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The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/474-the-calm-one).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 474 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This episode is coming out Tuesday, November 3, 2020. So if you’re listening to this while standing in line to vote, thank you.

**Craig:** And if you’ve already voted, thank you also.

**John:** And that’s the last we’re going to talk about the election in this episode. Instead, we’re going to try to lessen any anxiety you may be feeling today.

**Craig:** Think of this episode as a much of hot chocolate with the little mini marshmallows.

**John:** Or a dog sleeping in a sun beam.

**Craig:** Or that song you hear that takes you back to a fun night in college.

**John:** Let this episode be a half a Xanax and a glass of red wine. Not that you should ever do that. But people have.

**Craig:** Or if you’re more risk adverse a fuzzy blanket and a good book.

**John:** It’s Bob Ross painting fluffy little clouds for an hour.

**Craig:** It’s the Monday New York Times crossword puzzle. It’s just so easy to fill out.

**John:** It’s McDonald’s French fries that you don’t have to share.

**Craig:** It’s a lost episode Ted Lasso where he goes grocery shopping with Nate.

**John:** It’s Elmo from Sesame Street giving you a hug.

**Craig:** It’s your high school coach saying he’s proud of you.

**John:** It’s a marshmallow roasted over a campfire to just the right shade.

**Craig:** AKA completely burnt. It’s a hot shower you can stay in for an hour.

**John:** It’s hitting the snooze button on the alarm clock and then realizing it’s Sunday and you can just sleep in.

**Craig:** It’s an episode where we answer some listener questions. We help a writer figure out how to his agent. We discuss the quiet moments before the big set pieces. And we just keep things calm.

**John:** Yeah. And, in our bonus episode for Premium members, we’ll talk about dogs.

**Craig:** I mean, dogs.

**John:** Dogs.

**Craig:** Dogs.

**John:** In the spirit of keeping things calm and quiet the only bit of news is that I’m going to be doing a panel for YALL Fest. So, if you’re a person who is interested in middle grade writing or YA writing, either reading those books or writing those books, I’m doing a panel on November 13. YALL Fest is great. And it’s all organized by middle grade and YA authors. And so it’s a national thing. It’s all online. It’s all free. My panel is on November 13 at 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific, with a bunch of other middle grade authors. But if you’re interested in writing in that space at all you should sign up for it because it looks to be a great, great program this year.

So there will be a link in the show notes to that.

**Craig:** Wonderful.

**John:** Now, Craig, why don’t you start us off? You suggested this topic of the calm before the storm.

**Craig:** I wonder why. I wonder why this came to mind. So, in movies and television shows we have all experienced this moment and it’s something that I think we write a lot without being even conscious that we’re writing specifically this moment. It comes before the end. Pretty much right before the end. Something big is about to happen. The final movement of the story. And right before the final movement of the story whereas the normal order of business is to propel things constantly forward everything just stops. The whole thing stops. It’s like everyone takes a break. Which theoretically is anti-dramatic and disrupts flow.

But in fact the calm before the storm moment, and I’m talking about right before the verdict of a big case, or right before the big battle in the war movie, or right before the performance in the singing movie, or right before the big final game in a sports movie, in the moment before that everybody has this quiet night before/moment before moment. And I wanted to talk about why we have those moments and what’s supposed to happen in them and what the value is.

**John:** Yeah. What is the dramatic purpose of these moments? Because as you describe them, yeah, I see them in all of these stories. In all of these movies. And I feel like it’s true because in real life there is a buildup and a buildup in anticipation, but there is also a moment before the thing that I know is going to happen is going to happen. And it can be a moment of anxiety but it can also be a moment of coming together. It can be a moment of synthesis of sort of what I’ve learned so far. So talk to me about this moment. What do you see there?

**Craig:** Well, it’s usually at a point in your story where all of the things the characters needed to do, all the things they were capable of doing, they have done. So, there’s a sense of you’ve earned a break. We need to know as the audience that you have done all the preparations. And then you have this moment that we right now as people are listening to this are probably experiencing. Because we are in it right now. On Tuesday we wait to see how this all turns out. We’ve done it. We voted. We did what we could do. And all of the phone-banking and all that stuff is over and now you have a moment of reflection. And before the big final action typically there is a shared moment.

It is shared between our main characters. There is some sense of a relationship that is completing. Oftentimes these moments are a drink or a celebration. In the last season of Game of Thrones, before the big huge crazy battel began there was an episode that was basically a long party. And in the party people were drinking and celebrating. They were essentially reconciled. All of the “family business” had been completed. What happens in those sequences? People give each other advice. People consummate relationships that maybe were meant to go to a higher level. And they have a moment where they can help define for us watching who they actually are. Because in those moments – I think when I watch those moments at least – what I’m seeing is something that most closely approximates those moments in real life where things feel slowed down.

Where everything just slows down to a stop.

**John:** Classically in a story we’re looking at a protagonist/antagonist relationship. And so there’s still going to be a battle, a final moment to come. There’s going to be that big showdown is going to happen. But then a lot of smaller protagonist/antagonist relationships along the way. And so talk about those family relationships, how the team has come together, those other smaller tensions are hopefully resolved in this moment so we can basically concentrate all of our energy and all our force on this last thing.

So it is that backstage moment where the two rivals finally sort of come together to do this thing. Or the two people on the team who were always fighting and bickering are now united in a common cause. This is the moment where that happens so it doesn’t have to happen in that final set piece.

**Craig:** Right. In fact, it needs to happen here because it can’t happen in the final set piece. The problem with those things happening in the final set piece is that they feel circumstantial. When you make an alliance in a moment where if you don’t make the alliance your head is going to come off that’s not a dramatically fulfilling alliance. That’s just an alliance of convenience. But in these moments before what happens is we do take a minute to quietly talk to each other about where we went wrong and how it can be better and right and how we are now unbreakable.

So our alliances are secure. There’s no more question of where we stand with each other. We solidify our position no only vis-à-vis each other but with the community around us, whether that’s a baseball team, a small town, a city. Or an entire country. Thinking, OK, another classic example, the rah-rah speech is a version of this. The “we will not go gently into the night” speech before you fight the aliens. Everybody is now on the same page finally. All on the same page.

And why? Because symbolically these moments are about preparing for death. We are getting our affairs in order. It’s remarkable how similar these scenes are to pre-death scenes. What do you do? You get your affairs in order. You say your goodbyes. You tell people you love them. You bury the hatchet and squash all beefs. You write your final messages. You complete the circle. And we need this in our drama because if we don’t sense the characters are prepared to die then victory just seems sort of inevitable.

**John:** Yeah. Now we’re talking about this from the point of view of the characters. We’re talking about it from our point of view as the writer. But let’s think about this from the point of view of the audience. Why does the audience need this moment of calm? Think about your experience watching a movie and if it’s just relentless, you’re on a constant forward march to this finale, you never get to catch your breath yourself. You never sort of get to resettle in the seat and enjoy the movie that you’re watching. It’s just relentlessly pushing at you.

And so it gives you a moment of a tonal break. A moment to pick up the popcorn that you sat down on the floor and get back into it. It’s just changes the dynamic for you so that you have some different textures in your movie, otherwise it can just be the same thing the whole time through.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it also decouples your feeling about the hero from their potential success. Because I don’t want to love someone simply because they win. I want to love them for who they are in a moment. And when they have finally struggled past their flaws and patched up the conflict between themselves and the people that they should love or protect, or be an ally for, you feel like they’ve earned your love. Before they go into that battle I go, “They get it. They’re good. If they die now they die. But if they win they win. But either way I love them now.”

As opposed to just sort of like, well, let’s see. Because if he wins, then hooray, but if not, screw him. He just didn’t have it. And we don’t like that. We want to know before the big swing happens that they’re good. We want to know they’re good.

**John:** It’s crazy that you bring this up right now because this is actually the scenes I’m working on this week are in this space of the script. And it is so fascinating that you need to give the story permission to sort of go either way. So that the central characters, we want them to succeed, but we also know that if they don’t succeed, if this thing that we hope happens doesn’t happen that’s also OK. And obviously we’re talking about in general movies where there’s a final set piece, a final sort of thing that needs to happen. But even the thing I’m writing right now which is not so set piece driven there’s a fundamental dramatic question that’s being asked at the start of the story and changes along the way. But it’s a binary choice. What’s going to happen?

And to have this moment of quiet at this place 85% of the way through the story it makes it OK with either answer, which is important.

**Craig:** It is. It doesn’t have to be right before something large. My own example when I was working on Chernobyl was our big battle is a courtroom case which isn’t even a courtroom case. It’s a show trial. So the verdict has been predetermined. There’s nothing less dramatic than that. But there is a break in the trial and two of our three main characters go outside and they sit on a bench. And essentially what happens is one of them says, “I’m dying. And I didn’t matter. But you did and I’m happy I was with you.” And the other one says, very convincingly, “No, no, no, you mattered the most.” And in that quiet moment where there are no stakes, nothing changes other than that, their feelings about each other, there is a conclusion. And we need it. We just need it so that we understand when they go back into the courtroom whether they both die quickly or slowly. It doesn’t matter. They have settled their affairs with each other. And they have essentially said to each other that they love each other.

If you don’t have it, then what are the symptoms of the story without these moments? A sense of rushing. And it’s so weird because you will feel people complaining about a sense of dragging everywhere except this one spot. This one spot they will accuse you of rushing if you don’t take a pause.

**John:** Now, a thing that you will sometimes notice as you’re looking through a script that’s not working in its last section is you may be trying to do this either during that last set piece or after the last set piece. We’ve talked before about how in a football movie it’s not really about winning the game. It’s about the quarterback’s wife being proud of him. Then that’s the emotional moment. But don’t mistake that for this quiet before the storm moment where you see important relationships resolve. Important things being solidified and anchored before that last set piece.

And so if you’re having problems in your third act this may be one of the issues is that you’re not getting into that last beat right, or you’re trying to pay off a thing after the movie kind of wants to be over. After the story of the movie kind of wants to be over. So you may need to pull something up earlier on.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. Because once it’s over it’s just a confirmation of what happened in this moment we’re talking about, the moment before. Where typically you look at somebody like across the field you’ll see the person that you had the night before with, that whole discussion. You’ll see them. They’ll smile at you. You’ll smile at them. Because, yup, what we said last night, that was true. That’s all you need.

**John:** Yeah. You’re establishing the emotional stakes for this last set piece as well. You’re reminding the audience of where the characters started, where they’ve come from, and what literally just happened right before this moment is that they are unified as they’re going into this last thing.

And so you see this on every episode of Glee for example. It’s all the tensions that happen during the course of the episode and then in the final performance there’s a look between two characters and it’s cheesy and you just know it’s going to happen. But if it didn’t happen it would be very frustrating.

**Craig:** You’d be like where’s my look?

**John:** There’s your look. So, what lessons do we want people to take away from this quiet before the storm? I think it’s just a reminder not to rush. A reminder that you need to actually plan for this. Because if you didn’t anticipate you need to do this it could just be – if you’re just doing sort of like the note cards of set piece, set piece, set piece, set piece, set piece you won’t think about how important it is to have these transitional moments. Because it’s not flashy. It’s not exciting. There’s no big giant fireworks happening in this moment. And yet the movies you love most probably have this moment and you’re just not paying attention to it.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Just imagine your characters when they have nothing being asked of them. The movie essentially says, oh, normally there’s an event after an event after an event. But unfortunately because of a scheduling problem there’s no event right now. The event will be in one hour. The event will be tomorrow morning. What do you do? What you’re doing is you’re giving them time off. And in their time off they can reflect on what has happened and how it made them feel. And what they think is going to happen tomorrow.

And they can be honest with each other and they can express that they’re afraid. And they can express why it matters more than it might otherwise. All of that stuff is the most important stuff. If you don’t have it your climax will be active. But it may not be meaningful.

**John:** Agreed. Great. Now in previous episodes we’ve discussed when it makes sense to write something as a spec versus pitching it, but it’s not always a binary choice. In many cases you’re pitching these nascent ideas to your reps, your agent, or your manager who are going to weigh in on what they think they can sell or help get you into rooms to meet.

So my personal experience with this, my first agent was a good guy, a good friend, and I liked him a lot, but he just did not seem to share my taste. I had a hard time expressing to him what it was that I was trying to write. So I wrote this horror western and he just had no idea what to do with it. And I wrote the first part of Go and he’s like, “I don’t get this at all.” And that was a sign that, oh, then maybe you just don’t really get me as a writer and I ended up moving to another agency.

But then I started to realize that in some cases I was having a hard time describing these ideas and sort of why I should write these ideas. And it wasn’t really just the other person’s fault. I was having a hard time communicating what this was just because I was new at this.

And Craig what was your experience as a newer writer? Did you have a hard time describing what it was you were trying to do?

**Craig:** No. But it took a lot of work. Because I was working exclusively in feature comedy, and this was the ‘90s where everything was generally high concept feature comedy, you had to actually have this really clear concept. You needed to be able to explain out how the movie was actually a movie and not just a comedy sketch. And you needed to give them a sense of set pieces. So there was a lot of rigging and moving parts that needed to be there. And somehow you had to do all of that without boring them to tears. And it’s really hard to pitch comedy – I’m sure Drew can get into that as well – because pitching is not funny. It’s a comedy-killing medium. So it can get sweaty and it’s hard.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s bring on a guest because he wrote in on Twitter saying that he was running into this exact problem where he’s having a hard time connecting with his agent about the things he was trying to write. Drew Champion is a writer whose animated show Archibald’s Next Big Thing has its first two seasons on Netflix and a third season coming on Peacock soon. Drew, welcome to the program.

Drew Champion: Hi. Thanks for having me.

**Craig:** Drew Champion is such a good name. I want you to be like one of those huge robots in Pacific Rim. Like Gypsy Danger. Drew Champion.

Drew: It’s a great last name that unfortunately growing up you had a lot of pressure. Like, oh, let’s get him on our team. He’s going to be great.

**John:** Good omen.

**Craig:** And then what happened?

Drew: Exactly. Exactly.

**Craig:** Blew a draft? Take on Champion. Oh god.

**John:** Now, Drew, talk to us about what you’re writing right now because you have a writing partner but you also write by yourself. So what’s your current situation?

Drew: Right now my writing partner and I we did this show, Archibald’s Next Big Thing, at DreamWorks and we’re kind of between shows right now. We’re doing a little bit of development for DreamWorks Animation. And at the same time together with my partner we are also doing non-animated stuff together. And trying to work that out. And then also I’m doing some solo stuff, non-animated, as well.

**John:** Great. And so in animation, so it’s DreamWorks Animation, the stuff that you’ve been doing so far is not WGA work. It’s Animation Guild?

Drew: Yeah. It’s all Animation Guild. Yeah.

**John:** And you have an agent and a manager? What’s your representation situation?

Drew: Just an agent. No manager right now.

**John:** Great. So what stuff are you having a hard time with right now. Is it stuff you’re working on with your partner? Or stuff you’re trying to pitch that’s just you? Or figure out if it’s just you.

Drew: The stuff that I mentioned when I messaged you on Twitter was just my personal stuff. It’s like this fine balance of writing a pilot and sending it to my agent and having it not really connect very well. And then thinking, OK, maybe writing the full pilot was too much work. Maybe I’ll just write an outline. So I wrote an outline, a comedy, and sent it to him and didn’t really connect. And so it’s like, OK, what’s even less work than an outline? Let’s just try a logline. And so my loglines haven’t been landing as well. I feel kind of like I want to – I need my agent to be on my side. It’s the gatekeeper. And I need to write something that he’s excited about so that he would be able to take it around and do those things. But at the same time I feel like it’s kind of wearing down some of my enthusiasm on some of my projects.

So it’s like this push and pull of where should I put the effort into and should I just write it anyway? At most one of these outlines could be a sample. So, yeah, that’s kind of where my situation is at.

**Craig:** That’s a situation. Well, a lot of times there is some sort of systematic best practices answer. In the case like this, and I don’t mean your specific case, but just the experience of trying to convince a partner of yours, whether it’s a writing partner or an agent that what you’re doing is worth pursuing, I think the best practice is what fills your sail with wind. And if someone is not filling your sail with wind then it’s just no good.

Now that’s not to say that agents should just read things and go, “Great!” Because then that’s patronizing and it’s not real wind. But it does seem like maybe what’s happening is the dynamic has become I show up and I’m like here, what do you think about this, and he goes, “Yeah, it’s OK. I don’t know.” All right, well what about this? “Meh, I don’t know.”

As opposed to sitting down and saying, “I’m not going to pitch you anything. I’m going to tell you how I see things going. And what I want. And how I want to get there. I want to tell you about why I’m passionate about certain things and how I think it would connect to other people and why.” And rather than serve up some food, explain the theory and the desire. And also explain the context of what you want from them. Because, I mean, just as a side note, agents don’t know what good is. I mean, apologies to all of them, but that’s not their job.

Their job is to get you as much money as possible or as much work as possible. They generally figure out what good is based on what everybody else says good is. Generally. I mean, some of them really do have excellent taste. But that’s not their primary function.

Think about maybe like a tête-à-tête I guess is what I’m suggesting.

**John:** Yeah. I think Craig’s suggestion in terms of having a general discussion about where you want to be working in the next two years is a good way to sort of start this rather than focusing on this one thing that’s going to go out as a pitch versus that thing that you’re going to try to write as a spec. Talk about the kinds of things you want to be doing so that he gets the sense of what you’re looking at with your partner and what you want to be looking at doing yourself.

One thing to think about in terms of agents and managers is it’s cleaner when we think about like a real estate agent, because that real estate agent you don’t go to them for advice on what color should I paint this wall. They’re just there to help you sell your house or to help you buy a house. That’s their function. And our literary agents are really good at that and they have a good sense of what the market is and all that. But you’re not necessarily paying them for their taste or their ability to predict this is the thing that’s going to be the one that’s going to set you on artistic success. Based on their experience this is the kind of thing that’s going to make it pretty easy for me to get you in rooms to talk about stuff.

And so in addition to having a general sit down with your reps I would say imagine those hypothetical general meetings you’re going into and what are the projects that you want to be able to pitch to those executives you’re meeting with rather than thinking about what it is – how you’re going to pitch it to your agent.

Drew: Right.

**John:** Do you want to pitch any of the stuff that you’re thinking about to us? Is there anything that you’re working on that feels like–?

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** Well is there any sort of general spaces, like talk to me about – imagine that we are the agent where you’re having the sort of general conversation. What kind of stuff do you want to be writing?

Drew: Well part of my situation is that I come from kid’s animation. And this is the first show I’ve ever worked on. So I feel like I have a good foundation and then breaking out of animation might be – it’ll be a struggle. It might be a little difficult. But with conversations with my agent it sounds like that doing half hour comedies is probably the most adjacent thing to animated TV, especially in the kids space, rather than trying to do a broody period piece drama feature. That might be a little bit more difficult to get me on. But to do something in comedy.

So that’s where I’ve been kind of focusing right now is half hour comedies.

**Craig:** Let’s put aside what maybe structurally seems like the business appropriate move. What do you actually want to do?

Drew: I want to do those brooding—

**Craig:** Great. We just got somewhere.

Drew: That’s what I want to do.

**Craig:** Do you think going from Archibald’s Next Big Thing to a brooding drama, do you think that that is impossible? Ask the guy who went from Hangover 3 to Chernobyl.

Drew: No. I mean, it doesn’t sound impossible. It just feels, well, it doesn’t sound impossible, but then it does sound impossible. Because then it’s like well who the hell is this guy? He was just writing about a talking Chicken for Tony Hale. Why is he doing such-and-such?

**Craig:** Well, you know, I’ll just say that there are a lot of examples of this. Sometimes we miss them. Or we forget that Walter White was the silly dad on Malcolm in the Middle. There is a lot of this. In acting and in writing and in directing. And the beautiful part of doing what you truly want to do as opposed to trying to fit into some scaffolding is that it’s actually much easier. Believe it or not it’s easy.

It’s really hard to wake up in the morning and write what you’re supposed to write. It is incredibly easy to wake up in the morning and write what you want to write.

Drew: Right.

**Craig:** And it will open doors in a way that – look, if it’s good. Right? It will open doors in remarkable ways for you. What happens is they tell you you can’t go through any of those doors. You have to go through this one door. You write something else, you come in, and all those other doors fling open. Fling open. It’s like they just didn’t believe it until they saw it.

**John:** So, Craig, a very specific example that I can offer Drew from my own experience. My first paid jobs as a writer were A Wrinkle in Time and How to Eat Fried Worms. They’re both kid’s books adaptations. And the only things I was getting sent at my old agent was movies about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. I was very, very typecast as the guy who writes those kinds of things. I was typecast and I was pigeonholed. That’s what I was getting sent.

And so I wrote Go largely as a kind of middle finger to I can write other things. Don’t just think of me as this one kind of writer. And I ended up using that as the script that got me a new agent and sort of got me started on a new thing.

What was great about Go is it was the movie I most wanted to see. It’s the movie that didn’t exist that I really wanted to see. And happily people could read that script and apply it to whatever they wanted to be. Some people said like, “Oh, he can write an action movie. He can write a comedy. He can write serious stuff.” It was a very useful script for me on that level, even if it hadn’t ever gotten made. It would have gotten me plenty of work.

And so I would say be thinking about what is the movie that you, Drew, specifically could write that best shows the kind of movie that you could deliver to the world. You also do have a fallback plan. You do have a writing partner and you have a deal at DreamWorks Animation so you can keep doing that stuff. That’s the kind of great situation you find yourself in is you can always just do another animated kids show. Take this opportunity to write the thing that you really wish could exist. And I don’t think it is about pitching it, honestly. I think it is just going to be a brand new thing that you write that shows that you are a different kind of writer. And a writer who can do this by himself without the partner.

Drew: Right.

**Craig:** It’s scary.

**John:** It is scary. But exciting.

Drew: I’m terrified.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good. I mean, you’d be kind of sociopathic if you weren’t. I mean, I was scared. But also there’s a freedom to it. I was talking to Alec Berg the other day about how as you go on in your career you get better at writing. It’s inevitable. You get way better at writing. I’m a much better writer now than I was when I started. But he did point out something that was absolutely true that when you look back at the stuff you wrote way, way back in the beginning you were probably – you meaning all of us – were freer. We were freer in our writing. We were less constrained by our fears or what we were trying to do. Ambitions. The market. Other movies. Insecurities. Whatever the hell it was, we were too stupid to know that you shouldn’t write some things. And in that we were wonderful.

And, after all, it’s that writer that got into Hollywood, right? So, they were doing something right. So in something like this the nice thing is you get to be completely free. There are no notes. There’s no rubric. There’s no syllabus. There’s nothing. You do whatever you want. It’s amazing. It’s free. And stick it in at the end of the day if you want. It could be a little side job for you.

Drew: Right.

**Craig:** And if it goes nowhere it goes nowhere. But what I would say is, and this is the meeting that I had with my agent way, way back. We sat down and I said, OK, so here’s the situation. I think that I’m a better writer than the opportunities I’m getting. And so I want to concentrate on that now. And we don’t have to worry about, if it’s OK with you, I don’t want to worry about money. I don’t want to worry about this or that.

Now, we can’t always not worry about money. But in that instance I said I just want to work with better material. I want to work on better material. Because I want to use what I have. I had been stuck in the same – working the same aisle in the same store for too long. I wanted a new position.

So it’s fair to sit down with that person and say, “I’m still doing the comedy. I’m still doing this. Let’s make some money. But also I want you to know I’m doing this and this is exciting because we can go out and make some fresh kills.” You know what I mean? We can open up a new front in this war.

**John:** Drew, how are you feeling right now?

Drew: I mean, my mind is just racing. This has all just been really interesting, really good stuff. I think this is really helpful and I feel energized to kind of open my mind to a different level of just being open and free to just explore some of this other stuff. That’s really exciting.

**Craig:** It’s crazy. Listening to you say that, it does strike me, because I’ve had the same feeling, that this business convinces you that you’re not free.

**John:** There’s a Stockholm syndrome that sort of kicks in.

**Craig:** Yeah. But we are. That’s the crazy part. We are. They just put blinders on us. And they’re very effective blinders. And of course, you know, we have obligations that we have to meet, and so we do have to work on things that we get paid for. But I guess what I’m saying is we’re giving you permission. And you don’t have to worry that you’re being self-indulgent. Because I’m guessing that you’re a lot like me in that you’ve always been the far opposite of self-indulgent. You’ve always been terrified as coming off as self-indulgent.

Drew: Bingo. Bingo.

**Craig:** Well then you know what? Indulge a little. You’ve earned it.

**John:** Cool. Drew, we are going to be looking for your credits. We’re going to be looking for the announcement of the project that you set up that you’re going to write now. And check back in with us and let us know what you do next, OK?

Drew: Yeah. You guys, this has been so helpful. Thank you so very much.

**Craig:** Our pleasure. Thank you for coming on.

Drew: Thanks for having me.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Thank you, Drew. Suddenly we’re in a call-in advice show.

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Putting people’s lives back together. It’s lovely.

**John:** These call-in advice shows, they also sometimes have producers who come on who are reading questions. So let’s bring our producer on, Megana Rao.

Megana Rao: Hey guys.

**Craig:** Hey.

**John:** We are so excited to have you here with us. And you, how many questions do you get in at ask@johnaugust.com per week?

Megana: Oh lord. Probably like 20 to 30.

**John:** All right. And what is your criteria for sorting through the questions? And which ones make it on to the Workflowy?

Megana: So I think about questions that we have answered recently. Things that I think are unique and interesting and personally curious about. Yeah, and then I think things that are broadly applicable or if there’s a specific situation that seems, I don’t know, like you guys would have an interesting take on it. I kind of send all of that to you guys, get your feedback, and then the winners are in the Workflowy.

**Craig:** I mean, you know I don’t actually give any feedback. I accept what you guys do completely. Openly. Happily. I try and be as happy as I can. You do a great job.

Megana: But like cryptic puzzles from last week was definitely a Craig question.

**Craig:** I know. I know. And I was so – thank you for this.

**John:** Yeah, we kind of wedged that in at the end there.

**Craig:** I really appreciated it.

**John:** What do we have this week?

Megana: So Lisa wrote in about misdirection. And she asked, “I’ve noticed that mystery writers, particularly Agatha Christie, use confirmation bias to trick the reader into ignoring what’s actually happening. The reader gets a couple of clues that lead to a red herring, then happily ignores or downplays contrary evidence until the big denouement.

“Similarly, one of the meta clues in a mystery is the unnecessary-necessary character. The villain is introduced early on as a minor character who the reader ignores because their appearance seems normal to the plot. Then, when they are revealed, the audience doesn’t feel cheated that the villain came from left field. It feels fair.

“Any thoughts on how screenwriters can best use these techniques of misdirection?”

**John:** What a good question from Lisa.

**Craig:** An excellent question from Lisa.

**John:** Yeah, so what you’re doing with a misdirection is very classically like a magic trick. And magic tricks rely on expectation. What you expect is going to happen next and then defeating that expectation. Surpassing that expectation.

So in any misdirection, in a mystery, or whatever you’re trying to do, you’re leading the audience into making reasonable assumptions about what’s going to happen. So assuming that the protagonist isn’t actually the villain, that the movie is a reliable narrator, that the story is taking place on earth or in a specific decade. Basically that you’re not doing an M. Night Shyamalan on them. That things you are assuming are true are actually true. And I like that phrase the unnecessary-necessary character. Because that’s a thing I see a lot, Craig, is that the character who well naturally is going to be there because of sort of the situation and then they have a role beyond what you expect them to be doing in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like the Shyamalaning – I mean, there’s a difference between a joke and a prank. Practical jokes, which are not jokes, are just things that rely on someone’s ignorance of something that they shouldn’t know anyway. And that’s Shyamalaning. Whereas a proper joke or a proper trick or misdirection it’s legitimately fooling you. Because you could see it if you were able to. It’s right there.

So what Agatha Christie does, and I study her so carefully, is she is in fact using things like confirmation bias. She is allowing you to make conclusions that you don’t even realize you’re making. And she uses all of the tricks that we’ve talked about before. The ways that we are irrational. And the study of Kahneman and Tversky who sort of established the science of human irrationality. Agatha Christie before the scientists ever got ahold of this concept was preying upon all of those things. Anchoring, for instance. We tend to be influenced by the first thing that we see. But we shouldn’t. It’s just the first. It doesn’t mean it’s the best or the most important. But she’ll use things like that all the time.

So, part of the trickery of it, Lisa, is actually studying how humans think wrongly about things. It is fair game to take advantage of that. Because whose fault is it for overemphasizing the first thing you read? Or for presuming that if a coin spins three heads in a row that it’s more likely that the next spin will be tails as opposed to heads. Well, it’s our fault. It’s not the writer’s fault.

So the writer is allowed to take advantage of that. It’s not just about our skill in being sneaky. It’s about our awareness of how our audience is broken.

**John:** And I would say there’s a difference between what writers can get away with in prose fiction versus screenwriting. And the central difference is that in a book characters can disappear. Basically unless the writer actually puts that character in front of your face they can disappear back into the woodwork. So a character can be mentioned and then sort of not mentioned for a while. And because you’re just getting information from the writer you don’t have a sense of like, oh, this character is important or not important. Versus in a screenplay and therefore in a movie there’s going to be a physical actor there in the frame, in the shot. And if you’re trying to do a misdirect where that person who doesn’t seem important is actually very important, or that waiter is actually secretly complicit in the whole thing, that person is going to physically be there.

So as a screenwriter you may have to put in a substitute reason for why that character is showing up there so much. So you might be thinking about this is the guy who won’t stop freaking out during the robbery. And so he’s panicked. And so we think that he’s just a guy who is in the bank during the robbery but he’s actually part of the villains. Or the hacker who can get you through into that secure zone. So the reason why that guy is always sitting there at the computer is because he’s on our side. He’s one of our hackers, but he’s actually that guy.

You’re going to need to think of some reason for why that character is around so much and it’s a bigger issue for a screenwriter than it would be for the novelist.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a great example. Are you guys Agatha Christie fans?

**John:** In high school I read through all the books and I’ve seen some of the movies but not in a while. So not nearly the fan you are.

**Craig:** What about you, Megana?

Megana: Yeah, I’d say so. I was like very much so a Nancy Drew person growing up. So I feel like that followed a similar sort of format.

**Craig:** No question. The example I like to cite is Agatha Christie’s, I think it’s her first novel, her first full mystery. It’s called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And so this is super early. I think we’re talking like 1915 or something like that. And here’s how it works. It’s a first person narrator, which is odd. It’s not typical for a murder mystery.

But this guy lives in a small town and Poirot rents a summer house next to him. And so he becomes sort of fascinated by Poirot, because Poirot is such an oddball. And lo and behold what happens? A murder. There’s like a big super rich family in town. And the rich guy is murdered. And so our narrator basically accompanies Poirot and sort of tails along as Poirot begins to take the mystery part and solve it.

And there was at the time a mystery writers club, I think, in London. And I believe either they did or almost kicked Agatha Christie out because of this. Because, sorry for spoilers for a book that’s about a hundred years old. What happens you find out is that the murderer is the narrator.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And she’s brilliant. He never really lies. He just leaves a few things out. And it’s astonishing. In fact, and what’s so astonishing is that he was not unreliable as a narrator. He was reliable. He told you everything. But that’s the kind of thing that takes advantage of a natural bias that we are not even aware of. So as we’re reading and trying to figure out, or as we’re watching a movie like Knives Out, which is obviously a little different because you kind of know technically who did it early. But we know the audience is trying to figure it out. We know they’re doing the math. So, how do you beat them?

Well, somebody has got to be innocent. That’s probably the one who is not.

**John:** The only other thing I’d urge Lisa to think about is obviously misdirection in mystery is crucial to it, but misdirection is important for other genres of films as well. As an audience we are always approaching a movie with a set of expectations about the genre, about the world, the kinds of things we expect to happen in this movie. And most of the times as writers our goal is to meet and exceed those expectations. And so the audience feels smart. The audience is with you. I thought this was going to happen and it did happen and so I trust this movie.

But if you can build enough trust you can then also surprise people. And surprise relies on misdirects. This thing that you didn’t think could happen in this movie did happen. And it shakes you and it gets you really excited because you’re suddenly on a ride you didn’t expect.

So it’s the romantic comedy where they actually do break up and they never get back together again. That’s exciting. But you would need to lay in the possibilities for those misdirections early on.

Megana, another question for us, please.

Megana: OK, awesome. So I feel like this one is a great follow up. Brian asks, “How much should you reveal during a pitch meeting? If your script has a unique twist that you’ve never seen done would you reveal that twist or try to entice your audience by mentioning all the other things that make this script great without revealing the one thing that no one has ever done before? Because to do this would be giving away an idea for free. And I know how adamant you are about leaving no writing behind without payment. It seems there’s a tightrope you must walk by selling your script or idea without giving away ever single detail.”

**John:** Craig, do you reveal it all?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not writing. You’re talking about it. And these theoretically are professionals. So, they’re like, look, I’m going to read it before the audience sees it. I’m going to read it before we cast it, we shoot it, all that stuff. So what exactly are we waiting for? Because if I don’t like how it ends I’m not buying it. I need to know. And if the twist is unique and exciting and kind of mind-wobbling like, oh my god, he was a ghost the whole time. Well, that’s what they’re going to buy. They’re not buying set up, pretty much. I don’t think they are. Unless what makes your movie or your pitch unique the set up itself. In that case, sure.

But otherwise, no, go for it.

**John:** Yeah. Let me try to rephrase Brian’s question thusly. Hey, John and Craig, so I have a really unique idea but in the pitch meeting should I not actually make it sound unique or cool but make it sound like other things and hide what makes it unique and cool? Is that a good strategy?

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs]

**John:** The answer would be no. You should actually do what makes it unique and coo. And here’s the challenge is that obviously how you reveal that twist in the screenplay is going to be different than how you’d probably do it in a pitch. But you figure that out. And that’s the excitement of doing a pitch is figuring out where the listeners are at and how you get them to that moment. But, yes, you absolutely need to do it and so they have something to hang on. So they can really feel what’s going to be special about the project.

So, yes, leave it all on the field. You’ve got to give them what is special and unique about this, because otherwise you’re not going to sell it.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Word. Megana, thank you for these questions.

**Craig:** Thanks, Megana.

**John:** Now, when people write in to ask@johnaugust.com with their questions what are some helpful things you’d like them to do in terms of question length? Do you like the audio questions? Help us out?

Megana: Ooh, I love audio questions and I know you do, too. So audio, like if you can record and send me a transcript of the question that’s the ideal. Yeah, otherwise I think keeping it short and sweet and sort of getting to the point. Just like Brian is afraid to reveal too much, I feel like in a lot of questions the person asking is also afraid that I’m going to steal their story idea or that someone would if we read it on air.

**Craig:** Oh lord.

Megana: But that ends up making for a worse question if it’s really vague because you’re not telling me any details about your situation. So feel free to let me know you don’t want me to use your real name. But otherwise please send some more context and information. That’s always really helpful.

**John:** And we also love when you include your location because it’s just more fun to say Brian in Massachusetts than just Brian.

Megana: Totally.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Brian from Massachusetts.

**John:** Cool. Megana, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

Megana: Thank you guys.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing is actually three books that are all about money and I think I may have mentioned one of them before, which is Debt – The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. It’s a great look at sort of how money came into existence based on just people owing each other stuff and it ultimately becomes money.

Two books I read recently, Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein, and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood are both really good and very different looks at sort of what it is that we’re doing when we think about money and economies and sort of how stuff works.

Craig, did you have economics in high school or college? When did you first learn about how the “economy” works?

**Craig:** I actually had a class in eighth grade. I went to an odd school. I was at Hunter College High School in Manhattan until we moved away. And so they kind of did their own funky curriculum. And in eighth grade I remember our social studies class did have a long section on how the economy worked, how the stock market worked, how money worked, loans, interest, compound interest, inflation, all that stuff. It was interesting. I mean, I never had any desire to take Econ in college or anything like that.

But, you know, I think everybody should understand the basics of how corporations function, for instance.

**John:** Absolutely. How corporations function. Just the idea of supply and demand. And it’s weird because I had micro and macroeconomics in college. And as a journalism major we were required to take both macro and micro and they were really illuminating, but they’re also basically like this is capitalism and it’s almost like a Darwinian theory of how stuff works. But it just happens to work but it’s not kind of the only way things could work. And so it’s fascinating to look at other ideas about sort of how money and economies function together.

We talked in a previous episode, actually one of our first bonus episodes, was about the gold standard and why the gold standard is stupid.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’s just so, so dumb.

**Craig:** So dumb.

**John:** But it’s hard to explain why it’s dumb unless you have some background in sort of how money comes to be.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If people are looking for any sort of starter books I think all three of these – actually the one that’s not about the origin capitalism which is just a little too obscure to start with, but either of these other two books are great ways to be thinking about what money is and how money actually functions in society. Because it never grew out of barter. This myth that people started trading, like I’ll give you two deer for a bushel of corn. That never happened. And it was always just IOUs for things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Excellent. My One Cool Thing is America, maybe. [laughs] That’s all I’m going to say. It may be America.

**John:** It would be great if America were very, very cool.

**Craig:** I will do a follow up One Cool Thing next week to confirm or deny that America is cool.

**John:** Yes. All right. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Peter Hoopes. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send your longer questions, but for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We have t-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net were you get all the back episodes and bonus segments and a segment like this where we’re going to talk about dogs. So, stick around if you’re a Premium member because we are going to talk about dogs. Craig, thank you for a very calm episode.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, do screenwriters need to have dogs, or is it just highly recommended?

**Craig:** I’m going to go with need to. I’m going to actually make it mandatory. Of course, everyone needs to have a dog. Everyone.

**John:** I mean, basically you join the WGA and they give you the little card and they give you a dog. That’s just how it works. You got to have a dog.

**Craig:** Got to have a dog.

**John:** Talk to us about your dog situation right now.

**Craig:** Right now we have Cookie. She is a Labrador who we keep trying to sort of pretty up. We’ll put little ribbons in her hair sometimes when she gets groomed and then she keeps trying to make herself disgusting.

**John:** You said she’s a Labrador, but she’s a Labradoodle, right?

**Craig:** Labradoodle. Yes. Oh, did I say Labrador? Labradoodle. She’s a Labradoodle which is a wonderful breed of dog. Poodles are not my favorite. Labradors are wonderful. Labradors shed all over the place, Poodles don’t. Labradoodle, it’s like a Labrador that doesn’t shed. And they’re adorable. And very sweet and friendly. She’s very, very beta. She’s the most beta dog I think I’ve ever encountered in my life. And we’re actually going to be getting another puppy soon, pretty sure.

**John:** Oh, very exciting.

**Craig:** In part because as Cookie gets older I just keep in mind the line of succession.

**John:** Yes. You have to. You always need a dog. My first dog that was my own dog was my dog Jake who was a Pug who was fantastic and he was very classically a screenwriter’s first dog. I invested in him all of my paternal caring and it was an absolutely ideal dog for me to have. We had another Pug later who looked like a dog but actually had nothing in his brain. It was actually just some sort of weird alien. Who I still loved, but was just really a challenging dog.

But my current dog–

**Craig:** Ah, Lambert.

**John:** Lambert is just an absolute dream. You’ve met Lambert several times. And is some sort of Terrier-Poodle kind of mix thing. And has just been an absolute delight and a source of warmth and comfort at all moments.

**Craig:** Lambert and Cookie have met each other. They get along famously.

**John:** They have. And Megana brought them up to your house at some point. So I’ve never seen them meet, but I’m sure they were best friends.

**Craig:** It was too gentle dogs sort of looking at each other and seemingly fine with each other and then they both sort of went their separate ways. It was like, OK, yeah, you’re here, I’m here, great. And then Lambert sat down in his funny way where he just spreads his legs and puts his balls directly on the floor. Or where his balls would be.

**John:** Yeah. Now, what is – you’re a person who is interested in science and the evolution of things, what is your belief in terms of how dogs came to be and to what degree is it just us wishful thinking that they are so empathetic and they seem to understand us so well? What is your belief about dog evolution?

**Craig:** I mean, I’m just guessing, because I haven’t studied it or anything, but it seems to me like along the way certain wolves were taken in by groups of people and over time gentler wolves were bred with other gentler wolves and you started to get breeds of dogs that descended from wolves but were like the nice ones. And then it just kept happening. And obviously around the world there are different kinds of wolves that become different kinds of dogs. And then you crossbreed them.

And I think that initially was because they were incredibly useful. Because they domesticate so well. They were helpful for protection back in the day when there was no conceal carry. Your dog was your conceal carry. They protected the family. They helped you hunt. And they obviously also were there for comfort. They were loyal. So they have all of these properties that make them incredibly suitable to live with humans. And I think that is probably why we imprint our own beliefs on what’s happening in their minds.

My dog, for instance, she has a little routine. When I come home from wherever she runs frantically to me, sits down in front of me, gets kind of low, and then starts whimpering as if to say where have you been. She’s crying. And I could think, oh my god, this dog loves me more than anything. In fact, if I put my hand right on her chest I can feel her heart pounding. Like oh my god, this dog loves me more than anything.

But I know actually what she wants is one of those dried chicken strips. And she knows that when I get home and she does this and she starts whining and doing that she gets one. And the second she gets that chicken strip she’s gone. So, it’s mostly chicken, but it’s easy to see – of course, they do love us. I mean, there’s no question about that.

**John:** Yeah. I always find it fascinating when I look at my dog’s behavior and then I take a step back and look at, OK, in what ways am I behaving like a dog who is really just stimulus and response driven? I think I want a thing but it’s really that I want this other more basic thing. I really am just hungry. Or I really just need to be around somebody but it’s not – I’m creating these elaborate reasons for why I do certain things when really it’s just sort of stimulus-driven behavior.

And yet I look into my dog’s eyes and I see like, oh, well this dog clearly loves me. A strange thing about Lambert I’ve noticed is that Lambert, his favorite thing in the world is a visitor. And anybody who comes to the house he is so obsessed. And I think people come to the house and think like, oh, this dog must not like it here because this dog just seems to desperately like me very much, or want to get away from this house. And, no, it’s any new person who comes to the house, it’s just like come on in. Do you want to take the TV? Take the TV. It’s fine. It’s good.

He’s just so obsessed with that and it’s been one of the hardest things about the pandemic and the lockdown is that Lambert just doesn’t get to see new people. New people don’t get to come to the house. And so he’s stuck with the three of us.

**Craig:** Same with Cookie. She loves new people. She likes to bark when a new person arrives to let everybody know that a new person is here. And then she just melts.

**John:** Yeah. Aw, that’s nice. Melty dogs are nice.

**Craig:** It’s the greatest. Melty dogs.

**John:** And they’re very calming which is the reason why I thought we’d talk about them here.

**Craig:** Yes. If you have a dog definitely take moment now to just sit with your dog, turn off everything, sit with your dog and think to yourself how nice it is in their mind because they don’t know any of this.

**John:** They know nothing. And like when a water bowl gets filled with water, like you did magic. You were able to touch something and water came out of it and you put it there. You were able to do all of these things that a dog can’t do. They live in a world of magic and we are the magicians.

**Craig:** Right. So you might as well get a little something back and try to get your mind right in the same frequency as your dog’s mind where the rest of the world doesn’t matter. It’s just you and me. Eye contact. Scratches.

**John:** Great. We’ll end it there. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

 

Links:

* [YALL Write](https://www.yallwrite.org) John’s panel is on Friday, November 13th at 3pm ET/12pm PT
* [Drew Champion](https://twitter.com/drewchamps) and [Archibald’s Next Big Thing](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9165404/)
* [Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein](https://bookshop.org/books/money-the-true-story-of-a-made-up-thing/9780316417198)
* [The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood](https://bookshop.org/books/the-origin-of-capitalism-a-longer-view/9781786630681)
* [Debt – The First 5,000 years by David Graeber](https://bookshop.org/books/debt-updated-and-expanded-the-first-5-000-years-revised/9781612194196)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [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 Peter Hoopes ([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/474standard.mp3).

 

 

The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/470-dual-dialogue).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Craig Mazin is my name.

**John:** And this is Episode 470 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll look at what happens when two or more characters–

**Craig:** Well, the thing is if you have multiple bits of dialogue then you need to have people–

**John:** — talking at once, the best ways for writers to think about it. And–

**Craig:** — say them simultaneously. But how do you do that–

**John:** — portray it on the page.

**Craig:** — when they’re – oh.

**John:** Plus lots of follow up on delayed movies, mergers, assistant pay, and more. And in our bonus segment for Premium members Craig and I will discuss Halloween.

**Craig:** Ooh, Halloween. I love it.

**John:** Yeah. Do you love Halloween?

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** I don’t love Halloween. So we’ll get into that.

**Craig:** Well, I get why. I know why. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] You’ll have theories.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** All right. So lots of stuff in the news. First off, almost all the movies are delayed or the release dates changed. So we haven’t talked about this for a while but there was a pandemic. I guess there still is a pandemic.

**Craig:** So they say.

**John:** So they say. Some movie theaters are kind of opened. Most movie theaters aren’t really open. Tenet released in the US, sort of. Other movies have gone straight to video.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that looks at some of the big release date changes, but essentially coming through the end of this year all of the Marvel movies got pushed back. Some of the Disney movies are coming out. Some of them are not coming out. Something like Free Guys, December 11. Dune, of course, is December 18. Wonder Woman is December 25.

**Craig:** I don’t think they are. I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t think they are.

**John:** I don’t know if they are either. I was talking to some people involved with these movies and they said, “Yeah, I think it’s going to come out? Maybe it’s going to be out for like two weeks and—“

**Craig:** I would be shocked. Shocked.

**John:** I’d be surprised, too.

**Craig:** I think that this is going to be a while with these. If they don’t bite the bullet and just say, “We’re going to be charging you $30 to watch this at home,” then they have to wait. They just have to wait. Tenet was the movie that they all watched happen. And then they all looked at each other and said, “Ooh, no, no. We don’t want that.”

I mean, these things are economic propositions that have been well worked out with various formulae. A little bit like gambling where they’ve got it down to somewhat of a science, at least in certain ways. And not having a full theatrical release in the United States is simply untenable if you’re going to attempt to make your money back on some of these big bets. And they are pretty much all really big bets.

**John:** So I think the first question will be Pixar has some movies, Soul and the James Bond movie No Time to Die. Both of them are slated for November 20.

**Craig:** No way.

**John:** Yeah. That will be the first times we see. I mean, it’s not just the pandemic. It’s also it’s coming out of this election. I just don’t have a great sense for what America is going to be like at the end of November.

**Craig:** Normally if the movie theaters are open America is like I’m going to the movies. That’s normally what we’re like. But we’re not. We’re not going to be going to the movies on November 20. I don’t believe that. Unless something remarkable happens. It just doesn’t seem like it makes any sense. And the biggest moviemaking complexes are in the largest population centers. Those are the places that seemingly are most rigid and properly so about following the rules of social distancing. I just don’t see it happening. But, I mean, look, you can keep sliding things around on a calendar all you want. The nice thing is they don’t have to mail prints out anywhere anymore. It’s all beamed in electronically.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** But, nah, and I mean, and the marketing campaigns are flexible as well. So, no, I don’t think so. I would be blown away if we were watching a James Bond movie on November 20.

**John:** Yeah. And I don’t want to sound callous towards movie theaters. Movie theaters are a crucial piece of our infrastructure and they’ve just been completely hosed by what’s happened. And so I want theatrical movies to succeed. I want these things to be possible. I just don’t know that it is possible now.

And just using myself as a barometer, I’m a person who really likes to go to the movies and sees things opening weekend. But if I don’t feel safe going to movie theaters here, pretty well run movie theaters here, I just don’t see it being profitable for everybody.

**Craig:** No. The movie theaters are probably facing an extinction event in terms of the way it has been to this point. The removal of the consent decree and the pandemic have combined to – I don’t know how a large independent theater chain survives this. I really don’t. Maybe they have secret plans that are somehow opaque to me. But it does seem like the large media companies in the United States are sitting back waiting to see what happens with the pandemic ending and waiting to see how attendance works after that, at which point they will swoop in and buy these things at a cheap cost as distressed properties.

**John:** Very, very possible. I mentioned the election, Craig, what is your voting plan?

**Craig:** My voting plan is to receive my ballot in the mail. Fill the ballot out. And then I believe I’m going to be dropping it into a ballot drop box. That’s the last bit of research I have to do is see where that is. I assume it’s going to be at my post office. But it might be elsewhere. I will find out where that is. I will go to it and put my ballot into it. And I will do that on the day I get my ballot.

**John:** That is essentially my plan as well. I actually already got my ballot because the county of Los Angeles still thinks I live in France. And so they sent me this ballot early so it can get all the way to France. So I actually got my ballot. If it becomes a question of whether this is going to be problematic for me to turn it in early because they think I live in France then I will take this to one of the early voting centers and actually vote there as soon as I can do that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that’s the alternative. That’s what I did at the 2018 elections.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** So either way I will be voting as soon as I possibly can vote, just because you never know.

**Craig:** Well, I have always been a vote in person guy because I like the experience of voting in person.

**John:** I do, too.

**Craig:** I remember as a kid going into the voting booth with my dad. Back in the day, I don’t know if it was like this where you were in gorgeous Colorado, but in glum Staten Island what we would do is we would go to – it was actually my elementary school’s gymnasium and they had set up these little booths with this sliding curtain. And there was a machine in front of you. To me as a small child the machine seemed enormous. I suspect today it’s not. And it had levers. And you would flip the levers. Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack. You make all your choices and then you would pull this big lever at the bottom from left to right and it would go…and it would register your vote somehow using, I don’t know, some ancient Babbage machine.

And then you would open the curtain and exit. And I just remember thinking that this was very high tech and very exciting.

**John:** Absolutely. So I remember my mom doing that once. And at some very early point voting in Colorado moved to the more sort of freestanding little desk kind of things where you’re poking holes and things, which aren’t nearly as much fun for a kid to see.

**Craig:** No. No. So in California we have the ink dot system, or at least we did, which I thought actually worked very well. You stick your thing in the thing and you flip the pages and you push down. The system now is more automated. It’s a little odd. When I voted in 2018 it was a little strange in that you tap the things on the screen and the thing comes out and then you have to stick the thing back in and then it comes back out. I guess for you to check and make sure.

Anyway, I’m filling my thing out at home. Bring it in. Let’s do this.

**John:** I’m going to fill my thing at home and make sure it gets in early.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But voting day is still a priority this year and sort of every year. Our friends Beth and Travis sort of spearheaded a movement to sort of get the WGA to say, “Hey, shouldn’t voting day be a paid day off for our members?”

**Craig:** Yes. 100 percent. So Beth Schacter worked in television for a long time. She’s currently an EP on Billions. And Travis Donnelly is one of our re-elected, freshly re-elected, directors on the board at the WGA. And they are both absolutely correct. This is something that we do need to encourage. The WGA cannot force showrunners to say, “Go ahead everybody, take the day to vote if you need to.” But we should be encouraging it strongly. And that means that the showrunners then have to turn around to the companies and say, “FYI, I’m doing this, and we’re not going to not pay people and that’s the way it is.”

It is incredibly important. And until we have a national holiday for voting this is going to be something we need to do. So, it’s a great idea. And we should encourage – the WGA should be doing this officially, encouraging the people running shows. And then you and I should just keep doing it and talking to our friends and leading by example in saying let people go vote.

**John:** Agreed. And hopefully WGA saying this and encouraging this will get other unions to be thinking about this. Hopefully this industry can be thinking about this way and other unions down the road can be thinking.

**Craig:** The other unions do not listen to us. And we don’t talk to them, which we know. However, we can take the lead on this.

**John:** However, they do draft off of things we get. So that is a useful thing.

**Craig:** Sometimes they do. It’s true.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, there were no residuals until the WGA got residuals.

**Craig:** That was back in the ‘50s. That is true. That is true. Did you see the latest pandemic – there was this big agreement between the companies and the unions about how to proceed in terms of managing COVID and testing on sets. And again everybody involved accept the WGA. Do not know why. But you know what? That’s something the new board can figure out.

**John:** Yes. So let’s talk about our new board. The WGA elections were held. The results were that all the incumbents were re-elected plus Eric Haywood. So congratulations to the incumbents and to Eric.

**Craig:** Meet the new board. Same as the old board.

**John:** Obviously we’ll put a link in the show notes to the results. I know and work with all these people. I have nothing bad to say about any of them. You have bad things to say about Patric Verrone.

**Craig:** Nothing but bad. Nothing.

**John:** There was a big cliff between Patric Verrone and the next vote-getter after that. So it wasn’t even a close, tight election.

**Craig:** No, no. Patric Verrone happily inhabiting that eighth slot every two years. That’s where he lives. So, I was bummed out. I was bummed out because Daniel Kunka who was the one feature writer running did not make it in. I don’t think any of these people are feature writers. So, Betsy Thomas, Deric Hughes, Ashley Gable, Patti Carr, David Slack, Eric Haywood, Travis Donnelly, Patric Verrone. TV, TV, TV, TV, TV, TV, TV, TV, TV.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And this is not tenable. It’s just not going to work. And I don’t know what to do about it because the membership is skewed. So we have a large and completely unrepresented minority in our union. And that’s just a recipe for disaster. I don’t know how this is going to continue like this.

**John:** OK. So, as a screenwriter who was just on the board pretty recently. It’s not that we have no representation. Michele Mulroney is a feature writer. Dante Harper is a feature writer. It would be awesome to have more feature writers on there. That’s why were both pushing for Daniel Kunka to be a representative of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Having talked to all the people who are currently on there, I know they are well-versed in feature issues. And I know it is important to them. It is not affecting them directly the way it would affect a feature writer. So, let us just remind the people who are elected there some things that are super, super important for them to understand about feature issues.

Free work abuses is a thing that feature writers encounter that TV writers don’t encounter to nearly the same degree, which is basically being held on a draft and turning it in, basically not being paid because they keep pushing more and more stuff for you to do. And so you are working endlessly on a “draft” whereas a TV writer would have turned a thing in because they’re more on a weekly basis. That is a thing that is so specific to feature writers.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the problem that came out of mini rooms and the stretching of time where writers were getting paid the same amount in television for more and more time of work. The thing that made them crazy and led us to strike threat a couple of times. That’s been the state of affairs, times ten, for feature writers forever. So, if TV writers could just look at it that way. If they could just understand how much worse feature writers have had it in that area that they found so offensive for so long. If the 17 out of 19 people in board meetings could internalize that it would be enormously valuable for the thousands of feature writers that are in this union.

**John:** Yeah. Other things that are evergreen issues for feature writers is late pay. Basically you turn in your draft and it’s late coming. I will say there has been progress on this. Since the time I was on the board there would be more progress now that invoices and contracts are coming through to the guild. There’s already been work on this thing. It has to continue.

Teams. There are teams in TV. There are teams in feature. Teams in features, they’re screwed. You’re splitting a salary between two people. It makes it harder for everybody. So the issues that teams face are only magnified by the other problems in features.

And finally I would just want everyone to be mindful of the very definition of what is a feature film is in question. So if you’re writing a feature for a Disney+ or one of the other streamers let’s make sure we are using the terms of a theatrical feature and not getting dragged down to TV movie of the week. And we just have to be so vigilant that we are really treating these pieces of 110 minute entertainment that feels like a feature film that we’re paying these writers like they are writing feature films because that’s what they are.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is not unrelated to our discussion of a few minutes ago, the fate of theaters. If theaters eventually go away there are still movies. It’s just how we watch them. We don’t necessarily conceive of a massive difference at home. But the contract that we have with the companies dates back to the early days of television and the early days of theatrical exhibition. And that’s what it solidified into. Our contract is ancient. It is old and it is full of archaic language. None of which contemplated the Internet much less streaming and the blurring of features on big or little screens.

So all of that needs to be considered. But it can only be considered if it is a priority. And that means, again, that out of the 19 people in that room you have 16 board members and three officers. Of those 19 people, even though only two of them work in features all of them need to put features first. I don’t know how else to say it. Because all we’ve done is put television first and exclusively put television first for well over a decade. And I’m just going to keep banging this drum. I’m going to be – I’ll be that militant.

**John:** Be that militant. Several of the people I know who are on the board are also starting to do feature work. And I’ve had individual conversations with them about that. So I think as silos get broken down many of these writers will be more aware of what those issues are. It’s also the point in every one of these conversations where I also remind people that we have people who work in comedy and variety and they have it even worse than feature writers do. So, being mindful of those writers also facing challenges.

**Craig:** Sure. They will have to find their own Craig Mazin to bang that drum. I have one drum. One.

**John:** One drum. And he beats it loud.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Let’s talk about Quibi. So Quibi–

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw, Quibi. Quibi has short little videos for your phone. So, it won two Emmys this last week. Congratulations Quibi.

**Craig:** Oh. That’s pretty cool. I know that–

**John:** Yeah. It’s won more Emmys than I have. Fewer than Craig.

**Craig:** [laughs] No, Quibi has tied me for Emmys. Kaitlin Olson was nominated for an Emmy for her work on Quibi. I don’t know if she won or not. Was she one of the ones who won? I hope she was.

**John:** I don’t know. I didn’t see who actually won.

**Craig:** I’ll have to look it up.

**John:** So Quibi this last week engaged JPMorgan Chase to help the company review a range of strategic options. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the LA Times article about it. But let’s just talk about Quibi because we didn’t really talk about it when it launched. I had a conversation with Jeffrey Katzenberg, I don’t know, two years ago and there was a show I was going to do with Doug Liman and we just couldn’t make it work out financially or logistically.

**Craig:** At the Quib?

**John:** At the Quib. And I will say that the initial pitch I got from Jeffrey was kind of what the show ended up being and the problems that I sort of heard in the pitch became the real problems that were out there is that while it’s great in theory to have, oh, they’re videos that you watch on your phone, sort of like how you can watch YouTube on your phone. It wasn’t fundamentally compelling because those weren’t the kinds of things I wanted to watch on my phone. I wanted to watch things on my TV and I couldn’t watch things on my TV. I also couldn’t share anything that I thought was great about a show on clips on Twitter or Instagram. It couldn’t go viral because it was all locked down. There were fundamental things that were problematic about it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I have never understood it. I may be the only writer in America who has not gone in and met with people at Quibi and pitched anything to Quibi. I never understood it. To me, the concept itself sounded like an old person’s thrilling idea of how the Internet could or should work. But we have Quibi. It’s called YouTube. That’s how Quibi functions. Right? If you want short videos to watch on your phone, there’s YouTube.

But what people generally never wanted on YouTube were little mini-series that just played on YouTube. They just didn’t want that. That wasn’t a thing. They didn’t mind it on like a big laptop screen, but like on your phone? Nobody wanted that. And there’s been people who have trying that crap for a decade. It’s not what people want in that format. They just don’t.

**John:** So I’m going to take the position that Quibi in the end was a good thing in that it paid a lot of people a lot of money to make content.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Which is good. It increased employment. It got people to experiment and do new things. So even if it wasn’t a financial success for this company it basically took a bunch of stock market investor money and gave it to writers and creators and actors and other folks. And maybe that’s good.

**Craig:** Well, it gave the money to an executive who then gave it to a lot of writers and actors and folks. And if there’s a lesson here for the money people maybe it’s this. The guy who is famous for writing The Idea is Everything, Jeffrey Katzenberg, is not the guy who comes up with the ideas. He’s just the guy pointing at the concept of an idea and saying isn’t that important. Meaning what Jeffrey Katzenberg was famous for in the ‘90s was writing a memo saying, “Writers are everything. But let’s not pay them well. And also I’ll be in charge.”

Jeffrey Katzenberg, apologies to Mr. Katzenberg, doesn’t write anything. Doesn’t create anything. His big idea was to pay other people to have ideas. You don’t need him for that. What you need are people who come up with big ideas. Go to them. Go to them. You want them to be managed by somebody? I don’t know, hire four million mid-level managers for the same price of one Katzenberg. And his partner was Meg Whitman. She’s the Facebook lady, right?

**John:** Wasn’t she PayPal?

**Craig:** Oh, she was PayPal. She was PayPal and then she also ran for the governor of California at some point. Anyway, who needs them? They don’t do anything. They don’t do anything. I wish to god this capital would understand that. But I think sometimes the people who have billions of dollars only talk to other people that are like them. Oh, well Jeffrey Katzenberg is sort of like us. He’s an executive. And he talks in executive speak. Blech.

They don’t do anything. They don’t. Why?

**John:** There’s a struggle of disintermediation. So basically you’re objecting to the fact that people are giving money to Quibi who is then giving it to the people to actually make the things. And it’s like you should just give the money to the people who make the things. But someone has to build the distribution platform. So Quibi was trying to be that distribution platform the same way a Netflix is. The same way an HBO Max is.

It goes back to our discussion of theaters. You want to own the place where people see the thing because that is ultimately useful and powerful in your gatekeeper function. But I don’t know that it makes sense to – the same way that you don’t see a lot of tech money going into “we’re going to revolutionize movie theaters.” Or you see MoviePass trying to do that and it’s like well that’s a bad idea. Quibi is in many ways the MoviePass of video.

**Craig:** I think it is. And I don’t want to imply that there is no place for people that aren’t writers to run things in Hollywood, because there is. It’s just that most of the people that I work with are employed by a large corporation and their function is their utility in working with writers and filmmakers and directors and actors. They are good at it. So that’s why – at least most of them are good at it that I work with. And so that’s why they’re there.

But when you elevate a noncreative person to a kind of creative guru position then you are asking for trouble. Every time they do it. The Japanese via Sony truly believed that Guber and Peters they were gods of some kind. They knew something. They had cracked the code. And so if you’ve never read Hit and Run, which is a fantastic book about Sony’s purchase of Columbia Pictures you should. It’s amazing. And it really is just a story of how they got fooled by two guys who basically were just, you know, guys. One of whom may not even be literate. I mean, so I’ve heard. I’m not saying that in any actionable way. I’ve just heard that. It’s probably not true.

So this happens. Any time they escalate people like Katzenberg. And I have nothing against Jeffrey Katzenberg.

**John:** No. I think Katzenberg is very smart. And he deserves credit for the many things he has accomplished over the years.

**Craig:** Years.

**John:** And also congratulations you built a giant company–

**Craig:** Well, no. Now that one I’ve got to quibble – I’ve got to Quibi with.

**John:** You’ve got to quibble with Quibi?

**Craig:** A lot of people invested in that and are going to lose their shirts. And while the people–

**John:** I don’t think anyone is going to lose their shirts. I think it was money that was looking for a home.

**Craig:** Well, sure. But some homes are better than others. And these institutional investors, they themselves obviously are insulated from these losses because they’re fat cats. But they’re playing around with other people’s money. And those people ultimately get hurt. So anytime a business crashes of this scale, $2 billion, it’s bad.

**John:** And to stipulate it hasn’t crashed to – you know, $1.75 billion. It hasn’t crashed to nothing. It’s really hard to see how much it’s worth.

**Craig:** And on its way.

**John:** And who to sell it to. One of the interesting things about the Quibi business model which from the initial pitch is that the creators actually get their content back. And so after like seven years it goes back but they can also repackage it after it like two years, which does seem to be a tacit acknowledgment of like it sort of sucks to be working for somebody and have them own your thing for perpetuity.

Like I’m writing this movie for Netflix right now and it’s just it’s only going to be on Netflix. That’s all it’s ever going to be on. If Netflix goes away it gets sold off to somebody at some point.

**Craig:** Yeah. Somebody buys it.

**John:** It is locked away in ways that are frustrating for a filmmaker. So, Quibi was trying to acknowledge that.

**Craig:** Quibi was definitely spending money like a drunken sailor. And that’s the Netflix factor. This is why – I can imagine that pitch of just the only way to compete with Netflix is to out-Netflix Netflix. They’re a drunken sailor. We need to be an even more drunken sailor. And this is all in the short term good for folks who are receiving money for writing. In the long term it’s not good if it destabilizes because of eventually this all comes crashing down. Quibi has come crashing down way faster than I thought it would.

I’m confused by their insistence that this is related to the pandemic. The pandemic seems like it would be a gift from god for Quibi. But I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. I think they built a user story experience where it was like you’re watching it on the train as you’re headed to work. That’s the ideal use case for it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But honestly that’s so New York centric.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s such a view of one way that people live their lives.

**Craig:** Also, I’m sorry, but that’s not what people – in New York if you manage the catch the working wifi in between stations on the subway, yeah, you’re listening to music or you’re playing a game or you’re texting. You’re not watching a Quibi. For god’s sake.

**John:** Yeah. No. One place we can read all of the useful insight and criticism of this is in the trades.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And so the trades are–

**Craig:** You mean the trade? [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. The trades are what we call – originally they were printed newspapers, but Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline. They are the different places that report on our industry. And they’re now all essentially one company. They’re all one trade. So we will link to the Deadline piece on what happened. But essentially through joint ventures they’ve all basically become one thing.

Everything we think of being separate entities are basically one company.

**Craig:** Yes. And one of those companies is MRC which produces content in Hollywood.

**John:** Yeah. Funny that.

**Craig:** So you have a studio, essentially a studio, a financing arm of a studio that is the part owner of all of the major publications analyzing the entertainment industry. And that includes Rolling Stone, the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Billboard, Vibe, and Music Business Worldwide. That’s all of them. That’s all of them. So, you know, you and I growing up out here in the ‘90s as young screenwriters we knew that there was Coke and Pepsi. There was Variety and there was the Hollywood Reporter. And I remember being astonished at how much they cost. Because back in those days, because it was a bit of a kind of duopoly to get Variety delivered to your office every day, Daily Variety, you had to pay some insane yearly subscription at that time. It was like a thousand dollars. I’m like, what, this is insane.

And now apparently Variety is free as far as I can tell to everybody in the world. And Deadline disrupted everything. And now it’s just all smashed together into one thing. And what happens now–

**John:** And so I don’t know what happens now. So, I mean, it’s worth noting that Deadline was actually – Nikki Finke drove me crazy, but Nikki Finke created Deadline as a separate independent site that was just journalism about the actual industry and became incredibly influential because it was actually just journalism about the industry. And it was gossipy and all the other things we can sort of throw at it, but it was outside the norm. So it does feel like there’s a potential for an outside disruptor to come in here and make the new version of Deadline that is actually independent. So that’s a possible outcome of this.

But I want to talk about the MRC of it all. So MRC is a company that is also tied up with the agencies and sort of the affiliated productions of the agencies in complicated ways. But they make actual TV shows and features. So, Ozark, The Great, The Outsider, The Golden Globe Awards, Fire Fraud, which I think it’s great that they were the people behind that.

**Craig:** Knives Out.

**John:** The Billboard Music Awards. American Music Awards. Knives Out. Baby Driver.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So it’s just so complicated to be the trades who are supposed to be reporting on an industry that you actually are making the things you’re reporting on.

**Craig:** It is. And good journalists will often, you know, encounter this because of these multinational conglomerates. You’re always touching on something. And so they’ll say, “Full disclosure, this publication is owned by the same parent company as blah-blah-blah.” And so you say that out loud and they will say, OK, that they will have independence, which is fine. And I believe them to an extent because they know that if they don’t have independence then the property they just bought will become worthless. Because it will be pointed out and it will be skewered and devalued.

But what is not good is that there is the potential for – it just seems like an obvious potential for consolidation here. So you buy all this stuff and then you sit there and you go, so, um, we have somebody that does the same job at Variety as this other person at Hollywood Reporter. Why don’t we just fire one of them? And actually why don’t we just fire half of these people and just make one thing called the Variety Reporter. And then people will lose their jobs and also you narrow the diversity of voices.

**John:** It’s true.

**Craig:** That’s what worries me.

**John:** It’s the problem of any consolidation and having monopolies to control, or at least an oligopoly. It’s not even an oligopoly anymore. It’s just basically a monopoly. And particularly when it comes to, you know, creative expression and to journalism to only have one source of truth is very bad.

**Craig:** It’s not good. Even about something as frivolous as what Hollywood is doing. You know, I got to say I’ve gone full Bernie Bro on this episode. I’m just like swinging at corporations, Jeffrey Katzenberg for no good reason at all. I don’t even know him. Just throwing bizarre bunches in a wild podcast style. It’s been enjoyable.

**John:** That’s what we do.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s been enjoyable.

**John:** One of the wild swings we were throwing–

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** — months and months ago was about assistant pay.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** This last week UTA raised assistant pay across the board.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Minimum is $22 an hour. Goes to $24 an hour for agency assistants and the agent training program gets up to $26 per hour. This is good. This is progress. And so I just wanted to call out UTA for doing good work here.

**Craig:** That is good.

**John:** And also doing it in a time which is admittedly very difficult for agents and for the industry. It’s hard to say like everything is struggling and so we’re actually going to raise pay. It feels like the right choice and a difficult choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. And this looks to me I think the new golden standard here. I think that this is better than the Verve or CAA commitment.

**John:** This does feel better. And so the Verve and CAA had other things built in there in terms of like quality of life stuff, but–

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** But money is money. So let’s focus on that.

**Craig:** Money is money. So this is very good. And I do agree with you that this is a challenging time for the agencies, of course. But if the people at the highest level of these agencies who make an insane amount of money are willing to forgo a little bit of their enormous lucre, because if you say to, you know, whoever – who owns UTA? Jeremy Zimmer or something? I don’t know who owns it, like how that works.

**John:** They’re privately held. They have outside investors. But they’re privately held.

**Craig:** Right. But whoever the biggest shot is there, if you say to that guy, oh, by the way, just because for reasons you’re not going to get paid anything this year. They’ll be fine. They’ll be totally fine. So, like it’s good to maybe hit pause on the money pipe – I’m Bernie Bro’ing again. And give the people who are holding your business up, you know, a chance to survive and flourish. Ooh, I’m telling you, man. I am just swinging the flaming sword of the workers of the world today.

**John:** All right. Let’s do a little bit of follow up here. This is Ezra. He writes in about How Would This Be a Movie.

Ezra: Hi John and Craig. This is a follow up to a listener email from Episode 465 on using the Battle of Blair Mountain on your How Would This Be a Movie segment. My wife and I spent two physically and emotionally taxing years trying to have our first child. After a successful round of IVF we had our first in 2017. This past February we had our second, also through IVF. Science. It works.

As a way to do with all of the feelings I accumulated over that time I began working on a pilot script for a show called Trying, a half-hour comedy about a couple with fertility problems. I thought this was my Chernobyl, but sadly it was my Winds of War. I was a new dad with a time-consuming day job, whilst still working to finish it in March 2020 when AppleTV announced Trying, a half-hour comedy about a couple with fertility problems.

I could get into the differences between the ideas, for instance they’re not actually trying anymore, they’re seeking to adopt. But the underlying lesson remains. I dragged my feet and someone else who had a similar and probably better idea got it made. Can’t say you all didn’t warn me.

So to my fellow listener, it’s not only that other people have the same general idea as you. They can have literally the same idea as you down to the title. For an aspiring writer the struggle of infertility could not have been any more real than to watch someone else get to have the little writing baby I imagined for myself.

This is all to say that I agree very strongly with both of you that no one has a 100 percent claim on an idea or concept, putting aside all that legal stuff about owning ideas. If you had the thought someone else has had it as well. In the best case you are in a race to see who can get theirs over the finish line first. I dragged and my heels and now I need to find another darling to work on. It’s OK. Grappling with infertility gave me a much more nuanced perspective on other people’s successes. Congrats Andy Walton. And what kind of let downs I am actually capable of absorbing.

**Craig:** Wow. Ezra, you’re a grownup.

**John:** Yeah. Listen to grownup Ezra there.

**Craig:** Yeah. What an adult. It’s refreshing to hear an adult speak in an adult fashion about adult things. And, yes, that hurts. I get it. I don’t necessarily know that it’s over-over, because TV shows come and go. And also there’s very different kinds of TV shows that often have very similar premises. I mean, if you had an idea for a show about a group of detectives that use forensics to solve crimes, well, if you heard about another one it wouldn’t stop you. There are 12 on the air.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There can more than one show. And so one of the things is asking yourself what is it about their show that is inherently different than the way you would have done yours. Is there a different way to swing it around? Can you make it a different kind of couple? What is it inherent to that story that you love? Is there a way to repurpose it and rethink it? But it’s also perfectly fine to let it go and move on. And you’re absolutely right. Any idea that anyone is working on, it’s already in the work somewhere else.

You know what I love about Ezra is that he didn’t do the thing that seemingly 90 percent of ding-a-lings do which is like, “I’m suing.” No. Yes, sometimes people come up with the same idea. And even the title. Trying. It makes sense. That’s pretty much what people call it. Yup, we’re trying. So, yeah, you know, you’re going to be good, Ezra.

**John:** You’re going to be good. I want to go back to our conversation about loglines because it feels like really what it comes down is that the logline for Ezra’s show and the show that’s on Apple right now are the same. They have the same title. But that show by its concept is going to be incredibly execution-dependent.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** This is not like a meteor is headed towards the earth. This is relatable humans doing relatable human things. And the general situation, the framing, the premise has an overlap, but that’s really about it. So, the thing that Ezra is writing, it doesn’t just go away because this other show exists. And so Ezra you should finish that thing. It’s probably a great writing sample for you for working on your next thing and could be hired to do other stuff.

I’d pick a different title just so it doesn’t get confused with the thing that’s out there.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** But you did great. The reason why I wanted to play this is that so often on the show we’ve talked about like somebody stole my idea. And it just doesn’t happen. People have the same ideas. They have incredibly, specifically similar ideas. And this is an example of that. So thank you for sharing that.

**Craig:** Terrific. Thank you, Ezra, that’s awesome.

**John:** Also, last week we talked about lawyers and I asked our listeners, hey, if you have advice for how you got a lawyer or ways to get a lawyer if you’re an unsigned writer how to do it. People wrote in because we have the best listeners. So do you want to take Susan from LA?

**Craig:** Yeah. Susan from LA says, “Go to IMDb Pro,” I see you’ve got to get that account, “and pull up well-regarded recent indie films or documentaries. Scroll down the crew list until you find legal counsel. Then Google that person and check out their law firm home page. You can also look at Variety/Hollywood Reporter,” well who knows, Varollywood Reporter’s “power lawyer lists, but they’re a bit pricy and will require a larger retainer upfront.”

**John:** Susan’s first idea there is phenomenal.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I don’t know why I didn’t think about that. But as I look at–

**Craig:** You’re bad.

**John:** Yeah. I’m bad.

**Craig:** You’re bad.

**John:** As I look at like the attorney who helped me out with The Nines and sort of does independent film like that, it’s exactly their kind of gig. It’s what they do. And reach out to them. They can probably do it for you and they have experience doing this kind of stuff. So that feels like a great place to start.

**Craig:** And a month of IMDb Pro is, what, like $12 or something?

**John:** Oh yeah. That’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you can totally do that. Erin writes, “In my experience legit entertainment lawyers are not asking for money upfront, at least that’s how mine operates. It is for future commission. Granted, my manager referred me, but this is what I’ve anecdotally heard as well. I do my due diligence before paying cash for an option red line. There will certainly be good attorneys willing to do it for free with the idea that they will receive commissions once you start to get paid.”

I disagree with Erin there.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I don’t think Erin is correct at all.

**John:** I don’t think so.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And here’s the difference. I think because Erin is coming in here with a manager I think that manager is talking to that attorney and saying like, “Hey, this is a kid who I think is going to do well here. Maybe you do this for free and then you become his lawyer.” That’s not the general case situation.

**Craig:** No. I mean, lawyers in the entertainment business do an enormous amount of work on commission. Your lawyer does. My lawyer does. But that’s based on the notion that they’re negotiating employment contracts or the purchase of literary material. Those are large sales or large employments. Something where someone is coming in and saying, “I need you to look through this option agreement,” which may absolutely turn into nothing – no, that lawyer is almost certainly going to charge you some kind of hourly rate. They would be nuts not to. Because they can certainly say, “And by the way if you’re happy for this and it works out when it’s time to do the employment contract come back. That is done on commission. You don’t have to pay upfront for that at all.”

But, no, I don’t think there’s going to be good attorneys willing to do these option agreements for free. No.

**John:** I agree. I think your first choice of find the person who does this for independent films or just get other recommendations from people in similar situations is going to be better serving you for that first contract which as I recall last week is about like a $1 option agreement and a red-lining.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s not a situation – commission on a $1 – not worth it.

**Craig:** Ten cents. Five cents. Sorry, a nickel.

**John:** Five cents for an attorney. All right let’s get to a craft topic. I want to talk about dual dialogue because this week I’ve been writing scenes that have a lot of dual dialogue in it which is not something I often do. And I want to – we’ve discussed on Episode 370, we talked about simultaneity, basically when two events have to happen in the same time, but dual dialogue is a specific kind of that where people are just overlapping. And we may want the overlap for effect. We may need to hear information from two different sides. There’s a reason why we’re doing. It’s always a choice to do dual dialogue. And let’s talk about when you make that choice and how you might portray that on the page.

**Craig:** It is a little bit of a trap because if you watch movies, particularly certain kinds of movies where it’s very conversational, very dialogue heavy, almost all of it at times will seem like it’s overlapping somewhat. And so there’s a temptation to think this is going to make it realer. If I do dual dialogue it will make things look realer. The problem with dual dialogue is that it is such a heavy-handed instruction to everybody. Everybody is now going oh my god I have to actually – we are talking at the same time over each other very specifically. This isn’t a natural overlapping but a forced overlapping. So you have to be very deliberate, I think, about when you use it. It really comes into play rarely. I must say maybe three or four times in a script it’ll pop up. And even then I feel like I could probably get away with two of them, you know, get rid of two of them or something.

**John:** Yeah. So I think we often confuse and conflate it with people speaking quickly.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I think in a lot of movies that we see and we love we think they’re overlapping, but really they’re actually just speaking quickly. And they’re anticipating their next lines. There’s just not pauses between things. But they literally are not stacked on top of each other. So, we see a tool in Highland or in Final Draft that gives us the ability to dual dialogue and we think like, oh, that must be the way you do it. And I’ll tell you that on the page often that’s not how you do it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So some of the choices you might make is as a parenthetical “overlapping,” basically saying like there may be scene description that says all of this is overlapping. Basically don’t wait to clear the other person’s lines before you start talking. That it’s meant to be sort of on top of each other.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** For example, Call Me by Your Name, there’s a sequence in which he’s sitting at the table and the parents and these other visitors are just all talking over each other. And it’s not important what they’re actually saying. It’s the experience of being there listening to that. And so that’s probably just an overlapping because it just doesn’t actually matter what the individual people are saying.

Other cases, you are very specifically trying to get information out there. So, we had Noah Baumbach on for Marriage Story. We had Greta Gerwig on for Little Women. And in those scripts, you can go back to those episodes and look at the PDFs, they’re very specific about where those overlaps are and you are supposed to be hearing what everyone is saying. And the fact that they are overlapping becomes very important. Be thinking about what the actual effect is you’re trying to achieve.

**Craig:** Yeah. But there are those moments where it really is the perfect tool. Like you say, it’s not frequent. I mean, for standard overlapping for casual overlapping you don’t want to do this. It is a heavy-handed instruction to everybody. But, then there are times where somebody is going to try and talk over another person. Arguments, for instance, where someone is going to be talking and the other person starts talking as if to say, “No, you stop talking,” but the first person will not stop talking. Or, situations in comedies sometimes where two people are trying to explain the same thing at once. It is a moment where it is absolutely required that two people are speaking intentionally over each other with knowledge that they’re speaking over each other and neither one of them is going to stop. That’s pretty much the best case use for dual dialogue.

**John:** Yeah. Basically neither one of them is yielding the floor to the other person to speak.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So even the conversation that you and I are having right now, we are anticipating when I’m going to stop talking and you’re going to start talking. But along the way I might try to shout over you a little bit. I may do an acknowledgment, which I think is a special case we should talk about here, which is the uh-huhs, the yeahs, if you’re doing The Daily, the New York Times podcast, it’s Michael Barbaro’s “Huh.” It’s that signal that you’re still part of it.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** So those are all meaningful things. And sometimes you’re going to choose as a writer to actually break up someone’s dialogue with that “huh,” that acknowledgment. But that’s rare. It would also be rare to put that “uh-huh” in a dual dialogue. So you’re going to make choices. Basically I’m saying you may not put every utterance of a person in the dialogue of your script.

**Craig:** And when you are there you are going to find some sort of naturalistic language that comes out. One of the stark differences between play text, from a playwright, and screenplay text from a screenwriter is that the play text is designed to be performed by as many different actors as possible. Whereas the screenwriting text will be performed by one. And unless there’s some remake of the movie 30 years later, it’s one person. So there is going to be a certain tailoring and idiosyncratic adjustment to that single performer as opposed to a play.

So actually I do see dual dialogue frequently when I look at plays, when I read plays. It seems like that gets called out quite a bit because it’s formalized. Whereas in movies not so much. It is a decent tool. It’s very useful for songs, when you’re writing songs in movies, and two people are singing at once. It’s perfectly useful. But I think it’s probably good to ask yourself do I need it. It is not fun to read.

**John:** It’s brutal to read.

**Craig:** I’ll say on the page. Yeah. If you see a page where it’s just strips of dual dialogue your eyelids will get heavy.

**John:** Yeah. Because you have to make the choice of, OK, am I going to read the left hand column and then go back and read the right hand column? It’s a lot of work.

**Craig:** It’s also hard to imagine. And you know we can play one voice in our head at once. We can’t play two. We just can’t.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, you’re asking something there. Just use it – when you use it know that it is very intentional, very purposeful. It is a heavy spice, so sprinkle it with restraint.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to a question. Patrick writes in, “I was hoping you could discuss the singular they/them/their pronoun in reference to many non-binary people. I used singular they pronouns in a recent script for a non-binary character. It was a period piece where singular they was never used in dialogue, but it felt like the correct way to identify this seemingly genderless character in action lines. I referred to the character as androgynous in an introductory character description, and aimed to avoid pronoun confusion so it would be clear when the they referred to this character specifically versus multiple characters at once.

“However, I’m still worried that readers may be confused or distracted by the singular they. I want to leave it like it is, but I’m not sure I should. Have you had any experience using singular they in scripts, or reading scripts where others have? Would you advise us to use or not use it? And is a disclaimer necessary?”

**Craig:** Well, there is a natural singular they/them/their usage anyway. It’s not completely foreign to our longstanding use of the English language. When there is a gender – what would you call it – ignorance, I don’t know–

**John:** You just don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t know if this is a man or a woman, so it says the police officers walk in, adjust their guns, I guess that’s plural. But there’s ways where you do use it. I think if it’s a non-binary character I would probably want to call it out early and say I’m going to be using, just for the reader, just let them know I’m going to be using they/them/their because they’re non-binary. And maybe I might capitalize it inside of sentences if I am using a lot of other pluralized they/them/theirs for other people so as to not create confusion. But probably I would just call it out early on and not let…

So it says I refer to the character as androgynous. I would have added and I will be referring to this character, meaning I will be referring to them as they/them/their.

**John:** Yeah. I think Patrick is right to plan for – there’s a difference between the dialogue that we’re hearing as an audience, are we going to get confused by the they/them/theirs which can be a challenge? Because in real life conversations, like we have friends who have a non-binary kid, and the they/them/theirs are–

**Craig:** It’s tricky.

**John:** It can be tricky just because sometimes you don’t know, wait, are they talking about the group? Understanding whether you’re talking about the individual or the group can be tricky with it. That said, we’ve used it in English for centuries. We’ve used this as a singular thing for a long time when we didn’t know what gender to apply to a person that we’re talking about.

So I would say for Patrick if the dialogue and it becomes important to say this person uses they/them/theirs I would call that out just so that it’s not confusing in dialogue. In many cases it may be possible, because you have the luxury of time, you’re not actually speaking this aloud, to find sentence constructions where it just doesn’t become an issue and where you end up using the character’s name rather than a they/them/their. Basically just use the proper noun rather than the pronoun and you may not have this much of a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s going to be hard to only do that. Because it can kind of get–

**John:** For a supporting character. For a character who only has a certain number of scenes, maybe you’ll be fine.

**Craig:** Sure. You can avoid it. But, yes, you’re right. We have this usage where it’s like the child brought their pet in to show the class. That is a normal usage we have for a singular person with the their. It’s in our minds, so you just have to spell it out for people early on that that’s what you’re doing. And by the way, if people are confused then they’re confused. Because that’s part of the deal is like our pronouns have not caught up necessarily to the way we’re starting to look at people and their gender. So there’s going to be some confusion. And, you know, you can just acknowledge that. Sometimes honesty is the best policy.

You can just say, “If you get confused it’s understandable. That’s kind of how it goes.” And they will try. I think most readers when they see something like that they’ll at least know that you’re acknowledging it. If you don’t acknowledge it then they’re going to think like I don’t know if Patrick understands how confusing this is. If you acknowledge then they’re like, OK, he knows how confusing this is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or they know how confusing it is. I don’t know if Patrick is binary.

**John:** Let’s do one last question here.

**Craig:** All right. Theo asks, “I’m a big fan of the podcast. It’s a phenomenal resource to both learn about screenwriting and to distract myself from screenwriting. I have a question though for John about his #writesprints. They seem straightforward if the purpose of the sprint is to write scenes from an outline. But how do you structure them when the project you’re working on is still in the development phase and you’re doing more brainstorming and character discovery?”

John, can you explain the nature of your tyrannical write sprints to Theo?

**John:** So, with write sprints this is when I sort of declare on Twitter that starting at the top of the hour for the next 60 minutes I’m going to be writing and just writing, no distractions, no nothing else. And then I’ll see in 60 minutes, and if people want to join in and do it that’s great. And this is an idea I took from Jane Espenson who is another former guest who is just phenomenal.

I’m using doing write sprints when I’m in scenes. When I’m doing real scene work or in the case of the Arlo Finch books when I was writing chapters. But I will also use them for outlining phase. Basically if I want to do a solid hour of work and not be distracted that’s the same thing as a write sprint. And so it’s just being purposeful for a period of time about the work I want to be doing. That counts as a write sprint.

If you’re doing an outline, maybe you’re not generating the same number of words, but if you really are figuring out stuff that’s what this is. It’s basically just trying to be single-minded on a project for a period of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. I find sometimes that if I’m in the state of progress that Theo is in that the best version of the write sprint is the write walk, where I take a walk. And I just go, well, I’m going to go walking around thinking about this. And I’m going to turn around and head back when I feel like I’ve achieved something in my mind, some sort of clarity or construction.

I don’t do formal write sprints like you do for actual generating pages. I just mostly wait until I’m disgusted with myself and then I start – but I only write in write sprints. That’s just my natural way of doing it. When it’s time, it happens.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, I’ve just never been a slogger. I’ve never been a like I’m going to sit down for a three-hour session and get stuff done, because I just found that those were not productive to me.

**Craig:** No, like I know what I’m supposed to do. I know where I am. I know who is in it. I know what’s going to happen. I know what they say. Now just do it, stupid. And then eventually I do it. And when I do it I do it. I get lost completely in it and I do it until it’s done. So, that’s basically my day, day after day, every day for the last 25 years. Good lord. Geesh.

**John:** Good lord. All right, it’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article that Ashley Nicole Black linked to. It’s an article in the New Station with Judith Butler. And she’s a professor, writer, gender theorist. And it was a discussion of trans-exclusionary radical feminism, which I knew about only because JK Rowling was associated with it. Basically JK Rowling just kept saying dumb things. And everyone said like that’s a dumb thing to say. And she would just double down on dumb things.

What I liked about this article was that Judith Butler was just so masterful at being able to sort of cut through the questions. Basically just challenge the premise of the questions. If you’re just curious about like how to handle arguments, or how to sort of deal with controversial topics being thrown at you I thought she just did a very smart job of dismantling what was being thrown her way and presenting it back in a way so that you basically can’t even like hit the ball back. It’s like, oh, crap, I can’t even do that.

So, an example sentence here. She says, “Women should not engage in the form of phobic caricature by which they’ve traditionally been demeaned. And by women I mean all those who identify that way.” And so she can just take some of the arguments being tossed her way and look at them and saying, nope, I’m taking this apart and giving it back to you.

So I just recommend people check that out because it gave me a good education in some of the terms and thinking behind this and also going back 30 years. So, I’ll put a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** So far afield from what you just said. My One Cool Thing this week is you and your fellow party members in our Dungeons & Dragons game. You guys made me so proud.

**John:** We did pretty well last week.

**Craig:** You did great. So, one of the things about being a Dungeon Master is you are not in control of anything. You are gently creating situations and then your characters do things and you have to react in an endlessly improvisational way. You have to hold boundaries, but you have to know when to be flexible. You have to know when to be rigid. And the whole point is to create situations that ultimately are fun, not necessarily fun in a kind of I put my videogame on god mode way fun, but fun in a sometimes my heart is pounding a little bit and sometimes there’s danger.

And last week you guys just played beautifully. You were collaborating and you were being creative and you weren’t all seeking individual glory but working as a team. And you defeated a very difficult enemy. And you defeated that enemy I would say handily.

**John:** Yeah. It was surprising. And I was definitely the person who was most nervous going into that encounter. What I will say was galvanizing and this is probably applicable to anybody thinking about storytelling is that this group of protagonists were only able to come together after the death of one of their party members.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And basically it took a death for us to analyze what went wrong and how do we avoid making that same mistake again. And so I feel like looking at those moments of failure and learning from them is such a fundamental thing in both life and in fiction. And I was happy that we were able to do that and sort of go into this next encounter with really not just a plan but – because stuff happens and you sometimes can’t follow that plan. But a set of principles in terms of what we are going to try to do and what are priorities are going to be. And by sticking to those principles and each person rising to do the thing that they are best equipped to do we were able to defeat this really far too challenging of a future for us to be facing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you did it perfectly. And you guys have come a long way. And it makes sense. As you go through these things, just like in regular screenplays and stories, the character gains abilities and talents and insight and then the question is what are you going to do with it. That’s the booby prize of life is insight, as the great Dennis Palumbo says. What are you going to do with it?

And so you get all these powers and then, ooh, like we can polymorph people. And there was a session we had where one of our wizards polymorphed one of the bad guys into a dolphin while in a bar fight, which was smart on the one hand.

**John:** Don’t bring a dolphin to a bar fight.

**Craig:** Yeah, don’t. Because the dolphin doesn’t need to be in water to breathe. And the dolphin can hit people that are five feet away from it. And so it did. And everybody was upset. But I’m like that was a bad choice. You could have made it a lot of other things. And you chose to make it the worst possible water thing.

Well, this time around much smarter and thoughtful and just working things through. Because you’ve grown into your powers, which is exciting, because it’s going to get more and more dangerous as you go. Just like life. But I was so proud of you guys. You did such a good job. It was a joy to DM and I can’t wait to kill more of you later.

**John:** Aw. Nice. Tonight–

**Craig:** Oh, that’s right, tonight. You know what, I probably won’t kill any of you tonight. Not tonight.

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. So stick around after the credits if you’re a Premium member because we’re going to talk about Halloween. But meanwhile Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Med Dyer. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We have t-shirts and they’re great. Go to Cotton Bureau to find those.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Hey Craig. Halloween is coming up.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** It’s always the end of October. Growing up I loved candy so I liked Halloween for that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But if I’m being honest I was never a big Halloween person. Were you a Halloween person as a kid?

**Craig:** Well, I was. I was. So on Staten Island Halloween had more of an anarchistic feel. So, I was a good kid and my parents were very strict, so I had to put on my stupid costume. Remember the costumes, they were like vinyl? And then you had the plastic mask that you could stick your tongue out of the rectangular little mouth-hole that would then cut your tongue.

**John:** Uh-huh. And it sort of hurt your tongue. And it had the elastic that went to the back.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** And the mask could crack really easily, too.

**Craig:** Oh, absolutely. And the suit, “suit,” was just like a vinyl apron that tied in the back and had a smell on it, like an off-gas and plastic smell that almost certainly took years off of our life. And I would go out with that and my little hallowed out plastic pumpkin candy holder.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the other kids, like if you were slightly older, it was shaving cream and eggs. They would throw eggs on everything and they would put shaving cream everywhere. So my memory, my sense memory of Halloween is the smell of Noxzema or whatever that shaving cream was, or Barbasol. Walking around, getting candy. And my sister and I after it was over would sit down in my room, we would dump it all out on the floor, and then we would begin to barter. Because I liked certain things and she liked certain things. And you make the swaps.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Loved it.

**John:** Bartering is important. And obviously I had an older brother and there’s, of course, the manipulation that happens both as the younger brother and as the older brother.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Now, did you have something growing up where the school district, I think it was the school district, maybe it was the city, they really wanted kids home by a certain point. I think by 8pm they wanted all kids home. Maybe it was it was like 7. It was really early.

**Craig:** This was New York. They were dealing with Son of Sam. They didn’t have time to worry about us.

**John:** So we had a thing where at school we had to fill out this little form with your phone number and then parent volunteers would say this is the goblin calling to make sure you’re home.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** And then it was like a raffle. If you actually were home you could win a pizza party.

**Craig:** Well that feels really actually quite frightening in a Handmaid’s Tale sort of way.

**John:** Goblin calling.

**Craig:** This is the goblin calling to make sure you are home before 8pm when the witches come out.

**John:** So basically they’re going to have a stranger call children at their house.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s really what the whole plan was.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is all backward. But we grew up, you know, John, the kids today don’t get it. We grew up in a time of full-throated panic. Gary Goldman has an amazing – this is my second One Cool Thing, my bonus One Cool Thing. Gary Goldman has an amazing standup special called The Great Depresh about his depression.

**John:** Oh, yeah, I’ve watched it. It’s good.

**Craig:** And Gary Goldman is just a legendarily good standup. And he talks about how in the ‘70s growing up America was inflicted with this notion that children were being snatched off the streets constantly. Some guy went on the news and said 50,000 American kids are being stolen and kidnapped off the streets every year when it turns out actually it was like 200 people. So, everyone went crazy. We lived in a time when we would go to school, we would get milk at school, and there would be some lost child’s face on the milk carton.

Everyone was in a panic, all the time. As he said vans used to be beloved, and now they were objects of fear. So around Halloween there was this additional aspect of the whole point of Halloween is someone is going to put a razorblade in an apple. No one wants the apple. No one wants the apple.

**John:** It never happened. No.

**Craig:** No one wants the apple anyway. Go ahead, put razorblades in the apple. No one will ever get cut. No kid is eating the apple. And also, no, no. That’s not lunatics work.

**John:** But it got to the point where you would take your candy and they would x-ray it at the hospital, which is just absurd.

**Craig:** Insane. Now you’re radiating food. It’s just insane.

**John:** So, Craig, you’re saying things are much, much better now because all we have is QAnon.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** I think there’s a natural progression from this fear of an outsider coming. Antifa is going to poison your kids’ candy.

**Craig:** Antifa and QAnon are the new razorblade and apple of our lives. One quick question. When you – because we grew up at the same time there were probably the same weirdo candies floating around that aren’t much of today. What were some of your favorites, like in terms of the weird ones?

**John:** I was always a Milky Way. Milky Way is go to. If I wanted a candy bar it was a Milky Way. Nothing against Snickers. No one wants a Three Musketeers.

**Craig:** You’re wrong. See, here’s the thing. You’re normcore. You’re so normcore.

**John:** Oh, 100 percent. I’m completely normcore.

**Craig:** Oh my god. You’re so normcore. I was all about the weird ones. I loved the Three Musketeers.

**John:** And the Marathons.

**Craig:** I loved how light it was. Marathon. I was also a fan of those old creepy candies from the ‘50s like the Mary Janes. Loved Mary Janes.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I know. What is it? It’s made of plastic and nuts and dirt and sugar. I don’t know. Delicious.

**John:** A recent episode of The Boys, the second season, show on Amazon, they talk about the island of misfit candy bars. And people who are fans of the Bit-O-Honeys and stuff like that.

**Craig:** I love Bit-O-Honey. Love it. Most of the things that I liked tended to be mostly wax, I think.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Didn’t like those things that you have to like–

**John:** What was the wax bottles with a sugary thing inside? Who thought that was a good idea?

**Craig:** Those, the wax industry? Honestly the wax manufacturers of America had figured out. Those were called – I can’t remember what they were called. But, yeah, you would bit the top off and then drink the sugar liquid out and be left with just a tasteless thing of wax.

**John:** Wax. Yeah. Good stuff. Or like Wax Lips and other stuff like that.

**Craig:** Wax Lips. And of course the candy cigarettes which were the greatest.

**John:** It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** Teach your kids.

**John:** So this year’s Halloween, I thought Halloween would just get canceled, but then if you think about it it’s like, you know what, kids are already wearing masks. They put a mask over their mask. It’s actually not that dangerous. You’re outdoors. I say let the kids trick or treat.

**Craig:** Well, I think trick or treating has been somewhat canceled or something. I don’t know.

**John:** Over the years or for this year specifically?

**Craig:** No, for this year. I think that they have sort of said maybe don’t do it. I have looked up by the way what those things were called. The wax bottle liquid stuff. They were called Nik-L-Nip Wax Bottles. Nik-L-Nip. I don’t know why it’s called that.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** But that’s what they were called. Sounds kind of dirty.

**John:** It does sound dirty. Like some sort of…yeah.

**Craig:** You would bite it and drink it and it’s nasty.

**John:** Yeah. I just don’t know why the wax companies needed to do that. I mean, they said extra wax.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I think that was probably what it was. Someone was like, “You know, we could take this extra wax and put some sugar in it and morons will drink it.” They were right.

They were right.

**John:** So, Craig, Happy Halloween.

**Craig:** Happy Halloween, John.

 

Links:

* [Movie Releases Pushed](https://twitter.com/ErikDavis/status/1308814242569580544)
* [Black Widow Shifted to Summer 2021](https://deadline.com/2020/09/black-widow-jumps-to-summer-2021-spurring-marvel-pics-release-date-shift-west-side-story-delayed-a-year-soul-stays-theatrical-1234582771/)
* [Quibi Sale](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2020-09-23/quibi-sale-value-bidders-katzenberg-whitman)
* [All the Trades are Basically One Company](https://deadline.com/2020/09/pmc-mrc-form-publishing-content-venture-that-brings-rolling-stone-thr-billboard-vibe-under-one-roof-1234582626/)
* [UTA Raises Assistant Pay](https://variety.com/2020/film/news/uta-raises-assistant-pay-agency-wide-new-average-hits-24-per-hour-exclusive-1234778549/)
* [WGA Election Results Board of Directors](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/writers-guild-west-unveils-board-of-directors-election-results)
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 465](https://johnaugust.com/2020/scriptnotes-episode-465-the-lackeys-know-what-theyre-doing-transcript)
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 370](https://johnaugust.com/2018/scriptnotes-ep-370-two-things-at-the-same-time-transcript)
* [Judith Butler on the Culture Wars, JK Rowling and Living in “Anti-Intellectual Times”](https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [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 Med Dyer ([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/470standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/should-you-pitch-or-spec-that).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. And this is Episode 468 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is gone today, but luckily we get to welcome back our favorite north of the border screenwriter, Ryan Knighton. Ryan, welcome back to the show.

**Ryan Knighton:** I love that I’m your favorite north of the border. I think Vancouver is basically the northern suburb of Los Angeles at this point.

**John:** I didn’t want to get too narrow, because I could say like our favorite blind Canadian screenwriter. But really that just becomes insulting at some point.

**Ryan:** Then they’d be like well which one are you talking about.

**John:** Yeah. But you proposed – I’m so happy you’re here – because you proposed our main topic for today. So tell us what the question is that you asked that we will try to answer today.

**Ryan:** Well, the simplest way to put it was my question to you was what goes into the strategy between choosing whether you pitch a project or spec a project. And I know like there’s different conversations probably for whether we’re talking about television or feature, we can get into that. But it kind of came up recently for me, and I think it has for a lot of people, because of the pandemic. You know, the industry has really hit a kind of parenthesis since March and we’re waiting for the other end of that parenthesis.

But it’s made me rethink sort of my assumptions about how to take out a project and how best to put food on the table really in this time. So that’s what I was thinking about, because I don’t want to take anything for granted anymore. I mean, I’ve always assumed I had a certain approach to selling projects and now I don’t know if that’s sort of the right way.

**John:** Well let’s stay into that today. So that’s going to be our main topic. And so I reached out to a bunch of our Premium subscribers and asked for their questions about this. And so we will talk through your projects, my projects, and their projects to figure out what makes sense to pitch, what makes sense to write yourself, and hopefully figure out for 2020 what is the best approach.

I also want to talk today about the Academy put out new requirements for Best Picture. And there’s also questions about options and lawyers, so we’ll see if we can answer those questions. And then in our bonus segment for Premium members I want to talk to you about how you plan to spend this year training to become an amazing surfer and how you’re going to become a competitive surfer apparently. That’s what you–

**Ryan:** Critical screenwriting information for everybody.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s all about Canadian surfing. That’s really what this podcast is about. Hey, so let’s get started with some news. You saw this piece that the Academy is changing the rules for eligibility for Best Picture starting I think in 2023. Did you have an initial take on this? What was your read on these changes?

**Ryan:** Long overdue. It’s interesting, sort of the criteria that they’re using that there are sort of four categories I believe it is and sort of two of them must be met to be eligible for Best Picture, I looked at it and I thought, well, when you have a logjam sometimes you need a blunt tool. And I don’t necessarily think it’s the most elegant solution to a cultural problem. But sometimes you’ve got to kind of kick at the logjam in a very blunt way to get things moving. And obviously the status quo hasn’t been working. And meritocracy is not an argument when we haven’t seen a lot of change happening.

So, I welcome it. I don’t know what sort of the long view of this is. Because maybe this is what we needed all along. Maybe this is a great solution. But I don’t know, what do you think? Where is your mind at?

**John:** Let’s try to describe what it is, because it’s actually complicated. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to what the actual criteria are and how you can meet your eligibility requirements. And this is only for Best Picture, not for any other category. But essentially there’s four basic ways in. There’s four tiers that you need to hit. And within those there are specific requirements of things you can do.

So the first one is about the representation onscreen. So these are actors in roles that are being portrayed by historically underrepresented groups, so including different ethnic groups, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people. So that’s one way in.

**Ryan:** Canadian surfers.

**John:** Canadian surfers. I was thinking you and me together, you’ve got the gay screenwriter, you’ve got the blind writer. There’s some way to packet us together and we can make a Best Picture.

The second way in is the talent behind the lens. And so these are like you and me writers, directors, casting directors, costumers. So all the people who are not in front of the lens. And so representation among those groups. And that first category is also about the subject matter of the picture itself, and so that can be a fact that pushes you across the line.

Beyond that, you can look at sort of the studio or financier behind it. And so if they have programs that bolster inclusion that is a way to meet that requirement. Or the marketing and publicity engine behind the release of the film, if they have representation that meets certain requirements that can do it.

And so one of the natural first things you think about is like, OK, well there’s certain movies that it’s going to be hard to hit those requirements if it’s just about representation onscreen. So classically like a WWII war movie, it may not be possible to have a lot of different representation onscreen. That’s part of the reason why there’s other ways to sort of hit those requirements.

So, will it work? I don’t know. I think the reality that everyone is frustrated by this announcement probably means that it was pitched just about right in that people feel it doesn’t go far enough or it goes too far. So, in that way it may be sort of that sweet spot of actually making some changes. I think I could imagine that a studio looking at making a picture is going to have to be thoughtful about how they’re going to achieve these requirements and in thinking about how they’re going to achieve these requirements they may make some decisions that will bolster inclusion within the industry. I guess that’s the best case scenario for me of what’s happening here.

**Ryan:** It seems to me too like it’s a way of encouraging better behavior. Again, it’s sort of a blunt tool, but I think it’s a way of also just creating better habits in the way we think about how we both work behind the camera and in front of the camera and the stories we tell.

I think it’s also, you know, the other thing that kind of gets muted by this is what are we afraid of here by putting something like this in place? It’s not like they’ve put it in place rules that say you can’t make a movie if you don’t have these things. It’s just for the Best Picture nominations. And it’s interesting because I think your movies will change by virtue of the people that you include in all those aspects. I mean, it helps inform story. It helps inform sort of the point of view of the way that story is told. I don’t see a reason to be afraid of that.

**John:** I don’t really either. And especially in terms of looking at the behind the scenes talent, you might say like, OK, well it’s hard for us to find people that meet these requirements. It’s like well that is actually the problem and actually by incentivizing you to find those people you actually are increasing the supply of those people who you want to see more of in this industry.

Naturally I think everyone looks back at the work they’ve done before and figure out like, oh, which of the movies I’ve worked on would meet these requirements? And so I can’t say exhaustively sort of all the movies I’ve worked on. Some of them would, some of them would not. And you always have to, when you look back, be thinking about, OK, yes, but I was making that movie in 2003 and this is 2020. So I would be making different choices regardless.

So a movie like Big Fish it doesn’t meet some of the requirements in terms of onscreen representation, but I think probably would make different choices that would hit some of those things. Behind the scenes you had me, a gay screenwriter, and a bunch of gay producers. And that would help achieve some of those behind the scenes things. But it also would have come out of Columbia Pictures which would have by its nature had had better representation within those category three and category four requirements.

So I feel like it’s easy to think, oh, well a bunch of those old movies would not qualify. Yes, but if those movies were made today you would be making different choices anyway, so therefore they’re more likely to be qualifying.

**Ryan:** It’s interesting, too, you know, in terms of my TV experience going back to one of the first writer’s rooms I was in I learned later that even though I’m disabled I didn’t qualify as a diversity hire within that room. So it’s interesting to think like even between TV and film sort of the definitions of diversity are quite different.

**John:** Yeah. That feels like a big oversight. I hope that is something that everyone is looking at correcting. And we should stipulate that in terms of TV writer’s rooms the studio might have standards for diversity, the Writers Guild might have standards for diversity. There’s not sort of one governing body the way that the Academy is trying to look at diversity in terms of this Best Picture requirement.

So that TV writer’s room you were talking about was for In the Dark, the CW show, right?

**Ryan:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So tell me about that. That was the first TV show writer’s room you were in and we’ll put a link in the show notes to the episode where you talk about your experience being in that room. And you just went through that room again, right? Because you just finished writing a new season.

**Ryan:** We just finished season – I just stepped off season three. Yeah. We did one week in the room and then we went remote to Zoom. And I completed my time in the room off Zoom, which was kind of fascinating.

**John:** Because I know you were in town briefly and then you departed, so I had hoped to see you while you were here in Los Angeles. But what was your experience finishing that season on Zoom? And as a blind writer are there additional challenges being on Zoom, or in a weird way are you used to just sort of being in audio format and just talking it out? What was the experience like for you writing the rest of that season on Zoom?

**Ryan:** You just hit the nail on the head. You must be a good writer. You immediately imagined my point of view. Yes, it was a lot like my life experience insofar as siting in the room I might as well be on a conference call because I don’t see anything anyway. So, Zoom was sort of – I’ve talked to other people who have done Zoom rooms so far and one of the things I found most people say is they were surprised by the efficiency of it. That it seemed to get rid of a lot of the – you know, nobody wants to stay on Zoom for very long. So, there’s a kind of push to get the work done and there’s a kind of push to be decisive. And I found that part of it kind of fascinating how it really leaned out the way people creatively work together.

And we started back at the beginning of March and to sort of see the tools evolve of finding like, you know, we went for the first while without any sort of shared idea of a whiteboard working in the Zoom environment. And then eventually they came on, I think it was with Miro. We tried Google Docs for a while but it didn’t quite work efficiently with people being on the call.

But I found it was fascinating because my ability to work was not changed very much by it. I still had sort of a shifting sandcastle in my head of what would have been on the board. And I was still just listening to voices in an environment. I’ve heard other people say they find it visually exhausting to be on Zoom when the cameras are on. And I sort of question whether or not you actually need the cameras on in a writer’s room.

By the end I know other writers were telling me from other rooms that they were turning off their cameras. That they were actually turning it into more of a conference call. And they found that that was less exhausting. I don’t know. Not being a sighted person, I don’t know what the experience of that is like. Have you found that?

**John:** Yeah. Craig and I actually had a discussion about getting notes on Zoom and that we felt like weirdly it was better than being in a room or better than a conference call because it split the difference in terms of being able to be present and make clear that you’re paying attention and also to read people’s reactions and see what else is happening. Because on a conference call it’s never clear whose time it is to speak. It’s just challenging that way. And so having the visual information was helpful for us.

But I also suspect that for you having navigated as a non-sighted person for so many years you have a better sense of these cues. You can keep people’s voices straight a little better than other people could. And so that may be an advantage you have when it’s just an audio environment.

**Ryan:** Well, one thing I did notice is that the shift away from the central power of the whiteboard for a while was kind of fascinating. Because everybody was working more in a verbal environment. We still would have things like Google Docs and stuff to refer to, but I found when everybody had to move into sort of storytelling mode basically you couldn’t just look at the board and be comforted by all the writing on the board telling you that you’ve done lots of work and there was an episode in there somewhere. Because we had to keep telling acts or beats I found that the diagnostic of whether story was working was a lot different. Because when it comes out of your mouths you can tell when a story flags in a way that you don’t necessarily feel by just looking at a whiteboard and seeing a list of beats.

So, I think the empowerment of just verbal storytelling by the Zoom environment has been kind of an interesting change in the way a room is calibrated and sort of how we process the story that we’re working on.

**John:** Now in a previous episode where we talked about your experience in the room you said how important it was to be able to read the notes of the room, to read what the writers’ assistants were typing up so you could keep up to speed with stuff. And so sometimes during breaks you’d have them send you the document so you could read it on your phone and catch up on where stuff was at. How did that change and how did your experience of working with the text change when it became a Zoom situation?

**Ryan:** It pretty much stayed the same. We still had assistants on there taking notes. And at the end of the day we’d get the notes and you could read them at night and be prepared for what you were going to pitch the next day. So I didn’t find it changed very much.

I think the one thing I found really missing was there’s sort of less of a sense in a room, I don’t know if you know what I mean, but if you have 12 people in a room not everybody is looking at you at the same time. And so that sense that you could look away and sort of disappear into your mind for a while was a little different because in the Zoom environment there’d be a sense of like is that person even paying attention. Are they here? Because you’re looking at all 12 faces apparently and not everybody looks as engaged in that moment.

So there’s something about a peculiar anonymity in a room that gets lost once and a while by being in a gallery view. And I found that kind of fascinating.

**John:** In a writer’s room classically you are – attention is focused on the board at the front of the room and that is the source of everything. So without having a single source of focus and sort of a source of truth it is just that conversation. And it is just about you’re only looking at faces. And in real life you can’t look at 12 people’s faces all at the same time. That’s just not possible. And in the gallery view you can. So, it does – yeah, it definitely changes things.

You wrote this season, has any of it started shooting yet?

**Ryan:** No. I believe right now it looks like production will begin in October in Toronto. You know, all things hopefully going forward. But, you know, the west is on fire. So, who knows what’s going to happen in the interim.

**John:** Yeah. I realize we haven’t actually described to the listeners where you are right now. So tell us where do we find you as we record this episode?

**Ryan:** I am up in a place called Ucluelet which is a small fishing village on the west coast of Vancouver Island. So we’ve been here for the last six months and we decided to stay here. So my daughter just enrolled at the high school here for her first day of grade eight. And we are just on a little cedar forest on the edge of the ocean here. There’s only about 1,500 people in the village.

It’s funny because right now looking at the world, I mean there’s smoke up here coming up from the coast, too. I kind of feel like we hid up in the corner and there’s nowhere left to move everybody. We’ve retreated as far as there is left without stepping into the ocean and swimming to Japan. So that’s where it finds me right now. We’re out of the city.

**John:** So my perception of it is that it’s romantic and isolated. How accurate is that? And to what degree do you feel like this is the zombie pandemic that you have found the place of safety or that you are trapped up there and vulnerable?

**Ryan:** A place of safety. Ucluelet actually translates into a place of safe harbor. That’s what it means.

**John:** Oh wow.

**Ryan:** So, it definitely feels that way. And I’m very fortunate that way. But I think like other pp – I don’t know if you’ve heard this from others, but I know a lot of people now that are rethinking the necessity of living in the urban centers right now because everything has gone remote and proving to be done remote. And that change of cost is a huge factor for people. The expense of living in a city. When a city is a technology for me insofar as a city is what allows me to be a very functional, independent blind person. It’s a soft technology.

And everything is built at the school of a human foot. I can walk around. Public transit. All those things. And it’s fascinating right now how the pandemic has basically shutdown what a city is for me. I can’t safely move around it. I can’t socially distance from anybody without them doing it for me. I don’t know you’re coming. And so even just taking out the trash in my city place, I walk to the alley and bumped into two people. And I’m like did I get COVID? No.

So it just didn’t feel like a viable place for me to live right now. But I think other writers I know are kind of rethinking the city right now because it’s not on tap what it normally is. And I do find being away there is an anxiety that you feel the industry is carrying on without you. There isn’t that sense of where everybody is and everybody moving around and seeing each other and going to those general meetings and going to the studio lots. All that has really stopped and there’s a sense like is there even work going on out there? Have I just dropped off the radar? I think that anxiety is prevalent.

**John:** I think that anxiety is understandable and real. I will tell you that you’re not missing anything. The work is still happening. And the meetings are still happening, but they’re all happening on Zoom. And so many of the meetings that I’ve had over the last six months people would have no idea where I am. I could have been anywhere and it really wouldn’t matter.

And some of the projects I’m working on have teams that are in Argentina and France and other places because you might as well. Some things have become possible that would have been much more challenging in a pre-pandemic world. So that is definitely a thing.

**Ryan:** Do you think Zoom will persist after this historical moment as a really substantial part of our job?

**John:** Yes. I do think it will. I think there’s kind of no going back on some of it. I think there will still be in person meetings. I think writer’s rooms will split their time probably between Zoom and being in person. I hear enough from other TV writers who miss the experience of being together that they want some together time. There’s some things that are easier to do. But other stuff which was always done in person people are recognizing oh you know what I didn’t actually have to drive across town to do it.

I was talking with a friend who is producing a movie and she’s going through the edit right now. And you have to have fast Internet but she’s basically sitting “next” to her editor and supervising these cuts but she’s doing it from her house. And so that kind of stuff which was almost possible became possible during the pandemic and people realized like oh maybe we didn’t actually physically need to be there for certain things.

The inevitable question though which actually is a pretty good segue into our main topic is to what degree do you need to be going to somebody to pitch them an idea, or is it all going to happen on Zoom? What is the nature of work in the sense of like this is a thing that I need to write entirely by myself and then send to somebody, or can I just get on Zoom and pitch them the idea and convince them that this is the thing that they should hire me to do?

**Ryan:** Yeah. Or is there a sense that everything is really on a pause button, so spec your brains out? You might as well.

**John:** That’s an absolutely 100 percent valid way of thinking about it as well. As writers it doesn’t feel like we’re quite on a pause yet. But that may be coming. And there’s I think a natural question about all this writing happened while production was shut down. Once production starts again will we still do all the writing, or will we just pause the writing and shoot everything that we’ve written?

If this was ten years ago before streamers, before there was such a demand for so many shows, definitely writing would stop. Now I’m not so sure it’s going to stop. I think there’s a good chance it just keeps going at this rate because there’s so much stuff that these streamers want and need.

We used to think about time needed to be filled, but there’s vast servers that have to be filled with content. And I wonder if we’re just going to need to keep writing that stuff.

**Ryan:** And having said that, though, are the studios and the networks and the streamers, both feature and TV, are they spending money on writing like they were before? Even though there is that need. Or are they looking around and saying, “You know what? We don’t need to do as much development as we did before.”

**John:** What I sense is that they’re doing less development in the sense of like the classic thing where we’re going to shoot 30 pilots and pick five things up for series. I think they’re just making the choice about, OK, we’re going to hire someone to write a pilot. Off that pilot we’re going to write eight episodes and shoot eight episodes. I feel like there’s a lot more direct to series kind of orders happening than the classic shoot the pilots. But we’ll see if that’s the right choice or if that really holds up.

All right, let’s get to our main topic here. So this was your initial dilemma and question about pitching versus speccing. We should start by even defining our terms. So, Ryan Knighton, help us understand the difference between pitching a project and speccing it, or writing it yourself. What do you mean?

**Ryan:** Well, by pitching I mean the idea that you develop a take on something and you set up those meetings maybe through your team and you go out and you try and persuade either a studio or a network, depending if it’s TV or features, to pay you to write that idea out. So, pitching for me has always been the idea of you’re investing time in trying to persuade someone to pay you for writing what you would like to do. And there’s advantages to doing that, both financially and for the business side. And creatively there’s some advantages, too.

And then as far as speccing, speccing is the reverse order where you put in the time and you do the writing yourself. You write the project, then you take it out and try and persuade a studio or a network to pay you for the work you have done already. And there’s advantages to that, too. But the difference, you take on more risk, but then you might get rewarded more for the risk that you’ve taken on.

So, they are two different approaches really to the business of selling the work that you do. But also to how you creatively actually do the work. They’re quite different.

**John:** Now, when I was first entering the film industry in the ‘90s there were spec sales. And so people would write these spec scripts, these spec feature scripts, and sell them for $1 million. Friends of mine sold a script while they were in film school with me for a big chunk of change and it was really exciting. And that stuff did happen. It felt like sort of lottery tickets. People would write spec scripts with the intention of selling them. And that was very much a feature thing for a while, but then people started writing spec TV scripts which is confusing. So we need to separate our terms here.

There’s what’s called a spec where you’re writing an episode of an existing show just as a writing sample. But there’s also writing something that you intend to sell. You’ve written the finished script and you’re intending to sell that. So when we say speccing we’re really talking now about writing a script all by yourself that you then intend to take out and show people and they say, “This is phenomenal. We want to buy that.”

Every writer is making a choice of do I write the whole thing myself and see what happens, or do I develop the idea and then go and take a bunch of meetings with people and try and convince them to pay me to write this project.

**Ryan:** Exactly.

**John:** So, let’s talk about the advantages of speccing a project. What are some things you see as an advantage to you have this idea. It’s like, you know what, I’m just going to write it myself. What would make you decide to do that?

**Ryan:** Well I think there’s a few reasons that I can imagine. And I’m sure you can fill out more. But I mean the first one is creative control. There’s sort of an idea here that it’s difficult in words in a meeting to get them to see the picture that’s in your head. And sometimes a pitch lives or dies on your ability to do that. And sometimes it feels like, you know what, the best way to do this is for me to just write it so you can see for yourself what this thing is. The tone of it, for example, is often a hard thing to communicate in a pitch.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And so if you just do it it does a lot of that heavy lifting for you. The other thing being that you get that first run at a story without any interference. It’s you alone sitting beside the washing machine in your house writing this thing out with nobody else telling you, “I don’t know if we can cast that, or I don’t know those locations would work.” You just get the pure experience of getting this story out nose to tail.

And there’s a lot to be said for breaking the back of a story that way. So that’s speccing for me. What about you?

**John:** I would say the other big advantage you have is that you end up – at the end of the process you have a script. You actually have a thing. You’ve written this thing and it’s a thing you can use as a writing sample even if you don’t sell it. People can read this and say, “Oh, this is a really good writer.” So you end up with a finished product. And there’s a lot to be said for that. And there’s a reason why as writers are starting they’re just going to write specs because they actually have to prove that they can write. You’re not going to be able to sort of be a person who has never written anything and sell an idea. That’s just not going to happen. So you get to show what you can do. And so speccing is a chance to do that.

It’s 100 percent you yourself working through this thing and it’s completely your vision and you end up with a finished product when you’re done with this that you can actually take out in the world or decide not to take out in the world. You have total control over everything.

**Ryan:** Correct. You know, and I think what’s interesting in that, too, is you’re pointing out that your relationship to speccing may change over your career. You know, in many respects to start a career in this industry you have to spec. You have to show you can do this work before anybody will pay you to make the next thing necessarily. So, it might be more incumbent on you at the beginning, but as you develop your career you might do less and less of that. Unless what you try to take back is more control over your material by having that time beside your washing machine, right.

**John:** So, let’s talk through the advantages of pitching a project rather than writing it yourself.

**Ryan:** Well, for me one of the advantages of it, and I’ll be honest, I specced my first script and that was 10 years ago and I have never specced anything since. I’ve only ever pitched. And in part that’s just been a choice I’ve made in terms of what I feel is the best way to earn a living for me. And, you know, sometimes for pitching the advantages are particularly if you feel you’ve got the skillset to persuade people in a room to see something with you and to get excited about it and want to buy into it at the ground floor. And that’s one thing. I mean, it’s a different skillset to pitch something than to spec something in many respects because you are trying to bring people onboard to something you haven’t done yet.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And one of the things I find is an advantage of it though is that if people do get excited with you they bought it very early at the DNA and it helps see it through, I think, further. Because everybody was there from the green light. What do you think?

**John:** One of the other big advantages is potentially it’s a lot less time. So, the 12, 20 weeks you would spend writing that script is compressed down to the three or four weeks it took to figure out the take and actually go out and pitch the project. And so if you don’t find a buyer for it you’ve not wasted half your year writing this script. And so if no one wants this idea it becomes clear like, OK, you writing that script probably would not have been a good choice. And so you can come out with multiple pitches at the same time, too.

So, there’s good reasons to consider pitching. A lot of what I would say, you talk about buy in, and it’s also just the fact that they are paying you money. It’s much more sustainable. Like you, I’ve not written a ton of specs over the years and we’ll get into which of my projects have been specs versus pitches, but mostly if I have a good idea I will pitch it to someone who I feel is the right person to become a partner on this project and we’ll move forward, rather than writing a whole thing myself.

**Ryan:** One of the things I’ve thought about, too, is just that when you spec something, and this is one of the reasons I’ve shied from it, you’re also giving people more reasons to say no ironically. That is you’ve cut this thing from whole cloth. They read it. They either love it or hate it because they don’t want to spend a lot of time making a choice about something they didn’t ask for.

And so the danger is you can have somebody read and say, “No, just not for me.” But maybe if they’d heard it as a pitch and helped develop the idea with you and felt some ownership of what’s in it they would have a different relationship to the material. So, whereas on the other hand you can spec something and just knock people’s socks off and then you get rewarded handsomely like they did in the ‘90s and it put you in a time machine and you get to go back to the Sundance heyday.

**John:** Yeah. Back then. So, I want to talk through projects I’ve worked on, which have been specs and which ones have been pitches. And I think the decision of what I chose to spec versus pitching may be informative as we get to some listener questions. So the first specs I wrote, my very first script was called Here and Now. It was a romantic tragedy in Boulder, Colorado. It was just the first thing I ever wrote. And so it became a writing sample. It was not a pitchable idea. It really wasn’t a very good story in many ways. But it showed that I could actually write scenes and dialogue and characters.

**Ryan:** Can I ask what do you mean it’s not a pitchable idea?

**John:** It was very low concept. I think we should actually focus on this for a second. It’s like which ideas are pitchable and which are not pitchable. A pitchable idea has a concept that you can grasp that you can see like I can understand what that movie is even if it weren’t executed perfectly. And so we talk about something being execution-dependent, like OK it has to be done exactly right for it to make any sense. You really have to read it to understand how it’s going to work. Versus an idea that you can sort of quickly summarize.

The things I sold as pitches, DC was a pitch, and so it was the first TV show I ever did. It was seven young people living in a house in DC, sort of their first year after college. It’s kind of a post-Felicity show. That was pretty easy for me to sell as a pitch because people understand it’s like Felicity but after college. It’s about Washington, DC. People could read my samples and know that he can write those kind of characters. That’s a thing I sell as a pitch.

Something like Go would have been impossible to pitch because there’s not a clear – I had to write that as a spec because it wasn’t clear how this was all going to work, or that I could even do it. And so the same reason why it was hard to write a log line for Go, it would be very hard to pitch Go as a movie.

**Ryan:** I think that’s key to this. I mean, pitching you know you’ve got pitchable material when part of what persuades people is just the potential that they can see in it. A lot of it is about the gesture. As soon as you say it’s a kind of Felicity version of DC, the post-college grads in Washington, immediately I can feel 20 stories brewing in my head around that sandbox. And that’s part of what makes something very pitchable is that part of the persuasion is just the potential that the people across the table from you immediately see in what you’re saying.

**John:** Now, so I’ve mostly been working on assignments which are kind of like pitches but you’re pitching to get the job, but the things I have written as specs were because they were so execution-dependent that it would have been very difficult to convince somebody like, oh, this is something you should take a flier on and pay me to write. So the way that you and I met was my script for The Shadows which I wrote as a spec has a blind teenage protagonist and is very challenging in lots of ways. That needed to be a spec. I don’t think it would have made sense as a pitch. Would you agree with that?

**Ryan:** I agree. Because again the high concept element of it is just not there. And you’re right, I can feel as soon as you pitch it there’s a blind protagonist who goes through the – I don’t want to give away your story – but what she goes through is not necessarily going to compress into a logline that easily.

And I think the other challenge you can hit with something that doesn’t necessarily – or the other challenge you hit with something that feels pitchable is sometimes the challenge is that you are pitching something that there are other things in the marketplace right now or that just came out onscreen in the last few years that didn’t do well but they immediately see as a comparison.

So you might have a really high concept pitchable thing, but they will say things like, “Oh, nobody wants a western right now.” And it kills it right there on the spot.

And then that becomes now an execution-dependent high concept pitch, right?

**John:** All right, so in order to talk through what ideas are good for pitching and what ideas are better for speccing, we wanted some actual real examples, so I emailed out to all of our Premium listeners to say, hey, if you have a project you’re thinking about writing and you’re trying to decide whether to spec it or to pitch it send in a description of it and we will talk through and try to give you our advice for whether that’s an idea you should pitch or an idea you should spec.

Now, one thing to stipulate at the top of this is that in many cases our listeners are aspiring writers who don’t have credits or don’t have other things that they can sort of show how good their work is. And so in many of these cases you have to spec it just because there’s no one for you to pitch to. But we’ll also take a look at these ideas if Ryan or Craig or I were trying to write them what our decision process would be with that kind of idea.

**Ryan:** By the way, if any network is listening to this and they hear a game show in this, Pitch or Spec, we’ve got it. We’ve got this thing down now.

**John:** All right. Let’s take a listen to our first person who is Heidi.

**Heidi Lauren:** This is Heidi Lauren from Vermont. I’m working on a limited series adaptation of an historical fiction novel that was a book club darling back in 2006. I’ve already optioned it with the author and written the outline and treatment. Should I keep writing or try and find it a home first?

**John:** All right, so Ryan, historical fiction and it’s a book that she now has the option on. In her situation it sounds like she doesn’t have other credits, what do you think her next step is?

**Ryan:** That’s a hard one for me because the key word in there for me was that it was a book club success book. Like it actually has some heft to its audience already built into it. That makes me feel like it’s pitchable right there. However, as soon as you say historical fiction blah-blah-blah I am like, oh, that feels speccy to me. So I’m on the fence. Because there’s sort of two elements that are in contradiction there for me.

**John:** Yeah. The other contradiction for me is that she has an option on it. So, let’s say she writes this spec script and she’s not able to sell it right away, she kind of loses control over things. At some point the underlying rights are going to go away, so she’ll have this script that she can’t sell. And then there’s the book which someone else could buy. So she could have this orphaned script that she can’t do anything with. Still, a writing sample, but it’s frustrating on that level.

If Heidi were to pitch it to somebody I would say she would need to approach producers and financiers who are the right kind of people to make this movie who have made things like this who might be interested in doing this. And try to set it up that way where they’re basically buying both your option and they’re hiring you to write the script. Because that’s going to be the right home for it.

Whether it makes sense to spend months chasing down those people or just writing the script that’s ultimately going to be your choice. It sounds like you really want to write this thing, so I don’t want to stop you from writing this thing by scaring you that at some point you could lose control over the underlying source material.

**Ryan:** I guess now that I’m thinking about it and hearing you I would say if Heidi has a really good sample and then she has the option on this and she’s got – it sounds like she’s got the material to pitch it ready to go. I would lean towards pitching then. But I think the key element for me would be whether or not the sample that she has could really push it over the line for other people and say, oh yeah, this is the right writer for this material.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s listen to – here’s Niko.

**Niko:** Hi John and Craig. My name is Niko. And I’m a beginning writer who just moved out to Los Angeles about a month and a half ago. You’ve inspired me to take a big risk and take a jump in my life. And so far it’s been paying off. I got a question in particular about this idea I’ve had in my head about a Weezer miniseries. The story revolves around singer-songwriter Rivers Cuomo who already achieved international fame but returned to college at Harvard after he wanted to finish his education. I thought he premise would be interesting where you’d have the two worlds of being a rock star and still being confined to a 100-square-foot dorm room. Just wondering if that would work better as a pitch or a spec script. Thank you very much.

**John:** Ryan, so what’s the right choice for a Weezer miniseries?

**Ryan:** Spec.

**John:** I think it’s totally a spec. Spec, spec, spec, spec, spec. So, a couple things for Niko here. As Craig has made clear on the show you are allowed to write about real life and real life is up for grabs, but Rivers Cuomo is going to have some control over his life story. There’s going to be complications in making this thing. And so you might say like, oh, then you should pitch it so you don’t run into that. No, you should spec this because I think it’s actually a really interesting idea. It’s the kind of thing that if it gets traction, it gets on the Black List, people dig it. If it’s a fun idea it’s a sample.

I think you have to approach this as you are writing this as a sample that will get you hired onto work on a TV show or do other things. I think it’s a good idea, but I think it’s essentially a spec. You’re writing this as a writing sample with the minimal hope that it could become a real series if it catches fire.

**Ryan:** Correct. I totally agree. And also because really the selling point of this in a pitch is the name Weezer. It’s the band. It’s Rivers Cuomo. And that like you say is going to become complicated with life rights and other things.

If you take that element out of it and you made it a fictional story it actually becomes less compelling because it’s a rock star goes back to school, which could work. But you see sort of the sharp edge of the sell there has been blunted.

**John:** So, let’s imagine that Niko has some good samples, maybe even something that’s – maybe he’s been hired to do some stuff. And he actually has a relationship with Rivers Cuomo. That’s a situation which I think you could actually pitch. And so I can see you going into Seth Rogan’s production company saying like, hey, I have this idea for a thing and Rivers is signed off on it. Isn’t this a cool idea? Then, yeah, that’s a totally pitchable idea. But without those elements I think it is a much better thing for you to be speccing.

**Ryan:** Exactly. And if he had Rivers Cuomo sitting beside him I would say do not spec this. I would say pitch, pitch, pitch.

**John:** Yeah. 100 percent. Next up.

**Adam Kanter:** Hey John and Craig. My name is Adam S. Kanter. I’m a new screenwriter originally from Eastern Massachusetts and have lived in Los Angeles for about 2.5 years now. I would love to get your pitch it vs. write it take on a drama feature I’ve been developing that is a modern take on the idiom “don’t meet your heroes.” The movie is about a troubled teen whose longtime childhood idol is publically outed as a complete monster for to be determined reasons. The main plot of the film would show this teen’s struggle to fill their role model void at a critical moment in their pre-adult development while they themselves inadvertently begin filling that very role for the at risk youth that they work with. Really excited to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you both so, so much.

**John:** All right, so Adam, you introduce yourself as Adam S. Kanter. You’re going to need that S throughout your whole career because there’s already an agent named Adam Kanter. So that’s challenging. There’s also an actor named Adam Kantor, so that S is going to be part of your life.

To me this feels like it has to be a spec because it’s incredibly execution-dependent. Based on what you described and like, oh OK, so he works with troubled at risk youth. There’s this teen idol. There’s so many very specific things that have to work just right. I don’t envision this being a good pitch. Ryan, what are you hearing?

**Ryan:** I agree. I agree. I mean, even when you heard Adam describing the story the logline extended and extended which is an indication that it’s execution-dependent right there. And also some of the details were still a little fudgy. And it doesn’t feel like it’s in a state where Adam actually knows the story well enough to pitch it yet in any case. And sometimes speccing is a way to actually do that thinking for yourself and figure it out with some trial and error.

But I agree. I agree. It feels very execution-dependent even in the way it was described.

**John:** Great. Next up.

**Tiffany:** Hi John and Craig. My name is Tiffany and my idea is a series called The Unknowables. It’s graduation day at a tiny liberal arts college. And five kids who no one has ever seen before show up in their caps and gowns. This is the story of their college experience. As for me, I’m just starting out. I live in the suburbs about a half an hour out of LA, but I have no credits and I know pretty much nobody. Looking forward to your advice. Thanks.

**Ryan:** Ooh.

**John:** What you thinking?

**Ryan:** I’m thinking it’s close to a pitch.

**John:** Yeah. I’m not clear on the tone. So from that title The Unknowables is there a magical thing happening here? Is there some sort of sci-fi twist to this? Or are they just people who flew under the radar? So if it’s just they flew under the radar and that it’s kind of like a Freaks and Geeks situation it’s tough. I feel like that’s really execution-dependent. Unless you had samples that I read that people were breaking down the door to work with you, I think that that’s tough.

But there’s a high enough concept, like that first line of people show up and no one at graduation has any idea who are they or who they were. That’s compelling. That’s a good hook. And that’s the kind of thing that feels like you could pitch a story that gets us there.

**Ryan:** I totally agree. And I think it just depends on what the next sentence is. Which is because they are – who are they? Why were they unknown? How did they fly under the radar and just show up? The answer to that question is going to decide if this is pitchable or specable. Because it almost feels like it has, like you say, like tonally it feels like it’s leaning towards something that has the J.J. Abrams black box.

If it goes that way I would say it’s pitchable. If it’s more just, you know, I teach at a university. And if these are the five students that show up on the last day and they just never showed up during the semester and it’s about these sort of, you know, the Freaks and Geeks like you say, then yeah, it’s probably a spec.

**John:** All right. Next up.

**John from London:** Hey John and Craig. John here from London. So I have a book. I don’t own the rights. A freelance producer brought it to me and introduced me to the author. She was trying to set the project up with production companies here in the UK. She left the project as another show of hers took off. The rights are still available and I kept in touch with the author. It’s a limited series, black dramedy set in an urban UK city about a central character, an artist, on the brink of madness who meets his dead hero on the streets of said city. It’s a story about mental illness, but I guess that’s it.

It’s a difficult one to pitch, especially as a new writer. I’ve got work in development with various UK production companies. I’ve worked in a room on the fifth season of a big UK-US show this year, my first room. But that’s it so far.

I love this book. It would make an amazing limited series. Do I spec it at risk? My inclination is yes [unintelligible] a sale on it. I don’t think anyone else is [pinching] the rights any time soon. It’s not a well-known book. Anyways, thanks. Love, love the podcast. It’s been so much help over the years. Oh, PS, no, I’m not telling you guys the name of the book. Obviously I’m worried you’ll pinch it for yourselves.

**John:** Oh well, John, come on. I mean, Ryan Knighton might steal. He’s a notorious larcenist.

**Ryan:** I have to say right away though, you know, outside my window apparently are a bunch of cedar trees that my wife looks at. I would like John to be outside the other window for me. And I would just like him to narrate my life as I’m doing it. Ryan is currently making coffee. He just chilled me right out. John, keep talking.

**John:** My advice for John from London is to not write this or pitch this. I think he needs to find a different project. Because I just see this ending in tears, to me. And I can’t even quite articulate why I feel this way. But I just remember having projects that were kind of like this early in my career where I kept trying to sort of set up this un-setup-able book, or work on this thing that I didn’t really own. And I should have been focused on writing my own stuff.

Ryan, I’m curious what your instincts are.

**Ryan:** That’s fascinating you say that. My take is just slightly different. I know what you mean. I’m a little worried because even in telling us about the book you could feel John sort of just crumple at the end like I just – I love this book so much and I know it would be so great. And already feeling like he’s having trouble telling me why. And in that case that means it’s not really pitchable. The hook there was not necessarily a high concept one. The book clearly means a lot to him and I think that’s worth something. And maybe that is something you want to put your time into to spec because you love it so much. And it might be the kind of project where you just have to write it out to show somebody why you love it so much. That would be the perfect of speccing it. I’m going to write this out and you will see why I love it so much when you read my pages.

Having said that I agree with you. To be honest my worry is that speccing in TV also just feels like a different risk than speccing in feature. Because when you write a spec script in TV it’s a very simple choice. Are we going to make this pilot or not? There’s not a lot of appetite I think to go in and redevelop a specced TV pilot. Do you agree John?

**John:** I do. And so one of my previous spec examples, which I didn’t get to, was I wrote a project for Legendary TV. And it was sort of a semi-original idea and they wanted me to write it. So I wrote it and I wrote it for them kind of as a spec, and then we were going to – so they were paying me, but we didn’t have a network or a studio for it. And that was a giant mistake because we talk about buy-in on TV and they want to be part of the process right from the very start. And so since they weren’t part of the process everyone looked at this thing like, “Uh, yeah, we like it but we don’t necessarily really want to make it. It’s not ours.” And it didn’t have their fingerprints all over it. And so classically that’s the reason why you don’t see a lot of spec TV because the development executives and the culture of the home that this project is going to end up at becomes so important.

So, that would be my worry for him speccing this thing. He could come out of this with a terrific sample. And it could be great writing that gets him other work. So that’s definitely a possibility if he were to pursue this. But there’s no guarantees.

**Ryan:** I think, you know, another thing to remember is that when a producer brings you a book like that you also have to wonder like, OK, so why is this coming to me. Is it because they’ve tried bringing this to a bunch of other places and nobody has cracked it yet? Did anybody sort of look at this and say, “You know, there’s just something here. Hopefully somebody can figure it out for us.” The momentum may not actually be behind the book, even though you feel somebody brought it to you and that feels like momentum.

Sometimes it’s a bit of fishing. We think there’s something here. Do you know what it is? So, I get a little hesitant around that, too.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** But what you were saying John about pitching versus speccing with television really cuts to the heart of it for me right now. Which is I keep wondering right now if there is going to be more speccing for TV because there’s less development money being spent at the moment. And are we going to change that TV practice a little bit?

**John:** I think we might. And the way that features and TV are kind of converging because of streamers I think some of the practices we see of these writers going off and writing their own things will become more common. And people will set up limited series that are based on the spec pilot they wrote and that will become the basis of someone doing something.

So I can envision over these next few years a lot more sales happening along that line. Where there is a real crunch, which is worth talking about maybe on a future episode, is if you are a new writer who has written that thing that the sells they’re going to want to marry you with an experienced showrunner who can actually make sure the thing gets shot properly and that the whole thing can come together. There’s a real shortage of those experienced showrunners who people want to hire. And that relationship is difficult. The resource constraints there are real. And in a weird way it’s only exacerbated by the fact that we keep making these short series where no one has enough time to actually learn how to do the job of showrunning. So that’s a real sort of crisis we’re running into.

**Ryan:** Duly noted.

**John:** Duly noted. Let’s take a listen to Brendan here.

Branden: Hey Riddler and Robot. I have written for the game industry for nine years and for the past two years have started writing features and TV pilots. The advice I keep getting is flip-flopping on whether to write a spec or not because I’m told I won’t get the chance to pitch ever because I’m “new” to the business. I’ve written three features and three comedy pilots this year and have been told unless I know someone I can’t get a job as a screenwriter. Here are my pitches.

So the feature is a king who falls in love with a male baker during a time of war in this fairy tale romance. And the pilot is two inept local DJs shoot for the stars while bringing everything else down around them.

Since I was told I won’t get the chance to pitch I have written them out completely. Now what? Thank you. I love you guys.

**John:** All right. So Brendan is hitting the nail on the head here as we said at the start which is that as a new writer who has sort of no connection to anybody it’s tough to find a person you would even pitch to. So you are going to just write these things yourself. But to me both of those concepts are pretty much execution-dependent. The feature idea, which was the king falls in love with a baker, is pretty execution-dependent. It’s high concept enough, but you’re going to want to show that you actually can write this thing. The DJ idea to me, if you had good samples that sort of backed you up and had the right place for it I could see you being able to pitch that as a pilot.

What’s your instinct there?

**Ryan:** Mine are the same. And I feel for him. I mean, there is that hard thing at the beginning of your career. And I remember going through this where getting in those rooms felt like the difference between the choice in speccing and pitching because it is the difference. And without a team that can get you into a meeting to even try pitching something for the first time. I mean, that’s the other thing. You can pitch something and then it gets shot down. You still have the choice to spec it on the other side.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Ryan:** You can still do that. And you can learn a lot from pitching something and have it shot down. It can convince you there’s something there that they’re just not seeing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** But without that team putting you in those rooms it’s going to be speccing. And I agree that neither of those quite had the juice for a pitch I think.

**John:** I want to hear from a college student. So let’s hear from Steffi.

**Steffi:** Dear John and Craig. Hello. This is Steffi from Houston. I’m a senior in college and only recently distilled my love for screenwriting over the elongated summer. I wrote my first full length. Again, a huge thank you for all of your guidance. And I’m on to my second one which happens to be my senior honors thesis. So, in other words, A, I’m not in a position to be pitching to producers. And, B, I’m writing this thing regardless for a grade, even though in my mind it’s definitely not just for the grade.

So here it is. It’s a feature following the career of an award-winning Panamanian dermatologist and her fraught relationship with her daughter up until the revolution of 1989. Would love to hear your input. Also, feel free to cut out all the above blurb. I wasn’t entirely sure how you were going to use it in the exercise. But regardless thank you and goodbye.

**John:** All right. I’m excited for Steffi to be writing her script. So obviously she’s going to write it herself because she’s in college. She doesn’t know anybody. There’s no one for her to pitch to. But let’s imagine that you are Aline Brosh McKenna and this is the idea that you have. So Aline could pitch to anybody. Let’s imagine what Aline might do in this situation. Would she spec this or would she pitch it? Ryan, help me figure out what are the deciding factors for an established writer with this idea.

**Ryan:** Wow. I’m still stuck on the phrase award-winning Panamanian dermatologist.

**John:** It’s so good.

**Ryan:** That was the most specific character I think I’ve encountered in a while. I mean, I guess again it depends on the tone. If it’s Aline doing this I would assume it is going to be that amazing Aline tone. And when you paint that over that concept, boy, I’m pretty intrigued. I don’t know. What do you think, John?

**John:** If this were based on something I feel like the concept is fun enough – I’m assuming this is a comedy. The world is bright enough that I think it’s pitchable, but I think it’s much more pitchable if there were some source material. If there was like a short story or a real life story. Something you could point to underneath that sort of lies underneath this. But as just a pure pitch I think it’s actually pretty challenging even for an Aline to go out and set up. You want to have something – weirdly some base underneath that is why I think writing it as a spec would probably make the most sense.

**Ryan:** Yeah. I mean, there is something to be said for when you have some kind of IP, even if it’s an article or whatever, it provides a lot of comfort in the room when you’re pitching. Because it’s based on something. It’s already out in the world and people wanted to read about some way. And it sort of gestures to something that’s a little bit more robust than just something that’s inside your head and has been lingering around for a few months.

I can’t stress it enough. It provides a lot of comfort in a room when you’re pitching. Even if it’s a very small piece of IP.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s wrap up with the last one and this is a guy who actually has some credits and is in a little bit different situation than some of our other listeners.

**Ryan Roope:** Hello John and Craig. So my idea that I’ve toyed with for a couple years now is where an asteroid was set to destroy the earth. Many people quit their jobs. Spend their life savings. Basically get ready for the end of days. But at the last minute the world is saved and now everyone must somehow find a way to get to a sense of normalcy. My current idea has it sent through the perspective of a 20-something couple who got together when the world was supposed to end and must now figure out what continuing on with life not only means for their relationship but what it means in terms of their place in this now rebuilding world.

My credits include the Tom and Jerry Show, the revamp of the classic cartoon. And I’m currently working on a television Christmas feature set to air in France, which happened as randomly as it sounds. Lastly I want to thank you both for the work you do on this podcast. It has helped me immensely. And I only wish there was some way I could return the favor. All the best and many thanks. Ryan.

**John:** All right. Ryan, what is your advice to Ryan?

**Ryan:** So we had a John pitching to you. And we’ve had a Ryan pitch to me now. I am sold. I’m sold on it right away. And I think it is a great hook. There was a film in the mid-90s that a friend of mine named Don McKellar had made that was called Last Night. And it was an apocalyptic premise. It’s the end of the world but everybody has known it has been coming for years and years and there’s nothing you can do about it. So it’s just how is everybody going to spend that last night on earth when it’s not new news.

And it opens with this amazing sequence of a family having the last Christmas dinner even though it’s not Christmas and still having the same family fights they always do, even though it’s the last night on earth. And there’s something in that shift of the apocalyptic story to that kind of dark comedy tone that just worked so well. It was such a clean premise. And I hear that in this as well. I love the idea that the world is about to end and then it nimbly pivots. That would be my name if I was a Harry Potter character. I’d be Nimbly Pivots. It nimbly pivots to suddenly it’s not over and then how do we recover when we’ve made all these choices thinking we were in the middle of an ending. I think it’s a great hook. It’s a very high concept hook and I can see the comedy in it.

It’s pitchable because I can feel the potential in it right away and I want to write it.

**John:** Absolutely. 100 percent a pitchable idea. You have reps apparently because of the work you’ve been doing. They get you in rooms where you pitch this. I think it also feels like an idea that you pitch to an actor’s production company because you can imagine this selling with comedy actor production company – someone who is on board with this from the start.

A thing I should stress is, like you’ve referenced – what was it called Last Night, the Don McKellar movie – but there’s 50 at least scripts out there that have essentially the same basic premise in terms of like the apocalypse didn’t happen and then sort of what happens next. That’s not an original idea. But your ability to pitch the specifics about it are what sets it apart. And that is a thing that makes it sellable. And so your ability to go into a room and sell the characters, sell the world, sell what’s going to happen in the course of yours. It’s not even clear from your thing whether you see this as a feature or an ongoing series about what happens after that. Both work. And so this is a very pitchable idea.

Yes, you could spec it but I don’t think there’s necessarily a reason to spec it. In some ways I think getting it out there as a pitch so that people can have buy-in and have their fingerprints on it from the start makes it more likely to get made. So I think this is a pitch.

**Ryan:** I think the other thing that’s worth noting, just listening to Ryan pitch that little snippet of what he’s working on and what he’s thinking about, he delivered with a kind of confidence and a control that he knew exactly what this thing was about and what makes it work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And that’s part of what makes it pitchable. And when you compare that to some of the other pitches that we heard, people are still sort of working out what their relationship is to the material and how it might be executed and where it might go. You can still feel that sense that there’s some work to be done in there. But Ryan’s confidence there tells me it’s also pitchable. He knows exactly what this thing is.

**John:** Totally.

**Ryan:** Would you go TV or feature with it? Which would you go?

**John:** You can definitely do either. I think if it’s a TV show then it’s a Netflix eight-episode season after season thing. Sort of like a more Dear White People kind of scenario. If it is a feature then it’s just a high concept feature and I think you can do it low fi and sort of low budget-ish, or you can sort of do it slightly bigger, sort of a, again, sort of a Seth Rogan model kind of budget of this and do it as a romantic comedy or a relationship comedy of what happens after that thing. Or a Judd Apatow for that matter.

So, there’s many ways you could do. I think you’d probably try to sell it as a feature first. I think you go feature first. If you can’t find a home for it then you look at a streamer.

**Ryan:** Oh, see, I’m still your student because I’ve been leaning TV on it. I think there’s a great TV series in it. Because it’s particularly about these ongoing relationships on the other side of this new piece of information and how these relationships evolve and change and have to rethink themselves and so on and so forth. And that feels like the world of television. It’s not building towards a hard ending necessarily like a feature wants.

**John:** Yeah. The other possibility is that you’re intercutting between post-apocalypse and post-post-apocalypse and the lead up to it, so you sort of contrast expectation and how bad things were going to get and then what the actual reality is. And that is a TV way of doing it. You have the flashbacks to where everyone assumed things were going to get to.

**Ryan:** This feels like what you and I are doing right now is the feeling you want in a room when you pitch something.

**John:** That’s exactly right. That’s why it’s a pitchable idea rather than just a spec idea.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** We in talking through all this stuff we burned through all our time where we would talk about the other questions that came in, which is fine. It’s me and Ryan Knighton talking through pitching and speccing. Let’s wrap this up. What are your takeaways from this and was this illuminating to you at all in terms of your central dilemma about pitching and speccing in this time?

**Ryan:** It was because it puts me back in touch with the fundamentals. I’ve said over the years that one of the reasons I continue to teach at a university is I like to go in once a year and just teach writing and sort of revisit the things that I think I know. And just to see if they’re still true. And I feel like that’s kind of what I got from this. The principles of pitching and speccing, even in the pandemic, haven’t really changed because it’s still about how to persuade people to get on board with you and what is the right approach for the material in hand.

It might change a little bit I think like we raised that pitching with TV might not become so sacrosanct down the road. Like we might see more speccing in television coming out which is I’m sort of feeling is happening, too.

I think the feature landscape is still pretty consistent in its attitude towards what is pitchable and what is specable.

**John:** One thing we didn’t bring up in terms of like a decision to spec even if you have credits is that sometimes if you want to really change your perception, how people perceive you, the kinds of things people consider you for, writing a spec is a great way to do that. And so I have friends who have written on procedurals for years and they can hop from another procedural to another procedural, but they will deliberately write an original that is a different tone that gets them considered for different kinds of shows. And the same thing can work for features. So, if you are a person who is only known for writing certain things that can be useful.

Earlier in my career just based on what I had sold, what I’d been hired to write, I was only being offered projects that involved gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. Family movies were the things people would send me. And so I wrote Go as sort of a, oh by the way, I can also write other things. And so Go was incredibly useful for me to have written as a spec even though it didn’t initially sell because people could see whatever they wanted to see in it. And it got me into rooms where I could pitch on other things. And so one of the reasons why Ryan Knighton might choose to write a spec in this time is if there’s things that he’s not being considered for that he wants to be considered for. It’s a chance to write that different thing that is outside of what is considered his normal wheelhouse.

**Ryan:** I think that’s a really good point. That even though speccing might be something you do more at the beginning of your career, there’s still a really important function for it in a developing career over the years that you work in the industry. A spec allows you to present yourself differently to people who’ve made a certain opinion of you or out of efficiency think of you a certain way and think of you for certain projects.

I tend to be the person that people think of – if they ever think of me – but they might think of me like I have sort of a disease story, can you make it a bit funnier. You know, the disabled story. That kind of stuff.

But to be honest, the majority of my career over the last ten years has not been that material ironically. But it did take a little bit of convincing that I could write about things other than disability and so on and so forth.

**John:** I did not give you warning about One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing that you can share with our listeners?

**Ryan:** I do. Because I was looking back and the first time I was on the show I recommended Lovage which is an herb basically. I think it’s an herb. And then the second time I recommended an app. So this time I thought well I’m on a podcast. I’m going to recommend a podcast. And the podcast I want to recommend is a podcast called Crackdown. And it is created by Garth Mullins. I know Garth. He lives around the corner from me in Vancouver.

I think it is one of the bravest podcasts I’ve listened to. And I say that with all bias on the table that I admire Garth very much. But it is a podcast about the opioid crisis as told by the frontline drug users in the drug war. So it’s told from the point of view who are being affected. The point of view of people who are being affected by policy decisions. It is told at the street level with people, activists, who are trying to set up safe injection sites for harm reduction. The fights they’re facing with the pharmaceutical industry around the shift from Methadone to Methadose which is a fascinating episode.

The politics. The science. And the just human compassion that is in this podcast is incredible. And it exposes a subculture. I don’t think we should think of it even as a subculture. But it exposes the culture of the lives of people that I just don’t think we’ve heard them tell in their own words before. And it’s just so powerful.

**John:** That’s awesome. That’s great. So Crackdown is the podcast. Fantastic. My One Cool Thing is an evergreen One Cool Thing. I think every year I’ve used it as one, which is to get your Flu Shot. So the flu shot is now widely available in the US and presumably Canada as well. The flu shot is the vaccine we already have for a disease that is unlikely to kill most of us, but can definitely suck if you get it. Craig got it last year and it was bad. Luckily Tamiflu worked for that, but you know, getting your flu shot is a better choice than having to take Tamiflu.

So, the flu shot. It’s out there. It’s cheap. I got mine at CVS a couple weeks ago. So just get your flu shot. It’s not clear what’s going to happen with the flu this year. And so in Australia which would have had the flu season earlier they basically had no flu, but they were in really tight lockdowns. With us wearing masks and stuff like that it could be a mild flu season anyway, but a flu shot is just an extra little bit of insurance that don’t get the flu which just is terrible to get in any normal year. So, get your flu shot everyone.

**Ryan:** Yeah. I mean, it’s particularly helpful right now I think because it helps the entire healthcare system not get overloaded by people wondering if they have COVID but they have the flu.

**John:** Exactly.

**Ryan:** So it’s sort of like allowing people to spot COVID in the wild much more clearly if we’re all getting the flu shot.

**John:** Cool. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Lachlan Marks. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Remind me, Ryan, what your Twitter handle is.

**Ryan:** I’m @ryanknighton.com. Oh, not dot.com. That’s so ‘90s. I’m @ryanknighton.

**John:** So @ryanknighton. We have t-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. And advance warning on things like this segment we did today which we talked through things that our Premium listeners had sent in.

Ryan Knighton, thank you so very much for joining us on the show. Thank you for filling in for Craig who is unexpectedly detained. You are going to stick around and you’re going to tell us about surfing, because I want to know about surfing.

**Ryan:** I was so happy to do it. I’m sad Sexy Craig wasn’t here. I wanted to have a rivalry with my character, Curiously Appealing Ryan.

**John:** Yes.

**Ryan:** But that was a very pitchable idea just to hear Craig Mazin was detained. I want to watch that show.

**John:** That’s what it is. All right. Thanks Ryan.

**Ryan:** Thank you.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Ryan Knighton, so you are going to be spending this year apparently training to become an amazing surfer. Tell us how this starts. Tell us about surfing. Tell us about this whole idea.

**Ryan:** It’s a ludicrous idea. I know it’s a ludicrous idea. The story is I ended up out here on the coast in this little fishing village, Ucluelet, where my wife and I built a house, and the reason I’m out here is COVID pushed me out here. The city became too dangerous for me to be around. I couldn’t get around without – I don’t want to use public transit right now. I can’t take Ubers and taxis safely. I’m bumping into people.

So we pulled up stakes and moved out here by the ocean. And this place, I discovered it 10 years ago though a friend of mine who is deft surfer. And this is the surfing spot in Canada out here. And we’d gone to university together. His name is Colin Ruloff. He was a pro skateboarder. And we were in university together sharing notes in a philosophy class because I couldn’t see what was on the board and he couldn’t hear what the guy was saying.

So, we shared a brain. We got accused of plagiarism because we were making equal mistakes because were half [unintelligible]. But he kept saying to me you’ve got to try surfing. You’ve got to come out and try surfing. And I kept thinking I can never do that.

Then 10 years ago I decided to do it. I decided to try it with him. And so the deaf guy taught the blind guy how to surf for a day and it worked about as well as you would imagine. It was a lot of me saying where are you and him saying what and me saying where are you.

**John:** Marco Polo basically.

**Ryan:** Yeah, Marco Polo. I got it for a couple seconds. And I remember in that few seconds I stood up having this feeling that this was going to be a problem. That it was just going to be a problem. That I felt something I haven’t felt in years which was I was moving quickly without a cane and without anybody guiding me. And it was safe. I mean, when I wipe out I hit water.

So, I started surfing 10 years ago sort of loosely. And then my daughter and I would come out here in the summers and it was like a week a summer, and then it was two weeks, and then it was three weeks. And then I would be pacing in November because it’s going to be a long time until I get to go again. And then this year we ended up here on the coast. I decided I’m going to be here for a year. So I’m just going to throw myself into this completely. And I started doing research. And there is an open adaptive surfing competition every year in San Diego. So I’m going to train for the next year to go into it at the age of 48. And I’m really thinking about middle age and COVID and disability and I’m trying to understand my relationship to all of these things through the lens of surfing over the next year.

And I’m going to write an article about it. I’m talking to an editor friend of mine who used to be at Esquire. I think I’m going to go back to doing that as a feature article for them. If not for Esquire for another magazine. Because again it’s like I want to find something to write right now that’s a little more about self-care. This is about self-care.

So, unless I get killed in a wave. Then it won’t be about self-care. [laughs]

**John:** So, Ryan, one of the things I like so much about this is that it feels like you’re treating yourself as the protagonist in your own life story. There’s a way in which you are both being internal and external in terms of you’re thinking about Ryan Knighton. And the challenges that you’re encountering in terms of like how your world has changed. So basically the COVID pushing you to the coast, but giving you an opportunity to do this thing that you haven’t done before and really looking at being deliberate in your choices the way we hope that our heroes in our stories are being deliberate in their choices. And recognizing that there are some sacrifices you’re making for that.

And so leaving your home in Vancouver, but also recognizing that your work is going to change. And that it’s going to change some of your family dynamics. And that that’s all OK. But I’m just saying you made a very compelling pitch for this idea. And I think it’s a pitchable idea. I don’t think you necessarily – well, you are essentially speccing it because you are speccing your own life. But I would also buy it as a pitch.

**Ryan:** You know, it is one of the most generous things that anybody has said to me, the way you just framed that.

**John:** Well thank you.

**Ryan:** You know, coming out – like I wrote memoirs and my other career is as a travel writer and as you can imagine that has stopped right now for the past six months. I usually am on a plane every two or three weeks and I haven’t gone anywhere for six months. And it’s put me in a very interesting disorientation.

And I still think about how years ago an editor that I was working with, because I would do all these sort of first person travel stories, and starting to do them of like going around the world. Like if I had to go just smell something what I would go smell. That was sort of my travel angle. Trying to educate my other senses by going and finding those sensory experiences.

And this editor had said to me, “You know, one of the things that’s really important is to live an anecdotally rich life.” And I’ve always used that as the measure for a lot of the projects I do. Like is this going to be anecdotally rich? Am I going to come out of this with a lot of stories? And so treating yourself as a protagonist is a way of doing that. What is the uncomfortable thing to do right now? What is the thing that’s most surprising? What’s the thing I’m afraid of?

Coming out here I am so into the surfing thing right now, but I am so terrified about trying to just get around. I’m living somewhere I’ve never lived before and I haven’t done that in a long, long time.

**John:** Well I remember as we were first talking about The Shadows you described how important cities were for you and the ability to sort of find edges of things. And so being out in the forest by yourself is incredibly – it’s a scary thing for a blind person because you have no bearings. You have no way to orient yourself. And so that’s why I was surprised to find that you are in the middle of nowhere right now where you kind of can’t help but be more dependent upon other people to do some things that you could have done – you had self-reliance in the city just because you had routines and habits and the way of finding your own way around.

**Ryan:** Yeah. I mean, you know very well because there’s actually a sequence in your script that very much describes the experience of a blind person in the woods. It’s a very accurate experience. You know, I will be honest I took a page from your playbook. You and Mike and Amy moved to Paris for a year. You uprooted your lives and changed everything for a year. And that was really inspiring to me. Sometimes these moments come and you realize you can, again, it’s my Harry Potter name, you can Nimbly Pivot. And I tried to nimbly pivot because I want stories. And if I find I’m living a life that fills me with stories to tell I find it makes me a better writer.

I find it doesn’t make me as complacent in my thinking about things. And it’s good to be upset in that sense and feeling disoriented. So, I don’t do it lightly. I’m still afraid of the ocean. It’s not a forgiving thing. But I know I’m going to have an interesting year and I know I’m going to walk out of it with a difference sense of myself. And I think that’s important to me right now at this age.

And to be honest I think a lot of people are going through something like this right now. I don’t think I’m alone in looking at the moment historically and saying maybe we could just sort of check in and question the assumptions I’ve made about the way I live and where I live and what I’m doing. Because it can all change so quickly.

**John:** There’s obviously a big third act set piece here which is the actual competition itself. So you said that’s in San Diego?

**Ryan:** It is. And I’ve been doing my research and it’s fascinating. There’s a couple guys I read about who were in this competition that are blind. One of them he uses a crash helmet, I believe from like a motorcycle, because it’s got an ear piece. His coach walkie-talkies him from the beach while he’s out on the board. But he’s got a rash guard like mine, completely made separately, that says Caution Blind Surfer. And he’s got bumps on his board which I also have on mine now which help me feel like braille where I am on the board when I’m paddling, so I can position myself.

There’s another guy who actually uses an iPhone. He straps it to his bicep and has the VoiceOver on load. And his coach texts him from the beach so he can hear where to position himself. It’s been fascinating just this, you know, I’m going to do this. I’m going to figure out a way to do this. And then independently people are coming at their own sort of makeshift solutions to adapt. And that’s what this is. It’s called Open Adaptive Surfing. I find it fascinating.

**John:** I can’t wait to see you do it and to read the article that you write at the end of this, because it’s going to be great. I’m excited for you.

**Ryan:** I’m excited to do it. And I hope I’m still around in a year to tell you how it went. [laughs]

**John:** We’ll have you back on the podcast to pitch it.

**Ryan:** OK, great. Great.

**John:** Ryan, thank you so much.

**Ryan:** Thanks. Thanks for having me.

 

Links:

* [Academy Awards Inclusions Standards for Best Picture](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2020-09-08/academy-oscars-inclusion-standards-best-picture)
* [Film Academy Inclusion Standards Diversity](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2020-09-09/film-academy-inclusion-standards-diversity)
* [Ryan Knighton](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3716988/)
* [Crackdown Podcast](https://crackdownpod.com/)
* [Get a Flu Shot!](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/freeresources/flu-finder-widget.html)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Ryan Knighton](https://twitter.com/ryanknighton?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) on Twitter
* [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 Lachlan Marks ([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

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