have a team that sells that show around the world and collects the money from around the world.

If they have Designing Women, and they want to sell it to Portugal, and some Portuguese company wants to air it, they have to make that contract, enforce that contract, collect the money. That’s just a lot of overhead. You can’t expect one individual to do that. It just takes a lot of people and bodies to do it.

**Craig:** It takes a lot of people, which is why you can’t really create one of these things as a single-use entity, because the amount of people required, lawyers, financiers, to keep the pipeline functioning, it just is not warranted by a single-use entity.

The HBO is an interesting case, because they have certain, unlike Netflix or Amazon or Apple, which is just one worldwide, or Disney Plus, for instance. Everybody just logs on to the one thing. HBO still has linear. They have Max. They have Max LatAm. They have Max Nordic. There’s some local versions of it around the world.

Then for most places internationally, they’re making good old-fashioned distribution deals. For instance, in the United Kingdom, HBO material, through a deal that the studio made with Sky, is shown on Sky in the UK. In Canada, it’s shown on an outlet called Crave. Every single one of those deals has to be negotiated and forced, managed, renewed, evaluated. John, the amount of PowerPoints, we can’t imagine. We can’t imagine.

**John:** Obviously, Craig doesn’t have to worry about each of those individual deals. Craig might be asked to go to travel to some place to hype up the show as it’s being released in Canada, but he’s not responsible for negotiating the Canadian deal.

**Craig:** I don’t have to do any of that.

**John:** He doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to.

**Craig:** Thank god, because I would be like, “I’d love for Canadians to see it, but guys, how about just free? It’s free.”

**John:** It’s free. It’s free. I remember Rachel Bloom came to Paris while I was living in Paris, because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend had just started airing on its new network, and they wanted her to go there and promote it. She’s like, “I’ll go there and promote it.” We hung out. We drank some wine. It was nice.

I don’t want to get off this topic though without saying that just because it’s hard to build up an entire studio distribution marketing arm doesn’t mean that it’s hard for any given billionaire to make the production part of it. The production part of it’s actually the easier part. You make a thing, and you sell it to a distributor who does all the rest of that. We would love more people to do that, to do what Legendary does, to do what other companies have done to create that, because that’s awesome.

**Craig:** There is a lot of money in the world. There are only a few studios that are capable of marketing and distributing a film. Yes, lots of money. Now, traditionally, investing in movies and television has been a great way to lose a billion dollars.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like opening a vineyard. It’s like, oh, it’s a great way to make a little money off of a lot of money.

**Craig:** You know how to make a million dollars in the wine business? Start with a billion dollars. It’s definitely a thing. But it has always been, I think for a certain segment of independent financiers, a labor of love. Patron of the arts is a thing. Nobody who supports the production of Broadway shows, for instance, nobody goes into that thinking, “I’m gonna make a gazillion dollars.”

**John:** “I’m gonna be rich.”

**Craig:** No. You are doing it because you love it. Now, you may still be a hard-charging guy who’s probably corrupt, because Broadway accounting makes Hollywood accounting look absolutely spotless. Nonetheless, the point is, you can make a whole lot more money just handing it to a hedge fund and just sitting back.

There is still a value to the Medici-style patron of the arts. Those people exist. Those entities exist. Every now and then, a very wealthy scion will go into that business. The Ellisons, for instance, both Ellison siblings have done so.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And have led to the creation of some fantastic stuff.

**John:** Absolutely. You look at the success of A24, and as horribly toxic as they were, The Weinstein Company at its peak recognized the ability to make and market a certain kind of movie and distribute a certain kind of movie that did really well for them and did well for the industry, at least in terms of the quality of material they were able to put out there and some of the artists they were able to introduce. I don’t want to say it’s impossible to do it, but it’s not possible to compete on the big studio level with just a billion dollars.

**Craig:** No, it is very difficult. It may be the case that the lesson of the Weinsteins is that it’s only possible to be successful in going to war against those big studios if you are an absolute shameless son of a bitch. But who knows?

**John:** Who knows?

**Craig:** Look. A24, there are companies that do quite well.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I don’t mean to take things away. A24 really is the new Miramax. They really are. They seem to be doing it quite well.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s try one more quick question here.

**Craig:** CR asks, “I want to ask if having log lines or summaries of some of my original unsold scripts posted to a personal website with a prompt saying, ‘If you’d like to read this, please contact me at whatever email for the full script,’ is remotely a good idea. I’m friends with several amateur artists trying to break into their respective industries. One does a web comic posted to her personal website. She was telling me to start finding ways to give myself an internet footprint, so if someone wants to find me, there’s something to find. She recommended a website.

“The only problem is, what do I put on this website if I have nothing sold? I can’t just put up random pieces of writing like an artist might post sketches. I thought about putting final versions of original scripts I have up, but I’m not sure if I’m comfortable just having my unsold scripts there for the taking.”

**John:** My first instinct is, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. I just don’t think that’s actually gonna be successful for you. I’m curious what our listeners think, because we obviously have 10 years of aspiring screenwriters who have listened to this podcast. I’m curious whether any of them have done anything like this and found it to be successful in terms of getting people to read it.

My other instinct is, let people read your writing, but maybe just put up the first 10 pages so they can see, and if they want to read more, they can read more. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** I don’t understand why you can’t put up random pieces of writing, like an artist might post sketches. Throw a couple of scenes on. Throw one scene on. Throw one scene on with a storyboard. Maybe your friend who does a web comic can… Throw her a couple of bucks and have her do a little… Why not? I don’t understand why. Nobody wants to read a whole script anyway. Everyone hates reading scripts.

Also, you say, “I’m not sure if I’m comfortable just having my unsold scripts there for the taking.” What are you afraid of? You have the copyright on them. They’re there. You’ve published them on the web. Register them with the United States Copyright Office for whatever it is, 100 bucks, and then put them there. Why worry? Dude, no one’s stealing your script, man.

**John:** No one’s stealing your script.

**Craig:** No one’s stealing it.

**John:** If it’s on the web, an AI will scrape it. They’ve already scraped it. But you know what? They’re gonna scrape everything anyway. We can’t stop it.

**Craig:** You should be so lucky, because then you can point back and say, “This was copyrighted.” Now the people that scraped it and folded it into whatever have to pay you a lot. No, I think there is no problem whatsoever. Think about this. Photographers do it all the time.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Photographers take a picture. It is their copyright. They put it on the internet. Anyone can take it, copy it, and stick it somewhere. People don’t stick it in anything that’s actually legit and moneymaking, because they’re gonna get sued, and it’s gonna cost them money. They’ll throw it all over a bunch of crap that isn’t gonna make money, but also, they’re not pretending that they took the picture. I just don’t think this is a problem.

I think, I have always said this, the paranoia that people are gonna steal your unsold script is not warranted. You should be far more concerned about the odds, the minuscule chance that somebody who can make a difference in your life is also gonna find it and also gonna read it and also gonna like it. That tiny, little lottery victory is worth the chance that some dingdong somewhere is gonna take your pages and put them into his unsold script. It’s not a problem.

**John:** It doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** It doesn’t happen. Even if it did, you would have recourse. I just wouldn’t worry about it.

**John:** Agreed. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a holdover from our live show. We were gonna do One Cool Things. We ran long, and it was messy and chaotic.

**Craig:** Just say Natasha Lyonne. My belovedly messy and chaotic Natasha Lyonne.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is an article by Danielle Campoamor in Marie Claire. Headline is, We Need to See More Parents Having Abortions in Film and Television. The point is that if you look at, in film and TV, whenever you do see a character having an abortion, it is a young, unmarried white girl. That’s not actually the majority of abortions in America. It’s actually people who already have children are the ones who are getting the most abortions in the US. So rarely do we see that portrayed on screen. Literally, in 2020, of characters who had abortions on film, 73% were white, and one third were teenagers, and not a single one of them was a parent.

It’s just arguing for, we need to have representation of what reality is, because people see themselves in that and see the choices they need to make reflected in those characters. That gets people thinking about abortion in a different way, because I think our image of what it is is just that unmarried teen mom, and that’s just not the reality. It’s actually people who already have multiple kids and are deciding whether to have another child.

**Craig:** I completely sympathize with this. I think it’s important to get that message out. I’m not sure drama is necessarily the best way to do it. The problem is a little bit like showing… I bet you if we cataloged the portrayals of leukemia on film, you would also see a predominance of children and teenagers, maybe kids, or rather, young adults in their 20s. What you wouldn’t see are a lot of people in their 70s or 80s or something like that, because nobody cares, because it’s not dramatic.

The problem is the reality of abortion is it’s not dramatic. This is just the stark reality. It’s not dramatic. People who are in committed relationships, with three kids, and a woman gets pregnant, and they decide rationally, oh yeah, no, actually, this was not a pregnancy we wanted. She goes to a clinic. She goes to a gynecologist. There is an abortion. It’s done. Move on. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it’s fun. But it’s not dramatic.

That’s specifically the point I think that Danielle’s making is that what we tend to concentrate on is the overdramatic abortion scenario, a 13-year-old white girl, because white girls. Oh, god, white girl. That’s what we concentrate on. Therein lies the problem, is that we are dramatists.

We’ve talked about medical shows and legal shows. They’re soaking in this problem. They’re just not building medical shows around the mundane medical needs of people, nor are they building legal shows around the vast predominance of legal cases, which are boring and result in settlements between people in quiet rooms.

I understand. I think it’s a fair critique. I think the critique needs to be acknowledged. I think it is important. For instance, what I would argue is that at the end of an episode or a movie about or that contains such an abortion storyline, it would be important to actually put this information up on screen. That’s more, I think, actionable than just forcing non-dramatic situations into a product that is supposed to be entertaining and dramatic. It’s a tricky thing to do, but that’s where I would go with it myself. I’m sure no one will have any thoughts or comments about this.

But as somebody that actively and aggressively supports reproductive rights and access to reproductive rights in this country, I just want to make sure that we don’t end up getting stuck on too much of a hook as dramatists, to portray situations that are inherently not dramatic.

**John:** The article itself actually points out Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as an exception to the rule, because on that show, Rachel and Aline had a character who was a mom of two kids, who had an abortion. It wasn’t a big deal. I think it was such a smart choice to have the character who was facing this decision not be Rachel Bloom’s character, but her friend, who is a central character, but is not the unwed young mother. I think there are definitely ways to do it.

I guess, Craig, I would just challenge that it’s not necessarily that we need to wedge this into more things. I’ve not even seen a movie that it happens in, or it even be the central thing in a movie. I’ve never seen it come up as an issue in this stuff. It feels like it could. There’s gonna be interesting ways to do it, and unexpected ways. We have such a stereotype of who a character is who has an abortion. It’s great to always challenge those stereotypes.

**Craig:** I completely agree with that. Listen, I guess in a way, I’m almost being more aggressive about it, by saying that we should just put facts on screen, white letters on black, and just say, “What you’ve just seen is a dramatization, or is drama. Understand, however, this is the reality,” da da da da da da da da da, to aggressively deromanticize and dedramatize the truth of how abortions occur, not only in our country but around the world, and have always done.

But I agree with you. I’m not suggesting that it’s not possible to do. Of course it is. Nor is there a way to do it in a way where there is no burden of drama on it. Really, what I’m saying is I don’t want to unfairly judge works of art that do portray-

**John:** I get that.

**Craig:** … the most dramatic form of abortion, particularly because I suspect in most of those dramatizations, the characters do end up either having an abortion or relaying a positive perspective of that essential reproductive right. Could be wrong about that.

**John:** I think what we’re both saying is we don’t need fewer portrayals of abortion. We want more portrayals of abortion, and among those, maybe a broader range of experiences.

**Craig:** With an acknowledgement of the truth, because I think what Danielle’s writing about is incredibly important. People don’t understand how this actually functions. We are typically, in this country, always afraid of the wrong thing.

My One Cool Thing is just as much of a hot topic. It is not. We gotta take a break from some of the serious stuff and talk about things that are even more serious, like Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, boys.

**John:** It’s Dungeons and Dragons adjacent. You don’t actually have to play D and D to play this game.

**Craig:** You don’t. This is sort of exciting. Again, not for everybody, but for boys and girls who are dorks like us, and who do like role-playing games. There is a new board game out. This is not a typical role-playing game of the sort you might see on Critical Role or the kind that John and I play on a weekly basis, sometimes on a biweekly basis. This is a board game version of Dungeons and Dragons that is playable in one shot, I think they estimate over the course of two hours, which is not wildly nuts. It’s like a nice, long Monopoly game. It’s called Dungeons and Dragons: Trials of Tempus.

This is an officially licensed product, so it gets to use all of the characters, classes, spells, and so forths from Dungeons and Dragons. It was created by two friends of mine, along with a fellow I don’t know, Adam Carasso, and then my friends, Thor Knai and Kyle Newman. It’s excellent if you enjoy nerdery like we do.

What’s really interesting about it is you get to do something that we generally don’t get to do when we’re playing D and D, which is fight against each other. You get divided into two parties. The two parties are rivals in an heroic adventure. Normally, when I’m DMing, technically I suppose it’s like the DM versus the players, but I think that makes you a bad DM. I think it’s the DM with the players. The point is we’re all gonna get through this and have a great time and go through highs and lows and all the rest. This is more of a traditional “our team wins.”

It’s got all sorts of D and D-ish things about it. I know the overlap between D and D players and board game players is almost 100%, so I think you might like it. Check it out, Dungeons and Dragons: Trials of Tempus, freshly out, available online and all sorts of places, including Schmamazon.

**John:** I checked this out when I was at your house this last time. It is beautifully put together. It’s in a very heavy box. It’s full of figurines and cards and things and all the accoutrement that you love in a board game. I’m excited to play it with you.

**Craig:** (Speaks French.)

**John:** (Speaks French.) That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a 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. Craig, we gotta talk merch.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** We have T-shirts, and they’re great. They’re at Cotton Bureau, including the new Scriptnotes University T-shirt and sweatshirt.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Craig, have you even seen this?

**Craig:** No, but I want a Scriptnotes University… Is there a hoodie?

**John:** Of course there’s a hoodie, but also just a normal sweatshirt, a collared sweatshirt.

**Craig:** I never wear those.

**John:** I’m gonna paste a link in the Workflowy here so you can see it.

**Craig:** What I need is a hoodie.

**John:** There’s hoodies.

**Craig:** I’m getting one.

**John:** Our hoodies are good.

**Craig:** You know Cotton Bureau, by the way, used to make the blank T-shirt in the Stuart tri-blend?

**John:** They don’t do it anymore?

**Craig:** They don’t do it anymore. They stopped.

**John:** Oh, wow.

**Craig:** It’s such a shame. I’m checking out… I love the look of it. Oh, but this doesn’t show me… Oh, it doesn’t have a hoodie. Oh yeah, it does.

**John:** It does have a hoodie, yes.

**Craig:** But it’s not a zip hoodie.

**John:** Oh, you want a zip hoodie.

**Craig:** Yeah, I want a zip-

**John:** We’ll figure it out.

**Craig:** John.

**John:** We’ll figure it out.

**Craig:** John.

**John:** The problem is the zipper would go through the logo itself. That’s the problem with a zip hoodie.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true. Ugh.

**John:** It has a pullover crew neck. The pullover crew neck is what you would think about for a sweatshirt.

**Craig:** What about doing a zip one where you take the Scriptnotes University and just make it a bit smaller and put it on one side? I don’t want to screw up our merchandise methods. I’m just saying. A tank top? Wow. Who’s walking around in the Scriptnotes University tank top? That’s cool. Aw, there’s a onesie. Aw.

**John:** There’s a onesie. See?

**Craig:** Aw, so cute.

**John:** Make them for everybody. This was inspired by a Scriptnotes listener who wrote in. She wants to remain anonymous. She said, “I really feel like I learned more from Scriptnotes University than I did from actual film school. I really want a Scriptnotes University T-shirt, sweatshirt.” We’re now making this for her and for everybody else. If you zoom in, you’ll see that the little logo at the center has a typewriter. It’s surrounded by brads. It says “scriptum notas” and “ira and ratio,” which is umbrage and reason.

**Craig:** I love it. I love it.

**John:** Established 2011.

**Craig:** Established 2011, Scriptnotes University is objectively superior to every film school in the world and costs far less. I’m just saying it. I don’t care. I’m saying it now constantly. It’s just a fact. I know you guys went to Stark and everything. I’m just saying it. It’s a fact. We’re just better.

**John:** Speaking of college, any listeners who are college students, reminder that you can get Highland 2 for free for the student license. You just write in. There’s a link in the show notes. Also, just go to Quote-Unquote Apps. If you have a student ID, if you have a student dot-edu address, you get it for free. Why would you not want to do that?

We also have the new XL version of Writer Emergency Pack in the store at writeremergency.com. 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 Craig and I are about to record about going back to school.

**Craig:** Back to school.

**John:** Craig and Drew, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Oh, Craig. Megana was back from her trip, and she texted you and me, saying, “Oh, I was at Target, and I saw that it’s now spooky season, because they have Halloween stuff out.”

**Craig:** Freaking August.

**John:** Megana, it’s not spooky season yet-

**Craig:** it’s not.

**John:** … because it’s still back to school season. Back-to-school season is the best time of year. I loved back-to-school season. I didn’t like necessarily going back to school, but I loved school supplies. I loved stocking up for the new year.

**Craig:** Always fun, yes. Fresh, new stuff. Crisp, new stuff. I was the sort of kid that would just ruin his notebook or binder over the course of the first two months. To have a fresh, new binder, a new notebook, with that weird marble cover that makes no sense, all of that stuff was wonderful, and getting my new pencils, and pens, which we weren’t really allowed to use, until we were in, what, 7th grade or something?

**John:** For a while, we were allowed to use the erasable pens, which-

**Craig:** Those stank.

**John:** I’m sure they still exist, but no one uses erasable pens anymore.

**Craig:** What was it called, Paper Mate?

**John:** Paper Mate.

**Craig:** Paper Mate. Those stank. Poor lefties were just erasing their little-

**John:** That smear.

**Craig:** It was just so sad. Those stank. Protractor.

**John:** Oh yeah, compass.

**Craig:** Compass, all that great stuff. That weird eraser, that big, chunky, pink, trapezoidal, or parallelogrammatic.

**John:** I want to know, how did that form come to be, because where it’s slanted, it’s-

**Craig:** It’s a parallelogram.

**John:** It’s a parallelogram. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** It’s a parallelogram.

**John:** On the side. It’s a parallelogram extended as a solid.

**Craig:** What was it? Was it a Pearl? Was that what it’s called, Pearl Eraser?

**John:** Yeah, Pearl Eraser. Yeah, Pearl Eraser. A very distinct smell.

**Craig:** So distinct.

**John:** You’re not rubbing through the paper, but you can smell that burning rubber to it.

**Craig:** You know what? It’s by the Paper Mate company, and it’s called the Pink Pearl Eraser. It is one of those products still available, of course, that seemingly will never change. The script on it that says Pink Pearl and all that, it just will never change.

**John:** Why would you change it? It’s already perfect.

**Craig:** It’s kind of perfect. It does have that weird smell. Occasionally, it would crack.

**John:** Yeah, because it would dry out over the course of the year too. It was much better when it’s fresh out of the package.

**Craig:** Everything is.

**John:** A few months in, it’s pretty bad.

**Craig:** Everything is better. Also, we did have new clothes, which in my case meant going to Sears and buying-

**John:** Sears or JC Penney’s.

**Craig:** Yeah. On Staten Island, you would go to Sears, and you would have to buy all of your winter clothes, because that’s when they were available, because for some reason, they would only have winter clothes in the summer and summer clothes in the winter, which made me crazy. We were all in the same lower middle class economic stratum. We would get to school, and everybody’s wearing the exact same coat, this weird polyester thing with fake fur and a bright orange inside. Did you have that one?

**John:** I didn’t have that one, but I know exactly what you’re talking about. I also had this maroon color coat that was my coat for a couple years.

**Craig:** There was that. There were your jeans, your new sneakers. Everything was fresh, fresh, fresh.

**John:** You did not have hand-me-downs, because you were the oldest.

**Craig:** I was the oldest, yes.

**John:** I got a lot of hand-me-downs.

**Craig:** My younger sibling was a girl, my sister. She wasn’t really getting my stuff. That’s probably why our stuff was so shitty, because you could only use it once. It was all really cheap. I had a lot of Wrangler shirts. You know those Western style button-downs?

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** You’d get a haircut. Your hair’s all combed. You had to look super clean and neat on day one. This ended on day one. Day two, you could be an absolute rolling, lice-filled wreck. But day one, spotless.

**John:** Now, did you have school photos on day one, or was it in that first week? When were your school photos taken?

**Craig:** That’s a really interesting question. I can’t remember. Maybe it was in the first couple of weeks.

**John:** I think it was the first school week. I do remember, because there was another day where you had to actually look pretty good and bring a comb, or they’d give you one of the incredibly sharp, painful, disposable combs to run through your hair. Every year, I would have to get my photos retaken, because I just could not smile properly.

**Craig:** Was there some… Emotionally damaged or-

**John:** I would make the wrong choice in that last millisecond before the shutter went off.

**Craig:** Was it the kind of thing where you would smile and everybody would be terrified, like look evil?

**John:** No. I would just be looking away or something. I would get nervous by the eye contact.

**Craig:** I do remember, it was always like every year, you would just be in the same arrangement. I was generally taller, and so I would be in the back, next to my tall friend. Man, every now and then, somebody will send me something like, “Oh my god, look. Your former classmate, who’s on Facebook, put this thing up from 3rd grade.” They’ll copy and send me the photo, because I’m not on Facebook. I’m just like, “What am I wearing? What is this weird, horrible, nylon disco outfit that my parents have put me in?” It was just nightmarish.

**John:** I think it’s more fun to look at what the teachers were wearing, because the teachers were actually indicative of what adults were wearing at the time. Like, oh my god, how was that comfortable? That looks like polyester death.

**Craig:** Everyone was wearing some sort of plastic clothing.

**John:** Not a tri-blend. No. It was actually just all plastic.

**Craig:** A uni-blend of some sort of cancer fiber that we were all breathing in. You know what? It was also a lovely time, because I’m sure it was like this for you, for us in New York, the weather was getting cooler. Finally, summer was ending. Fall was sweeping in. Fall in New York is lovely. There’s also all the fun fall stuff. It’s not spooky season. I just want to be clear. It was just more like apple cider and whatever. I don’t know. Leaves.

**John:** I remember we would get the Ditto machined copy of like, this is what you need to bring for your school supplies. I just loved that, checking off the things. You had to bring a box of Kleenex, because somebody, mostly me, I would go through all the Kleenex is the classroom, because my nose was always runny.

**Craig:** You were the snot kid.

**John:** I was snot kid, because I had terrible allergies in a time before people understood what allergies were, apparently.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Now, I take medicines for them, but at that time I didn’t have them.

**Craig:** There was always a kid with snot. I guess it was you.

**John:** It was me.

**Craig:** Then we would also have to bring a shoebox, which all the girls or resourceful boys or non-resourceful boys’ mothers would cover in wallpaper or newspaper or something to make it look pretty. That was our school supply box. We would have our Elmer’s glue and our safety scissor and whatever else was on that Ditto sheet, which I’m sure, Drew, you are absolutely falling asleep here, but let me just wake you up for a second and explain.

We did not get emails listing what we required. No. A teacher hand-wrote a list of things on this toxic piece of disgusting purple paper, that was then stuck to a large roller, coated in even more disgusting purple fluid. Then they would roll it with their hands. As they would roll it, it would stick onto another piece of paper, send that piece of paper off, pull in another piece of paper, and thus, like a small Gutenberg printing press, made of purple death. Each one of those things stank, and yet we all loved the smell of it.

**John:** You did, because you’d get a fresh Ditto machine, you’d just stick it up to your-

**Craig:** Everyone.

**John:** Stick the paper up and inhale it, yeah.

**Craig:** Everyone was snorting whatever was in that. I don’t even want to know what was in it. We were absolutely huffing paint, in the classroom, by the way. The teacher would be like, “Go ahead, kids. Snort it up.” Then we would go to work. That’s what we would get. What a time. What a time to be alive.

**John:** My olfactory memories of that age are so distinct, because I also remember when you have heads down for Thumbs Up, Seven Up on a rainy day, I remember what the desk would smell like. It would smell like this weird cleaner, whatever they used to clean the desks. I have that memory firmly in my head.

**Craig:** Same. It’s funny, you went to school halfway across the country from me, and our desks smelled exactly the same.

**John:** Absolutely. It was not quite urine, but it’s almost that. It was an ammonia-ish kind of thing to it.

**Craig:** It was ammonia. It was this weird, rank ammonia smell. It’s a disgusting smell. The desktop was some horrible, again, plasticky, lacquery thing.

**John:** It looked like wood, but it was not wood.

**Craig:** It also had a little bit of a sour milk smell to it. It just was disgusting.

**John:** Craig, did you have a number line taped to the top of your desk?

**Craig:** Of course we did. Of course. We all had a number line when we were learning addition and subtraction. Also, lining up in size order. Drew, did you ever have to line up in size order?

**Drew:** Yeah. I was always at the front because I was tiny.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw, little Drew.

**Craig:** Aw, little Drew. Oh my god, he was in the front.

**John:** We were almost always in alphabetical order, especially if we were going to lunch, because we had to go through the lunch line. If you were buying lunch, they would check your name off on the little logbook.

**Craig:** I see. That actually makes sense. Lining up in size order seems unnecessarily cruel to everyone on either extreme of the line. Even if you weren’t on the extreme of the line, if you put two boys, if they happen to be next to each other in the size-order line, there would almost certainly be a shoving fight over who was taller. Just pointless. Why? What is this size order thing? Who came up with that? What does it even matter what the order is? What does it matter?

**John:** They want to make sure Drew gets his milk first.

**Craig:** Because he needed it. They’re like, “There’s only one thing that’s gonna make this kid grow: warm, under-refrigerated milk.”

**John:** In a cardboard container.

**Craig:** That has the picture of a lost child on it.

**John:** Indeed. Drew, what are we forgetting about back-to-school?

**Drew:** Oh, my god.

**Craig:** He’s like, “You guys are from a different time.”

**Drew:** No, the smell is real, but I can never delineate where the smell is cleaning product and what is just the smell of children.

**John:** That’s true.

**Drew:** Maybe that sounds strange, but-

**Craig:** It really does sound strange.

**Drew:** It does.

**Craig:** That’s really upsetting.

**Drew:** Should probably walk that back, but yeah.

**Craig:** I just like the idea of a small Drew just walking around, just sniffing.

**John:** Sniffing.

**Craig:** Everyone’s like, “Oh my god, what is with that kid? Oh, leave him alone. He’s small.” They didn’t know what the Ditto fluid was. Ditto fluid.

**Drew:** I wonder when they retired the Ditto machines, because I definitely went to a school that did not have up-to-date equipment by any stretch of the imagination, and we didn’t have one, which makes me feel like they must’ve-

**John:** At your point, it was all photocopies, right?

**Drew:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s a website that says mimeographs, that was the technical name, “The classroom chore that smelled so good.” I’m just looking to see if they actually identify what was in there. The duplicator fluid was methanol and isopropanol, so basically-

**John:** Alcohols.

**Craig:** … alcohol, but non-drinkable alcohol, the kind of alcohol that makes you blind. That’s what we were snorting. Hooray.

**Drew:** In my generation, we had the markers that ended up, I think had to be the same stuff that kids would just stick straight in their nostril.

**John:** Craig, you and I didn’t really have markers as much, because even Sharpies were late in my career. We had some marker things, but it wasn’t a default thing. I didn’t go to school with Crayola markers at the start. Did you?

**Craig:** They were much later on. We typically went to school with a box of Crayola crayons. The classic was the 64… I have one. I bought one of them just off of eBay for two bucks. I loved it. It was a proper 1970s era 64 Crayola crayons with the crayon sharpener in the back, which didn’t-

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** … sharpen shit.

**John:** No, but you didn’t really need to. Of course, the pink color was labeled Flesh, because that was the default white.

**Craig:** Yes, Flesh was that, yes, was a slightly whitey peach-ish. I don’t even think Flesh was my color of flesh. It was really for John and Melissa.

**John:** Basically, yeah. It’s a difference between my very tanned legs and my very pale ankles. It’s the pale ankle color.

**Craig:** It’s the pale ankle color, yeah. Flesh, it was like, oh, you’re very light. That is back when things weren’t quite the way they are. There was also Indian Red. That was a color, Indian Red. They’re not red, and they’re also not Indians, but okay, Crayola. That’s how we grew up. We had the Crayola thing and, oh yeah, man, the tape. Magic Tape was a huge deal.

**John:** Oh, Magic Tape, a huge innovation.

**Craig:** Yes. Before Magic Tape, Drew, regular Scotch Tape was shiny as hell.

**John:** Yeah, it was shiny and gross.

**Craig:** You’d put it on something, and it would just reflect like a mirror. Then somebody over there came up with this matte finish, called it Magic Tape. It was invisible. Everybody lost their crap.

**John:** Those 3M scientists, we don’t talk enough about the innovations they had. Magic Tape. Then they had the Post-It notes.

**Craig:** Oh my god, absolutely. They’re geniuses over there, absolute wizards.

**John:** Oh, question for both of you. Were you required to… You got your textbooks, or your math book or your science book.

**Craig:** Cover it?

**John:** Did you have to put a cover on them?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Was it like part of your task is, okay, now you have to put on this cover?

**Craig:** Book covers, yes.

**John:** Loved them.

**Craig:** Which I bet you made your own book covers.

**John:** Yeah, out of paper bags, for sure.

**Craig:** I knew you would. I knew it. Now, you’ve seen me attempt to do crafts, so you know that I could not. My mom would have to do it. Then eventually, I got my sister to start doing it. If it ripped in class, you would get in trouble. I don’t know why. I would ask one of the kids sitting next to me. I’m like, “Can you fix my da da?” Then they would, because everybody just understood I was helpless.

**John:** They would rip off a piece of their shiny tape and fix your book cover.

**Craig:** Yes, just so shiny. So shiny. Inside the textbook, sometimes it would be like “this book is the property of” and then there’d be one kid after another, and it’s stamped. What was that about? Who needs to know?

**John:** I loved that.

**Craig:** Yeah, like, “Oh my god.”

**John:** They had the history. “Did you know that some of these kids are dead by now, and they owned this book.”

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** They got sent off to war.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Some of these people who were reading this book had been sent off to Vietnam, and I’m reading this book.

**Craig:** I’m reading this book on vocabulary, and the last kid who had it died in Inchon. It’s all very grim. I gotta say, man, every generation has its ups and downs and things, but you know what? Generation X, we’re pretty great.

**John:** We’re pretty great.

**Craig:** Does anyone hate us? I don’t think anyone hates us.

**John:** No, because we’re a small generation too.

**Craig:** We’re small. We’re kind of like, “Whatever, man.” We were still there when computers came around. We reminisce, but not like, “And our way was better.” We’re usually reminiscing in a way of like, “God, that sucked.” We like everybody except the Boomers. Nobody likes the Boomers. Let’s face it.

**John:** We grew up mostly with a fear of nuclear war.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re terrified. We’re all right.

**John:** We’re all right.

**Craig:** Last question for you, Drew, on back-to-school week. Are there people that don’t like Generation X, or is there a generation that you think is opposed-

**Drew:** To Gen X?

**Craig:** … naturally to Generation X?

**Drew:** I don’t think so. I think you guys are truly safe, because my generation looked up to you. I’m firmly Millennial. We looked up to you. You were creating all the content when we were growing up. I think Gen Z likes you much more than us, because we’re very cringey to Gen Z, because we’re very cringey in general.

**Craig:** Yeah, you guys are special. You know what? It’s not your fault. Your echo Boomers. You’re the children of Boomers. You are trying to outrun a legacy in your blood, and you’re doing all right.

**Drew:** We can’t escape it though.

**Craig:** It’s tough. It’s a tough one. That was amazing. I wish it were back-to-school week every week.

**John:** I love it. Drew and Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, Judge Says in Ruling That Could Give Hollywood Studios Pause](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-works-not-copyrightable-studios-1235570316/) by Winston Cho for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Thaler v. Perlmutter](https://www.scribd.com/document/665871482/Thaler-v-Perlmutter#)
* [The Mandalorian, Loki, And WandaVision Are Getting Limited Edition 4K And Blu-Ray Releases](https://www.slashfilm.com/1371265/mandalorian-loki-wandavision-getting-limited-edition-4k-blu-ray-releases/) by Ryan Scott for Slash Film
* [Lingua franca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca)
* [Where Story Begins – Premise](https://scriptmag.com/features/script-notes-where-story-begins-premise) by Michael Tabb for Script Magazine
* [The premise, or what’s the point?](https://johnaugust.com/2016/the-premise-or-whats-the-point) by John August
* [We Need to See More Parents Having Abortions in Film and Television](https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a35802152/parents-having-abortions-on-tv-films/) by Danielle Campoamor for Marie Claire
* [Dungeons & Dragons: Trials of Tempus](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/385546/dungeons-dragons-trials-tempus)
* [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/)
* [Writer Emergency Pack XL](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/writer-emergency-pack-xl)
* [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 Adam Pineless ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and is 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/610standard.mp3).