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**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig has the week off, but luckily we have someone remarkably qualified to take his spot. Damon Lindelof is the co-creator and showrunner of Lost, a screenwriter and producer of films including Tomorrowland, Prometheus, and Star Trek: Into Darkness. And most immediately the guy behind the HBO series The Leftovers, which began its third and final season this past Sunday. Damon, welcome to Paris.

**Damon Lindelof:** It is so exciting to be here, looking out the window and seeing the Eiffel Tower. It’s a beautiful sunny day here and a little stressed out about sitting in for Mr. Mazin. I feel like Jerry O’Connell must feel when he’s on Regis & Kelly or whatever it’s called now.

**John:** That’s a high stress job. I mean, Chris Hardwick seems like a very natural choice to fill in there.

**Damon:** That’s true.

**John:** But you have to be very up and present and it’s challenging, but we’re not nearly so demanding of an audience. People are driving in their cars or they’re walking around, so it’s not nearly–

**Damon:** No pressure.

**John:** No pressure.

**Damon:** I understand.

**John:** Yeah. Kelly, she’s always on at the gym. And the gym, that’s a high pressure environment. But you–

**Damon:** That’s true.

**John:** This is nothing. Why are you here in Paris?

**Damon:** I am here for Series Mania or that’s the American pronunciation. Series Mania.

**John:** Sure. That sounds right.

**Damon:** It’s a big TV festival that they have in Paris. And I’m on the jury. So, I’m also premiering the first two episodes of The Leftovers’ third season here in Paris, so that’s going to be tomorrow night at the time of this recording. And so we’re flying in a couple of the actors. So Justin Theroux and Christopher Eccleston will be here. Max Richter, who does our music. So, the premiere is going to kick off this festival, and then I get to watch a lot of great international television that I’ve never seen before. And sort of Sundance or Telluride where we will award a grand jury prize and a couple of acting prizes, etc.

But, it’s basically just an excuse to eat baguettes and coffee and stare out the window at the Eiffel Tower, which I’m going to do right now.

**John:** That sounds really good. So, on today’s podcast, I’m not going to ask you any specific questions about Lost or The Leftovers, because I feel like there’s probably 10,000 hours of tape of you talking about those two shows, which are both fantastic. And I’ve seen every episode of both.

**Damon:** Blah, blah, blah. Yes. Enough.

**John:** But I do want to talk to you about television, because Craig and I get a lot of questions about television and we really don’t know very much about television, so whenever we have a guest–

**Damon:** But you watch a lot of television.

**John:** I watch a ton of television.

**Damon:** So you know a lot about television.

**John:** Yeah, but like the making of television is a very different process. And it’s changed a lot even over the last ten years. So, I’ve not had a series on for quite a long time. But just watching you and sort of your career, it has just transformed a lot. I can tell.

So, I want to talk to you about sort of making a series. But also I’ve known you since before you were a television writer, so I sort of want to talk about growing up, becoming a staff writer, and going into showrunning.

**Damon:** Sure.

**John:** And maybe answer some questions from listeners that have written in. And then finally I want to talk about sort of the back catalog of ideas, because you’re at a place now where you’re done with The Leftovers and you have to figure out what you’re doing next. And I want to talk about how do you decide whether to do something new or to visit something old. So, we’ll go through all of that today if we can.

**Damon:** Oh man. OK.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Damon:** What would Mazin do?

**John:** Mazin would find a way to cut this short and plow through it.

**Damon:** Joke it up.

**John:** He would joke it up.

**Damon:** God love him.

**John:** He’d bring out another character voice.

**Damon:** There’s a closet door behind you and I know that Mazin is going to pop out of it at any moment. And harangue me, which is just the way I want it to happen.

**John:** Sounds good. Let’s go back to sort of your origin story and how you got started as a writer. Because I think I first met you in ’97 or ’98. You were working–

**Damon:** I was working as an assistant probably for Toby Jaffe at the Ladd Company. And I think you were working on a project there. But I remember, like I think I had read Go, but before it was made.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** And you came out of the Stark program, if memory serves. And I just thought, wow, you were the – not that you aren’t still – but you were the young, hot, you know, scribe. And this was a time where Hollywood Reporter and Variety were not yet really online. And you would buy the trades and there were always talks of sales and deals and etc. And I remember being in awe of you, which I still am, as I mentioned.

So you basically had the job that I wanted, which at the time I think probably in the mid to late ‘90s, a movie writer. A screenwriter.

**John:** Yeah. For sure. I think at that point I had stopped working as an assistant and Go might have sold. We hadn’t gotten it made yet. And I had a few other assignments. But we had a mutual friend, so a guy who worked at your company was also a Starkie. And so I remember going to lunch–

**Damon:** Yes. That’s right.

**John:** I remember going out to lunch and going to the [Cuccaro] on Larchmont.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** And how I first got to know you. And I think I remember, we’ll circle back to old projects at the end, but I remember you pitching me a movie you were writing, a script you were writing, that was about hemophilia.

**Damon:** Oh yes. What a genius idea that was. Just to contextualize, at that time still in the mid ‘90s, even though we were many years beyond the initial Die Hard, that idea of like when you were pitching movies or selling movies it was Die Hard in a blank. The specs that were selling were the kind of Shane Black, you know, big action concepts. And my idea, which I thought was brilliant at the time, was what if there was a guy who was a severe hemophiliac to the degree where any kind of significant subcutaneous cut would put him in enormous peril. And he was incredibly wealthy, like Bruce Wayne, and had a tremendous amount of resource, but was basically living in this penthouse apartment in New York City, but never left.

And he kind of had a – he was a grown man, but sort of a state of arrested social development because to get cut would basically kill him. And what if we took this guy and threw him into like an incredible action scenario where every single set piece he couldn’t end up like John McClane. Where it’s like just the single cut. So he is having sort of a Rear Window, like borderline stalking relationship with this beautiful woman who lives in the penthouse across from him. And she’s in a relationship with this dude who is like some kind of Russian – some bad guy.

And he is watching her and fantasizes about like what her life is, in a very cute, innocent PG-13/non-stalkery way. Although it is stalking in hindsight. And these toughs basically break into the apartment and kidnap her. And he realizes that he is the only one who witnessed this and must go and rescue her. And hijinks ensue.

**John:** Hijinks ensue. So, that was a script you wrote?

**Damon:** Oh, I wrote it.

**John:** You wrote it. And was it your first script?

**Damon:** No. I mean, I had probably written like maybe three or four completed screenplays, one of which was a bad Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, kind of like rip-off, like a party comedy, a John Hughes wannabe thing. And then there were a couple like busted action movie ideas. And then I wrote this western called The Perfectionists that was kind of like in the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino ultra-violent comedy western set in Mexico. And that screenplay was the first thing that I wrote that I was like, “Oh, this isn’t the worst thing that I’ve read in my life and I’ll at least let some of my peers read it.” And got some positive feedback from them. And then I submitted it for the Nicholl Fellowship, which is done through the Motion Picture Academy.

At the time they got like maybe 5,000 submissions a year and I started getting letters that I made the first cut, and then the second cut, and the third cut. And it was down to maybe 50 scripts out of those 5,000. And I was like, oh, this is good. I have to choice to make, which is the next letter may say I’m no longer in the running, and that will be incredibly demoralizing and I’ll decide that I’m a terrible writer again. Or, I can just take all of this positivity and make a move.

And so I sent out an email to everyone I knew and at that point I’d just been watching a tremendous amount of television and I started to have some peers who were working in television. And it felt like my skill set would be much better suited to TV because I love collaborating. And I heard about this thing called a writer’s room, as opposed to the way that you know feature writing works, which is there’s no collaboration fundamentally. There’s collaboration between you and the producer and the studio, but those three entities are very rarely in the room at the same time. You’re getting mixed messages. And then if a draft doesn’t come in exactly the way they want it, they fire you and replace you, versus the way that it made much more sense to me and more fun is to basically take four or five talented people and put them all in a room together. And everyone is basically coming up with ideas and supporting one another and challenging ideas that aren’t working, et cetera.

That was only happening in TV. And a friend of mine, Julie Plec, who was running Kevin Williamson’s company at the time as an executive, and now Julie runs – she’s a showrunner. She’s been running The Vampire Diaries which just ended and The Originals, which is the spinoff of that show. But she emailed me back instantly and said, “Kevin just had a show picked up.” This was after Dawson’s Creek. “It’s going to be on ABC. But you need to start – could you start on Monday?” And this was on a Thursday. So, I quit my job. Ladd told me, both encouragingly and discouragingly, “You can always come back.”

**John:** Yes.

**Damon:** “I’ll be here when things don’t work out.” And I took the writer’s assistant job on Wasteland. And that was in the 98/99 season, so that was 19 years ago. I’ll be a professional television writer for 20 years next year.

**John:** That’s crazy. So, I remember Wasteland, because I was doing a competing show.

**Damon:** Really? Very few do.

**John:** I was doing a competing show. I was doing D.C. which was the WB show. Your show was like young twenty-somethings in New York, mine was young twenty-somethings in Washington, D.C.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** Yours lasted like 13 episodes. Mine lasted three.

**Damon:** No, only two episodes of Wasteland aired.

**John:** Oh, fantastic. So, I may have beaten you.

**Damon:** We made 13.

**John:** Yes, absolutely.

**Damon:** And D.C. had a – you know, the premise of Wasteland was Friends as a drama series with no comedy. Like, it was just twenty-somethings having existential crises. But at least D.C. they were in pop–

**John:** Yeah, there was some kind of reason.

**Damon:** There was a franchise.

**John:** Mine was supposed to be like post-Felicity. So it was supposed to be fun. But it was not a good show. Have you gone back and watched any of those early things that you wrote? Because I’ve not gone back to watch DC at all.

**Damon:** Oh my god. No, I have not. But I think I probably should, just to–

**John:** Might be sobering.

**Damon:** Some sort of learning, yeah. I could use some sobering.

**John:** So, you start as a writer’s assistant. And were you able to write an episode during your time as a writer’s assistant? Was that an actual writing job?

**Damon:** What ended up happening on that show, because Kevin Williamson was the de facto showrunner, except he had just handed off Dawson’s Creek to Greg Berlanti who was like a one – I think he was like 24 or 25.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** Running basically Dawson’s Creek.

**John:** And he still seems like a boy wonder.

**Damon:** Amazing.

**John:** The man does not age.

**Damon:** I mean, how prolific and incredible his shows are. Kevin was also directing this movie called Teaching Mrs. Tingle, for New Line, so he was not around for the early days of Wasteland. He would just basically buzz in for an hour or two a day and the room would pitch him ideas. But he was not able based on his other projects to take the reins.

And what ended up happening over the course of just about six weeks is that the showrunner quit, a number of other writers were fired, and by the end of six weeks it was the staff writers and the story editor and very junior level writers and me. And there was no material beyond the fifth episode. And we were about to go into production on it. And I was like I’m just going to write a spec Wasteland, just on my own. And I did that over the course of two days and handed it off to the staff writers and said, “If this is worth anything, rewrite it, put your names on it, but at least we’ll all be employed for another week or two.” And they went into their office and closed the door and I was feeling really anxious and the door remained closed for 45 minutes. And I was like I’ve made a huge mistake. I’ve overstepped my bounds.

And then Kevin, he was a friendly guy, but he’d never – I didn’t even know that he knew that I really existed. And he walked right up to my desk, which was in the kind of bullpen. And he said, “Are you Damon?” And I said, “Uh, yeah.” And he said, “Did you write an episode of the show?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Do you have an agent?” And I said, “No.” And she said, “You better get one.”

**John:** That’s great.

**Damon:** And he went into his office and then moments later Jim and Andy, who were the staff writers, they came out and they were like, “We really liked the script. We called Kevin.” I was like, yeah, he just…

So, you know, it was off to the races from there. So, I ended up writing on three or four of the 13 episodes of Wasteland that were produced, but again only two aired before it was canceled. So, that’s how I got my WGA status and my representation and all that stuff was on that show.

**John:** I want to connect a few dots back earlier. So, Julie Plec was the person who brought you in to do this.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** How did you get to know Julie Plec?

**Damon:** I’m sure it still exists today, but there was just – there was like an assistant circuit of the assistants from agencies, studios, and production companies would have like these mixers, you know, on Thursday nights. And we would just go and basically network with each other and get drunk and make out and make friends. And so everybody started as PAs and then became assistants and then people started getting development jobs. And so I had known Julie, circling back to Jerry O’Connell, he and I were really good friends at NYU. He did Scream 2.

**John:** Which was Kevin Williamson.

**Damon:** For Kevin. And then that’s how I met Julie through that group.

**John:** So you didn’t show up in Los Angeles with any network of anybody? You just started working and built it out from there?

**Damon:** Literally knew nobody. Came out here with my roommate from college in ’94 and we wagon-trained from – he lived in – I came from New Jersey to Chicago. He lived in Michigan. And the two of us, his name is Erik Baiers, he is a big mucky muck at Universal now. He and I drove out and like basically just rented an apartment. And answered ads in the trades. Went to Kinkos and faxed our resumes in. And got internships and then just parlayed that into assistant jobs.

**John:** So, what I like about your story in terms of both leaving the Ladd Company and writing the script for Wasteland is you didn’t ask permission, you just sort of did it, and very politely waited for the next step to happen. You sort of put yourself into positions where you could become lucky by going out for that job, letting people read your script, by letting people read the spec you wrote which you decided to do. That’s a common thread as I’ve talked to a lot of writers who have progressed up is that they didn’t sit around waiting for someone to tell them that they could do something. They just did the thing and sorted it out as it happened.

**Damon:** Yeah. I mean, I think that it didn’t occur to me at the time that – it wasn’t like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Sort of like moxie play. Like in my brain at the time that it was happening it felt like it was a survival play. But there was also this other ingredient in what you’re talking about. Because I agree with what you’re saying. And I feel that there is commonality. But the missing ingredient, other than luck and let’s just say, you know, that you have some fundamental talents or experience, because a lot of people in that situation, you know, it does have to be on the page, or you do have to be able to speak articulately about story, but desperation also happens to be part – usually part of the story. And so I can guarantee you that had Wasteland been a successful show, like on the scale of Dawson’s, that I never would have made that move.

Like, I would have gone through the entire first season doing my job, the job that they hired me to do as writer’s assistant, but it wasn’t like, ooh, I see an opportunity, I’m going to grab it. It really was dark days. The show is going to go down. You know, they’re going to shut us down. We don’t have scripts. Like, I have nothing to lose.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** And it felt like a very low risk play.

**John:** Yeah. I had a good conversation with Drew Goddard and we were talking about sort of his first–

**Damon:** Hack.

**John:** Hack.

**Damon:** Hack. Oh my god. The worst.

**John:** A charming hack. He was talking about his first TV experience and it was with Joss Whedon. A similar kind of situation where like–

**Damon:** Haven’t heard of him.

**John:** You know, the show was really having a crisis and they were lacking an episode. And so he just happened to be the person who was nearby and just started up the conversation and became the idea between takes. And he wrote it. And as I was talking through the whole conversation with him, you see that at sort of every step along the way Drew just worked harder. And also just like he was the guy who did stay up all night to do the thing so it could sort of save the day.

**Damon:** Yeah. And you know I’m a big believer in when we hire writer’s assistants on shows that I’m running, I’m hiring writers. So, the de facto rule is that the writer’s assistant does not speak in the room, because their job is to basically synthesize everything that everyone else is saying. And if they’re thinking about pitching their own ideas, they’re not really listening. That’s the thinking. That said, there are moments in the room and out of the room, like when the room isn’t actually up and running, for the writer’s assistants to pitch. And because there is this – I don’t want to say it’s a political – it’s more of like sort of a social dynamic thing. It’s like you want to hire people who figure out like – who see their moment and take it.

And it’s very hazily defined. Like, you know when it’s too soon. And you know when it’s too late. And it’s hard to do it when it’s just right. But the thing is, you know, what I would say to all writer’s assistants or anybody in that position, you know, the first thing that you say better be great because if that first thing that you pitch is not great, then the second thing that you pitch has to be exponentially greater than that thing.

So, just bide your time, but essentially you have to jump into the Double Dutch jump rope at some point. That is an expectation. And certainly on The Leftovers over the course of the three years we promoted both of our writer’s assistants, both our writer’s assistant on season one, Nick, and our writer’s assistant on season two, Haley, because both of them demonstrated they were able to do the job of writer’s assistant incredibly well, but they also found those moments to demonstrate that they were writers.

**John:** So, when I was doing D.C., my first TV show, I had to put together a staff. I never was a staff writer, and suddenly having to assemble a writing team. And I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have any real good sense of what I needed. So, now that you’ve done this a couple of times, what are you looking for as you’re putting together a writing staff, from writer’s assistant all the way up to the people who are going to help really run the show with you?

**Damon:** Well, almost everything that I learned I learned from Carlton Cuse. He’s been a mentor and continues to be a mentor to me on so many levels. But, following Wasteland, which was not the most functional staff in terms of the way that it was assembled at first, although consisting of amazing writers, I went on to Nash Bridges in its sixth season. Sixth and final season. So it was this well-oiled machine. But something happened at the end of season five where essentially there are just moments in television shows where the entire staff basically goes off to do other things, and it happens simultaneously just because they’re at the end of their three-year deals or whatever.

So, at the end of season five, Shawn Ryan, who basically wrote a spec called The Farm, because he wanted people to think that he could do more than just Nash Bridges, that ended up being like FX’s first drama, The Shield, and one of the greatest television shows of all time. And Glen Mazzara, they both left at the end of season five. So, Carlton basically reconstituted the entire staff because with the exception of he and John Worth and one other writer, Reid Steiner, there were five new hires. Because I think that he realized that Glen and Shawn were so powerful in the room that let’s just kind of do a complete and total overhaul. And I was one of those writers.

And so the first thing that you do is you read samples. And it’s not a zero sum game in terms of this person is a good writer, or this person is a bad writer. Like you have to be able to assess how are they with dialogue, how are they with character, how are they with plot, how are they with humor. How are they with pace? And nobody is going to check all those boxes. And the key is to basically not have redundancies. So, don’t meet with three people who are really great at dialogue because certainly in the sixth season of that show the voice of the show is already clearly defined. And so you have to be a good writer, but it’s a lot more technical.

**John:** So, you were the person being staffed, so you weren’t reading other people’s things for Nash Bridges.

**Damon:** That’s correct.

**John:** So why do you think they hired you for Nash Bridges?

**Damon:** Carlton said he read two of my samples. I wrote a one-act play about time travel and a spec Sopranos. And he read those two pieces of material and met with me. And in the meeting, he was like, “Tell me what’s your story. Where do you come from? What do your parents do?” He didn’t really seem interested at all in what I had to say about Nash Bridges. He was more interested in who I was as an individual. And I think that was the other component which is try to build a room that comes from a different place than you do, and looks at the world in a different way than you do. But then in the overlapping Venn diagram you’re all going to meet at the show, so there has to be some common language.

But I was very candid with him in saying, “Here’s the thing. Nash Bridges is on Friday nights at 9 o’clock. I’m out, like partying. But the episodes that I’ve seen, and I love Miami Vice, I’m a huge Don Johnson fan. I love Cheech. I really think this is a great show. And I think that I could write for it.” But that was like 5% of an hour-long interview.

And to go back to your initial question, so you read somebody’s sample. That gets them in the room. But the intangible is you sit down with them for an hour or 90 minutes if the interview is going particularly well, and you just have to ask yourself could I hang out with this person in a room for nine to ten hours a day and enjoy hanging out with them? And that’s just a gut instinct. And there are some amazing writers, incredible on the page, who I just had very awkward stilted interviews with. We just didn’t click. Like, that’s just as much on me as it is on them. And I ended up not hiring them because of that.

And then each writer you hire you have to basically think about them now existing in that room as you start to build the room around them. And I don’t say this just because it is the politically correct thing to do, but having real diversity in a writers’ room, particularly on gender lines. I mean, I think that the industry has a huge way to go in terms of finding writers of color in general. The agencies are just – their rosters are very anemic when it comes to that. But in terms of men and women, there’s more of an equal balance. And so just start from a de facto place of the room has to be 50/50 because if it’s just eight guys in a room, it’s not going to be good for the show.

**John:** So, you’re making the decisions about who you want to bring on, but there’s also other voices saying, “How about this person? How about this person?” So there’s a studio talking to you, there’s a network talking to you.

**Damon:** Sure. Right.

**John:** There’s a bunch of agents talking to you.

**Damon:** Yes.

**John:** How, as a showrunner, do you sort through all that? And when do you decide to read a person’s script or not read a script? Is there a first vetting process is somebody helping you go through that pile first?

**Damon:** That’s a great question. I mean, I think that probably the loudest voice in that mix is the network. When they’re staffing a show, either shows have just gone done, or they have overall deals with talent, probably less so now than before. Or someone that they’ve been monitoring and they’re huge fans of. So, you know, if HBO when we were putting The Leftovers together, Michael Ellenberg was basically our point exec on that. He had like seven people that he felt would be good on the show and that I should read. They came from a whole spectrum of they were playwrights, some of them were novelists. Very few of them had any actual television experience before because I think the thinking was like let’s put people in this room who haven’t done it before because maybe they’ll come up with more outside-the-box ideas.

So that’s first and foremost if the network says you’ve got to meet with these people, or I think that you would like – you have to do it, just on general principle. And chances are you’re not wasting your time by doing that. And then level two is Warner Bros., the studio, is producing The Leftovers. They also had talent that their executives had been developing. And I think that they have immaculate taste over Warner Bros. So, I met with those people.

And then my agents. So I’m represented by CAA. I’ve had a relationship there for 15 years. And so my agent is not going to waste my time sending me – they know me better than anybody else. Just as a person versus as a writer. And what I’ll try to say to them is just send me like your three or four best. I know that you’ve got a lot of clients to service, but your three or four best. And then the other agencies will send one or two as well.

And in the hiring process, I’ll probably generate a stack of between 30 to 50 scripts of writing samples. And I will read pretty religiously like the first 15 pages of every script. If something is like particularly spectacular, I’ll actually finish it, because I’m just like oh my god, like I just want to see how things turn out. But for the most part, within 15 pages or so I can kind of determine whether or not it’s going to be a match.

**John:** So, you’re putting together this staff for a writer’s room, but I feel like you have sort of different qualifications for writing on something like Leftovers, which correct me if I’m wrong – I think Leftovers you wrote all the episodes before you started shooting. Is that correct?

**Damon:** It is incorrect.

**John:** It is incorrect. So, on the first seasons of Leftovers, how far were you in to the writing before you started filming?

**Damon:** I think that we had three scripts completed and had broken the fourth episode and maybe an outline on it. And potentially had some sense of what the fifth episode would be. That’s beyond the pilot. So, HBO still pilots shows. And so Tom and I wrote the pilot together. We produced the pilot. And Toto edited the pilot. And then HBO said we will pick this up to series. So that was in the can.

So, I really only think we had two scripts when we went into production.

**John:** That’s much more like a traditional broadcast situation. We’ve talked to the Game of Thrones guys, and like they have to write the whole thing ahead of time because they’re block scheduling things that it’s impossible to sort of do that show any other way. But I guess going back to staffing, so you need to find people who can work well in the room, but you also are looking for some people who have the experience of actually producing television so that they can do that functional job of like going to set and looking at a cut. You have to find people who have some skills beyond just throwing words around on the page.

**Damon:** For sure. And that’s why there are staff writers are story editors and the expectation on them because they’re newbies is it’s primarily a writing job, but then once you get to the producing levels you do expect some producing acumen.

On Lost and The Leftovers, we migrated to a philosophy where the writers did not go to the set. And I know a lot of television shows do send the writers to the set, and that’s wonderful. But the model of both those shows was we had incredibly strong producing directors. In the case of Lost, Jack Bender. In the case of The Leftovers, Mimi Leder. And so the idea of having a writer on set felt like to do what. You know, to basically protect their material?

So the writers are always available. They would be involved in the tone. Calls with the directors, which are key. And very heavily involved in the prep phase. But all of which can happen by phone and did. And we had writer-producers, Kath Lingenfelter, and Jacqui Hoyt in season one, who never visited the set, but had incredible – like were totally producing their episodes and the whole series writ large. Gave notes on cuts. Watched dailies. All that stuff.

So, I think that that thinking not just migrated from eliminating the redundancy of nobody should be on set who doesn’t have a clear cut job, but the other issue was I’m just a very room-heavy showrunner. There are other showrunners who float in and out of the room and I want to be in the writer’s room six to eight hours a day. That’s my favorite part of the job. That collaboration. The kicking the tires. We beat out every story with a great degree of specificity.

If you send a writer off to set, and they’re going to be there through prep, on a show like The Leftovers, they’re gone for four weeks. And so the idea of losing a valuable player is like the equivalent of the designated hitter in baseball, where it’s like they only get one at bat every three innings. But you don’t get to use them in the field. And so I just kind of felt like I wanted the writers in the room. Not the best way to do it, but the best way for me.

**John:** So let’s talk about being in the room versus when writers leave the room. So you have your writing team assembled. You’re breaking an episode. So let’s say you’re on episode four of the first season of Leftovers. Is that process going up on the whiteboard? What is the process for breaking an episode of a show like that?

**Damon:** So by the time you get to episode four, you’ve already got some sense of what you want to happen in episode four because you’ve got some sense of hopefully what episode ten is going to be, and what it is you’re moving towards. You’ve learned things from the first three episodes. But essentially, episode three is off the board and is being written and exists in draft form. And you erase all the boards and you’re looking at these big white boards. And you start – we usually would do at least two, sometimes three days of blue-skying. Which is kind of anything can happen in this episode. Let’s talk about what we want to be happening thematically. What do we want to have happen between certain character relationships? In the storytelling mechanism do we want to focus on just one story, or are we doing three stories? So there’s a lot of experimentation and sort of fumbling around.

Until you basically land on what I would say is like the big idea. And in the case of the fourth episode of The Leftovers of season one, somebody pitched, you know, what if the baby Jesus gets stolen from the nativity scene. It’s just a prank. I was like, oh, that’s cool. It has thematic resonance for the idea of the show. It could be a little bit fun and silly. And we’re getting to talk about religion without talking about religion. And it’s something that our chief of police isn’t going to want to deal with because he’s got more important things to be dealing with, like the fact that his wife has joined a cult. But I was just like, OK, so that’s going to be the organizing principle.

And so then you start saying like, what are the beats of that story? And then someone pitched like, oh, it would be really cool to watch that baby being made like in a doll factory. And see the mold being poured. And then it being put on the assembly line. And then having its eyes painted and put in a box. And then the box ends up on a shelf in Target. And then a woman buys the baby and then she dresses it up. And then the whole end of that idea, she puts it in the manger.

And so we’ve just basically shone you how Jesus Christ is made in the real world. And everybody goes like, oh, that’s awesome. That’s a great idea. And then that’s how it’s going to start. And then you try to figure out the corresponding bookend, which is what’s the end of this episode going to be? In the case of episode four, it’s interesting that you just threw that out arbitrarily, which is that’s the episode that I think had the most problems in the first season because we broke an entire story, an entire what we would call a B story, which we stopped doing towards the end of season one, and we started doing much more interconnected singular point of view stories, but we did a story with Kevin’s son and Laurie’s son, Tom, and this girl Christine as they joined this commune of barefoot people who are like these kind of hedonist hippies.

We shot the whole thing, and it was an utter disaster. And we scrapped it. It’s the only thing we ever shot for the show that didn’t air. And then basically re-broke it. And in the process of re-breaking it, we came up with a new ending for the Baby Jesus story which incorporated Matt Jamison, who we had now seen dailies for episode three and we saw what Eccleston was doing. And we were like, oh, we have to – like the payoff for the Baby Jesus story has to be a scene between Kevin and Matt, which didn’t exist in the original draft.

So, the show starts telling you what it wants to do. But, the story-breaking process is what’s the first scene, what’s the last scene, and now let’s just fill in everything that happens. What do you have to do to earn the last scene?

**John:** So this is all going up on a big whiteboard?

**Damon:** Yep.

**John:** And then ultimately whose job is it to transfer what’s on the whiteboard to a document that everyone else can look at?

**Damon:** The writer’s assistant.

**John:** OK.

**Damon:** So one of the low level writers, a staff writer or a story editor, is putting stuff up on the board. So for the blue-sky phase, once we land on something that we like, you just write a sentence. Like baby doll made in Tijuana. And then like last one is Kevin throws baby out window. And it’s literally just those sentences. And after two days, you look and you have about 20 of those sentences up on the board and then you’re ready to go into the next phase, which I think is what I would call the story-breaking phase, where you just go scene-by-scene and you start to pitch specific dialogue, character dynamics, etc.

And so it’s usually for an episode of The Leftovers, wire-to-wire, like a two-week process I think from the beginning of blue-skying until an episode comes off the board. But when it comes off the board, by then all five whiteboards are filled in super mega detail. And then off of that the writer will go to outline.

**John:** Great. So the writer goes to outline, so you assign one of the writers who is in the room, like this is your episode. And does that writer know ahead of time that this is going to be his or her episode?

**Damon:** Yeah. In the first season less so. I mean, usually you try to do it hierarchically, so the more experienced writer-producers get the first scripts. I told everyone when I was hiring them I’m going to be co-writing every episode of The Leftovers with you, so that we can develop and find the tone of the show together. Because I think that that’s going to help me learn how to write the show, but also it will put you in a position to be more successful. And also will generate material, the scripts a lot more quickly, if we’re co-writing them. And everybody was down with that.

So, we just had a rotation. But I co-wrote all the episodes in the first season, say for one, which was episode eight.

**John:** So it’s gone from this detailed five whiteboards to a document, an outline that everyone can look at?

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** And off of that outline, are there notes or changes? Like does the studio see this?

**Damon:** Yes.

**John:** Network sees this? OK.

**Damon:** The outline is the first that the studio and the network catch wind of what it is we want to do. They would give notes. Very good notes. Points of clarification. Our outlines were very detailed, like they were 20 to 30 page documents. Because more importantly, because the scripts were sort of the last thing to come, and we always had the scripts in time for prep, which is a week before the – a week to ten days before the episode shoots. But usually like right up against it.

But, we would also – production would have the outlines. And that – they’d have that like a month ahead of time, and that was really important because they’d know what all the locations were.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** What the cast asks were going to be. They could start to build a schedule and more importantly a budget off of the detail of those outlines. But then particularly in the first season of the show, the notes would sometimes detonate outlines. And I would come back to the room and say we just got blown up. And sometimes you get a note that blows you up and you immediately resist it just because you know how much work it’s going to create for you, but you know that it’s right. And other times a note is potentially explosive, but you feel like it is wrong and you can scrap it out.

We were getting many more good notes than bad notes. I can’t think of any bad notes that we got in the first season. So, the outline is basically the first test. And it’s a little bit like the Congress and the Senate. Like if the bill makes it out of outline, you’re going to have a lot less problems when it crosses the President’s desk. So, we wanted to generate – we didn’t want there to be any surprises in script.

**John:** Yeah. So from the five whiteboards, how long does it take to make an outline? Is that just a day to write that out?

**Damon:** No, because the outline is a piece of writing. So, it’s not – the writer’s assistant has taken what’s off the board and generated notes, but now the writer has to actually write it and create all the things that a writer does. So, it could take like a week from it coming off the board before the writer generates that outline. Because, again, like I said, it’s a pretty lengthy document. And because I would be chugging along on the next episode, that writer would basically generate that outline pretty much independently of me and then I would notes them or rewrite it. But I was much more involved in writing the scripts than the outlines for sure.

**John:** Great. So once you have an outline that everyone has signed off on, or signed off on enough–

**Damon:** Sometimes they say, “We’ll see. We’ll see how it works in the script,” which you know like oh my god that note isn’t going to go away.

**John:** How long is it taking you guys to go from the outline to the script?

**Damon:** That’s fast. I mean, that takes just almost the same amount of time that it takes to go from board to outline. Maybe just a week. And, again, because there’s two of us, we would just divvy it up.

**John:** You just pick scenes and do it?

**Damon:** In the case of the first season, there’d be like the Kevin story and a Jill story and a Laurie story, so you just say like, Kath, you take the Laurie story and I will take the Keven story. Then we started doing episodes like episode three which was just a Matt Jamison story, which I co-wrote with Jacqui. In that case I would be like these are the scenes that I feel like I have a beat on. And she would take the scenes that she felt she had a beat on. And then we would basically exchange notes to each other and then I would do a conformity pass.

**John:** So you’ve divvied up the scenes between the two of you, but in the outline stage is it so clear sort of how a scene is going to begin and end? Because I can just imagine if you have a scene that’s butting up against the scene that she’s writing, you want to have a natural transition between the two of you. Do you just not worry about it until you are assembling the whole thing together? Or are you asking her sort of like what the first thing is there? Or is that already in the outline basically how you’re going to start that next scene?

**Damon:** That’s a great question. I mean, for the first season of a show, as you’re determining what its rhythms are, I think that you’re asking the pivotal question which is how do the transitions feel. How to you carry water from one scene to another? And I think that we learned that essentially we would have a higher degree of success if I took the first 25 pages and the other writer took the last 25 so that you could build your own internal rhythm versus writing patchwork, alternating scenes, for exactly the reason that you specify which is I think that the outline sometimes did indicate here’s the first moment in the scene, but maybe not the first line of dialogue or you would find a different blow, a different out for the scene.

And writing The Leftovers was a much different experience for me than writing Lost at a number of levels, but just in terms of construction Lost had commercials. And so every seven pages of a Lost script had to have–

**John:** You had to start over, yeah.

**Damon:** Bum, bum, bum. Like, you know.

**John:** But you also have the joy of coming in with new energy. And being able to sort of open up the curtain again.

**Damon:** So you could just separate by act. You know, you’d basically say like, OK, Eddie and Adam, you guys take acts two and three and five. And I’ll write the teaser. That’s how you could divvy and you knew like you were just all building into the commercial. Whereas I think writing a pay cable drama, or even a show like Mad Men that has commercials, but those commercials in Mad Men were always like, what? It’s not meant to be watched with commercials. It’s meant to be experienced as a single one-hour movie or whatever it is you want to call it.

**John:** Cool. Let’s tackle some questions, and then I’ll get back to some of my own questions. These are things that listeners have written in. Sam writes, “I co-wrote a pilot script a few years ago, which went out to almost every major studio network. One of the major studios loved it and put a deal in motion to buy and develop the pilot. A few days later, the deal fell apart when it went to business affairs because a production company attachment we had that the studio did not want. Their attachment deal has now expired. And we have full control of the project again. But the development people that wanted the show are no longer at the studio and we’re starting from scratch. We still love the show and believe in it.

“Are agents and basically everyone else is telling us that once a project goes around once, it is old news and no one wants to look at it again. So they don’t want to take it out again. In your experience, is that true? Do we have any shot of reviving this?

**Damon:** The answer is yes and yes. So, yes, our industry does for some reason have a bias towards anything that is rehashed or old news. Or when they think about the narrative of a project, they want to be able to say this thing started with my enthusiasm for it versus somebody else was enthusiastic about it once and now I picked up something someone else rejected. Which to me is like a great narrative. But I do think that the reality is when I think about a question like this, I think it’s all in the hands of the representatives, which is like nobody knows that this event happened other than you and your rep and the development executives who are no longer involved.

And so unless your agent discloses that this happened with this material three to four years ago, there’s nothing that should prohibit them from presenting it as new, especially because you control it now. So–

**John:** Well, he does say though it did go out and everybody read it.

**Damon:** Oh they did?

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** So he’s saying people were enthusiastic about it at one point, but are no longer enthusiastic because it happened years ago.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** To be completely candid, that sounds like a polite pass to me. I mean, I think that strong material, if available, people will snap it up. And another Sam, Sam Esmail, who had no prior showrunning experience and is now on the short list of the greatest auteurs working in television today, you know, he wrote Mr. Robot as a movie, then repurposed it as a television show. And nobody is decrying the fact that it’s the same material in a slightly different format. But–

**John:** Wasn’t Mad Men also like an old script that he dusted off?

**Damon:** My understanding is that Matt wrote Mad Men while he was on Becker, and the Mad Men sample is what got him the job on The Sopranos. And that David Chase loved the Mad Men pilot and wanted to produce it, but HBO passed. And so he took it to AMC. And everybody scoffed because AMC, what’s that, and now 11,000 Emmys later. But he had that material for quite some time.

So, you know, I think that great material is evergreen and I would suggest moving on to the next thing.

**John:** I would suggest moving on to the next thing, too. A thing that I find really weird about TV and tell me if you find this to be true as well. I have friends who staff on shows and when they’re going to move from one show to another show, they need to write a new pilot to represent themselves. And it seems crazy, because I feel like if you’ve written a really good show, especially written on a really good show, that should show your talent. But, no, the agents want a fresh thing that they can send out for staffing, which seems crazy to me.

**Damon:** It does seem crazy to me, too. But I also sort of feel like television writing, and probably any kind of screenwriting, is like the singularity now where the rate at which TV writing is changing and shifting is happening so fast that a piece of material that someone wrote two years ago doesn’t feel of the now because it’s – when you wrote it, you weren’t aware that Stranger Things existed. You weren’t aware that Transparent existed. And so this idea of like a piece of material kind of has to push the buttons that like all this zeitgeist-y shows are pushing and sort of demonstrate kind of like some awareness.

I mean, I remember I wrote a Sopranos spec, and that’s not the same as writing an original pilot. Tony’s mom was in it. And then she died. Nancy Marchand died. And so I was basically like, well, who cares. I mean, it’s still something that I wrote. It’s still The Sopranos. But people would read it and be like, “This doesn’t feel like The Sopranos anymore because the character is dead.” And I think like writ large that idea of pilots have to kind of be of the now. They have to kind of feel like they have that sort of energy. But, I don’t know. I mean, I think a great piece of writing is a great piece of writing. And agents, it is their job to put you in the best possible position to get work. And so if they’re not seeing the best result from your old sample, or they just want you basically exercise that muscle again, etc., or I would venture to guess they’re trying to trick you into writing something that’s so good somebody wants to buy it as a TV show and that it’s not a sample.

I mean, I’ve read some samples, some pilot samples recently where I was like this should be a show this is so good. Like why would I hire this person to be on The Leftovers? This should be a show.

**John:** Cool. Lou writes, “I wrote a spec pilot based on a friend’s idea. He asked me to do it. The story in the pilot is from his real life experience. What would be the appropriate way to write credits on the title page? To clarify, we are not writing this script for anybody other than ourselves at this point.”

**Damon:** Sure. I don’t know what the Writers Guild response to that is, but Lou is the one who is writing it, so it would basically say the name of the – The Adventures of John August by Lou whatever your last name is. And then I put Inspired by the life of John August. Or based upon the memoirs.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** So, you know, I’d solidify the fact that you are the only author of this material, but it is based on the life of your friend.

**John:** That seems fair to me, too. Again, this isn’t sort of the WGA credit. But when there’s an underlying source behind things, it’s important to acknowledge that on the cover page just so – it’s the morally right thing to do, but it’s also just – it’s going out there in the world and it’s based on someone’s real experience.

**Damon:** Completely agree.

**John:** Richard writes, “I’m writing a pilot that contains a mystery surrounding a certain symbol.” This feels very much up your alley. “That symbol is both the opening and closing image of the episode and it carries great importance. Since screenwriting is a highly visual enterprise, I would like to show the symbol in the script rather than just describe it, which would be tedious and devoid of impact. I’ve encountered the opinion that inserting pictures into a script exposes a hack and my screenwriting software does not even include such a feature. What are your thoughts about including a symbol in the script?”

**Damon:** Wow, that’s a great question because I agree with everything that you just said. Now the reality is because it is the first image of the script, normally I would basically say is there a way for the symbol to be the last image of the script. Because you don’t want to send that hack flag up–

**John:** On page one.

**Damon:** On page one. But if your writing is great and the story is great, then you can put it on page 50 and no one will think you’re a hack because they’re completely and totally into the storytelling. I agree that that sends like a real – having illustrations of any kind or symbols is, you know, is immediately sort of you have to find a way to describe the thing without showing it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** I can’t even – I will say this, though. Based on this question I’m like, ugh, what is this symbol?

**John:** What is it?

**Damon:** Like–

**John:** My instinct would be to do it on a page between the title page and the first page of actual script. And so if there was an intermediary page that just had the symbol and didn’t even necessarily explain why that page was there, but then when you sort of read through it you get like, oh, that was what that thing was.

**Damon:** Got it.

**John:** But having it break in the flow of the text, that’s where it feels hack to me. That’s where I get really nervous about doing that.

**Damon:** Right. And the other thing is if you can’t describe it in simple – there has to be a way, even if the symbol feels like it’s complicated to describe, you know, you or I could describe Prince’s symbol in a sentence, which is like it’s kind of like the symbol for male or female but with some artistic flourishes, without saying it’s got arrows on the end of each – you know, you don’t have to be overly descriptive.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you there. Rian Johnson’s script for Looper has one image in it, which describes like one thing sort of late in the script, but it’s not on page one, and he’s also Rian Johnson.

**Damon:** Correct.

**John:** And so that’s a difference between his situation and Richard’s situation.

**Damon:** Yeah. I think that once you’ve established yourself, then symbol it up.

**John:** Yep.

**Damon:** Go symbol crazy.

**John:** So, you’re wrapping up The Leftovers, and all the episodes are shot now. They’re all edited now.

**Damon:** Yep. It’s as done as done gets.

**John:** That’s great. So, a thing we were talking about before we started recording is that while you were doing Lost you kept getting hit with two questions. And I want to sort of address those two questions that everyone always asked you about the show and what effect they could have. So what are the two questions?

**Damon:** I could do like a psychic act where I can say if you were watching Lost, I want you to close your eyes right now and think of what is the one question, especially in terms of process. Forgetting about polar bears and all that fun stuff. Like what you would ask. And I will predict that it will be one of two questions.

The first question is were you making it up as you went along. And certainly as we were writing the show that was in the present tense, are you making it up as you go along? So that’s question number one. And when someone asks you a question like that, they’re not curious. There’s an answer that they want. Because who in the history of the world has been asked that question and you want the answer to be, “Uh, yeah, I’m just making it up as I go along, man. I’m just winging it. I’m President Trump. I’m just like tweeting and figuring things out as I go. This is a tough job.”

You want people to have a plan for sure. So that’s the correct answer is we are absolutely not making it up as we go along. There is a roadmap. There is a bible. All of these things exist. That’s the appropriate answer.

Question number two. How much influence does the audience/fandom have on the outcome of the show? We’re really engaged. We have theories. We go to fan events. We’re on Reddit and Twitter talking about and theorizing about the show. Do you read that stuff and does it influence you? And the answer to that question, the desired answer is, yes, you as an audience have a tremendous influence on the show and the outcome of the show. We’re listening to the things that you don’t like and we’re course-correcting and we’re listening to the things that you like and we’re doing more of that.

And yet there doesn’t seem to be an awareness that these two ideas are paradoxical.

**John:** Absolutely. They’re completely antithetical. Like something can’t be predetermined and be, you know, have free will based on what the audience wants.

**Damon:** That’s a very Rousseau/Locke way of putting it. That those are the philosophers, not the crazy French women and the guy in the wheelchair. But, yes, if there is a plan, the audience has no effect whatsoever on its outcome. And if you’re always listening to what the audience tells you, then you have to be winging it. So, how do you thread the needle?

**John:** And so when you’re doing a show like Lost, which had 24 episodes in its longest season.

**Damon:** Yeah, 25 hours with Season 1.

**John:** It was crazy. And so on a show like that, you are writing the show while you’re filming the show. It’s an ongoing process, so you can actually see sort of what’s working in broadcast and change things.

**Damon:** Correct.

**John:** But with shorter seasons, that’s much less likely to happen. So, even on the first season of The Leftovers, had any of the episodes aired by the time you were producing the final episodes?

**Damon:** Oh, for sure. I mean, we produced the pilot in the summer. You know, in July. And then it got picked up. And then we went into production on the series I think the following January or February in New York. I think we were still in production when the episodes started airing.

**John:** But if somebody watched the first episode or the second episode or the third episode and they said like, oh, I really want it to be more like this, there wasn’t much of an opportunity for that to happen.

**Damon:** No.

**John:** Because it was–

**Damon:** All of the material was already generated. I mean, where the space exists is between seasons. So, certainly between the second and third season of The Leftovers had certain things that we did, like big swings – we did an episode called International Assassin that takes place in a – I’ll just say a different reality than the rest of the show. Had the audience rejected that idea instead of embraced it, that would have affected the storytelling in season three for sure.

In fact, you know, one of the big storylines of the third season, I’m not going to spoil anything here, but if you’ve watched any of the trailers or the promos for the coming season, you know, the idea that Kevin, our main character, died and came back to life is a major story thread. And I think had that not worked out in the second season, we would have just pretended that it had never happened.

**John:** So, this comes up, this idea of like is it all prefigured out or not prefigured out. Two recent series sort of brought this home to me, which were Stranger Things and Westworld. So, Stranger Things is a Netflix show. It all dumped at once. And so you knew from the start that nothing you thought about the show was going to change the show, because the show was done. Because you could see that all of the episodes were there, ready for you to watch.

Versus Westworld as I was watching it week by week, and I love the creators and I’m so happy with the show, but I detected a lot of fan annoyance about how slow things were moving. There was a frustration that was building from fans based on how the storytelling was reeling out which I don’t think would have happened had it been all dumped at once.

**Damon:** Oh for sure. It’s the – did you get me a bike? It’s a bike, right, for Christmas paradigm where your kid basically asks you for something for Christmas and it’s the big gift. And your kid knows that you love them. So, yeah, chances are they’ve got the bike. But they’re not getting it until Christmas. And so all they’ll basically say is whether they believe in Santa or not, another spoiler alert, you know, am I getting a bike? Am I? Am I getting a bike? Did you get me a bike? Am I getting a bike? And I think that there is a certain level of anticlimax and frustration, but your job as a parent is to basically preserve that moment on Christmas morning when they get the bike. And I think Jonah and Lisa have spoken pretty candidly about the idea that they didn’t expect Reddit to reach certain conclusions that fast–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** But the reality is when you can hive-mind a solution it only takes one person to figure it out before something catches on. And so if there’s millions and millions of people watching something like they are in Westworld, they’ll figure it out. And then I think the other thing that’s sort of worth talking about per both those shows and what you’re saying is there’s a time investment. And so what’s interesting is your time investment in watching Stranger Things and Westworld is exactly the same. You invest ten hours in watching those television shows. But in Westworld–

**John:** But they’re ten very different hours.

**Damon:** You actually feel like you’ve invested 100 hours because you’re counting the hours in between the weeks that you are discussing, debating, you know, doing the deep dive on, talking about the men in black. How far in the future are we? Are we on a different planet? All that stuff. That time and energy you also count as your investment. And so the more time you invest, the more possibility for frustration there is.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** Unfairly, I believe.

**John:** I agree that it’s unfair, but it has to be something that’s on your head as you’re thinking about going forward. So, right now Leftovers is finishing up and you need to be thinking of what you want to do down the road. And I don’t know if you’re thinking about TV at all, but you have to be thinking about anything you do in TV now is going to be a decision of like is this a show that should all be watched at once, or are we going to try to do this sort of week by week basis. What’s your feeling?

**Damon:** Here’s what’s interesting. The answer is both. Because, so for me the “have your cake and eat it, too” scenario is you roll it out week by week, so for that portion of the audience, that’s how they watched Big Little Lies. You had to wait until Sunday night in order to watch it. And now it’s over and the finale was widely adored, including by myself, and so the people who didn’t want to take the risk that it wouldn’t turn out well or not to invest in it yet, they’re now going to binge it.

So, the way that the show lives on is always going to be in a binge model. Is always going to be in a you can watch all the episodes at your own leisure. But for this one period of time when you’re first rolling it out, as Dickens did with Great Expectations, you know, I mean, we all read Great Expectations as a novel, but when Dickens put it out it was serialized. So, why not have your cake and eat it, too, and do it both ways. Because I want to engage in shows. Like I wish that Stranger Things dolled it out. You know, because as much as I loved it, when it was over I was like, oh, that – I did it too fast. I wished that I could have been part of the community. Instead I watched this thing for three days and now we’re all talking about the entire series. But I wanted to speculate as to what Barb’s fate was, as opposed to I’m now exactly 90 minutes away from determining Barb’s fate.

**John:** Well, but in order for this cake and eat it, too–

**Damon:** #Barb.

**John:** Barb. You have to have an end. And so in the case of Lost, it was 100 episodes you did?

**Damon:** 121.

**John:** 121. And so it was so many episodes out in the future. And so I know you asked for a stop date at a certain point so you could plan for it, but someone who wasn’t sure whether they were going to commit to the show, they had to decide am I going to wait four years for it to finish. So something like The Leftovers, each season is very discrete. Like you can sort of watch seasons – well, you really can’t – it’s hard to sort of come into season two and for it to make a lot of sense.

**Damon:** Although I’ve heard.

**John:** People do it.

**Damon:** I’ve heard anecdotally some people are like just start with season two, and they’re a little confused at first, but it’s fine.

**John:** It’s fine. But the advantage to Big Little Lies or Stranger Things is that you know that it’s only ten episodes, and so you’re not going to have to wait that long to start watching it if you–

**Damon:** I think Big Little Lies is like seven episodes or something like that. Yeah. No, you know, the thing that I always say is people want to know how thick the book is before they buy the book. So, it’s sort of like it’s why Sorcerer’s Stone is of a certain thickness and Order of the Phoenix is of a – because it’s like by then J.K. Rowling is basically like I got you. So, these are going to be as thick as I want.

But I think if the first book was as thick as Order of the Phoenix, that certainly would give me pause. And so but television, almost until recently you don’t know how thick the book is. And so even Game of Thrones, you know, when HBO started airing it you knew before you watched the pilot of Game of Thrones, and I had read the first three of George’s books at that point, I knew that I was like signing up for the long haul. Like, oh my god, is this going to be ten years of my life if the show works? And I’m down with that. But that’s an intimidating commitment to make. It’s daunting.

And so I really feel like Ryan Murphy and Noah Hawley are at the apex of the newest trend in television which is the serialized anthology. The way that every season of Fargo feels like it is self-contained but part of a larger, sprawling narrative. And they are interconnected in terms of how they move around in time. So, a massacre that was alluded to in season one is actually dramatized in season two. But season two doesn’t feel like a prequel, even though it’s chronologically taking – it feels just as important. And then they connect with the movie Fargo, so the money that Steve Buscemi basically hid and was unresolved in the movie is actually found in season one in Fargo in the Oliver Platt storyline, etc.

But there’s a larger – it’s not just, oh, here’s another season of Fargo. There is a sense of serialization in there. And then Ryan, of course, who with American Horror Story he’ll have actors basically play different characters, but there is also a sense of some meta interconnectedness. And I think that’s a new storytelling form, which is very exciting.

**John:** But, I mean, I will push back a little bit on Noah Hawley. Legion, which I thought was a terrific pilot and a really interesting show, it felt like it was designed for streaming, yet it came every week.

**Damon:** Oh, interesting.

**John:** And so I have a suspicion that the show plays much better if you actually just watch the episodes straight through. But with the week in between you lose the connective tissue. You just can’t actually kind of remember what happened week to week. It’s such a complicated show that without seeing it sort of back to back to back, a week between things have sort of destroyed the momentum.

**Damon:** I had an entirely different reaction to Legion which was that I loved having the anticipation of the next episode, but I also felt like that show was teaching me how to watch it. And you’re probably right in terms of there’s an intricacy in terms of storytelling and plot and figuring out who is Lenny, and is Lenny is a guy. Who’s the shadow king? Like all of those things. But, for me it was in the way that Twin Peaks was, it was more about a mood. And it’s sort of broadcasting at a different frequency. And so I feel like the penultimate episode of Legion, and again not to spoil it if you haven’t seen it yet, or something like that, like dropped into the middle of a binge, and then suddenly that episode would end and you just have – there’s just this amazing – they do this thing with Bolero and then it’s black and white and you’re in a silent movie. And there’s major revelations and this animated thing on a chalk – it’s just like the idea of that episode ending and then immediately going I’m now watching the finale, versus I need to just take some time with that one, I don’t know. I appreciated–

**John:** I can the arguments both ways. I felt like my experience of understanding what actually happened over the course of the season would make a lot more sense if I had watched it all together as one thing than just spread out the way it was spread out.

**Damon:** Yeah, I mean, I think that one thing that sounds super pretentious/precious is that the showrunners of these shows, the storytellers of these shows, should start prescribing the way that they want their shows to be watched. And the audience can choose to ignore them. Like for me, I’d be like, “Noah, what do you want me to do?” And I just assume Noah wants me to watch them every Tuesday night, the week that they’re on, because that’s the way that he’s – Noah Hawley, if he wanted to, he could do the show on Netflix. I mean, maybe he’s in an overall deal at FX or whatever, but like I do want to have a stronger sense of how the people making it feel like it should be watched, even if they’re wrong.

**John:** Yeah. J.K. Rowling with Harry Potter, her initial recommendation was that it’s designed to be like one book a year. And so it’s meant to be you grow up with the kids. And so the later books are more advanced because you’re supposed to be a more advanced person reading them.

**Damon:** For sure.

**John:** It moves from middle-grade fiction into YA.

**Damon:** And we’re reading Half-Blood Prince right now with Van, my son, who is ten years old, and we started Sorcerer’s Stone I think when he was six.

**John:** Yeah, that’s just right.

**Damon:** We’re a little bit faster than once a year, but there was no way that we finished Order of the Phoenix and he wasn’t like, next. At that point he was like, “Let’s get to it.” But you do appreciate how brilliantly she recaps the previous book, because when you and read them the beginning of episode six where they’re dealing with the British PM, having to like basically be apprised of the fact that Cornelius Fudge has been replaced by Rufus Scrimgeour, and then all the things that happen in between books. I remember when I picked up Half-Blood Prince I was like, oh man, it’s been a while since I read Order of the Phoenix. How am I going to remember what happened?

**John:** And there’s a previously on…

**Damon:** And she just did it so brilliantly. Oh my god. She’s the best. The best. And you’ve seen–

**John:** I saw the play.

**Damon:** You saw it.

**John:** Yeah, it’s good. The play is really good.

The last thing I want to get to is this idea of idea debt. And so this was some articles I sent to you. The first one I read was by Jessica Abel. And she had a conversation with Kazu Kibuishi where she’s talking about this sense of the old projects that were sort of always lingering behind. So this is what she actually wrote.

“Let me tell you about Forest Lords.

Forest Lords is a series of ten fantasy novels, each a 1000-page brick, about the epic adventures of Greenleaf Barksley, elf proletarian, and his journeys to attain the Golden Leaf and save his homeland from the scourge of the Curse of the Titaness Denox.

The thing is, none of this series exists—not even Forest Lords Volume One: The Elven Soul. There are binders and binders of “lore.” There are a hell of a lot of character designs (that look suspiciously similar to Elfquest characters). There is the vivid, lively picture the putative author has in his head of how it’s going to feel to write a fantasy series that has everyone panting for the next book or movie or TV show.*

But there is no book. There is only Idea Debt.”

**Damon:** Yes.

**John:** So, this felt really familiar to me.

**Damon:** Yeah. It felt really familiar to me, too. And I had the same smile on my face as I read the article that you have on your face as you read aloud that part. Look, I think that world-building is super exciting. And I think that this idea of a broad and expansive universe and saying that this thing is epic in scope, it’s a saga, is a wonderful thing. But the grounds of creative storytelling are littered with the corpses of these elven warriors. And I think that ultimately my takeaway from reading that article and the others is that that’s the fun part, this world-building. The hard part is actually just writing the first one. And the more worlds you’re building, the less storytelling you’re doing. Because it’s sort of like the world-building is easy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** But what’s getting me into the world, like if you just basically think about like how much time did George R. R. Martin spend building the world of Westeros before he actually started typing chapter one, and now there’s dire wolves. Well, chapter one is kind of our introduction to the White Walkers. But now basically dire wolves pups are being presented to all the Stark kids and Jon Snow. And I guess that there wasn’t a lot of lag time between the idea to do Game of Thrones and the writing of that chapter. And then he started building his world along the way.

And I think that this idea debt is basically prohibiting people from actually working.

**John:** Yeah. I think people approach it with these weird expectations where they think they need to build George R. R. Martin’s world for Game of Thrones, or they need to build the Potter-verse for J.K. Rowling’s universe, without remembering like, oh no, you actually have to write the book first.

**Damon:** Sure.

**John:** And that the universe doesn’t come before the actual text comes. But I think the reason why people want to do that world-building is because there’s no risk. You can’t fail at the world-building because there’s no actual product. But the minute you actually start to write something, it could suck. And that’s the fear. And so you put it off because you’re worried about it.

**Damon:** I couldn’t agree more. And I also feel like the thing that the world-building is devoid of is the fundamental thing that we attach ourselves to in story, which is the characters and the emotions. And if you read George Lucas’s original treatment for Star Wars, you know, whatever, when it’s Luke Star-Killer and it’s, you know, the Wills and all that stuff, is like it’s all that stuff. It’s all that world-building stuff, but it’s lacking the moment on Tatooine, looking out at the twin suns. It’s certainly – he had to write Star Wars to learn that Vader was Luke’s father. Like, that was not in the world-building part.

And so you have to – I know that there’s a lot of debate, and I don’t even know if J.K. Rowling has spoken about this or been asked this, but it seems to me that had she known about Horcruxes prior to when they were revealed in the books that she could have used that word once or twice casually by Azkaban. And the fact that she didn’t leads me to believe that it was an idea – the story was telling her what to tell, because you have to listen to the show. You have to listen to the story. And all the time that you’re not writing it, it’s not telling you what it wants to be.

**John:** Absolutely. The sense of what it wants to be and what it doesn’t want to be, the second part of this idea that like all of those things that you have sort of abandoned along the way, those ideas that sort of got half-developed that you’ve never actually done anything with.

And there’s a guy named John Sexton who has a good piece I’ll also link to in the show notes talking about all those things that you’re sort of dragging with you from apartment to apartment, project to project. Those things you always meant to write that you’ve never actually written. And I found myself nodding a lot as he was going through his list, because I have all those things, like someday I’ll get back to that stuff.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** And I’ll never get back to those things.

**Damon:** Right. If it sits in your storage unit for like a couple of years, there’s a reason for that. It wants to stay there. But I would say that certain things that are tickling you or get you excited as a writer, they will work their way into – like for example, I always wanted to do a show about time travel. And then I suddenly realized, hey, Lost is that show. Like there is not time travel embedded in the pilot of lost, but J.J. and I tried to do everything that we could to open up all possibilities in the pilot so that if we wanted to get to time travel, we could.

And I always wanted to set a show in the ‘70s, and I was like, well, we’ve got time travel now. So Lost is that show, too. And I’ve always wanted to do like a pirate show. Well, Lost could be that show, too. .

So, if you basically find the canvas that can accommodate all those disparate ideas and you can kind of cram them in there, it’s amazing how resilient television storytelling can be, particularly in this day and age. Where the audience will sort of let you go. And the idea that Noah Hawley is like maybe he – I haven’t heard him talk extensively about Legion yet, but he’s a colleague and I’m a huge fan of his, but the idea that Noah Hawley had always wanted to do a super hero show and it ends up being Legion, you know, is sort of like he seems much more interested in other genre elements than the super hero genre, but there are some things that are distinctly super hero-ish in there that he doesn’t seem particularly interested in.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** And that makes the show all the more fascinating that it’s like, oh, like this is an X-Men show. Like it can be this, too? Oh, that’s cool.

**John:** Yeah. Circling back to this sense of the world-building and sort of knowing everything that’s out there before you get started, you know, we were talking about J.K. Rowling, whether she knew Horcruxes, but like you guys didn’t know everything that Lost could be when you were writing the pilot for Lost. You guys were just writing the pilot to make the most compelling pilot possible. And sort of to stake out a giant circle of possibility around you.

But if you had actually had to go into it with a plan for like this is the six seasons. This is how it’s all going to work. This is how these two things connect. There’s no way you could have done it. You had to discover it by doing it.

**Damon:** Yeah. You’re back to do you have a bible. You know, and even the bible was written, you know, I mean I guess there are people out there who believe that the Bible was written by God and then dictated to man, but even the Bible was written one verse at a time, one story at a time. And in the pragmatic reality of storytelling, that’s the only way that you can do it because J.J. and I had ten weeks to basically write and produce and deliver a two-hour movie. That was the two-hour pilot. And the idea that we also in our spare time were able to get together and say like, hey, let’s talk about what season three of Lost might look like. It just didn’t exist.

It’s also hubris. I mean, I think that I always say to studios and networks who are saying like we need a bible or we need to know what season two is, I understand that concern. You’re investing in this thing. You want to know that we have some sense of where we’re going. But, the job – my job right now is to just make one great hour of this thing, not just the pilot. And then episode two has to be – that’s the real pilot of a television show is episode two. But if you make three bad episodes in a row, the audience is out. And it really doesn’t matter if you’ve got a great idea for what season two could be. You should have been more focused on what episode four was.

And so I’m a big believer in look at the episode right in front of you and do everything that you can to make it great. Have some sense of where you want to take things, but then there has to be a discovery process along the way.

**John:** Cool. Let’s go to our One Cool Things.

**Damon:** I discovered the show called Occupied on Netflix. It was recommended by a friend. And I don’t know when it was made, but I have a feeling it was made in the last two years. And it’s about a silk glove invasion of Norway by Russia. It’s kind of I guess got 24 and Homeland baked into its blood. But what’s sort of fascinating about it is I didn’t know anything about Norway. And I’ve always had this idealized version of what it is to be Scandinavian. And this is kind of the nightmare scenario. The storytelling set up is that each episode is a month. It doesn’t take place over a month, but is titled like April, May, June. So they jump 30 days between the ending of and the beginning of episodes, so part of the fun is like, hey, what happened in between these episodes. There’s a little bit of catching up. But essentially over the course of the first season you see what it looks like for a country to be invaded by another country. And particularly in terms of what’s happening in the world right now, it’s the most like V, which is a show–

**John:** Oh, I loved V.

**Damon:** I loved.

**John:** Oh my god. I loved V.

**Damon:** Of anything that I’ve seen in the last two decades, but it’s sort of like what if V happened in the real world. And I’m not saying that the Russians eat guinea pigs. I’m not saying they don’t. I’m not saying they could.

**John:** They peel off their skin, it is reptilian underneath.

**Damon:** But the Russians are–

**John:** Who is the Diana of the show? Is there a person–?

**Damon:** Yeah, there is a Diana.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Damon:** You know, it’s a Russian woman who is essentially – she’s very charismatic. Like the Russians are not just straight up bad guys in it. That’s what’s really interesting about it, too. I would say like the Norwegian Prime Minister is not being presented as this incredibly noble and flawless individual. Lots of different shades in it. And also there’s a lot of English. It makes you, again, hate yourself as an American because every Norwegian and every Russian speaks fluent English. So when they’re talking to each other they speak in English. When the Norwegians are speaking to each other they’re speaking in Norwegian. But you’re like, oh, like all these people are all multi-lingual and here I am like I can order like a burrito and I feel proud of myself.

**John:** I always feel bad on The Americans, because there are times where I’m sort of half paying attention. Like it could be the radio play, where you can sort of hear the discussion, but then they’ll switch into the Russian section and you have to–

**Damon:** You got to watch.

**John:** You got to watch close, because it’s going to be something about the food supply.

My One Cool Thing is also a series. Fits in really well with this idea of recycling your old ideas. It’s called City Girl. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. It’s a romantic comedy done by Parenthood’s Sarah Ramos. And she wrote it in 2003 when she was 12 years old, but it tells the story of this 28-year-old boutique owner and she has this weird affair with her allergist, like her migraine doctor.

But basically, this writer, she found her old script and shot it the way – she didn’t change it. She didn’t update it. She actually just shot it the way she wrote it when she was 12 years old.

**Damon:** Oh my god.

**John:** And so it’s like this weird misunderstanding of sort of like what a 28-year-old is like, and what the motivations are.

**Damon:** Oh, that’s great. They just shot it as is?

**John:** They just shot it as is.

**Damon:** Where is it?

**John:** It’s a series of like web shorts. And so I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. But it’s really–

**Damon:** Oh, that sounds fascinating.

**John:** Brilliantly done.

**Damon:** Can I do one more tiny one?

**John:** Please.

**Damon:** Which is the writer and personality John Hodgman, who is a genius, super amazing. He wrote a pilot that you just reminded me of. They did a live reading of the pilot, because it never got produced. But the premise was that it’s his – it’s a coming of age story of him as like a 13-year-old boy, but it’s played by John Hodgman as an adult. He’s the only adult on the show, so all the other kids are played by actual 13 year olds, including his love interest, who is also a 13-year-old.

It’s amazing. And they did this live reading of it that is listenable. I think they did it as a podcast. It’s amazing. It’s so good.

**John:** Cool. We’ll find a link for that in the show notes as well.

**Damon:** Do it.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show, as always, is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Damon is not on Twitter at all.

**Damon:** I’m off Twitter.

**John:** He’s fully off Twitter.

**Damon:** Craig can keep his day job, because this is big boots to fill.

**John:** Yes. You can find us on Facebook, just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. That’s also where you can find us on iTunes. While you’re there, leave us a comment. That’s always helpful.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. There’s apps for both Android and for iOS. You can listen to all those back episodes.

At johnaugust.com you’ll find transcripts and links to all the show notes. So, Godwin gets the transcripts up about four days after the episode airs. This one might take a little bit longer because it was a longer episode. But, Damon, thank you so much for coming to Paris and being on the show.

**Damon:** It’s so weird, because we live so close to each other in Los Angeles, and you made me come to–

**John:** Yeah, I made you fly all the way here to do this.

**Damon:** But it was worth it.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. Good luck. Bye.

**Damon:** Bye.

Links:

* [Damon Lindelof](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0511541/)
* [The Leftovers: Final Season Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9w0sz5y83k)
* Jessica Abel on [Idea Debt](http://jessicaabel.com/2016/01/27/idea-debt/)
* [How I Got Out of Idea Debt](https://medium.com/@heyjohnsexton/how-i-got-out-of-idea-debt-124d3cdc4031) by John Sexton
* [Occupied](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QWC_DZj0HE)
* [City Girl](https://thehairpin.com/sarah-ramos-explains-how-she-gave-life-to-city-girl-the-rom-com-she-wrote-at-12-years-old-addd405b56b0)
* John Hodgman’s [Only Child](http://www.maximumfun.org/dead-pilots-society/episode-2-only-child-written-john-hodgman)
* [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 Rajesh Naroth ([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_296.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 295 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program Malcolm Spellman returns to help us answer a bunch of listener questions, including the most important one of all – what’s Malcolm up to.

**Craig:** Oh, he’s not going to know the answer to that. I’ll fill that in for him.

**John:** All right. So, I sound a little bit strange because I just flew from Rome to London. I made it here, but my microphone did not. My bag got lost, and so I’m on a pair of really crappy white iPhone headphones. So, Craig and Malcolm are going to take most of this episode by themselves. So, through the magic of editing I’m going to be here for the intro and for the outro, but it’s going to be the Craig and Malcolm show. So I am as excited as the listeners are to hear what Malcolm is going to say.

**Craig:** Everybody hang on to your seat. And I guess we should probably mention that when Malcolm is on the show, the chance of us not having the explicit rating is zero. So, folks who are listening in the car with children be aware that we will be using adult language in today’s program.

**John:** I think it’s a very strong bet. Some follow up. First off, the tickets for the live show on May 1 are now up for sale. You can go and find them at HollywoodHeart.org. That is Monday May 1, 7:30pm to 9:15pm, at ArcLight Hollywood. That’s Rian Johnson. That’s Dana Fox. That’s Rob McElhenney. It’s going to be amazing, so you guys should go see that. I will look forward to hearing it myself.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s for charity. Hollywood Heart is a terrific charity that our friend, John Gatins, is involved in. And of all the live shows that we’ve done, this may be the most impressive guest lineup we’ve ever had. First of all, just Rian alone. Star Wars, people. Star Wars. But with Dana, and then you throw on Rob McElhenney, creator and star of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which now is like the longest running sitcom in television history.

**John:** That’s remarkable.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. It’s amazing. So that’s our lineup. And it’s like the tickets are not that expensive. And it goes to charity. So, if there’s even any left, jump on them.

**John:** Sounds good. Next up, one of our very first episodes of How Would This be a Movie was the Hatton Garden Job. So if you don’t remember that, that was a bunch of British bank robbers who carried off a very complicated bank robbery where they broke in through walls. It was a bunch of old geezers. And we figured, you know what, someone is going to try to make this into a movie. The first movie version of Hatton Garden Job is actually coming out. April 14. The writing credits are Ray Bogdanovich, Dean Lines, and Ronnie Thompson, who also directed. Reviews seem pretty good so far, so hey, there’s already one of these movies out there in the world. So, I think it’s our first movie that we successfully made out of the Scriptnotes podcast.

**Craig:** Shouldn’t we have some sort of thing that we could put on a movie like the way the ASPCA puts stuff on No Animals Were Harmed. Like this gets the Scriptnotes Seal of Prediction, or something?

**John:** Well, I think it needed a little special laurel around it that says Scriptnotes. Yeah.

**Craig:** Win. [laughs]

**John:** As inspired by Scriptnotes. As discussed on Scriptnotes. Win, yes.

**Craig:** Win.

**John:** Win. That was a reference to last week’s episode where we talked about the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition. We had another listener write in. This was Guy Poland who wrote in. He says, “I, too, was a winner in said contest. A three-time winner, thank you very much. I won gold for comedy, a silver for a thriller, and I was a finalist for comedy for Meeting Mr. Gimbel.” So, let’s pause here to say why did you enter this competition three times? You won three times, I guess. But wow.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, after the first time when your life didn’t change, maybe save the entry fee.

**John:** Well, I guess he submitted for all three of these things simultaneously. So, he put three different scripts in in three different categories.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** But it’s like $30 a pop, I’m sure. So he writes that “I, too, emailed to ask about prize money. I was not afforded a response and didn’t push the issue because I knew it was all bullshit. They did, however, send me three nice winner certificates in a PDF format that I can print out, frame, and hang on my wall. Note that they misspelled Comedy on the certificates and had to redo it. No prize money or coupons whatsoever. Certainly not $200.”

**Craig:** Hold on a second. This poor guy didn’t even get the coupon to the non-existent software. And I love this. You enter a contest and the contest said on their webpage, Malcolm, they say, “$20,000 in prize money and stuff, or whatever, in prizes.” Nobody gets anything. And I love that when you win the contest you have to email them, “So, can I get the prize?” And they’re like, “Um, no.” And then you go, “OK.” And then they send you PDFs of a certificate that the best part is they couldn’t even mail them a real certificate. They sent him PDFs that he had to print out himself. My god.

**John:** No, he writes there was another option. So they also gave him the option of receiving a winner’s trophy, “Which I would have the pleasure of paying for at the modest price of $150, plus $20 shipping.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Now, the point of a screenplay competition is, of course, to get interest from the industry. It says he got zero read requests as a result of winning these three things. Let’s see, “Oh, a bonus fuck up for you. At some point the competition staff mixed up some of the winning scripts with the wrong writer. Put another way, the scripts were posted on their site, but the corresponding writer was wrong. They finally got that straightened out.”

**Craig:** Oh, well that’s good. They’re on top of it then over there at the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition which appears, from what we’ve heard, to be the worst screenplay competition in the world. And that’s saying something because pretty much all of them are horrendous. This one, though, wow.

**Malcolm Spellman:** It’s the Russian version.

**Craig:** It’s the Russian Screenplay Competition. They’re just mining your data. Amazing. Amazing.

**John:** So, we get to hear Malcolm Spellman in the background, but Malcolm I want you to lean a little closer to the microphone and tell us what you’re up to, because I have not seen you in nearly a year. But listeners haven’t seen you even kind of for longer than that. Last we talked with you, you were on Empire. I honestly don’t know what you’re doing at this moment. Fill us in a little bit on what’s happening in the Malcolm Spellman universe.

**Malcolm:** It’s a big point of transition for me right now. So, I did three years on Empire, which was awesome. And learned a ton. Probably learned more in that three years than the entire 13 years leading up to that I was in screenwriting. And I’m moving on now, but amicably. And I am enjoying Hollywood with some heat for the first time since I first broke in.

**Craig:** Since your fumbled heat.

**Malcolm:** Since my fumbled heat. And it’s very, very interesting to see the difference in temperature when I walk into the room. And it feels like I am now in a position where maybe some shit can happen. You know what I’m saying? We’ll see.

**Craig:** All right. That’s a pretty good position.

**John:** And what is the shit that’s happening? Are you doing TV shows? Are you doing movies? Where’s your focus right now?

**Malcolm:** I’m doing a pilot with a buddy of mine at Hulu. And I have a couple of things. I’m overseeing a couple of writers on a pilot also. And I have a feature I’m writing for Warner Bros. And I think there’s a couple things pending. I’ve got a lot going on, John. It’s popping.

**John:** That’s fantastic. And you’ve also promised that if Craig kills me for some reason, you’ll investigate my death and avenge me if it turns out to be Craig. I have your word on air right now?

**Malcolm:** I’m not that good investigating, but I’m definitely good at avenging, so it gets to that part.

**Craig:** If you believe him, because maybe I already hired him and he’s just doing his job right now making you think that.

**John:** Man, Craig Mazin, you’re really, really good.

**Malcolm:** He’s Russian.

**John:** So, I’m going to leave you guys to talk through, we have a bunch of questions here that listeners have written in with.

**Craig:** Did you just call me racist?

**Malcolm:** No, I called you Russian. But that’s the same thing. That’s absolutely the same thing.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Malcolm:** In Russia, you spell Racist – Russian.

**Craig:** It’s the same word. It’s like the Eskimos have 50 words for snow and Russians have one word for racist. Russian. All right. Sorry about that, John. We’re having fun over here.

**John:** Which is really good. So, I’m going to bow out for the bulk of this episode, but I left you a bunch of really nicely organized questions.

**Craig:** You did. You did.

**John:** In the outline. So I look forward to hearing your answers to a bunch of these questions. You know what? I got to stay for at least this first one because it has some good vocabulary. So I’m going to stay for this first one, and then I’m going to bail, then let you answer some more questions. This was a question we got from Blake. He says, “Why do so many shows, no matter the network or targeted age group, seem to act as if no sexual acts exist that don’t involve full penetration and the possibility of pregnancy. Basically, where are the hand jobs and blow jobs? There are a number of shows that talk about sex in a fairly frank manner, but they’re almost all judgmental and fearful. And most willingly ignore or underplay sexual activities that are less likely to involve a pregnancy.”

So, Malcolm, you come from a show that was a big Fox show. Were there blow jobs and hand jobs on Empire? I didn’t see. So tell me.

**Malcolm:** They fuck. I got to think, and there’s a good amount of gay sex.

**Craig:** But the specific question here is why is it only just fucking. Why in television shows and movies do people not just sit there and watch somebody getting a hand job?

**Malcolm:** Man, I got to imagine it’s because no one cares about – I mean, grown-ups don’t care about hand jobs.

**Craig:** I’m so with you on this.

**Malcolm:** Grown-ups don’t – I mean, you’re not making TV for kids – listen, if there’s a hand job or a blow job and it’s not for kids, and if it’s a grown-up, they want fucking or further.

**Craig:** Yeah, it just feels like kind of funny to me. Watching somebody get a hand job is funny because it’s so lazy.

**John:** So, a couple of perspectives I have on this. So, first off, in the Showtime pilot for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she gives the guy a hand job in the pilot. And it becomes a very funny plot point. And I agree it is sort of funny, because she’s trying to interrogate him while giving him a hand job. And they actually play the fact that her hand is on his dick.

My theory is that it’s very hard to hide a penis. Like, if you’re showing sex, then you’re not sort of seeing the penis. But if you’re showing a blow job or a hand job, it’s sort of hard to hide it. And that may be part of the reason why we’re not seeing them so often in television.

**Craig:** Well, but you can fake it. You could do it in such a way where you weren’t seeing a dick, but the thing is it is funny. It’s just so – and I think that just a natural thing – there’s like a weird narrative short hand. If I see somebody getting a blow job in a movie, I don’t like them. I feel like they’ve done something wrong. And if I see somebody getting a hand job in a movie, I feel like they’re lazy and inattentive.

I don’t know why. Because in real life, of course, blow jobs and hand jobs mean neither of those things. Most of the time I would hope that they’re just mutually happy. I don’t know. Maybe it’s boring to watch?

**Malcolm:** There was a blow job on Billions last weekend.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. And how did it come off, so to speak?

**Malcolm:** Someone was fucking up.

**Craig:** They were fucking up.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, the dude was not supposed to be getting a blow job.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Malcolm:** And he was getting one.

**Craig:** See? There’s like this thing where if you’re getting a blow job in a movie or a television show, you’re a villain. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** [laughs] Sucking dick is for bad guys.

**Craig:** No, sucking dick is for good guys. Getting your dick sucked is for bad guys.

**Malcolm:** So, wait, if it’s two dudes–

**Craig:** If it’s two dudes, then the guy that’s blowing the other guy is like a good guy who is probably getting taken advantage of or there’s a misunderstanding.

**Malcolm:** You’re right.

**Craig:** Something is going wrong. He’s being paid–

**Malcolm:** That’s so fucking right.

**Craig:** There’s so many things, right? And the guy getting one is just a bad dude.

**Malcolm:** It’s true. You just cracked the code. Even as you’re saying it as a joke, it’s fucking true.

**Craig:** It’s just true. John, do you agree that I’ve cracked the code?

**John:** I think you may have cracked a trope. I don’t think it’s anything we should aspire to. I think the underlying question here that Blake is writing is in real life people are having sex in ways that are just not depicted on screen. There was an HBO show called Tell Me You Love Me which was sort of notorious for like they had a lot of sex in it and they actually showed penises. And so like Adam Scott was in that show and so he had this fake penis that you saw a lot. And so he would be getting blow jobs and you would see his fake penis getting a blow job. And it was weird just because you’re not used to seeing that part of the body.

Even a show like Girls on HBO, there’s a lot of sex in there, and you see like a lot of anatomy, but you don’t see dicks, really. And it’s a strange thing even in that show where like they talk about everything, but you’re not seeing that specific part of the action.

**Craig:** You know, I think sometimes we forget that sex, like all human behavior, comes in varying degrees of interesting illustration. I mean, like a lot of people eat lunch by hunching over their desk and shoveling it into their mouth as fast as they can. It’s really weird.

**Malcolm:** That’s me.

**Craig:** Like Malcolm. But we don’t really show that in movies and TV, unless we’re trying to make a joke of it. Because even though it’s completely normal and expected, it’s just not – I don’t know, we just don’t like watching it so much.

**John:** That’s true. I don’t know why. All right. I’m going to jump out for a bit and let you guys answer questions about martial arts, about managers, about parentheticals in dialogue. So, those are all going to be great things. Then I’m going to circle back and come to you when it comes time for One Cool Things and our outros.

**Craig:** All right. So, now it’s just down to you and me. So let’s answer some questions here. We’re going to blow through as many of these that we can in the time that we have. I’m just going to tee them up and you’re going to answer them as best you can.

**Malcolm:** OK.

**Craig:** All right. So we’ve already heard from Blake and we already discussed blow jobs and hand jobs. How could we possibly top that? We can’t. But, we do have something from Alan, South Carolina. And Alan wants to know, “When writing a spec feature or series that would rely heavily on specific types of martial arts, like Kung-Fu, Highlander, Badlands, etc., how can the writer convey this emphasis without assuming the mantle of the fight choreographer or bogging the story down in specific fight details that would likely be ignored anyway?”

**Malcolm:** It’s a dance. It’s definitely good to flavor a script, especially if you have expertise in it, because I know one of the things – like when I was first coming up as a writer, I used to love reading action scripts where someone had done enough research that like, oh, this dude knows his guns. Or this dude knows the physics of what’s happening to play out here. So, if you can quickly reference why – naming a specific martial art is important to the scene, meaning this, like this form of martial arts specialize in weapons, so this dude is going to be picking up every single thing in the room. Then you ain’t getting bogged down in it, but you understand that a different dynamic is at play and you’re getting a different set piece.

**Craig:** Yeah. That to me right there is the key. I don’t think I particularly care about where on the body you’re striking somebody unless it’s sort of a signature move or something like that. And I think it’s probably boring to sit and read, you know, “Reverse kick, then rib punch, then…he ducks the leg and then turns around.” It’s really about the character moments, right? Every fight has a choice or two in it. Something that means something dramatically. Getting up off the ground when you think you don’t have enough left in you, but you do anyway. Doing the thing you were taught to do that you weren’t able to do before but now you can.

Whatever it is, those choice points are what matters. Technically speaking, if there’s something like whatever the heart of the particular martial art is, show it. Yeah, makes total sense. You know, if you’re like sword master, do sword stuff. So, early Steven Seagal, like before Steven Seagal went crazy.

**Malcolm:** Before he got fatter.

**Craig:** Right. But in the early days, the three word days, where it was like Above the Law, and Out for Justice, and whatever there was. You know, the typical Steven Seagal scene is he would walk into a pool hall full of thugs, and he would beat them all up using the things that were there, like his moves were you can’t punch me because I slap your hands out in the air and then I pick up a pool ball and I hit you with it. And then I pick up a cue stick and I hit you with it. And I use the environment. Those are the important things.

**Malcolm:** I think like also if you’re facing off with a martial art form you’ve never seen before, then that’s going to evoke a feeling in your lead character. You know what I’m saying? Like oh my god, this dude is using the crane technique. I have no counter for this. And it’s not just about no counter. It’s how it makes me feel. All of a sudden my confidence is bleeding out.

**Craig:** Character. As always. So, I would say, Alan, the key there is to think about character. If it’s something that is a specific fiddly thing that a fight choreographer can change without impacting the character or the scene, then perhaps it’s not the most important thing to put in the pages. All right, next up, Sasha writes, “Up until–,” oh, you’re going to like this one.

**Malcolm:** Oh shit.

**Craig:** You ready? “Up until about three hours ago,” now I don’t know exactly when Sasha was writing this, but let’s just say recently, “up until about three hours ago I was working with an extremely unprofessional and volatile manager. I never signed a contract as I always had a bad feeling about him. Today, after he threatened to assault my writing partner…”

**Malcolm:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “…I sent him a very calm email explaining why we should no longer work together. Duh, the dude repeatedly used the phrase, ‘I’m going to punch him in the fucking face.’” That’s the manager to her writing partner. “The manager is now firing off a series of missives demanding commissions on projects that have yet to sell. He wrote, ‘As is customary in our business,’” we’re going to be challenging that in a second, “’if a job or a sale on one of these projects happens in the next 12 months, I am entitled to a commission on it for the life of the deal.’”

Sasha continues, “I’m guessing he’s just peacocking, trying to scare me into submission, but is there any validity to his claim?”

**Malcolm:** No, but also how the fuck do people meet these kind of people? Like, I think more importantly fuck that manager and he can’t do shit to you. And don’t ever – when you do sell something, you will have a lawyer and then he’ll deal with that manager. So that’s the answer to that.

But I do think like, you know, on the board or whatever, I’ve been hearing more and more stories about writers of various levels, some who are pretty high level, dealing with slightly abusive or reps that take you on. And I think for writers who are coming up, you have to have a sense of destiny or you’re going to – there’s no way – I know a ton of fucking up-and-coming writers who haven’t made it yet who would not be dealing with a manager like that for one fucking minute.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** And that’s because they believe they’re going to make it, and therefore it allows them to actually behave in a way that will get them to a proper manager more quickly, because they ain’t wasting a minute with a motherfucker like that. You can’t.

**Craig:** It’s pretty crazy, right? Well, let’s talk about the legal stuff for a second. Malcolm is right. What he said here is complete bullshit. In fact, I got to tell you, Sasha, that if your manager has done anything to violate the Talent Agency Act, which would include for instance procuring you work or attempting to procure you work, then not only do you not have to pay him for the rest of your life now that he’s fired, on anything you make, but you could file a grievance against him with the Labor Commissioner of the State of California and actually get him to cough up money that you have paid to him. Which I’m sure he wouldn’t want.

I strongly recommend that if you do not have an attorney now, you get one. And that you have the attorney state to that person in no uncertain terms, “Fuck off. You’re getting nothing.” The rules on how managers work in the State of California, I believe a lawyer once told me that it’s called On the Wheel, Off the Wheel. So, the deal is that unlike agents who earn 10% for the deals they negotiate, and who collect that money even if you fire them the day after they close the deal, they collect the 10%. Because their 10% is based on what they negotiated.

But managers really are service employees. You are paying them while they service you as a manager. They’re on the wheel. When you fire them, they’re off the wheel. They are not, even though they collect commissions, they are not entitled to the money that keeps coming out. The idea is that the commission is simply paying them for the work they’re doing while they are your manager, and not one minute after.

**Malcolm:** But also, you know what, that dude is threatening to hit people. Call the fucking police. You know, if you got time, make him pay. You know what I’m saying? He shouldn’t be doing that.

**Craig:** All right. So then let’s talk about this other issue, which is how writers deal with abusive people. And first of all, why? Why are there so many abusive people? Look, I think every business has abusive people. Every business has bullies. But, in Hollywood I think there are certain kinds of predators who understand that artists – and I’m talking about writers, and directors, and actors – come out here because they’re looking for validation. They’re looking for love. And they take advantage of it. And I think it’s in their interest to make us feel afraid. And most importantly, it’s in their interest to make us feel like we need them. And so, you know, it’s an abusive spouse situation when it gets like that.

You actually don’t need any single agent or manager or lawyer. You need an agent. You need a lawyer. Maybe you feel you need a manager. But there is no specific individual one that is going to change your life or make a huge difference. Your work will. Your work got you this manager, your work will get you another manager. If you’re listening, and anybody in your professional life is treating you in any kind of abusive way, get out. And they get nothing. Ooh, that felt good.

All right, let’s move on to Seth. Seth says, “In addition to being a writer, I’m also a voiceover director, and I find that when I write dialogue I lean heavily on the use of ellipses and other punctuation to create specific rhythms and flow. Do you think that’s micromanaging the actor’s potential performance? How much use of punctuation to control the flow of dialogue is reasonable?”

**Malcolm:** I am just starting to wean myself off that. So, he probably is micromanaging, but it’s also something you learn over time. Like I use less parenthesis than I used to. I like some ellipses though. I do. I do. It really is an effective tool.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**Malcolm:** You know what I’m saying? So, yeah, he’s probably micromanaging a little bit and you will as you write become more and more confident in the fact that your readers, especially if you’re fucking with pros, are going to know – they’ve done this a million times. They know how it shown be flown. You know what I’m saying? And you start to wean yourself off of it. I’m almost done with exclamation points. Not quite. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Yeah, I use those pretty rarely.

**Malcolm:** You know who killed me on that?

**Craig:** McQuarrie?

**Malcolm:** Yes. Worst thing ever.

**Craig:** He’s the devil.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** McQuarrie is too obsessive about exclamation points. But you get a couple per episode, you know.

**Malcolm:** His quote was every time you use an exclamation point it’s an admission of failure. [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s a little strong. Look, I used ellipses all the time. I use dashes all the time. When I do, I like to take a moment to stop and go, do I need it? It’s always more elegant without. Of course. But I think that Seth’s focus on micromanaging the actor’s potential performance is off the mark. Actors don’t give a damn about any of that stuff. They remember the lines and then they start acting. It’s not like they sit there and go, “Oh god, there’s a dash-dash, I got to respect that.” They don’t. They perform it how they perform it. And the director works with them and it becomes – it’s entirely about the reader. It’s about the reader getting the scene and feeling the pace and feeling a trail-off.

See, the dot-dot-dot at the end of a line isn’t anything an actor is supposed to perform anyway. It’s the way almost every sentence ends. I just did it.

**Malcolm:** You did.

**Craig:** Right? Very few sentences end with a period.

**Malcolm:** Mine do. I make people uncomfortable with that shit.

**Craig:** OK. Maybe you do. But most people kind of – there’s an invitation to continue the conversation. So I think people worry too much about this stuff. I wouldn’t be too concerned about it. I do think that if a reader is saying I got distracted or thrown off by the mass of punctuation and other stuff, take that seriously because that’s who you’re trying to put a movie inside of. You know? Inception.

Jeff in San Jose, California writes, “In Episode 134…” You remember, Malc, right? Episode 134?

**Malcolm:** Yeah, I listen to all you guys’ podcasts.

**Craig:** “Craig takes umbrage with Oscar winners who neglect to thank their writers in their acceptance speeches.” Fact. “To paraphrase Craig, without the screenplay nobody working on a movie can even begin to do their job and all Oscar winners should thank their writer first.” It’s true. “My question is do you have any sense of how many writers who win the Oscar thank the other writers, if any, who worked on the screenplay but did not receive credit?”

Damn, Jeff has got a pretty good – this is a nice shot here.

**Malcolm:** It’s getting weird.

**Craig:** But it’s a good shot. I like it. “I don’t recall any Oscar-winning writer actually saying during the ceremony, ‘I’d like to thank Jane Doe for her uncredited writing on my screenplay.’ Then again, perhaps those uncredited writers are among the names rattled off during the winner’s speech.”

All right. So, Jeff is calling us out on the mat a little bit here. You got an opinion on this?

**Malcolm:** Well, for starters, Jeff’s got to understand 90% of writers think they wrote everything, so they wouldn’t be – in their mind whatever is on there is all them. You know what I’m saying? So, they can’t go through that. On top of that, I would imagine it could get weird legally if you start naming people, like if people ain’t getting credit on a movie, you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** I don’t think there’s a legal problem. If you were trying to erase somebody’s name, maybe then, you know, there would be an issue.

**Malcolm:** OK, well maybe not legal for a lawsuit, but I don’t think that the graciousness of doing that actually would have the effect you think it would be.

**Craig:** I agree.

**Malcolm:** Because you’re calling in ghosts and shit who didn’t make it past the threshold of an arbitration that had nothing to do with any of you guys. And you’re giving them credit. You know, that’s weird. You know what I’m saying? But mostly all writers think they wrote everything, so why would they do it?

**Craig:** I think that’s a huge part of it. I mean, if you have credit on a movie and somebody else did not receive it, then they couldn’t have done that much. And, no, you’re probably thinking to yourself this Oscar belongs to me. I’m the one that got the credit. I did all the work. And maybe that’s true. The other thing is that I’m not sure other writers would necessarily want that. If I worked on a movie for a couple of weeks quietly like that. I suppose if somebody thanked me I would feel really nice about it, but the studios would hate it.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** The press people would hate it. The people representing the movie would hate it, because all you’re doing now is calling into question the illusion. And it is an illusion that a person did everything. Right? So when directors get up there to – you know, a film by blah-blah-blah, what a joke, right? But that’s movie magic that they’re using to sell stuff. So I think the studios would hate it. That’s probably why I’m guessing.

**Malcolm:** But mostly it’s because the writer who is up there believes he did it all.

**Craig:** I think that’s probably the lion’s share of it, too. Greg writes, “What if the first three pages don’t grab you? Are there movies that went on to be successful that due to complexity or weirdness or something else didn’t grab the agent/director/studio/or producer in a compelling way in the first three pages if there was something still that made it worth reading just a little further?”

**Malcolm:** Yeah. This whole culture that’s happening online and like sometimes a professional writer or a big time producer or director will tell you you got to grab them the first three pages. And that is a good thing to do. And they’re not thinking that they just made that statement that they’re going off to work on a script that deliberately meanders for 20 or 30 pages and then takes off. They don’t even realize that off that statement, a bunch of novice screenwriters are thinking you always have to do this.

And you absolutely don’t. Yes, it’s good to grab someone in the first three pages, but the other thing is usually within three pages you know if a motherfucker can write. That’s really what’s happening.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** And so that’s the next threshold. And if you can promise that you’re going to go somewhere, then you don’t have to grab someone because you’re promising. You know what I’m saying? You’re saying, hey, in these first three pages it’s very clear that this writer has a handle on what’s going on and is leading me somewhere and wants me to be kind of a little bit mundane or whatever. You know?

**Craig:** I could not agree more. In fact, I think the problem is what people think the word “grab” means. I think they think it means everything has to explode on page one, and then on page two the planet collides into another planet, and on page three you find out that your dad is really your mother. That’s just plot. I am not grabbed by that ever. I’m grabbed by that intangible thing.

I can read three pages where nobody says a word and nothing is happening and yet while I’m reading it I think I’m in the hands of somebody. They’re doing something. I’m fascinated by this. I want to keep – I’m grabbed.

So, that’s the problem. When they hear the first three pages got to grab you, they think, oh my god, let’s just get out the clowns juggling, the chainsaws, and people on fire and all. No. No, no. It means just write something that makes me want to keep reading. That’s it. And usually, at least for me, the thing that makes me want to keep reading is it’s good. I can’t define it any better than that.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s good. There are plenty of movies where, I mean, god, can you imagine sitting down and reading the first three pages of Unforgiven, which is one of the best screenplays ever written. And I’m pretty sure it starts with a guy just feeding pigs while his kids watch, and then he can’t get on a horse. And he’s old and he’s tired. And there’s a grave there. Right? Zzzz.

Except it’s written so beautifully. And you wouldn’t know from the first few pages what’s coming.

All right, let’s get to our next question. Heather from Agora Hills wonders, “If I have a specific scene from an old movie that I would like to play alongside the end credits, how do I write it? Do I put it in before Fade Out and before The End, or in between those two? The only examples I’ve been able to find simply state Roll or Over Credits, then whatever it is the writer wants to show. They didn’t write Fade Out or The End at all.”

This feels like a question we can just solve right here permanently. This feels like it has an answer.

**Malcolm:** Give it.

**Craig:** My answer is you get to the end of the movie, you want to do stuff over credits, you can say Fade Out if you want to Fade Out, or Cut to Black, and then you write Roll Credits, and then you describe whatever the hell you want. And then instead of saying the end just write End Credits. And you’re done.

**Malcolm:** Yes.

**Craig:** All right. We’ve answered that. Heather, that’s the answer. That’s literally the answer. Damon writes, “I’m currently working on a sci-fi spec and I’m getting into some complicated storytelling territory. It’s not a time travel movie, but I can compare it to that kind of created world with lots of moving parts, difficult to understand science, and multiple timelines. Some of these elements won’t show up in the film, but I need to understand them to make sure I have all of my bases covered in the final story. Do you have any suggestions or tools for keeping complicated details in order as you figure out how the story will play out?”

Malcolm, any suggestions for Damon?

**Malcolm:** I will say that in general being complicated and messy is probably my biggest weakness as a writer. And I advise people to bat that shit down and get it to where you can express it verbally very, very cleanly.

I saw a movie, I’m going to go ahead and name the filmmaker. There are films in which when you start doing world-building if your rules aren’t neat and tidy, you have to constantly keep resetting the rules and explaining a new rule. Right?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** And that can become exhausting.

**Craig:** It is. Well, it’s exhausting because you feel like all they’re doing is constantly moving the goal posts. Why should I believe anything you’re telling me when ten minutes later you’re going to say, oh, but only if blah-blah-blah?

**Malcolm:** Yep. And M. Night did it in that movie there’s a pool in it. You couldn’t see the people.

**Craig:** Lady in the Water.

**Malcolm:** Yeah. And it’s like, so, rules and world-building really need to be reduced to what is active and matters, because honestly one of the things I learned about sci-fi writing in general – you may know this already – but this was a revelation to me. In general, when you pick – like let’s say you’re writing something that’s set in the future or whatever, right, where there is some sci-fi dynamic. Usually there is one thing that is different about the world than that is kind of the main thing you’re exploring.

So, if you look at Minority Report, it is this is how crime is solved in the future. And yeah, they’ve got flying cars and shit, but that’s the main thing, and that’s what you keep coming back to. And when you’re just doing a world in general, which I’ve seen, I have a buddy who has a history, he does this a lot, right? And it’s not one thing you’re investigating. It just becomes a sprawling mass – it’s like a comic book.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a comic book or maybe it’s, you know, a very involved miniseries. But, yeah, I mean, if you look at Star Wars, other than the space ships and things, what’s the thing, the force. That’s the thing.

**Malcolm:** Inception you’re entering the brain. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Exactly. So, I would say tools-wise, Damon, I’m not sure what to recommend here. I know a lot of people like this program, Scrivener, because it apparently lets you organize all sorts of things and then tag them back and forth together and connect them to a screenplay. I’ve never used it. My main tool is a corkboard. Corkboard and index cards.

**Malcolm:** So unsexy.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s like you get the work done by getting the work done. So, you write everything down, you put it up on the board. Things that are related, you connect them together. And what ends up happening over time is you just know it. You just know your world. You know what’s going on, especially because you’re inventing it. But the complicated things and the feedback, I know that Rian Johnson when he was writing Looper was really careful about that. And he had very carefully worked out diagrams so he understood. So anybody asked him a question, he has an answer for it. So, I think maybe the tool is your brain and the suggestion is work hard, which you’re going to have to because it does sound kind of complicated.

We’ll do one more. What do you say, one more?

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’ll done one more.

**Malcolm:** One more.

**Craig:** Lucas, he’s going to give us our last one of the day. Lucas writes, “I just finished a revision on a screenplay and here’s the thing. The screenplay has no dialogue. It’s something like the first half hour of There Will Be Blood.” Love that movie.

**Malcolm:** All-timer.

**Craig:** All-timer. “Do you have any advice or experience on restricting yourselves this way? Do you have any specific things you do when trying to tell the story visually? Any general advice on telling a story like this?”

There’s a couple of things, I mean, WALL-E comes to mind, that very long extended no dialogue section. And our forefathers who started screenwriting, they didn’t have dialogue, right? They weren’t talkies. So they had to write almost everything like that and then just little cards of dialogue.

When you’re writing extended sequences with no dialogue, are there some tricks? Some tips?

**Malcolm:** Be efficient. You know what I’m saying? Because you’re asking a lot. And that will actually probably help you clarify whatever the purpose is in any given scene. And I think personally, I don’t know, this still feels like something that would drive some screenwriters crazy. I think it’s OK to cheat. I’m not someone who believes in never do anything that you can’t film or whatever, especially if you’re doing something like this. You might have to write a sentence that lets the audience know what they need to be expecting moving forward through this scene. You know what I’m saying? Like in this scene Tom is about to confront his inner most fear. Because you ain’t got no dialogue. You know what I’m saying?

In this scene Tom is going to – like you can cheat like that, I think. Especially in a situation like this.

**Craig:** I agree, but I’d do a little differently, and I don’t think it’s cheating at all, in that what I think is if there’s not going to be dialogue, but I want the audience to understand what the character is thinking, then I am OK with writing their dialogue in italics in action. So, they look at something and it’s like we’re reading their minds kind of. But we know it’s not going to be spoken. But I get it. I know that an actor can perform that face.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** And I know that that face is something the audience can perceive. So to me, that’s all right. That’s completely all right. The cheating that drives me the craziest is when people introduce characters and tell us about their life story when all I’m doing is looking at them sitting at a bar and nothing else, so that’s cheating. But this is different, right?

So, if you have a character, he turns the corner, and he sees a man holding a gun to his brother’s head. And so let’s say our character here is Charlie. Charlie stops, stares. And then I might put in parenthesis, (Please don’t, please). He can act that. Charlie can act that. So, I try and think a lot about that, because it can become very technical and it can get boring, I think, for people reading.

You know, when people read scripts, I think a lot of them just read the dialogue.

**Malcolm:** Damn right.

**Craig:** And so I perversely then spend so much time thinking about the not dialogue, because I want them to read it. So I try and make the not dialogue entertaining, and interesting, and fun, because if they’re not reading it, then they’re just getting the dialogue and they’re not seeing the movie.

You know, I think we’ll hold back a couple of these other questions for next time. I think we got a good show in.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, they don’t all have to be two hours long.

**Malcolm:** Nah, they don’t, Craig.

**Craig:** No. They don’t.

**Malcolm:** It’s OK.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like if you and I did this show together, let’s say we killed John.

**Malcolm:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Keep talking.

**Malcolm:** No, I understand exactly what you’re saying.

**Craig:** I think the show would be – it would run 45 minutes, right? That’s not the end of the world.

**Malcolm:** It would run hot, too, though.

**Craig:** It would run hot. See, that’s the thing. The 45 minutes would be fiery.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** Fiery. People would talk.

**Malcolm:** Right. There’d be occasional falling outs between us in the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, and when we say occasional we mean every single episode something would go wrong. Well, with that being our last question, I think we should probably go to One Cool Things.

All right, so let’s bring John back to wrap our show up now that we’ve answered those questions expertly. Mr. August?

**John:** Pleasure to be back. My One Cool Thing this week is Patrick Lenton’s story of the Dog in Skyrim. So, this is actually a Twitter thread he did a year ago, and someone put it back up in Twitter this last week. And I just remember how much I loved it. So, it’s this guy who’s playing Skyrim and he basically tells this long story of how in Skyrim he’s sort of adopted this dog. And the dog was just an incredible drain on his life, because he was always so worried about the dog dying that he had to sort of do all these things to try to keep the dog alive. And to like build a house where he could have a family and have an orphan who could adopt the dog so the dog wouldn’t be killed.

And it just reminded me so much of playing Skyrim, but also it felt very much like how life actually is, is that you end up becoming attached to this one thing and then you sort of focus all of your energy on saving this one thing, even if it’s not your real goal. So you end up not fighting dragons. You end up sort of worrying about mining ore and saving this virtual dog who you don’t really care about, but you just don’t want to see die. So, that was a great recap of the experience of trying to save a dog in Skyrim but also sort of go through your life.

**Craig:** Yeah. I play Skyrim, of course, and I play every Bethesda game. Fallout 4. And one of the first things I do when I play those games is I just make a choice. No companions. Don’t want them. Don’t want them near me. Don’t want to care about them. Don’t want to bring them with me. I got that dog in Fallout and I immediately sent it home. Just stay at home.

**Malcolm:** That’s fucked.

**Craig:** Everybody that was like can I walk around with you, no you can’t. Yes you can until I get the quest that that unlocks, and then I’m sending you home. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** That is awful.

**John:** So, I’m playing Skyrim right now, so I’m playing the up-res version of it and really enjoying it. So, I do have like one companion I go through and I did kill my first companion and I felt just horrible about it. This guy who I am playing with now seems really sturdy, but I’m not going to be upset if he dies. But I’m definitely not adopting any orphans. I don’t care about my little house and breeze home. I’m trying not to play that. I’m actually just playing the quest.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. I can’t remember, I know in Fallout 4 you can fall in love and sleep with your companions, but I don’t think you can do that in Skyrim.

**John:** You sort of can. There are companions that you can marry and companions you can’t marry, but I married the first time and I completely lost interest in the game once I got married.

**Craig:** Just like life.

**Malcolm:** Just like life.

**Craig:** Just drains the color out of everything, doesn’t it? It’s amazing.

**John:** [laughs] Why are there no blow jobs in Skyrim? That’s the real question.

**Craig:** Why are there no blow jobs? I almost had the first gay sex of my life in Fallout 4. Almost. I came close.

**Malcolm:** And you ended up having it in real life. You were like, fuck it, didn’t happen in Fallout 4, so I decided to in real life.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was like, exactly, like that guy turned me down, so I got to get Grindr. No, I came close. I came close. But what can I say? I got to be me. I ended up sleeping with the newspaper editor lady. I don’t know. She had a way about her. But I got close. I got close, John. I’m getting there.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Give me time. All right, my One Cool Thing is a super short One Cool Thing, but it’s also videogame based. Every year San Diego Studios puts out MLB The Show for the Sony PlayStation platform. And this year they are up to MLB The Show 17. MLB The Show series is fascinating because of the weird way that licensing worked for a long time with Major League Baseball. They had given their exclusive rights to I think Electronic Arts and the only way that you could get the rights to baseball player’s names and likenesses is if you made a game for your specific platform, but you couldn’t cross platform games.

So, the Electronic Arts game was not very good, but MLB The Show is spectacular and it’s just getting better and better. And the reason that it’s my One Cool Thing this year is because this version of the game does this – there was something that was making me crazy about this game for so long, but I understood it was hard. Baseballs have stitches on them. That’s why you can throw curveballs and sliders. You can make them do things. But similarly when you hit a baseball really hard, it will not travel in a straight line. It will curve. It will bend. Sometimes it almost seems like it takes off in the air mid-air because of top spin and air pressure. All this stuff.

And, of course, in videogames it’s hard to do. Well, this year they nailed it. It just looks so good. When you hit a baseball coming off the bat it just bends and it drops and it hangs. It does all the things that baseballs do. So, I love that. Love this game. If you’re a baseball fan, like I am, and the season has begun, MLB The Show 17 for Sony PlayStation 4. Highly recommend.

Malcolm, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Malcolm:** I do. I thought of it. My One Cool Thing is Fantastic Negrito is opening up–

**John:** I knew it.

**Malcolm:** He’s opening up for an artist named Sturgill Simpson. And it’s a big deal to us. We wanted to get on tour with him for a while. When you bring up other musicians, it’s very hard to find people who, for Negrito anyway, are like, oh yeah, I’ve been watching that guy. You know what I’m saying? I’m into his shit. And what Sturgill represents, and the fact that Negrito already knew about him, and that we tried to get on his tour before, it’s a big deal for us because it represents something. Like it’s not about this is an established artist so much as this feels like a connection in the trajectory of this dude’s career that is meaningful. Like I said, it represents something. So, that’s a cool thing. He’s opening up for Sturgill all over the country.

**Craig:** Well, pretty much everything this guy is doing is working these days. So, I have to assume that’s going to work, too.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced, as always, by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Jeff Bayson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones Craig and Malcolm tackled today. For short questions, though, I’m on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Malcom is @malcolmspellman.

**Malcolm:** Yep.

**John:** We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes podcast. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there leave us a comment or a review. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

And you can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net. You can listen to them through the apps you can find on your applicable app store.

So, Malcolm, thank you so much for being on the show this week. You were fantastic as always.

**Malcolm:** Thank you for having me this week.

**John:** And Craig and I will be back next week. Hopefully my microphone will be back and I can join for an entire episode. But until then, have a great week.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Thanks guys. Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Live Show Tickets](http://hollywoodheart.org/upcoming/)
* [The Hatton Garden Job](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5351458/)
* [Patrick Lenton’s Dog Story](https://twitter.com/patricklenton/status/717163582115307521)
* [MLB The Show 17](http://theshow.com/)
* [Fantastic Negrito](http://www.fantasticnegrito.com/)
* [Malcolm Spellman](https://twitter.com/MalcolmSpellman) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jeff Bayson ([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_295.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 294 of Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And, Craig, there’s exciting news. So, we had talked about a live show with Rian Johnson. It got postponed but it’s now back on the calendar.

**Craig:** It’s back on the calendar. Right now I believe we are looking at May 1. I think it’s going to be at the ArcLight in Hollywood and Rian will be there as will Rob McElhenney, the creator and star of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, an excellent show and an excellent guy. Dana Fox will be filling in, playing the role of John August. So, between Dana, and Rian, and Rob, we’ve got quite a lineup. Rian, of course, has directed a small film which will be coming out in December. And tickets, not yet on sale, but maybe. So we’ll have a link once we get them.

**John:** Yeah. We’re not going to string you along with promises of a live show and never deliver. We will eventually have this live show. I will be seething with jealousy that you guys get to be in a room together and I will not be. And the ArcLight feels like a great home for it. We’ve talked about the ArcLight as a venue before. We’re often across the street at the LA Film School, but actual ArcLight seems great.

When you have Rian Johnson there, please recall the anecdote of Rian Johnson when he was doing Looper, he actually came into an audience screening of Looper and he had dressed up as an ArcLight employee and did the standard greetings and welcome. And like, you know, turn off your cell phones. And did that for a screening of his own movie, which I thought was just delightful and very Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** Did he let anyone know that he was Rian Johnson?

**John:** Apparently he got recognized a ways into his spiel.

**Craig:** Damn.

**John:** That’s just great.

**Craig:** That is pretty great.

**John:** So I would love to do that at some point.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Today on the podcast, we’ll be discussing chess, bad news, baseball, god, and screenwriting competitions. It’s a hodgepodge episode, Craig.

**Craig:** Really? Because to me those always get discussed together.

**John:** What’s weird is a lot of the things do go together, like bad news and baseball obviously is great. Baseball and god, I can see there’s–

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Like Aaron Sorkin would talk about the connections between these different ideas, but it’s just a lot of things.

**Craig:** Aaron Sorkin was in the news recently.

**John:** He was in the news recently. What was he talking about? Oh, he was talking – yeah. I felt kind of bad for Aaron Sorkin.

**Craig:** I did, too. I did, too.

**John:** I saw it as a Twitter storm outrage, but it felt like he was quoted a little bit out of context. Like he sort of sarcastically answered back to a question and then probably said something more, but we saw his little snippet of it and it sounded like he had no idea what was going on.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not sure it was sarcastic. So, for those of you who are wondering what the hell we’re talking about, the Writers Guild Foundation had their annual festival. I participated in it, in fact, with Derek Haas. We had a very nice discussion with some folks. One of the main acts, as it were, was a discussion with Aaron Sorkin. And during it the topic of diversity and underrepresentation of minority writers of all sorts of types in Hollywood came up. And he seemingly was shocked that – I think what he was shocked about specifically was the idea that white male, or white straight male directors for instance, are perceived as getting free passes or opportunities that perhaps they haven’t quite earned, whereas other writers who aren’t that norm, so to speak, would not. And he seemed flabbergasted by this.

And said, “Well, OK, now that I know, what can I do to help?” And there was some outrage of the sort of, “Really? That’s classic white privilege for you to not know this.” And, you know, so I was actually talking with one of the organizers of the festival about it afterwards and he said, “You know, in the room his comments were received quite well overall and that people were actually quite heartened by his concern and his desire to do what he could do about that.”

When you just take it as an isolated comment and you put it on Twitter, it does sound oblivious. And I – the truth is it is oblivious, but oblivion is certainly not as bad as awareness and lack of care. It’s a weird time we live in where people maybe are late to understand that there’s a certain kind of injustice, express a dissatisfaction with that injustice, and express a desire to do what they can to correct that injustice. And that is seen as a failure.

**John:** Yeah. I can definitely sympathize with the it felt one way in the room and it felt a very different way when looking at a transcript, because we make a podcast that has transcripts and every once in a while something will come up that will become an outrage because of what was in the transcripts, which never was an outrage when we were actually speaking it. And so when I saw those comments out of context, I assumed it was just the snippets around things rather than the actual meat there. I do share your frustration that sometimes we become outraged by the person who is trying to be an ally but sort of bumbles it a little bit, rather than the person who is actually trying to do harm.

That’s the nature of the world that we’re in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, I’m not suggesting that we give people extra credit for ham-fisted or late-to-the-party attempts to be good people. I don’t think people deserve credit for that. Frankly, I don’t think you should get credit for doing what you’re supposed to do anyway. I just don’t think they should be torn down. And certainly, look, I had a crazy experience as you may recall a few years ago when we did a live podcast and sort of the same deal. In the room there was absolutely no problem whatsoever. Not one comment was made at all. It was only afterward, when somebody pulled it out of a transcript, somebody who had not been there, that it took on a life of its own.

So, you know, these things do happen. So, I did feel somewhat bad for him. I didn’t think that he quite deserved the grief. I don’t think he deserves credit, but I don’t think he deserves grief. Well, see, that was an unplanned topic.

**John:** It was an unplanned topic, but you know what, I think it actually ties in very well to our planned topics, because I think it raises the issue of benefit of the doubt. And I think many of the things we’re talking about tonight really do speak to benefit of the doubt and whether giving benefit of the doubt could make some of these things that seem outrageous a little bit more understandable.

**Craig:** Can I give you a compliment? I want to give you a compliment. I think that one of the essential aspects of intelligence is the ability to find connections that are not necessarily obvious in things that would otherwise be viewed as disparate. That is an overlooked aspect of intelligence. And you are absolutely right and that was very, very smart.

**John:** Oh, great. So–

**Craig:** You’re smart.

**John:** Thank you. Let’s see if it bears fruit in the actual discussion.

**Craig:** Yes, so now don’t be stupid.

**John:** The follow up. Let’s start with a really simple, simple question. This was raised on Twitter a week or two ago. And you and I both tried to deal with it on Twitter, but let’s talk it out here. A question that came from Matt Schlicter who says, “Does an atheist/agnostic capitalize the G in god in a script? I.e. when a character says, ‘Thank god.’”

So, you and I answered this question in different ways. So, Craig, talk about your answer. I’ll talk about my answer. And see if we can come to a common ground.

**Craig:** Yes. So I am an atheist. Generally speaking, I do not capitalize the word “god” unless I am referring to god in the specific religious sense. So, if I have somebody say, “Oh my god, or oh god, or goddammit,” or any of those things–

**John:** Or god bless.

**Craig:** Or god bless. I don’t capitalize the G. If I have somebody saying something like, “Do you believe in God? Or when I pray to God,” then I would capitalize because that person is – I presume that character is religious and believes in God and is also speaking specifically to God.

**John:** Yes. So, I generally do capitalize, and so I would do it in Thank God and other things, but I’m not sure I’m entirely consistent. So I could do some sort of grep search through all of my old files and see whether I’m capitalizing that G or not.

**Craig:** Grep search. Nerd.

**John:** Yeah. Nerd.

**Craig:** UNIX.

**John:** But I have not actually done that kind of search. But in general I do capitalize it. My rationale for it is that God is sort of a character. Like I would capitalize Zeus. And so therefore I’m capitalizing God. And that I generally think of God as being the God of Abraham. And so I’m referring to a specific character and therefore I would refer that character, the capital name.

That’s not entirely reasonable. And I think your distinction between like would the character saying that word capitalize it or not is a reasonable thing to do. It’s just sort of a choice to not capitalize it, so I’m sort of not making that choice. And it’s just simpler for me to capitalize it in most cases.

**Craig:** I don’t think it really matters, unless you’re submitting a script to a faith-based producer.

**John:** Then you should capitalize Thank God.

**Craig:** Probably capitalize it and also take out the abortion stuff, and your gay characters, and your Jews.

**John:** There are faith-based producers who are happy with the gays.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah. I’m sure there are.

**Craig:** Wait a second. You went from “there are” to “I’m sure there are.”

**John:** Indeed. I’m gradually backtracking down there. But I have certainty that there is some faith-based producer who would be offended by a lower case G but not be offended by Gays in the script.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? You’re probably right.

**John:** Mark Burnett. Mark Burnett is a religious person. But I also think he’s probably not an anti-gay person. Guessing.

**Craig:** Hopefully not. But yeah, I think that generally speaking it doesn’t really matter one way or another. It would be glaring to me if I saw the lower case G and it was a priest and he was saying, “You need to come to God to understand God,” and that was all lower case. I would just think was this person’s shift key broken? But, if I see someone say, “Oh my god,” and it’s – frankly I find the capital G in oh my God to be too religious. It’s weird. Because in my mind when people say that they’re not talking about actual God. It’s simply a phrase. So it’s personal choice.

**John:** It is personal choice. I would also say like in the words like goddammit, like that feels really weird to sort of capitalize the G in that, so I’m probably not consistent at all in my things. It’s just when it’s the single word by itself I tend to capitalize it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to less controversial topics. This is an email that came in from Jason Kessler, a listener. He says that, “Every once and a while the topic of screenwriting contests comes up and whether or not they’re useful. I thought it might be helpful to share my experience with you.”

**Craig:** I’m sure this is going to go great. I’m sure he’s had a wonderful experience and nothing went wrong.

**John:** OK. “The Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest has 13 different categories—“

**Craig:** And we’re off.

**John:** “The Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest…” – sirens are going off right now.

**Craig:** I mean, red flags on top of sirens. Yeah. Yikes.

**John:** Let’s pause here, because Beverly Hills and moviemaking really don’t have a lot to do with each other. I mean, it’s like while the talent agencies are in Beverly Hills, I guess, it’s not like, you know, oh, let’s go to Beverly Hills and make movies. No, you go to Beverly Hills to see tourists buy expensive jewelry.

**Craig:** No, for sure. First of all, CAA isn’t even in Beverly Hills anymore. And second of all, Beverly Hills isn’t even Beverly Hills. Because that’s just like back from 90210 days where everyone was like, Ooh-ah, Beverly Hills. Yeah, Beverly Hills is fine and everything, but most of Beverly Hills is just, you know, it’s the flats. It’s a bunch of houses and stuff. The Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest just screams of fakeness.

**John:** It does. So, this contest though has “13 different categories, each with a gold, silver, and bronze winner. And then one overall grand prize winner. The website advertises the competition as having “over $20,000 in prizes and awards.” So Jason writes, “My Silicon Valley spec script was the gold winner of the TV Existing Series competition this year.” So, congratulations to Jason.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** Because you wrote a good episode of Silicon Valley, which is a fantastic show. So, hooray for him. “As a winner, I was informed that my one and only prize for winning the gold in the category was a coupon code for a free copy of the Scrivener Screenwriting Software…”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “…that is hardly worth more than the entry fee to the contest.”

**Craig:** What was the entry fee to the contest, by the way? Do we know?

**John:** $30.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** “So unless the grand prize winner got a check for $20,000, I find their claim of over $20,000 in prizes and awards to be very questionable.”

So, if I were Jason I would be a little bit frustrated that, you know, I won the gold and I’m getting a coupon code.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, this is the worst lottery of all time. This is right up there with buying scratchers. You enter a contest for $30, you pay them $30, and if you are one of the top winners, right, because there’s 13 different categories, each has one gold winner. So, if you are one of the 13 best, I’m excluding the grand prize winner which I doubt did get $20,000, you get something that’s worth $20 more than you paid in? This is the worst.

**John:** So, fortunately Jason is not just the kind of person who writes into us. He actually wrote to the competition people themselves to sort of ask a question and complain.

**Craig:** Atta boy.

**John:** So, this is the first update we got. So, Godwin, our producer, has been on the email chain with him quite a lot. So we have some follow up here.

So he says, “I pointed out to them that their website says the gold winners will receive a copy of Imagination Pro 4 software and they asked for my mailing address and said they would send it to me.” So, Imagination Pro 4, I kind of–

**Craig:** What is that?

**John:** I kind of recognize this. I think it’s basically like brain-mapping software.

**Craig:** Oh Christ.

**John:** It’s outlining kind of stuff. I don’t know anybody who uses it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s a useless software that exists.

**Craig:** Useless.

**John:** He says though that, “Now if you check the same webpage about the prizes, they’ve edited to remove that part of the Imagination Pro 4 software,” so he’s guessing that they won’t be sending it to the other gold winners.

**Craig:** [laughs] Because he got their one copy? By the way, I love a contest where you win something, then you write to them and you’re like, hey, I didn’t get all the stuff I was supposed to win, and they’re like, “Oh, OK, would you like it?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess I would like it. OK. Well, no one else gets it anymore. What the hell?

**John:** There’s more. “So the contest wrote to me last night and offered to send me the cash value of the Imagination Pro Software instead of the actual software if that’s what I prefer. I said yes, even though I don’t know what the software is and can’t really find it online to check out what the retail value should be. They said they’d send the cash via PayPal. The whole thing is pretty weird.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So yeah. I’d say that’s pretty weird.

**Craig:** It’s pretty weird.

**John:** PayPal. I mean, it’s potentially money.

**Craig:** Right. No, so they have gone through the rigorous process required to achieve a PayPal account. So, good on you, Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest.

**John:** Well, I’m sure they had the PayPal account because they had to take the $30 entry fee.

**Craig:** That’s right. There you go. So out of their massive pool of cash that they’ve suckered out of people, they said, “Oh you know, we actually,” I feel like they were like, “We don’t actually have any Imagination Pro copies here. And we got to go buy one and then we got to send it to this guy. Can we just give him the money instead? It will be faster.”

**John:** It will be faster.

**Craig:** And I love that he was like, “I can’t even find this software online for sale to see what it costs.” [laughs] This is amazing. By the way, also, can I just say the worst title of software in history is Imagination Pro 4. What about Imagination is Pro 4 Software supposed to do for me? How is software supposed to enhance my imagination? Oh my god, I want to kick this contest in the nards.

**John:** Well, I mean, it’s a big step up from Imagination Pro 3. Because that was–

**Craig:** That actually made your imagination worse?

**John:** Yeah. It was soul-crippling.

**Craig:** It took your imagination away. It made life gray.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. It was like the Dementors from Harry Potter just like flew in and sort of sucked your soul out a little bit.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. And that’s for the Pro version.

**John:** It was a bug really, but they fixed it. They mostly fixed it.

**Craig:** It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

**John:** It’s much better. So finally there is some resolution here. So often just like we’re going to kick this around and never know what happens, here’s actually what happened. Jason finishes up that, “All in all I ended up with $200 cash, a free copy of Scrivener Software, and the ability to tell my friends and network that I won a screenplay contest, all for an entry fee of $20. So I definitely made out ahead in the end.”

OK.

**Craig:** Yeah. He won. I mean, it’s kind of crazy that you’re like, “OK, after winning, and a bunch of communication, I did actually do better than what it cost me to enter.” I mean, that’s – that shouldn’t really be a struggle, right?

**John:** Obviously there was a lot of follow up here. “My takeaway advice to all screenwriters when it comes to choosing contests, rule out any contest that doesn’t explicitly state what the exact prizes are for each winner. And be aware that a claim of X dollars in prizes does not mean cash. It might mean free software or ambiguous ‘promotion’ to their network and [industry meanings] they can assign and inflate a dollar value when making the claim about the overall value of prizes.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yes. He says, “I didn’t get any inquiries from managers or producers. But I can also confirm that in the end they did send me $200 cash and it cleared my account. So my final call on them is if they continue to make ambiguous $20,000 claim in prizes without specifying exactly what prizes go to each winner, then I would recommend avoiding this contest.”

**Craig:** Uh…

**John:** He’s under-learned the lesson here.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s the most patient, accepting person I’ve ever met in my life. I would go bananas at this point. So first of all, let’s expand our definition of the contests that we should avoid. It is not merely the ones that claim absurd inflated amounts of prizes that include self-assigned values to ambiguous nonsense. How about just about all of them? Just about all of them are worthless. When you win the gold prize in a screenplay contest and zero people in the business seem to be interested, and the contest has failed to deliver any real actionable result to you, then it is worthless. You don’t need Scrivener, by the way. I don’t use Scrivener. You certainly don’t need Imagination Pro 4. And this is a bad way of turning $30 into $200.

Generally speaking you won’t – you meaning collectively you – will not be the gold prize winner. Just avoid these things.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s take a step back and look at screenplay competitions overall, because we’ve talked about them in previous shows. Our basic advice is that the Nicholl Fellowship, if you win the Nicholl Fellowship, you are a finalist in the Nicholl Fellowship, that’s awesome. That’s aces. That is really a thing that matters, because people will actually notice that and say like, oh, I will read your script. That is a fantastic thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** To some degree, Austin can be helpful or not helpful. There’s really a mixture of opinions on sort of what degree Austin is going to help your career. But don’t try to go to Austin saying like, “I’m going to win a prize.” Winning a prize, like a cash value prize, that shouldn’t be the point. Your point should be to start a career. And so whether you got a $200 piece of software or $200 thing from PayPal, you don’t want $200. You want a career. And so if you’re entering a competition with the hopes of getting your career going, enter one of the ones that could actually have an impact on your career. Because the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition or any of these other ones with like $20,000 in prizes – that’s not going to start your career.

**Craig:** Not at all. And while it may be tempting to think that if you’ve completed a screenplay there’s some upside to monetizing it through contests, this is not a very good money-making scheme. Each one of these places charges a submission fee. You’re not going to win most of them. And so this is a bad way of making money. It’s also not a lot of money to begin with.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Beyond that, I question why these exist. I understand why the Nicholl exists. It is run – managed and run by – the Motion Picture Academy. The people that–

**John:** The Oscar folks.

**Craig:** The Oscar folks. Right? That’s quite legitimate. And everybody certainly pays attention to what they have to say. Many of the people in our business who are important and successful are members of the Academy, including. But not me. [laughs] That will never happen.

**John:** One day, Craig.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. But that aside, why are these people running a contest? They can’t seem to deliver anything in terms of industry contacts. They can’t seem to deliver even what they promise in terms of “prizes.” So what are they in it for? And at that point I think a reasonable question is are they in it for the money? Is this a for-profit contest? If it’s not for profit, is part of the expense of their not-for-profit paying salaries to the people that run it? I don’t understand why this exists. And I would not participate in it.

**John:** Let’s circle back to our umbrella theme for today. Benefit of the doubt. So, if we want to give the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition benefit of the doubt, I could imagine a scenario in which they incorporated with the idea of let’s be a screenwriting competition that makes a difference, that helps young writers, that exposes writers to new talent. Maybe they actually had a relationship with one or two managers and they think like, oh, this is a thing we can do and we will charge a minimal fee of $30 to pay readers because you’ve got to pay readers, because you’re going to get a bunch of stuff being sent in. So it could have been done with the best of intentions, but the best of intentions does not lead to a good outcome in this scenario.

So, I don’t want to ascribe any negative necessarily motivations behind the people of this competition, but I don’t think it is serving screenwriters well to exist.

**Craig:** No. I don’t either. And I’m looking at their website and I don’t see anything that states that they are non-profit or not-for-profit. I don’t even see anything explaining who runs it. There’s not a lot of transparency here. It appears to me that it is a scheme. It’s a promotional scheme where they collect fees and they offset their costs through sponsorships. And the fees go in their pockets, I guess. I don’t – I could be wrong. But I don’t see anything that indicates otherwise.

**John:** Yeah. The two sponsors listed are Sellingyourscreenplay.com. Hmm.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** And Scrivener. And Scrivener did provide the coupon codes for this, so I don’t know, but I’m not seeing a lot of excitement there. Also their logo sort of looks like a red Christmas tree.

**Craig:** Oh my god, their logo! First of all, they have two things going on on their page. They have the worst logo in history. And then underneath their big banner it says, “Over $20,000 in prizes and awards,” which somebody possibly could class action lawsuit, “Introductions to producers, develop execs, and agents,” or not. “Exclusive benefits from leading industry partners,” which I presume includes the before-mentioned Imagination Pro 4. “Script analysis from professional judges.” Fine. And then in the middle of that, you know the double laurel thing that you see that all film festivals have?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Oh, I won, you know, Cannes, the double laurel. Well, they have the double laurel and in between it it says, “Win.” Win. [laughs] So if you want, let’s say you submitted your script and the movie got made and it went to Cannes and it won the Palme d’Or. Then on the poster it could say that, you know, with the Palme d’Or double laurel. And next to it it could also say, “Win.”

**John:** Win.

**Craig:** Win. This is the dumbest. I don’t like it and they should be ashamed.

**John:** I think that’s fair. Even with benefit of the doubt, I think we’re not going to encourage anyone to enter the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition or really any kind of screenplay competition.

Let’s move on to one of our bigger topics, which general category of getting things wrong. So on a previous episode we talked about the importance of trying to do the research to make sure you were doing things properly in a medical show, or with the law. We pointed out our frustrations when writers and filmed entertainment falls back on tropes that are not even accurate. And so we were encouraging people to do the research to get things right.

Robert Lee writes, “I’m currently writing a script in which chess plays a major role. A lot of drama and conflict will come from the game itself. Would it be suitable or possible to put diagrams of the chess moves into the script?” I will answer for both of us. The answer is no.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Putting diagrams into your script in general is not going to make sense. Craig, I think, in previous times has said it would be great to include a picture for something to show what something is going to be like. But in general, no. And I think the chess diagram will just annoy people. And the third time I see a chess diagram, I am throwing the script across the room if it’s a printed script. But I don’t really print anything anymore, so I would probably close the PDF reader on my iPad and play some Heart Stone if I saw another chess diagram.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, even in a world in which script software and the industry together have evolved to a place where people want to see visuals and imagery in screenplays, you still wouldn’t put diagrams of chess moves into a script for one simple reason: people that don’t play chess have no idea what the hell they mean. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. 99% of the people reading your screenplay, Robert, will not be chess experts. They won’t even be chess dilettantes. They will not know how to read the diagram. And even if they do know how to read it, like I’m terrible at chess. I know what chess diagrams are and I know roughly what they mean. I still wouldn’t know what the significance of the particular moves are. It’s just absolutely no. It is no.

**John:** We’re saying that most people reading the script are not going to be chess experts or chess aficionados to the degree that they will understand that, and yet there are experts out there. And so I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this great article by Cara Giaimo who is writing for Atlas Obscura called Why Chess Fans Hate the Movies. And she goes through and explains why chess in movies is so often so wrong and how it drives people who actually know what chess is like absolutely crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So some of the things that she points out are no one actually like knocks over the king in a checkmate situation. A lot of times you’ll see the pieces on the board in actually impossible positions. And so you see it from episodes of The Office. You see it From Russia With Love, The Shawshank Redemption, Ace Ventura, When Nature Calls, which is I think really pushing for an example.

If you’re a person who knows chess and can look at a board and recognize that there’s a mistake, that’s going to frustrate you. And so after we talk about our next topic, let’s go into sort of why some of those things happen and maybe how you can try to avoid those, but also how you can provide some benefit of the doubt to those filmmakers for why they make such horrible mistakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there are levels of these things. And in part they are related to the kind of movie and story you’re telling. If you’re making a movie that is not about chess at all but there happens to be some incidental moment where people are playing chess, you know, certain things are understandable. The knocking over of the king is not something that chess players do, but we’re all accustomed to it. If you’re making a movie about chess specifically, that becomes a little trickier. I happen to love Searching for Bobby Fisher. I’m sure that Cara Giaimo has issues with it. Certainly there is the knocking over of the king repeatedly. But what I would say to people like Ms. Giaimo is we can’t afford to limit our concern to chess players. We have to think about the general audience and we have to explain and dramatize things.

And it is generally speaking better storytelling to do something visually than to just have somebody say, “Oh, OK, well, good game.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because we in the audience won’t necessarily know what happened. So, for instance, she cites an example in Season 5 of The Office there is an episode where Jim has both of his bishops on white squares, an impossible orientation in that particular game, in any game. I think in chess one bishop is on a black, one bishop is on a white, they can only move diagonally so they can never change colors. That’s reasonable. Nobody should really make that mistake.

But, the other stuff, meh.

**John:** Yes. And yet having been on sets I can totally imagine how that mistake came to be. Or even that was a plot point that somehow just got dropped out of the edit. So, I’m sympathetic to sort of how these things happen. But let’s go to an example that’s actually more writing oriented. This came from David in San Diego who writes in, “In addition to being a Scriptnotes listener, I’m a fan of baseball. Recently my favorite baseball podcast, Effectively Wild, played a clip from an episode of Chicago Justice, an NBC legal drama produced by, among others, your friend Derek Haas. The show’s lead character, Peter Stone, is a former Major League baseball pitcher turned district attorney. In the clip, Peter attempts to impart some wisdom to a younger colleague by telling her an anecdote from his baseball days. The point of this story is that Peter felt personally responsible for losing a game rather than blaming it on a teammate’s error.”

Let’s actually take a listen to this little snippet from the show.

Female Voice: That was the best redirect I have ever seen.

Male Voice: In your three years of practice?

Female Voice: Seriously. It was Atticus Finch. Tom Cruise kicking the crap out of Nicholson.

Male Voice: What if Kaleelah had adult onset diabetes? What if she said the deputy had two fingers raised? Hmm?

Female Voice: Never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.

Male Voice: I was naked out there.

Female Voice: I know I screwed up, Peter. I should have asked if she wore a—

Male Voice: Forget it. Forget it. You know I played baseball, right? I pitched. It was Cubs/Sox, 2007, bottom of the 9th, we’re up one. I throw the sinker and it’s an easy grounder to third. A sure double play. Until my third baseman boots it. And just like that we lose. Now, the entire north side of Chicago, they blame the third baseman. But the only person I blamed was myself. See, if had thrown the splitter, the batter would have popped it up to right and we would have won.

**John:** So David continues, “The problem is that for a baseball fan the anecdote makes no sense. In his anecdote, Peter did exactly what a pitcher is supposed to do and his teammate simply screwed up. And the details, such as the type of pitch he should have thrown, are all wrong. The character could have just as easily told a story that got the baseball details right while accomplishing the same goals for the scene.

“My questions are, A, how does this happen? B, is it unreasonable to expect a network drama to get these kind of details right? And, C, given that baseball is integral to the lead character’s backstory, why wouldn’t the writers have called on someone to fix these type of questions when they came up?”

So, Craig, what do we say in this scenario about this one anecdote that doesn’t ring true to a person who actually knows what baseball is? Because I’ll be completely honest – I have no idea what he’s saying. He could just be talking random nonsense words and it makes as much sense to me. It’s like, you know, Sheldon on Big Bang Theory talking about quantum mechanics. I’m more likely to understand the quantum mechanics.

**Craig:** Well, that’s actually part of the problem, I think, with the anecdote there. But I think that David in San Diego makes a perfectly justifiable point here on one level. The anecdote makes no sense. He’s saying I really should have had him pop up and so I should have thrown him the splitter. Splitters are the most groundball-inducing pitch you can throw. So, that makes no sense. If he wanted the guy to pop up, he would have said, “I should have thrown him an elevated fastball.” So, it’s incorrect. It’s just flat out wrong.

Oh, and we should add, by the way, Derek is associated with Chicago Justice, but he actually doesn’t write on Chicago Justice or supervise the writing of Chicago Justice. So I don’t want Derek to get folded into this.

**John:** Yeah. We did email him about this. And he’s like, “I really don’t know anything about that episode.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** We completely excused him from any discussion of this. But, I think it’s interesting to talk about why this has happened, or how does this kind of situation happen. And I can imagine the scene in abstract. Let’s say like me, a person who doesn’t know anything about baseball, is tasked with writing this scene. And the purpose of this moment is to clarify that this guy sees an analogous situation in his previous career where he made a choice that was the wrong choice, or that he escaped blamed when he really should have gotten blamed for a scenario.

And so me not knowing the baseball of this all, I would seek out an example of what that might be like in baseball terms and attempt to write it. And then find somebody honestly who could tell me that I was wrong in the situation. And so it’s surprising to me that this made it all the way through to air, but I don’t the specific scenarios on like how it got to be in the show.

**Craig:** The point is that sometimes the wrong person gets blamed. That was a bad example. It was a bad example because as, again, David points out correctly the wrong person didn’t get blamed. Any time a player in the field commits an error, it’s their fault. An error by definition in baseball is a play that is not made that could otherwise be made with reasonable effort.

So, that doesn’t make sense. And also then the follow up about what pitch he should have thrown doesn’t make sense. Why does this happen? It happens because usually there isn’t anyone in the group other than the person writing it who feels or who has additional expertise to say that actually doesn’t make sense. Sometimes there are arguments about these things and the people who are correct lose the argument. I mean, television writing staffs are notoriously regimented and there’s a certain hierarchy.

I, like you, tend to want to confirm and reach out on all of these things. But I want to point out here that there is another level to this, which is if the audience gets the dramatic point, and the audience generally isn’t easily understandable as authorities or fans of the topic you’re discussing, in the end does it matter that much? No.

Look, I always strive to be correct in these things. Always. And we should. Believe me, I’m not excusing mistakes. However, other than David, I don’t believe there has been an outcry from the very large, millions and millions of people large, audience of Chicago Justice. So that tells me that, well, it looks like maybe they got away with this one because the dramatic point was understood. And in the end that is what matters. But, I agree with you that in general we should reach out and check on these things. We don’t want to get caught with our pants down.

And in today’s world where there are a million blogs and Twitter ready to call you on every mistake, it seems like a little extra care is probably called for.

**John:** Yeah. So, I want to look at both this chess example and the baseball example and the experts in both these scenarios are frustrated by what they’re seeing portrayed on screen. And I can imagine a doctor, a lawyer, a police detective, a military person shaking their damn heads as they’re like, “What are you complaining about?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because every single time they turn on the TV they’re seeing things reflected back that are not the actual experiences of being any of those jobs.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so there are shortcuts being taken in all those things for the sake of expediency in television. And so while we are always pushing for authenticity and for getting the details right, there are just things that in every medical show that are not sort of the way it would actually be done. There are things in every police show that are not done that way. We’ve compressed time. We’ve simplified things. We’ve merged jobs. I’ve never seen Chicago Justice, but I would guarantee you that there are unlikely things that happen in every week’s episodes on a legal basis just because that’s how legal basis legal shows work.

And so if you look at like a Law & Order, you know, we kind of forget that like, oh you know what, they’ve compressed out two years’ worth of time for an episode.

**Craig:** The boring time.

**John:** Exactly. So I have sympathy for the chess fans and for the baseball fans, but also I want them to broaden their sympathies to everybody else who sees their real world not being portrayed accurately on screen.

**Craig:** I think that’s fair. I mean, the one thing I would caution writers is if you know you’re doing something for narrative expedience or dramatic expedience, that’s one thing. Actually you could have taken no more time and crafted an anecdote there that would have been baseball logical. And so that’s an avoidable mistake. The incorrectness, it does not accrue to your benefit in any way. Whereas various legal inaccuracies do accrue to your narrative benefit, because they compress time or make things more exciting. Knocking over the king accrues to your narrative dramatic benefit. This one just seems like a mistake.

So, if you can avoid it, avoid it.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s take a look at why some of these mistakes happen, or why these situations happen. I think the biggest one by far is simplification for clarity, which is both the knocking over the king, it is the compressing of time, it is the characters explaining some part of what they’re trying to do to a character who would not need to know that explanation. It’s characters doing something in the course of their job in a different way than they we would do it in real life. Just that action makes sense for an audience who has no familiarity with that. And that’s a thing that’s going to happen and your challenge as a writer is to do that in the most natural way that doesn’t feel gross or forced, but you have to make sure it makes sense to a person who doesn’t know what the heck that person’s job really is.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. I mean, just the fact that we’re telling the story the way we tell it, we are required to cheat. Sometimes we’ll make shows that are set in another country and people there are speaking accented English. They don’t speak accented English. They speak their own language. It’s just that we didn’t want to deal with the subtitles the whole time, so we have to cheat things. We have to cheat time and space all the time.

And so I’m not a huge fan of the gaffe squad type people. You know, the other thing that happens sometimes is people will catch the mistake. For instance, the aforementioned bishops, two bishops on white squares. By take two, somebody is probably rushing over and going, “Um, the bishops are in the wrong spot.” And the director is like, “What? No one cares, dude. Now our continuity is going to be all screwed up because the bishop is going to be moving back and forth between shots. Let’s just keep going. It’s not that important. Let five nerds complain about it, but I just don’t want my piece hopping back and forth now in between shots.” And that’s legitimate.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** That is a reasonable decision to make.

**John:** Yeah. Sometimes you’ll see characters are supposed to be heading west, but based on where the sun is in the sky there’s no way they’re headed west. That’s just moviemaking guys. There’s really nothing more you can do about that. It’s the schedule of when you shot. It’s when the light looked best. It’s when you had those actors.

Again, there’s also genre conventions. And so we have a genre convention where even though you shouldn’t hear sound in space, we hear sound in space. You know what? There’s movies that will be very adamant about not doing that, and it feels weird, but great, go for it when you want to do it.

We also have a genre convention of warp drives. You know what? It’s certainly not possible the way we show it in movies and TV shows. But without warp drives, it would just be incredibly tedious and you wouldn’t have the Star Trek Enterprise. So therefore we have warp drives.

**Craig:** Yeah. We love seeing the streaky star line things. I don’t think that’s how it works. But then you know again it’s not real anyway. I mean, certainly when you’re getting into science fiction, that’s a whole other discussion of how accurate to science do you want to be, because you’re walking a very strange line there. You don’t want to simply have no rules, because then it feels like you’re just cheating. On the other hand, you have to change some things that are true because we’re not supposed to be able to go faster than the speed of light and we want to. It’s fiction.

**John:** Yep. It’s magic.

**Craig:** Yeah. Magic.

**John:** Your point about characters speaking with an accent when they should be speaking their own language, a thing that has always struck me is in movies set in the past like everyone speaks British English, and even if they’re cultures that shouldn’t be speaking the same language they can speak to each other. And it’s just because we don’t want to stick anybody in subtitles. And I just get it. There’s a reason why you’re doing that. And like you could choose to put a lot of subtitles in there. And Game of Thrones I think impressively decided there would be a common language and then like everybody else would speak different languages and that was just a thing they were going to choose to do.

But they could have made a choice to not do that, and that would have been I think equally defendable.

**Craig:** For sure. And even in Game of Thrones, you’ll notice that when they have scenes where people are speaking say–

**John:** Dothraki.

**Craig:** Dothraki, right? Or Essosian, I don’t know what that one is called. Valyrian. That they will have very few scenes where that is the only language being spoken. It occurs. Those scenes tend to be short. Typically there are translators going on, because you have various characters who don’t speak that. And so we are getting the advantage of that. Yeah, but they do short scenes.

The problem with – and we have to just account for this – is let’s say you were writing a movie, you were hired to write a Game of Thrones movie after the season concludes. And the movie takes places in Essos. Well, you can’t have an entire movie where everyone is just speaking that, because it’s annoying after a while. It’s like give me a break. And there is a natural disconnect that occurs, not in short bursts, but over time a natural disconnect that occurs between us and characters who are not speaking a language we understand. It is inevitable.

**John:** It’s true. So let’s wrap this up again with our benefit of the doubt umbrella over things. I think we are both urging sharp-eyed viewers to give the writers and filmmakers the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t deliberately ignorant. They weren’t trying to undermine the authenticity of things. Just something got messed up along the way, or it wasn’t the high enough priority either – in the writing it’s harder to defend – but on the day it couldn’t be the top priority to get that bishop on the right square. And, sorry, that’s a thing that’s going to happen. The priority was getting the story told and making sure you were focusing on the things they wanted you to focus on. So, I definitely am mindful of how frustrating it can be to see things portrayed incorrectly on screen. That’s why we always urge people to try to be accurate and specific.

But I think you have to take a breath when you see things that aren’t accurate.

**Craig:** Yeah. Do the best you can, but don’t be trapped by purity.

**John:** Cool. Craig, this next topic is yours. You put this on the outline. It’s about bad news.

**Craig:** Yeah. This kind of was inspired by a fun Twitter thread. Adam Sternbergh. @sternbergh started a thread in response to a post by Gary Ross. I guess the Gary Ross, I think.

**John:** I hope it’s the Gary Ross.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Who wrote, “Note to filmmakers. People don’t actually stare at the receiver after they get disturbing news.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And this created a long list of responses of people coming up with things like that, which kind of, you know, again, falls into the category of faking stuff. And so some of the examples that came up are – beyond staring at the phone receiver – entering – I love this one – entering an apartment or house, pressing back up against the wall, closing eyes. [laughs]

**John:** It’s so specific and so true.

**Craig:** It’s so true. People do that in movies all the time. They walk inside. They close the door. And then they just press their back up against the wall and close their eyes. Covering your mouth with your hand. People do that in movies–

**John:** I actually do that sometimes, though.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I did it instinctively just now doing this. That sort of gasp.

**Craig:** You’re so dramatic.

**John:** So dramatic.

**Craig:** Splashing water on face.

**John:** That drives me crazy.

**Craig:** Have you ever splashed water on your face to change your emotional state? [laughs]

**John:** I have not. Although I feel like maybe it was in this thread or it was another conversation with Aline Brosh McKenna. She said like, “Oh, yeah, of course I do that.”

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Just like I put my hand over my mouth, she splashes water on her face. Or, I’m completely misremembering and Aline I apologize if I misremembered something we talked about.

**Craig:** But we can agree that nobody in real life ever walks into their house, closes the door, and backs up against the wall. That’s just–

**John:** Like I can’t believe I just got through that. Yeah.

**Craig:** Like oh my god. Never. Never.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So what do we do about these moments? I mean, we want to convey this sensation to people in the audience that this character is feeling overwhelmed or is absorbing this terrible news. But on the other hand, you know, maybe we want to try and do it in some interesting new ways.

**John:** So, let’s talk about some options here. So the first is just kind of to find a way to articulate what is actually going on inside. Find the new way to demonstrate that thing and try to be accurate to what you might actually do in that scenario. I don’t shut the door and lean back against it and close my eyes, but I might drop the keys on the console, or I might rest myself a little bit. I just shake off that experience that just happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you’re asking the right question which is what do we actually do. And then of course out of the various things that we actually do, we want to try and pick one that the audience will be able to pick up on. Because I suspect that most times this is entirely internal for people and so there is no way for the audience to see it. But one way that we can show these things dramatically is by watching the person attempt to not absorb it. And then it hits them.

So, they receive this bad news. They’re struggling with it. But they soldier on bravely as if it weren’t bothering them at all. Usually by just going about their normal activities, the mundane. And then something finally breaks through and it comes out. And there’s this very famous moment from the ‘70s sitcom Good Times. Florida is the mother. Her husband has died. And everybody is very upset about this. But she’s just sort of soldiering through. And she’s in the kitchen. She’s alone. She’s just moving a glass dish from one place to another and then she finally just lifts it up and throws it on the ground and smashes it. And she goes, “Damn, damn, damn!” Which is freaking awesome. And we’ll have a clip in the show notes for that moment if you haven’t heard it.

It’s spectacular and it felt very real. I think it actually was quite shocking to audiences at the time, because you know in the ‘70s sitcoms were still rooted in the stagey. You know, we were not that far removed from the early days of I Love Lucy where television was kind of a represented stage vaudeville kind of format. And everything was very carefully curated. That was very raw.

Now, it’s 40 years later and we’re a little more progressed down the line, so that would probably in and of itself now seem hokey today. But at the time it was sort of shocking. And the kernel of the theory there is a good creative kernel to think about.

**John:** A similar story I heard last night from Andrew Lippa, the composer for Big Fish who I got to see in London last night, and he was talking about going through a really emotional moment, but he was sort of ignoring the emotional moment. And he dropped the remote control for his TV on the floor and the battery shot out and the dog freaked out, like ah what’s going on. And so Andrew was laughing because the dog was freaking out and he’s trying to gather the batteries. But the actual physical process of laughing became like sobbing. And the physical experience of shaking that way shook out the actual tears and became a big emotional moment. And that I think is the equivalent of a damn, damn, damn in real life.

And that’s the kind of thing I’d love to see characters encounter in our stories. That’s a thing that is such catnip for an actor because it’s getting to really get to some primal physical feelings under there.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in a moment like that, the advantage to doing that as a writer as opposed to very quickly and short-handedly having somebody press their back up against the wall is when they press their back up against the wall we go, “Oh yeah, they’re upset.” When somebody starts laughing at something absurd like that and then that turns into tears, we’ll cry, because it’s jumping up on us in a real way in the way it’s jumped up on them. And that is where the alchemy happens.

So, that’s really the point. It’s not – I never think that the point of avoiding tropes is to seem original. The point of avoiding tropes is they’re not working as effectively as they should.

**John:** Yeah. So we talked about the big reaction, but like the small reaction, the under-reaction can be just as powerful. It requires more work in the scene setting to make sure that we actually understand what’s going on there. That we can actually read what the character is doing. But the character who is sitting very silently and small in the frame, or we’re in a close-up of that character can also be a great way of showing the impact of the moment we just encountered.

**Craig:** Yeah. This also truer to life. But in this case what you’re going to do is take advantage of the internality of these kinds of moments. So one example that I think about often is the scene in Unfaithful where Diane Lane is on the subway, or the train, and she’s coming back home from just having had an affair. And the camera is just looking at her. And the whole world is zipping by through the window of the train. But she’s just sitting there. And she’s thinking about what just happened. And we’re watching her be excited and she’s pleased and she feels loved and attractive. But then the guilt comes in. And you watch all of it happening quietly, just on her face.

The story is telling us that this is – keep watching. Just watch this person. And that is interesting. That is a moment that feels real. It requires an excellent actor, which Diane Lane certainly is. It requires a patient, secure director who does not feel the need to get in the way of the performance. Sometimes all you need for a moment like that is a locked down camera. Sometimes a little bit of a push. In that case, also, you can play some editing tricks. You can just jump cut around. So you can see, OK, what we’re watching here is a long train ride and this is occurring.

But it is truer and I think it feels more for us when we see it unfold in that way. You just have to know as a writer you’re instructing everybody this will be quiet and it will take time.

**John:** Yeah. I can think of several moments in Michael Clayton that do that kind of thing. So the last shot I recall with George Clooney is the equivalent version of that, where he’s like in a car and we’re tracking with him. But you see Tilda Swinton, who is just remarkable as well. There are moments where you’re able to see her reacting to things. And there’s bigger moments, there’s smaller moments, but it’s not the scale, it’s not leaning back against the wall. It’s really taking the hit for that emotion that just happened. And finding the moment that she can actually expose what’s going on there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Keeping them accountable to the news they’ve just heard or the thing that they’ve just done.

**John:** A thing which I see in movies but I also feel is true, I just know this from my own life, is that when I get devastating news I sit down. There’s something that actually – like gravity gets a little stronger and I just feel like I need to sit down to make sure I don’t fall down. And so being on the phone and then sitting while you’re still talking on the phone is a thing that I find myself doing often, sometimes because it helps me focus. But also just because I need to make sure that I’m safe while this happening.

And so if a character can’t sit down, they will lean against things. They will find ways to support themselves while they are getting burdened by the news they just encountered.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in those moments, too, sometimes – and this is why my most hated fake rule/bad advice for screenwriters is don’t direct on the page. The camera in those moments is meant to be us. And the camera is telling us are we meant to be sympathizing with this person or are we perhaps meant to be standing in judgment of them?

In the cast of say Diane Lane on the train, we’re clearly meant to sympathize or empathize. We’re meant to be in her mind and to experience this collision of contradictory feelings all at once. Sometimes in a case where, for instance, somebody sits down. The camera may slowly start to back away from them, as if to say they’ve done something wrong. They have to be alone now. We have to leave them in their little private hell. Because what they’ve done is bad. And I think about these things all the time. And it’s important, I think, for writers to think about the camera in this way.

This is an essential part of storytelling. And we fail ourselves and our readers. And then, by the way, the director, and the actors, and everybody if we don’t think about stuff like that. Because if I just write on the page, “John sits down,” OK. Now if I write, “John sits down. We slowly move back and away from him, out through the doorway, out through the door, until he’s barely there.” That implies – even if that’s not what the director does, they understand the point.

**John:** For sure. I think the other thing we need to look at from our writing perspective is are we better serving this story moment by letting another character provide the reaction for us? Or another character investigate the reaction. So let’s say we have the character is receiving bad news on the phone. If there’s another character in that scene who can be listening, can be watching, can be trying to read what’s going on. We will naturally sort of be doing the same process with the spectator character.

So, an example at the start of Big Fish, Billy Crudup is in Paris. He receives word that his father is in the hospital. And it’s because Josephine, the wife, is there to watch them that we know what the actual content of the other side of the phone call must be. We know sort of how serious this is.

So, look at whether this is sort of the opposite of the character closing the door and sliding against it. There’s another character watching and through that other character watching and reacting we can see what’s really going on and the extent of that bad news.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to approach this. If there’s any general advice to give, it’s that you at least start from a place where you’re going to be honest to how this would really work.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And then think about how that is specific to the character that you have and the moment that you have. And then think about where your camera should be. Is it with them or is it away from them? And is it moving, is it not moving? What is their reaction? How slowly or quickly does it evolve? Does it surprise us or does it just dribble out? Think about all those things and then try and do it true.

And if you can, I guarantee you it will be more effective than the splashing the water on the face, because at this point so many people have splashed water on their face it doesn’t mean a damn thing anymore.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a thing that people do in movies.

**Craig:** It’s a thing people do in movies.

**John:** Yep. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the video to All This Time by Jonathan Coulton. It’s just terrific. And so the song is great, but the video takes the form of a text-based adventure game, sort of like Zork, and it’s so incredibly well done.

**Craig:** All right, I’m in.

**John:** Yeah. It’s very smartly done. Jonathan Coulton also did the Still Alive from Portal, which also has the feeling of this. But this is really pushing it to the next level. It’s one of those rare videos where you have to do a lot of reading, but it’s worth a hundred percent of your attention for those few minutes. So I strongly recommend All This Time by Jonathan Coulton.

**Craig:** Did you play the Infocom games when you were young–

**John:** I did, yeah. I loved them.

**Craig:** Kids today. Now, you know, you can play all the Infocom games for free. I think there’s a website that just has them. And I was reminded how terribly frustrating they were. They actually were horrendously designed games in the sense that they were not fun. But they were so – I don’t know – they were just very important to me when I was a kid to go through them.

I mean, the most brutal of them, that was famously brutal of them, was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I don’t know if you ever played that one.

**John:** I don’t think I played deep into it. But I remember playing before we even had our personal computer, my dad had a terminal which was the kind that had like the [unintelligible] things you could attach. And so there was an online version of that that I could play. And I think I might have even played Zork way back in the day, which was on an equivalent BBS system. And they really were remarkable things.

But once I started playing like Ultima or the things that had some graphical component I never went back to those original just text-based games.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, they were so frustrating. OK. Well, my One Cool Thing is a website called Every Noise At Once. We’ll put a link in the show notes, but it’s pretty easy to remember. Everynoise.com. And then when you get there you will see these folks have put up this massive Ngram style plot. Well, Ngram isn’t right. That’s the Google thing, right?

It’s more like a word cloud, like a keyword cloud kind of plot of literally every kind of music noise that has been made in culture. It is massive. And it’s got everything. There are things on there I did not know existed. You know, some things I knew existed but I never listened to, or there are things like, OK, there’s 20 different kinds of trance music. I wasn’t aware of all the different sub-genres. Then there are things like [Schrempf] or something. Some crazy German format where it’s just repetitive industrial noises. All the way down to Gregorian chants and Islamic religious singing. And it’s just got everything. It’s fascinating.

You could spend hours just looking through it. It’s something else. They have like Norwegian Christmas music. It’s insane. So, check it out. It’s a lot of fun. Every Noise At Once.

**John:** I accidentally clicked Kirtan, which I don’t know what it is, and now it starts playing. So it’s a good thing to–

**Craig:** It’s pretty wild, right?

**John:** Experimentation there. Yeah, it’s neat. Cool. That’s our show this week.

Our show, as always, is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Ben Singer. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, like the ones we talk about on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. Also search for Scriptnotes Podcast to find us on iTunes.

You can leave a review for us, which is lovely. You can also download the apps which are currently the only way to get to our back catalog of nearly 300 episodes. Actually more than 300 episodes because there’s bonus episodes with people like Aline and Rachel Bloom and all sorts of good folks.

You will find the show notes for this episode and all previous episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you can leave reviews of previous episodes. Go to johnaugust.com/guide. And you’ve left so many great reviews on your favorite episodes, which are terrific. So, in the next couple weeks we’ll figure out what form we’re going to put these recommendations in, be it a book, be it some other sort of web tool for people finding their best episodes.

So, if you’re new to the show, we can point you to the episodes that are most worthy of exploring. And, if you are interested in coming to the live show that we talked about at the top of the hour, go to Hollywoodheart.org. That’s where they’re going to be putting up the tickets. We’ll also have a link on Twitter once there is a link. So we’re excited to see everybody there for that. We’re excited to be at the ArcLight.

Craig, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* The Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest
* [Adam Sternbergh’s Tweet](https://twitter.com/sternbergh/status/841075763675820032)
* [Good Times – DAMN DAAAMN DAAAAAAMN](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKUwcCp7LPE)
* [Jonathan Coulton – All This Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvVNxqosZ7s)
* [Portal – ‘Still Alive’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ljFaKRTrI)
* [Every Noise At Once](http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html)
* [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 Ben Singer ([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_294.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 293 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at three stories in the news and figure out how we might convince a director like say Jordan Peele to attach himself to the project. Craig, have you seen Get Out yet?

**Craig:** Get out.

**John:** Get out. I’m guessing you’ve not seen it yet, because you don’t see a lot of movies.

**Craig:** I haven’t, but I’m going to because everybody loves it and everybody says it’s great. And I’m sure it is great. I’m sure it’s awesome. And I’m a huge fan of Key & Peele. And I know this is different. So, yes I’m going to see it. Haven’t seen it yet. Not ashamed.

**John:** You should not be ashamed. But you should see it. And I’m looking forward to seeing it whenever I get a chance to see it. It’s not here in Paris yet. But hopefully it will come here sooner, because it has been so successful. And I’m so happy for that.

But I do think that Jordan Peele could get nearly any movie to happen. Like he has so much heat at this moment that the world is his oyster.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you might be right. The list of directors in features is incredibly short. And all of them work. All of them. There is currently as we all know a push for diversity among the cadre of feature film directors, which is blindingly white and blindingly male. And so I can’t think for even a second that you’re not exactly right. I would imagine that he’s on the top of every list. And apparently well earned. But not yet willing to confirm that on my own behalf because I haven’t seen the movie.

**John:** Yeah. But I trust that everyone in America is correct and it’s a phenomenal movie, so I look forward to seeing it. But let us talk not about a movie that already exists but movies that could exist. It is our segue to How Would This Be a Movie, one of our favorite features to do. This week we needed a special to really help us out here.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m very happy to introduce a writer who has done several of these true life adaptations. Irene Turner is a novelist and screenwriter of An American Crime. Her new film is The Most Hated Woman in America, which just debuted at South by Southwest. Welcome Irene.

**Irene Turner:** Hi guys. Thanks for having me on. I have seen Get Out.

**Craig:** Get Out.

**Irene:** All right. And I’m out. I did love it, so there you go.

**Craig:** All right.

**Irene:** And I don’t even go to horror films.

**Craig:** Well, I’ve heard it’s not really a horror film. It’s more like a – well, like old school thriller.

**Irene:** Old school thriller. And the end – and you’re cringing in your seat and wanting to run. And I enjoyed it. But no spoilers.

**Craig:** Got it. Got it.

**John:** Zero spoilers. So, you are just back from South by Southwest. You’re back from Austin. And like literally just last night landed. So thank you for coming to do this. But tell us about this movie because I think as long as I’ve known you you’ve been working on this movie. So this is the story of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a famous atheist, who is kidnapped. But what is your journey on this movie? How did you come to write this movie?

**Irene:** It’s been a minute on this one. And I guess we started – the idea got brought to us by our producers, Max Handelman and Elizabeth Banks. And neither Tommy O’Haver nor I, who is the director and also my writing partner, had heard of her.

**Craig:** You hadn’t heard of Elizabeth Banks?

**Irene:** Well, Elizabeth Banks we had heard of. But Madalyn Murray O’Hair we had not heard of. And in fact nobody under the age of about 70 had heard of her.

**Craig:** Except of course for me.

**Irene:** Well, except for Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** I’m sort of an MMOH fan.

**Irene:** Well then there you go. But Madalyn was once really well known for fighting to get forced prayer out of public schools in Baltimore, Maryland. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court with it. And after that formed an organization called American Atheist. And kind of fighting atheist causes and fighting for First Amendment rights, which are near and dear to my heart.

And the great thing about her as making a movie about her is that she was conflicted, complicated, opinionated, got in her own way. And had problematic relationships with her family. So, oh boy, strong character. Fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. It seems to me. I mean, one of the things we talk about all the time when we go through these How Would This Be a Movie is we see the facts of some complications, circumstantial drama, and then we are inevitably asking, OK, but what about the people. Where is the people stuff? And she was a fascinating person and kind of a little bit of a monster.

**Irene:** She was a big bit of a monster. She got in her own way. She had problematic relationships with her kids. She smothered them and pushed them. And her one son, Billy Murray, Jr. actually, ended up being an alcoholic and had other issues and finally found god.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**Irene:** Yeah. And at this point is still alive and is fighting to get prayer back in public schools.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Irene:** But she was so difficult. She ended up having sometimes hiring felons to work for her at her atheist organization. They didn’t pay very well. And she felt like she could just judge character and it would be fine. Kind of difficult.

**Craig:** And how did that work out for her?

**Irene:** Not real well. See the movie.

**Craig:** And this movie, this is a Netflix film, correct?

**Irene:** Yeah. One of the reasons it took so long to make is that Netflix as a streaming organization making original movies didn’t exist when we started writing it. And so Netflix, I think, fills a really important niche to get independent small films out there. It’s not really a big studio movie. Mm, murdered atheist that nobody remembers except Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Franchise!

**Irene:** Mm-hmm. But where’s the sequel potential? So just getting to make those kind of niche films. And Netflix has a lot of other kind of films as well. But I think they’ve been really a force in the indie world for making sure that what otherwise might be a festival film and two theaters in New York and LA, at best, gets out there.

**John:** So, talk to us about, so Elizabeth Banks and Max Handelman came to you with this idea. Was it just the idea? Was it a specific book? What were you working off of when you sat down to start writing this movie?

**Irene:** We had thought about using a book and then that morphed into there’s so many different points of view about her and what she wrote, what other people wrote about her. And we ended up, it’s actually original. We sources. We used her diary. We used books about her. She did a lot of press.

**Craig:** She did talk a lot, didn’t she?

**Irene:** She talked a lot. I appreciate that. Because, yeah, she lived in an era where Johnny Carson would invite people to get on the Tonight Show and talk about atheism in America. So her opinions on things are well known and so we kind of gathered from lots of sources to try and discover what made her tick. You know, what she wanted in life. How she got where she was. What, you know.

**Craig:** So, when you go through all these sources, because I’m dealing with this right now on this miniseries I’m doing. It’s based on true events, and so true people. Did you have any sort of legal guidance about what you could and couldn’t use without having say rights to an estate or rights to this or that?

**Irene:** Well, the basic principle is having multiple sources for facts that are in the public sphere. The great thing about Madalyn is she did give so many interviews and she’s been written about so much that nothing is only coming from one source. If you’re only coming from one source on something, then you can’t use it without getting the rights to that source.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**Irene:** That’s the basic answer.

**Craig:** OK. Fair enough.

**John:** Were there any concerns about libel or sort of the public rights of the people who are still involved? So you say that her son is still alive. So was there any sort of zone of safety around that character to make sure you weren’t doing anything with that character that the person could come after you for?

**Irene:** Yeah. With him, yes, we had to be very, very careful, because we don’t have his life rights. And we had to use sources from the time period and what he said or did to newspapers. Fortunately, he did a lot of speaking tours and things like that, which were reported on. But you know with the characters who are no longer living, you can’t libel the dead, and so that makes the standard much easier to deal with.

**Craig:** Can you slander them?

**Irene:** Only if you want to.

**Craig:** Because I know so many dead people I want to say wrong things about.

**Irene:** You can get sued by family members of dead people who are saying that you’re libeling their family legacy and things. And it can kind of get tricky. On An American Crime we had a 90-year-old lawyer who pretty much hated the film. I mean, and it’s a child abuse film and there are children abusing other children. Very difficult subject matter. Some of them are alive, although most of the living ones had taken assumed names in the interim. So just tricky. And he just didn’t think we should be discussing the subject at all, in my humble opinion. And so 90% of the dialogue in that film is from court transcripts. And he actually made us adjust a scene where a 12-year-old boy who has been abusing another girl, we have him teasing a dog. And we had to cut that back because there was no evidence that this character had been teasing a dog in this way.

**Craig:** Oh, well.

**Irene:** It’s a standard.

**Craig:** And is that 90-year-old lawyer still available? Because he sounds great. Or has he since moved on?

**Irene:** I don’t know. And I’m trying to forget him because I got stuck at the last minute with annotating everything and anything. And it was not easy.

**Craig:** Well, you know what? Maybe we’re free to slander him at this point. You know, if he’s, you know.

**Irene:** Dead? Yeah.

**John:** So your movie, people can see it starting on March 24 on Netflix, correct?

**Irene:** March 24 on Netflix. Yes. Worldwide day-and-date. Which is crazy to me. You want to see Melissa Leo in Spanish, Italian, French, go to it.

**Craig:** That’s so great. And she is, from what I hear – I mean, obviously I haven’t seen it yet because it’s not out – but I hear that she, as per usual, is spectacular in this role.

**Irene:** She is Melissa Leo-ing all over the Melissa Leo and she is great. If you don’t like Melissa Leo, don’t watch this film because she dominates it in a really great way. Like there’s a fabulous supporting cast and things like that, but the center of it is Madalyn. So, and she is–

**Craig:** The Most Hated Woman in America. So that’s Netflix. March 24. Melissa Leo. Josh Lucas. Adam Scott. Pretty great cast you go there. Directed by your writing partner, Tommy O’Haver.

**Irene:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Well fantastic. Congratulations. But I feel like we should use you here because you’re obviously good at this. Because what we like to do is find these articles and try and figure out how would they be a movie. And you’re kind of an expert at that. So would you be willing to help us with this?

**Irene:** I would love to.

**Craig:** Well–

**John:** Very good.

**Craig:** John, we’ve got ourselves a partner.

**John:** We got a partner here. So, our first story is The New Underground Railroad. It’s a New Yorker article by Jake Halpern. So it’s centered around a safe house in Buffalo, New York, where asylum seekers from around the world prepare to flee the United States for Canada. So, it’s based around this New Yorker article, but I actually first encountered this as part of a Trumpcast episode, Slate’s Trumpcast, where Halpern did an interview with Virginia Heffernan and it was a really great piece. And so if you are a podcast person, which you probably are because you’re listening to this podcast, I would actually go to the podcast first because it’s really great and it gets much more into Halpern’s reporting of the story which I find is also fascinating.

So, guys, how are we going to start digging into this story because there’s a lot here? So, we’re looking at this house, basically this old abandoned schoolhouse called Vive, which is founded by these nuns, and it’s been a safe house for asylum seekers since 1984. We have the different asylum seekers who are coming through here. We have Halpern himself. Where do we want to start with the idea of this as a movie?

**Craig:** Irene, what do you think?

**Irene:** Hahaha, I knew you were going to make me start.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Irene:** I mean, it’s a great setting for a movie. And there’s the potential for great characters. And what intrigues me about it, and it’s the sort of thing I would have enjoyed doing, is it’s a spin on all the kind of movies where people are trying to get into the United States. And so the spin on people, A, trying to get out. People undergoing great hardships to both get here and then to get to Canada.

And also these individuals’ stories, there’s so many of them. I mean, the problem for me would be like picking the right stories of the right refugees and also avoiding the trap of going in, you know, kind of from the American protagonist. That you want to make sure that you’ve got a variety of voices in there. Kind of picking the characters and picking the separate journeys. The other problem that just struck me right away was make sure you haven’t set yourself up for a play. Because this sanctuary is so isolated and contained and just kind of know where you’re going to be able to break out of it and see parts of the – you know, like the containment. Make sure you’re not writing a play.

**Craig:** That is absolutely the thing that jumped out at me as well. I was very concerned with the insularity of it and the internal nature of it, because it really is in this one small house in a terrible neighborhood. A neighborhood that’s so bad that they warn everybody, “Don’t leave the house.” They even describe it sort of quasi-prison like in a sense, even though they’re willingly there. But it is cramped and it is small. And they are using this really to funnel people, as you said, sort of in and then out. So it seems to me if I were approaching this material, I would probably start by saying this is not going to be a movie about this house. This house is going to be one part of a movie that is about being a refugee and your relationship to the United States and your relationship to the world and the struggles that you have.

And I guess I would probably call Stephen Gaghan up and just say, “Hey Stephen, remember doing Traffic? Do you remember doing Syriana? Can you do that again, but about immigration?” Because it just seems like this is in his wheelhouse to gather disparate stories – a government official, a fleeing person, a nun, a border patrol. Telling all sides of this story so that all of the proverbial blind men feeling the elephant, we get the whole elephant. It just feels like I would want to Gaghan this up.

**John:** Yeah. I definitely was thinking of Syriana and I was also thinking of Babel, where you have these separate stories being told in different parts of the world. And basically you’re setting up these characters who are all going to cross through this nexus and then try to find their way into Canada through different means. And so let’s talk about who some of these characters are. I’m going to pick out three, but there’s more who are in the world of the story.

The first we meet is Tita. She’s an Eritrean woman. She’s trying to reunite with her family who are already in Canada. She has a husband who she got married to at a previous refugee situation. So she was able to make it out of Africa, I think to somewhere in Europe, then to Brazil, then to Mexico. Then she crossed the border and she made her way to Buffalo, New York. So she has this huge journey, paying this trafficker $15,000 to get her to this place.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And still not quite sure if she’s going to be able to get back to her husband and her young son who doesn’t really necessarily remember her. So she’s got an amazing story.

**Craig:** And she’s sort of married. But the marriage is a religious marriage and it’s not a government-recognized marriage, so there’s – actually one of the things about that story that really jumped out at me was how important paperwork suddenly becomes. And in just now your life is in limbo because of papers.

**Irene:** Papers define who you are. It defines your personhood. It makes you either a person or a non-person, or someone who can go places or can’t. And we’re not used to that for those of us who are not refugees or whose families have been in this country for a long time. That being defined by a piece of paper says what and who you are.

**Craig:** That part of it I found fascinating.

**John:** Absolutely. So another character who we follow through this, and I think Halpern has the most direct relationship with, is Fernando. He’s the young Columbian man fleeing gang violence. So he’s made his way to Vive and he’s trying to find his way across. And so this is where we get into a strange part of the immigration law here. Whatever country, either US or Canada, that you enter into first, that has to be the place where you’re supposed to be seeking asylum. And so if he were just to cross the border and try to get asylum in Canada, they would just send him right back. And so there’s a loophole though: if he can cross further into Canada and go to not a place on the border, but deeper in, he can seek asylum.

So he’s trying to find a way to get across from New York into Canada and get deep enough in that he can go to a place and sort of try to document himself there.

Here we have a young man fleeing gang violence. He’s the most action-adventure things that are happening in the New York/American section of the story.

**Irene:** Oh yeah. Absolutely. Because there’s that tension in his journey. How far is he going to get? I mean, he really needs to get – it’s not just step over a line and then freedom. You’re outside of the Eastern Bloc. You’re over the Berlin Wall, and then it’s done, in the ‘70s, or things like that. And he’s also got the most tenuous situation in terms of he’s not coming from a war-torn country. In a sense it’s a gang-torn country and he’s seeking asylum for those kind of reasons. And those are more difficult.

And so, yes, his journey is very fraught. And the physicality of that. That gets you outside that box.

**John:** Absolutely. What I liked about it is like if you follow Tita’s journey, it’s like a long journey. There’s a lot of little speedbumps along the way. But his is the most like an action movie, where he literally is going into a dark field and not sure what’s on the far side. And it’s that panic of getting lost and falling in a river and nearly freezing to death. He has the most sort of movie adventure beats. It’s also nice that that probably happened late in the story when you’ve already gotten to this place of comparable safety.

**Craig:** There’s something inherently ironic, which we’re always looking for. Somebody is escaping violence and the escape from violence is putting them in a situation where they might die.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And that’s what we’re afraid of in the back of our head. That the narrative is leading us to that Twilight Zone ending. And so we’re so, so hopeful we don’t get that.

**Irene:** Yes. The stakes are very, very high for all of them and especially him.

**John:** So the last characters I’ll single out are the two Mohammeds. They’ve come from Afghanistan. They are both soldiers. They’re here in the US for training. And so they have a day off where they go to Washington, DC. They don’t get back on the bus. Instead they’ve hooked up with an Afghan family who has gotten them up to this haven in Buffalo, New York. And that’s where they’re trying to make the crossover into Canada. They are the only of the stories that we’re singling out here where they were not successful and they are ultimately sent back to Afghanistan.

So they were trying to get out of Afghanistan because they were going to be assigned to watch over the poppy fields and they felt like they were going to die if they went back to Afghanistan. So, they felt their life was in huge danger if they go back. And ultimately they are sent back. So I think we learned the least about them in the story, but I liked that they were coming in a very different way than the other two characters.

**Irene:** Also, John, I think their story is good and maybe if you were diving further into this you might find another one that’s good as well. But you have to show the refugees that don’t make it. That get turned back. It can’t just be the feel good story of the ones that got through, because that’s not the real situation, and you kind of have a duty to make sure that you’re showing the heartbreak and the sadness as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. This one, I think the value was that there is failure at the end of it, but probably would want a little something else going on here. I would want a parent who had lost a child. Or I would want someone falling in love with another person. They don’t even speak the same language, but they’re two refugees who have both lost people they love, and now they’re in this little house and they fall in love. And then one of them gets to move on, and one of them has to go back.

So, I want something a little bit more. The nature of their story, I mean, obviously in a true-life sense is tragic. But in a narrative sense, didn’t – I would probably veer away from the specificity of it, because I’m not sure I would get enough drama that I would want. Or a different kind of drama.

**Irene:** Yeah. I was fascinated and the article didn’t go into them as much, but their residence – they tried to make private rooms for the people who just had been there forever. And who couldn’t move. And that’s hard to show cinematically. But as a small thread of a larger picture, there’s a residence there and I would try and show it.

**John:** So let’s talk about what the characters might be in this movie. So, there’s obviously the people who are running the organization. So it was originally created by nuns. It’s no longer really run by nuns. And some of the people who are working there are former refugees who have been through the system or are there for one reason or another. Also, a question of whether Halpern himself becomes a character in the story. Because especially in the podcast I listened to, he’s a very big character in the Fernando story. And there’s a really interesting line of like as a journalist does he cross over or not cross over in terms of like giving advice to this kid who is trying to make it across. And he has the normal human and kind of paternal feelings of like I don’t want this kid to die out in the woods. And yet as a journalist he needs to step back and sort of like report the story and not create the story.

So, he’s a potentially interesting character, but also potentially troubling for the sort of white savior aspect of this character in this movie. What did you guys think?

**Craig:** Well, on that front I actually never really find the crusading journalist character particularly, well, let’s not call them crusading journalist, but the protective journalist character, it just feels like a false struggle. Because I don’t have that problem in my life because I’m not a journalist. So it’s something that’s very specific. It’s a very specific ethical problem for journalists. I’m not sure I would love to watch that unfold on screen.

If I’m watching a border patrol guy who catches him and has to bring him back, and then catches him again and brings him back, and then the third time he thinks he’s going to go out there again and he might die tonight because of X, Y, or Z, what should I do. That I find compelling. And it’s not about savoir. It’s just about two people on the opposite side of a fight discovering this shared humanity. I would probably go in that direction more than the journalist direction.

**Irene:** Yeah it’s not The Year of Living Dangerously, or you know, films where journalists are going into hot spots and trying to bring back a story that people need to hear. In that sense it’s not that you couldn’t have him as a minor character, but I think it would be a mistake to make him kind of the eyes of the audience character, or the protagonist, or starting the story on him starting this story. I think it would be problematic.

**John:** I agree. So let’s talk about this as a movie. And so where do we see a movie like this happening? Like what are the scenarios in which this kind of movie could exist?

**Craig:** Netflix. Amazon.

**Irene:** We love us some Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s not a studio film.

**John:** Oh, I think it is a studio movie. I think this to me feels like the studio’s Oscar movie. So this to me feels like an A24, it feels like we’re going to go for it and we’re going to push. And I think because it’s timely, because it does have the possibility of some really big visuals, because you’re going to a lot of different environments, so you get to go to Africa, you get to go to Afghanistan, you go to Mexico. So I just feel like you’re going to be able to find the filmmaker, probably the international filmmaker, who is the right person for this. And I think you’re going to be able to do something great.

**Irene:** Cast-dependent. You better right that script so well that that name cast comes in kind of brings it up to an Oscar-bait movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, even A24, you’re still talking about an independent financed film. But it would have to be – yeah, so I mean a studio could pick it up and release it, but I totally agree with Irene. This is where you need somebody like Matt Damon for Syriana, or you need, well, all of the people that you had in Traffic. Quite a collection of actors.

**Irene:** An Idris Elba. You know, kind of a cast that combines on that kind of level where they’re really making interesting choices and give actors meaty roles.

**Craig:** Right. Like Emily Blunt is in Sicario. I’m not sure you can get Sicario made without Emily Blunt. So, I think that that’s correct. And this, by the way, this is part of the problem that writers run into when they’re trying to avoid the white savior problem, and then what happens is a lot times the foreign sales people, because in independent films the independent film financiers aren’t going to do it unless they can presale the film overseas. And the foreign sales entities are saying, “Well we need one of the following list of stars. And they have to be the star.” And they’re all white. And now what do you do? This is where it gets insidious. This is a movie that has to be pretty carefully – so I guess what I’m saying is I don’t see it as a mainstream studio developed project.

I think it would be independent and then released.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a version of this where it’s sort of like a Plan B, Brad Pitt, you know, like 12 Years a Slave is an example of a movie that you’re able to make because, yes, he can play one part in it, but like it just has enough high class people around it that people are going to – a studio will roll the dice and spend the money they need to spend on making this movie. And, yes, it’s very execution dependent, but in good execution you’ve made a movie that could do really well.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a movie to be made about immigration and the state of being a refugee in the world today. I don’t know if the halfway house is where I would begin. I guess I would put it that way. I think it’s a little bottleneck-y for me.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get on to our next story. This is called You May Want to Marry My Husband. It is by Amy Krouse Rosenthal writing for the New York Times Modern Love section. So Rosenthal, who at the time of writing the article was dying from cancer, makes the pitch for potential suitors about why her husband is such a catch. So it’s her writing about her husband and how great he is. And how much she’ll miss him, yet also ladies pay attention. This is a guy you want to keep on your list. Where do we start with this kind of movie? Who wants to take this off?

**Irene:** Well, this is so outside the kind of movie that I might write. The problem with this is, and I’m guessing it has been optioned because it got so much buzz, and the author has since passed away. The article itself is sort of a jumping off point. There’s so many questions I have. Is it about their relationship? The article makes me want to read her memoir and read more, actually more about her husband to see if there’s – like what’s the story?

We’ve kind of seen the movies, like is it Step Mom with Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon, where Susan Sarandon is dying and Julia Roberts is going to kind of mother her kids and things. Is it the husband’s story after the author of the article has passed away, has died? It’s really – I looked at it and I went, wow, I’m glad nobody offered me a lot of money to adapt this because it’s got like a thousand directions you could go. And I’m not sure what the right one would be.

**Craig:** Well, it’s very sad, obviously, and it’s very sweet. Amy Krouse Rosenthal is an excellent writer. You can see that she’s just in total command of her art. And here she is. Actually the first line says, “I’ve been trying to write this for a while, but the morphine and lack of juicy cheeseburgers (what has it been now, five weeks without real food?) have drained my energy and interfered with whatever prose prowess remains.”

Well, I disagree. That’s a pretty amazing sentence. And she wrote this on March 3. She died ten days later. It is a beautiful thing and it is the scariest kind of thing to try and turn into a movie because the potential for what snopes.com calls Glurge is extraordinarily high here.

**John:** Define Glurge for us here.

**Irene:** Yes please.

**Craig:** Glurge is, they apply it generally to things that you might see passed around on Facebook and so forth. They are incredibly sentimental, sweet, sappy, tear-jerky stories about dying children or puppies who are missing a leg. Or a grandmother that reunites with her long-lost twin. And it’s so – it’s glurge. It’s overtly whip out your Kleenex time and cry.

So, when you’re talking about a woman penning a letter to America saying, “Won’t one of you marry my husband because I love him very, very much and I’m about to die,” I’m already going, OK, this is very–

**Irene:** It’s saved by her prose, but the movie doesn’t have her prose.

**Craig:** It doesn’t. The movie doesn’t have her voice. Now, you could theoretically create a sense where she’s over the movie like a Ghost, obviously you don’t see her, but you hear her.

**Irene:** But like Ghost. Not the thriller-ish, but yeah.

**Craig:** The way that Kevin Spacey is doing the voiceover in American Beauty and as it turns out he’s dead the whole time. You can hear this voice. But even so, again, the potential for glurge is high. And as a writer, I would not take this job on because specifically I feel like she did what she had to do. She wrote this article. Those were her words. That was her feeling. She did it beautifully. Who needs me to come along and turn it into fake drama? It just seems gross.

So out of respect, frankly, even though I could come up with all sorts of easy, cheapo ways to do this, I wouldn’t. I just wouldn’t.

**John:** I’m not that scared about the glurge. Yes, there’s a lot to be avoided, but I think there’s a lot to sort of lean into here as well. So, yes, we have to be mindful that part of what makes this article so effective is her voice is just so terrific. And we won’t have that literary voice in the movie. But I think you do have a generosity of spirit, a sense of what is special about these two people’s relationship. And to be able to see that is a good thing.

And so while the headline, which she probably didn’t write the headline because they rarely write their own headlines, the headline by itself feels like a great – obviously a great Facebook title, but it’s also a good title for a movie in general. But I think the movie itself may want to be that story of tracking their relationship and sort of like what do you do with that relationship when you know it’s going to end. It’s sort of what happens to a marriage as the kids move out and you have all these plans. And the plans are taken away from you because of this diagnosis.

And we’ve seen the bad version of that so many times. But a really good version of that, a James L. Brooks version of that could be something remarkable. And so I think that’s the opportunity here. How do you take a tragedy and find some good in it? And that’s what she was able to do in her piece. And I think that’s the challenge for anyone trying to take this story and move it to the big screen is finding what is the fresh, engaging way to deal with this thing that could be so horrible. And I think that’s the opportunity.

That’s why I think there is a reason to be thinking about this as a movie.

**Irene:** The thing is it made me want to read her memoir to learn more about her as a person because the article is so much obviously about him and what she wants to leave for him. And that’s how I kind of discover whether I think there was more of a movie in it than this thing right here. Yeah, it scares me. It’s way outside what I generally do and I – ooh.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? I can like to write sentimentally at times. I just feel like – almost feel like this story has put its thumb on the scale so heavily that it doesn’t need me. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s like it doesn’t need me. I would be working really hard to say look at this fresh interesting take on this very sad and yet beautiful thing this woman did. And I just don’t think we need it. This is why I shouldn’t be running a studio, because I’m sure every studio would be like, “Yeah, of course we’re going to make this.”

**Irene:** And it would turn into a Nicholas Sparks movie.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, that’s the thing. It would.

**Irene:** And I can’t write Nicholas Sparks movies. But I couldn’t write, you know, the version that I would want to write, that would be tough.

**Craig:** See, if somebody came to me and said, “Look, we want you to write a movie and we have an idea. And the idea is a woman is dying and she writes a letter to America saying you should marry my husband.” I would say, oh, that’s an amazing idea. I know how to write that movie. And I could see all sorts of fascinating ways to approach it. Not the least of which is tracking this man as these women appear to him because it worked. But he’s so broken and yet so alone and lost and ashamed to think that maybe he would—

There’s a whole exploration of grief and recovery and finding new love. But because it’s real, I don’t want to do it. It feels creepy.

**John:** Craig, is it because it’s real or is it because it’s successful? Like if you had come across this thing and it was not a giant popular article, would you be as scared of it? I don’t think you would be. I have to believe that it’s because this is a big thing out there, and so there’s a giant spotlight on her and this one thing. But if it was just a little thing that only you knew about, you wouldn’t be so worried about it.

**Craig:** No, I wouldn’t. But that’s the point. It’s that there wouldn’t be a thumb on the scale. Because this is so well known, and because she did a brilliant job of achieving her goal here, I’m just kind of using it. It’s like I’m using her pain and her beauty and her brilliance to get you to cry in a movie theater and fork over $12 and buy some popcorn. It just doesn’t feel right.

**John:** Yeah. So I go back to Big Fish. And so I read Big Fish when it was a book. And Daniel Wallace wrote a great book. And it’s really a lot of stories about him and his dad, but I was able to take that and say like, OK, I can’t really use those directly, but it’s a way for me to talk about the things that I want to talk about and incorporate what I knew sort of about that whole world and that emotional terrain. And so I feel like, yes, her story is going to be the jumping off point, but I think there’s great material to explore and great intra-emotional material to explore given this framework.

**Craig:** But Big Fish is fiction.

**John:** But it’s not entirely fiction, though. I mean, yes, it’s fantastical, but the emotional stuff underneath it.

**Craig:** Oh, sure, sure, but it’s different.

**John:** No, but I’m saying Daniel’s relationship with his father, that is the story of Big Fish. And so I was taking a lot of his own personal stuff and mucking around with it. But that’s the nature of what adaptation is.

**Craig:** Yes, but–

**Irene:** The tricky thing with this article is it’s her voice as the voice of the article, and yet if we’re speaking in screenwriter terms, she’s the character who is dying and do you then write a film – you know if it’s an idea as Craig said, then do you write the film about the guy in recovery trying to navigate this post-Amy world? Then that’s something I can kind of see, and yet her voice is so strong that you don’t want to negate that. So then do you write the film that leads up to that? Or do you do double stands?

It scares me. I admit it. Raising hand.

**John:** Yeah. I get why it’s scary. Before we finish this up, I do want to circle back to the Nicholas Sparks of it all. Because I think we’re using Nicholas Sparks as a shorthand for sort of like the bad version of this kind of movie. And just like we sometimes we’ll throw Katherine Heigl for like the bad version of romantic comedies. But we can’t be paralyzed about a whole genre just because there’s bad versions out there that we’re afraid we’re going to trip into. Like there’s bad versions of sort of every genre. I just think there’s potentially a great version of this movie. We shouldn’t be afraid of writing the great version of this movie.

**Craig:** I agree with you. Look, and the truth is I like The Notebook. My issue with Nicholas Sparks’ movies is that there have been so many of them. And they aren’t different enough that over time I feel like I don’t need see them. I saw The Notebook. It was very sweet.

The problem with the Sparks-ing of a story like this isn’t that Nicholas Sparks’ movies are inherently bad. Not at all. It’s that this is real. And it is public. And we have all seen it. And it was specifically intended to be real and public and personal. And none of the Nicholas Sparks stories are real at all. They’re just made up – they’re made up glurge. But they’re oftentimes well done glurge.

**Irene:** Some of them are really great and some of it have become a little bit of a factory.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. This to me – look, you’re going to make all the money on this.

**Irene:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But Irene and I will be here like, yeah, but you know what, we kept it real.

**John:** You kept it real. So, our third and final topic for today is about Prenda. And so this is the movie that you’ve not ever seen before. So, I originally put in the outline this article by Nate Anderson who is writing for Ars Technica about Prenda, but it’s actually so obscure and so far at the end of this story that I think honestly the Wikipedia article is a better place to start your adventures in Prenda.

So, in the early 2010s, a Chicago-based law firm named Prenda Law went after porn downloaders for copyright infringement. And so this is from a different Ars Technica article by Joe Mullen. “The basic scheme worked like this. Prenda Law, or one of several attorneys who worked for the law firm, would file a copyright lawsuit over illegal downloads against a ‘John Doe’ defendant they knew only by an IP address. They would then use the discovery process to find out the subscriber name from various ISPs around the country. Once they got it, they’d send out letters and phone calls demanding a settlement payment, typically around $4,000, warning the defendant that if they didn’t pay quickly they would face public allegations over downloading porn.”

**Craig:** These guys were so brilliant. What an amazing plot. So they’re like, OK, so they’re sitting at home and they go, you know how the Recording Industry Association of America, they send out these letters to people they occasionally catch file-sharing songs, and then they jack them up for a grand or two. We can do that. Oh yeah, we could, but we don’t actually have stuff we own. Well, let’s make some stuff. Let’s make porn and then let’s put it out there ourselves, then let’s watch it, make sure somebody downloads it “illegally.” Then we’ll send them a letter and they’ll totally pay up, because if they don’t everybody is going to find out because we’re going to file a court case that they were watching our screwed up porn.

It’s genius. And it almost worked.

**Irene:** It’s genius. It’s evil. It’s hilarious in a certain sense. And you would totally want to see these guys get caught.

**Craig:** I would totally see this. And I should add that I have a personal friend, a great guy named Ken White, who is a criminal defense attorney. He used to be a federal prosecutor. And he is also the primary author at the website Popehat, which is a pretty popular blog that talks about legal issues about rights.

**Irene:** It’s a great blog.

**Craig:** It’s terrific. Freedom of speech, and so on and so forth. And he has been all over Prenda since the start. He was one of the big – the early investigators of their whole – because somebody basically forwarded him one of the takedown letters that Prenda had sent. And he smelled a rat from the start. I mean, this feels like a Coen Brothers scheme, doesn’t it?

**John:** It does. So I think it’s great that you brought up the Coen Brothers, because I was really having hard time figuring out what are we actually seeing on screen and who are we following. Because they’re so despicable. So ultimately they claim to have raked in about $15 million, or at some points they have claimed $15 million. There’s reasons to doubt that because there’s reasons to doubt everything they’ve ever said.

So in a 2013 civil ruling, they were found to have undertaken vexatious litigation, misrepresentation, calculated deception, professional misconduct, and to have shown moral turpitude.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I think Coen Brothers, Craig, is a really interesting way to go into that, because it allows it to be like nasty and fun at the same time. Because I was worried it was just going to be nasty. And I don’t want to just see a nasty movie.

**Craig:** No, I think it’s hysterical this thing. I mean, look, you’ve got these guys, Paul Hansmeier and John Steele. Right off the bat, those names are amazing, right? And it does feel like Fargo. Like you’re watching weasels turning on each other. These guys, if you read all about this, I mean, they were inventing fake people and there was some guy that they said worked for them and he literally didn’t work for them, but he knew them vaguely. And they were just using his address.

They just get deeper and deeper, and what’s so beautiful about Paul Hansmeier and John Steele as far as I can tell, because I never met these two people, they’re actually not that smart. They’re just ambitious as hell. And watching them get hoisted by their own petard over and over is so incredibly satisfying. So, I just think I would approach this from the black comedy perspective. What about you, Irene?

**Irene:** Absolutely. I mean, everybody likes to see evil lawyers go down. I mean, seriously, it’s almost a trope, and it’s fun every time. And their machinations are so ridiculous. And so all of it, it’s funny. I don’t know if you guys have seen I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore, which won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance – now streaming on Netflix.

**Craig:** There you go.

**Irene:** Oh, I hope Netflix is listening. I love you guys. But yeah, that’s also kind of a Blood Simple-esque story with Melanie Lynskey–

**Craig:** I got to watch it, because I love Melanie Lynskey.

**John:** We all love Melanie.

**Irene:** If you love her, you should see it. It’s an indie – it’s good.

**Craig:** Done. Sold.

**Irene:** But everyone says, oh, you have to have a sympathetic character to follow and we all know that that’s insane. And I mean I keep writing about difficult people and, you know, people who are tough to love and problematic situations and complications are fun and interesting. They make better films. And even these guys, just the joy of watching these guys go down would be just great to write.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you’ll get a natural good guy in the lawyer that’s pursuing, but it’s that Texas, Murdering Texas Chainsaw.

**Irene:** Cheerleader.

**Craig:** The Cheerleader Mom. It’s just watching these petty creepy people who are just greedy little monsters. And they just aren’t anywhere near as smart as they think they are. And just watching the walls close in on them is delicious.

**John:** So, how do we see this though? Is this Fargo on the big screen, or is this Fargo on the small screen? Is this better as a movie, or is this better as a TV show or as a season of a TV show? How do we do this?

**Craig:** Again, it’s casting-dependent entirely. But I could see this absolutely being on the big screen. It’s not going to be some big summer movie, but if you’ve got the right people and you had a great trailer where you really were laughing – and obviously make this for a price, right? So, like the way John Lee made The Founder or something like that. You make this for $20 million and you cast two terrific. You know, you cast Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as Hansmeier and Steele, or whoever. You know, McConaughey and whatever. And you just have fun with it. Yeah, I think you could do just fine.

I mean, keep the expectations low. But it seems like it would be entertaining as hell.

**Irene:** I think you could do the $5 million Get Out version of it, too. You know, kind of the – it feels more like a film because I’m not sure there’s enough substance in there to go ten episodes in terms of twists and back and forth. I mean, it would depend on who I was pitching to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Irene:** Maybe I could find a TV series if I thought I could get a job doing one, but I think I would probably aim for a film version.

**John:** I could also see like Seth Rogan and sort of his folks, Jonah Hill. I could see a version of that that uses those kind of people in there, because that’s sort of the new batch of people we have who do this kind of comedy. And they could do a great job. So, I can see the big screen version of it. But I can also imagine a small screen version of this working.

**Irene:** Actors love playing larger-than-life assholes.

**Craig:** They do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No question. So do I, by the way. I don’t know if people have noticed.

**John:** We’ve heard the voices, Craig.

**Craig:** I have so many different voices.

**John:** Ugh, so many. So at the end of these we like to figure out which of these How Would This Be a Movie will actually become movies. And our batting average has been remarkably good. So, usually if we’ve singled something out, like someone is going to make that as a movie, within a few weeks someone has optioned the rights to that. So, of these three, which do we think are the most likely to become actual movies?

**Craig:** Well, unfortunately I think if the estate of Amy Krouse Rosenthal or Amy herself prior to her passing agreed to sell the film rights to her New York Times essay, that will certainly be bought and somebody will attempt to make it. I don’t think they should, but fine. And I think that’s probably it. I don’t really imagine that we’re going to see a Prenda movie. Maybe on cable. I think it would be great, but unless somebody like the Coen Brothers comes along, I just don’t think it’s going to happen. And I have to say I don’t think the Underground Railroad is a movie.

**Irene:** I would love to see the Underground Railroad get made. It’s just in the realistic look at what does get made, it’s tough. I mean, I feel like the Prenda stuff, I mean, you’d have to go in with attachments and pitch it with attachments. Or spec it or things like that. It would really need to start with more things worked out than are in an article right now.

**Craig:** And what about the You Want to Marry My Husband?

**Irene:** It’s got so much reach and so widespread that it feels like unless the estate, or you know her husband, unless they’re so wrapped up in her passing away, which is so recent, it just feels like it’s inevitably going to get made because those kind of cultural events like that tend to.

**Craig:** Unless they don’t agree to sell the rights.

**Irene:** Yeah. They may not. It may not be what he wants to do. So, or what she wanted to do.

**Craig:** What do you think, John?

**John:** So, I actually think the most likely movie to get made is the Underground Railroad. I think we will see an announcement about rights on this within the next two months. I think someone will try to make this movie.

**Irene:** I hope you’re right.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure.

**John:** I agree with you that the You Should Marry My Husband is either – it’s all a question of whether they agree to sell the rights to this or not. And I can see good arguments both ways. I didn’t think there was any chance of the Prenda movie, but you guys actually completely convinced me that there is a movie here. Because I was not seeing the black comedy part of it. And that makes it delightful.

So, if the Prenda movie happens, I think it will be because we helped frame some borders on that. And I think we deserve our 1% take on that.

**Craig:** Get a little taste.

**John:** A little taste. Just a little off the top there. It’s time for our One Cool Things. So, Craig, why don’t you start?

**Craig:** Well, my One Cool Thing is super easy this week. It’s obvious, how could it not be, a new podcast. I know, hold on a second. Everyone is going, “Wait, wait, wait, wait. You don’t listen to podcasts.” And that’s true. I don’t. Except when this happens. New podcast called You Had Us At Hello, cohosted by Tess Morris, our beloved Tess, and Billy Mernit. And I believe it’s going to be a limited run podcast, but it’s basically the two of them discussing romantic comedies, the writing of, producing of romantic comedies. Why they love the ones they love.

Tess Morris, as most of you know, friend of our show. Screenwriter of the most excellent Man Up. And Billy Mernit wrote a book called Writing the Romantic Comedy, which was highly influential for Tess. Billy also works in the story department at Universal where he reads every script that everybody writes over there and puts all the notes down on paper for all of us. So, including a lot of my work. And so I am grateful to Billy and his whole crew over there. So, I’m definitely going to listen to this. And I think we might even have – a little sampler for people?

**John:** We do. So at the end of our show, after our outro, you can hear about ten minutes of this first episode that they did. What I love so much about it is it’s completely Tess. And so you can hear the teacups and the china. And you can hear the dogs barking in the background. And it feels like two good friends sitting around a table, talking about their favorite subject which is romantic comedies. So, congratulations Tess.

**Craig:** You know the only thing that could possibly make it better?

**John:** Oh, no. It would make it much, much worse, Craig.

**Craig:** No, I don’t think it would, John.

**John:** I thought you were going to do Sexy Craig. The Bane is actually probably much worse in this.

**Craig:** Is that tea? Are you drinking tea, Billy?

**John:** Irene, do you have a One Cool Thing to save us?

**Irene:** You know what? Watch I Don’t Feel At Home in this World Anymore. I really liked it. And Melanie Lynskey is great. And I’ve loved her since Heavenly Creatures. And if you don’t want to watch that on Netflix, watch Heavenly Creatures.

**Craig:** You know I have the biggest crush on Melanie Lynskey. I mean, I’m friends with her husband, so I can’t–

**Irene:** You can’t do anything about it?

**Craig:** Or, I don’t know, are they married? Jason Ritter. Greatest guy. Yeah, no, no, no. It’s a platonic crush.

**Irene:** Don’t we all carry just like a little flame for Melanie Lynskey? Just like a teeny bit?

**John:** We all do. 100%.

**Craig:** And literally the nicest person I’ve ever met in my life. She’s the greatest. You can’t even believe.

**Irene:** I am so happy to hear that. Because there are some actors I don’t want to hear that they’re terrible in real life.

**Craig:** I know. Well, like I want her to be my mom.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s amazing. So I’m going to totally watch that.

**John:** That’s good. My One Cool Thing this week is two apps, but it’s really more kind of a concept. It’s called Couch to 5K. It’s this idea that if you’re a person who does not run, but you want to learn how to run, that’s sort of the couch part of it. Like you’ve been sitting on a couch for a long time. You can get up to running a 5K race pretty easily. It just takes a couple weeks of training. And basically every other day you’re sort of building up a little bit more, a little bit more. So you have the app that’s sort of talking you through when you’re walking and when you’re running, and it gets you up to running a 5K.

So, I did the 5K version of this when I was back in LA. I’ve done the 10K version of it here in Paris. And so I can now run a 10K, which is sort of remarkable. Because I’m not a person who ever was sort of born to run. But it’s been great. So, I’ll put links to these two apps in the show notes.

But there’s actually a lot of other apps, so while I like these apps, you should try some other ones because they all work a little bit differently. But they’re all gradually up to running a full 10K.

**Craig:** Wonderful. Good. Will keep you alive.

**John:** That is our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Victor Krause. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. For short questions, I am on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Irene, you’re on Twitter?

**Irene:** I am. @renila.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** I should follow you. Do I follow you?

**Irene:** I don’t know that you do.

**Craig:** I’m gonna. Doing it right now.

**John:** It’s so interesting to hear you pronounce it, because I would pronounce it Renila. But it’s like Irena LA. So, yeah, it makes much more sense.

**Irene:** Everybody does. It came from like an old online dating handle, Renila, from like 10 years ago. And so it’s short, so it became my Twitter handle.

**Craig:** Following.

**John:** Following. We are on Facebook. You can search for Scriptnotes podcast. Find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Leave us a review. We’ll love you for it. We might even read it aloud. Also, while you’re on iTunes, you can download the Scriptnotes app. There’s an equivalent Android app. That’s right now the only way to get to all of the back episodes of the show. So we have 292 previous episodes, plus bonus episodes.

**Craig:** So many.

**John:** You go, you subscribe to those. It’s $2 a month. Show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We’ll try to get those up a couple days after. But in the show notes you’ll find links to Irene’s movie, which is on Netflix, so you can watch that.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And all the things we talked about, including the articles. And, Irene, it was so great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming in.

**Irene:** I love you, John. I love you, Craig.

**Craig:** We love you, too. And congratulations on your movie.

**Irene:** Thank you so much. It’s good to get things made.

**Craig:** Isn’t it?

**John:** It’s the best.

**Irene:** It is so good. Ah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** See you guys.

**Craig:** See you next week, John.

Links:

* [Most Hated Woman in America | Official Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsAIPE2f0QQ)
* [The New Underground Railroad](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/the-underground-railroad-for-refugees)
* [A Safe House for Refugees](http://www.panoply.fm/podcasts/trumpcast/episodes/46O6tturlKCUeKq6sAUIEo)
* [You May Want to Marry My Husband](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/style/modern-love-you-may-want-to-marry-my-husband.html?)
* [Prenda, Copyright and Porn](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/its-official-prenda-copyright-trolls-made-their-own-porn-seeded-on-pirate-bay/)
* [Prenda Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law)
* [Couch to 5K](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/couch-to-5k-running-app-and-training-coach/id448474423?mt=8)
* [5K to 10K](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/5k-to-10k/id526458735?mt=8)
* [You Had Us At Hello](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/you-had-us-at-hello/id1215934253)
* [I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a891D5_bGY4)
* [Irene Turner](https://twitter.com/renila) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Victor Krause ([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_293.mp3).