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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 546 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’re looking at the genre/form of limited series based on actual events with two of the writer/creators behind recent critically acclaimed shows.

Elizabeth Meriwether is the creator and showrunner of the limited series The Dropout. She began her career as a playwright in New York before transitioning to television where she created seven seasons of the amazing hit comedy New Girl. Her other credits include No Strings Attached, Bless This Mess, and Single Parents. Elizabeth Meriwether, Liz Meriwether, it is a damn pleasure to finally have you on the show after 546 episodes. I can’t believe it took this long. Hi.

Elizabeth Meriwether: Hi. That was a great interaction. Hello.

John: Thank you. You’re a little bit sick as we’re talking to you. Thank you very much for being with us. I’m sorry. It sucks being sick.

Meriwether: Much like Elizabeth Holmes, my voice is a little deeper, which is exciting.

John: Absolutely, but not a deliberate choice. You didn’t stand in front of the mirror practicing to get your voice to this pitch.

Meriwether: No, she says in quotation marks. Just kidding.

John: Our next guest is no stranger to this show. Liz Hannah is the executive producer and co-creator of Hulu’s limited series The Girl from Plainville. She also executive produced and wrote for The Dropout. Her other credits include The Post, Long Shot, All the Right Places, and Mindhunter. Liz Hannah, welcome back to Scriptnotes.

Liz Hannah: Thanks for having me. Hey, everybody.

John: It’s so good to have the two of you here. We have two guests named Liz, which will not get at all confusing.

Hannah: You could just go by last names. It’s the easiest.

John: I was going to say.

Meriwether: We were in a writers room together, and we had a third Liz, Liz Heldens, who’s incredible. We would just all call each other by our last names, so I’m probably going to be Meriwether and she’s probably going to be Hannah for today’s podcast.

John: Hannah versus Meriwether does feel like some sort of big title fight.

Hannah: We were also talking about Elizabeth Holmes. It was a very odd eight months of our lives.

John: For the rest of the show it’s Hannah and Meriwether.

Hannah: There you go.

John: You can call me August or John.

Hannah: Great.

John: Whatever you want to do. One of our recurring segments on this show, which I love and listeners like a lot too is How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at stories that are in the news and figure out how they could become movies or really basically limited series. You guys just both did. You both took things that were in the news and turned them into high-quality film and entertainment.

I want to obviously focus on your two shows, but also at the end I want to go through some other topics of things that are in the news right now and spitball ideas in terms of how you would adapt these into limited series down the road, if they were appealing to be adapted. I’ll bring up that one of the topics we proposed as a potential one, one of our guests said, “Could we not do that one? I’m actually looking at getting the rights right now.” That is how close to the source we’re getting to on these. We’ll get into that.

In our bonus topic for Premium members, let’s talk about showrunning and producing while pregnant, because that’s something you both had experience with, because Hannah very recently had a baby.

Hannah: He’s here. He’s very fresh.

John: I love it.

Hannah: He also has some fresh attitude that will maybe be chiming in. We’ll see.

John: That’s great. Rachel Bloom, when she was on this show, she was breastfeeding. We’re normalizing maternal things happening while-

Hannah: Look, we all have feelings. He has a lot of them right now and has to talk about them.

John: He’s got to express himself.

Hannah: Doesn’t know what hands are, so the only thing he can do is scream.

John: I love it. Let’s talk about this moment we’re in right now with limited series that are based on actual events, because there’s so many on TV right now. We have your two shows. We have The Dropout, The Girl from Plainville, but we also have We Crashed, The Thing About Pam, Super Pumped, Inventing Anna, Pam and Tommy, The Tinder Swindler. This is a moment where a lot of these things are happening. I want to start with your two shows. Maybe we’ll start with The Dropout. Miss Meriwether, how did The Dropout come to be? What was the first thing? Was this something you pursued? Did they come to you? What was the origin story The Dropout, the story of Elizabeth Holmes?

Meriwether: I was finishing New Girl, and Searchlight contacted me, because they had optioned the podcast The Dropout, which is incredible and anyone who’s interested in the story should listen to it. They had Kate McKinnon already attached, and it was already set up at Hulu. They were just like, “We have everything in place. We just need a writer.” Just a little thing.

John: A small thing.

Meriwether: I do feel like Searchlight, this was their first television show. I think they are coming at it with more of like the movie thing, of like, we just need to write. It’s like, no, welcome to television. I read Nick Bilton’s Vanity Fair article. There was a really big article. Vanity Fair with Theranos was falling apart. I’d read it, I think a couple of years before Searchlight contacted me, and I loved the story. I just hadn’t done anything with it. I was familiar with the story. By the time they contacted me, I just had that feeling like, there’s been a documentary, there’s been a book, there’s been a lot of reporting about it. I think at that point there were some companies in Silicon Valley that had Elizabeth Holmes Fridays or whatever. Didn’t we find that out, Hannah, that they had been dressing up like [inaudible 00:05:20]?

Hannah: When we were in the room, I was in Austin for something, and it was Halloween. I saw three Elizabeth Holmeses walk in. This was before the show. I think I texted you guys. I was like, “What goes next? Everybody already dresses like her.”

Meriwether: This story was definitely in the news. I had that question that I’m sure you had too, Hannah, which was just like why does this need to be dramatized, why does this need to be a limited series. I think the answer I came up with was that I felt like it hadn’t been told from her point of view. Her interior world hadn’t been explored. I thought it would add to the story. The only people who can do that are writers. It’s not the job of journalists to picture themselves in somebody’s shoes. I felt like that would really add to the story. I went in for the meeting. As I was talking about it in the meeting, I just got more and more animated. I just found myself getting really emotionally involved in the actual meeting. I had that out-of-body experience where I was like, “I really want this [inaudible 00:06:32] care about this story,” which is never good in the meeting.

Hannah: To realize it?

Meriwether: Yeah.

John: You’re talking yourself into it.

Meriwether: Then you’re like, “I’m not going to be able to walk away from this.” Then Liz Hannah hired Liz Heldens, incredible drama writers, because I had no drama experience, and really knew that I needed help in that way. Then we wrote it. We were supposed to start shooting March 2020. Then COVID happened, and we lost our director and Kate McKinnon, and then spent a year trying to put it all back together again.

John: I definitely want to focus on the writing of this, because I’m so curious what your process was going into it, because you’d run shows before where you’re cranking out 20 episodes, 24 episodes in a year. This is such a different beast. Before we get to the writing of it, I’m curious what the origin story was for The Girl from Plainville. This is again based on a real story of a young woman is accused of leading a man, another teenager, into suicide. What was the start of this? Was there a book? Was there an article? Who came to who with the idea of doing this?

Hannah: There was an article called The Girl from Plainville by Jesse Barron in Esquire. I had not read it. I’d heard about it. I’d obviously heard of the case, but really in a peripheral way, I think in maybe how we all knew it, which was I knew it happened. I knew less about that than I knew about Elizabeth Holmes upon being approached to do The Dropout. I hadn’t listened to the Dropout podcast but knew it existed and knew more about her, at least in the zeitgeist, than I did about Michelle Carter. The article existed, and then there was the documentary, I Love You, Now Die by Erin Lee Carr, that was on HBO. Universal had optioned the article.

Patrick McManus, my co-creator and co-showrunner, was attached to do it, but really wanted a partner on it, and didn’t feel that he could or wanted to tell the story all by himself. Elle Fanning was considering doing it. I had worked with Elle previously. We’d been looking for things to do again together. They brought it to me. I was like, “Hard pass.” We were still in the room on The Dropout I think when they approached. I was like, “What kind of… “ The similar approach was just like why do this, what is there to add to the story, but also I was like, “I just spent a long time unpacking the interior life of a quite complicated woman who everyone hates. I don’t know if I want to dive into that again.”

I didn’t read the article until Elle wouldn’t take no for an answer, and neither would Brittany Kahan Ward, who’s my manager and our producing partner. I read the article, and the thing that really struck me was, similar to Elizabeth Holmes, which there’s so much more to this girl to unpack, and also that I really felt like she had been depicted in a very salacious way in the media that maybe undercut some of the larger conversations to be had about the case itself and about the relationship itself, and I think very dismissively talked about suicide, rather than having a larger conversation about mental health and the toxicity of this relationship and the toxicity of technology and all of these things. It felt very of now to tell that story. This was in December 2019. Patrick and I sat down and tried the pilot. We were going to take it out, and then the pandemic happened.

The thing that I couldn’t relate to in the show was how you could be so consumed by your phone. I’m consumed by social media, but I don’t have a relationship with my phone, because I didn’t grow up with it. It’s a different experience to just not have been 12 and have an iPhone or a Twitter account, and to not necessarily understand the connection that you can have with somebody that’s so distanced between that. Black Mirror and then the pandemic happened, and every relationship I had was with everybody over a phone. It became very timely in a weird way.

That was really where it started, and very similar to why I was interested in doing The Dropout, which frankly was because Meriwether was doing it. I was like, there’s a why now aspect which I think is interesting, but there’s also a voice aspect, which I think Meriwether is one of the best writers I know. I wanted to work with her and hear that. That was really exciting. I think when you decide to do one of these things, it’s what we’ve been talking about, unless it’s going to be additive, then it just feels like we’re putting another thing on television. There’s enough.

John: From the start, did you guys know how many episodes this series was going to be. Meriwether, did you know that this was going to be x number of shows?

Meriwether: Isn’t this funny, because Hannah knows all the answers to these questions?

John: If your voice fails, Hannah can fill in.

Hannah: This one’s a really funny one.

Meriwether: First of all, I was terrified of drama, and I was terrified of drama-linked stories and drama-linked scripts. I was like, “Six, six, it’s definitely six,” which felt like the shortest amount that you could do. I was also like, “I don’t know how much the audience is going to want to engage with this story.” Then we started researching it and working on it and interviewing people, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. It just became clear that six wasn’t going to be enough. For a long time it was seven or eight. It was either going to be seven or eight.

Hannah: Unless you’d asked Dan LeFranc, who still wants 10 episodes.

Meriwether: He’s still working on two more. Even after the writers room ended, Hulu was still like, “By the way… ” They were incredibly patient with me, but it was up to a point where they were like, “We need to know. We’re making a budget. We need to know if this is seven or eight episodes.” I finally was just like, “Eight,” because I needed them to budget in case it needed to be eight. I think what I was so afraid of was that the eighth episode was going to feel like it was just wrapping up. I think what was tricky about The Dropout story was that in my mind at least, and I think people who are familiar with the story, and anybody who’s seen All the President’s Men, that first article comes out and you’re like, “That’s the end of the story.” The more I was reading about what happened afterwards, I realized the article didn’t actually stop Theranos, that it was a mix of the article and just this federal agency.

Hannah: Bureaucracy.

Meriwether: Yeah, it’s bureaucracy. Then in the room, in the writers room, they talked a lot about wanting to end at Burning Man, which was always the dream, that we were going to end it with her and Billy at Burning Man.

Hannah: There was an acid trip in there at one point. There was a lot.

Meriwether: Hannah, we’ve never talked about this, but I credit [inaudible 00:13:35] for stopping the Burning Man dream, because what had been Burning Man turned into one woman getting into an Uber.

Hannah: It is actually amazing, the whole process that takes place in a short amount of time. There was an acid trip and there was a burning down of something. It’s the burning down of the building thing.

Meriwether: Who knows? What about you? Did you know what the amount of episodes was, Hannah? How did that work?

Hannah: I think we always knew it was eight. I don’t know, it felt like not 10 and not 6. That felt like a nice, round number.

John: Was that a creative decision or was that like, this is economically viable to do 8 episodes, whereas 6 is too few for us to pay out, and 10 is-

Hannah: It’s a bit of both. Six is really hard to convince a studio to do. They just don’t make money back when it’s six, for a sundry of reasons. I think you could maybe get away with seven if you were like, “Creatively it doesn’t make sense for us to have an eighth,” and you made a real case for it. In all frankness, I think there’s a bit of extension that happens in Plainville for the eighth episode, but at the same time we also knew that we wanted to give Conrad a full day, his last day as an entire episode, and give him his moment. Knowing that then backed us into the eight. We definitely never were like, “There’s more to the story after that.” Dan also wasn’t in the Plainville room. I’m sure had he been, we would still be talking about parts 9 and 10 of Plainville.

Meriwether: It was so foreign to me just as somebody who had spent eight years being told everything I had to do, and to the point where I think it was the first season when we were really a hit. After you plan a whole season, getting a call towards the end that’s like, “You need to put two more episodes on the air,” it’s… I almost felt like I had too much freedom, where I was just like, “How many episodes do you want this to be?” I’m like, “What? What is this alternate universe where I get to decide things?” I put off the decision for as long as I could.

Hannah: Length was also a weird thing for me. I know we did this in the room for Dropout 2 is… The page length, they were like, “If it has a five in front of it, that’s maybe a problem.” They wouldn’t push back on it. I don’t know if you had a similar experience, but in post it was like, we have the amount of minutes it had to be for international sales, and that was it. It was like, as long as it hits this, which I think for us was 42 minutes. Our episode length could really be anywhere from 42 to 60 minutes and could even go over if it needed to. We don’t, but we could’ve. We had that conversation. That was really weird and interesting to have this… There’s no handcuffs. If this is a 40-minute episode, then it’s a 40-minute episode. Do whatever is creatively right for it.

Meriwether: I strong-armed them. I am not good without limits. I was like, “Just tell me what is the best time for episodes to be.” They finally gave in and were like, “51, 52.” Then I went into post with that. This was so foreign to me. I was used to hitting 21:35 no matter what, and to the point where you’re like… We called it ball shaving. I don’t know if we should put-

John: That’s awesome.

Meriwether: To the point where I was in with the editor taking frames out of… It was so bizarre to me to have that kind of freedom.

John: Before you get to the ball shaving and the final post of it all, you have to write these episodes. Let’s talk about the writing of the two shows, because from what you’re describing it doesn’t sound like what I expected, because Hannah, I assumed you came in after there was a pilot and after there was an order, but it sounds like you were earlier than that. Hannah, let’s start with Girl From Plainville which I think might be a little bit more normal. You’re at Universal. They said, “We want you to do the show.” Then they’re going to take it to Hulu. Did you guys write a pilot episode first before you wrote everything else? Talk to me about that pilot? What other documents did you write at the same time?

Hannah: We wrote a pilot and a pitch document, and that was it. We also made the article. Erin Lee Carr was on as consulting producer on the show. We had Erin and Jesse there for anything. The pilot that we wrote, and then that was how we sold the show, aside from removing some scenes, is pretty close to what’s on the air. There’s not a lot that changed.

Meriwether: It’s so good, by the way.

Hannah: Thank you. There’s a writing motif, I was just telling somebody about this earlier, that we had in the show. I don’t know that we need past, present, fantasy, text fantasy, and then this other thing on top of it. That’s no longer in there. Other than that, it was that. We sold it to Hulu. It was the same partner as I’d worked with on The Dropout. Then we opened the room and it was pretty straightforward. We had a 20-week room. We wrote six out of eight in the room. Then I wrote seven, and then Patrick and I wrote eight. We had outlines I think for… We knew what eight was always going to be. We had that done and then we just had to write it, which we did about four days before we went into production.

John: Universal’s hiring you guys to write this pilot. You guys are writing this document and this pitch document before you’re going out to pitching it to the Hulus and the other potential distributors for it. What is the pitch document like for this? What’s in that? How long is it? Is it a keynote? Is it a pdf? What is a pitch document?

Hannah: The greatest thing that ever happened was that I didn’t have to drive to Santa Monica four times randomly over the course of two weeks, because it was all on Zoom. I don’t know that I’ll ever go back to pitching in person. It was glorious, because also, guess what. Little pages, document right up on my screen, you can’t see it and I can’t see you. I can just read, and it’s great. I can ad lib and do my little shtick. It was great. That was it.

The document was why we had come to the show. It was a synopsis of the pilot, because generally no one reads the pilot until they hear the pitch. Then they’re like, “Oh, maybe.” Then they read it. You remember when you read in the pilot, that you didn’t read, that these things happened. Then it was like a here’s what the show will be. We went into it with what are the ways that people will pass on this show. We knew putting the texting out there was a way to pass, because it’s the thing we’ve all been trying to figure out how to do for the last 20 years is put texting on screen and not make it just subtitles or just I’m reading my phone and seeing texting. Patrick in our very first meeting had pitched me the idea of their last conversation being in person. Then we took that and ran with it through the whole show of having these texting reenactments of them being in the same place together. That was in the pitch. Then we had the fantasies, the Glee fantasies in the pitch. They were not musical numbers yet, but they did have those.

John: This document, you’re saying it’s a pdf. Is it just text or do you have images to show-

Hannah: Just text. It’s interesting. I don’t do a visual component to pitching. I’ll either become too obsessive about it or I [inaudible 00:21:03] myself and then I don’t write the actual document. I’m like, “Look at all the pretty pictures.” I know people that do it. My husband is a writer/producer and he uses a visual component in his pitches, and it’s really effective. As the audience for his practice pitches, I find it very effective.

I do it with directing sometimes, because I think that’s a much more… You’re trying to be specific about your vision for this. We did a visual component when we did our final pitch-out of the season before we went into production and our production plan. That was when Lisa Cholodenko and Fred Elmes had come on, and so they had said how we were going to aesthetically deal with some of these things. It’s just words. Then at the end we were like, “Elle Fanning will star on it, so you should buy it.” That was about it.

John: You should buy it. Absolutely. Star of one of your other big series. Meriwether, for you, it was already set up at Hulu. You had a star. You had Kate McKinnon attached. It sounds like you actually brought in writers to help you from the start. Is that correct?

Meriwether: Yeah, it was really bizarre, also having now sold my next project as a limited series. I did it in a more traditional way. I’m realizing how strange The Dropout was. I came in and they were just anxious to get going. I had a conversation with Hulu. It was the classic Hollywood thing where they don’t tell you it’s a pitch. They don’t tell you it’s-

Hannah: It’s a meeting. It’s just a meeting. There’s no pressure.

Meriwether: No pressure. It’s a meeting. You would think I would know at this point. I had notes on my computer. I’d actually had an idea for what the structure was going to be, so I pitched them the loose structure of what the episodes were. Then we just got a room together and we started working on it. I think before the room began, I wrote out some document. I don’t remember what it was, but I think it was an overview of what the series was going to be and what each episode roughly was going to be. At that point I thought it was six episodes. It wasn’t the most accurate thing.

Hannah: The pilot was pretty… It was there.

Meriwether: I’d outlined it, right?

Hannah: Yeah, you had outlined the pilot. Then there was a few pages of what each episode then was going to be. A lot of how we would break that show in particular was by years, because so much time had passed. It was like this episode is between X and X years or X and X month, and then here’s everything that happens in that, and that’s what we’ll address. Then going into the room, it was like the weaning of that and finding where each story was.

Meriwether: We had that overview. I was used to getting into the breaking. Then we realized that we had to do so much research. We had to become engineers and chemists and talk to a bunch of people. The crazy thing was what I was simultaneously… Because they were in a hurry to get it out, joke was on them, ultimately. I was simultaneously running an ABC sitcom called Bless This Mess that was about a young couple on a farm. I had the two rooms going at the same time.

Hannah: We were on different sides of an office. It was one side of windows, and then the other side of windows.

John: Who gets Meriwether’s attention at this moment, and you’re trying pitch [inaudible 00:24:40]

Meriwether: I was running back and… It was the most strange reality of walking into one room and having conversations about chickens and-

Hannah: Microfluidity.

Meriwether: Chicken comedy. The call sheet for Bless This Mess would sometimes be four goats. It’s having those conversations, and then going into The Dropout room,we’re having very serious conversations about sexual assault and microfluidics and a lot of things.

John: These were actual rooms. This is also a difference, because this was pre-pandemic. You were literally together with bodies around a table figuring out this stuff and looking at the same whiteboard experience, which is not norm anymore. That’s all changed.

Meriwether: I think we had an awkward mixer, where it was the Bless This Mess writers mixer.

Hannah: Yeah, we had a lunch. It was kind of like step-kids meeting for the first time. It was very strange. Isn’t Cheaper By the Dozen about that? I think that was based on that lunch. We didn’t have that for Plainville.

John: Let’s talk about the difference between the Plainville room and this room.

Hannah: Do we have to?

John: The Plainville room, you had a pilot already, so you were hiring writers to come in to help you out on that. Everyone could look at the same master plan, like, “This is the pilot. This is the show we’re trying to make.” Then what was the process of figuring out from there how to break out this information across these episodes? Had you done this before?

Hannah: I hadn’t showrun before, no.

John: What was your approach?

Hannah: Fear, terror, a sense of humor about myself. “Yes, but” is what I would say about the pilot, because we had the pilot written, but the pilot is extremely different than the rest of the show, because it doesn’t… Conrad is not introduced, his timeline is not introduced until Episode 2, and the prosecution doesn’t begin until Episode 3, or the real investigation doesn’t begin until Episode 3. The pilot we had, and we had that for a total touchstone and pacing, but we were looking for writers. Patrick was about to go do Dr. Death. He had just wrapped the writers room for that around the time we had done The Dropout. There were a few writers on that that I met with and really loved and wanted to bring on. There was a continuity to it, particularly because Patrick was going into production on Death five or six weeks into the room.

The big thing for me about all the writers that came in was I wanted writers that didn’t want to write a true crime story. I wanted writers who didn’t have an interest in just being a straightforward true crime story. I wanted them to come in and do different things, which was similar to The Dropout, if not the same. I don’t think any of us had any interest. I don’t think anybody had really done true crime except sort of me with Mindhunter, but that doesn’t really count. There were a lot of playwrights in the room. Heldens, who’s the best, she’s the best of the Lizzes, had done network dramas for a long time.

Meriwether: Friday Night Lights.

Hannah: Friday Night Lights. We had talked about that, because we were obsessed with Friday Night Lights. I think I played it cool for two days and then was like, “Can we just talk about Friday Night Lights?” We all approached it from a very different way. Then Heldens would be like, “This is how a show is written.” We were like, “Copy.”

That was the approach that I took to Plainville was just having a bunch of interesting brains, not necessarily brains that were experienced in writing this material. We knew similarly with the structure, like what we were talking about before, we knew that the final episode was going to be… I actually think we thought the penultimate episode was going to be Coco’s last day, and then ultimately as we got into the breaking realized it was going to be the last episode. Then we had the spine of the investigation and the trial and things like that.

I would say the biggest obstacle we had is that nobody was interested in the trial, because we were like, “We’ve seen it.” It was similar with Elizabeth, where at a certain point we’re like, “We’ve reached this place where everybody knows her. How do you make it interesting? Everybody’s seen this part from documentaries.” I would say the trial and the breaking of that was by far the most difficult part of the process because we were hamstrung into making it. You have to tell the facts and you have to tell the story that I think is fascinating, of how did this girl convicted off of something she said, that we don’t know if she said, based off a text message to another friend. It’s a very flimsy thing to be convicted on. That was fascinating to me. We’ve also seen trials before, so how do you make it interesting?

John: Now Meriwether, for something like New Girl, you are breaking story, you’re writing an episode, you’re shooting an episode, you are posting an episode all at the same time. How different was it going from that to this where you went into production with these scripts written? It felt like you were doing one thing at a time.

Meriwether: Is that what you think happened?

John: Were there things that you would do differently based on what you learned through this?

Meriwether: Yeah. I learned an important thing, which is that I can’t run two shows at the same time. I certainly can’t-

John: I don’t understand how someone could.

Meriwether: A show on network that’s airing at the same time that I’m running another show, because the way you described my job on New Girl was my job on Bless This Mess 2. We were shooting, editing, and writing, and then I was also running this other thing. At a certain point I think I just couldn’t. I couldn’t anymore. It was too hard. I really am in awe of those showrunners that can do that. It was an important step for me to realize that I can’t. I’ll never put myself in that situation again.

John: I couldn’t do what you did on New Girl, where you’re running a show that’s filming right now.

Meriwether: I couldn’t do it either.

John: You did it for seven seasons, by the way. You did it for seven seasons, so I think-

Meriwether: I had a lot of help. It’s very hard. It’s not conducive to great television.

John: Or good life or happiness.

Hannah: It’s not conducive to life.

Meriwether: I didn’t have kids when I was on New Girl. I spent nights at the office. It was my entire life. It consumed my whole life. It’s just not a good way to work. I was so happy with all of the IATSE stories. I do feel like a lot of the way that television gets made needs to adjust a little bit.

John: Was this experience on The Dropout better in that way in terms of doing one thing at a time? What were the pros and what were the cons? I’ve definitely heard a lot of the cons, which was that sometimes the writing process was so divorced, by months or by a year, from the production process, that people end up being dragged across… A producer, in your case, could be still producing a show that they wrote a year ago, and they’re not getting paid any more money and they’re actually being pushed down towards scale levels of pay, because they’re still producing this thing, or the original writers can’t be involved with the actual production, because they’re now on three shows after this. Those are the cons.

Meriwether: The writers room on Dropout, I was doing a bunch of things at the same time, but we weren’t shooting it. That was different. I think the system hurts the younger writers the most, because I feel like working on New Girl was this amazing crash course for a lot of people, including myself, on television production. I think it’s so important and so great to see an episode from start to finish, and even if it gets rewritten a million times, but to be able to go to the table or hear what the notes are, hear how the genre handles the notes, go to set, all those things are invaluable. It’s honestly in a job that doesn’t have really a school that you can go to to figure out. It made me sad that the writers on The Dropout weren’t involved in the production at all. I was texting Hannah screenshots of the monitor. I was like, “This is your episode.” I really didn’t like that way of working. I felt like that was strange.

Hannah: COVID on top of it. At least for us, we couldn’t bring our writers to set. Even if you can, because now it’s just so rare to have the writer who wrote the episode cover the episode or even be a part of it. Even pre-COVID, I agree, it’s just not a typical thing anymore.

Meriwether: I felt guilty, because I was like, “You’re not being paid anymore. I can’t ask you to be on set.” It’s just crazy.

Hannah: When it’s disconnected like that, you’re still not in the writers room. It’s like [inaudible 00:33:32] what’s the incentive to do it, other than the learning experience? I think it’s really important for everyone to, if they can, just go visit for a couple days and be on set and observe and be a part of it. Because of COVID, we couldn’t do that for any of our writers. We couldn’t do it for any of our support staff, because we were on lockdown for… I think Dropout wrapped before us, because we started prep in June, and we wrapped in the middle of December. We were really fortunate to bridge both Delta and Omicron.

Meriwether: Oh my gosh.

Hannah: We were PCR testing every single day until two weeks after Thanksgiving. Then we were PCR testing three days a week. Then we got hit by Omicron two days before we wrapped. I turned to Dan Minahan, the director, and I was like, “Dan, I have to leave. I have to leave here, so you have to finish this episode of television before 2022. We have to finish it.” He was like, “There’s no one left to do the show.” I was like, “I don’t care. It’ll be you and me.” I agree. It’s a real bummer that writers… Being a writer in television is 30% of the job. Being a writer as a showrunner is 15% of the job. There’s so much more to it. If you’re not exposed to it, you have no idea.

Meriwether: I will say the pro for me was after the room was finished, and because we had COVID, and I had a year to sit with the scripts. It was the first time in my life. I guess when I was writing for theater I had the same time. That part of it was incredible. I just could sit with the scripts and think. I had nothing else to do. I just got to write. What a gift. That’s great. I think once we started production…

When you’re making network television, you’re getting constant feedback, and sometimes it’s great to incorporate that into the show, and sometimes it can be destructive, because you’re chasing numbers, or you read a tweet and then you change a whole storyline. I think when you’re making network television, you have to protect yourself a little bit of that. I was scared because I was like, “We’re not seeing anything. I’m not seeing anything. I don’t have any feedback. I don’t have any audience. I just have to keep going down this road.” That part of it was a little unnerving too. This is a very long answer to your question. I think for me it was a lot of pros and cons, in interesting ways. I feel like I learned a lot from doing it.

John: Let’s wrap up this pros and cons with our fantasy world, because you’re both people who have successfully run these limited series now. If you could set it up in your dream way, what would you do differently or how would it work? Is there a way to get those writers on the set? Is there a way to make sure that we can actually have that sort of apprenticeship that you learned, the good thing about New Girl? Is there any stuff that you can bring through to this process? Hannah, from features, is there stuff that we could be doing to make these even better?

Hannah: I’m laughing just because I’m like, I really just wanted more time and money and not having to-

John: A unique thing, yes.

Hannah: The COVID situation was really detrimental I think to everybody, and obviously everybody in the world, but I think to filmmaking and to television it was really detrimental. There was just so much that was impacted creatively in the show that that was really a bummer, and that bums me out. More time and money, please.

John: More time and money.

Hannah: I take it.

John: No COVID.

Hannah: I take it here. Thank you.

John: Structurally, is there a way to make the experience of doing these shows better for writers and ultimately [inaudible 00:37:11] creative project at the end? I’m just thinking ahead. If people who are setting up these shows now, what kinds of things could they ask for that would make it a better process for them as showrunners but also for their staff?

Hannah: I would just say I do think it has to do with money, which is making it part of your budget that you’re bringing the writer to set. I also think it’s a part of talking about how we make these shows, which is… Meriwether, you do this, and I know some other showrunners that do this, but not a lot of people do this. You talk about the showrunner, you don’t talk about the room, and normalizing the fact that television is not made by one singular person, that it’s a group of people that make it.

It’s similar to talking about being rewritten in features. When you’re rewritten in features, the first time it happens to you, you’re like, “What? This never happened. How is this happening?” Then you talk to a feature writer and you’re like, “Oh no, this happens in every single script. It will happen to you for the rest of your career. It does not matter how big you are, how little you are. It will happen forever. You have to just have conversations about it. There’s a good way to do it and a bad way to do it. We’ve talked about that before, if you’re the rewriter reaching out to the person you’re rewriting, however it is. I think that having a larger conversation of, this episode was written by this person, and this is the person who came up with this… There’s enough credit to go around. The only way that I think networks and studios will find it important to bring those people to set and empower them is if we empower them. We’re like, “We can’t do this without them. They know this.”

I was really fortunate to bring my number two in the room, Ashley Michael Hoban, to set because I was like, “I’ve never run a show before.” Patrick’s, it was in post on Death, I think, and then it was airing. I’m not doing this by myself. That’s a really quick way for me to lose my mind and for this to be a terrible show. Hoban was there the entire run of the show and covered set. It was amazing. I literally would not have survived without her, and the show would’ve not been good without her. I just think that took just convincing. I just think there’s enough credit to go around that we should just be like, “These are the people who need to be here to make it better.” You hire 9,000 PAs, because we can’t do these things ourselves. It’s not dissimilar to, we need writers around to make this better.

John: Let’s talk about the writer’s responsibility on the set, because I’m sure it varies from project to project. Liz, you were covering set sometimes, but you also had someone else helping you there, Liz Hannah. Meriwether, were you on set for the whole thing? What were your responsibilities on a day of shooting?

Meriwether: For your listeners who are going to hear the bonus content, I’ve just recently given birth. I know that I gave birth on April 10th, which is my son’s birthday, and we started shooting in June. I had an infant and also COVID. I was on a feed, which was… For me, it’s so hard.

Hannah: It’s horrible.

Meriwether: It’s so hard.

Hannah: It’s awful.

Meriwether: I really felt for the director, and trying to text notes that are complicated, that are like, “Can she move her… ” Putting that over a text message is crazy. I didn’t have a room anymore. Everything that Hannah just said was brilliant and exactly right. I loved the script coordinator who had been with me for the year, that after we had the room, Zach Panozzo, who I asked to be on set, so I just promoted him to associate producer, and he was on set every day. He had a really tough job of me texting him and him having to go and give notes to the director, who was occasionally not psyched that there was this dude here shoving a phone in his face.

Hannah: To be fair, they’re not always psyched when it’s you approaching them without the phone.

Meriwether: That was really hard. That being said, I think I also am glad I wasn’t there at every moment. I feel like on New Girl, sometimes when we got behind, I was always trying to fix things on set or fix story issues or character stuff on set. I liked having a little distance I think in the end, because I don’t know how to direct a drama. I think it was kind of good that I was on this couch in a weird little bubble, looking at a feed, pumping milk out of my breasts. It was a very weird existence.

John: Hannah, what were you doing?

Hannah: I was on location the whole time. We all moved to Savannah from June to December.

Meriwether: Oh my god.

Hannah: My husband and I drove across the country with our dog. Similarly, the day after we arrived in Savannah, I found out I was pregnant, which was not a plan that we had. That was a bit of a twist. I was pregnant the entire time we were shooting. By the time we wrapped I was seven and a half months pregnant. I was on set in Savannah in the summer. We’ll talk about it for the bonus. It’s great.

John: Obviously, as the writer covering set, you’re there to make sure that this scene is actually doing what you need it to do. You’re there as a second set of eyes and whispering to the director and getting stuff moved. Were you also rewriting or changing things?

Hannah: Yeah.

John: How much change on the day?

Hannah: Quite a lot. Not on the day necessarily, but there was a lot that changed before we went into production and prep. Patrick was there for prep. Ashley Michael was there for prep. I was there. Then our producing partner Brittany Kahan Ward was there. Brittany basically would body-block people from coming into our offices so we could write. We had seven of eight written. Patrick and I wrote eight. I think during prep, we turned in the first draft. Then I think our shortest script was 57 pages when we flew to Savannah or when we got to Savannah. That was exceptionally long. They all had to be cut. I think every script got cut between 7 and 11 pages. That was just a massive overhaul that we had to do to begin with.

Something that I really like to do, that we’ve done in the room, but haven’t been able to do with all the episodes, because obviously seven and eight weren’t written, we’ve done on this Mindhunter, was we pulled characters, storylines, put them in a final draft document, and treated them almost like they were features. We would have 400 pages of Wendy and would be like, how does she flow through the season? Then you put them back in and see how they speak to each other.

Meriwether: That’s so cool. That’s such a good idea.

Hannah: It was Courtenay Miles on Mindhunter, and Fincher, were like, “Can you take this character and do this?” I was like, “Yes.” Again, it was one of those things where I’m like, “That actually sounds like something that’s common sense to do,” and I’d never done it. I’d never done it for a feature either, just taking a character and being like, here are their scenes. We did that in Plainville with Michelle, in particular because her arc is so circular, and that if you watch the past timeline in the finale and then you watch the present timeline in the pilot, you’re fully caught up. There’s one hour that’s been skipped basically. We were able to do that and spend time on that. Then once a director and a cinematographer come on, this process was not super dissimilar from features in terms of Lisa and Fred were there for prep for a good amount of time and were very involved in how we were going to tell a lot of these stories.

We did I think four tone meetings for one and three and were really drilling down on it. That’s what we were doing for all the prep. Then I covered for one and three. Then Ashley Michael and Patrick did two. She covered me when I was directing. She also covered four and five. I would prep while they were covering. We basically just did that until we lost time, and now we’re here.

Meriwether: I always think a writer on set though… What I always found was so amazing about it was that they had this breadth of knowledge. They knew what every joke was supposed to be and why it was there. To me it was like this person who could speak to the choices that we had made in the writer’s room. I did feel that the lack of that and not having the right answer-

Hannah: It’s like an encyclopedia.

Meriwether: It’s an encyclopedia of what happened in the writers room, which I think is really important. Similarly, because of the situation, I had I think marathon tone meetings that Showalter I think is still scarred from. I think we were averaging about four hours an episode, which is pretty embarrassing.

Hannah: Yeah, but detailed. Very detailed.

Meriwether: I felt like I was just going to have to say everything. It actually did help I think in the end. A lot of rewrites came from the tone meeting, of just talking stuff through. I wasn’t actually doing that much rewriting on set, which was really helpful. I went into production not having written… I had a first draft of Seven, and I had not written Eight at all. I don’t recommend that.

Hannah: Having to write Eight while we were in production was brutal. This was the first time I was a director and I was covered on set, which was a fascinating experience. I was like, “I’ll be fine. I don’t need a writer to cover me. Of the two, I wrote one of them. It’ll be fine.” Then I got three days into production and I turned to Brittany and I was like, “I think I need Ashley Michael to come back.” She was like, “She’s coming back on Friday.”

Meriwether: You need it.

Hannah: It sounds silly, because it’s like, you wrote the episode, you’re a showrunner, why do you need a writer there. It’s because as the director, you’re not thinking about it.

Meriwether: Story.

Hannah: I don’t want to rewrite while I’m also trying to convey to an actor what the interpretation of the material is. I don’t want to have to figure out why the scene is not working in real life when it worked on the page while we have 10 hours to shoot, and then also having a producer on set. That’s the other thing. I was the producer on set when I wasn’t just the writer on set. There were things that would happen that I was like, I as the writer and director now cannot be the producer. You can’t wear all of the hats at once, as much as you want to. I was extraordinarily pregnant at that point and barely mobile. If anything, it doubled down the need for writers to be on set, for features, for TV, for everything. It’s just having another set of eyes is the best gift you could have. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want it.

John: A couple of terms that have come up here that I wanted to make sure we’re talking through. A tone meeting for the two of you is really walking through the script with director or other important department heads in terms of this is what’s happening in the scene, this is what it needs to be, make sure you’re not getting the wrong version of the scene at the end of the day. What else is important to cover in a tone meeting?

Hannah: Any questions they have for anything they don’t understand. The first tone meeting is usually when you get a lot of the notes from them. We did multiple tone meetings for every episode, just because it was just a bananas show and there was a lot that was confusing about it. We would do that. Then it’s really like you go through every line of dialog, every choice a character makes, every moment of the show.

Meriwether: It’s supposed to be your chance to talk to the director. In an ideal world, it’s like this is your version of communicating to the director how you would want it directed, I guess. On New Girl, once we were in production, the tone meeting unfortunately became my first real actually engaging with the director on an episode. A lot of the times our amazing line producer, Erin O’Malley, got the rhythm of that and would try to… While she was prepping with the director, she would know that things would pop up, and she’d text me like, “He’s doing this,” or, “She’s doing,” whatever, because there were certainly times when we’d get to tone meeting and I’d be like, “Wait, that’s completely [inaudible 00:49:24].”

Usually, the tone meetings are set for the Friday before we start shooting on Monday when you’re doing network. That’s too late to make big, big changes. I was trying to get ahead of that. We started calling them pre-tone meetings. They were taking so long that they just became the tone meeting, because nobody was going to do a pre-tone meeting and a tone meeting. All of the designers started listening in, just because so much comes up. For us in The Dropout, it became a concept meeting and a tone meeting, where it was talking through what everything was going to be. Television is supposed to be pretty organized with meetings and production and stuff. I think doing limited series, people are making different rules and what works for them a little bit more.

John: You’re halfway between how a feature would do things and how a normal series would do things, because in both of your shows, you had some sets you could come back to. Were either of your shows block shot or did you shoot episode by episode?

Hannah: Yeah.

Meriwether: Yeah.

John: You were block shooting. Defining terms, in block shooting you can group together all of an actor’s scenes or all of a set that you’re going to use that appears in multiple episodes, so you can efficiently shoot that out and then move on to the next thing. It’s always a question of how to best manage that time.

Meriwether: I’ve never done that before, because for network you don’t really block shoot, because the stuff is just not ready with enough time to block shoot. We block shot The Dropout Episodes 1-4.

John: Wow.

Meriwether: Repping for four drama episodes at the same time, it was like… I couldn’t-

Hannah: When you told me that, because you sent me a photo of old white guys in August, and I was like, “You guys are already on Episode 4?” You were like, “We’re block shooting four episodes.” I was like, “That’s terrible.” What a nightmare. I can’t believe you guys did that.

Meriwether: Keeping it all in your head where you’re like, “Wait, that’s a scene in Episode 4,” it’s just… Then after that we did two. It’s two at a time.

Hannah: We did two at a time, and then we had two solos. Two and Eight were single episodes.

John: Generally, in block shooting you have the same director and cinematographer who’d be working on those things so they could collaborate on that.

Hannah: We had an AV team swap it, going back and forth. Just going back to the tone meeting really quick, because I also toned Six and Seven with Patrick, which was a funny experience to… When you have a co-showrunner, there’s also a funny experience. It’s like who’s going to blink first on what they want to say the scene is about, to see if they’re wrong, because he and I would split scenes and then we’d do passes on each other’s scenes. I think with Seven, we were talking about something, and we were just like, “What do you think this should be about? How should we do this?” It’s fun. It’s a fun experience I encourage everybody to do.

John: That’s nice. Let’s wrap up this conversation and talk about stories based on true events, where these people are still alive. These are people who could come after the studio producers and stuff. At what point were there conversations with legal departments about these are things we can do and things that we can say or can’t say?

Hannah: Constant. All the time.

Meriwether: All the time.

John: You’re going to have to make choices about how you’re portraying these events. There’s certain things which are going to be easily, factually documentable. These text messages happened or didn’t happen. There’s going to be things that you are inventing because you’re inventing a show. At what stage did legal get involved? How early did it happen? How much was it a factor in the story you ended up being able to tell? Let’s start with Girl From Plainville. Obviously, the trial happened. There’s documentation about a lot of stuff. As I watch the show, there is an opening credit thing saying this is based on real events but they’re fictional things. What was the conversation?

Hannah: The short conversation is that we talked to legal I think before we even sold the show. We talked to legal when we were writing the pilot. There were a number of things, not the least of which was Glee, that we knew had to be in the show. We didn’t get the okay to use Glee until three weeks before the show premiered, four weeks before the show premiered.

John: Wow.

Hannah: There was a lot that there were plan B’s on. That was a constant conversation.

Meriwether: That’s crazy. Sorry.

Hannah: We had the okay to do Make You Feel My Love when we shot it. We reshot that in December. That was originally shot with the way that you could cut basically seeing Glee out or only use fair use, which was about three to five seconds, and then you really get into it and it’s two and a half seconds, which meant nothing. We had that version. It just did not work. The whole point was to see it. Patrick spoke to our partners at Hulu. Then we all got on the phone with everybody and were like, “We want to re-shoot it, but we don’t want to re-shoot it unless we can use Glee.” We got that. We were in our last week of shooting. It was early December probably. Then we didn’t get the rights to do the rest of Glee until right before it premiered. We were constantly talking to legal.

Then because we had the text messages, the one thing I really learned from The Dropout that I brought onto this show was having a dedicated researcher, hiring somebody specifically to be a researcher, because there was so much more than even we thought we would need to know in The Dropout and then very quickly realized… I have no idea what microfluidics still is. I think once, I could write a sentence about it and it maybe was accurate, but it’s gone now.

Meriwether: Tiny fluids.

Hannah: I know that, but how they work.

John: Teeny, tiny fluids.

Hannah: We had somebody draw a diagram of the box for us on a whiteboard, because we did not understand it. By the way, it didn’t work, so there’s a reason we didn’t understand it. It was very confusing to us. I hired a dedicated researcher named Patrick Murphy, who’s incredible. He came on very soon at the beginning and made all the text messages searchable for us and made them consumable so that it wasn’t just like literally scrolling through text. Then that was given to our lawyers at the studio so that they could vet every script. Every text message conversation in the show is either exactly the conversation they had or paraphrased for time or they were like, “Heart you,” things like that. It was constant. Then we changed the names of anybody who was underage during the show, except for Conrad in the show.

Meriwether: I obviously never worked with a lawyer on anything that I’d ever written.

John: New Girl wasn’t going to liable anybody. New Girl was happy reality-esque.

Meriwether: It was interesting, because I think at first I was really thrown by it. I think that we started having conversations with legal as soon as we started turning material in. Hannah was there for a lot of it. It was just so exhaustive and just every tiny thing and our amazing writers assistants and script coordinators having to answer a lot of these legal emails and things with our research and being able to-

Hannah: Annotations.

Meriwether: Back it up and annotations, yeah. I think at a certain point, I started really appreciating the conversation. I started thinking about it like it’s keeping you honest in many ways. As a writer you can get really caught up in the story and just trying to tell it in the best way that you think. Often, the real story has nuances and gray areas and just contradictions that are interesting. I think it definitely was frustrating at times. Then other times I feel like it veered us in better directions than it would’ve otherwise. The other thing about legal notes is sometimes they sound really big. They sound really global. There’s really scary legal language where it’s like defamation and all this. Then when you get down to it, it’s like, can you change this glass to a plastic cup?

Hannah: I was going to say.

Meriwether: That was one particular example of that.

Hannah: It’s still one of my favorite legal conversations to use as an example in the room, where I’m like, “When you get this note, this is how you can do it,” which is there’s a scene in the show where… It’s in the trailer, but I don’t think it’s in the show, which is funny. Sunny was going to throw a glass at Elizabeth, and it was the green juice, and it shattered down the hall. It was a 20, 30-minute conversation about this glass and what it could mean.

John: A glass that shattered could be dangerous, whereas a plastic cup is not.

Hannah: Yes. Meriwether was like, “What if it’s plastic?” They were like, “Yeah, totally, that would work.” We were like, “That’s 20 minutes of our lives that we’ll never get back.” Again, it makes sense, and you know why they’re doing it. They’re doing their job. That’s why they have their job, and I don’t. When you break it down to that minimal of a thing and you’re very stressed out about being sued, it’s…

Meriwether: Beyond being stressed out about being sued, I felt, and I’m sure Hannah felt this too, just an enormous responsibility. I thought about it constantly. It was something that I was constantly worried about.

John: Meriwether, there’s legal and there’s ethical. You were telling a story, and some of these people will not have their own chance to tell the story, so you’re going to be the public representation of what they were thinking, what they were doing. I think your show, Hannah, about the ethical and moral responsibilities of portraying teen suicide… While there’s a warning card and there’s all this stuff and there’s resources available, it must have been a constant discussion about how are we going to responsibly portray this real thing that happened in a way that’s interesting but that’s not going to be glamorizing. What were some of the conversations you had about that? Who else did you involve in those conversations?

Hannah: There was a lot of conversation about that before we even agreed to do the show, because it was like, “Is this the right thing to do? Does this need to exist?” Ultimately, I do think it does, again, for what we were talking about. I think it can hopefully be additive to a conversation about the three-dimensionality of mental health, that mental health is health and we should talk about it, and that I think with Coco in particular, and to some extent Michelle, that his suicide was so abrupt and shocking to his family, and who he was with Michelle was not the person that he was with everyone else, and that also he had a really good day the day before he died, or he had a really good morning the day of his death, and that suicidal ideation and depression is not a contiguous line. It’s not a straight line. It’s a roller coaster. You get flipped upside down. You go backwards and forwards. I think that not just expecting somebody who’s depressed to present as depressed I think was a conversation that we’ve been having for a long time and was something that I thought… I thought that this show could help be additive in that conversation, in that depiction.

Also, I’m not a mental health worker. I don’t have any experience in that. We brought on the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which was the foundation we’d worked with on Bright Places as well. Their team read every outline and read every script. They watched the cuts. They were extremely additive in avoiding triggers or being aware of triggers. There were certain things. Conrad dies by suicide in the show. That was something that obviously is going to have to happen in the show. Being able to tell that in a way that doesn’t feel grotesque or gratuitous or horrific or any of those things was extremely important to us, that we were telling responsibly.

Meriwether: I thought you did that so well in the pilot with them-

Hannah: Thank you.

Meriwether: …discovering his body. I love that the camera stayed on the police officer and that you just were getting the information that you needed from… I think there’s obviously a lot that is done in the writing, but it should be such a conversation with the director and how things are being shot and the way that they’re being represented.

Hannah: I think all of our directors met with AFSP to have those conversations as well. That in particular was something that we talked to them about was how to show… We never show his body on the show in that way. Obviously, we have images of it or glimpses of it. That was quite gratuitous to me in particular, and to Patrick. We didn’t want to do that.

Something that I learned on the show that I never knew before, and I’d made a movie that dealt with similar issues, was that the terminology or the phrasing of it is died by suicide, because committed puts the blame and onus on the person who’s suffering. That depression that leads to suicide is like cancer. That is like taking the blame off of that person, which for me was a revelation and was really honestly that very small, which was in our very first conversation with AFSP, that very small… They corrected me. They were like, “Hey, just so you know, this is how we talk about it.” That really actually opened up the whole conversation of Conrad’s journey and trying to be respectful.

I absolutely live in fear that the thing I don’t want to do is ever make somebody feel not seen because of the show or because of something that we were trying to say and feel ignored or that we did something salacious or anything like that. We really actively tried to avoid that at all times.

John: Even thinking about that moment where the body is discovered, we stay with Norbert Leo Butz’s character, who calls to say there’s yellow tape everywhere, doesn’t even say that it’s death. It’s just that it’s about the moment or the situation and not the evaluation of what’s happened there.

Hannah: Going to what Meriwether said, that’s actually what Co said to Lynn. In that truth is stranger than fiction or more emotional than fiction, everything that happens in the pilot is something that was sourced. A lot of the conversation were things that we got from court transcripts or interviews. Jesse Barron had done a lot of interviews and had a lot of material that couldn’t make it into the Esquire article that we had. Lynn in particular for me is somebody that I felt an enormous amount of responsibility for, in telling her story. She was actually the reason I leaned into the show in a lot of ways. I love her. I think she’s such a fascinating woman. The way she speaks is so eloquent. What she’s gone through is horrific. I feel a real responsibility, of course.

John: Great. Now, we’ve had a long conversation about some of the shows you’ve made. I don’t think we have time to do a big deep dive on how these other things could be a movie. I want to hit the headlines here. We’ll put links in the show notes for what we were going to talk about more fully. Maybe we can vote on which of these three things is most interesting for you guys to pitch as a future limited series.

The first one we want to talk through was Birds Aren’t Real, which is early 2017, Peter McIndoe was studying psychology at the University of Alabama, and he went to a protest, and he wanted to be a counter-protester, and he held up a sign called Birds Aren’t Real, which was just a joke. Then he became an improvver who was going on this whole big fake conspiracy about birds not being real. My teenage daughter loves it. I think it’s a great meme. Is there a story to be told about Birds Aren’t Real?

Hannah: Yes.

John: Either of our Lizzes, do you think there’s something to be made there?

Hannah: I’m trying to pull up the… Maybe I won’t, because it’s actually my One Cool Thing is this article, so I won’t say it. I would say that there’s something to be made about the society that does that, that we’re the society that two years ago one of the most famous NBA stars in the League is like, “The Earth is flat.” That’s where we’re at in our space.

Meriwether: I feel like it’s such an amazing story about young people too. That part of it really jumps out at me as just what it feels like to be a young person right now where you’re living in this absurd time and it coming out in that absurd way. That feels really funny to me. Or you lean in and you just do a documentary about how birds are real, as if you’re explaining birds to somebody.

Hannah: It’s the Pelican Brief. We actually watch the documentary.

John: We love it.

Meriwether: That’s such a dad joke.

Hannah: I know. You’re welcome. It happens though.

John: I do also love that he’s homeschooled and that he says that that’s a big part of how he has this feeling about… Being raised in the bubble of homeschooling and in a very Christian upbringing is interesting.

You’ve both made great series about young blonde women who are the center of a story in which mental health becomes a big thing. Let’s talk about the Britney Spears conservatorship and the end of the Britney Spears conservatorship. What is the series we might make about Britney Spears? One of the things we always are wrestling with when Craig’s on the show with us is where do you start and where do you end the story. Is there a story to be made about the conservatorship and her being trapped in this and breaking free of it? Do you start the story earlier? What kind of Britney Spears limited series would be interesting to make?

Hannah: I’m just laughing because I feel like I’m going to end up making this show, because Elle and I recently discovered I’ve only worked with blonde actresses in my career. I’m just going to make another blonde story.

Meriwether: The gaslighting part of it is really interesting to me. I think that the experience of realizing that you’re trapped in this thing… The story that really jumped out at me about all of it was the putting a bug in her room, that her dad put a bug in her room. Just the feeling of safety with the family and then slowly realizing that that family is against you I think is fascinating. I feel like that would be what I would focus on, as long as you could have a lot of big musical numbers, I guess.

Hannah: Obviously. The thing that makes me the saddest of that story is that Britney did need help. She needed help. She needed somebody to help her get out of a very dark place. They took advantage of her in that way. She still didn’t get help. That’s the part that ultimately is so tragic to me is that she didn’t get what was the only thing she needed. The way we talk about mental health, and particularly women, and maybe just because I had a baby, but postpartum…

The thing that sticks with me that she talked about was her sitting in that restaurant with her two kids because the paparazzi were outside, and nobody would help her. Everyone was making fun of her in that restaurant. That’s horrific. I’m not Britney Spears, and I could not imagine my child having a meltdown and everyone being horrible to me in a crowded place. I find that so tragic.

Meriwether: That’s interesting. Would you start the story there? It’s a rock and a hard place. She’s either going to be out in public on her own and totally under attack, or she’s going to be in her family where she thinks is safe, is actually-

Hannah: The complete opposite.

Meriwether: …against her. I think that’s fascinating. My agent who’s no longer my agent, early on when I started writing, I was talking to him about wanting to go to therapy. He was like, “No, don’t go to therapy. I need you to keep writing, keep making scripts.” He was joking, but I think that mindset of just keep producing, just keep producing, and nothing else-

Hannah: Don’t take care of yourself.

Meriwether: Yeah. That part of it’s interesting. I also love that in the Britney Spears story, that Instagram becomes this outlet for her is fascinating.

Hannah: I’m really into this. Should we do it?

John: By the time this episode comes out, you guys could start this up. I feel like the two of you together [inaudible 01:10:04].

Meriwether: I do think that question of would we need that-

John: Do we need it?

Meriwether: Her story has been taken from her so many times. It would be very interesting. At this point she needs to tell her own story, I feel.

John: Finally, MacKenzie Scott, so MacKenzie Bezos Scott. I only knew her as Jess Bezos’s ex-wife, who has been giving away all her money. I wasn’t clear on her backstory. She actually has a really interesting backstory. In some ways it reminds me of The Dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, in that she grew up with a lot of money, all the money went away. She struggled to get through her writing degree.

Meriwether: She had to leave high school because they couldn’t pay for her school, right?

John: Yeah, but then ends up becoming quite a good writer and then being with Jeff Bezos and helping him start Amazon. She was a much more interesting character. Now I have to say, she has dark hair, so that may just rule her out from Liz Hannah’s-

Meriwether: Oh, Jesus.

Hannah: Didn’t read the article because of that. I was like, “Ah.”

Meriwether: By the way, I did make a show with an actress with dark hair for a very long time.

John: Famously dark hair and bangs.

Hannah: Also, I just want to be clear that I’m a brunette, so let’s not make this a situation. I just think it’s funny. That’s all.

John: Is there a MacKenzie Bezos story to be told that is not set around Jeff Bezos? What are you thinking about her as a character at the center of a series? Is there a series to be made there? I’m not sure there is, but tell me what your instinct is.

Meriwether: I love that she’s given away $12 billion. I think about that all the time, just happening into so much money. I think I would start it in the middle of her marriage or the beginning of the end of the marriage and then just track the experience of getting divorced from the world’s richest man. Then she falls in love with a high school teacher, which I think is amazing, and then starts giving away… She’s given away more money than anybody else in the world, I think, if I remember.

Hannah: I think in that amount of time.

John: Meriwether, what you’re describing though is… I wonder whether you need to tell the actual real person’s story or if it’s just an interesting jumping-off place, because you could imagine a woman who gets divorced and ends up with a crazy amount of money. It doesn’t have to be billions, but just a crazy amount of money, and then falls in love with the chemistry teacher. That’s an interesting premise in and of itself, somebody who is so-

Hannah: I smell a rom-com.

John: I’m just wondering if it’s a Marry Me. I think there’s something more classically comedic about it.

Meriwether: That’s interesting. I don’t know. It’s such a marriage and a couple that I feel like people want to know about. That’s another interesting one, because she’s really, really private. I think it would have to be a question if you’d want to invade that privacy.

John: There’s also the possibility of where… Succession isn’t technically about the Murdochs.

Meriwether: That’s true.

John: It’s sort of about the Murdochs. Maybe you could do a show that’s not exactly them, but that high-profile divorce is at the center of it.

Meriwether: That’s a great idea.

John: I’ll sell that one. Divide the three [inaudible 01:13:20].

Meriwether: Ours is about Sydney Beers.

Hannah: I also can’t believe we’ve been talking for 90 minutes and Succession just got brought up, and neither of us were the ones that brought it up.

John: Hey. [Crosstalk 01:13:33].

Hannah: An interesting twist. Didn’t expect it. I love the idea that while Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are both trying to buy Twitter and flying into outer space, she’s just writing checks for billions of dollars.

John: To the YMCA, yeah.

Hannah: It’s like the best way to get back on your asshole ex-husband is be a really good person and make him look even shittier. It’s kind of amazing.

Meriwether: I also think it’s amazing all she wanted to do was publish a book, and then she ends up in a relationship with the man who’s killing bookstores, and then she can’t sell her…

John: That irony is amazing.

Meriwether: Maybe you can do an insane First Wives Club with Melinda Gates. By the way, I do love true stories. I know there’s probably now too many of them and we’re going to go in a different direction. My dad is a journalist. I feel like there’s something interesting to me. I do get excited about them.

John: You were describing at the start of the conversation that you want people to tell you what the rules are, what the boundaries are. What’s nice about reality is there’s some boundaries there, and that does help [inaudible 01:14:42].

Meriwether: Having you repeat that back to me was like therapy. I’m like, oh yeah, I do like when people tell me what the rules are.

Hannah: I also think what you said about the interior life and that… Giving purpose to true story is I think the important thing. For me, it serves a purpose if you’re telling the interior story, and that can’t be told by journalists, or shouldn’t, or that’s not their job, as you said. I thought that was really smart. I’m also somebody who’s literally made a career doing true stories, and so I apologize. So sorry.

John: It’s come time for our One Cool Things on the show. I have two very related things. These are two AI-powered art generation tools. This is where you give them a prompt and they come back at you with just amazing artwork that has been generated by your prompt. One’s called Midjourney. The other one’s Dall-E. Let me see if I can share this in the Zoom so you guys can see. I’ll share a link here so you guys can see this. The thing I loved most about Dall-E was there’s an example of The Matrix if directed by Wes Anderson. That was the prompt.

Meriwether: Do I want that?

Hannah: That’s amazing.

Meriwether: I think I do. I think I do want that.

John: [Crosstalk 01:15:57].

Hannah: Is that Fantastic Mr. Fox?

John: Sort of, yeah.

Hannah: I was trying to think of, with some of these things, who’s the filmmaker or the storyteller to do the jumping-off point for that. There’s something interesting about a David Lynchian Birds Are Real story.

Meriwether: The whole thing is just a man in a room with a curtain behind him talking about birds.

Hannah: Or he controls all the birds in the world.

Meriwether: You could also do, Hannah… I’m sorry I’m still stuck on this.

Hannah: This is great.

Meriwether: You could do a bird as the main character talking about how it’s not real.

Hannah: He’s having a crisis.

John: A dissociative disorder.

Meriwether: This is amazing.

Hannah: What’s that movie where Amy Schumer thought she was like Emily Ratjkowski, that movie I Feel Pretty, but you do that with a bird, where a bird thinks he’s a human. Is that where we go? I feel like, guys, we’re set on this one. We’ve got a few shows and movies.

John: 100%. The concept art will all be generated by-

Hannah: I love this.

John: …these two great AI things, which are remarkable. Bart Simpson by Pablo Picasso is also fantastic. Literally, if a real person painted this, I would buy these paintings. I just think they’re terrific.

Hannah: These Spider-Man ones are dope.

Meriwether: This is awesome.

Hannah: I love this.

John: The same stuff’s coming for writing, which is scary, but also interesting. We’ll see where we’re at. Ten years from now I’ll be talking to the AI people who created the next-

Hannah: I know. People already think writers are expendable, so let’s just make a computer app to do it.

John: Hannah, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

Hannah: I do. There’s this article in The Atlantic that I read yesterday that I saw people going around. If you haven’t read it, I really recommend it. Also, if I listened to it as a podcast, because now these… I love that you don’t have to read them, you can hear them. Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt. Strong recommend. It’s fascinating. The long and short of it is that social media’s the devil and none of us should be on it.

John: That feels right.

Hannah: I shared it on Instagram. It felt very weird.

John: Perfect.

Meriwether: Perfect spot for it.

John: Hypocrisy.

Hannah: I thought it was great. I thought it was exactly where it should live.

John: Meriwether, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

Meriwether: I just recently re-watched, for the millionth time, Notorious, the Alfred Hitchcock movie. I just love it so much. That’s not super cutting edge. It’s definitely not AI-generated art. There’s this scene between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. When I go back and rewatch things, I often just find myself on Wikipedia reading about it. I didn’t realize there’s a scene in the beginning where they’re kissing for so long. Apparently, they had to break up the kiss after two minutes, and then they would go back to kissing, because of the code. They weren’t allowed to kiss for longer than two minutes. If you watch it, they’re kissing and then they break apart and then they start kissing again, and then they break apart and then they start kissing again.

John: I feel like I’ve seen the movie, but a long time ago. I can’t even imagine two minutes of kissing. That just feels like that’s a long kiss.

Meriwether: Wait, it must’ve been shorter than that. I don’t know. I’m sorry, I’m misquoting it. It was definitely because of the code they had to keep breaking up the kissing.

John: That’s great.

Meriwether: It’s so hot. It always blows my mind.

John: Love it.

Meriwether: They’re not even allowed to open their mouth when they kiss each other. Most of it is them just smelling each other’s faces. You’re like, why is that the hottest thing?

John: I find characters who are about to touch, that’s the most tantalizing moment. When they actually touch, great.

Meriwether: The To Catch A Thief scene where… I obviously love Hitchcock. They’re watching fireworks. They’re not even touching. It’s Grace Kelly and Cary Grant watching fireworks. Maybe they were just all really beautiful. I don’t know. Anyway, I love that movie.

Hannah: I was going to say, it’s also Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. I would watch them-

Meriwether: That’s true.

John: Beautiful people.

Hannah: I think that’s a Hitchcock thing though, convincing you you’ve seen something that you haven’t and finding the tension in that.

John: Hitchcock would’ve been a great director for you guys’ show because he loved pretty blondes. He would’ve made a hell of a Dropout. Elizabeth Holmes and Hitchcock together, come on. She’s an icy blonde.

Meriwether: Can you imagine Hitchcock directing television? Can you imagine him sitting through a tone meeting?

John: No, I don’t think that would work especially well.

Meriwether: That was another thing in the Wikipedia page. There was a moment when Ingrid Bergman had one idea on set, and he loved her so much that he took the idea. It actually made it onto the Wikipedia page because actors were so-

John: It’s so remarkable.

Meriwether: …afraid to not speak in his presence. I don’t know.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. Are the two of you on Twitter?

Hannah: I am.

John: Talk about social media and the evils of social media.

Meriwether: I was hacked, and I never got back on.

John: Smart choice there, Meriwether. Hannah, where are you on Twitter?

Hannah: @itslizhannah, same on Instagram. I don’t have Twitter on my phone anymore, which feels like a real-

John: That’s smart.

Hannah: I became obsessive, and it needs to go away. I also sit around with a child now. I’m just scrolling. It’s doom scrolling constantly.

John: Not good.

Meriwether: Instead of following me on social media, watch that scene in Notorious.

John: That’s how you get the real, full Liz Meriwether experience.

Hannah: Read the article about how social media’s destroying our lives.

John: You can find the show notes for these episodes and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can 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 babies and having babies and being pregnant while making television programs. Liz Hannah and Liz Meriwether, absolute delight having you on the show. You are always welcome back any time, even without a new series.

Hannah: This was great.

Meriwether: What a dream.

Hannah: Thank you.

Meriwether: What a dream. Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Let’s talk about babies, because I think people who’ve listened to the show for a long time know that I absolutely adore babies. I’m obsessed with babies. If I could just be a part-time baby nurse, I would be delighted. Give me a baby. You guys have babies. Hannah, you were describing that during production you showed up to set and you found out you were pregnant and went through all of your pregnancy while there.

Hannah: I had an OB in Savannah. It was a bizarre experience.

Meriwether: Oh my goodness.

Hannah: Was it a thing? Did production know that you were pregnant? What were your choices there? What were the decisions?

Meriwether: I told my manager, our producing partner, who’s the EP that was on the ground with me. I told her four seconds after I told my husband. I told my assistant, because I was like, “I can’t tell… “ You’re not supposed to tell anybody until you’re 12 weeks. I think we started production, or we were close, it was a week out when I hit 12 weeks. Then I through it told a few people. I told Elle and I told our costume designer, Mirren, who I’ve worked with a number of times and love. I didn’t really tell anyone. I didn’t look pregnant, quote unquote, until the last week of production. I just looked like I was gaining production weight the whole time, which I also did, so that was fun.

Meriwether: That’s what we called the Peggy on Mad Men.

Hannah: I did the Peggy. I basically just pretended I was eating for two but only one.

Meriwether: By the way, it must be nice that you didn’t look pregnant. I wouldn’t know how that feels.

Hannah: I did, and now I still look like I’m pregnant, eight weeks after giving birth. That was actually fine. I really loved being pregnant. I was really happy that I had something that had to distract me from doom scrolling about pregnancy and what could happen and all of the horrific things that went through my mind of what could happen to my child, and then also had a distraction from the show.

I wasn’t necessarily able to, although I’m sure my partners just completely disagree, take it too seriously. I took it seriously enough in that it was my job and I wanted it to be as good as it could, but I was also like, “I have a baby, and that feels really important.” It didn’t become all-consuming until we were… We were in post while we were doing the show, but we were in post for the last four episodes, five episodes when we got back. Then I was eight, nine and a half months pregnant doing post, and that was really brutal. I had amazing partners. I only did one conference call from the hospital after giving birth.

John: Now, Meriwether, you were in the same boat. You were pregnant during production.

Meriwether: Yeah. It was my second baby. For my first baby, I was also pregnant and… It’s a very common experience. I don’t believe in the don’t tell people until 12 weeks, as somebody who’s had a miscarriage, because I feel like if you want to tell people right away and then you have a miscarriage, people also need to know that.

Hannah: Absolutely.

Meriwether: It’s really important, unless you just don’t want to share. Then that’s also fine. I guess I just feel like the rule about don’t tell people until after 12 weeks is just to preserve other people, not to help you.

Hannah: I think for me it was my superstition of being very jinxy. It was like, “If I tell people, then something will go wrong,” which that’s not true. My husband also wore the same clothes during the March Madness, because we kept winning, which I’m sure affected the game. I agree. I think it’s normalizing all of that.

Meriwether: In a strange way, Zoom helped a lot, because it wasn’t immediately apparent that I was pregnant. I think it’s obviously totally unspoken at this point because people have been drained, but there is that feeling of, oh no, is this going to mean that we can’t… I got pregnant when we were in this real transition moment with the project. There was definitely a feeling of, is this going to mean the end of this, because we’re not going to have her focus?

I did a lot of overcompensating of just like, “I’m going to hire a million nannies.” I wish that wasn’t the go-to thing. I obviously completely believe in family leave, and it’s so important. It’s just really hard with production, because when it… The Dropout, we’d been sitting waiting for a year. Then when they tell you it’s time, there’s really nothing you can do. You just have to take each day at a time and listen to yourself and think the thing that you’re doing is really important, but also taking care of yourself is really important and just having to check in with yourself a lot.

I think for me I don’t like being pregnant. I am not overly fond of infants, because I feel it’s sort of just terror. Then it started being fun later on when it wasn’t just pure terror. I think having something else to do, having something else to think about I think was really helpful for me. I will say for certain I think male executives, if you’re in a fight with them and then you just start rubbing your pregnant belly, sometimes you win arguments that you shouldn’t win, because there’s a Mother Earth goddess over here. I definitely think sometimes it works in your favor.

Hannah: I definitely also didn’t, I think, give enough credit to… I thought people would think I was a burden, or similarly, I couldn’t do my job, just because I think that’s what’s ingrained in all of us, whereas my assistant knew from the beginning and was amazing, and then our crafty women found out, because I just kept eating constantly, and they were like, “Is she okay?” They literally took care of me the entire time in production. They kept it a secret until I was ready to tell people or until I started to show. Then they would check on me all day every day. They were like my mothers on set. These were two women who I’d never met until we went to Savannah. The community of women and parents, I wouldn’t say it was even gender-specific, I would just say of parents on the show that took care of me, was really remarkable. I didn’t necessarily expect that. Yes, there were times that I was hysterically crying. I was like, “Guys, I’m fine. This is just a thing that’s going to happen, and move on. I’m not as sad as I could feel right now.” I think that was really something that I had never anticipated was the open arms of people taking care of me on that. Even in arguments on set, it was I think a little more subdued.

The first three months I was so stressed out and so freaked out about the show and so freaked out about being pregnant, I really did think I was going to lose the baby, because I was not in a good place. I held that in for a really long time. Talking about it, going to what you were saying, Meriwether, freed me up to start preemptively dealing with all of the emotions I was dealing with.

Meriwether: It’s tough, because in an ideal world, aka Europe, there’s help. There’s help built in to being a citizen of that country and just getting childcare. I just said in my answer, I’m going to hire a bunch of nannies, which was sort of a joke, but I can afford that. It was absolutely crucial to me being able to do this show. I wonder if there’s some way to build that in. I don’t want to say studios should have to pay for… It’s absolutely a necessary thing that you need, and I would not be able to do it without… I had a baby nurse and a nanny, because I have two kids. I don’t know. I think that’s really important and sometimes gets left out of the conversation. It’s just like, oh she was pregnant and she did the show. It’s like, no, I had an enormous amount of help that I was paying.

Hannah: I love that Melanie Lynskey thanked her nanny when she won a Craig’s Choice Award. I got so emotional seeing that, because I have a night nurse for my son. I literally could not function as a human, nor do my job. I released the show two weeks after I gave birth. I could not do that without help. My husband couldn’t do it on his own. My husband is super involved, but I don’t know how we could do all of that. There’s an enormous amount of privilege in me being able to say that sentence, the fact that I was able to do anything because I could afford a night nurse, or I can get sleep because of that. I can make choices about my life because of it. I can continue to work. There’s an enormous amount of privilege that is very unfair in I think how we deal with children.

Meriwether: The other thing I would say is also postpartum. I think that’s also hugely important. When we shot the Bless This Mess pilot, I was pumping, and I had to pump in an actual barn where we were shooting, near cows, real cows. That was a low point. A low point for my assistant was carrying that milk, I’m sure, back to the freezer. I think just the difficulty in the logistics of pumping and breastfeeding as it relates to production I think is something that isn’t talked about a lot. How do you make sure that there’s a place to pump on set for people who need it?

John: We had Jack Thorne on the podcast recently. He was talking about disability access for members of crew. I don’t want to medicalize or fragilize pregnancy, which is such an incredibly common thing, but it feels like those accommodations and accessibility for people who need to pump breast milk or just have a place to sit down because they need to be able to sit down, it feels like it’s part of the same conversations, like how do you make sure that-

Meriwether: Yes, humans.

John: …sets are designed for everybody who needs to be there and who can be there, because otherwise people are going to get excluded. You guys were running the shows. They had to figure out ways to accommodate you. If you weren’t, it would’ve been tougher. There wouldn’t have been the same-

Meriwether: Absolutely. It’s infuriating. It’s totally infuriating. You’re right, it’s not just pregnancy. It’s just accepting that people working on shows, on sets, are human beings, and writers rooms too.

Hannah: I’m going to shout out my dad. My dad’s a designer, and he wrote a book called Access By Design 30 years ago, which is about not having disability access, but having just access for humanity. You don’t have stairs and a ramp. You just have a ramp, because people who are able to walk on two legs can walk up a ramp. We don’t need stairs to differentiate. Having door handles that everyone can use rather than specifically calling out somebody who can’t use it. That to me is something of just like we don’t have to have the pod where I go in and do this thing. We just should have it all be accessible at all times to whatever any individual’s need is, because nobody’s the same. Sorry I cut you off, Meriwether, but what you were talking about with writers room I agree with.

Meriwether: The short seasons of these streaming shows are also not conducive to women taking leave. That’s another thing that’s complicated, because on New Girl people were able to go away for a month or two and come back. When I first started New Girl, a male writer came to me and was like, “My wife’s having a baby.” My showrunners, who are great men, but they were just telling me how things work, and they were like, “He gets a week off.” I was like, “Okay.” I to my dying day regret it, but I was like, “Okay, you get a week off.”

I think that mentality, like this is how it’s always been done, if you take any more than that you’re being overly precious about it, is totally wrong. I also understand the difficulty of shorter seasons where you’re like, if I take a month off, I’m missing half of the room or something. It’s all a bit complicated. If you want to put it in purely cynical terms, that’s how people do their best work. If you want good shows, if you want good content, make the experience pleasant and livable. It took me a while to learn that, by the way. I really had to figure that out.

Hannah: I also think shorter order and limited series, because at least with ongoing series you have a hiatus of some kind and there’s some consistency. If you get more seasons you know [inaudible 01:35:51]. Limiteds you can just stack on top of each other. They can be happening any time. Patrick, like I said, was doing Death and Plainville at the same time. He had done another show before that. He has a family and was basically gone from his family for three years. Though there’s a benefit, I creatively really enjoy doing limiteds, because I feel like I’m able to express everything in a short span. I get to take risks and do some things that I wouldn’t necessarily have the opportunity to do and something ongoing. I also think there’s benefits of things that are ongoing that you don’t have on limiteds. I think for me it was baby steps. It was like I’ll do a 2-hour and then an 8-hour and then I’ll be okay maybe doing 13.

That I think is really an expectation now in this industry, particularly with showrunners that are experienced in doing limiteds, is that you just have the next one lined up and you’re ready to go. It’s really, really, really hard. It’s the hardest thing I have ever professionally done was make this show, and regardless of having a child, need a break, but then I also was pregnant and had a child and my maternity leave was my quote unquote vacation, which FYI it’s not. Also, there’s not really a maternity leave.

Meriwether: You didn’t think it was a… I had the time of my life.

Hannah: I’ve been sipping Mai Tais and just waving at my child from afar because he’s perfect. My husband just texted me and he’s like, “How’s it going?” because he’s losing his shit.

Meriwether: I know, I have to go put my kids to bed.

John: We can wrap this up. Thank you so much for this conversation on babies. We’ll circle back in 10 years and see whether the industry’s improved how we handle pregnancy and babies.

Hannah: I don’t think so.

John: There’s no way to say anymore.

Hannah: We may have the David Lynchian Birds Aren’t Real show.

Meriwether: I would like to see that.

John: We’ll follow up.

Meriwether: Thank you so much.

John: Thanks.

Hannah: Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• The Dropout on Hulu and The Dropout Podcast
• The Girl from Plainville Show and the Esquire article by Jesse Barron
• Liz Meriwether
• Liz Hannah on Twitter
• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt for the Atlantic
• Notorious Alfred Hitchcock Film
• AI art – MidJourney and Dall-E
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/20-questions-with-craig).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 544 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Last week, Megana and I answered 20 listener questions without Craig. This week he’s doing the same without me, because I am not here. This introduction is prerecorded and the show is completely in the hands of Craig and producer Megana Rao, so God help us all. I now turn over hosting duties to them.

**Craig:** Hosting duties belong to us. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Megana and I will finally have a chance to discuss millennial stuff. Megana, welcome to our show.

**Megana Rao:** Thank you, Craig. Thank you for having me.

**Craig:** We both feel a little bit naughty right now. I think that would be fair to say, right?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You mentioned that we felt a little bit like perhaps when the teacher leaves the classroom and we’re put in charge of the class but we’re not really in charge of the class, or like if our dad owned a store and he left and we had to work the cash register.

**Megana:** It’s like, what amount of freedom do I have but I still care about the store?

**Craig:** Because you’re the good kid, and I’m the kid that clearly doesn’t care. If something goes wrong, ultimately you’ll be held responsible, not only by our parent, but by your own overactive conscience. You also love me, so you’re really torn here. You’re in a tough spot. All we can do is talk about keyboards. Logitech K860 does have Bluetooth, Megana. Are you aware of this?

**Megana:** Yes.

**Craig:** We’re getting into follow-up here. This is what John would normally structure for us. I’m going to read this. Joseph wrote in regarding the keyboard discussion. He went through the same journey that I did, from Microsoft Sculpt to Logitech K860. He knows that he’s never been tempted by John’s crazy, inverted thing, and neither has anyone else.

**Megana:** Have you ever tried using it?

**Craig:** Yeah, I did. I think at his house I sat down and did it for a minute and went, “Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope.”

**Megana:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Joseph was saying while the Logitech does work with Logitech dongles, it also works with regular Bluetooth. What? What? I’m going to have to try that shortly. That’s exciting. I’m into that. Oh my god. Then apparently you and John took a typing test.

**Megana:** In Episode 543 that John and I recorded, we followed up on the touch typing conversation you guys had, because I was feeling very insecure that I didn’t know what touch typing was, and that maybe I didn’t know how to type properly, but turns out I do.

**Craig:** Oh, Megana.

**Megana:** I took a typing test.

**Craig:** This is so good.

**Megana:** I got 81 words per minute and 100% accuracy.

**Craig:** I think anyone over 70 I think is starting to get into really good territory. Once you hit 100, you’re getting into zip zip, and then anything over that, you’re talking about professional stenographers and so forth. 81 words a minute is terrific. It’s terrific.

**Megana:** Thank you. Thank you. John got a 62 on his stand-up keyboard.

**Craig:** Which means probably on a regular keyboard he would be 4,000 words a minute.

**Megana:** Exactly, in the hundreds for sure.

**Craig:** It sounds like I’m going to have to take this one. Once we finish recording here, I’ll sit down and bang this out and report back dutifully.

**Megana:** Perfect.

**Craig:** How I do. Megana, for the love of God, just honestly. Apparently, there’s a bonus question here.

**Megana:** Yes. Today we’re going to get into 20 questions that listeners have wrote in for you.

**Craig:** Oh, my. Oh, my.

**Megana:** There was one question that came in through Twitter that asked, “Did Megana take Craig’s advice to watch Barton Fink?” As follow-up, we’re going to answer that here. I have watched Barton Fink now. I really enjoyed it. I understand why you recommended it to me.

**Craig:** I’m glad that you liked it. Obviously, a lot of Barton Fink is somewhat obtuse by design, but it’s an incredible view of the screenwriter, both as victim and also as wretch. Dig in a little bit. Tell me what struck you about it. I’m curious.

**Megana:** First of all, absolutely unexpected turn of events in it. Brilliantly executed and very satisfying by the end. As I was watching it, I was like, “Where could this possibly go?” I’m not sure that I had any of my questions really answered, but I felt very pleased by the end.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**Megana:** Barton Fink as a character was so painful to watch, perhaps because of some self-loathing, him talking over John Goodman’s character about how much he wants to be the voice of the common man and never lets him speak.

**Craig:** The common man. “You don’t listen!”

**Megana:** When he’s talking about how much he envies John Goodman because he leads the life of the mind, oh god, it was –

**Craig:** “I’ll show you the life of the mind.” One of the things about Barton Fink that I love so much is that in addition to the kind of baked-in inauthenticity of the writer, I guess the Coen brothers turning the lens back on themselves in a fascinating way. It also is a pretty disturbing examination of writer’s block and the weird, creepy decay that can happen in your own brain where things are just melting inside your mind. The entire hotel that they’re staying in begins to melt.

**Megana:** The wallpaper.

**Craig:** The wallpaper. The paste that comes out the wallpaper is the same as this infectious ooze coming out of Madman Mundt’s ear. It’s all this creepy connection. I have all these deep theories about Barton Fink and what I think about it.

I was lucky enough to work on a movie that John Goodman was in. He is lovely, such a sweet guy, very quiet. I wouldn’t say shy. Maybe a little bit. A little bit shy in his own way. I walked over to him at one point when he was alone, and I said, “This is a wonderful moment for me because I’m such a fan and also I get to ask you about Barton Fink, because I have all these theories. I would just be fascinated to know what you thought.” He said, “I have no idea what it means.” He said, “Those guys are geniuses. My job, as far as I could tell, was to make sure that I knew my lines on the day. On the day, I really worked hard to make sure I knew my lines and was able to say them the way they wrote them. I have no idea what it means.” I was like, “That is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” In my life. We did talk about the scene where he’s running down the hallway and how they did the fire, so it was fun. Anyway, point is, John Goodman doesn’t know what it means, so I think you’re allowed to think it means whatever you want it to be. I’m glad you liked it, at the very least.

**Megana:** I did like it. I love the Hollywood of it. I love the head of the studio. It was so fun. It’s like, yes, I know that Michael Lerner’s character flipped so quickly, but what a joy to be on that ride while you are.

**Craig:** I’ve been there. As awful as they were and continue to be, there’s something of the Weinsteins in there. When they wanted to charm you, boy did they go all the way. Everybody comes here and imagines a moment where somebody who runs a studio, who’s famous and powerful, tells you to your face that you’re a genius. When it happens, it flips switches in you you didn’t realize you had. Then later, boy when you fall down or when they throw you down, boy does it hurt. When I watch that, I’m like, oh man, I know exactly how that feels. I’ve been in that meeting. I’ve been in both of those meetings. The berating of the underling is something incredibly familiar to me as well.

**Megana:** Oof, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, oof.

**Megana:** We need an episode that’s a guide of how to deal with that narcissistic charm, because it is…

**Craig:** Oh boy. Yeah. We do. There’ll be a lot of therapy in that episode. A lot, because ultimately, you can’t do anything about them. You can’t. All you can do is identify the breaks in your own system that they are sneaking through.

**Megana:** Correct.

**Craig:** In this way, they illuminate for you. They give you a little bit of a gift. They shine a light on things that need to be fixed. You just need to know when it’s happening.

**Megana:** It’s like a pressure test of…

**Craig:** It’s a pressure test, because they are there to find their way in through the breaks and gaps and lean on the parts of you that hate yourself and need approval. They find them. They’re so good at finding them. You don’t realize it’s happening until it’s too late. Each time it happens you get a little bit smarter, you get a little bit better.

**Megana:** Are you ready to get into the 20 questions?

**Craig:** Yeah. The deal is I got to answer all 20 of these, right?

**Megana:** Oh gosh, I haven’t thought of what the alternative would be.

**Craig:** I’m going to do it. You know what? I’m going to do it.

**Megana:** You’re going to do it.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. We’re going to do it.

**Megana:** Our first question came from Julien, who asked, “My script’s been professionally read a couple of times and is heavily based on true events. However, the notes say I should weave real moments throughout the script, which I already did, a lot. How do I notate reality? Is it kosher to have an explanation page at the end, or footnotes?”

**Craig:** What Julien’s saying is that people don’t seem to be recognizing the real moments throughout his script, which I think is not going to be helped by an explanation page or perhaps Julien saying, “No, but I did.” The whole thing with notes is they’re just being the audience. If people in the audience don’t get that you are being real, it doesn’t matter if you’re being real. You actually have to be aware how that’s coming across.

What I would say probably is, “Okay, thank you for that note. Here are a number of real moments. Did they feel real? Did you think they weren’t real? That’s something that we can address or talk about, where are we losing a sense of authenticity.” It could be possible that they just don’t know at all. If you put it in the form of a question, you’ll be better off. If you say, “Dear idiots, here are 12 places I put true events,” you’re probably not going to last. If you say, “Okay, that’s really valuable. Here are 12 places where there were real events, but it seems like it’s not coming across as real events, so let’s have that discussion and figure out maybe how we could do better at that together,” because they may go, “Oh, good lord, we didn’t know. Okay, thank you.”

I’m not sure what the story is. Sometimes when real stories have very wild elements, you have to be aware of that and figure out how to ground them so that people actually believe it could possibly be true. Sounds like you just need to have another conversation with people. When it’s been professionally read, I’m just wondering who are these professionals, what does that mean, and can you get some follow-up from them.

**Megana:** With Chernobyl, you had a podcast where you did notate reality. You were talking about the events that were real. Most of them were the decisions that you made behind that. I guess I’m curious, is that something that you wanted to do so that people would buy into the show more?

**Craig:** No, the opposite. I wanted to make sure people knew what we had made up. I remember having this discussion with HBO, because at first they were like, “A podcast? Why? What are you talking about?” They thought I meant a marketing thing. I was like, “This has nothing to do with marketing,” because of course nobody was going to watch Chernobyl or listen to the podcast. I really was like, “This is just because we live in a time when everyone scrutinizes everything. I know they’re going to be scrutinizing this show. If we put stuff out there and don’t acknowledge that we’ve made certain changes to history, people are going to point their fingers back at us and say, ‘You guys made a show about lies and you lied,'” which would be true. If you can be transparent about where you had to dramatize or adjust to fit years of reality into five hours, then it’s much harder for people to point fingers at you, which is why I insisted that each episode of the podcast appear literally 12 seconds after each episode initially aired, so there was no gap. It was like, there you go, no waiting.

There were a lot of moments when I was writing Chernobyl where I was concerned that people just would think, “That’s not real. You just made that up,” because people made crazy decisions that were hard to understand. It was important to me that I present them in a way where the audience could at least say, “Okay, I kind of understand.”

There’s a moment in the first episode where Dyatlov is thinking, and then he’s just like, “The tank. That tank. It’s big enough to have caused this explosion,” because he’s come up with a theory of why it exploded. It felt like I needed a moment where I saw him convincing himself, because otherwise I would be wondering, why would a person just leap to that conclusion and then never question it in any way. There’s moments like that to just help people understand the reality of the human foibles behind the bad decisions.

**Megana:** That’s so interesting. I’m watching The Dropout that’s about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. I find myself asking, because there’s a lot of really specific beautiful details that are in there, and I’m constantly asking was that real, where did that come from. I just don’t know if that’s a helpful question for me to be asking as an audience member.

**Craig:** Probably not. I think if you’re watching a documentary, it’s always a good thing to ask, what is the perspective involved here, is there an agenda, because editing is a wonderful, powerful thing. Documentaries are questionable, should be questioned, should be interrogated and held to task if they distort. Drama is drama. The point of drama, even when it’s based on reality, is not to journal, but rather to instruct in some manner of humanity. Dramatic instruction. What are we going to learn from the character? What are we going to learn about human behavior and nature? It is not there to be a full book report on a nonfiction event. Some events I think it’s best to be as accurate as you can be. I tried to be with Chernobyl, because I thought actually the beauty was in the specifics, and in a way in the journalism of it.

There’s been a terrific documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, so probably not much of a need to be perfectly documentarian again with the drama. Can you do the voice, by the way? Can you do the voice? Can you do it?

**Megana:** We’re hoping to change the world.

**Craig:** That’s great. That was great. Wow. Someone said once that–

**Megana:** There you go, that’s it.

**Craig:** That Elizabeth Holmes’s voice was just the voice that women do when they’re doing an impression of a dumb man.

**Megana:** You know what? That does feel right, because as I accessed it, I was like, this feels familiar, this feels like a pathway that I’ve used before.

**Craig:** Maybe it was Aline who said that. I can’t remember who said it. Maybe it was Aline. I just thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Anyway, great job. That character should come back, like Sexy Craig, every now and again. Theranos Megana.

**Megana:** That’s really helpful advice just for writers, dramatizing real events, that you’re not writing a documentary.

**Craig:** You’re not doing a book report. You get to decide how close or how far you want to be.

**Megana:** Next question. Andreas writes, “I wanted to ask how you approach writing jobs where you’re brought in quite late and asked to make the dialog funnier, touch up specific storylines, scenes, characters, or make cultural references more specific, etc. How do you curb your writerly instincts that you yourself would tell the story in an entirely different way and just focus on the job at hand? How much feedback on the overall story is expected of you?”

**Craig:** That’s a great question. So far I have not been called in for cultural references, weirdly. They made a whole movie about Staten Island, never called me. I was shocked. I do get called in from time to time, quite late, later than you would ever imagine, to make dialog funnier or touch up specific storylines, scenes, or characters. Yes, this happens all the time. It takes a certain kind of writer to do it. Not everybody can do that, because you are in a very different mode. You’re in a problem solving mode.

You need to understand production. I think that’s really important, because that’s what you’re writing for at that point, production, almost always. That means you need to understand scheduling, you need to understand who the actors are. Oftentimes you’re being put on the phone with them, because they’re upset about things. I can’t tell you how many times I have sat and been a therapist for famous people because they’re unhappy with the script. Partly, I have to just listen and hear what they need and then come back to everybody else and say, “Look, whether you agree or not, this is what they need. They can’t do it unless they get what they need. I’m going to give them what they need, but I now have to do it in a way that also gives you what you need,” because what they need is more action, or this scene needs to be better.

Sometimes what I suggest is that they have put their fingers on the exact right problem, all of their solutions are wrong. We should not do any of those things. I’m not going to do the seven things you asked me to do. I’m going to do these four things I think you ought to do instead. Oftentimes, and I’m not patting myself on the back as much as just pointing out that I have a job to do and they have their job to do, I’m right, because that’s my job. That’s what I do. Their job is different. In a good way, they’re trying. They’re trying to say, look, we know what a problem is and we have a suggestion of how to fix it, but they are not going to think of the things outside the box. Sometimes, you have to just go outside of what exists and say what we need is actually an entirely different scene in a different spot that is going to solve these 12 problems in one fell swoop.

You have to be a problem solver. You need a lot of experience. It takes time. Nobody who is a fairly new writer to business is going to be pulled in for stuff like that or relied on in that kind of way because they just haven’t done it enough. It’s very specific work. Very specific work.

**Megana:** Getting back to our screenwriting RPG framework, that seems like a very specific instance where you need a lot of wisdom and confidence.

**Craig:** Yeah, you need a tremendous amount of wisdom there, because there’s no way to survive that whole thing. Everyone is upset. When you walk into those situations, there’s tension. Everyone’s scared. They’re scared not only because they’re in a scary situation. They’re also scared of you, because they don’t know what you’re going to do. Everyone is quietly lobbying you to not mess everything up, meaning we’re going to call you in here and we’re going to tell you that we have some problems. Please do not tell us that we have 29 problems. Please do not tell us that we actually have six other problems that we don’t think are problems. Please don’t make our director leave. Please don’t make our actors angry. Please don’t make us upset.

You just have to listen really carefully and then understand that what everyone wants, what they’re dreaming of is that you’re going to sit down and go, “I have the solution. The solution will not upturn the apple card. It’s going to answer everyone’s questions. It’s not going to upset anyone. It’s not going to set you back in a huge way. We’re not going to tear all the stuff down. we’re just going to do this fairly easy series of things, and it will be much, much better.” That’s what they want and that’s in fact exactly what you have to deliver. It has to be effective. Not easy, but they do pay you a lot, so there’s that. Best money in Hollywood. Weekly production rewrites.

**Megana:** Speaking of money, I think this is going to be a question you’ll like, Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School wrote in and said, “I’m 23 and wrote my first screenplay in 2020 and got good scores on the Blacklist and met a director hoping to make it. He’s been taking the script around trying to get us a deal. He’s had it read by Paramount, HBO, etc. The most exciting news he told me was that Paramount liked it so much that they recommended it to their team.

“With my very first script already having made it as far as it has, it’s given me a lot more confidence in my ability to turn this passion into something real. Now, the problem is, I haven’t written a second script. I have the idea. I’ve slowly been mapping it out, but working part-time and going to school full-time has left me with virtually zero space to fit in my just-for-fun hobby. Obviously, I can’t quit working, but at this point it’s starting to feel like school not only isn’t benefiting me anymore, but that it’s actually holding me back from jump-starting my career. On the other hand, I’m four years into it, and I would only have about two terms left to finish my degree. It feels like either option I choose results in a waste of my time, either finish the degree and waste the next year of my life getting something that I don’t think will help me instead of actually writing, or I drop out and have the last four years of my effort and money be for nothing.”

**Craig:** Sunken costs fallacy here, writ large. It comes down to this. We struggle with the notion that we’ve wasted time and money. We struggle with it so much that we insist on finishing something that is a waste of time and money, which means spending some more time and money. What will that degree get you? I don’t know. As far as I can tell, nothing. We were on set just yesterday and I turned to Bo and I said, “Did you learn any of this at NYU, any of this?” She said no in such a hard way. It was the hardest no I’ve ever heard.

**Megana:** I don’t know that Bo has any soft no’s though.

**Craig:** This was one of the harder… It was like a no and not even close. It was sort of like she went to school and she was supposed to study how to make television and movies, and then when she arrived in Hollywood and saw how we made television and movies, it seemed like what she had really been studying was veterinary medicine and they just called it television and film studies because it had nothing to do with what we do. Nothing.

If Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School is 23, he’s already young, he’s getting some interest, he’s just starting. 23 is a fantastic age to be starting, because you have lots of energy. You have lots of enthusiasm. Everything is still exciting. You have lots of scripts ahead of you. You don’t theoretically have a family. As John and I pointed out, children are not zapping your life away. You can really make inroads.

As he points out, he’s just languishing in this school to get a piece of paper that no one will ever ask for. Ever. The only paper anyone’s ever going to ask to see is a script, if that’s what he wants to do. Furthermore, the degree will not get him anything anywhere else. In fact, all it’ll get him, and I think this is something else Bo and I were talking about, is that he will qualify to teach at film schools. That’s what those degrees give you, as far as I can tell.

He can finish it another time. It’s not like they go, “All that time is gone.” You can always come back and finish, I think. Take a year off. Take two years off. You don’t have to decide right now whether or not you’re going to flush the prior four years. Take a couple years off. Work on your career. If it happens, don’t go back. If it doesn’t happen, and you want to go back and complete it to get the paper and do something else, do it. Seems to me like you don’t have to make this choice right now. You can punt. I would punt. I would take the two years. I would take some time off, write some scripts, get some work, and see how this actually functions instead of whatever film school is teaching you.

**Megana:** I do agree with a lot of that, but I just worry that that piece of paper would get him a foot in the door or some entry level jobs and it would help him as his resume is being screened through a job at a big agency or something, that he has a completed degree. Not that I agree with that, but I wonder if that would help him to have that.

**Craig:** I don’t know where he’s going to film school. If he’s not going to NYU or USC, I’m not sure what networking there is available. Film schools are barfing out humans at a remarkable rate every year. They’re not all getting jobs because they went to a film school. What if he just went to a temp agency and got placed and started working at a company somewhere? Paramount’s looking for people to be assistants. You don’t need to have a film school degree to get those jobs, do you?

**Megana:** I think that you might. That’s what I’m worried about is I feel like even those jobs are so competitive. I’m very bad at rationalizing with the sunk cost fallacy, so I know this is a weak point of mine. He’s so close.

**Craig:** I think we’re getting to the real of it. I can hear your parents talking through you.

**Megana:** It’s like just do the two more terms and then do whatever you want. Become the doctor and then become a writer.

**Craig:** Become the doctor and then become the writer. This is your parents, and by the way, a useful voice to have. The internalized parental voices are important to an extent. We don’t want to nourish them too much. If we don’t have them at all, then we theoretically might head down sociopath lane. Don’t you agree, or perhaps I shouldn’t lead the question, do you agree that he can take a break, see how it goes, and then come back?

**Megana:** Yes, I do think that he can take a break. I am a huge advocate for taking time off before or during while you’re getting higher education, because it is such a privilege to be able to take classes and to spend time learning. I think you want to set yourself up in a way that you are getting the most from that experience that you can.

**Craig:** I think it’s a privilege to not go to film school. Anyway. Sounds like at least we agree on this. You can take some time, punt on the decision, see what happens. If it doesn’t work out, then you got an option to finish it and do what Megana’s parents would want you to do.

**Megana:** Correct. I hope Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School writes back and lets us know what he does do.

**Craig:** Yes, please. Yes, please do, Please.

**Megana:** No Context asks, “What tools do you use to keep track of notes and ideas that happen when you’re not at your desk, visual or analog?”

**Craig:** Here’s where John and I probably diverge. I have no doubt that John has an entire team of people working on a perfected software application to do precisely this. In the meantime he has six or seven different integrated processes.

Here’s what I do. I email myself. That’s it. It’s pathetic. On a given day of writing, I will typically think about what I’m writing that day in the morning, walk around, take a long shower, whatever it is, and then I know what it is. I don’t need to write it down. It’s in my head. It’s the scene of the day. I can do it. Sometimes when I’m thinking ahead about things that are coming or moments, as I walk around I will stop and go, “Okay, there’s actually a specific way I just said that line of dialog in my head that I want to make sure for this flow of lines that this leads to this leads to this interesting twist of line. I’m going to just quickly tap this out to an email to myself,” and I send it and then I have it and then I refer to it. That is as analog as digital gets, I suspect.

**Megana:** John’s answer was actually surprisingly more analog. He just uses index cards.

**Craig:** What?

**Megana:** He has stacks of index cards around the house.

**Craig:** What? When you say index cards, you mean individual miniature iPads of his own manufacture that are in the shape of an index card, that synchronize to some Cloud-based–

**Megana:** No, I mean paper and pens, pens with ink. I don’t know. Who’s the robot here?

**Craig:** Megana, I feel like I’m going to cry. Oh my god, never meet your heroes. Never meet your heroes. Oh, man. Wow. You rocked my world there.

**Megana:** Paul asks, “Will Zoom pitches still play a big role in post-pandemic life or will this all go back to in the room?”

**Craig:** Zoom pitches are here to stay. It’s not that we will eschew the room completely, as we did when we were in lockdown. Of course there will be in-room meetings. Inevitably, the Zoom pitch is here to stay because people’s schedules are tight, because they are all over the place. They’re traveling all the time. They’re in different spots, because of convenience, because a lot of people now have home offices that are just as comfortable and obviously more convenient than the at-office offices. While I don’t think the room is gone, the Zoom room I do believe is here to stay. What do you think?

**Megana:** It makes so many of the logistics of my life easier that I imagine that that’s probably true for everyone.

**Craig:** Certainly if you’re the kind of person who is going to a meeting as opposed to a person who’s receiving a meeting, way easier to do Zoom. When I started working on The Last of Us with Neil Druckmann, we had a series of early story sessions. Because he was still hard at work on The Last of Us 2, I would go to the Naughty Dog offices in Santa Monica. Driving to Santa Monica for me is–

**Megana:** From Pasadena?

**Craig:** That’s right. Essentially I said, “I can meet you roughly between 11:30 and then I’m leaving by 2. That’s it. I’m going to be nowhere near the edges of the day.” We would never do that now. We talk to each other all the time. I’m in Canada right now. He’s in Santa Monica. By the way, not that much further than Pasadena. It may actually be faster, because I could fly and land at LAX and get to Santa Monica faster.

**Megana:** 100%.

**Craig:** We Zoom all the time, and we will continue to, and we’ve all become incredibly used to it. If one thing the pandemic achieved, other than a horrifying death toll, is it normalized video conferencing, which prior to the pandemic, people forget, everyone was like, “Eh.” Even Google couldn’t get us to do it. We were like, “Eh. FaceTime, ew.” Then suddenly–

**Megana:** Google had Google Meet, but yes.

**Craig:** They had it, but nobody liked it.

**Megana:** Yes, but coming from working at Google, I used it all the time.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course. That’s like, “Coming from a cattle prod factory, I did occasionally use a cattle prod. I didn’t like the feeling of being cattle prodded.” It was not and continues to be not a good solution. Google does a lot of things brilliantly well. Google’s social, what was it called, Google Circles or something?

**Megana:** Oh gosh. Google Plus.

**Craig:** Google Plus. Google Minus.

**Megana:** That was tough. Speaking of The Last of Us, Matt asks, “When you have a project to write where you’re the main stakeholder, do you subconsciously change your style? John and Craig talked before about Ryan Johnson’s scripts being for himself to direct, so he can do what he likes with regard to the rules. Basically I’m wondering if Craig has so much to write for The Last of Us in such a short amount of time that he’s going gonzo freestyle.”

**Craig:** Oh no, I don’t have a gonzo freestyle. Hopefully, people don’t think that I wrote all The Last of Us in a short time. The Last of Us, which is entirely written and we just have a little bit more to shoot, was written over the course of essentially two years. I’m a very deliberate writer. For the scripts that I was writing while we were still in production early on, because the production of this is rather lengthy, they were so well outlined and thought through. I mean thoroughly outlined. I’m not praising myself. The writing of the script was not ever going to be anything approaching gonzo freestyle. I don’t know how to write gonzo freestyle. The only things I write gonzo freestyle are birthday cards. Even those sometimes I deliberate.

The fact that I am over-empowered and have too much authority has not made me any less fastidious or nervous, because ultimately, you can say you’re the main stakeholder, you’re in charge, you’re the boss, the audience is waiting. If there’s one thing that people who wrote comedy features know, it’s that they’re out there with their knives and you are going to have to face the music sooner or later, so do what you can to get it right and never just think, “Oh, I’m in charge. I can do whatever I want.” You’re not in charge. The audience is in charge.

**Megana:** There are so many other departments that you have to communicate with. It’s not just about shorthand between you and the director.

**Craig:** Oh, certainly. In this case it’s me and the directors, because we have quite a few, because there are 10 episodes. You’re putting your finger on something huge. Every department has 4,000 questions. You are accountable to them as well. The one thing I can never do is say to our special effects team or our costume team, “Oh, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I don’t know.” Ever. I am not allowed to say that. I have to know. I can’t make it up in the moment either. I have to pre-know what I mean and what I want, because they will say… Look, in good ways, they want to make sure that I’m getting what I want. They will say, “Here’s what we’re planning for this.” Sometimes I go, “Oh my god, nailed it, perfect.” Sometimes I say, “180 from what I want. That’s okay. I see why you did that. Here’s what I want instead.” What I can’t do is go, “Oh. Huh. Maybe.” They’re like, “What would you want different?” “Hm. Oh, I don’t know. Do other things and let me see them,” which maybe other people get away with, but we have too much to do.

I am accountable to everybody that’s working around me. They need fast answers because we’re on a schedule over here. This train don’t stop. I am accountable to HBO. I am accountable to my creative partners, my other producers. I’m accountable to my actors, because on the day, if they go, “What does this mean?” and I go, “I don’t know,” that’s not good.

Then ultimately, I’m accountable to the audience, which is why editors are a good early punch in the face. Editors represent the audience. They advocate for the audience. They don’t know how hard it was to write that line or how hard it was to get that day shooting. They don’t know about the weather. They don’t know if the actor is cranky. They don’t care. They just look at the footage and they’re like, “This is bad, so I think I’ll do this instead.” They don’t care. That’s actually quite refreshing, because once shooting is over, you get to shake it off like a wet dog, take a breath, and then say, all of the creation, the raw creation, is completed. This is what we have. Now, let us begin the final act of creation, which is narrowed into this world of finite possibilities, as opposed to that world of infinite possibilities. No gonzo freestyle for me. Sorry, Matt, or you’re welcome, Matt, if you’re not a gonzo freestyle guy.

**Megana:** Sort of a follow-up question to that, because how you got to where you are now, Cat asks, “How did you find your voice and what are some steps to produce your own if you’re having a hard time finding it?”

**Craig:** I have no idea. There you go. I have to gonzo freestyle that one. I don’t know. Someone, maybe it was Scott Frank, he said he doesn’t like to delve too deep into the how did you get your voice question out of terrible fear that it will make him self-conscious about something he didn’t realize was just his voice. It’s a little bit like if somebody ever says back to you, they’re like, “Oh my god, you have this interesting vocal affectation that you say this thing all the time.” You’ll suddenly realize that you say it all the time and you’ll say it less.

Neil Druckmann, the other day, not the other day, it was a couple months ago, I asked him a question and he went, “Correct.” He went, “By the way, that’s what you say all the time. You know that?” I said, “What?” He goes, “Yeah. Instead of saying yes, you go, ‘Correct,’ just like that. ‘Correct.'” He’s like, “Correct.” I’m like, “Oh.” Then I was like, “I don’t know if I do that.” Then seven minutes later I heard myself do it and I went, “Oh, no.” Now I don’t do it as much because he ruined it.

I don’t want to stare too much at this other than to say I don’t know, but that is a metaphor. Don’t get too tripped up, because I think maybe voice is just a small word for confidence in your own mind’s organization of words, thoughts, and feelings. You have a point of view. You have thoughts. You have a way of saying things. Whether you realize it or not, you have your own quirky bits. If you become confident that your quirky bits and your way of presenting things are interesting to other people and you continue to invest in that, other people might point at it and say that’s your voice. Thinking about what your voice is and trying to find it is counterproductive, because that’s calculated and it will never work. You want other people to tell you afterwards about it. What’s your voice?

**Megana:** That’s really helpful. If you define it too much, then you also somehow limit yourself and limit the potential of what it could be.

**Craig:** You can’t hear it. You can’t hear your own voice the way other people do. Even the sound of your own voice physically sounds different. Really what you’re saying is how did you find the way to do things that create the following impression in other people and how can I do that. I don’t know. Megana, you have a voice. You have a very specific way of thinking and talking and presenting things. If I heard 12 people and all the voices physically were turned into the same pitch, I think I could still pick you out.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** Because it’s about your mind.

**Megana:** Friendship.

**Craig:** It’s about the way your mind works. Friendship. Is that a millennial thing to just go, “Friendship.”

**Megana:** No, that’s just me.

**Craig:** That’s just you. See, you have a voice. You have a voice.

**Megana:** Oh gosh. We can’t talk about it too much, because then it’ll go away.

**Craig:** I know. I’m ruining it. I’m ruining it. Next question.

**Megana:** We’re going to do some quick ones. Christopher asks, “What’s the best way to format a quick flash of memory three seconds long or a quick image? Do you simply write it in description or add a CUT TO?”

**Craig:** Oh, easy. I usually will just, in an action line, all caps, say FLASH TO: colon and then return and then write the little bit that I’m flashing to or even keep it on the same line with the colon. I might put the stuff that I’m flashing to in Italics. I may say FLASH BACK TO: or MEMORY FLASH: or something like that. I don’t add CUT TO’s. I just write it into description and then flow. Basically, I’m just including it the way you would experience it watching the movie.

**Megana:** Another craft question. Brilland asks, “Purposeful pauses, beats. When should silence carry a scene?”

**Craig:** Constantly. Constantly. Here’s a quirk of mine. Okay, Cat, I’ll give you a little piece of the voice. I know, because I feel myself doing it and I don’t care, I write the following thing, I don’t know, at least 12 times a script: “They sit quietly, then,” or, “There’s a moment, then.” I’m writing that all the time, because I believe that people pause. There are moments when people stop because they don’t know what to say. The importance of those moments is that they inform how the next line must be, because when you break a silence, you break it in a certain way. You don’t break it without deliberation. What you say next has been considered, because that’s what was happening in the wait. Somebody didn’t want to say something, made a choice to say it, thought about how to say it, and then they said it. I think this is incredibly valuable, because most of the time when we’re talking it’s extemporaneous, it’s flowing, it is impulsive. We make mistakes. It’s clumsy. It’s not well thought of.

I like movies where people speak brilliantly and quickly, like Sorkin or Tarantino, but it is mannered. It is not meant to be a reflection of how humans actually speak with each other. They don’t do it that way. That is more of a stylized presentation of reality, which is wonderful. Those guys are excellent at it. It’s not my jam. I’m not excellent at that. I like clumsiness. I guess I just dig a little bit more in drama work into the authenticity of how people speak to each other. Pauses are a huge part of it. Do not be afraid of silence. Embrace the silence, for in the silence is great opportunity. Just like we just had.

**Megana:** I was trying to hold for silence for a bit, but I am conscious of your time.

**Craig:** We did it. We did it.

**Megana:** Hannah from Minneapolis asks, “How important do you think reading classics/popular literature is for both improving your writing and for social capital and respect within the TV/film writing industry? Do other writers expect that of you?”

**Craig:** This is such a good question, Hannah. When I first started, I would go on these meetings, and for whatever reason, I don’t know what it was at the time, but in 1994 when I was having these meetings initially with producers and so forth, and I was working in comedy, they would reference the Peter Sellers film The Party all the time. They would talk about The Party. I had never seen The Party. I had seen The Pink Panther. That was when I was a kid, because my dad made me. I hadn’t seen The Party. I would just go, “Oh yeah,” because they would never say, “Have you ever seen The Party?” They would be like, “It’s like The Party. If we can aim for The Party but do this or this or this.” I’m like, “Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that’s great.”

The funny thing is, in 1994 watching a movie that was slightly obscure was actually hard to do. You had to find it somewhere and rent it. I was just like, “I got to go and rent The Party at some point.” I finally did and I watched it and I was like, no offense to Party fans, like, “Wah? Wah?” I guess when I was done, I thought like, oh, I think what they mean is cheap. I think they mean a comedy that’s mostly in one building that there’s a party in. That’s the whole movie. I don’t know.

Anyway, it is a little important. Try and keep up as best you can. At some point, it will be impossible, and that’s okay, because you’ll be old, Hannah. When you’re old, nobody expects you to know anything other than old stuff. They think it’s adorable when you know new stuff. When you are young, yeah, you do need to be plugged into what’s going around. You should be, because that’s the time of your life when you would be. It is helpful to know what the hell is out there, and look, too much for everybody to watch. Do you feel a pressure, Megana, to keep up?

**Megana:** I do feel a pressure. It’s also a desire. I want to see what’s out there and what’s going on. I love television and film, so that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. Her question asks, “Reading classic/popular literature, how important is it for improving your writing and for social capital?” I think that a lot of the writers that I talk to, I’m not talking to them about classic literature. I think that’s something that they probably have read. A lot of my writer friends have lots of references, whether that’s a very random nonfiction interest that they have or a specific genre of television shows that they watch or types of books that they like.

**Craig:** By the way, you don’t have to be. You could also be just really into what you’re into, and people know that one of your quirks/voice is that you don’t know what the hell is on TV right now, but you are a master of 1960s action films, and that’s okay, as long as there’s apparently some interest.

What will happen, Hannah, is if you start doing well in this business, then the reference that you’re most familiar with, the TV show or the film that you’re most familiar with is the one you’re making. Then that’s the only one in the world. There’s only one television show I really care about right now, and that’s The Last of Us. That’s all I work on. That’s all I think about. That’s my job. The fact that I haven’t seen 12 other things that have come out in the last month, no problem, because no one needs me to. They just need me to make the thing that they want me to make, and hopefully they’re happy with it. Then in the in-betweens I catch up a little bit, as best I can with some things, but the truth is, I feel like it’s more important when you’re in your early stage, your young years in the business.

**Megana:** I agree with that. I also think agents and producers tend to be really plugged in. It’s incredibly important for them, with good reason.

**Craig:** That’s their deal is they need to know everybody and everything, because that’s their trade. They’re not sitting down and writing stuff. They’re watching and reading, watching, reading, watching, reading. They have to know everything. I could certainly see where your fancy boss mentioned something and you haven’t heard of it, then they’ll throw a stapler at your head.

**Megana:** The classic Hollywood punishment.

**Craig:** Classic.

**Megana:** Anders asks, “What are some important questions to ask oneself during the pre-writing phase?”

**Craig:** What is this about? What is the point? Why would anyone care? Would anyone want to watch this? Why would they want to watch this? If I create it in such a way that they feel compelled to watch it, why will they keep watching it? How will they feel at the end? What is the purpose and point of all of this? Then get into the rest of the stuff. I think that people forget to ask that first. Why? Why should this exist? There’s a lot of television. There are a lot of movies. There are a lot of books. There are a lot of songs. Why should this one exist and why would people care? It’s not about being cruel to yourself. It’s just about, again, respecting your ultimate boss, the audience.

**Megana:** I guess going back to what Hannah’s question, what you were saying about that, is that it is important to be plugged in culturally so that your writing is responding to the moment.

**Craig:** Yes, and not only to the moment as you see it, but the audience consists of people much younger than you, when you are old. When you’re young, it doesn’t, unless you’re writing for children’s television. If you’re in your 20s and your 30s, you’re probably writing comfortably for people in their 20s and 30s, and that’s no problem. Most stuff is aimed in that, whatever, 18 to 45. That’s the big classic TV demo. If you’re in your 30s, yeah, of course you’re writing for people between the ages of 18 and 45. You are between the ages of 18 and 45.

As you get older, you may forget or discount what 20-year-olds might be interested in, and you will certainly, certainly, you will overestimate how important things that are important to you are to others. In Hollywood right now, I’m sure there are people that are trying to remake things that people really enjoyed in the ’80s, but no one in their 20s cares because the ’80s is 5,000 years ago to them. When I started out early on, so again, let’s go back to 1994, and Disney was attempting to do a film adaptation of My Favorite Martian. Have you ever heard of My Favorite Martian?

**Megana:** I have.

**Craig:** What is your awareness of it?

**Megana:** I think it’s a show.

**Craig:** Go on.

**Megana:** Was it on Nick At Nite or Turner Classic Media?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll get you off the hook. They did make a movie. They did it. They made a movie. I did not write it. They made it in 1999. The movie My Favorite Martian was based on a television show that aired on CBS from September 29th, 1963 to May 1st, 1966. Now you can imagine that I, who had been born in 1971, and who felt that things from the early ’60s were essentially from the Stone Age, how I felt hearing that Disney wanted to make a live-action movie of this that no one would care about, because they were overestimating how beloved the things that were beloved to them were, because the people who made it were children who watched that show and loved it. Right now there are things that children are watching and loving that eventually they’re going to want to make a movie of and people are going to be like, eh, because we don’t care. We just don’t care.

Part of this whole thing is just making sure that… Just ask yourself, okay, what would people not like me think? What would people who are not my race, my gender, my age, my orientation, what would people not like me think of this? Are they going to roll their eyes hard? Because man, in 1999 when they put My Favorite Martian out, I’m sure a lot of people went, “Okay, whatever,” but they did it to themselves. Everyone’s going to do it online right now and in your face and they’re going to make fun of you. Just interrogate yourself before you start writing.

**Megana:** Fair. Leah asks, “Do you have tips on simplifying a complex world for an audience? Any other exemplary scenes like Minority Report’s PreCrime Unit or Chernobyl’s courtroom reactor explanation?”

**Craig:** Thank you for putting me in there with Scott Frank’s excellent script. The tips are that you need to be a teacher. Again, you’re thinking about other people. You don’t want to bore people. No one likes homework. No one likes sitting in a classroom. Whatever it is about your complex world that thrills you, that makes you passionate, that excites you, hold onto those bits and relay those bits and build your case carefully and always with an eye at keeping them interested. Take breaks.

You notice the courtroom, one of the reasons I structured that the way it was was, A, I just didn’t want to do the usual, okay, episode 1 is a sunny day and then it ends with something exploding. The other reason was because I knew that when it was time to walk people through what happened and solve the mystery, that I wanted to give them breaks. Otherwise, it would’ve just been awful. You may enjoy those scenes as they exist, but if it was just 40 minutes straight of that stuff, you would pass out, because you just can’t. You’re stuck in a room for too long. Give them breaks. Structure it. Make it interesting. Teach them carefully and use what makes you excited as a signifier for where you ought to put your sign posts along the way.

**Megana:** Super helpful. We’re going to do another little lightning round. Adrian asks, “In what part of writing the script do you think about music? Not like the movie Yesterday where the plot revolves around the music. I’m particularly curious about music rights you don’t own.”

**Craig:** I don’t think about it much, only when I think to myself, oh, a song would really add something here, hearing vocals and pulling people out of the reality for a bit and hearing something. Then I think about it. Then I do a little research. I also remind myself, I don’t need to solve that now unless I’m literally seeing somebody singing it on screen. Yes, I think if you’re making Baby Driver and you’re Edgar Wright, it’s incredibly important to think about that. That would be more like the movie Yesterday. The plot revolves around it, but also I think somebody like Edgar also really does key in how he writes and creates scenes to pre-imagine songs that have to go there and function like that. I don’t, for what I do. I would say just listen to yourself and ask that question. Don’t get too bogged down in it if it’s not crucial to what you’re doing.

**Megana:** David asks, “Should the writer acknowledge in a note that they are aware that something a character says is insensitive or ignorant if that detail will be confronted later in the series?”

**Craig:** Oh wow, that’s a really interesting thought. It’s a pretty rare circumstance, I would imagine, where you’re writing something that’s going to be in a series. Maybe if it’s a pilot, then yes. I think if it’s a pilot, so that script exists on its own, and if somebody says something like that, I think it’s fair to acknowledge on page 38 someone says something that is insensitive and ignorant and upsetting, it will be confronted later in the series, to let people know you are aware of that, so you don’t just get this note back like, “What’s wrong with you? Do you not live in the world right now? Do you not see how people are functioning?” Yeah, that’s perfectly reasonable to do.

If you are in a flow of a season, that means the show’s already running. There’s probably a room or at least there’s a showrunner or other people, so people will be able to just pick up the phone and discuss it. When I say pick up the phone, I mean text each other. I guess if you were doing a pilot where that would be coming back around, and you don’t have the opportunity to address it right then and there, it’s not a bad idea. Not a bad idea at all.

**Megana:** I wasn’t expecting you to say that.

**Craig:** Oh, what’d you think I was going to say? “No! Wrong!”

**Megana:** No, just to have good faith that it would be resolved or addressed later.

**Craig:** I don’t have that faith. I got to be honest. People surprise me all the time. They really do. They surprise me, because when you’re like, “Do you not know how that’s going to… You don’t get how that’s going to come off, really? You’re not on Twitter? You don’t read?” Let’s put it this way. If I saw that in a pilot script, I would not go, “I hate that.” I would think that’s reasonable, you’re taking care of me.

I wouldn’t spell it out, other than to say there is a moment. You don’t even have to say on what page, because they might flip right to that page. You might just say there is a moment in the script where someone says something that is insensitive and ignorant, it will be confronted later in the series. Perfectly fine. Smart.

**Megana:** Cool. Tom in LA asks, “I have a script that’s been optioned and reoptioned, two times, different 18-month options. During that time I was paid to do a rewrite. Then another writer was brought on to do a pass. The option has just lapsed, and I was wondering what happens now. My agent says that it’s not as simple as just getting my original script back, since the production company did spend money on development. I’ve had many producers hit me up for the rights, but my agent said any new producer might have to repay the original producer. My hope is to get rid of all the changes and start with a script that I originally had.”

**Craig:** Here’s what I think is happening. Tom writes a screenplay. It is optioned and reoptioned. It is not purchased outright. The rights to the screenplay belong to Tom. The producers have paid him some money to have the exclusive right to develop that at this point, meaning he can’t sell it to someone else. They then pay him to do a rewrite. Kind of curious why they didn’t just buy the script at this point, but okay. They pay him to do a rewrite. Now what that means is that’s a work for hire. The rewrite is something they do own.

Now, at this point I’m very confused, because I as Tom’s agent never would’ve allowed this. The reason why is, they’ve created… I don’t know how this works. In their agreement, they must have created them in such a way where they own this, regardless of whether or not they own the underlying rights, because he’s granted them the… I don’t understand how this functions, because essentially, they’re… If they don’t have the ability to properly own that rewrite, which they would, as work for hire, because he says it’s WGA, once the option lapses, that rewrite doesn’t have any value to them at all. Meanwhile, Tom’s problem is, if he goes to sell the script that has reverted [unclear 00:57:50] the original script to somebody else, he obviously can’t sell those rewrites, because somebody else owns the rewrites. What his agent is pointing out is, anybody else buying this thing knows that the other company’s out there with the rewrites. Any rewrites they ask for, if they come even close to what was in the rewrites the other company owns, they’re going to have to buy those out from the other company or they’re going to get sued.

This is a mess. I don’t see why this went down this way. I would say you can say your hope is to get rid of all the changes, Tom, but the problem is, other people might ask for the same damn changes. Now what do you do? Do you write them? Do you say, “Oh, I can’t do that. I can’t do that change because I did it once before for someone else, or I can do it, but I can’t do it the way I would normally do it.” It’s a mess. If this is going to go somewhere else, I suspect your agent’s right about this, new producer would just have to repay the original producer and then some to buy out those things. Why was this done this way? I don’t know.

If you’re going to option something, you’re holding back the big, valuable thing, which is copyright. If they want you to do a rewrite, don’t sell it. You do the rewrite and it’s for you. You’re doing it for you. It’s your rewrite too. You own that also. It’s like I own a house, but I’m going to let you come and own the first floor. I will own the foundation and the second floor. What am I supposed to do with the foundation and the second floor, without the first floor? It doesn’t function. Confused about how this went down. Would not recommend that method. Yes, I think your agent is right that it is not as simple as just getting the original script back.

**Megana:** Oh man, that’s so tricky. Poor Tom probably hasn’t been paid. Two times 18-month options for three years on this?

**Craig:** He got paid to do a rewrite, so he was paid. That’s the problem. In a way, you just have to understand, if you’re going to sell it, sell it. There’s nothing wrong with selling. That’s what we do. We’re professional writers. Brush off anyone that calls you a sellout, because that’s a feature, not a bug. You’re a professional. You get paid. If you’re going to sell out, sell out. Don’t rent out and sell out at the same time. You’re going to do worse than you would’ve otherwise. Otherwise, you took a little bit of short-term money and you, I think, muddied the water on something that could’ve been more valuable if it had been kept intact.

**Megana:** Got it. I guess I feel for Tom, because I can understand how in his position he would want to get paid, but your advice is…

**Craig:** Absolutely, without question. This is why I’m just wondering where his agent was on this one, because I would just say, look, if you guys want to develop this, let’s do it right. Now, if they were like, “No, we just want to pay WGA minimum for a rewrite, I smell a rat. They’re making a very low commitment for something that’s valuable and disruptive to the chain of title and I would just advise my client to say, no, hold out, let’s sell this. If they have a plan for how they want to develop it, convince a studio that they have a plan, and then have the studio buy the script and finance the development of this property. That’s the way we do it, or in the network or the television production company. I agree with you. I commiserate with Tom completely.

**Megana:** Richard asks about another project that hasn’t gone as well as he’d hoped. He says, “I’ve recently finished my first film, a short on a very low budget, and it stinks. I tried so hard, put everything into it, but it’s rubbish. I’m not too disappointed, as it’s my first attempt and I only had 10,000 to work with. It made me wonder what it’s like to make a flop when the budget is 10 million as opposed to 10,000. More specifically, when do you know it’s going to tank? Audience viewings, opening weekends, or way before? Secondly, how do industry people dress it up? Are they honest and admit that it’s a turkey or do they wrap it up in ‘maybe it will have a second life on DVD’ sort of rhetoric? Thirdly, what’s the follow-up for the writer specifically? Do you lose work? Do people start answering your calls? Is there resentment from the people who took a chance on you, or is it understood that some films just sink without a trace?”

**Craig:** Oh, man. Richard, I’m sorry. For what it’s wroth, we’ve all been there, except for Lord and Miller. I don’t know, Chris and Phil have never tasted the… No, I take it back. They have. They have. Every time I say this to them, they’re like, “Ah, [unclear 01:02:36].” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, right.” You got fired before any… Okay, you were fired, but you didn’t have a bomb under your name, see, so your track record is 100%. I still hold them up as the rarest of rare unicorns.

For the rest of us humans, it happens. It often happens early on. It is devastating. It is particularly devastating the first time, Richard. Yes, it’s your first attempt. Yes, you only had $10,000 to work with. This was going to be a small thing. I’m sure you also were thinking to yourself as you were making it, people have done things with $10,000 before and made big, wonderful things. You know it. This one hurts. It hurts more than it will ever hurt again, because you have nothing else to compare it to. You are currently oh for one. Oh for one is rough. When you have one victory under your belt, it buys you at least a certain amount of emotional ability to withstand another flop or two, because you feel like, okay, I’m not just Ed Wood, but most normal people are walking around nervous that they’re Ed Wood as they’re trying to do something good. Feel your feelings.

I’ll tell you that the difference when the budget… Budget’s irrelevant, to me. I think for producers and network and studio people, that’s a huge part of it. They don’t care. Oh, whatever. They’re looking at budget cheats and they’re looking at what they’re accountable for. As an artist, humiliation is humiliation, and failure is failure, no matter what the budget is. Sometimes the only factor is how much you cared. If you care a lot about the thing that cost $10,000 and you cared sort of a little about the thing that cost 10 million, the $10,000 failure will hurt more.

When do you know it’s going to tank? Audience viewings are definitely a big indication. There’s no question about that. A bad opening weekend, unless you are one of the .01% of movies that somehow just keep on trucking and build and build and build, that’s a pretty good indication. The first time you watch it, you may think it’s… If you just watch it and you go, “That’s just absolutely unsalvagable,” then it’s unsalvagable.

How do industry people dress it up? There’s a certain layer of people in our business that are paid to lie and will do so. The way they dress it up is just by announcing that everything’s fine and it’s great. They use that to get their next thing. I think the non-creators, the business folks, when they sense a flop is coming, they just work hard to make sure that they’re protected and already have the next thing working, so that they can’t be fired and ended permanently. For the rest of us, not so easy.

What is the fallout for the writer specifically? Depends. If you have created a television show, you are the showrunner and it fails spectacularly, that is on you. I do think there’s going to be a bit of a work your way back in process. If you are a writer in feature films, generally speaking you are not going to be blamed. People will blame the director. It is the only upside to a system where the writer is demeaned and deprived of any positive credit whatsoever. It’s that when there is a disaster, they just blame the director. Is there resentment from people who take a chance on you? Only if you fought them tooth and nail every step of the way and told them they were idiots and insisted on things and wouldn’t change things and then it failed and then, yes, they will absolutely resent you.

Do you lose work? Not if you already had work ahead of time. Always keep the treadmill going. Do people stop answering your calls? No. It doesn’t really function that way. People weirdly love to talk to you when something has just failed. It makes them feel better about themselves. Is it understood that some films just sink without a trace? Yes. Sinking without a trace, vastly preferable to being noticed while you sink. Lots of boats sank, but everyone remembers the Titanic. Be one of the boats that quietly sank that no one talks about.

**Megana:** Gosh. John is so good at segues. I’m really appreciating that skill level now.

**Craig:** You’re missing segue man.

**Megana:** I’m missing segue man.

**Craig:** That’s an interesting point. The thing that you just said has nothing to do with the next question. So-and-so asks…

**Megana:** Speaking of films…

**Craig:** Segue lady.

**Megana:** Ryan asks, “Screenplay examples for instructions come in waves. Tootsie, Star Wars, Casablanca. Which scripts from the last 20 years do you think should get taught in film programs?”

**Craig:** Oh my god. Of the last how many years?

**Megana:** 20 years, so 2002.

**Craig:** I’m the worst person to ask this question of, because I don’t know. Taught in schools?

**Megana:** Taught in film programs, your favorite institutions.

**Craig:** None of them. None of them, because it doesn’t matter what they teach you. There are things that are instructed to me that don’t mean anything to anyone else. There are things that other people seize on that just blow their minds and make them be in love again with movies. The answer is what blows your mind. The premise is flawed. Indeed, it is the premise upon which these programs are constructed, which is to say there are objectively valuable, wonderful films that if you study and dissect all the way down to the atomic level, you too will be able to create. You will not. The people who created them created them. You’re going to create what you create. There’s no Codex.

What are the movies that film schools obsess over? We all know that they have an unhealthy obsession with 1970s and particularly with Spielberg and Scorsese and Coppola, but also then they like to go to the Italians of the earlier years, ’60s and ’50s, Sica and Fellini, and they should. They’re wonderful movies. Also, what are we looking at there? Those guys all sound alike. They all look alike. A lot of the movies come from certain schools of thought and ways of being. All those men came out of the years they were born, in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s. Now when we talk about the movies that come out now, all those people were born in certain years and they did certain things and it doesn’t matter. You just like what you like. If you don’t like The Godfather and you don’t like Reservoir Dogs and you don’t like Casino and you don’t like The Bicycle Thief, that’s okay. You don’t like them. That’s fine.

What do you like? Why love it? Some of these movies, you watch them and something sings in you, starts singing. Listen to the thing that starts singing in you. In the end, these schools and all of the thousands of para-academic discussions that happen around films, on Reddit and everywhere else, are just people being critics, not in a boo I hate it or yay love it way, but rather in an analysis way. People are critiquing films. They’re analyzing films. They’re discussing them. They’re breaking them down. What they’re not doing is creating anything. They’re just contributing to the howling tornado of film opinion. In that howling tornado, there are about three or four people I’ve ever listened to where I thought, oh, I’d like to listen to them more talk about movies. I’d like to listen to them more talk about television. My answer is, the ones that make you sing. Those are the ones.

I don’t care what they choose to teach in film school, at all. In fact, I almost feel like don’t watch those movies. Go find other ones, because all you’ll end up doing is you’re in a camp where they’re all teaching you how to play Kumbaya. Then you leave and you start writing Kumbaya-like songs. Just go listen to your own music. Do your own thing. Do I sound like a hippie or do I sound like… I don’t know.

**Megana:** It also relates to the thing you were saying about My Favorite Martian. If you were going to an institution where someone was teaching you something, they’re teaching you the things that were important or meaningful to them, but those references have changed because you are a different age than them. You are a different person than them. I feel like there’s a lot of parallels to what you were saying earlier on that too.

**Craig:** I just feel like I’m on an island sometimes. I feel like I’m alone.

**Megana:** I guess you are your own sort of little cult leader, like, “Do what makes your heart sing.” I don’t know what you would call your acolytes, your followers, the Mazinites?

**Craig:** I wouldn’t have any. I would say that that’s already disqualifying. You fail to be a Mazinite if you’re following me.

**Megana:** That wouldn’t stop them.

**Craig:** Really what I’m saying is be your own cult leader and make sure that your cult is a cult of one person, which is you, and show us something new, or just show us something you. Why do we care what six grouches in a conference room that smells like bad coffee think we should watch? Bicycle Thieves, by the way, not The Bicycle Thief. I’m an idiot.

**Megana:** We’re almost done with the 20 questions. We have one more.

**Craig:** Great.

**Megana:** Spencer asks, “I’ve heard from a few different sources that one learns more from writing a large number of scripts and focusing on quantity over perfecting a single project over the course of several drafts. However, no one talks about the point at which one should put that script down, after just one draft, after two or three. While I feel comfortable putting a script down when I feel like it’s good, what is the point at which the learning stops and I should start a new project?”

**Craig:** Wouldn’t it be nice, Spencer, if there were a graph, we could just go, draft amount quality increase, chart it, hit the sweet spot, and stop there? I don’t know if one learns more from writing a large number of scripts and focusing on quantity. Focusing on quantity is a weird way to start. Over-perfecting a single project over the course of several drafts, here’s the uncomfortable truth. If you want to be a professional writer and continue to work and have a lengthy career, you need to both focus on quality and perfecting a project over the course of several drafts, and quantity. You have to do it a lot.

I think sometimes when it’s early, you think, is it better to write eight different scripts or is it better to write eight different drafts. The answer is, write 400 drafts. That’s the answer. You can say that those 400 drafts are over three movies or they’re over 58 movies. Doesn’t matter. You just have to write way more than you think. Way more. If you’re worried now about whether you should be doing two or three drafts a script or should you be doing five drafts a script, those numbers are not different. They’re the same number, as far as I’m concerned. Quantity of scripts will create a lot of pdfs. Nobody cares. You want to talk about a quantity of scripts, the collective screenwriting humanity has written a massive quantity of scripts. You are competing against the rest of the world. You’re not going to hit their output, which is four million bad scripts a day. I would try and write one good one. How about that? You know what? There we go, Spencer. Just start and say you are allowed to write and focus on quantity when you’ve written one good one.

Now when people say you learn more from writing a large number of scripts and focusing on quantity, I have no idea how that functions. It could be that if you write lots and people give you lots and lots of feedback and each one gets better, then yes. I wouldn’t call that quantity as much as evolution and improvement. At some point you need to be able to write good enough to be a professional screenwriter.

Is it better to perfect one pitch or learn five pitches? Doesn’t matter, if you’re never going to be a Major League Baseball pitcher. Probably a false dichotomy. Most of these questions I just end up disputing the premise and then saying a lot of things that must cause tremendous discomfort in people, because what I do is I sow uncertainty. I sow uncertainty because indeed it is uncertain.

**Megana:** We all have to be more comfortable with it. I think you’re doing us a service, all of us Mazinites.

**Craig:** Dammit. I don’t want anyone in this church. Get out. That’s how all my sermons begin, with, “Get out.” All right, well, if you’re not going to get out…

**Megana:** You can’t help but speak in slogans. Like you said, what did you say, be you, be…

**Craig:** See how bad that slogan was?

**Megana:** No, you had a really good rhyme. I wish I could rewind this and go back.

**Craig:** You’ll be able to later. I have perhaps the trappings of a cult leader, without any of the ambition.

**Megana:** What is the line?

**Craig:** They always say you want to elect someone who does not want to be president. That’s the person you want to elect as president. I do not want to be a cult leader.

**Megana:** It will inevitably happen precisely because you don’t want to be a cult leader.

**Craig:** I can’t wait to just disappoint people on a weekly basis as I refuse for us all to live in one compound, and I insist that we do not randomly murder people to make a point.

**Megana:** The cult is wondering, Craig, what is your One Cool Thing for this week?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing for this week, so everyone is caught up in Wordle, of course, Wordle Qordle Septidurdle Schmurdle Fertile Framle Lamle. That’s exciting. As somebody who is an avid solver and loves puzzles of all kinds, I love it when everybody nerds out over puzzles. I wasn’t surprised to see the New York Times, of course, bought them, and we discussed this before. I wanted to call out a little bit of old-school New York Times variety, since people are interested now in what I would call a variety puzzle. It’s not a crossword, for instance. The New York Times also features variety puzzles. If you have a subscription to their puzzle service, which is not too expensive, and I think much worth it, they have the typical things like Sudoku and so forth. They have, every Sunday, in addition to the Sunday Times crossword puzzle, there is a variety puzzle.

There’s a kind of puzzle called Split Decisions, where there’s pathways of letters that then split and then resume. There might be three letters in a row, and then it splits, and on either side there’s two letters, and then it resumes with another four letters. There are words where the only difference between them are those two letters in the middle. As you fill them through and they cross each other, you’re able to fill the whole grid. It’s fun. I think one of the more venerable forms is the acrostic. Have you ever done an acrostic, Megana?

**Megana:** I’m Googling it now. Is this just a crossword puzzle?

**Craig:** It is not at all. An acrostic is, in its traditional form, is a quote, some sort of pithy quote. Maybe it’s 20 words long. It is presented to you in grid format, just straight across, white squares, black squares separating the words. Then you are given a list of clues below. They’re not for the words in the quote. They’re their own things. As you fill those in, under each letter is a number. All of the letters in the quote have a number. You’re answering one kind of clue and then assigning those letters to various spots in the quote above. As you begin to fill in the quote above, you can start figuring out some of the clues below. As you figure out the clues below, you can figure out the quotes above. It is a really interesting way of doing things.

There is a lovely reveal at the end, because you get a really interesting answer and all of the letters, the first letters of these things will ultimately also spell out the name of the author and the book or source from which the quote comes. It’s all very clever. It’s well done. You can do it online, which is the best way to do it. When you do it on paper, it is tedious. “Okay, so this letter goes to, oh, here. This one goes to this.” Online it’s super easy to do.

I believe they’re a husband and wife team, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, have been doing the New York Times acrostic for as long as I can remember. Every two weeks, without fail, they deliver. It’s wonderful. It’s like a mystery. It resolves itself a little bit like a mystery. It’s fun to watch it all come together. If you love puzzles and you do have a New York Times crossword puzzle subscription, definitely on every other Sunday online check out under variety puzzles right there the acrostic by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon.

**Megana:** Very cool.

**Craig:** How about you?

**Megana:** My One Cool Thing for this week is a podcast called Not Past It. It’s produced by Gimlet and hosted by Simone Polanen, who is one of my dear college friends. That’s why it’s also not weird if I say that if honey could speak, it would sound like Simone.

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**Megana:** She has a lovely speaking voice. She’s very smart and very talented. The premise of the podcast is each week they look at something that happened that week in history and provide more cultural context and history around it. She has a lovely episode called The Last Queen of Hawaii. Spoiler alert, the US government does not look good in this story.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**Megana:** Yeah, I know, shocking.

**Craig:** We’re the greatest country on Earth.

**Megana:** I know. She has another episode called World’s Most Famous Virgins. It’s spectacular. In 30 minutes she goes from the Virgin Mary to the Jonas Brothers and George Bush purity politics.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**Megana:** Lots of fun episodes. Really bold swings. Give it a listen. It’s called Not Past It.

**Craig:** I love that you’ve referenced in the notes here Mary’s immaculate conception. Even Catholics a lot of times will mistakenly believe that the concept of the immaculate conception refers to the conception of Jesus, but it does not. It refers to the conception of Mary herself.

**Megana:** This is so fascinating to me. The biological mechanisms that they traced sin with are so interesting. Something she talks about is how I guess the Catholic Church determined that original sin from them taking this bite of the forbidden apple was then solidified or manifested in Adam’s sperm, so all of us who are the product of sexual relations are burdened with–

**Craig:** We’re tainted.

**Megana:** We’re tainted. We’re tainted.

**Craig:** We’re tainted. Something had to break that line, and they had to break it when Mary was born.

**Megana:** Mary could not have been a product of sin because then she wouldn’t have been pure, but then what about Mary’s mom?

**Craig:** Mary’s mom was sinful and that’s the miracle is that somehow Mary was born without sin. You could say, hey, Catholic Church, if you can just stop it wherever you want, just stop with Jesus, or what about Mary’s grandma, whatever, the rest? That’s when you realize that all of modern religion in this fashion is as if 8,000 years from now people discovered this ancient record called The Simpsons, believed it was true, and then built an entire series of laws and moral determinations around it. There was no Garden of Eden. It’s so stupid, but it’s very organized.

**Megana:** It’s the power of storytelling, Craig.

**Craig:** I know, cult. It is a cult. That’s what it is, just all cults.

**Megana:** That’s our episode for this week.

**Craig:** Who’s Scriptnotes produced by?

**Megana:** Megana Rao.

**Craig:** What? Who’s it edited by?

**Megana:** Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Our outro is by whom?

**Megana:** Let’s just go ahead and say Matthew Chilelli. We haven’t picked one out yet.

**Craig:** If you at home have an outro, to whom or to where should you send a link?

**Megana:** To ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Oh. That must also be a place where they can send longer questions, but for shorter questions on Twitter–

**Megana:** Where are you at, Craig?

**Craig:** I am @clmazin and John is @johnaugust. We must have T-shirts. They’re surely great. They’re from Cotton Bureau. Megana, where can we find the show notes for this episode and all episodes?

**Megana:** At johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

**Craig:** That’s all great and fine, but what if I want to sign up to become a Premium Member? Where do I go?

**Megana:** You can sign up at scriptnotes.net, which is also where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record.

**Craig:** Right now. Megana, that was a joy. Honestly, if people at home aren’t clamoring for you and I to do this every day, there’s something wrong with them.

**Megana:** You guys can request more content with hashtag #craigana.

**Craig:** Yes! Hashtag #craigana. Thank you, Megana. That was fantastic.

**Megana:** That was fun. Thanks for a fun episode, Craig.

[Bonus Segment]

**Craig:** What should we talk about today on our Bonus Segment for these fine folk?

**Megana:** I think that it’s time for us to face on issues of millennials.

**Craig:** It’s happened. I’ve been clamoring for this for a while as well. Megana is a millennial extraordinaire. Unlike a lot of my grouchy generational cohort, I love millennials. I think they’re great. Millennials are better at a lot of things than we were. Also, millennials, as they get into their dotered ages, the dotage, as they arrive at dotage, meaning they’re in their 30s and 40s, they’re going to be running this business. I’m going to need a job. I need millennials to take care of me. I think it’s time for us to dig in a little bit more into this generation that a lot has been said about, but probably quite a few misconceptions have been formed about, and who are indeed going to be shortly assuming the mantle of being in charge of this whole place. Megana, it hasn’t happened yet. Millennials have not yet taken over Hollywood, but surely it’s coming.

**Megana:** I think I would argue that it is happening. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a millennial, Greta Gerwig, Michaela Coel, Chloe Zhao. I think that there are a lot of millennials who are doing exciting things in Hollywood right now.

**Craig:** There are a lot of exciting millennial artists. The question is, where are the millennials who are in charge? I think about Hollywood, and Hollywood has always been very good at exploiting the young. They practically invented the art of it. When it comes to running things, I do remember when I started out, most of the people that were running things were white men who were seemingly between 50 and 60. Right now the people that seem to be running things seem to largely be white men and women between 50 and 60. Is that always going to be the thing? Are millennials going to get there a little faster? It certainly seems like the one thing that your generation is not patient about is changing stuff.

**Megana:** Are you saying in terms of studio heads and executive leadership?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m saying why haven’t you stormed the Bastille yet and taken over? In I think it was the ’80s, CAA was swarmed from a bunch of, they called them the Young Turks, but I think they were all in their 30s. They were the millennials of their time and broke away from the old, frumpy agencies and began their own thing. It seems like that some sort of millennial revolution is going to happen sooner or later. There are some things that are built in to the way life functions right now that might make it a little bit more difficult for them than it was say for Baby Boomers in the ’80s, specifically the fact that our world is falling apart, slightly.

**Megana:** I don’t know. I wonder if there’s some economic reasons why it would be tougher for millennials and the industry to assume that sort of risk.

**Craig:** Oh, really? You seem to be suggesting that perhaps there have been some sort of multi-year pandemic and shutdown and that housing costs were at an all-time high and that the entertainment industry itself had undergone some sort of minor upheaval, like the disappearance of the theatrical film business. Things are changing too damn fast. It’s hard to get a hold on it.

**Megana:** Also, things aren’t changing fast enough. As we’ve talked about with the Pay Up Hollywood stuff, the cost of living in LA is increasing very quickly, but other things like wages are not matching that.

**Craig:** Millennials found themselves trapped in between two things. The business is transforming, but on the other side all this other stuff isn’t transforming, but just continuing, including, I think probably, as much as Hollywood likes to pat itself on the back, diversity at the higher levels of things probably is not where it ought to be. I think we can say for sure. I don’t know, from my point of view, as Oldie Olderson, to seem rather hopeful, I will say from my longer point of view, things are definitely better now in lots of ways than they were back then. Shall I count the ways or will it be depressing?

**Megana:** No, I’d like to hear it.

**Craig:** For one, the consciousness around diversity didn’t exist. I’m not going to say that it’s higher now. It literally did not exist at all. No one talked about it. If you were to say something like, “Oh, that’s weird, everyone in this room is a man,” then somebody would be like, “Whatever. Shut up.” No one would care. Much less, “There’s no one in here who is a person of color.” No one cared about anything. It just was not a topic at all. That has changed dramatically, and certainly for the better. The ability to make yourself known to the world was a zero back then.

Now everyone has a megaphone to the planet. What we do with the megaphone, certainly there are toxic impacts. Everyone does have a megaphone to the planet. The amount of material that’s made now is I believe larger than it was then. We can say, “Hold on, they made lots and lots of movies back then.” Yeah, true, but there were essentially three networks, and now there are streamers that put out so much context. Netflix alone I think makes more stuff in a year than everybody combined made in 1994. There is more stuff, but I suspect that you’re going to tell me, there are some areas where things are worse or have not improved at all.

**Megana:** I think with more content and the more shows that we’re getting from streamers and places like Netflix, we’re also seeing shorter season orders and smaller rooms, and so whereas on a network show in the ’90s you would have, what, a 22-episode season?

**Craig:** Yeah, or 26 episodes, something like that, something nuts.

**Megana:** If you were a staff writer on that show, there’d be so many opportunities for you to write an episode or go to set, because there’s just more material to be written and to be worked on. Now it seems like you have to elbow your way in to get one out of six or eight episodes on a streamer.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. That’s a great point. The streaming business has introduced a slight McDonaldsization to how we employ people. The people who are always going to get squeezed by that are the people who are on the younger end of things. In your cohort, is there any sense that at least you’re no longer the rookies, that it’s Generation Z are in the rookie zone, and you guys have a little bit of seasoning, picking up a little bit of authority as you progress through this business?

**Megana:** Gosh, I don’t know, it’s hard because right now the mood feels so like we’re all sort of coming out of this sluggish, depressive few years. I talked to so many millennials who have been assistants for sometimes over 10 years and I don’t think that that’s something that older generations necessarily dealt with. I would imagine that it’s more like welcome to the bottom.

**Craig:** Oh, my. Welcome to the bottom, that’s a decent title for… That’s depressing.

**Megana:** Not for all millennials. I don’t know whether that’s because the idea of pursuing film and television as a career has become more popular, so the people who are pursuing this, the pool has expanded. I don’t know, I’m curious what you think about that.

**Craig:** Everyone talks about everything more, so yes, it’s possible that everybody wants to do this. I think there is more of a sense that everybody can do anything they want, because access in a way became both worse and better at the same time. I guess when everybody has a megaphone, nobody’s listening to anyone, so there is that problem. I’m part of the weirdest generation, Generation X. We don’t know what the hell we are. We never considered ourself really generational. Nobody likes Baby Boomers. I think we can all agree on that. They’re the worst. Even they agree. They know. They know they’re the worst. I don’t think we ever thought of ourselves as a cohort in a really weird way. I just didn’t. Is there a sense among millennials and/or Generation Z that Generation X is the problem, that we’re the ones that are blocking the path up or creating that kind of permanent bottom?

**Megana:** No. I think we should just continue to blame everything on the Boomers.

**Craig:** Great. Thank God.

**Megana:** Do you think it’s Generation X that is the problem? I don’t think it is. Generation X, let’s define terms, that’s 45 to 55?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s about right. Let’s see, Generation X is born between 1965 and 1980, so I’m a younger Generation X kind of person. It seem like actually you can go even up to 62 kind of thing. Oh no, 1965 is just 57. Then 1980 is young. Now we’re talking about 42. 42 to 57. Let’s just call it 40s and 50s. That seems reasonable. The 40s and 50s people, we are mostly in charge of this business. There are definitely some Baby Boomers sitting on boards and thing, but not too many that are still in charge, I think. It seems like we’re the ones that are in charge. I don’t know, I hope that we would be doing better than our Boomer people before us.

For a generation that has been labeled as soft and afraid and fragile, it’s endured quite a bit. I don’t see that as a reality. I worry about this permanent bottom thing. That’s bad news. There’s something that happened, I noticed, in the feature business, where studios empowered producers, and producers became incredibly abusive of screenwriters, and it got to the point where essentially we were running out of screenwriters, because everyone just left. Nobody wanted to do it. Either they never got a chance to get good because they were replaced constantly and treated like widgets, or they fled to television. We were running out of feature writers.

Towards the end of my feature career, because I started really concentrating on TV, I was getting a stupid amount of calls for work, to the point where I’m like, “I am not this good. I don’t deserve this number of phone calls. No one’s left. This means no one’s left.” When I say no one’s left, no one’s left who has 20 years of experience. No one was allowed to become experienced. Everybody who wasn’t allowed to become experienced was punished for their inexperience, and so all that was left were the few people from my generation that had been allowed to become experienced, who essentially had been allowed to fail, because they kept making movies. They were doing things. We were taught.

There’s no system for teaching. I’m worried that the same thing is happening everywhere, that no one is allowed to learn and be taught, and so we run out of people to come and refresh the troops, to be the new A-list people of tomorrow. For all the lip service that we pay to bringing new kinds of people in, it doesn’t matter if we don’t teach and nourish the next group. This is nerve-wracking to me. Actually, I’m shooketh, as millennials say. I’m shooketh.

**Megana:** I have a question for you, because I think feature films are interesting, because I had a friend who also pointed out that a part of this problem with trying to have a career as a feature writer as a younger person is that the mid-range studio films don’t really exist anymore.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Megana:** It’s very hard, and reflective of what we’re seeing is that it’s almost impossible to go from being someone who’s making these low-budget indies to then being granted the reins to a major studio tent pole. To your point about teaching, who taught you? What was your process like? Do you think that it was the opportunity to make some of those mid-tier movies?

**Craig:** Yes, which is all I made for a while, because the movies that I made, generally speaking, cost between $18 million and $50 million. That was the meat and potatoes of our business, movies that weren’t tent poles, that weren’t massive budget items, that were producable and shootable and makable and releasable. If they failed, they failed. If they hit, they really hit. That was great. Everybody loved that. That was where you learned. There was a lot of it. Then there were rewrites and there’d be other rewrites, but you learned, because there was stuff to move around in between. Then it all just went away. Who do people hire? When they don’t have a lot of stuff to make, they hire the most experienced, quote unquote, best writers they can find who are available, because there’s not that much stuff. Then what happens? Those people age up.

As we get older, we start to lose touch. Our goodness becomes more narrowed to certain areas and we are less good in other areas. Comedy, notably. I’m not being ageist. I’m just being factual, that people who are in their 60s cannot possibly be plugged into what is culturally relevant to people in their 20s in the way the people in their 20s are. Just factually impossible. There was nobody then left to turn to, because so few people had been trained, because there was nothing to train them with.

It was like if you get rid of the Minor Leagues in baseball and you just go, look, everybody has to just come from high school and then we’re going to throw you into the Major Leagues and you’re good or you’re not good. No one’s trained. You just keep going, okay, well let’s just trade for the people who have been trained in the Minor Leagues when they existed. Then those people all get old and then what do you do?

I’m worried that the same thing is happening in television because of the way, like you say, the shorter season orders, the mini rooms, how fast things go. People don’t get trained. They cannot grow up with this system. They start carping at each other and blaming each other for things, because when there’s scarce resources, people start to hurt each other in their attempt to get those scarce resources. It’s a mess. Basically, what I’m saying is I’m worried about your generation, especially when I’m saying, okay, people have been an assistant for 10 years. Some people want to be assistants. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you don’t, and you’re on your 10th year, that’s problematic.

**Megana:** Last question for you, I see the benefits of what you’re saying and how it would grow the next generation of writers, creators, directors, executives, people to move up into leadership roles. Do you think that there are business benefits towards doing that, because I don’t think that it would necessarily change unless there was an economic impact that studios would also see.

**Craig:** A massive benefit for studios. It’s research and development. Other industries understand this inherently, but in Hollywood, everyone is so focused on what you just did and are you making money right now that they don’t have time to think about sowing a field for the future. As far as they’re concerned, they’re going to get fired soon anyway also. What are they doing? Growing the next generation of brilliant writers to benefit the person that knocked them off the perch? This is the issue. I’ve said as much to people who run studios, that ultimately somebody is going to be left without a chair in the musical chairs game, and they’re not going to have people who are any good to write these things, because they’re not being trained properly at all and they don’t care. They don’t care, because that’s going to be somebody else’s problem.

If I were the chairman of one of these corporations, not just the person running the studio, chairman of one of these corporations, the answer is pretty simple. Look, there’s certainly plenty of good in what they call their training programs, which are almost exclusively focused at increasing diversity in the hiring pool. Those are fine, but they’re not the same thing as getting hired and working. The experience of being hired and working in the real situation, not a simulation, but the real deal, live fire on the battlefield, there’s nothing like it. That’s how you learn. That and that alone is really how you learn. They are not going to get, they meaning the businesses, are not going to get the people they need at the level they want unless they start increasing those opportunities and that means paying people and keeping them on longer so that they can live and afford a home and can have a family and learn and get better. We had this for, I don’t know, 100 years, and then we just suddenly went, meh.

**Megana:** That’s really helpful. I’m also interested to hear what other people have to say and would love for people to write in with their experiences.

**Craig:** Yes, and as always, tell me I’m wrong. I would love to be wrong about this, but I’m worried.

**Megana:** Unshake Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. I want to be an optimist. I do. I think every pessimist wants to be an optimist. This is not a rosy picture. The fact that my generation’s cranky about your generation isn’t going to help. Tell me I’m wrong or tell me I’m not even right enough. That’s my other favorite kind, like, “You weren’t angry enough.” Sorry.

**Megana:** As always, do what makes your heart sing.

**Craig:** Do what makes your heart sing.

Links:

* [Logitech K860 has Bluetooth!](https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/k860-split-ergonomic.920-009166.html)
* [Take this typing test -](https://www.typingtest.com/test.html?minutes=2&textfile=benchmark.txt) Craig got a 110 wpm!
* [Barton Fink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barton_Fink)
* [Chernobyl](https://www.hbo.com/chernobyl), [Chernobyl Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chernobyl-podcast/id1459712981) and [The Dropout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dropout)
* [60 Seconds With Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/crosswords/who-made-my-puzzle-cox-rathvon.html) and puzzle [here](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/27/acrostic)
* [Not Past It](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/not-past-it) Podcast
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* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/544standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/science-movies).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 539 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we ask the eternal question, how would this be a movie? This time focusing on stories and topics related to science. To help us out, we have two special guests joining us. First, Erin Macdonald is an astrophysicist PhD and a tattooed one-woman career panel for the field. She lives in Los Angeles, working as a writer and producer, and is currently the science consultant for the entire Star Trek franchise. Welcome, Erin.

**Erin Macdonald:** Hi. Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

**John:** I have so many questions about the science in the franchise, and specifically space science as it relates to Star Trek, which feels like it’s a long history there. Warp drives, we’ll get into all that stuff with you today hopefully.

**Erin:** Excellent.

**John:** Next up we have Leigh Whannell. He is an Australian screenwriter, actor, producer, and director, known for co-creating the Saw and Insidious franchises with James Wan. He made his directorial debut with Insidious: Chapter 3, and has since directed 2 more films, the widely acclaimed Upgrade, and The Invisible Man, which was the last movie I saw in theaters pre-pandemic. Leigh, welcome back to the show.

**Leigh Whannell:** Thanks for having me again.

**John:** You were on Episode 354, which was an episode that Craig recorded without me. Now we’re recording this episode without Craig. Essentially, we always have to keep one of us off the podcast when you’re there, because you’re just too dangerous.

**Leigh:** It would be too dangerous, like combining the wrong type of chemicals.

**John:** It’s all risky. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, speaking of risk, we are going to talk about Leigh’s proposal for a period shopping mall theme park experience. I’m strongly in favor of this happening, for the record, and so I want to really work through all of the possibilities for Leigh’s proposal to create a theme park experience period mall.

**Leigh:** Excellent.

**John:** We’ll do it. Before we get into sciencey stuff, we have a business question. Actually, it’s here from Megana. Megana, can you ask your question that I see here in the outline?

**Megana Rao:** I saw this tweet from Ed Solomon about the accounting for Men in Black. I spent an embarrassingly long time looking through these documents, and I feel so confused about what I’m looking at. I was hoping you guys could explain some of the movie accounting to me. He says, “Sadly, Men in Black lost over $5 million this period alone. Someone needs to call Sony and tell them to stop building sets. Seriously, does nobody know how to run a business?”

**John:** Ed Solomon is putting up links here to the profit definition, the profit statements from Men in Black, obviously a huge, huge hit, one that spawned many sequels. He’s one of the credited writers on it. He has a net profit participation in the movie. The movie is not into net profits, even having generated gazillion dollars. Leigh Whannell, you are a person who’s written movies that have generated hundreds of millions of dollars. Is this at all familiar to you?

**Leigh:** I did enter the film world through a different door. It wasn’t the front door. Obviously, Men in Black was a film that was made very much within the studio system. Big studio, big money, big movie stars. The first few films especially that I was involved in were definitely independent films. The first Saw film was actually financed by the producers. Two of the producers did what they say you should never do in Hollywood, which is spend your own money. They mortgaged their houses to pay for that movie. It’s a very different financial map. I guess it’s the old saying of betting on yourself. I think with those movies, by betting on ourselves, maybe we saw more backend and more profits.

What I hear about these big studio films, and maybe you can enlighten me, John, is that they always find some creative accounting to show why, “Oh, no no no, you see, the standees that we made in Malaysia mean that you don’t get your profit participation checks.” That’s what I hear from people who have worked more in the big budget studio system.

**John:** I’ve made many movies for Sony and for other places. I made Aladdin. I will guarantee you the movies will never turn a technical profit. The reason behind it is that setting out to make this movie, the studio takes a loan out to make the movie. They’re borrowing $150 million or whatever to make this film. Your film Invisible Man is probably similar sort of [unclear 00:04:20] because it was not that expensive, but it was still expensive enough that it will never turn a technical definition of profits.

These studios are taking out this big lump of money to make this film. They’re spending the money to make the film. They’re charging interest on that loan for the whole time. Even though they are both the bank and the person borrowing the money, they are essentially continuing to generate interest on that original loan, and that original loan will never pay down. They’re also throwing every conceivable expense against the film, including a distribution fee, which is money they’re paying themselves to distribute the film, basically all the other overhead and accounting they’re throwing at it. These films will never achieve technical profit, based on the definitions. Those definitions are laid out in the contracts that you and I have signed as writers when we are doing this. Even the attorneys who we’re paying good money for tell us never to expect to see real money in the backend on these things.

**Leigh:** You say the studios take out a loan, are you saying… This might prove my naivete on these matters. Are they taking out a loan from themselves? Don’t these studios have vaults full of cash that essentially when they finance movies, the money, it doesn’t come from a bank, it comes from those vaults? It comes from the studio coffers, right?

**John:** Yep. You would think that you could not loan yourself money in that way, but that is technically what they are doing. Each of these films, just like your Saw film or Insidious film, it is its own company that is formed and set up to do the thing. They’re loaning money to that production to do this. There’s many ways they could be structured. It could also be structured as an international situation. They are designing things in ways to maximize the amount of money that the studio gets back in without the film itself getting paid money.

**Leigh:** It is interesting to hear about things. I had a friend of mine who was directing a film for Universal, and he wanted to shoot some scenes on the studio back lot, in one of the studios. One of the producers was saying, “It’s too expensive.” My friend said, “This is a Universal film and we’re shooting on the Universal lot.” The producer said, “Yeah, you don’t get a discount for that. They will charge us.” I just found that an insane version of double dipping.

**John:** There might be circumstances where a studio will require a production to use its things, for certain good reasons, but they will still charge that full freight for using their own facilities. That’s just how it goes. This can be frustrating, but it’s also, I think, because it is unlikely that a writer will ever be paid these kind of net profits on things, that’s why you find other ways as a writer to get some backend participation. Obviously, residuals have nothing to do with the profitability of the film, and so we get paid residuals no matter how much it shows on this statement, which is great.

We might also ask for box office bonuses. If we know that our film is going to be theatrically released, which is never a given in 2022, we can say, “When the US theatrical box office on this film hits $50 million or $100 million, you have to write me a check for X.” That’s one way to get around these impossible net profit definitions. Megana, did we answer your question to any degree?

**Megana:** You did. Basically, it’s not supposed to make sense to me, but yeah.

**John:** When you’re back in the office, I can show you Aladdin statements or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory statements that show that they are similarly money-losing propositions on paper, even though they’ve made the studios good money.

**Megana:** Thank you very much.

**John:** We just played the role of business consultant here, explaining to Megana how this weird thing in accounting work. I’m only vaguely qualified to do that. I’m not qualified to talk about space or astrophysics. Luckily, Eric Macdonald is qualified to talk about this. Can you give us, Erin, a sense of your history studying astrophysics and how that segued into your working on the Star Trek franchise?

**Erin:** I’ve always been interested in film and television and the entertainment industry. I made that fork crossroads decision when I went to college, or university, to decide to study physics. As I went through there, I realized I didn’t quite like it as a career. I did research for many years, specifically in gravitational waves. I went through, did my PhD in Scotland, had a great experience, but when it came to the postdoc life of research, that wasn’t really for me.

When I left academia, I was looking for things that would scratch some of the things that I enjoyed doing in academia, one of which was teaching. I started going to sci-fi conventions to teach about the science behind things like Star Trek. I would go and give these science talks, and they were hugely popular. People just really lined out the door to see these talks. I started going to multiple conventions all around the country. I started to meet a lot of writers, creators. Then when I moved out to Los Angeles, a lot of them started to give me a call and start folding me in. I found my way in a very indirect route to now be a part of the entertainment industry, which I’m thrilled about.

**John:** Can you talk about those early calls you’re getting, asking for your advice, your input on a project? What are the kinds of things that, at a writing stage, they want to know from an actual scientist?

**Erin:** Typically, it’ll just depend on when they find out that I exist, whatever the stage the project is in. Typically, it’ll be in that story development period, where they’re coming up with a high concept, especially for some hard sci-fi. They’re going to ask me questions about like, this is the method of faster-than-light travel we use, or this is the energy source that this population’s using, or here’s the inciting incident that is somehow science-based. Can you just give me a pass on it to see how it feels? I always say, all right, if I can read it and it doesn’t make me throw up in my mouth, that’s a good pass.

**Leigh:** Erin, I have to say, this is really strange kismet that you’re on this episode, because I recently in the last six months started writing a sci-fi, horrory type thingy and needed to talk to an astrophysicist because our film was about that. Everything you’re talking about is exactly what I’m basically sitting someone down and saying, okay, how ridiculous is this?

**Erin:** I love that, by the way. I try to take the approach with writers that I’m going to “yes and” your project. I’ve heard a lot of stories of people with very negative experiences with science consultants, where they have a friend or a friend of a friend who has a background in that story, and then they send them the idea, and the response is like, “Nope, that doesn’t work. Science doesn’t work like that.” I really try to take a more positive approach, like, “Okay, if that’s what you want to do, let’s see how we can make this work and let’s see to what extent we need to explain it.” That’s sometimes a lot of what I do too is just say, “Yeah, you can do it. Just don’t try to explain it.”

**John:** Let’s think about the kinds of questions a writer might ask. A lot of times these are bigger conceptual questions. If it’s gravitational wave, faster-than-light travel, this is the means of faster-than-light travel I’m planning to use in my script, so great, and talking them through the options there. In some cases are you also talking about what the lingo is, what an actual astrophysicist would say in these moments? We had Zoanne Clack on the show, who was originally hired as a writer’s consultant on Grey’s Anatomy. She was there as a medical consultant, not just for like, this is the medical procedure, this is the disease, but also like, this is what a doctor would actually do or say in those moments. Do you get involved in this is what an astrophysicist would be like?

**Erin:** Absolutely, yeah. I think that’s where the direction of my career has gone. I still have those early concept conversations like you were talking about, Leigh, but now when I’m folded into a writer’s room or into a specific show, it can be all the way from story development and most of my days reading scripts. I will give little tweaks to the dialog here and there. Then like you talked about, maybe not necessarily getting the technological language right, but more the conceptual drive of what a scientist does. That’s something I’ve done for a number of episodes, where they have a scientific problem, and I’ll help the writer’s think through it as you would a scientist to build that story and to drive that forward.

**John:** We had a conversation two weeks ago with Mike Schur from The Good Place. He was talking about as it came time to do the moral philosophy on his show, he had done a lot of reading on moral philosophy, but he needed an expert who could really talk about this the way that a philosopher would talk about it. He enlisted Todd May and another philosopher on to do that. It sounds like you’re involved in a similar place where the writers may have a good sense of what they’re trying to do in general, and they’re coming to you for specific help and making this actual fit with everything else that’s around it. Is that right?

**Erin:** Yeah. What’s really interesting about my role now is I’m available to the whole Star Trek franchise. That’s five shows right now that are currently in development. They all use me very differently. Some of it is based on the fact that I’ve been with them for multiple seasons, and so that trust and that relationship has grown. I’ll be in from breaking season arcs all the way through to sitting in the writers room to reading scripts, but even be involved with the post-production aspects and help with graphics. Other shows, I’ll just get the script and I’ll just edit little dialog and just do a little wordsmithing here or there.

Any time I’m approached about a science-fiction project, I always like to ask, okay, science fiction is a huge spectrum of science to fiction, and tell me where you want to live, and we’ll tweak the science to fit that appropriately, because there’s a lot of different types of sci-fi out there.

**John:** Speaking of different types of sci-fi, Leigh, your film The Invisible Man involves a scientist who’s developed a means of invisibility, which is very different than in the original film. He’s really using optics to become invisible, and a suit that lets him do this. At what point in the development of the script were you really figuring out, oh, this is what is believable to me for how this invisibility technology works?

**Leigh:** It’s a good question, because Invisible Man and Upgrade were both films incorporating a lot of sci-fi elements. I am definitely not a science major. If you started quizzing me about the Periodic Table, I would draw a blank, but yet I have my imagination. It’s been strange to watch certain things that I’ve invented in my mind somehow create some link to the real world. In the case of The Invisible Man, I thought, what if you had a suit covered with cameras, and each camera was taking thousands of pictures and then simultaneously projecting a hologram, so it’s almost like this hologram suit.

We were well into pre-production in Sydney, Australia, when we went and talked to some scientists at the Sydney Institute of Technology. We were explaining to them that it would work. They were thinking, and they were like, “Yeah, that could work.” They said the technology’s not there yet, but if you had a camera that could render fast enough and take these images and project. It was almost like I was retroactively given the green light on what I was thinking, but by that point the ship had sailed. It is interesting, this meeting ground between your imagination and real science.

**John:** For our topic today on How Would This Be A Movie, it’s interesting, some of them actually are things that started out as science fiction and then crossed more into scientific discussion. There are ideas that were first broken in the pages of sci-fi, yet the underlying concepts were interesting enough that given enough time, real science could catch up to these ideas.

Let’s segue right into some How Would This Be A Movies. For this installment, I asked our listeners on Twitter for suggestions on articles, topics to explore, and as always, they delivered. We picked a mix of some astrophysics, social science, some biology. I want to dig into some of the reality of each topic, but then also, what are the fictional possibilities based on the topic. This first one is an example of something that we first see in science fiction and then explored more. This is the Dyson sphere. Erin, maybe you could help us explain what a Dyson sphere is and why we might be looking for those out in space.

**Erin:** Yeah, totally. I love Dyson spheres. I’m very excited about this. Dyson spheres are a theoretical construct, kind of a thought experiment that people have put together about trying to find advanced life out in other solar systems. Really quickly, we live in our solar system, which is a bunch of planets that orbit a star, and then there’s millions and millions of stars in our own galaxy, and then there’s a bunch of galaxies out there. Typically on this scale we’re just talking about within our galaxy, but outside of our solar system. The idea of a Dyson sphere is that you essentially build a giant sphere, sometimes starts as a ring, then that ring starts to grow, that goes all the way around the star, and it’s essentially solar panels, that you’re able to harvest all of the solar energy off of this star. It’s an insane amount. If your civilization is advanced enough to do that, then the idea is they’ll probably need that much energy anyway.

**John:** A Dyson sphere is a way of harnessing all the power of a star. The reason why we might notice those out there is if you’re actually collecting all this energy, astronomers here on Earth, using our space telescopes, might notice that something is weird about that star, and they might be able to see the effects of this Dyson sphere and that it’s collecting all this energy.

**Erin:** Yep, absolutely correct. When it comes to trying to find a Dyson sphere, the big thing is trying to find ways that astronomers can differentiate between an artificial object like a Dyson sphere versus any sort of naturally occurring objects. This actually happened. There was something called Tabby’s Star, where they discovered it had a weird signal to it, that it could be artificial, but upon further investigation, they think that it’s just a bunch of debris that’s around this star that was making its signal look weird. That’s the tricky part about astrophysics.

What I think makes it a great vessel for storytelling is we just have to take what the universe gives us. We really don’t know anything. We can’t create our universe in a lab. We get these puzzle pieces that we have to put together. Dyson spheres are a really exciting one to explore.

**John:** Let’s think about this in terms of a movie, because building a Dyson sphere would presumably take thousands of years, and so it’s not a thing that’s going to be happening in the course of one of our movies, most likely. It could be a character who is encountering a Dyson sphere that exists in the world, finding proof of an alien civilization, because they have one. Leigh, what’s jumping out to you in terms of a way that a Dyson sphere could appear in a film that you want to make?

**Leigh:** The first thought I had was of those two options. Are we building a Dyson sphere to save our universe or do we come across a Dyson sphere? I feel like you solved the first problem. It would take too long to really make a film about building one. Maybe this is a film about finding a Dyson sphere. It’s so funny, because the film I’m writing right now, I could really incorporate some of these elements. I would say coming across or seeing a Dyson sphere at a distance, and then where do we go from there?

**John:** It feels like it’s a setting, it’s an initial incident, but it’s not the actual thing itself. Erin, you can tell us… Obviously, there’s probably NDAs for future stuff, but have Dyson spheres already appeared in the Star Trek universe?

**Erin:** They have, actually, totally NDA-free. This was in The Next Generation. There was an episode where they discovered a Dyson sphere around a star system. It was a Next Generation episode, but they were able to bring back Scotty from the original series, that his ship has crashed into this Dyson sphere. That’s exactly what it was. It had a huge gravitational pull. That’s why his ship crashed, because it was just so massive. In this case it was a fully closed sphere, which it doesn’t need to be. The gravitational attraction of this is what caused the ship to crash. It’s been seen before.

**John:** We can’t talk about search for extraterrestrial life without maybe bringing up the Fermi Paradox, that sense of, there should be so many civilizations out there, given the time span of the universe, and there should be more things out there. It’s the question of why does it seem like we’re the only people, or at least we don’t see any other civilizations out there.

That paradox could be answered in a couple different ways. One of the possibilities is that no civilization actually gets up to the point where they would build a Dyson sphere that we could see them, they all collapse first, or there may be other reasons that we can’t understand why we’re the only ones who are visible. Maybe people are out there and they’re hiding because it’s a good idea to hide. There’s all sorts of interesting, provocative questions that are raised by the lack of evidence out there.

**Erin:** I love the Fermi Paradox. You touched on a couple good ones. Like you said, it’s this idea that it takes so long to create this advanced capability, whether that is a Dyson sphere or something like warp drive to be able to visit other star systems. A big one for me is not the philosophical aspect, but just the probability that your civilization is going to have an extinction event from space, like a gamma ray burst wiping you out, is much higher than you having enough time to build that. The analogy I use, it’ll take you 200 years to build a house, but you live in a 100-year floodplain. It’s going to wipe you out before you do it.

**John:** It’s all very dispiriting.

**Erin:** It is.

**John:** Leigh, let’s think about characters in this situation, because it feels like if we’re out in space doing things, we have such tropes about what space [unclear 00:21:38] are like, but is there any other way to get into the characters who would be in this story?

**Leigh:** I think if we’re talking about the human characters here, it sounds like a film about humans meeting obviously a much more advanced civilization. What’s interesting to me about a lot of these films is that a lot of sci-fi films that involve creatures from space or other civilizations still couch it in very human terms. A spaceship is a very graspable concept for human beings. It’s a flying car and the aliens look just like us except their skin is green or something. I find the mysteries of space so much more enticing, like the last 15 minutes of 2001, where what’s happening is so far beyond your comprehension. I do think Arrival was a recent film that, it made the aliens very mysterious. I thought their language was very provocative. For me, I see a movie about us primitive humans, the ants on the side of the freeway, meeting this super advanced civilization and learning about them, I guess.

**Erin:** I can throw out one fun science thing that you can maybe play with for the story, which is the fact that it takes light time to reach us from other stars. We might detect a Dyson sphere that’s, let’s say 100 light years away, but we saw them as they were 100 years ago. You can always factor that in in space exploration stories, especially about humanity, that can sometimes talk about the passage of time or the futility of existence, because hoping that they’re still there by the time you’re able to talk to them.

**John:** Or that they might be on their way to us. Can you give us a quick primer on warp drives, both the warp drives that exist in the Star Trek universe and what the other versions of warp drives we see in the Star Wars universe? What are the basic edges of faster-than-light travel in these different environments?

**Erin:** There’s typically about three flavors of faster-than-light travel. Warp drive is the one most people think of. That’s this idea that when you’re on the surface of space time, this bowling ball on the trampoline visual some people are familiar with, you cannot go faster than the speed of light. Once you have no mass, then you just coast in a straight line. Warp drive is saying, what if space time goes faster than the speed of light and you wrap that fabric of the trampoline around your ship and then that moves you faster than the speed of light. That’s essentially how warp drive works.

Other fun examples include things like wormholes, whether they’re artificial or naturally occurring, which is, again, thinking about that fabric, that trampoline, you take two points and you have a tunnel between them that’s actually shorter than the whole distance from traveling along the surface. We’ve seen a lot of those.

**John:** I think it’s Carl Sagan I first saw on Cosmos, who had the piece of paper bench and a pencil sticking through. That’s a very classic image of the hole through the plane.

**Erin:** Bingo. Exactly. That’s it. Again, wormholes are something similar to warp drive that mathematically our understanding of space time, they could exist. It’s just we’ve never seen one or we don’t have enough energy to create that. Then the final way to travel faster than the speed of light are things like we saw in Battlestar Galactica or Dark Matter, which were jump drives or blink drives, which is where you spool up. It’s as if you’re pulling that fabric toward you, using a ton of energy, and then you make a small jump, and then you let go and you get catapulted to where you were wanting to go. Also takes a ton of energy to do that.

You mentioned Star Wars, so I’ll just explain briefly. Star Wars is hybrid between a wormhole and a jump drive. It’s as if you’re building the wormhole as you’re traveling through that. Yes, I’ve tried to science Star Wars.

**John:** Let’s go from these big cosmological problems to really small, inside your DNA problems. We have a tradition of movies that explore science that goes too far. We have these human-animal hybrids, Island of Dr. Moreau. It turns out that hybridism is actually much more common than we would’ve guessed. Specifically chimerism, which is where a human has two different sets of DNA in themselves. We’ll put a link to a couple different articles about this. Oftentimes it’s from in the womb. You’ve absorbed your identical twin, and so both of your sets of DNA are in there. In real life, there are examples of a woman who was suspected of murder for her young children, and it turned out that she actually had a chimerism disease, disorder, that was causing these kids to be dying, or their DNA samples didn’t match who they should be, or they were not the father of their own children, weird situations that come up like this. Let’s think through some movie options, story options for chimerism. Leigh, is anything jumping to mind?

**Leigh:** I feel like my brain, it must be stuck in bad ’90s thriller mode or something, because the first thing that comes to my mind when you’re talking about this hybrid is it’s one bad twin, one good twin. They’re one human being, but it’s almost a Jekyll and Hyde situation with two personalities fighting each other and maybe one personality not remembering what the other person’s doing.

**John:** That’s literally the plot of Stephen King’s The Dark Half, which is that it’s an unborn twin.

**Leigh:** One of my favorite Stephen King books when I was a teenager. Underappreciated. That’s right, in that book he ingested his twin and it became his pen name. That’s where my brain first goes, but maybe that’s just the first piece [unclear 00:27:07] that you get out all the bad ideas before you get to the good one.

**John:** Erin, it seems like part of the issue, why we’re just discovering chimerism right now, is that there’s really no reason to check a person’s DNA unless there is a problem. It’s only in these weird fringe cases like a crime or a paternity thing that we would even notice that someone had two sets of DNA in them.

**Erin:** That seems to be the case. I think when you look up examples of chimerism, a lot that you see are aesthetic duality. You can play a lot with visuals there, where you have one half of the flower is one color, one half is another one, or a cat that’s half one type of cat and half the other type of cat, because it seems like… Again, I’m not a biologist, but it does seem like this DNA almost, it’s like they merge but they exist side by side as opposed to existing throughout the whole body. It’s really interesting.

**John:** It is. Let’s think about the kind of characters we would find in this story. Thrillers are natural, but maybe there’s options for comedies or other kinds of stories. It could be the main character is a chimera, actually has this double set of DNA. It could be like The Dark Half or it could be some other reason why they’re manifesting as two selves. It could be also the investigator who’s trying to find out how it’s possible this crime was committed by somebody who doesn’t match up to this thing or the DNA’s not matching. It could be a scientist exploring this. Leigh, any thoughts about who you’d want to see in this story?

**Leigh:** I like it from the point of view of the person living it, rather than the investigator, which turns it into a twist, like aha.

**John:** It feels like a Law and Order episode.

**Leigh:** Exactly, whereas I think a movie from the perspective of somebody who’s actually sharing their consciousness and their body with some other set of DNA, I think this could be really interesting, like a first-person. Maybe the two sides could be communicating with each other. You have these long blackouts where the other guy’s in charge. Then the two sides of the personality are communicating about what the other one’s doing. I think that’s a more interesting thing.

**John:** Erin, I’m thinking back to Star Trek: The Next Generation, or sorry, it was a later show. There’s the Dax character who has… It was a person who, they have another consciousness inside them. It feels like a trope that Star Trek has played with a bit.

**Erin:** Oh yeah, for sure. I think whether it’s a dual personality or whether it’s something that exists somewhat separately. Like you said, the Trill were these alien species that had a symbiont that would pass from a host to another. Instead of it being a chimerism thing, then you’re thinking it’s almost like two sentient entities. You’re talking a little bit more about a parasite symbiotic relationship, which is really fun. Then when I see chimerism, the first thing I think of is the original series episode, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, where you have the people who are white on one half and Black on the other. Black on the other half and white on the other half. It’s a not so deep metaphor.

**John:** I can’t imagine an analogy for anything.

**Erin:** They hate each other. Again, that’s more visual, whereas what you’re talking about is much more psychological, which I think would be a fun area of this to explore.

**John:** It’s also easier to envision a world in which chimerism was so common that people visually did look interesting. You could tell that they had multiple people in them at all times. We’ll put examples too. These people whose skin tones don’t match from side to side, but you can have more extreme examples than that. That doesn’t go quite to the black and white Star Trek, but it could be an interesting look for a character. If Craig were here, he’s always talking about hair, makeup, and wardrobe and how characters look. It could be an interesting detail for how a character looks. I like that.

When Craig was on the show, a couple weeks ago, we were talking in the Bonus Segment about population and how growing up I was always taught to fear population growth, that basically we’d run out of resources, that the world’s population was going to get too big, and now suddenly we’re facing, like, oh, populations are declining in a way that could be very detrimental, and population loss is a thing.

I want to talk about the scientific concepts behind sudden population loss. Asked on Twitter was, how much of the population do you have to lose where you go from a Leftovers situation, where they lost 3% of the population, it was sad, but life goes on, to Station 11, where they lose almost all of the population and you’re suddenly back in agrarian times. I’d love to talk through the math and science behind how much of the population you can lose before everything changes and everything falls apart.

**Erin:** When you think about population, there’s an interesting aspect, which is the exponential growth. I think I remember those messages sent from the past about how population growth is out of control. There is true to some extent, but when you really think about it, let’s imagine the blip, where half of life gets wiped out.

**John:** In the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

**Erin:** Yes, correct.

**John:** The Thanos snap.

**Erin:** I remember seeing something where people were like, if you just got rid of half the people now, our global population would be down to what it was in 1970.

**John:** Which doesn’t seem so bad at all.

**Erin:** Right, but half seems like a lot. That’s just our understanding of exponential growth, which I think we’ve also seen a lot this past year with how exponentially things can spread from one person to another. It’s hard for us to wrap our heads around sometimes. I’d probably err on going on the more extreme example of that.

**John:** It’s also this question of how quickly you lose all the people. If you lose 50% of your population in the snap of fingers, you’re also going to have a lot of collateral lost, based on the planes that were in the air and the people who are stranded and things falling apart. I think my question, which it’s hard to answer scientifically, but I think is good to grapple with as writers, is what other institutions of our civilization would just completely collapse if we didn’t have enough people to do them, that the human infrastructure behind things would be really challenging? Leigh, as you’re thinking through this space, we always talk about post-apocalyptic and we always think about, oh, there are zombies now or there’s some other problem, but honestly just having not enough people can be its own struggle.

**Leigh:** I was going to say, maybe the most interesting thing for me would be somewhere between the Leftovers and Station 11, whereas Leftovers was a chunk of the population and they were just dealing with the weirdness of it, and then Station 11 is everybody. What if it was like all of a sudden, there’s still a lot of people, but it’s half what was there before, and suddenly it’s like, wait, nobody knows how to make this anymore. We lost most of our scientists. It’d be interesting to suddenly see people having to grapple with minds that have been lost. A lot of people who were maybe working on things that were going to improve the planet are suddenly gone.

**Erin:** That’s so funny you say that, because I really feel… When I worked in engineering, and in academia, we had a lot of people that were like that, that had been in the industry for 30, 40 years, and make the morbid joke, like, man, he better not get hit by a bus. We’re in so much trouble.

**John:** Think back to the Y2K bug and all the problems that could’ve happened if we’d not been able to pull people out of retirement to fix the computer systems that were written in. Was it Coble?

**Erin:** Yeah.

**John:** They were the folks who actually knew how those things were built. If you lose certain people who know certain things, that’s going to be a huge impact, the folks who actually know how to run the nuclear power plants or know how to run our water systems. You look at the zombie shows, you look at The Walking Dead, and the zombies are terrifying, but not being able to use a sink is also terrifying.

**Leigh:** You think about time travel, I remember talking to a friend once and saying, “Yeah, I’d love to go back in time, 200 years. I would just rule the population by holding up my iPhone.” My friend was like, “Yeah, but could you explain to them how it works?” I was like, “No.” He was like, “What happens when it runs out of batteries? What would you do? Could you explain to them how a toaster works?” I was like, “No, but I could tell them what it was.” He was like, “You would very quickly be flayed and hung on the castle and you wouldn’t amount to anything because you can’t actually make anything or explain it.” He was very right about that.

**John:** That’s where I think it’s so interesting about sudden population loss, because it’s like time travel, where you’re having to revert back to an earlier time, even though you’re moving forward in time. It’s like certain things just can’t be done anymore because you don’t have those capabilities. As you think about this as a movie, let’s think about what characters we may want to see in this story, which also I guess depends on what time frame we want to tell our story in. Station 11, it’s both present day and jumping forward 20 years to what happens after that.

**Leigh:** What if it was a scientist character who was building something that maybe was going to some sort of climate technology that was maybe going to improve the world, and then suddenly he was part of the population that disappeared, and his teenage children or adult children are suddenly left with this thing that they don’t understand how it works, that their father was the mastermind of. He’s creating a tension there of we have all this stuff, but we don’t know how it works anymore.

**Erin:** Yeah, or even their colleagues or their people that they were mentoring or that are now having to piece together what they were working on.

**Leigh:** Exactly. There we go. Let’s [unclear 00:36:22].

**John:** In the second South Park movie about COVID, that actually is a plot point, where this one guy has built this thing that no one else can figure out how to do. It’s definitely an idea that’s out there, that sense of the person who’s created the situation is the only person who can solve it, and we can’t find the person who created the situation, which feels great. That person is probably not the central character. That’s the obstacle, the McGuffin we’re looking after. It’s either children of that person or someone else who is searching.

**Leigh:** Perhaps the thing that caused the massive population loss could be what the scientist character was working on. Suddenly he’s one of the people that’s gone, and his children or his colleagues, as Erin said, have to figure out how it works before everybody’s gone. There’s this ticking clock of how do we figure out how this thing works before we all disappear and there’s not 50% of the people here, there’s 0%.

**John:** At least pointing out that we have to have continuous stakes. If it’s a onetime event where we lose half the population, that’s horrible and there’s repercussions, but what are the ongoing stakes? What’s the ongoing narrative tension that’s being built up through the situation? Something like it’s going to keep happening.

**Leigh:** Maybe if there’s a rip in the dimensional fabric. Now we’re getting into Marvel territory. If there’s some sort of cataclysmic event, cosmic event causing the population loss, and this machine or device that the scientist character, she or he has been working on and is suddenly gone, I think as that tear in the cosmic fabric gets bigger and bigger, you’re like, there’s something to work towards.

**Erin:** I really like the idea of it being a continuous event and that ticking bomb of like, all right, we have to make this as accessible and as understandable to anyone, because we don’t know who’s going to go next.

**John:** Let’s talk about accessibility and understandability, because our characters in the movie are trying to understand it, but also we as an audience have to understand it. I think back to, Leigh, your explanation of how the suit works in Invisible Man. It was really clear. You were showing it to us. We were seeing it happen. It’s like, oh, I get what it was, and there wasn’t anything more to it. Anything that’s involving a scientist concept, we have to think about what is the simplest, most logical way to explain what’s happening here without over-explaining it.

**Leigh:** I always love people explaining something to a child. It’s always helpful, because then again, I think it’s a way to dramatize exposition. I feel like one of the gold standards for this is the scene in Jurassic Park when they sit down and they get the kids animation that’s like, hey kids.

**Erin:** 1,000%.

**Leigh:** Here’s how dinosaur DNA works. I remember the 13-year-old watching that movie in theaters. Within 30 seconds, the writers and the filmmakers had completely explained this hugely complicated concept of extracting dinosaur DNA from mummified mosquitoes. All of a sudden I was like, “Great, got it,” and they can just move on with the monsters and the crashing and the bashing. It was beautiful. I feel like if you involve a child, and the child’s like, “I don’t understand,” and you just have a character saying, “Look, this McGuffin over here is going to fix all our problems,” I feel like that’s a good way to explain it to the audience.

**Erin:** It’s a classic trope we use in Star Trek all the time. It started with Spock over-explaining something and then Kirk giving a blank stare and getting a much more simple–

**Leigh:** [unclear 00:39:50].

**John:** Then you have McCoy saying, “No one could possibly understand this.”

**Leigh:** I’ve noticed a tic in screenwriting. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, John. I’ve noticed a tic with screenwriting, like in Marvel movies and stuff, not to keep calling them out, but they’ll have one of their characters… I’m just making this up on the spot. They’ll have one of their characters say something like… It has to sound creative scientific and very complicated. One of the characters will say, “No, listen, what we need to do is take the interlocker and connect it to the vectranon and then when we plug it twofolds back into what we would consider dimensional da da da, then we’ll be okay.” Then one of the other characters will say, “Time travel. You’re talking about time travel.” It’s like, oh my god, they do it every time. I look around the theater, and I’m like, is it only our screenwriters noticing this tic?

**John:** I do want to give a shout-out to Episode 419 of Scriptnotes with David Koepp, where we actually talk about the film strip inside of Jurassic Park that explains all.

**Leigh:** Can I ask you, John, is there an actual industry screenwriters nickname for that thing of saying, “Time travel.”

**John:** In some ways it’s like hanging a lantern on the exposition. Basically someone’s explaining jargony stuff, and they do have some character comment on the fact that you’re explaining jargony stuff. It’s a little bit hanging a lantern, but if a listener has a suggestion for, oh, that’s what we called this, we’re happy to popularize a term for that phenomenon that I’ve definitely noticed.

**Erin:** I have no problem with it, because it’s been my entry into the industry is to write them, is to write those scenes.

**Leigh:** You do the jargony part for the screenwriter, and then the screenwriter comes in and goes, “Flying. You’re talking about humans flying.”

**John:** I love it. This whole thing has been a thought experiment on different story topics. Our next one actually is a thought experiment. It originated on a rationalist message board. It’s called Roko’s Basilisk. Basically the greatly simplified version is that a future artificial intelligence might punish or otherwise take action against anyone who stood in its way, including those in the past. It gets a little hand wavey, but essentially, because for all we know, we’re living in a simulation, AI could torture us, or torture indistinguishable copies of us, and so therefore, we shouldn’t try to stand in the AI’s way.

**Leigh:** John, just in reading the article, I did have one point of confusion, which was just how does this hypothetical AI torture people in the past? Does it have time travel capabilities?

**John:** Basically, because it could create a simulation with us in it, that would be indistinguishable from us, it’s torturing a version of you, even if you, Leigh Whannell–

**Leigh:** Right, but I would not be affected by my simulation being tortured. My simulation wouldn’t be having a good time, but I myself would not be–

**John:** If you stick it in the framework under which all these other discussions are being had, if a version of you is being tortured, it is you being tortured, if that thing is indistinguishable. That’s my best understanding. Help me out, Erin.

**Erin:** As far as I understand it, and this is one of those things that does result in crying in the shower in the middle of the night, but the way I have thought about it is it’s… This is why they talk about it as a doing thought experiment.

**Leigh:** I love when the article says, “Be warned. Just reading this article may send you insane.”

**Erin:** What they’re trying to get across is, once you’ve learned this sentient, all-knowing artificial intelligence could exist in the future, you now have a decision if you’re going to be one to help that or to not help it. Your decisions as you make along the way could influence that one way or the other and it could eventually punish you. Again, as John mentioned, there are versions of this where it’s in a simulation or we’re living already in that simulation. Extrapolating the probabilities of your own behavior, like when we code NPCs in video games, non-player characters in video games, we’re assuming they’re going to make decisions based on what you do. It’s the same idea that this artificial intelligence will make a decision based on what we’re deciding to do. It’s very philosophical.

**Leigh:** Maybe the movie there, so as not to skirt too closely to the Matrix, although maybe it already is, maybe the movie there is that there is an anti-AI scientist, somebody who is a distinguished scientist who believes that AI is the wrong direction to go in, if we give it too much power, suddenly starts to find their life falling apart. Things are happening. Maybe people they know aren’t recognizing them anymore. Starts to work out that the AI that this scientist colleague invents in the future is now inflicting pain on a simulation, but somehow that simulated version of this main character is affecting her own life. Somehow the simulation is bleeding into her own life, and it becomes this almost Jacob’s Ladder version of what’s real, what’s not, how can a supercomputer in the future be tearing apart my current reality.

**Erin:** It brings up good things you can play with with free will. Am I going to choose this? I’ve been predetermined to choose this. Everything I’ve been exposed to in the past says I’m going to choose this, but now I know that it knows I’m going to choose that.

**Leigh:** Maybe the main character’s life starts falling apart so much that the AI in the future sends her a message somehow, be it through somebody else or whatever, but saying, “This can all stop if you get on board and help your colleague to make me what I am today.” She has this moral crossroads of do I stop this tearing apart of my life and help my colleague create this thing that is tearing apart my life, or do I keep on my current track of trying to stop something that I think is bad for humanity.

**Erin:** I got to say, this reminds me of a film, Superintelligence, with Melissa McCarthy. It was really similar to this.

**Leigh:** Oh wow.

**Erin:** Really weirdly similar to this.

**John:** Let’s pull back a little bit and look at the article in context, because the headline is, are there basically ideas that are too dangerous to think. That reminds me of The Ring. Once you’ve seen the videotape in The Ring, you are cursed and you are going to die in seven days. I think there’s some aspect of once you’ve been exposed to a thing, you can’t ever get away from it, feels like an evergreen topic. Everything we’ve been describing feels like a horror film [unclear 00:46:23] in some ways. That knowledge could be a curse that you carry with you.

This also reminds me of, there’s a book that Megan McDonald and I both like a lot, called There is No Antimemetics Division, which has a sense of ideas that you can’t actually see or think, because they are anti-memes. They’re memes that are so powerful that they worm their way into your head. There’s something that feels scary about this, but also not necessarily super cinematic. I’m having a hard time picturing a thing that a camera would be pointed at.

**Erin:** I could picture it being a very heady hard sci-fi, psychological sci-fi horror about how do you forget you learned something, truly forget it.

**Leigh:** Also, if you have an AI in the future that’s torturing you, I almost see it as a science fiction Jacob’s Ladder where the character’s life is falling apart in really eerie and scary ways because this entity in the future is messing with her reality somehow. I can see things to point the camera at.

**John:** You’re quire a director. I’m also thinking early Darren Aronofsky. I’m thinking Aronofsky around Pi and that sense of people who get so obsessed with ideas that it takes over their life. [unclear 00:47:40].

**Leigh:** I want to pitch what I’m working on right now, because every time you guys are talking about seeing things in space that don’t make sense or a character becoming so obsessed with an idea, I’m like, I just want to pitch it, but [unclear 00:47:53] so I can’t.

**John:** Let’s go back out to very, very wide and things we can’t point a camera at, which would be solar storms. I’d love to talk about the reality and dramatic potential of solar storms, which are basically… The surface of our sun sometimes puts off these giant plumes of fire and radiation that can mess up life on Earth. We have records of these things that happened. There have been telegraph lines becoming charged and paper catching fire. That was before we had all the modern technology. If we were to be hit by one of these right now, it would be really, really bad. Erin, can you give us a sense of what a solar flare or solar storm could be like? You’d mentioned gamma ray bursts earlier on. There are things out there that are just really bad if they hit the Earth.

**Erin:** Yeah, space will kill us. I love that you brought this up. The big bad solar storms are called coronal mass ejections or CMEs. Actually, we wrote this into an episode of Season Three of Star Trek: Discovery, where the engineer referred to it as a star burp. We will simplify it to that. Like you said, it unleashes a huge amount of radiation, a huge amount of heat. Now you’ll survive the Earth getting hit by a CME. A gamma ray burst is such high radiation, you’re just going to fry. A solar storm isn’t going to necessarily hurt you, but what it does do, as you said, is it takes down technology. It’s a huge electromagnetic pulse.

You mentioned the telegraphs and the papers catching on fire. That was from an event in 1859 called the Carrington Event. That was when Earth got hit by a CME right at the early stages of this industrial era. It was so powerful, it took down transformers. It blew out all the telegraph lines. People who were using telegraphs, it set their paper on fire. They got shocked by it. It’s crazy. It’s come close to happening these days. I think in 2012 we discovered a couple years later we only missed one by a couple weeks. It can happen, and the implications are numerous and delightful and catastrophic.

**John:** It’s not hard to envision the big catastrophe movie of this, which would be everything gets taken down. Let’s set a moment to think about the period film of this. If we actually were to make a movie about the Carrington Event and what that would be like, in some ways it could be charming. It would be a disruption and things could happen, but it’d be a good parable for losing this technology we counted on and having to do things the old way or something like you can’t send a message out and so you’re isolated. There’s something charming about that image.

**Leigh:** Yeah, that’s actually a great idea. I actually think just that concept, it almost is by the by now when you talk about the solar storms. It’s like a movie based on what would happen to us all if none of our devices worked anymore, if suddenly everyone teenager’s TikTok in the world was not available to them. I think I can see an interesting dramedy about that.

**John:** As we went through this pandemic, it was bad. Everyone agrees, it sucked, but we still had our technology. Without our technology, it would’ve been much, much, much worse. Our ability to get things and communicate with people, if we didn’t have Zoom and FaceTime and phone calls, it’s hard to even imagine how much worse this would’ve been. Scaling back up to the modern day catastrophe movie, it would be horrible. It would be one of those pre-apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic kind of scenarios. We could get our way back, but it would be really, really hard.

**Erin:** I think it’s fun to explore. I’ve tried playing around with different stories with this too. We could be sitting here having this conversation, a CME could hit us, and it’d just all be gone. All the cell towers are gone. None of the electricity works. All the power lines are down. What do you do in that situation?

**John:** A question for you. I’m envisioning the Earth turning in space. Does it only hit half of us or does it hit the whole planet? Do we know what would happen?

**Erin:** Good question. That’s why we’ve dodged them in the past is because it’s just lined up with Earth’s orbit or not. Yes, if a CME hits us, it will affect the whole Earth, because of Earth’s magnetic field. These are all charged particles. If you think about iron filaments in a magnet, they’re all going to align with that. Certainly the side that’s hit direct will be affected by it, but the magnetic field of Earth will carry that throughout. There are some nuances to it, but it would definitely be a global event.

**John:** We talked through these different scenarios and different story ideas. Obviously, we’re overlapping so much with what Leigh’s already writing that he’s really angry at us now.

**Leigh:** No, I’m not angry at all. I’m desperate to almost chat it over with you so you guys can shoot holes in it and talk about it with me, but maybe to do that publicly wouldn’t be wise.

**John:** Maybe we’ll do that offline.

**Erin:** We’ll take it offline.

**John:** Yeah, we’ll do that. Thank you for talking us through the science behind all these things. If a studio were developing one of these ideas, how would they enlist your help in doing this? How early do you come in in a process? Do you come in when there’s a script done and the director’s figuring out some stuff? What is the best way to involve a scientific professional like you on this?

**Erin:** I’m naturally moving into the writer space. Other science consultants have done the same. Naren Shankar and Andre Bormanis both got their starts as science consultants on Star Trek. It’s very easy now for me to see how that transitions into a writing career, but what I’ve found with other writers is the earlier the better, because we can brainstorm fun ideas. We can break story. We can add layers that you might not have thought of, that have this backbone of science. Then we also don’t have to undo anything, just because it doesn’t quite fit. It’s not that I would never not let you do something, but it just means that we can make it stronger by getting ahead of stuff.

**John:** Erin, if somebody were working on a thing like the chimeras in a story, obviously they can do a lot of research themselves, but what would be your recommendation for finding experts or finding people in the field who they could actually bounce ideas off of? Do you have any guidance on that?

**Erin:** Yeah, there’s a few resources. The Science and Entertainment Exchange is one in LA that is available to writers. I know the WGA has some connections as well, that you’re able to reach out to them. I’m hired as a science consultant, and sometimes I do get asked biology questions. My role for that predominantly is to reach out to experts I know and whom I trust, but also that I have that research background to filter through a lot of the BS, to not waste anyone’s time, and that I can translate that in a way that helps your story. There’s lots of resources. Twitter’s also a great way to reach out to science communicators and people who are good at translating stuff for you.

**John:** Fantastic. We have one question here Megana’s put on Workflowy. Do you want to ask that for us?

**Megana:** Greta asks, “I’m writing a sci-fi horror project about an experimental medical procedure. I’ve gotten really caught up researching the science and mechanics of drug trials, etc, but when I watch other movies in the genre, they don’t seem to spend much time explaining or justifying the premise. My question is, how do I get out of the way of my own backstory?”

**John:** That’s a good question. We talked a little bit about that in the great explainer in Jurassic Park, which is such an efficient talking it through, like this is how this is all going to work. As I think through, so many of my favorite movies that are in a scientific space don’t spend a lot of time on the science. It’s just part of the premise itself. Leigh, with both Invisible Man and Upgrade, you have scientists in those movies, but they’re not sciencing that much.

**Leigh:** I feel like I remember reading an interview with a guitarist once who was playing really experimental, seemingly crazy music. He’s like, “Yeah, but you have to know the rules to do this. You got to learn the rules and then forget them.” I feel like one thing for me is just to know what the science is. In the case of The Invisible Man, I had my theory and had written out how I thought the suit worked, but I didn’t feel the need necessarily to have a scene where somebody explains that in detail.

I feel like sometimes you knowing how the science in your film works can filter through your screenplay in more of a drip feed fashion than this exposition dump. I do feel like audiences pick up on a lot. John, you said before, “I saw the suit and I felt like I knew how it worked,” but I didn’t really have anybody explaining it in the movie. I did have a couple of people say, “You didn’t even explain how the suit worked.” I guess you’ll never please everybody. My policy is just to know it yourself, but not necessarily force that knowledge on the audience in a heavy-handed way.

**Megana:** Do you find yourself ever going through in a pass and taking out some of the science if you’ve overwritten it?

**Leigh:** Sometimes, yeah, because I guess when you get into editing you realize that the essential bone marrow of the film is just the story, and anything that’s not pushing it forward is window dressing. What I actually love is one thing that you’ve talked about, Erin, that you do, is giving people technical terminology. There’s this thing that I love where it’s like when you’re watching a film and you feel like you’re in the hand of authority. If I’m watching a scene with neurosurgeons and somebody’s like, “Hand me the excavator,” is like, “Three milliliters of da da da da,” I don’t need to know what that stuff is. What I do need to know is that the people on screen know what it is.

It works very well in spy movies when somebody sits down and is using terminology that I don’t understand. If somebody sits down, some CIA guy, and is like, “This whole thing’s a blackout. I’m going to need a two-day wash-up on this,” I don’t know to know what those nicknames are. I’m like, “Oh, wash-up, that sounds important.” The scene would be bad if the character sat down and said, “Oh, this whole thing’s a blackout,” and the character they were talking to said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I’m pretty new here at the CIA. What’s a blackout again?” and the guy was like, “A blackout is when an operation goes totally south and we have to pretend it didn’t exist.” If I was watching that movie, I’d be like, “Oh my god, you had me at blackout. What are you doing?”

The script I’m working on right now, just to give you guys… I’ve been talking to someone about telescopes, super duper powerful telescopes. This guy from Cal Tech was giving me all these terms that they use that I’ve been dropping in the script, like, “Check the baffles.” I wouldn’t explain to anybody what baffles are or anything. By the way, if I’m remembering correctly, it’s the black sheeting that keeps light away from the telescope.

**Erin:** Very nice.

**Leigh:** What I would do in the script is have someone on screen say, “Check the baffles,” and then somebody else would be like, “Baffles are all good.” I really don’t think the audience would be sitting there going, “Wait a minute, what about baffles? I’m lost.” All they need to know is that these guys are scientists who know their shit. That’s the most important thing.

**Erin:** The counterpoint too is that it gives a lot of good credibility when you do have that one astronomer or that one neurosurgeon who’s watching it, and they’re like, “Yeah, they used the right word.” [Unclear 00:59:15].

**Leigh:** On Upgrade I got a lot of comments, or I saw a lot of comments on Twitter from hacker types who would say, “He used the right terminology for that hack.”

**Erin:** Makes a big difference. It makes a huge difference. I’d still caution people to throw the techno babble in, as I like to call it, but making sure that it is right. You don’t have to explain it, but make sure what you’ve got is at least as close to possible.

**Leigh:** It’s not important for the audience to know how the science works. It’s just important that they believe the people on the screen know how the science works.

**John:** Exactly the point. You have to believe that the characters know what they’re doing and are doing things properly. The case with Star Trek, Erin, I will say that there’s techno jargon, but it’s also very Star Trek-specific techno jargon, because you want to make sure that you’re referring to the same things in the same way, episode to episode, series by series, that it’s consistent.

**Erin:** That’s a lot of the reason they brought me on to be available to the whole franchise was to maintain that consistency, because that’s five shows. Once shows are off and running, they’re operating pretty independently. Having someone double checking how one show’s talking about transporters or talking about warp drives or imposing any numbers or star dates, all that stuff is in my purview to make sure that that all stays consistent, and consistent with the last 55 years of Star Trek. No pressure.

**John:** I bet we have some listeners who are so envious of your job. It does sound remarkable.

**Erin:** Thank you.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Annie Rauwerda for Input. She’s talking about the love story behind… In Wikipedia, if you look up High Five, there are these four photos of this man and this woman doing high five, down low, too slow, showing what those actual things are. They’re the public main photos for those things. It’s tracking down who were those people in those photos and what is their deal, because they look to be like they’re in college. It’s not clear, are they a couple? What’s going on? The spoiler for it is they are actually a couple. They are actually married. They have two kids now. It was lovely to see a thing that’s been on the internet forever and tracking through who those people are now. It’s a lovely story that has nothing to do with science whatsoever, but made me happy as I was reading it.

**Leigh:** Very good.

**John:** Leigh, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Leigh:** My thing would be, I’ve been reading these short story collections by an author named Brian Evenson lately. I’m really loving his short stories. He writes these, I wouldn’t call them horror stories necessarily, but they are somehow infused with existential dread. Literary horror I guess would maybe be the term. He’s written a few collections of short stories. I just read one called A Collapse of Horses. He has another one that I’m just about to start reading called The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell. Actually, each story is related to somehow, going by the back blurb, each story is related to what we are doing to our environment and our planet. I guess he’s building these stories of eerie dread out of the way our planet’s going. His stories, some of them are very short. They’re just amazing little bite-size chunks to read before bed or whenever, just because we don’t have enough existential dread in society right now. Things are going just fine, and you want to feel more uneasy.

**John:** We love it. Erin, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Erin:** Yeah. I’m taking the opposite approach to Leigh in terms of existential dread and confronting it or running away from it. I have gotten really back into comic books and comic book stories and that lighthearted, fun, skirting around sci-fi fantasy world. I’m reading a book right now called We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen. It is a delightfully fun book about two characters. One has woken up with no memory, but he’s able to erase other people’s memories, so now he becomes a super villain. He holds up banks in order to buy coffee and books. Then another character is also looking for her past. She can’t remember, but she can go really fast, and so she deliveries fast food. They meet in a memory loss support group and then they team up. I haven’t finished it, but it is an absolute delight to read. It’s We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen.

**John:** That sounds absolutely great. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Contra Entropy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Leigh, where are you on Twitter?

**Leigh:** @lwhannell.

**John:** Great. Erin, where can people find you on Twitter?

**Erin:** @drerinmac. That’s D-R E-R-I-N M-A-C.

**John:** Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where we’ll have links to articles and topics that we discuss today on the show. You’ll also find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can 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 Leigh’s fantasy mall. For now, Erin and Leigh, it was an absolute pleasure. Leigh, thank you for coming back on the show. Erin, you’re welcome back on the show any time. This was a delight having you here.

**Erin:** Thank you. I had a great time.

**Leigh:** Thanks, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Leigh, on Twitter one night I saw you pitch this idea of like, would anyone go to a period shopping mall where basically you were in the ‘80s or the ‘90s and everything inside this shopping mall, presumably a dead mall that you’d resurrected for the thing, would be of that time period. Am I explaining your concept properly?

**Leigh:** Yeah, pretty much. It was interesting. This idea of mine lives in the gray area somewhere between an actual business plan and a stoned 2 a.m. thought. It’s somewhere in the middle there. I just sent up this tweet. It got a lot of attention, maybe more so than my usual tweets. Once you get the attention of the internet, that can be a bad thing. The 17 Scandinavian Saw fans that usually respond to my every tweet are nothing but positive. All of a sudden the darkest tentacles of the internet were like… If we had to think of the internet as a creature unto itself and not millions of individual people, I’m always astounded at the anger of it.

In that tweet that you’re referring to, I said, “Would anyone want to come and visit this period ‘80s themed mall with movie theaters, but if you had to give up your phone to keep up the illusion of it being the ‘80s, would you do it?” It was astounding, the number of people who were like, “You can take my phone when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.” I was like, whoa, calm down, random guy, not really posing this. I was also astounded by the number of people who would quote tweet it and write, “So…a mall,” or like, “Hey, what if I took a mall and turned it into a mall?”

No, random people. I will use this podcast as an opportunity to say, basically what it would be is a little nostalgia theme park, that you take a dead mall and you make it all very period, so the cinema just shows ‘80s films. The arcade there just has vintage games that were around in this era of the mid ‘80s, the food, everything about it. Basically it’s essentially a Stranger Things theme park. You’re walking around. I just know that if someone did do this, I would want to be there every day. I would want to drink it in. It is something I’ve thought about a lot over the past year.

**John:** Now Erin, would you visit Leigh’s mall?

**Erin:** I would. Depends how long, but again, I spend a lot of time in malls. I don’t know if I have a ton of nostalgia for it.

**Leigh:** What I think the idea is, it’s not so much a mall, like hey, you’re here in a mall to go shopping. It takes the shape of a mall, but it’s really an adult theme park. I went to this place in Portland, Oregon a few years ago with my friends. It was called the Kennedy School.

**John:** The Kennedy School’s great. Describe it, because it really is a very unique place.

**Leigh:** Incredible, especially for someone who lives in LA, which is a city that I don’t think has great entrepreneurial bar and entertainment options that are happening, new ones. Basically, the Kennedy School, this company has bought this old elementary school, which I think was called something something Kennedy School. They bought it and they’ve converted it into this entertainment complex for adults. It has movie theaters in there, a bowling alley, several different bars. It’s a one-stop shop that you can go to. Instead of doing a bar crawl down a street, you go to the Kennedy School, and you walk in and there’s one little bar here, and then there’s a movie theater, and you can plan a night around it. I just remember being blown away. I don’t know how you felt, John.

**John:** I went there for a lunch. It was cool that it was clearly a public school and everything looked like a public school, but it had just been turned into a bar and restaurant, movie theater. I think there was even a hotel.

**Erin:** That sounds awesome.

**Leigh:** I loved it. Dammit, see, Erin’s loving this Kennedy School idea way more than my mall idea. The great thing about it is you’re walking down the corridor, and it was like an elementary school corridor with the little hooks for the coats and everything. I guess my mall would be like that. It’s not a mall in the sense that you can shop there. It’s restaurants and bars and entertainment options would be the only… There would be a movie theater, a bowling alley, an arcade, three or four different food courts, and different bars. It would all be housed in the shape of a mall. Maybe there would be some performance art. Maybe somebody is doing 80s style robot dancing or something. You could really build this little insular world.

I like this world building thing that’s happening with theme parks. I went to the Stars Wars World at Disneyland recently. I loved the all-encompassing nature of it, that when you walked in, it’s like you’d left this planet and you were now interacting with Storm Troopers.

**Erin:** I love that.

**Leigh:** I guess this would be the ‘80s nostalgia version of that Star Wars theme park. Maybe there’s a video store there or something.

**John:** We need to ask Megana Rao, who’s too young to have ‘80s nostalgia, would you visit Leigh’s ‘80s nostalgia mall.

**Megana:** Yeah. I like arcade games and bowling and things. I miss mall food courts. Would you have that there?

**Leigh:** Absolutely. Absolutely.

**Megana:** Yeah, I’m in.

**Leigh:** It would be good food. You would gussy it up a bit. It would have the look of an ‘80s style mall food court, but the food would be a little bit better.

**John:** Let’s talk about how we manifest this vision of yours, because I would like to visit this mall too. Who builds this? How much control do you want over this? Do you just want it to exist and be able to visit it or do you want to have some role in making it exist?

**Leigh:** It’s one of those things where a lot of people say if nobody’s doing it, you should do it. I’ve read a lot of interviews with people that have opened restaurants or whatever, and they’ve said, “I decided to open this restaurant because it didn’t exist.” If I’m to take that approach, I have no hospitality experience, so I guess I would have to get in touch with someone who is some sort of venture capitalist or had some experience in experiential… I do know there was a guy at Blumhouse who I’ve worked with a few times who was in charge of their maze experiences or anything that was real.

**John:** Escape rooms, that kind of stuff.

**Leigh:** Exactly. Maybe someone in that field who could… Maybe you could tie it in with… For all I know, you could go into Netflix and say, hey, this could be Stranger–

**John:** Stranger Things. If you are a Scriptnotes listener who is probably wealthy, but also has experience in hospitality, that could be great. I think about my friend Ryan Reynolds has a gin company. Ryan Reynolds doesn’t know anything about gin. He didn’t go into this knowing anything about gin. He wasn’t a gin expert. He had an appreciation for it, and he built this company and sold it for a gazillion dollars. I just want this to be your gin, Leigh. I want this to be your Aviation Gin.

**Leigh:** I feel like with your encouragement this might exist one day.

**John:** We’ll hope so. We’ll have you back on the show for that.

**Leigh:** Excellent.

**John:** We’ll do live Scriptnotes from your mall. I promise you that when the mall opens, Craig and I, we’ll commit Craig to doing a live Scriptnotes at your mall.

**Leigh:** Thank you. Excellent. I’ve got two guaranteed customers.

**John:** Leigh, Erin, thank you so much.

**Leigh:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [Ed Solomon’s Tweet on MIB Movie Accounting](https://twitter.com/ed_solomon/status/1495249600428523522)
* [What is a Dyson sphere?](https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-a-dyson-sphere/) and [Dyson spheres on Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere)
* [What is a Human Chimera?](https://www.insider.com/what-is-a-human-chimera-and-how-does-it-happen-2017-11) and [Becoming Two People At Once](https://interestingengineering.com/becoming-two-people-at-once-human-chimerism)
* Stephen King’s [The Dark Half](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Half)
* [The Science Behind the Endgame Snap](https://www.fandom.com/articles/avengers-endgame-science-snap) and [Minimum Viable Population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population)
* [Rokos Basilisk: The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time](https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/rokos-basilisk-the-most-terrifying-thought-experiment-of-all-time.html)
* [There is No Antimemetics Division](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FHHQRM2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by qntm
* [Are Solar Storms Dangerous to Us?](https://earthsky.org/space/are-solar-storms-dangerous-to-us/) and [How We’ll Safeguard Earth From a Solar Storm Catastrophe](https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/space/how-we-ll-safeguard-earth-solar-storm-catastrophe-n760021)
* [The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos](https://www.inputmag.com/culture/wikipedia-high-five-too-slow-photos-mystery-couple-solved) by Annie Rauwerda for Input
* [A Collapse of Horses](https://theamericanreader.com/a-collapse-of-horses/) a short story collection by Bryan Evanston
* [We Could be Heroes](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087JJ5G5K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Mike Chen
* [Leigh Whannell](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1191481/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/lwhannell?lang=en) and Leigh’s [80’s mall tweet](https://twitter.com/LWhannell/status/1490133853607919616)
* [Erin Macdonald](https://www.erinpmacdonald.com/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/drerinmac?lang=en)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Contra Entropy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/539standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/mistakes-of-yes).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin.

**John August:** This is Episode 532 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re looking at how you move from scene to scene. That’s right, transitions. It’s a clip show where we listen back to past John and past Craig as they offer their advice, which for all we know, is better than our current advice, because we were younger then, and fresher.

**Craig Mazin:** So much younger than today.

**John August:** Now we actually got an email in from a listener recently saying like, “Oh, I went back and listened to your early episodes, expecting it to be different, that John and Craig would’ve grown and changed a lot.” She said, “No, actually, you know what? It was the same. Your microphones weren’t as good, but it was the same show,” which I was heartened by.

**Craig Mazin:** Yes, I think it might’ve been a man.

**John August:** Oh. It could’ve been either one.

**Craig Mazin:** I think based on that name I think it’s a guy, but either way, I wanted to say to that fellow that no, of course we weren’t great at that then, and we have gotten better. Maybe it’s just that we found something where we weren’t accountable to anybody at all. Sometimes the key is that if you have something where you’re completely free within it to do whatever you want, how you want to do it, without any accountability whatsoever, and no expectation or ambition or anything, then there is a purity to it, and people who are going to like that purity are going to like it. If you dig Scriptnotes Episode 500, yeah, you’ll probably like 1 through 10. If you hate Episode 500, I guarantee you’ll hate 1 through 10. We’ve said a lot.

Don’t get fooled by the way things look on the other side of stuff. Here, hopefully you just listen to me talk about how ashamed I am all the time and how I feel bad about myself, and I try and work on that really, really hard. Don’t compare yourself to anybody. Basically in your letter you said, “To be honest, I was hoping that you guys weren’t as good at the beginning. It would’ve given me hope to get better myself at my stuff.” You have plenty of hope. You’re doing a hard thing. You’re trying to do a hard thing. You’re going to move at the speed you move.

**John August:** Yeah, and I always also say at the beginning we were new to podcasting, but we weren’t necessarily new to screenwriting and offering advice to screenwriters. That was a not a new thing for us to do. It was just sticking a mic in front of us was the new aspect of it.

Let’s travel back in time and look at transitions. These are three conversations we’ve had over the years. We’re going to start with Episode 446: Back To Basics, where we talk about the origin of screenwriting, opening scenes, what a scene is, what it means, and the difference between formatting and transition versus the psychology of what a transition actually does, like how you’re moving from scene to scene versus the actual words you’re using.

In 493 on our Opening Scenes conversation, we talk about how you begin a screenplay, the process for thinking about opening scenes, the rules and expectations. We talk about Chernobyl some. It feels like a lot of what we’re talking about in this is really relevant to transitions, basically how are we going to get the story started and how are we going to get the audience moving with us into the plot.

Finally, we’re going to go back to Episode 89, which is probably, wow, eight years ago?

**Craig Mazin:** Peesh.

**John August:** Yeah. We’re looking at technical approaches to different types of transitions, so literally what are the words on a page that is signaling to the reader that this is how we are going to be moving from this scene to that scene. Literally it’s the right-hand margin stuff we’ll get into in that last
segment.

Three segments here. We’ll also put a link in the show notes to some blog posts where we talk about transitions. If you’re a Premium member stick around, because when we come back at the end, we are going to be discussing how to get out of a conversation, so it’s really the transition between I am talking with you right now and I don’t want to be talking with you any longer. We’ll be discussing how to end conversations, both in person and online.

Now let me make a transition out of this opening segment into our three pre-recorded bits. Craig, can you help me out with this transition?

**Craig Mazin:** No.

**John August:** Perfect.

All right. This is a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, and so I thought we might actually take this time in Episode 446 to define screenwriting and what screenwriting actually is, because I don’t know if we’ve actually talked about it in actually that much depth, weirdly, over the course of this, because Craig, you did your solo episode about how to write a screenplay. That was really fundamentally 101 the things about writing a screenplay, but I wanted to do some backstory about the origin of screenwriting and how screenwriting began to what it’s become now and what those transitions were.

I have three things I want to keep in mind as we talk about what a screenwriter does and what screenwriting is, and maybe tease them apart a little bit, because I think especially newer people who are approaching screenwriting, which we have a bunch of new people listening, just because they watched Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge last week, really talk about what the screenwriter does and what screenwriting is about.

**Craig Mazin:** I hope that my understanding of it is correct. I’ll be very embarrassed if I’m wrong.

**John August:** I think you will probably be very, very correct. Let’s talk about the origin of screenwriting, because screenwriting as an art form is only about a century old, because movies are only about a century old. When the first motion picture cameras were aimed at things and it went beyond just photographing a train coming into a station, to actually trying to tell a story with a camera, at some point people recognized, oh, you know what, it would help if we wrote down the plan for what we’re going to do before we actually shot this stuff. Those initial things that would become screenplays were just a list of shots, or a plan for how you’re going to do the things. When we talk about screenwriting being like architecture, that’s what we’re getting to is that sense of like it’s a plan for the thing you’re going to make. It is a blueprint for what the ultimate finished product is going to be, which is the finished film, the thing that a person is going to watch, which is not the literary document or not the paper document that we’re starting off with. Craig, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those first screenplays, but they don’t closely resemble what we do now.

**Craig Mazin:** No. I think that when people say a screenplay is a blueprint, I always get a little fussy about it, but in this aspect of it, that’s exactly what it is. Part of a screenplay, a screenplay is many, many things at once, one of the things a screenplay is and has always been, going back to those first ones, is essentially a business plan. It is an outline of where you need to be and how long you need to be there and what needs to be seen. There’s not a lot of art to it. It really is more of an organizational thing, and the modern counterpart to it I guess would just be sometimes a director will come in and make a little shot list for the day. That is appropriate to blueprint.

**John August:** Yeah, or agenda. It’s basically these are the steps. This is how we’re going to do it. Because it’s written on eight and a half by 11 paper and it’s done with words rather than a flowchart, it feels somewhat literary. The words you pick matter a little bit, but not a tremendous amount. It’s basically as long as you’re going to be able to communicate what your intention is to the other people who need to see this document, that’s all that really matters.

**Craig Mazin:** That tradition carries through to this day when a screenplay still uses interior, exterior. Every scene must give you blueprint information that is not literary information. There is nothing literary about exterior, house, day, rain, or whatever you say there. The literary part comes in this other stuff that started to emerge as our craft of filmmaking and writing evolved.

**John August:** Now, that evolution, I’m not enough of a student of the history of cinema to tell you exactly when the screenplay became more what we talk about today, but often you’ll hear Casablanca referenced as a turning point between this list of shots to something that’s more like a modern screenplay in the sense of it’s a document that you can read, and in reading this document, you get a sense of what the actual film is supposed to feel like. It’s not just the pure blueprint. It’s more like this gives you a sense of where you are, what’s going on. It gives you a preview of what the film is actually going to look and feel like, versus just a straightforward list of these are the things you’re seeing.

**Craig Mazin:** This is not necessarily historically … You can’t call me a professor here, by any stretch of the imagination, but my understanding when I look at the early stuff is that it was the American movie business that was very blueprint-y and shot list-y. There is a pretty famous … You’ve probably seen the silent film A Trip to the Moon.

**John August:** Oh yes, yeah.

**Craig Mazin:** Yes, remember where the moon gets shot in the eye.

**John August:** The Brothers Lumière.

**Craig Mazin:** Exactly. George Méliès. Méliès? Méliès? Méliès? If you look at the script for that, it actually feels quite modern. There is a literary aspect to it. It’s more descriptive. I think in Europe probably there was a little bit more of a literary aspect to this much earlier than there was in the United States, but eventually by the time you get to films like Casablanca you’re fully in the swing of a literary screenplay that is combining two things at once, a non-literary production plan and art.

**John August:** Now, in both the literary form and in the blueprint-y construction plan form, the fundamental unit that you come back to is the scene. Even novels have scenes, that sense of there is a moment in space and time when generally characters are saying something or doing something. It’s one carved out moment of a place and a time where things are happening. That idea of a scene you see in both the really clinical early versions of screenplays and you see them in modern screenplays. That sense of like this is a chunk of time in which these things are happening.

I want to suss out three different kinds of things we mean by scene. First is that moment of space and time where characters are doing a thing. That’s scene version A. Scene version B is the writing of that scene. By the writing I mean this is what the characters are saying and doing. It’s where we’re coming into that moment. It’s how we’re getting out of that moment. It is the words we’re using to describe the world in which the characters are happening, the actions they’re taking, basically everything we call scene description, which you compare to stage plays, which is the other natural version of this, the scene description in stage plays tends to be incredibly minimalist. It’s much more robust in screenplays, because you are trying to really visually describe this world in which the characters are inhabiting. That’s an important transition. That’s version B is really the writing.

The third version of a scene I want to distinguish between is all the formatting stuff. All the basically the grammar of screenplays that we use that make them, the conventions that make it easier for people who read a lot of screenplays to understand what’s actually happening. The same way that commas and periods become invisible to a reader, people who are used to reading screenplays, they don’t even see INT and EXT and DAYS. Your brain just skips over those things and is able to concentrate on the meat of those. All that other information is there, but it’s invisible to a person who is used to reading them. Being able to understand those conventions and use them properly really does affect how a person perceives a screenplay. That formatting, that syntax choices and all that stuff, is really a different thing I would say than the words you’re using to describe stuff. It’s really grammar versus the actual creative act of writing.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah, and that grammar is eventually going to be analyzed by a grammar specialist known as the First AD, who along with the production managers, are going to be taking those scene headings and asking, “Okay, are these scene headings accurate to what we think we’re going to be actually doing in terms of the locations we found? How can we group them together? We need to make a timeline, night, day.” All those things have huge production implications. None of them have to do specifically with art. You’re guessing at what you think the ultimate grammar will be, but then you make adjustments once you get into production. Individual first ADs will have different ways of adjusting that grammar.

You’re right that for most people reading it, those things serve weirdly as just paragraph breaks. They’re paragraph breaks, which are incredibly helpful. It’s one of the reasons why my formatting preference is to put two lines before a new scene, because the scene, the EXTERIOR or the INTERIOR, is serving as a break in the visual flow of the reading, so I make it one, because I agree with you. I think that that’s really what it’s doing. If you took out all the interiors and exteriors and just mentioned those things in action lines, the script would become a book and it would be harder to read.

**John August:** Yeah. In thinking about scenes in three different waves, so there’s the visualization, the imagination of what’s happening with those characters in space and time, that is a thing that a screenwriter does, but it’s also the kind of thing a director does. It’s a thing that other creative people can do. It’s a thing an author does, is envision people in a place and a time doing a thing or saying a thing. Directors often do that scene version A a lot. They’re really imagining what that scene is like. They’re thinking about it through their own specialties. They’re imagining it’s like, “Okay, so I’m envisioning this scene, this moment happening,” and then they’re thinking, “Okay, where would I put the camera? What are the opportunities I have here? How would I use my tool set to make this happen best? What am I going to tell the cinematographer about what I’m looking at? What am I going to tell the editor about how I imagine this being paced? What are the costumes? What are all the things that I will need to be able to describe to other people about this moment?” That’s a version of crafting the scene.

The screenwriter has to do all that stuff, but then take a second level abstraction, thinking, “Okay, having thought through all that stuff, what are the words I’m going to use to describe what’s most important about this moment? Because I could describe everything, but that would be exhausting, and it would actually hurt the process of being able to understand what’s important. How am I’m going to synthesize that down to the most important things for people to understand if they’re reading this scene about what it’s going to feel like, what’s important, what they need to focus on?”

Most of what Craig and I really are talking about on the podcast is this second level, is the B version of that scene, which is how do we find the best way to describe and tell the reader what they would be seeing if they were seated in a theater watching this on a screen, how are we going to convey that experience, what it feels like to be watching that moment on the big screen. That’s mostly what we talk about on this podcast.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. There’s a weird kind of psychological game we’re playing with scene work, in the way that Walter Murch wrote this book about editing, I think it’s called In the Blink of an Eye, where he says we’re cutting in the pattern of people’s blinks, that we blink in normal moments. We’re kind of predictable this way. We have a rhythm. We’re editing slightly on that basis. Editing feels like music. It’s all about timing. You just know, there, cut there, that’s the spot.
It’s kind of the same thing with scenes. What you’re doing is feeling a psychological impact and then there’s a blink, a story blink, that just needs to happen. We have reached a point where something should happen and the story should blink and reset, and in a different place or a different time or with a different person, a different perspective. That to me is where the scene begins and ends.

Inside of the scene, we may have additional slug lines or scene headers, because we’re giving that blueprint information, that nonliterary blueprint information, to our production friends. For the purpose of being artistic and literary, the scene is the psychological unit. I don’t know how else to describe it other than something blinks and the story moves.

**John August:** Here’s an example. Imagine you could take a real life thing that’s happening. We’re in a room. There are people talking. Imagine we’re at a cocktail party. There’s a cocktail party happening. It’s maybe six people in this room. There’s discussions happening. We could invite three screenwriters in and have them see all of this, and then each of them goes off and writes their own version of this scene. There would be three very different scenes, because those screenwriters would be choosing to focus on different things.

Even though we all encountered the same moment, we’re writing different scenes, because we are choosing to focus on different things and we want to direct the reader’s attention to different moments. It’s what snippets of conversations we’re using. It is who we’re choosing to focus on. The same way the director is choosing where to put the camera, we are choosing where to put the reader’s attention. That is mostly what we talk about on this podcast is how as a writer you make the decisions about what you’re going to emphasize and what you’re going to ignore about a moment that is happening in front of us as an audience.

**Craig Mazin:** It’s one of the reasons I stress transitions so much. We have a podcast we’ve done about transitions. I can’t remember offhand the number, but we’ll put it in the show notes. Transitions help the audience demarcate the blink, the beginning and end of the scene, because inside of scenes, once you get away from the page and you’re just watching a television show or a movie, there is the montage effect, which is essentially, in the old sense of the word, not the, “We’re doing a montage,” but rather when you show something and then you cut to something else, we understand that time is continuing even though we have moved the camera and cut. These things are constantly happening. So how do you know when one thing begins and one thing ends? Since it’s all cut cut cut cut cut, why does one cut signal the beginning of something, and why does one cut signal the end, and why do others feel like they’re just part of a continuity? Transitions. They let you know when the scene has begun, and they let you know when it’s over.

**John August:** Absolutely. That’s a great segue to really this third version of what I’m describing. It’s this scene which is all of the formatting and the standard conventions and grammar that we’ve come to expect out of screenplays. It’s different from the transition that Craig is talking about, because Craig is really talking psychologically what are we trying to do by ending the scene there and getting to the next scene. That will also have a reflection in literally the words and how we’re formatting that moment to get us from one scene to the next scene. All the stuff that your screenwriting software does for you, that is the technical details that makes screenplays look so strange and different.

As I was reading through all these entries for the Three Page Challenge, picking them for the episode we’re recording tomorrow, I was struck by many of our listeners really get it, they know exactly what they’re doing, but some of them are actually still struggling with that third kind of scene writing, which is basically understanding how standard screenplay conventions are so helpful in letting the reader understand what’s important in this moment. Some of them are still struggling with that stuff. That’s the kind of thing I think you can actually teach and be taught. The best way to do it is to read a ton of screenplays and see just how it is, just so it becomes really natural. You read a bunch, you write a bunch to try to match up to that thing, but you will very quickly get a sense of how screenplays are formatted and how to make that feel effortless, make it feel like it’s not in your way but it’s actually helping you. What’s much harder for us to try to teach you is that second part, that part of how to very naturally convey what a moment feels like. I want to make sure we keep that distinction clear, because being able to type “cut to” and understand how to get down a page is a different thing than being able to really shape what a scene is going to feel like for the reader.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. Literally anyone can put something into a screenplay format. It’s never been easier. saying “cut to” and then “exterior such-and-such” will make something look like a scene has ended and a new scene has begun on the page, but it actually will not translate whatsoever to the actual viewing experience. The only thing that you have in your arsenal to demarcate that for the viewer is creativity. A sense of rhythm. A sense of conclusion. A sense of propulsion. A sense of surprise. Contrast. All the things that we talk about when we think of transitions that have nothing to do with formatting, because alas, there is no sign flashing in the movie or on your television set that says, “New scene has begun.” This is the craft part. Man, if I were teaching a screenwriting class at USC or UCLA or one of those places, I think honestly I would just begin with that. I would just begin with please let’s just talk about the art of letting people know something has begun and something has ended.

**John August:** Yeah, because “cut to” is not when a scene ends. The scene ends when the scene is ending. So often you feel like, okay, that scene is over, but there’s a couple more lines. When you actually film that you’re going to realize you don’t need this extra. You recognize that that moment is over and therefore the scene should be over. It’s a hard thing to learn until you’ve gone through it.

**Craig Mazin:** That is where the talent and instinct is. Obviously experience helps as you go on, as it does with everything, but there is an innate sense that something has concluded. Even for those of us who have been doing this for a while and we’re professionals, we will often make a mistake of going a little bit too far or not far enough, and then somebody will come and say, “I feel like maybe the scene ended here.” The key is that when somebody says that, you can look at it and go, “No, it hasn’t, and here’s why,” or, “Yeah, you’re right. That’s where it ended.” There is a sense.

**John August:** Having written the Arlo Finch books, one of the great advantages to traditional literary fiction is that if you’re lucky, you have a publisher, and that publisher provides an editor, who is going through that work and doing some of this actual checking with you. Whereas I might send Craig a script and he can say like, “Oh, I think your scene really ended here,” the editor’s job is much more clinical, saying, “Okay, now I’m … ” She’s actually cutting some stuff, saying, “No, you’re done here.” Sometimes you’ll get to a line editor or a copy editor who is going through and actually fixing your mistakes.

Screenwriters generally don’t have anybody like that, so we are responsible for doing all of that ourselves. I do sometimes wonder if sometimes there are people who are really pretty good at that stage A of writing a scene and stage B of writing a scene, but are really kind of terrible at stage three, that stage C of writing a scene and doing the actual making it work right as a screenplay kind of thing, would just be so helped out by having someone who could just go through and make it read better, make it read more conventionally on the page, so that we can really see what the intention is, versus being hung up on the strange mistakes they’re making.

**Craig Mazin:** I was a guest for a webinar, a Zoominar. A Zoominar through Princeton University. I did it yesterday. They open it up to members of that community. I don’t know, there was 100 people or something like that watching, which is kind of fun to see all the little Zoom faces. Someone asked a question and it essentially went to this, which was, when you look at how screenplays work as opposed to a novel, there are so many other things that you have to be thinking about. In a novel you’re just thinking about what people are saying and doing and thinking. In a screenplay you’re managing all this other stuff, like time and the camera and the visual space and how it will be structured and when things move from one place to another. Unfortunately, that’s true. If you want to be a good screenwriter, you’re going to have to be a little bit of a Swiss Army knife. It’s very hard to be a good screenwriter but only be good at one thing.

Every now and then you’ll hear somebody say, “Oh, we’re bringing them in, but they’re doing a character pass.” I’m like, what the hell does that mean? What’s the difference between character and story? They’re exactly the same thing to me. They’re interwoven. I don’t know how to separate these things. Or sometimes they’ll say, “We’re bringing somebody in to do a comedy pass.” Okay, so is that just like somebody’s going to stop in the middle of the movie and do some standup? The comedy has to come out of who they are and what the situations are. We have to do all of it at the same time, which is why it’s so hard. It’s really, really hard. There are, I don’t know, 4,000 times as many successful novelists as there are screenwriters.

**John August:** That is true. What I will say though about the Princeton question is the things that student was asking about, like, oh, you have to do all these other things, those become really automatic and much simpler with experience, so you stop having to worry about them so much. The same way like once you really learn how to use a semicolon, you can just use a semicolon. A lot of the detritus and the weird things about our modern screenplay format, once you get used to it, you stop thinking about it, it becomes less of an obstacle. I’m never, as a screenwriter, frustrated by like, “Oh, I don’t know how I’m going to do this in a screenplay format.” It just becomes really straightforward after a time.

**Craig Mazin:** It does take time, but eventually … It’s like touch typing. I don’t think about where the W is. My finger just goes there.

**John August:** What we can do is talk about really specific crafty things, which I feel like you and I are much better in our element to discuss. This actually comes from a question that Martin in Sandringham, Australia wrote in to ask. “I’m curious about the process to decide on the beginning point of your screenplays. Have you noticed a pattern of thinking that you tend to follow when choosing that first line of the script to be in the story, or is it purely driven by the unique nature of the story that you’re telling?”

Craig, it occurs to me that often we do a Three Page Challenge, and we’re looking at the first three pages of a script, so we’re really looking at these opening scenes, and yet because we’re only looking at that scene, we don’t really have a sense of what that scene is doing for the telling of the rest of the movie. We’re really just focused on what is the experience reading these scenes, what are the words on the page, but not what is that scene doing to establish the bigger picture of the movie. I thought today we’d spend some time really looking at opening scenes and our process as we go into thinking about an opening scene for a movie, or writing one.

**Craig Mazin:** It’s a great question, Martin. It I think has changed over time stylistically, which is no surprise. When we were kids and we saw movies from 30 years earlier, meaning the ’50s, the opening scenes seemed a lot different than the opening scenes we were used to. We’re sitting at home watching a VHS tape of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and we see how that opening goes. Then maybe dad shows us a movie from 1955 and it’s much slower and more expository in a flat sort of way. Perhaps there’s jaunty music happening or sweeping violins. These days as time has gone on it seems like opening scenes more and more are about a strange kind of disorientation, a giving to you of a puzzle that the implied contract is this will all make sense. I think of maybe the most influential opening sequence or scene in recent television history was the opening sequence of Breaking Bad, which was designed specifically to be what the hell is going on? What is that? Why are there pants there? Why is there an RV? What is happening? Why are there bullet holes? Then the puzzle gets solved.

**John August:** I like that you’re bringing up the change from earlier movies to present day movies in how openings work, because I think you could make the same observation about how teasers and trailers for movies from a previous time worked versus how they work now. You look at those old trailers and you’re like, “Oh my god, this is just so boring. This is not selling me on the movie at all.” In many ways we now look for these opening scenes and opening sequences to really be like a trailer for the movie you’re about to see. They’re really setting stuff up and getting you excited to watch this movie you’re about to watch and to reward you for like, thank you for sitting down in your seat and giving me your attention, because this is what’s going to happen.

Let’s maybe start by talking about what are the story elements that need to happen in these opening scenes or opening sequences, they don’t have to happen, but tend to happen in these opening sequences. What are we trying to do story-wise, plot-wise, or character-wise in these scenes?

**Craig Mazin:** You have choices. You don’t actually have to do anything. Sometimes the opening is just about meeting a person. You are accentuating the lack of story. They’re happy. They’re carefree. Everything’s fine. I agree with you. More and more there is a kind of trailerification of the opening of a movie or a television show. There is the indication of a thing, and it’s often a thing that the characters don’t even see, or if they do see it, they’re looking at it from a different time, this is later, or this is earlier, whatever it is, but there is an indication of something, that there is a crack in reality that needs to be healed somehow.

**John August:** Yeah. From a story perspective you’re generally meeting characters. If you’re not meeting your central character, you’re meeting another character who is important or a character who represents an important part of the story. In that opening scene you might be meeting a character who ends up dying at the end of that scene or sequence, but it’s setting up an important thing about what’s going to happen in the course of your story, the course of your movie. You’re hopefully learning about the tone of this piece and what it feels like to be watching this movie, the setting of this world, how the movie kind of works, and some of the rules of this world. If you’re in a fantasy universe, is there magic, how does gravity work, what are the edges of what this kind of movie can be, because in that opening scene you want to have a sense of like this is the general kind of movie that we’re watching, so that you can benefit from all the expectations that an audience brings into that, because of the genre, because of the type of movie that you’re setting up.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. I think about openings that have always stuck with me as being confusing and challenging, which I’ve always loved. I often look at the very curious opening to Blade Runner, which was not the original opening that they had planned, but it’s the opening they ended up with. Neither of the characters in that scene are main characters. There is an unknown investigator, and there is a replicant who we don’t know is a replicant. He’s not the important one. He’s not the head villain. He’s a henchman, essentially. You have no idea what the hell is going on. There’s one man in a very strange device that might be futuristic or antique, asking strange questions of this guy and seemingly zeroing in on something important. Then the man, feeling somewhat trapped by the series of very abstract questions, kills the investigator.

What happens there is a challenge to you to try and keep up, and a promise that it will make sense later. In addition, I know that this world looks a certain way. I know people are going to dress a certain way. I also know that it is going to expect some things of me. It’s good if the first scene gives the audience a difficulty level. It doesn’t have to be high difficulty. Sometimes your first scene says this is going to be an easy play. Let people know what the difficulty is with that first scene.

**John August:** As you’re talking about that, I’m now recalling that scene. It works really well and it’s setting up that this is a mystery story, that there’s going to be questions of identity and existential issues here. Even though you don’t know that it’s necessarily a science-fiction world it’s a pretty grounded science-fiction, if it is a science-fiction world, so all these things are really important.
Now Craig, an experience I’ve had sometimes reading a friend’s script or someone I’m working with’s script is that I will really enjoy the movie that they’ve written, but I’ll come back and say, “This is not your first scene. You have written a first scene that does not actually match your movie and does not actually help your movie.” It’s a weird thing to run into, but I often find that some scripts I really like, they just don’t start right, they start on the wrong beat, or as you dig deeper, you find that the writer wrote that scene first, but then they kind of wrote a different movie, and they need to write a new first scene that actually helps set up the movie they actually really wrote. Is that a common experience you’ve had?

**Craig Mazin:** I’ve noticed this. I think sometimes it’s hard to hit that mark, because nothing else has been written yet, so it’s your first swing. Sometimes the first scene suffers from a sense of, oh, you’ve been thinking about this as a short film for about seven years and you finally got the nerve worked up to finish it, but the problem is this thing feels like it’s a seven-year-long thoughtful short film, and then the rest of it is just a movie. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes there’s a sense that the opening is fine, but it is not special. The opening is our chance to be brave. I think that we have two moments in movies, or in any particular episode of television, where the audience will forgive us a lot. It’s at the very beginning and it’s at the very end. In the middle you’ve got to stay in between the lines on the road, but in the beginning and the end you get to have fun.

**John August:** Let’s talk about why you have that special relationship with the audience at the start, because they’ve deliberately sat down to watch the thing that you’ve created. If they’re going into a movie theater to watch it there, they’ve put forth a lot of effort. They bought a ticket. They’ve driven themselves to that theater. They’re going to probably watch your whole movie, whether they love it or they don’t love it. In those first minutes, they really, really, really want to love what you’re giving them. Their guards are down. In TV they could flip away more easily, so there’s some issues there, but their expectations are very malleable at that start. You really can take them anywhere. You get a lot of things for free. They come in with a bit of trust. If you can honor that trust and honor that expectation and get them to keep trusting you, they’re going to go on your story. If you don’t set that hook well, they may just wander off and they may never really fully engage with the story you’re trying to tell.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. They’re hungry at the beginning. They’re hungry. Don’t just immediately shove all the food down their throat. You can have some fun here. You know that they want to feel that anticipation. When you go to a concert and there’s the opening act, and then they’re done and they leave, and then the PA system is playing just songs and you’re waiting, and then the lights go down. It’s not like the lights go down and then the band comes out, “Here we are! Let’s go!” and then they immediately start a song. There’s usually some sort of wah.

They get you ready. That can go on for a while, because everybody knows, oh my god it’s happening. Let it be happening, don’t let it just happen, if that makes sense.

**John August:** Yeah. Let’s talk about some of our own writing and our own opening scenes and what our experience was for this. I’m going back, thinking back to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, if I recall correctly, opens with an old woman and a cow.

**Craig Mazin:** That is how Episode Four or Three opens.

**John August:** That’s right. It was later on. It’s not the very first image of it. What is the first image of the first episode?

**Craig Mazin:** The first image of the first episode is a couch with an afghan type thing of a deer, and we hear a man talking. We actually hear his voice before we ever see anything.

**John August:** Yeah. We don’t realize at the time it’s going to be a Stuart Special, that we are setting up a thing, the past, and that we’re going to be jumping back and forth. I think the reason why I was remembering that cow scene is that it’s an example of we don’t have context for who these characters are, why what’s happening is happening. Are these characters going to be important? No, not really. You were just setting up the question of that episode and that world and what kind of story this episode is going to be. I thought it just worked really well.

**Craig Mazin:** Thank you. Every episode needs its own beginning. I’m pretty sure that’s beginning of Episode Four. It’s sad that it’s all mushing together now. That was designed to be a bit confusing, because we don’t know what exactly this guy is doing there, and we’re not sure what his orders are, and we definitely aren’t sure what her deal is, and we don’t know he’s just standing there, and so this goes on. Then at the end of it we know. We know a lot. That is a standalone intro, which we didn’t do much of, and generally I don’t. Sometimes it’s okay to make this opening its own thing that announces something about the world, and then we catch up to the people that we know and care about. We think, oh, do they know that they’re in a world where that other thing is happening? Certainly one way to go.

**John August:** Completely analogous situation is the opening of the Charlie’s Angels movie. Of course, again, you’re establishing a place and a time and a world, except that it’s in a very candy-colored … We’re in a plane and we see all these characters. We see LL Cool J is the first recognizable star that we see. There’s clearly some sort of heist thing happening. It’s only as the sequence plays on that we realize, oh, the Angels were actually part of this the entire time and this is this elaborate sequence to get this guy, this terrorist off this plane before he does something dastardly. That sequence was important to establish the tone and feeling of this movie and what the rules are of this movie and the heightened gravity-optional nature of this movie and what it’s going to feel like to watch this movie. Nothing that actually happens in that becomes important for the plot. It’s just introducing you to who the Angels are in a very general sense, the fact that they could go into slow motion at any point if it’s glamorous, and just how it feels. It was one of the only sequences that made it all the way through from very early, before I came onboard to the movie, through to the end, because it just felt like a good, goofy, fun start to this franchise.

**Craig Mazin:** With a punchline. I always feel like your openings need punchlines. It’s weird to say, okay, the punchline of the opening of the first episode of Chernobyl is a man hangs himself, but that’s the punchline in the sense of there’s a surprise end. Similarly, the old woman and the cow, you’re pretty sure that soldier is going to shoot her and he doesn’t shoot her. He shoots the cow. Punchline. You need to land something surprising. If you can, then the additional benefit you get from your opening is you’re putting the audience on alert that you are one step ahead of them so far. This is a good thing. Now they’re leaning in. They’re trying to see what comes next, but also they are aware that you’re not just going to feed them straight up stuff, which is good.

**John August:** The most difficult opening sequence I ever did was Big Fish. I’m trying to establish so many things. I’m establishing two different worlds, a real world and a story world, that there are two protagonists, and that both of them have storytelling power. Getting through those first eight pages of Big Fish and setting up the storytelling dynamic of Big Fish was really, really tough, yet crucial. That was the case where if I didn’t have that opening sequence, the movie just couldn’t have worked, because you wouldn’t know what to follow and what to pay attention to.

**Craig Mazin:** This is kind of high anxiety time. I like that you care. I think sometimes when I read these scripts, and we’ve said I think the word precious real estate about, or phrase, a thousand times, you need to nail it. You’ve got to make that opening fascinating so that the audience says, “I will keep watching.” If it’s just kind of meh, then you could’ve done anything there. The moment you have an opening, you have limited what can come next. There’s a narrow possibility for what comes next.

**John August:** You build a funnel.

**Craig Mazin:** You make a funnel, a logical funnel, but not in the beginning. In the beginning there’s no funnel. You can do anything. If you don’t do anything interesting I don’t see why people would think, “This will get better.” It won’t.

**John August:** No. Weirdly, it is probably the scene or sequence that as writers we spend the most time looking at, just because by nature we’re going to end up rereading it and tweaking it a zillion times. I do wonder if sometimes, let’s just talk process here, at what point do you figure out that opening scene versus figuring out everything else in your story? Sometimes I think the best approach would be to figure out where your story overall wants to go before you write that opening scene, because so often you can be trapped in that opening scene and love that opening scene, but it’s not actually doing the best job possible establishing the rest of the things you want to do in your story.

**Craig Mazin:** 100%. If you do know what your end is, it would be lovely if you had that in mind when you wrote your beginning. Certainly I did when I did Chernobyl, because it works like Pink Floyd’s The Wall album. It begins with, I think it’s maybe David Gilmore saying, “Where we came in,” and then the song starts and then that album happens, and at the very end you hear him say, “Isn’t this where?” You go, “Ah, aha!” in a very Pink Floyd cool way. I see what you did there, Pink Floyd. I like that. I like the sense that you catch up and you complete the circle. It doesn’t have to be temporal like that. It can just be commentary. It can be somebody’s face ending in a similar position to how it began.

Here’s an example. Social Network. Opening scene, fantastic, and down to nothing but dialogue and performance, two people sitting and talking. That’s it. Excellently written and excellently performed and excellently shot. At the very, very end of the movie, he goes back to looking at that girl’s profile on Facebook. She is not mentioned or referred to at any other time. It’s just the beginning and then the end, and you go, “Oh man, this guy.” That’s how you can think about these things. The beginning is the end. The end is the beginning. Know them both. It will help you define that opening scene much, much more sharply.

**John August:** Cool. Now as we look at Three Page Challenges going forward, let’s also try to remember to ask that question in terms of like what movie do we think this opening scene is setting up, because that’s really a fundamental question. We’ve talked so much about how those first three pages, that first opening scene is so crucial to getting people to read more of your script, but let’s also be thinking about what movie we think it’s actually establishing because we have strong expectations off the start of that. Just a note for ourselves. We will start, try to think about how those opening scenes are setting our expectation for the rest of the movie that we’re not reading.

Let’s talk about transitions, because it’s an important part of screenwriting that we really haven’t touched on so much over our 88 episodes.

**Craig Mazin:** One thing that we should probably say right off the bat is that there are people out there in the screenwriting advice world who spread this nonsense that writers shouldn’t direct on the page, “Don’t tell the director what to do.” Oh, please! We’re not selling screenplays to directors. Directors aren’t hiring us to write. We’re writing screenplays for people to read, so that they can see a movie. Part of our intention when we write screenplays is to show what the movie should look like. The director doesn’t have to do what you say on the page, but you know what? I find that they tend to appreciate that you’ve written with transitions in mind, because it’s really important to them. Frankly, if you don’t write with transitions in mind, some directors aren’t going to notice and they’re just going to shoot what you wrote and then it won’t connect. Transitions are a super important part of moving from one scene to the next so you don’t feel like you’re just dragging your feet through a swamp of story, but rather being propelled forward through it.

**John August:** Let’s clarify some terms. There’s two things we mean when we talk about transitions. One is literally just the all uppercase on the right hand margin of the page, CUT TO or TRANSITION TO or FADE TO or CROSS-FADE TO. That is the element of transition. That is a physical thing that exists in the syntax of screenwriting. We’re only half talking about that. That’s a way of indicating that you are moving to something new. Most modern screenplays don’t use CUT TOs after every scene. That’s a thing that you were originally taught to do. You can tell first-time screenwriters because they will always use a CUT TO. In most cases you won’t really use a CUT TO. In personal life, I only use CUT TO if I have to really show that it’s a hard cut from something to another thing, to really show that I’m breaking time and space to go to this next thing. Usually you won’t do that. Usually what you’ll do is … You want a scene to flow into the next scene. That’s really what I think we should talk about today is how do you get that feeling of we’re in this scene, and now we’re moving into the next scene, and there’s a reason why we left that scene at this moment, why we’re coming into this scene at this moment.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. This is a very nuts and bolts craft thing. They’re techniques. I wrote down a few techniques, which I’ll run through, and you tell me what you think.

**John August:** Great.

**Craig Mazin:** The first and the easiest one is size. A size transition is to go from a very tight shot to a super wide shot, or to go from a very wide shot to a super close shot. Sometimes you can even be in a medium shot where two people are talking, and then the next thing you see is a close-up of a watch, and then we’re into a scene where somebody is checking the time. Just using the juxtaposition of size in and of itself helps feel like things are happening and they’re connected in their own way.

**John August:** Let’s talk about what that actually looks like on the page, because you’re not describing every shot in a movie, obviously. If you were in a dialogue situation where it was two characters talking, and they’d been talking for awhile, the assumption is that you are going to get into some fairly close coverage there. If it’s just it’s about those two people, then if your next shot is described as a giant panorama of something something something, that is a big size transition. Similarly, if you were to cut to the close-up of the watch, or some fine little detailed thing, then we’d see, okay, that’s a huge size transition. Even if you’re not describing what that shot was on the outside, we have a sense of relative scales there. You don’t have to necessarily draw our attention to it, because we’ll notice that something different has happened.

**Craig Mazin:** It will help your reader see your movie instead of read it. It’s just real simple things like that. Another simple one is music or sound. There’s nothing wrong with calling out a piece of music. It doesn’t have to even be a specific song. You may just say, okay, like we’re looking at two cops and they’re in the break room, they’re chitchatting, and then over the sound of hip-hop we are, and now we’re South Central LA, rolling down Crenshaw, just to help the reader understand there’s a connection here. Similarly, you can use sounds. Two people are talking quietly about what needs to happen, and the next thing we hear is a siren. By the way, you can pre-lap that audio, or you can have it just be a hard cut. Something that jolts us. In a weird way, the funny thing about transitions is they’re almost anti-transitional at times, because the point is you want people to understand I’m in a new place at a new time. If it all just flows together like mush, it’s almost too transitional.

**John August:** Absolutely. There are times where we want that really smooth, legato flow from one thing to the next thing, and there’s times where you want big, giant, abrupt things, like that cliché flashbulb, to tell us we are at a new place at a new time, and there’s brand new information going to be coming your way.

**Craig Mazin:** Exactly. One cool thing you can do, I wouldn’t overdo it, but it’s fun here and there, is what I call a misdirect transition. A guy says, “They’ll never see us coming,” or whatever, and he’s got a gun. We go to a close-up, bullets going into the gun. Pull back to reveal, interior, it’s another character loading a gun.

**John August:** Exactly.

**Craig Mazin:** Little tricks, basically.

**John August:** Yeah. Again, that’s a thing where if you did that three times in a movie, you’d be golden. If you did that 10 times in a movie, we would want to strangle you.

**Craig Mazin:** Probably, unless it was just like everything was so clever and it’s like a, I don’t know, a Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels kind of movie or something.

**John August:** Yeah. I was going to say the Asian action films might do that more often. Yeah, if that’s your style, then it’s going to work, but otherwise it’s going to probably feel too much. A similar related thing is Archer does these amazing transitions from scene to scene where a character will, they’ll pre-lap the character. They will pull a line of dialogue up above the cut, that seems to be about the scene that you’re in, but it’s actually about a completely different moment that’s happening on the other side of the scene. It’s very clever how they do it. That’s a way of misdirecting you comedically from what you thought you were talking about to something completely different.

**Craig Mazin:** Exactly. Exactly. I suppose the most conventional transition is the pre-lapped audio. Two people say, “That didn’t go very well.” The next shot is a courthouse. Over the courthouse we see, “Everyone please come to order.” It’s the most standard TV-ish thing, but it helps you move at least inside and outside in ways that are not so clunky. Another tricky dialogue method is the question-and-answer transition.

**John August:** Exactly.

**Craig Mazin:** Where someone will say, “Someone isn’t telling us the truth,” and the next shot is a woman smiling. It doesn’t even have to be a dialogue answer, in other words, but just that the transition itself is giving us information.

**John August:** That’s very much a TV procedural kind of thing. That’s a thing you would see in Law & Order where the, “We need to find a witness who can,” and then the next shot is going to be the witness who can do that, or like, “This is the question we need to have answered.” You ask a question on one side of the cut and you come to a possible answer on the other side of the cut.

**Craig Mazin:** Right. “Does anyone know where Luke is?” Cut. A guy on a boat, drunk.

**John August:** In a very general sense, what you’re trying to do as you end a scene is you’re trying to put the reader’s head, and really the viewer’s head, in a place where they have a certain image in their head, and so when you come to the far side of that cut, that is changed or that is addressed in some meaningful way. Thematic cuts are another common way of doing this. A classic is Lawrence of Arabia, the match that transitions to the sunset. That is a fire. There’s fire on both sides of the cut. You’re thinking fire, and then you see this giant image of a fiery sun. That is a natural transition. Sometimes you’ll do that with imagery. Sometimes you’ll do that with a word that matches. Sometimes you’ll do it with a question that seems to be answered on the far side. Those are natural ways to get people across the bridge there.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. The ones we’ve gone through here are very rudimentary. They’re generic, because we’re discussing them in generic terms. Find your own and find ones that are meaningful to you and your story, but really do make sure as you’re writing that you’re not just bone-on-bone here, that there’s something that helps move us through, little tiny things. It makes an enormous difference. It really, really does. Frankly, it puts you in greater control over the movie that will eventually exist.

**John August:** I would agree. Another thing I would stress is that you probably want to save your powder a bit, and use those big transitional moments for big transitional moments. Don’t paint a big, giant landscape of something if it’s not an important moment that we’re going to something new. Don’t always give us those big transitions. Some things should be straight, simple cuts, where we’re just getting from one thing to the next, so that when we do the bigger thing, we as the reader will notice, okay, something big and different has changed here.

When you’re reading through scripts, after awhile … The first couple scripts you read, you probably read every word, because it’s all a new form to you, but after you’ve read like 30 scripts, you recognize that you stop actually reading the INT/EXT lines basically. They just skip past you. You can sometimes jump back to them if you’re curious, but you’re really just looking for the flow of things, and so most times you’re just jumping over that. You don’t really know or care where you are. Even though we tell people to be very specific in those things and give us those details, a lot of times people aren’t going to read those. They’re just going to read the first line of action that happens after the scene header, if you’re lucky. Save those bigger moments for the bigger moments that you really need that reader to stop and slow down and pay attention to the fact that we are in a new place, a new time, this is a new section of the movie.

**Craig Mazin:** Well said. Well said.

**John August:** Great.

All right, we are back in the present, which in our case is 2021, but by the time you’re listening to this it’s 2022. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

Craig forgot to do a One Cool Thing. He forgot to have a One Cool Thing, so he’s hopping on a phone call while Megana and I are going to do our One Cool Things.

My One Cool Thing is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. I love me a good fallacy. I think I’d heard of this fallacy, but never had it described to me before. Basically it’s why, when you have a whole bunch of data and you are looking for patterns in the data, you can find things that really aren’t there. The actual description of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is like, “Oh wow, look, this person hits the bullseye every time.” If you’re shooting at a barn, basically if you shoot first and then paint the target afterwards, you’re going to find patterns there that aren’t really there. I just really like that as an idea.

It reminded me of, this is something that Megana knows what I’m talking about, but I’m going to be a little vague here, I went in to pitch a project at a studio or a streamer, and they said, “Oh, we decided looking at the data we no longer do that genre of project, because it’s not successful.” I’m 100% convinced it’s really a Texas sharpshooter fallacy, that basically they looked at all their data and said, “Oh, this thing doesn’t work for us,” but I think they’re really after the fact trying to find a pattern for a couple failures that really don’t make sense.

**Megana Rao:** Just so I’m clear, because I haven’t heard of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, so it’s that you paint the target after you already have …

**John August:** Yeah, basically you’ve taken all the shots. Basically you have all the data there, and then you are trying to paint the target after the fact. You’re basically picking a small subset of the data to describe what the bigger thing is, and you’re saying, “Oh, this is the finding, the conclusion we’ve had,” but you didn’t actually have a hypothesis, a thesis going into it, so you weren’t really looking for anything. You noticed something and said, “This must be significant.” It’s a problem whenever you have a large big batch of data, it’s very likely that you’re going to some subset of the data that indicates a certain thing, but if you weren’t actually systematically looking for that thing, it’s not probably a valid result.

**Megana Rao:** It’s how you guys talk about screenwriting structure, screenwriting books.

**John August:** Oh yeah, absolutely, because if you’re looking at all these things and you’re trying to say, “These are the patterns that are in there,” it’s like, are they really the patterns that are in there or are you basically just deciding that’s a thing you’re going to look for, describe being in there, but that was never the intention, that was never the actual goal behind it. When this studio or streamer says, “Oh, this genre does not perform well for us,” it’s like, okay, did you go through and systematically say, “Okay, let’s take a look at all of the examples of this genre we’ve ever done,” and then seeing how they performed, or you’re just saying, “Of the five biggest disappointments of movies we’ve made in the last couple years, were they in the genre?” You’re being choosy with what data you’re letting in and letting out of that criteria.

**Megana Rao:** Very cool.

**John August:** Now since Craig doesn’t have a One Cool Thing, Megana, can you pinch hit for him?

**Megana Rao:** Yes. In our last bonus segment where we talked about New Years Resolutions, I talked about data privacy and data rights and trying to be more digitally hygienic. My One Cool Thing is this movie Ron’s Gone Wrong, which is delightful and funny and has a lot of themes about data privacy that I think are accessible and rendered in a family-fun way.

**John August:** Cool. I saw that mostly [inaudible 00:57:26] bus board advertisements. I never actually saw a trailer for it. When I actually looked at the trailer for it, it looks delightful and definitely worth checking out. Now I see it’s on all the … I got a screener for it, so I know that they’re going for the typical awards for it.

**Megana Rao:** Yeah. It felt really fresh. Zach Galifianakis voices the robot, and he has this really flat affect that is so funny. I was just watching it by myself and chortling, laughing, chuckling. It’s a fun movie.

**John August:** Cool. Ron’s Gone Wrong.

**Megana Rao:** Yep, Ron’s Gone Wrong. I think it’s on Disney Plus and some other places too.

**John August:** Fantastic. That was our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with one segment produced by Stuart Friedel, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig Mazin:** Of course.

**John August:** Our outro’s by Henry Adler. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for the episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net. You’ll get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on getting out of a conversation. Craig and Megana, thank you so much.

**Craig Mazin:** Thank you guys.

**Megana Rao:** Thank you.

**John August:** All right, Craig, thinking back to times when you were at a party with actual people around you … Actually that last time I think I saw you in a party situation was at a fundraiser for Mark Kelly, who was running at that time for Senate in Arizona. That was a party filled with people I knew and some people I was just getting to know, but it was a lot of small conversations, and I needed to get into and out of those conversations. Is that an experience you recall from that night?

**Craig Mazin:** Sure. That’s a pretty common thing. You’re at a party and you start talking to people, and then sometimes it gets boring or it gets awkward or you run out of things to say. I try the best I can to not think about who else I should be talking to. I try as best I can to be as present as possible for the person I’m talking to, no matter who they are, because the notion of, “Oh I should be talking to that person,” or, “That person would be more fun to talk to,” oftentimes turns into utter disappointment anyway. My general rule is if I’m enjoying a conversation with somebody, whether it’s the most important person at the party or a waiter, I’m going to keep talking to them because it’s rare enough to enjoy a conversation.

If things are going a bit boring or slow or sluggish and it seems like the other person doesn’t feel the same, or maybe does, either way, that’s a great time to just simply say, “You know what? I’m going to go grab myself a drink, but I’ll be back around,” or I’ll say, “I’m going to run to the restroom,” or I’ll say, “I just got to go find my wife.” That’s always a good thing if your spouse, partner is there, or I’ll somebody and be like, “Oh my gosh, I promised that person I would catch up with them. I do have to, but this was so much fun talking to you.” I’ll say something like that. Of all the things I have shame on, and there are so many, that’s not one of them, and I try not to calculate how to have conversations at parties.

**John August:** I would say I’ve gotten much better at this over the years and I’ve done all the techniques that you described, and certainly having someone that you can use an excuse to go on to the next thing is great. The other technique is the handoff, which is basically someone who’s passed, who you’ve already had a conversation with or you know, you can say, “Oh hey, have you met Bill?” Then you introduce the two of them and then you can make your exit out of there. That can be a very useful way out of it. I will say this, honestly doing a lot of the WGA stuff where I’d be in these rooms where I’d have to have 50 conversations over the course of an evening, I got much better at basically being very present in a conversation and giving 100% full attention. It was clear I’d addressed that issue. I could just really make a clean exit, like, “It was great talking with you. Thanks for coming out,” and move on to the next thing. That’s more of a work function than a social function. It feels honest that I’m not looking for an excuse and basically saying, “This was great. I value our conversation. Now I’m taking two steps over this direction.”

**Megana Rao:** Are you guys sure that you want to be giving away all of your secrets for-

**Craig Mazin:** It’s not really a secret. I’ll tell people. I’m just like, “Yeah.” Look, it’s not like if I say I have to go to the bathroom at a party, I don’t want people to think, “Oh, he hates me now.” Sometimes I really have to pee. If they don’t see me go, if I don’t leave and go to the … By the way, when I say I have to go to the bathroom, I always go. I don’t not go. That would be horrible.

**John August:** Yeah, even if it’s just to shut the door and check his phone for a few minutes, he will go to the bathroom.

**Craig Mazin:** By the way, I’ll do that sometimes anyway. When I’m at a party, at some point I’ll hit a little bit of an overload. I’ll go to the restroom, close the door. It’s like when I’m on a plane. Sometimes I’ll do that, just to be alone. Just for one lovely minute I’m alone. It’s so nice. I try and be as honest as I can. When there are situations like when we would do live shows, after the show is over, there’d be a lineup of people that want to talk to us. They all have comments or questions, or sometimes they want a selfie or whatever it is. We’ll do those things, and I have no problem at some point saying, “I want to answer some of their questions too, but thank you for coming up. I really appreciate it,” so that I can just say the truth, which is I have a limited amount of time and I have to talk to these people too. The same thing would happen if I were on a panel at the Writers Guild, which occasionally I have done. Same deal. Afterwards you talk to people. At large parties, honestly I have no problem, if I get cornered by somebody and they’re awesome, I’ll talk to them all night. I don’t care. All night. I do not care. I have no FOMO when it comes to party conversations. 99% of them are just air.
What about you, Megana? It sounds like you don’t want to give away your secrets, but how do you handle let’s just say the mixing, the mixing around?

**Megana Rao:** Yeah, I think the same bathroom, drink technique. What I’m more curious to hear about is, I don’t want to shame anyone else or give away too many details, but the situation if you’re at a dinner party or a place where you’re more fixed, and the conversation is just unbearably boring, like you’re hearing about somebody’s pandemic hobbies that are just … I’m sorry, I don’t want to hear about anybody making sourdough starter. I don’t care. I have no interest in it. How do I transition out of that conversation where I can’t easily move around?

**John August:** It’s tough when you’re locked in place and you didn’t actually have a choice or you just made a wrong choice about who you sat down next to. It’s always tough, because you don’t know if it’s the kind of situation where there’s going to be one conversation for the table or if it’s going to be like there’s a conversation on your left and a conversation on your right, and if you turn to your left, then you’re shutting out the person on your right. It’s tough. I find myself trying to ask a question that will just get us off the horrible track, if possible.

**Craig Mazin:** Some people are nothing but horrible track generators. It doesn’t matter what you say to them. They will ruin everything with their monotonous, banal point of view, their rambling stories that go nowhere. This is why if there’s something where I’m fixed in position, a dinner party for example, I need to know that I know enough people there where I can’t get stuck alone with somebody that’s not doing it for me. Ideally there’s somebody I know will sit next to me. You have to protect yourself going into those situations. If you are single, you still need a friend. That friend can be somebody that you’re interested in. It can be somebody that’s just friend friend. It doesn’t matter. You need somebody you can anchor yourself to, who can help you and rescue you. Also if I get invited to a dinner party and I get stuck next to a super boring person, that goes into my ledger, and I’m not going back there ever again. Life is too short.

By the way, I will also just leave. I’ll leave. I don’t care. I’ll leave, because here’s the thing, everybody’s got limited time. I’m not saying because we’re all busy. I’m saying we’re going to die. Sitting next to boring people all night while other people are having fun five feet away from you, it’s brutal. No, I’ll just fucking go. I don’t care, because if I go home, I can do all sorts of things that are wonderful. I have video games and puzzles and television that I can catch up on. You know I’m really down to it if I’m doing that. I don’t have to stay there. Why? You know what? Shame on the party host, the dinner party host, for putting anyone at that table that that’s boring. The only time that I honestly get stuck is if sometimes if Melissa says in advance to me, “You need to do the following thing.” I’ll say, “Okay,” but she’ll be there, so I’ll be fine.

**John August:** Many dinner parties will separate spouses so that you have-

**Craig Mazin:** Nope. I don’t do that. I don’t do it. By the way, everyone knows. I’m sort of famous in my little town for not showing up, for leaving early, for going, “I don’t do crap like that,” because I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t like small talk. I like big talk. I like to really get into it with people. I don’t just bland-

**John August:** Two things that I really respect about my husband is first off he’s the only person I’ve seen who can in real life click the ignore button, where someone is trying to engage with him, and I see this floating ignore button, he’s hitting that button, it’s like, “You don’t exist to me.” I love that he’s able to do that. The other thing is he’s very honest about, “We don’t want to go to your dinner for this charity we support. We will write a check. We’re delighted to write you a check. I have no interest in actually going to the event.” Where I can happily go to the political fundraisers all the time, he’s just like, “No, I don’t want to do it. I’m not going to do it.” I respect that. He is the Craig Mazin of our relationship on that whole-

**Craig Mazin:** By the way, they don’t want you at the dinner anyway. They just want your money. If you give them money and don’t show up to the dinner, you’ve given them extra money, the money that they would’ve had to spend to feed you. No one cares. I’ve been a host of multiple political fundraisers that I did not show up to.

**John August:** Yeah. There was one at your house, which was great, but it did feel like a rare exception for us to be at your house to do this thing.

**Craig Mazin:** Definitely, yeah. That was Beto O’Rourke. That was way, way early in his run, so early that indeed he was showing up to the likes of my house. It was smallish, but it was nice and we had fun people there. It was an interesting conversation. That was that. As things have gotten bigger and larger and so on and so forth, I just … God bless Billy Ray, our colleague Billy Ray, that does a lot of fundraising and is always collaring me for that stuff. Sometimes I’ll end up with my name on the hosting … By the way, so-

**John August:** You’re not going.

**Craig Mazin:** No. People, if you ever get an invitation to a political fundraiser and it lists a bunch of hosts, that doesn’t mean that they’re all sitting there figuring out who’s going to cook what. It means they all gave a certain amount of money. That’s what that means. That’s all it means.

**John August:** All right. Let’s transition to talking about not in-person gatherings, but text threads and text messages and that stuff, and how you end a text conversation, because I’ve found myself sometimes where we’ve been texting back and forth for half an hour, and sometimes it can be awkward, it’s like who’s going to end the conversation? My default move is the tap back, which is basically the thumbs up, the whatever, saying that’s it and it’s mentioned, and this conversation is done here. Is that what everyone else is doing? Megana, what are you doing when a text conversation has run its course and you need to make it clear that I’m not going to be answering your next text?

**Megana Rao:** I feel like either that or sometimes, “Hey, I’m about to hop in the shower, but I’ll answer when I’m back out.” I think the cadence with millennials is a little bit different. It’s fine if somebody doesn’t respond to my text for days or hours. I don’t know, it just doesn’t bother me and it’s fine if the conversation fades.

**John August:** Being left on read doesn’t kill you?

**Megana Rao:** If it’s just a friend, a close friend that I’m texting or a friend that I’m catching up with, no.

**Craig Mazin:** Maybe I’m a millennial, because I feel like that’s the whole point of text is … Mostly. Sometimes I will think, “Oh, I feel like I’ve run out of things to say here,” but I don’t want to send some sort of formal, “It was lovely chatting.” Then I’ll think, “Will they be upset?” Then I remember, no, no one gives a shit, because if I send you a text in a conversation, and the thing doesn’t ping back, I’m not upset. I’m relieved. It’s over. We can all move on.

**Megana Rao:** It’s almost more awkward if … The example that I even gave before is not something that I do. It’s something that some friends will do to me. It’s more awkward if you acknowledge that the conversation is ending.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah, like can’t we just be cas and just talk to each other and not have to worry about that? Text to me, sometimes for fun, what I will do is I’ll just go, “Byee.”

**John August:** Yeah, I’ve gotten a byee.

**Craig Mazin:** I love byeeee. That’s fun. I like to do that. Basically every text conversation I have at some point will devolve into GIFs and then it’s over.

**John August:** Yeah. Fair choices.

**Megana Rao:** I do feel that I have acquired a very specific skill of knowing exactly when John is done talking, in person, via email, or via text.

**John August:** My sentences do get shorter. It goes down from three sentences to one sentence to two words and then the conversation’s done. Even in emails I do find it sometimes there’s a bounce back and forth, and I thank you, you thank me, and then it’s all resolved, because in text it’s not quite a conversation, it’s not quite an email conversation, it’s just this weird middle ground and you don’t quite know whether you’re done talking. Megana, do you find it happens in Slack? I don’t as much, but what are you finding?

**Megana Rao:** You and I aren’t casually texting that much. I only text you when I really need your attention. We casually Slack sometimes. That’s the same thing where-

**Craig Mazin:** Sounds gross.

**Megana Rao:** I’m in communication with John all the time, so I don’t really think of us having a cadence there, because I’m talking to you at all times of the day.

**John August:** Basically.

**Craig Mazin:** I feel like even though Bo and I are together every day, I probably text with her more than talk. We text all the time. Oh yeah. We’re besties. We’re texties. We’re like beep beep beep beep beep GIF lol. Yeah, we’re two 12-year-old girls. It’s wonderful.

**John August:** The advantage of texting or Slack or whatever is that you can also scroll back and get to that thing. If I said something to Megana in person, she’d have to remember it, but if I text it to her, then it’s there for her to be able to look back at and confirm.

**Megana Rao:** I do remember everything you say, but yes, I hear your point.

**John August:** You consult with everyone else about, “What did John actually mean when he said that thing?” Now if you don’t mind, I got to go to the bathroom. It’s been great talking with you both.

**Craig Mazin:** Byee.

**John August:** Byee.

**Megana Rao:** Bye.

Links:

* [A Good Life is Painful by Sean Illing](https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/2021/12/13/22811994/vox-conversations-paul-bloom-the-sweet-spot)
* [The Sweet Spot](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-sweet-spot-paul-bloom?variant=33090880733218) by Paul Bloom
* [Crazy Italian chocolate cake (egg free chocolate cake)](http://chelseawinter.co.nz/egg-free-chocolate-cake/) by Chelsea Winter
* [Baba is You](https://hempuli.com/baba/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Owen Danoff ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/532bstandard.mp3).