Search Results for: outline

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome, my name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 660 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now one thing I love about our podcast is that we actively solicit suggestions on topics from our listeners. Today’s episode exists entirely because of one email we got. Craig, would you mind reading this email?

Craig: I would not. It says:

“Could you do an entire episode on why Moneyball works? A strange disease I have is watching the same movie over and over again when it affects me, and lately, it’s Moneyball. My older son has been doing this too lately, which I’m either proud of or worried about, and he was the one who landed on Moneyball, a movie I don’t even think I saw in theaters. I would very much welcome an expert understanding of why that movie, which contains so few of the traditional elements of a movie, a B-plot love story, for example, is so effective.” Side note, I challenge the premise.

John, I think we should do this.

John: I think we should. I think this is a great suggestion from any listener, but when it comes from an accomplished journalist, a best-selling novelist, she wrote Fleishman is in Trouble. She also wrote the acclaimed adaptation, the limited series adaptations of Fleishman is in Trouble, who we had her on the show to talk about that, and this summer’s new bestseller, Long Island Compromise. We had to get her on the show. Welcome back to the program, Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: It’s so great to be here. Thank you for having me again.

Craig: I love this. We have a genius on. This is great. I get to argue with her about Moneyball, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, and–

Taffy: Is it?

Craig: Extra thank you, Taffy, because we get to talk about baseball on a podcast where 50% of the people on this podcast don’t talk– They don’t even discriminate between various blank balls, basketball, football, baseball, it’s just sports ball to John, and I’m a baseball fanatic. I love Moneyball. I, too, have watched it over and over and over. I think it’s brilliant for so many reasons, and I do think it has all of the traditional elements of a movie, so, huh.

John: Wow.

Taffy: On the surface, the traditional–

Craig: We’ll get into it.

Taffy: Let’s go for it, let’s go for it.

Craig: We’ll discuss.

John: I agree with both of you. I think we’ll try to find the happy middle, the dialectic between these two polar opposites here. This joins your tradition of deep dives. We’ve done it on movies before, so we’ve talked about The Little Mermaid, we’ve talked about Frozen, we’ve talked about Die Hard.

Taffy: Clueless was one of my favorite deep dives.

John: Oh my God, Clueless, incredible. We’re going to do this. Also in our bonus segment for premium members, I would like to talk about money, because, Taffy, your book, Long Island Compromise, is about the intersection of trauma and money. Moneyball is literally about calculating how much a person is worth, so I thought we would dig into our feelings about money and value and how we value ourselves as writers. Money for our bonus segment, premium members.

Taffy: So good.

Craig: Amazing.

John: All right, Craig, you and I have a little bit of housekeeping to do before we can get on with Taffy here.

Craig: All right.

John: About two weeks from now, we are going to be in Austin for the Austin Film Festival. You and I are doing a live Scriptnotes show. I’m doing a 25th-anniversary screening of Go.

Craig: Oh, nice.

John: Yeah. I see that you are on at least one or two other panels. You’re doing the– I can’t believe they drafted you into doing the Pitch Finale. I don’t know how they–

Craig: You know what, I’m there. What else? It’s either I’m drinking while judging the Pitch Finale party, or I’m drinking and not judging the Pitch Finale party. I will say the thing about the– listen, I don’t care about pitches. I don’t think they make any sense. This is like, I don’t know why they keep picking me. They all know this. But it is fun because it’s in a bar, it’s packed, it’s kind of exciting. I feel like Simon Cowell, obviously that’s my part. I play Simon Cowell on the show, and we get to make somebody very, very happy, but the crowd is like really into it. That part I think is fun.

John: That part is fun. Drew will be there. Megana will be there. Craig, I don’t think that Megana’s going to come as well.

Craig: I am now levitating.

John: Chris who does our Inneresting Newsletter will be there as well. They’re there to help support Scriptnotes, but also because we’re launching the new version of Highland and so we’re going to throw a party for that. If you’re in Austin and whether you have your badge or don’t have your badge and you’d like to join us for this launch party for Highland, that’ll be on Thursday afternoon at some point. You need to click the link on the show notes and tell us that you want to come and then we’ll send you the details about that.

It should be a good fun time to see the new version of Highland that everybody else will be using. Let us get to the marquee topic here, Moneyball. We will talk about the development and probably at the end of this because there’s actually a really interesting development history that we can talk through. Let’s talk about the movie that we’re watching on the screen. It’s based on a book by Michael Lewis, screenplay by Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin.

Craig: Who?

John: Two hacks, they’ve never done anything else.

Craig: Can you imagine? That’s already screenwriting Voltron. That’s incredible.

Taffy: Right.

John: It is incredible. Story credit by Stan Chervin. Drew has found this undated 166-page draft. It has omitteds in it that makes it feel like it’s a production draft, but it’s not actually a very close representation of what we see on screen right now. Drew at some point made a hop in to tell us like, “This is a thing that was different in this draft as written versus the movie that we see.” Really for our purposes, we’re going to talk about the movie that we experienced.

If you were to download it as we’ve recently watched it, this is the movie we’re seeing. This is why it works on screen the way it works. Let’s get to the premise here because Taffy, you said that this quote contains so few of the traditional elements of the movie, like a B-plot love story, yet it’s so effective. What has been your experience and exposure to Moneyball and what prompted you to actually ask this question?

Taffy: Like I said in my email, my son has started watching Moneyball over and over. My son recites full scenes from Moneyball.

Craig: Yeah, he does.

Taffy: There are a couple of words that you could say that will trigger an entire scene. He is excellent at it. I’m not allowed to disseminate video of it, but I have video of it. In case you see me, I will show it to you.

Craig: Amazing.

John: I think you sent me a clip. We’re not going to post it–

Taffy: Did I?

John: Yes, I think you did.

Taffy: We started watching it a lot together. I have been a sports reporter, but before you get excited, Craig, I do not understand baseball on a level that I have had to, in ESPN Magazine stories, write, “please insert sports stuff here,” which is how it works sometimes if you’re bad. I think of baseball as the language Mandarin. You could learn it, but if you didn’t learn it before you were 11, you will never be fluent at it.

Craig: You might be onto something there because I certainly did learn it before I was 11.

Taffy: See. And by the way, I therefore think that there is something very, very– like I watch Moneyball over and over. I can now recite it. I still don’t know how baseball work. I think one of the successful things about it is that unlike the movie, also about a thing I don’t understand, Rounders? I don’t understand. When I watch Rounders, I don’t understand what I’m supposed to think based on the hand of cards that’s presented to me. I don’t feel that I am missing anything.

I feel like maybe these luminaries who wrote it may be learned about baseball, but understood more from my point of view than theirs, that you don’t need to know anything about baseball.

Craig: I agree with you. I’m running through my mental inventory of Moneyball and it teaches you the things you need to know along the way. You get a basic sense, okay, Billy Beane is the GM. That means he’s deciding who to trade, who to engage, but he doesn’t own the team. Then you have a bunch of scouts whose job, everybody played baseball and they’re old guys and they’re supposed to find you new talent. Then there’s this kid who’s helping him figure out with statistics, how do we solve this problem we have, which is that our team sucks.

One of my favorite quotes of any movie is Billy Beane, as played by Brad Pitt, defines the problem the Oakland A’s are having. You don’t need to know anything about baseball to understand this. “The problem we’re trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there’s 50 feet of crap and then there’s us. It’s an unfair game. If you try to think like the Yankees in here, you will lose to the Yankees out there.” Anyone can understand that. We are dealing with an underdog.

John: Let’s talk about digging into more of Taffy’s question. There are things that she is expecting to see in a movie like this that do not appear. Part of it, I think it’s also because the presentation of the movie is not what we might expect. It is shot almost like a documentary. It feels like a documentary at times. The camera’s very loose. There’s a lot of archival footage put in there. You feel like you’re watching things happen in front of the lens, but it’s not as presentational as we might expect from other movies.

Taffy: Can I just say also on that documentary note, we looked up all of the actors in this movie. Some of them are scouts and some of them are professional actors. The professional actors are not acting like professional actors.

Craig: They’re not.

Taffy: They’re acting like people who are in a documentary.

Craig: I’m so glad you said that.

Taffy: It’s amazing.

Craig: Because the person that I’m obsessed with the most, just on a tone point of view, is this actor named Ken Medlock who plays Grady. Grady is kind of the villain scout. He’s the guy who doesn’t want to hear about the idea– the basic premise of Moneyball is baseball’s been around for 100 years. It is imbued with tradition and old ways of thinking, the Oakland A’s are a poor team and they’re losing. This kid comes along from Yale and says, “There’s a better way of thinking about how to evaluate players.”

Grady represents the old guard who’s like, “You and Google boy– as he calls them– aren’t going to change baseball.” This guy, Ken Medlock, I was convinced was an actual baseball scout. He had baseball body, gym teacher face, and just the fluidity and realism of the way he portrayed that character. People don’t talk about a great character actor enough. Ken Medlock, you’re my one cool thing this week. I don’t care. Ken Medlock. So good.

Taffy: Is his name John Henry at the end who plays the owner of the Red Sox?

John: Arliss Howard plays him. Yes.

Taffy: Sorry, Arliss Howard plays John Henry.

Craig: The owner of the Boston Red Sox.

Taffy: The owner of the Boston Red Sox. He’s an actor, but he is acting like somebody I would have interviewed and is trying to figure out how to speak to somebody for the first time in front of a– it’s amazing.

Craig: It really is amazing.

Taffy: It’s like a third kind of movie, a thing that’s conveying itself as the thing we’re used to in a documentary from all these ESPN, 30 for 30 things, right?

Craig: Yes, this stiffness to it.

Taffy: So interesting.

Craig: Bennett Miller, who directed the film, also, a ton of credit there for just both the visual style and also keeping everything so wonderfully grittily grounded. You’re right, like an ESPN 30 for 30.

John: Well, let’s also talk about things you might expect to see in this movie. Let’s imagine that Michael Lewis’s book lands on your desk and like, okay, well, how do we adapt this book? How do we adapt this story? The very basics of the story is Billy Beane is the general manager of the Oakland A’s, has this team that is not winning, does not have the money to do what he needs to do. Ends up recruiting somebody on to help him figure out how to assemble a team in a much less expensive way that is the antithesis of how you’re supposed to be doing baseball.

We get this Michael Lewis book. The things we expect to see in a movie, like Taffy points out, is like, well, where is the B-story love interest? Where is the Brad Pitt love interest? You have Brad Pitt and he doesn’t kiss anybody in the whole movie. Now, Drew, the script that you gave us, there is a love interest in there. Talk to us about what’s different if we wanted to look at this script.

Drew: Yes, from the get-go, he has a girlfriend character who he’s bouncing things off of. A lot of those scenes get repurposed and given to Jonah Hill in the final thing. Yes, throughout, she pops up, they’ll have dinner and just little moments where he gets to talk to her and use her as a sounding board.

John: The movie is almost completely focused on his quest to make this team work under this new principle. Yet there are moments where we are able to hop off of this main ride and see some things who are not directly baseball. We have his daughter. We have Robin Wright who is his ex-wife. We had one scene with Robin Wright and Spike Jonze, who plays her husband, which is great fun.

Craig: Awesome.

John: They’re useful, but they’re not crucial. I think they’re just there to– well, let’s talk about why they’re there. Because almost this entire conversation is going to be about the main arc quest about this. Let’s talk about the little side quests we do with the daughter, with the ex-wife. Why they’re there and what function do they serve in this movie? Because you could have cut them out but they still feel crucial. Craig, I see you squinting like you couldn’t have cut them out.

Craig: I don’t think you should. There’s the right amount of them. To me, the story it’s a classic redemption tale. This character, Billy Beane, is a real person, obviously, was a first-round draft pick coming out of high school, I think, and was projected by scouts to be a star. And he was a complete flop. Ah-ha, scouts, flop, failure, and now he rolls himself into this front office gig, which is generally seen to be a bit like, “Well, you crapped out, so now this is what you can do instead.” His success and that’s what we’re invested in like, can he come back? Can he achieve?

Because in his mind, he’s a loser. His whole thing is, “I am a jinx and a loser. What I’m doing here, on the one hand, theoretically will work and it’s bold. On the other hand, simply because it’s me, it probably won’t work because I am a loser.” We need some stakes beyond whether or not the Oakland A’s succeed. We need to know that there are people at home that he is trying to also prove himself to, that he feels like a loser in context with. The most important one is his daughter.

It’s not like his daughter and his ex-wife are like, “If the Oakland A’s don’t win, then like we said, you’re a loser.” They do believe in him. That’s why it hurts more. He needs to show them, though. He needs to. Or else he goes home with his tail between his legs, again, a failure in the eyes of the people he wishes he could impress. The only people I think he’s trying to impress in this movie are his– really, the only person is his daughter, actually.

Taffy: I also think his daughter is there for a much more practical reason, which is that she is there to talk about his anxiety about being fired. Also, I want to say, I don’t know if this is even an okay thing to say. In a couple of those scenes, Brad Pitt is a different size and wearing a wig. It makes me wonder if he is returned–

John: These small things I never notice.

Taffy: -because there aren’t enough. I notice wigs all the time-

Craig: Oh, goodness.

Taffy: -but Brad Pitt, I was like, “What are those veins in his neck?” He’s bulking up for Troy 2 or whatever. He’s brought back in, and also, she’s a girl at a funny age where she could look like a child or a grown-up within a second.

I guess I think that a lot of this movie revolves around the idea that if you look at the movie in a certain way, Billy Beane is a villain who is just– he throws things. He is cruel to people underneath him. He’s a little bit abusive. He is doing something that actually puts a lot of people’s livelihoods in danger, but she is there to ask him, “Are you going to be fired?”

We have to see with him that the stakes are so, so high. He has another scene with Jonah Hill, with Peter Brand, where he says to Peter Brand, almost apropos of nothing like, “You went to Yale, this is your second job, you’re going to be fine. If I fail at this, I fail forever.” It’s like him against the world, but what is he doing? What about this world? I think the whole thing lands, and he’s saved by the one essential question of the movie, which is, what is the best way to love baseball? Is it to honor its traditions, or is it to innovate so that it becomes what it could be?

Craig: I love having this conversation. I’m fascinated, Taffy, by your view that there’s a slightly villainous aspect to him because I have a very different relationship with this character. My relationship with this character is– one of the reasons I love baseball is that it’s fairly scientific. I remember as a kid reading– I talked about it here on the show before, a book called the Microbe Hunters. There’s this old book written in the 1920s, but it basically catalogs seven or eight great scientists in history who tracked down the cause of disease and figured out a way to solve it.

Louis Pasteur, for instance. One of the things that keeps coming up over and over in these things is how much resistance each one of these people faced by the church, by commonly accepted… And the tension that I felt reading this was, there’s like this innate anger in watching somebody who is scientifically correct having to force their way past ignorance, doubt, fear, and superstition to prevail at great risk to themselves.

Watching this movie, that’s what I connect to. It’s like watching a story about Galileo or Copernicus trying to argue that, “No, the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth. The earth revolves around the sun, and I’m going to risk my life and limb to prove it because it’s correct.” I love that. I do. I love him for it, and I forgive him all of his tantrums and his stuff.

Taffy: I think that you’re right, and I think that that’s why it’s a great movie. I think his villainy is just viewed from all of these different parts. I do think he’s doing the work of innovators, and he’s very afraid. Also, there’s no winning for him. Even at the end when he wins, he didn’t win the last game of the season, so he gets to hate himself all over again. I think this is what I meant exactly when I said this doesn’t come along with the traditional, not just a love story. But with a certain kind of sympathy and a certain kind of like a dog, all of the things that you would have if we were showing you were such a great innovator but a really difficult personality.

It’s almost like it’s one of the freest movies I’ve ever seen because it just allows him to be in this story about this thing he was trying to do without– when I was learning how to write screenplays, I was told that if you have this difficult character, you should give him like a disability. The professor, I remember, always said, “Clubfoot.” I don’t know. That’s what he always said.

Craig: Worked for Shakespeare, I guess.

Taffy: Right. I felt like this was free from the constraints of that. That’s more what I mean when I say the protections around a traditional story are that he’s just allowed to do this. He’s allowed to fire people and send them home. He is allowed to have the hate of the people. Also Brad Pitt’s performance in this, his contempt for the people he’s talking to.

Craig: It’s so good.

Taffy: It’s so good.

Craig: “What is the problem? Enh. What is the problem? How can you solve it if you don’t know what it is?”

You’re absolutely right about everything you say. The counter really is just that there are elements that if– and I don’t know what the ordering was. I don’t know if Zaillian sat down and then Sorkin showed up, or Sorkin sat down and Zaillian showed up. It doesn’t matter if you have both those guys. The things that pop out when you look at the book and the story are, A, this guy was first-round draft pick and failed. That’s good character setup.

B, the Oakland A’s suffer this incredible challenge because they lose their star player. In general, they’re poor, and so the owners can never afford to keep the good players. They always leave for free agency. Then by applying this method, which no one believed in, the Oakland A’s go on to tie the record for most consecutive wins in a season by a team, and that is capped off by this insane game where they were up by an enormous amount.

It was in the bag, and then they almost blew it, and then the guy who wins it for them is the very guy that Billy Beane went out and pulled off the scrap heap even though he had unrepairable nerve damage and can’t throw, as Grady says. All of that stuff gives you really basic things. The only thing that would be missing there and then along it comes is what is the central relationship. Where is the love story?

The love story, to me, I would argue, is between Billy Beane and Peter Brand, that it’s Brad Pitt and it’s Jonah Hill. Because obviously it’s a buddy-buddy love story, but it is two guys who decide they’re going to go all in with each other and trust each other. The look when they pull off that trade for Rincón and Jonah Hill, the passion of it. You see these guys are in love with each other. They’re falling in love, and the whole thing will be on their shoulders.

To me, there are those romantic, basic storylines, and of course, the beautiful moment of Billy Beane to say, “Okay, we’re winning. I’ll show up at the 20th game. Oh God, I showed up and we immediately started to lose.” That’s the final climactic test of a character, all that stuff. I agree with you. There is all this beautiful freedom, and then you have all these great traditional elements that I think, had they not been there, this would have been a hard movie to write.

Taffy: Can I just say one more thing?

John: Please.

Taffy: I’m sorry. I agree with all that. The traditional stuff I was talking about was more like someone having sex with Brad Pitt.

Craig: Oh. Yeah, that’s pretty traditional.

Taffy: It makes me always think, by the way, which is why I love sports movies, that I really do believe you just have a freedom in these kinds of movies. I also want to say that I think that the love story– I love their relationship, but I think the love story is between Billy Beane and baseball. It is like-

Craig: Fair way to look at it.

Taffy: -it’s the only relationship that changes. He and Peter Brand are sort of like Butch and Sundance for the long haul. Billy goes from, is the best way to love baseball, to look at its statistics, or is it to just love it? He comes around to the best way I can love baseball is by trying to get to win this game. Anyway, you go on, sorry.

Craig: No, I think that’s a fair point. Look, what’s the line that people quote the most? “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Baseball, which is, if you don’t love it the way I do, is one of the more boring sports to watch on television. Baseball, without question, empirically, factually, is the best sport to turn into a movie. There are so many great movies that have baseball at their center, and so few that have football or basketball. There are some, but you don’t have a field of dreams. You can just go down the list of incredible baseball movies and how much fun they are, all the way down to Bad News Bears. There’s no–

Taffy: What is it about baseball that does that?

Craig: Well, great question. Only a theory. Baseball is one of the few games where everything stops to let one person face off against one person, even though there’s a whole team. Baseball is the only sport that doesn’t have a clock. There’s no like– baseball is full of these traditions. It is pastoral. The fields are all different. There’s this sense that it was cobbled together out of America. I think most importantly, it’s the fact that there’s no clock.

The ability to stop and pause and feel anxiety is enormous. And only baseball has a home run. Everything else, a touchdown is how you score. You score touchdowns or you kick a field goal. In basketball, football in hoop. Hockey, puck in net. Soccer, put ball in goal. Baseball, you can run around the bases. You can steal home. Then there’s the home run, which is just everything stops. Everyone has a party. It’s just dramatic. Slow, but it’s wonderful. I love it.

Taffy: It also has a moment as opposed to moves. It has a moment.

Craig: Has a moment. When we get to the moment in this film where Scott Hatteberg gets to the plate and has a chance to win this game for them, it’s the same moment that you’ve seen in The Natural with Robert Redford. You see this over and over. Everything slows down. Time slows down. Bull Durham–

Taffy: Parenthood.

Craig: Every movie with baseball, there is a moment where everything gets slow and quiet. It’s just me and the hands squeezing on the bat. Everyone almost shoots it the same way and it works every frickin’ time. Because, you put it perfectly, baseball has space for moments and other sports don’t.

John: Yes, if you try to watch a football game or soccer game–

Craig: Match.

John: -you’re trying to follow the ball. You’re trying to follow, where’s the ball? Because that’s where the action is. Versus baseball, you’re looking at the people and what the people are doing. You can follow the action much more clearly and so can the camera, so can the audience, which is fantastic.

Let’s follow the ball in this story and take a look at how it unfolds on screen. We’re going to start with, the movie opens with Billy being listening to– not really listening to this disastrous game.

He’s frustrated. This is where we wonder if he’s a villain because he smashes the radio. He’s really upset. Then, seven minutes in, we get him explaining what the problem is and what he needs. This is a scene where he’s going to talk to the owner of the team. Let’s take a listen to this clip from seven minutes into Moneyball.

Billy: We’re not going to do better next year.

Steve: Why not?

Billy: Well, you know we’re being gutted. We’re losing Giambi, Damon, Isringhausen. Done deal. We’re in trouble.

Steve: You’ll find new guys. You found Jason, you found Damon.

Billy: I need more money, Steve.

Steve: Billy.

Billy: I need more money.

Steve: We don’t have any more money, Billy.

Billy: I can’t compete against $120 million with $38 million.

Steve: We’re not going to compete with these teams that have big budgets. We’re going to work within the constraints we have, and you’re going to get out and do the best job that you can recruiting new players. We’re not going to pay $17 million to players.

Billy: I’m not asking you for 10 or 20, 30 million dollars. I’m just asking for a bit of help. Just get me a little closer and I will get you that championship team. I mean, this is why I’m here. This is why you hired me. I got to ask you, what are we doing here-

Steve: Billy, I–

Billy: -if it’s not to win a championship?

Steve: I want to win just as much–

Billy: That’s my bar. My bar is here. My bar is to take this team to the championship.

Steve: Billy, we’re a small-market team, and you’re a small-market GM. I’m asking you to be okay not spending money that I don’t have. I’m asking you to take a deep breath, shake off the loss, get back in a room with your guys, and figure out how to find replacements for the guys we lost with the money that we do have.

Billy: I’m not leaving here. I can’t leave here with that.

Steve: What else can I help you with?

John: All right, such a great scene. You guys are talking about your experience with baseball and so you were making fun of me for sports ball and not knowing anything. Here’s what I will say. I had not seen this movie in the theaters, I don’t think. Until Taffy wrote in with the email, I was like, have I seen Moneyball? I watched Moneyball and it’s of course fantastic. What I found useful is I could see the analogies to the studio system that we’re used to working in this movie.

Billy Beane is the producer. He’s not the director. He’s not the coach. He’s not the one who’s directing all the action on the field. He’s the producer putting the whole thing together, but he’s not the studio head. Right now he’s talking to the studio boss saying like, “I need more money.” They’re like, “There’s no more money. You got to figure out with what you have.” He has to figure out like, “Okay, well, I don’t know how to do this. I’m explaining very clearly what I need, and I’m not getting what I need. What am I supposed to do?”

The scene we just played is essentially I want song. If this was Moana, this is How Far I’ll Go. This is I have this thing I need to do, and I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to need to find a way to win because I want this team to be a competitor at the highest level. I want to win.

Craig: You nailed it there, and I love your analogy of, because it’s dead right, this guy that he’s talking to is the studio chairman. He’s the producer. The director is the manager, and the actors are the players. He is saying, “You guys want me to, and I want to win.” He’s not even saying, “If I need more money to be able to do the job, you’re asking me to do so I can keep my job.” He’s saying, “I need more money so I can win.”

“I want to win,” and what this guy is telling him is,” I don’t have more money. You’re not getting more money.” I love just how stolid he is, “And hey, I’d love to win too, but also, it’s not actually that big of a–“ really, as long as our tickets sells and I profit, he’s not in it for the same reason Billy Beane is. That’s very, very clear. What a wonderful way of establishing where Billy is in the pecking order, what he wants, and what the problem is.

John: Yes, I agree with you, establishing what is the problem so that the hero can go about trying to solve the problem. So Billy Beane goes back to his scouts because he needs to find a replacement for the players that he’s lost. The scene in the movie is terrific with all these– a mix, I think, of real scouts and some actors in there playing scouts, and as we talked about, the documentary feel of this is fantastic.

Now, the script that Drew found actually has a scene that’s different that’s really, really good, and so I thought we might do a little play acting here, and let’s read through the scene that’s actually in the script for this thing. Craig, will you play Billy Beane?

Craig: Sure.

John: Taffy, can I have you play Grady? I’ll do Poat. I don’t know whoever Poat is. This, we are in the conference room with a team talking about how to put this together, and Billy Beane has lost his patience with his scouts.

Billy: What if we’ve been wrong this whole time about what ingredients manufacture a win? What if this whole time we thought it was the chicken that made the chicken soup taste good when really it was the onions that made the chicken soup taste good? Onions are a lot cheaper than chicken. You see what I’m saying?

Poat: I don’t have the first idea of what you’re saying.

Billy: We got to go start over. We got to go rethink this thing. We got to go look where others aren’t looking.

Grady: With all due respect, we’ve been doing this for a long time.

Billy: It doesn’t mean you’re doing it right. You watch nature docs? You know what happens to the runt of the litter? He dies. I’m open to any solution, as long as it’s not what the other guys are doing. Now, I’m going to Cleveland to poach an outfielder named Brandon Garcia.

John: All right, so this is a scene that’s not in the movie. At the end of this whole segment, we’re going to talk about sort of the development process of this, because this is a really weird situation. What I like about this is like, this is the feeling of the scene, but it’s not the actual words that are in the scene. You can see the scene like, oh, I get the shape of this. I get like what it is that he’s trying to do, but these words are not what we’re actually seeing on screen.

Craig: I think runt of the litter made it in, as I recall.

John: Yes.

Taffy: Runt of the litter did make it in, but it also feels like you’re doing a baseball movie and you’re writing it and you don’t know how much the person reading it knows about any of this. You just over-explain so that everyone’s on the same page and then you could take it out.

Craig: That’s a really good point. One of the things that they threaded beautifully on the page and then on the subsequent film is, they make sure that the way Billy is explaining things to these guys, and specifically the what is the problem scene, why I love that scene so much is, he’s explaining it to them, but not in a way that you would have to if you were with baseball people. He’s explaining a baseball thing to baseball people, but he explains it in a way where you go, ah, they haven’t considered doing it like this before and very specifically, he talks about how important it is to get on base.

What he says is, “I don’t care how people get on base,” because these guys do. All he care is how he gets on base. This is who we have to replace, Jason Giambi. This was his on-base percentage. We have to get three people who in the aggregate recreate Jason Giambi. That is a way of explaining things to baseball people where I go, oh, yes, whereas the chicken soup thing here feels a little bit like, oh, none of us know baseball, so let’s use a cooking analogy.

John: Yes. All right, so we zoom ahead and so he’s going to talk with the Cleveland Indians about doing a trade there. It’s in that room that he sees Jonah Hill’s character. He’s playing Peter Brand, who’s just a guy off in the background who would be a day player, except that Brad Pitt notices him and is like, “There’s something, people are listening to this kid for whatever reason.”

He goes and finds this kid in the bullpen and talks to him. There’s a scene which is like a first kind of an aggressive meet cute between them there. Then the real meat of the scene happens in a parking garage below. He’s just like, “Follow me down to the parking garage.” Let’s take a listen to that parking garage in which Peter Brand explains his theory of the case.

Peter: There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening. This leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams. I apologize.

Billy: Go on.

Peter: Okay. People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. In order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. You’re trying to replace Johnny Damon. The Boston Red Sox see Johnny Damon and they see a star who’s worth $7.5 million a year. When I see Johnny Damon, what I see is an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. The guy’s got a great glove. He’s a decent leadoff hitter. He can steal bases, but is he worth the $7.5 million a year that the Boston Red Sox are paying him? No.

No. Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions. If I say it to anybody, I’m ostracized. I’m a leper. That’s why I’m cagey about this with you. That’s why I respect you, Mr. Beane. If you want full disclosure, I think it’s a good thing that you got Damon off of your payroll. I think it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities.

John: Wow. I pulled that clip this morning and so I was watching it as I was playing. Now that I just listened to the audio, you realize that music cue comes in at just that moment and says like, aha, this is where we’re getting a resonance between what he wants and what I want, that the light bulb is starting to glow there.

Craig: We also start to shift to footage of Johnny Damon and what he does. Johnny Damon, it always hurts me in my heart a little bit because the Yankees eventually make the same mistake the Red Sox do with Johnny Damon, no offense to Johnny Damon, but everything that this character is saying here is correct. The most important part of this is baseball thinking is medieval. It’s hard for us now, if you are a baseball fan, to process how medieval it was all just this short time ago.

Spoiler alert, not only do the Oakland A’s and Billy Beane adopt this way of thinking, everyone does, and not just a little, an enormous amount. It hits its crescendo with a guy named Theo Epstein who becomes a very young Billy Beane-ish general manager of the Boston Red Sox. Boston Red Sox don’t, they’re not able to get Billy Beane. They end up with Theo Epstein. Theo Epstein applies all these principles and breaks the curse. The Boston Red Sox finally win the World Series after a gazillion years.

Then what does Theo Epstein do? He leaves Boston Red Sox and goes to the Chicago Cubs, the only team with a longer curse, and they win the World Series using all of this. The problem baseball deals with now is that maybe they’ve gone a little too far with this. They have a billion statistics now. It has become insane. Just a short time ago, what they had was a bunch of scouts going, “He’s got a good baseball body. He’s got good hands.”

John: Yes, it was like phrenology. Yes, it felt medieval. Now, I’m not pushing back, but I’d say like, growing up, I always heard about baseball stat. People were always obsessed with stats.

Taffy: That’s what I was going to say, that you could look in The New York Times and–

Craig: Sure, there’s a box score.

Taffy: Yes, and see what happened at every point in the game. I also just want to say, my birthday is on October 26th. I can’t tell you how many game three, four, five, like surprise dinners I’ve had with boyfriends that forced me to watch one of these games. It feels like it’s all statistics and that’s what every– people make snow angels in statistics. It’s hard for me to understand why this was such a big deal.

Craig: Here’s what statistics used to be. I, of course, collected baseball cards like every little boy baseball fan. On the back of the cards, there were statistics. A hitter has a batting average. That’s how frequently they get a hit. They have home runs, hits, stolen bases, runs batted in. Those are your five statistics.

Here are what you have now just for hitting: You have batting average on balls in play. You have isolated power, late-inning pressure situation, on-base plus slugging. You have slugging percentage, which wasn’t a thing back then at all. Pitches per plate appearance, runs created, weighted runs above average. The most important one, wins above replacement. They figured out how many wins you create above the league average of who you are at your position. There are weighted runs created plus. There are maybe, and pitching– don’t get me started, there are about 40 statistics that they have now, including things I literally don’t know what they mean, like skill, interactive, earned run average. The spreadsheets that are happening right now with these players is insane. It’s insane.

John: Now Craig, what I would say though, is the success of this movie is that we don’t need to know about any of those statistics, because the only thing that Jonah Hill is introducing is that we need to actually figure out how much they are worth. Because we, as people, understand money. It’s like we don’t have the money to do this thing, so how much money is this person worth? I think one of the things when we’ll get into the bonus segment too, but like the movie talks a little bit about assigning a value to a person and reducing them down to just their statistics and not think about them as human beings.

Craig: As people.

John: Yes.

Craig: I will say like the one thing that they did brilliantly here was, and this was an early day’s thing for this sort of stuff, sabermetrics is ultimately what it was called, is on-base percentage. Like I said, it used to be, how many hits do you get? How many walks do you get? How many home runs do you hit? How many hits do you hit? What he’s saying here, what Peter Brand says in that speech we just heard is, I see an imperfect understanding of where runs come. Your goal should be to buy wins, and in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. What he boils it down to is, to get runs, you need people on base.

They have to reach base. The imperfect understanding of baseball was walks. It’s mind-blowing to think that this was revolutionary, but the big revolution at the time was saying, a guy who reaches first base by hitting singles, and a guy who reaches first base by walking a lot, are the same guy. We’re paying the singles hitter an enormous amount more. They boiled it down to just that one concept. So why do you want Jason’s little brother, Jeremy Giambi, because he gets on base? Why do you want David Justice, an old guy whose best days are behind him, gets on base? Scott Hatteberg, gets on base.

Taffy: Am I correct to think though, in baseball, that it’s more interesting to watch someone run to the base than to walk to the base?

Craig: Of course.

Taffy: Is that what it is? It’s that like betting changed this? It’s that it didn’t matter anymore if it was entertaining, it mattered what you were betting on?

Craig: The ultimate entertainment, I think, is winning. What fans want is winning.

Taffy: I feel that way.

Craig: You, as a Yankee fan, if a pitcher wants to fall apart and walk eight guys in a row, which means a bunch of guys are going to score just by being walked in, awesome. Getting on base is not as exciting as getting a hit, no question. Winning is the most exciting thing. That’s what sells out a stadium and sells out your season tickets for the next season.

John: And in baseball and other sports, if there’s a thing that is happening that is not entertaining, they will change the rules to make the more entertaining thing happen. That’s happened in baseball in the last few years, right, Craig? Where they’ve changed some of the things to speed up the play and just make-

Craig: They have.

John: -it a more interesting game.

Craig: By the way, after a century of refusing to. I just want to say, baseball has been the most rules-change-resistant sport there is. Over the last 10 years, I think they have made a few, not dramatic, but a few good rules changes. For so long, they refused to change anything. Whereas basketball is like, you know what, they love the three-point line. They love it in colleges, screw it. Let’s do it. Let’s put it in.

John: Brilliant. All right, so let’s get back to the actual movie that we’re watching on screen.

Taffy: Especially since it’s so sad that I’m not going to remember anything you said, but I understood it in the moment. So sad.

John: Getting back to the movie that we’re watching on screen. Billy Beane is implementing these changes over the resistance of his scouts. He’s making trades and changes to the lineup that his head coach hates, that everyone says is not going to work. I think according to movie logic, it doesn’t work. Luckily, the true story is that it does not work at the start. They’re not winning games. Everyone is coming down on him like this is a stupid idea and he’s doomed for failure until it starts to work.

Taffy: And they have this moment where the two of them have to really recommit to each other. Billy and Peter have to decide like, “Do we really believe in this?” That’s a very touching moment to me. I think that so many of the things we’re talking about are aided by music and showing something on the screen that is illustrating the thing that they’re saying. In that moment where they recommit to each other about it is the moment that I understand really what I’m watching.

Craig: We have to personify the resistance. The resistance was personified by this scout Grady. Grady gets himself fired by putting his hand on Billy. His very baseball-y kind of thing. Then we have a new villain. The new villain is Art Howe, the manager. Played brilliantly as always by the late greats Philip Seymour Hoffman. The problem now is, okay, I’m the producer of the movie. I’ve come up with a plan that might make this movie good with the tiny amount of money we have. The director isn’t going along with the plan. And I can’t set the lineup directly.

What I can do as a general manager though is start to trade guys that I don’t want playing to make the manager have to play the people I do want playing. This is the great tension and in the best part of it all is that in the end, you see Art Howe– by the way, this isn’t really how it worked in real life. They did not fight like this. Art Howe makes the fateful, wonderful decision when everything is on the line. They’re trying to make baseball history to send Scott Hatteberg to the plate, which is his commitment to being honorable and pursuing of truth rather than baseball medieval thinking.

John: Now, so one of the things that the story does do, they establish that Billy Beane does not watch the games. He does not want to listen to the games. He doesn’t want to have any direct interaction with the players. He doesn’t travel with them. There are moments along the way that he is actually becoming more involved in the day-to-day. He’s in the locker room more and talking with them. A scene I think really embodies this is his conversation with David Justice, who they’ve now recruited on-

Craig: So good.

John: -to play for them. This is a senior player, and they’re having tension. This is all happening at a batting practice. Let’s take a listen to this scene.

Billy: Had a few thoughts.

David: Yeah?

Billy: Yeah.

David: Can you teach me some things?

Billy: Excuse me?

David: I’ve never seen a GM talk to players like that, man.

Billy: You’ve never seen a GM who was a player.

David: Huh.

Billy: We got a problem, David?

David: Nah, It’s okay. I know your routine. It’s patter, it’s for effect, but it’s for them. All right? This shit ain’t for me.

Billy: Oh, you’re special?

David: You’re paying me seven million bucks a year, man, so, yes, maybe I am a little bit.

Billy: No, man, I ain’t paying you seven. Yankees are paying half your salary. That’s what the New York Yankees think of you. They’re paying you $3.5 million to play against them.

David: Where are you going with this, Billy?

Billy: David, you’re 37. How about you and I be honest about what each of us want out of this? I want to milk the last ounce of baseball you got in you. And you want to stay in the show. Let’s do that. Now, I’m not paying you for the player you used to be. I’m paying you for the player you are right now. You’re smart. You get what we’re trying to do here. Make an example for the younger guys. Be a leader. Can you do that?

David: All right, I got you.

Billy: We’re cool?

David: We’re cool.

Taffy: Villainy. This is such a mean scene. This is so mean.

Craig: It’s so wonderful you think that.

Taffy: I feel like his arc is like, yes, he keeps a distance from his players. There’s this point where he’s trying to give them a pep talk and it’s like an eight-word disaster. “You don’t look like a winning team, but you are one, so play like one,” is what he says. In things like that, I feel like we are being set up storytelling-wise. By the way, patter is such a showbiz word. I do not believe at all-

John: Don’t believe it.

Taffy: -anyone here [unintelligible 00:50:00] yes. I think we’re being set up for a guy who is trying his hardest to keep his distance and can’t do it without getting a little bit messy. That’s what the three-part runner about cutting players is, when he’s trying to show art and he keeps cutting players.

Again, on my 30 millionth viewing, I started to think, that’s actually pretty terrible. You are firing people and ruining their lives because you’re having an argument with this guy. It’s the same thing as a guy who throws his chair across the room. It’s like a display of something that hasn’t aged very well.

Craig: I shockingly have an entirely opposite point of view about this.

Taffy: Good good good.

Craig: One of the things about sports, and when you listen to fans discussing sports, they’re brutal. The fans are the meanest ever. A little bit like the way the audience out there on Twitter is the meanest about, we never talk about each other’s shows or movies the way people online just go, garbage, blah. People are brutal. There are entire, still functioning, listen to AM radio stations that are nothing but call-in shows for 30 to 50-year-old, 60-year-old men to yell about players sucking. There is a brutal reality to sports, which is winning is winning. Every athlete gets into it to win. It is a binary function. There’s winning and losing.

Billy’s job is to make them win. He’s not cutting those players to win an argument. He’s cutting those players because that’s their best chance to win, and there’s somebody in the way of their best chance to win. That’s the thing about sports where it gets super focused. This scene, to me, is not villainy. This is actually kindness, because when you start to lose it as a man, where you’re like I had this physical capacity as a man, and there’s a reason the scene is set where it is. It’s in the stadium, in the back area of the stadium inside, and David Justice, who was an amazing player, is in the batting cage crushing these pitches coming out of the pitching, the little machine, right?

He’s putting on this display of masculine power, and Billy is like, you need to graduate because you’re 37. If you’re hanging on to what that was, it’s leaving you. I’m telling you have to redefine the value of your masculinity, and your masculinity’s value is no longer physical prowess, it’s wisdom.

Taffy: It’s we’re all told that we can’t always play the children’s show, right? Is that what it is, the children’s game? That’s what it’s called?

Craig: Yes.

Taffy: I feel that the movie agrees with me that it’s villainy, which is why he gets the soda in the end. I think that you’re right. I also think that when he restores the soda after David Justice is like, why am I paying for my own soda? It is an admission of villainy.

Craig: I don’t know if it’s an admission of maybe imperfection, but I want to point out how fantastic the beginning of this scene is. This is where there’s this formalized romantic way of portraying men talking to each other, and Mamet is the king of it, right? Sorkin and Zalian both excellent at it. The beginning of this: I got a few thoughts. Yeah? Yeah. Teach me some things? Excuse me? Never seen a GM talk to players like that, man. You never seen a GM who was a player. We got a problem, David? Now, there’s so much being said there in this blah way. You got a few thoughts? Get out of here. Yes. You have no validity with me. Teach me some things.

He’s just going basically, dude, you suck. You’re not a player. Then Mr. Sensitive/Villain goes, yes, I was. David Justice goes, not like me. Not even close. What are you doing down here, man? Then this thing about the money. I’m sorry, he’s right. The Yankees were paying $3.5 million dollars for David Justice to play against them. It’s hard truth and that’s why at the end, I think David Justice says we’re cool because he knows it’s true.

Taffy: Right, he can’t win.

John: My previous analogy, like this is actually a story about show business. You can map everything into the equivalent show business thing. I think about Amy Pascal running Sony Pictures while this is happening and she was the owner of everything and she had to make this decision. The three of us have all been the person in charge on set or we’ve had to make tough calls. I remember going to the first AD saying like, “I never want to see that extra again.” Just like, “Make them disappear.” That’s villainy but it’s also like this is standing in the way of what I need to do my job.

This conversation is really, it’s having the conversation with your lead actor, the top of the ticket. I need you to be a leader here. We had Ryan Reynolds on the show. We were talking about that, about when you’re number one on the call sheet, I need you to do a certain thing. Act like the number one on the ticket and be the example here. Having that honest conversation is just so crucial. I can’t imagine the back half of this movie working without this scene.

Taffy: I agree. I will say that the second AD having the conversation with the background person is the villainy. You were incredibly passive in that as you were supposed to be, right? You were supposed to not, you’re not supposed to fire them yourself. That’s the thing is that all the more so, this is him doing it in a way that we understand, but is brutal.

Craig: Yeah, and effective.

Taffy: Very effective. It pokes at every masculine little point. He just punctures everything.

Craig: But then builds them back. Yes, that’s the thing. I think the reason it works is he’s not saying you shouldn’t play or you should quit. What he’s saying is the implication of the movie was David Justice shows up and he’s just like, this team sucks. I’m just going to take my money, go out there, dog it, not try that hard, whatever. If the stuff works great, if it doesn’t, I don’t care, right?

Then he’s coming and saying, no, no. Actually, you do have a role here that could matter. It won’t be by occasionally hitting a home run. It’s going to be by teaching, mentoring, and leading by example. That’s your new value. You can feel in the scene– who’s the actor that played? He did such a good job.

Taffy: He did such a good job.

Craig: Playing David Justice. You can see him actually like, yes, actually, there is a competitive spirit in me that resented the fact that I have to give up and not care. Billy’s given him a reason to play.

Taffy: It’s so interesting because maybe the whole runner about cutting people is about how the most direct conversation is actually the kindest. That you don’t sit there and you don’t sit– maybe the movie is trying to explain that to you, this scene.

John: Yes. Brad Pitt’s character explains to Jonah Hill, this is how you cut a person. We actually see Jonah Hill having to do it and how to have the grown-up conversation about how to be the second AD who’s telling the extra that I don’t ever want to see on set that goodbye, you’re being paid for the day and see ya without a reason, why you were so annoying in that shot.

Craig: Or over apologizing or dragging it out or making it, there is– and Billy Bean’s character is brutally direct. You can also see from that very beginning scene that you cited, John, the problem that he has is also brutal. There’s no way to win if you pussyfoot around it. You have to just go straight at it. When you see the, my favorite scenes in the movie are the two scenes where he’s with the scouts because he’s so brutally direct. It’s wonderful. Watching again, that greatest character actor.

Taffy: My son Ezra is available to act that out for you right now.

Craig: Ezra may just do it all day long. One day I’ll be Billy, he’ll be Grady, then he’ll be– and then we can do the Fabio.

Taffy: Oh, he’ll do both sides.

John: Who’s Fabio?

Craig: He’s a shortstop.

Taffy: Who’s Fabio? I think he’s a shortstop.

Craig: He’s a shortstop. Yes, no, you got to go carry the one. There’s so many great little moments in there that are incredible. He walks a lot. Do I care if it’s a hit or a walk? Then he points, you do not. Do you want me to talk when I point at you, yes.

Taffy: When you point at him.

Craig: So many great things in those scenes.

Taffy: Yes, oh my God.

Craig: Anyway, this movie, and can we just talk for a second about the beautiful thing at the end? This is why I love baseball. They have this incredible moment where it does all work. Billy seemingly is able to overcome the curse of him even being near the team and they win and they win because of Scott Hatterberg and a home run. It’s tremendous, but they don’t win. They don’t, ultimately they don’t win the World Series. There’s this lovely, it’s a metaphor, Stone Hill over in the Plains-

Taffy: I know what it is.

Craig: -of this guy in their farm system who hits a ball and because he’s a big guy and he’s slow, he thinks it could be a double. He rounds first, gets scared that he’s going to get thrown out, tries to get back to first, falls. Then it turns out he hit a home run.

This is true. The Billy Bean didn’t think he did it and he did. He changed baseball permanently. By the way, the Oakland A’s winning 20 games in a row that season, that is insane. That is bigger than winning the World Series. It’s so special. The tragedy, of course, is that the Oakland A’s are no longer in existence as of right now.

Taffy: Last week.

Craig: That’s correct. The Oakland A’s played their last games as the Oakland A’s. The entire franchise is leaving Oakland and is being reconstituted as the Las Vegas Aces. This is not the first time this has happened in baseball. This has happened a lot in baseball and in all sports. There’s a reason that the basketball team in Utah is called the Utah Jazz. It’s because they used to be in New Orleans.

John: Because jazz is what I associate with Utah, yes.

Craig: Of course, the Los Angeles Lakers, because of all the lakes in Los Angeles.

Taffy: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Craig: Yes. These teams come from elsewhere and keep the names sometimes. In this case, they do not. The A’s became the Aces. It’s clever but it’s sad. The Oakland couldn’t survive. They just couldn’t survive. One of the reasons, ironically, they couldn’t survive is because everybody else picked up on it. The big market teams that do have a better fan base and do sell more tickets and can spend more money, they all follow the Billy Bean model. All of them.

John: Let’s now close up this discussion and talk about Brad Pitt’s character. Billy Bean and the decision he has to make at the end. The end of the movie finds him going to Boston. He’s talking with John Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox. It’s a really interesting scene. It’s raining. There are umbrellas. They’re in this semi-outdoor space. We’re going to hear some rain in the background here. This is that discussion and ultimately a job offer for Billy Bean.

John Henry: Steve told me he’s offering you a new contract.

Billy: Yes.

John Henry: Why did you return my call?

Billy: Because it’s the Red Sox. Because I believe science might offer an answer to the curse of the Bambino because I hear you hired Bill James.

John Henry: Yes. Why someone took so long to hire that guy is beyond me.

Billy: Baseball hates him.

John Henry: Baseball can hate him, you know. One of the great things about money is that it buys a lot of things. One of which is the luxury to disregard what baseball likes, doesn’t like, what baseball thinks, doesn’t think.

Billy: Sounds nice. Well. I was grateful for the call.

John Henry: You were grateful?

Billy: Yes.

John Henry: For 41 million, you built a playoff team. You lost Damon, Giambi, Isringhausen, Pena, and you won more games without them than you did with them. You won the exact same number of games that the Yankees won, but the Yankees spent 1.4 million per win, and you paid 260,000. I know you’re taking it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall, he always gets bloody. Always.

This is threatening, not just a way of doing business, but in their minds it’s threatening the game. Really what it’s threatening is their livelihood. It’s threatening their jobs. It’s threatening the way that they do things. Every time that happens, whether it’s a government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people who are holding the reins, they have their hands on the switch, they go bat shit crazy. Anybody who’s not tearing their team down right now and rebuilding it using your model, they’re dinosaurs. They’ll be sitting on their ass on the sofa in October watching the Boston Red Sox win the World Series.

John: There he slides a piece of paper across the table.
[movie scene playing]

Billy: What’s this?

John Henry: I want you to be my general manager. That’s my offer.

John: All right. What’s crucial to me about this scene is that he’s done it. He went out with this goal and someone is finally saying, yes, Copernicus, you were right. The solar system is the way that you described it, not the way that everyone always described it. It’s so nice to have an outside person come in and say, you did this.

It’s important for us to have the people who we’ve established in the movie, who he loves, who love him, provide that support, but to have an outside person that he’s always been pushing against come say, no, kid, you were right, is crucial.

Craig: Absolutely. Even more so, give our hero, I still think he’s a hero, give our hero a chance to do one last heroic thing which is to stay loyal to the sloppy mess that he helped improve. It’s like listen, I inherited a broken down trailer home and I worked really hard to make it look like a mansion. And I’m going to stay with it. And Even though I know I’m going to be losing to you probably, because now you now, Bill James was the guy that invented sabermetrics, which leads into the whole thing that Peter Brown was talking about. Now you got Bill James, now everything I know, I’m going to lose.

I’m going to lose over and over and over because now I’m not, because the trick is out, but I’m not leaving because I’m loyal. Literally, that’s exactly what happened. He stayed with the A’s and the Boston Red Sox won the World Series.

Taffy: I also think all sports movies have a stoic guy. In a romantic comedy, the equivalent would be a “you complete me” or a big sweeping kiss. In a sports movie, it’s the stoic guy cracking a smile. It’s Kurt Russell in the tunnel in Miracle. I think in this movie, I know, I know. You’re like, everything in your body just needs them to be happy for a minute.

Craig: For one moment.

Taffy: I think when he turns to Peter Brandt and says, “You’re a good egg.” That is our sweeping kiss. That is everything I need, which sets me up for that car scene that murders me dead every single time. I just need three notes from that song and I’ll need a minute. It’s really beautiful.

Craig: Yes. In the end, you have to boil all the sports away and get down to who am I as a person? What is my value? Have I performed up to the level of expectation that my loved ones should have of me? It doesn’t matter if their love was unconditional. It wasn’t to me. I needed to fulfill conditions for their love. Did I? The answer is yes, I did.

That’s why everyone who sees a movie like this can connect to it. Everyone. It doesn’t matter. This is where I do think this is different than Mamet when you talk about movies about men being all men-ish.

Mamet movies are brutal and Mamet stories are brutal and they’re wonderful and I love them. Glengarry Glen Ross I’ve gone all day about it. The sentiment of Sorkin and Zaillian, and they are sentimental to me, is why I love these movies. Love them. I get transported by them. They’re just wonderful.

Taffy: You didn’t have to learn about sports. I leave with as much knowledge as I came in with and it’s fine.

Craig: True. That’s absolutely true.

John: I want to go back to something you said quite early on about shame. We were talking about, and I think Craig, you also mentioned that Billy Beane is a character who was recruited and was going to be a superstar and was not. He feels shame. He feels this thing that was supposed to happen didn’t happen. It was his fault and he just did not live up to promised potential. The journey of the story is like how do you get past that shame? How do you get past the fact that you were seen as an underachiever, that you didn’t do this thing?

He’s actually able to finally do it. Having this outside force and everybody else say, yes, you did it. You changed baseball. You are worthy in baseball. For a movie that is so much about what is a person worth? What is a person in baseball worth? He’s proven his worth. That’s ultimately what he seems to be going for here. Like most movie protagonists, he couldn’t explain at the start of the movie what he actually needs inside. We as an audience see at the end like, oh, he got that missing piece that he was so hungry for the whole time through.

Taffy: That’s so interesting because the thing I always think with this is one of the plots is changing baseball, but it’s actually about a man processing his failures. If you look at the structure of it, it’s exactly at a third that you see the first flashback. The question is like, how long are you allowed to play? We’re all told we have to leave the children’s game and we don’t know when it is. The question that looms throughout this, is this when I’m leaving? Even as the GM, I’m playing the children’s game. Is this when I’m leaving? Is this when I’m leaving?

Craig: Wrapping this up, we talked a bit about how the screenplay that we have that we can look at is not a very good reflection of the actual movie that’s in front of us. Some of that is, I think, related to the development of the movie. Here’s what we know. This writer Stan Chervin pitches and sells the idea to Sony in 2004.

We’re going to talk about Amy Pascal. Amy Pascal was running Sony Pictures at that time. Brad Pitt was attached to a draft by Steve Zaillian in 2008. Chervin apparently wrote something, but Steve Zaillian came in and wrote a draft, and that is the draft that got Brad Pitt attached.

Steven Soderbergh attached himself to the project in February 2009. There’s a quote we have from him saying, “I think we have a way in making it visual and making it funny. I want it to be really funny and entertaining, and I want you to not realize how much information is being thrown at you because you’re having fun. We found a couple of ideas how to bust the form a bit in order for all that information to reach you in a way that’s a little oblique.” Former athletics players and manager Art Howe were set to play themselves. Dimitri Martin was cast as Paul DePodesta, who was the actual real person in real life who became later the Jonah Hill character.

The Jonah Hill character is not the person in the book. It’s a composite of other things and stuff put together. DePodesta ultimately asked, “Can you change the name of my character?” Because, it’s not me. The movie was given a green light with a $58 million budget.

Then five days before it was supposed to shoot in July 8th, 2009, Sony canceled it. They stopped production on it, and Soderbergh left. Bennett Miller was brought in December 2009, and Amy Pascal brought in Sorkin for a rewrite. We don’t know where stuff was at quite with this, and so we don’t know, I’ve never seen the Zaillian draft. I don’t know what stuff is what. I think we always can reach for and feel what feels like a Sorkin-y bit, but I’m not sure we really know.

My speculation is that there’s a draft, but the way scenes were actually shot, it feels like in going for that documentary feel, they probably did it a bunch, and they weren’t as text-obsessed as you would expect in a Sorkin movie.

Taffy: The thing I heard was that maybe the previous version was more literal documentary, real players, people looking at the camera and interspersed. I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s true, I don’t know that apocryphal, I just–

Craig: I think that’s what Soderbergh was going for, from what I understand.

Taffy: Yes, which is its own great way to go.

Craig: Could have been great, that’s the thing.

Taffy: You never know.

Craig: You could have three different versions of this movie that are all great. I am just thrilled that we got what we did get, which was very romantic, sentimental.

Taffy: It’s a very sentimental movie.

Craig: It’s very sentimental, it’s very dramatic at times. It clearly is, like the score is borrowing from those, the score for The Natural, like one of the great movie scores of all time. Ba-bam, ba-bam bum bum. It has that when Hattenberg hits the home run, that, whoa, that dramatic swell. I love the tone.

John: The movie was given a July 2010 start date, so about a year after it had been stopped, it got started again. Brad Pitt’s still attached, budget reduced to $47 million, and they went ahead. Amy Pascal coming in there and saying, “We got to go change some stuff, and you don’t have as much money,” feels very much like the owner of the ASA, no, this is how much money you have to do it, and figure out a way to do that.

Craig: What else can I help you with?

John: On the first Charlie’s Angels, I remember a meeting on a Friday afternoon going in, and Amy Pascal’s going through the script, and she’s like, and she just ripped out five pages and she’s like, “These are gone, figure it out. Basically, got to go save some money,” and that’s how we did it.

Craig: Figure it out is one of the great lines. Robert Weiss, who I worked with, he’s a producer, go all the way back to Kentucky Fried Movie and Naked Gun. He produced one of the great bad movies of all time called Nothing but Trouble, starring Chevy Chase.

Taffy: I love Nothing but Trouble.

Craig: Yes, it’s insane. It’s terrible, but it’s also so crazy that it’s worth watching. In the development of it Chevy Chase, the characters start in Manhattan and then they drive into Pennsylvania, and Chevy Chase, Bob Weiss was like, “We’ll do the New York stuff in Toronto. We can’t afford to shoot in New York.” Chevy Chase is like, “No way, no. If it’s New York, we’re shooting in New York. In fact, I’m going to call–“ the head of the studio was Mark Canton. “I’m calling Mark Canton right now.”

He picks up the phone, “Mark, Chevy Chase, I’m hearing that we can’t shoot this in New York. I demand we shoot in New York.” “Thanks.” Click. “We’re shooting in New York” and then he walks out, and then Bob Weiss picks up the phone and calls Mark Canton and goes, “Did you just tell Chevy Chase we’re shooting this in New York?” “Yes.” “Are we?” “No. Figure it out.” I always love figure it out is like-

Taffy: I love it.

Craig: -that’s amazing. Yes, no.

Taffy: Oh my gosh.

John: All right, that wraps up Moneyball.

Taffy: Thank you.

John: Quickly, let’s go through some one cool things. Taffy, do you have one cool thing you want to share with the audience?

Taffy: I do. I went to a Yeshiva high school, so I always feel that I am behind in my education.

Craig: My dad would teach, he worked at Grady High School in Brighton Beach, and then after that day was over, he would go to Mirror Yeshiva.

Taffy: That’s serious stuff. To teach what?

Craig: To teach the Yeshiva book, his history-

Taffy: How to read.

Craig: -because they had to pass the Regents exam.

Taffy: I know, it’s because of the Regents exam.

Craig: The Regents exam.

Taffy: Everything we know is because of the Regents exam.

Craig: The Regents exam. Everything is secular that you know.

Taffy: Right. I did not read great books but I read the Scarlet Letter four times.

Craig: Because you had to.

Taffy: That’s like cheating on your husband. Also because it was kosher. It punishes women for infidelity. It’s good, it’s good.

Craig: It’s good.

Taffy: I always feel that I am behind in my education, and I found this app recently called Imprint, and it is teaching me philosophy. It’s teaching me step-by-step. Also, I feel that I have several undiagnosed learning disabilities. It is teaching me exactly how I would like to be taught, short sentences and cartoons. I think that is my-

Craig: Imprint.

Taffy: It’s called Imprint. I think it’s like $25. It’s so good, and I am learning all about Stoicism. Right now learning about Stoicism. We’re moving on to Kant.

Craig: Oh, Immanuel Kant. Boy, you’re about to get into synthetic apriority and posteriority.

Taffy: Someone didn’t go to yeshiva.

Craig: Correct. Also, Kant, as it turns out was wrong. If you can avoid reading his massive super boring book, then you’re–

Taffy: I’m just going to see a cartoon about it. I think I win this.

Craig: The best way to learn Kant. The best way.

Taffy: All right.

Craig: Amazing.

John: I have two uncool things that are very closely related. These last two weeks I was traveling. I was first in London, then in Paris. I was in London in large part, to see ABBA Voyage, which is the ABBA show outside of London. It is incredible.

This is a sanctioned ABBA thing that uses, I thought it was holograms, but it turns out it’s not holograms. It is just done with really good visual effects and ILM and a real band that’s playing and just a purpose-built space. It was really incredible. The illusion that, I am somehow back in 1970 and I’m watching ABBA do these songs was great.

Really, I just thought ABBA Voyage was fantastic. If you like ABBA, even to some medium degree and you’re in London, see it, because I thought it was really good. Relatedly, weirdly, the apartment we were staying in, we got there and it had one of those narrow, stripped fireplaces that was lit when we went in. I’m like, this is really wasteful. Let me figure out how to turn this off. Then I realized, as I got very closer it’s like, oh, this is actually not a fire at all. This is some sort of virtual screen thing that’s incredibly compelling and looks like a fire.

It turns out it was actually the same basic technology as what I was seeing in ABBA Voyage in that there are foreground elements which are actually up above in the enclosure and there’s a split glass thing like how we do teleprompters that is making it look like it’s at the base and then there’s a video screen that’s really compelling. We ended up leaving it on the whole time, and I genuinely miss that fireplace in the apartment.

I was just astonished that both in the ABBA Voyage show and in this fireplace, synthetic things that felt so real and compelling are possible in 2024 through recording this. I applaud the technology behind them and encourage people to check out both of these things. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this Opti-V fireplace, which is the European version, but there’s many other ones out there.

Craig: The Dimplex Opti-V Duet. Well as promised, my one cool thing has to be Ken Medlock. I was looking Ken Medlock up as we were talking here because if you look at his resume, it’s classic character actor resume. He’s happily still alive. He’s 74 years old, but he hasn’t done much in movies since Moneyball. Really, it seems like he might be like possibly semi-retired because he really hasn’t done much since those years. Here’s something not surprising at all to find out. He played baseball. He played in minor leagues. He was a pitcher for the Decatur Commodores in the 1970s.

That’s a team that I don’t believe exists anymore. Then later worked as a coach for the St. Paul Saints. He was like most people that have ever had any experience in professional baseball, he never made it to the major leagues but he’s a player. You could just tell. That’s the thing. I’m so not surprised. I would have been so much more surprised if he had not played baseball just because he has that thing. He’s got baseball face, baseball voice, baseball– it’s hard to describe. Anyway, brilliant, absolutely brilliant job. I’m obsessed.

I think he’s only in three scenes. He’s in the two scenes with the scouts and then he’s in one scene where he confronts Brad Pitt. By the way, you’re going toe-to-toe with Brad Pitt and he just ate him up. He ate him up. Yes.

John: I want to congratulate Ken Medlock, Bennett Miller for directing him so well, but also let’s shout out the casting director who found him and found that this is the person who can do this role. Whenever we see those moments where that one actor was in one scene and killed it, that’s some great casting directing there probably.

Craig: Let’s find out who the casting director was, shall we? Casting director. Casting by Francine Maisler, who’s-

John: Oh, Francine Maisler–

Craig: -just a legend.

John: Indeed.

Craig: Legend.

Taffy: I’m sad that we didn’t get to talk about Brad Pitt’s stress eating in the movie.

John: Oh my God. The greatest.

Taffy: The Twinkie.

John: Constantly eating.

Taffy: Yes, the Twinkie that he jams angrily into his mouth. It’s not in the script.

Craig: It’s so great. I think it was a thing, he was like, I want my character to always be eating.

Taffy: Same.

Craig: It’s a real challenge when you’re directing because of continuity. It’s just the sandwich is too big, too small. You have to have a bucket. You have to spit the thing out or otherwise you’re going to be barfing after take seven. They committed and just pulled it off. It’s great stuff.

Taffy: Because he shoves everything in his mouth. There’s no continuity problem. You just need 30 Twinkies.

Craig: That’s true. That is also such a guy thing. Like oh, screw you food. I win.

Taffy: We do that. Just so you know we do that too.

Craig: We do it in front of everyone and you guys are like, there’s no one watching.

John: That is our discussion on Moneyball. Scriptedness is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew, thanks for all your research and help here. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on money. Taffy Brodesser-Akner, thank you so much for joining us.

Taffy: Thank you for having me. I just want to say thank you to my assistant Chris Logan, who is wearing a Mets jersey right now and is so excited about this. Don’t spit on him right now. He’s having the best day of his life.

Craig: It’s going to be over real soon. If they make it to the Yankees, if you’re so lucky to make it to the Yankees, we will destroy you.

Taffy: I still don’t know what that means, but thanks, everyone.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. We are here for the bonus segment. We’re going to talk about money. Listener note here: Craig had to disappear at a certain point. If he vanishes for a bit in this conversation, it’s because he had to give up the room that he was recording in. Taffy and I are going to be talking a little bit in the middle part without Craig there, but you’ll hear him at the end because of editing magic.

All right. Taffy Brodesser-Akner, I just finished reading your book, Long Island Compromise, last night. I was reading it on the flight on the way back, and then I stayed up and read the final chapters. Such an accomplishment. So well done.

Taffy: Thank you.

John: I want you to go out and read it. Taffy, your book is about the intersection of trauma and money. Do you feel any resonance between the things we were talking about in that and Moneyball?

Taffy: Yes. If we’re talking about worth, and thank you so much for saying such nice things about my book, which is about how money makes you crazy. I want to say that people ask me very often, what was making a television show like? I answer with actually what is a good answer to your question, which is this:

I work at the New York Times. I work at the New York Times Magazine. I’ve worked there for many years. Before that, I was a freelancer. I know how much you get paid and I know how hard things are. I think very often about this story I wrote about sexual harassment at Kay Jewelers. Remember every kiss begins with Kay?

Craig: Yeah, mall jewelers.

Taffy: Oh my God, terrible stuff. Two and a half years it took to write that story. Maybe 14 cities, thousands and thousands of New York Times dollars. It was dangerous. There were threats. There was crying. There was protection ordered for people. It was hard. It was scary. And it came out and the money I got paid for it was the same amount of money that I got paid per scale to write a six-page outline for an episode of a television show based on a novel I’d already written.

Craig: Voila.

Taffy: I couldn’t get over it. I would say, I’m writing paragraphs that are true, that are out there in the world and people took a risk in talking to me. I couldn’t get over it. I still can’t get over it because I think what does this mean?

Also, maybe we know what it means because we see how news is being treated. We see how entertainment is treated, although it’s starting to happen in entertainment too, this lessening. But it made me understand that it’s just crazy what we value in this system. To assign money as an assignation of what is valued, that way lies madness.

John: Yes. I’m thinking about the times often on this podcast, we talk about why are screenwriters paid the way that we’re paid, which is arguably too much. It’s interesting we’re talking about Moneyball because there are fewer professional screenwriters than there are professional baseball players. It is, in the end, a unique skill, a thing that we’re able to do and that gets us paid the way that we’re paid. And that I’ve also been in the same situation you’re fine. It’s like, I feel like I’ve been paid too much for the amount of work that I’m doing here or that I’ve had to play tricks on myself saying like, I just do not want to write this. If I actually break down the amount I’m being paid per page, I’m of course I’m going to write this. It’s crazy.

Taffy: Right.

Craig: What we get paid doesn’t necessarily make sense from day to day. The same talent that we have earns us X. Then two years later, for some reason, it earns us twice X. Then for two years later, it’s half X. There’s no real rhyme or reason when you focus on it. Overall, one of the things I’ve come to understand is, and it’s hard to process, no one would ever suggest that what we do is as valuable as, say, somebody that’s working on a vaccine.

John: Right.

Craig: Those people get paid less, probably, than the people working at the New York Times Magazine. Then there are people who get paid even less than that, who are doing other things that are just beautiful work. Then there are people who don’t get paid at all, the unpaid labor of the world, particularly among women. Then the question is, how do I morally reconcile all this? Kant will have some stuff to say about this as you go through your course. One of the things that I’ve come to just understand is that entertainment which we think of as frivolous, while it certainly doesn’t save anyone’s life, seems to be one of the reasons people like to live.

It’s one of the things we’re here for at all. If we took it all away, including watching sports or playing video games or movies or television or reading great fiction, then at that point, people may not care as much about having their lives saved. Because what’s the point? People’s value of entertainment is so profound — way more than I value it, by the way. I love the creation aspect of it but sometimes I do I can feel guilty about these things. The bottom line is, the demand for what we do, particularly if it works for people, is so high that this is how the market functions.

Taffy: Right. I don’t think I feel bad about it because now I’m both people. I’m making that for an outline. It’s just astounding to me. It makes sense to me that athletes and actors get paid an inordinate amount. They have at least the perception of an expiration date of their prime, whereas you and I can imagine that the older and older and older we get, eventually we’ll keep. You’re right. I don’t know. We may be dwindling already. I don’t know.

John: We also have an opportunity cost. Part of why I’m getting paid this thing is so that I’m not doing something else.

Taffy: I think these are all these questions about how we value a person. I think the answer is, I was always this person and then I got an amazing agent who suddenly had access to things like this. But I was always like this. If you go back to when I was being ridiculed at my first job at Soap Opera Weekly, I was writing the same things that I am now highly valued at the New York Times for writing. It makes no sense. What are we supposed to do with that?

Craig: Let’s go back to your book here. One of the characters in Long Island Compromise, Beamer, is a screenwriter. He’s a screenwriter who’s written with a writing partner. It’s really clear that Beamer’s not the talent there. Beamer has some soft skills but he’s not the writing superstar here.

Now that the partnership is broken up, he is questioning his own worth because he was getting paid good money to do this as a writing team. It’s a real question, can he do it himself? Is he worth anything by himself? He comes from a family where he didn’t necessarily need to make money. This was all a game for him to start with.

Taffy: Right. He, by the way, when you’re as wealthy as Beamer Fletcher is, the money isn’t meaningful. The question is when we meet him is my value dwindling? My agent hasn’t called me back in two days. That is what he knows. That is what I live in fear of, is I haven’t heard from you. Oh, it’s been Sunday, okay. You still love me, my agent? Thank you.

John: Our sense of self-worth is like a price tag on it. There’s the number of likes we get on a post. There’s the number of people who show up to a book signing. There’s all these little ways in which we determine our value based on outside forces coming in to tell us things. None of that actually reflects our own internal sense of valuation.

I think you’re going to be looking at in your Imprint app probably, is really where is the sense of self, the degree to which our self-perception is internally generated versus externally put upon us. That balance is tough. The dollar figure people are paying you is one of the ways in which you calculate your own self-worth.

Taffy: It’s one of the ways they calculate my self-worth. Can I ask you, what do you think? What do you think about all this? Your quote, it goes up and it goes up. Do you feel better about yourself? Or is there a point at which you’re like, I’ve made it. Is it success or is it money or is it money defined as success?

John: There was a point early in my career, like project after project, my quote was going up. I remember at one point, my agent, my lawyer, were pushing really hard on the studio to pay me more than this, or basically better, or John won’t do it. I was upset with them because I felt like they were pushing too hard. Basically, ah, I’m not worth that much, you’re asking for too much.

Then we moved into a period which was supposed to be technically post-quote, where they’re not supposed to be asking for quotes, but people still supply them. You’ll wait to get an offer. Then they’ll say like, “Oh, no, let me send you these last few things so you can say this is how much he’s actually worth.”

You can also as a writer, get to a place where your quote is so high they won’t even consider you for certain projects. That’s a situation that people will run into, where it’s like, I was at a lunch with a producer and she was talking about this project that they were looking to do. She said, “Oh, no, we’re looking for a younger writer for that.” I heard younger writers, like babies really, she meant a less expensive writer. I was 30 at that point. I was like, “How much younger do you want?” But they meant less expensive. There are certain things which you’re just not on the list for because they just know you’re too expensive.

Taffy: Which is where money backfires, because the more they’re spending also in this business, the closer they’re watching and the more their ability to make a decision is jostled by the immense amount of money. There’s a sweet spot, it seems, where you stay under the radar of anybody being up at night worried about the money that’s being spent.

John: Yeah, it’s crazy. Then I would say like over the course of my career, a lot of the places where you really feel your value because it’s just so direct is when you get paid on a weekly to come in and do on a project, it’s like my weekly quote got really high. It’s like, that was exciting, but also I felt like you’re on a tightrope. It’s like, Jesus, am I really worth this amount of money for this one week’s work? You quickly realize, yes, they want your writing, but they mostly need you to be able to survive in a room with some of these people because these are sometimes monstrous, sometimes just really talented, but also very demanding people.

And there’s very few people that, there’s a scarcity problem. There’s very few people they can put into that room who can survive in there and then also still deliver the project that comes out of there. That was really what I was going to be paid for was not necessarily the words I was writing, but the words I was able to say in those rooms.

Taffy: That’s so interesting. Also, that is the true opportunity cost because every time you’re doing one of those weeklies, you’re not doing something that is the product of your brain, the product of your creativity. It is maybe the least gratifying thing. What if the way you can define your self-worth in this business monetarily is the amount of money someone like John August is paid to fix your terrible screenplay? I would like to think that they don’t pay more than $150,000 a week to fix my crap. If they do, I quit because I should be doing something else.

John: I’ve actually heard that rationalization not applied to me directly, but someone saying, no, yes, they’re replacing you. They’re bringing on this big writer, but it means they really love the project because look how much they’re paying that person. Which is absurd, but also true because it means if they’re willing to spend six figures on something or seven figures on something, they really are planning to make it. So it’s good news that you’re being replaced by this big giant, expensive writer because it means they really want to make it a thing. It’s crazy.

Taffy: You go home that night and you share the same blanket that David Justice had to say, well, Billy Bean thinks I’m a good leader. That’s all you have to keep you warm that night. I guess I’ll be a good leader.

John: You’ll be a good leader. You are a fantastic guest on the program. Thank you again, Taffy for doing this.

Taffy: You guys are the best. I had such a good time.

Craig: Bye, guys. Thank you.

John: Bye. Thanks, Craig.

Links:

• Moneyball on IMDb
• Moneyball screenplay
• Taffy Brodesser-Akner
• Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
• Scriptnotes LIVE! at the Austin Film Festival
• Highland Pro Austin launch party – sign up here!
• ABBA Voyage
• Opti-V fireplace
• Ken Medlock
• Imprint App
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

Craig Mazin: Hi. Today’s episode features an enormous amount of profane language, and not for any reason. I just felt like cursing. If you have kids in the car or anybody that doesn’t enjoy that sort of thing, earmuffs on.

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

Craig: [Underwater voice] Hello, and this is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 658 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we open our overflowing mailbag to tackle listener questions on collaboration, non-disclosure agreements, self-delusion, and when to switch jobs.

Craig: I like self-delusion.

John: Are you going to switch your job?

Craig: If I said yes, I would be engaging in some serious self-delusion.

John: Yes. Our bonus segment for premium members, which English words do we recognize but never actually use? We’ll discuss those words. We’re too chicken to try. I have a list of those.

Craig: Okay. That’s fun.

John: First, Craig, we have some actual news, a thing that has changed in the world. For as long as you have been a member of the WGA, you’ve been looking for your big green envelopes.

Craig: Oh my God. The WGA sent an update to us all. It was almost like, “Hey, we are now accepting your mobile phone number instead of your landline.” It was that overdue and out of date, but they are finally doing direct deposit of residuals into your bank account. Why it took them this long, I’m sure there’s a reason.

John: Yes. I can tell you some of the reasons why.

Craig: Yes. I’d love to know.

John: It was a subject of negotiation every time we went in with the studios.

Craig: Really?

John: Yeah. Because if you think about it, residual checks, they’re coming from the WGA, but they’re actually really coming from the individual studios. That relationship between the studios and the person being paid is complicated. Usually direct deposit is simple because you have direct deposit from just your one employer. Because they’re coming from all these different accounts, getting it all together to happen was an issue.

Craig: Just out of curiosity, because I don’t understand banking. I think everybody knows that about me. The WGA would collect the money and then it would conglomerate it into a paper check that came from the WGA to me. The companies weren’t paying me, right? The WGA was paying me.

John: The companies are ultimately paying you. There’s accounting that goes behind it too. It was more complicated than you would think.

Craig: It must have been.

John: Because obviously for 20 years we’ve been talking about this.

Craig: Right. It was crazy. The idea that paper checks were still– the cost of it all.

John: The cost of it all, yes.

Craig: Especially when you would get–

John: The checks would get lost.

Craig: Sometimes you get those weird residuals that are valued at less than the cost of the stamp.

John: It’s a good change. It just took a long time for it to happen. They’re rolling it out in phases, which makes sense.

Craig: Oh, you mean I’m one of the lucky ones that got it early?

John: Yes. Maybe I got it now, but my checks have been going to my business manager, so I’ve not actually seen the big green envelopes coming in.

Craig: Well, same. Nonetheless, I was happy for them. Business managers, particularly the large companies, the amount of those envelopes they have to process every week from writers and directors and actors, the opening of the things and the pens and the check and blah, blah, blah, so annoying. So, hooray. I’d love to really know–

John: What were the real obstacles, yes.

Craig: So strange, but thank God.

John: Thank God. We are a business that is being employed gig to gig, so all of our paychecks are coming through different services, but the same kind of payroll services that do things a lot. It makes sense that there should be some relationship electronically that they could figure out. So I’m not–

Craig: No, there is, obviously, because they did.

John: Yes. Making them partners.

Craig: It’s just whoever was responsible for this logjam, it is an interesting thing. Bureaucracies can harden themselves to things. When I was involved in the public schools in La Cuñada, here in California, which is a small school district, one of the first things that I encountered was that technologically, they weren’t just behind. They were so far behind, they were using software and a server that no one had really heard of or seen since the mid-‘90s. Basically, the guy who ran it was like– it was like when you’re trying to take your dog somewhere and they don’t want to go and they just plant their legs and you have to drag them. Eventually, he just got reassigned.

Somebody else came in and was like, “Oh my God. What?” But that was what they knew. The thought of a new system terrified everybody. They worried that the system will make them redundant. Sometimes there’s just this weird bureaucratic, what do you call it, cruft?

John: Cruft, yes.

Craig: Cruft.

John: That’s absolutely true. Sometimes it’s the gatekeeper, decision-makers, the doctors. Sometimes it’s the individual teachers who are so used to their one way of doing things, they don’t have the bandwidth to learn a new thing. Then other times, it’s just this acknowledgement that trying to change the system is going to be really difficult. My daughter’s at BU, and they changed the way this one financial thing works there. It’s just been absolute chaos to get bills paid.

Craig: That’s the thing that they all worry about. On the other hand, there are ways to transition to new technologies that are smooth, if they’re well thought through, well-planned. My goodness, the amount of meetings that must have occurred.

John: Oh, yeah.

Craig: It makes me shudder to think of having to sit through the quantity of meetings at the Writer’s Guild to transition to direct deposit. I don’t even want to think about it.

John: It’s going to be a lot. Well, as we talk about trying to transition people off of using Final Draft for everything, or the sense of colored pages, or the sense of locked pages, it’s tough because people are used to a thing.

Craig: Yes. And they’re afraid.

John: They’re afraid.

Craig: Oh, by the way, a little tip of the hat to our friends at Scriptation, because they sent me a free copy. Because I guess I mentioned on the show today, I was like, “I don’t have it.” Then they didn’t think like, “Oh, he can afford it.” They just sent me a free one. I would have also gone with if they had just been like, “Dude, buy a copy. Stupid.” They were very nice and they gave me one.

John: They gave me one too.

Craig: I downloaded it.

John: Nice. That’s the first step.

Craig: That’s the first step.

John: I agree, bit by bit. Back at Episode 654, we were talking about AI training. There was basically this service that was trying to hire WGA members to train on scripts.

Craig: Oh my God. Yes.

John: Peter wrote in and actually had his experience as a person who does this. Drew.

Drew Marquardt: Peter says, “I make between $20 and $30 an hour having conversations, editing text, and reviewing other workers’ conversations with AI chatbots. I work with General Models, LLMs designed to be personal assistants. I’m a 30-year-old actor, writer, and producer. To be clear, I’m not making it yet in the industry. I’m not yet in the Writer’s Guild. I audition for all kinds of projects and write all the time. I show up on my friends and colleagues’ sets to lend a hand when I can and will do whatever work I’m capable of.

There’s not as much of this happening right now and much less of it tied to a paycheck. I’d love to avoid this, but it pays my bills while I struggle to break into entertainment in a financially meaningful way. I set my own hours and my coworkers who are AI models are non-toxic, two things I highly value after working for years in the corporate service industry.

If I were a WGA writer, I would likely not volunteer to train a model specified to write, engineer, or filter scripts, even at $100 an hour. That said, as someone who’s been waiting for the chance to write and look at words all day and simultaneously make money, I’m extremely happy with this new position. I worry that I’m stealing from myself and my peers in the future, but the groceries I need to buy exist in the present.”

Craig: Well, that’s how they get you. Yes, you should be worried that you are stealing from yourself and everybody else in the future. Also, you should be worried about buying groceries, and this is how they get you. I think we were pretty clear when we discussed this last time that we certainly did not sit in moral judgment of somebody that needed to pay bills.

You need to pay bills. You need to pay bills. There are obviously other ways to pay bills. Everybody does have a choice. Peter has certain values. He doesn’t want to work in the corporate service industry. Do not blame him. He doesn’t want to deal with toxic coworkers. Don’t blame him. He’s training assistants, not AI writing.

From our point of view, okay. If I were an assistant out there, I would not like this at all.

John: Assistant is a pretty broad category. What Peter is doing is sort of making Siri better, like making those kinds of things. That’s also an assistant.

Craig: Yes, and hopefully that’s what it is. Then, okay, because I’m also a realist and I understand if Peter doesn’t do it, then Michelle will. Somebody’s going to do it. I understand this completely. I do think that we just have to be mindful that it’s not Peter’s fault. It’s the system and our business’s fault that it is driving people like Peter into the arms of the AI fuck masters.

John: I guess the language warning has to go on this.

Craig: Yes, I thought about it for a second. I was like, “It’s worth it.”

John: We had more follow-up from Kevin in San Francisco.

Drew: Kevin says, “Have you ever considered training an AI on the Scriptnotes transcripts? You could train an AI to create co-hosts that could fill in when one or both of you are too busy to record.”

John: Which one of us is going to be too busy to record, Craig? I wonder who would get filled in more often.

Craig: “It’s not my fault. I’m just trying to do my job.” Yes, we should totally do our job.

John: We totally have done that. You’ll remember this. Back in Episode 405, that was the one with Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone at the Ace Hotel, I had used a Markov chain generator, which is a very early rudimentary version of this thing, to create these synthetic statements of quotes from me and Craig, and we played a game called Bot or Not. We had to figure out, was that a real thing that we said or a robot?
Then in prepping for the script notes book, I had a resident genius named Yusefi train a version of ChatGPT-3, the older one, on the whole corpus of Scriptnotes to see if we could ask questions like, “Give me quotes from John and Craig talking about stakes.” We could search through the whole thing and then pull up the stuff because that’s useful. It’s not writing the stuff, but basically, can you gather up all the stuff–

Craig: Gather the things we’ve said.

John: We’ve said. It worked, but it was really kludgy, it was Python, it was really a brutal process. That was April 2023, and so just yesterday, I should say that nothing in the book is AI-generated at all, it’s 100%–

Craig: You’re goddamn right.

John: You’re goddamn right. It’s the stuff we said, edited by Drew and Chris and other folks who’ve just worked their asses off to do this, but yesterday, I went on perplexity.ai, which is one of the other big sort of LLM services, and I asked it to give me quotes from script notes in which John and Craig talk about stakes. That’s the only prompt I gave it, and holy shit, did it really come back with a lot. Craig, I’m going to show you the resulting page here.

Craig: I can get my glasses on for this.

John: All right.

Craig: It says, “In Episode 402 Scriptnotes titled How Do You Like Your stakes, John August and Craig Mazin delve into the concept of stakes in storytelling.” I have a problem with that first sentence, but that’s fine. “Here are some notable quotes from their discussion. John emphasizes the importance of understanding the stakes for each character. ‘When we talk about stakes, our key focus has to be our hero, our protagonist, and what are the stakes for that character?’” Okay, so it’s just– “But it’s important to remember that there should be stakes for most of these characters and they don’t have to be the same stakes.

Craig adds that different characters may have competing stakes. ‘For some characters in the show, the stakes are love. For other people, the stakes are I have to keep this government together, and If I fail, then there’s going to be chaos.’” Well, that one actually was sort of interesting because it introduced the idea of competing stakes based on what I said. That’s fairly impressive. Certainly, this looks like a book report from a very bland person.

John: I think what is remarkable, which is what we were trying to do when I had Nima train this himself, was it’s not hallucinating a bunch of stuff. It’s pulling quotes and you can actually click and see like, “Oh, that is where that this is from.” That is useful as a research tool, which I think is the kind of thing that I’m actually okay with. If it’s doing the job that a Google search would do, I’m much better with that than if it’s generating stuff.

Craig: I agree with you. Part of this is to not fall into the trap that a million math teachers fell into when we were growing up, which is to say calculators are cheating. No, they’re not. There’s really no benefit in knowing how to add three numbers together. There actually isn’t. If a calculator can do it, what’s the difference? If you want to be a mathematician, you have to understand the fundamentals behind that. I understand. Once you understand the fundamentals, what’s the point of requiring you to do it by hand? It’s stupid. It just comes down to [makes crazy sounds] I don’t think we should be that way with stuff like this.

If you say, “Listen, you have to go through by hand and pull all the things,” and it’s just drudge work, then yes, I’m fine with something that makes drudge work faster, sure. I would not be fine with saying, “Hey, ChatGPT-4…” is that what you use here?

John: This is actually perplexity.

Craig: Perplexity. “Hey Perplexity, go through all 600 and whatever episodes and write a book.” Nor, as the Australians say. Nor.

John: I agree. To your point about adding three numbers, there was a recent study, and I’ll try to find a link to it, that was talking about, I think it was college students who were encouraged to use AI to learn how to do certain things and basically studying how much did it help them when they were doing the thing right then, but how much did they actually retain in terms of their skills to actually do the thing? It helped them in the short term and it hurt them in the long term because they didn’t fundamentally learn how a thing worked. That’s the subtlety that I think we need to get past is that sometimes these AI systems are so good at doing certain tasks that we forget how to do them and we don’t understand the fundamental things behind this.

Drew, you have an example of this for Weekend Read, right? You were trying to– these duplicated lines that were showing up in a script that you were trying to clean up.

Drew: Yes, the OCR for a script had doubled every sentence, but it wasn’t perfect sentences. I tried to go to ChatGPT to have it make a Python code to just, or even a regular expressions thing to just take away that second sentence and it was nearly impossible.

John: The challenge is, Drew has the expertise to know how to ask ChatGPT to do a thing, but not really to understand how it’s doing the thing. It’s not a generalizable skill.

Craig: Yes, it seems to me that if you use these tools to take something you know how to do, but do it much, much faster, sure. That’s what– I can multiply any two numbers together. Doesn’t matter how big they are. Might take me a week if they’re really, really big. Calculator can do that instantly. So fine, do it instantly. I know how to do it.

John: Example of trying to use an LLM for a good purpose. This is when I tried this last week was, the prompt was, have a conversation with me in Spanish, correct me in English if I say anything wrong, and you can start your questioning with something about what I did today. It just becomes a back-and-forth conversation in Spanish. When I will freely make mistakes in front of this thing and will correct the mistakes, but then the conversation will continue. That was genuinely useful for me.

Craig: That’s actually a brilliant idea. That’s a really interesting way to learn a language. People generally say the best way to learn a language is just immerse yourself somewhere where you don’t know the language and you’re going to have to figure it out. If you talk to ChatGPT all day long and it’s speaking another language and it’s correcting you in that language, slowing down and repeating it, now that seems like a really good way of learning something. Did it insult you when you got things wrong?

John: I didn’t ask it to be snotty and insulting.

Craig: I would.

John: They’re very good at those tonal shifts, so I’m sure they could do that for you.

Craig: Did it ever sigh in exasperation? Like, “How many fucking times–“ there goes a language warning. “How many fucking times do I have to tell you? That’s a masculine word, not a feminine word. You goddamn moron.”

John: Yes. There’s a little of that.

Craig: That’s what I would set it to.

John: A little shame.

Craig: Because that’s how I learn best.

John: Absolutely. It’s well established that shame and abuse are really–

Craig: My love language.

John: We have more feedback on GitHub for screenplays. This is, again, I think that same episode we talked about how ideas of merging changes and like a bunch of whole established ways in coding, which you can– most people have been working on a code base and you can merge those changes. Someone with firsthand experience wrote in with their expertise.

Drew: “Tried and Failed writes, John and Craig are absolutely correct about Git being ineffective for script collaboration. I’m a software developer for a major innovative service vendor in the film industry. I was on a highly-skilled team that was instructed to build an internal screenplay-related tool with a Git backend and like a nice UI. We reluctantly built it and got it to production and the experience was awful for us and our poor users. The Git approach quickly descended into corner case hell.

Git works for code because the what and the why are explicitly expressed in code and comments with tightly bound atomic change sets. Screenplays are so different. They’re an incomplete product of sprawling intentions. A lot of what makes a screenplay effective happens off the page and the bones supporting that are rarely expressed atomically in text. I’ve used revision control for three decades and I assure you merging complex script changes was way more difficult than complex code changes.

As programmers, we dread huge unfocused pull requests, but with screenplay change sets, that’s the norm, not the exception. Revision control was the wrong approach.”

Craig: Yeah, seemed pretty clear to us. John, do you know what GitHub is called in the astral plane?

John: It’s something Githyanki?

Craig: It’s GithHub.

John: It’s GithHub, very nice, yes. Just for the D&D players out there.

Craig: Yes, GitHub is the wrong tool. Nothing wrong with that. It’s a great tool for collaborating on code, clearly. It’s very popular, but no. Screenwriting is not a matter of revision tracking. Revision tracking is secondary. Most of the revision tracking we do, we do even individually, just for ourselves. Then we show other people so that they can see what changed, not to make different changes. But when people are writing together, the changes should be happening together. When I was writing with Todd Phillips, we would sit side by side, computer in front of me. I would type because I type faster.

We would just talk through everything and just do it. That, to me, seems like still the best way, but there are solutions that aren’t so obsessed with revision tracking, but rather just we’re writing together. More like a shared Google Doc. Writer Duet sort of functions like this.

John: One of the points that he brings up here, which I think is really interesting, is that in code, you’re supposed to put in comments to sort of say like, “What’s actually happening here?” That would be a really great practice for writing in terms of like what is this scene? What has changed?

Craig: It’s so exhausting.

John: It’d be exhausting. One of the things we do in Highland is we have this thing called synopsis. Basically, we start a line with an equal sign. It doesn’t show up in the script, but it shows up in the actual editor. That is actually really useful for mapping out stuff. I wonder if it’d be a good practice to start just saying like, “This is what’s actually happening here. This is the intention, or this is why I changed this thing.” Because there’s an episode of a different podcast that’s coming out down the road, and a script that I’d written 20 years ago, they called to ask me about like, “Well, why is this thing this way?” I’m looking at the script, I have no idea.

I have no idea when this idea was introduced, but if it had some commenting in there, I could maybe figure it out.

Craig: I know that Final Draft and Fade In have a notes feature, which essentially, is the same thing. I never use it because, again, I just write for myself. Sometimes what I’ll do when I’m talking with people about– so I’ll sit with a director and we’ll go through the script, and we’ll have a discussion, and they may bring up a great point like, “Oh, you said this, but actually they don’t have the walkie-talkie right now.” I’ll just, I’ve set up a new revision level. I’ll just type my notes in bold, all caps. Then I go back, erase, and do the things that I want to change. That’s just for me.

John: I use synopses for the same thing, basically. I’m basically like bullet-pointing, like, “This is what’s going to happen here.”

Craig: Yeah, it’s a nice idea to think that we could go back and actually have a library of intentions, but writing’s hard enough. It’s just not– Also, I’m not sure to whom it would be super useful.

John: A thing we can already do is track changes, and so basically I’ll say compare this script to this script and see what changed, and with that sort of showing what changed, you can generally understand why, if you’re doing that close enough to the time that you actually did it. It’s like, “These are the reasons why I did that.” It would be a good practice to go in and, as you’re delivering a new script, just to spend the 10 minutes of like, “This is what actually happened in this draft.” Sometimes I can check the email that I sent with the draft and say like, “Here’s what’s new, here’s what’s different, and that’s a way to–” It doesn’t stick with the script.

Craig: It doesn’t. Season one, our script coordinator was very thorough about this. I think she would send a change log with every draft. Nobody read it. Nobody cared about it. They just looked for the asterisks, and then were like, “Okay, that’s the new stuff.” This season, I don’t think we did a change log. It just seems like nobody pays any attention to it.

John: In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, because there was no script coordinator. I was essentially the script coordinator. When I would send it through a color revisions, I would bullet point like, “These are the things that have changed.”

Craig: Oh, definitely. If it’s that kind of thing where I need people to know, but by the time we get into production, it’s all the product of meetings and things anyway, and generally no one cares. They are just, “Where’s my instruction set?” “Oh, I no longer have to do this with five people. I only have to do it with three people. Okay.” “We’re not shooting over there. We don’t have to build that anymore. Okay.” In development, it’s an easy thing to sort of say, “Hey, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s how it changed.”

John: Classically in TV, which is probably not your experience doing the show for HBO, but you would deliver an outline to the studio and then to the network, and they would give you notes back on this thing. In the follow-up phone calls and in the follow-up documents you’re sending through, you would make it clear like, “These are how we are addressing the notes that you sent through.” And that gives you some history on what’s actually happened here, but it’s not the same as what I think we’re asking for.

Craig: We do that with cuts. We’ll send a cut to the network and then HBO will have thoughts and then what I’ll do is I make what I call the little Christmas tree document. After absorbing them and looking through the material we have and also considering, do I agree? I will send back a response that’s basically, I just highlight their notes and I paint them either red or green. If I paint them red, I explain why I can’t or don’t want to do them. If I paint them green, I tell them how I either will be doing them or here’s the way we’re going to address this or we’re going to try at the very least. That stuff is all worth changelogging.

John: Well, we have a bunch of listener questions. It’s been a while since you and I’ve done this. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Yes, we’ll start with two questions on being torn between two jobs. SoVeryTired writes, “I’m a writer/director and VFX artist in LA. The lead actress from my last short has asked if I can help out with visual effects for a proof-of-concept pilot she wants to make. She’s made it clear this project already has a writer and director. She’s asked me to come on in a VFX artist capacity, which is my day job. My aspiration is to be a writer/director. My question is, how do you choose which projects to say yes to when you’re early in your career? I wouldn’t get paid much, if anything, for this. It’s definitely not about the money. I’ve asked to see an outline or script to see if it’s something I’m interested in.

Should I choose based on whether or not I’m interested in it or whether I think it has legs and might get picked up? I’m sure you’re going to say not to get involved if I don’t believe in the project, but nothing else I’ve made thus far has gotten me work. What if this project could be the one to get me noticed?”

Craig: What was the name of this person?

Drew: SoVeryTired.

John: SoVeryTired.

Craig: SoVeryTired, what you were sure of is incorrect. This sounds like you’re early in your career. Generally speaking, when it’s early in your career, I think the notion of opportunity cost is overemphasized. Your day is more elastic than you think. You have more time than you think. You have more energy than you think. Say yes, if you can. As long as it’s not clearly taking you away from something else.

It doesn’t sound like the conundrum is, “I am supposed to do this, which could help my career in terms of my creative output, but it’s not a lot of money. This over here is offering me a bunch of money for something that isn’t necessarily going to advance my career. What do I do? I’m torn between money or aspiration.” That’s not what’s happening here.

Nobody was healthy in the ‘90s, emotionally, and no one had any pride, because I did–

John: Or boundaries.

Craig: Or boundaries or anything. No one talked this way. No one. No one was like, “Oh, don’t do anything that your heart…” No, I did it. Nothing I did for 10 years had anything to do with what I wanted to do. I was just like, “Get me working. Get me knowing people. Get me experience. Have me prove to the people that do these things that I am reliable and talented.” Everyone’s path to that is different.

Your path to it was way different than mine. Your path was shorter. It was more efficient. I doubt there was much of a time where you were like, “Oh yes, I’m not going to do–“ you were 24 and you’re like, “I’m not doing that rewrite for this amount of money because it’s just not where my heart is, even though I have nothing else going on at the moment.” No, you just say yes.

John: I think saying yes is the right approach to most of these situations. I would say, you’re publicly saying yes, but internally, you should also be thinking about what is it I hope to get out of this experience? Do I want to meet some new people? Do I want to try this new visual effects tool that I’ve not gotten a chance to use? Do I want to get more stuff from my reel? SoVeryTired, you say that you are a writer/director, and VFX artist. If your goal is really to be a writer/director, do be mindful that you’re not only taking VFX jobs and never actually getting around to the thing that you actually want to do, which is writer/director.

There is a reality of people sometimes will distract themselves by taking a bunch of not-so-meaningful stuff because they know their main goal is hard. You’re young, you’re early in your career, do the things. If people are asking you to do a thing, say yes.

Craig: First of all, you’re not very tired. I’m sorry. You can’t be that tired yet. I’m very tired. I’m very tired. I just shot 12 hours a day for 7 months. I’m 53 years old. I’m very tired. You can’t be very– if you’re this tired already, bad news for you. Now, I’m making presumptions. Because even though it’s early in his career, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s early in his life. He could be 70 for all I know. Doesn’t matter. When you start, the one thing you really can’t afford to be is tired. This is when you’re supposed to have boundless energy. This is actually a pep talk.

I agree with John. If you go into this VFX thing, if it’s for a little bit of money or whatever, you’re hoping to get something out of it. Sometimes, you know what, you don’t know who you’re going to meet. That’s the crazy part. You don’t know who you’re going to meet on this gig. That person– how many stories are there of like two PAs meet, love each other creatively, write a script, become a thing? That happens.

John: Here’s what we’re not saying. We’re not saying you should do a thing that your spider sense says, “Don’t do.”

Craig: Of course.

John: If there’s people involved, you’re like, “I don’t think these are good people,” then that’s not worth your time.

Craig: Correct.

John: Don’t say yes to bad situations.

Craig: You want to basically say yes to things that you are actively interested in or things that don’t seem offensive and may therefore get you some additional experience. You want to be a writer/director? Well, bad news, hardest thing to be, rarest thing to be. We’ve talked a lot about shorts, which everyone seems to have and no one seems to watch, and the questionable value of those.

John: We have a question about that today.

Craig: Oh, well, you know what, maybe we’ll get to that question if I shut the fuck up. Once we do it, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: Once we do it, we do it. It’s been a long time. It’s been a long time since I cursed on this show.

John: On this show?

Craig: Yes. It’s pointless.

Drew: A second question here from Ben. Ben writes, “I’m an office coordinator in the facilities and real estate department for a major film studio. I took this job to make connections and hopefully get a job as a screenwriter. However, I find myself at an impasse today because of a few different factors. First, a lot of the connections and development that I’ve made were just laid off. Second, I just received an offer doing the same facilities job, but at a video game studio for double the pay. Finally, I recently got a publishing agent who also handles film and TV rights for my books, and I really enjoy writing novels now, not just screenplays.

If you were in my shoes, would you take the video game job and know that you’ll still be writing novels that have a slim chance of getting turned into movies anyway, or would you stay at the film studio and try to make more connections?

John: This one is so easy to me.

Craig: We’ve never had more of a slam dunk in our lives.

John: Take the video game job.

Craig: Oh my God.

John: You’re working in the facilities and real estate department for a major film studio. That’s nothing.

Craig: That’s like working in the facilities and office coordination area at Ralph’s or anywhere. It doesn’t matter. The fact that it’s at a studio is completely irrelevant.

John: If you worked at Universal Studios in the theme park side, you’re not any closer to the film and television business.

Craig: Correct. You’re just geographically close to the film business. Look, you made a mistake of perception. You thought, “Okay, if I work in the office and real estate section of a movie studio, I will be able to make connections to sell screenplays.” Never in a million years is that going to happen. You don’t come into contact with those people that’s not part of your job. However, it sounds like you’re very good at your job because this other company is offering you all this money to do it. Of course, also, you seem to like writing novels. Where are all your screenplays?

Your novels are doing well. They’re getting published. Maybe people are going to talk about adapting them. Great. Maybe you’ll be the person to try and adapt. Who knows? You are not at all in the right place to make “Connections.” Someone’s offering you double the money to do the same gig and you can still write novels on the side? This is like walking up to a 1 foot-high basketball hoop and dunking. John, dunking is the act of taking a basketball…

John: I know what dunking is.

Craig: Okay, just checking.

John: It sounds like this is your day job. Basically, they’re offering you a day job that pays twice as much because it seems like you really perceive yourself as a writer and possibly a novelist rather than a screenwriter. These are wonderful things. Many great novelists have come out of working day jobs their whole lives. It also sounds like this job is not taxing you mentally. It sounds like– I was an intern at Universal. There were three assistants above me and I was the intern below them. I had no responsibilities. I came home from work and I had not used my brain at all. I wrote my first screenplay those evenings.

Craig: Yes. When I was an intern at Fox Network, I was 20. My responsibility was to work for the assistant to the assistant to a guy. That meant xeroxing and covering phones for about 30 minutes where everyone was panicked I would screw it up. You’re absolutely right. When I got in my car, my brain emptied completely. I haven’t had that feeling since 1991.

John: It’s so nice.

Craig: It’s so nice to just know job ended. Go home. Think about not job at all because job done. Sounds like you got that nailed and you have time to write novels.

John: I bet because you’d be working at Starbucks and you’d have the same situation, you’d be exhausted because you would have been on your feet all day.

Craig: Exactly. Here you’re sitting in an office. You’re good at it. You answer some– you set up some people with some office space for– This one. Oh, one of the easiest ones we’ve ever had.

John: Love it. All right. Two questions here about career momentum.

Drew: Stu writes, “I was hired to write the pilot and Bible for two major sci-fi television franchises, each of which for various reasons never made it to production. I recently saw that the producers have now teamed up with a very well-known late-night talk show host to produce the series and they’re looking for a writer. Apparently I got fired without ever being informed I was fired, which sounds like Hollywood.”

John: I’ve been there.

Drew: “My frustration beyond the obvious is that I put a good four years of work into this project and I’m quite proud of it. Yet outside of a few offhand mentions buried deep in the internet, my contribution to the franchise seems to have been erased from our timeline. It seems childish to update my own IMDb page with the project in question. My question is less about what to do about this particular project and more what I should be doing to ensure that I can maintain industry visibility when I’m hired to write something that 9 times out of 10 will never make it out of development.”

Craig: Oh my God. What are we going to do with this generation?

John: First off, the easiest thing is you do not update your IMDb.

Craig: No.

John: No. No, absolutely not.

Craig: No.

John: Great. You were hired to write a pilot and Bible for two major TV franchises. I am assuming that got you reps. I don’t think this is going to be a situation like our mistakes on Hallmark movies. If these are major things, you have reps. They know the work you did. You got paid for them. They have those as samples that they can show around and give you additional work. Focus on what you’re doing next and you got to move past thinking about these two things that didn’t happen.

Craig: We have to talk about the value of recognizing and appreciating our failures. We fail all the time. In this case, a failure occurred. I’m not saying it was a failure of creativity. What you wrote might’ve been incredible, but here’s what happened. It wasn’t enough to get it made. Then the people that own the property had a conversation with some late-night talk show host who loves that property. No one has any interest in what you did. It doesn’t matter. They just hit reset and started over. You’re sitting here talking about all of those years and the pride and all the rest. You got paid. You took a job. You got paid. You took the money.

Welcome to being a professional in Hollywood. Put your pride away. Don’t go on IMDb with a, “Look at me thirsty, uncredited.” Every time anybody with an uncredited on their page, it’s a stain, as far as I’m concerned. All it says is maybe I did something, maybe I’m lying, or maybe I got fired. Either way, nothing good. What’s wrong with going, “Okay, lost. I lost that game.” Doesn’t make me a bad player. It just means you can’t win them all. I lost it. What industry visibility are you hoping to get from being a washout on a project? The only visibility you can get is a guy that got–

You weren’t even fired by the way. You weren’t fired. You were hired to do something. You did it. Job ended. That’s not even fired. It just means they didn’t want to keep going with you. That’s independent contracting.

Look, I know I have shame issues. I know that. I know that I’m not healthy, but it just seems like we have to get the pendulum swinging a little bit back towards, let’s not say shame. Let’s just say humility. This thing of, “Well, I worked on it, so therefore I deserve something from it.” You got something. Money, experience. Move on.

John: Now, down the road, if this project happens and it’s the same producers, you may still be in the chain of title for this thing. You may still end up with some credit on it.

Craig: Who knows.

John: Who know. You cannot be banking on that. You cannot be focused on that, because Craig and I both know too many writers who got so obsessed with this one thing that didn’t happen and it derailed their careers.

Craig: It’ll kill you. It’s a poison in your veins. To me, I am angry because I didn’t get to succeed on this. I’m not going to say I failed. I’m angry about this and I’m going to fight it in my heart and soul and also in the world somehow.

That’s one of the great poisons that can be in your blood in this business. The other one is envy. When you are watching other people and going, “Well, I should be where that lady is. It’s not fair that she’s there. I’m better than her.” None of that shit is going to help you ever. It’s only– not only to hurt you, it will keep you from succeeding all the time. There is nothing wrong.

By the way, Stu, the most Hollywood thing about you is that you worked on something that it didn’t work out. That’s the ultimate Hollywood professional thing. You don’t think that’s happened to me? You don’t think that’s happened to John? Not once, not twice, but maybe 10 times. It’s just what happens, man. You got to just– you got to let it go. Come on. Come on, Stu. Stu, be the guy that got that job. Don’t be the guy that lost that job.

John: Craig and I have both had conversations with– we’ve had folks on this podcast who were the subsequent writers on projects that we had initially done.

Craig: Yes, of course.

John: You roll with it.

Craig: Absolutely. Look, you and I have both sat in movie theaters, watching movies that are huge hits that our names aren’t on. We weren’t even sent a copy that we wrote a lot of. We took the money. It’s about not getting defined by these things and also not clinging to this one thing is like, “Look what I did.” Next. No one cares what you did four years ago.

John: Here’s the related thing, is I think we talk about writers whose career could derail because they get too obsessed about the thing that didn’t happen. There’s also writers who get too obsessed about the thing that did happen. The success that happened and like, well, that’s it for them. “I had this one success. I got this nomination on this movie was a hit,” and they’re not thinking about what comes after.

Craig: There is a well-known study. I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but that when directors in particular win an Oscar award, the time between that and their next movie is way larger than the time between whatever the median director is and their next feature. It’s because there’s this awards paralysis of, “I must now be precious.” Keep going, man. Just keep going, kids. None of it matters. Did you sell something today? Celebrate. Celebrate for three days if you want. When Monday comes around, get back to work. Do the next thing.

John: I was watching a movie this last week that I thought was fantastic. I was wondering like, “Where is this director’s next movie?” Because this is 10 years and the next movie has not happened. I emailed my manager who figured he’ll probably know this. I said, “What’s the deal? Did this person get secretly canceled? Is there a problem? I don’t understand.” It’s like, “Oh no, apparently he wants his next movie to be something he writes himself, and he’s just having a hard time writing that script.”

Ten years?

Craig: John, see, he wants something. What he wants has nothing to do with how he does his best work. What he wants has everything to do with his pride. “I don’t want to share it. I don’t want somebody else to get it. It’s me. I’m the man. Me. Me.” Well, you’re not. There’s nothing wrong with that either.

John: I do wonder whether there’s a sunk cost fallacy. It’s like, “Now, I’ve spent seven years working on this thing. Maybe I’ll spend another three years.” He should have directed three movies in that time.

Craig: Cut, bait, move on. You can’t. Maybe it’s an offshoot of follow your dreams, do your passion, all that crap, that then leads people who are underemployed and under-credited to behave as if they’re not.

I still struggle to say no to things because I’m panicked that it’ll all end. I have to, because I don’t have the time. That’s because I’m working. There’s no part of me ever that was like, “What? I’m above that.” The only time that I was like, I was very focused on, “I want to try and do something that’s different than the things I’m doing.” And that’s why I did Chernobyl. I did it. And I got to tell you, while I was doing that, I was writing other stuff. I was rewriting things left and right for money.

Because Chernobyl, the entire thing, paid me about what I would make in a week and a half on production rewrites on some very good movies and some spectacularly awful ones. That’s okay. I needed money to support my family while I did this. I never, ever just hit the brakes and was like, “I am now God’s little special, passionate dream child.” I’m in a mood today.

John: You are in a mood today.

Craig: You know what? There’s nothing wrong with that.

John: Let’s move on to Michael here.

Craig: Stu’s probably like, “What the fuck? Jesus, just say, just say no.”

Drew: Michael’s thinking about the next thing. Michael says, “My first short film was recently turned into a film that has won several prestigious awards in my home country. However, the biggest surprise is that it won Best International Short at an Oscar qualifying festival in the States, making it eligible for a 2025 nomination.”

Craig: Congrats.

Drew: “I understand that being long listed isn’t life changing. However, I don’t want whatever potential opportunities that might come from this to pass me by. I’m uncertain about my next steps. Should I continue to focus on developing another short film, or would it be more strategic to shift towards a feature script or TV series? If I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I’m speaking to anyone about potential future projects, I want to make sure I have something in the chamber.”

Craig: I feel like I’m dying.

John: Craig’s shaking his head. You go to that third paragraph and it’s like-

Craig: I feel like everyone’s turned into a fucking agent.

John: Here, I want to make sure we’re catching this. My first short film script was recently turned into a film. Michael is not the writer director, is the writer of the short film script. Michael, I’m so happy for you. I’m so happy the short turned out great. You as the writer will get a very small bump off of this. The writer directors and directors get bumps off of shorts. You will not. Anything you’re doing now to write other stuff that people can see is what you should be doing. Writing another short is not the best use of your time.

Craig: There is literally one way to convert this into value for you, Michael. That is to have whoever sends your script, your next script to someone, whether it’s you or a representative, they get to say in that little thing, “This script is from so-and-so whose movie that he wrote got this award, this award and was long listed, shortlisted or even won an Oscar.” That’s it. Period. The end. Meaning there is nothing to get from this. It happened. They need scripts. There has to be a script. Keep writing. Stop calculating so much. Everybody is just, “How do I convert this into max?” Because that’s the way everyone fucking talks now. It’s unreal. I see it.

You know there used to be, there was a bunch of fake gurus and you hated them? There’s too many now. There’s not enough hate in the world. Everyone now is obsessed with strategizing. I’m like, “You want to cut through all the strategizing? Write a good script. Then you don’t need strategy.” Guess what? My former writing assistant for season two of The Last of Us, I won’t say her name or anything about it identifying because I haven’t asked her for permission. I’ll simply say this. This is an unassuming human being who has the least amount of strategizing of anybody I know. She’s just a very simple, cool, down-to-earth person who’s a bit shy, a bit diffident, a bit nervous.

Well she wrote a script. And I don’t know who initially saw it or got it but there’s a full seven studio bidding war over this thing going on right now. The strategizing got no further than her calling me in a panic going, “I’m terrified and I feel like no one’s really on my side during this.” I was like, “Well, who are your representatives? Who’s your lawyer?” “I don’t have one.” “Got it, done. Now you have my lawyer. Now someone’s on your side. Go with God and congrats.” No planning, no conversions, just writing a script. Which, by the way, Michael, that’s how you got into this position in the first place. You wrote a script. Just keep going. Oh my God. It’s over. Let it go.

John: I do wonder if some of the strategizing that we’ve seen over this last, I’d say the last 10 years has been more of a focus on that. I think, I wonder if social media and the way that you get the instant gratification of like the likes and the re-shares is an acceleration. “This thing has happened, so therefore I have to capitalize on it.”

Craig: Oh yes. It’s poisonous. Everyone thinks that that’s getting you something. It’s getting you nothing. You are all just huffing air and pretending it’s special. It’s not. There’s nothing happening there that matters. As a writer, nothing. Your screenplays matter. The self-promotion, the strategizing, the, “Look at me,” all that stuff, if it makes you feel good, great. Hopefully you recognize that, but it doesn’t matter. The scripts, that’s it. Write something. Keep writing. Stop talking so much about it. Do it instead. I say that as somebody who’s on episode 609,000, but that’s only because you make me. I’m your indentured servant.

John: The last thing I’ll say to Michael is if you had a good experience with this director who did the short and you want to do other stuff, that might make sense. If they are getting some traction and you can be the person getting traction there with them, you can get in some meetings, fantastic. That’s a way that you could actually get out of this.

Craig: You can certainly, you can contact the producers of the film. You can contact maybe the studio that’s releasing it. It’s an easy one for at least for somebody to pick up the phone and go, “You wrote a thing that we made, of course.” Like I said, short of saying, “Hey, this is what I did, therefore, you might want to read the next thing–“

John: If you’re on anybody’s radars, if you’re on the radar of a Sundance Institute and it helps you get into the Sundance Labs, if that’s the thing you’re interested in, could be useful.

Craig: Apply.

John: Apply.

Craig: Anyone can apply.

John: Anyone can apply.

Craig: There’s no strategizing.

John: Two questions on IP stuff.

Drew: Wendy writes, “We’re starting to show our pitch deck around town to gain the interest of an actor. We have an NDA that everyone so far has agreed to sign.”

Craig: NDA, everyone knows that term.

Drew: “We have interest from a verbal pitch by a well-known actor, and his manager is telling us that they don’t sign NDAs. Is this common practice? When I worked as a producer at Imagineering at Disney, we wouldn’t let anyone in the door without signing an NDA. I feel the same way with this, but wanted to make sure that was correct.”

John: I think that anybody’s willing to sign an NDA for you is surprising. NDAs are not common for me as an individual to go out and do a thing. Disney is notorious. You’re not allowed to walk in that Disney Magic Hat building without signing an NDA.

Craig: That’s for them. We shouldn’t also know that abbreviation. We should be innocent of these things. It’s a nondisclosure agreement. Anybody that comes and auditions for us, visits our set, walks near our props, has to sign an NDA. If you’re talking with people about maybe working on something together, I’ve never asked. I personally, I’ve never asked anyone to sign an NDA in my life. It’s sending a little bit of an amateur vibe, I think, to say like, “This actor, we want to talk with you, but we don’t really trust you.”

John: I think it’s Silicon Valley NDAs are more common. When you’re going to pitch a concept of a–

Craig: Of course, because it’s financial, it’s about investing. This is about collaboration. Unless I’m misunderstanding.

John: No, it seems like it is. My answer to Wendy is I don’t think you should be stressed about it. Just don’t worry about it. They’re not going to sign an NDA. Then take that as–

Craig: I can see where like, if your whole career– Wendy worked in Imagineering?

John: Yes.

Craig: I get, your whole career you’ve been signing NDAs. People have been signing NDAs. Nobody can go to the bathroom without an NDA because, “Oh my God, no one can know about the Star Wars hotel or whatever.” But that’s that. You might think like, “That’s been my life. Therefore, it’s what we should do.” No, not in this circumstance. It doesn’t feel like it to me. Look, hopefully you have a lawyer who is working with you, but I’m not really sure what it is that they’re going to disclose anyway that’s so damaging.

John: Drew, let’s jump ahead to Brandon, who’s also sort of IP.

Drew: Brandon writes, “An artist friend and I were originally planning a comic book idea called Monster Agents. I handles all the writing, he worked on art concepts for the characters. But due to his schedule, a comic doesn’t seem likely. He gave me full support and permission to move on with adopting our comic idea into a children’s animation series. I began adapting my own comic scripts to a television pilot and it’s gotten some fantastic grades from some screenwriting feedback services, with many people believing this would work great as a television series for kids. I’ve started organizing a pitch deck and this leads to my question. In any of my pitch materials or on the front of my screenplay, do I say, adapted from the comic book concept?”

“The comic book never left basic storyboards, character concept drawings and scriptwriting phases. Also, it’s me adapting my own work from one medium to another, so would that be weird to mention? Should I just present it as purely an original television animation concept?”

John: So we actually have an answer here. Source material is defined in the WJ credits manual as, “material assigned to the writer that was previously published or exploited and upon which the writer’s work will be based.” This was not a comic book that was published out in the world. This is still an original idea.

Craig: It wasn’t even made. The answer to your question is no. That would be like saying, “Adapted from an idea that I had.” So not adapted. It’s new. It’s a new thing. The fact that you talked about it with people or even the fact that somebody illustrated images that you’re not currently using to promote it or anything like that, no.

John: The degree to which this was a collaboration between you and this artist friend, if you guys, this was your joint thing that you were doing together, I think it’s shitty to try to cut them out of this. You have to have a conversation with them to what degree are they a story collaborator on this?

Craig: It sounds like the other person was like, “Go do it. I drew some things, but we couldn’t turn it into a comic book.” If in the development of it, monsters started looking like the monsters that the artist drew, that would be a discussion to have, of course. But no, it’s an original work.

What was common, I don’t know if they’re still doing it, but in the 2000s and 2010s, it was common for people to nearly self-publish some sort of graphic novel to then go to studios and say, “I wrote a graphic novel, it’s IP, let’s set it up here and then I’ll adapt it into a screenplay.” That was somehow schmuckbait for dumb executives who couldn’t tell. Basically, they were just selling you a screenplay, but they just wrote it and put some pictures on it and published it at some baloney press. You could do that, but why?

John: There’s no advantage to it.

Craig: No, not anymore, I don’t think.

John: All right, let’s do our One Cool Things. I have two one cool things. First off is the new COVID vaccine, a booster shot that I got yesterday. I got it in my arm. Craig, you don’t need it because you just got it.

Craig: I just had nature’s COVID vaccine.

John: You just got the COVID vaccine. It’s out there, so everyone should get it. I always recommend the flu shots. From the very start of the program, I would recommend the flu shots. Now it’s the COVID booster.

Craig: I need to pick a week where I’m okay with being a little gross for a few days because I do need to get the shingles vaccine. Shingrix.

John: I got my shingles vaccine. It did, makes you feel bad. The second one hurts more than the first one.

Craig: Is it a series of two shots?

John: It’s two shots.

Craig: Hurts like your arm swells up kind of hurts?

John: No. They just feel bad. The shot hurts a little bit.

Craig: Your body reaction?

John: Yes.

Craig: Remember the first COVID vaccines, how much they hurt? The next day, your arm was like, ow.

John: My arm was a little bit sore.

Craig: Oh man, it really hurt. Then everyone was like, “That means it’s working.” I’m like, “I’m sure it is.”

John: My second one thing is a feature they’ve added onto threads, which I think is actually really smart. It’s called Hide for Everyone. Basically, if someone is replying to your post and is just being a jerk, and you tap Hide for Everyone, it just sends them into a void where they don’t know that you’ve hidden it from everybody else.

Craig: This feature is one of the most brilliant things. Back in the old days when I was on the writers’ BBS-type forums, there was a setting on this old, I think it was V Bulletin, I think it was called. There was a setting called Send to Coventry. It meant that person would not know that anyone couldn’t hear them. No one else would know that person was talking. They would just go on and on. No one knew. They didn’t know. It was wonderful because some people, oh my God. Send to Coventry, so that’s what they’ve done here, which is brilliant. Love it.

John: The other feature is you can, if you’re getting piled onto for a post you’ve made, you can disconnect that post from the feedback.

Craig: I see.

John: It just sort of takes you out of that.

Craig: To short circuit the viral kickback?

John: Yes.

Craig: You know what really does that? The best version of Hide for everyone.

John: Stay off social media?

Craig: Stay off social media. That’s what I’ve done. I have the ultimate Hide from Everybody. Disconnect. It doesn’t seem to have slowed me down, even though strategically I’m not leveraging my social media reach. Barf.

John: Barf.

Craig: Barf.

John: Craig, you got any one cool things for us?

Craig: It’s an old one cool thing, but it’s a renewed one cool thing because it’s just so goddamn cool. Obviously Baldur’s Gate 3 was my one cool thing when I first played it through. Now that we’ve wrapped, I’ve picked it back up to do a new playthrough, which is a little painful at first because you have to like learn a new character and you’re trying to break your old patterns and you want to experience different things.

John: You’re on rails for that first little section too. I find frustrating.

Craig: Ish. But that’s the thing. On this playthrough, as a totally different character, I’ve just made a point of like, “I’m going to slow down and look everywhere.” And the amount of shit that I had missed-

John: Totally.

Craig: -is insane. I’m not even talking about things that were like, “Well you made this choice. That gets cut off for you. I’m talking about-

John: A Little geographic exploration.

Craig: Correct. It’s bananas. Larian is just a little miracle. It was, it’s honestly like a little miracle. It’s hard to believe. The first playthrough, did you by any chance fight Raphael?

John: I did. Yes.

Craig: You did? That’s a, that’s a tough fight. That’s the toughest fight in the game.

John: It’s a really tough fight.

Craig: 666 hit points.

John: Of course the special song that plays.

Craig: The special song, which is catchy.

John: On your first playthrough, I bet you did not do the Githyanki crush.

Craig: I did.

John: You did?

Craig: I did. That’s the thing. On my first playthrough, I didn’t go to the house of hope. I didn’t do that. That entire thing I missed. I’m just saying like, “Wait, here’s a whole weird house with a thing in it that was in the corner of a map that I didn’t know was there.” There’s so much stuff. I thought I’d picked through all of it. In Laroque and the wizard in Baldur’s Gate, that tower has so much shit in it that I was not aware of. Now I am. God damn, that game is good. It’s so good. You know what? We should play D&D tonight.

John: I think we will. We should go to your house and play some D&D.

Craig: Huzzah.

John: What do we eat for D&D?

Craig: You know what? Whatever you want. You tell me and I’ll order it up.

John: I think some Burger Lounge could be good.

Craig: Burger Lounge? Done.

John: It’s been a minute.

Craig: It works every time.

John: That is it for Scriptnotes for today. It’s produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: What?

John: Edited by Matthew Cilelli.

Craig: Oh God.

John: Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com

That’a also where you find the transcripts, and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau, and hats. Hats are great. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on words we know, but never use.

Craig: Like GithHub.

John: Craig, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Alright, Craig. The motivation behind this segment was I recognized that there were words that I knew, but I was never actually using. I’d be nervous to type them, but I certainly wouldn’t say them in a conversation. It’s like, “Am I going to get it wrong?” For example, I got reticent wrong on the podcast and people called me out. I was like, “That’s right. It does not mean reluctant. I was using it as that.” Here’s a word that I’ve heard you use. This is the one.

Craig: Decrement?

John: Yes. I’ve heard you in the course of D&D say dee-crement rather than decrement.

Craig: Sometimes I’ll say dee-crement. I don’t know which is better, pronunciation wise.

John: Dee-crement matches up well with decrease and with the opposite of increment, but it does go down. Yes. Then I also listened to this past week, wrote in to say we should talk about bathos, and do you even know what bathos is?

Craig: I know that it’s not pathos.

John: Bathos is an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from sublime to the trivial or ridiculous. You might say, “His epic poem has passages of almost embarrassing bathos.”

Craig: It’s not going to come up often.

John: It’s not going to come up all that often.

Craig: No. It certainly is going to come up constantly in the staff meetings at the English department, classics departments at various colleges.

John: I thought we might take a look through some words that I will see used, and I’ve never been tempted to try to use.

Craig: Let’s play this game. I’m certain to fail.

John: Desultory.

Craig: Desultory?

John: Have you ever used it?

Craig: No.

John: Desultory is lacking a plan or purpose or enthusiasm. “A few people left dancing in a desultory fashion.”

Craig: Okay. A fancy way of saying random.

John: Yes, random.

Craig: Purposeless. Aimless. Unfocused.

John: Yes, I think the fact that we have really good alternative things for it is-

Craig: Don’t need it.

John: Induritize.

Craig: Induritize?

John: Yes, to harden the heart.

Craig: That’s just ridiculous.

John: We don’t need it.

Craig: Because we have inure. Inure to. Induritize. That almost feels like a mistake.

John: It does feel like a mistake. Not necessarily a word. Ebullient.

Craig: Ebullient means with bravado and confidence.

John: Confidence and joy and enthusiasm. I get the word. I’ve just never been tempted to use it.

Craig: Nah, it feels like you’re an asshole if you use that word.

John: Importune. To importune upon somebody.

Craig: To importune is to, is that to prevail upon them in an interrupting way, to force yourself upon someone?

John: Yes. Again, I’ve not needed it.

Craig: It’s not necessary.

John: Assent, so assent not to climb up, but to give one’s assent to a thing.

Craig: That’s to give your nod of approval. That I do use all the time.

John: Yes, with your assent. I use it as a matching to dissent, but it’s not a word I would reach for.

Craig: Do you give me your assent? What it’s been replaced with is consent. People are obsessed with consent.

John: Consent, but they’re not the same word.

Craig: They are not the same word.

John: Consent is agreeing to a thing.

Craig: A mutual agreement. Whereas assent is, and I think a lot of times when people say consent, they mean assent. Which is, “I assent to you doing this to me.” Consent is, “We both agree this will happen.”

John: Expatiate.

Craig: Oh boy. I guess it would mean to send somebody away from their country?

John: That sounds right. Expatriate is how I think it would be. If you think about it. Expatiate is to speak or write in detail about, expatiate upon.

Craig: Couldn’t have been wronger.

John: Again, a word that we’re not going to use.

Craig: Also, I said wronger.

John: Do you ever use mettle? Mettle, like prove you’re mettle?

Craig: Yes.

John: I don’t think I’ve ever used it.

Craig: Yes. To test someone’s mettle? Sure.

John: Rakish is a word I know. I never use it.

Craig: A rake, a rake is sort of a slightly caddish guy. A rakishness, rakish audacity is one of the things in D&D. Rakish. You’re a bit suave and cool and sassy.

John: Confidently careless and informal.

Craig: There you go.

John: Censorious.

Craig: Censorious, so that’s with a C?

John: Yes.

Craig: I assume that means in the matter of a censor, meaning prohibiting things.

John: Prohibiting, it’s actually criticizing.

Craig: Like censure?

John: Yes.

Craig: I see, interesting.

John: Insipid is a thing, I know it’s negative, but I’ve never actually had the opportunity to use it.

Craig: Stupid, banal, boring, witless.

John: Here’s a word, peruse, which does not mean what we think it means.

Craig: No, it does not.

John: It’s drifted and now it just means-

Craig: Peruse is in the category of decimate, and has become the opposite of what it means. Peruse means to study something very carefully, but everybody uses it to mean briefly scan for something. Where decimate means remove one-tenth of something and everyone thinks it means remove 90% of something.

John: Harsh. Laconic. Laconic is using words, using a lot of words or using very few words?

Craig: Very few.

John: Yes, and to me it feels like using a lot of words, therefore I’ve never reached for the word.

Craig: Laconic is a classic SAT word that gets grouped in with terse, brusque.

John: Perfidy.

Craig: Perfidy is lying, it’s being a liar.

John: Yes, have you ever used it?

Craig: I’ve used perfidious. Perfidy as a crime, rarely spoken of.

John: Supercilious.

Craig: Supercilious is a wonderful word that means snobby, basically. It comes from, it basically means raising your eyebrow. Super above cilia, the eyebrow.

John: Nice.

Craig: It literally comes from like, “I’m better than you.”

John: With your word game background, you’re probably encountering some of these words that you’re not even reading that often, but they exist.

Craig: They’re part of my life.

John: They’re part of your life but they’re not necessarily things that I would, even knowing what they mean, I would be not inclined to put them in my own writing.

Craig: Supercilious, if I used that word, I would be aware that I was almost self-defining as supercilious. It’s a word that means, like sesquipedalian means a lengthy word. You’re a dick if you say supercilious. You’re being supercilious. Nobody’s going to be like, “That common word.”

John: The challenge here is they’re not dead words. They’re words that people could use and people can understand, but they’re nearly dead words because you can’t count on a person understanding what your intention is behind them. While they could probably pick it out of context, it’s tough.

Craig: If you note, quite a few of these words are either Latin or Greek-rooted. We tend in English to move more towards the Germanic, our Germanic roots and our Scandinavian roots. There’s no way that the Romans or the Greeks didn’t come up with snobby. That’s going to have to be from the Vikings, right? Something like that. Supercilious, yes, very Latin.

John: As we talked about on the show before, English is unusual in that. We had a whole bunch of words and then the French came in and we took all of their words too. We have a bunch of redundant words that actually have the same origin.

Craig: That is correct. We have both small and petite.

John: Yes, which is fun. Royal and regal, which is good. There’s also the words that on podcasts I hear mispronounced and I’m always so surprised when it happens. This last week I heard re-present for represent. It wasn’t that they were re-presenting something that they presented before. They actually just said re-present.

Craig: Like he represents a version of, yes, that’s wrong. It’s just wrong.

John: It’s just wrong. I hear prefix.

Craig: No. Who says prefix? Prefix, like prix fixe menu?

John: Prefix menu. Tell me your objection.

Craig: I thought you meant prefix.

John: Not prefix. Not the thing that comes before a thing. Prix fixe like a fixed price menu. People will try to over-journalize the rules they think they know about French and so they’ll say, so they’ll say “pree fee,” or…

Craig: No. There’s a weird thing. You’re talking about prefix. Now, by the way, with that, I understand people can mispronounce French words. Especially with Xs.

John: Sometimes they’ll be so insistent that they’re doing it right.

Craig: There’s something that Melissa pointed out to me that I didn’t believe was true. Then the moment she said it, I encountered it many times. A little bit like when her cousin pointed out that a lot of people say hythe. I was like, “No, they don’t.” Then literally for the rest of my life, I’ve just been hearing hythe from people. I just, hythe from very educated people will say hythe. It’s mind-blowing. There are quite a few people who pronounce the word concierge, “conciere”. That’s insane. If it ended in a T? Sure. It doesn’t. It ends in a G. Do we say garage instead of “Gara,” instead of “Garage?” It doesn’t even follow internal rules. Outrageous.

John: Drew, you were pointing out at lunch yesterday that you had confusion about a small wiener dog.

Drew: Yeah, I thought that dachshunds and “dash-unds” were two different types of dogs until probably my late 20s.

Craig: What is it you thought? You saw the word dachshund. You thought it was pronounced “dash-unds”.

Drew: No, I heard the word dachshund. I was like, “That’s a type of dog.” Then I saw the word dachshund and was like, “That’s a wiener dog.”

John: He thought like the dog he was seeing would be, a dachshund would be like a D-O-X-I-N or something?

Drew: Probably D-O-X-E-N is what it was in my head, but that makes no sense.

Craig: It’s actually logical, but hund, hound, it’s all there.

Drew: I wasn’t that bad.

Craig: It was there for you. You just needed to reach a little harder.

John: Those are the words that are like, where once you understand. I think we were talking about lunch also, about like cupboard, like the word, it feels like there should be a word C-U-B-B-A-R-D.

Craig: It is odd that cupboard is pronounced cupboard. We have a few of those strange, very English abbreviated pronunciations like that. I don’t know why. It’s actually, cupboard is a really interesting one. It doesn’t make any sense. I remember as a kid thinking, “Why? Mother Hubbard, H-U-B-B-A-R-D, has nothing in her cupboard.”

John: Coxswain, like the person at the head of the boat. There are those things, which a lot of times place names will be the same situation where it’s like, “It’s spelled that way, but you don’t pronounce it anything like that.”

Craig: Other than spelling bee purposes, no one who hasn’t seen the word coxswain would ever spell it the way it’s spelled. It’s impossible.

John: C-O-X-S-W-A-I-N.

Craig: Correct.

John: That’s insane. It’s coxswain and then it’s coxswain and it’s one of those cupboard things.

John: It’s shortened down. I think the only takeaway I would say from this is that if you’re going to reach for one of those words, or if you have a character who’s reaching for one of those words, just understand that there’s the context around it. Understand that if the person uses one of these ambitious words, that tells you something about the character.

Craig: If you look at the text of the architects, two semi-monologues in the second Matrix movie, there are more high vocabulary words per minute than any other movie I’ve ever seen. Some of those words are incredible, like sedulous, but that was the point, was that he’s vastly smarter than you. Certainly than Neo.

I just like that Keanu Reeves’ character never was like, “Wait, what’s sedulous?” Which we made fun of in Scary Movie 4, because it was funny, but what is sedulous? Why would you let somebody say that in passing and not go, ”Sorry, roll back? What does that mean?” He was just like, “There’s been more of me.”

You don’t know what sedulous means, Neo.

John: I have no idea what sedulous means.

Craig: I still don’t know what sedulous means.

John: We have answers in our pockets. What does sedulous mean? “A person showing dedication, diligence.” “He washed himself with the most sedulous care.”

Craig: Sure. Careful would have been a perfectly good word.

John: Absolutely. That’s an example. It’s like, it’s not a needed word anymore.

Craig: No. I think that the Wachowskis certainly must have gone to a thesaurus and said like, “This guy is going to use these words as part of his character. We want people to be like, ‘What, huh?’” Otherwise they would have just said careful, or diligent even as a slightly more elevated word.

John: My guess is that the word makes persistent English a little bit because I suspect there is seduloso or some other Latinate language might still use it in a way that keeps it alive.

Craig: No one, I have never heard anyone in my life use the word sedulous. Except the architect in The Matrix. He is the only one, ergo. He did say ergo, which I love.

John: Very good. Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

• Move Over Green Envelopes, WGA Rolls Out Direct Deposits For Residuals by Peter White for Deadline
• WGA Screen Credits Manual
• CDC Recommends Updated 2024-2025 COVID-19 and Flu Vaccines for Fall/Winter Virus Season
• Hide posts on Threads
• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.