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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/conflict-of-interest).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 347 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be discussing conflict of interest, both as a legal theory and as a reality in the world of film and television. Then we’ll be answering listener questions on TV comedy, establishing time periods, and not writing.

But Craig I’m so excited because you are all the way on the other side of the world. It’s the first time where we’re doing one of these long distance podcasts where you are in Europe and I am in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yeah. Not just in Europe but Eastern Europe, so I’m a bit far flungerer than you were last time when you were in Paris. I am in Vilnius, the capital city of the great country of Lithuania. I am 10 hours ahead of you. This is very exciting. We just finished our second week of shooting on Chernobyl and all is going well.

**John:** I’m so excited for you, Craig. I was actually with Craig Mazin as the first shot of his show went off. We were playing D&D and he got the text message with the first still image from the first scene being shot. And this has been a very long journey so I’m so, so happy that you are making your show.

**Craig:** Well, thank you very much. And all, I think, all television and film production should begin with the writer-producer playing Dungeons & Dragons while the first shot goes off. I think that’s fair.

**John:** That is only fair. It’s the way things should be. In a perfect world it would all be Dungeons & Dragons and television programs.

**Craig:** I’ve got here in my hotel room, it’s Rise of Tiamat, the module that I’ll be preparing so that when I return I will be DMing that for you and the boys. So D&D never too far away from me. But we’re making it work, you and I, as we do no matter what time zone we’re in.

**John:** All right. Let’s start our episode. First off I have some news. So, along with John Gatins, a friend of the show, I’m going to be hosting a special Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Q&A with Aline Brosh McKenna and Rachel Bloom on Wednesday May 9, 2018, 7pm, at UTA. So, this is actually at an industry thing, so it’s not like a thing that I can sell tickets for. I can’t send you to a website to come to this screening. But what I can do is Aline says we can put two people on the list to come to this. And I feel like we have a big bunch of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fans among our audience. But I’m trying to think of the best way to give out these two tickets. And, Craig, this is the first you’re hearing of this. What I think we might want to do is the first listener who can send in an email to ask@johnaugust.com with the lyrics to a song, like just write the lyrics to a song, that expresses why they want to be at this event. That might be the thing.

But, Craig, if you could offer some sort of theme for the song, or maybe even a title for the song that would convey what it should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. The theme is I want to be on the inside at an exclusive event because I’m on the outside normally and I want to be on the inside where not anyone can just go, because you said it’s a special industry fancy people event. And so I think let’s call the title of the song “The Other Side of the Velvet Rope.”

**John:** Ooh, I like that very, very much. So, if you are a person who wants to come to this, we are going to give away two tickets – well, they’re not tickets. We’ll put two names on the list and we’ll put those two names based on the person who writes the lyrics to that song. So, write those lyrics about The Other Side of the Velvet Rope. Send them through to ask@johnaugust.com and we will put those two names on the list.

To be clear here, I think whoever writes that and their plus one will be our guests for this special little thing.

**Craig:** Great. I think that’s a great idea. And it’s not a lyric contest. It’s really just like who can put the effort in, you know?

**John:** Exactly. We want you to jump over a bar. And that bar is write some lyrics.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we have an actual real Scriptnotes show to hype as well. So on May 22 we are going to be doing a show at the ArcLight. Tickets are not yet available but I want you to clear your calendars on May 22. There will be a live show in Los Angeles. We are going to have very cool guests. It’s going to be a good, fun time. So, if you have anything scheduled for May 22, now is the time to cancel it because there’s going to be a Scriptnotes live show there. And this is the equivalent live show as when we had Rian Johnson on and Dana Fox and Rob McElhenney. It’s the equivalent of that show. And we’re excited to announce our guests pretty soon. You can’t come if you’ve – don’t schedule surgery for that day.

**Craig:** No, no. Well, listen, don’t schedule surgery if you don’t have to, obviously. We’re not big fans of the elective stuff. But also, folks, this is the event that we do to support Hollywood Heart, which is a wonderful charity that our friend John Gatins supports. And the past two times we’ve done this have been, well, we like to save some of the heavy firepower for those shows. So, the first time we did it we had Dan Weiss and Dave Benioff from Game of Thrones and we had Jason Bateman from Jason Bateman. And then, yeah, last year we had Rian Johnson on the eve of The Last Jedi coming out. We had Larry Kasdan, I believe. Oh no, Larry wasn’t on – he had his own show. He had his own live show.

But we had Rian Johnson and we had Dana Fox. I mean, we’ve had great guests for these. I don’t want to say yet who we’re getting, but we’re going to be getting some great people. So, no elective surgery on that night.

**John:** No. No. All right, so enough hype of future events. Let’s go to the past. Let’s do some follow up. So, a regular feature on the show is How Would This Be a Movie. One of those recent stories was the Worst Roommate Ever, the story by William Brennan. And that story was acquired by our friend Chris Morgan and Blumhouse. They are going to be trying to develop this for both TV and for features.

**Craig:** Yeah. So where did we land on that one? I can’t quite remember.

**John:** I think we landed that it was a very interesting premise and character. I think we may have differed on whether we needed to actually acquire the rights to this specific story or that as a general story space, like the idea of the roommate from hell genre might be a thing worth pursuing. But they decided, you know what, the actual rights to this story were worth it and they locked down those rights.

**Craig:** Well, I think if you are an individual writer and you get inspired by something like this it’s perfectly fine to write your own story as long as you feel you’re basically drawing on public facts as listed in this article. But when you’re a big company, and Chris Morgan has a big company, then you almost always just go and get the rights because you have a certain amount of money to spend and it generally plants a little bit of a flag in the space. You’re saying to other people, “Hey, we’re doing this, so maybe you don’t want to waste money doing it.” It’s a bit of business gamesmanship I should say.

**John:** I would say so. So I’ll be curious to see what project or projects come out of this idea. Almost all of us have had roommates at times. Most of them have not been deranged. But almost everyone has had a bad roommate experience.

**Craig:** I’ve had–

**John:** Actually, some of us have had deranged roommates. I guess you trump most of these other stories.

**Craig:** Yeah. I kind of have a problem with anything called Worst Roommate Ever, because I’m pretty sure I had the worst roommate ever.

**John:** Oh, always good. More recent news. We got an email from Nate. Craig, would you read what Nate wrote to us?

**Craig:** Sure. Nate writes, “I was listening to Episode 345 today and hearing about how Isaac and Elizabeth moved to LA right after college and that hit me harder than it should have. After I graduated I had plans to move to LA from Philadelphia with one of my best friends from college, but I was fortunate enough to be pitching a couple of shows here that picked up some momentum and decided to ride them until they were shelved.

“Once they plateaued I made plans again to move out. Just before putting down a deposit on an apartment I was hospitalized with Lyme disease.” Oh, that’s not good. “At that point my focus was health and put everything on hold again. And that urge was suppressed until today. I currently have a great job at 27 as a post-production supervisor at a large e-commerce company, a comfortable position that a lot of people would kill for in the area. A girlfriend of more than two years who has always supported me and my crazy ambitions but doesn’t want to move to LA and it has come to the point where it physically hurts to not be in LA.

“I guess I have more of an ask of you and Craig than a question. I would appreciate it if you and Craig could just tell me to quit being a coward and tell my girlfriend what I just told you.” Huh.

**John:** All right, well Nate, I can’t speak directly to your girlfriend but I can only tell you what I would tell her which is that if you are 27 and you want to be working in the film and television industry that is centered in Los Angeles, you don’t want to be in Philadelphia anymore, this is the time to do it. And you’re going to want to move here. And hopefully there’s a way you can move here and that she comes along with you. But I will say it’s not unprecedented for a person to leave a two-year relationship at 27 and move to the city they want to be living in. So, I think it’s time. Craig, do you have any more advice for Nate?

**Craig:** Well, look, it’s the girlfriend part that’s kind of stopping me. Because, yeah, all of the details seem about right. I mean, you’re 27. You’re still fairly young. You’re a post-production supervisor. That’s a gig that actually could get you a fairly decent day job working in a similar capacity in LA. So, theoretically there’d be a fairly nice glide path in for you.

I’m a little concerned when you say it’s come to the point where it physically hurts to not be in LA. Obviously it’s a slight amount of hyperbole there, but you seem to have put a lot of hopes and dreams on the location of Los Angeles. You haven’t exactly said why. I mean, you said you were pitching a couple of shows, but you know nothing was stopping you from writing shows while you were in Philadelphia and you weren’t. So, a couple of concerns. A couple of things to think about, Nate.

First, why is it super-duper important that you be in LA, and, if you have an answer to that, can you answer why you haven’t been at least working towards those goals while you’ve been in Philadelphia? And secondly, and more importantly, this girlfriend of yours of 2.5 years, you say she’s always supported you and your crazy ambitions. Well, that’s real. That’s a thing. And if you love her and she loves you, I don’t know, like it just seems – sometimes there’s things that are more important than living in Los Angeles, which is just a place, Nate. It’s a place.

So, I just want you to think really carefully here. I just want to make sure that you aren’t imagining that it is location that’s going to make and break you and location is going to solve your problems and make all of your dreams come true. Because generally speaking while it’s easier in LA, it’s not the be-all, end-all. And I don’t know, breaking up with your girlfriend, I hate to advise anyone to do that, especially because it sounds like you and she have a good thing going.

**John:** Yeah. This last week I spoke at USC. I was part of their Talent Week in which they bring in alums to talk to other alums and current students. And the thing I ended up talking about was the nature of sort of how characters express their wants and how to think of yourself as a character in the story of your life. And so I would urge Nate to think of himself as the protagonist in the story of his life. And if he sees himself that way he’d recognize that heroes of stories have triumphs and setbacks. They go on journeys. They come back from places. He perceives himself as the person who meant to leave Philadelphia but like weird stuff got in the way and he was never able to leave. And the nature of his true quest, where he really should be, is to be in Los Angeles.

He’s never going to be sort of the same person he was at 21. But I also don’t want him to think that like, “Oh well, now his movie is over.” That the thing he wanted is unrealistic or impossible at this point. I think the reason why I’m pushing him to maybe go to Los Angeles or really have the hard conversation with his girlfriend and figure out whether this is a thing that can work or not work is because he maybe really unhappy five years, ten years, 15 years from now if he hasn’t done this thing he always meant to do.

I don’t want him to be with the same woman, married with kids, and still be frustrated that he never tried in Los Angeles. So, that’s where I’m pushing Nate this direction.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, those are the two competing movies, right? So you have the movie of the person who never quite follows their dream and suffers in silence and then finally gets a chance and goes for it and wins. Then there’s this other movie, it’s more of the romance. A person who doesn’t realize what they have, leaves to go get something better, and eventually comes back home realizing, “Oh, you know, it was right here in front of me the whole time.”

There’s these two movies. I don’t know which one is Nate’s movie. I do know that when he says, “I would appreciate it if you and Craig could just tell me to quit being a coward and tell my girlfriend what I just told you,” um, you know, I would say to you that’s, generally speaking, good advice always. You should be able to tell your girlfriend everything you’re thinking and feeling in that regard.

I don’t think you’re being a coward, Nate. I think you’re trying to have your cake and eat it too here. And you need to decide what you want and what matters more and make your choice. Real simple. We can’t do it for you, buddy.

**John:** Yeah. Nate, a year from now please write us back and let us know what you have done or decided to do and how it all went, OK?

**Craig:** Good idea.

**John:** Last bit of news is way back follow up. In Episode 32 of this podcast we discussed Amazon Studios, in particular discussed their plans for inviting anyone in the world to send in their movie ideas, their pitches, their treatments and things, and there was a whole service. There was a whole website you could go to to put in your stuff and we both thought it was a terrible idea. And there was news on that front this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. So apparently Amazon finally admitted that it was, in fact, a terrible idea. I think they knew it was a terrible idea almost immediately. And they just sort of kept it lingering there because it didn’t really cost them anything per se. Just sort of hard drive space on servers which is kind of their bread and butter. They’ve got more of that than anyone. They’ve shut it down. They finally said no mas. This thing is over.

And, John, I’m pretty sure that they should have just listened to us.

**John:** Yeah. It would have probably saved some time and some effort. I don’t know to what degree they were actively doing any of this script outreach stuff. I don’t know whether this was a factor for years, honestly. And I didn’t hear anybody talking about it. But I will say if you look at what Amazon Studios is doing right now, they are investing heavily in high-priced IP and expensive talent to try to make big things like a Game of Thrones. That’s why they’re spending a gazillion dollars on the Tolkien rights. They’re making big, big swings because that’s how you make big hits in general.

So, it’s 180 degrees from this sort of crowd-sourcing thing that they started with.

**Craig:** Yeah. And look, I remember when we talked about this, some people got their feathers a little ruffled. You and I occasionally will get hit with the whole, “You guys are elitist, and you’re just trying to keep the little guy out. And that there are all these men and women out there who, if only they could get past the gatekeepers, would be successful. And that crowd-sourcing is the future. And you’re old. And you’re done.” And I believe our thesis at the time was, no, this is not something you crowd source. This is about personal creative vision and intelligence. And, no, we’re not trying to keep anyone out. We’re just being realistic. People generally are fussy about what they watch and it’s really expensive to produce things. So, this isn’t going to go well.

And we were 100% right on this one. And there was no doubt. Sometimes you and I make guesses about things. I don’t think either one of us were guessing back then. We knew. It’s not enough that Amazon does this whole thing – by the way, I also remember that they pushed a very bad contract out initially and then they fixed it. But it’s not enough that they put this out there and then just face plant, but they are now, as you said, all the way in the opposite direction. They’re now chasing all the A-list “elitist” writers because as it turns out writing is hard. Writing for screen and television is hard. It is not a common talent. It takes time to cultivate and to perfect, or at least to progress in. And so, yeah, there’s actually something called a professional screenwriter. Sorry. I don’t know what to say.

The entire exercise I thought was kind of a weirdly cynical bit of false egalitarianism that was never going to work.

**John:** Yeah. It’s interesting. There’s the choices of going wide versus going deep. And so wide is the sort of crowd-sourced model where you get a bunch of different brains working on things, and it’s really good for some stuff. It’s really good when there’s things that could be kind of figured out algorithmically.

But screenwriting, at least screenwriting so far, is not a good candidate for that sort of algorithmic wisdom-of-the-crowd kind of thing. It’s such a specific thing that requires one person’s intense focus for long periods of time. And that’s why both writing a movie or showrunning a TV show requires just this person’s brain to be so intensely focused and have a vision for what things are. And crowds are really good for like vision in a lot of different directions, but when you need an intense, focused vision that ends up being one person or a very small group of people.

And I think this is another example of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Silicon Valley at times gets a little too up its own butt about these notions of things like, for instance, crowd sourcing and the wisdom of the crowd. But even in the case of groups of people writing in Hollywood, for instance television shows, there’s a hierarchy. And there is a person in charge. And things are decided on that level. The notion that there’d be some kind of group pushing something towards brilliance is so bizarre because, you know, what’s everybody’s complaint? I mean, the most watered down Hollywood stuff is movies by committee. And here Amazon attempted to expand the committee to the world. It was dead in the water from the start. It was never, ever, ever, ever going to work. And honestly I do think people should listen to us.

When you and I 100% agree on something it’s not possible that we’re wrong. If we both agree to 100%, everyone just needs to just trust us.

**John:** Absolutely. So, having said that, please don’t go back through the archives and figure out all the cases where we were completely wrong, because I’m sure there are some of those.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, but not when we’re 100%–

**John:** 100%, yeah. That will be the thing. No, no, we were only 99% sure.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I will say even like recent things like MoviePass, we’re like well that can never work. And right now it seems to be quite successful. But we’ll see sort of how it all goes.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we were a little wishy. I wasn’t at 100.

**John:** We were a little wishy. We were like confused.

**Craig:** Yeah. Whereas I remember with this–

**John:** We were never confused about Amazon Studios.

**Craig:** No. I lost my freaking mind over this one. This was early umbrage. This may have been the first umbrage. I don’t know.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our feature topic of today. This is conflict of interest. And so I put this on the outline because this came up a couple times the last few weeks and I want to talk about it as a concept. So first thing that sort of came up was the discussions about the agency deal and the deal with writers and the WGA, particularly in terms of packaging and producing. I heard the terms conflict of interest used a lot around that.

And also more recently we have Sean Hannity who is talking about Michael Cohen, but he’s in fact a client of Michael Cohen. And as a journalist or whatever you want to call him, that is troubling. And so the word conflict of interest was also coming up there.

So, I want to dig into conflict of interest.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a tricky little area. I mean, I have often discussed this fact with lawyers. This is one of those areas where sometimes the things that we think of as conflict of interest aren’t necessarily conflict of interest. It seems rather situational. And certain professions are more susceptible to it than others.

So, yeah, let’s talk about how this applies to our lives as writers.

**John:** Absolutely. So we’ll try to define terms a little bit as we start. I think the crucial thing to understand is that conflict of interest is not a crime in itself. It’s not even necessarily a big wrongdoing in and of itself. It’s just a situation. It’s a set of circumstances. It’s wherever you have a person/organization that has multiple competing interests. They can be financial. They can be other kinds of interest. But in trying to service one of those they may end up acting in the detriment to one of the other interests. So each of these interests thinks that they are the primary interest and they can’t be. And so it’s those conflicting things that become a conflict of interest.

So, any situation where your loyalties are divided, that’s the way of thinking about a conflict of interest. And so it can go beyond the strict legal definition to just these murky places we find ourselves where even if there isn’t an actual wrongdoing, there’s a perception that something could be unfair towards the parties involved because you have these multiple competing interests.

Classic examples, if you are buying a house and the real estate agent is representing both the buyer and the seller, that is a conflict of interest. That happens sometimes, but it has to be publicly acknowledged that there is a conflict of interest here because the seller is trying to get the highest price. The buyer is trying to get the lowest price. The agent is also kind of trying to get a higher price because they get a percentage. So, that’s a thing that has to be discussed.

If you are given a bonus based on how many life insurance policies you sell to the clients of this organization, that can be a real conflict of interest because those people you are selling these to, they may not need life insurance policies. But if your salary is based on how many of those you sell, that can be a conflict of interest.

So, it happens in lots of situations. But, particularly for our podcast I want to talk about the situations where it happens for writers.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, to me conflict of interest typically revolves around questions of trust. There is a sense of a violation of trust. If you believe that somebody is working on your collective behalf. That is to say on behalf of them and you. Or, if that person is working for you. You’ve paid them and they are advancing your interests. And very specifically what they’re doing is providing you a service in which you can trust. For instance, a doctor. I trust my doctor. My doctor says, “You know what? I’ve done a blood exam and I really think you need this medicine Flamydol.” OK, great.

Now, if he doesn’t tell me that he’s a shareholder in the company that makes Flamydol, that is a conflict of interest and he’s violated my trust. This is something that’s very clear in certain areas like, for instance, doctors, lawyers. Journalists are constantly having to disclose things. They seemingly are the most fastidious about it. So, very typically you’ll read a news article and somebody will be talking about a product or a movie. And then they will say, “By the way, that movie or product is manufactured by such-and-such, the parent company of this paper.” So at the very least by disclosing it you don’t have to worry that we’re trying to put a fast one by you. You can judge that for yourself, but we have not violated your trust.

**John:** Or an organization like a newspaper might have firewalls between the advertising department and the editorial department so that the people who are selling the ads to those companies are not influencing the editorial decisions of stories written about that company. And that’s a reasonable way of trying to avoid conflicts of interest because even if there wasn’t impropriety, the perception of impropriety is sometimes just as damaging.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in our business I think that’s – well, look, there are some areas where there is clearly a question of financial conflict of interest. But maybe more than half of the time what we’re talking about is the appearance of a conflict. The appearance or sense that trust has been violated because what happens is one party or the other discovers something that someone didn’t disclose to them and that’s where we can get ourselves into trouble or people can get into trouble with us.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk through some examples that writers are going to face. First off is just with their agencies, with their agents, because agents represent you but they don’t only represent you. They represent multiple clients. And so if you are going in for a job pitching on the Slinky movie, well your agency – your agent – might have other writers who are pitching on that same job. And that is going to happen in your life. And sometimes you’ll know about that. Sometimes you won’t know about that. You should know about that. And so we’re going to talk through strategies for like how you have those difficult conversations.

But it’s not just writers. They also represent directors. So, you know, that director who signed on to that movie who wants to fire you, that is a weird conflict of interest that happens all the time where they are trying to keep their director client happy, but also their writer client happy. Same thing happens with actors. They may really want to have their actor from their agency in your TV show. Are they doing what’s best for the show, what’s best for you as the writer? Or are they doing what’s best for them as the agency because they have this big high profile actor client that they want to get into a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, there is a certain aspect of this where it’s a bit caveat-scriptor. The agency is absolutely going to represent other people. You know they represent other people. You know that a bunch of them either do the same thing you do, going up for the same jobs you go up for. Or are people that could theoretically fire your, or employ you. Or people who make more money than you do, therefore it would enrich the agency more. They also represent producers.

So, you kind of have to just assume, I think, as a writer no matter where you are represented that unless you, the client, are literally the highest paid client at that agency that at some point or another your agents will be in a position where they have to choose between your interests and the interests of a client that earns more money for themselves and therefore earns more money for the agency. It’s just priced into the situation. It’s kind of hard to, I don’t know, pretend that you didn’t know. It’s sort of out there, isn’t it?

**John:** It is. And so a thing that’s come up recently in discussions about sort of the agency deal is we all know sort of the challenge of the multiple clients situation, but when the agency has their own financial interest in a project that changes the equation. So if an agency has a packaging fee on a TV show, they no longer have the interest in trying to make sure that you’re getting paid – your being paid more salary isn’t helping them because they are not commissioning that salary. They are not taking their 10% on that salary. So they no longer have an interest in trying to make sure your price goes up.

In fact, they may have an interest in making sure the show is sustainable. They want that show just to keep running because they’re getting a fee for every episode produced. If the show is incredibly successful and syndicates they are getting a percentage of the overall profits of the show. So, their interest is in the success of the show and not necessarily interest of the client. And that is, very classically, a conflict of interest.

Similar kinds of things are happening on the feature side where some agencies and other companies are really truly acting as producers. They’re financing projects. And therefore they have an interest in the final product that is not the same as their interest in the client who put the project together. That’s a challenging situation and the kind of thing we’re trying to figure out a way to address.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, look, technically speaking there is a law that governs talent agents, at least in the state of California which is where all the talent agents we’re describing live and work, and it basically says you get to procure employment on behalf of artists and in exchange for that exclusive right no one else can do it without a license you are not allowed to charge more than 10% commission. And you are not allowed to have a financial stake in the employers or the companies that are employing your clients. That’s simple straight up non, you know, conflict of interest avoidance let’s call it.

And what the agencies have done is put a little end run on that. They have created essentially side companies. So there’s the illusion I think of a separate company because they do these things.

So, OK, the talent agency is actually a Talent Agency Incorporated. But the production company is Productions Limited. Well, the finances are comingled and the shareholders are the same. But they’re two different companies therefore this one is not violating the talent agency act and this one is – it’s bull sugar.

And, also, this packaging thing I hate. I hate it. And here’s the – so packaging basically as far as I can tell, the scam is that the agencies have basically performed a shakedown maneuver on studios. They say, look, a number of our clients are in this show. You have to pay us money per episode or we’re going to, I guess, tell all of our clients to not be in the show. Or we’re going to not have our clients show up for your next show. It’s a little bit of a, “Oh, it’s a shame if anything should happen to your network.” And they get this money. There’s no value added, at all, whatsoever. This money is theoretically money that could be spent instead on the show itself. Or, god forbid, on the clients.

Yes, the clients don’t have to pay commission on that. But as you point out the whole point of commission is I want to pay it because that means you’re motivated to get me more money. The problem as far as I see it in that case is a flat-out conflict of interest as far as I’m concerned. The issue is I don’t know if there’s anything we can do about that one, because it seems like the big agencies – UTA, William Morris Endeavor, CAA, ICM – all package. And we are mostly represented by them. And so it’s not like you can leave and go to the other one. It’s going to happen to you again. And it is apparently not illegal.

**John:** Yeah. So these are things that are going to be figured out over the course of the next year. And so if you’ve been to some of the WGA meetings you’ve heard some of the plans on that front. We won’t sort of rehash them here.

I think it’s important to talk about them because it is an inherent conflict of interest and there always are going to be conflicts of interest. Because I’ve heard people talking about like, “Oh, this WGA is to eliminate all the conflicts of interest.” And I want to stress that that’s impossible. That will never happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because conflicts of interest are inherent in any situation where people are representing multiple parties. That’s going to happen. I think what you want to do is get to a place where one of the parties they’re representing isn’t themselves. And that’s not the biggest party that they’re representing. And we’ll see if we can make progress on that front.

But I also don’t want to leave it all on the agency’s doorstep here because studios have conflicts of interest as well. Look at pilot season. Pilot season is conflict of interest season. It’s basically “We are going to create a bunch of TV pilots and some of them we’re going to pick up to series and some of them we aren’t. But we don’t know which ones yet and so we’re going to pretend that each one of them is the most important thing and that we’re going to stick the best actors in each one of them. But really we know we’re not going to actually make it all – they’re not all going to work. And we’re going to be pulling people out of things. And we know it’s going to be a train wreck. But we’re going into it just thinking like, OK, this is our process. This is how we’re going to do it.”

There are inherent conflicts of interest in there. And if you go through like casting in the pilot season process, it’s all conflicts. It’s all people trying to negotiate these things and you don’t know all the information. It’s really crazy. But that’s just the way it is. And no magic wand will ever be waved that can make that all go away.

So as a writer you’re going to be entering into a system where that’s just part of the game.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, there’s conflict always. And then there are these times when you have – a very common situation that we encounter where the studio is engaging in conflict of interest. A studio head is fired. A new studio head is brought in or a new network head. They have an inherent conflict of interest when they’re evaluating the shows that are there. They may quietly think this show that this former head was developing is brilliant. But that just makes me look terrible. If I go ahead and greenlight that show and it becomes a big hit everyone is going to say, “Oh, look, see, they fired the wrong person. They hired him. They should have just kept her.” So, I think I’ll just kill that thing.

That’s just a classic conflict of interest. And also internally what a lot of people don’t know is that the – let’s call them the sub-level of executives. You’ve got the boss, and then you’ve got the two underbosses. And then you’ve got the layer of the five under-under bosses. Each one of those executives has shows for which they are responsible and accountable. They are being evaluated by the success of those. It is in their personal interest to see those shows get on the air. And it is in their personal interest to see their colleague’s shows not get on the air because there is an endless churn of competition and survival of the fittest in the ranks of these executives. That, of course, is also conflict of interest if we define the ultimate interest as good show, which John it often is not.

**John:** It is not. I want to quickly go through some of the other flavors of conflict of interest you’re going to find. So, self-dealing. Self-dealing is when you are basically buying something at a reduced price because you’re essentially selling it to yourself. And so that happens in television where a studio will sell its TV show into syndication to the network it itself owns. So that’s become a subject of several lawsuits where they’ve negotiated a lower price than it’s believed they could have gotten on the open market.

That can hurt show creators who are counting on that price to be what’s affecting their profits on the show.

Another situation we all face is outside employment which is basically you’re working on two things at once. A lot of writers are going to be working on two things at once. You kind of on the phone call sort of pretend it’s the only thing that you’re working on. But realistically you are going to be working on multiple projects at once. The buyer thinks that you are only working on their thing when in fact you’re working on multiple things. Usually that doesn’t become a problem. And usually it’s just understood that this is a thing that happens. But it is a conflict of interest.

Am I giving all of my best thoughts and words towards project A or towards project B. Sometimes you are making choices like that.

**Craig:** I think writers do face these situations of potential conflict of interest all the time and it’s fair, if we’re going to whack agents and studio executives for it, we also have to give ourselves a pretty good spanking because it comes up a lot. Writers are constantly playing this game of managing multiple children. Each one of those children is a project of theirs that they love or care about. Someone comes along and says, “Oh, would you be interested in helping us fix this movie?” And you know that you just worked on that movie’s competition at another studio. It would be proper to disclose that. But if you do not, you are engaging in blatant conflict of interest.

If either one of those parties find out that you worked on this movie and its direct competition, you’re violating everyone’s trust. You’re taking money and violating trust. And it would be fair for both of them to question whether or not you did your best on either one and even worse if you did then that meant you took money to hurt the other one. That’s a real thing that comes up all the time, especially because there’s – as we’ve often said – rarely a movie that doesn’t have some kind of direct concept competition at another studio.

**John:** So the most direct competition thing I can think of that’s happened in my career is I signed on to write an Alice in Wonderland movie and Sam Mendes was going to direct it and it was produced by Dick Zanuck. Separately, Tim Burton signed on to do Alice in Wonderland at Disney and Dick Zanuck was his producer so Dick Zanuck joined him in that. So, Dick Zanuck was attempting to produce two competing Alice in Wonderland movies at the same time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Dick Zanuck was amazing. And I am so sad he has passed away, because he was remarkable. And he was one of the best producers I ever met in terms of just really being honest with me. So, I remember sitting at lunch. It’s like, “Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s crazy that this is the situation. I’m going to do my best to support both things at the same time. I don’t know what’s going to happen. And at some point I’ll have to choose.”

Ultimately the universe chose and the Disney movie went and the Sam Mendes one went away. And I never ended up writing the Sam Mendes one. But those things do happen. And Dick Zanuck himself was – the role of a producer like that is always conflict of interest because he’s trying to protect the movie, and his relationships with everyone involved with the movie. You know, it’s complicated. So, I have nothing but sympathy for the kinds of situations we find ourselves in as we’re trying to make these nebulous, impossible things come to life.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would advise writers, I mean, because in a situation like that – the good news for Dick Zanuck was everybody knew. Right? So, the second studio that says–

**John:** Exactly. He was transparent.

**Craig:** Yeah. So they say, “OK, listen, we know you’re doing this. It’s crazy. We’re pricing it in. Everybody knows everything. We still choose this. Fine.” Conflict of interest has been avoided. Voila.

For writers who are working – professional writers – if something like this should come up, I think in general it is good to err on the side of disclosure. More disclosure than less.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** About most things. Because I believe – and I could be just Pollyannaish about this – but in the long run people appreciate honesty, particularly in our business where it is in short supply. And you will be probably rewarded. You will probably end up if you were to say lose a potential job because of disclosed conflict of interest, the karma would come back around to boost you up later. I just sort of believe that.

I try my best to not get into a situation where if somebody were to find out that I were doing something they would feel betrayed. I think that’s the most important thing. I never want to walk around worrying that if somebody should know something that I’m doing that is true they would feel betrayed.

**John:** Absolutely. I think it’s always good advice to imagine the phone call you’d get if that person found out. And, all right, that phone call would be horrible. I should tell this in advance.

There was a situation where I was working on a movie for Spielberg and I was also working on the first Charlie’s Angels. And both things had to happen at the same time. I had days where I was going between those two meetings back to back. And so I told Steven I’m doing this thing for Drew. He knew Drew because of E.T. And it was all fine and it was all good.

But, if he had found out separately that I was still actively working on Charlie’s Angels, or if Charlie’s Angels had found out I was doing this other thing that could have been a real conflict. And so being upfront about it, just being transparent, is helpful. And just phrase it in a positive way. I want you to know that this is what I’m doing. It’s going to be these three days and then I’m back on yours fulltime. That it will all work out.

That’s much better than the betrayed call that you get from that person. Because it poisons things after that moment. Even when you give them that great draft they’re going into thinking that they’re upset with you. That you are a bad person who didn’t do their very best work because of this other reason. So, disclose.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, it’s not like they necessarily always follow these rules. You will find yourself in situations where you are doing the right thing for someone and then they turn around and do the wrong thing to you. And you may feel that you have firmly discovered the whole nice guys finish last rule. And that you’re a sucker. And you’re a doormat. And you should check your morals at the door. It’s the only way to get ahead. And all I can say to you is no. It is not worth it.

Yes, there are unscrupulous, bad, evil people that work in our business. I think it’s become more evident than ever. And they do succeed. And it is nauseating. The levels of injustice at times can be nauseating. However, that doesn’t mean you have to be a bad person. Nor does it mean you have to embrace any kind of betrayal. You can absolutely succeed by being a decent person.

I’m not suggesting you have to be a saint. This is a tough business. Sometimes you sugar coat. Sometimes you have to kind of bend the truth a bit just to avoid – you know, it’s the whole white lie syndrome. Right? These are things that have to happen.

But, you can be a decent person and succeed in this business. Will you end up with $500 million? Probably not. Do you want that? Eh, you’re in the wrong business anyway.

**John:** Yeah, I think so. So let’s talk about what can be done, or at least what steps an industry can take and individual people can take. So I’d say industry-wide what works for lawyers, what works for doctors, what works for newspapers when they’re run properly are standards. Codes of conduct. Basically public statements about this is what our policies are. And so when you have standards and practices, if you have a fiduciary standard where a client’s needs have to be the primary thing you’re working for, that helps.

So even like the NBA players, they have a code of conduct with their agents which sort of dictates these are the things that are allowed and that are not allowed. And so the degree to which you can figure out ways to codify what the expectations are, that helps. Because it’s when there are no clear cut expectations that these conflicts of interest become so pervasive.

Individually I would say that as a writer you have to acknowledge that those conflicts are going to be there. And that some of them are completely unavoidable. Like your agent represents multiple people. That’s just the nature of it. And so unless you are the only client, that’s going to happen.

And in a weird way the bigger your agency, the more of those conflicts are going to be a factor. That’s just the nature of it. You may have more access to some things at a bigger agency. But you also are going to have more conflicts just because there’s more people and more relationships there.

Some of the things that I think are useful to ask on the phone call is “What’s been your experience with this person?” Just get them talking about like who this person is, who this executive is, who this producer is to see if they have some preexisting thing. I’ve always been surprised where studio execs when they are renegotiating their contracts at the studio, it’s the agents who do that negotiation for them. So, agents have ongoing relationships with these people at studios that go much beyond just their clients working with them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, ask about that stuff.

It’s fair to ask, “Hey, do you have anybody else going up for this job?” I think that’s a fair question. If your agent won’t answer that question, they’re not really your agent.

**Craig:** And also the answer is, “Yeah.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think that Hollywood and DC are very similar in this regard. The lobbyists and the politicians and the people who run businesses that the laws govern are all way too involved with each other’s lives and there’s simply not enough separation there. That said, like John said, be aware of the stuff that’s obviously there. Just as, by the way, the studios are aware that every time they talk to us about an idea there’s a decent chance that we either have been working on a similar idea on our own, or could love that idea but want to do it on our own and not tell them. Everybody’s kind of dealing with that sort of thing.

So, by and large you can only essentially govern your own honesty and your own sense of decorum and good behavior. And you can only really govern your own representatives in as much as you have a sort of choice. But that sort of choice isn’t great. I got to be honest when it comes to these issues I don’t know of any particular agency where I would look at it and go, “Oh well, they are more, I don’t know, above the board and clean-handed than any of the other ones.”

**John:** Yeah. I would say you can find out reputations of people who are – you can avoid some shady people by asking questions. And that’s why when other writer friends ask us about agents or that they’re moving around we will tell them quite candidly what we think and sort of what’s happened. But in terms of the inherent systemic conflicts that are going to be there, they’re going to be there regardless. Even the best agents are going to have those conflicts. And I would say the agents I would choose to work with are the ones who are going to be most transparent and are going to put my interests as far forward as they can. That’s all you can sort of ask for.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get to some other questions.

Jay writes in, “In regards to sitcoms, what factors are used in deciding if it should be a single camera or a multicam? Should the teleplay’s formatting differ based on the camera setup?”

**Craig:** Well, generally speaking multicam shows are fixed in a couple, two or three, key locations. So you’re thinking about your Seinfelds and your Cheers and a number of the Disney and Nickelodeon sitcoms where you’ve got the living room, the bedroom, and the office. You’ve got the movie theater, the kitchen, and the schoolroom. It’s that kind of thing. Or in the case of Seinfeld, it’s Jerry’s apartment and it’s the diner, right?

So, the reason why is if you’re camping down with the multi-camera setup you kind of are living in a space. You don’t want to yank all of your multi-cameras around. The whole point of multi-camera is we’re on a stage. We have a base. So we can set up our cameras and go from there. We’re probably going to have an audience. There’s a fair chance of that as well.

Single camera you have quite a bit more freedom. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have certain sets or locations that you use over and over. In terms of formatting, I don’t know necessarily if the formatting is hugely different as much as the style of the writing itself is necessarily going to be different. You can have lots of shorter scenes when you’re single cam. And obviously you can go outside and you’re going to want to find some different locations to move around and justify your single cameraness.

If you’re a multi-camera format and you’re in the living room, you’re probably not going to do the three or four line scene. You’re going to camp down for a while. You can kind of get this just from watching these shows. It’s sort of intuitive I think.

**John:** So, right now a couple of listeners are screaming at their podcast player right now because multicam is formatted differently. So, if it’s a multicam show it looks really different on the page. It’s double-spaced.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s crazy.

**John:** It does. It’s double spaced.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** Scene headers are underlined. I’m going to send you a link. It will drive you mad. I don’t know the actual origin of the multicam format, but it is a very different looking thing. So, it’s double-spaced. Action lines are all uppercase. So you’ve got to really look at the shows that are multicam and study that format because if you were to sort of halfway do multicam people would be – they would throw the script across the room. It’s a really different look.

**Craig:** Are the multicam shows all exactly the same? Or are some different than others?

**John:** You know, there are going to be some house styles. But part of the reason why I know what multicam looks like is the new Highland has multicam as a template. It looks so different. Here, I’m sending you a link to what this looks like. I’m going to send you the link in screenwriting.io, a website that our own producer Megan McDonnell updates, to show some of the big differences here. I’m going to throw it in Skype for you.

**Craig:** What the F? This is stupid. I hate it. All action and description is in all caps. Well, I guess they hate – you know what? I sort of understand. How much action and description can you have when you’re in the same damn set every time? You know what I mean? So maybe that’s why they do it that way. That’s so weird. All right.

**John:** And so I also put in an image there.

**Craig:** What the – that’s ugly as F. Oh, and they put the characters underneath. It’s almost like a cross between a play and a – yuck.

**John:** My guess is that the multicam format evolved sort of with the birth of television and it was a little bit more like a play. And if you really think about it, television and film came from kind of different worlds. And so film was done out here in Los Angeles. It was a thing that sort of grew up 100 years ago. TV had its own origins. It sort of came out of radio and plays and multiple cameras doing stuff. And they’ve co-mingled, I mean we think about them in the same way, but multicam shows are written in this different way. And it’s jarring when you first see it.

So you still see INT. You still see DAY. But character names are listed in there. There’s much more underlining, all uppercase. It’s a really different looking thing on the page.

So, getting back to I think Craig’s more important point is that the writing is also different. There’s an expectation in multicam shows that we are getting to jokes and that the jokes are presented and are landing and they are acknowledged by generally a laugh track and an audience. And there’s just a timing and a spacing. We’ll put a link into the show notes for this great YouTube clip of Big Bang Theory without laughs.

**Craig:** It’s so great. It’s eerie.

**John:** It’s so disturbing. But it’s this moment that like plays totally natural with laughs, but if you take the laughs out feels just bizarre. So, you will know whether your show is meant to be a multicam or a single cam. It’s also weird we still use the term single cam because all of the “single cam” shows they use multiple cameras. It’s just they are shot more like a drama or a TV show in that they have – yes, they have coverage. They’re shooting A and B camera. They’re doing more complicated things.

So, the shows, half-hour comedies that are single camera include things like Modern Family, Blackish, The Office. A lot of these shows have that sort of half-conceit of there is a documentary crew there. But the other ones that are just truly fully dramas that happen to be half an hour long.

You will know whether your show is which one. But they are actually very different. I’ve never written multicam. But some people love it.

Roseanne is a modern example of a multicam that is hugely successful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I obviously have never written in it because I didn’t know that it was a different format. And I’m kind of hoping that there’s somebody out there that’s working on a multicam show that’s striking some sort of blow against the tyranny of this very silly format.

**John:** Absolutely. Another format which is related to both of these but different still is the graphic novel format. Graphic novel format is not as standardized as either screenplays or this multicam format is. But it’s a way of sort of reflecting the script of a book and sort of where the panel layouts are and what is dialogue. It’s not just screenplays, you learn.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Charles writes, “When writing a period piece, how would you establish a time period? I suppose putting something like The 1920s in description would suffice, but it feels a little too simplistic and the opposite of artistic.” Craig, how would you specify the time period for something like Chernobyl? What details do you put in there to let us know – to anchor us in a time and place?

**Craig:** Well, you have some choices. I mean, the first thing you can decide is exactly how you want your reader to discover the time period and by extension the audience. Obviously the audience does not see scene headers, right? So I don’t like to put in the establishment of a time period in a scene header. I feel like that’s the least interesting way because, again, the audience won’t have it.

So what you start with are some key things. We know that there are certain things that stick out. Appliances. Streets. Clothes. Technology in general. And even language. There’s all these little bits and bobs that kind of make indications. Smoking in a weird way has become a signifier of a time period.

So, little things like finding a cool reference to a brand that no longer exists. Little subtle ways so that people can figure out the mystery on their own. And then, if you desire, if it’s important for your story, you can indicate exactly when this is. It depends on the time period. People may think, well, this is 30, 40 years ago. If it’s important for them to know which then you throw the subtitle up on screen.

But first I like to kind of let people figure it out on their own. So we’re talking about our environment. Hair. Makeup. Props. Location. Language choices. All the things that make a period as vibrant as it is.

**John:** So situations where you may want to put the year in there is if it has to – like there’s multiple time periods in your script and you need to make it clear which time period you’re in for this thing. That’s a great time to put some time period in your scene header.

Or if you’re anchoring two specific real world events, then that’s a situation where you might honestly just put it on screen because it’s clear that this is a very specific moment in time and you want the audience to be crystal clear on exactly when you are in time and space, because this is going to be a hugely important part of your story.

But what Craig describes is right. I think your job – remember always – in the screenplay is to be the movie in paper form. So if there’s specific things we’re going to see and hear in the film that are going to clue us into what time period we’re in, those should be in your script.

**Craig:** Yep. Even sounds. You may have somebody walking along a street at night. And it might not be necessarily evident from the way that they’re dressed what the time period is. But you hear a car going by in the background and a horn. And there’s a certain kind of old car horn. That alone just puts you in a space. So use all of the things that exist. And I can tell you now that I’m here and we’re shooting a show that is period, every single thing has to be thought about. Everything. And the question that is often asked is “Did they have this?” That would be the worst thing of all. Like, “Oh, we put a thing in that just didn’t exist during that time.” That would be a nightmare.

But every single thing there is an attempt to source it to period so that it is accurate and the world feels true.

**John:** Absolutely. All right, so it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing could not be more related to what you just talked about. So in terms of anchoring you into a place and time this is a re-endorsement actually. Dana Stevens on Slate Culture Gabfest mentioned this. It’s from 1911. And so the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern took a trip to NYC and they filmed it on the motion picture cameras of the time. And so we’ve all seen that kind of footage. It’s all herky-jerky and odd because the frame rates are different. But this person named Guy Jones on YouTube has taken that footage and adjusted the frame rate so it’s smooth to modern eyes. And he added sound effects. He added ambience and full sound effects. And it’s really amazing because it’s like, “Oh, that’s what it actually looks like.” So we’ll put a link into the show notes, but you see horses and cars both simultaneously moving around NYC. You see the Flatiron Building which looks just like the Flatiron Building.

Everybody wears hats. We’re in Chinatown. You see this little Chinese kid and he’s doing what kids now would do is like, “Oh, it’s a camera. I’m going to try to get in front of the camera.” And that’s just a great sort of instinct. It’s just really cool to see the real version of this, because I’ve seen movie versions of the same time period a lot, but we can never actually build something this big. I mean, you see all of these people on these giant sets and it really is incredible. So I encourage people to take a look at this thing. And also just to – the sound design on this is really good. It’s very convincing and it’s more believable and more interesting because it feels like you’re really there in the time. Because this was a silent film, but they built a really good ambient track for it that feels like the period.

So, that’s my One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Well, my One Cool Thing is somewhat similar, but I’m not looking at the way things really were in 1911. I’m looking at the way things really were in Cleopatra era Egypt.

**John:** Ooh.

**Craig:** And Greece. Yeah. Because I’m playing Assassin’s Creed Origins. Of course. And I believe it is accurate in all ways. So naturally at the time I would have been this wonderful man named Bayek who goes around – only in pursuit of justice – just shedding massive quantities of blood. But it’s a really good game.

I like the Assassin’s Creed series. Have you ever played an Assassin’s Creed, John?

**John:** I never have.

**Craig:** There’s this underpinning concept to it that is so stupid I don’t even – it embarrasses me to say it. But you’re not really – the idea of the game is you’re not actually an assassin running around in ancient Egypt or in 1800s London or in Renaissance Florence or all the things that they’ve done. You’re actually a person in the modern era accessing genetic memories of somebody. It’s absolute nonsense. I hate that part of it.

**John:** I saw that in a trailer for the movie. So I saw Michael Fassbender in this big rig. And so that’s what you’re describing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like if it had been me – no one asked me to write Assassin’s Creed – but had they asked me I would have said just slice away this ridiculous thing and no doubt they would have said to me, “Um, Ubisoft, the company that’s licensed us the rights, they’re not going to let you do that.” Then I would have just fired myself.

Regardless, the actual gameplay though of Assassin’s Creed is really good. They’ve made a lot of them. They seem to make one a month. So, I had kind of gotten off the Assassin’s Creed wheel. But the aforementioned Chris Morgan said, “Oh no, this one is really, really good.” And it is. It’s really fun playing as somebody in a completely different culture. The Assassin’s Creed games have generally been white, white, white, white, white. So, it’s fun to be an ancient Egyptian. Well, I wouldn’t say ancient. I mean, you’re talking a little bit before the Common Era as they say.

But it’s just a cool time period. You’re riding a camel. You’re lopping people’s heads off. It’s great. So, you know, I’m a big fan. I say yes Assassin’s Creed Origins.

**John:** Yes Assassin’s Creed. The common thing said about Cleopatra is that she lived closer to our time than to when the pyramids were built. I don’t know if that’s actually true. But it’s a thing I hear repeated a lot.

**Craig:** It is true. And, in fact, it is mentioned in a splash screen at one point while the game is loading up.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** Yes, so that is true. Cleopatra was fairly modern. I mean, we’re talking just – we’re starting to edge towards the 0 Common Era. But you do – there’s one point where you’re running around. You’re doing stuff. And you just happen to turn to the left and there in the distance are pyramids. And it’s quite breathtaking. So big fan.

**John:** Very nice. That is our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tim Garcia. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send the lyrics to the song you’ve now written about being on the other side of a velvet rope so you can join us for the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend special Q&A thing.

If you have longer questions like the ones we answered, those are great at ask@johnaugust.com. But short ones are easy on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you would like to leave us a review, that’s lovely. It helps other people find the show.

Here’s my reminder that we have a game that is out there in the world that is called AlphaBirds. It is a fun game for people who like words and like Scrabble or Boggle. Craig played it along with Melissa, god, like two or three years ago at Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yeah, in Austin, right? Yeah.

**John:** It’s a fun game.

**Craig:** It was fun.

**John:** Back then it was called Sparrow. It’s now called AlphaBirds and it’s available for purchase. So that’s at store.johnaugust.com. Or alphabirdsgame.com.

You’ll find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. The transcripts go up about four days to seven days after the episode airs. All the back episodes are available at Scriptnotes.net. It’s a subscription. It’s $1.99 a month.

We also have a few more of the USB drives that have the first 350 episodes of the show on them. Craig, delightful talking with you across the world.

**Craig:** Indeed. Thanks, John. I’ll see you next week. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* To win an invite to the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend event on Wednesday May 9th, send your lyrics to “The Other Side of the Velvet Rope” to ask@johnaugust.com
* Amazon Studios is no longer accepting [unsolicited submissions](http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/amazon-studios-shuts-down-open-script-submissions-1202753480/)
* The Deadline [article](http://deadline.com/2018/04/talent-agency-business-writers-guild-deal-proposal-shakeup-packaging-deals-1202373395/) that outlines the WGA’s proposal to renegotiate the Artists’ manager Basic Agreement
* [Dick Zanuck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Zanuck) and his [credits](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005573/)
* Multicams are [formatted differently](https://screenwriting.io/how-are-multicamera-tv-scripts-formatted/). This clip of the [Big Bang Theory with the laugh track removed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASZ8Hks4gko) shows how different the rhythm of a Multicam can be.
* Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern’s [footage of New York City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aohXOpKtns0) as adjusted by Guy Jones
* [Assassin’s Creed Origins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed_Origins)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [AlphaBirds](http://alphabirdsgame.com) is our fun new word game!
* [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)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Tim Garcia ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_347.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/changing-the-defaults).

**John August:** So, language warning. There are some bad words in this episode, so if you’re driving in the car with your kids you might want to put on some headphones. Well, don’t well headphones in the car. But you might not want your kids in the car while you’re listening to this. Or put on headphones and listen to it somewhere else.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Scriptnotes, Episode 346. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig just started shooting Chernobyl, so he is off in Lithuania. But I am lucky to be joined by Christina Hodson, a screenwriter whose credits include the upcoming Transformers spinoff Bumblebee. It was also just announced that she will be writing the upcoming Batgirl for Warner Bros. Welcome Christina.

**Christina Hodson:** Hello. Thank you for having me.

**John:** So mostly I don’t want to talk about big comic book movies or big Transformer movies–

**Christina:** Why not?

**John:** I want to talk about your experience on things like the Black List. I want to talk about inclusion riders. Characters’ races. Windows and mirrors. Who gets to write blank? The male/female splits in movies. Basically I want to solve the systemic issues of inclusion and representation in Hollywood in the next 59 minutes. Is that OK?

**Christina:** Great. I think that’s very achievable. And between the two of us I think we’re probably going to get it all done.

**John:** We’re smart people.

**Christina:** Yeah. I feel confident. Strangely confident.

**John:** We’re feature writers. So as feature writers, maybe we’ll only solve it for features. But I feel like that will be a good template for extending through to the rest of the industry.

**Christina:** Maybe the rest of the world.

**John:** Maybe so.

**Christina:** Maybe.

**John:** You know what? Because Hollywood is the world.

**Christina:** It’s true.

**John:** If it happens here, it can happen anywhere.

**Christina:** I mean, this is the most important place in the world.

**John:** It is the most important place in the world. I have a little news before we get to that, though. First off, I’m going to be at the LA Times Festival of Books. That’s the big event that’s at USC. That is Saturday April 21 at 4:30pm. I’m on a panel talking about Launch and Arlo Finch. I’ll be signing Arlo Finch copies. So if you want to come and see me and producer Megan McDonnell and producer Ben Adair, we’ll be there. April 21 at 4:30pm. Come to that.

Also, LA Times Festival of Books is great. Christina have you ever been to that?

**Christina:** I have not.

**John:** So they basically take over the USC campus and it’s all book stuff and it’s great. And there’s lots of stuff for kids, but also panels for grownups, so it’s cool for that.

Second off, I made a game. It’s called AlphaBirds. Christina has it in her hands right now.

**Christina:** It is very adorable.

**John:** It is a small red box. It is a word game, so if you are a fan of Scrabble or Boggle or things where you make words it’s like that, but it’s a card game. It’s really good for like two to five people. We usually play on Friday afternoons as we are drinking beers. And it’s good because most of these word games require such intense focus. This requires intense focus while it is your turn, and then you can just chat and drink your beer other times.

So, if you would like to see AlphaBirds it is at alphabirdsgame.com.

Christina, you are mostly a feature writer. Are you only a feature writer? Have you done TV?

**Christina:** I’ve developed one TV show for about five years. And the rights just lapsed. So mostly features, yeah. Features is where my heart is and I only did the TV show because the book that I was adapting was too good to do in two hours.

**John:** So talk me through where you started, because I think you came through development?

**Christina:** Yeah. So I started in London. I’m obviously British. Or I’m just putting on this accent for show.

**John:** It’s a really impressive accent. So nicely done.

**Christina:** Thank you. I’ve been working hard on it. I’m actually from Texas.

So I started in London. I was at Focus Features. I kind of worked my way up from the very bottom. I was a runner at Working Title first and then an intern at Focus. Worked my way up to a junior-junior executive there. Was in development. And then moved to New York where I ran development for a small strange company, mostly features but some TV.

**John:** A Small Strange Company is a really good name for a company.

**Christina:** By the way, it is. Now I’m going to take that and use it for my own company. Small Strange Company.

**John:** For your loan out.

**Christina:** Just to be creepy and mysterious. But I did not love it. I loved working with writers. I loved story. I did not love my job. So I started writing, weirdly actually I also wrote kids’ books. Dark, weird, twisted kids’ books. It was a cautionary tales book written in rhyming iambic tetrameter. I mean, it was–

**John:** It was poetic.

**Christina:** It was poetic. But very cruel and dark and sinister. It was Roald Dahl meets Edward Gorey. And I gave it to one friend. They passed it around. And I got a call from a book agent at ICM saying, “Hey, thank you for your submission. I want to rep you.” And I was like I don’t know who you are, but great.

And then very shortly after that my now husband and I got engaged, married, moved, quit our jobs. Everything within four weeks. Moved to LA. And I had 90 days while my green card was pending. And I was like, well, I’ve got a book agent. Maybe I can write. Maybe I’ll just take 90 days and I tried to write a screenplay. And I got very, very lucky. And my first screenplay was Shut In, which ended up selling and then getting made into a movie that for a while was zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

**John:** Oh congratulations.

**Christina:** Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s a rare honor.

**John:** So what bumped you out of the zero percent? Someone liked it?

**Christina:** I guess. You know what? I stopped looking because they’re not as fun when they’re – the damning ones were really fun. The good ones were – I mean, few and far between, but not as fun.

**John:** So I want to back up here because this thing where you wrote this book and it got passed along and suddenly an agent at ICM was calling you, so often on the podcast this kind of thing happens where it’s a thing that you wrote that gets attention that you didn’t really mean for it. So you weren’t actively out there stumping for it. Just like people liked it.

**Christina:** Yes. I just got lucky. And that’s honestly a little bit what happened with Shut In as well. That script. I didn’t really mean for it to go out necessarily. I sat on it after I finished it for a month because I was too embarrassed to let anyone read it. I finally let my husband read it. He gave it to a friend who – and he gave it to one friend and one agent. And while the agent was reading it the friend slipped it to other people. So the agent then had to go out with it.

So my very first draft of my very first screenplay ended up being the one that went to the town, which was, you know, a weird experience. But yeah, with the book I had no intention of that at all.

**John:** So this script Shut In, that ultimately landed on the Black List. To what degree was it being out on the town was helpful or being on the list was helpful. This was 2013 Black List.

**Christina:** 2012.

**John:** 2012 Black List. So it’s still relatively – the Black List had been going for a couple of years, but it was still relatively new for that. What was the experience of that for you?

**Christina:** Honestly, I mean, I’m a huge fan of the Black List and what Franklin is doing. In my case it didn’t actually make a huge difference just because my script went out to the town I think in February. And we had optioned it by I think March. And I’d already gotten my first – I then got my first studio job in I think May or June. And the Black List doesn’t come out until December. So by the time the Black List came out I was already working and I had already done the water bottle tour.

I was very lucky to be on the Black List the next two years, and that then became a thing that was nice for my agents to be able to say like, “She’s been on the Black List three times.” It was helpful. For the first one it kind of came too late almost.

**John:** Talk me through the 30 days left on your green card, because that’s a thing that I hear from a lot of international writers who are here and they start to sort of panic, like am I going to be able to stay in the country. Like how do I sort of keep this all going?

**Christina:** It’s awful. It’s awful. So it wasn’t 30 days left on my green card. It was 90 days where I was waiting for my green card to come through, where you’re not allowed to be earning money. You’re not really allowed to be seeking employment. Honestly, like a lot of people would have worked through that or would have done cheeky things. I am just so scared of breaking any of the rules. And I’m trying to become a citizen right now. I’m in the middle of the process. I was just always so nervous of that. And my main advice to people that are international people that are coming here: don’t break any of the rules. Once you do it, you can’t go back. And it impacts. So I’ve been through a lot of visas. I started on a student visa. That’s how I came to America. I had all the right intentions. And I started an MA at NYU and just hated it. Mainly because I’d been working in the industry already.

**John:** An MA in English or writing?

**Christina:** In film and TV. It was at Gallatin so it was a very specialized MA. And it was great, and it’s a wonderful school. But I’d come from being a grownup in London and earning money and having a job. And then suddenly being in classes with undergrads, because it was mixed, it was Gallatin so it was MAs and undergrads at the same time. It was too much.

So I started working almost straight away. I think I got a trainee visa. And then I was a consultant for a while. And then I got an H-1B. I went through the whole shebang.

**John:** So you have these 90 days and you’ve written the script during this time. When you sell this script Shut In and then you get hired for your first WGA job, does anything flip? How do you go from there to being able to stay in the country longer? What was the next visa?

**Christina:** My green card just came through because of getting married. It was good timing. That’s why it was lucky that I did everything in those 90 days so I didn’t have to worry about that. It is much harder if you are dependent on screenwriting for your visa. You kind of have to be fairly established in your own country and then come over. It’s tricky.

**John:** So international listeners should know that there are special visas for like if you are a fancy British screenwriter who is already established and you’re coming over on a special talents and–

**Christina:** Yeah, I think it’s a 01 Artist Visa.

**John:** And there are special attorneys here and there who will help you make that all work. But since you already had your green card you’ve just been working on your green card this whole time through?

**Christina:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s lucky.

**Christina:** Yes. All good.

**John:** So marry well.

**Christina:** Marry well.

**John:** That’s a good thing. Going back to the Black List, news came out this last week that Franklin actually secured funding to make movies himself.

**Christina:** Oh. That’s exciting.

**John:** I’ll be curious to see what that next step is. So we’ll have Franklin on the show at some point to talk through what that next thing is.

**Christina:** He is a good person to give money to.

**John:** I agree. So it’s money that comes out of China and James Schamus is also involved with it.

**Christina:** My first boss.

**John:** Absolutely. So, we’ll see what kind of movies they’re able to make. But apparently three to five movies per year they’re trying to either make or invest in.

**Christina:** Very cool.

**John:** That’ll be a new thing. When we first started emailing one of the things you wanted to talk about was race and representation. So, I’m curious, how do you identify yourself racially?

**Christina:** Somewhere in the middle. I’m half-Taiwanese and half-Caucasian. In England I call myself a Halfie. And me and my sisters, we call ourselves Halfies. Here I think half-Asian people tend to call themselves Hapas.

**John:** To what degree has that influenced you think your career in Hollywood? Do you think you are thought about for certain jobs because of that? Do you think it has any impact on sort of the things you’ve been approached about writing or how meetings have gone?

**Christina:** Definitely not in the past. And I would say it’s only shifting in the last six months, probably around Black Panther honestly where I think people are wanting to do things that are more culturally specific. It’s obviously kind of strange because some of the things I’m being sent are about Korean-Americans and I’m neither Korean nor American so I honestly don’t – I know probably as much as you do. You live fairly near to Koreatown. But it’s also like a tricky one because if I could only write the things that I know I would only be writing about British half-Asian girls. So, yeah. I’m somewhere between.

**John:** It’s interesting with writers because to some degree you end up kind of casting a writer for a project. You sort of think, well, who do you want to write this thing. And I always think about actual real casting and sort of what roles do actors decide to put themselves up for. And to what degree do you feel like you are an appropriate person for writing this kind of story or for participating in this kind of role.

And it’s challenging to figure out sort of like what do you feel confident being able to write those things for. And so do you get sent stuff ever that you feel like they just wanted an Asian person to take a look at or take a pass on? Or that doesn’t happen in your career yet?

**Christina:** That has not happened in my career yet, but mostly because I don’t think a lot of people are doing Asian-focused stuff. I really hope that starts to shift and I would love to start being sent more of those things, not necessarily because I’m going to write them but because it means that there’s more of them out there in the world.

I have a few African American screenwriting friends who definitely get sent things because they’re African American. And they’re like nothing in my resume suggests that I would want to write this other than the color of my skin. That can get a bit weird but I understand why it happens.

But, no, so far I’m not getting stuff because I’m half-Asian. I am getting sent stuff definitely all the time because I’m a woman.

**John:** Great. Well let’s talk about that. So you just signed on for Batgirl and other movies you’ve done have had female leads in them.

**Christina:** So far I’ve only written female leads.

**John:** All right. So let’s talk about sort of coming to this last year. There has been increased focus on moving beyond the Bechdel test to really looking at sort of like what are the roles for women in these films, but also what are the roles behind the scenes. And so you’ve been involved in some of these discussions. What is the shape of these discussions and where do you think we are headed overall in the next five years? Where do you think the natural trajectory is and where would you like to see the trajectory go?

**Christina:** Well one of the big focuses of Time’s Up is the 50/50 by 2020 which is just trying to shift in front of the screen, behind the camera, in executive offices. There is a massive imbalance right now. I think one of the pieces of information that came up through a Time’s Up meeting that most struck me was a visual essay that The Pudding did that was a breakdown of film dialogue by gender which was so shocking. And I watched the Stacy Smith Ted Talk that was very famous where she breaks down the number of female speaking characters versus male speaking characters, which shocked me and whatever. But honestly seeing the amount of dialogue spoken in percentages and that breakdown shocked me so much more I think because even movies that you assume are pretty female heavy when you look at them they’re not. It’s really shocking how silent a lot of the female characters are onscreen. Even I think Frozen doesn’t break – I could be wrong – but I think it approaches 50% female dialogue, but I don’t think it breaks it.

Finding Dory was the only movie in the Top Ten in 2016 that was just over 50%. I think it was 52% or something. But it’s kind of nutty.

**John:** It is nutty. That’s the one of the things that writers can actually do. So let’s talk about sort of where you think the writer’s responsibility is in trying to find parity and try to find an appropriate level of female voices in these things. What advice do you have to screenwriters as they’re looking at their scripts, plotting out their scripts in a big way but also looking at the scripts that they’ve written? How do we improve this?

**Christina:** Am I allowed to talk about–?

**John:** You’re absolutely allowed to talk about things you want to talk about.

**Christina:** OK. Well, the reason that I reached out to you in the first place is that I wanted to talk about this issue particularly, and I wanted to talk about Highland because I think that we can be self-policing. And we can be looking at our own unconscious biases, and I think it will really help. I think there’s a lot that needs to be done later down the line with casting directors and executives and making sure that the background characters are all kind of appropriately diverse.

But I think we can be doing a lot of that stuff as well kind of before it even leaves our desk. Geena Davis who obviously has been doing amazing work for gender balance onscreen, one of the things that she said that really struck me is that one of the most effective tactics she’s had is not kind of publicly shaming people for their statistics in looking at their work but going into companies, showing them kind of, look, this is what’s going onscreen from your company. Did you know that it was this imbalanced? And that people want to be better. And self-policing is a good thing.

So I was thinking it would be great if scriptwriting software like Highland, like Final Draft, could shift and have a way of looking at your own work so that you can do that gender breakdown so that it’s not always done after the fact in some depressing study. And you were very magical and did things incredibly quickly. And I’ve been playing with it. And it’s a really fascinating tool to be able to – I mean, you can explain how it works. But I went back and I looked at all of my scripts and I was really shocked by some.

I mean, I write really female-heavy things, but some of the results were really surprising. And it made me think how important it is that we all do this.

**John:** Yeah. So what you’re referring to is based on our emails we went back and looked at Highland 2 which is about to release and we added a gender analysis tool to Highland. And so based on your script while you’re writing it, or when you’re finished with it, or you can even drag in a finished PDF, we can go through and look at what is the split of male and female characters in the story and what percentage of dialogue and what percentage of words, down to–

**Christina:** The words is weirdly the most important thing I think. And that’s why you’ve got to be careful with some of these statistics because number of female speaking characters will include a waitress who says, “Here are you pancakes, honey.” And that doesn’t really count. But it does affect statistics. So looking at number of words spoken was important.

**John:** Absolutely. It was also important to us that you had the fine tune control. That you could take out certain characters who really are not characters. Or if you have robots that are neither male nor female you can sort of account for those as well.

**Christina:** Yeah, unspecified.

**John:** Yeah. So that’s a tool that’s coming out in the next version of Highland. And I would hope to see other software being able to use it, but also just it’s a tool for the industry to take a finished script and just say what is this. Because you look at the analysis that other companies have done sort of after the fact and it’s really hard. If you’re just going through a PDF–

**Christina:** Incredibly hard.

**John:** — with a highlighter and so this is a thing that software can do.

**Christina:** They’re also having to retrofit things through IMDb and character names have changed and the scripts that they have that are often old scripts, not the shooting script. Or even if they are the shooting script the final film is so different than the shooting script. So this I think is an amazing tool to be able to look at your own stuff before it leaves your desk. Or for as you say executives to be looking before it goes to the casting directors.

Like the thing that struck me is how many of my minor characters who I really didn’t care about I was just kind of going Cop, but I was using male – I would check, because I couldn’t remember if I’d done female cop or male cop, and I’d have to go back and check. And often I would just default into like he, his. I was just making them men because they were forgettable. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. And so it’s being specific in ways that’s helpful. So let’s stick with gender for right now, but I want to get race next which is a more challenging topic. But when you proactively make female cop, when you proactively give a gender to some of those roles, it lets the movie fit into our world a little bit more – not cleanly, but a distinctive choice. It’s showing a female police officer–

**Christina:** It’s more accurate.

**John:** It’s more accurate. It’s also showing a female police officer, it’s showing people in these roles that is important.

**Christina:** It’s so important. Especially with STEM jobs. I think, you know, there’s that saying “If you can see it you can be it.” And I think particularly for young girls, like as a girl growing up I was watching TV and not that I wanted to be Indiana Jones, but I wanted the option of having a hero like an Indiana Jones. And they were all 40-something year-old strapping white men. And I think it’s really important that we see even with tertiary characters where it doesn’t really matter. There was this other statistic that came up that really shocked me which is that you can watch 85 hours of popular TV or movies right now and you would only see a single instance of a black or Hispanic woman doing anything to do with computer science.

Which given how many TV shows we have where it’s a bunch of nerds sitting around tapping away on computers, that’s kind of shocking.

**John:** That is.

**Christina:** And with STEM jobs, particularly like why can’t we make those background doctors and scientists and researchers and computer analysts? It’s so easy to shift that. And, yes, a lot of that onus is on casting. But we can do it often in our scripts by just giving them a name or kind of, I don’t know, we can shift that ourselves I think.

**John:** One of the things I’ve discovered as I’ve been playing around with the tool in Highland is that bumping up those minor characters can sort of give a little bit more parity, but it tends to be more major characters who have more lines that is ultimately going to make a huge difference. And so it gets me thinking about sort of like, “Well what if that character were female. How do those changes ripple through if that character is female?”

And I think so often in our movies we expect that if there’s a man and a woman onscreen that there’s a romance, either they are mom and son or there’s a romantic thing happening. And to be able to say like, “OK, these are just coworkers. These are just people who are on the same team rowing in the same direction” is an important aspect of representation, too. Because we work in workplaces where men and women are not romantically–

**Christina:** Most of the relationships in our lives, hopefully, are not romantic relationships.

**John:** Yeah. So finding ways for that to be possible as well.

The natural segue though then is race–

**Christina:** Segue Man!

**John:** Segue Man. Race and representation. And where I find it very easy, usually, to take a role and say like that’s male or female, sometimes it’s harder to say like, well, this role is Thai. Or this role is Sub-Saharan African. Like trying to figure out where the natural place is to be specific but not so specific that you’re precluding a bunch of other options.

**Christina:** That’s the problem. And you guys talk about this very rightly on the show, a lot of specificity is key. Specificity is wonderful. You want to write characters that don’t just feel like generically Asian but like my Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. That’s a really specific good character that is written as part of that culture, not just generic Asian guy.

But, if we are too specific in our first drafts, are we then limiting roles to a very, very tiny pool of actors when really what we want is just to make the whole movie more diverse? So it becomes really tricky, particularly I think in the kind of movies that we write, you know, bigger studio movies that the story won’t necessarily need to be about the fact that the dad in the movie is John Cho, and is Asian, but it would be great if he were.

So, it’s hard knowing when and where to specify. And one of the questions that I reached out to you with because I was thinking about it is should we – because I know Craig and you have said on the show in the past like you can’t put race just in parenthesis next to age because that’s not a character, as your only character description, which is completely true and fair. That’s not what defines you. But there’s also characters often where you don’t want to waste the lines or the extra words on a bigger character description, but you would like that person to be other.

It becomes tricky because you have to kind of find a standard. If you only name the people who are other than are you suggesting that everyone you don’t name is Caucasian? The answer is no, it shouldn’t be. But honestly there is a problem with the default white read.

**John:** There is. Absolutely. So let’s go back through and talk through some of these issues here. So, one of the ways which a screenwriter can signal that a character is a specific race is to give that character a name that’s just what race he’s from. And so Gutierrez or Chu or Chow or something like that.

Your Crazy Ex-Girlfriend reference is – and people can listen to the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend episode I did with, I think it was a bonus episode I did with Aline–

**Christina:** Yeah. It was great. I listened to it.

**John:** Where they talked about originally it was I think Josh Cho, originally Josh was supposed to be Chinese. And they ended up finding an actor who is Filipino and they said like, well, that’s awesome. We’ll make your last name Chan. And they built out his whole universe as Filipino and they were able to find a great Filipino writer who was going to help them out with all of that. And it worked out fantastic. It was a very specific thing.

And yet if they felt themselves limited by their initial instinct to cast him as Chinese they wouldn’t have gotten to that guy. So finding that flexibility.

**Christina:** Yeah. And what if – I mean, it’s slightly different with TV because Aline is in there and can make changes as she’s doing it and she’s very much in control. With features, imagine if that was a feature and she’d written it just Josh and didn’t specify any race, would people have been able to make the mental leap when they were casting him to be like, “Oh my gosh can he be Filipino?” You know, to go from nothing to a specific race – if she started with Josh as Chinese, would it have then been fairly easy for them to cast him as Filipino and kind of then tweak the script versus if she just left it open, everyone assumed he was white, and then you have to go to Asian. It’s a tricky thing.

**John:** I want to get back to a point you made about specifying a character’s race might make it seem like it’s important that he be that race. That there’s going to be a story reason why that character has to be that thing. And it’s a natural thing we see in features is that every choice seems deliberate, and so therefore if you’re making the choice there must be a reason why you’re making that choice. And sometimes the reason is just because you want the movie to be more diverse.

**Christina:** Yeah.

**John:** So we can flag that by names. I still feel a little hinky when I see the “Chinese, 40” after a character’s description.

**Christina:** Of course, yeah.

**John:** But maybe we need to get past that hinky feeling or find another way to show in scripts like, “These are opportunities for inclusive casting.”

**Christina:** I know. The question is do you have some kind – do you say “open ethnicity?” Do you have some shorthand for it? Some standardized thing that everyone is using? Because I’ve been talking to people kind of since I’ve been looking into this and a couple of studio heads have said, “Yeah, when we send things to casting if it doesn’t specify race, 100% the casting list comes back and it says Caucasian now suddenly next to their name.

And obviously we can’t fix all of that. But maybe there is something that we can do to fix some of it. I just feel like because we are completely in control until we give the script in, it feels like there’s got to be something we can do. And at least having the conversation I think is important because it’s a scary weird messy conversation. And when you first asked me to be on the show I was like, “I don’t think I should.” But I also think it’s time for us to have the messy, tricky conversations. And there aren’t any easy answers. But it doesn’t mean we should stop looking.

**John:** Yeah. Often when I send in a script I’ll have an after page that will give additional notes about things. Like if I’m using songs in a script I’ll add a page that says these are the songs and these are the people who wrote the songs, just so I feel like I’m not just poaching people’s stuff. Or make it clear what was the original song versus what I added and so people know where stuff came through.

And so I can imagine we could come up with some sort of standard thing that doesn’t feel too scary that says like opportunities for inclusion or things like that, because you don’t want to list only the roles that could be non-white, but you want to make sure that you’re flagging–

**Christina:** That it’s clear that things are open. Craig also suggested when we were emailing – his suggestion was he’s always wanted a character breakdown at the front of scripts. I think doing them at the front of scripts in the ways that plays do is probably too much of an ask. It’s like a big change in this industry. I also think it kind of kills some of the mystery and romance of like, “Oh, who are we going to meet later in this script?” But I do think there’s a world where that’s a standard thing that you deliver with a script at the back, or as a separate addendum, which maybe could help there where you could literally have a slot where you’re listing the age range, where you’re listing is race important in this particular – is a specific race important in this role or is it open? And if you say open then it should be open and shouldn’t be white specific.

**John:** The conversation we’re having is really between what we do as a writer and what a director will do and what a casting director does, and obviously producers and studio heads have influence over this, too. But it’s how do we sort of get from this idea of what we have on the page to the actual breakdown. And that literally is the casting breakdown.

This last week someone on Twitter had posted – I think it was a Deadline article that I tweeted about a casting breakdown for a new show. And they were describing the different characters in this – it sort of felt like a Friends kind of show. And the female lead of the show, it was painful sort of how she was described where she’s like, “She’s a girly-girl who can hang with the guys. And she has a tattoo behind her ear.” And it didn’t talk anything about what she wanted or what her goals in life were. It was just like she’s the hot girl next door.

And I do wonder if there’s something that we as screenwriters can do to sort of help get past those casting breakdowns. Because I guarantee you those writers didn’t write that description. It was written by the casting breakdown person. But we need a little intervention there with them about how we’re describing these characters because it’s so frustrating for us, the writers, but also it’s got to be frustrating for every actor going in for that part.

**Christina:** But also kind of humiliating. Just depressing. Yeah, we do need to fix that. I also think that – and you and Craig again talk about this often and it’s so important is good character descriptions in the script when you first introduce a character. That aren’t all about how cute, effortless. Ugh. We need to work on that and we need to make sure that our character descriptions on the page – because by the way the casting breakdowns would love to just copy and paste something from our own scripts if we had great pieces of intro there.

The problem is how many lines you use up. And sometimes you try to pack a lot in and you can’t afford to do that. But also describing someone in a way that does leave it open racially. I wrote one of my spec scripts, where because I’m mixed race I generally am not assuming anyone is white. I’m kind of assuming anyone is anything. But I kept hearing that people assumed that the lead role was white and I couldn’t understand why. And I went through the whole script and I found there was a couple of places where I said that she pales. And they were like, “Oh, she must be pale. She must be white.” And I was like people of other colors can pale as well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Christina:** But little things like that, or comments on color of eyes can subconsciously be really rooting you in a certain race without you meaning to.

**John:** Yeah. A script I wrote recently that I may direct at some point, I wrote one of the main roles in it. And in my head it’s like, well, you know Octavia Spencer who was in The Nines would be fantastic for this. But I didn’t put anything in there specifically that said she was African American. And so it was interesting as I sent it out for – because we were doing budgeting – and I started talking with producers about this is who I was thinking about. They’re like, “Oh, I didn’t realize she was black.” And because I didn’t insist that she be black it did go to a default white.

**Christina:** The default white is crazy. I was in a studio meeting a year or so ago where someone said, “Oh, I’m really worried this script is too white.” I mean, I’m pleased by the way they were worrying about it, but I said, “Why? There’s only two people that are specified where it was important and one was Hispanic and one was African American.” And they were like, “Well, everyone is white.” And I was like, “No they’re not. They’re just not specified as being anything,” because again I don’t want to say that someone is Indian and then block someone that’s Thai getting the part. You don’t – they could be anything, but everyone just kind of – unless you point it out or unless it’s part of the story does kind of default white read most of your characters unfortunately.

**John:** Yeah. We only have about 20 minutes left, so I don’t know if we’re going to be able to solve default white reads.

**Christina:** Dammit.

**John:** I mean, come one, we promised people–

**Christina:** I know. I thought we would be so much further ahead than this.

**John:** I think part of the solving it though is the real discussion of it and sort of recognition of that if you don’t specify people are going to fall into that. Or maybe we can train readers to not slip into that thing so quickly. But it is frustrating.

Have you heard the term “windows and mirrors” used in terms of inclusion in writing?

**Christina:** Only from you.

**John:** OK. So this is a thing I heard a lot when I was doing Arlo Finch because in kids’ books they talk about it all the time, especially for middle grade. And so the idea is that books can serve as windows and mirrors for kids as they’re looking at those characters and trying to fit them into the bigger world.

And so a window is if you have a character who has a certain background or experience and so a kid who doesn’t have that can look through their eyes and see what it was like in their point of view.

A mirror is a person – if a kid who can see themselves as that character. Basically – especially like races or situations that have been underrepresented, they get to see themselves reflected back and they feel like, oh, I am part of that culture. And so often you’ll see African American writers who say, “I loved Chronicles of Narnia and all these fantasy books but there were never black people in any of these stories.”

And so to provide that character in there is a mirror back to their own experience or a specific life experience that they never see reflected back to them. So like Arlo Finch mirrors back that sort of mountain life that I grew up with that I just never see in books. But it is an interesting idea that I think is really popular in kids’ lit right now, but I think we need to start looking at in terms of what we’re doing in movies.

With Black Panther, I think part of its huge success was that it mirrored back something that the African American audience desperately wanted to see.

**Christina:** Super powerful, amazing, exciting way.

**John:** I remember before the movie opened and just people on Twitter or on Instagram people were with the standees and they were just cheering the standees. Just the fact that it existed was a huge thing.

**Christina:** I have to admit, and it’s weird, I cried in the casino scene in Black Panther because it was so refreshing to see this woman be so badass, and she was in a stunning, elegant dress, but she wasn’t like sexy for the sake of being sexy. She seemed powerful and strong and she was kicking all the ass. And it was so exciting to see. And I know a lot of women who had the same reaction in Wonder Woman in No Man’s Land. Just like so happy and overwhelmed.

**John:** I wept openly in No Man’s Land. Yeah.

**Christina:** You can’t believe it. And it’s so strange that we can’t believe it, but we really have grown up not seeing that. We’ve seen kind of the over-sexy, leather pants, skinny hot sidekick girl kick ass. But it never felt real, or true, or powerful in the same way.

**John:** The other thing which really struck me about the casino scene in Black Panther is that when we leave Wakanda we don’t go to Europe or America, we go to Asia. And it’s like we’re not going to the place where all the white people are. We’re going to Asia. And it’s a completely specific place that we’re going to. And I guess Martin Freeman is the one white person who is sort of wandering around in there. But it’s not about “We have to go to the ‘real world,’ the ‘real world’ being white. We’re going to a very specific Asian place.” And that was a really cool moment.

I haven’t seen a lot written about Martin Freeman’s role in Black Panther, but it is fascinating that the white people in the movie, they’re there to see some stuff but not to sort of make anything happen.

**Christina:** They don’t save the day.

**John:** They don’t save the day at all.

**Christina:** Thank god. We’ve seen enough of those movies.

**John:** No white saviors in this.

**Christina:** No white saviors for sure.

**John:** So, going back to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and other shows where in having Josh Chan be Filipino they were able to bring in a Filipino writer who could bring a very specific perspective to that. So often in features we’re the one writer, so we’ve got to write everything. They have a room for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but we are just the one person. Have you ever worked in any room situations in features? Can you talk about that?

**Christina:** So, the Transformers writers’ room was obviously a famous features experiment where we did three weeks in a room together and it was 12 writers, three of them were partnerships. But 12 writers in a room. It was not dissimilar to the TV thing in terms of we learned about the thing that we were doing, we talked about it as one big picture and then we each kind of picked an episode as it were. We kind of naturally gravitated towards different things. It was amazing how naturally we all went to different areas. There was no overlap. And then we each developed our own stories and helped each other brainstorm and it was a very collaborative thing where we would pitch a loose outline and then people would give suggestions or notes or thoughts. But we really kind of had our own pieces.

And then obviously I do, as I’m sure you do, like a ton of roundtables of things. I recently did with Paramount another writers’ room like that for three weeks.

**John:** So part of that seems so exciting because it gets more people and more brains involved on something on topics of inclusion and making sure that the world is fully representative. It gives you a chance because it’s more than one person looking at stuff.

Part of me also is just terrified of the sense of like it’s hard to figure out then who deserves credit for story. Because we’re not really set up to do that kind of stuff in features.

**Christina:** And I think it can get very tricky when – the situation that I have not done on purpose because I don’t like it is when it’s a ton of writers going in and you don’t know who is going to come out writing the job. And it’s one job. That I think can get super murky. And I know writers who have given very fundamental core ideas that have made the movie and that haven’t gotten credit.

So the ones that I have gravitated towards have been the ones where it’s more about collaboration and helping each other, which I think is a wonderful thing because we are such hermits as feature writers, we’re also good together and we like helping each other and we’re good at helping each other.

And as long as you don’t go in with too much of an ego and you’re open to that experience I think it can be a wonderful thing. The competitive bakeoff thing not so good.

**John:** Yeah. I had a friend describing situation where it was this four or five day room and then like whoever sort of did the best in the room was going to get the job.

**Christina:** It’s gross.

**John:** It feels gross. And usually what it is is they have some more powerful high-priced writers and then some inexpensive writers–

**Christina:** Who they milk.

**John:** Yeah, who they milk. But a lot of times it is one of the inexpensive people that they kind of want to give it to because they don’t have that much money. It feels weird. If I were starting in the business now, of course I would go to one of those things. And in some ways it’s no different than to have 12 writers going in to pitch on a project. But rather than doing it serially you’re doing it parallel.

**Christina:** Yes, except that you shouldn’t go in and pitch on things and then they just steal all your ideas. Like that’s also not nice.

**John:** At least you’re getting paid for it.

**Christina:** And, by the way, it’s OK to – like I’ve had an experience with a studio where I went very deep in the, I mean, I got beyond pitching. I was kind of meeting with the director and some of the producers for long periods of time. And they did the honorable thing. At the end I didn’t get the job but they wanted to use a couple of ideas so they gave me a contract and paid me as a consultant.

**John:** Yep.

**Christina:** Like it can be done not that expensively. So the getting people in to pitch knowing that you’re just doing it to steal their ideas, or doing those roundtables knowing that you’re just doing it to milk – ugh – milk writers and then pay someone cheaper. It is gross.

**John:** It is gross. So, hopefully it’s a thing we can move past. But I would say overall as the WGA we’re not well set up to figure out how to handle and treat these feature writers who are in these roundtables. Because during that roundtable you were probably paid like a producer – you’re paid like a minimum?

**Christina:** No. Transformers writers’ room, Akiva Goldsman ran that and was very adamant that we all be paid really well so that we wouldn’t hold back and say that it wouldn’t be kind of using and abusing writers. We all did that room for three weeks and then we all wrote our own treatments. And then if we then were sent to script, which I was and that’s how Bumblebee came about, then we get paid for that script separately. But we were paid for our participation in the room and for a treatment. So it was very fair and good and they did right by us on that one.

**John:** That’s great. I want to listen to a clip – so during the Oscars Frances McDormand said very early in her speech like, “Two words, inclusion riders.” So after she said that in the Q&A room she had a little explanation about what that was. So I want to listen to her explanation and then talk through what we think might be the possibilities and realities there.

**Reporter:** Can you please explain your comment at the end, the two words, inclusion rider?

**Frances McDormand:** Right? I just found out about this last week. There is – has always been available to all – everybody that does a negotiation on a film, an inclusion rider which means that you can ask for and/or demand at least 50% diversity in not only the casting but also the crew. And so the fact that I just learned that, after 35 years of being in the film business, we’re not going back.

So, the whole idea of women trending, no. No trending. African Americans trending? No. No trending. It changes now. And I think the inclusion rider will have something to do with that.

**Christina:** Women aren’t trending.

**John:** Women aren’t trending. Women have always been here. So this idea of an inclusion rider, I can’t envision any screenwriter getting anything like this.

**Christina:** I feel like you could, John. You could do anything you want, dammit.

**John:** Demand it. In some ways we are our own inclusion rider. We can shape the degree–

**Christina:** On the page.

**John:** On the page. And we’ll see sort of what happens. Do you see it working/happening? Do you think this is a thing that we’ll talk about?

**Christina:** Even if it doesn’t fully work we’ve got to try. You know, this is something that Stacey Smith came up with I think in 2014 and they’ve been working really hard on figuring out the legals of it and how to implement it and how to make it work.

And I could be misspeaking, but I think the idea is not that you have to have 50% diversity behind the camera, but that you have to aim to have 50% diversity behind the camera. I think there is such a natural kind of backlash and people freak out that like “under-qualified people are going to steal our jobs,” which there always has been with things like this. And people need to just chill the fuck out.

But I think, yeah, it’s about kind of implementing things like the Rooney Rule. It’s about aiming for that. Interviewing a lot of diverse candidates for the jobs. And trying to get that behind the scenes.

**John:** What is the Rooney Rule? I’ve heard it, but I don’t remember what it is.

**Christina:** I can’t tell if you’re pretending you don’t know or if you really don’t know.

**John:** I genuinely don’t know what it is.

**Christina:** So the Rooney Rule comes from NFL and the idea is that when you’re hiring – in the NFL it was when you’re hiring a coach or someone outside of the – not institution, well, institution – that you have to interview at least one candidate who is diverse. And it’s something that the WGA has talked about a bunch. They were talking about it for this recent round last year. It didn’t end up kind of kicking in. But it’s something that a lot of people are supporting and want. I think it’s hugely important and I would love to see it implemented. I would love to see it be obligatory. Because I think a lot of the time writers aren’t even getting in the room. You know, you’re not getting enough women in the room. You’re not getting enough people of color in the room. Get them in the room. Give them a shot.

Like on Transformers, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Lindsey Beer, and I were probably the diversity aspect. We were the only three women in the room. When they first announced the first four writers in the room they were all white males and there was a huge kind of backlash, like “How can you just have a bunch of white guys?” Thank god there was a backlash. They then hired the three of us, I’d like to hope not just because we’re women but also because we’re talented. But we were kind of probably the less experienced writers in the room. And we all did really well.

Like look at what they’re doing now. Geneva Robertson-Dworet wrote Captain Marvel. She just wrote Tomb Raider. Lindsey Beer is writing King Killer Chronicles for Lionsgate. She’s crushing it. She just spent three days in a room with Quentin Tarantino for Star Trek. Because we had that opportunity we got to prove ourselves. So I think getting people in the door and letting them fight for the job is so important and so worth doing. And it’s a big part of what the inclusion rider will do is give people the chance to get those jobs that they may otherwise not have gotten.

**John:** Absolutely. So in terms of in front of the camera, those changes can be challenging based on the nature of the movie. There are going to be movies where it’s going to be hard to find – if it’s a period piece, it’s a period WWII piece, it’s going to be hard to do that. So you’re going to have to be realistic about those. But behind the camera–

**Christina:** There’s no reason why we can’t.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Christina:** And in front of the camera we also have to remember, I mean, you mentioned Chronicles of Narnia. That’s fantasy. There’s no reason why there should be no black people. Like, if there are leprechauns, I mean, it’s not leprechauns. There are people with goat legs. They can have black people there.

**John:** I 100% agree. And I always get so frustrated when people like will poke at Cinderella for having a black character in Cinderella.

**Christina:** It’s Cinderella World!

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like it’s kind of Europe but it’s not really Europe.

**Christina:** It’s so crazy.

**John:** It’s frustrating. Even on Big Fish, I remember there was one time where we had a circus scene. And this is a fantastical world. And this extra came up and was saying like, “Oh, just so you know there shouldn’t be black people here.” And it’s like, “Yeah, OK, I can understand in an historical context, but remember we are in a fantasy. This is the idealized version of sort of what this world should be.”

**Christina:** It’s not the real world anyway so why can’t we do what we want with it?

**John:** Yeah.

**Christina:** It’s maddening.

**John:** It’s maddening.

**Christina:** Maddening.

**John:** A challenge with inclusion riders behind the scenes, and so I think there’s ways to say this that’s not sort of implying that you’re going to hire less qualified people. Sometimes it’s hard to find enough people, people who have training and stuff. So it feels like it’s also a mandate to make sure that you are giving people the experience–

**Christina:** It’s not going to happen overnight. We’ve got to train the people up.

**John:** Absolutely. So you talked about STEM and representation of STEM people. It’s like, you know, well if we want to hire more black female engineers we need to make sure that they’re–

**Christina:** That they’re going to university for it. Yeah.

**John:** That they recognize that it’s a thing they can do and make sure that they identify it early enough. And support them while they’re going through that.

**Christina:** I also think that’s really important once you’ve hired the person that you keep that support. I have a friend who is a producer who tried to hire an incredibly diverse team for the movie behind the camera. Hired someone in a very key position who was less experienced, but because she was a woman and she was a woman of color and they really believed in giving her a shot. But because she didn’t have that much experience she really struggled.

And I think what’s important is that person who made that decision to hire that person isn’t punished for that decision and that there is some sort of network or system or safety net so that that person doesn’t lose their job but they can be supported and helped and then get the next job, and the next job, and continue their career and continue to become more experienced.

**John:** Absolutely. You don’t want to put people in positions where they’re going to fail.

**Christina:** You want people to win.

**John:** Yes.

**Christina:** So mentorship programs I think are hugely important. But also just like starting on all levels. You can’t just suddenly change the top levels without working on the lower levels.

**John:** The DGA training program seems like it’s working well in trying to get more diverse directors out there, both literally directors and also assistant directors and those crucial roles of actually making the trains run on time.

**Christina:** Yeah. And I think TV can do a lot of help. They can really help out with features as well because you can take more of a risk on one episode of TV. You know, Ava DuVernay has done amazing things with her shows in terms of hiring very female-heavy crews and female directors. More people need to be doing that.

**John:** And the training equivalent for writing in some ways is TV. It is our writers’ rooms. And so that’s why you see an emphasis on trying to make sure that you are getting those diverse candidates in those rooms, both because it’s helping those candidates grow, but also because it’s making those rooms better. It’s bringing in new voices.

A frustration which I’ve heard about through the WGA is that a lot of times candidates who come in, or people who are brought into a show on the lowest level as the diversity hire have a very hard time getting the second job and the third job.

**Christina:** Well, often because they were the diversity hire their job was subsidized. And so then getting paid an actual salary is like, “Oh, but we can’t actually pay her real money.” I mean, it’s mental.

**John:** That has to be fixed.

**Christina:** That’s got to be fixed. It’s craziness. Craziness.

**John:** There’s a question we have from Kate and so let’s wrap it up by talking about her question. She writes, “I’m pondering why some movies feel timeless while others don’t. Why do some things have such staying power like The Princess Bride or Indiana Jones or Singing in the Rain, while other movies feel dated almost as soon as they come out?”

Christina, what thoughts do you have about movies that stay timeless versus ones that feel like, wow, they were of that moment and don’t last?

**Christina:** Interesting. I mean, this is a silly thing to say but one of the things I’m always careful of when I’m writing is not including too much technology if I don’t have to because that–

**John:** 100%.

**Christina:** The person doing whatever doing on their smartphone, that smartphone is going to look ridiculous in five years’ time. And I think that can often really date things.

But I think it’s also just about universal character arcs. Really relatable characters. Stories that feel like they aren’t – they don’t just belong to that one person but they are captivating in a bigger way rather than just kind of this specific girl growing up in very much the ‘90s or the 2000s or, you know.

**John:** A lot of things she references having staying power are fantasies. So, they have some grounding in the real world but they’re mostly sort of taking place out in another space and time and so therefore they don’t feel as anchored into our time.

You mentioned technology or cellphones, which are of course really a killer.

**Christina:** They’re also just a bummer, honestly. Who wants to see anyone texting?

**John:** They destroy us.

**Christina:** They ruin thrillers. They really do.

**John:** They do. But any reference to technology tends to be really time stamping. You know, Sandra Bullock in The Net. It’s like, oh no, you recognize that–

**Christina:** It was so cutting edge…for a minute.

**John:** Yes. But in some ways it’s the movies that ask kind of timeless questions or that have great heroes who feel like they’re out of time. Those are the ones that sort of tend to stay. And the ones that are asking very contemporary questions, in some ways that feels more like TV where it’s like you’re right of the moment. And also just think about the lead time to make a movie. It’s two or three years to make a movie. And by the time they come out it really might be a thing that has passed for us a bit.

So we’re going to hear Craig’s voice for a second because it’s time for a special feature.

**Christina:** Yay.

Craig: John’s WGA Corner.

**John:** So a couple listeners wrote in to ask, “Hey, will you and Craig talk about the thing that’s happening with the agency agreement being renegotiated?” And, yes, we will be probably next episode. But I’m curious, Christina, have you heard anything about the agency agreement or do you know anything about what’s going on?

**Christina:** I know a little bit about what’s going on, but I missed both meetings because I was out of town. And I would like to hear your episode on it because I want the breakdown.

**John:** Absolutely. So we will break that down and talk about what’s happening and sort of what’s not happening and it’s a very different thing than sort of when we negotiated our deal with the studios. So it’s going to probably be a very slow train. But we’ll talk through what that is and sort of why it matters.

And it’s interesting you brought up the Rooney Rule because there’s another sports connection between this is that writers are much more in some ways like NBA players.

**Christina:** I feel very much like an NBA player.

**John:** Yeah. Our relationship with the people who employ us is kind of more like our dealing with teams than it is dealing with the big factory. And so some interesting things happen because of that and because we have agents that represent us there’s actually some good parallels there, so we’ll talk about that.

**Christina:** And who’s working for who.

**John:** Exactly. And making sure that our agents are working for us and we’re not working for our agents. Have you been in any situations where an agency is employing you or some–?

**Christina:** No.

**John:** It’s happening.

**Christina:** It is?

**John:** Yeah.

**Christina:** Oh, of course, because they’re financing movies now.

**John:** Yeah they are.

**Christina:** Which is very tricky.

**John:** It’s very tricky. So we’ll get into a bit of that.

**Christina:** I don’t like that.

**John:** Other little bit is from Stuart Friedel, who is our former Scriptnotes producer, he’s also a new WGA member. Congratulations Stuart.

**Christina:** Ooh, congratulations.

**John:** He had these questions about dues and then he ended up finding a really useful PDF that talks through the process of sending in your dues. Because you’ve dealt with WGA dues.

**Christina:** It’s so old-fashioned. It’s crazy. The system is so hinky and weird and you can just put in whatever you want and make up. It’s crazy.

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Christina:** It’s getting updated though, right?

**John:** It’s getting updated. So, what’s weird about WGA dues, and so for people who don’t know, as a member of the Writers Guild you end up paying 1.5% of your earnings into the guild. And you would think like, “Oh, well that must get taken out of your checks.” It doesn’t. Like you are responsible for filling in a form every quarter saying this is what I earned on this project.

**Christina:** And you better type in all the numbers correctly or you pay the wrong amount and get in trouble.

**John:** And then you send them money. And so they don’t dock money. It’s a really strange system.

**Christina:** Really strange.

**John:** And so people as they do it for the first time have questions, so this little PDF I’ll put a link to helps answer some of those questions. But we might do an episode more about dues down the road because both dues collection has been updated throughout the guild and there are probably ways we could do even better down the road.

**Christina:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. End of WGA segment. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Christina:** Oh shit!

**John:** Did you forget your One Cool Thing?

**Christina:** I completely forgot my One Cool Thing.

**John:** How about this? I will do my One Cool Thing first. And then while I’m talking you can think about something that you like a lot that you want people to see. It could be a TV show, it could be a book. It could be something great out there in the world.

My One Cool Thing is a book. It is a book called Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies. I actually met Dawn because she has the same publisher and we were at this dinner together. And so she stood up and she talked about her book and I’m like “That sounds really cool.” So I bought it and I read it. And it is really cool. To describe it, I would say if you’ve read any of David Sedaris’s books, like they’re kind of memoirs and they’re funny, this is like David Sedaris but if you grow up poor in South Florida. And there’s a little bit more sort of holy shit.

What I like about it is, you know, a bunch of stuff happens in her life. It sort of goes from her childhood up through where she is now. And a bunch of stuff happens that would sort of break other people. And it reminds you that so much of who you are is sort of the ways you got broken and healed. And it’s just really great and really funny and really terrific writing. It’s her first book. So I was just super impressed. Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies.

**Christina:** I would love to pretend that I have just suddenly come up with a great One Cool Thing. So I’m going to come up with a One Cool Thing that is a general idea.

**John:** Sure.

**Christina:** Which is – and it’s a piece of advice I think for all aspiring writers – which is my One Cool Thing is my female writer friends.

**John:** Oh, tell me about this.

**Christina:** I think it is really important that you find your – people are so worried I think in this industry about networking and about networking up. And I think honestly it’s the wrong way of approaching it. I think you’ve got to focus – sure, network if you want. I find it gross. But find your peers. Find your people that will stay with you through this industry. You know, I mentioned Geneva and Lindsey earlier. We support each other. We take care of each other. We text each other when we have painful experiences in pitches or whatever. Julia Hart who is a female writer-director. You know, there are days when we have horrible experiences, where we’re really struggling, where the system is misogynistic and painful and awful. And if I didn’t have my girls supporting me and like by my side I would have a hard time just emotionally.

I think it is really important – boys, find your boys, or your girls, or whatever. But I think women in this industry, find each other, support each other. There is this myth that we’re all competing with each other and we want to push each other down. It’s the opposite. And I think it’s really wonderful to – particularly in this moment – women represent only 25% of the Writers Guild. That’s so sad. There need to be more of us. Find young female writers you can mentor if you’re an established female writer. Make there be more of us.

**John:** Absolutely. Screenwriting was invented by women. And it’s crazy that–

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

**John:** I’ll have to Google to find out her name, but sort of the first established and known screenwriter was a woman.

**Christina:** Of course she was.

**John:** Because as the screenplay format sort of came into being, because of course originally it was just like they were pointing cameras at things and shooting. But eventually you had to have a plan for what that is. So one of the first sort of credited screenwriters is a woman.

**Christina:** I love that.

**John:** And as the screenplay format evolved, she evolved with it. So, it is–

**Christina:** I bet she had good girlfriends.

**John:** I hope she had good peers. I hope she had a good group there. Yeah, thank you. That’s a very good One Cool Thing.

That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Hunter Christensen. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place you can send longer questions. For short questions, on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Christina, are you on Twitter?

**Christina:** I am not on anything.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Christina:** I literally have no social media.

**John:** That’s very nice. You can find us on Apple Podcasts at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. We also have a few of the USB drives that have the first 300 episodes available if you want those for your bunker. As the world falls apart and you just need to listen to Scriptnotes, you can listen to those.

**Christina:** Wear your USB around your neck.

**John:** Absolutely. Just plug it in whenever you need to. It’s very, very nice. Christina, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a pleasure talking to you.

**Christina:** Thank you so much for having me. I really didn’t swear as much as I thought I was going to.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Christina:** Thank you. I’m very proud of myself.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Christina Hodson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Hodson). Her upcoming movies include [Bumblebee](http://deadline.com/2016/11/transformers-bumblebee-christina-hodson-script-paramount-pictures-spinoff-script-1201852869/) of the Transformers franchise and [Batgirl](http://deadline.com/2018/04/batgirl-movie-christina-hodson-writing-bumblebee-1202361134/).
* The Pudding’s [Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age](https://pudding.cool/2017/03/film-dialogue/)
* Premium subscribers can listen to the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend bonus episode with Aline Brosh McKenna and Rachel Bloom [here](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-aline-brosh-mckenna-rachel-bloom-crazy-ex-girlfriend-qa).
* A [pilot announcement](http://deadline.com/2018/03/bright-futures-emily-ratajkowski-shameik-moore-lilly-singh-calum-worthy-jimmy-tatro-cast-lisa-kudrow-narrates-nbc-comedy-pilot-kenya-barris-1202355863/) that includes this character description: “a girl-next-door type but also with a behind-the-ear tattoo. She can just as easily bro out with the guys as she can be the girliest girl.”
* A [guide to WGA dues,](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/DUES_FAQ.pdf) courtesy of Stuart!
* [Mothers of Sparta](http://www.amazon.com/dp/125013370X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Dawn Davies
* Female writer friends, like [Frances Marion](http://time.com/4186886/frances-marion/)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [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)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Hunter Christensen ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_346.mp3).