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The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/screenwriting-in-color).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 494 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Movies are written in black and white but filmed in color, except for Mank which is about the writing of a screenplay for a black and white movie, so the general point still stands that screenwriters must think about color. And today on the show that is exactly what we’ll do.

We will also have a new round of the Three Page Challenge with a special focus on how opening scenes are setting up the reader for the movie that follows. And, of course, we’ll answer some listener questions. Then in our bonus segment for premium members Craig and I will discuss our Olympic ambitions.

**Craig:** Oh, we have those?

**John:** Or maybe you had those at one point.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** Like our sort of fantasy. If you could be good at one Olympic sport in winter and summer games which sport would it be and why?

**Craig:** Oh, OK. That’s fun.

**John:** We might also talk about sort of whether we should have the Olympics and sort of the international implications thereof.

**Craig:** I think that’s also a pretty good – that will get us in trouble. And I want trouble.

**John:** No troubles at all there. But Craig I don’t know if you heard. The WGA is on strike.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** As we record this the WGA is on strike against the ABC quiz show called The Chase.

**Craig:** Oh god. No. No!

**John:** Not your episode of The Chase. So The Chase is this quiz show that opponents in it are big Jeopardy! winners. Like Ken Jennings and folks. And so it is a show that is going into its second season of filming in theory and the WGA has not been able to reach a contract with this show. And we talk about on our podcast how the WGA covers things made for big screens and for small screens, including game shows. The WGA covers shows like Jeopardy! and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and The Weakest Link. This is a show that should be covered by that same kind of deal.

So, the writers on that show are currently on strike.

**Craig:** Hmm. See, I’m looking at the information here. It seems like ITV America, which is the company that produces The Chase, does have an agreement with the Writers Guild of America East, which is kind of the necessary substrate for a strike. You can’t have a strike if you don’t actually have a relationship I think with the company, or if you voted for a contract, or whatever. Anyway, the point being they have a deal with the WGA-E, and they’re apparently just not abiding by it.

**John:** Well, it sounds like there are things that are in that deal that are not up to the level of what a deal needs to be. And so those writers need pension and health benefits. They need residuals. They need the basic protections and they don’t have those yet. So that’s sort of what is at issue right now.

This is being handled by the East because East handles more sort of this kind of show, even though the show actually films out here. So, we hope this is resolved by the time you are listening to this podcast, but just to know that there was a WGA strike that very few people are participating in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And a lot of people may not understand that game shows require writers, particularly these kinds of trivia shows.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** The questions are writing. And people have to do the research and write them and put them in a script and stick them on a teleprompter.

**John:** I remember a campaign at some point called Somebody Wrote That.

**Craig:** The worst campaign the guild ever did.

**John:** Billboard, “Somebody Wrote That.”

**Craig:** I’m so glad you brought that up. It was my least favorite – the best thing about that, like we’re driving around LA and there’s this huge billboard and it has a quote from a movie and then a picture of a screenwriter and then it says, “Somebody Wrote That.” And I guess the point was like, see, actors don’t come up with these lines on their own, but my point was like who is that? Can you put their name on the billboard you idiots?

So, that was the worst campaign we ever did.

**John:** Yeah. But anyway so we will see what happens with this WGA strike action.

**Craig:** Well good luck to them.

**John:** In happier, more local news, so listeners likely know that my company makes Highland which is the screenwriting app for the Mac, which I use to write everything that I write. It is a free download on the Mac App Store and will remain a free download on the Mac App Store. It’s $49 to upgrade to the full version.

But for the past 18 months we’ve also done a student version which is the full pro version but just for people who are in university writing and film programs. And so we partnered up with individual schools to do that to make sure it all works right for them. And now we’re opening it up to everybody. So, if you are a student in a college level writing or film program and would like to get the full version of Highland free for a year there’s a whole new way to do that.

So you apply, you send in a photo of your student ID, and we send you the code to unlock it free for a year. So, if you’re a listener who would like this and you are in a university writing program or film program you go to Quote-Unquote Apps and click on For Students and we will get you set up.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s lovely of you. Well done.

**John:** Yeah, we do try.

Finally, we’ve been talking a lot about scheduling of movies. And this week a whole bunch of movies came sort of smashing around like little broken up iceberg pieces in the summer season. So Black Widow and Cruella are both in theaters and on streaming. It feels like everyone is just trying to figure out how big the summer box office is going to be and when things get back to normal.

**Craig:** Yeah, this one is another whack at the piñata of the theatrical movie business. Specifically because Cruella and Black Widow, they’re big movies, right? So they’re on par with what Warner Bros recently did. And they’re also doing this premier access thing. So you pay for Disney+ and then if you want to see Cruella or Black Widow when they come out that’s another $30.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And is that $30 for the year and then you kind of get everything in that premier access? Or is $30–?

**John:** No, it’s just for that title.

**Craig:** Holy cajole.

**John:** I say that with such confidence. I cannot promise you with that confidence. But I really do believe that it’s for that title.

**Craig:** That’s my move. OK, well, I’m interested to know. But either way that is pretty huge. Because on the one hand you think, well, geez, $30 to see one thing streaming when you’re already paying for Disney+ is a lot, but I think a lot of parents remember that not too long ago, like two years ago, if you wanted to take your two kids and one of their friends to a movie it was going to be way more than $30 because of all the food and everything. So, it’s still kind of a deal.

This is one more shot at the sustainability of the theatrical business. I have no idea where this is going to go. This is nuts.

**John:** It is nuts. So two things. First off, one of the things we need to remember about parents with young kids is you are just desperate to get out of the house. So, going out of the house to see a movie with your kids is a totally viable way to burn some hours on a weekend, as opposed to watching at home. Makes sense.

But I also say like I’m not vaccinated yet but I feel like when I am vaccinated this summer I am excited to see Black Widow and Cruella on the big screen. So I’m increasingly saying what about my own possible movie-going experience in the future here.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the things that is in play here is the secret, not so secret, but the silent economic killer of the theatrical business which has always been marketing costs.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And you and I both know that the marketing costs as they went up were also starting to, I’m going to use the word corrupt, I don’t care, corrupt the creative process of making films, because where it used to be that creative people would say here are the movies that we as a studio want to make, and then marketing people said, “OK, well, let’s figure out how to sell that.” Once you were spending more on marketing than on the movie naturally that flipped.

So the marketing people were telling the creative people what kinds of movies they should pay for. Now, with streaming you don’t have anywhere near the costs involved, because you’re not asking people to leave their house and go anywhere. In fact, every single show on Disney+ will serve as an advertisement for Black Widow or for Cruella.

Furthermore, social media has kind of taking over the job of advertising for you. People just talk about it with each other. So, if a movie like Cruella, I don’t know what Cruella cost, but it looks pretty expensive. A movie like Cruella before in the old days they probably would have spent $150 million marketing that thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, if they only spend $30 million marketing that is a massive difference in how the profitability line is on that kind of movie. It’s enormous. I cannot overstate how big of a deal that would be if the big marketing buy of theatrical movies went away. That more than anything will change everything. And I have to argue probably for the better. Probably for the better.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, the big marketing spends really anchor a movie in people’s heads. And so you don’t get sort of the giant change everything franchises unless you sort of have that marketing push behind them I would argue. But, yes, when Netflix makes a movie that costs $100 million it really kind of just costs $100 million because they’re not spending a fortune on marketing that movie because it’s just they’re pushing it through their own channels. They’re putting up some billboards in the city where the actor lives but that’s it. And they’re not sort of doing the big nationwide campaign for it otherwise. So it’s going to be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

I’m making a movie for Netflix now and it feels like the right thing to be making for that platform and that service, but it’s going to be weird not to see commercials for it and sort of a push for it.

**Craig:** I get that. I just think that if television has taught movies anything about the way streaming works it’s there is value in being unique and good. And that that is more important than kind of putting an advertisement for your movie on every carton of milk in the world because people will find it and talk about it with each other and watch it. And you do save a ton of money. And hopefully this leads to movies returning to a more adventurous mindset and not just a kind of franchise-obsessed, navel-gazing, big, big event movie for PG-13 audiences only.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** All right. Some follow up. Last week we talked about foreign levies and our own Stuart Friedel wrote in to say that foreign levies can be paid to your S-Corp but the WGA just needs a W-9 on file. So, if you are a loan-out corporation you can just register that with the WGA and they will pay it to your S-Corp rather than paying it to you as an individual person.

**Craig:** I did not know that.

**John:** Yeah, so things we learn ourselves. We have another foreign levies follow up here. Do you want to take that?

**Craig:** Sure. Bea asks, “Yesterday I got a WGA foreign levy for a project that was never made. It was a feature writer’s room, single day, major studio. Definitely hasn’t been made yet, if ever, but somehow the WGA is sending checks in its name. How’d that happen?”

**John:** So we won’t say what the name of this movie is, but Craig and I can both see it on the outline. I have absolutely no idea why you are getting this check for this movie that has not been made yet. Cash that check because the only reason the WGA got that check is because the studio wrote that check. And so it’s the studio’s fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not the WGA’s fault. Cash that check. I have no idea why you would be getting this check.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wonder if sometimes out of ease what happens is the countries will say like to Warner Bros, “Here’s a bunch of money that we have for your projects that are kind of…” Because remember they’re not collecting money off of the movies and shows that air. They’re collecting money off of the sale of blank tapes, disk drives, thumb drive, etc.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** So it may be that the studio kind of aggregates all of its expenses and says here’s how we will distribute that money, or here is how it should be distributed. They send a big list of information to the country. The country goes, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, let’s send out that money to the WGA for these things. That’s my guess.

**John:** That’s probably the best guess we can make for this. Basically they had a list of what writers did you employ during this year.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Bea’s name was on that list and that’s what happened.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Well, cash that check. Whenever I got sort of like small checks for not a lot of money I always treated it as like Panda Express money. Ooh, I can get some eggrolls at Panda Express. That was a treat for me when I got those small checks.

**Craig:** Orange Chicken, man.

**John:** Oh, I love the Orange Chicken.

**Craig:** Everyone loves Orange Chicken. They figured something out. I remember when in the mall I noticed for the first time Panda Express had smartened up and did the double tray of the Orange Chicken. Because remember it used to be the same size tray as everything.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And then they were like, OK, fine, we give in, you people. You love sugar and fat. Here we go. Fine.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** Yup. It’s delicious.

**John:** Some follow up on Episode 491, the deal with deals. Danielle asks, “Following up on your conversation about writer deals, can you cover if-come deals? Specifically how they may or may not be hurting newer writers.”

Craig, have you ever had an if-come deal?

**Craig:** I was offered one many, many, many, many years ago and I said no. But I understood the general wisdom of it. I understood that.

**John:** So if-come deals are really common in TV. And so what will happen in TV is you are a writer with an idea for a series. And so you go and pitch to a studio or to a production company and they say this is fantastic, we really love that idea. We are going to make a deal with you that’s pending us getting a successful setup at a network. And so basically I’ve pitched to Sony and Sony says, yes, we love it, we’ll make you a deal. If it’s if-come on getting a network, so an ABC, or CBS, or somebody else to do it.

Super, super common in TV. And you can sort of get why they do it because that studio is going to be paying you but they’re only going to be paying you if they actually have a home for that project. And so it’s just sort of a given way of doing business in TV.

In features it’s weird and I don’t hear about it in features I think mostly because if you wrote a spec script and somebody wanted to buy it but not really buy it, or sort of have the option to buy it that’s just called an option purchase agreement where they’re paying you some money now and a promise for a lot more money down the road. That’s standard in features. What I’m guessing may be happening here in features would be let’s say, what did we decide it was, it was not the Slinky Movie, not the Uno Movie, what are we–?

**Craig:** Oh, what are we up to now? Oh, Mister Clean?

**John:** Mister Clean. So let’s say the Mister Clean Movie. So the Procter & Gamble or whoever owns Mister Clean says, OK, we love your take on the Mister Clean Movie and we want to be the producer of record on this, so we are going to make a deal for you, but it’s going to be if-come based on whether we can actually get a studio partner to actually release the thing.

I would not be excited about that deal.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because they are basically locking you up for a lot of time and they’re not paying you everything. There’s just no guaranteed money.

**Craig:** Well, even worse, what they’re doing is they’re purchasing insurance against an auction. And this is why I said no. And also I should say if-come was more common during the network dominance era, because now many streaming channels are their own studio, of course. But what they’re saying is like, OK, that’s a really cool idea. We can go and sell that to any one of 12 different places. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to lock you into what we’re going to pay you now and we’re only going to pay it to you once it lands at a place. That means is if there’s a huge competitive situation where everybody wants it the studio will benefit because the rights are going to go through the roof, the licensing fees will be massive. You won’t.

So, much better for you to be like, Nah. If I’m willing to bet on myself here I’d rather just see if a couple places want it and then they can fight over me and then I will also benefit from the competitive situation.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, one of those.

**John:** It’s also important to understand that even if you have an if-come deal if they can’t find the buyer at the level that they were expecting, or the kind of situation they were expecting, they might come back to you and say like, OK, we couldn’t actually get that deal so we need to figure out a new deal that’s actually makeable for the thing we’re trying to do.

And so I’ve encountered that in my career where I got like a pretty sweet ass deal, on paper, but then we went out to the market. The one place that wanted it wasn’t going to pay the amount that would actually pay out the other places. So they were going to renegotiate your deal anyway. That also happens.

Having that quote, a good quote, could be helpful for future deals. So there’s some valid, some reason why you might want to do it. But I would say if you’re a newer writer being offered an if-come deal especially for a feature or for a TV project that feels like it already is kind of set up at one place, that just doesn’t make sense to me.

Like an if-come waiting for an actor to be attached, that makes me really nervous.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ll also get if-comes a lot when you’re dealing with a producer that has an exclusivity issue. So you go to a particular company and they’re like well we have a deal with Netflix and we are exclusive to them. So we’re going to make you an if-come deal because there’s nowhere else to go. That’s it. We’re going to go there or we’re going nowhere. At that point maybe makes a little bit more sense.

**John:** Yeah. But it also may make more sense to actually just pitch to the one place that you can go and try to make a deal.

**Craig:** Well, correct. And so then you’re gambling, right? And the interesting things about those arrangements is they can be a little incestuous. So these people have a relationship already with the streamer and they can make a kind of deal where you get screwed and so do you want to lock something in earlier? It’s complicated. Your agent or lawyer will have the best advice. But Danielle that’s basically the long and short of it.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, what is your favorite color?

**Craig:** Red.

**John:** My favorite color is blue. How long has red been your favorite color?

**Craig:** Since the first time someone asked me what’s your favorite color. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it’s always been red. There’s never been a question. And it’s not like, oh, I’ve got to wear red or I’ve got to paint my house red. I don’t do that. That’s stupid. I just like it.

**John:** Yeah. I’m that way with blue. It was always the first answer and I just like blue. And when I say blue I have a very specific blue. It’s like a Crayola Blue. The basic blue crayon.

**Craig:** Standard blue.

**John:** Is the kind of blue that defines my favorite color. But of course like all things as you grow up you develop maturity and you horizons expand and you come to appreciate many other colors that are wonderful out there. And so you get past the sort of like very rainbow colors of your youth.

But I want to talk about color because I’m reading this book, The Secret Lives of Color, by Kassia St Clair. It’s a couple years old but I’m just now reading it. Which goes through the history of how humans sort of came to be able to make the colors that we see and use. Like how dyes and pigments and sort of all these things actually came to be. Because dyes were incredibly expensive, and so it was so hard to find the things that actually got you to that color. And worth more than gold, ounce for ounce, over the annals of history. And it’s only through modern science that we sort of have the ability to reproduce all the colors that are out there.

And I’m reading this book but I’m also thinking about the script I’m writing and I feel like partly because I’m reading this book I’m just very aware of the colors of the scenes that I’m writing and sort of what is what color in what space. And even though I’m not writing those colors necessarily into scenes they’re definitely informing my choices. So I thought we might talk first about sort of how color works on screen and some of the iconic moments that we sort of think about where you couldn’t pull color out them.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. All right.

**John:** So I think of movies with amazing color palettes. Amelie. The greens of Amelie. The pink in Grand Budapest Hotel. 2001 is mostly white. And then there’s some sequences that are all red. So in the movie Knives Out Chris Evans is wearing a sweater. Craig, what color is that sweater?

**Craig:** It was an off-white.

**John:** Yeah. It was on off-white.

**Craig:** It was a bone.

**John:** American Beauty has the red flowers and she’s in the red flowers. Midsommar has a really limited color palette and it’s just the explosive colors of the flower headdresses. So color is such a part of our movies and yet we don’t think about it that much on the page. So, let’s spend some moments thinking about it on the page.

**Craig:** Well it’s hard to do because it is purely visual. Sound I think occupies maybe – well, it depends on your mind. I think everybody’s brain functions differently. For me I find the ability to hear sound from a page much easier than to visualize color so much of what’s on page is dialogue. We’ve been trained since childhood to read books where people are talking to each other and so we are trained to hear words. And therefore we can hear sound effects. And sound effects are also very onomatopoeia-able.

So, well, I made a word. I can describe with words what a smash is. Describing colors turns basically into a simile fist. So it’s tricky to do. And it’s something that I think one of the first things that happens when a director reads a script is that can start to fill in more. The director who is going to be doing the first few episodes of The Last of Us, made this movie, Kantemir Balagov made this movie called Beanpole and color is an intense part of it and so much of our conversation already has been about color and specific color choices and what it means and why they pop up.

You’re actually putting your finger on something that I think is lacking probably in my toolbox. And I don’t think of enough. And maybe I should think of more.

**John:** Yeah. Something I’m trying to be more aware of as I’m writing, but you’re also right that a lot of times our color conversation becomes part of the conversation, becomes our discussion with the director and ultimately a production designer and an art director about how things are going to look beyond what’s just happening on the page.

And so when a filmmaker is thinking about how to shoot something there’s a discussion of color palette. And color palette not just like here’s all the colors, it’s like, no, no, we are being deliberate about what colors we’re using and what colors we’re not using. And really it’s that omission of colors that becomes even the stronger statement. So, in my movie The Nines it has three different segments. The first segment is really leaning towards reds and yellows. And so that informs the color of the light, but also just the wardrobe. We really go into yellows and reds. You will not see any blue or green anywhere in that section.

When we get to section three it’s all blues and greens. And we’re outdoors in the forest and it’s wet. And the light is whiter and bluer and colder. And you will not see any reds and yellows. That is a very common set of choices that filmmakers are going to make about how they’re going to shoot a thing just to make something feel deliberate and not random.

**Craig:** Correct. And I think you’re right that a lot of times it’s the subtractive aspect of it that strikes us. It’s a subconscious thing. We don’t really know that we’re not seeing something. Just like we don’t know we’re not hearing something. But it does create a subconscious, psychological impact which is something of course everybody wants. As opposed to just, oh wow, that’s a red movie.

So, removing things is a really interesting choice. The other aspect of color that I do think about when I’m writing, it’s not specifically a color choice, but overall is a question of saturation

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So saturation is just how – I guess it’s how vivid the colors are. So when you think about, like for instance you did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Very vivid, right. Candy colors, which is no surprise.

**John:** Once we’re inside the factory. But outside the factory it’s very desaturated.

**Craig:** Exactly. So you make these choices and generally speaking we think of very saturated color as heightened reality and desaturated, particularly very desaturated as verité. So, the opening sequence in almost all of Saving Private Ryan is really desaturated to the point where you’re like, wait, is this black and white? It’s that desaturated. And it makes us feel like we are in something that’s super grounded. And there’s no right or wrong, obviously. It’s a question of tone.

So, with the stuff that I’m writing now I tend to want to write towards desaturation.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a scene I was working on this past week where I wanted that desaturated feel and I was thinking about well how am I going to get that. What is the natural way to do that? And I decided it’s two sides of a FaceTime call. And so I decided on the side I wanted desaturated. Oh, it’s going to be raining on that side and it’s going to be a guy outdoors standing under extra covering, but it’s raining. And that is sort of naturally god’s desaturation. It’s like you’re pulling the color out of things.

**Craig:** God’s desaturation.

**John:** And let’s talk about how color is created, because you can’t talk about color without talking about light. So, what color is the light? Basically what time of year is it? What time of day is it? Sort of where are you at geographically and sort of emotionally at that time?

I just watched Another Round, which I really loved, and it’s set in Denmark. And most of it takes place in sort of summery months, and so it never really fully gets dark. And so the colors are really strange. And it’s sort of always at most like a twilight. And that really affects sort of how you feel about the things you’re seeing and the choice to set those scenes at those times of day versus bright sunlight really does impact how those scenes play out.

**Craig:** Yeah. The impact of light on things, it’s a little scary for me to write it because when you start to get into how the light changes, the color of something as something moves through it, you do risk that kind of purple dialogue that we want to shy away from.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** A lot of new writers are talking about the golden hue as it turns–

**John:** The crimson sky.

**Craig:** And yada-yada-yada. And, of course, when cinematographers read that stuff they kind of roll their eyes and they’re like, OK kid, but this is not actually how light works. But there is a feeling, and I always feel that the goal is rather than to be technical – I like to just be honest, you know, the way the light hits you it makes you sad. Just say that. I think cinematographers vastly prefer that because they know how to achieve that. Just like actors are just like tell me I’m supposed to be sad. I know I can do that. So, I do think about light that way.

And then there are gags, which is our all-purpose moviemaking, television-making term for special things. So there’s a gag where a particular beam of light is coming down through a shaft and it’s combining with something else. Well that you can always call out and describe because that’s really specific.

**John:** Yeah. Well one thing you may choose to call out and describe is the colors that we’re seeing on screen, especially if they’re impacting characters. So characters are making choices about what clothes they put on, how they do their makeup, and that will have an impact. And so I’m definitely not arguing that you’re going to label the colors for every single thing a character is doing or wearing, but it’s important to highlight some things.

Like in the thing I’m working on right now it’s basically a two-hander and one of the characters has sort of a uniform that he wears every day. He just doesn’t want to think about the clothes he’s wearing. And so I’m able to describe what that is that he’s wearing. And the other character I describe as being unafraid of color and pattern. And that just tells you, like, it was a signal to the costume designer you can push this guy a little bit. This guy lives in a heightened space. And so I’m not really calling out color so much as sort of like the range of choices that should be open as we’re visualizing this character.

**Craig:** It’s such a good point. And it’s why I wish that movies would function more like television shows in the sense of how a writer interacts with key department heads, like costume. Because, you know, I’m writing a scene, or I wrote it, in an episode and there’s a crowd of people. Who they are is not important. I just want people to notice one particular woman because something is going to connect through to later. She’s not going to have a name. She doesn’t have dialogue or anything like that.

So, what I’ve done is given her a particular piece of clothing with a particular color. As I’m doing it I’m well aware that this feels very Schindler’s List. There’s the little girl in red where everyone else is in black and white. And so I don’t want to be that. But what I want to be able to say to the costume designer is this is what this means. This is what I’m just trying to achieve. Now tell me how you would go about doing it. Let’s take a look at some choices. I can always go back and revise that. But this was the intention. It is a relationship that should exist in movies and weirdly in features, for whatever reason, everyone feels the need to aggressively sequester the screenwriter from everyone else. And it just, I don’t know why other than directorial insecurity. I don’t know. It’s just bizarre.

**John:** I’m thinking back to go, my first movie, and Sarah Polley’s character, Ronna, where’s this iconic sort of red leather coat. And that’s not scripted in there, but the idea that she would have a sort of signature look, that makes total sense. What is scripted in as a color is that Adam and Zack are driving a yellow Miata. And a yellow Miata is actually just a very specific joke. And I knew it would also photograph well at night and so you could see it in these dark scenes. But them driving a yellow Miata actually does pay off. It’s a recognizable car. It also tells you something about them as characters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that becomes important. Again, we’re always arguing for specificity, but as a writer you have to be very deliberate about what things you’re putting in and what things you’re putting out. So we’re not saying to make everything a color but to be thinking about color and thinking about whether color could be helping you tell the story, especially what’s happening in the scene.

**Craig:** 100%. And if you find yourself in a specific moment wondering what you can do to get the awesomeness of your mind’s image across think about color. Because there may be a point in your script where you may want to hammer it and help people see. I think about that moment in The Last Jedi where the one spaceship goes light-speeding through another one and splitting it apart. And it’s so white. But it’s also starlight white. And I don’t know if Rian made that clear on the page, because he’s also directing and he doesn’t have to necessarily communicate it on the page the way we might have to with a different director.

But it was a moment where you go, ah, sound stops, this incredibly bright light shines, and I can see where a signature moment could really use a full attention to color on the page. So, it’s a good choice to make when you’re looking for something special as well.

**John:** And I haven’t gone back through Scott Frank’s scripts for Queen’s Gambit, but that is a series that uses color quite aggressively to establish time period. Because different time periods have different colors that are predominate. And so calling out mustard yellow appliances, that’s not just painting the walls, that’s actually anchoring you into, oh, this is what this kind of kitchen feels like because mustard yellow is a very specific time period.

And so just be aware of that. I think if you’re doing anything period it’s worth looking at sort of what the colors were that were dominant at that time because it may be worth calling those out.

**Craig:** Time and place.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because there are places that have colors. The colors of 1980’s Soviet Union, well they’re colors. I mean, you know what they are. We certainly did our research and there’s certain ones that keep popping up and they’re glorious. I mean, they’re not colors we used. I guess on one level you’d go that’s objectively an ugly color, but on another level you go it’s weirdly kind of beautiful and hypnotizing. So think about that in terms of place as well because no question that color is reflected by culture in huge ways. There’s just certain cultures just have a different point of view on color than others.

**John:** So my advice for screenwriters going forward here, listening to this conversation, as you’re watching movies and TV shows be aware of color and be aware of when you think those choices of color were deliberate and sort of how early in the process those choices of color might have been made. Because I suspect you can retroactively write the scenes and decide, oh, they really called out that color quite early on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then as you’re going through the outside world just try to be more aware of the colors that you’re seeing. Because imagine yourself in a scene in a space. What would be the predominant color? And so if you’re hiking in the Grand Canyon you’re just going to be overwhelmed by that red color. And so that is going to influence any scene that is being shot there. If you’re in certain forests it’s just going to be overwhelmingly green unless you’re doing something to desaturate it. It’s going to be just super, super green.

So just be thinking about what the impact of color will be if you were to watch this on a screen.

**Craig:** Great advice.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get to our Three Page Challenge. So, this time we’re doing things a little bit differently. So let’s establish first what’s normal about the Three Page Challenge is we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their movie or their script and we read through them and offer our honest feedback. We’ve been doing this since very early on in the show.

But based on our conversation last week we said like you know what’s interesting about the Three Page Challenge is we’re just reading these pages in a vacuum and we don’t have any sense of what’s happening in the rest of the story, so we don’t know whether these opening scenes are actually setting up the movie that we think they are.

So what we asked our listeners to do is to send in their three pages but also give us a log line or a description of what happens in the rest of the script so we can see whether we were right and whether we set these up right. So let’s welcome on our producer, Megana Rao, to get us set up for this.

**Megana Rao:** Hey guys.

**John:** Hey. So we sent out an email to our premium subscribers on Sunday afternoon saying like, hey, we’re going to try this thing. Send in your script and send in your log line, too. And how many responses did we get?

**Megana:** And we got 190 responses. I read all of those.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Oh man.

**Megana:** By Tuesday night my brain was absolute mush. So I had to ask Bo to help me narrow it down from like the top 10 to 15.

**Craig:** Thank you, Bo. Thanks for helping, Bo. But so you read nearly 600 pages.

**Megana:** Yes. But if I found two typos like pretty early on I was like I’m not going to keep reading this.

**Craig:** Ooh. I like it.

**John:** That was a new thing I asked Megana to put in as a check because I get frustrated when we do a Three Page Challenge and you and I spend time talking about stupid typos on the page. And so going forward if Megana sees typos they go away. We’re not going to consider them anymore. Because you just don’t send in your stuff with typos. Have someone else read this first.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you want us to care about, at the very least you have to care about it.

**John:** Yeah. And also so this episode will have an element of surprise and mystery because Megana has seen the writers’ log lines for these things, the synopses, but you and I haven’t. So we’re going to speculate what we think the script is about and then she will tell us what the writer thinks the script is about.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** All right. Let’s get us started. Megana, can you talk us through Rinky Dink by Stephen Brower. And we’ll have a PDF in the show notes, but if you could give us a quick synopsis.

**Megana:** So Elias, 28, films a promo video for his aunt, Janet Witherbaum, a bronze-level figure skater in her 40s, at a skating rink in Minnesota. Janet is raising money for her trip to the National Championships of Adult Amateur Figure Skating. Elias tries to teach Janet a TikTok dance which she doesn’t get. Through talking head interviews we learn that Elias’s parents have died and that Janet taught him to skate but doesn’t allow him to skate at her gala events.

**John:** Craig Mazin, what was your first read and instinct on Rinky Dink?

**Craig:** Well, I was enjoying. The Minnesota kookiness, like wacky Minnesotans is a well-mined area, you know, from Fargo, and the Fargo show. But I’m a sucker for a good ice skating comedy and it definitely feels like a comedy. And I liked the way it started. Janet was an interesting character. I liked the say she was described and I liked the way she performed. I could see it. I could see the whole thing.

I ran into trouble on page two. So, I was cruising along. But on page two what happens is we go from this POV of an iPhone that is recording her and then there’s a wide shot of her nephew, Elias, shooting her through the iPhone. OK, cool, I get it. We went from an iPhone POV to that. And then it just says, “Elias Talking Head.” And he starts talking and I’m like where is he? I didn’t understand until quite a bit later that what’s happening is Stephen is putting Elias in one of those like Office-style testimonials somewhere else, but that needs to be spelled out really clearly. Because I was baffled for a bit about where the hell he was.

My other issue was I couldn’t quite get a read on Elias’s age. I mean, we are told that he’s 28. And we’re told that he’s kind of sweet and very easily steamrolled, which I liked. But he was interacting with her the way teenagers interact with old people. You know? Like “Come on let me show you the latest TikTok dance or let me say randos.” He didn’t seem like somebody on the edge of 30. So I was a little confused by the character there.

But I like the setup of things. It seemed like there was an interesting concept. Elias was still fun. And I thought there was a really good line when he says, “This year I worked up the courage to ask Janet if she would mind,” you know, to perform. “And she said, ‘yes,’ she would mind.” Which I liked.

This is cold open for presumably a series. It does not end with much of a punchline. I think we talked about last week how important punchlines are, whether they’re dramatic or comic. And this one just sort of ends. So that was an issue.

**John:** Craig, I literally wrote “not quite enough punchline.”

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** So, this feels like Modern Family. This feels like Modern Family, sort of Best in Show kind of space in that – whether or not there’s a documentary conceit like the way there is in The Office, or it’s just like for whatever reason they can talk directly to camera in these confessionals, it has that feel. And I mean that in a really good way. Like if I were to read this whole script and the whole script was to this level I’d be like, oh, this is a person who can write a Modern Family kind of show and shows real finesse with it and the ability to tell a joke and sort of get things going.

I have the same concerns you do about Elias though because I had forgotten that he was 28 so I just kept aging him down and down as I flipped through the pages.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Weirdly I know a lot about his parents dying and stuff like that. I know a lot of backstory, but I don’t get the great sense of who he is individually and specifically. And I’m asking a lot for the first three pages, and so I don’t want to sort of push it too far, but I don’t have a great sense of who he was at the end of these three pages in the way that in a Modern Family or in The Office I felt like I would have in the first three minutes. And so that’s a thing which I think can be worked on.

But let’s talk about some of the things that work really well here.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Page one, “Right now and always she means business.” Great. That scene description on the page it’s working really nicely for me here. Elias says, “Sorry, are you sure though? That’s what it’s called.” “No, I know.” “National Championships for Adult Amateur Skaters.” The just repeating it again to get the extra underline on the joke works really well and has a good sense of it.

On page two, here’s an opportunity to just trim a line but also I think works better as a parenthetical. So, Elias has his talking head. And so the “’whole social media thing, so’… He crosses his fingers. “’Her idea.’” I wouldn’t have broken out to the action line for that. I would have just kept in parentheticals crossing his fingers. It saves you a line and also keeps that thought together because it really should be one thought.

**Craig:** Right. I totally agree with that. I thought that one thing Stephen did pull through these three pages in terms of Elias is that he has got one of those indomitably happy spirits. So even when someone is kind of being insulting to him, or mean, he just keeps on smiling. You know, he’s like okie-dokie. So, he has a little bit of that weeble-wobble, you can tip him over but you can’t knock him down. And so I liked that. I liked him.

And so that’s why I kind of have a suspicion about where this is going, but you know, look, I’m not in possession of a log line.

**John:** What you’re saying about indomitably happy, like if he’d called that out on page one or page two, sort of like shortly after meeting him, that’s a fair thing to note because that colors what we’re seeing of the rest of his lines.

**Craig:** Right. It could contextualize that stuff for people a little bit better. I agree. But I thought that what was working here was that Janet feels like an interesting potential villain and Elias feels like an interesting potential hero. I like that the hero doesn’t quite get that the villain is the villain. And I think mostly other than the kind of simple clerical business like letting me know that we’re dealing with kind of Office testimonial, including where are they when they do it, you just need to kind of give us a good ending there. Because it just sort of petered out.

**John:** So this is the part of this special episode where we speculate about what the rest of this pilot is. And so I’m guessing that while they are central characters to this that there’s actually a pretty – there’s a bigger ensemble at work here. Because it feels like that kind of show. And so we’re going to see more of that family. Meemaw may still be alive there. And I think since Elias is our point of view character it’s going to be sort of centered around him. And so he will be sort of the straight man in – the “straight man” – amid all these sort of crazy, kooky people around him.

And so this first episode will go up through her event to raise money for her going off to this championship. And that things will go awry in trying to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Certainly we’ll have lots more characters. I can’t shake the feeling that this is going to turn into Elias versus Janet. And Elias is going to get a chance to skate in the Adult Amateur Figure National Championships. And either Janet is going to become his coach, or Janet will – so Janet has to leave the dream behind and help her nephew achieve his dream. Or, that they actually aggressively compete against each other, which would be fascinating.

But it does seem like ultimately this is going to turn into Elias hopefully in some final showdown a la Strictly Ballroom or something.

**John:** Megana Rao, can you come back and tell us what does Stephen Brower say happens in the rest of this script.

**Megana:** All right, so this is the log line we got from Stephen for Rinky Dink. “A charmingly delusional 40-something figure skater must prove her work among apathetic has-beens, cutthroat mothers, and snotty little children.”

**Craig:** Oh, so Elias is just sort of along for the ride.

**John:** Yeah, so she’s the central character.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** That can work, also.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** I mean, we’ve definitely built shows around sort of a delusional central figure before.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that makes total sense, right? So it’s maybe more of an ongoing thing. But, you know, this is the fun part. You kind of guess from these three pages. It’s no surprise that you might think that, OK, the thing that the three pages sort of highlights is what you would imagine everything to be about. But that’s interesting. I hope that Elias does get a chance to perform in that show. Because he’s sweet and he deserves it.

**John:** Nice. All right. Let’s look at Twilight Run by Andrew McDonald and Nick Sanford. Megana, start us off.

**Megana:** Twyla, 30s, wakes up in a 1980s Camaro next to a character titled Dipshit. Dipshit tells her she needs to take the edge off and offers Twyla a pack of cigarettes that she throws out the window. We cut to Twyla, Dipshit, some henchmen, and a French scientist in the pasture outside of the car. The French scientist claims that he has a world-changing technology and will only deal directly with Twist Jackson.

Twyla tells him he’s out of luck. Suddenly, a cowboy figure rides in on horseback. This is Twist Jackson. He exchanges briefcases with the French scientist who tries to warn Twist of the Twilight Run. Twist shrugs off the warning and later opens the box to reveal a swirling green gas.

**Craig:** You know. The usual.

**John:** The things that happen. This is a heightened world. And so one of the reasons why this made the finalist list is because we could talk about tone. We can sort of talk about what universe you’re setting up. And this is a clearly heightened universe. And I think the things that worked in this were about setting up what kind of heightened universe it is.

I don’t sort of really know what the rules of this universe are, but things are a little bit goofy in sort of a Buckaroo Banzai or a Rick and Morty kind of sense. And it’s good to see that by the end of page three. I got a sense that there’s some logic behind this even though I don’t quite understand what’s happening here.

My biggest issue was Twyla who is identified as our hero. I know nothing about her by the end of this. I really have no great insight into sort of who she is and why she’s special, or what her deal is. And instead Twist Jackson is the person who is sort of occupying things. So, by the end of these three pages I wanted a better sense of what makes Twyla interesting other than sort of being kind of grouchy and spacing out. I didn’t get a great sense of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What were you seeing Craig?

**Craig:** Definitely Buckaroo Banzai. I mean, this just seems like an ode or an homage to Buckaroo Banzai. We could be totally wrong but that’s surely what it feels like at least through these three pages.

Couple of things. Tonally, there is a little bit of a mismatch because the first page feels tonally rather grounded actually. It’s just a couple of people in a car. They’re talking to each other. I was a little bit confused about, again, where we were. When I see somebody in a car in my mind they are – she’s behind the wheel. And then she looks over at – is she looking over to the right, to the passenger seat? Or is she looking out the window to a car next to her?

**John:** And I would say that the first two-thirds, “a woman’s face through a rearview mirror,” like I just didn’t really quite know what was happening there. And so even the second reading through I didn’t quite know what I was seeing, or why I was seeing it.

**Craig:** Correct. And I think that this underscores a larger issue that I want to talk to Andrew and Nick about. But the one thing I do know for sure is that the French scientist’s dialogue, “This discovery will change the world. I could have sold it to nations the world over. I made a deal with Twist Jackson. I want to deal with Twist Jackson,” even if the tone is heightened that’s just annoying. You have to kind of establish that a character lives in a world of bad dialogue to have him successfully deliver the bad dialogue. But we just met him. It’s literally the second – the first thing he says is, “Where is he?” which is, I don’t know anything, and then the second thing he says is this incredibly arch, villainy plot exposition thing.

So, again, you can get away with it if you know that that’s the world that guy lives in, but until you do harder to get away with.

Here’s the bigger issue, the biggest issue, and it ties directly to into what John is saying about how we don’t know anything about Twyla. There is no sense of perspective in these three pages. None. The perspective is I think a camera.

**John:** I felt like I was in a wide shot for the whole time.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. Because nothing is centered on somebody observing. Everything just happens and we’re observing, which is kind of no good. Especially when we’ve established a hero. The reason that we’re so confused about what the hell is going on is because you guys have this visual reveal that you just sort of toss out there. Like they’re in a flat open pasture. Well that is not where we expect a 1981 Z28 Camaro to be, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. So make a reveal out of it. Acknowledge that we’re not quite sure where we are, whatever it is.

And then this conversation, give me a sense that Twyla is having reactions. When Twist Jackson does show up, essentially completely contradicting what Twyla said, what does she think? We know what the French scientist thinks, but what does she think? When he shows up and grabs this thing what is she doing? She’s gone. She literally is gone. But somebody’s perspective has to be the perspective.

And it’s one scene. And in one scene, or one connected scene basically once we reveal where we are, one character has the perspective. One. So who?

I don’t mean POV. I just mean who are we kind of anchoring to?

**John:** Yeah. Like who is our entry point character? We’re sort of standing in their shoes as the scene is happening. And we don’t have that here yet.

**Craig:** We don’t.

**John:** Let’s talk a little bit about the words on the page. “Asleep, her head resting on a plain white pillow.” Well, there’s a color, just white. White pillow. Dipshit has prelap. It’s not really a prelap because it’s not like he’s going into really future stuff.

**Craig:** I circled that also. I was like it’s not prelap.

**John:** Yeah, so that’s just off-screen, or voice over. You can do either one of them. Both of them are acceptable here. But that’s not really prelap.

But that whole first sequence I just didn’t get the point of it. I really had a hard time understanding what that was. So, if you need that, if this really becomes important for your story that you need that, great, but I feel like just that precious time and you need – we talk about sort of the first line of dialogue in a movie, the first image in a movie is so crucial, so precious. Just to be wasting it on something that we can’t understand or really see, it’s not good. So I think starting someplace else will help you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also want lines to be motivated. We’re going to see this issue come up in our next three pages as well. So in the very beginning, “TWYLA, our hero. 30s, short hair, black bomber jacket. Don’t fuck with her, she won’t fuck with you. Lounging behind the wheel, she looks over at: SOME DIPSHIT…” This is what you’ve described. I’m looking at a woman. She is sitting there. And then she turns for no reason to a guy who then says something. Like he was waiting for her to look at him for him to say what he’s saying which makes no sense. Especially when he’s saying “you keep zoning out.” Why would he say that after she’s turning to look at him?

That’s not what zoning out means. If she’s zoned out and then she hears, “(OS) You keep zoning out,” and then she turns and looks. So you see what I’m saying? And again that helps drive perspective so we understand we’re with her. That’s kind of important.

**John:** Lastly, these three pages had more colons in it than I’ve sort of ever seen in a script. Basically Andrew and Nick have made a choice that colons are going to be there dashes. And it’s fine. I’m not complaining. It’s a way of doing things. And so in places where you or I might use dashes or some other piece of punctuation they’re using colons. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Works.

**John:** Go for it. There’s a whole range of styles of work and at least it’s consistent. There were no other real problems on these pages in terms of like formatting screenwriting stuff, so go for it. If that’s your style knock yourself out.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, you know, perspective guys. Big one.

**John:** All right. So Craig we’ve got to speculate. What happens in this script?

**Craig:** Oh boy. Well you’ve got this really weird thing going on in the very first shot that’s like some sort of dreamy thing. I think it’s Buckaroo Banzai and I think that Twist Jackson is maybe an idiot and I think maybe Twyla is going to have to save the world from Twist Jackson’s arrogance as he seeks to do something with the swirling green stuff that leads to the Twilight Run.

**John:** Yeah. I think the box with the swirling green gas is a MacGuffin and there are going to be a bunch of people after it. And what this deal was and sort of the bigger stakes of it all are going to be important. And that she will be forced to make a choice about which side she’s on. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** Now let’s find out how we did.

**John:** Megana, what’s the truth?

**Megana:** Wait, can I prolong the reveal and ask you guys a question?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Yes.

**Megana:** What do you think of the character description that’s “some dipshit who will get blown up by page nine?”

**Craig:** Great question. I personally have no problem with it. I think it’s a tone signifier.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So it’s the first indication that we might be dealing with a bit of a wacky heightened reality. I’m totally cool with that. That page unfortunately didn’t have anything that the movie viewer or TV viewer would detect that would indicate a heightened tone. It only had kind of a very mundane situation between two people. So it’s a little bit of a cheat. If the visuals matched that attitude I’d be totally cool.

**John:** Yeah. I agree. I mean, I should mention that I was never clear who the goons were working for. Sometimes it seemed like Twyla’s goons and sometimes it seemed like the French guy’s goons. So just be aware of that, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think there’s two sets of goons.

**John:** Too many goons.

**Megana:** So here is their log line. Five years after a deep undercover operation ended in failure a former ATF agent teams up with a smart but socially awkward tech specialist to infiltrate a deadly cult and stop an arms deal that if successful could alter the very fabric of reality itself.

**Craig:** That’s plot. We don’t quite get what the character stuff is there. It’s so funny, we only think about stuff with character. But again log lines are very plotty, aren’t they?

**John:** They are very plotty. Yeah, I guess I could buy her as a former ATF agent who then discovers this sort of heightened universe world. But I feel like Twist Jackson exists as a semi supernatural character, just sort of appears out of nowhere and rides a horse. So, yeah, it’s not quite what I would guess. But teaming up to stop a thing, sure, you’re setting that up right here on page three.

**Craig:** There’s no sense of tone in that log line which I think actually might be a mistake. I think it’s good to kind of indicate – the way that he’ll get blown up in nine pages. Indicate a little bit of a sense of that heightened-ness because otherwise people are going to read this and go like “What is this?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Embrace the Buckaroo.

**John:** That could be Mission: Impossible.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** That could be a whole bunch of different set ups.

**Craig:** It could be a billion things. And it seems like what these guys are going for is Buckaroo Banzai. I mean, the dude is named Twist Jackson for god’s sakes.

**John:** Cool. All right, it’s time for our third and final Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** By the way, we’re doing poorly. I just want to point out. O for 2.

**Megana:** Great. So South Carthay by Alex Rennie. In the middle of the desert 11-year-old Andy watches the 1988 film Hellraiser 2 with his brother Parker, 13, and their pit bull, Jules. Parker is blind and relies on Andy to narrate the movie to him. Their mother, Maggie, 35, speaks to her agent Karen on the phone in her home office. Karen tries to set up a meeting for Maggie’s new book in Santa Monica but between doctor’s appointments for her sons Maggie doesn’t have any availability. Karen urges Maggie to move from the desert to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Craig, do you want to start us off.

**Craig:** This, I’m going to talk about a couple things. My first question and I still don’t have an answer for it is what year is this.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Because they’re watching a movie from 1988, but I’m not sure if they’re just watching it as an old movie or if this is 1988. And it will become relevant in a little bit.

But there are two instances of a problem in here that I alluded to in the prior pages and that is – I don’t know what else to call it – the movie waiting. It’s like reality waits for something to happen. So here’s what happens at the very, very beginning. We get a description of a two-story house in the center of a barren desert. It’s very, very hot.

“The scene is suddenly interrupted by a demonic voice. Hellraiser, prelap,” once again not prelap, “you solved the puzzle box. You summoned us, we came.” And my question is how does that suddenly happen? The movie is on, right? Like it’s not like somebody suddenly starts up a remote for the movie.

What you can do, Alex, if you want to just not have rando dialogue and then that line have music that we go like what is this weird music. That’s weird music for this. And then the line would go, oh, that was score from a movie. But the point is the movie can’t wait. It can’t just suddenly come in.

Because we then go to a television screen and we realize that these two kids, Parker and Andy, have been watching it. Have been watching. Not just started, right?

I liked the reveal that Parker is blind. I thought that was really well done. Because first I was a little bit like I don’t understand why he’s asking these questions that he’s asking. And then I was like, oh, that’s why. And I love that feeling, right. There’s a joy as a moviegoer or television watcher to think that you got the writer and then you realize they got you. So I like that.

The problem of the world waiting for something to happen occurs again. These guys are watching TV and at the same time I assume their mom is on the phone with her agent. And that scene begins with the agent on the phone saying, “Mags, I sent them your book yesterday.” What were they talking about before? So the phone rings, I answer it, and then I just wait, wait, wait, oh the camera is here. “Mags, I sent them your book yesterday.” That is not how that works.

So you need to pick them up in mid-conversation, or have the phone ring and have her answer. Either way you can’t just suddenly have this line start in. Especially because it’s good news and it just makes no sense to have her waiting.

There’s a story problem here that you’re describing, or a character problem rather, that Maggie is being – she’s a book author and she’s being told she needs to have a meeting in Santa Monica at noon tomorrow and her problem is that Andy has a doctor’s appointment, so maybe they can do Sunday. This sort of like, ah-ha, single mom raising kids trouble. But the issue is this feels old because we’ve just spent a year not having to go to Santa Monica. Like you can Zoom. So that’s why I want to know what year is this.

**John:** Craig, I was also concerned about what year it was based on page two, “Maggie sits in front of a desktop word processor, a house phone pressed to her ear.” And I’m like, wait, what universe is this? First off, what is a desktop word processor?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** A desktop PC I guess? Her desktop word processor, are they talking about that post-typewriter but before it was a real computer thing?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s a landline because that’s just what it is? Because that’s conceivable but that’s a very specific time period. And I don’t think that was really what Alex was going for here. So, again, one word choice of saying word processor rather than computer threw me and made me question what year this was happening in.

**Craig:** Or maybe it is happening in 1988 or 1989 and Alex just wants us to suss it out. And I guess what I would say is you need to give us a clearer indication than that. There just needs to be a clear sense, especially because they’re watching a scene from the 1988 horror feature. So they’re watching it on television. It’s either on video tape. The point is they’re not going to see it in theaters, so it’s not 1988. So when is it?

OK, so you’ve got to figure that out. And then finally I would say that the last bit here where Maggie is arguing with Karen about where she lives feels a little soft.

**John:** I didn’t buy it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just don’t buy it. It just didn’t make any sense. Like it doesn’t matter that she got Road R as opposed to R Road. And she wouldn’t know that that’s where the airplane graveyard is. It doesn’t seem – and also this entire discussion feels very elementary. This is a real problem, but the way they’re discussing it and the way that Karen is responding just feels very elementary. Karen does not feel like a human. She feels like a plot machine.

**John:** So here’s where I liked about the characters, and the setup, and the world. And so I’m going to – and I guess this ties into where I think the story is actually going. I liked the brothers and one brother is blind. I liked the mom, the setup. I like them being out in the desert. I thought there was a promising space for a movie there. And I don’t think they’re actually going to stay out in the desert. I think they’re going to move to South Carthay, which is Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just my guess about why it’s titled that. So I like that in the setup. And so I dug these pages even though I thought a fair number of things weren’t working.

One thing I want to point out is just right at the top, “EXT. DESERT – DAY 1 A two-story house sits in the center of a barren desert landscape, dotted with patches of scrub brush.” You’re not giving me enough there. First off, there’s not just a desert. What desert? A California desert? Where are we? Anchor us. Because if you say desert I guess I’m thinking of the Sahara until you give me more stuff. So anchor us a little bit more.

And tell us what it feels like. You don’t have to describe every little thing, but is it just barely above a trailer park? Is it a two-story trailer home? Did it have that kind of feel to it? But I just don’t get a sense from this of what kind of space we’re living in.

When we get into her office we do get some more details about what her office is like and I liked that. I got a sense of character making choices that influenced the environment that they were in.

Craig had already pointed out the Hellraiser problems or the voice over that’s happening that becomes the Hellraiser dialogue. My way of handling this in general would be scratch that line “The scene is suddenly interrupted by a demonic voice.” You just hear character name Demonic Voice, “You solved the puzzle box. You summoned us. We came.” New action line. “A man’s voice screams in terror. Cut to…” And then you’re in. And that’s great. So we’re wondering what are we hearing rather than spoiling it by saying Hellraiser right at the start.

**Craig:** Right. I think that’s a great idea.

And I want to point out that Alex does do a really good job of creating perspective because in this first scene it’s not there’s an indication in the action that we’re meant to identify with Parker and understand the scene from his perspective, but we do. It’s just written in that way. We understand we’re with him and his inquisitiveness and his confusion. And that’s good. I mean, there’s good stuff there. But I’m nervous about some of the elementary nature of the drama that’s being created.

**John:** A few other small things to look at. In American screenplays parentheticals get their own line underneath the character’s name. So on page one, that “unsure” right now is tucked into that dialogue line. We don’t do that in American screenplays. On page two, two action lines. “Andy thinks, picking at a set of stitches above his right eye.” That’s great. That can work. Later on, “Andy’s sandwich collapses as he struggles to keep it together.” Those are two completely separate actions that are just too close together. I feel like you’re just throwing too much business at this one character. And it’s distracting from the scene. So either he’s working on the stitches or he’s trying to eat this sandwich like he was falling apart.

Pick one. There’s just too much there.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And if you imagined him picking at the stitches with the hand that was holding the sandwich because they’re itching and then it collapses, that’s fine. But you’ve got to let us know. But absolutely. You don’t want to have him pick-pick, and then line, and then a line, and then he’s doing an entirely other thing that implies some sort of sandwich disaster occurred. So it’s just like time management issues here in terms of continuity of reality.

Guesses, I guess it’s time to guess, huh?

**John:** It’s time to guess. So I was speculating that this family is going to move to the Carthay Circle part of Los Angeles which is close to where I live and that it’s going to be about them adjusting to their new life there. But I don’t have any sense of what the actual plot is of this story. These three characters are centered to it all, and perhaps there’s maybe stretching, reaching that it could be kind of a Lost Boys situation where it’s like the boys have their own adventure and the mother is sort of a secondary character. That’s my best guess at this point.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does feel like, and I don’t like this necessarily, but it does feel like mom is being setup to just be mom from E.T., like problem to be avoided.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And who is having a generic single mom problem like divorce, or balancing job and children, without more flavor to it. It does feel like this is going to be about Parker and Andy and some kind of horror thing, I hope. Because that would be fun. And, yes, moving to LA. But, you know, I have no clue from this which is not, I mean, again, 0 for 2. So let’s see how we did.

**Megana:** OK, so Alex wrote in, “When the MacLaine family inherits their dream home they quickly discover that their new neighborhood hides a sinister secret and must work together to find the truth.”

**Craig:** There we go. Well I like working together.

**John:** I like working together. I think we were closer than I would have guessed.

**Craig:** Oh definitely.

**John:** Yeah. It also has like a Fright Night quality where you move to a new house in this neighborhood. I like that.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, Lost Boys, right? You literally, I mean, that’s exactly what happened. They moved to a house. It harbors a big secret. But I’m really happy to hear that it’s all of them together so that mom isn’t just mom, but mom. Good.

**John:** Yay. Well that was fun. So, as always, we want to thank everyone who submitted their pages, especially Alex, Andrew, Nick, and Stephen for sending in your stuff. Thank you to Megana and to Bo for reading through all of these. You’re remarkable.

**Craig:** Thank you so much guys.

**John:** And again this is not a competition. This is just an exhibition where we all get to take a look at some writing and figure out what’s working well and what could be working better.

If you want to send in your own pages you go to johnaugust.com/threepage. And there’s a form you fill out, including a new field for where you can put in your log line for your script. This is not a log line competition. We don’t really care about log lines. We are just curious what the thing is about. And so just for the reasons we used on the podcast today.

So, Megana, thank you very much for all your hard work and all your reading in making this happen.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana. Great job.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Emily VanDerWerff from this past week that was looking at the way professional critics and fans get drawn into what she calls The Loop of defending positions on a movie or TV show or piece of culture. So talking about the show Girls she writes, “I had tied my own personal opinion of the show to myself and from there it was far too easy to grow more and more defensive with every criticism the series endured because it was like the criticism was criticism of me.” And it just felt so true to a phenomenon I’ve experienced more and more and more over the last decade where I love a thing, someone hates that thing, that person is attacking me. And this weird way that we sort of claim ownership over things and form our identities based on what we like.

And just a really great article detailing her perspective as someone who gets paid doing this as a living and still gets stuck into that loop.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, I’ve gone off on critics a billion times on the show. I’m not going to bore everybody by doing it again. But I will say that I do personally like Emily. I did a nice interview with her for Chernobyl. It was one of the early interviews I did and I thought this was – I read this, too. And I thought it was very thoughtful. And I just wanted to say you think you grow defensive with criticism of a show you watch, imagine criticism of a show you’ve written.

And what it kind of comes down to is what I’ve always said. I do think that these feelings we have about movies or television shows are a function of the relationship we have with them. And that means it’s not just about the show or the movie. It’s about us, and the show and the movie. Some intersection of who we are and where we are and that. And therefore it makes no sense – it literally makes no sense to explain to people why it is good or bad for them.

You can talk about why it was good for you. And you could talk about why it was bad for you. I wish that critics would just be more subjective. Like literally just say here’s how this made me feel. I don’t know if you’re going to feel the same way. But this is my thing. Instead of just declaring that movies are good, bad, stupid, etc.

But I enjoyed – the introspection here I thought was very valuable.

**John:** And a thing I think has changed over the course of our lifetime in terms of criticism is that it’s one thing to be a critic looking at a movie because that movie is finished. And so while people will come to that movie with new perspectives over time that movie is done. But what Emily was doing with Girls and a lot of other TV series is you’re critiquing something that is still ongoing where it hasn’t been finished yet and your criticism will actually change the thing. And that just becomes an impossible feedback loop as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just everyone to be mindful of the fact that the creative process is influenced by the criticism of it in not always healthy ways. And that if you are criticizing a piece of art to differentiate criticizing that piece of art from the person who made it. Because they really are not the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just the way that things are completely redeemed or vilified over time. I mean, blech.

I have a much easier One Cool Thing than that.

**John:** All right. Pitch it.

**Craig:** Cake.

**John:** I like cake.

**Craig:** Everyone likes cake. So, we over at the Mazin house have been engaging in a kind of homemade food exchange with another family in our town as we’ve been navigating the pandemic. So occasionally they would make something and bring it over and leave it on our doorstep and then we would make something and bring it over and leave it on their doorstep.

And so we owed them one and I asked what they wanted and they have three girls. And all three girls said chocolate cake. That was what they wanted. Which seems like, oh, OK, well chocolate cake. Who can’t do that? There’s a billion chocolate cake recipes.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m kind of a recipe nerd. I love the science of it. And so I went through and read all sorts of them and I landed on one, just faith, and it’s a recipe by a woman named Robin Stone. And it’s called The Best Chocolate Cake Recipe Ever. It might be. It’s really, really good. It’s really, really good.

And you might be saying well what’s the big secret in it? I don’t think there is a big secret other than she does have you adding a cup of boiling water into the batter at the very end before you put it into the oven. It makes it much–

**John:** I’ve seen that in other recipes recently.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting.

**John:** It’s a chocolate thing.

**Craig:** Exactly. But overall whatever the balance of ingredients were it just came out beautifully. Same with the frosting. She also has a recipe for chocolate butter cream frosting that goes with it and it came out also beautifully. So if you’re looking to make a chocolate cake.

**John:** I’m looking to make a chocolate cake. Craig, my question for you is this gives a choice between milk, buttermilk, almond milk, coconut milk. What did you use?

**Craig:** In that circumstance – and one of the things that made me a little nervous is that Robin is like whatever. And I’m like, all right, I’m a little more finicky than that. I went with straight up whole milk.

**John:** Whole milk. So super rich.

**Craig:** Well, it’s one cup of it. It’s not exactly half and half or anything. But, yeah, just one cup of regular old whole milk as opposed to any of the other stuff. But if you were lactose intolerant does that still work after you bake something?

**John:** Yeah, it does.

**Craig:** Then you might want to try the almond or the coconut milk. There’s not that much in it so I can’t imagine it would make a massive difference.

**John:** You’ve got a cup of boiling hot water in it to dilute it anyway.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Damn straight.

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Always.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Ella Grace. 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. But for shorter questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and 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 which is also where you’ll find the PDFs of for our Three Page Challenges. You’ll find transcripts there and be able to sign up for our weekly-ish 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 the bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the Olympics. Craig and Megana, thank you both very, very much.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you guys. Thank you. And I just want to say a quick hello to listener Miranda, because I know she’s a big fan.

**John:** Oh, nice.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Well great. And that outro felt very Winter Olympics to me. I could imagine that being under a Winter Olympics Montage. Which is a good segue to a question from a listener, Adam in Los Angeles, who writes, “If you were an Olympic level athlete what sport/event would you like to compete in?” And so we’ll look at winter and summer. Craig, of the Summer Olympic events if you could be a medal-worthy athlete is there one sport that you’d go for?

**Craig:** Well, I suppose that one way to think about this is a little bit like how fun it is to fly in a dream. Because you’re never going to fly. So one possibility is pick a thing that you would never be able to do. Like in theory I could wrestle some people. I wouldn’t be any good at it, but I could wrestle for a bit at my weight class or something. I could throw a pole.

But the thing that I cannot do, ever, in any circumstance and have never been able to do, even as a child, is run for a long distance. I was not built to run for a long distance. So I would want to be a marathon runner. I just think that would be like flying. That would be so cool.

**John:** So I can run for a long distance. I ran a half marathon. And I assumed I could never run, but now I can run. But I don’t think I would actually want to be a long distance runner for Olympic stuff. I think I would actually prefer to be like a sprinter because that to me feels like you’re The Flash where you’re just so incredibly powerful out of the gate.

But what you were saying about flying made me think like, oh, maybe I should pick pole vaulting because that’s a thing in real life I would never, ever do, but it just seems so cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I don’t even understand how that happened. Why did – who figured that out? Why?

**John:** Yeah, we can pole vault. My guess is there’s a season of The Amazing Race where they were doing these – they were in these canal kind of places, flooded field canals, and you actually do use poles to get from one side to the other. So maybe that was sort of how pole vaulting became a thing. I don’t know. We could have looked it up by the time I–

**Craig:** Could have, but you know what? Nah. I’m tired of learning. I don’t want to learn anything else. I’m done. I’m done.

**John:** But I should clearly choose gymnast, because male gymnasts have the amazing skills, versatile skills. You feel like a real life Rogue. And great bodies.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was waiting. It’s about the body. The male gymnast body is stupid. It’s a stupid body. Yeah, like how? Oh my god. Could you imagine?

**John:** Now the Winter Olympics. Craig, what winter sports would you want to do?

**Craig:** Ooh, I do like the Winter Olympics. They’re fun. I mean, look, like the weirdo one like the biathlete where you ski and then shoot. That’s a silly one.

**John:** That was my top choice. Biathlete.

**Craig:** It’s a pretty silly one so I kind of like sneakily want that. But I think, so the guys who do the skeleton in the luge, and the women, are moving at insane speeds. And it’s terrifying. I think maybe if I could be one of those people. Just the idea of just firing down a shoot like a bullet for like a minute just seems like it would be pretty awesome.

**John:** I said that I was so excited to be a pole vaulter, but I don’t think I would be a ski jumper because that just–

**Craig:** Ooh, god.

**John:** No. That’s just too much terror for me. I’ve bungee jumped. Great. I’m not going to ski jump. That’s, no. That’s not good at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. The ski jump is kind of like you go down the ramp and you catch, just perfect, boom you launch off perfectly and you’re like I’m doing it. I’m going to go further than anybody. And then when you start to go down you’re like, oh, shit.

**John:** Well, Craig, you and I both grew up with ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Of course the agony of defeat. This big intro and then it goes “the agony of defeat” and they show this guy going off the edge of the ski jump and just falling. I still feel pain just thinking about that shot.

**Craig:** Why would anyone be an athlete after that? You’re just watching a human being tumbling down a mountain, breaking I assume everything. And, yeah.

**John:** In reference to our Three Page Challenges, I think figure skating is just remarkably great, and to be able to do that stuff. But I would just get such performance anxiety to actually have to masterfully do all these things, and be artistic, and hit all those jumps. That feels like too much.

**Craig:** Yeah. The artistic part – figure skating, I don’t love it. I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t love it. Not on the level of ventriloquism which is a ridiculous waste of everyone’s time. Actually, it’s the fact that figure skating is a remarkably demanding athletic pursuit, but they also have to wear these outfits.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, they don’t have to. I think they want to in a sense. But it just gets sillier and sillier. It’s like Vegas kind of. It just becomes so odd. You know what I mean?

**John:** As a young gay child I just loved my figure skating.

**Craig:** I get it. I get it. I do. And maybe it’s also like the performance aspect of it is so outrageously fake. Do you know what I mean? The smiles and the…

But I can also see where, you know – look, my wife loves figure skating. I mean, loves. So I watch it when it’s on. All right.

**John:** I never looked at the contents of my mom’s DVR after she died, but I guarantee you there were at least 16 hours’ worth recorded of figure skating on that. Just to watch at any point, which is great.

**Craig:** I love it. Who was your favorite?

**John:** Growing up it was Torvill and Dean. They were an ice dancing pair.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** They were remarkable. They were the Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh of their time, but on ice. And they were just remarkably talented. But then like through the Brian Boitanos, through the Kristi Yamaguchis. Katarina Witt, who I saw at a post office here in Los Angeles. Just remarkable talents.

**Craig:** Torvill and Dean, were they married?

**John:** They were married but I think they ultimately split up, yeah, which was controversial and terrible.

**Craig:** Oh, it was controversial?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Yeah. If I remember correctly. Chris Schleicher who is a writer who I only know through Twitter, but was a competitive figure skater before he became a writer. And I always find that so fascinating as a second act, you know, get out of figure skating and then become a writer.

**Craig:** Yeah. Interesting.

**John:** So, Craig, should we go to the Olympics in China? So that’s the 2022 Winter Olympics are going to be in China. And China has not done some good things.

**Craig:** You’re asking should you and I personally go?

**John:** [laughs] Oh yes.

**Craig:** Or should America go?

**John:** Should America send a delegation to the Olympics in 2022?

**Craig:** I got to tell you, and this is one of those hot button things. It’s practically designed for people to argue. But I remember as a kid feeling like boycotting the Moscow Olympics wasn’t great. The point of the Olympics was let’s get closer together.

I don’t think the Olympics, going to the Olympics, is any kind of tacit approval of what a government is doing. The United States went to the Olympics in Germany when Hitler was in power and Jesse Owens got to beat everyone in front of him, which is awesome. There’s a little chance to stick it to people at the Olympics also. And the way we kind of did to the Soviets in 1980 in Lake Placid.

But it kind of bummed me out. And then of course the Russians boycotted after. I feel like once you start it’s hard to stop. Because everybody has a reason to boycott everybody. There’s no reason that – if there’s ever an Olympics in Mumbai for instance, well, should the Pakistanis just immediately boycott? Do you know what I mean? You know, over Kashmir.

Everybody has got a problem. So, let’s preserve this one place where we just come together and we do it outside of the bubble of the bad things that we are or are not doing. And hopefully it brings us together and maybe solves a problem. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. I wonder if we hadn’t had the situation where we boycotted one Olympics and they boycotted us, I wonder when we decided that Olympic athletes a chip that we would use in international trade. Because we’re not talking about like, OK, we’re going to boycott Chinese products or we’re not going to do business with China at all, because clearly we’re doing a ton of business with China.

So, it does feel weird on that level. And yet at the same time you’re dealing with a government that is doing some really bad things. So, I’m sympathetic to both sides and I’m happy to be the one who doesn’t have to make the decision.

**Craig:** Right. Turns out weirdly that they have asked me to make this decision.

**John:** Craig, as your profile grows then so does your responsibility.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know how this ended up in my lap, so I’ve got to really think about this. [laughs] I’ve got to be honest with you. I’m in a whole boatload of trouble over here.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [WGA Strike](https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/the-chase-strike-writers-wga-itv-1234936943/) against ABC’s The Chase.
* For current university students and professors: Learn more about the [Highland 2 Student License](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/students.php)
* [The Secret Lives of Color](https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Lives-Color-Kassia-Clair/dp/0143131141) by Kassia St Clair
* [Rinky Dink](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F03%2FRinky-Dink-Three-Page-Challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=428197df8aa5744b9773ac3f65f597c5f8419e2fd6e60923f799f6b7e82795bf) by Stephen Brower
* [The Twilight Run](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F03%2FThe-Twilight-Run-Three-Page-Challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=f3e0780b9271811e28acf59ac67b2286357b3148ddf029bb4e12671a3fa558d9) by Andrew McDonald and Nick Sanford
* [South Carthay](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F03%2FSouth-Carthay-Pilot-3_21_21.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=ba275113a62a9a36a5dbf43a1c70442a3d5dd4ac8d303ec137268bbe73da2528) by Alex Rennie
* [The Loop by Emily VanDerWerff](https://emilyvdw.substack.com/p/the-loop)
* [The Best Chocolate Cake Recipe Ever](https://addapinch.com/the-best-chocolate-cake-recipe-ever/) by Robin Stone
* [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/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/494standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/getting-staffed-in-2021).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode was recorded just a few hours before the WGA officially announced that it had reached a deal with WME thereby ending the two-year agency campaign. Now I promise Craig and I will talk about it all next week, including revealing the contents of that encrypted thumb drive I gave him backstage before our live show in Episode 431. You remember that. We set that up a long time ago and we’re going to pay off that set up I promise on next week’s episode. But today’s brand new episode is really good so listen to that and watch the feed because we might put out this next episode a little bit early if we get it recorded in time. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 487 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we unwind a Twitter thread with great advice on getting staffed as a writer on a TV show. And we look at the state of assistant pay in Hollywood. We then fulfill our cultural obligation as a podcast to discuss GameStop, specifically do we really need three movies about it. Plus, listener questions. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we’ll share awkward dating stories from our past.

**Craig:** Sorry. I was just getting coffee.

**John:** We’ll share awkward dating stories from our history.

**Craig:** That actually – you should keep that as it is because that was awkward. And I think it’s important to just own awkward moments. It really is. So I think that’s wonderful. Actually quite lovely. We had an awkward moment that was applicable. I love it.

**John:** Fully, fully applicable.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Yes, exactly. Comedy comes from awkward moments and acknowledgement that the specific awkward moments are also a universal phenomenon.

**Craig:** They’re the best.

**John:** My present awkwardness is they are jackhammering a building behind my office right now, so if you hear some background noise that Matthew is not able to cut out that’s what you’re hearing is a jackhammer. Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.

**Craig:** It’s not awkward. That’s just annoying.

**John:** No. It’s not been nerve-wracking all day. I’m not jangled.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nothing like that.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** In our crucial IP update the Uno Movie starring Lil Yachty was announced this week. So, the toymaker, Mattel, has announced a live action heist comedy is in development. It’s written by Marcy Kelly and set in the underground hip hop world of Atlanta with Grammy-nominated rapper Lil Yachty eyeing a starring role. So, phew, it’s good to have one piece of IP that has a plan. It didn’t announce who the studio was for it, but Mattel is on the case and naturally the Uno Movie is going to revolve around underground hip hop which is just a natural fit there.

**Craig:** I’ve got to say, like if you’re going to do it, right, you might as well just blow it up and do it. When I first read this article it seemed almost like someone had done Mad Libs. I need a noun. I need a famous rapper. I need a city. But, you know, I guess the point is what you can’t do – we know you can’t do this. You can’t do the cards come to light at night and number four is to figure out how to join the blue cards. Blech. So, screw it, let’s go all the other way and make it about Lil Yachty.

**John:** Yeah. We wish nothing but the best for Marcy Kelly and the whole team [unintelligible] and making this movie.

**Craig:** It’s a heist movie apparently.

**John:** A heist movie. Sure. We love a heist movie. Got a plan. So Uno joins the Mattel films in the works, including American Girl, Barbie, Hot Wheels, Magic 8 Ball, we’ve talking about before. Major Matt Mason, I don’t know who that it is. Is that a GI Joe kind of character?

**Craig:** Huh? Who? [laughs] Oh, ha-ha. OK. Matt Major. Matt Mason. I got to be honest that’s a WTF for me and you and I are not young, so we should know this. Unless is it a new thing?

**John:** It could be. But, I mean, it doesn’t feel like a new thing. It feels like a very old thing.

**Craig:** I’m looking it up right now.

**John:** Masters of the Universe. So, I would say that Masters of the Universe is a genuine IP in the sense of like they were characters. They were doing things. There was a cartoon I remember about it.

**Craig:** They made a movie before.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** With Dolph Lundgren.

**John:** Thomas and Friends. View-Master. View-Master is a strong contender there, because think about what View-Master is.

**Craig:** Oh my god, dude. Do you know, this is crazy.

**John:** Tell me about Matt Mason.

**Craig:** There needs to be some sort of intervention at Mattel. They’re out of control. Major Matt Mason was an action figure created by Mattel. He was an astronaut who lived and worked on the moon. When introduced in 1966 the figures were initially based on design information from a Life Magazine, Air Force Magazine, and other aviation and space interest periodicals. So this was before we landed on the moon, Major Matt Mason in 1966. Come on.

**John:** I’ve got to say I am genuinely fascinated by that idea because there’s some sort of like retro future thing where it’s just like it’s the ‘60s vision of what space would be like. There’s some kind of great comedy to make there. They’re probably not trying to make some great comedy there. I’m rooting for it. It’s Matt Damon in The Martian but he’s on the moon and, yeah, it’s great.

**Craig:** Well, maybe if there is some sort of – or if there’s an amazing nostalgic take that’s like meta or something. Here’s the point. You can do something interesting and creative with just about anything. The question is why that thing. So, one thing that these companies do in a strange way that is I think not terrible for artists is it limits the artist’s focus to a thing, like we can sit around and – I can write 100 different things. I can write anything I want. Well here comes a company saying, “Or, here’s a puzzle. Figure this out, smart guy. Major Matt Mason.” And you go, well, I’ve got an idea. You’ve focused my attention.

So, you know, Wishbone. What the hell is Wishbone?

**John:** Wishbone I believe is a dog. Let’s see what Wishbone is.

**Craig:** Oh golly.

**John:** It could be an American salad dressing. It could be a football formation, obviously.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** A computer bus. Is a boom for wind-surfing?

**Craig:** It’s the clavicle of a bird.

**John:** In popular culture, American children’s program. I bet it’s the American children’s program. Let’s click through that Wikipedia article.

**Craig:** Wishbone.

**John:** And yet I don’t see any Mattel connection to Wishbone. So, I don’t know.

**Craig:** Do you think that they think they own the bone? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. That’s possible. I’m finding an article from July 15, 2020 which is that there’s a Wishbone movie in the works from Mattel and Universal. This is a Variety article. So there’s something here.

**Craig:** I’m going to get an angry phone call now. Stop bagging on our Wishbone movie. I’m not!

**John:** It’s about a Jack Russell Terrier. So now we know.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. So he was a dog. It’s a dog movie.

**John:** It’s a dog movie.

**Craig:** Fine. Great. Wishbone. Mattel.

**John:** Yeah. Uh, OK.

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** In further follow up, in one of our Three Page Challenges last week we looked at a scene in which a character got electrocuted when using a vibrator. And you and I both expressed skepticism about that scene.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Some of our listeners wrote in including Kate from LA and many of them were pointing towards the Hitachi Magic Wand which does in fact plug in and therefore could conceivably electrocute someone if used in a bathtub. So I want to acknowledge that, sure, there was some cis male bias here in our ignorance of this plug in vibrator being a real thing.

But I also want to defend ourselves for saying I don’t think it was a great beat in those pages.

**Craig:** No. And I am aware of the Hitachi Magic Wand. It is the Cadillac of vibrators, John. The Hitachi Magic Wand famous for being the solution to women like the character in those pages that can’t have an orgasm. But I did a little research, because I love Googling vibrator and electrocution.

**John:** The most research Craig has ever done for an episode apparently.

**Craig:** By the way, there are vibrators that – so I thought, OK, if I Google vibrator electrocution I’m going to get a lot of stories about Hitachi Magic Wands falling into tubs. I got none. Zero. My guess is probably because everybody’s bathroom now to code has the GFI circuit on, so it would just trip a breaker and not.

But there is apparently a new generation of vibrators that electrocute you on purpose.

**John:** Oh yeah, electrical stimulation. Sure.

**Craig:** Yeah. That just seems like you’re, I mean, I don’t know, it just seems like you’re asking for trouble.

**John:** Sure. I think whatever someone likes in that area is phenomenal and fantastic.

**Craig:** Until it kills you.

**John:** Until it kills you. So, getting back to that specific use of it in that script is it relied too much on the fact that it was a vibrator being used in a bathtub with water apparently, which didn’t seem – that’s what I wasn’t necessarily believing and felt like a bit of a stretch and wasn’t working for me in those pages.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** But I want to acknowledge that I was wrong. All vibrators are not battery-based. I got you.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is true. Hitachi Magic Wand. Been around for a long time.

**John:** It’s a classic. So we’ll put in links in the show notes to both the Hitachi Magic Wand and stories about electrocution, which there are basically none.

**Craig:** The person that you think is jackhammering behind your house may be using the Hitachi Magic Wand. It is apparently very loud.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** That is the one thing that I read. If you’re in an apartment with thin walls other people will know that you are Magic Wanding.

**John:** All right. Continuing our follow up, about two years ago Craig and I started talking about assistant pay and sort of the problems assistants were facing based on emails we got in from people. We’re starting to have that conversation. But at the same time Liz Alper and other folks were talking about the PayUpHollywood movement. They stated this group called PayUpHollywood.

So we’ve been working with them to try to figure out what are the issues, how do we get assistants and support staff in Hollywood paid better. Then over the course of the pandemic, or when the pandemic started, it became less of an issue of pay equity and just sort of survival. How do we make sure that people who are working in these positions can actually afford to keep living in Los Angeles? So that became a source of urgency.

We raised a bunch of money for support staff, Liz and I and Megana, who is also on the call, were instrumental in trying to get that money out to people facing this kind of crisis. Now it’s time for sort of an update on where we’re at with assistants, assistant pay, and so I wanted to invite on two folks who know a lot more about this than we do at the moment. Liz Alper is a writer whose credits include The Rookie, Hawaii Five-0, Chicago Fire. She’s a WGA board member and the cofounder of PayUpHollywood. Welcome Liz.

**Liz Alper:** Hi. Thank you guys so much for having me.

**Craig:** Hey Liz.

**John:** Jamarah Hayner is a political consultant who founded the public affairs firm JKH Consulting. In her career she’s worked with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and then California Attorney General Kamala Harris. Welcome Jamarah.

**Jamarah Hayner:** Hey guys. Great to be here.

**John:** Give us the sense of where we’re at right now. You just put out a big sort of survey and results of that survey. But can you give us the 10,000 foot overview. What’s happening in the assistant and support staff landscape right now at the start of 2021.

**Liz:** So right now the big takeaway is a lot of assistants and support staff are very, very broke. Unfortunately because of the pandemic about 80% of assistants and support staff didn’t make $50K in the last year. In Los Angeles in order to be considered not cost burden, which is basically making three times what your monthly rent would be. The average is $53,600 per year. When 80% of assistants and support staff are making well under that, I think 35% were making less than $30,000 in 2020. It’s sounding alarms.

And obviously we’re in such a weird predicament because nothing like the pandemic has ever really happened before. I don’t know, John and Craig, if you guys can speak to this but I’ve never been in Hollywood during a recession that’s actually impacted the industry as strongly as the COVID-19 pandemic has. But what we’re seeing is that we’re losing a lot of assistants to financial stress and there aren’t necessarily supports in place to help them out of this time and keep not just their bank accounts in tact but keep them on this same upward trajectory that they’ve been on. It’s derailing a lot of careers.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think there’s ever been anything like this. There have been turn downs. There was obviously the major economic crisis of 2007/2008. When I graduated college in 1992 there were some lovely headlines about how it was the worst year ever to graduate. The recession and blah. But what we didn’t have was a combination of a downturn in the economy and an inherent kind of state of economic despair.

So, if you had a couple of bad years you fought back, but what you weren’t doing was paying exorbitant rent and exorbitant other things while also not getting paid much. Generally speaking the prices of things kind of moved up and down with the amount that you would earn. Generally speaking. It doesn’t seem like that works that way anymore. So, one of the things that I looked at in your beautifully designed presentation is how many support staff had been essentially – have been relying on friends and family to essentially help them survive, even though they have fulltime or in many cases more than fulltime jobs. And 19% of support staff are as reported having had to move back in with family or friends or relocate out of the city because of lost income from COVID-19. That’s one out of every five. That’s awful.

**Liz:** Yeah. It was kind of devastating looking at these results. I think Jamarah and I can both attest that we knew that 2020 had not been a good year for most of us but seeing how hard hit the assistant and support staff community had been impacted was really, really hard to read. We read every single one of the thousand plus survey results that people took and we’ve read all of the anecdotal messages that they left. A lot of people just saying I don’t know how I’m going to get through this next year if things don’t turn up.

The other thing that people were really shining a light on, and we made sure to include this in our survey as well, was that not only were they making less money that they had in previous years but because the people who were working from home were working from home they were being forced to take on the additional office costs that would normally be paid when you’re working in an office. So things like extra electricity. Increased power bills. Buying a printer. Buying paper. All of these other expenses that you tend to take for granted when you’re in an office setting, all of that piles up. And when so many were reporting that, you know, my hours have been cut, I still have the same workload and in addition to that I’m actually taking on added expenses to compensate for not having an office space, you’re sitting there going how are assistants and support staff paying more to do their jobs than ever before when at this point the studios and the companies should be stepping in to say how can we relieve this financial burden that you guys are under to make sure that our businesses are working as efficiently as possible because we’re making sure that our employees can work as efficiently as possible.

**John:** Jamarah, when we were first talking though these issues, this is a system that was inequitable, it was broken in so many ways. And so we were trying to highlight those issues. I remember the roundtable sort of gatherings we had where we would talk about what they were experiencing. And it feels like in many ways it’s gone from being broken to just like shattered glass on the floor. We sort of long for the problems we used to have in the system.

But, as we pull out of the pandemic, as we sort of imagine a life sort of outside of this sort of crisis, what are some ways we can think about building back the system better? Because I’m wondering whether some of these assistant jobs are just not going to exist in the same way that some of these systems will be there in the same way. What are ways we can think about getting people back to work and getting them back to work in a way that was better than how they left it?

**Jamarah:** Yeah. I mean, I think one of the really great things about PayUpHollywood is, as difficult as these realities are right now, is that this movement is working. Right? We’ve seen major employers and studios, Verve, ICM, WME, CAA, UTA leading with increasing pay rates for assistants. So, I want to make sure that doesn’t get lost in this, right.

So when we are organizes, when we’re speaking up, when we’re telling the truth about our realities and encouraging people to be intentional about how they’re running their companies, we actually make progress in really significant ways. So I think as we start to move out of sort of panic and recovery mode into rebuilding that increased attention is really, really critical. Not just sort of across the board we’re all going to get back at this together, but realizing that there are some real inequities that have existed for years and exist more so now.

You know, Liz talked about people relying on their families. For assistants and support staff that come from families that themselves are feeling economic stress right now, they may not be able to help chip in a few hundred dollars a month for your rent. So parents and other supports aren’t going to be able to be there. So I think it’s not just about lifting everyone up but being really intentional about naming those inequities which we know exist. We’re putting the out data to show it exists. People know this. They’ve gone through it themselves if they were assistants back in the day. And really leaning into that.

But I think that we know as PayUpHollywood that when we speak up and we speak loudly and speak boldly we get results.

**Craig:** And if we had not, I say we, I mean it’s you guys, but we were sort of cheerleading there early on, if this hadn’t been in place already and hadn’t already won some victories I shudder to think of where we would be right now.

**Liz:** Yeah. I completely agree with that, Craig. Because I think you guys say cheerleading and I really say instigating and invigorating kind of this movement. Because I think the difference between now when assistants are speaking up and the difference between all of these past years that they’ve been speaking up without anyone listening is people like you and John and other showrunners are speaking up in support of these assistants. And making sure that their voices are amplified. Their concerns are amplified. And you guys take them seriously. And there’s a level of care and respect that hasn’t been there before. And that’s so important to making sure that this movement succeeds.

**Craig:** Philosophically there’s something I wish I could say, oh no, I can. I have a podcast, so I’m going to. To the people who work in Hollywood who employ support staff, whether they’re like me or John and they are running shows, writing movies, or if they are working at a studio as an executive or anything like that, I think because Hollywood is so success-focused, obsessed with winning and earning and money and quotes and how well you do and how big your house is and all that stuff, that there is almost this philosophical fear of staring closely at something that isn’t what you would define as financial success in Hollywood.

So, when you are employing people I think a lot of folks in Hollywood just don’t want to look at this stuff because it makes them uncomfortable. And rather they would just like this person to magically show up. You have no emotional accountability to them whatsoever. They do their job and they go home and you don’t have to think about it ever. And I submit respectfully that we do. And that financial success is not the only kind of success there is. And more so you’re not going to be able to get financial success if you are burnt out and chucked aside, or if you are barely keeping your head above water, or if you have to live at home, or borrow money from friends just to stay afloat. That it is important for all of us to look at these numbers. And then act on them.

Because the amount of money that is required to move people from the “I’m drowning” column into the “I’m breathing” column is not that much. It’s certainly not much for the corporations. And I know it’s not much for big showrunners. I know it’s not. I know it’s not much for big actors. I know it’s not much for big directors. It’s entirely doable. You just have to be willing to look at it and give a damn. And that means, oh my god, thinking about somebody else. So, there, I’ve said it on my podcast.

**Jamarah:** Hey, Craig, I’ll raise you there. I would say a lot of the content that is being created these days is about racial inequality, income inequality, and we see that whether it’s the beginning of a season or during awards. So, I would say that if you are part of a production that is doing great work onscreen talking about these issues, keep those issues in mind as you go back into your office and pass that person in front of the desk. Or think about the person that you’re calling to do something for you at 11pm at night. The issues are the same. And if you can talk about it in the screen you can live it out in your life.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Thank you so much. Because, I mean, look, Hollywood hypocrisy is beautifully florid. It’s everywhere. It always has been. But this is one area of hypocrisy I think where maybe we can just go, nah, we’re not going to do that anymore. We can’t all sit around and applaud Parasite and then go home and be the rich people from Parasite. We can’t do it. You’re not allowed to do it anymore. It’s got to stop.

So pay attention and just look at this stuff. It’s not petty. It’s not beneath you. If you don’t have to worry about these things and somebody is working for you that does have to worry about these things then you have to worry about these things. You are accountable to the people you employ. I believe that.

**John:** Now, Liz, before the pandemic you and I had many phone calls where you were talking heroically with the head of a major agency about assistant pay at that agency. And made some great progress and I want to commend you on that progress. But some of the stuff that came up in terms of like assistants working at that agency were the demands of wardrobe and lunch and hours and clocking in and clocking out. And it occurs to me that as people go back to work they stop working from home and start going back to work new systems are going to need to be figured out. And what I’d love to make sure we are empowering support staff to do is to help make some of those decisions about how work should work now. Because just getting back to work safely is going to be a challenge. It’s going to be so interesting.

You as a writer working on a writing staff, I assume you’ve been working remotely all this time. And same with the support staff for this. And getting people back into a room is going to be challenging and I want to make sure that we are thinking about support staff in those conversations.

**Liz:** Yeah. I completely agree with you, John. Because I think right now a lot of what support staffers are facing are – they’re being asked to come back to potentially unsafe conditions. A lot of the support staffers who took this survey reported that their employers were taking the pandemic seriously, which was great. But if you look at some of the anecdotal stories that are happening on Twitter, some that were submitted to us, a lot of the people who are being put in charge of monitoring Covid testing on sets are assistants who are being paid less than a regular PA rate daily to be in charge of this very, very important aspect of production.

And then there are other things that we’ve tried to tackle with PayUpHollywood and we’ve realized that the scope is so big that it’s almost impossible for us to figure out every single issue that every single assistant is going to be facing. A wardrobe assistant is not going to have the same problems as an agency assistant.

And I think that’s what we were talking about at the end of the survey when we were encouraging employers to actually talk to the support staff in their company because different support staffers are going to have different needs. We just received an email from someone who said, “I can work from home. My company is OK with my company working from home, but I can’t afford to live in an apartment that has central air or even decent air conditioning. So come summertime I am going to be dying because I don’t have an office to escape to or a coffee shop to escape to because I literally cannot afford to pay for AC on the salary that I am given.”

And I know in the grand scheme of things that seems so small, but that’s one of the discomforts that support staffers are putting up with right now, in addition to being underpaid. In addition to having to adjust to their employer’s new schedule and potentially not being considered in the plans of restructuring the company and how that works within a pandemic.

So, there’s a lot going on and we can’t be the only ones who are catching all of the problems. We do need every employer and every company to actually start stepping up and start investigating what it is that their support staffs need from them. Because it’s going to be unique from case to case.

**John:** Thank you both very much for this update. Thank you especially for the survey and the results of the survey. We’ll put a link in the show notes to both the press release that went out, but also this terrific infographic you guys designed.

**Craig:** It’s lovely.

**John:** That walks us through where we’re at at the start of 2021. Can we have both of you guys back on a year from now to sort of tell us what next year’s survey results were and hopefully we can see some progress along these lines?

**Liz:** Yeah. I think that’s the goal. Every year we’re just tearing out the old foundation and putting in a new one. And then building upon it.

**Craig:** Let’s see how we do. I’m just going to be the guy that just keeps banging the shame bell walking alongside these rich people going, “Come on, people. Come on. These assistant are sitting there going through your bills. They know what you pay your pet psychic.” I hate pet psychics.

**John:** Liz and Jamarah, thank you so much.

**Liz:** Thank you guys.

**Jamarah:** Thank you guys.

**Craig:** Thanks Liz and Jamarah.

**Jamarah:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Cool. All right, moving on. So this past week, past two weeks, one of the biggest stories in the United States has been GameStop. And this has been a significant event in world news, so I can see that. But it has also been a source of a bunch of folks tweeting at us and emailing us saying like, “Hey, do you see there’s a GameStop movie in development?”

We often talk about How Would This Be a Movie. This is a situation where there’s a story in the news and suddenly there’s like three movies that are brewing.

Keith Calder, a previous guest, tweeted, “Is it possible to short the movie adaptations of the GameStop story?” To take a little meta quality there. But for folks who are listening to this episode in 2026 and have no idea what GameStop is or was Craig would you talk us through the briefest version of what happened?

**Craig:** Yeah. GameStop is a videogame brick and mortar company. And they are publicly traded. A number of large institutional hedge funds, I think the big one was called Melvin I believe, they bet against it. So, they took out short positions on it that basically said we are betting that in the future the share price is going to be lower than it is now. And if that is the case then we are going to make money.

A lot of people feel like hedge funds essentially which generally short stocks are kind of ruining everything. I don’t know enough about finance to agree or disagree. All I can say just as a person is it’s like when you go to Vegas if you play Craps and somebody comes and bets against the people at the table it’s like screw you man.

So, anyway, there is a sub-Reddit called Wall Street Bets and they like to kind of work together to buy stuff and I guess maybe the combination of GameStop being something that a lot of people that are Reddit-y are familiar with/nostalgic for, plus the idea of just sticking it to these hedge fund dickheads rallied the folks on Wall Street Bets together and they just decided we are going to start buying GameStop. We’re going to buy it regardless of its earnings, its potential, anything. We’re just going to buy the stock.

And they did most of that through a trading site called Robinhood. And what happens when you buy, buy, buy? Price goes up. Price goes up. Price goes up. Price goes up. And if they make the price go up high enough all the people that had bet against it using their various metrics would lose millions, possibly billions, possibly their entire hedge fund. Gone. And it very quickly became this underdog story of a bunch of people on the Internet essentially turning the same sort of trickery, nonsense gaming that a lot of our financial industry runs on against them.

So, it was incredibly attractive. And so the price went from $35 to like $400. Alas, it has plummeted recently all the way down, I think it’s currently in the $60s. So that’s where we’re at.

**John:** So looking at this from, pulling back and looking at it, you can see, OK, there’s some stuff that feels a little bit movie-like in the sense of sticking it to the man. You have clear class divides there. There’s a sense of it feels like a heist movie that’s being done sort of through the Internet in a way. You could ascribe good motivations to these sub-Redditors and the folks who are buying the thing and sort of driving up the price and perhaps saving this struggling business.

There’s different ways you can approach it that feel like there’s a narrative there that could go towards a movie. And yet it’s not clear where we are in the act structure of this story. It feels very, very we’re still in the news cycle of it. So it seems premature to be talking about this as a movie, and yet there are three movies in development.

So let’s talk through at least what we know of so far. MGM has acquired a book proposal of the events written by Ben Mezrich. He was the guy whose previous books were adapted into the films 21 and The Social Network. So he feels like a person who would be good at writing this kind of stuff.

Netflix is apparently in talks with the Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter, Mark Boal, about a film that would star Noah Centineo who is the star of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. That’s a possibility. And then RatPac which is the Brett Ratner company has apparently bought the life rights to the guy who created the sub-Reddit. So that’s another way to sort of approach it. And these are three potential movies, three different approaches to sort of how they’re getting into it. One is buying a book written by a guy who is really good at writing books about this thing. One is bringing on a big screenwriter. One is getting the life rights.

I don’t know that there’s one right approach to it. I don’t think we’re going to see three movies come out of this though.

**Craig:** Not a chance. Not a chance. We will see one, maybe two. This is the danger. So there’s risk and reward. Just like all of the betting on Wall Street itself. This is a story that people are fascinated with.

Now, what people are fascinated with today is not necessarily what they’ll be fascinated with tomorrow or two or three weeks from now. What this story has going for it is that it is about something that feels very relevant to what it means to be an American right now. Economic inequality. This kind of Wall Street machinery that both the left and the right are resentful against. The sense that we are not really in control of our economy. And then here comes these folks that sort of prove it. And then get turned on, you know, by the powers that be as the powers that be kind of influence Robinhood to shut down a lot of the trading there.

But we don’t know how it ends. Right? So we don’t know necessarily what the full story is here. So the bet is that you are going to have a story that ultimately turns out to be something that is a full story, A. B, will still be relevant when the movie comes out. Won’t feel dated or like yesterday’s news. And, C, will feature characters that are fascinating and feature actors and filmmakers that people connect with. So, that’s the big gamble. And the additional risk that you’re dealing with is the fact nobody owns facts.

So, there could be 17 other Wall Street bets GameStop Robinhood movies quietly in development. There could be people just writing specs right now. So, what do they have going for them? Well, if you can find somebody like Ben Mezrich who has proven to convert things like this into books that then can be converted into very good movies, that seems like – you know what you’ve done? You’ve hedged your bet. That’s pretty good. I’m going to keep doing money analogy. I like it.

So that’s what it is. It’s basically gambling. You’re gambling with ideas.

**John:** Let’s talk about two book adaptations that feel appropriate here. So obviously Ben’s book, The Social Network, which is about the rise of Facebook and the infighting that happened at the early days of Facebook, an advantage that The Social Network is that it has characters. It has characters who are interacting with each other in physical spaces and can actually have arguments.

And so Aaron Sorkin is a great writer, but he also had really good real life people who can become characters who can actually do things cinematically. That’s going to be a challenge for any writer who is looking to adapt the GameStop story because these people are not in rooms together. They are people working with their own agendas separately and the movie has to stitch them together in ways that they would not naturally be there together. The conflict between two characters on a screen is going to be challenging to do in the GameStop movie because they’re not physically there together.

So, someone who is making money through Wall Street bets or who has spent money – has spent money in through Robinhood and has seen their net worth go from $5 to $300,000, that’s transformational for that character but you’re basically going to be probably inventing that character because that’s not going to be a real person or at least a person who is going to have conflicts with other folks in the world of your story. That’s going to be challenging.

The other book that came to mind as I was looking at this was Hillbilly Elegy which was a big bestselling book talking about sort of coming off of the 2016 election a lot of people were using that as a way to look at and explore a story of white working class people that had been underreported. And so there was an adaptation of that, but it was a challenging adaptation and did not sort of set the world on fire in its cinematic form. And I wonder and worry if that could be a similar kind of problem with this story which is so amorphous and kind of hard to hold. There’s not a plot to it.

**Craig:** Well, there is a plot in the sense that there’s a beginning, there’s a middle, and eventually there will be an end. The question is what will that end be? And will it feel like it justified the journey? So we’ll find out. There are some fascinating stories that I’ve read. You can look. You can go to Wall Street Bets and just read through individual people saying I think I screwed up. I put all of my money in this and I just lost it all and I haven’t told my wife and I don’t know what to do.

I mean, there are people that are talking about suicide on there. It’s terrifying. So, there is a kind of like dream and nightmare scenario going on there that I think is kind of fascinating. But you’re right. To wrangle it into one compelling narrative they are going to need to focus on some individuals. I will say that I do believe that we have an appetite for process stories, arcane process stories, more than Hollywood used to think. Hollywood generally the rule was that people are idiots and what they like are boobs or cars going fast or something exploding. And not that they don’t, but movies that come along like The Big Short which are deeply process movies, or The Social Network which is very much a process movie, people lean in. They want to actually see how the things that they interact with on a daily basis work under the hood. They really do get interested in that.

Whereas it used to be that diving into the weeds was a recipe for people not showing up, well now it kind of works. Is this a theatrical release? Well I don’t know if there’s going to be theaters anyway. But, no, I would think that this very much feels like it should be a play on Netflix or HBO or Apple or something.

**John:** Yeah. So I remember during the time of The Big Short, the movie The Big Short, not the actual real events, you and I, I think, both had sit down with Adam McKay and or Charles Randolph, the writers who adapted Michael Lewis’s book, and really good conversations you and I each had about sort of how challenging that process was and how to find character stories that could help illuminate really complicated situations about the housing crisis and sort of what actually happened there and how to visualize and narrativize those stories. And that’s probably what’s going to need to happen here. The way that we are sort of trying to obliquely get around what a short squeeze is, we’re going to have to find good ways to visualize that so the audience can understand that.

But I agree there is sort of a hunger for that. The same way that we have hunger for military thrillers where they explain sort of how some warship works. We do love to see that and we love to see people demonstrating their expertise in a very specific field.

So, it’s all conceivable and possible. I think my biggest hesitation is that we just don’t know what the third act of this is at all. And are we going to look at the events of GameStop five years from now as being like oh that was a big positive transformational event, or the start of something horrible? And we just don’t know yet.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it’s going to end poorly for the people who invested in GameStop. That’s just my guess. Because in the end there is this interesting – what’s the game theory, the problem of the commons?

**John:** Yes, the tragedy of the commons.

**Craig:** The tragedy of the commons. This is a classic tragedy of the commons situation. Eventually, and it’s already started to happen, people who can walk away with a massive amount of money are going to. And this in fact is kind of the problem with the whole thing. There’s a fascinating discovery of how human behavior underlies all this stuff. And there is a little bit of a sadness in how we celebrate the underdog in our traditional fictional narratives, but in real life the underdog almost always loses. And what does that mean about us and our society and the American dream?

So, interesting things to look at. I do think that it will end – my guess is that it’s going to end poorly for people that bought into GameStop. My guess is that the billionaire hedge fund guys will remain billionaires. But that in and of itself is an interesting ending. We’ll see how it goes.

**John:** I’m hoping that Steve Mnuchin produces at least one adaptation of this. Because really who would be more qualified than Steve Mnuchin to – he’s a Hollywood producer who was also a Treasury Secretary. So he should be the person who should produce this.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Boy. All right. So we’ll flag this for follow up. Obviously we’ll see what happens to any of these three movies or other adaptations along the way. But it’s a great example happening in real time of the urgency which people feel to acquire rights to hold down this thing which as you point out anyone could do. So we’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** Anyone could do.

**John:** Craig, you have left Twitter, although I do see you replying to other people on Twitter sometimes, but you have mostly left Twitter, so you may not have seen a really good thread that happened this past week.

**Craig:** I didn’t.

**John:** Rachel Miller put together a thread with advice for people who might be staffing or looking to staff on a TV show. And I thought it was terrific. And it also occurred to me that a Twitter thread does not work especially well at all on a podcast. So I reached out to Rachel and said hey would you mind recording your Twitter thread so we could actually talk about it here, because I thought your advice was flawless and succinct and so brilliant. But it needed to be working in an audio format. So we reached out, Megana worked with her to record this all.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I thought we would go through her advice and listen to it, but also respond to it and see what people could do, how people could implement this in their own lives. So, some context, Rachel Miller, she is a founding partner of Haven Entertainment, so she’s a producer rather than a writer. She’s also a founder of a nonprofit, Film2Future, which is a pipeline for underserved LA youth in Hollywood. She was just staffing a show for a streamer. And so she and her showrunner/partner read 368 scripts and they reached out to another 50 people to check availabilities for five writer spots for the room.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** And she said that the truth is that the odds are not in your favor, but there’s some things you can do to help improve your chances of getting staffed. So, let’s take a listen to her advice.

**Craig:** OK.

**Rachel Miller:** One. Write something buzzy. Your sample needs to be something that cuts through the noise, that makes us remember your script after reading 368 scripts. For staffing, we aren’t necessarily looking for a pilot that sets up a series, just something that makes us remember you and your writing.

**John:** Yes. And so I remember when we’ve had TV showrunner guests on before them talking through like I will read the first couple pages. I just need a sense of can this person write. They kind of don’t care about the plotting overall. They just want to know is this a person who has an interesting voice. Is this someone who I want to keep reading?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Rachel:** Two. Work on the first 15 pages, make them sing. If the first 15 pages aren’t good, it’s unlikely that we will keep reading, but if they are, we will most likely keep reading to the end of the script.

**Craig:** Well, because if the first 15 pages are good the next 45 are also probably going to be good. I mean, if you write well you write well. That’s how it kind of goes.

**John:** Absolutely. And so it also speaks to don’t hold back crucial things, oh, I don’t want that reveal to happen. I would say really do focus on that initial experience. So when we talk about the first three pages of this Three Page Challenge we really are getting a sense very quickly whether this is a script we want to keep reading.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So just make sure that works.

**Rachel:** Three. Have a second sample ready to go. Many times we asked for a second sample to read more of a writer and was told they had none. A second sample should show off something different about your writing, we should not read two versions of the same story in two separate samples.

**Craig:** That’s reasonable.

**John:** Yeah. That’s great advice. You know, when I talk to people who are looking to staff I ask them sort of what they’re sending out, but also what else have you got. Because you want something that shows some range. It doesn’t show the same person every time.

**Rachel:** Four. Make sure you have a bio and credit list and that your rep has it and it is updated. For a bio, tell us something that makes you unique. You never know what someone is looking for in a room so adding something specific that separates you from everyone else is always helpful, especially if you are a lower level writer and a ton of credits a good bio is key.

**Craig:** Hmm. Well.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, you’re not hiring writers for your show, but there’s other folks who you’re reaching out to. You’re trying to find out information about them. Do you find yourself Googling them? Are you looking for information about them? Or are you just taking what the reps send you?

**Craig:** Yeah, so I’m not hiring writers, therefore the people that we’re talking to we will generally get IMDb breakdowns on them. And sometimes if it’s a certain kind of person, particularly actors, but also for department heads, if there’s an interview online I’ll watch it. Interviews are fascinating. If you ever have a chance to be interviewed for anything – maybe you’re not on a staff or anything but you’re a writer and somebody has interviewed you for any little tiny program, well any little tiny program is going to be Google-able. Anything. Right?

And so take it seriously. Take that interview seriously. Be gracious. Be interesting. Don’t be me, me, me, me, me, but just be fascinating. Somebody might find that. Those things matter to me more than – look, honestly, this one is not my – bios are fake. That’s the bottom line. Bios are super fake. Like all resumes are fakes. Everybody who has ever written a resume knows that resumes are fake. So, I don’t put too much credence in those, but an interview. Well that’s something.

**John:** Yeah. So before we started recording this episode I was on a Zoom with some strangers who I’d – people I’d never met before. And I found myself just Googling them while we were talking. And I was curious the difference I saw between like some people I could find information about them that sort of helped me get a bigger picture of them. And some people were just un-Google-able. There was nothing out there that was helpful. Or the only thing I could see was like in 2016 this person obviously went to Harvard. But I couldn’t figure out really what they’d done in the time since that time. And so if they’d had a site, if they had other stuff out there that could help me get a sense of who they were that would be great. And so I think that’s the advice that Rachel is giving too, to make sure that if it’s an official bio or some other site that it gives some sense of who you are as a writer because you may not even have a rep who is there advocating on your behalf. The script could have just been handed in by somebody else.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Exactly.

**Rachel:** Contact info. And this seems easy, but it wasn’t. Make sure your correct rep’s info is on your script, is on IMDb and Studio System, and on your website. It is very difficult to actually contact a writer if there is no way to get in touch with that writer. Make sure your website is up to date as well. And if you don’t have reps, make sure your contact info is on the script.

**John:** Yeah, so for Three Page Challenges I’ve been happy to see that that’s actually improved. I’m consistently seeing contact information on the Three Page Challenges that we’re getting in. Stick in an email address there and they will email you if someone is interested. And we know people who have been featured on the Three Page Challenge who are getting contacts from reps and managers because there’s something they liked. And they can just reach out to you directly. They don’t have to go through Megana. That’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah. How are people missing this? I don’t understand. I mean, that’s one where – when you are going through all this stuff, everybody who is going through this has 12 other things they also have to do. Any tiny friction point is going to hurt. And if you’re interested and you want to talk to somebody and they didn’t put their contact info on I’m already angry at them for their weird judgment. So unless the script has blown me away I’m just going to keep going.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just weird. Like how do you miss that?

**John:** The other thing I would add, if you are a WGA member you should update your Find a Writer profile because that is a way you can give your contact information, show who your agent is if you have one, your manager if you have one, attorneys if you have one, and include some samples. It will take you 20 minutes to do and that is another way people can find you. So, update that in the directory.

**Rachel:** Six. If you hear about a staffing job and you have no reps and you think you are a perfect fit, take your shot and reach out to the producers with an email explaining why you feel you might be a perfect fit. Not all producers will say yes to reading someone unrepped but some will and it’s worth taking a shot. Just make sure you specify why you think you are a perfect fit. Do not attach the script in the original email. That will get your email immediately deleted. Wait till the producer writes back and says it’s OK or not to send the script.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Yeah. And so you and I have always been skeptical of query letters and sort of that sense of like, “Hey, I have this thing,” but it sounds like what she’s talking about is being very specific and targeted towards like this person is making a medical investigator show set in Philadelphia and I am a person with a background as a medical investigator in Philadelphia and I’m a damn good screenwriter. You should reach out to that person.

**Craig:** The second part is the key. You have to be able to say, listen, now that I’ve told you this thing you and I would both agree that I would be an idiot to not try. Right? I mean, so that’s the key. You just don’t want to do it and be like, “I’m not repped and I don’t know anything, but I love the stuff that you guys are doing and I think I’d be a great fit.” I love it when people say, “I think I would be a great fit.” And I’m like do you? What does that mean? OK. But there’s no evidence. You know?

**John:** You know who is a great fit? Zoanne Clack when she’s getting hired on to Grey’s Anatomy. She’s a doctor.

**Craig:** She’s a doctor. Exactly. That’s a great fit. That’s a fit. Exactly. That works. Not, oh, you’re a great fit because we have a job and you want a job? That’s not fit.

**Rachel:** Social presence – if you have a website, make sure it works. Even if it just lists your contact info, make sure it’s not a dead site. Think about joining Twitter, Instagram, all the other socials. Being part of a writing community is always helpful but also it’s a way to express yourself so a producer, or showrunner, or exec can get a glimpse of you. There is a flip side to this: Think about what you are posting. No one wants to hire someone who is constantly negative about other people, other shows, other rooms. Build your writer community. Often a showrunner or producer will reach out to their friends for personal recs and those scripts will always go to the top of the pile.

**John:** Great. And I’m glad she’s pointing out the double-edged sword of having social media because that is a way of sort of showing your voice and showcasing what you’re interested in. It gives me a sense of who you are as a person. But in giving me a sense of who you are as a person I’m going to decide like, oh, I don’t want to be anywhere near that person. That person seems like a real bummer to be around. So, you’ve got to be really mindful about what you’re putting out there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if you’ve written a good sample and they like it and you are not on social media at least for me that would not be a problem for me whatsoever. Most people are too online. And I guarantee you, no matter what I feel about you, if I’m going to read 100 of your tweets I’ll find two that piss me off. No question. That’s anyone. Anyone. Much less somebody sitting there and digging back through your history.

So, I’m not sure about that one to be honest with you. I don’t know if that is good advice. That one I’m questioning.

**John:** But I think of like Ashley Nicole Black who we only know – we were only sort of put in contact with through Twitter. And has been a guest on the show twice and is just a phenomenal writer both on Twitter and in real life and is doing great.

**Craig:** But we’re not hiring her. And she’s not doing great because of Twitter.

**John:** I don’t know if there’s really any correlation between her Twitter use and her writing. I think it enables other people to find her.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there is that. I like the idea of having a presence on the web where you can express yourself in a controlled way and you’re not kind of necessarily – believe me, it’s not like I’m saying don’t be on Twitter. It’s just be really careful. I think that the potential for trouble is actually greater than the potential for benefit in terms of if you’re not on it don’t – I’m just saying if you’re not on it and it’s not your thing, don’t feel like you have to be.

**John:** Yup. This is a good place for me to plug on the 18th of February I’m going to be doing a WGA panel on public relations and social media for writers.

**Craig:** Oh great.

**John:** So if you have other thoughts on that you can join us there.

**Rachel:** OK, so now you’ve got a meeting. Now what? One, be enthusiastic. Tell us what you liked about the show, what excites you? What part or what characters are you most interested in writing about? Have show pitches ready to go. Some showrunners won’t want to hear them, but some will. At least have them ready in your back pocket should a showrunner ask. Read the materials before the meeting. Sometimes you’ll just have a pilot, sometimes you’ll have a pilot and a book. Sometimes it will just be a link to watch. Make sure you do all your homework and Google the showrunner and producer. Come in as prepared as you can.

**John:** So, it’s not surprising that she’s saying to come in prepared. And we’ve talked about going in for meetings and going in for general meetings, going in for specific meetings on a project. But I think our biases as feature writers is it’s always like how are we going to approach this project that’s here in front of us. And what’s different about going in for a meeting with a showrunner is that you’re responding to that person’s work. And so you have to be super positive about the thing that they’ve made and how great that is. But also sort of being able to “yes and” and sort of talk about where the series can go, what’s exciting to you about that, which is a subtly different thing than going in to meet with a producer about the Uno Movie.

**Craig:** No question. And beyond the evidence that you are a worker, and an adult who reads what you’re supposed to read and knows what you’re supposed to know, actual demonstrable passion for a show is going to move you further than almost anything else. And you can’t fake it. It’s got to be real.

The reason you do all of your homework in addition to your actual passion for the show is because it is not only a sign that you are an adult. It is a sign of respect for the people that you’re sitting with. They wrote that stuff. They’ve been working on it. They don’t want somebody sitting there going, “Yeah, I guess I could work on this. You know, I’ll come in and do what you need, whatever you need. You like what I wrote, I’ll write some stuff like that for you.” Well, get out. Get out of my office. You make me feel bad about myself and my show.

What I want is for you to come in and say, “I love what you do. I love your show. It means something to me. I want to be a part of it. I want to learn from you. And I want to leave my thumbprint on it. I want to influence this because I care about it.” Then I lean forward and I go who is this? I want to know you. And, again, you can’t fake that. It’s got to be real.

**John:** Yeah. So don’t play hard to get. I mean, the opportunity to get hard to get is when there’s multiple people who want to hire you for a job for a slot. That’s fantastic and then you can maybe get your price up a little bit. But, no, you want to seem like the person who has passion for this specific job who they can imagine being in a writer’s room or writer’s Zoom for weeks on end with and not dread seeing you.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Rachel:** Four. Write a thank you note after the meeting. Your reps or an assistant will forward it on. It looks great. Five. Most importantly, be yourself. Again, you’ll never know what exactly the needs of the room are. And what mix the showrunner, producer, or network are looking for. So being yourself is always the best answer. Break a leg out there.

**Craig:** Yeah, being yourself.

**John:** Great advice. So thank you notes. I’ve generally not done them. Maybe I should do them more. I’ve always liked it when I’ve gotten thank you notes when I’ve been interviewing for people to come work for me. I do notice when those thank you notes come through. So that’s a good idea. I just haven’t done it.

**Craig:** [laughs] You like getting them, you just don’t like writing them.

**John:** That’s so totally true. Just like the opposite is true. I prefer to give a present than to give a present. I don’t really like getting presents.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, no, I hate getting presents because mostly it’s just an exercise in me trying to convince you that I don’t want to throw this thing out. But I do like writing a thank you note. And I’m sort of the opposite. I don’t really care about getting the thank you notes so much, but I like writing them because, again, it’s just to show respect I think mostly. Just to show respect, no matter what the power dynamic is. Whether it’s somebody that was trying to get a job from me or somebody that I’ve been talking to about a job. I do that because it just feels, I don’t know, nice.

But the be yourself advice is always the best advice. It is true that there’s stuff going on that you’re not aware of and never will be aware of that sometimes qualifies you or disqualifies you within seconds. And you have no control over it. It just is what it is. And so you can’t calculate your way to success. Be your enthusiastic, passionate, authentic self.

**John:** So I want to thank you Rachel Miller both for writing that lovely Twitter thread and for recording it so we could talk about it here on the air. So thank you again Rachel Miller.

All right, I think we have time for one listener question. So **Megana Rao:** if you could come on board and talk us through a question that we could answer from the mailbag. Because I see there’s a bunch here, but maybe this top one would work for us.

**Megana Rao:**: All right. Great. So Oscar asks, “What are your thoughts in showing something in flashback versus hearing a monologue about it? Let’s say you have the limited resources to actually shoot that flashback. What would be reasons you would cutaway versus leaving it as a monologue?”

**John:** That’s a great question.

**Craig:** I love this question so much because I literally was confronting this very question just a couple weeks ago in thinking about a future episode that I have yet to write of The Last of Us. And the answer Oscar is you’ve just got to feel it. Because there are some stories you really do want to be in. And then there are some stories that you want to hear. And I can’t tell you why one thing feels like it’s better to hear than another other than to say if it seems like if you’re in it and it’s happening it might feel possibly melodramatic as opposed to if you’re just hearing about it and that person can kind of play against some inherent melodrama than maybe that’s a reason to have somebody relay it as a story.

If you think that the story would be fantastic to see and not really a good story to tell then you don’t really have that option. But, if it’s something that you think the storytelling would kind of contrast with. And a great example is in Jaws. So there’s Robert Shaw delivering that amazing story about what it was like floating in the water after the USS Indianapolis is hit a torpedo I think. And they’re all floating in the water and then the sharks come.

Well, you could say it, but then it’s sort of like, oh look, a camera is there and people are in the water and it’s a big action sequence and people are screaming. But having him kind of tell that story with that weird smile on his face because that’s how he covers up the pain, and he’s slightly drunk, and you can tell every now and then inside of the story he starts to reveal feelings and then, no, not at all. And the way he ends it as if to say, “Well, there you go. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.” That becomes fascinating because now the story isn’t about plot, the story is about character. So that’s your choice. You’ve got to figure it out. You’ve got to feel it.

**John:** Yeah. I would say that whatever movie or TV show you’re doing you also are setting some rules for yourself about are you the kind of thing that tells stories or flashes back. And if there’s one flashback in the whole movie or the whole TV series well that’s weird. It feels like you’re just breaking the rules to tell that one thing. So there has to be a really good reason why you are doing that thing.

Also, you need to ask yourself do you have a good person to tell that story. Is there a person who actually would be an interesting narrator to tell that story and who their choice to tell that story within the scene is meaningful and makes sense? Because it’s not just the story. It’s the scene in which the story is being told. And if you have that moment where it actually really makes sense for this character at this moment to tell that story, that’s awesome. But if you’re just dumping information at the audience that probably is pushing you back more towards a this is the movie wants to tell you, show you what happened, versus this character wants to tell you what happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. You never want your story to feel like, oh, they just needed to save money. Or, oh, they just needed you to know a whole big bunch of crap and they didn’t want to make you sit through all of it because it’s boring. It’s got to be a great story. That’s the key. It’s got to be a great story.

**John:** We have many great questions here so I think next week will probably end up being a mailbag episode because I was just looking through this outline and some primo questions being sent in to ask@johnaugust.com, so thank you everyone who has sent those through. And thank you Megana for sorting through all of these.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Thing this week. The first is an article by Dan Froomkin entitled “What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters.” What he’s arguing for in this piece is basically that we need to stop having politics reporters or political reporters and relabel them as government reporters. Because when you start talking about politics you inevitably move to a this side versus that side and to a sort of sports team kind of reporting on things which is not actually helpful for the good of the nation or for people understanding what’s actually happening.

So, it was a really interesting framing. And I think it could potentially be really useful in terms of what if we just talked about what government is doing and what the issues are and stopped talking about it as a race. And I think some really good points being made in there. So, I will point you to Froomkin’s article there.

And once you’ve read through that long piece I think you need a palate cleanser which I will send you to. This is a clip of Whitney Houston and Brandy singing Impossible from the ABC version of Cinderella. And I just – this is behind the scenes of them recording this. And it’s just such a reminder of what – not just what an instrument Whitney Houston had but just how much life she had. It was just so good to see her so joyful as she was singing this. And as she’s ribbing Brandy to actually sing on pitch, it’s just great. So I loved this little bit. I’m going to play a little clip for you here Craig so you can appreciate how good this sounds.

**Craig:** I would like that. Yes.

[Song plays]

**John:** That made you smile right?

**Craig:** So good. I mean, just – just the GOAT. Just unbelievable.

**John:** And it made me remember that like I think too much about the tragic end of Whitney Houston. And I need to move past that and appreciate the joyful beginning and middle of Whitney Houston and what she was able to do.

**Craig:** Effortlessly.

**John:** That I got to be alive while she was singing like that.

**Craig:** Just effortlessly. I assume you’ve watched the famous clip of her singing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl.

**John:** Oh yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** And when she redefined, literally redefined the melody at the end of the National Anthem. No one else had done Free-hee. No one else had done the octave jump on free. And now you have to do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She just made that. She made it. She invented it. It’s amazing.

So my One Cool Thing is, I know I’m off of Twitter, but if you are lurking on Twitter which I think is perfectly fine because it’s free to everybody there is a fascinating woman named Stella Zawistowski. Stella Zawistowski is part of the crossword world. She’s often in the mix at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. The big one in Connecticut. And she’s got a great – this is what makes her especially fascinating. This is her, what do you call the little bio thing on your Twitter profile: “Personal records…” I’m going to do it backward from the way she does it because I just like the reveal of it. “Personal records: New York Times Sunday crossword, 4 minutes, 33 seconds. Back squat 265 lbs.” That’s right. Stella Zawistowski not only can solve a Sunday Times puzzle in under five minutes, but she is a powerlifter. There’s a picture of her doing it. It’s impressive.

So that’s a combination you don’t see too frequently. Not to rip on my fellow crossword people but we are not known for our brute strength. [laughs] So, Stella is. But what I love about Stella lately is that she’s been helping people with understanding and getting into cryptic crosswords which I’ve talked about on here before. And she has a hashtag she’s been doing called #ExplanationFriday where she shows a clue and gives people a chance to get it right. And then she gives you the answer and explains how the clue works, because that is how you learn how to do cryptics by sort of going back and reverse engineering the clues and learning the conventions and the tricks and all that fun.

So, it’s a great way to start learning, because honestly I’ve become too bored with regular crossword puzzles. I need the cryptics. So, cryptics or metas. So, Stella Zawistowski for all of your powerlifting, crossword, and cryptic clue needs. @stellaphone. @stellaphone.

**John:** Excellent. And that is our show for this week. So, as always, Scriptnotes is produced by **Megana Rao:**. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our fantastic outro this week. So stick around and listen to that. 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 I am @johnaugust. Craig is not really on Twitter so don’t at him.

We have t-shirts and 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 find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish 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 awkward dates. So stick around for that. Craig, thank you for a good episode.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

[Bonus segment]

**Craig:** That’s great to see. What are they saying?

**John:** I don’t think they’re saying anything.

**Craig:** Just Latin sort of just chanting?

**John:** Just Latin chanting.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** It’s great. I also love that it’s so creepy and yet beautiful. I mean, it’s joyful and creepy at the same time, which is just a uniquely church-y kind of thing you can do.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. That was beautiful.

**John:** Yeah. Our topic this week is also potentially creepy and beautiful. Adam in Los Angeles wrote in to say he wants to hear us talk about bad dating stories. And here’s a situation where I think I probably have more dating stories than you do just because you met your wife in college and probably didn’t date a lot post-college. What’s your dating history?

**Craig:** I didn’t date at all post-college. I dated in high school and I dated in college. I mean, dating in college is really just like I sleep with you, I sleep with you. But then I met my wife my junior year and it’s been her since. So, yeah. I’m out of that whole scene man.

**John:** I was dating up until I was 30. So I have lot more dating history.

**Craig:** You’ve got some stories. Yeah.

**John:** I’ve got some stories.

**Craig:** Tell us stories.

**John:** But let’s go back to high school. So my most notable date, I have two things from high school that are embarrassing, which most high school dating is kind of embarrassing. This first one though I remember very distinctly. So, I got set up with a friend of a friend. A girl named Tonya who I didn’t know at all, but she was friends with other friends and apparently she was really into me and I didn’t know who she was. But we got set up.

So we talked on the phone and we ended up going to see a movie for our first date. And, Craig, that movie was Fatal Attraction.

**Craig:** That’s working.

**John:** That’s working really, really well.

**Craig:** Everything about this situation is clicking.

**John:** Absolutely. So this girl who is apparently a little obsessed with me takes me to see Fatal Attraction. So we see Fatal Attraction which is a really good movie, but also not a good first date movie.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So then we go back to her family’s house and her parents aren’t around because her parents are gone for the weekend or something. And I was like I don’t kind of feel safe here. And so I should stress she’s lovely and so I’ve met her at the high school reunion and she’s great and phenomenal and happily married and everything else. But it was not a good experience for me.

**Craig:** No, that must have been – yeah, you walk into the house, there’s no one there. It’s the reverse right. Normally you go, OK, I’m the straight guy. I go home with this girl. I walk into the house. The parents are gone. Woo! Party time. And then not the case in this circumstance.

**John:** It was not the case in this circumstance. Do you have a high school story?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve got some high school stories. Sure. I’m trying to think of a bad, a really – well, I’ll tell you actually prior to high school you know there’s like the awkward early crush, like so now you’re talking like fifth grade crush.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not quite a date story. But I had this like beyond crush on the girl who lived across the street named Sandra. And I told my friend Eric about her. And he was like you’ve got to write a love letter to her. And I was like what, no way. And he convinced me. And I did it. I wrote a love letter to Sandra. And I walked across and I put it in her mailbox because you could do that. And then I went home. And then I had terrible regrets. I had terrible regrets. What have I done? She’s going to tell everybody. I’m going to be laughed at. She’s not going to like me.

So I went back over there. It had already been taken out of the mailbox. I rang her doorbell. She came out. And I basically said, yeah, none of that’s true.

**John:** Oh no, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just took it all back. And she must have – look, I’d like to think, this is the most charitable imagining. Sandra got this. We’re all like 10, OK? Sandra go this, read it, and went, “Huh?” And then I came to her door and she’s like, “Oh, hi.” And then I say this crazy stuff about how I didn’t really mean it and it was all just a joke. And she was polite about it and then she went back inside and went, “What?” And then just moved on with her day like what the hell was that about.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s very classic comedy. Something that was so important to you and it meant nothing to her at all.

**Craig:** I hope. I hope. But, yeah, you know, I don’t have too many disastrous date stories I must say.

**John:** So this isn’t even really a date story, but it actually has a similar dynamic. So this is in, I don’t know if it was in high school, or maybe it was I was back for summer in college. And I ended up making out with this girl at a party and, whatever, you make out with somebody at a party. And then I guess we exchanged phone numbers or whatever. But she’d said like, “Oh, I work at Fashion Bar in the Crossroads Mall.” And I think she had said something like, “Oh, we could get lunch or something.” And so I showed up at like where she worked.

**Craig:** Oh, you’re a stalker.

**John:** Yeah. And in retrospect I’m looking at this from her perspective. She could not get away from me. So I regret that. But I fundamentally did not understand that I was meeting her at work. It was just weird and I’m embarrassed now to even sort of tell that story.

**Craig:** You know, it’s important to hug yourself.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And forgive yourself. We all have done these stupid, stupid things. Just, you know, everyone has one. But that’s not too bad, you know.

**John:** It’s not too bad. I didn’t keep stalking her in any way like that. I think in going there I was like, oh, we’re not going to be able to have a conversation there. And so therefore I should just–

**Craig:** Right. What is Fashion Bar?

**John:** Fashion Bar was some sort of retail clothing store. I think there was a Fashion Bar Men’s and a Fashion Bar Women’s. It was a private chain.

**Craig:** Got it. So she could be like, “Look, I know we made out at a party, but if you want to stay here you need to buy a sweater.”

**John:** That’s pretty true.

**Craig:** And use my sticker for the sale.

**John:** Now, Craig though, you missed out on all dating in your 20s which was the beginning of online dating and all that stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah, never done it.

**John:** I’ll quickly talk you through some of the highlights of that. So, not an online date, but I do remember an Aspen gay ski week, meeting a guy on a chairlift and sort of flirting there. And then it’s like, oh, come by my place. I’m like, great, I’ll come by your place. And then he ended up living in New York and so we had phone conversations. So you never had to do a lot of phone dating either.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I remember this one conversation where he said, “Oh, you’re exactly the kind of guy my therapist wants me to date.”

**Craig:** Oh no.

**John:** That first red flag. And so he was like an investment guy. And I was a broke aspiring screenwriter. And he’s like, “I keep dating these sort of like hot guys who are wrong for me. Listen, I’ve got the money, I can get your surgery. I can get you a trainer. Basically I can change you into the thing that I want to date.”

**Craig:** Wait, he was Pygmalion-ing you?

**John:** He was trying to Pygmalion me.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, hold on a second. You don’t necessarily want to turn down free surgery. What was he offering?

**John:** I don’t know. You could be dealing with a completely different host here.

**Craig:** That’s so weird.

**John:** So weird.

**Craig:** That’s psycho. I can get your surgery. That’s what you want from somebody. That says love.

**John:** Yeah. I wish I could figure out this guy’s name to sort of see where he’s at now in life.

**Craig:** If only we could cut into you and rearrange your meat. Then…

**John:** Do you need all your ribs? I don’t know that you do.

**Craig:** Oh my god. That’s terrifying. All right, well, you know.

**John:** That’s dating.

**Craig:** Hey, he was open with you at the very least.

**John:** And so the one last sort of Internet dating story I’ll share. I will say that I do miss dating in my 20s because I like seeing people’s apartments.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a thought. Sure.

**John:** It’s nice going to see people’s apartments. A guy who, an Internet date, and we ended up going out to lunch at like a Baja Fresh. And Baja Fresh is a chain in Southern California that is known for, they have a salsa bar. And you can have lots of different kinds of salsa there to put on your burritos and your tacos. And this guy got like 15 little cups for salsa. And filled them up with pico de gallo, the chopped up tomato thing, and just sort of ate that as a salad.

**Craig:** What? [laughs]

**John:** That should be a giant red flag. And it was a giant red flag. There was not a second date.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, what if that was just this adorable affectation that he had and he was amazing. He’s like the best husband ever to somebody and they’re like, “Oh my god, Jimmy, the one thing about him is the pico de Gallo thing, but otherwise he’s perfect.”

**John:** Other than like stalking that girl at Fashion Bar.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** He’s a good guy.

**Craig:** Other than the fact that he came to my house, delivered this love letter, and then 20 minutes later came back and said the whole thing was fake, he’s great. We suck. God we suck.

**John:** So you shouldn’t judge people by the worst thing they’ve ever done. Which in your case was mail fraud.

**Craig:** Mail fraud. Exactly.

**John:** And in my case was stalking at a retail store.

**Craig:** And Aspen gay ski week guy’s worst case was just being Jame Gumb from Silence of the Lambs and wanting to cut into you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s terrifying. “You’re the kind of person my therapist wants me to date,” what that means is I don’t want to date you.

**John:** Indeed. It really does. It frankly does. It’s like you’re not a thing I want, but I want to want you.

**Craig:** You’re the kind of food my dietician says I should be eating. OK, I get it. I’m asparagus. Screw you man.

**John:** Fun stuff. Fun times.

**Craig:** Bad dates.

**John:** So you haven’t dated in forever, so do you miss any part of that life?

**Craig:** No. Not at all. I mean, I don’t know – it seems to me like it’s chaotic and disruptive and scary. Fraught with pain. I mean, I’m painting a terrible picture of it. I guess mostly the reason why is if you’re not dating, if you’re in a monogamous relationship and you have a lot of friends who are dating they don’t come to you with good dating stories. They come to you with the disasters. That’s all you hear are just – I was on my skateboard and it went great. Nothing happened. Crazy. And I came home. You just hear like fell off my skateboard, smashed my face into the ground, lost five teeth. Traumatized. That’s the kind of dating story I would get. Just the disasters.

**John:** Yeah. I think I miss being young. I miss my youth. But I think if I were to ask that person then like what do you want, I totally want exactly what I have now which is like a really happy marriage and family and all the stuff. So I’m just the luckiest person alive. So I don’t miss that dating.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well that’s the idea. That you know what you want. You get what you want.

**John:** I won.

**Craig:** You’re happy with want you want. And you don’t need to, for instance, surgically alter Mike.

**John:** I do not.

**Craig:** He’s perfect, except for this one slice.

**John:** No, no. Perfect.

**Craig:** I want to meet this guy. This guy sounds awesome actually.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you John.

Links:

* [Lil Yachty Uno Movie](https://deadline.com/2021/02/mattel-uno-lil-yachty-1234687330/)
* [PayUpHollywood Results](https://drive.google.com/file/d/10movS-DYGCxXdFf0daf1XnVSAmv2bWH4/view) and [article](https://medium.com/@elizabeth.alper/the-2020-payuphollywood-survey-results-are-here-3e5c6be8744f)
* Thank you to [Liz Alper](https://twitter.com/LizAlps?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) and [Jamarah Hayner](https://jkhconsultingservices.com/about/)!
* The Gamestop movie at [Netflix](https://deadline.com/2021/02/netflix-gamestop-stock-movie-screenwriter-mark-boal-noah-centineo-scott-galloway-makeready-1234684568/), [MGM](https://deadline.com/2021/01/mgm-ben-mezrichs-the-antisocial-network-wall-street-1234684378/), and [RatPac](https://www.wsj.com/articles/reddits-wallstreetbets-founder-sells-life-story-to-movie-producer-ratpac-entertainment-11612440001?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_2&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s)
* [Rachel Miller](https://twitter.com/RachMiller) [Twitter Thread](https://twitter.com/RachMiller/status/1357048517143851008)
* Check out Rachel’s nonprofit [Film2Future here!](https://www.film2future.org/)
* [What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters](https://presswatchers.org/2021/01/what-the-next-generation-of-editors-need-to-tell-their-political-reporters/) by Dan Froomkin
* [Whitney Houston and Brandy singing Impossible from Cinderella](https://twitter.com/ivyknowIes/status/1357387970807005185?s=20)
* [Stella Zawistowski](https://twitter.com/stellaphone)
* [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/) also we’re now offering annual memberships!
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/487standard.mp3).