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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/making-the-modern-comedy-series).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 551 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’re going to the writers room to discuss the making of two of my favorite comedies of the last year. To do so, we have two amazing guests. John Hoffman is a writer, producer, and actor whose credits include Grace and Frankie and Looking, but most recently was also the co-creator of Only Murders in the Building, starring Steve Martin, Selena Gomez, and Martin Short. Season 2 premiers in June, but we have him here right now. John Hoffman, welcome to Scriptnotes.

**John Hoffman:** Thank you, John August, very much. It’s so nice to be here. I’m a big fan.

**John August:** Thank you very much for coming on the show. I loved your show. I was excited to see it beforehand because of the cast. What you were able to build that we’re… I really want to dig into the strange, very specific tone you got to and where that all came from. I’m hoping we can explore all that.

**John Hoffman:** Thank you. It’s a favorite topic. I love it.

**John August:** We also have Brittani Nichols, who is a writer, actress, and organizer, known for Suicide Kale, A Black Lady Sketch Show, and the phenomenal Abbott Elementary. Welcome, Brittani.

**Brittani Nichols:** Hey. Thanks for having me.

**John August:** Now, I want to talk to both of you about going from the whiteboard to a finished episode, about alt lines, tone, table reads, what you learn as the season unfolds, so just a few things. In a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, if you’re up for it, I want to talk about the pressures and possibilities of being openly queer writers, because all three of us on this call are, and something we don’t get to talk about a lot. If you guys are game for that, we can do that as a Bonus Segment. Sound good?

**John Hoffman:** All in.

**Brittani:** Sounds great.

**John August:** Fantastic. Now first, you guys, we’re all working on acclaimed shows that got second seasons, so congratulations. This past week was a bloodbath for a few shows that didn’t make it to their second seasons or didn’t make the cut. Seventeen shows canceled in 48 hours, which is so brutal. Now, Brittani, you’re on a network show, so it’s a reminder that there still is a season to network shows. In the spring, a bunch of shows don’t make the cut. When you were working on Abbott, at what point in the process did you start thinking, worrying about a second season? Did you know early on, okay, our show is doing great, we’re going to be able to go back for a second year?

**Brittani:** I think we were all pretty confident from the first moment that we saw the cuts of the early episodes coming in, and so we were like, if we’re able to just get this out there, we feel pretty good about it, which was definitely a unique position to be in. I think that second-guessing varies a bit within a room, and the people at the top are a little more hesitant to be confident. Us lower-level, mid-level writers are very much like, “We think we’re going to be okay and feel pretty safe.” We’re not going to be out shucking samples, looking for something else to hop onto.

**John August:** Now, you got your renewal notice. Were you still working on the show when you got the call that you were going to have a second season?

**Brittani:** No, we were out of the room. We just were playing the waiting game and hearing about all of the backroom details that go into renewal, and based on if the studio has other shows that haven’t been renewed and if it’s a shared production and all the sort of stuff that I never really knew about, I learned about as we were waiting for something that we knew was going to happen and hadn’t happened yet and we were trying to figure out why.

**John August:** Now John, for your show, I went into watching the show thinking it was just going to be a limited series. I really thought there would just be one season. Did you know going in that you wanted a second season, that there was more to do? What was your process about thinking about a second season, and when did you know that it was a possibility?

**John Hoffman:** I actually did want and assume there would be a second season, I think because of the auspices around it and the desire to dive in and explore these characters and this world in the way that we were talking about in development. I think there was the sense like, okay, I think there’s a good shot. It’s how we went into a second season which was concerning to me. That was the big question mark of whether the show would be embraced, whether everyone involved with the show, who I loved and respected so much, would feel good about it. These are the questions that I obsessed on and just thought, oh god, what a nightmare if this doesn’t get received well or what a nightmare if Steve, Marty, Selena aren’t having fun or enjoying it or thinking it’s worth their time. That was where I was thinking more, and just entirely on story and entirely on fulfilling that crowd.

**John August:** Your shows are so different in a sense of Abbott Elementary is like a classic sitcom. It is an engine that can keep generating story. It can just keep going in a way that’s so nice and refreshing, we don’t see as much anymore, as opposed to Only Murders in the Building, which resolves. There’s a murder, and the murder is resolved. I guess it wasn’t until those last episodes I realized, oh, you were setting up hooks for a second season. That was always part of the plan.

**John Hoffman:** Yeah, it really was. It was the pitch from the beginning. When we sat down with Hulu, it was in the pitch, at the end of Season 1 we have three newbie true crime podcasters who find themselves suddenly the suspects in a new murder and the subjects of a new podcast that’s being done by their beloved mentor. That was really where we were aiming. I think when you’re making a murder mystery, you have to know where you’re aiming, to twist your way there. I felt, I know where we’re going and I know how to set it up so that it doesn’t belie the truth of what really happened in this mystery, but also it was just necessary in some way for the storytelling to have it be satisfying reveals and a leap forward into, oh god, now what, that takes you beyond how many people can die in one building.

**John August:** Now Brittani, you’re back in the room on the second season of Abbott Elementary, so obviously you can’t give us any spoilers, but as you were writing that first season, did you have a sense of like, okay, this is the territory we want to cover in this season, this is where we want to leave characters at the end of this season? Did that change at all during the time you were in that room?

**Brittani:** Quinta came in with a pretty good idea of where she wanted things to start and where she wanted things to end. It was really on us to fill in that middle and figure out how we got from point A to point B. It feels a bit like that this season as well, where she has what happened over the summer planned out and where we’re starting the characters and we’re figuring out where we want them to end up now, especially with… We’re hoping to have more than 13 episodes this season, so seeing what we can do with a little bit more time to play.

**John August:** You say you’re hoping for more than 13 episodes. That just gives me a panic attack. I can’t imagine doing 13 episodes, much less 18 or 22. It just seems like so much. Yet as we were talking before we got on the call, you were able to shoot your episodes in five days, which is just terrific. It’s so smart that you can do such a great show in such a limited period of time. John, I see you nodding here. Do you want 13 episodes? Do you want 20 episodes?

**John Hoffman:** No. I’m right with you in that. I admire so much. I talked to Quinta about this too. I’m like, “God, the idea of it seems so daunting.” To keep it alive and as fresh as you guys are doing on that show, and knowing the work that goes into the 10 that we have to do, and to feel like it’s fulfilling and deep and funny and all of those things it has to be, yeah, it makes me sweat.

**John August:** Brittani, you first came onto my radar because you had a tweet that showed some of the handwritten alternate jokes from one scene on Abbott Elementary. Can you describe what we saw in that tweet? Because it was just such a revelation to me, all the different ways you were trying to get out of that scene or what the anchor points were for that dialog. Talk to us about that tweet.

**Brittani:** We are lucky enough that we’re not under the gun constantly. We have a little bit of time to play with alts. We also are lucky enough that when you’re the writer of the episode, you get to be on set for your episode, which I think was really touch and go during COVID. We felt so lucky that we got to be there and also that we were given the opportunity to do that, because I know a lot of shows, if the showrunner’s there, if the upper-level producers are there, just because it’s your script doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be able to talk to the actors, look at the director, and figure out spots where you can play with things, play with lines. Actually, when I was on A Black Lady Sketch Show, we certainly did not have time to do that, but I would still prepare each day or have alts and just show up with alts.

With Abbott, I tried to do the same thing. I would have alts prepared, and I would also be writing while I was on set, depending on the blocking, depending on how things felt, on the tone, on what was hitting, what wasn’t. I tweeted a list of alts for a joke, because I thought I had some pretty good ones that didn’t make the cut and just really wanted to share them. I thought it was fun. That’s I think a practice a lot of the writers here do, just trying to make ourselves laugh, keep it fun on set, keep the actors surprised, guessing. Also, it encourages them I think to have some fun as well. We’ve definitely had a couple of lines from this past season that the actors came up with themselves. It’s been really fun, especially with some of the inspirations for me, like Parks and Rec and Community, where I know some of the famous lines from those shows were alts or were improvs.

**John August:** We had Mike Schur on the show recently talking about Parks and Rec. That mockumentary format is so handy for being able to just throw out ideas. The camera’s rolling, you pitch a thing, and they could say that thing, and you could see what actually lands, as opposed to I’m guessing Only Murders in the Building. It’s a really tightly shot, cinematic show. Are alts a thing that happen on your show, John?

**John Hoffman:** It’s so funny. Marty and I were just talking about this last week and dinner. He said, “I get asked all the time about improvving and alts and things like that.” He said, “Honestly, it’s so rare.” As you point out, it’s necessarily so in certain ways, because it is very densely plotted. Also, what I love is that I get the benefit of Marty Short’s phone calls after a script lands in his laptop, I want to say 45 minutes after we sent it. He’s already pitching on… “There’s just two lines, John.” I get one-sentence emails from Steve, always, three times a week, which I love. They’re either ideas for the show or there’s one line. Steve will walk onto set, ready to do a scene, and inevitably, “John, John, there’s just one line.” I’m like, “I know. I’m sure there is. Let’s make it better.” That will happen. In general, the other thing that happens is Selena, every now and then… They’re all just lovely, generous, open people. Selena, when she feels something is not right or false or this doesn’t feel… Nothing is better for me than hearing her say, “This is what I think I would do,” and we have a good phone call or two about it. It’s great. That’s really the limit. Sometimes for alts, I’m reaching or thinking or popping another line just to button a scene or something like that. Otherwise, it’s pretty straight to script.

**John August:** Let’s talk about the script and the actors encountering the script. Do you guys have table reads for Only Murders in the Building? Do you table read each script?

**John Hoffman:** We have blessing of table read over Zoom that’s only for cast and myself and for Dan and Jess, Dan Fogelman and Jess Rosenthal. We don’t have studio or network there for that. It’s very familial and very Zoom-like, Hollywood Squares with a ridiculous cast. It helps them tremendously on a Saturday afternoon to read through it and hear it. Then many times the actors will make appointments on Zoom with other actors to say let’s go over our scene. It’s great, and yet there is a freedom that doesn’t put the angst around a table read as much either. Everything’s been signed off by the time we have them.

**John August:** Now Brittani, for Abbott, do you guys table read?

**Brittani:** We do, yeah. We do Zoom table reads. The actors have their videos pulled up. When you are the writer of the episode, you’ll cast the day player parts with the other writers. That’s always fun. You might get your feelings hurt a little bit if you’re not cast. Then we’ll have network and studio folks on the call as well, but without their videos on.

**John August:** Let’s talk through the whole process for coming from the whiteboard, the start of the season, blue sky, we could do anything, to a finished episode. John, for yours, you started with, I assume, a pilot script and then went to a room to figure out the rest of it. What was the process for you?

**John Hoffman:** That’s exactly right. This one, I just felt the onus immediately of being as prepared as I possibly could. I did have a full three-act structure to the whole season. I had a real sense of how it would move. I had the main thematics of the character arcs across the season, and a pilot, a pilot I worked on with Steve and got great input from Dan Fogelman and Jess Rosenthal as well. All of that was in plan in a big pitch. Then got together with the writers and tried to make sense of the pilot, because I had certain specificities in the pilot which posed questions that I didn’t quite have the answer to yet, one of them being who is the ultimate killer. I knew I would need that pretty quickly. The writing team and everyone else got in there, and we sorted out how that would make the most sense and how that would make the most bang for our buck.

**John August:** It sounds like the pilot was asking provocative questions, and then it was the job in the writers room to find provocative answers.

**John Hoffman:** Yeah, I saddled them with that. I was definitely like, “Yeah, we got to figure that out.” I was happy to have a group to work some stuff out that way. It was all strangely though infused, I should say. Also, just on a personal level, I had been through this very profound year before this show landed in my lap, a personal experience around the murder of a friend of mine that I had been out of touch with for a while. I found myself investigating and getting involved in that in a way that was revelatory to me. I’ve had a very personal connection to the kind of story we’d be telling in this show. A lot of it was guided by the underlying truth that I had experienced in that journey. That helped guide us a bit into the-

**John August:** John, let’s dig deeper on that, because I think those writers, as they’re approaching a piece of material, the question you’re always asking them is what is your personal connection to this. It sounds like your personal connection to this was you had the experience of being a person investigating a murder or asking people questions about a murder. Your assumptions of what you did, what you didn’t know, and the ethics of what you’re doing in terms of this investigation, how much of that carries through into the script, and how much of your quest is really the quest we see the actors going on, the characters going on?

**John Hoffman:** I think the spirit of what I had experienced is in the show. It was something Dan… I don’t know why I told this story in the first meeting with Dan Fogelman, but I couldn’t not, because I was so deep in it. It made us connected. I think that was the core of the show. That became the core of the show. The funniest moments can come at the most traumatic. The best laugh is at a funeral. The best laugh is at the most inappropriate time. The most bonding moment can be in the most shocking moment that you share with people that you may not know that well, and therefore your vulnerabilities are stripped bare and you are investing with people and around people that you wouldn’t normally.

All of those things felt like a basis of where I wanted the funny to live in this show and where I wanted the poignant to live in this show. It’s very much what I was experiencing. I was taking big leaps in my own life to go and meet people I didn’t know around my friend’s death, his family, his children. I didn’t know they existed before I found myself in Wisconsin meeting them and being completely charmed and having huge laughs with them out of this huge traumatic moment that they had all experienced. There’s that that feels to me connective tissue that we could play with. It felt like a bit of a guiding force for how to best play the comedy and the drama in our show while trying to keep it all fairly buoyant.

**John August:** Brittani, Abbott Elementary exists in a world that has The Office and Modern Family, so this convention of characters acknowledging the camera’s established. For that aspect of tone, you had it. Yet Abbott is so specific and uncomfortable at moments. We’re seeing things we don’t normally see on screen. Can you talk to us about when you’re in the room pitching on an Abbott Elementary or pitching an idea for that, what does that feel like? Because it sounds like [inaudible 00:17:34] that you were probably describing some really uncomfortable things and trying to find a funny way into it. What is the process of… You are a story editor on the season. What are you doing in the room as you’re pitching an idea?

**Brittani:** Luckily, I’m a producer now.

**John August:** Fantastic. Congratulations.

**Brittani:** Congratulations to me.

**John August:** Second season, love it.

**John Hoffman:** Go get it, Brittani.

**Brittani:** One of the first things that we did the first season was talk about the characters’ relation to the camera. Obviously, Ava really loves it. She brought them there. She is living for them. The rest of them, it varies from tacit acknowledgement to trying to hide to being caught by it constantly. I think even as far as character development, their relationship to the camera I think tells that story as well, so seeing how people are going to be reacting to the camera in the second season. Is there a way to even use the camera against other people or for your own devices? Are there ways to manipulate the camera? That’s definitely something that we are talking about all the time, because we also want to be very careful in how we develop the camera’s relationship outside of the school.

I think with mockumentaries, as they go on, you tend to expand the world a bit. This being set at a school, that will be outside of the school, possibly at apartments. It’s going to be a decision from us about where is it realistic for this camera to follow people. How much are we going to hang on to this convention? Because shows like Parks and Rec, they at a certain point left that behind a little.

**John August:** They can go anywhere.

**Brittani:** I think we just want to be aware of it so that if that ever happened, it’s happening because we’ve made a collective decision to move away from that. Right now, we’re still pretty firmly planted in the boundaries of that reality.

**John August:** I’m thinking back to The Office. This may not be the first time we really left The Office, but I remember the Diwali episode was one of the first times where we seen people outside of their normal space and comfort zones and you get a sense like, oh people go home to a place after they leave work, and they have a whole other life. It hadn’t even occurred to me that we really have not seen outside of the walls of the elementary school in that whole first season, but we really have been locked in there. I guess we go to the zoo in the last episode, but it’s literally a field trip.

**Brittani:** Yeah, we go to the zoo and we go to the nail salon.

**John August:** That’s right.

**Brittani:** At the nail salon, it is very much a topic about the school. We still buy why we’re there. We still get why we’re there.

**John August:** Let’s talk about the topics you do get into in Abbott Elementary, because especially in those first couple episodes, the stakes feel a little bit higher than most of these mockumentaries in the sense of there are kids who you want to see getting a good education, yet the system seems stacked up against them. The first episode is about literally getting rugs for the classrooms and the shenanigans you have to go through to get them. As you’re discussing those, do you bring up the uncomfortable idea and everyone kicks around trying to find the funny? What is the pitching process in the room about it, that goes from here’s a general idea to this becomes a center of an episode?

**Brittani:** We don’t pitch lesson-first. It really is what do we think is funny, what is the situation, and then from there we will layer things on or we’ll find things. It’s just an inherently political show, I think just from the fact that it’s at a public school, and we do have a very contentious relationship with public schools in our country right now. All of those things I think are really naturally interwoven, and it’s really easy for us to organically find those tie-ins that I think a lot of the time just come from a moment of dialog, a scene here or there. It’s not what is driving the story. It’s the background. It’s something that is constantly present and that we acknowledge when we have to. There is no separating the show or the characters or the situation from reality.

I think that’s something that makes some people a little uneasy if that is something that they’re facing in their real lives. It could be a pretty hard show to watch because we are having people not laugh at the situation, but laughter and humor is a coping mechanism. I think that that’s one of the ways that we want to use the show overall is there’s so much that’s happening constantly. This can be a nice little reprieve from that, while not completely divorcing yourself from what’s happening.

**John August:** Great. I want to talk to both of you about the documents that come along the way. We’ll start with you, Brittani. You’re in the writers room for Abbott Elementary. You’re figuring out an episode. That’s literally done on a whiteboard. I guess probably it’s a virtual whiteboard for a lot of this, because of the pandemic. At what point does it come off that board into an outline form? Are you pitching story areas? What are the documents that happen before there’s a script?

**Brittani:** For us that is a sort of general brainstorm doc of one or two lines of I think this would be funny, what if this happened. We just blue sky that for a bit. Then we’ll identify from within those what seems like an A story, what seems like a B story, do any of these seem like thematically they resonate with each other and trying to pair those together. Then we will do a story area. We’ll do just a few paragraphs about the A and B story. Then after the story area we’ll go to a pre-outline. We’ll have all the scene slugs and just some sentences below that about what’s happening, a little bit of dialog, a little bit of jokes. Then that’s when we’ll go to the outline.

**John August:** The story area is the first document that you’re turning in to other people outside of the room, that’s going to a studio and a network, taking a look at what the general idea of the episode is?

**Brittani:** Yes.

**John August:** John, curious on your side, what does it look like for the documents along the way? You have such a puzzle piece of a show. A lot of stuff can happen in an episode that ties into things two episodes later. What do the documents look like along the way?

**John Hoffman:** It’s so much so early for ours, because in some ways we have to have the whole season mapped out in general terms in order to make sense of episodes. A lot of it is focused early on in the writers room to map out the full thing. Mystery-wise we have what I call clotheslines. We’ve been nothing but a Zoom room. We couldn’t deal with whiteboards on writers room. It’s terrible. I know I should be better about these things, but I was like, no, I can’t. We had no whiteboards. I would call them clotheslines, the mystery clothesline, the character arc clothesline, the bucket of things that we want to do that feel like comedic premises that feel fertile. There was all that. Really, I have to do a full season pitch over Zoom to Hulu and 20th. We work on that pretty quickly to get that together.

**John August:** How long is the full season pitch?

**John Hoffman:** Forty-five minutes to an hour. It’s very visual and slap-happy and gets you all of the things we’re exploring in the season, a general three-act beat of a three-act structure for the season, and then the character arcs for the season. Then we jump into Episode 1, Episode 2. Then we accelerate it through all the things we still don’t know yet to come, but we can give general blocks of areas. Since the show itself is set up so that each episode has its own way in, a perspective through the narration of the podcast that is being done, and the template we now have of walking in from a perspective of a kind of New Yorker that you might not expect to be telling the story, we’re making this little bit of a tapestry of characters of New York through episode per episode. The big arc is laid out, and then each one feels like its own little episode I can hold in my hand is what I keep on saying to the writers, and understand what we’re telling in that story. We actually do not go to outlying stage to present to anyone but ourselves. We only give full scripts into studio and network. It’s painstaking to get there, but they have understood the entire arc of where we’re going by the time they’re getting a first episode.

**John August:** This presentation which is taking the place of the outlines, how far are you into your writers room by the time you’re putting together this presentation?

**John Hoffman:** It’s been at least two months, two and a half. It’s the most painstaking part of it. You make commitments to it that you have to be able to toss away. You also have to be prepared to fulfill them in better ways than you pitched them in that 45 minutes to an hour, for sure.

**John August:** Is Only Murders in the Building block-shot or are you shooting it episode by episode?

**John Hoffman:** We shoot two episodes in a block. We have one director handling two episodes. They’re always back to back, or have been so far. We have it mapped out in twos.

**John August:** Brittani, you were saying earlier that your episodes shoot in a five-day week.

**Brittani:** Yep, Monday through Friday.

**John August:** Wow, such a dream. We were also saying that that set that we’re seeing in the school is truly a set, and so you guys can do whatever you need to do in that one standing set, which is just remarkable.

**Brittani:** Yeah, we’re on a four in, one out schedule, or we were the first season. I think we might get a few more days out this season.

**John August:** Four in, one out means that four days you have to be on your sets and one day you can be out in the fields with trucks and trailers and doing all that stuff. That’s to get your exteriors for places that couldn’t be on there or if you need to go inside some place. Before this, you were working on A Black Lady Sketch Show. Is that entirely out?

**Brittani:** The season I was on, which was the first season, we were completely on location for everything.

**John August:** With Abbott, John’s talking about one director’s doing two episodes back to back, you’re mixing in scenes. With you guys, how far ahead of the episodes shooting do scripts tend to be?

**Brittani:** I think we’re going to have turned in maybe 10 episodes I believe is the goal before we start shooting the first episode.

**John August:** That’s fantastic. That’s great. I want to talk a little about career trajectories. We got right into the shows you’re making and not where you came from. John, what’s your origin story? I know you’re an actor as well as being a writer. How did you come up the ranks to be doing what you’re doing?

**John Hoffman:** I know, I make no sense when I look at my own IMDB or whatever it is or any resume I look at. I started as an actor in New York after college and then found myself working really hard to get cast in plays that I was then embarrassed to have people come and see. I thought why not try and write something. I found myself writing for myself as an actor. When I wrote, I wasn’t just writing monologues or one-man shows. I was writing plays. I found myself learning structure in certain ways. I’ve always been a storyteller, I think when I was a young person. That segued into coming out here to Los Angeles and getting work as an actor in TV shows, many TV shows that weren’t very good in certain ways. Some were wonderful experiences. It was again that muscle in me that was saying I think I do better with the things I write than it was a crazy ride of screenwriting for me where my writing got picked up by certain producers, certain studios.

At the time when writers got deals at studios, I was getting deals at Disney and Warner Brothers and writing screenplays and learning how to do that while being able to make a living. I segued that way, mainly into growing into more deeper love with storytelling that way, but also finding myself picking the projects that were harder to get made and finding my way into getting very close to getting certain things produced that felt very close, and after years of work and things like that, challenges all around, and finally relented and joined a team at HBO where I’d been developing many shows for them.

They finally said, would you like to join this new show called Looking? I thought, I’m going to have trouble hitting someone else’s target for a show. They know what they want. Let them do it. I consulted on it, because I loved the people that were involved. I remained great friends with them to this day. It allowed me to feel myself as like, oh I could be valuable in a room. I learned a lot and very quickly moved through the television world to land in this crazy place.

**John August:** Now, Brittani, you are an actor as well. What was your journey coming up as a writer?

**Brittani:** I started as a PA, background actor, writer for a website called Autostraddle just to make a few pennies here and there as I was trying to become a writer, because I really was steadfast that I was not going to work in a service industry. I just was going to be broke until I wasn’t broke. I did a web series called Words with Girls. Then I wrote a pilot version of that. I was part of this Listserv for Black people in the industry. Denise Davis, who was one of Issa Rae’s producers at the time, and continues to be, sent out an email, and I cold responded with a pilot of mine. Issa ended up independently producing it alongside two other pilots. Right when we were going to try to take those out on the town, Insecure got picked up. That was enough to give me a little bit of credibility.

I ended up working on a BET variety show. I ended up doing Billy On the Street in one of the earlier seasons, and really just through luck and randomness and being prepared, just continued to I guess somersault from one thing to the next, until I made a feature called Suicide Kale that did the LGBTQ film circuit, won a bunch of awards there, audience awards, comedy awards, etc. That is ultimately what landed me my first scripted job, which was Take My Wife on Seeso, RIP.

**John August:** Oh, Seeso. It sounds like you say lucky, but also you were putting yourself in positions where luck could strike, having the courage to blind submit to Issa Rae’s producer. You’re making those choices. You had the material that you could send, and you weren’t afraid to share it with people. It sounds like you were happy to work for people who wanted to employ you. Didn’t matter whether Seeso was a real network or not, you were there and eager to do it, ready to step up and show that you could do these things. We have a couple questions from listeners. Most of our listeners are aspiring writers and writer-directors. Maybe you guys could weigh in on what you think they should do. Megana, do you want to start us off?

**Megana:** Great. We got a question from Tim from Washington, D.C. who asks, “I’m an East Coastie writer-director who moved to Los Angeles from 2016 to 2021 after having made an indie film that sold at Sundance. Though I improved as a writer and improved my network, I had so-so relationships with my reps and wasn’t really able to get anything going during my time in LA. My question is whether I’d be better served living in LA year-round versus instead living where I would like and visiting Los Angeles for a few weeks or months out of the year. I’m trying to cobble together one of those careers where I can write feature scripts for myself to direct, occasionally write features for hire, develop television, and occasionally direct for TV.”

**John August:** John, what’s your instinct? Do you think that Tim from DC should come to Los Angeles? Should he go to New York? Right now in 2022, what should Tim be doing?

**John Hoffman:** It’s hard to say for Tim personally. I don’t know what his life is like. It is hard for me to imagine a place, I hate to say this in this way because it sounds so corny, but more embracing of talent than Los Angeles. New York is tough. New York was tough for me. New York is theater-based. I love the theater. I found it hard to break into television and film through New York. People do. I know they do. I think in general the swath, the breadth of opportunity in Los Angeles is just greater for what it sounds like Tim wants to do. In the world of film, independent film, you can find your way easily. I was just talking about Looking and talking about my friend Andrew Haigh who broke in by making an independent film in England for $45,000.

**John August:** That’s Weekend.

**John Hoffman:** Exactly. That’s a great model. Not to say you can’t do it. It can happen anywhere if you’re working at your craft and making it in the way that you want, bring yourself to it. I do think there’s no way to get around the fact that there is more work, more opportunity, more people in the business, more conversations you can have with people that can lead to opportunities.

**John August:** Brittani, what’s your instinct for Tim?

**Brittani:** I can’t speak to the feature aspect of it, because that just might be something that’s completely different. As far as the jobs that I’ve gotten and the friends that I’ve made that have helped me make my feature, that was all a product of being in LA. Every job that I’ve had I can connect back to a chance meeting or a random text or some event rather than I can trace it back to me being incredibly talented, which I am.

That is an additional thing that never would’ve been any use to me if I hadn’t been out there making connections, making friends, and just being around. I tell people this all the time. I hear people when they’re hiring. I hear people when they’re casting. So much of it is, oh, I just saw so-and-so at this coffee shop. Oh, I just ran into so-and-so at the movie theater. There’s so much just recency bias of the last person I saw is the person that I’m thinking of and the person I’m going to hire. If you just do not show up and be in people’s faces, it’s just easy to forget you, no matter how talented you are, unfortunately.

**John August:** I’ve said this on the podcast several times. I bumped into Melissa McCarthy at Starbucks. She’d been in Go. She’d had a tiny part in Go. She was great in it, but the movie hadn’t come out yet. I bumped into her in Starbucks off of Melrose and said, “Oh, you’re amazing in the movie. I’m going to write something for you.” Then I did. Then we ended up writing a bunch of stuff together. She ended up being in my little short film, and our careers grew together. Being in the place where people are trying to make film and TV is really helpful just for the accidental overlaps of interest. I think, Tim, if you have the opportunity, if you didn’t like LA the first time, maybe give it another shot and maybe just find ways to put yourself out there more so you’re bumping into people the way that I bumped into people and Brittani bumped into people. Megana, do you have another question for us?

**Megana:** Yeah. Jason asks, “I understand that new writers are generally expected to specialize if they want to get anywhere with their career. How do you choose which path to take when, for example, your first love is feature comedy but your idea generator tends to produce six times as many pitches for TV dramas? Assuming the quality of my writing in both is comparable and at a professional level, and that I would enjoy drama television writing only slightly less than feature writing, would I be better off investing in writing this one comedy feature idea or pursuing several drama samples?”

**John August:** Brittani, what do you think, sample-wise? You were writing samples I’m guessing for years. Were you trying to specialize? Were you trying to just write a huge variety of things?

**Brittani:** I knew I wanted to work in comedy, but even comedy right now, there’s such a diverse set of what is considered a comedy. You got hard comedies, you got drama comedies, you got mixed genres. I think honestly, it being good matters more than it necessarily falling into any specific bucket. I’ve been writing off of the same sample for, I’m not kidding, probably four years at this point. It’s just because it’s really good. It’s just the one that people gravitate towards the most. Though I have a large selection, it’s really just getting it to the point where you feel like it really exhibits your voice and really is something that only you could write. That should come across no matter what genre it is.

**John August:** John, what’s your instinct? Do you think Jason should try to specialize or branch out?

**John Hoffman:** I agree with Brittani. I came at this, as I said, as an actor. My path to what scripts I wrote, the genres and all of it, was wildly an actor’s point of view, like I want to play every part and be comedic and be dramatic. I confused a lot of people, truthfully, in the screenwriting world when I was doing a World War II epic and then I was doing a really straight down the line comedy. Then I directed and wrote a family film for MGM. It’s all over the map. I agree with Brittani. You find the thing that is the great story and tell it the best way you can. That’s going to be the ticket I think more than anything, than genre or anything like that. I think the most personal and the most connective to what you do and what you love and what you respond to or what you recognize out in the world as a great story that no one’s told yet or a great story no one’s told in the way that you want to tell it, that’s the thing that ultimately will feel signature to you. That’s everything.

**John August:** I’ve said before on the podcast that I got pigeonholed really quickly as a guy who does kids movies. My first two paid jobs were A Wrinkle in Time and How to Eat Fried Worms. I was just getting sent material that was about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. I was just very much pegged as a safe family guy. Writing Go was really helpful for me, because that became my sample for years. You could look at Go and see it as a comedy. You could look at it and see it as a drama, an action movie. Whatever you wanted to see in that movie, you could see. Writing something like that that can serve more than one purpose can be really helpful as well. It’s time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend things that people should check out. Brittani, do you have anything you want to recommend our listeners investigate?

**Brittani:** I want people to check out the Knock LA Voter Guide because we have an election coming up on June 7th.

**John August:** I had a hunch that you were going to talk politics. Tell us about this guide. Tell us what are some races that we really need to be keeping our eyes on.

**Brittani:** The races that I think people should really be paying attention to are the mayoral race. We have a billionaire who is running, Rick Caruso, not great. I don’t know if you’re a billionaire yourself.

**John August:** There are no billionaires on this Zoom.

**Brittani:** Then maybe that might be your guy. If you are not a billionaire, then I would caution against supporting his candidacy. The sheriff’s race, our sheriff currently, Alex Villanueva, is the laughingstock of the nation. Actually was just on John Oliver’s show. He has been putting out some really, I think, hilarious while also deeply disturbing ads, if you haven’t had a chance to check those out. They’re very cinematic. If you’re a filmmaker, they’re worth checking out. Paying attention to the sheriff’s race and seeing who else is out there that you might consider supporting, because those are the two really big ones. The Knock LA Voter Guide if you are progressive, which I think most people in LA consider themselves to be, even if that’s not necessarily the case. You should check it out.

**John August:** One thing I would stress is that this election could be a preliminary election. There could be runoffs for mayor and for sheriff, but not if either of these candidates get over 50%. You may have different opinions about who you want to be the mayor that’s not Rick Caruso, but if you really don’t want Rick Caruso to be the mayor, just don’t vote for Rick Caruso, but definitely vote, to keep him below that threshold, same for sheriff. We can have a whole other podcast about why we vote for sheriff, which just seems really crazy, something you’d want to appoint and then be able to fire when they are terrible. That’s a whole different podcast on law enforcement. John, do you have anything to share with us? Do you have a One Cool Thing?

**John Hoffman:** I love that we go political deep, because it’s all I can think about these days. I do think that we’re in a time, we’re heading to a time, it’s the most tumultuous time I’ve known in my life. I think any time you’re wondering what to do with yourself as a writer or a creator, if you’re not looking to tell the stories that are happening now in real ways, that I watch what’s happening in the Ukraine and recognizing that’s a camera sitting in someone’s house that’s changing the world right now. The personal stories are going to be the ones that make the most impact. To me, that’s everything right now is to look to ways to lean into making the world better. It’s our vote. It’s our activism for the things that matter most to us right now. Find the ones that feel straight to the heart for yourself, and don’t hesitate to get out.

**John August:** Sounds good. My One Cool Thing is an article by Ameena Walker, who’s writing for a newsletter called The Prepared, which is actually a really great newsletter you should also subscribe to. Basically, it talks through the logistics industry and how products go from place to place and how things get made. This article that she did was about… The headline is, “Each year, millions of barrels are shipped from New York City to the Caribbean. Here’s why, how, and the economics behind it.”

She’s talking about how people from the Caribbean Islands who live in New York City are always sending stuff back to home. They’re always sending stuff back to the islands. The way they do this is they buy these barrels that are about 40 bucks, and they pack it full of all the stuff that they can find to stick in there. It could be toasters. It could be rice. It could be whatever. They seal it up, and they take it to a specific delivery place that just ships stuff on boats to the Caribbean Islands. Then it carries from there to individual homes. It’s just such a specific thing that I’ve never seen before, because I always think about sending money home. I always think people who live here are sending money back to the countries they come from. In this case it literally is a barrel.

It just felt like such an amazing story opportunity for getting that barrel, what you’re putting in that barrel, that barrel gets lost. It just felt like a very cool story area that I’ve never seen before. It’s a good reminder to me about why it’s important to try to make sure we get writers on staffs who have a range of experiences, because I wouldn’t know this was a thing that existed. It just feels like such a great comedic or dramatic potential that I wouldn’t know about if I hadn’t found this article or if someone hadn’t pointed me to it. This is by Ameena Walker in The Prepared. We’ll have a link in the show notes to this.

That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Daniel Mix. 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. Brittani, what are you on Twitter?

**Brittani:** @bishilarious.

**John August:** It’s true, B is hilarious. John, are you on Twitter?

**John Hoffman:** I am, yes, @johnnyhoffman.

**John August:** Fantastic. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 being queer in Hollywood and queer stuff, queer stuff in general. John, Brittani, an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me.

**John Hoffman:** Thank you.

**Brittani:** Thank you so much for having me. Really would be wild to go back to 2010 me and say this is happening.

**John August:** Why so? You read my blog, didn’t you?

**Brittani:** I did, yes. I credit your blog for really teaching me a lot of the underpinnings of screenwriting.

**John August:** Fantastic. Makes me feel so happy and so old.
[Bonus Segment]

**John August:** There are three queer writers on this Bonus Segment for the podcast. I guess I just want to start, I was out really from the very start of my career. Was that true for the two of you as well?

**John Hoffman:** Almost. I would say because I started as an actor, it was a tricky moment and a tricky time for me. I was very cautious about that, because clearly I’m leading man material. No. It was all that dance. It was just a different decade. I came out probably very shortly after I realized I don’t want to be an actor. I actually wondered if the last part I got on a television show is actually a replacement happening that never happened. It was a question as to whether I was going to get replaced, because I was supposed to be a character that was deeply invested in women. I don’t know that I was pulling it off as clearly as I could’ve been. That was a moment.

**John August:** You were Frasier Crane-ing it a bit there?

**John Hoffman:** Exactly.

**John August:** Or Niles maybe, a little too Niles?

**John Hoffman:** Yeah, a little bit of Niles. That was for a moment. Then it was just the greatest relief and creativity just opened me up completely to be able to just own everything and be honest about it.

**John August:** Brittani, how about you?

**Brittani:** Yes, my professional career, was out the whole time. I think when I first started writing plays in college, I was definitely still grappling with some things. I think the arts is how I figured some of that stuff out.

**John August:** John, I would say your show, there’s not a lot of directly queer content. I would say it has a queer sensibility. I’m not even sure why to say that. I guess there’s a New Yorker quality. The aesthetics of it feel kind of gay. To what degree do you think your show has queer elements to it?

**John Hoffman:** I hope it does. I think all the things you point out, like New York, the theatrical way we’re telling the stories.

**John August:** Splash the musical feels like a-

**John Hoffman:** Splash the musical.

**John August:** It’s a very queer idea.

**John Hoffman:** Not to mention the poster of the show I really want to see, which is in Marty’s, Oliver’s apartment, Newark, Newark. All of that sensibility, I can’t help it. It was crying out for everyone I knew in prewar apartment buildings in New York City when I was living there, when I was forming my creative identity there, all of the characters, all of the richness of New York. It’s representation within the fabric of the truth of New York. There are representations, Detective Williams, played by the amazing Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who narrates our Episode 6. She and her wife were struggling with naming their child.

**John August:** I forgot that, but yes, absolutely.

**John Hoffman:** That’s what I hope. It’s almost like you want to blend it all together as New York does. I think that’s part of it is the sensibility and the storytelling feels not afraid to be filled with pathos and filled with struggle and vulnerability and everything that makes people laugh in the deepest way in the queer community for me.

**John August:** Brittani, on the projects you’ve been working on, how often do you feel like you’re able to bring some aspect of queer culture into it, or to what degree do you feel like that’s helped you sell some jokes, make some things work? To what degree are you able to bring that into the room?

**Brittani:** The first couple of scripted series that I worked on both had queer main characters. With Black Lady Sketch Show, definitely was able to get some queer sketches in there. They’ve continued to do that even now that I’m gone, because there are plenty of queer women in that room. Then with Abbott, I think this is probably the first time where there hasn’t been a very obvious queer hook to the show, and so finding moments in Abbott I think has been interesting. I think the moments that we have found, people think they’re really fun. As we grow the world, I think we’ll be able to see more queer characters in ways that I would like to see them more, which is just existing and just living their lives and having normal jobs.

We did have a moment like that in the first season actually, where there’s a delivery woman who is just very clearly a stud lesbian, and it’s very quick, but so many people messaged me just being like, “That person was hot. Is there a way to bring them back? Also, it’s so fun that there’s just a queer person existing and there was no commentary on it.”

**John August:** A person existing on screen is such a signifier. I just remember growing up watching TV shows, and you just see like, oh, that’s an actual person who does that thing. I grew up with… We had Paul Lynde in the center square of Hollywood Squares, but we didn’t have a lot of actual… I think part of the reason why we love Bewitched so much is that, again, you have Paul Lynde, but you have that sense of it has a queer sensibility even if there are not openly queer characters. I feel like the one delivery person in that background shot isn’t a big thing and yet it is for that kid who’s watching that wants to say oh, I see myself in that character.

**John Hoffman:** In the storytelling, I feel that. That’s so right. I was recently talking to someone about What’s Up Doc and how that’s informed our show in a certain way. Again, not outwardly queer characters, but the sensibility in the storytelling, I remember that so clearly opening up my brain and like, why am I into this and why am I so deeply intrigued and all of that, poking around at that to give people the sense of possibility and wonder about a way to tell a story that’s a little bit heightened maybe and connective tissue to more characters than would typically be on your TV screens.

**John August:** One of the things I loved about Looking was that that show was full of gay men and other queer people who were not saints, and they were actually kind of obnoxious at times. They didn’t know what they wanted. There’s that thing, either the gay people have to be funny or they have to be heroic and saintly. In this case, they were neither. That was remarkable in its time.

**John Hoffman:** Not to mention Chris Perfetti from Abbott Elementary.

**John August:** Who is delightful. Let’s get back to Chris Perfetti because he’s great. He reads as gay to a gay person immediately, and yet the show holds off on the reveal until pretty late on that he has a boyfriend. Clearly, everyone else in the universe knows that he’s gay, even though it hasn’t been said. When his boyfriend is revealed, they first mention his boyfriend, that’s news to the characters in the show. Did you guys always know that the reveal was going to come about when it did?

**Brittani:** We did. We talked about it early on, because there are certain things that we as writers know about the characters that we’re just keeping close to our chest. I think for queer people, we definitely were like, oh, obviously this is family. Most of the world is not queer. People were genuinely surprised. We even tried to point to it a little earlier in the episode where he gets roasted. Someone calls him gay Pete Buttigieg, which he says is repetitive. A lot of people didn’t catch that. A few people on Twitter did. I think it’s looking back when you rewatch the season, a lot of people will be like, okay.

They were layering that in without explicitly saying it. We definitely didn’t want to make it a huge moment, because he’s existing in a world that knows that he’s gay and has accepted him. It’s more about what is it about his relationship that is revelatory to his relationship with Janine, rather than it just being a shock that he has a boyfriend, and then being sure to bring that boyfriend in later in the season and not just be something that we pay lip service to and then never really see that relationship.

**John August:** In some ways I think I blame Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory for people being confused about the Chris Perfetti character, because Sheldon Cooper, any queer person can see that’s a gay person, that’s a queer person, and yet the show makes them straight. It always feels off to me that it’s not acknowledging that this character is who we think he is.

**John Hoffman:** I agree.

**John August:** That’s my little rant about Big Bang Theory.

**John Hoffman:** I agree. I also just want to say what I love is the thing that we’re doing now. I don’t know, starting with Looking for me, just because that was something I worked on, but I loved that discussion. I loved so many of the discussions around the writers room on that show and how it always had to be about character. It wasn’t the fact that they were gay that you were talking about by the end of Looking. Maybe that was one of its problems with connecting to the gay community in some ways. I think it was about the character flaws and about other things. Of course they’re all in bed with each other. They’re all looking for people of the same sex and all that. It’s all there. It’s connecting through character and the moves of which, the way in which you approach love and romance and relationships and struggles with your own history that tie in, certainly, but make it more dimensional. That’s all I hope for, to continually make this all the more dimensional and just unafraid.

**John August:** I think what’s crucial about the Chris Perfetti character… I’m sorry, I’m forgetting the character’s name, so I’m just calling him Chris Perfetti.

**Brittani:** Jacob.

**John August:** Jacob. What I love about Jacob is he’s sipping a character independent of his being gay. We can see all of the choices that he’s making and what he wants to do and how he keeps bringing up Africa. Those are all very specific things that have nothing to do with his sexuality, so that he doesn’t have to carry a lot of water for being gay. He doesn’t have to carry that into the storylines.

**Brittani:** Yet we really try to make him being queer inform that specificity. We talked so much about how does that white person become that sort of white person. We’ve talked really extensively about his upbringing and what it was like for him coming out and what are the situations that led to him being the way that he is. I think that it is deeply informed by the fact that he grew up a queer kid. Getting to explore that and finding ways to explore that as the show goes on is something I’m personally really excited about.

**John August:** Talk to us about those conversations. Are those being written down in some sort of bible form? They’re not canon yet, but they’re what you guys are thinking about for his history. You have some sense of who his parents are, what his family is, where he’s from, even though it’s not been established in the show yet?

**Brittani:** Yeah. We just have tons and tons of notes. What we’ll find I think a lot of the times right now in the second season is a lot of false starts where we think this is this story that’s going to bring this to the surface, and then we’ll get to writing it and we’ll go, “No, not yet.” It’s a little bit there, you’ll get a little bit here, but we’re not going full bore into that yet. It’s just I think a lot of excitement about really wanting to explore so much about so many of the characters, but still the confines of a half-hour sitcom. You really only have so much time. Wanting to give it the space that it needs to breathe and really hit I think is just something that we’re going to keep trying to do and keep finding exactly which stories are going to allow us to tell those stories the way that we want to. We’re just tracking all of it, talking about it all the time.

**John August:** Fantastic. John and Brittani, absolute wonderful time talking with you both about queer things. Congratulations to both of you on your second seasons. I cannot wait to see them.

**John Hoffman:** Thank you, John, so much. Great talking to you.

**Brittani:** Thank you.

**John Hoffman:** Great talking to you too, Brittani.

**John August:** Cool.

Links:

* [Only Murders in the Building](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12851524/) on Hulu
* [Abbott Elementary](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14218830/?ref_=nm_knf_t3) on ABC/Hulu
* [John Hoffman](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0388971/?ref_=tt_ov_wr) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/JohnnyHoffman)
* [Brittani Nichols](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4575382/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/BisHilarious)
* [Remittance by the Barrel](https://theprepared.org/features-feed/shipping-barrels) by Ameena Walker
* [The Knock LA Voter Guide](https://knock-la.com/los-angeles-progressive-voter-guide-june-primary-election-2022/)
* [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 Daniel Mintz ([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/551standard.mp3).

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

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has a few bad words from Paul Giamatti. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 549 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

In Episode 547 we touched briefly on the Sideways effect. Basically, movies sometimes have a real-world impact, not just in culture but also politically and economically. We see the Black representation onscreen or depictions of nuclear power. Movies can make things seem cool or uncool or scary. As screenwriters, we want to be aware of the influence our writing can have.

The term Sideways effect comes from the 2004 film Sideways, written by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from the Rex Pickett. Who better to ask about the Sideways effect than the writers themselves? Luckily, someone else just did, so I don’t have to. Today’s episode comes from the amazing Slate podcast Decoder Ring, hosted by Willa Paskin. It’s been one of my One Cool Things before, but this recent episode on the sideways effect was so good, I asked Willa if I could run it as a Scriptnotes episode. She said yes and agreed to have a chat afterwards with me about sideways and other cultural mysteries she’s investigated. Stick around after her episode for our conversation. For our Premium Members, Craig and I will chat about what he’s missed these last few weeks that he’s been gone. Enjoy.

**Willa Paskin:** In October 2004, the movie Sideways was released in theaters. It’s about two guys who go on a bachelors week to Wine Country. One of them is a cad who’s about to get married. The other, played by Paul Giamatti, is Miles, a hardcore wine-lover.

****Miles Raymond:**** We’re going to drink a lot of good wine. We’re going to play some golf. We’re going to eat some great food and enjoy the scenery, and we’re going to send you off in style, mon frere.

**Willa:** Sideways is a small, mellow movie, but it got big. It grossed $110 million worldwide and received five Oscar nominations. It also upended the wine industry. Famously, it is said to have done this with one line of dialogue. It arrives about a third of the way in as the guy are preparing to meet up with two women.

**Jack Cole:** If they want to drink Merlot, we’re drinking Merlot.

**Miles Raymond:** No, if anybody orders Merlot, I’m leaving. I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!

**Willa:** At the time this line was first uttered, Merlot was a popular wine people were chugging down by the glass full. Legend has it that after this line, after, “I’m not drinking any fucking Merlot,” Merlot went ahead and tanked.

**Laura Lippman:** It’s like I’m RoboCop and that’s one of my directives now, no Merlot.

**Willa:** Laura Lippman is a crime novelist who saw Sideways when it first came out. Did you notice right away that it just put you off Merlot?

**Laura:** Yeah, right away. Right away. It was like a battle cry. I have literally tried to kind of overcome that, standing in neighborhood liquor stores and looking at what’s for sale. I can’t do it. I bet I would like Merlot. I think I did like Merlot. It’s so weird. It’s like I’m the most susceptible, suggestible person on the planet.

**Willa:** When it comes to Sideways, Merlot, and wine in general, she’s not the only one. I’m Willa Paskin and this is Decoder Ring. In the mid-2000s, the movie Sideways had an impact on the wine industry so notable that it has a name: the Sideways effect. In this episode we’re going to be looking closely at that effect and what it really is. Did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades? Did a monologue jumpstart demand for a whole other varietal? Did Paul Giamatti’s sad sack character change our relationship to yet another wine, one that was barely mentioned in the film? Today on Decoder Ring, all of these questions and this one. Is it long past time to start drinking some fucking Merlot?

The Sideways effect is not just one thing. There are a number of components to it. I’m going to begin with the best known part of the phenomenon, the one I started with, the theory that Sideways shanked Merlot sales. When Sideways arrived in theaters, Merlot was the trendiest red wine in America, but America had not always had a trendiest wine. The country had been largely indifferent to wine well into the mid 20th century. California whites caught on in the 1970s when one of them won a blind taste test against world-class French wines. Then in the early ‘90s, red wine got a boost when 60 Minutes aired a segment on the so-called French Paradox. The paradox was that French people ate very fatty foods but had much lower rates of heart disease than Americans. The 60 Minutes piece came to a definitive conclusion about what was going on.

**Morley Safer:** The answer to the riddle the explanation of the paradox may lie in this inviting glass.

**Willa:** Sales of red wine spiked, and none benefited more than Merlot, which by the end of the decade would become the most popular red wine in the country.

**Tim Farrell:** Merlot is a good candidate because couple of things.

**Willa:** Tim Farrell is a wine buyer for the wine store Brooklyn Wine Exchange.

**Tim:** This is not actually too simplifying to say. It’s an easy word to pronounce. The other part is that it’s fairly fruit-forward and the tannins aren’t very strong, and the acidities are fairly low, especially when it’s made in California. It’s like a very soft, easy-drinking kind of red wine.

**Willa:** Merlot is most famously grown in Bordeaux, France, largely as a blending grape, but the American boom was centered in California, where production of Merlot quadrupled in the 1990s. Merlot is a relatively easy grape to grow, adaptable to a range of climates and soils, but that doesn’t mean it should be grown everywhere.

**Tim:** Grapes are a funny fruit because the more grape vines has to struggle to ripen, the more flavorful the fruit is.

**Willa:** California’s cool coastal areas are good for Merlot, but during the Merlot boom, it also started being planted in California’s breadbasket, the hot, fertile Central Valley.

**Tim:** That’s where Driscoll’s strawberries come from. If Merlot grows too easy in the irrigated, flat, sunny Central Valley, you’re going to have really bad grapes. That’s where the really bad Merlot grapes were coming from.

**Willa:** The mediocre grapes led to a lot of thin, too sweet Merlot, and even the better stuff was often made to be an affordable, easy sipper, the kind of inoffensive fruit-forward gateway wine offered by the glass and sold in Franzia boxes, all of which made Merlot something of a joke to wine people.

**Rex Pickett:** It was uncool to drink Merlot.

**Willa:** In the 1990s, Rex Pickett was a struggling writer living in Santa Monica.

**Rex:** I’ll try to be brief. My life was shit and I made some films and parted company with my ex-wife, whatever. I started going to wine tastings up at a little wine store. There were doctors and lawyers and snobs and whatever. It was just generally conceded that if you liked Merlot, that you were either a wine philistine or an idiot.

**Willa:** Rex regularly went up to the Santa Ynez Valley, just north of Los Angeles. As Wine Country goes, it’s nowhere near as famous as Sonoma or Napa, which are hundreds of miles north, closer to San Francisco. This region in Santa Barbara County was sleepy and underdeveloped, dotted with horse stables, golf courses, and vineyards.

**Rex:** There’s nobody up there. I’d go up midweek. I was broke. I’d go play golf for $25 on a grape course. I’d go wine tasting. It was free.

**Willa:** Rex poured these trips and his thoughts about wine into a book called Sideways. The main character, Miles, shared a lot with Rex. He was also a frustrated, divorced writer whose favorite wine was Pinot Noir, and who had the reflexive disdain for Merlot, of a 1990s oenophile. When Rex finished the book, it was rejected by dozens of publishers, but it ended up getting to Alexander Payne, the director of Election and About Schmidt.

**Alexander Payne:** I read the book actually on a flight from London to Los Angeles. When I’m reading something that I think could be a movie, I’m just praying, “Oh, please stay good until the end. Don’t come up with some gimmick or guns or violence or something. Keep it a good, sad, funny human story.”

**Willa:** When his plane landed, he called his agent and said he wanted to make Sideways into a movie. Payne is also into wine, and when he co-wrote the screenplay, he knew the no fucking Merlot line was a good one.

**Alexander:** People who knew about wine knew how much crappy Merlot there was. Then I think people who didn’t know about wine and always order Merlot were called out in an affectionate way. It had this kind of snowball effect. It was a good snowballing joke.

**Willa:** It seemed to roll right over Merlot’s reputation. What do you guys make?

**Jeff Bundschu:** We’ve been growing these Bordeaux varietals for as long as I’ve been around.

**Willa:** Jeff Bundschu is the sixth-generation owner of Gundlach Bundschu, a family vineyard in Sonoma that specializes in, among other things, Merlot.

**Jeff:** A good Merlot is pretty sexy, voluptuous, round, and intense, without the mouth-puckering tannins or austerity of an ageable cabernet.

**Willa:** Jeff agrees that in the 1990s a lot of Merlot on the market just wasn’t very good. When Sideways called this out, his Merlot, the high-quality stuff, got caught up in it.

**Jeff:** You’d have thought Spider-Man himself had swung in and tossed out Merlot.

**Willa:** Scores of newspapers chronicled Merlot’s troubles. Katie Couric, while hosting The Today Show, said she heard she wasn’t supposed to drink it anymore. People started coming into Jeff’s tasting room and saying they just did not drink Merlot. Pretty much every winemaker and seller has a similar anecdote. Steve Cuellar, a professor of economics at Sonoma State University, has heard plenty of them.

**Steve Cuellar:** It was literally just repeated over and over and over, tasting room after tasting room after tasting room, even to this day. I just figured, okay, let’s try to measure it. What is the effect?

**Willa:** In 2009, he co-authored a paper called The Sideways Effect: A Test for Changes in the Demand for Merlot and Pinot Noir Wines. It looked at wine sales in supermarkets in the four years after Sideways.

**Steve:** The movie was released in October 22, 2004. Prior to that, Merlot was experiencing a really strong growth rate. After that, sales really just collapsed. If we do a percentage growth rate, it literally goes from, I think, 13% growth rate before to almost 0 afterwards.

**Willa:** Steve was showing me a line graph as we were talking, and it’s the shape of a steep mountain that just abruptly flattens out.

**Steve:** When I first saw this, I’m like, holy cow, this is going to be a huge effect. At least I’ll be able to put some numbers on it and all that kind of good stuff.

**Willa:** First, he wanted to check Merlot’s sales against a control, to look at another wine to see what happened to its sales.

**Steve:** We figured, let’s choose something that isn’t mentioned in the movie. Let’s just avoid the red wine and we’ll choose Chardonnay. It’s got large sales. It should be equivalent to Merlot.

**Willa:** In fact, I think of Chardonnay as the Merlot of white wine.

**Steve:** Exactly. It is the big seller.

**Willa:** As big as Merlot was, Chardonnay was bigger. It was and is far and away the most popular wine in America. When Steve looked at the sales numbers for Chardonnay, he found something surprising. He pulled up the graph for me.

**Steve:** When you do that…

**Willa:** It looks the same. The graph of Chardonnay’s sales growth right after Sideways has the same shape as Merlot’s, a steep mountain that just abruptly tables off. After Sideways, in the sample he was looking at, Chardonnay sales had flat-lined too.

**Steve:** Which is just bizarre. This is really the gist of the paper. Yeah, Merlot did crash, but it probably wasn’t the result of the movie Sideways, because Chardonnay, which wasn’t featured anywhere in the movie, good or bad, really experienced the same crash.

**Willa:** Based on these findings, Steve feels strongly that we only think the Sideways effect is real and that there must be another explanation for what happened to Merlot, one that applies to Chardonnay too. In the decade-plus since this paper was published, Steve has asked dozens of people if they have such an explanation, and they don’t. There is a sense among wine insiders that Merlot sales were already cooling off, its low quality catching up with it. Nothing can stay trendy forever. There was no major event, no financial crash, no natural disaster, nothing of note to explain such a dramatic change except Sideways. What does Sideways have to do with Chardonnay? That’s not a rhetorical question. I think there’s an answer to it. Before we can get there, I want to turn to the next component of the Sideways effect. Let’s put a pin in Merlot and Chardonnay for now and talk about a wine that Paul Giamatti’s Miles actually likes.

**Miles:** Pinot’s a very thin-skinned grape that doesn’t like constant heat or humidity, very delicate.

**Willa:** If the first theory about Sideways is that it tanked Merlot sales, the second is that it boosted sales of Pinot Noir. Pinot, wine experts tell me, is a subtle wine that is exquisitely sensitive to the environment in which it is grown. Two Pinots from vineyards just a thousand yards apart can taste really different. This distinct expression is part of what geeks wine people out.

**Kathy Joseph:** Those of us in the wine world feel once you love Pinot Noir, you love Pinot Noir, and you explore Pinot Noir. It’s very sensual and it’s exciting and it’s delicious.

**Willa:** Kathy Joseph is the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars, a vineyard and winery in the Santa Ynez Valley. She makes a Sauvignon Blanc that was name-checked in the film, but she also makes a Pinot Noir, which she readily admits is tricky to grow.

**Kathy:** Probably more than any grape, Pinot Noir does demand a certain environment for it to excel. It needs a cool climate. It needs good drainage. It needs a place that isn’t too rich. What happens is that it’s all expensive.

**Willa:** All of this had made Pinot a kind of specialty grape in America, a fanatics grape, as someone put it to me, grown in small quantities and rarely offered by the glass. Then along came Sideways. See, Pinot Noir is Miles’s favorite wine. He gives a beautiful speech about it, in which it’s clear he’s not just describing a grape, he’s also describing himself.

**Miles:** It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it’s neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. Only if somebody really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. Oh, its flavors, they’re just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet.

**Willa:** Upon hearing this ode to Pinot, Americans started buying it in droves.

**Kathy:** Absolutely. Yes, there was an uptick in immediate interest for Pinot Noir.

**Willa:** A Nielsen analysis found sales of Pinot spiked 16% in the months after the movie came out. Wine producers were caught off guard by Pinot’s overnight popularity, and there was a mad dash to plant more of it. In California, production of Pinot Noir has increased 75% in the years since. There was a lag at first, because it takes four to five years for a grapevine to bear usable fruit. There were other difficulties too, starting with the price. Tim Farrell, the wine buyer you heard from earlier, was working at a sports bar in Indianapolis in 2006 when a customer ordered a glass of Pinot.

**Tim:** I remember thinking, oh, we do have a Pinot Noir, and it’s $12 a glass. I thought, that’s insane. We have Bud Light for $2.50. Why would you ever want a $12 glass of wine?

**Willa:** Pinot grown correctly is expensive. It just takes a lot of care. After the movie came out, not only was there more demand for Pinot, there was more demand for Pinot from casual wine drinkers, the kind of folks who want an affordable Pinot. You start to see a version of what happened to Merlot happening to Pinot. Pinot is planted in places that it probably shouldn’t be and attended to less carefully, and that means less quality product makes it into bottles. Another paper, one from 2021, found that most of the frenzied Pinot plantings of the mid-2000s were in the Central Valley, the sunny, fertile, hot, strawberry-growing Central Valley that wasn’t even good for adaptable Merlot.

**Tim:** Then you have a flood of really bad Pinot Noir coming out by about 2008, 2009.

**Willa:** Even good Pinot Noir didn’t necessarily deliver what a casual wine drinker was looking for, like the person who ordered a $12 glass of Pinot at Tim Farrell’s sports bar.

**Tim:** They returned it. They said, “Oh, this is watery. I don’t like this at all.” I took it back. I didn’t know anything about wine at the time. The flavor profile and the texture and the body of Pinot Noir is not actually what people were expecting. They were Merlot drinkers, and so they were probably expecting a big, rich, full-bodied, powerful wine, and it’s exact opposite.

**Willa:** Wine producers needed to please these customers that wanted a Pinot that didn’t taste like a Pinot. Fortunately, there were a lot of other grapes around, because remember, growers hadn’t been expecting Pinot to be the next big thing.

**Tim:** The less scrupulous producers of Pinot Noir that just wanted to cheapen their production and make a more rich, smooth wine for this market that was sending watery glasses of Pinot Noir back at sports bars, was they started adding 25% Syrah to a lot of these wines.

**Willa:** Blending is a common and accepted practice in winemaking. Some of the very best French wines are blends. In America, the standards are a bit looser. You only need 75% of a wine to consist of the grape that’s named on the label. All of that extra Syrah, it made the Pinot go down easier.

**Tim:** They had to soften up and make Pinot Noir super accessible because real, unadulterated Pinot Noir, in addition to being very expensive, is not what the American consumer in 2006 really wanted. It even confused the market for what Pinot Noir should actually taste like.

**Willa:** I’m not saying Pinot Noirs all became phony baloney overnight, all got bad or all tasted like Syrah. In the long-term, the interest in Pinot probably did push American palates in a new direction. In the short-term and on the low end of the market, Pinot became a victim of its own success. While this made for a bunch of lousy Pinot, the irony is it made for better Merlot.

**Jeff:** What it did mean there for a minute, there was a ton of really good Merlot that was available for super cheap.

**Willa:** Jeff Bundschu, the Merlot maker at Gundlach Bundschu again.

**Jeff:** The red blends in the 10 years that came out after Sideways, that became red blends because no one would buy Merlot, were way effing better.

**Willa:** As you may have suspected, I know very little about wine. I’ve learned a bunch from working on this episode, but I can still barely tell when a wine has gone off. When someone asks me what I think about one, I often don’t know. I think the truth is that none of the wine tastes that good to me, but I feel like it could, if only I knew more, tasted more, tried harder, grew my palate. I honestly feel a little self-conscious about how little I know. I know this isn’t a universal feeling, but I don’t think it’s uncommon.

**Jeff:** Like you could ask somebody, “Do you like that movie? Do you like that peanut butter? Do you like that toothpaste?” They’re going to say, “I hate that movie. I love that peanut butter. I’m down with that toothpaste.” You ask them about a wine and they’re like, “I’m so sorry that I’m not a wine expert, but this kind of doesn’t taste very good to me.”

**Willa:** Why is just uniquely intimidating. I think that’s at least as important to the Sideways effect as whatever was in the script. It helps explain why a little movie that opened in four theaters could have such a big impact. People want guidance about wine, and we’ll take it from a waiter, a wine store clerk, a sommelier, a wine critic, or a movie character. Miles is a man who can barely affect change in his own life. He’s miserable, lonely, and a little insufferable. Listen to him.

**Miles:** Don’t be shy. Really get your nose right in there, really. A little citrus. Oh, there’s just the faintest soupcon of asparagus. There’s just a flutter of a nutty Edam cheese.

**Willa:** He is not at all what you picture when you close your eyes and imagine an influencer, and yet he influenced the heck out of us, even though we weren’t using that word then. His high-strung, forceful, informed opinions make him a compelling authority. His strongest views are about Merlot and Pinot Noir, but maybe thinking his influence stops there is underestimating him, the movie he’s in, and how much hand-holding people want about wine. Maybe it’s all bigger. Maybe it’s even big enough to extend to Chardonnay.

We’re going to get back to that Merlot Chardonnay mystery I pinned back there. You remember the economist Steve Cuellar published a paper that showed both Merlot and Chardonnay sales plateaued, in an admittedly small, regionally specific sample, right after Sideways came out in 2004. No one had really been able to make sense of this. Then I mentioned it to Kathy Joseph, the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars. Should I tell you what the economist said?

**Kathy:** Yes, I’m very interested.

**Willa:** Kathy pointed out that in the 1990s there had been a rise in sales of wine by the glass at restaurants, and those glasses were mostly full of Merlot and Chardonnay.

**Kathy:** The reason, in my opinion, is because of their accessibility and also how they were made. Chardonnay was a little bit sweet. Merlot could be a little bit sweet. They were just like almost a transition wine. They were easy. People didn’t order white wine any more by the glass. They ordered Chardonnay.

**Willa:** Once Kathy flagged this connection for me, I realized she was not the only person who had talked about it. It came up a lot, including with Alexander Payne.

**Alexander:** Those were the two wines ordered by people who didn’t really know much about wine. People who knew wine would start saying, “I’m ABC, anything but Chardonnay.”

**Willa:** Rex Pickett had noted it too.

**Rex:** The waiter would say, “Red or white?” If you said white, it was going to be some really cheap, probably Chardonnay. If it was red, it was going to be Merlot.

**Willa:** Here are these twinned wines. Then Sideways comes along and curses one of them out and ever so slightly shades the other.

**Jack:** I thought you hated Chardonnay.

**Miles:** No, no, no. I like all varietals. I just don’t generally like the way they manipulate Chardonnay in California.

**Willa:** Maybe what happened to Chardonnay is just a minor version of what happened to Merlot. Audiences picked up that Chardonnay was the other uncool wine, and they backed away from it. If that feels a little overdetermined to you, another way to think about it is that Sideways made it very clear to casual wine drinkers our basic choices had been noticed and found wanting, but it also made it clear there was a whole wide world of wine out there. Walking out of the movie, you could think, I’ve got to stay away from Merlot, I’ve got to drink Pinot Noir. You could also walk out thinking, huh, I should learn some more about wine.

Steve Cuellar’s graphs of Merlot and Chardonnay in the wake of Sideways show consumers cutting back, but the wine market didn’t collapse. We just started drinking something else. This is certainly how the winemakers I spoke with saw it. They thought Sideways encouraged people way more than it shamed them. Jeff Bundschu again.

**Jeff:** I think that what happened in Sideways is Miles, who I can’t believe I know of by first name basis, was like, “This Merlot sucks.” He sort of just gave voice to an entire world of people that had been choking down what they think they should have been choking down instead of standing up for saying, “I don’t care. This isn’t very good.”

**Willa:** Do you really think that people were trusting their own palate or they were just like, “We trust Miles.”

**Jeff:** I see it more as permission, but I guess that’s because I’m an optimist. Everybody is like total sheep, like a permission to hate wine that they don’t like.

**Willa:** Kathy Joseph use the exact same word, while being similarly optimistic.

**Kathy:** The movie gave people permission to explore beyond what they already were comfortable and familiar with.

**Willa:** This is based on her experiences in the years after Sideways, years in which the Santa Ynez Valley, where the movie was set, became a bustling tourist destination, when the wine market doubled and wine was diversified way beyond Merlot and Chardonnay. It all amounts to a third theory of the Sideways effect, that Sideways encouraged wine drinkers to branch out. As it turns out, there’s a speech in the movie that makes the case not for any one varietal, but for wine in general. It isn’t from Miles. It’s from Maya, the wine connoisseur and romantic interest played by Virginia Madsen.

**Maya Randall:** I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes, and if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve. If I opened a bottle of wine today, it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive, and it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity.

**Willa:** Maya isn’t relaying rules about wine. She’s praising it for always changing. There’s a contrast between her and Miles, and the movie knows it. It’s why they make a good romantic pairing.

**Maya:** It tastes so fucking good.

**Willa:** Miles’s rigidity is set off against her flexibility, his instructions off her explorations, his acidity off her balance, two ways of appreciating wine and life.
Steve Cuellar’s paper about Merlot and Chardonnay sales only covered the four years following Sideways. Chardonnay sales bounced back. It’s still the most popular wine in America. Merlot production and prices stabilized too, but it’s now often used in America as it’s used in France, as a blending grape. The overall percentage of it, compared to all the grapes crushed in the country, has fallen.

**Jim:** A few years in, our Merlot sales were down and I’m like, “Dad, we got to get out of Merlot. We got to plant something else.” He was like, “Oh, it’s going to come back, Jim. It always come back,” for a decade, two decades. When’s it coming back? When’s it coming back?

**Willa:** This brings us to the final wrinkle in this story, that Miles, the guy that destroyed Merlot’s reputation, doesn’t even hate it.

**Maya:** What gems do you have in your collection?

**Miles:** Oh.

**Willa:** About halfway through the movie, Miles tells Maya that he’s been holding on to this one really good bottle of wine.

**Miles:** I’ve got things I’m saving, definitely. I guess the star would be a 1961 Cheval Blanc.

**Maya:** You’ve got a ’61 Cheval Blanc and it’s just sitting there?

**Miles:** Yes, I do.

**Maya:** Go get it. I’m serious, hurry.

**Willa:** A ’61 Cheval Blanc costs about $4,700. He tells Maya he’d been saving it for his 10th wedding anniversary, but is now just waiting for a special occasion.

**Maya:** The day you open a 61 Cheval Blanc, that’s the special occasion.

**Willa:** In one of the final scenes, Miles finds out his ex-wife is pregnant with her new husband, and he decides to drink that wine. He takes it to a diner, orders a burger and onion rings, and drinks it out of a Styrofoam cup. As he sips it, he lets out an appreciative, “Hm.” Even in these degraded circumstances, the wine shines through.

This shining wine, this Cheval Blanc, as Alexander Payne knew, is made mostly out of Merlot. Some viewers spotted this contradiction instantly. You can read comment threads about how this makes Miles an idiot and a hypocrite. The meaning seems plainer to me. Miles really loves wine. He really knows wine. He doesn’t hate Merlot, one of wine’s essential, noble grapes. He just hates the bad version of it. This love hate thing is right at the heart of why this little movie had such unpredictable and outsized effects. It tapped into the dualities that exist in most of us, people who hate being uncool, but who also love to try new things. We’re sheeple and we don’t want to be told what to do. We’re easily led and we’re curious. We’re Miles and we’re Maya.

When I spoke to Laura Lippman, who rejected Merlot like RoboCop at the beginning of this episode, I told her about the twists and turns of this story and my sense that Miles himself would now have it in for some other trendy wine. The next time we talked, a few weeks later, she’d just gone to the wine store.

**Laura:** There was something going on where I was like, “I should get a really good bottle of red wine.” I was like, “What if I bought Merlot?”

**Willa:** She did it. She took the bottle home, made a nice dinner, and poured herself a glass.

**Laura:** I thought it was terrific, actually. I was like, “I will do this again. I will drink Merlot again.”

**John:** I am thrilled to welcome Willa Paskin, who is the host of Decoder Ring podcast and Slate’s TV critic. Willa, congrats on another great episode of your show.
**Willa:** Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, John.

**John:** Recently we’ve been doing episodes on nuclear energy and climate change, looking at how stories we tell have an impact. The idea of the Sideways effect has come up multiple times. It was just amazing kismet that your episode this last week was on the Sideways effect. How did it come to be? How did you decide to do it for an episode for your show?

**Willa:** At the beginning of every season, I scratch around for ideas. I think I had asked on Twitter if anybody had any thoughts. It had come up. I had looked into it really perfunctorily. It seemed like the answer was really obvious. It seemed like everyone was like, “Yeah, it just tanked Merlot sales,” whatever. I was like, “That’s not interesting enough.” Then, luckily, a couple of weeks later, this other tweet started going around that was a graph of what had happened to Merlot after Sideways essentially. We just started talking about it in Slate’s internal messaging system. There was a wine guy on staff. He’s Jordan Weissmann. He writes about money and economics.

**John:** I know Jordan.

**Willa:** He’s entwined. We just started side chatting. He was my wine guy basically. He has a wine guy. His wine guy, who’s a wine seller in Brooklyn, had basically talked to him a lot about Sideways. It just suddenly became very clear, just from this brief chat on Slack, that oh no, there was enough there for it to be interesting. Had it really affected Merlot? Had maybe it actually affected Pinot? Then I started talking to people, and it turned into this nice little delectable rabbit hole, which is always super fun. I ended up, in the episode, speaking to an economist who had done a study about it.

One of the things that’s interesting and funny about something like the Sideways effect is we all know what it is and everyone talks about it, but of course, it’s not actually hard science or news, and so there have not actually been… Most people who are economists or who study stuff for a living have not actually been like, “Definitely, I need to look into the Sideways effect.” There actually haven’t been that many real papers about it. When I did speak to one of the guys who had done one of the papers about it, it ended up taking me places I was not expecting.

**John:** In the episode you frame three questions, which is did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades? Where do you stand, Willa? How strong do you think the Sideways effect was for what happened to Merlot?

**Willa:** I think the consensus about Merlot is twofold. One is that it did depress both Merlot sales and Merlot plantings. There was another study that just came out very recently, actually, about the long-term effect of it, but not dramatically. It affected it some. Wine, as an agricultural product, it’s interesting in the sense that it takes years to plant a grapevine and then for it to make grapes that are good enough. You just can’t act on information as quickly as you can on like, everybody wants a strawberry or everybody wants a pair of jeans. You have to wait. While you’re waiting, you’re not making any money. No one was ripping Merlot out, basically, because that’s just-

**John:** That’s suicide. It got blended into other wines, as you talked about.

**Willa:** Over time, it did not get replanted at the rate that it had. It does seem that Pinot really did get planted at a huge rate. That’s the first thing. I would say the second thing is much, much fuzzier. Just reputationally, absolutely, it really, really hurt Merlot. That doesn’t mean that it hurt it for everybody. That doesn’t mean that all consumers were suddenly paying attention to this movie. Madmen doesn’t have to be watched by that many people to have a really big footprint or to feel like it has a really big footprint. I think something like that is very similar.

**John:** I always think about Twitter, because not very many Americans are actually on Twitter, but Twitter has a huge impact on the national conversation. People didn’t need to necessarily see the movie to know that, oh, we’re not supposed to be drinking Merlot. It just had a stink to it because of the smart people who saw the movie said, “We shouldn’t be doing this.” It had an outsized impact.

**Willa:** I think similarly to Twitter, there’s tons of people that have no idea what’s happening on Twitter, are never affected by it all, but the people that are paid attention to by the media basically did.

**John:** It was a meme, basically. Don’t drink Merlot is a meme. It just got spread in a pre-internetty kind of time.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to… The Travis Lybbert paper that you mentioned is behind a paywall, but there’s another, Journal of Wine Economics, that shows the graph of the two things. You really see how Pinot Noir just really took off. You can also see that the prices fell for Merlot, which I think is also useful to see that supply and demand… There just wasn’t demand, and so the prices for Merlot fell.

**Willa:** I would say one of the things that was interesting from talking to wine people about it is this isn’t settled. I think if they looked into these papers, it would be, but it was not. Something happened and everyone has a ton of anecdotes, but a lot of the serious people were like, “It’s not clear that that’s really true,” which I was surprised by. I was like, “Oh, isn’t it obviously true?”

**John:** These can all be future episodes of Decoder Ring down the road if you want to. Around the office we were talking about other examples of things that are like the Sideways effect, where movies had had a weird impact in the real world. I wanted to bounce them off of you and see what your instinct is for these.

**Willa:** Is your first one Clark Gable and the undershirts?

**John:** Hey, it was my third one, but yes, let’s talk about Clark Gable and the undershirt, because it happened one night. He takes off his shirt, and he was not wearing an undershirt. Apparently, men realized, oh, I don’t have to wear an undershirt underneath a dress shirt. Snopes says it’s unclear whether that’s actually a real thing or not. What’s your ruling on Clark Gable and the undershirt?

**Willa:** I would love to believe that is true. How can we have any idea? It would be hard to follow that, track that information at the time.

**John:** If you were to do an episode on that, you’d probably need to talk to fashion historians and really figure out where we were at at that time and was the undershirt going away at that point.

**Willa:** If I was doing that, there’s a couple things. There’s immediately, I think, a number of things. One is I start to think about hats. It’s similar to-

**John:** What happened to hats?

**Willa:** What happened to hats? In a way that it’s like, you were going to do a couple stories from one episode. It’s like, what happened to hats, what happened to undershirts. I could imagine undershirts being the open. Then also undershirts, which we’re not allowed to call wife-beaters anymore, but what is the semiotics of the undershirt. I think there’s probably a bunch there.

**John:** It gets complicated.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Two other things that you actually can measure. Super Size Me. We had the documentary Super Size Me. Six weeks after the movie came out, McDonald’s dropped the term super size me from everything. They stopped using the term all together. That’s an impact.

**Willa:** Can I tell you my cocktail party chatter about Super Size Me?

**John:** I want to hear this.

**Willa:** This is truly basically the only thing I remember from Super Size Me. I remember the takeaway was McDonald’s is really bad for you. There’s in passing a graphic about how one bagel is equal to eight slices of bread. It’s a picture of the bagel. It’s a drawing. Then it equals eight slices in bread. I believe in carbs. I don’t have a problem with carbs. It has haunted me. It didn’t ruin McDonald’s. It just really gave me pause about bagels forever. That was my personal impact [inaudible 00:40:40].

**John:** That was your Super Size Me. Blackfish, the documentary about SeaWorld, the stock in SeaWorld fell 50%. That’s a pretty direct cause and effect there. I want to talk about the name Madison. What is your perception of where the name Madison came from?

**Willa:** Oh my god, I have no idea. I do just perceive it as being one of those on the top 20 girls’ names now.

**John:** It came from Splash.

**Willa:** Did it?

**John:** In the movie Splash, Tom Hanks is with Darryl Hannah. “What’s your name?” She looks at a sign for Madison Avenue, and she says, “Madison.” He says, “That’s not a name.” It wasn’t a name. It was the 216th most popular name for girls in 1990, but then it became 29th, and by 2000 it became number 3. It was not a name being used.

**Willa:** It does fit in with a ton of other name trends, which is the last name for first name trend, like Hudson. There’s a lot of names that sound like that, Lawson. It’s snugly right in there, and then also it’s upscale.

**John:** It does fit in with that trend. My very first TV show, there were these twins, a boy and girl twins. I named them Mason and Finley.

**Willa:** You nailed it.

**John:** I’d never seen anyone in the real world named Mason and Finley. I called that trend. They are now popular names.

**Willa:** I’m really impressed. That reminds in Baby Mama, the kids are named Banjo and… They didn’t call it, but they just made fun of it nicely. Those are perfect. You did it.

**John:** Finley and Mason. We also talk a lot about representation and how depictions of people on screen matter in terms of how people interact with people. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, Sidney Poitier, hugely important, probably the face of a Black man on screen was helpful. Philadelphia, for just Tom Hanks playing a person with AIDS was important. We can have our faults with either of those movies, but they were important in their times. It’s always hard to remember what it was like before that movie came out.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Jaws and perceptions of sharks, perceptions of shark safety. We can’t go back to a time pre-Jaws.

**Willa:** No, we definitely can’t.

**John:** People weren’t worried about sharks. Now my daughter was scared to be in the pool because of sharks.

**Willa:** Sometimes when I’m just swimming out, I hear the song in my heart. You feel it. It’s coming for you. I think I talked about this in the episode pretty directly. A thing about Sideways that really tickled me and that I thought was really fun about this episode was we don’t imagine that someone like Miles would have an impact upon us. He just is not a poster child for that. That’s just not how things work. Sometimes it’s who you least expect. I like that. I like that it’s unpredictable in that way, because if it was just up to people who make decisions based on what you think is going to happen or what’s happened before, you’d never cast… You’d make Miles be totally different. You’d sand off his edges and you’d make him someone else.

**John:** We often talk on this podcast, what is the nature of a protagonist, what is a hero, what is a hero going through. Also, Miles feels like a sidekick character to somebody else, and yet he’s centered in this movie. He’s like a Shrek at the very center of this movie, who is grumpy and angry, and we learn to love him because he’s just center frame the whole time. One of the things that I really liked about your episode is that you bring up Maya, who is his antagonist, who’s this person who’s challenging all his beliefs and actually genuinely loves wine in a way that’s more approachable than maybe he does. She’s not strident. She’s embracing of like, let’s celebrate wine, rather than pit them against each other.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Which is fun. I want to talk just a moment about some of your other episodes.

**Willa:** Please.

**John:** It’s been a One Cool Thing repeatedly on the show for me. You have a two-part episode on the Jane Fonda workout, which was a really fascinating deep dive in terms of it’s so strongly associated with her and yet she’s really taking this work that someone else has done and repackaging it. You broker a conversation between the two women.

**Willa:** That’s one of my top two episodes we ever did. It was totally not what I was expecting to happen. I basically had decided that the Jane Fonda workout itself was fascinating and that Jane Fonda’s story is fascinating, because it is. When I started looking into it, the woman who actually created the workout is named Leni Cazden. Jane Fonda had cited her in a couple places and in her biography, but also she’d thanked her at some awards show. She was findable, essentially. It wasn’t a secret. Then a lot of things just fell into place that I didn’t have anything to do with it. My timing just happened to be really good. I got to speak to both of them and then got to follow up with Leni. I just felt this delicious psychological long-term relationship just fell into my lap. That doesn’t happen that often. That was super fun. Then we basically did the episode that I had been imagining second. Then we did this other fun one that I hadn’t been expecting first.

**John:** A lot of them are just one-offs that are just great and fun. The history of Gillette razors, let’s go to five blades, then the razor wars was just weird and how we got into that and the history of razors. It feels like there’s some, not necessarily a movie, but there’s some version of that absurd way we got to it. It feels like a Soderbergh movie, where it’s just like how we got to five blades eventually.

**Willa:** Some corporate espionage. The thing that I always want is there to be an actual idea, that’s not just the idea that the show purports to be about. It’s not just the topic. With that one, with the five blades one, the big idea was just like, oh my god, capitalism is so silly. Why do we keep doing this? It’s cool, a single-blade razor actually works pretty well. It lent itself to that. I usually find those things as I’m looking into them, but that one was very clean in that way.

**John:** I want to talk to you about the making of the show, because unlike Scriptnotes, which is exactly what we’re doing, which is just a conversation between two people, and there’s an outline I’m looking at, you are fully scripting the whole thing. It’s starting with research, and then you’re doing your interviews. You’re figuring out what parts of those interviews you can use. Then you’re having to write every word you’re saying to get that right and make it all fit. What is the process for you? You’re figuring out your ideas for the season, but what are you actually doing on a daily basis to get this stuff written?

**Willa:** The process is, I’m like, okay, what sounds like a good episode? As I said earlier, I start to dig around about a subject, just Google around about it. The ones that are right, they feel like, you know when there’s things hollow, like there’s a trick door or something, it’s going to spring back at you? It actually feels that way. You’re like, “Oh, this has a little give. There’s stuff here that I wasn’t expecting.” Once it starts to feel that way, there’s just… I just have to have one idea about it or just a sense that there’s a layer.

Then I just start to report. I do a lot of research. I’m also having a lot of conversations as I’m doing it. It’s not like a one and then two. They’re together. Then ideally, I would do all the reporting. I now report a couple of episodes at once, just because it’s just a better use of time. Then I essentially sit with all the stuff that I have, all the actualities, all the research, all the audio, all the interviews, and I write from the beginning. I listen back to the tapes and stuff, to the tracks. I’m trying to get somewhere, usually. I’m trying to make a point or explain some history.

It feels really written. It feels sculpturally written in a different way. It’s pretty that. Then I just spend a bunch of time writing it, however long it takes. It always takes longer. It’s the part that still hurts, as writing anything does. Ideally, that doesn’t take more than two weeks, but it’s been to. In some ways, it’s hard to track it. Then it still takes a pretty long time, because basically it’s-

**John:** It’s all the post process. You had this plan going into it. Then you’re listening to this thing. These episodes are scored. They have ins and outs. You have to figure out breaks.

**Willa:** A hundred percent. It’s all those things, but it’s not even that. It’s almost like when you turn in a first draft to an editor, they change it. They tell you all these notes. They give you all these thoughts. Weirdly, putting it on tape is the same thing. Suddenly, you just hear all these things that are wrong with it. You hear all the places it’s paced wrong. You hear the information that’s in the wrong order. You hear the beats that aren’t quite working right. Because a show is trying to build and often is about ideas…

Just with the Sideways episode, for example, there was a third sections that’s about… It’s after Pinot. It’s after the Merlot section. It’s after the Pinot section and trying to resolve what happened with Chardonnay. I knew where it was going. I knew what the end was. All that stuff was written. There was something about the pacing that was making that pay… It just wasn’t working. On paper, it was working fine, but it’s not working fine when you actually hear it. That takes a long time. I think that takes longer than it probably should. I think it takes longer than other people’s process. There’s a lot of iterations basically. The music comes in later. The breaks are written in. It’s a lot about making sure the arc works. I have found that that is not… It’s supposed to be written to be heard. When you’re just writing it, it’s not in the form it’s supposed to be at. Something really changes there.

**John:** The closest I’ve done to this is I did a podcast called Launch, which was a six-episode series about the creation and printing and release of my book series. It was great, but it was such a different experience. I was not prepared for how much time it was going to take and also just what a different workflow it was. We hadn’t transcribed everything, all the interviews, but then we missed out on stuff. Are you transcribing everything you do from all these people or are you just taking these are the bits we need?

**Willa:** This is a thing that I don’t know what would’ve happened in the past, but we use basically an automated transcription program. A computer does it. You get them back fast. There’s use cases that I don’t have, where you would need it to be really precise. It’s pretty good actually. Because I’m listening back to it no matter what, the transcript lies, you still have to hear. It sounds like it’s great, but then you listen in, they’re talking in a monotone. You still have to listen back to it. We do transcribe everybody, but that’s because it’s not what it was.

**John:** Once you’re writing it, is this in Google Docs? What program are you using when you’re writing?

**Willa:** I was a faithful Microsoft Worder for all my writings, and I still am. Google Docs, it’s just if other people have to get into it, which obviously the producer and editors do at some point. Then also, just when the drafts were just changing so much, after you’re going through, we basically listen and we make changes and then retrack. It just became so much easier to just have it all just in this one place. You just need the link, not to email the document every time it changes.

**John:** That’s brutal. The episode we listened to, how many hours of work on your side was that?

**Willa:** I couldn’t…

**John:** Is it three weeks?

**Willa:** I work really hard.

**John:** It was a ton of work.

**Willa:** That one I will say, it was a lot of work, but in a different way. The writing of that one was the smoothest, cleanest writing experience I’ve had in a long time. I think it took me, not counting the day that I just went back through all the audio that I had… I also didn’t over-report that story, so that helps a lot. I wrote that piece in four days, which never happens. Then I got stuck with it at different stages once it was whatever. It’s almost like I’m almost sad it happened. I’ll be like, “I can do it in four days.”

**John:** [inaudible 00:52:42] “Maybe I can do it in three days.”

**Willa:** It hasn’t happened in a long time that I’d done it that fast, and it’s not going to happen again. It was nice. That one was just very structurally, very clear in my mind as I was doing it. That’s not always the case.

**John:** Willa, so many of your episodes are just incredible fodder for our segment How Would This Be A Movie. In a future How Would This Be A Movie, would you mind coming back and talking us through some of these things?

**Willa:** I would love to. Anytime.

**John:** Fantastic. Willa, thank you so much.

**Willa:** Thank you.

**John:** That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 what Craig’s been up to. Now, let’s roll the credits for the original episode of Decoder Ring.

**Willa:** This is Decoder Ring. I’m Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is written and produced by Willa Paskin. This episode was produced by Elizabeth Nakano. Derek John is senior supervising producer of Narrative Podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our technical director. Thank you to Jim Taylor, Jordan Weissmann, Peta Work [ph], Lo and Lou, Josh Levine and Travis Lybbert. The 2021 paper Travis co-authored called A Sideways Supply Response in California Wine Grapes also corroborates the Sideways effect, and we’ll link to it on our show page.

If you’re a fan of Decoder Ring, please sign up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get to listen to this show without any ads, and they’re supporting the work we do to make Decoder Ring. Members will also get to hear a special behind-the-scenes episode with me at the end of the season. Please go to slate.com/decoderplus to sign up now. I really appreciate your support. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig is back. Craig has been gone for weeks and weeks and weeks. Now Megana, last week I asked you, “Hey, is anybody wondering where Craig’s been?” You are the person who’s responsible for the ask@johnaugust email account. I was wondering whether people were wondering where Craig has been.

**Megana:** Yes. We had one person who wrote in, curious about where Craig has been.

**Craig:** One person was wondering where I was.

**John:** By the time this Bonus Segment is out, I guess the news will be out. Craig, you were in space. You were the first screenwriter to fly on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spaceship. I guess my real first question is, what was it like to leave the bounds of Earth? What was that experience like? They always say to send a poet, but a screenwriter is the person to send.

**Craig:** Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid. In fact, it’s cold as hell. Anybody? Anyone?

**John:** I don’t know what that’s from.

**Craig:** That’s Elton John’s Rocket Man. It’s a popular song.

**John:** It’s a popular song. I’ve heard it once or twice.

**Craig:** 1970-something. God, this is just one kind of sadness upon another. One person cared, and neither one of you know Rocket Man. I think it’s going to be a long, long time until touchdown brings me around again-

**John:** That I do recognize.

**Craig:** I’m not the man they think I am at home.

**John:** You were not on Mars. You were instead in night shoots. You were in night shoots for your TV show, which is just a lot. Your schedule, which was difficult, became impossible.

**Craig:** I’ve been doing pretty well, I think, all things considered, by when you go into three weeks of nights, you’re no longer on the schedule that any other normal human being is on. It’s amazing actually how fast you can get used to it. Much easier to get out of it than to get into it. I would say that much at the very least.

**John:** While you were gone, you missed some episodes. I don’t think you had a chance to listen to the episodes. I thought we’d review what we learned and get your opinions on some things. The first episode, which I really missed you for, was on nuclear issues. We had two experts on to talk about nuclear war, nuclear arms, nuclear energy. You obviously have a background in this stuff. We were looking at what the current landscape was, and of course with the war in Ukraine, the growing escalation of possibilities of nuclear war. It was not a fun episode. I wouldn’t say it was joyful.

**Craig:** No, never joyful to talk about things like nuclear weapons. I don’t really know what the point is of talking about the possibilities. Either they will or will not occur, and if they occur, we’re all dead. That’s basically the deal.

**John:** I would say going into it, I was of the mindset that because of the reduction in number of nuclear arms that are out there in the world, nuclear war wouldn’t be as bad as what we grew up expecting. It’s still terrible.

**Craig:** Oh lord, yeah. The arms race that occurred, I’m sure you guys covered this, largely in the ‘80s, between the Soviet Union and the United States, led to a situation where both nations had this absurd surplus of nuclear warheads. We don’t need that many. We know that a single large nuclear weapon can destroy most of a city. There are only so many cities. Once you start lobbing them, the destruction that occurs is dramatic not only to the people that live there. Obviously it’s fatal. Then you have long-lasting effects around it. Economies are shredded. The environment is destroyed. It’s almost impossible to imagine a situation where one nuclear weapon is intentionally fired and set off and is not followed by a retaliatory strike. Essentially, nuclear weapons are unusable or usable all at once. It’s actually amazing that we have these here and have had them for our entire lives and they haven’t been used in our lifetime.

**John:** Let’s keep it that way.

**Craig:** That would be nice. Unfortunately, we are not in charge.

**John:** Craig, are you familiar with the story of Stanislav Petrov?

**Craig:** Was he the guy who said, “I’m not going to fire that nuclear weapon.” The Soviet said, “Fire nuclear weapon,” because they had misunderstood a test, and he was like, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

**John:** Yep, it’s that guy. That was brought up as one of the potential stories that has not really been very well dramatically told. One of the things I brought up is that I think it’s sometimes really challenging to tell a story about a thing that didn’t happen. The guy who stands in the way of a bad thing happening is a little less dramatic than the guy who does the thing.

**Craig:** There’s one movie that I think does that very well is Crimson Tide, 1994’s Crimson Tide, which I think probably drew quite a bit from the Petrov incident and is very much based on that idea that a submarine receives orders to fire a nuclear weapon and then there’s another message coming in, but the radio’s damaged. They don’t get the rest of it. It might say, “Wait, actually don’t,” but they don’t know. There is essentially a debate and mutiny over whether or not they should fire those nuclear weapons. They made it very exciting. A fine Tony Scott film.

**John:** Agreed. Other episodes you missed. Episode 546 was Limited Series. We had Liz Meriwether on the show, finally…

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** …and Liz Hannah. They both recently had limited series out there. We had a talk about what that was like. You of course did a limited series for Chernobyl. One of the things I think was so key from their descriptions of why tell this story now was that feeling that in a limited series or a dramatic series versus a documentary series, you can tell that central character’s internal POV, that you just couldn’t if it’s strict documentary. They had a chance to really explore what was inside the character, rather than what just the facts were.

**Craig:** The difference between a limited… Any kind of fictionalization, doesn’t matter whether it’s a limited series or an ongoing series or a single movie, but any dramatization affords you a wildly different palette than you would have as a documentarian.

**John:** Lastly, the episode that we are going to be putting this Bonus Segment on, was about the Sideways effect. I think we’ve talked about the Sideways effect just between you and me, or maybe on the air as well. Of course, that’s the impact of the film Sideways on Merlot and Pinot Noir in America and around the world and how one character’s rant, or he rants twice, can have a measurable impact on popular culture and economics. We talked with Willa Paskin about that.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting thing. I remember seeing Sideways. I remember that happening. I didn’t know anything about wine then. I barely know anything about wine now. I know the kinds of wines I like. Interestingly, I don’t like Pinot Noir.

**John:** I’m not a fan.

**Craig:** I don’t know about you, John. I like a huge, big, red, stupid wine. I like a dumb, big Cabernet. That’s what I like.

**John:** That’s what I say too. Whenever somebody’s coming over, “What kind of things you like?” I just say, “I like a big, dumb red.” I’m not apologizing for that. It’s just actually what my taste is.

**Craig:** I like to be hit in the face with a Cabernet bat. That’s me. That’s just what I like. Am I a cretin? Probably. I don’t care. I don’t like Pinot Noir. It’s thin. It’s like it’s not really there to me. Merlot, it’s not offensive to me. I don’t mind it. It’s fine. Actually, there are some fantastic wines that use Merlot as part of their blend.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** There are some great blended red wines out there. Sideways, I don’t know. By the way, I love that movie. It’s amazing. Why was it so obsessed with Pinot Noir? I don’t know.

**John:** Basically, Willa’s argument is that Pinot Noir was really just meant to be a stand-in for the Miles character himself, and that he’s difficult, but there’s actually something good underneath the surface, and you have to really come to appreciate what it’s trying to do and take it as what it actually is. He feels like he is a Pinot Noir that people are not appreciating properly.

**Craig:** Thus an entire industry was disrupted.

**John:** It was. Now, part of the reason we got into the Sideways effect is on Episode 547 we had Quinn… You know Quinn Emmett.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** The other folks behind Good Energy were coming on to talk about how we talk about climate change in our films and TVs and how we can put messages out there that have an impact. We talk about how sometimes things really do have an impact, but in terms of representation, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner or other films along the way have that impact in terms of showing a different way of people interacting, dramatizing situations that people may not have thought of, and certainly for LGBT representation. There’s important films along the way like Philadelphia that get people to address their prejudices.

**Craig:** I don’t know how good of a tool movies are going to be for climate change, because the thing is most people recognize that it exists, most people are concerned about it, and most people, meaning almost everyone, feels that they have no direct impact upon it, and they’re right. It’s going to take large governmental action and sweeping changes globally to prevent this situation from getting worse. I think that’s not going to happen. I think the situation will get worse. I don’t know what it is. With something like climate change, where we can see it’s there and we’re just not sure how to deal with it, it very quickly can turn into lecturing or it can be parody or satirical. We can make fun of people for being stupid and ignoring climate change.

Ultimately, I’m not sure how you’re going to do, because the problem is you don’t see the end result. Philadelphia, you see a man change. You see the way he thinks about another human being change. You see how that human being’s death changes him so that theoretically, moving forward, he will be a better person. We can identify with him because he’s Denzel Washington and he’s a great actor. That’s impossible to do with climate change, because they’re not going to see it happen.

**John:** I would debate the premise that it’s impossible for it to be done with climate change. I think it’s a question of what are you trying to do. Are you trying to make a movie that is specifically about climate change or are you trying to normalize things that you wish people would normalize in their real lives? An example would be, if you have characters who are going onto the roof of their building, are there solar panels on that roof, and normalizing that expectation. Are you seeing people do small things like take public transportation rather than be in a car? Those are some small steps. Then there are also… We’ll put a link in the show notes again to the Good Energy playbook.

There are things that don’t feel like climate stories, but of course really are climate stories. Anything about disasters have a climate element to it. One of the points they try to make is that in anything we’re doing in film or television, if you’re not addressing climate change, you’re making science fiction, because a reality of the world is climate change. To not address it is science fiction.

**Craig:** Sure, unless you’re telling a story that really doesn’t have anything to do with outside. Even if it does have something to do with outside on any given day, you’re not going to be experiencing this specific aspect of climate change. I don’t know. I don’t know about that. I love Quinn, and I get what he’s doing, and I appreciate how devoted he is to this. To me, honestly, the thing that we could do, the thing that I could do, I try to do this, is talk all the time about how positive nuclear energy is.

I feel like I have a somewhat privileged position in that regard because I made a show about a nuclear disaster. I’m saying nuclear energy is a good thing. In fact, if the United States invested heavier in nuclear energy, and I know that Quinn and I agree on this, that would matter more than anything else. That would matter more than solar panels. That would matter more than wind turbines. Just putting us back on a nuclear grid would change everything. I try and talk about that. It’s hard to put that into… Maybe I’ll have a character yammer about it in a show. I can do that, I suppose.

**John:** Talk about your show, because your show’s going to have some connection to climate change, just by necessity. There’s fewer people on this planet.

**Craig:** Climate change stops. Once we stop driving cars and pumping coal carbon into the air and burning fossil fuels like oil and gas, then climate change essentially gets reversed. I think it’s fair to say, without giving too much away, that climate change is not irrelevant to what happens. That’s as far as I’ll go.

**John:** That’s as far as you’ll go. Craig, it is wonderful to have you back on the show. Next week we’ll have you back for a full episode. Anyway, congratulations on surviving your night shoots.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I’m looking forward to having you back on the show and back in Los Angeles before too long.

**Craig:** I’m almost home.

**John:** Cool.

Links:

* [Decoder Ring](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring) and the [Sideways Effect Episode](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2022/05/sideways-the-movie-had-lasting-effects-on-the-wine-industry-and-casual-wine-drinkers)
* [Sideways Movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375063/)
* Willa Paskin [on Slate](https://slate.com/author/willa-paskin) and [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/willapaskin)
* [A “Sideways” Supply Response in California Winegrapes](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-economics/article/abs/sideways-supply-response-in-california-winegrapes/FE14CECD927047BD0582207D77F1B09E) by Travis Lybbert for the Journal of Wine Economics
* [Snopes on Clark Gable and Undershirts](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-shirt-off-his-back/) and [Madison Name from the Movie Splash](https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/bp/splash-joke-lead-madison-baby-name-boom-190720175.html)
* [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 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/549standard.mp3).

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
* [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 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).