Search Results for: parenthetical

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/ambition-and-anxiety).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 434 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you’re back. You’re recovered from your flu.

**Craig:** Yeah. That was a little nasty. I thought it was just the cold. I never think that I have the flu. But you know what, a cold will kind of over the course of a couple days just get worse and worse. This thing started in the morning and by the evening I thought I may be dying. And I went over to the urgent care. Do you know how they do the flu test? Have you had that done before?

**John:** You described it to me on the bonus segment. So we’ll spoil it for people. They stick something far, far up your nose and swab.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nasty. Did in fact have the flu. They put me on Tamiflu and holy cajole that stuff worked great. I guess if you get it really early at the start of your flu. I basically had that day and then the next day I wasn’t feeling too good and then I was fine.

**John:** Great. Glad to have you back.

**Craig:** Happy to be here.

**John:** You missed a terrific episode with Greta Gerwig. So folks if you skipped that episode, go back and listen to it. It really was terrific. We got into a lot of very specific stuff on the page. We talked about parentheticals. Craig will be so envious of this conversation we had about real specificity on the page.

Today is also a specificity on the page, because we’re going to be doing another round of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** That’s where we take a look at the first three pages of screenplays that people send us and we talk through what’s working and what’s not. We will also be talking about the difference between ambition and anxiety and how writers can find a balance between those two opposing forces.

**Craig:** This sounds like a pretty good day. I love talking about pages. I love talking about screen pages. I also love talking about anxiety. I was feeling rather anxious earlier today. I was in my car and I just got the feeling in my stomach, and I just thought, well, this is terrible. And but I did my breathing. You know? And while I was doing my breathing I thought, OK, I’m doing all the right things. This is just anxiety. It still stank.

**John:** Yeah. It does stink. Even when you know you’re doing the right things to take care of it, it can stink.

**Craig:** I know. It stinks.

**John:** And our Premium members will also hear a bonus segment at the end of the show where I will rant about mugs, because I have really strong opinions about mugs and I feel like I need to talk to somebody. So I’m going to talk to Craig and our Premium members.

**Craig:** This is where the Premium members question the wisdom of their subscription.

**John:** But so many people have joined the Premium membership program. So thank you everyone who has subscribed. The Premium membership is at Scriptnotes.net. For $5 a month you get these bonus segments, you get the bonus episodes, and all the back episodes. We’ve crossed a threshold so I feel pretty confident we’re going to be able to hire somebody new to be able to help on the technical backend side of Scriptnotes, which is great.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So thank you very much to everyone who subscribed.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Thank you.

**John:** And reminder to everybody that the old feed, the one that was on the app, that will be going away, so everything is going to be on the new thing. But thank you to everybody who has signed up now at Scriptnotes.net. And news today that we now started accepting Apple Pay. So you don’t even have to pull out your credit card, you can just hit the little Apply Pay button to subscribe to Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** I have to admit that whenever I see Apple Pay I get super excited because I can just use my face or fingerprint. I’m that lazy. They figured it out. They knew exactly what needed to happen and it was to make me be able to buy things without moving.

**John:** Yep. Now if you’re buying things this week a thing you could pre-buy would be the third Arlo Finch book. So I finished my trilogy.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** So people who have listened to this show for a while will know that I started writing these books, Arlo Finch. There are now three of them. The third one comes out February 4 here in the US. February 4 is also my Half Birthday, so you can help me celebrate by buying Arlo Finch 3, or the whole trilogy if you haven’t bought it yet. Craig, were you ever a person who would not start a series until he knew that all the books were written?

**Craig:** Absolutely not.

**John:** No. But there are those people out there.

**Craig:** That’s a person? Really? That’s the weirdest thing.

**John:** Because they don’t want to get trapped by an unfinished series.

**Craig:** No. It’s called Anticipation. When J.K. Rowling was still working on the Harry Potter series–

**John:** This is before she was canceled.

**Craig:** [laughs] She is uncancelable as it turns out. I think I started reading those books I want to say when she released the third one. So I caught up quickly. And then for the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh when those books would come out it was kind of a little holiday for me. I would take the day off and I would just read the book that day.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** And it was great. I loved those days. They were great. And the waiting made it all worth it. I love that. We can still wait. We don’t have to binge everything.

**John:** What’s exciting about the third book in Arlo Finch is the first two had advanced copies, and so there were these sort of special paperback ones that would come out a few months before the hard cover. And so folks would read those. And so it was sort of a soft rollout. Kind of no one has read this third book. Like I’ve read it. Megana has read it. My editor has read it. But very few other people have read it. I’ve slipped it to a couple kids who are big readers and they are very enthusiastic.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I can’t wait for folks to be able to take a look at the third Arlo Finch.

**Craig:** Spectacular. And congratulations, by the way. That’s a real achievement.

**John:** Thank you. For people who want the custom bookplates, you can go to johnaugust.com/arlofinch and there’s a place where you fill out the little form and I will send you a custom bookplate with your kid’s name on it, or your name on it if you prefer.

**Craig:** Is that an illustration? Is that what a custom bookplate is?

**John:** Yeah. A bookplate is a sticker that goes in the front of your book so in lieu of me coming to sign your book, it’s a way that you have a signed copy without ever meeting me in person.

**Craig:** We had a woman that worked for us for a while. She was a housekeeper. And her thing was more like, mmm, today instead of cleaning I’m just going to pick a project for myself that has not been assigned and do it that nobody wanted her to do. And, I mean, lovely person though. And there was apparently a pile of these little – I guess you would call them stickers that said this book belongs to….

She decided to go through all of the books in my daughter’s bookshelf and put them in there, except that a lot of those books were Melissa’s books when she was a kid. It’s like some of them were worth some money. Well, not anymore.

**John:** Ugh. Sorry.

**Craig:** You know what? What are you going to do?

**John:** What are you going to do? I would say putting one of these author signed bookplates in a book would probably actually increase its value rather than decrease its value.

**Craig:** That will increase the value. Your custom bookplate sounds like a positive thing.

**John:** But if you’d like me to sign your book in person you can come to the signing at Chevalier’s on Larchmont. It’s a bookstore on Larchmont. That’s February 9 at 2pm. So, it’s a chance to say hello to me and buy your Arlo Finches and I will happily sign them. I will also have some sort of talk which I have yet to figure out. So I’m not doing a big book tour this time. Just small little events, including February 9 at Chevalier’s.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Well, again, congrats. That’s pretty awesome. How many total book papers have you generated?

**John:** Wow. That is a good question. Words I can tell you. I can figure that out more easily. About 220,000 words.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** The three books. It’s a lot.

**Craig:** That’s so many words.

**John:** It’s just a lot of words.

**Craig:** So many words. God.

**John:** That’s the thing about books versus screenplays is just all the words.

**Craig:** I feel like, I mean, in our careers just in terms of screenplays we certainly are over – I never know how many words are – but well over a million words, right? Each?

**John:** Oh, we have to be. Oh yeah.

**Craig:** 10 million?

**John:** I don’t know. We could figure it out. That would be a challenge for us.

**Craig:** Terrifying.

**John:** I’ll have Nima write a little program that will figure it all out.

**Craig:** [laughs] That would be so great.

**John:** That will be in Highland 4.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Calculate your entire – all your work.

**Craig:** I’m almost a million miler on American Airlines.

**John:** Oh, nice. And the pilot will come back and congratulate you–

**Craig:** Is that right? Do they do that?

**John:** Yeah, they do. They come back.

**Craig:** Holy crap.

**John:** When you’ve reached a million medal miles they come back.

**Craig:** Wow. Amazing. OK, cool.

**John:** Things to look forward to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Before you can hit that million mile status you actually have to earn a living. And that is something that is a little bit easier for some CAA assistants this week. Craig, talk us through it.

**Craig:** Well, you and I, we can’t take all the credit for this. We did start I think a very worthy conversation. But it was prompted by somebody who wrote in. And this ball has really been carried forth by a lot of other people. But the good news is it’s working. So, earlier I guess last month Verve, the agency Verve, said, hey, we’re going to bump up our pay for our minimum wage for our assistants from $15 to $18 an hour. And this week CAA, which is the second largest agency in Hollywood, announced that they are doing the same. That’s a big deal. They employ at least a thousand people in that building I would imagine that could work as assistants, mailroom folks, etc. Between their two offices in New York and LA. It’s a lot of people. It’s a lot of money. And it’s a pretty good thing.

So, you know, we are always monitoring the whole hourly wage versus hourly work guarantee thing to make sure that you’re not getting more per hour, but fewer hours.

**John:** Absolutely. As we stressed on the show really your weekly take home pay should be the metric by whether you’re able to survive in Los Angeles. And so we want to make sure that this higher hourly rate really does translate to people being able to afford to do this job in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Right. I think one of the things that was really positive about what CAA announced is also that there’s a different way that they’re contemplating raises. Raises at CAA used to be basically, well, if you’re an hourly employee at the end of the year there’s some kind of – I mean, my guess it was a probably perfunctory raise. And it was just a function of, well, you made it. Congrats.

And what they’re saying now is, no, that actually you can get raises based on upward movement in the company. That it’s not just about the fact that you were a warm body there for a year, but if you take on more responsibility you can get more money. This is – it’s kind of crazy that I’m saying this like it’s something new and exciting. It should have been that way and it should be that way everywhere. And I’m hopeful that now UTA and WME and ICM and Gersh and all the rest of these places will do the same thing. This is how the market should work.

If they don’t, well, they’re going to lose a lot of people to CAA and Verve it would seem to me.

**John:** I would agree. So let’s talk a little bit about our role in this in terms of you and me, because this was sort of a special case. I’m represented at Verve. You know a lot of folks at CAA. As folks wrote in to us at the Ask account the folks who were talking about Verve we took all those emails anonymously and sort of gathered together in a document that we were able to take – that I was able to take to Verve – and say like, hey, just so you know former and current assistants at Verve have these concerns and you should have a discussion.

You were able to do the same for CAA.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Again, all anonymous. But this is really specific things that folks who were working at CAA had concerns as assistants. I do think those helped initiate some conversations within those agencies.

So, if folks who are listening to this who are at the agencies want to write in with their specific information about what they’re seeing at their agencies, we are happy to gather this together and also take them to those agencies to help stoke a little bit more fire underneath them.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s great. This is sort of an absolute good. If we can keep doing this and improving people’s lives. Look, it’s not an enormous amount, but it matters. This is an amount that matters. And our hope is that not only will it make life better for the people who are doing these very important jobs that support all of us, it will also make these jobs potentially available and feasible for a lot of people. Everyone. And not just people who maybe have additional financial support from their families.

**John:** Agreed. But that was not the only agency news this week. So we’re recording this late on Friday afternoon. It was announced earlier on Friday afternoon. As we were recording it just went out the actual red lined agreement, so I have not had a chance to read through it carefully. The biggest changes from the previous agreement which was with Rothman Brecher is the extension of when this all sunsets, when packaging gets sunsetted. Some different language in terms of auditing and reporting.

But it’s kind of largely the deal that we’ve been seeing in all these other agreements along the way.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is good news. Gersh is what I would call, and again, apologies to everybody else, but I think it was the first what I would call major agency to sign. I mean, I guess Verve is sort of a major agency. I would count them, I guess. But I guess traditionally Gersh was always up there with sort of like – I would think of them in the tier of Paradigm and Writers and Artists and people like that.

**John:** Gersh also represents actors and directors. They represent a huge swath of kinds of people, so they’re not just a literary agency in the way that Verve is.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. They’re a multi-service agency. I’m not sure how many writers they represent compared to say people like at ICM, but they were my first agency back in the day. So this is good news. So glass half full. They signed it. And the modifications that I’m looking at here don’t seem particularly problematic in any way, shape, or form. Packaging fees sunset period going to July 15, 2021. I mean, we’ve been living with packages for half a century, so I think another year and a half is no big deal.

Glass half empty. They weren’t a huge packaging agency to begin with. It took us about a year to get them to sign this.

**John:** Nine months. So, three-quarters of a year.

**Craig:** There we go. I’ll take that back. It took us about three-quarters of a year to get them to sign it. And I think we’ve run out of this kind of target. I think we’ve gotten the Vs that can matter. And so now what remains are the problems that have always been there and that is WME, ICM, UTA, and CAA.

On the legal front things haven’t been going great for us it seems to me. Can you walk us through that?

**John:** Sure. So let me talk both of those concerns. So, we’ll start with the legal side. The legal news recently, there’s been delays, pushes. I think from the last time we spoke the Justice Department had tried to intercede on the case. The judge says, no, no, that’s OK. You don’t need to intercede. So they were not invited to intercede on the agencies’ behalf, which I think is a great development.

But clearly the timeframe on the lawsuits is long. And if you go back to sort of like the initial conversations about how all of this was going to go, one of the things that was sort of stressed in those WGA meetings was like the question was always like why don’t we just do the whole thing as a lawsuit, well the lawsuit could take a really long time. And that’s sort of what we’re seeing. It’s not a speedy process to go through this. So, the timeframe is into 2021 before it looks like we have resolution on some law stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we did get handed a defeat in there, because we were hoping to get the court to toss the agency lawsuit against us, which accuses us essentially of an antitrust violation, and the judge said no I’m not tossing that. So, that’s not good.

**John:** That’s not good, but it’s not unexpected I would say. So, I mean, I would say that the legal tussling has been the legal tussling that was sort of anticipated. I think the difference being that it’s happening in a federal court rather than a state court which was the initial plan.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the legal stuff is long ongoing.

Back to your previous point though in terms of the big four. The time before that we spoke about this I said that one of my frustrations is that I know a lot of things that I can’t tell you. And I said a possible solution for that which would make me feel better would be to type them up in an encrypted PDF and give you the encrypted PDF so that when this is all resolved I can give you the password and you can see like, oh, that’s why John was feeling the way he was feeling because he knew those things. And so I did give you that PDF.

**Craig:** Yes. I have that. Obviously I don’t know what’s in it, because I don’t know the password.

**John:** Yes. And so all the hacker teams you’ve pulled on the PDF to try to break it open, I know they’re trying their very, very best, but strong encryption is really, really strong.

**Craig:** I have not even inserted it into my computer.

**John:** So, but here’s a thing that is on that list that I’m actually now allowed to say. I have official approval from the WGA to say is that the guild has been negotiating with the agencies this whole time. So, not just the Gersh who signed this deal now, but these negotiations have been happening since the middle of the election, up until this past week. And it’s not just the agencies five through 12. Like it includes three of the four big agencies, ongoing negotiations.

So you say that you don’t think there’s more progress to be made, that’s why I think there’s more progress to be made.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Don’t get me wrong. Well, first of all, I presumed that there were ongoing back channels. I mean, I know that there haven’t been official negotiations, in other words you guys haven’t gotten back into the big formal room with anybody. As far as I know that would have to be announced. But then again I don’t think that that’s the proper venue for negotiating, nor was it ever the proper venue for negotiating this kind of deal.

So, that’s not a big shock to me. All I’m saying is that in terms of I guess what I would call the “easier victories,” the agency that would be more likely to sign this without major reconsiderations, we’re kind of out of those. And it’s a little discouraging that it took this long to get Gersh to sign it. Again, because not a big packaging agency. Obviously I am rooting for all of this to conclude as soon as possible in a way that is favorable to us. And whatever the negotiations have been, they have been long. Longer than negotiations that we typically have for instance with the companies, which while can be bruising and difficult they tend to finish within a matter of say, I don’t know, three months.

This has been much, much longer. And also with what I think we all presumed would be much more effective pressure. They have gone along for nine months now without collapsing which is, you know–

**John:** So, just to point out though Gersh is a major agency that was part of the ATA. And so all the deals that have been made now are with ATA agencies who have said like, OK, no, we’re dealing with the ATA anymore. We’re dealing individually. So I want to distinguish between back channel and individual, because back channel I think implies it’s those sort of unaffiliated folks who are sort of like sticking off in a distance. That’s not what this is. It’s been individual negotiations. And it’s been a lot of what I would say papers being pushed back and forth rather than sort of like the weird Kabuki thing that we do in MBA negotiations where it’s a bunch of people in the room.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I like that.

**John:** That is different.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I do like that. I think if you’re negotiating individually with CAA or ICM or WME or UTA that’s great. I mean, that’s all I think we’ve all wanted. Well, I don’t need to get into communication issues. I mean, the Writers Guild tends to communicate in a way that I don’t understand or think is effective. But, on the other hand nine months is not an eternity. The closer we get to a year the more difficult this becomes.

And I do have some concerns about the fact that these lawsuits are hanging out there. There’s some weird stuff in there that I am, well, I just find concerning. So, as always, I am hopeful that this gets resolved in a way where the great majority of writers who have not signed on to the agencies that have signed on to our code of conduct, but are in fact waiting to get the agents that they wanted back can get them back.

**John:** You and I share that goal.

**Craig:** Yes. I cannot wait to see this conversation in print verbatim in Deadline again.

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

**Craig:** Can’t Deadline just say, “Hey, listen to their show.” Wouldn’t that be better?

**John:** Yeah. That would be terrific.

**Craig:** That would be great.

**John:** You know what we should do? We should put all of this conversation only on the Premium feed so that they have to–

**Craig:** They have to pay us $5?

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** I think they will. [laughs]

**John:** They probably will.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s move on to another piece of follow up. Akiva Schaffer wrote in to us about his frustration with all the waste being generated by DVD screeners and scripts and everything that we get sent during this awards season. And asked like couldn’t we possibly just have this all under an app. He wrote back in with some follow up.

**Craig:** Yeah. He says, well, so Akiva just to refresh you guys is one of the three members of Lonely Island. And of course therefore he is friends Jorma Taccone and Jorma Taccone is married to Mari Heller. Everyone is a friend of the podcast. Akiva took a look at Mari’s Academy account to see how they laid things out. I want to be clear. He wasn’t looking at the screeners or anything illegal like that. He just saw how they basically do their thing.

And he said it looks amazing. That the Academy basically has figured out how to do the screener thing. “Every movie is HD or 4K with 5.1 sound. They are laid out and organized in a way that is easy to use.” And honestly his hope is that the Academy could reach out to the guilds, WGA, DGA, SAG/AFTRA and help them do that. Because there is really at this point no reason for us to be getting paper scripts in the mail and DVDs in the mail with all the attended packaging and then I guess associated carbon that’s being spewed out of the trucks. It’s all silly. None of it needs to happen that way. It has to stop.

So, I think good advice. Everybody should be calling the Academy and saying help us do it the way you do it.

**John:** Yeah. It really has been quite good. So, during the nomination season as the For Your Consideration season the interface was a little bit wonky on it, but the minute the nominations came out the screen was redesigned. So it just goes by category. And so it’s like Best Picture and here are the movies available for Best Picture. All the way down through things you can see like, oh, in this category these are the movies I’ve not seen. It’s really well done. I’ve had zero problems with it. So, yes, my hope is that the other guilds can go to the Academy and say like, hey, can we piggyback on this thing or whatever vendor it is that is providing it can also provide it for the guilds. Because it is just a mitzvah to everyone.

**Craig:** I love hearing you say mitzvah. I have a voting question for you, John.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** I have noticed both the DGA and the WGA appear to do some kind of staggered voting, where you get a window to vote for a certain number of categories, but not all of them?

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know why.

**Craig:** Then you get another tranche where you get to vote for – why don’t we just do it all at once?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I’m not wrong about that, right?

**John:** I think you’re not wrong. I think there are certain categories which get held out for certain reasons. There’s also certain categories for nominations where you have to be on a specific committee, like foreign film.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not talking about nominations. I mean, like just voting to see who wins.

**John:** Oh, category wise I think I vote for everybody all at once. I could be wrong.

**Craig:** But for the guild we don’t seem to be.

**John:** Yeah. Because I don’t remember, I mean, I’m going to vote for Chernobyl, but I don’t remember voting for Chernobyl yet.

**Craig:** I don’t think that that has opened up yet. So, like the last one was feature screenplays and a couple of other things, and drama series, and news series. This is for WGA. All sorts of voting. I don’t know why they don’t – I’m sure there’s a reason.

**John:** There’s always a reason.

**Craig:** There’s always a reason.

**John:** I don’t know why though either.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** It’s probably about some weird thing that’s in the guild bylaws about when things have to happen.

**Craig:** Oh god. The guild bylaws.

**John:** It’s probably the bylaws.

**Craig:** Oh god. The guild bylaws.

**John:** The most important thing about mentioning Akiva Schaffer is that Akiva Schaffer brings us to Jorma which brings us to the news that MacGruber–

**Craig:** MacGruber!

**John:** Is coming back as a TV series on the Peacock which is the only real reason I’ve heard so far for why we need another streamer. It’s so we can have MacGruber.

**Craig:** Well these streamers aren’t dumb, right? They go I think people need something. And somebody over there must have realized that MacGruber is this quiet sleeping giant.

**John:** Oh, 100%.

**Craig:** That is ready to be awakened. As anyone who has been listening to this podcast since, god, the beginning practically knows that I’m obsessed with MacGruber. And I have read various incarnations of a second MacGruber movie. None of them ever happened. I can’t wait for this.

**John:** Yeah. It’ll be great. I’m very, very excited for it.

Craig, will your kids watch MacGruber? Will they find it funny?

**Craig:** My son will not watch MacGruber. He doesn’t really watch any television like that. That’s not what he does. My daughter watches an enormous amount of TV. Will she watch MacGruber? No, I don’t think that’s her gear. No.

**John:** Yeah. And so my daughter wanted to watch a comedy this past week and so we ended up watching Airplane which was phenomenal.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**John:** It’s just great. And I was happy to be able to get her to that place. But I think comedy is an especially tough thing to watch with teenagers because what the teenager wants to watch that’s funny versus what I remember being very funny as a teenager, there’s just not an overlap. It’s such a – so many movies that were funny to us are just not funny to them.

**Craig:** And aren’t really funny anymore.

**John:** Sometimes they’re not funny anymore.

**Craig:** They’re just not funny anymore. I mean, Airplane is kind of permanently funny. But I do remember the feeling of my father saying you will love this movie, it is so funny. And I was just like brace for impact. And it was usually not that funny. But, you know, you watch it with your dad.

**John:** So, comedies can bring us together. Action movies can rev us up. But news came out of London this week that the film Aladdin, my film Aladdin, could actually save your life. We’ll put a link in the show notes to according to the University College of London going to the movie theater to watch a movie can be as good for your heart as going to the gym.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So in this study of 71 people they had folks who were watching Aladdin with all sorts of monitors attached to them and folks who were reading a book with all sorts of monitors attached to them, and the folks who were watching Aladdin had a better, more beneficial heart outcome than the folks who read the book.

**Craig:** The folks who were reading the book died. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, I should also say that this study was put together by a movie theater chain.

**Craig:** So cigarettes don’t cause cancer?

**John:** It’s funny.

**Craig:** Books are bad for you. Movies good.

**John:** Cigarettes improve your vim and vigor. Yeah.

**Craig:** Four out of five doctors agree. Not a ton of stock to be taken in this particular study. But it is nice to see at least watching movies isn’t something that will kill you. I mean, every day there’s a study that explains why something that you like doing will kill you. So, you know, I’ll take that. I’ll go as far as saying it doesn’t appear that they kill you.

**John:** So this was arguing for why seeing a movie in a theater is a beneficial thing for you. And a point it makes here which I think is probably a valid point which they could study some other way is that it is a communal experience but it’s also an experience of focused attention. Because in theory when you’re watching a movie in a theater you are not doing anything else. And in our 2020 world we’re always doing nine things at one time. And so to be doing one thing and being focused on one thing at a time is probably a novel experience for someone in 2020. So in that way it probably is helpful for your mental wellbeing.

**Craig:** It’s like going to the spa.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like the Onsen but for cinema.

**Craig:** What’s the Onsen?

**John:** So some future episode we will talk about public nudity, but Onsens are the Japanese spas–

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** It’s where you hang out naked with everyone else. And it’s uncomfortable for a moment but also kind of a nice thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not going to do it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** Nope. Last bits of follow up. Highland2. We came out with a student edition. So people were writing in saying like, hey, I am a film student at this school. We would all like to use Highland. Final Draft will give us a discount. Can you give us a discount?

And so we found out a way to do that. So, if you are a film student at a school, and at a school that uses an edu or something that’s clearly a school email extension where you are, we have a program now where you can sign up to get basically the full version of Highland2 for two years for free.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** So send us in at brand@johnaugust.com and cc your professor or whoever runs that program so we can get your school signed up so that you guys as film students can use Highland2 for free.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, a discount off of Final Draft may reduce its price to nearly what you ought to pay for it, but you’re probably still paying too much.

**John:** Yeah. So send this is in, brand@johnaugust.com and we will get you hooked up.

**Craig:** Great. Good job.

**John:** Lastly, Weekend Read, the other app my company makes, we have I think all of the nominated scripts for the 2020 awards up in Weekend Read right now. So if you want to read what those screenplays are you should take a look in Weekend Read. They’re there. I think one of the best ways to really celebrate the movies that you’re seeing is to see what those words were like on the page.

**Craig:** Excellent. Smart idea.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our feature topic today which is anxiety and ambition. We’ll start with a listener who wrote in. “I’m a 29-year-old aspiring writer who is currently working a ‘job with value’ from Episode 422 for a major TV network here in Los Angeles I am not gainfully employed as a writer, but I’m hoping to be one day. For much of my adult life I’ve been dealing with some form of manageable anxiety. To cope I’ve always brushed these feelings aside. After all it’s easier to blame the news cycle, Twitter, a bad relationship, or some other external influence.

“I tell myself things like this must be part of what makes me me, or aren’t the most shining archetypes of writers always battling and embracing their own demons in one way or another? After years of brushing my anxiety issues under the rug with little work to show for myself I thought it time to reconsider my practices. During the past few months I’ve started seeing a therapist, practicing yoga three or four times a week, journaling daily, and exploring the many realms of meditation. Before these practices it felt like I’d been subconsciously wearing a heavy jacket of tension that forced me to suffer in silence.

“Paying attention to mindfulness seems to be impacting my life in dramatic, positive ways. I feel happier, healthier, and more able to connect with my inner voice. A lot of the credit for me taking the step to see a therapist goes to your discussion in Episode 99 with Dennis Palumbo. So, thank you. Out of curiosity what sort of mindfulness practices do you both engage in? I apologize if you’ve already talked about this in some form and it missed me.”

**Craig:** Well, that’s terrific to hear. I think you’re not alone, friend. A lot of people cope with anxiety by brushing it aside, which of course is not coping, and nor is it aside, nor can it be brushed. It never goes away. Avoidance is everyone’s first move. It’s the path of least resistance. And we’re humans. We’re built to be efficient. So if someone is walking down the street and suddenly they turn left and they’re walking on a bunch of nails they’re going to stop and go a different way. Avoidance. Pretty normal.

Unfortunately with things like anxiety and depression they can’t necessarily be avoided because you are the nails. You’re generating pain. So a lot of people, they engage in mindfulness exercises – meditation, yoga, deep breathing. Some people just sit really still and think. Honestly, whatever works. I mean me, personally, I’m a breather. I just stop and I really just work on breathing for about 45 seconds. I hate it. I’ve got to be honest with you. I hate it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But then like suddenly it works. But while I’m doing it I just feel stupid and angry. And then it works. So, you know, it’s like eating vegetables. You’ve got to do it.

**John:** So the listener mentions meditation. So I started using Head Space. I don’t use it regularly right now but I will say that going through the practice of like that first month of it got me much better at being able to mentally open up my fist and sort of let that anxiety go. There’s a way in which your mind grabs onto things and holds them really tight. And it just lets you unclench and let that thing float away and you find like, oh, I can actually get that thing to not be occupying every thought in my head.

Mindfulness to me is really about sort of recognizing where you are in the present moment and so it’s not ruminating on the past or like over-planning for the future. It’s really sort of being like where you’re at right now and sort of checking where you are in that space. So, breathing is fantastic.

Another thing that can be really helpful and this sounds really simple and dumb but it’s just like to sit where you are and take a survey through the room and just like notice everything in the room. And not try to put judgment or value on it, but just be really seeing everything that’s around you. And it just sort of stops kind of your brain from doing other stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Those are things I find myself doing when I get stressed out.

**Craig:** I do think that for some people, and I’m likely one of them, sometimes there is an anxiety because of some emotional things that you’re holding onto or you’re struggling with, or you’re afraid of. Sometimes I think I’m experiencing anxiety because my brain is designed to work. It’s designed to chop a certain amount of wood. And if it’s not chopping the wood it can start chopping itself.

And it’s one of the reasons why I love puzzles so much because they kind of just – it’s like my dog will just sit there with that rawhide bone and she’ll just chew, and chew, and chew. And I just think well what for? It’s not food. You’re not getting anything. Well, because she needs to chew. And puzzles are like my rawhide bone. And I think it’s important for writers to also remember just because their mind is worrying and they’re kind of feeling that sort of brain churn it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re broken or flawed or sick. It’s just that’s how your mind works. And sometimes all you need to do is give it a bone to chew.

**John:** Yeah. I want to talk about an aspect of anxiety that’s probably more common to writers than sort of the general population which is ambition. And so I was having a conversation with some USC film students this past week and they were talking about this need they feel to like I have to say yes to every project. I have to always sort of be climbing ahead, ahead, ahead. They sort of sounded like Silicon Valley types. That they were constantly sort of chasing. And they were overworking themselves. They were suffering from burnout. And like, wow, you shouldn’t be suffering from burnout when you’re in your second year of film school. That’s too much.

So I wanted to distinguish between some good things about wanting stuff and going after stuff, which I label ambition, versus anxiety. If you’re going to say yes to a project here are some good reasons to say yes to a project. It might be because there’s something you’re just genuinely excited to do. Or there’s a specific thing you want to learn or a specific person or group of people you want to work with.

You’re asking yourself why do I want to do this. And if those good reasons are there then, yeah, that’s a project you should consider. But, if you’re approaching a project and you’re wanting to say yes because of these bad reasons that’s anxiety. So you might be thinking you’re afraid if you don’t say yes there won’t be another opportunity. You’re jealous of other people doing stuff like that. Or you’re just kind of adding to a list. And it’s understandable why people sort of want to do all the things but really if you just take a second and think about why you’re trying to do this thing you may decide, you know what, I don’t really need to or want to do that. Because every time you say yes to a project you’re de facto saying no to something else. You have a limited amount of time and there’s a bunch of stuff that you probably should be writing, that you want to write, that are really uniquely yours to write that if you’re always chasing after other stuff you’re never going to get the time to actually do them.

**Craig:** And you will make mistakes. You will say yes to things that you shouldn’t say yes to.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** You will say no to things you shouldn’t say no to. You will say yes to something that makes total sense and then 12 days later somebody comes along with something that’s so much more interesting and better and now you’re not available. These things will happen, so just price it in. There’s no way, there’s no perfect strategy. You’re not going to be able to solve this. You just kind of hope for the best.

I think your list here is great. The only thing I’d probably add into the bad column is that you don’t want to say yes because someone is giving you approval through the offer of work. When someone comes to you and says we think you’re amazing, we love what you do, only you can fix this, you’re incredible, and it’s a big deal, you might go, well, who am I to say not to that? I mean, this is amazing, right? They’re telling me I’m great therefore their opinion of whether or not I should write this is more valid than mine. And as it turns out it’s not.

**John:** Craig, I got a shiver as you talked through that because that still works on me, honestly.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, it works on me, too. It never stops. I’m trying to become more aware of it because I think 90% of the time people are being honest with you. They’re saying we love you. And as somebody who is – you know, we all start in this business unloved. Right? We’re out in the cold. We’re desperate for somebody to take us in. We’re like the Little Matchstick Girl in Hans Christian Andersen, freezing out there, while everyone is inside eating that big turkey.

And then suddenly people are inviting us inside and we’re so delighted. And we never really lose the trauma memory of being shut out and undervalued and underused and underemployed and underappreciated.

So, when people come at us with honest approval it can sometimes screw up our brains.

**John:** Yeah. It overwhelms your pleasure sense. You’re just like, oh yes, this is what I’ve craved all this time.

**Craig:** Exactly. 10% of the people know exactly that they’re doing that. And those are the worst people. And you’d think, well, 10% is not that many. It’s a lot. It’s actually numerically a lot of people. So you just have to allow yourself to enjoy the approval of somebody wanting you to do something without feeling that that obliges you to do it.

**John:** Yeah. Now, I also want to be aware that what we’re talking about may seem like luxury, like we have the choice of things, where you’re not stuck doing a thing because you have to keep the lights on, because you have to sort of pay rent. Totally understand and get that. But the things you’re doing for yourself, the choices you’re making I’m just arguing to avoid sort of meaningless grinding. Like there’s that videogame quality where you’re just killing orcs in order to make enough leather to do at thing.

You know, sometimes you have to grind a bit and just try to make a meaningful grinding and at least be aware of why you’re doing what you’re doing. And if it is just to keep the lights on, that’s fine. That’s good. But don’t pretend that it’s also your artistic satisfaction if it’s not.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I mean, if you’re doing it well you will end up in a place where you will have more things offered to you than you can do. That’s inevitable. So, yeah, we don’t mean to rub it in because some of you are listening to this going what a wonderful first class problem. But, my friend, if you are struggling right now but good you will have this problem.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. The other last thing I would say to avoid burnout is to focus on the process and not the results. So obviously you want to come out of this with a great script. It would be wonderful to get awards. But really look at how do you make the days’ work meaningful? That doesn’t mean it’s actually fun and joyful at all moments, but that you could wake up in the morning saying like, OK, this will be a difficult day but I will get to learn this thing. I will get to see these people who I like. There will be a good reason for me to go through this day. And I will go to bed knowing that I did something that mattered today. If you can do that–

**Craig:** [laughs] I always struggle with that.

**John:** But if you can do that then you’re finding some meaning in the process and it’s not all about sort of chasing this thing down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I say all the time that what we do is a process job, not a results job. And yet there are days when you kind of feel bad because there weren’t results that day. Over time you will be able to recognize that just because you didn’t get results on a particular day doesn’t mean that you’re result-less.

Look, it never ends. It never, ever ends, no matter what you do. No matter how you do it in this business. Your brain is going to mess with you somehow. It messes with you on your worst days. And I’ve got to be honest, it messes with you on your best days. It just gets in there. You know, you’d think like, whoa, hey, cool man. You won some awards. And then you think, oh, never going to do something that good again. Then your brain starts doing what it does. It’s just part of who we are and you’ve got to kind of give yourself a break as your brain undermines itself. It’s just inevitable.

**John:** Yep. It is true.

Let’s move on to our next thing, and we can frame this with a question that we got in from Michael. He lives in East Hackney, London, UK. He writes, “I was curious to hear your thoughts on how much knowledge and spatial awareness writers should have of interior spaces. Seemingly subtle things like the location of a bathroom or the distance between your character’s living room and their study may play an important part in your story, but its location has been scouted or built is there an industry standard for how specific you should be when it comes to describing specific interior spaces?” That’s a good question.

**Craig:** It is a good question. I don’t believe there’s any kind of standard of how specific you should be when it comes to describing those spaces. But I’m a big believer that you should know them. Because what you fail to do if you do not know them is write something that will easily map onto real physical space. If you have thought about the physical space clearly, and then written the scene, nothing that you write will be incompatible with the physical space.

Very frequently new writers will write scenes and then you get there and you’re like so this person just, what, teleports to the other side of this room in one second? How does that work? Because they haven’t thought about the space. So this person is coming out of the thing but they’re facing towards the door so the bathroom is in the street? What’s going on here?

And, Lindsay Doran, famous for asking me, “Where are they standing?” It’s a big thing. Literally where are they standing in the space. So I think about that a lot. A lot. And the fact of the matter is the more you have a sense of what it ought to be when the rubber hits the road and reality shows up and you’re shooting somewhere that isn’t like what you imagined in your mind what you imagined in your mind can still exist in it, because what you imagined is consistent with reality.

**John:** 100%. So I want to offer as proof of concept of this is Rian Johnson’s screenplay for Knives Out. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to the PDF.

**Craig:** Garbage.

**John:** It’s a pretty good script, I guess.

**Craig:** Garbage. And nominated for an Oscar. Congratulations, Rian.

**John:** Yes. A wonderful movie. But we’ll look at the first two pages of this, just as you take a look through them, he describes “The grounds of the New England manor. Pre-dawn. Misty.” We come inside the house. I’m not going to read the whole thing aloud. But he talks about the first floor, what’s there. “The detritus of a party. Stray champagne flutes.” It’s minimal. We follow a housekeeper named Fran carrying a tray of coffee up a flight of stars. The second floor doors are all closed. “The house has not woken up, and Fran steps lightly.” So he’s describing this tracking shot which is going to establish the geography of this house, which is of course incredible important. But it’s so well done. And it doesn’t feel like D&D descriptions. It’s not talking about a 20×30 foot room with ceilings of a certain height. He’s telling you what the character of the house is, but also giving you a sense of the unique geography. The way the hallways get narrower and narrower. The stairways get narrower and creaky. It completely tells you what you need to know about this house.

I’m assuming he wrote this way before he knew what the actual locations were he was shooting in and he was able to find locations that gave him what he wanted. It’s a great example of sort of how important it is to think about these interior locations as you’re writing.

**Craig:** I mean, I haven’t even asked him this question. My guess would be that the house was a set.

**John:** No, the house was not a set. I heard him on another podcast talking about it.

**Craig:** Wow, really?

**John:** So – actually when they screened it for the Academy Rian and everyone else was there talking about it. And that was the question, like what was the set? And basically it wasn’t a set. It’s a real house. There’s certain rooms in it where they shot at other houses. But, no, it’s not sets.

**Craig:** Wow, great. Well, it’s a terrific job that he does here. First of all, he’s directing on the page. And you can say, no, he’s a director, too. Yeah, uh-huh. OK. So it’s our job is to direct on the page. And it doesn’t involve camera, zoom, lens, blah. It’s just I need to know what’s going on.

I love how short and terse and readable it is. There is exactly as much information as I need. And none of what I don’t need.

So, and this will come up as we read through these things here. Here’s a wonderful thing. The very first line of action description. “The grounds of New England manor.” “The grounds of a New England manor” is not a sentence. Doesn’t matter. I get it. Great. “The grounds of a New England manor. Pre-dawn misty.” 999 writers out of a thousand, particularly those who are aspiring to be professionals, will come up with some sort of purple, rosy, fingers of Jesus pre-dawn haze lingers like the breath of an angel. Blah-blah-blah. “Pre-dawn misty.” Got it. Next.

Do you know what I mean? Like no time for baloney. Just here’s the deal. “Inside the manor. Unlit and still.” That’s how we do it. “Unlit and still.” It’s just like when we talk about how to describe characters. Wardrobe. Hair. Makeup. Things I can see. “Unlit,” view, and “still,” sound. Wonderful. Three words. Also not a sentence. Doesn’t care. Lovely. Great job.

**John:** Yep. Lovely. And by doing things so efficiently he’s able to give us a dead body at the bottom of page one.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well done Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** Yeah. He deserves an Oscar.

**John:** All right. So he did not submit his three pages for us to critique.

**Craig:** Should have.

**John:** But a bunch of other people did. So thank you to everyone who submitted to the Three Page Challenge. Here is how this works if you’re new to the podcast. We have a page on the website, johnaugust.com/threepage. People send in the first three pages of their screenplay. They sign a little form saying it’s OK for us to talk about them. And they go into a big hopper. Megana reads through them. This time we had help from Bo Shim and Jacq Lesko in your office. Thank you very much for lending them to us.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** To read through all of them with a specific mandate for what we wanted to talk about this week which is how you establish settings. So that was the mandate we gave them to look for scripts that would let us talk about settings. So in some cases they did it brilliantly, or there were some issues. But that’s what we’re really going to focus on as we look through these three pages. So if you want to read along with us you can find links in the show notes and pull up the PDFs. But we’ll also give you a quick summary of the three that we’re going to take a look at today.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We’ll start with Bruja by Janelle B. Gatchalian.

**Craig:** All right. Shall I read the summary?

**John:** Read the summary for us, Craig.

**Craig:** I shall. Outside of a condo building two security guards fan themselves off with folded cardboard as a swarm of bats flies past them. One considers shooting at them but stalls. He looks up at a window. Inside a child’s bedroom we see a dresser, a doll on the floor, and four clocks set to different time zones on the wall.

On a calendar we see that it is April 13, 2001, Good Friday. There’s a crucifix on the wall and below that two cribs. A mother tucks her twin daughters in. They’re infants. One has a twinkling face. The other has watery eyes like she’s going to cry.

Nearby her son asks from his bed about the aswang. His mother replies, “We don’t believe that stuff anymore.” And he says that he heard bats. She says, “No, you didn’t. The sounds would be too high-pitched.” She says go to sleep. She leaves. Turns off the light revealing glow-in-the-dark stars.

Later we watch the stars fade as a breeze sweeps through. The door hinges open. Bats fly into the room in a cluster. The bats take form into a Filipino woman wearing white. We see her black hair in the mirror reflection as she makes her way to the cribs. She floats above them. Then wraps her tongue around one of the crying baby’s necks before she eats its head and then the rest of it.

The little boy is scared but watches as the aswang makes its way over to the other twin. And holds her, resting the baby at her shoulders where we see three small freckles on the baby’s ear.

And that is the first three pages of Bruja by Janelle Gatchalian.

**John:** Fantastic. So small exception here. There’s actually an extra page here because Janelle has included a glossary. It’s between the title page and the real page of script. There’s a glossary that lists seven terms and sort of gives descriptions of them. For some scripts I would be fine with this. I didn’t need it for these three pages. For a longer script it might be helpful. Craig, how did you feel about the glossary?

**Craig:** I don’t mind it. It’s not ideal. If you can get away with not putting the glossary in you’re better off because the audience will not get a glossary.

**John:** Nope. They will not. Also panopticon I don’t think belongs in a glossary because that’s just a normal English word.

**Craig:** That’s just a word.

**John:** All right. But getting to the actual text on the page, you know I did have a sense of the space and the place. I liked what we were doing in terms of establishing that there are security guards, that it’s hot, that’s it is in an environment that is sort of interesting and exciting to read. I have nitpicks on some of the writing on the page in terms of like some of the word choice. But I will say that I read this this morning and did sort of stick with me. If you were going to have a lady made of bats who then eats the head of a baby it’s going to stick. And at the end of these three pages I was curious to read more.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is meant to be a pilot for a series. My biggest issue really was with the very first scene. So this exterior condo building, night. I don’t know what a condo building is.

**John:** I don’t either.

**Craig:** I mean, I know it’s an apartment building that has condos, but how many, what, three stories? Four stories? 100 stories? And then I don’t know where it is. Is it in a city? Is it in the suburbs? Is it outskirts.

**John:** Yeah, only when we get to the caption near the bottom of the page it says Manila, Philippines. Give that to us at the start. It’s important. Really anchor us into the place where we are.

I love that it’s hot. I love them fanning with the cardboard. But we’re talking about the stagnant air and yet I can’t feel that. We need to see what’s happening to the security guards who also a little too generic for this. I want to see them – distinguish them. Make them sweaty. Tell us more about where we are.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this condo building is a nondescript building. It’s in the middle of nowhere that is defined. The two security guards emerge out of a guard post. What? What guard post? A guard post in front of a condo building?

**John:** I don’t know what that’s like.

**Craig:** Is there like a guard arm? Is this to enter the parking lot? Is it just a kiosk? What are we looking at? Why do they emerge? When it says to beat the hot still air, I need to see that they’re hot before they emerge. Usually if you’re hot on the inside there’s a little fan or something. So, they’re just coming outside. And I don’t know why. It seems like they’re emerging just because the writer wants them to emerge.

And then this is one of the stranger bits, because we’re talking about geography. It says, “Their eyes roam to motionless wheels of a parked car.”

**John:** I had a big question mark there, too. I don’t know what that means. They’re looking at a parked car?

**Craig:** The one thing that will never attract anyone’s attention ever are the motionless wheels of a parked car. Also, is it just one car? Is it alone? What kind of car? Why would they care? And then it says, “A swarm of bats rush in.” To the outside? You can’t rush into the outside. They’re outside.

**John:** They can rush past.

**Craig:** They can rush past. Where do they come from? They don’t just materialize out of thin air. This is exactly the kind of logic geography that we need to consider or else on the day of production meetings people say, “Are the bats just poof? What’s up?”

**John:** Yeah. So let’s describe the fantasy version of this scene which I think is what we were maybe trying to go for. Is that you have these two security guards who it says, “Swelteringly hot night.” They’re near their little booth, whatever it is. Have them already be outside the booth. There’s no reason for them to be inside and then come out. They’re already outside this booth. They’re fanning themselves with the cardboard. I love it.

Suddenly a thousand freaking bats are swarming past them. They freak out. They get inside the booth. One of them pulls a gun like should I shoot the bats. Like, no, of course you don’t shoot the bats. That is an interesting opening and I think that’s kind of what we’re trying to get to here. But the words in this opening section didn’t land for me.

**Craig:** They didn’t. And also it says that one of the guards “aims his gun at the bats. He stalls, shivering with fear.” Nobody actually shivers with fear. Not like that. And then it says, “He looks up at a window.”

**John:** Why?

**Craig:** Why? And which window?

**John:** Why?

**Craig:** How do we know he’s looking at a window? You know what it will look like when he looks up at a window? He’s looking up. That’s what it will look like. We won’t know. There is a version of this, by the way, just occurred to me, where you start with these two guys in their guard kiosk and it’s super-hot but there’s a little fan going [spinning sound]. And then the fan goes [sound of fan dying]. And it stops. And they’re like, oh no, because it’s super-hot, but they don’t want to go outside, which is information. Like well why don’t you want to go outside? What’s the problem?

And then they’re like, screw it, let’s just do it. It can’t be that bad. And then the bats come. Because the implication is that they know, I guess, that there’s some sort of supernatural thingy out there.

**John:** Yeah. Could be. So let’s take a look at this moment of looking up at the window because I think the instinct was to be, oh, that’s going to help the transition into the apartment. It doesn’t help. It’s just confusing. So if we see these guards and all these bats go past, the fact that we’re cutting to the inside of this apartment with this mother and these kids, we are expecting those bats to come. And that is tension that is great. And so that suspense is going to be there because holy cow something is happening.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. But the problem is that the bats appear to be in some sort of JFK air traffic control holding pattern for a very long conversation.

**John:** They do. Yes. So I think we can probably lose a little of this conversation. I also want to lose the mother’s line on the bottom of this first page. “Naku. It’s 2001. We don’t believe those things anymore.” Scratch that line. Just say like, “Mama, what about the aswang?” “Naku.” “I heard the bats.” Cross all the rest of this out. “Just close your eyes. I’ll keep the AC on. You’ll fall right asleep.”

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** That’s all we need.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** We’re set.

**Craig:** We’re done. We’re good. The scene where the woman appears, it can be scarier. The truth is that the – like when it says, “Hard to make out her face. She flips her raven hair back.” You know, like my daughter’s friends flip their raven hair back. Do you know what I mean? There’s a way for the hair to – you want to feel like this – is it stringy? Is it wet? Is it dirty?

**John:** Dirty fingernails claw through her stringy hair.

**Craig:** Or does the hair just float away revealing this terrible face? We’re missing something. And then honestly when she eats the baby it’s gross. There’s a line – sorry folks – “a bloody flesh of flesh, eyeballs exposed, floats and enters her mouth.” Well that almost sounds funny. Because like how does – flesh doesn’t have eyeballs. Anyway, there’s some issues here like this. And in the middle of this page – there’s about a page description or three-quarters of a page of this creature eating a baby.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when it is done eating the baby our writer writes in description, “She just ATE THE BABY!” Yes, we know.

**John:** We were there. We saw it.

**Craig:** Yeah. We saw it.

**John:** But did the young boy see it? And that’s where I got a little frustrated with the sequence.

**Craig:** Yeah, where is he? What’s he doing?

**John:** So I was confused by sort of the boy is in the room with the twin babies. OK. That’s great. But we lose him through all of the baby eating and then suddenly he’s there on page three. “The young boy grips the covers. He can’t control his heavy breathing. The aswang turns its head to the other baby twin, unfazed.”

So, he’s there but we don’t clock him for a very long time in there. And that should be – we should be worried about him. We should be seeing him.

**Craig:** Perspective. Right? You want to talk about what’s scary? Well the kind of objective perspective of this creature is not scary. A little boy’s perspective of this creature as it floats by him and then eats one of this infant siblings–

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** And then we’re like peeking. We’re getting peeks. We’re getting things. And then it looks over and he hides. You know, you’ve seen this stuff before. I mean, so anyway, that’s – yeah. But, you know, it seems like a good setup for a show.

**John:** It does seem like a good setup for a show. So this is a show about setting and sort of places things in a specific place. I like Manila, Philippines as a place to set this story. I have not seen it before. I’m curious about the mythology that Janelle is building for all of this. And while I didn’t love some of what happened on here I did like the idea of like, OK, there’s this woman who is made of bats who just ate a baby. That’s compelling.

**Craig:** Yeah. Bat-cloud lady baby-eater is good. So, we’re really talking about, again, living in that space. Looking around. Seeing it. And asking what do people need to know. Space. Relationship to space. Time matters. If bats are going to fly toward a thing they need to show up at bat speed, right? That’s just how it goes. So it’s stuff like that.

**John:** Yep. All right. Let’s travel still in the southern hemisphere for Night of Game by Alex Beattie. We’re in Kruger National Park at night. We see 50 white rhinos migrate through the plains. We hear the buzz of cicadas. And through the long gross we spot a silver tip of a rifle and then a few yards away more silver tips. We watch a rhino grunt as it charges ahead only to be shot with bullets and the wail of the rhino as it collapses. We see these white Boer poachers rise from the grass, removing their knives.

Then we cut to the Zimbali Lodge at night. Masks and sculpt animal heads lining the lobby. We follow the footsteps up the stairs to the hotel rooms. There’s a beep as a card swipes and a door opens. Miles, 18 years old, sleeps. We pull up on him as his eye flickers open and we see his seven-year-old sister Caitlyn. She’s fully dressed, trying to wake him up.

Miles protests that it’s too early. It’s 4am. Miles gets up and meets his mom, Lori, in her hotel room. He looks at an old framed photo of his parents as Lori makes a comment about the night she met Miles’ father with a melancholy tear in her eye.

We cut to a game reserve with an anti-poaching sign. The family rides in a jeep. Caitlyn is asleep. Miles is in the back. Lori is up front with her guide, Barry, who welcomes them to the park saying it’s the largest white rhino population in the world. Lori says it was her husband’s second home. And that’s where we’re at at the bottom of page three.

Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** OK, well, keeping with our topic today of location we begin with exterior, the bush, night. Super: Kruger National Park, South Africa. And then we see a crash of at least 50 white rhino. That is a lot, by the way. We tend to underestimate the size of numbers when we look at these things. 50 white rhinos. A ton. Migrate through the vast rugged plains. A rhino lingers behind and wanders into the thicket.

Well, is it plains or is it thicket? Because plains ain’t thicket.

The huge bull feeds on a nearby thorn bush. And so hidden in the long, dry grass a silver gun tip. I feel like this is an area where you’re setting up a rhino is about to get picked off by predators. And therefore I need to know specifically what’s going on. Is it a little area that’s through a gorge? Is it flanked on both sides by tall grass? Is the rhino aware? I mean, this is the setting of a kind of a murder, right? So what we have is a little too generic. It’s sort of like Africa. Here comes guns. But then it charges and it dies. And they come out in their night vision goggles. OK, so that’s kind of, you know, it’s fine.

But I would do, I don’t know if you thought the same, but I would be far more specific about the arrangement of cover and stuff to create a sense of suspense and danger and also give the people who are making this movie a fighting chance at actually picking a location or designing something or even filling it in to fit the vision of the writer.

**John:** Yeah. So going back to Rian’s script for Knives Out. The grounds of a New England. Pre-dawn misty. So incredibly minimalist but we also identify it as Thrombey Estate Manor House. So it’s pretty easy to summon an image in your head of what kind of place we’re at. This right here I do feel like we’re sort of generic African savannah. I need to be grounded a little bit more clearly. You’re going to have to paint me a picture a little bit better, in part so we can get the suspense that Craig is looking for. Like, you know, if we’re just seeing these rhinos here, well, I mean, is this going to be a predator attacking? What’s going to be happening here?

Once we see a gun, OK, it’s going to be some sort of poaching thing. Is there going to be a twist? How many people are there? What’s happening? And I didn’t get that sort of grounding that I wanted here.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s hard to generate surprise when you haven’t really laid in the arrangement in my mind of where these things are coming from and why it even works at all.

So, our next location is Zimbali Lodge and we start inside Zimbali Lodge which is an interesting choice. Typically we’re going to want to see the exterior of something like this. But hopefully we get the sense of what it is. We’re going to need a break in between the scene before and this scene, which is why I’m thinking you might want some sort of exterior. And we’re in the lobby and we’re creeping low along the stone tiles and faint footsteps climb the steps. I was a little confused by that. Are we the footsteps? I think so.

So, it’s OK in this point and here’s where I would say golly gee, don’t be afraid to say “we.” This is a perfect time to use “we.” We are climbing the steps slowly. At the top of the landing, hotel rooms. Beep. A swipe. We push the door open. A fan whirls. Reveal we are, blah-blah-blah, if we needed to, right?

Why is this little girl in a lobby at night? I have no idea. She’s seven. I understand why a little girl would want to sneak out of her room to wake up her brother because she’s bored. But why would she start in the lobby?

**John:** Yeah. That didn’t track for me either. So, this little girl, so story logic wise, this little girl is excited to go on their safari. They do start at the crack of dawn. I’ve done them. They’re fun. But you do start at night, so that’s not unrealistic. But it’s unrealistic that she’s out of the room. I also get concerned by – so if you’re in a location that has multiple sub locations you can do the thing like what we’re doing here which is just hotel room, but I didn’t get a sense of like, wait, are we inside the room? Are we outside the room? You got to make it more clear where we’re at here.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I didn’t know why we were sort of sneaking up. But then through binoculars we see Miles Abbott, 18, slim build, sprawled out asleep. Wait, were we in binocular vision this whole time? What’s going on? I was just really confused by why we were doing what we were doing. And are we supposed to feel frightened for Miles? That these poachers are after him? I didn’t get what the writer was going for here.

**Craig:** Well, I think it is fake suspense. By the way, it’s not shootable. You can’t shoot the thing through binoculars. It just doesn’t work like that, unless they’re fake binoculars because they’re a toy apparently. She’s holding a tiny pair of pink binoculars. Maybe they’re a toy. But even then you’d have to vignette it like binoculars which would just be confusing to people.

And like you said are they doing that the whole time? So it’s meant to be a misdirect and it just doesn’t make sense.

So here’s the thing about misdirects. Totally cool to do. But when you reveal they have to make retroactive logic, otherwise their just a cheat and the audience loses faith in you and they feel like you’re just cheating, which you are.

**John:** Which I worry you would feel that way in here. So, the actual conversation between the two of them if you just strip away all the other stuff is just like the girl is really excited to go, the boy is 18 years old and sort of being a teenager and wants to sleep in. He then goes into the mother’s room and has – this is the kind of scene that I really – it’s not quite the air vent for me, but it’s close. Where there’s a conveniently placed photo of the person who is dead. And for no apparent reason one character picks it up and starts talking about it and they have a conversation about this dead person, which is meant to set up something else. You got to find a different way to do that, folks, because it can’t be there. It can’t.

**Craig:** Well, when a man dies and leaves behind a wife and two children inevitably about three years later one of the kids will look at a picture and the wife will start talking in an impromptu fashion about the first night they met, as if the kids never heard that story.

It’s just, yeah, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’s not emotionally logical.

**John:** And here’s the opportunity that Alex has given himself for getting that backstory out, because they’re going to go on safari and she gets the opportunity to say like my husband was a safari leader. Basically we don’t need that information on page two because it’s going to be very easy to get out on page three if it really is that crucial. So, I think that’s interesting and helpful.

I had a question on page two about accents. I think they have British accents but I’m not sure if they have British accents. You got to tell us, because I don’t know how to read some of these lines until I know what accent these people are.

**Craig:** I mean, generally speaking cheeky would imply British to me. Or Irish. Or Australian.

**John:** Or they could be South African.

**Craig:** Or they could be South African. Actually you’re right.

**John:** There’s a lot.

**Craig:** There is a lot. It could be a lot of different things. This is not a sentence. “Hluhluwe home to the largest population of white rhino in the world.” There is no verb.

Now, people don’t necessarily have to speak with verbs in their sentences. But this is a sentence that would normally have a verb like “Hluhluwe is home to the largest population of white rhino in the world.” Why is he suddenly saying that? I mean, normally we want to come into these scenes in the middle. He’s going on and on. He’s rambling.

**John:** Yeah. OK. But let’s talk about transitions between moments in scenes. Because page three, the end of the Lori/Miles scene, “Where’s Caitlyn?” “She’s already started her little safari adventure!” It’s not a good out. So we talk about the out of a scene is like how do you stop a scene so you can get onto the next thing? Or leave a scene with enough energy that you’re spilling into the next one. I didn’t buy it. Especially with “They both laugh.” No. That’s not–

**Craig:** What’s funny?

**John:** Yeah. Maybe laugh at something that’s funny. This is not a moment that’s funny that’s going to give you the out. And in so many cases stop trying to write for the out and look for what is the last thing that sort of necessarily wants to happen in that scene so you can just cut to the next thing and move on. And you can come into the next thing a little bit later. I just felt like we always have these opportunities to be moving ahead.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve covered this one.

**John:** I think we’re good.

**Craig:** Yeah, we did it.

**John:** But I want to say setting something at a safari park is good. That’s a space that I’m not seeing in a lot of other things, so I think there’s really good opportunities to do fascinating things there. But describe what’s interesting and new and different. And unfortunately in these pages we got kind of generic-y Africa and we got a hotel room.

**Craig:** And generic people and generic emotions.

**John:** Again, we want you to take advantage of the specific things you can do in that place which is to make your movie and your first three pages different than all other three pages.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. Well, let’s move onto our last one. This is Upward Mobility. It’s limited series pilot. Oh, I like limited series. And this is story by Carol Gold Lande, Lande I’m going to guess, L-A-N-D-E, and Linda Minnella Yardley. And it is written by Linda Minnella Yardley.

We watch an opening credit sequence of the Diego Rivera Detroit Industry Fresco Murals. The show opens in the dining room kitchen of the Ford Bomber Plant, late morning. A busboy unloads Ford monogramed china while a black waiter, Lester in his 50s, and a young white trainee walk through the kitchen. Lester explains to the trainer that Mr. Ford and his executives eat breakfast in the dining room every day. And Mr. Ford prefers his milk unpasteurized, believing that it’s healthier.

Trainee doesn’t like this, doesn’t appreciate that he has a person of color as his boss. We head into the dining room. Other waiters are getting the room ready for lunch, but Henry Ford, 79, and Harry Bennett, 55, are in conversation. Harry hands Ford a photo of a University of Michigan football player. And throughout this exchange we learn that Ford is disappointed in his own son and is looking for someone to spy on him. He rejects the football player, thinking that his son would identify him as a spy. Lester serves Harry a steak. The trainee gives Ford his milk and cereal.

Ford looks through and finally picks a photo of a middle-aged man named Joe Salvo. Lester brings the phone from the kitchen. There’s a call for Harry. Harry listens briefly and has to leave. He tells Ford one of their planes has blown up and the entire crew is dead. He also says to Ford that Edsel has landed. Ford drops his napkin and then tucks it back into his neck and tells Harry to get Joe Salvo hired for his son, Edsel, quickly. And that is our summary of Upward Mobility.

John, what did you think?

**John:** So, the pages we’re reading are not the first three pages. Apparently there’s a teaser that happened right before this. I’m guessing in the teaser we actually saw a bit more of factory-factory because in what we’re seeing here we have the opening title sequence and then we’re into this sort of executive dining room.

But, with what I saw I was intrigued by sort of some of the setting, the geography, and curious about what was happening, but a little bit confused.

So, let’s talk about this opening title sequence. I know Diego Rivera Fresco that she’s talking about. I think that’s actually a great idea for using in these opening titles because it feels dynamic, it feels period, it feels really cool. In my head because I recently saw Ford vs. Ferrari I keep picturing that Ford Motor Company. So this is a few years earlier. I need to know a little bit more place and time. And I might have gotten those in the first three pages before this, but I was missing some specificity about exactly what year I’m kind of in. And I would love to have seen that.

That said, I’m excited to see Lester and, you know, the black waiter who is training the trainee, and that little bit of racism. I always love a moment where a phone gets brought to a table. I find that to be a good period detail.

But I also got a little bit lost in the we’re hiring someone to spy on the son. And I felt like there could have been sharper moments than that. Craig, what were you feeling?

**Craig:** Yeah. If I had to guess, I mean, again who knows? But I would think the teaser might be the plane crash.

**John:** Yes, OK.

**Craig:** That would be a fun way to open a show is a plane crash. I mean, everybody likes a good old plane crash. I mean, except for the people on the plane. Or the people under the plane. Yeah, the opening title sequence could be pretty cool. You know, the thing about opening title sequences is if they’re not actively telling story, like for instance the title sequence for Game of Thrones, then they might not even need to be detailed if they really are just graphic title sequences.

The bomber plant, again, I would probably not start inside a kitchen if I don’t know where the kitchen is. I haven’t seen the exterior. I’m guessing I don’t see the exterior in the prior bit. That’s if I don’t. I also don’t know what bomber plant means. And bomber plant is kind of a strange phrase. It means bomber airplane. So maybe just a little clearer there.

But there’s a good job here of using space. I like steaming fog. I like rattling. I like flinching as he plucks hot plates from the rack and stacks them.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** I can feel it, right? Like I can see it. I can feel it. I’m not sure why young white trainee who is part of this scene and who is bristling under the training of–

**John:** He gets a name. He should get a name.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so. Right? He gets a name. Otherwise I’m less interested in his racism to be honest with you. It just has less impact because he’s not a real person.

**John:** Craig, I want to delete the paragraph, “Even though he’ll never hold paper on a spec of land, Lester addresses the trainee with the posture and confident formality of the man who owns this kitchen.”

**Craig:** I agree with you.

**John:** Don’t need it.

**Craig:** Because his dialogue does that for you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think the actors can see what’s going through here.

**John:** I like Lester’s line, “Fix that good in your mind.” It’s specific and kind of weird and it sticks. I mean, and it doesn’t feel too written. I dug it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wasn’t – so we have to talk a little bit about when people say names. We’ve had a few of these in here. People are just announcing names. Generally speaking a cook, “Lester, food is good to go here.” No, I don’t think so. Cook taps the order-up counter. “Food’s ready.” Or just taps it. And they take the plates. There’s an opportunity if Mr. Ford knows Lester’s name that’s good. Or if Harry says, “Thank you, Lester,” because they know him. That’s good. It’s just finding those moments. Speaking of names, a lot of people aren’t going to know that Henry Ford’s son was named Edsel. In fact, most people will not know that. So when it says, “Even Edsel could spot him as one of your moles,” is Edsel a competitor? Does Edsel work for the government? Who is Edsel? Is Edsel confusion? Hard to say.

So, “Even my son could spot him as one of your moles.” Something. You just have to be a little clever about this, otherwise we’re going to get a little – I think that’s part of the confusion. Because this is also a confusing thing they’re doing. They’re looking through photos to find somebody who can spy on or look after his kid and they’re not even sure what the criteria are.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, it sounds like a Talented Mr. Ripley situation where he wants somebody to kind of befriend or sort of get close to his son so he can keep an eye on him. That’s my guess is that Edsel is sort of a mess-up and he wants somebody to watch over him.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. So it’s a little bit – and I love that. I think that’s a really cool idea. It’s just that I’m not quite sure when he says I don’t like this guy, I don’t like that, I’m like why exactly? Altar is spelled incorrectly by the way. A-L-T-A-R.

And also I don’t quite understand what’s going on when Harry says, “One of our planes blew up. The whole crew is dead.” Ford doesn’t care. Lester is worried. And then Harry says, “And Edsel just landed.” That’s all in italics. And that seems to jar Henry Ford. Why?

**John:** Yeah. So I don’t think we have – it’s not that we don’t have information, but we’re not sufficiently curious to make us really want to go to like got to have the answer to that question. And I think some tightening in these scenes could get you to that place.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so.

**John:** We may have seen Edsel in the first three pages which is why we’re focusing on this. So we don’t know everything about this.

**Craig:** We don’t.

**John:** Something I want to talk about with title pages on all of these projects. In this case it’s story by Carol Gold Lande & Linda Minnella Yardley, written by Linda Minnella Yardley. It wouldn’t be written by, it would be screenplay by. So, written by is both screenplay and story. So, if this is a situation where the two of you came up with the story together and one of you actually wrote these pages, Screenplay by is what you would actually be putting in that place.

That date belongs in the bottom right corner of the page.

Generally you won’t see the Written by or Story by, you won’t see the word written or story capitalized. Those would be lower case by themselves. It’s not a big thing. But most scripts you’re going to read are going to have that be lower case. So you might as well do that.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny. I’m just thinking about this because it’s television, I don’t know – would it be screenplay by–?

**John:** Sorry, teleplay by.

**Craig:** Teleplay by. Yeah.

**John:** Teleplay by. You do television now, Craig, so you’re going to have to learn this.

**Craig:** I mean, I am so far behind on everything.

**John:** All right. I want to thank everyone who submitted. So I guess it’s more than 60 folks that we read through. But especially these three/four people who wrote in with their scripts. Thank you for sharing them with us so we can talk through what we loved and what we thought could be improved upon. If people want to send in their own scripts again it’s johnaugust.com/threepage. And you will be able to submit for the next time we do this.

It’s time for our One Cool Things, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh, good, you know I have one this week.

**John:** You go first.

**Craig:** So many, many, many moons ago one of my One Cool Things was a game for iOS and possibly for Android, although I don’t care about Android, called House of Da Vinci. And House of Da Vinci was kind of a Room knockoff. It wasn’t kind of Room knockoff. It was a Room knockoff. But it was pretty good. And as I recall I said this is like a good stop gap for people who love the Room. And they have a sequel out now and it’s really good. And it’s not really a Room knockoff. It still has very similar mechanisms in terms of picking up objects, manipulating them, folding them, turning them, twisting them. And some of the same sounds. But the nature of the gameplay is quite different. And it’s really well done. I have to say. And it runs beautifully. Very smooth for a game that’s clearly complicated and large in terms of its demands on my iPad.

So, strongly recommend. If you do like puzzle-solving games like the Room, check out the latest House of Da Vinci.

**John:** Fantastic. I will check that out. I have two One Cool Things. The first is How America Uses its Land, which is a Bloomberg thing, which apparently is from 2018, but I just saw it this last week because people were tweeting about it. It’s this really good map of the US that sort of shows acre by acre or however they’re dividing it up sort of how America actually uses its land. And so of course all the cities in America could fit up into the northeast. And most of our land is pasture and other sorts of things. Really it’s a great way of describing the choices we made as a country in terms of what we’re using our land to do. And we could probably use our land better than a lot of golf courses.

The second thing is an article in the LA Times about Sweetgreen. So I eat at Sweetgreen every week or two. They make good salads and they try to compost and do things. This article talks through the struggles they’ve had actually composting and sort of they try to have no waste go into landfills. And it’s very, very hard. So the article does a good job showing the real struggles they’ve had with waste management in terms of it’s one thing to try to source recyclable products and things that are made of compostable materials, but actually getting them from the store to those facilities is really difficult. So, just a good article about sort of the really complicated production chains of modern commerce.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Nice. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao with production assistance this week by Bo Shim and Jacq Lesko.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Jemma Moran. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

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

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 you’re going to hear right after this music where we’re going to talk about mugs.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Bonus Segment

**John:** OK, here is my issue with mugs.

**Craig:** I cannot wait for this.

**John:** All right. So I think mugs are a good invention. I think they’re delightful for coffee or for tea or for whatever you want to drink. My issue is with novelty mugs that are given to me as gifts or as part of gifts. And I don’t want your mugs. I don’t want the mug you’re giving me for this school where I did an Arlo Finch event. People give them to you because they’re thankful for you doing something for them, but you can thank me by not giving me your mug because I don’t want your novelty mug.

**Craig:** You’re a real mug Grinch.

**John:** I’m really Grinchy about mugs. Craig, so let’s say you went to some award show. You’ve been to a bunch of award shows lately. And in the gift bag there was a mug. What would you do with that mug?

**Craig:** I’d probably shove it in the mug cabinet.

**John:** So, you have a mug cabinet. And tell me about your mug cabinet.

**Craig:** You know, it fills up with mugs. [laughs] The thing is like the mugs – I want you to direct your mug ire at Color Me Mine. This is an entire business where you’re paying them for you to end up with an endless mug.

No, I get it. I mean, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that accumulates. The things that bums me out is there’s all these gift baskets and things. Like people send you a gift basket, great, that’s awesome. But there’s an actual basket. It’s like this woven thing.

**John:** What do you with the basket? Yes.

**Craig:** You got to chuck it. There’s nothing else to do with it. You can’t have a room full of baskets.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And at least, look, it’s basket material. It’s not made of iron. Or chemicals. But still like it’s just more junk.

**John:** There’s a limited number of Baby Moses, so I cannot send him down the river. I mean, there’s nothing for me to do with this basket.

**Craig:** Like back in the day of Moses when he was sent down the river, do you think when people found him they thought it was a gift basket? [laughs]

**John:** They did. Like, whoa, look what we just found.

**Craig:** What a bummer. It’s not even like – there’s no wine. There’s no crackers. It’s a freaking baby.

**John:** Yeah. There’s no fancy cheeses in there. There’s nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing.

**John:** No, not a bit.

**Craig:** Useless.

**John:** This year I got only one gift basket. And so I realize – I think it’s partly because, well, the agency I was at which usually sent me a gift back, they’re not my agency anymore. Bruckheimer did not send me a basket this year. Another director I worked with before didn’t send baskets this year. And you know what? I honestly didn’t miss it that much.

I missed sort of like not having that moment of thinking like, oh yeah, I remember I used to work for them. But I didn’t miss like the stuff that I didn’t want that I was going to throw away.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, it’s funny. CAA doesn’t send gift baskets for Christmastime. They usually just send – they do a charity thing and then they’ll send a little booklet to show you, OK, here’s where your money went, I mean, here’s where we donated money instead of buying you a basket. Which honestly I think is great.

The thing is sometimes I think – so there’s a whole world of company junk out there. My late father-in-law was a Burger King franchisee. He owned a couple of Burger Kings. And he and my mother-in-law would go every year to a Burger King convention. And kind of the whole deal was like stuff. Junk. Pads. Pens. Clips. Mugs. There’s like a world of crap that gets generated with logos.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the logo crap industry.

**John:** Logo crap. Yeah.

**Craig:** And, you know what? You’ve converted me. I’m out. I’m out of the mug business.

**John:** I’m out of the mug business, too. So, I say, Craig, just take that – Marie Kondo that mug cabinet. You don’t want those mugs. So what we’ve done is we got rid of all our novelty mugs. And so all of our mugs are the exact same identical mug from Pottery Barn. And you know what? I make my coffee in the morning. It’s indistinguishable from any other mug. And it’s better that way.

**Craig:** Look, we have these glass coffee tea mugs that are kind of like that insulated glass so you can have a hot thing and it doesn’t hurt your hand. That’s all I need. But I guarantee you if I throw one of those mugs away I’m going to hear about it from one of the two women in my house. No question. One, either my wife or my daughter, is going to say where is my blankety-blank mug? And I’m going to say, really? You wanted that? And then I’m going to get in trouble.

**John:** I want to be able to opt out of mugs. And so I want to be able to like – I want there to be a polite way for me to be able to say like, hey, I’m excited to come to event. And if you’re thinking about giving me a mug, or a baseball hat, with a logo on it please don’t. Or pen. These are things – you’re actually going to make me feel worse about the event for giving me this thing.

**Craig:** I will always take a pen. I love pens. So, I’ll take your pen.

**John:** Another bonus segment will be about my strong feelings on pens.

**Craig:** Oh, I love them.

**John:** All right. I love pens, I just don’t like any pens except for the pen I actually want.

**Craig:** Ugh, god, you’re a robot.

**John:** I am. Craig, thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Bye.

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

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

**Greta Gerwig:** Hello. I’m Greta Gerwig.

**John:** And this is Episode 433 of Scriptnotes.

**Greta:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. 433 episodes.

Today on this show we will be discussing ambition, authorship, and adaptation, which is why we’re so lucky to have Greta Gerwig filling in for Craig. She is the acclaimed writer and director of Little Women and Lady Bird. We’re going to answer some listener questions about descriptive writing and parenthood as well.

**Greta:** Great.

**John:** Craig is out sick today. But he has promised to join me after the credits for a bonus segment for Premium members where we talk about what was happening with him and Tiffany Haddish at the Golden Globes. So, Craig won a Golden Globe. He won a Golden Globe for Chernobyl.

**Greta:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Which is great. And now you already had a Golden Globe, because you won a Golden Globe for Lady Bird.

**Greta:** Actually you know what? The thing is because I wasn’t listed as a producer on Lady Bird or Little Women I actually don’t have any awards.

**John:** Well, you have many awards. You don’t have a Golden Globe?

**Greta:** No. Because it won a Golden Globe for Best Comedy but because I’m not a producer I don’t have a Golden Globe.

**John:** I’m going to throw this table.

**Greta:** I know.

**John:** I’m so angry.

**Greta:** I know. People are like let me see your Golden Globe and I’m like the thing is I don’t have one. It’s quite all right. I think eventually I will be a producer on my projects. But for the first couple I was like I want other people to be able to take that full space.

**John:** That’s fair. So I assumed that you and Craig had that in common winning Golden Globes. But you and I have something in common I discovered during our research. We are both born on August 4th.

**Greta:** No?

**John:** We are birthday twins.

**Greta:** Birthday twins. Plus Obama.

**John:** Plus Obama. The three of us. A powerful–

**Greta:** Have the same–

**John:** A powerful team.

**Greta:** And I think Queen Elizabeth. Is that right?

**John:** That sounds right. I’ll believe it. Say it with confidence and we’ll believe it.

**Greta:** Queen Elizabeth. No, that’s really great. A Leo.

**John:** Yeah, a Leo. I don’t really believe in astrology but like–

**Greta:** Oh, I do. [laughs]

**John:** But I have many qualities of Leo.

**Greta:** I mean, actually I don’t know that I believe in it in that I don’t know that I think there’s a correlation between the facts of the world and what you can glean from astrology. However, I think people use lots of things which it’s not technically based in hard fact at all. And if it makes you a little happier, why not? I mean, an astrologist told me once that I was in a lucky corridor. It was when I was making Lady Bird actually. And then she was like so if anything goes wrong, just ask yourself how is this an opportunity for me. Because it is.

And I was like well that’s just pretty good advice in general.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. Astrology maybe not true, but good advice always welcome.

**Greta:** Good advice. And I have Leo-ish qualities.

**John:** I’m going to be asking a lot of advice from you for our listeners. But let me lay out the overall agenda of things I’d love to talk about while I have you here for this hour. So I want to talk about your adaptation of Little Women which is unconventional and just terrific.

**Greta:** Thank you.

**John:** We have the script in front of us so we’ll be able to do some deep diving on some scenes. But I want to know how you came to write it. Why you wrote it? It’s a story about ambition. Jo is very ambitious. You are ambitious as a filmmaker. You were instrumental in helping create a whole genre of filmmaking. So we should talk about that.

**Greta:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then I want to talk about the notion of authorship because Jo aspires so hard to be an author. And the work I associate you with is so autobiographical. And so like Little Women is sort of meta autobiographical because of some of the things you did, but Lady Bird is highly autobiographical. So the degree to which you are writing things that only you could write is I think a good thing for us to talk about.

**Greta:** Right.

**John:** That will be our agenda for this hour. But I want to know how you came to write Little Women because it’s a public domain story. You could have written it at any time, but you wrote it in a very specific way. So tell me about how you came to write it.

**Greta:** Well, the truth is actually I didn’t really know about the public domain for a long time, in terms of the text of Little Women. But I grew up reading this book. I read it many, many times. And Jo March was my favorite character. And in many ways she was the character that made me believe I could be a writer, because she wanted to be a writer. She was a writer. And then in some way that I didn’t know completely but I think you intuit when you’re reading it is because you’re holding the book Little Women in some ways you know she became the writer who wrote the book even though it’s a different name.

And I didn’t really know who Louisa May Alcott was because I read books the way all kids read books which is that the things within the pages seem real to you, even though they’re fiction. And I think the last time I read the book when I was something like 14 or 15 and then when I was 30 I reread it and I felt like I’d never read it before. I felt like it was brand new.

**John:** You read it just on a lurk? There was no reason?

**Greta:** I was actually moving out of one apartment into another apartment and that’s often the occasion to uncover some things, which is why it’s sometimes good to either move or clean stuff out, because then you revisit stuff. Anyway, I had the copy of Little Women that I had had when I was a girl. And I reread it. Or I sat down to sort of like page through it. And then I started reading it and I was like, oh my god, this is – in one way I almost know this by heart, and in another way I feel like I’ve never read it. I feel like it’s totally modern and strange and pressing. And I knew I wanted to make it into a film. I started seeing it as a film.

And then coincidentally my agent mentioned that Amy Pascal and the folks over at Sony were interested in making it. And I said you’ve got to get me in that room. And I went and I talked to Amy and Denise Di Novi and Robin Swicord and I told them what I wanted to do with it. And I hadn’t yet directed Lady Bird. So it was a long shot. But they said – initially what they said yes to was me writing the screenplay.

**John:** Let’s talk about you as a writer before that moment. Because you’d written on other movies before. And you directed before, but much smaller things.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** And so what were they reading of their work?

**Greta:** Why did they give me this job?

**John:** I’m truly curious. You’re coming into this room. What was it like?

**Greta:** Well, I had co-written two screenplays with Noah, Frances Ha and Mistress America. I think especially now that I’ve written and directed stuff on my own I think it’s a little easier to see how much of that is my writing. But I think when you’re initially a cowriter and also when you’re an actor I think there’s almost an assumption that maybe you just wrote the lines you said.

**John:** Exactly.

**Greta:** Which is not true. But it’s an understandable assumption. And then–

**John:** And that’s probably true for any writing team in general. You don’t know whether one of them by themselves can really do the work.

**Greta:** Exactly. And you’re not sure – and, because Noah had done things alone, it’s a little harder to tease out. But I’d done that. But then I had been hired properly – properly I mean by a person – I wrote a script for Lionsgate for Eric Feige and that I went in, I knew they had an idea of doing something I pitched and I said here’s what – and they gave me the job. And I wrote them a script. And so that was kind of the first thing that I’d done like that.

And then actually interesting on a sitcom that I tried to do that didn’t work, How I Met Your Father, How I Met Your Dad, I was a writer on that as well.

**John:** So there were things people could look at to say like she can really write by herself.

**Greta:** Yeah. There were a couple things. But it was kind of on faith. I mean, I did give them the script to Lady Bird even though I hadn’t made Lady Bird yet. And said, oh, I wrote this.

**John:** OK. That’s a pretty good script.

**Greta:** It was a good script, but I also think, you know, it’s hard to be the first one in the pool. And I thought it was a good script and I had gotten some feedback. People said, oh yes, it’s a good script. But like nobody really knows yet. You know, you have to believe in the thing before anybody else says it’s good. And that’s like what makes great producers is they can read something without anybody else telling them it’s good and think it’s good.

I had that script but it was still kind of – I mean, they certainly didn’t hire me to direct it. And it was like, well, give it a shot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Greta:** It wasn’t like–

**John:** Take a chance on you.

**Greta:** Yeah. It wasn’t like some big like now we’re all in on you. And I think I always wanted to direct it and thought that I should, but even though they weren’t thinking that way, I think a couple of things helped in that regard which is that I sort of had a sense of like I’m going to do whatever I want with this script because I mean nobody is ever going to make this.

**John:** Well let’s talk about talking into that room, meeting with – because I know Amy well and I know Denise and I know Robin Swicord. They’re all very smart, accomplished women.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** What was your conversation? Were you coming in to them saying like I want to do Little Women and here’s my take of a nonlinear way to get into this and how you’re going to handle all this? How much of it did you know as you were going into those meetings?

**Greta:** I knew quite a bit actually going into the meetings. Well, I think one of the first things I said was that I said to me this book is about authorship and ownership and it’s about money. And it’s about women and money and how that intersects with artistic output. And it felt like it was all over the book to me. And then I had already started looking at Louisa May Alcott’s life and what that was. And how that intersected with the subject of the book. And I didn’t quite know how I was going to interweave the time periods, but I didn’t know that I wanted to start with them as adults. That was the way I wanted to come at it.

And I think in part because I knew that the adaptation that I wanted to do was not just an adaptation of the text as it is in the book. Although I did rely heavily on the text in the book. I also wanted to treat all adaptations as almost an urtext as a collective memory of what Little Women is, so that there are things – you know, this is an example that I don’t know how much it’s useful but I always think about it. Our conceptions of heaven and hell for example. They’re not from the bible.

**John:** No, they’re not at all.

**Greta:** They’re from Dante. That’s where we got all of it from. So if you actually go to the bible and you’re like where are the descriptions of the hell fires? They’re not there. They don’t exist. Because that’s something we got later. And I do think that there’s this sense of an urtext or collective text which means more than even what the original text said. So I felt like I had the original text, but then I had images. And the images are things like Marmee and the girls gathered around the fire reading the letter from father. And the kiss in the rain under the umbrella. And Amy falling in the ice or burning the book. There are these little moments. Or going to the Hummels or the Christmas morning. These moments that I feel like they’re from the book but they’re also from all of the times we’ve seen it.

**John:** The collective unconscious. It’s what we associate as this being–

**Greta:** Exactly. So what I wanted to do was kind of find a way for that to be almost like the found materials. And then to explode it and deconstruct it and put it back together again.

**John:** So you mentioned the starting with them as older and then going back to them as children. My guess when I watched the movie was that part of your instinct for doing that was so that the actors that you cast would be established as the older versions so that when you come back to them as a younger version it didn’t feel like a weird mismatch. Like if you started with those older actresses as the younger versions you’re like, wait, she’s not 13. But you’re more forgiving. That’s something as a filmmaker you’re doing, but it was also your narrative sense of that you really wanted to make sure that the older life of them was as important as the younger version. What was your instinct?

**Greta:** Yeah, well, one thing that I realized – I mean, there are so many angles I could come at this from which leads to very longwinded answers. But there’s an inherent meta quality to the text which I was alluding to before which is that you’re holding a book, so someone wrote it. And then so you have Louisa May Alcott writing Jo. And Louisa May Alcott is writing something that looks vaguely like her life and Jo is kind of an avatar. And then Jo was also writing something that vaguely looks like her life. And then it’s me writing Louisa writing Jo. And I felt like the only way to represent all of this is to get quite Cubist about it.

It’s like there’s all these different points of authorship. And I think that there’s a real ache in the text. There’s a couple of lines I could point to that have it. But one thing is that the text is not told – it’s not first person. It’s not Jo narrating it. It’s Louisa or the narrator or whoever that person is. And there’s a lot of sadness in that person behind the people. And this perspective of Louisa’s real sister is already gone. Her sister Elizabeth died. And Louisa herself had gone to the Civil War as a Civil War nurse and had suffered through typhoid fever and almost died. And her sister, not Meg, but the character that Meg is based on, she’d gotten married and it was devastating for her.

And so there’s all these things of like she is writing about a thing that already past. And there was something when I was reading the text – and this is why every answer is so longwinded – I realized that once they’re all in their separate lives, like once Amy is in Europe, once Meg is married, once Beth is living at home but sick, and Jo is in New York trying to sell stories, they are never all together again. The thing that we think of as Little Women has already past. And I think that ache and that absence of the togetherness and that absence of the sisterhood as being the way that we contextualize these cozy scenes brought out something in me that felt was inherent in the text.

And then I think I wanted to start it just squarely with the publisher with this idea of this negotiation of will you buy my work and what do I have to change for you to buy it. And I think, you know, there’s another level on which like this scene is something that I know from this scene. I know what it’s like to sit across from someone who basically tells you morals don’t sell nowadays. So it was – I mean, there were lots of reasons for it. But emotionally I felt like there was, yeah, that ache. That it’s already gone. And then beyond that this relationship of Louisa to the text and me to the text of I think that what artists do is you write it down because you can’t save anyone’s life. Like I think that’s part of what the impulse is.

I can’t save your life, but I can write it down. And I can’t get that moment back, but I can write it down. And I think that’s part of it for me. And that kind of – and it allowed me to kind of weave that sense of is that how you remembered it or is that what happened. Is that what happened or is that how you wrote it?

**John:** But you also by moving back and forth between the two timelines you’re creating a tension for the viewer saying like, wait, how did we get there because I assumed that Laurie would be with her, but Laurie is with this other guy, so it becomes a mystery.

**Greta:** Exactly. And then also I will say this is a less poetic response. But I think there’s always been just when you tell the stories narratively straight, this is now just a nuts and bolts thing. I think there’s two things that are tricky about the traditional straight ahead narrative of Little Women. The first one is Beth gets sick and then she gets better. And then Beth gets sick and then she dies. And I always find that’s like a little hard narratively to kind of get like oh no, oh it’s OK, oh no it’s not. So one idea I had was just that stacking. And then there are poetic reasons within the stacking–

**John:** Of course. There are scenes where she comes down and sees her there, sees her not there.

**Greta:** Exactly. And that feeling of like when someone dies I think you have this inherent feeling of like but they were just there. And it was just the other way. And I felt like it was a way to cinematically give us that. And then the other thing was I felt as a viewer and as a reader and why I wanted – I hope there’s no spoilers – but why I wanted Mr. Dashwood as the publisher to say like “Frankly, I don’t see why she didn’t marry the neighbor” is because that’s what everyone for 150 years has thought. Like if you’re going to marry someone, you might as well have just married that guy across the street. Like he seemed really nice and he likes you. And what’s wrong with him?

I feel like it’s more true in movies than any other medium that the person you see them with first is the person you believe they should be with. I don’t know why it works like that. I just think it tends to work like that. And so one thing when you tell the story straight through is that you see Laurie and Jo together. And when it’s like Laurie and Amy you’re like what the hell is this? I’ve been with these other people.

The second thing is then when you meet Professor Bhaer you’re like dammit who is this guy? I don’t know this guy. I don’t care about this guy. I’ve never met this guy.

**John:** I don’t want him in my movie.

**Greta:** I know. He’s an old German professor. Like who cares? So in a way, I mean, that’s just nuts and bolts-y. I was like if I see Amy run into Laurie first and obviously he’s the object of her affection, and if I see Professor Bhaer at the beginning then I’m less introducing a new person later. And then on top of it someone said later they were like, oh, Professor Bhaer when he shows up it’s like deus ex machina, but to me I was like but that is what it is. It’s in the book. It is deus ex machina. He just shows up. And it’s like if we could set that early at the beginning and be like – and I mean, also because I’m dealing what is storytelling and what do you need and what do you expect from your characters, like with just the briefest outline of this is a romantic interest that you’re like, oh yes, I see it is a romantic interest. Part of it is playing with narrative expectations. So in any case that’s like the less beautiful answer.

**John:** But even in trying to establish that, Bhaer as a potential love interest, you’re doing a very deliberate rhyme where like she burned her dress both times with both of these guys. And so we associate like, oh, her burning her dress or being caught on fire is a thing that happens when there’s a love interest introduced.

**Greta:** Yes, that’s right. It’s right. And also the first scene of the movie when she’s trying to sell the scandal story and he says, “You know, if the main character is a girl make sure she ends up married, or dead, either way.” And then the very first scene you see her in it’s like well there you go. There’s the guy. I mean, we just set up guys because it’s like he just told her married or dead. So now we have to see is it marry or dead. It’s like putting a gun on the wall in the first act.

**John:** Chekhov’s marriage.

**Greta:** Exactly.

**John:** All right. Let’s take a listen to a scene. So this is a scene from Page 68 in the script. This is Amy and Laurie in France. I think it’s chapter 39 in the book. It’s pretty late in the book. This is a scene between Amy and Laurie. Let’s take a listen and then discuss the scene.

**Amy:** I’ve always known I would marry rich. Why should I be ashamed of that?

**Laurie:** It’s nothing to be ashamed of. As long as you love it.

**Amy:** Well, I believe we have some power over who we love it. It isn’t something that just happens to a person.

**Laurie:** I think the poets might disagree.

**Amy:** Well, I’m not a poet. I’m just a woman. And as a woman there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And we had children they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.

**John:** Ah, such a great speech.

**Greta:** Thank you.

**John:** So Julie Turner who hosts the Slate Culture Gabfest, they were talking about your amazing movie on this week’s episode. And I asked her like Greta is coming in so do you have any more questions for her. And she said, “Did you always find Amy sympathetic or is that something that came to you on later readings? How did your view of her evolve?” Because this is the evolved Amy we’re hearing in this scene.

**Greta:** Yes. Well, no, Amy was one of the characters that I was just utterly knocked backwards by when I read it again. And she was the one that I kept underlining lines. And there were so many great lines I couldn’t even get them all in. I mean, everything about the script I will say can be essentially footnoted. I could tell you why every line is there. And it’s either directly from the book or it’s from a piece of research. But she has a line where she says, “I don’t pretend to be wise, but I am observant.” And I was like holy crap! Who is this? That’s such an amazing sentiment. And I felt like, oh, she’s been sitting here this whole time.

And I felt to me actually the section when she’s in Paris and in Italy, but she’s with Laurie and she’s kind of contending with her art, I found that to be very profound. And it was, you know, the line “I want to be great or nothing” it’s straight from the book. And I was like well that’s not a person who takes their art lightly. That’s somebody who is really swinging for the fences. And I think that depth of seriousness about her work was fascinating to me and also the pain of giving it up because she doesn’t think it’s going to go great. That’s a very adult thing. And it’s something that I very much understand.

And so, yeah, Amy was the one who was fascinating to me. And also hilarious in a way that I felt like I hadn’t even totally tapped into. Or I hadn’t realized when I was younger. But there’s a whole section – I mean, there’s so many great things in the book that I couldn’t include. But there’s a whole section where she says, she’s asking about Beth because Beth is very good at piano. And I think it’s after Mr. Laurence gives her the piano, and Amy is trying to logically work out what the difference between her and Beth is. And she’s like, “Oh I see. It’s nice to have talents. But it’s not nice to tell everyone you have them.” And they’re like, right. And then but she’s not humble. But she’s figuring out that to be liked she better look like she’s humble, which I think is really funny and really great. And anyway she just was so much richer and funnier than I had ever really totally given her credit for.

In any case, and like the “I don’t pretend to be wise, but I am observant” I later turned that into the line where she says – “Since when did you become so wise?” And she says, “I have always have been, you were just too busy noticing my faults.” I kind of thought that for me it’s like for 150 years we’ve looked at this character as being kind of petty and a little shallow. And I was like we never noticed. She was always kind of amazing.

**John:** Let’s take a look at this scene again. So this is a moment where Laurie is really noticing how incredible she is. So she says, “I’ve always known I would marry rich. Why should I be ashamed of that?” Laurie, “There’s nothing to be ashamed of as long as you love him.” He’s the person challenging the romantic ideal that you should marry for love. And she has the insight to say, no, this is an economic transaction. This was obviously a thing you pitched from the very start.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** This idea that this is really a story of money.

**Greta:** Right.

**John:** And here it is. So of her speech here, what comes from the text? Because we looked through chapter 39 and couldn’t find any of those words, but the spirit is there.

**Greta:** The spirit is there.

**John:** It’s a much longer scene and a much longer conversation. But none of these actual words. So how do you get to this?

**Greta:** Well, OK, so the line “I’ve always known I would marry rich” that’s from the text. She does say that. And later she feels sort of embarrassed about actually having said that. But this speech actually for the most part it comes from a conversation I had with Meryl Streep about this movie. We had an early coffee and we talked about it and she was going to be in it. The book had meant a great deal to her. And she essentially said to me the thing that you have to make the audience understand is this. And she said some version of this. But she was sort of like it’s not just that women couldn’t vote. It’s not just that they couldn’t own property. They couldn’t. It’s that they didn’t own anything. And that they legally couldn’t unless they were completely unmarried and had their own fortune. But even then it was complicated. They couldn’t get educated.

And so she was sort of laying out these limitations. And I knew I wanted Amy to have a speech like this, but actually this particular speech I wrote ten minutes before we shot.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Greta:** Yeah. Because I knew I wanted it to get there and I knew I wanted them to have this conversation. And I assume the people who are listening are screenwriters. In the run up to making the movie what often happens is you end up having to cut a lot of stuff to make page count seem lower, because you’re trying to be like this isn’t unwieldy. This is completely reasonable to make. So you end up like cutting so much stuff. And what I was doing, and it doesn’t matter now because it’s all made, but what I did was I cut the script down, but then I would just save the pages I wanted to make and then write before we’d go. I’d just give them to the actors and I’d say, all right, we’re going to do this. Or I’d give them the night before or something. Sometimes I’d just give it to them handwritten so there was no paper trail. Because I didn’t want them to give it to anyone.

And I’d say like can you just say these things. Because I figured once the lines are in the dailies what are they going to do? Tell me I can’t have them?

**John:** They’re not going to compare them back to the printed pages. No.

**Greta:** No. Nobody is going to do that. So I knew I wanted something like this, but I knew nobody is going to let me do this.

**John:** So this scene existed in the shooting script, but it was shorter and it didn’t have quite this text in it.

**Greta:** I think this scene ended before the speech. It did. It ended before the speech because nobody was interested in the speech. And anyway, I handwrote it. I gave it to her. But I always knew I wanted something like that in it. But I just felt like hearing Amy say I want to marry rich sounds quite crass if you don’t really understand the stakes of what that means. And it’s, you know, for women at that time it was the decision. And if you married the wrong person, if you married someone who had–

**John:** Disastrous.

**Greta:** –drinking problem, or couldn’t make a living, or treated your children badly, that’s it. That the worst decision you could make. So, in any case I wanted to give her context.

**John:** Now, while we’re looking at physical printed pages here, two things you do in this script which I find so great and so fascinating. So first off, all the scenes that are in the past you have printed in red. And was that from the very start. Did you always plan to do that?

**Greta:** Yes. I always did it that way.

**John:** Because very few scripts have such a back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. It’s got to be so helpful for everybody involved to know like, OK, from production design to costumes to everyone like what world are we in.

**Greta:** It was a beast in prep I will say just tracking everything. And we had things set out that, you know, on boards where it was like here it is chronologically. And then here it is the way it appears in the script. Because I just always wanted the present and the past to be talking to each other.

**John:** Of course.

**Greta:** And there’s always a link. And in some ways like I felt like I wanted everything to work emotionally. Where moving from one place to another that even if you’re not intimately familiar with the story, because the truth is everything moves forward, which is there’s two origin points of the story. 1868 and 1861. And everything moves forward from there. You don’t actually go back in this story. You just go between those two timelines that are everything is going forward.

So I wanted it to work emotionally, but I also wanted it to if you broke it down to completely work logically. I actually did look at them like a graph, like Nolan had made during Dunkirk. I mean, he had the three timelines that took different amounts of time. And I mean I really loved that intersection of time and the play with it. But you might not know on first viewing how everything lines up. You just are watching it emotionally.

**John:** But you also have confidence that it will work.

**Greta:** Right. So if you do break it down later it all works. And so I wanted it to be, you know, have that thing that it both works. I mean, there’s lots of movies that do that. Obviously Irishman does it.

**John:** Big Fish does it the same way.

**Greta:** That’s right.

**John:** So Big Fish both timelines move forward, but we’re in a fantasy timeline or a real world timeline. And ultimately they overlap.

**Greta:** Exactly. I mean, I think it is one of the things – it’s tricky to do and it’s scary to do. But I think it’s something that movies do well. Can play with time in a way that other mediums can’t as much. Like it’s certainly harder in theater. And also because this is a movie about what it is to make something and to make something of your life–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Greta:** So it felt like the exact right way to play with it. But, yeah, I definitely put it in red from the beginning and I remember Tom Rothman at Columbia Pictures who is great, I always say he’s my favorite person to fight with. He was like, “But I know that it’s the other time because it’s red. How will anyone else know?” And I was like, don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.

**John:** There will be a flashing red light in the corner that says PAST, PAST.

**Greta:** I know. But it was actually in the writing of it it was always like this. But it was a bit of a trick in the beginning to figure out how to present everything. But I really have faith in viewers. I love lots of complicated movies. But also people watch really complicated television shows with multiple plot lines, multiple timelines. And I was like viewers are super sophisticated.

**John:** They are.

**Greta:** Like I think that they’re very good at – I mean, I watch Game of Thrones. It’s amazing how intricate it is. I think that sometimes people underestimate how sophisticated viewers are. And they really are able to follow things that aren’t – you don’t need to sign post everything as strongly as you think you need to sometimes. And actually it’s so funny because I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience. Like while you’re making something you encounter different things and then you’re like, oh, well they did it this way, and they did it this way. But also at Columbia Pictures was Once Upon a Time in Hollywood which I loved very much, but like I remember talking to Tom about it and sometimes there’s a chyron that says it’s this place or this time, and then sometimes there’s not.

**John:** It’s arbitrary.

**Greta:** I was like how does he do that? And Tom I think was like because sometimes the audience needs it and sometimes they don’t. And I was like, oh, that’s right. You can do whatever you want.

**John:** Whatever is helpful is helpful.

**Greta:** Sometimes when you’re conceiving of these things everything feels like it has to be so very logical. And the truth is when you’re watching a movie sometimes you need it, sometimes you don’t.

**John:** I will say in watching your film, at the start I wasn’t quite clear what timeline we were in for a while. And I gave up worrying about it and I just trusted that it was going to work, and it worked. But I was reading our local free paper that gets distributed, The [Unintelligible] Park whatever. The reviewer gave your movie a 9 out of 10. And said phenomenal except that it has this crazy nonlinear thing which is completely unnecessary.

**Greta:** Oh, that’s really funny.

**John:** You don’t understand the movie you watched, but you enjoyed it.

**Greta:** Well you know what’s funny? You might not think it was necessary, but maybe you wouldn’t have had the experience you had–

**John:** Oh, he wouldn’t have at all.

**Greta:** If you had told it linearly. I mean, that’s the thing. I don’t know. Movies are mysterious like that.

**John:** Someone will do a cut of Little Women that puts everything back in order.

**Greta:** Well, it can’t be done. I mean, it really can’t be done. Because it’s not made that way. It’s not constructed that way. There is no entry point. And I will say there was in the edits a moment where we looked at – because we were asked to look at could you do it the other way. And you can’t. I mean, there’s no movie. And actually one thing that’s not funny but just that I’ve noticed – again, I hope it’s not spoiler-y, but I assume if you’re listening to this you’ve seen it. One thing when shows have asked for clips one thing that’s interesting to me is I often find that the clips aren’t very good at communicating what it is because if you see just childhood in isolation–

**John:** It looks weird.

**Greta:** It looks weird because that’s actually not what it is. And if you see – it’s like seeing the kiss at the end of the movie as if it was just the kiss. But that’s not what it is. So, when you just see them gathered around reading the letter from father it looks like a very pitch straight down the middle. But it’s not a pitch down the middle. What’s the pitch that drops? Do you know baseball?

**John:** No. I don’t talk about sports well on this show and Craig always makes fun of me for not knowing. Like a slider? A drop?

**Greta:** Yeah, a slider.

**John:** Sure. We’ll pretend.

**Greta:** Like it looks like it’s coming over the plate and then it’s just not. So I find that like actually there’s no way to really – the tone is the contrast if that makes sense.

**John:** Totally. On page 68 we also have an example of something else you do which I’d not seen before. You have a lot of overlapping dialogue.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** But you also do this thing where you warn us in the title page. There’s a slash in the first person’s dialogue to show where the person is interrupting. And I’ve never seen that done before. Tell me about your choice to do that.

**Greta:** The slash is sort of a “don’t make,” and then there’s a slash “fun” and then Laurie is “I’m not!” So the word that overlaps is fun and I’m. So don’t make/I’m not. That’s sort of the way it’s supposed to sound. I took that from playwrights. Caryl Churchill does it all the time in her plays. And Tony Kushner does it in his plays. And it’s something that I find really useful because if you want to specifically hear certain words but you like a controlled cacophony it’s very helpful because it makes the actors know it’s not talking over each other. It’s like a madrigal or a round or something.

**John:** It’s also an anticipation of what they’re going to say and–

**Greta:** Exactly. So it gave for the girls in particular like the four of them it’s overlapping over the time. And it gave a very technical thing to work on during rehearsal which was wonderful which was getting everyone up to speed. And it means that, I mean, I like this in general. I like everything said exactly how I wrote it. Because I have strange rhythm things that if you change a word it sounds wrong to me. And it makes it so that you need to have the lines memorized in a muscle memory. You can’t be reaching for the lines ever. And I like that kind of memorization. And I like that kind of ability because it allows me to – especially with the group scenes – treat all the actors like an orchestra.

**John:** And you’re also able to stay wide which is helpful.

**Greta:** Yes. Exactly. And I think some of that does come from my background. My first love was theater. I wanted to write plays.

**John:** And plays are very much that. But here I want to talk about the other films you’ve made. The whole genre of filmmaking you’ve made. Because I associate mumblecore as being under-scripted.

**Greta:** Well it was. The funny this is, well, I wanted to be a playwright. But then I became involved with this very loose improvisational – and improvisational in all ways. We’d have characters, we’d have scenes, ideas, but we would have no actual lines written out, or just the most rudimentary lines written out. Because we would find it in improvisation on camera. And it was incredibly useful in a lot of ways because it, I mean, it became a film school. It became the way I figured out how things were edited and what the camera is interested in and not interested.

But I always missed writing. I really always missed the written word. And I missed what actors could do with text because I found that in a certain way I think we’re all understandably self-protective. And as actors improvising I think it’s actually very hard to go to scary places. Something will stop you from doing it. You know, your brain is protecting your ego or however that works. And one thing about text is it forces you to be vulnerable in a way that you might not be if you weren’t given it.

So when I think of part of the job of an actor is to rise to the text, you can have very complicated, very vulnerable things that you might not access another way. So I always missed the text. And so when I started writing with Noah Baumbach and I wrote those two movies with him part of it was because – the first time I worked with him was as an actor. And when I read his screenplay for Greenberg I thought oh this is, yes, it’s so precise. It is so precise. I know exactly – I could hear it when I was reading it. And that was something that we really shared. So when we started writing together that’s how I wrote.

And then as I continued writing that’s just how I continued writing. I mean, maybe one day I’ll loosen up. But I really like things just said as they were written. [laughs]

**John:** You talk about vulnerability, so I want to get to a second clip. So this is Jo and Marmee. They’re talking in the attic. So it’s page 100 of the screenplay. Probably comes from chapter 42 of the book.

**Greta:** Yep.

**John:** Let’s take a listen.

**Jo:** I just feel – I just feel like women – they have minds. And they have souls as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition. And they’ve got talent as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it. But I’m so lonely.

**John:** So that is a terrific. A terrific moment. So iconic. Let’s talk about what it looks like on the page. So they’ve been having a conversation. It gets down to Jo. The parenthetical reads (crying, trying to explain herself to herself). And then it gets into those words. What a great parenthetical.

**Greta:** Oh yes. I do like a parenthetical. You know, it’s funny. I do think of screenplays as pieces of writing that should be able to stand on their own. And I try to make them as deep as possible. And I think I never want it to be just a blueprint. And I think one of my sadnesses actually about screenwriting is unlike playwriting is that the screenplay is just never a thing.

**John:** It’s not seen, read.

**Greta:** No. And I have some pride in what the actual text of the screenplay is, including screen directions, including parentheticals. So, in any case thank you for pointing out the parenthetical that no one will know. But I also think sometimes I try to cue in the actor to something that is going on. But in any case.

So this scene, you know, it’s come off of this sequence of death to marriage. I wanted to do this thing of like the older timeline where Beth lives then all of a sudden it’s Christmas. And then when you go back she’s gone, then it’s to funeral, and then of course to me it made perfect sense to go from a funeral to a wedding. These are the ceremonies of how we mark life. This is how we do it. This is what… – Anyway, so we do that. But there’s all these losses that have accumulated in both timelines. And this comes from the chapter where Jo does say–

**John:** I am so lonely.

**Greta:** She actually doesn’t technically say I’m so lonely.

**John:** Oh, Marmee says, “I see you’re lonely.”

**Greta:** Yes. And Marmee says it. And then but she does say, “If he asked me now I’d say yes,” which I felt like, wait, we always think of Jo as being like so certain in her path. She never doubts it. I think that’s kind of to the urtext of Jo. And I was like she doubted it. She wondered should I have done the other thing, which just kills me. And in any case this text, this speech, “women have minds and souls, as well as hearts,” actually is from another book that Louisa May Alcott wrote. This is from Moods, I believe. I have to go back and double check that. But I think it’s from Moods. And I found this piece of text. I thought it was so beautiful, but to me that “but I’m so lonely” just was kind of the penetrating thing in this chapter.

I will say about this chapter, too, which goes to the idea of the narrator, is that it begins with the narrator, which we can assume is Louisa May Alcott, speaking about being a spinster and speaking about never marrying. What she says is, “Girls of five and 20 joke about being spinsters, but they do it because they don’t really think it’s going to happen. But when girls become 30 they stop talking about it at all because they know it is happening.” And then she says, she goes on this kind of tangent of be kind to the spinsters because you don’t know what passions are hidden under their somber gowns, or something like that.

It’s this amazing tangent. And I was like, oh my god, it’s her talking. Like you don’t know what my life was, or my loves were based on the fact that I didn’t get married. You cannot tell my heart from my outsides. And I just thought that that was such an incredible thing and in any case I wanted that to be part of this scene. And so when I found this passage I was like I love this passage and I want to add this penetrating loneliness. And I also think there is something about not just Jo as a character, but I think there is a certain loneliness to the writer. And I think she has the loneliness of both.

**John:** At the end of the script we get to sections where they’re labeled “fiction?”

**Greta:** Yeah.

**John:** One of the lovely controversies of your movie is sort of like what actually happens. And I’m not going to ask you to specifically state because clearly looking at the script you want there to be some ambiguity in terms of to what degree did she do this thing, did she not do this thing. To what degree is she the author of this text? You start the movie with a book by Louisa May Alcott and you end with a book by Jo March. So it’s clearly getting into that sense of what is authentic, what is authorship.

But this choice of labeling fiction at the end, was this controversial at all during the development?

**Greta:** Yes. Well, it was controversial also because someone said, “Oh, you sent the wrong thing. There’s question marks all over the end. This can’t possibly be the final draft.” And I was like, no, it is. I mean, this is the end of the book. The end of the book is she’s opened the school, she’s married Professor Bhaer, and it’s Marmee’s birthday. That’s the end of the book. So that is the end of the book. And in life Louisa May Alcott, she didn’t get married, she didn’t have kids, but she did keep her copyright. And the book which was printed, which is actually the book that you see being made is a reproduction of the first printing of 1868 which sold out in two weeks, which is kind of incredible.

**John:** Crazy.

**Greta:** I knew I wanted it to interweave. And this goes more towards directing, but to me directing and writing, it’s all so linked. Because to me everything needs to be on the page in a way that I understand. And I didn’t know exactly how I wanted to shoot this, or how I wanted to shoot the scenes of the past or the “fiction?” But I did know I wanted the style to be different. And it’s a more heightened style.

**John:** It is.

**Greta:** And I wanted it to feel that way.

**John:** You got some big long Steadicam shots.

**Greta:** Yes, well actually we’re on a crane. We’re on a big like–

**John:** The Techno Crane kind of thing?

**Greta:** Yeah. And someone is on a wheel. And we did these big long shots. We did two, no, three sequences. It took all day to go through the house and then to go on the other side of the house and then go down to Marmee. In any case, it was a big – I don’t actually have a lot of – I have two moments of Steadicam in the movie. But everything else is on dollies or cranes.

But in any case like I knew I wanted it to feel heightened. It’s funny, I was actually just talking with – I hope I’m not giving away trade secrets, but I think he’s talked about this – Edgar Wright about the end of Baby Driver, which is a fantasy.

**John:** Sure.

**Greta:** But he was like well some people don’t know that. That’s OK. Like that’s OK.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Greta:** Like whatever you want to know about it. In any case, I hope I didn’t give anything too much away about that. But I wanted it to be both. But what I did know is that I wanted the moment at the end when you see Jo hold her book. And I knew from the beginning I wanted it to be this way. I wanted to figure out how to do a trick where the image you didn’t know you wanted to see was this girl holding her book.

**John:** Exactly. You’ve established the goal of the character from the very start to have her book printed.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** And so if the movie ended with like Marmee’s birthday that’s not rewarding.

**Greta:** No. It’s not. Marmee’s birthday–

**John:** It’s lovely, but it’s not the reason we’re here.

**Greta:** But I felt like because I’m doing this thing where I’m honoring the book itself, I also really wanted to do the literal ending of the book, which is this birthday. Someone was like, “Oh, it’s so weird that it’s her birthday. Why do you need that?” And I was because for the people who know how the book ends this is how the book ends.

**John:** Julie Turner had one extra question which is related to this moment. She asks why did you make the professor a smoke-show. Why is he hot?

**Greta:** Oh. Well, I mean, for a couple of reasons. Number one, movies. It’s movies. [laughs] But really, I mean, I don’t want to get too much into this because I hesitate to talk about male gaze, female gaze, because I think it can sometimes ascribe something gendered to something that doesn’t have to be. Like I don’t want to say like this is how women see the world and this is how men see the world. Because I just think that that’s too reductive.

But, I’m a female filmmaker. I want Professor Bhaer to be Louis Garrel.

**John:** Great.

**Greta:** I mean, I feel like men have been putting glasses on hot women forever and telling us they’re awkward. I can do whatever I want. I always saw, you know, with Laurie and Professor Bhaer and with James Norton who is also very beautiful, you know, all the men. You know, Chris Cooper. Tracy Letts. They’re beautiful men. And I thought, you know, the very first time we see Timothée Chalamet I shot that 48 frames per second. I shot that to be slow because I wanted to shoot him like Bo Derek. He’s the object. He is the object. And I felt like no one really understood why I’d done that. And actually I felt like no one knew totally at the studio why I had done that and thought it was kind of goofy and weird and maybe take it out.

And then the first time I ever had a screening of the movie in Paramus, New Jersey I heard every girl in the audience go – [gasps] – they did exactly what Amy did and I was like because that’s the way we feel about Timothée. And that’s OK.

And I felt like I wanted to make Professor Bhaer the same way. I’m a female filmmaker and this is in some ways if you’re allowed to author that the way that looks maybe you get to author it this way. You know, I wanted to do that. Also, I just Louis. But, in any case it was in a way my own commentary on what we’ve been told women are in movies.

**John:** Two questions that people wrote in with. They’re not specifically about your movie, but I think you might have some answers for it. This one you kind of already answered but I’ll ask the question, too. Jordan asks, “I recently read the script for Parasite by Bong Joon-ho and was completely blown away by how the scenes lifted off the page and roped me in. To be clear, I haven’t seen this movie yet, but the text was enough to draw me in and make me incredibly invested in the family. I also read the script for Annie Hall, another movie I hadn’t seen, but it felt like a chore to drudge through despite many people saying it’s one of the best movies of all time. I felt like if I was a reader at a studio and came across this on my desk I would have passed on it.

“My question is how important is it for a movie to be engaging on the page? Writer-directors don’t necessarily need to paint the world as richly because they’re the ones shooting it, but it seems strange to leave that detail on the page because you know you have it in your head.”

Now, you were saying that you think the screenplay needs to be a real document to read and enjoy that you can really see and feel the movie.

**Greta:** Yeah. Sorry, I’m just going to go to the first – I want the sentences to be active and to draw you in. I want to feel part of something that’s in motion from the beginning. And I’m very deliberate about this.

**John:** Do you want to read some of your first page?

**Greta:** Sure. So, you know, it has the sort of New York publishing office, 1868. Jo March, our heroine, hesitates. To me, I’m interested. What? She hesitates. Like I feel – it feels open. It feels like I’ve opened something. And not everyone has my taste, but for me to give something that feels perhaps unnecessary, you could just write she’s standing in a hallway. Like there’s no reason. But the hesitates, you’re like why? What’s going on?

**John:** Yeah.

**Greta:** So Jo March, our heroine, hesitates. In the half-light of a dim hallway she exhales and prepares, her head bowed like a boxer about to go into the ring. She puts her hand on the doorknob. A pause. And then she opens it onto a disorderly room. Like I want the words to draw – I want it to draw the picture. And then even at the end, and I didn’t know what I meant when I wrote this, but at the very last page she’s given the book and I say, “Jo turns it over in her hands, touching it like the holy object it is, her inchoate desire made manifest. Jo looks up…and sees the future. Cut to black.”

I don’t know what I meant by “sees the future,” but I also did.

**John:** Yeah. You knew what you meant.

**Greta:** And I knew that Saoirse would be able to do that because she’s a genius. But I feel like for me I always want every piece of making a movie to be as excellent as it can be. Because the truth is I don’t know if this is going to become a movie because it’s so unlikely because they’re so unwieldy and expensive and it takes so long. So for the moment all I have is this script. So I want it to be as good and as emotional and as detailed and as specific and honestly as dense as it can be. Because this is all I have of the movie at this moment. I don’t have the movie yet.

So, I want every piece of it to feel that way because that’s how I know it’s – I can will it into existence if I can feel it on the page.

**John:** Yes. You’re going to be asking all of your department heads to do their very, very best work. And so you as the writer doing your very, very best work, it’s got to be inspirational if they can see what you’ve done on the page.

**Greta:** And I also think like little details, little details that are – like I mean on page two a parenthetical that I always liked, I mean now I’m just complimenting myself.

**John:** I enjoy.

**Greta:** But I do think nobody ever knows the parentheticals, but on page two it says, “What do you – that is, what compensation?” He’s saying, they’re talking about the story she’s selling him. He says, “We pay twenty-five to thirty for things of this sort. We’ll pay twenty for that.” She says, “You can have it. Make the edits. But the parenthetical just says “(money over art).” And like to me I was like, oh, no one will ever see it. But I think – I sort of wish – now this is probably I shouldn’t say this, but I sort of wish that the screenplay that would get distributed would be the actual complete shooting script. Because I find it, you know, you do take things out and change them. And this is very close to the shooting script.

But, at the same time, I mean, I find as a screenwriter one thing that helped me tremendously was being an actor because there were lots of things that I auditioned for that I didn’t get. But what I did get was to read the script. And then I got to watch the movie. And then I was like, oh, I see. It went from this thing to that thing. And I feel like reading essentially a transcription of a movie after the fact isn’t as useful as reading the screenplay. Because then you can really see what happens.

So, I understand why later it’s like, well, you don’t need to have the scene in that wasn’t in, but I mean, but for my movies actually I will say they cut really, really close to the actual screenplays. And also my line producer said to me, he’s like, “You really did use all of it.” And I was like I told you I would. That’s why I needed it.

**John:** So the next movie they’ll know.

**Greta:** Exactly.

**John:** So, on this podcast a lot we’ve been talking about assistant pay. And how low assistant pay is a pervasive problem in Hollywood. There’s a New York Times story that came out today as we’re recording this. You can see a photo of me and producer Megana Rao in this exact room where we are recording this. But Kimberly wrote in with a question. She said, “I’d love your thoughts on assistants with or wanting to start families. I’m really hoping to start a family within the next year and I have 100% confidence in my ability to get both my assistant work and my own work done while also having a baby. But I’m afraid to ask for any maternity leave or an increase in pay to do so. Do I have any right as an assistant to get pregnant and start a family? If this becomes an issue with my higher ups do I have the right to call foul for women’s right? Will this cost me my job, which I like and want to keep entirely? I recognize this is an issue that is country-wide and spreads across multiple industries, but I’m hoping you can talk more about specifically assistants who aren’t in their young 20s who may have families or rather responsibilities, especially women, and how they can navigate moving up in this crazy industry?”

**Greta:** Yeah, well, I mean, this is a big one. This is the big – I think this is a huge part of talking about women both in our industry and all industries. And what we’re doing about it as a country and collectively. And I think it’s something that, I mean, I don’t want to speak to things that I don’t have actual correct knowledge to speak to, but I do think that there is something about things that are “women’s issues” or “family issues” where somehow they become something that you just have to deal with behind closed doors and we have no idea how you got from A to B.

And I think that’s a failure of our sense of what civic life is. And I think civic life is family life. How do you think we get engaged citizens? By people raising them. Mothers and fathers. And I think you can point to a lot of Scandinavian countries who have very excellent ways of dealing with this. And when I was in Sweden they told me they have not just maternal leave, but they have paternal leave which is mandatory.

**John:** Absolutely. Norway has it as well.

**Greta:** Because otherwise they want to make sure that men don’t not take the time.

**John:** Or that women are penalized for having taken the time and men are moving up.

**Greta:** And men are moving up. So, I mean, I think that this is at the center of a civic discussion is what are we doing for families. And it’s everything. It’s healthcare. It’s benefits. It’s leave. And I will say, because I was pregnant while I was making Little Women and I gave birth 72 hours after I showed the studio my cut. And it’s something I’m still educating myself about and learning about because I did not know a lot of the laws that were already on the books. And I’m not someone who doesn’t have access to information, but I actually didn’t know that you have – in California – that employers are required to have a certain amount of paid leave. And I didn’t know any of that. I actually didn’t know stuff like that. And I also think what are the laws that are on the books? What are the laws that we need to get on the books? What do we need to move forward?

Also, I mean, childcare. I mean, national childcare. I have help and I also have my mother. And my mother and my dad watching my baby while I’m able to do different things.

**John:** Record this podcast.

**Greta:** Record this podcast. And I also have an amazing nanny. And that is something I am able to have because I have access and I have means. And not everyone has that. I mean, this is a big old thing. So, I guess everything I’m saying is just to say I don’t know if that’s the right question. And I think I am everyone else, I do want to figure it out.

I think also as filmmakers it’s difficult because if you’re employed by a corporation there’s laws that you can – again, I don’t know that this is completely right. But there can be laws that constrain and also prescribe corporations to do X, Y, or Z. So if you are an assistant working a company, or employed through a company there is something that sort of can be done in a top-down way. But if you’re a writer or if you’re a director it’s a gig economy in a different way. Then it’s like you’re writing something on spec, there is no one to give you leave. You’re on leave because you’re not working. Do you know what I mean? So, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that.

Same with acting. Like it’s not–

**John:** Totally.

**Greta:** And I think, and I don’t know if that’s something that we need to go guild by guild, or it’s a national thing we need to be dealing with, or industry, but it is – here’s another thing I’ll say in addition to being in Sweden. I shot a film in Paris. There’s French hours.

**John:** Oh, French hours are required.

**Greta:** French hours are also – the women who are working on the set, and the men who are working on the set, because of the day is more manageable they were able to either take their kids to school in the morning, or give them dinner and put them to bed. But if you’re working 12 hours and then with transpo and everything it’s 14 hours away from your family, if you’re a man or a woman when are you going to take care of your family?

**John:** Craig and I are both pushing for French hours.

**Greta:** I think it’s so much more human. And so that’s a whole lot of gobbledygook I just spat out, but I–

**John:** I share your frustration. And in Kimberly’s question when she said “do I have any right as an assistant to get pregnant and start a family” I wanted to throw a chair.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** Because, yes, you do.

**Greta:** Yes, you do. Yes.

**John:** And part of like having reproductive rights is the right to become pregnant.

**Greta:** Yes, that’s right. That’s right. And of course – and also there should be laws to protect that and resources to help you. I mean, actually there’s a book I read. The title of it is, it sounds much more hard than it is. But it’s called Motherhood and Cruelty. But it’s by a really interesting thinker, Jacqueline Rose I think is her name. Anyway, she says it’s funny that parenthood is seen as an antisocial act because what could be more social. That it’s something, meaning as we were speaking about civic responsibilities, but sort of like a thing you do on your own. But yet what is more social than parenthood?

**John:** Parenthood and continuing our culture and our species and our civilization.

**Greta:** That is a social act. But it’s seen as you do on your own time. And the social thing is seen as just capitalism or commerce. And somehow that’s not part of it. But, anyway, yes, of course you have the right.

**John:** At the end of every episode we talk about One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing this week is actually a puzzle which is sitting in front of you. It’s called New York in Color. It is this really good 500-piece puzzle we did over Christmas holidays. It’s these photos by Nicole Robertson. I just loved it. I love a jigsaw puzzle.

**Greta:** Oh, that’s so cool.

**John:** I find it a great way to make my brain stop braining and just sort of focus on puzzle pieces. Especially good for the last thing at night before you go to bed. Just check out.

**Greta:** Puzzling. You know who is a big puzzler is this genius actress I’ve gotten to work with is Laurie Metcalf.

**John:** Oh, I can imagine.

**Greta:** Loves a puzzle. She also puzzles before she goes on stage every night on Broadway. She’ll like get there an hour early. She’ll puzzle for a while. And then she’ll go out and give the best performance you’ve ever seen in anything. And she kind of, I don’t know, she’s extraordinary. I love her.

That’s good. Well, I guess I’ll give a book suggestion.

**John:** We love books.

**Greta:** It’s a big book, but it’s a rewarding book. It is Behave by Robert Sapolsky. I don’t want to give the title wrong, but he’s a professor at Stanford. He’s an evolutionary biologist, I think. But he’s written a lot about – he studies primate behavior. Anyway, he’s written a lot of really fun – I love science books for lay people.

**John:** As do I.

**Greta:** Because like I don’t really have the math to do it.

**John:** Give me some Dawkins. Give me all that.

**Greta:** Yeah. Like I can’t do any of the real stuff, but like I’m so happy to have it explained to me in sort of laymen terms. And I loved it. And it’s chockfull of lots of interesting things. But it’s sort of about a given behavior that we say like why this. And he sort of walks it through kind of from the nearest proximity to the farthest away.

So like milliseconds before a behavior happens, what are the synapses in your brain doing? How does it get from there to here? But then if you walk it back two weeks, where are your hormonal levels? And then if you walk it back 100 million years, how did we get to this point of this behavior? It’s a very interesting book and also I think one thing is because obviously I tend to – I read a lot of fiction. But it’s not a book that I inherently thought, oh yes, I need to know all about this. But I think as a writer it’s important to read widely.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. And this sounds like a book an actor, a director, a writer.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** Like talk about behaviors.

**Greta:** It’s interesting.

**John:** What is the motivation that got that moment to happen?

**Greta:** And it’s looking at it from a very specific perspective, but it’s really, yeah. And I also think – somebody told me when I was young, it was actually a neighbor who said, “If you read widely consistently, that’s as good as going to college.” And I said, really? And she said, “Yeah, just keep reading everything and don’t only look at the one thing you’re interested in.”

And I mean I ended up going to college. But I don’t know.

**John:** Maybe you didn’t have to.

**Greta:** I never forgot that she said that.

**John:** I think that’s probably true. That is our show for this week.

**Greta:** Oh.

**John:** So for listeners who are Premium members, stick around afterwards because Craig will talk about what happened at the Golden Globes.

**Greta:** OK.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megan Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Jemma Moran. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. You are not on Twitter I’ve noticed.

**Greta:** No, I’m not on any of those things.

**John:** You’re so smart. So smart. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We’ll have links to the books she mentioned and we’ll also have a link to the screenplay so you can download it and read it. That will also be up in Weekend Read if you want to read it there. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

And, of course, you can become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

Greta Gerwig, thank you so much for being on the show. Please come back any time.

**Greta:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Greta:** Bye.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig Mazin, welcome back to Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you John. A little under the weather. Sorry I couldn’t be there. I was so bummed. But you did not want me there. That’s for sure.

**John:** So when I was talking with Greta you thought you had a cold but that was not in fact the case.

**Craig:** No, so I thought I’m feeling worse than I would normally feel with a cold. And I had a night of – you know those dreams, those looping dreams?

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yep.

**Craig:** Where you just dream about like the same four seconds of dream over and over and over.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a fever thing.

**Craig:** That’s a fever thing. So I went to work. I sat there. I did absolutely nothing except feel awful. And on the way home I swung by the urgent care clinic here in my little town. And they did a test for the flu. Have you ever had the flu test?

**John:** No, but is it a nasal swab? How do they do it?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a nasal swab. They put a little Q-Tip up both nostrils. But man they go in deep. It is incredibly unpleasant. Anyway, they go and they do this fast test and the doctor came back in and she said, “Well, you know, let’s just cut to the chase. You’ve got the flu.” Which is bad. And I’m stupid. I didn’t get the flu shot. Because I was – it’s not because – I love the flu shot. I worship the flu shot. I just, you know, oh I was too busy. Blah. Well.

**John:** That’s what happens.

**Craig:** And people are nice. They’re trying to comfort me by saying I got the flu shot and I also got the flu, which can happen. But they put me on Tamiflu immediately and it’s been very effective I will say.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if you have a choice between getting a cold or getting the flu and having Tamiflu started immediately, weirdly you’re better off with the flu and Tamiflu.

**John:** All right. So you’re on the mend. Now the reason why I desperately wanted you on for this bonus segment is you and I have not spoken since you won your Golden Globe and most crucially since that moment where you were up on stage and Jared Harris is speaking, he’s giving a speech, but you’re holding the Golden Globe. And Tiffany Haddish leans her weight against you. And there’s an eye contact moment. What was happening between you and Tiffany Haddish on stage at the Golden Globes?

**Craig:** You know, some people thought that maybe she was going to faint or something, but I think all she was doing was taking her shoes off. I think she was uncomfortable in her shoes. And when I look at the shoes that people wear I get it. I understand why. So we were just kind of – so I was like, oh, this is cool. Me and Tiffany Haddish. I’m not going to tell you what we talked about. We had a good conversation. It’s private. It’s private stuff between me and the Tiff.

**John:** 100%. I get it.

**Craig:** But, well, I’ll tell you off the air. I was so happy to not – so I had arranged to not do the speech. Some people were wondering why I did not do the speech. And the answer is, you know, we all worked on this. And when it comes to an award where the show was winning I think it’s fair for some of the other people that worked so hard on it to talk. We initially – I had convinced Jane Featherstone to do it, but we all expected Jared to win. And he didn’t. In fact, the opposite of what I thought would happen happened. I thought Jared would win and I thought the show and Stellan and Emily would lose. And Jared did not win. And the show and Stellan won. And I said to Jane, what do you think about the speech and she said, yeah, let’s give Jared the speech. I mean, he was our quarterback. And so he did a great job.

I mean, he was a little nervous that he had to have a rejiggered speech up there.

**John:** He also had to follow Michelle Williams which felt like just I mean a bullet dodged on your behalf because she gave really the moment of the evening. And the next speech after that was not going to be as big a moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think when you’re watching television that’s probably how it feels. In the room itself there were a lot of good speeches I thought. I mean hers was terrific. Maybe my favorite was Ramy.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I thought he was adorable. I was like this guy is so humble and not fake humble. Humble-humble. And genuine. And funny. I thought that was fantastic. And I could have listened to – Tom Hanks who I think gave me the flu from the stage. I didn’t meet him. I didn’t get to meet him. I was so bummed out. But I think just by listening to him intently I got his flu. But I could have listened to him for another hour. I was fascinated by him.

But you know the truth is honestly speeches–

**John:** Speeches.

**Craig:** Speeches.

**John:** Now the reputation of the Golden Globes and everything I’ve heard is it’s a very boozy evening. Was that your experience there in that room?

**Craig:** Oh yeah. So it is. There’s two large ice buckets on your table, each with a magnum of Champagne in it. I think that’s what that’s called. That big bottle. And they have wine coming around all night long. And people are getting drunk. There’s no question about that. It’s a very strange kind of dinner. We got there on the early side. And because it’s – I mean the red carpet had no interest in me. And the feeling is mutual. I’m not wearing like some flowing gown, or am I an actor.

So Melissa and I just headed on into the ballroom I guess you’d call it and there were – you know, maybe it was like 20% full. And every single seat at every single table there was a bowl of soup. And after about eight or nine minutes of being in there and maybe five or six other people had come in an army of waiters just swept through and removed the soup. And I just thought no one is ever going to have the soup.

**John:** Nope. The soup is gone.

**Craig:** The soup is gone. And then, yeah. It’s a very–

**John:** Maybe it’s a lesson for life. Like the soup will always disappear. If you don’t take advantage of the soup when you can have the soup, there’s no soup to be had.

**Craig:** I just thought like – but I get it, because actually what they don’t want is people eating during the show. If you don’t want people eating during the show and you do want people on the red carpet then you should just not have food. But then I think some people will get grumpy and drunker. Look, I mean, I was just fascinated by the whole thing. I mean, the tables are so close. Everyone is very chummy. I mean, it is tight.

**John:** And Cousin Greg was joining you at your table for at least part of the evening.

**Craig:** Oh my god. We were so happy. So Nicholas Braun who plays Cousin Greg on Succession, aside from being one of the tallest people in the world is also one of the most pleasant. He’s just a sweetheart. And there were just a lot of Succession people. And he kind of got overflowed onto our table. And I kept telling him I’m like first of all I spent most of the night just yelling the word Succession out because I love that show so much. And Jesse Armstrong is so brilliant. And the cast is so great.

And they seemed like a happy family. They legitimately do seem like they like each other which is always nice. Especially when it’s a show about people that hate each other, or are rivals. And I said to Nicholas if we win you should come up there with us. Just come up. Let’s not explain it. Let’s not make it seem weird. You just happened to join us as if you were on the show.

**John:** Yes. The way Greg Roy is always showing up at the Roy’s places. Like why is Cousin Greg there?

**Craig:** Right. And he said, “Should I?” And there was an HBO executive at the table who said, “No. You should not.” She said, “You know, Chernobyl is over. Your show is continuing. No.” [laughs] But so we almost had him. We almost got him.

**John:** Congratulations on the Golden Globe. You are skipping out on the – is it TCAs tonight? What was the awards tonight?

**Craig:** Tonight is as we’re recording this it’s the Critics’ Choice. And I’m very sorry I can’t be there. But Carolyn Strauss and Jared Harris are there. And hopefully we do well. But, you know, listen, I never thought I would be in any Critics’ Choice short list. So, it’s very nice. And I’m sorry I won’t be there. But I think everybody would prefer that I not bring my contagious self.

**John:** Absolutely. Well, congratulations on that. I hope you do get a chance to hang out with Greta Gerwig in the future because you would love her. We talked about parentheticals and a lot of stuff on the page. She will be one of your favorite writers I suspect. But Craig continue to heal up and we’ll have a normal show next week hopefully.

**Craig:** Thanks John. Appreciate it. Bye.

Links:

* [Follow along with the Little Women script in Weekend Read](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weekend-read/id502725173)
* [Little Women Script](https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/little-women-by-greta-gerwig.pdf)
* NYT Article with John and Megana [Hollywood Assistants Are Fed Up](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/business/metoo-hollywood-assistants.html) by Rachel Abrams
* [Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [New York in Color Jigsaw Puzzle](https://amzn.to/2FDEBI0)
* [Behave by Robert Sapolsky](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311787/behave-by-robert-m-sapolsky/)
* [Greta Gerwig](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1950086/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jemma Moran ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/433standard.mp3).

The original post for this article can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/fantasy-worldbuilding).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, ah.

**John:** You got it.

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

**John:** This is Episode 416 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we’ll be talking with a senior narrative designer at Wizards of the Coast about fantasy world-building as a profession. It’s a great conversation about what is probably a lot of listeners’ dream job.

But first we have a ton of follow up to get through, so Craig let’s get at this.

**Craig:** Let’s go.

**John:** All right. So in the last regular episode before the Veep episode I was talking about this movie The Shadows that I’m planning to go off and direct. We’re starting casting on it because there’s this one very specific role that’s going to be challenging to cast. It is a 15-year-old girl who is blind. And to find a 15-year-old blind actress could be a challenge. But luckily a lot of people have sent in stuff and, you know, I’m starting to get audition reels and people out there have been really great about passing the message out there. And so it’s been really gratifying over the past two weeks to see a ton of stuff come in from people who kind of want to be in the movie or want to help find the actress for this movie.

**Craig:** That’s great. And so how are you doing it? You’ve set kind of, you know, a tricky goal for yourself. You went to America and said–

**John:** America and English-speaking countries outside of America.

**Craig:** And English-speaking countries outside of America. And you said let’s crowd-source this. Let’s see if we can do it. How has it been going?

**John:** It’s been going pretty well. So the things I did for the announcement was obviously Scriptnotes and I put out a tweet. That tweet got shared a lot which was terrific. And people sort of reached out beyond and into their networks. Now we’re doing the systematic outreach to all of the organizations we can find in the US and English-speaking countries that work with blind youth because the theory is that this actor may not realize that she’s actually an actor yet because she may not have had the opportunity. And so we’re reaching out to them. We’re sending the casting notice which you can find at johnaugust.com/casting.

But we’ve also brought in a casting director who has done a lot of big movies, but has also worked on projects that involve actors who are blind or low-vis. And she is also helping us do some more outreach there. So I’m optimistic that we will be able to find the actress for this role.

**Craig:** Great. I am, too. I’m sure you will. When there’s a will there’s a way. And, also, let’s just say, people generally want to star in movies, don’t they? It’s not you’re looking for somebody to clear out your P trap underneath your sink.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So, yeah, I feel like you’ll get there.

**John:** I think we’ll get there. Along the way in this process people sent through this link to something that was really great, so we’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s the Hollywood Disability Inclusion Toolkit put out by an organization called Respectability. It’s a really good website that talks through what to be thinking about when you’re thinking about inclusion in your project, in this case looking at people who have different abilities. And it’s just really great. So I was happy that this thing existed. I would not have known about it if people hadn’t sent me the link, so I’m going to pass on this link to you guys. If you are writing a project that includes people who are not in your realm of experience this may be a really good place to start looking and start thinking about the questions to ask and the issues to keep in mind.

**Craig:** And it’s good that we have these resources now. I mean, it’s one thing to say to creators, look, you have to do better, right? That’s the Twitter phrase, do better. It’s the all-purpose Twitter phrase for shame on you, I’ve noticed by the way. Any time somebody doesn’t like what you say or do they just go, “Do better.” But in some cases we really can do better. We have not done well as a community on this particular topic of casting people with disabilities. And people who don’t have disabilities, writing for characters who have disabilities, even just the amount of writers with disabilities is pretty low, like a lot of our marginalized groups in our business.

But you can say to people, well OK, do better. And then they think I want to, where do I start, what do I do, how do I get there? The last thing you want to do is call up your one blind friend and say, “So can you tell me about blind stuff?” That’s no good.

**John:** That’s what I do with Ryan Knighton all the time, but yes. Ryan Knighton cannot be everyone’s resource.

**Craig:** [laughs] He can’t be everyone’s resource. And also I should say like, yeah, there’s like three phases. There’s I don’t know you, so don’t talk to me. Then there’s I casually know you so this is awkward. And then, OK, we’re friends, I can ask you anything. If you haven’t crossed all the way over into we’re friends and we have a certain understanding and trust of each other. So, it’s nice that organizations are providing these resources. And when they do they’re not only offering you help, they’re removing one of the great excuses of all time: well I don’t know where to go, I don’t know who to talk to. Well, now you do know where to go and now you do know who to talk to.

**John:** So we have a couple listener questions about this. I’m going to mash two of them together because they were both long but they covered some really good territory.

**Craig:** Mash them up. Let’s do it.

**John:** So Ian wrote in to ask, “After listening to this week’s podcast I was very intrigued by John’s movie concept and casting call for a young blind actor to play Abby. At what point does an actor cease becoming an actor. Actors exist to portray people they are not. Some examples like gay actors should be able to play a straight person. A kind, caring actor should be able to play an unspeakable evil. A younger actor can portray an older actor, especially with the help of makeup. A native English-speaking actor can portray somebody from another country with an accent, for now anyway.” That was his parenthetical there.

“A qualified actor should be able to inhabit the role of the living person, for example Queen Elizabeth.” I’ll continue on with Matt who wrote in to say, “Perhaps you and Craig could speak to the larger trend of increased casting scrutiny currently coursing through Hollywood.”

So, Craig, what do you think of these questions? Have you noticed over the past few years a change in what is considered proper for casting in certain roles?

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I think what we’ve seen is there’s a change in what is considered inappropriate casting. So there have been a couple of very high profile incidents where white actors were being cast to play characters that either were not white in source material or were not really even white in an original screenplay for instance. So there’s a sense that you do want to – I mean, look, I’m with Ian in one sense. The whole point of acting is that you’re being somebody you’re not. Just like the whole point of writing is that you’re writing somebody that you’re not. In fact, you’re writing lots of people you’re not. And the last thing we want to do is balkanize everyone so that you can only write what’s in front of your eyes. That would be disastrous.

However, in the case of acting it is reasonable and I think it’s desirable to say to people there are certain actors that are underemployed and under-utilized and they have really interesting things to offer your part that others don’t. If I am making a show about the life and the challenges of an obese woman, OK. I could hire a thin actor. You may have noticed there’s quite a few of those. And pad her up. I could do that. And she can act that. That’s doable. In fact, it’s been done.

But, when you do that not only are you taking – you’re taking something away from a kind of actor that generally is under-utilized, but you’re also robbing yourself of an actor who may bring a certain emotional depth and truth to that part that someone else wouldn’t have access to. There is an authenticity there that you no longer have access to.

So, my feeling is this. If the part could be played by somebody who is of the sort that is under-utilized and underemployed, try and find the person that’s under-utilized and underemployed. Go for that. Yes, a gay actor can play a straight person because straight actors are not under-utilized or underemployed. Can a straight actor play a gay person? I would have said, you know, it’s an interesting kind of thing. And I’m interested in what you have to say about this. Because I feel like it used to happen all the time because gay characters weren’t really people, they were characters. And then there was a stretch there where it was sort of like, OK, let’s not do that. And now I feel like there are so many gay characters that maybe – for instance on Modern Family, Eric Stonestreet is not gay and he plays a gay character. And his husband is played by an actor who is gay. There are enough gay characters where maybe you can say well that’s OK. What about Jewish characters? There are a lot of Jewish characters, so I guess I don’t mind as a Jewish person that an Irish woman plays Mrs. Maisel. [laughs] It just doesn’t really bother me that much.

But, yeah, I think if you’re talking about under-represented characters then why not try and help people that have been ignored. It only works to your benefit as far as I’m concerned creatively.

**John:** Yeah. I think it does work to your benefit creatively. And I think a thing to look through in the examples you gave, but also the examples that Ian gave in his initial question, I think it may be interesting to draw a distinction between external realities of a character that we’re seeing onscreen and internal realities of that character. And so the idea of whether a gay person can play a straight role or a straight person can play a gay role that is internal acting that is 100 percent sort of what the actor inside is doing. That is not the physical reality of how that character presents onscreen.

And so I feel like we’re in a moment as we approach 2020 and probably this next bit of time where you’re going to try to cast the person who physically can inhabit that role sort of natively and naturally wherever possible. And so that’s part of the motivation behind looking for a blind actor for the role of Abby is that I don’t want the blindness to be a thing that the character is acting. I want the blindness to be a thing that is just naturally part of what comes in that performance.

**Craig:** So that’s a purely creative justification. And I would love to live in a world where you have purely creative justifications. There is a layer of our businesses is a very public business and it’s a very publicized business. And I think part of the reality that we have to steer through, I don’t want to sound like I’m naïve or a child, we also are aware that we live in a world now where these things are scrutinized.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And if you’re going to make a film about somebody who is say deaf, or someone who is hearing-impaired, who is sight-impaired, who is blind, someone who is in a wheelchair because they are a paraplegic, and you don’t cast somebody who has that then you’re going to be criticized wildly and heavily. That’s something that did not exist ten years ago.

Now, let me take that back. We weren’t aware of it ten years ago. So what’s been happening is people have been yelling in their own homes. Right? People have been yelling at the screen saying, “Not again.” Right? And now we all hear it. So I think that’s the difference is that we now hear it. If we are not naturally responsive to it, and I think we should be, then at the very least there are enough people in this business who just from a cynical point of view are aware that products that we make here in Hollywood can be damaged if we are stepping on people’s toes and being dismissive of needs for representation.

So, we have to take that into account. And I don’t take those things into account with my eyes rolling like, ugh, I guess we have to. No, I mean, look, all we’re doing is working for an audience. If there are people upset in the audience then we screwed up. So, why not do it the right way?

**John:** Yeah. So I think we have at least articulated three reasons why at this moment it feels important. First it’s creative reasons. Second is looking for access for actors who would otherwise not get a chance to be in these movies. And third is the realities of putting out these movies and TV shows in our environment right now and that there is an increased scrutiny which is probably merited.

So, those are three reasons why I think anyone who is looking at casting these roles is going to be thinking about with this role written a certain way how do I find the actor to best fit that role.

**Craig:** Exactly. And that’s something that happens I’d imagine in the beginning. When you started working on this I’m sure the second thought after so a blind girl, dot-dot-dot, you went, “And I’m going to need a blind actor.”

**John:** Yeah. And so as we get into this process and hopefully this movie gets made, you never know if this movie gets made, I’d love to talk more about how this all comes together and sort of the specific challenges not just with the Abby role but with the movie altogether in the next 100 episodes of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Cool. Further follow up. We had a How Would This Be a Movie where we talked about ice cream wars. We talked about Mister Softee in China and in Brooklyn. Ed in DC wrote in to say, “I’m surprised neither of you remember the 1984 film Comfort and Joy which was a dark comedy about such a turf war between ice cream companies. If you haven’t seen it it’s great. And he puts in a link in the show notes. I didn’t know about Comfort and Joy. Did you?

**Craig:** No. And I’m surprised that Ed is surprised. It’s not that I’m not familiar with the director of Comfort and Joy, Bill Forsyth, because Bill Forsyth directed Local Hero which I think a lot of people have seen. It’s a fantastic movie. But suffice to say that Local Hero was far more popular than Comfort and Joy. I’ve never heard of Comfort and Joy. Obviously it made it over here because Ed is in DC, unless Ed is Edinburgh. I don’t know. I don’t remember Comfort and Joy rolling on HBO with the same frequency as Beastmaster in 1984. So, sorry Ed.

No, I mean, I will check it out because, again, huge fan of Local Hero. You’ve seen Local Hero I assume?

**John:** I’ve never seen Local Hero.

**Craig:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** The list of movies I’ve not seen is long and embarrassing.

**Craig:** You know what John? Here’s the thing. That’s OK. No one has seen everything except weirdos. But Local Hero is one of those movies that is just a ray of sunshine. It’s just an absurdly positive, happy-making movie. It’s sweet. It’s adorable. Yeah, you will–

**John:** I’ll love it.

**Craig:** You will love it. Everyone loves it. It’s just got this wonderful whimsy to it. You’ll think it’s great.

**John:** I’m excited to see it. Jason Pace also wrote in with a link to 99 Problems which is a short film by Ross Killeen in Ireland. I think it may be becoming a feature. But his point was that it’s definitely universal. This idea of ice cream trucks which might seem so specific to the East Coast, there’s a universal quality because they’re happening in other places.

**Craig:** [laughs] Is there? So wait, hold on. There’s been a movie in Scotland and a movie in Ireland. So we’re now saying that this is a universal thing?

**John:** It is universal. Because if you have Brooklyn plus Scotland and Ireland? Come on, that’s like three different islands. So come on.

**Craig:** So how many Irelands, Americas, and Scotlands are needed to equal one India? Just out of curiosity. I think like six. I don’t think that this is necessarily indicating that we have a universal property or universal cultural point of view. But that’s OK. It’s not that everybody needs to know about the same thing. Sometimes you’re learning about them. Yeah, no, the fact that something has happened with a topic does not quite get us into universal territory.

**John:** Maybe not. But speaking of specificity and universality, do you want to do the follow up on Akashinga rangers?

**Craig:** Akashinga rangers. Meg writes, “I was so excited to hear you guys talking about the possibility of making a movie about the Akashinga rangers. This past spring at the Philadelphia Environmental Film Festival I was lucky enough to see the Black Mambas, a short doc by Bruce Donnelly about the all-woman, all-badass anti-poaching crew who patrol Kruger National Park in South Africa. It was a great short doc and it was followed by an even more mind-blowing feature-length doc, When Lambs Become Lions, which I cannot recommend enough, even if you were already expressing some interest in how to make a story about anti-poaching units. Really gripping. It is hands-down the most stunning drama I’ve seen in years.” Hold on a second. Sorry. I’ve just got to back up a second.

Meg, I’m right here. Come on. I mean, I just – I tried so hard. Come on.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, Chernobyl, I don’t know.

**Craig:** I’m not saying it has to be the most stunning drama you’ve seen, but anyway. That’s Meg’s question. I’m just joking Meg. “I was constantly forgetting that it’s a documentary because it was just so beautifully constructed to keep you right on the edge of your seat the whole damn time. Its complexity hinges on the fact that the anti-poaching units in this small Kenyan town are so inconsistently funded that many locals go back and forth between working as poachers and working to prevent poachers, depending on which best allows them to feed their families. Friends and family members can easily find themselves on opposite sides and maintain close personal ties outside of the elephant refuge while hunting each other to death within. It is completely crazy. It is a fragile system to try and wrap your head around. And by the end of the movie you feel like everything you thought you knew about anything is maybe not so certain.”

Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I want to watch that.

**John:** Meg wrote a good review of When Lambs Become Lions. And, yeah, I think that if you’re going to make this movie about the Akashinga rangers that’s going to be a great aspect of this where even if it’s not our central characters that we’re following, the community that they’re in flips back and forth based on just economic need and necessity. And that’s great. That’s true. That’s human drama.

**Craig:** I mean, that does actually sound like possibly the most stunning drama I would see in years. I’m feeling a little bad.

**John:** Also, I mean, I’ve been to Kruger National Park and it is stunningly gorgeous. So just imagine that against that backdrop? Yeah, it’s good.

**Craig:** Ugh. [laughs] Darn it. We have another question. This is coming in from Leann and we’ve got an audio follow up from Episode 315, 100 episodes ago.

**John:** Let’s take a listen.

**Leann:** Hi John and Craig. Over two years ago on the show you gave your thoughts on a question of mine about waiting to hear back from a producer who is considering one of my scripts. A couple months later I briefly met you, John, at McNally Jackson Bookstore in SoHo after an episode recording. I told you that the producer had indeed come onboard the project and the film was now in development. You told me to write in again when my movie became ‘more real.’ I am very pleased to say that this film, my debut feature as a writer-director, recently wrapped production and is now in post.

We’ve had a wonderful cast and team behind it and things look exciting for the film’s future. Also, before we shot I submitted a different script to the Nichol and just found out it has advanced to the semi-finals.

I mention this because both of these events are a culmination of many years, hard work, and learning and your show has played a significant role in both my screenwriting craft and my understanding of the business. So thank you very much, again, for all your invaluable guidance over the years. You truly help so many people with your work. Thanks.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Congratulations, Leann. So congratulations on wrapping your film. Post is a wonderful and terrifying time where you will question why you’ve made this movie in the very first place. But I hope it comes through in spectacular form and you get it to a good venue, be it a festival, be it a distributor. However it ends up in the world, congratulations. And congratulations on your script placing well at the Nichol.

**Craig:** That’s fantastic. First of all, thank you also for writing in Leann, or speaking in and letting us know. It’s really nice to hear those things. And it’s particularly great that after all of this time we can chart people’s progress from the very, very start to here you are with a movie. And I think what John’s saying is absolutely true. No matter what happens with this film, and I hope it is everything you ever wanted it to be, tons of great careers started by people falling on their faces immediately after the starter pistol went off. Like mine. Just, you know, just right away face plant. And that’s OK.

That is not a predictor of future failure or anything. It’s just great that you’re through this now. You have gotten the hardest part done. You are now one of the very few people in the world who has written a screenplay that has become a movie. You now have access to a certain experience and information that 98% of screenwriters do not have. And so take all the lessons from this. Think of this as this great opportunity to learn all these lessons and I’m very glad in particular that when you did run into John at that bookstore that he wasn’t a monster to you. Because you know that’s – I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had to talk down after they’ve had a run-in with that monster. [laughs]

**John:** The Jekyll and Hyde quality. Sometimes it’s just, ugh, it’s just the worst. I know.

**Craig:** How great would that be, by the way, if you really were a monster? Like every time people met you in person they were like oh my god he is not what he is on the podcast at all.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, it’s Matthew’s clever editing that makes me sound like a rational human being when in fact I’m just–

**Craig:** No, you’re a nightmare.

**John:** Completely crazy.

**Craig:** Nightmare on wheels. So, anyway, thank you Leann. That’s wonderful.

**John:** Hooray. Craig, I don’t think we’ve actually talked about the fact that there’s an election happening, a WGA election that’s happening for the West. So I don’t know if you’re aware of it.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** But it’s happening right now.

**Craig:** W, G, oh, the Writers Guild.

**John:** The Writers Guild. We’re both in the Writers Guild.

**Craig:** Here’s I think practically speaking this is my point of view about this election. Any Writers Guild election will favor the incumbents. I don’t remember the last time an incumbent ran for reelection and didn’t win, for anything. Officer or board. But this year is different because there’s quite a bit of controversy and the union has been undergoing an internal disagreement. Which I think is good.

I think there’s a generation of writers that have grown up inside a guild that has never argued. And you and I come from an earlier time when the guild would argue all the time with itself and I think that that was healthy.

I would love to see dissenting voices in the mix. I would love to frankly have more disagreement inside the room because I think when there is more disagreement ideas can be better stress-tested and evaluated and you will get better results. That’s my working theory here. That’s the board that I was on. I remember the way it functioned. In fact, in two consecutive years there were two wildly different leaderships and a consistent disagreement inside the room which was terrific.

So, I am supporting all the members of the, what is it, Writers Forward. I think they call themselves Writers Forward. They always come up with names. I don’t care about the names. Nobody cares about the names. But that, because I want to get some of those dissenting opinions in there, particularly as it regards the agency issue which I think is a terrific cause that has not been prosecuted correctly.

And so, you know, even if all that happens is everybody votes and it’s clear from the voting that a lot of people are unhappy with the way leadership has been doing things to this point that too will impact how leadership behaves following the election.

One last thing I’ll say. There has been this what I consider a very poisonous notion that has been introduced into our body politic and I’ve seen it – really this is the first time I’ve ever seen it. And the notion is this. That disagreement with leadership weakens the union. This is a terrible notion on its face. I don’t even think that people who are proposing it and promoting actually believe it in their hearts anyway. Because if Phyllis Nagy and her slate sweep the election, which is unlikely, but let’s just say that happens, those people aren’t going to immediately say, right, well we disagree with everything she says but she’s in charge now so now we have to agree with it completely. No one is going to do that. And no one should do that. That’s not what it’s about.

What’s behind the whole disagreement weakens us – the converse is therefore just do what we tell you to do. And agree with what we say. And I think that’s terrible. It’s particularly terrible for a writers’ union when the whole point is that our livelihoods are based on a kind of necessary free expression. So, I believe actually disagreement, public disagreement, rigorous discussion makes us stronger and actually makes our union mean something. As opposed to a kind of compulsory solidarity which is nothing more than a lot of people being ordered to drudge in together in the same direction.

I don’t want to be drudging in the same direction. I want us all to be running in the same direction thrilled. So, I think we get this from this agreement. That’s why I’m supporting this group. John, the floor is yours.

**John:** I disagree with this characterization that the folks who are supportive of the current agency action are poisoning everything with their trying to ask questions of the dissenters. What I’ve seen again and again is at any time that the folks on the Nagy slate are questioned or trying to hit down at specifically what they’re trying to do that theme portrayed that you are being too aggressive, you’re being too lockstep with the guild. I don’t see that actually being the case. But in terms of the folks I’m supporting, listen, I was part of the group that is prosecuting the agency campaign right now. So I’ve been in all those rooms and I sort of know what’s actually happening. That’s why I think the incumbents that I’m supporting are fantastic because I’ve seen them do the work day in and day out.

The folks who are not incumbents who I’m supporting I also saw them sort of independently reach out and do a lot of really amazing things for writers during this time. So that’s why I picked the other writers who I’m supporting. So voting is really important. I think it’s great that everyone vote and a big vote this time will show both the guild and the town sort of how active and engaged membership is.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think engagement is a sign of our power. The more we engage I think the stronger more formidable I think we are. And to be clear I would never ever defend anyone who has said, hey, you can’t question a candidate. Question them all you want. For sure. It’s just that there’s – it’s not even a support necessarily all supporters of the incumbents. It’s just a few people have made very public statements that no one should disagree openly with their leadership. I just think down that road is insanity.

**John:** I think it’s also unfair to put blame for that on the incumbents. Or that the incumbents are directing that kind of thing.

**Craig:** They are not. I would agree with you completely. In fact, I don’t think, I can’t speak for all of the incumbents but I can certainly speak for David Goodman on this because I’ve spoken with him. I mean, we talk all the time. And there’s no way that David Goodman would agree with that. I just don’t believe he would agree with that. I wish he would say it more. I wish he would directly rebut some of these people who do this in his name. But I agree with you.

I don’t think anybody that has gone through the process of being in guild leadership which you and I both know requires a certain kind of, oh, you know, magnanimity and responsibility to all would ever suggest such a thing. It’s really more kind of the people on the fringes or the edges of things. But, you know, that’s what Twitter and Facebook can do is they sort of magnify voices on the edges. And I don’t mean to say that the people are on the edges, but rather their positions where they’re staking themselves out in terms of political point of view is a bit far.

If anybody out there is feeling slightly guilty that they would disagreement with leadership please don’t feel guilty about that. You should always disagree with leadership. I’m an incredibly disagreeable person. My feeling is my job is to quiz and question leadership. I was doing that when I was in leadership. I think that’s how you get better leaders.

**John:** Cool. Two last bits of news. First off, Highland2 the upgrade to pro is on sale this week. So if you’re a person who has been using Highland2 and have been holding off upgrading to pro this is the week because it’s on sale. So you should do it. I guess it’s a back to school sale. I don’t know. It was Labor Day. We decided to put it on sale. We will do this like once a year. So this is your chance to get it for a break.

Also if you would like to order the NaNoWriMo classroom kit, so this is a kit that goes out to classes across the US, you can order it for your kid’s class or for some other class that you just want to have this thing. It’s a great program that gets kids writing in the month of November. It’s a really structured thing for teachers to use in grade schools and junior highs as well. Writer Emergency Pack is included is included in that. So if you want to get that for your school there is a link in the show notes to that.

And now it is time to get to our special guest. Alison Luhrs is Senior Narrative Designer at Wizards of the Coast where she works on properties including Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. Welcome Alison.

**Alison Luhrs:** Hello.

**John:** Hello. Alison, where are we talking to you right now?

**Alison:** You are talking to me from a weird little phone booth thing inside of our office in rainy Renton, Washington State.

**John:** So Renton is near Seattle?

**Alison:** Yeah, it’s about 20 minutes south of Seattle. It’s sort of its kind of ugly cousin to the south. But I live in Seattle and commute down here.

**John:** Fantastic. So I introduced you as a Senior Narrative Designer. What does that actually mean? What do you do for a living?

**Alison:** So my job is to advocate for characters and story inside of the games that we make. So, it can be in the tabletop space for the tabletop version of Magic: The Gathering or Dungeons & Dragons. But right now I work for digital publishing. So it’s my job to be in charge of expressions of story within the digital games that we’re currently working on.

**John:** Great. So you’re a storyteller. So like most of the people listening to this podcast you’re involved with characters and worlds and story, but in a very different sense than sort of a normal 120-page screenplay. You are dealing with whole giant fantasy worlds and then populating those worlds with characters.

**Alison:** For sure. It’s super esoteric and weird. So I kind of do everything from actual writing of scripts and barks and different communications between characters in the game as well as doing a ton of documentation on the designer’s end for what is the overall arc structure. What are the different narrative choices that can happen in the script? As well as world-building. So coming up with what are the rules of the world. What does it look like? What is the structure of the different cultures that inhabit this place? And using that documentation to hand off to the folks who are in charge of actually doing the art and the audio and the creative verticals for game design.

**Craig:** So basically you have the coolest job ever. I mean, that’s what I’m hearing. You have the coolest job in the world.

**Alison:** It is the coolest job in the world and I had no idea it existed until about five or six years ago. Yeah.

**Craig:** Now one thing that I imagine you have to deal with that would be blow my mind – I mean, you know, John and I both love Dungeons & Dragons and my son is a huge Magic player.

**Alison:** Awesome. Nice.

**Craig:** So we’re Wizards of the Coast people.

**Alison:** We’re all nerds here. Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re all wizards here. But I would imagine that one of the things that you have to deal with as a kind of burden is this massive quantity of canon and lore that you need to consistent inside of. How often do you run afoul of this where you step on a landmine you didn’t even know was there? Or you create a character and someone says, “Oh actually there was a character.” I mean, what’s that like?

**Alison:** It is something that is constantly on my mind. And luckily we have folks in the building who I can go to as the experts to ask. Like, hey, have we already done this 25 years ago? And usually the answer is yes. One of the nice things about working on properties like Magic or Dungeons & Dragons that have been around for so long is that there’s only a certain point where you can really be specific to everything. You know what I mean? Like you can only match canon so much of the time.

And so one of the ways that we kind of approach this is by recognizing that canon is something that has to grow alongside your audience. There are things that we would do for an audience today enjoying one of our games that we wouldn’t necessarily do 25 years ago, or wouldn’t even really be on our mind. So, when we are producing a new character or producing some sort of new world or new work the question that we ask first is how is this appropriate for the audience that’s playing it today. If there’s a way to tie that into the old lore without stepping on anything, cool. But if it does step on something that’s a point to pause, talk to the experts inside the building, and say how can we make this work. Or, what do we need to actively address and actively shift to move forward.

So we never really want to get pigeon-holed into wanting to be dogmatic about sticking to canon. Canon is the most important thing of all. Instead we have ways to work alongside it and move it forward to a modern audience.

**John:** It sounds like what you’re saying is that canon is an incredibly useful resource. You have all these characters and all these worlds and in the case of D&D decades of history going back to like these characters Mordenkainen who was back there from the very start.

**Alison:** Yeah.

**John:** But you have to always be asking what is that helpful for the game right now.

**Alison:** Exactly.

**John:** How does that character fit into the universe that you’re establishing right now and the stories that you want to tell.

**Alison:** Right. Mordenkainen is a really good example, too, because what’s his personality? Origin story? What are the bits about this character, one who has been around for forever? There isn’t necessarily a lot that’s been written about the guy.

**Craig:** He’s a spell brand name. I just think of him as he’s got his magnificent mansion. He’s put his name on spells. Him and Mordenkainen.

**Alison:** Yeah. They’re both very busy dudes.

**John:** But I can imagine looking through the more recent hard cover books you’ve done on Mordenkainen is it’s a character who kind of feels like a Doctor Strange in the sense that he’s an incredibly powerful magic user and also bridges between different universes within D&D lore. So, he actually seems to have an awareness that there are other dimensions and other possibilities. Like he can talk about the elves in this universe versus the elves in that universe. So it’s a way of sort of bridging across things.

**Alison:** Absolutely. Right. And the really convenient thing as a creator is that that’s about as much as we have on him. With D&D specifically there’s a huge breadth of knowledge about these worlds and about all the space that D&D has to play in. But it’s very flat. There isn’t a lot of depth that’s been done about specific places. Because it’s been added to so many times by so many hundreds of creators, it’s very horizontal and not necessarily deep. So even though there is a lot of different things that you can cover, because there’s so many different things there’s a lot of chances to go really deep on character. So even though there hadn’t been too much written about Mordenkainen before, a lot of the textbooks about him recently came out, it was a chance to really explore the depths that hadn’t been established yet.

**John:** Let’s talk about the work you’re doing. So what kind of documents are you writing? And are these things that are just internal? Because we’ll put in links to some of the stuff that shows up on the web. So these are short stories you’ve written. They are explanations of new Magic: The Gathering cards or sort of the backstory behind this new character that you’re introducing into the world. But does the actual document look like? What application are you in? What is your cursor blinking in as you’re doing most of your work?

**Alison:** Sure. So when we’re developing a new set for Magic: The Gathering or a new world for D&D a lot of the work that we’ll do is creating the world guide. So the world guide is documentation not just for us narrative designers but it also guides our visual artists, our game designers to help come up with mechanics later. And these world guides are around 40 to 60,000 words. It’s kind of a Wikipedia article. The imaginary world that we’re coming up with.

So the world guide will go over not just visually going through the different cultures and environments and biomes look like here, but what are the cultures that live here. What are their real world inspirations? How do they function with inside the world itself? How do they operate with different cultures? What are the economies that work here? It’s really just like picking up on a Wikipedia article about a country and then translating that to a fictional place.

So even though it sounds really minute that we would need to know the tiny specifics of how an imaginary culture works within this world, we’re creating experiences that our fans will enjoy for 60 hours at a time. So we need to have all that information in our back pockets so that we can develop those long experiences they want to come back to again and again.

**Craig:** So you’re leaving room ultimately for everybody participating to do their own storytelling. I mean, that’s kind of the point of Dungeons & Dragons. So you’re creating all the details and the playgrounds and then people can come along and sort of grow inside of those things.

**Alison:** Exactly.

**Craig:** But there is – I mean, I know they’re trying to make a Dungeons & Dragons movie. And they tried that for a while. And there are some properties where I guess you can – you have two spaces. You have the space where people make their own stories inside of like the world guide. So I understand right now we’re running Dragon Heist. So, I can—

**Alison:** Oh fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I can tell these guys a lot about the city because I have the guide to Waterdeep and I can walk them through things. The stories inside obviously I’m playing off of the narrative prompts, but they’re kind of making the story as they go. That’s how Dungeons & Dragons works. You know that. I’m just telling it for people at home. But then there’s like living next to that is the opportunity to do fixed narrative where you’re telling stories, beginnings, middles, and ends, and people are absorbing it passively like they would a movie. Do you have interest in that? Do you think that Wizards is going to be doing more of that? Or are they going to kind of stay in that sort of hybrid space where they create a world and then they invite you to tell stories within it?

**Alison:** Our plan is to feature a variety of trans-media experiences. There’s going to be a world where we do have beginnings, and middles, and endings for experiences. And in narrative design the thing that makes it different from sitting down and writing a screenplay or writing a novel is the element of choice. There always has to be room for our audience to choose what happens to them. And the trick as a narrative designer is finding ways to make all of those choices feel like they were intentional and feel like they’re part of the experience.

And so the way that you nail that is by aiming for tone and theme rather than for specific arcs. So that way you can build in lots of different endings for your player experiences but they all still feel like they were intentional and part of the experience because they match the same tone. So, when we do end up doing some kind of TV show or a movie or whatever for any of our properties we would be aiming to match that same tone that we have when you sit down at the table to play with your friends. Or when you are playing a game of Magic against somebody else.

But the trick is managing to find a way to replicate that experience without having to have the same pitfalls. Like I said earlier, because D&D is so horizontal we don’t really have a ton of named characters. Those characters that everybody knows off the top of their heads. And so there’s our chance to establish that when we do eventually go down that path. But until then it’s my job to make sure that we’re maintaining the same tone that you have when you are playing at your kitchen table with your friends as when you sit down to a console game to play D&D or to play Magic.

**John:** So obviously in the fantasy space we think back to Tolkien who wrote the novels Lord of the Rings but also really did the rest of the world-building there. He was drawing his own maps. He was sort of figuring out everything around that, even if it didn’t necessarily directly fit into the books. Here it’s sort of the reverse situation where you had a lot of the landscape and you kept filling out the landscape, but now you’re trying to find who are the characters and what are the stories that are pulling us through this.

I feel like so many of our listeners probably kind of want your job rather than our job, because it’s a chance to sort of just really – you have this giant sandbox so you can just build and build and build and build and there’s not this responsibility that everything has to fit neatly into a two-hour chunk of entertainment.

**Alison:** Absolutely. Sometimes the challenge with doing this is remembering that you have to create a 60 to 80-hour experience. You know? Like there are people who play campaigns for years at a time. Or folks who return to the same Magic set again and again and again. I think that a lot of folks who want to create for the sake of constantly creating would thrive in this career. I had no idea this existed until a couple of years ago when I was inside the building.

There isn’t really a class structure that you can take to get in here. There’s no real college course to major in narrative design. It’s still a really young field. And what my job looks like from company to company is vastly different. So even though I’m writing world guides here inside of Wizards, if I were to go to another study I would likely be doing a much different job just because these two companies are different. And the value of narrative design inside of videogame design is still really undervalued. It’s usually not something that’s added to a game until it’s nearly out the door.

Narrative is the most flexible part of game design. You can change what the word in a sentence is while you’re having a conversation a lot more easily than you can change the mechanics of a how a videogame is actually played. So frequently a narrative designer won’t even really be brought in until they’re at the very end of the process of development.

**John:** Yeah. They may have figured out the art before they actually figured out the story that was really behind that art. And that’s a huge mistake. That’s an opportunity that’s missed.

**Alison:** Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean one of the secrets to Wizard’s success is that we include story from the very beginning. So my job has to always be ready to adapt to whatever the developers change. It’s kind of my job to sort of think on my toes and change whatever I need to change at a moment’s notice. So I can imagine that would be a little off-putting to someone who is more used to having story be the thing that’s driving the car.

**John:** Now talk about sort of you’re working with a team because some of what you describe sort of sounds like the experience of being in a TV writers’ room where there’s a bunch of people and there’s probably a whiteboard and you’re thinking through stuff. But I’ve also done some work with videogame companies and ultimately they might sort of – you describe it as sort of being like a Wikipedia article, ultimately their source of truth is this internal Wiki that basically lists everything and every character and everything that’s been established.

Obviously it’s collaborative, but is it collaborative with a bunch of folks in the room together, or is collaborative in the sense of someone breaks off a chunk of the world and goes off and does it and it falls into a bigger document? What is the work flow?

**Alison:** So the way that we work internally is that I typically will do world-building alongside other members of different creative verticals. So I’ll usually do it alongside maybe a member of the D&D team or the Magic team, but also our lead art director and our lead producers and the members of the creative team who are going to be involved with creating other aspects of the project. I want to make sure that their brains are in the room because they’ll usually be thinking about something that I’m not necessarily.

So, when we do those big brain-stormy meetings I’ll usually take the notes and then go back into my desk and dive in the writer hole for a few hours. And emerge, you know, days later with a couple 10,000 words worth of stuff that we just discussed.

My goal is to usually have that documentation finished early that way when folks are developing stuff later on they can refer to it and hopefully I was smart enough to include something that they’ll need an answer to later on. But if not they’ll come to me directly and say, hey, we want to have this kind of feature in the game. Can you find a creative reason why it makes sense we would ask the player to do X. And so it will be my job to kind of figure out, OK, what’s the high level creative of what we’re asking the player to do. How can we fit that in to what we’ve already established?

**Craig:** So I have a question about your audience, because I think that every writer should be and naturally is consumed with what the audience is going to think. You have a very particular audience. And I mean they are particular. At the same time I feel like Wizards is doing a really good job of kind of progressing. They’re moving the ball forward. I mean, classically speaking all of the kind of Dungeons & Dragons stuff was an echo back to European Middle Ages, just like Lord of the Rings was. So white guys with swords. And scantily-clad women being rescued from mythological creatures.

And it’s not that anymore. But as you—

**Alison:** No it’s not.

**Craig:** But as you go through and you tell your new stories how do you manage – this is really a personal question. It’s not about the company. It’s actually just about you as you’re writing. How do you manage the kind of push and pull knowing, well, I’m dealing with some people that may be resistant here so I have to figure out how to move the ball forward without freaking people out? But still I don’t want to be regressive. Talk me through that process.

**Alison:** I believe in listening to what the audience at large wants. We often talk inside the building about the bell curve of fans. So, on the left side of a bell curve that will be folks who don’t really have any knowledge of the lore or the stories that we already tell inside the building or in our games. And on the far right end you’ll have the people who know absolutely everything about it. And the bulk of your fans are going to fall a little bit to the left of center in this curve. Most people don’t know everything. And most people know a little bit more than the folks who don’t know anything about the game. But the folks that we’re aiming for live in that part that isn’t going to be angry at every major change and isn’t going to be upset that we aren’t featuring women being rescued in every single adventure that we have and having every single major character be played by a white guy.

What we’re aiming for is what the culture at large is moving towards. And I like to hold an audience responsible for keeping up. It’s our job to make sure that we bring in more people and we do that by listening to what the trend of the audience is moving towards, not trying to hold on to what it used to be in the ‘80s and the ‘90s.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s great. I mean, I’ve noticed even as we’re running Dragon Heist that there are characters that are just casually gay couples. And what I liked is it wasn’t part of the story. It’s not particularly relevant.

**Alison:** No.

**Craig:** We just make note that he works as a blacksmith and his husband is in the back helping. So it is interesting to see how in a strange way – and I don’t know why it is that in imaginary world – imaginary world should be more progressive than our world. I mean, that’s the point, right?

**Alison:** Yes, they should. Absolutely. The last thing I want to do when I’m playing pretend is imagine that I’m in a world where I have to deal with sexism on a daily basis.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**Alison:** Why would I want that to be part of my fantasy?

**Craig:** Right. And there’s more room in a fantasy world to do these things. And yet oddly, traditionally fantasy rooms have been more restrictive and more regressive in that regard because they were, I don’t know, this is like strange fake nostalgia for a time that really didn’t even exist.

**Alison:** No, that’s totally what it is. And a lot of it, too, has to come with who was creating that fantasy and those worlds. When you have creators who are from a background that hasn’t been traditionally represented you’re going to have fantasy that is more deep and more complex than you ever would if it was written by a specific kind of person.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it’s great.

**John:** So, Alison, there’s maybe a new world or a new sort of section of an existing world that you want to sort of explore, so maybe thinking about it for a campaign or for some other materials. It could be based on some sort of world mythology or some idea that sparks for you. What would be the process of pitching that idea internally? Would it be just you coming in with an idea? Do you enlist artists to help you draw stuff up? What is the process of developing a new world or a new section of world inside the company?

**Alison:** Yeah, so we’re fortunate enough to have a couple of concept artists inside the building. So if I ever have an idea for something I’d like to do in the future usually I’ll find a concept artist that I get along with and sit down for a couple hours and just jam out some ideas. Like think what are some different visual approaches that we can use. What are some cool narrative approaches? How can we marry these together so we come up with an elevator pitch that everybody thinks is super rad?

A couple times a year we’ll have opportunities internally to pitch those kinds of ideas depending on what game that you’re doing. We usually plan out our products a solid three or four years into the future. So, when we are pitching and developing these ideas it’s for way, way, way down the line.

But that collaboration between narrative and art is what makes for a really cohesive experience. And so after we come up with the pitch for what a world could be we’ll typically bring on a game designer fairly early so we can try and figure out, OK, what’s a cool mechanical hook based off of these things that we know are happening creatively. And from there it can ideally enter into the development process for whatever game that we’re attaching it to.

**John:** Yeah, so for example if you want to bring back a Psionics mechanic there might be some interesting world in which the Psionics makes a lot of sense even though it’s not most of what we’re seeing in Fifth Edition.

**Alison:** Right. And Magic is really easy for this, too. So maybe I could go back and say, hey, you know what? I miss Morph. Morph was really cool. Let’s find some way to bring it back for a different setting. And then we’ll use that as kind of the jump-off point for, OK, we know that we want to use this kind of play style or this kind of mechanic, what creatively facilitates that in a fun and interesting way. And sometimes that’s how different world ideas start off.

**John:** So I bet we have a bunch of listeners who are eager to get your job. Let’s talk through how did you get hired into doing your spot? You were a community manager? What was your responsibility before then?

**Alison:** I was. I did social media management for my day job. But my background is in theater. So after I graduated from college me and a couple friends of mine cofounded a theater company up here in Seattle. And so while I was doing my crummy day job of slinging social media tweets and dealing with the masses, in my evenings I was playwriting and I was collaboratively creating. And I was working alongside a team of different artists to create and write different things.

So, I was playwriting. I was writing long-form fiction. And once I got inside the building at Wizards doing social media I remember learning that there were people who were paid to write about dragons and elves. And I said, well, I can do that. That’s easy. And it’s only because of all that time I’d spent creating with a team and grinding my narrative skills on my own and with my own play groups that I was able to kind of bring to the table and say, hey, I can do this too.

There really isn’t a straightforward way into doing narrative design professionally. You kind of have to do your own thing on your own and then make opportunities happen for yourself by applying smaller gigs and working your way up. I think a recommendation if someone wanted to start doing narrative design would be to just start DM-ing. Start running your own play groups.

**Craig:** DM-ing.

**Alison:** DM-ing will only make you a better storyteller no matter what medium you are writing in. You will learn everything you need to know about narrative by sitting down and forcing your friends to play through whatever you came up with.

**Craig:** And then being accountable to whatever they come up with.

**Alison:** Yes. Learning how to listen to other people’s ideas and respond to that and find ways to solve narrative problems. It’s the most valuable skill you can have. For something actionable that you can do right now if you want to practice using choice as an element of writing, Twine is a really excellent program. It’s free to download and you can use it to make sort of text-based adventures. So you know like Choose Your Own Adventure style narratives? It’s basically that. When hiring for narrative design jobs often we’ll ask people to just submit a short like 10 or 20-minute Twine game. And usually that can show how good you are at integrating choice into the narrative experience. And showing that you understand how different trees of narrative work.

So, start building a Twine game. It’s super easy and super-fast. And it’s industry standard for applying for a job.

**Craig:** I want to do it now.

**John:** It definitely feels like we’re at a moment—

**Alison:** Do it, yeah!

**John:** We’re at a moment where there’s a tremendous intersection between what we think of as cinematic writing, with film and television, and game writing, and comics, and other sort of fiction stuff, where people are building out these bigger things. And university programs haven’t quite caught up. USC’s School of Cinematic Arts has game design and has some aspects of this, but it’s really much more steered towards videogames.

**Alison:** Programming, yeah.

**John:** Programming and sort of animation and that aspect of it. But it’s really this meta concept of a sort of what is the universe of this idea and then what are the physical things we’re going to see come out of it. And balancing those two things is tricky but I think we’re going to find a generation that has less of a distinction between this person is this kind of writer or that kind of writer. They’re all working together to sort of make a cohesive thing.

**Alison:** Absolutely. It’s just different mediums. And being able to understand the rules of one will only make you stronger in the other. It bums me out that there aren’t a lot of opportunities, especially for college kids, to really learn these skills and develop them if you aren’t going to a game design specific school. But as far as like what kinds of writing that you can get good at if you want to do the things that I do, dramaturgical writing which is something that a lot of folks outside of theater don’t really know about is probably the closest thing.

So dramaturgy is the person in a usually well-paying show whose job is to research the time period that it takes place in or the world that the play is set around. And come up with a sort of similar document that I do for that specific experience. Weirdly enough there’s a lot of crossover between the skills that are necessary for theater and live performance and for videogames. And I think it’s that presence of choice or presence of an audience that you’re always trying to work around into your experience.

But, yeah, dramaturgy weirdly enough has a lot of crossover. I would also recommend studying screenwriting as much as possible since that’s still kind of the format that most people in the game industry use for writing scripts and such. But instead of a fairly easy to hold in your hand script we usually churn out one that’s a couple hundred pages long rather than a couple dozen.

**John:** Cool. Alison, thank you so much for this overview. I think we’re going to have a lot of follow up questions for you down the road. But if people need to find you on Twitter where should they reach out to you?

**Alison:** My handle is @alisontheperson but I usually answer work-related questions @alisonthewizard.

**Craig:** Of course you do.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Of course you do.

**John:** We do a segment on the show called One Cool Things and so I’m going to start with my One Cool Thing. It is a book I just finished called Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch. It is just terrific. It is a look at sort of how English is changing with the rise of the Internet. And in a weird way you’d assume like, oh, it must be changing faster because of the Internet, but she also points out things like spell check are slowing down some of the changes that would naturally happen. So it’s just a really great funny overview of what’s happening in our language right now, the rise of meme culture. So, Craig, you will love it because you love John McWhorter. Through him I found this book.

**Craig:** I do. And I read a fairly thorough article by her that was sort of I guess a chapter and it seemed great. By the way, did she talk about Grammarly? Because if I see one more damn ad for that stupid thing I’m going to lose every ounce of S in my body. I’m trying to stay Internet safe here. I can’t handle it.

**John:** Craig, we should put the transcripts of this show through Grammarly and see if they have suggestions for improving it.

**Craig:** F-in Grammarly. It’s like “Writing is hard. Sometimes you…” Shut up. Shut. Up. Also, your stupid program isn’t going to change anything. If you don’t know how to write you don’t know how to write. I swear to god. So, anyway, there’s my umbrage for that. I haven’t gotten angry in a while. Weird that I would pick a—

**Alison:** No, feel it. By all means.

**Craig:** Now Grammarly of all things is getting it.

**Alison:** Stand in your truth, dude.

**Craig:** Thank you. Thank you. Freaking Grammarly. So, the first thing I do when I install a fresh copy of Word or something like that on a computer I’m like turn off the stupid green underline. I don’t need you to tell me how to structure a sentence. How dare you, Microsoft Word.

**John:** How dare you.

**Craig:** How dare you. My One Cool Thing this week, it’s a little pricy. I’m just going to be honest. It’s a little pricy. But Thanksgiving is not so far off. We’re a couple of months away. Three months away. Why am I starting to talk about it now so early? Because if you were going to get a Heritage turkey you would need to think about ordering it now. What is a Heritage turkey? Have either of you had one for Thanksgiving?

**John:** I’ve had a Heritage turkey. It was delicious.

**Craig:** Alison?

**Alison:** I have. Yes.

**Craig:** Great. Well, you two are freaking cool. So here’s what’s up. The regular turkeys that you get in the store are – and I didn’t know this – there’s a name for them. They have a breed name and it’s called Broad Breasted White, which sounds—

**Alison:** Typical. Typical.

**Craig:** Yeah, it just sounds dirty. So, Broad Breasted White turkeys were literally manipulated in a laboratory by USDA scientists and the point of them was basically Americans like white meat turkey. Apparently. I’m kind of a dark meat guy myself. But regardless, they like white—

**Alison:** The same. It’s a shame.

**Craig:** It’s a shame. They like white meat so let’s come up with a turkey that has this massive breast and also grows really fast so we can make a lot of them and they’re huge. And that’s what they’ve done. These companies that sell Heritage turkeys, they’re basically unmanipulated turkeys. They’re the original breeds. They tend to be a bit smaller. Well, some people think of it as a gamier taste. I think of it as a more flavorful taste. There’s less white meat. There’s more dark meat. There’s lots of different kinds. They come in all sorts of sizes. But they’re expensive.

So it’s a little bit of a thing. If you’re feeling fancy for Thanksgiving, you know, I honestly say I think they’re way better. Brine it. You know, brine it. Because they can tend toward the dry if you don’t. But lots of places to buy them. I won’t recommend any particular place. I’m sure they’re all excellent. The one place do not get a Heritage turkey from Grammarly. Because you know what? Screw Grammarly. Honestly. How dare they?

**John:** I think we’re going to do a search through the transcripts to find how many times Craig has brought up turkeys on this podcast. Because I feel like it’s got to be at least 10 where you’ve mentioned something about Thanksgiving or brining turkeys. It feels like it’s a subtext for so many episodes.

**Alison:** It’s a really important topic. I’m glad someone is talking about the turkeys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Someone has to talk about them.

**Craig:** Well Alison and I have our own podcast called Brinecast where we just—

**Alison:** Brinecast. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Where we talk about different brines. Wet brines. Dry brines. There’s a lot of different kinds.

**Alison:** Buttermilk.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Alison:** Apple cider vinegar. There’s a million different things that you can pour on your dead meat.

**Craig:** Correct. And you can also kind of go sous-vide to maybe avoid the brining. That’s an episode.

**Alison:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** That’s our show.

**Alison:** It is.

**John:** Alison, do you have a One Cool Thing that you can share with our audience?

**Alison:** I do. Yeah. So, Airbnb has a search function where you can look for offbeat houses. So eight of my friends just went to Ireland for a friend’s wedding. He went to Dublin, found an adorable Irish lady, and they got married. Yay for them. And we just came back from staying in a castle for two or three nights. So, on Airbnb you can search to stay in an actual castle. And with eight of us staying in the same place at the same time it only came out to about $110 per person per night.

**Craig:** What? [laughs]

**Alison:** Yeah. It’s way more affordable than you think. You can live and sleep in an actual castle. Please do it.

**Craig:** Hold on a second. Is this castle like the one where Sauron is slowly regathering his strength? There’s got to be a reason that—

**Alison:** No. It was like a cozy Downton Abbey style. This used to be one tower and then someone added on a fancy estate. We had the whole run of the place. So we got out the nice goblets and celebrating in the dining room.

**Craig:** Did you guys LARP? I mean, you were in a castle.

**Alison:** No, we did not LARP. We did play hide and seek. Yeah. Had a really, really fantastic time celebrating in a fancy ass castle. Highly recommend it.

**Craig:** Wow. All right. That’s way cheaper than I thought it would be. Nice.

**Alison:** I know. I know. That’s why we did it.

**John:** Nice. Cool. And that’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions. But for short questions I’m on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Alison you can find @alisonthewizard.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You can also find transcripts. Those go up the week after the episode airs.

Alison, thank you so much for talking through your job. I think there’s going to be a whole new generation of senior narrative designers in the making who are going to be coming after your job hard. But you helped inspire them. So thank you very much for talking through.

**Alison:** I look forward to sharing the stage. Thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks Alison. Thanks.

**John:** Thanks. All right. Bye.

Links:

* [The Shadows Casting Call](johnaugust.com/casting) John is looking for a 15 year old blind actress for the lead role — please help by sharing this link with anyone who might be a good fit!
* [The Hollywood Disability Inclusion Toolkit: The RespectAbility Guide to Inclusion in the Entertainment Industry](https://www.respectability.org/hollywood-inclusion/)
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 315: Big Screens, Big Money](https://johnaugust.com/2017/big-screens-big-money)
* [NaNoWriMo classroom kit](https://store.nanowrimo.org/products/d5ce724ee44c89b2d2240da73f117eebf329e3364f629f8f-23)
* [Comfort and Joy](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0087072/)
* [99 Problems](https://www.99problemsfilm.com/) by Ross Killeen
* [The Black Mambas documentary](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8430900/)
* [Wizards of the Coast](https://company.wizards.com/)
* [Twine](https://twinery.org/)
* [Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language](https://amzn.to/2Z4gpLg) by Gretchen McCulloch
* [Alison Luhrs](https://twitter.com/alisontheperson?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) on Twitter or [here for game related questions](https://twitter.com/alisonthewizard?lang=en)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_416_fantasy_worldbuilding.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/rolling-dice).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 408 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we have far too much to talk about.

**Craig:** Oh no.

**John:** Eight topics, any one of which could be the centerpiece. So I thought Craig we might borrow something we do every time we play D&D which is there’s situations where arrows are shooting into a group of people and you’re not quite sure who the target is. So you as a DM, what kind of thing might you do to figure out which of those random people is the target?

**Craig:** You give them a number. You count how many there are. And you roll that many sided die.

**John:** So luckily in the world there exist eight-sided dice. So here are the topics we will let the dice decide which order they will fall into. The topics are: Aladdin. Chernobyl. John’s new agent. The WGA elections. The status of the agency stuff. Craig’s solo episode. WGA financials. And dots, dashes, and parentheticals.

**Craig:** Ding.

**John:** One small craft topic.

**Craig:** I just wanted to add the Jeopardy noise.

**John:** It’s important.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We could have Matthew do it in post but really I think that artisanal homemade feel is what this podcast goes for.

**Craig:** Ding!

**John:** Ding. But first, Craig, there was some follow up from Episode 406. Do you want to talk us through this?

**Craig:** Sure, Alice, a longtime listener, first-time commenter writes, “Dear John and Craig. I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your discussion with Rachel Bloom about how sex is portrayed on TV. You asked her to give you a wish list of the kind of scenes she wanted to see but I don’t think she did. So here is my wish list of what I would like to see more of.

“One, discussions of contraception. A humorous and embarrassingly memorable example is in the movie Shop Girl. Two, allowing men to say no to sex instead of implying that they are always ready to go at a moment’s notice. Three, discussion of menstruation as a natural part of a woman’s life and not just as a punchline. Four, verbal discussions of what kind of sex the characters are comfortable with before the act. Although it has been derided by many, one of the good things about 50 Shades of Gray is that they had such a discussion. Many shows imply that not saying no means yes and they skirt dangerously close to date rape, see for instance Blade Runner.

“Five, more laughing during sex because it can be hilarious. Thanks so much for your show. Keep up the good work”

That’s a pretty good list.

**John:** That’s a great list. Alice, thank you very much for that list. I hope that some of these topics make it on to the whiteboards of TV shows that are in the room right now to figure out their seasons because they’re all good things. And there’s ways to do all those topics even on broadcast television. So yes, more of that.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yep. All right, let’s get to our eight big topics because this could be a marathon episode if we don’t get to it quickly. So I could roll a physical die but I think I’m going to try to have Siri roll the die for us so that everyone can hear and so that Craig knows I’m not cheating and trying to – because we’re doing this on Skype so he can’t see what I’m doing.

**Craig:** True.

**John:** Roll an eight-sided die.

**Siri:** Rolling.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Siri:** Five this time.

**Craig:** Wow. Whoa.

**John:** Siri has picked number five.

**Craig:** God, she started us off with a hot topic.

**John:** Oh, the status of the agency stuff. Oh my gosh. All right, let’s get into this.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** So much has happened since we last talked about the agency stuff, but nothing really fundamentally on the ground has changed. Let me recap some of what’s happened since we talked about it on the show last, because there are a lot of little individual things. And we are recording this on a Friday. By Tuesday when this episode comes out, who knows, things could have changed again.

So, the WGA got back into the room with the ATA. The ATA doubled their previous offer on packaging but didn’t change anything on producing. That’s a fair summary I think of what happened in that room. It didn’t go great. In a video response the president of the WGA, David Goodman, explained that revenue sharing was a non-starter and that we weren’t going to negotiate percentages on something we didn’t think addressed the fundamental issues involved.

At the same time the WGA stated they were at an impasse with the ATA and would begin negotiating with the individual agencies instead. Then, WME, CAA, and UTA sued the WGA for antitrust. They were separate lawsuits but they’re basically all saying that the writer firing that happened in April amounted to an illegal boycott. The WGA issued a cease and desist to the ATA claiming antitrust, price fixing, and unlawful collusion.

The WGA sent out a modified proposal allowing a one-year sunset clause on packaging fees. Abrams Agency let the world know that they were willing to give up packaging fees and producing since they were the first of the major ATA agencies to sort of break away from the pact there. But they didn’t want to sign the Verve agreement, so as we’re recording this it’s not clear that anything is actually going to happen with Abrams. So, that’s a summary of I think the highlights of what’s happened since we last talked about this on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, if we want to call those highlights. So, it seems to me that the kind of missiles, the legal missiles that are firing back and forth is, well, in the short term – and when I say short term I mean probably within a year – I can’t imagine either one of those or any of these kind of cross-suits having a direct impact because it’s going to take forever to wend its way through the system. These are leverage moves.

I am so disappointed. I’m just going to come out and say it. I am so disappointed with the position that our side took which is that revenue sharing was a non-starter. I don’t know how else to get to an agreement myself. And I’m concerned that the agencies make so much money off of packaging fees that they may just look at the numbers and say we make more if we keep packaging directors and actors and never get anything from writers than we would if everybody goes to 10%. In which case this never ends. And the guild sort of unilaterally excludes its own membership from the four biggest agencies on the planet, which I’ve said before is unacceptable to me for so many reasons, not the least of which is I think it will permanently damage our status in television which is well-earned and well-deserved and hard fought for.

So, I’m really disappointed. And I think it’s something that has to change. I don’t think we’re going to get there with a lot of the same people in charge. I don’t think anything is going to happen until an election. And I just feel a little jerked around. I think that the vote that we had, the implication was give us negotiation strength so we can negotiate a deal and we haven’t negotiated anything. We’ve just said, nah, no packaging fees. So, I’m upset. I’m upset. Yeah.

**John:** I hear all that. And so last time as you vented I didn’t sort of respond back. I do want to respond back on some things because I feel like there’s some differences of opinion here that are important to voice.

So I can’t say some things that are sort of stuff that’s ongoing. I do think it’s a little disingenuous to say that, well, you can say that you gave him your vote on moving ahead to give them leverage to make a deal. But I think it’s very clear and there’s good tape to show that the request with the vote is to vote honestly, to vote your conscience, and not to vote to give them leverage. And that’s a thing that was said repeatedly in the run up to it.

So, I can totally understand why you felt you were doing that and that could have been your intention, but that wasn’t a thing that was asked for. Am I communicating that clearly?

**Craig:** Yes. I disagree.

**John:** OK. We can disagree on that point.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I share your frustration and disappointment at this process. I think I quite naturally direct most of my frustration and disappointment at the agencies for not looking at their clients, or their former clients, and a valuable thing for them to be winning back. And I don’t see them trying very hard to do it. And so I think a difference I’ve noticed with the smaller agencies and we’re going to get to Verve later on, but of the major agencies only Verve was the one who emailed out a survey to all their former clients saying like, hey, what do you actually want. And they took the results of what they heard back from their former clients and realized like, oh crap, we should probably actually take that seriously.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I don’t see the agencies, big, and some of the smaller ones, too, taking that seriously.

**Craig:** I agree with you on that.

**John:** That’s a thing I would hope to see more of in this near period.

**Craig:** You won’t. [laughs] You won’t. I don’t foresee that changing on their part. I mean, just so you know, I don’t think that their angels in any way, shape, or form. To me they’re a known quantity in a sense, so I just – I’m so pragmatic. You know, I just think like, OK, they’re not going to stop being leopards, but we need to figure out how to get them to stop taking bites out of our leg and go back to biting other people on the leg. And any kind of hope that they’re going to find their way toward some sort of more moral position is I think ultimately going to be fruitless.

**John:** Oh, no, no, I’m not arguing for a moral position. I’m arguing strictly practical. Strictly sort of like what do the numbers tell us. And what is the opinion of the folks we were trying to represent as clients? And I don’t see them actually doing that.

As I would say in the run up to it they were doing a lot of outreach meetings trying to sway that opinion but didn’t do a lot of actually listening sort of what that opinion would be or what the opinion is right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. They blew that. They blew it. No question.

**John:** I do want to talk a moment about the revenue sharing, the decision not to move ahead with the revenue sharing. And we’ll link to the video which sort of explains why that became a non-starter. You know, as the video explains it wasn’t simply that it was the moral issue of sort of we’re now trying to share this thing we don’t think should exist. It was also the practical matter of how the hell are we supposed to divvy up this pie and divvy up this pie not only necessarily among writers but other folks who would be perhaps entitled to a piece of this packaging fees. It became – it was basically like kick it all at the WGA to figure out how to disentangle this incredible mass of stuff that would be heading our direction. And it wasn’t clear how soon that money would be coming. It became clear that we were negotiating to enter into a percentage negotiation on this thing was to accept a tremendous amount of responsibility for dividing this thing that was probably indivisible.

And that there were other topics. There were other solutions that were not being seriously considered because this had been the anointed decision.

**Craig:** I think it’s our responsibility if we’re going to demand that our membership fire all their agents that they have relationships with and empower our guild to negotiate with the agencies, then yeah, it’s their responsibility to do the difficult thing. Of course it’s difficult. If it were easy, you know, this wouldn’t be a negotiation or at least the potential for a negotiation. It’s not going to be as difficult as the MBA which is 800 pages.

We have models for divvying pooled amounts of money between writers, directors, and actors – residuals for instance is an excellent model. And I do think there’s a way to do revenue sharing that restores the you-make-more-when-we-make-more. The fact that it simply wasn’t explored either somebody – either we don’t have the right people because our people are saying, “Oh golly, the math is too hard.” Or we’re using that and when I say we I mean some people inside the building are using that as an excuse. I don’t know how else to get there. I literally don’t. I’ve thought about it for a while. I don’t know how else to get there and I don’t think we will get there any other way.

And, by the way, we’re leaving money on the table which I think is really bad for writers. Again, we’ve empowered the union to make a deal for us and they’re not. Currently the plan appears to be nothing, because saying we’re going to negotiate with the individual agencies, they’re not doing that. They’re not going to do it.

**John:** Again, things I can say and things I can’t say. I think what you say from Abrams was an attempt to do that. And so we’ll see–

**Craig:** I’m sorry, they don’t count. And no offense to Abrams, and no offense to their clients, but the big four are the ones that we have to figure out how to live with. We have to. Or we’re going to be damaged.

**John:** Yeah. I understand the sense of the necessity of figuring out how we’re going to deal with the giant elephants in the room.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I totally do hear that and understand. I will say that there are the members of the negotiating committee and the board do understand that and do have – that is a subject of discussion.

**Craig:** I’m praying for all of us. And when I say I’m praying I don’t pray. I just sit and stew really is what I do.

**John:** As an atheist Craig prays. All right, are we ready to roll the die again?

**Craig:** Roll it.

**John:** Roll an eight-sided die.

**Siri:** It’s four this time.

**Craig:** Four.

**John:** Four.

**Craig:** Oh, more WGA stuff.

**John:** Oh, this is a very related thing. So it’s the WGA elections. The announcement came out about the upcoming WGA elections. Every year we have an election. Every year on this podcast we talk about the elections. In certain cycles we’re electing the officers, so the president, the vice president, and the combined secretary/treasurer. In other cycles we are just electing half of the board. So there’s a total of 16 people on the WGA West board. Eight each time are up for reelection or for selection for those spots.

So if you’re looking through the list that came out recently of who those candidates are you will notice Craig Mazin is among the people who is running for the WGA board.

**Craig:** What an idiot. What an idiot.

**John:** I can say that because I’m not a person who is running for election in this cycle.

**Craig:** So smart.

**John:** So Craig and I would not be on the board at the same time if this were to happen. There are eight board seats. There are 17 board candidates. But there could be some more being added because people can also submit their names by petition. Those petitions have to be received at the guild by July 23.

There will be a candidates’ night forum which I suspect this year will actually be fascinating. Where people can ask questions of the candidates and sort of engage in a discussion there. That is happening Wednesday, August 28, at the WGA headquarters, probably in the newly refurbished room that is so much better than it used to be.

**Craig:** So much better.

**John:** So much better. Voting ends on Monday, September 16. So, the candidates’ night forum is probably the start of the election cycle, so the 28th. But all voting is done by September 16. So, we’ve still got a long runway ahead of us here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Thank god. Because I really don’t want to do any of this stuff for a while. Campaigning is inherently demeaning to everyone. I really do believe that. I wish we didn’t have to do any of it. But I understand the point of campaigning. I mean, you need to let voters know what you think.

You and I talked about how we do the podcast. When you were running our basic rule was we could talk about WGA issues the way we always do and we could endorse other people, but you couldn’t campaign for yourself. And I think that’s a perfectly good way we should approach mine.

**John:** And on this podcast I will not be promoting you either, so it will just be a discussion of the general things and the election, encouraging people to vote, but not to vote necessarily for–

**Craig:** Me.

**John:** You, a person who is on this here podcast.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, Craig, things you get to look forward which may be different from the last time you were on the board because that was 10 years ago? More. It was a long time ago.

**Craig:** Almost 15 years ago.

**John:** 15 years since you’ve been on the board. So a thing you will probably be doing, you will probably go to wix.com because everybody goes to the exact same website for the endorsement stuff. So you put up a little endorsement website with a form that fills out. People fill out their form.

**Craig:** I was the first person to use an online form.

**John:** Craig, you were a trailblazer back in the day.

**Craig:** I was just lazy. It was Wufoo was what I was using back then.

**John:** Wufoo is the other good choice. So Wufoo probably will be the one you’re using. You know what, I said Wix. I bet it was Wufoo that I used this last time. I blocked it out of my memory.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But that will happen and you might have some events. You’ll get some people to endorse you. It will be a thing.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Craig, it’s important to have screenwriters on the board. Because here’s a general pitch I can make on behalf of sort of interests of the board and just what I’ve seen is there will be really smart, talented people running for everything which is great. I want to make sure that as I leave the board, as Andrea Berloff leaves the board, and Zak Penn leaves the board, that’s three screenwriters we’re going to be down. So please do elect some folks who are primarily feature writers, or at least do write features because some of those issues are different and we need to make sure that screenwriters are well represented on the board.

**Craig:** I feel like I have enough anger for five screenwriters.

**John:** Yes. But you’re only one person.

**Craig:** I’m only one person.

**John:** And you will also be busy doing other things. So I want to make sure that the screen subcommittee that Michelle Maroney and I started and ran these last two years can persist, because there are enough people on it to actually get that work done.

**Craig:** Nevertheless we persisted. We will persist.

**John:** Nevertheless.

**Craig:** We will persist.

**John:** And now we will roll the die again.

**Craig:** Woo-woo.

**John:** Roll an eight-sided die.

**Siri:** Rolling. It’s seven.

**John:** Seven.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Oh my god, we’re so WGA focused in the start here. I apologize. This really was random. Every year the WGA has to publish its annual report, its financials. And every year on this podcast we talk about it, so let’s quickly look through the financial report. We’ll put a link to the PDF in the show notes here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, some interesting things popped out but no more interesting to me than the very first thing that the guild currently for fiscal year, for this fiscal year, ran an operating surplus of $10 million. And this practically sent me through the roof. Why?

Because, it’s not like surpluses are inherently a bad thing. In a sense you can squirrel away from stuff for a potential cold winter. My problem is that screenwriters pay 1.5% in dues. It used to be 1%. Then it went to 1.5% of every dollar they make in writing income and residuals to the union. Television writers don’t. They pay 1.5% of WGA minimum because there’s this other surplus money they make as producers that the WGA can’t touch. So essentially feature writers have been over-taxed in a way that is hard to describe. And when we’re running a deficit it’s hard to make an argument that you should be reducing one category’s dues rate. But we’re not.

So to add insult to injury we’re running a surplus of $10 million. That’s for an organization that spends about $43 million a year. So that’s like 25%. It’s a lot. So, I think dues reform has to happen. Has to.

**John:** Great. That’s a thing Craig Mazin can do if you were elected. That won’t be controversial at all, Craig. I think that will be smooth sailing, nothing to worry about. Those aren’t live wires sitting in a shallow puddle.

**Craig:** It’s all I’ve ever wanted.

**John:** No worries there. Let’s take a look at some of the little chart things because I always find that interesting. So the number of writers reporting earnings, which is basically the number of working writers really, that dropped 0.6%, but the overall amount earned grew 4.2%. That was slower growth than previous years, but sometimes those numbers in the last year adjust upwards because stuff gets reported late. So I’m not going to take that with too much – I would say it looks more flat than anything else, so we’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s my guess, too. But of note we have increased our earnings every single year for five years running now. We’re doing well.

**John:** And easily you can point to the growth of streaming television as why there are more jobs. We’re making more money because there are more writers working. There were 6,057 writers working this last year earning $1.5 billion. That’s great. We cannot count on that always happening. There’s obviously disparities between features and television. What I found interesting is that there was a decline in the number of people working in TV but not in features. Actually the number of people working in features was up a tiny bit.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s Netflix.

**John:** That’s probably Netflix. Movies written for Netflix. I’m sure you’re right.

**Craig:** I think that’s what it is. Also, it’s good to note that even though we are essentially flat in terms of the number of writers reporting earnings, I mean, it’s just like whatever 38 fewer, we still are going up in earnings, meaning we’re earning more per writer which is great to see.

**John:** Yeah. But let’s take a look at sort of why that is is it tracks pretty closely to the increase in scale minimums that happen. Because particularly in TV, as Craig said earlier about dues, is that in television we’re only looking at the writing income and that writing income tends to be scale. It’s producing income that’s above scale. And so as we’re looking at writing income increasing that’s largely because every three years we’re negotiating for increases in those things. So, that’s largely what’s pushing those numbers up.

So, we’ve just got to keep pushing those numbers up.

**Craig:** That’s true. In screen, however, where that doesn’t apply at all, we are again doing better, which is great, because screen, you know, really got hammered for a while. So in feature I think entirely because of Netflix, I really do, we have essentially again holding flat the number of writers between 2017 and 2018, but the income goes up again, I think when everything is rounded up probably around 8% or so, or 9%, which is fantastic. It means, again, we are earning more per writer in features which is a sign of the marketplace.

**John:** Yep. Let’s take a last look at residuals. So TV residuals were up 10.6% to $307 million. That’s good. Theatrical residuals were basically flat line, it was a 1% increase to $154 million. The best part of that chart to look at is the source of where that money comes from, because the actual money coming in is about the same year to year, it’s that it used to be home video and now it’s entirely “new media,” which is streaming, it’s Netflix, once again.

The answer to most of the questions in the annual financial report is Netflix.

**Craig:** Correct. It has made a massive difference in things which is scary. You actually don’t want that to be so concentrated in one area, but while it’s happening let us celebrate it and make hay as the sun shines as they say. The only other thing I noticed, and this just sort of is a general bums me out thing, our legal department every year reports the number of open cases they have. Those are cases that they’re pursuing that have not yet been resolved. And every year roughly that number is around 500 and change.

It’s too much. Either we don’t have enough lawyers or, I don’t know.

**John:** Actually, I’m going to – so I will say that I see the settlements and I see sort of what actually happens. The amount of money that legal brings in in getting stuff done is really impressive. So, the fact that we may have 500, those aren’t the same 500 year to year.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** That’s how many they’re actively pursuing. And so you may absolutely be correct that we may need more resources there, but I don’t know that more resources would actually push that number down. It might just mean that we are bringing more cases. I think the better thing to look at is how much money are we collecting for our writers who are not able to collect it for themselves. And I think that is a meaningful statistic to look at.

**Craig:** Yeah. And for that we kind of move in a weird way between about $4.5 million and $16 million, it was a high water mark in 2014. 2017 was $5.6. This year it was $10.8. So, yeah, you know, it’s in that kind of zone. This looks to be more like an off year for us, but it may be cyclical. We may get more stuff done by the end of the year. I don’t know.

But, yeah, you know, I think more lawyers would be a good thing.

**John:** So, and here’s what I’ll stress I that whether it’s $4 million or $10 million that the guild is bringing in overall, if you are one of those writers who is not getting paid or needs that money that is a game changer. So we have to make that for every member we are able to do that work and sort of deliver the checks that they deserve.

**Craig:** Unquestionably.

**John:** So that’s a thing that if you are back on the board this next time you can look at their reports every time and see who we’re getting money for and that to me is one of the best parts of every meeting is seeing what they were actually able to do and solve.

**Craig:** Yep. I will.

**John:** Let us roll the dice again.

**Craig:** Roll it.

**John:** Roll an eight-sided die.

**Siri:** OK. Seven this time.

**Craig:** We already did that one.

**John:** OK, we repeated a seven. So maybe we need to switch to a D6. Let’s renumber and go to D6. Change here. So we’re going to get rid of – number four is gone.

**Craig:** Number five.

**John:** So four will now become your solo. Four is now your solo.

**Craig:** And five is gone, too.

**John:** Roll a six-sided die.

**Siri:** It’s five.

**John:** Number five – dots, dashes, and parentheticals. So, a long time ago I would do these little videos on YouTube where I would record my screen as I was writing through a scene and talking through stuff and people found them really helpful. They were just a huge hassle for me to do and so I sort of stopped doing them. But this last week I was answering a question, I guess coming in through the mailbox through ask@johnaugust.com about when do I use three dots versus when do I use two dashes. And it felt like the kind of thing that like it’s just going to make much more sense for me to just show in a video than try to describe it.

So I’ll put a link in the show notes to it, but it’s a little six-minute video I did that sort of talks through the conventions of when to use three dots versus dashes when dialogue is interrupted or when people don’t finish their thoughts.

Craig, was it consistent with what you do? I go for three dots when someone is trailing off, when it’s like an incomplete thought. I use two dashes for someone who is cut off by either another event or someone else interrupting them. Is that what you tend to do?

**Craig:** Essentially. Yeah. I will also – I will use dashes if I’m cutting them off because I’m putting a parenthetical in or some action takes place. So it’s meant to say there is no real disruption. If I go from you’re saying something dash-dash and then you’re saying something start with two dashes, and then continue. That just means you keep rolling.

So, yeah, that’s pretty much what I do.

**John:** The last little point that I talk about in the video is that when characters are talking over each other you have a couple of choices. And a tempting choice is always to do dual dialogue and it’s rarely the right choice. So there can be cases where you have two people speechifying at the same time. And the point is that they’re not listening to each other. That’s an example where dual dialogue might make a lot of sense.

You also have situations where do you want to go to the park, one character says yes, one character says no, and they say it simultaneously. You can dual dialogue that.

But if someone is just overlapping or you want the sense that people are talking over each other, I find the parenthetical of overlapping or at the same time tends to be more helpful in communicating what I’m trying to convey on the page. Is that your experience, too?

**Craig:** It is. I almost never use it. I used it one time out of all of the five scripts for Chernobyl and it was when Akimov and Dyatlov are having an argument about what the rules state, that you can’t lower it from 50%, when we came down from 80%. And I wanted it to basically be these two guys were essentially talking over each other and not listening to each other and that worked.

But by and large I just think that forcing overlaps like that is very mannered and it’s also uncommon. People don’t really do that with each other. They might overlap each other a little bit naturally at the beginning and end of something, or interrupt each other, but it’s so rare to have people just talking at the same time and not stopping.

**John:** We were rewatching Call Me by Your Name last night and there is a section in that where this Italian couple is at the table and they’re just talking constantly. And so that was a situation where you literally would put the side-by-side dialogue because it’s 30 seconds where they’re talking at the same time and not paying attention to each other at all. So that’s an example where you might want to do that.

But this last week on Twitter, Craig, someone had tweeted at both of us asking how much do you use beat. So there’s a convention which is not maybe a great convention in screenwriting, where as a parenthetical you just say “beat” which means sort of a pause or it’s a moment. It’s an interruption and such. And I said I don’t tend to use beat all that often. That I probably use it less than I used to. But I really liked your answer to it, so talk us through what you often do in that parenthetical.

**Craig:** Well, like you I’ve reduced my usage of beat, mostly because it’s so generic. It really is just saying nothing more than a mechanical instruction to the actor, pause. Right? But a pause is there for a reason. And as I’ve kind of gone on in my career I’ve just become more and more enamored of just informing the actor and director what the subtext is through parenthetical or through action lines. And so instead of just saying beat I might say reconsiders, or questions herself, or realizes. So that the reader and the actor and the director all understand why something there is happening. And it also gives them the choice of how to time it. So you don’t have this rigid pause but rather sometimes that little flash can happen so quickly that we see it happening and they keep talking and that’s way better than a kind of overdone stop, two, three, next line.

**John:** For sure. So I really liked how you phrased that on Twitter. It was a better answer than I gave so I wanted to make sure that you said it aloud because not everybody reads the tweets.

**Craig:** Well, thank you, John.

**John:** Rolling the dice. Roll a four-sided die.

**Craig:** So cute.

**Siri:** It’s three.

**John:** It’s number three.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s your new agent.

**John:** I got a new agent. Yeah, so that was big news of this last week. So for the first time in 20 years I have a new agent, a new agency. I switched to Verve. So I decided I would tweet out that I’d done this just so that I could actually say my whole – present my whole case and not have it sort of misreported in the trades. And that mostly worked. So there was an article in the trades about it, but it actually just said what I said and I didn’t have to answer any reporter questions.

**Craig:** Isn’t it amazing? Like I honestly feel like 95% of the things that are in the sort of web journalism are simply regurgitations of other things. Like they don’t do any – did they even call you? Or did they just reprint what you said?

**John:** They just reprinted what I said. And here’s the thing. The conversation we had earlier about the agency situation, they will recap that as if they are quoting it. So I just want to call out the people who are going to do this in Deadline especially right now. You know what, at least mention the Scriptnotes podcast. Because so often they’re saying like “In a recent podcast” and it’s like what podcast. Oh, my podcast? That’s where I said it, in my own podcast.

**Craig:** Why wouldn’t you call us? If you’re doing an article you should call. I mean, all you’re doing is just, what, writing down something transcribed and it’s not – how is that a thing?

Anyway, so you have a new agent at Verve.

**John:** I have a new agent at Verve. So here are the tweets I sent out and this really is sort of a good recap, but I’ll do a little framing around it afterwards. So, I tweeted, “I’ve signed with Verve. They’re the agency that represents some of my favorite writers, including Michael Arndt, Meg LeFauve and three of my former assistants,” which is true. “I’m excited to join them.”

Tweet two, “Back in April, I tweeted that I’d happily give my UTA agent of 20+ years a kidney. The offer still stands. But my frustration with big agency practices has only grown. I don’t think they’re putting clients first.”

Tweet three, “When I toured Verve, I really liked the vibe and spirit. It felt like a good match. To be clear: I would have met with ANY agency that had signed the agreement. I know a lot of screenwriters who will do the same.”

Four, “My decision to go to Verve is entirely my own. Yes, I’m on the WGA board but that’s not why I’m making the move. I remain committed to reaching an agency agreement that serves all writers. WGA West members can help by filling out the survey coming to inboxes this weekend.”

So those are my four tweets. And it was my decision to move there and that’s not going to be applicable to a lot of other people, but you have actually changed agents more than I have. And so I kind of want to talk through what it’s like to change agents because this was kind of a new thing for me. So I could talk through sort of what I did, but I suspect there’s some useful things for anyone who is considering moving from one agent to another for whatever reason if it’s not sort of this reason.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Cool. So, in my case I reached out to see who is there and who is there that could vouch for them or just give me some experience on the ground. So I reached out to Jac Schaeffer. She’s the writer who is running the Scarlet Witch show that Megan McDonnell, our former Scriptnotes producer, is writing on. So I reached out to Jac and I said, “Hey, I know you’re at Verve. Are you happy at Verve? And if you are at Verve who is your principal agent there because I’m considering making a switch?”

She wrote back that her agent there was Bill Weinstein, he’s fantastic, and offered to make the email introduction. And that is a very common way things happen here is someone who knows both people makes the email introduction just so it’s not me blinding emailing into somebody at Verve.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think the times that I’ve done this, there was one time where I really did a big I’m going to sit down and meet with all of the major agencies and talk to all of them and then pick one. And with that I used my attorney. I basically had him kind of call and say, “OK, would you like to meet with him? And who would like to meet with him over there?” And those were decided and off we went. It was a week of awkward couches.

**John:** And so used your attorney for that, other writers might use a manager for that. That’s a very classic thing that managers set up agency meetings for a person to go in and sign with an agency.

So in this case it was this writer who had made the introduction. I emailed with Bill Weinstein. We scheduled a phone call. We had a good phone call. Set up a time for me to go in. And before I went in they read some stuff so they’d have some stuff to talk about when I actually came in.

I went in, I met – I shook so many hands. I met kind of everyone at the agency. I sat down with Bill Weinstein and two other agents to talk through specifically what my goals were and what I was looking at for the next year and couple years ahead in my career.

Then I talked to my attorney, an important person to get involved with this.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And then when the time came to make a decision I called Verve, I called UTA to let them know that I was making the change, and that was it. A thing I need to sort of clarify because the timing looks weird is that the same day I announced that I was moving over to Verve was the day that UTA announced that they were suing the UTA. That was a coincidence. That wasn’t one causing the other. So that was not the reason for why I left.

**Craig:** You know, something you said there just flicked a little switch in my head. And it was about the manager thing. One thing to think about if you are a writer that has an attorney and a manager and you’re trying to figure out which agent you should go to, maybe rely on the lawyer a little bit more. Because managers are already inherently dealing in a kind of conflicted space. I mean, all the problems that we have with agencies, managers have codified from the very beginning of their work. That’s what they do. They want to produce your stuff and then you don’t pay commission.

So similarly a manager may be funneling you to an agent that they can kind of protect each other with, because inevitably down the line if you have an issue with one or the other you’re going to go to one or the other and say what do you think. And sometimes they just protect each other. And that’s not what you want.

What you want is an independent adviser. You don’t want necessarily a sweetheart deal being made behind your back that you don’t even know about.

**John:** Yep. I think that’s really good advice. And attorneys tend to see just a wider scope of things because they’re just dealing with many different clients and many different situations. They know a little bit more about how the sausage is made sometimes. I think it’s a good recommendation to at least enlist your attorney’s opinion if they’re not actually steering the conversation around.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** But I also say, I mean, the reason why I reached out to this writer was because I wanted to make sure that she was having a good experience at this agency and with this agent. And so asking for those personal recommendations is an important part of this as well.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** So right now Verve is the only sort of mid-sized agency that has signed the agreement. So I was really happy at Verve, but that was also sort of my one choice of a place, a midsize agency, that I could sign with. But in a macro sense let’s talk a little bit about the pros and cons of big agencies versus little agencies. Because I think there’s some real things to think through.

So at what other point this all gets resolved and people have a choice of I could go to a giant or I could go to a smaller agency, some pros and cons.

Some cons. In theory a smaller agency has a smaller information network. They have fewer agents who are talking to everyone at all the studios. Their tentacles are in less things in terms of understanding all the jobs that are out there or what’s really happening. Their information network could be smaller.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They might have less access to certain IP or certain deals. So, they might have – you know, the big agencies would have a big book-lit department that would track all the books that are coming out. And might be able to steer some of those your way early.

They would have less history of making certain kinds of deals, especially big overall deals. Like the mega blockbuster deals.

**Craig:** Right. The monster deals for your J.J. Abrams and your Mike Schurs and those guys.

**John:** So interesting on the patching thing is that I sat down with a director this last week who was at Verve and his point was – it was an interesting pushback against that – is he said that being at a purely literary agency, so Verve only represents writers and directors, he finds it very easy to go after any actor because there’s not an in-house stable. You’re not competing with your own folks inside the agency. So, he’s actually been able to have good relationships with the talent agents at the different agencies when it comes time to go after an actor for a role. So that’s a thing he found coming from a big agency to a smaller agency, he found that helpful.

**Craig:** And I can see that, particularly if you’re talking about features. In television I think things are a little bit trickier. Well, why? Because the agencies are addicted to packaging fees. They are motivated to package. Yeah.

**John:** We’ll list that as a pro. I would say a pro is fewer clients means fewer internal conflicts. So basically we’re not all fighting over the same thing. And we talked about that in our conflict of interest episode a zillion years ago which is that the more folks you have who are going after the same things, there’s naturally going to be some conflicts among clients and that’s just a thing that has to be managed. And the fewer clients the fewer conflicts there are there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s probably less positioning which is that sense of they’re not actually putting you even on the list for that job because they have three other people who are clients who they need to be sending that to first.

**Craig:** That’s the danger. I mean, ultimately you are competing against everyone. But you want your advocate advocating. And they can’t really advocate for you fully if there are three people ahead of you on the list that make more money and are more important. I mean, that is an inherent issue at these agencies. And even at a small agency like Verve it could potentially be – somebody on Bill Weinstein’s list just took one step backwards. [laughs]

But you’re right. There are fewer potential conflicts to be had there. I think at a place like CAA it’s always conflicted.

**John:** Oh yeah. The last pro I’ll list is that you as an individual client probably have a bigger impact on that agency’s bottom line at a smaller agency than at a large agency.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And part of that is just because there’s more clients, but also the bigger agencies are – as we’ve seen – are invested in a lot of other things, too. And so the financial interest in making sure that each of these clients is served to their best capability is different at a small agency than at a bigger agency.

**Craig:** Right. Absolutely true.

**John:** Let’s roll the dice again.

**Craig:** So much fun.

**John:** Roll a four-sided die.

**Siri:** It’s two.

**Craig:** It’s two.

**John:** Oh, Chernobyl!

**Craig:** Chernobyl.

**John:** Craig, so we haven’t gotten to talk about Chernobyl since it resolved and so you’re so sick of talking about Chernobyl. Can I just congratulate you again on–?

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** –On Chernobyl and on the podcast which I thought were fantastic.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** The Chernobyl podcast is the top rated TV and film podcast in the world.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, congratulations on that.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** Which is great. Questions I had for you, and these are not really spoilers, so if you have not seen all five episodes I don’t think I’m going to spoil anything for you in talking through this.

**Craig:** There are no spoilers. It blew up.

**John:** It did blow up. Episodes one and episodes five cover some of the time periods, particularly in the control room. My question – does anything that was originally intended to be shot for number one or number five drift back and forth in the edit?

**Craig:** Nope. It’s exactly as planned.

**John:** But I suspect you did shoot all of the control room stuff at one time.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** You didn’t like send everybody off.

**Craig:** Oh no. We shot it all in one. There was one week. One week in that control room. And, you know, we – when I look back at that week we got a lot of pages done.

**John:** Oh, I’m sure.

**Craig:** Well, that was – there were really only three sets we constructed. We really tried as much as we could to be on location or on an exterior. We built the sort of Kremlin conference room because we couldn’t find one that worked right with its little hallway attachment.

We built Lyudmilla and Vasily’s apartment just again to control this little apartment. And then we built the control room. And the control room was our biggest build. And Johan and Jakob shot the hell out of it. I mean, they found angles that I would have never even thought of and just kept it looking fresh all the time. But, yeah, it was a great week. I loved all those guys in there. They were all fantastic. Just good people. Great actors. Some people don’t know that the guy who plays Stolyarchuk is Billy Postlethwaite, Pete Postlethwaite’s son.

**John:** Oh how nice.

**Craig:** Great guy. They were all just terrific. It was a joy to work with those guys.

**John:** How early in the schedule was the control room shot? Was that quite early on in the months of shooting?

**Craig:** I would say it was sort of – I’m a little fuzzy but I’m going to say it’s maybe like a month in out of four months. April, May, June, July. Maybe a month out of five months. It was about a five-month shoot. So it wasn’t in the middle. It wasn’t right up front. Part of it was that we needed time to get it built.

**John:** I get that. In the library at johnaugust.com we have the scripts to all five episodes, but on the podcast earlier you said that you initially thought of this as six episodes. What would the extra episode have been or was it two things combined? What was the difference between the initial plan of six and what became the five episodes?

**Craig:** So, I was writing episode two, I had laid out a show bible and I had a description of how each episode would work. And the way I described episode one, episode four, and episode five, and six I guess at the time, was all correct. But when I was writing episode two I found that – I noticed, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but in the new world of limited series where you’re allowed to just set your own episode limit kind of it seems like writers sometimes are a little languid with their pacing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this. But they sometimes – I’m like I think you might be wasting my time here with this kind of indulgent 20 minutes.

And because the second episode was taking place essentially in the day, the one or two days following the explosion of a nuclear reactor, I really wanted to people have the sensation that they were just falling through an episode, just out of control. So, I just said, you know what, I’m just going to tighten everything up. I think I can tighten this and just make it way more urgent if I combine episode two and episode three into one episode. And that’s what I did.

And so I called up HBO and said, hey, look, I’m thinking about doing this is that OK? And they were like, yeah, that’s great. And then later – because I come out of movies I found out that I get paid by the episode.

**John:** Ha!

**Craig:** So that’s why I think some of these limited series are a little long, you know. I get paid for another episode, yeah, sure.

**John:** What was the episode ender for episode two as you initially had thought about it in your show bible? Or you had not gotten to what individual scene would end an episode at that point?

**Craig:** You know what? I’ll tell you right now. So the original end of episode two happened around the point in episode two where General Pikalov drives his truck in and comes back and reports that it’s not 3.6 roentgen, it’s 15,000. And then the next thing I showed was a scene that we never had in the show, I never even wrote it. It was the moment where the Swedes determine that something was wrong at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant which was kind of the beginning of the end of the secrecy.

So that’s where that ended. And I think I made a smart choice to combine.

**John:** Yeah, I would say that the truck driving in there felt like it was a moment that could have ended the show and yet there was still 20 minutes, there was more runway left there and so it made sense. You did the right thing.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** My last question for you. If you could email yourself back three years ago when you were just starting on this project some piece of advice what advice would you give to younger Craig Mazin going into this about the show?

**Craig:** Hmm. I think I would advise myself to stand by my instincts. And generally I did. But I have – this is the first thing that I’ve ever done that was truly mine. It wasn’t an assignment. It wasn’t a sequel. I didn’t have a writing partner. It was mine. There was no source material like a fictional book or something like that.

So, I went in and said this is the product of my instincts and now unlike those other situations where a lot of times I get into people-pleasing mode and want everyone to be happy, in this case I just was like the most important person to be happy is me. Which is a very weird thing for me because I’m not built that way. I just mostly want the puzzle to work.

But I allowed myself a tiny bit of preciousness, precocity.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of those. And I think it helped. And I don’t mean to imply that I ever threw any tantrums or anything. It was more like when I felt that out of the five people in the room, four of them thought one thing and I thought the other, I gave my point of view a full fair hearing. I didn’t always. Sometimes you do change your mind because other people are right. But I didn’t default to, OK well, it’s a vote.

**John:** Good. So you advice would be stick with that the whole time through. Because probably earlier on in the process you felt like, oh, I’m going to have to bend a bit here and you learned that bending was not the right solution.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes I would, you know, I would bend and then I would come back and say, no, no, no, no, we’ve got to go back the other way. And that’s, you know, by and large that worked. But, again, I don’t mean to imply that I wasn’t open to things because all sorts of contributions came in from all directions, from our key cast and from Johan of course and from Carolyn and Jane and everybody involved.

It’s just that it’s not really that I said I’m not going to listen to other people. It’s mostly that I said while I’m listening to other people I will also consider what I want equally, which is new for me. So, I would want that to be fresher in my mind before I started.

**John:** Sounds great. All right. We’re down to two things, so I’m going to say flip a coin.

**Craig:** Oh, I like that.

**Siri:** Tails.

**John:** Tails. Tails is Craig’s solo episode. So, Craig, you did a first-ever solo episode. This is back Episode 403 where you taught us how to write a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was really good. People loved it. And so, here’s let’s read what Bob wrote. “Immediately upon hearing Hegelian dialectic I shot up from the coach and started taking notes, hitting the pause button frequently and shaking my head as I’d never heard the phrase ‘central dramatic argument’ before. It didn’t stop there. The presentation led me over to my script and allowed me to see it in a whole new way.”

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** And I’m going to paste other things in the show notes so you can see and be happy about people’s reaction to it. But I’ve got some questions.

**Craig:** Go for it.

**John:** Here are some questions I have for you. I can very easily imagine someone listening to this or reading the transcript and saying like, “Ah-ha, Craig has found a new formula.”

**Craig:** Oh god. I hope not.

**John:** And I think the reason why they might do that is because the same way that Syd Field took Casablanca and sort of made it fit this sort of paradigm someone could say like, oh, all movies are like Finding Nemo and everything should follow in that thing. So, do you have any sense of how to encourage people to use what’s helpful here but not let this be a straitjacket for them?

**Craig:** Sure. So, Pixar movies in general are formulaic. There is a Pixar formula. And the Pixar formula happens to mesh nicely with my point of view about structure. But that’s – they do it in a very pure way. And animation can do things in story that live action can’t. Animation is almost like pure story. In fact, you will see, I mean, this model of how I’ve described things isn’t just Pixar. It’s across almost every major animated film now, ever since Pixar came on the scene.

But for live action this is meant to just be inspiration for how to think about your characters and how to think about why things happen in a movie at certain times. But your choice of execution should be as unique to you as your own fingerprint. If it’s not, then, you know, you will just have made a very well-structured piece of crap.

So this is not a formula. This is meant to be a kind of philosophical musing on why narrative works the way it does. Why it appeals to us the way it does. And in that sense if I’ve inspired people to stop thinking about plot and start thinking about character first then I will have done my job.

**John:** Great. And I will say having seen Toy Story 4, which I’m guessing you have not seen yet.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** It does – it’s completely the Craig Mazin plan. It really does follow the kinds of things that you’re talking about. If you look at Woody’s journey through Toy Story 4 it is a lot of what you’re pitching in your episode.

I want to make it clear that most screenwriters that you encounter in real life are not going to use thesis and antithesis. So Craig is using philosophical terms that are meaningful for his argument, but if you start throwing those around causally people will look at you kind of cross-eyed, or they’ll know that you listened to that episode of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They’re not things that I’m casually using. Like Aline and I aren’t having mussels and talking over these things.

**Craig:** No, no, or having mussels.

**John:** Oh, Aline and I are having mussels on a regular basis.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** In Larchmont.

**Craig:** That’s your shellfish choice?

**John:** I love mussels.

**Craig:** No, absolutely true. This is not something you want to just trot out when you’re on your water bottle tour of Los Angeles and you’re sitting in a room with a studio executive or a producer. You could easily sound like a pompous jackass if you begin talking about Hegel. Yeah. This is really more of an inside baseball philosophical thing for you to think about when you’re alone quiet with your laptop or desktop.

**John:** Yes. I would caution that Craig’s philosophy if applied without subtlety and artistry could make it seem like the choices are being made by the author rather than the characters. And so just to really be mindful that your characters don’t end up becoming in a weird way plot bots responding to all the terrible things that the author is doing to them.

And so that’s always one of the trickiest things in writing narrative is you’re laying out these roads for your characters to walk down but making it feel like your characters are choosing to walk down those roads and that they actually have free will. That’s not a unique criticism of Craig’s screenwriting philosophy here, but if done poorly I think that’s what the result is going to feel like. It’s just an angry, evil god punishing these characters.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you’re doing that you’ve got it completely backwards. So the idea is that you need to understand this human being fully. And they need to be interesting. And what they feel and think needs to be interesting. And then you have to ask what would be the most fascinating thing to do to that person given what I know about them. The worst thing you could do would be to go this is the point where torture happens and then they just get tortured but it’s not interesting. It’s just torture. That’s, you know, well some people like that. But it’s not my thing.

**John:** Lastly, I think if I were to lay out sort of my philosophical argument for screenwriting and sort of how to write a movie I would approach it a lot differently. A thing that is a huge focus to me which I didn’t hear you talking a lot about is the role of the audience and the role of the audience’s expectation and the social contract you make with the audience and how they are the third party in all of this. And so you have the author intent. You have the character’s intent. But you also have the audience’s intent. And to really be mindful of what does the audience want. And that they are a character in this drama as well. And to be really thinking about their perspective on that.

And that doesn’t fit neatly into the thesis and antithesis, but they are the other party who is engaged with this whole argument to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, I mean, the truth is I’m mostly thinking about them with this because I’m trying to get at why any of us like any story. But understanding, having an innate sense of what the audience is going to want to want is – that’s where talent is, I think. I mean–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s nothing – I can’t really – I mean, we had a clever headline for the episode, but this is not a substitute for talent. This is merely a way to help talented people organize their thoughts if they’re struggling or feeling like they’ve written something that’s plotty or they feel like they’ve run out of runway.

**John:** The last thing is I went through a list of my top movies and the top 100 movies to think of movies where this thesis/antithesis sort of dynamic doesn’t really come into play. And so there are a lot of movies where you don’t really see this. But I think as long as you’re looking at this as not a formula but a useful set of questions to be challenging yourself with as you start to write, it’s only going to benefit, even if the ultimate movie doesn’t fit into the dynamic of this character’s world view keeps getting challenged the way that Craig’s describing.

So, what I don’t want people to do is think like, well, you know, Jurassic Park doesn’t fit this at all and if you’re saying that Jurassic Park is a bad movie, no. We’re not saying that. I’m just saying that the kinds of questions that Craig is challenging you to ask would make even movies like Jurassic Park which don’t fit this overall template stronger.

**Craig:** Completely. Yeah. There’s nothing – I think I said in it, too, that this is really about a kind of movie. It’s about a very classic sort of movie-movie. But even a lot of classic movie-movies stray away from these things and that’s totally fine.

If you’re writing something and you’re loving it and you’re confident in it then you’re in a good space. If you’re writing something and you’re struggling and you’re not sure why, then maybe this will help. That’s about as much as I can–

**John:** Yeah, I would say the movies that it’s going to help most are the ones that feel like they kind of have a classic hero’s journey. A Joseph Campbell kind of thing. Because I think what you’ve done is a really smart way of addressing the stages of the hero’s journey, but what it really feels like on the character’s perspective. Or what they’re watching.

**Craig:** And it’s free. It’s free. You don’t have to pay $2,500 to go see some dude yammer on stage, or buy a book. It’s free.

**John:** Free!

**Craig:** I’m just trying to put these people out of business, obviously. [laughs]

**John:** It’s a noble goal.

**Craig:** This is just spite.

**John:** All right. Lastly, our last of our eight topics is Aladdin.

**Craig:** Aladdin!

**John:** Aladdin! So, Aladdin crossed $300 million domestic, $900 million worldwide so far. So it’s the highest grossing movie of my career, which is–

**Craig:** Congratulations.

**John:** Which is very exciting. And so I wanted to talk through sort of how much money I’ll be getting off of it. And because that’s the thing that people come to me. It’s like, “Man, you must be rolling in dough. Your movie made a ton of money.” And it’s like, no, it’s great that my movie made a ton of money. I think it’s important for people to understand that I don’t get any of that box office money. Like that ticket you bought, I don’t get any of that. But thank you for buying that ticket. It’s still meaningful and valuable that you bought that ticket.

So, screenwriters, I got paid good money to write a script that became a movie. And down the road thanks to the WGA I will also get residuals. And so residuals are for all the things that aren’t showing on a big screen or showing on an airplane, for weird reasons.

So it’s home video. It’s buying it on iTunes. It’s renting it on iTunes. We have a really good rate for renting on iTunes. So rent that movie on iTunes.

It’s for when it sells to a streaming service, when it shows up on ABC television. Those are the things where I get extra payments for it. So I don’t get any money right off the top of the box office. Sometimes some contracts will have a box office bonus. I checked through my contract. I don’t have any box office bonus, because that would have been swell.

**Craig:** That would have been swell.

**John:** I didn’t have one for Aladdin. But in lieu of that I got a credit bonus which is a common thing you’ll also see. For sharing credit I got a bonus for that.

But I was looking through, so if you’re curious about your residuals I know a lot of screenwriters who never check their residuals. And so on the guild website go to mywga.org. When you’re signed on click on the My Residuals tab. It’s actually really good.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is.

**John:** You know, and so full props and credit to the WGA for figuring out how to really show you your residuals. But by movie or by year you can check exactly how much you’ve gotten and from what categories. And so the closest comp I had for Aladdin is probably Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which didn’t do quite as well but did really well.

And so over the 15 years since Charlie and the Chocolate Factory came out I’ve made $2.7 million in residuals. And I say that because it’s a big number. And I think it’s important for people to understand that like residuals really do matter. They really are an incredibly important source of income for writers. So those checks come every quarter. You get the big green envelope that has your check in it. The biggest checks are in the first year that a movie shows up on video. But then they do keep coming. And so for a family film like Aladdin I can expect those checks will keep coming.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if you want to understand the value of our union, and I like to point these things out particularly when I’m grousing about them, the original Aladdin, the animated Aladdin, came out in 1993, 1992. It came out in 1992. That’s 27 years ago. And worldwide it made $500 million. And I would venture to say that 27 years ago that’s probably akin to your $900 million now worldwide.

And Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, who wrote Aladdin, got zero dollars in residuals. And they don’t even get credit for the story, right, for the new one?

**John:** Yeah, they get an onscreen credit, but it’s not a WGA credit.

**Craig:** It’s a source material credit. So the point is the animation world doesn’t have residuals like WGA does unless you’re talking about primetime animation like The Simpsons and Family Guy. So that difference is millions of dollars.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And we can’t work hard enough to protect that. But these are the things – and it’s really when I look over at animation I go, OK, whenever I’m feeling a little grumpy about the guild I just look at animation and I go we get to determine our own credits. We get residuals. This is really, really important. Because it’s a strange feeling to know that in massive success not one penny is going to trickle down to you. That’s bad.

**John:** It is bad.

A thing I do want to say is that I am assuming that Aladdin will come out on iTunes, it will be available on DVD and all those normal things. And I’ve seen cover art for DVDs, so I think they will exist. I think that’s a thing that’s going to happen. But another thing I know is going to happen is Disney+.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, Disney+ is Disney’s equivalent to Netflix, it’s a streaming service. Aladdin will of course show up on Disney+ and not on Netflix or someplace else. And the rate that Disney will charge Disney for the movie of Aladdin determines how much residuals I will get. And that is a weird situation. So that is the reason why I’m going to be very mindful of sort of what numbers they are reporting for how much they are licensing Aladdin to itself.

**Craig:** Sure. And we know that Disney+, which I think is going to be an enormous success for Disney, is starting out at a very reduced monthly rate to sign the world up, which I think they will. And so you’re right. That does impact your earnings.

Now, compared to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which was driven largely by DVD sales, our rate for Internet rentals and streaming and sales I think is a bit better.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** Than the DVD rate. So it may balance out. But you’re right. There’s a huge difference when someone is buying a DVD that costs $18 or someone is paying – what is the initial Disney+ rate? Like $12 or something?

**John:** It’s surprisingly low.

**Craig:** Yeah, for a month, and your one piece of it. So you carve out your biddy share of the whole thing. I mean, which in Aladdin’s case will be a pretty good share. But, yeah, I’m fascinated to see how that functions.

In the long run I think it will be good for writers. In the short term, while Disney is slowly harvesting humanity it may be slightly negatively impacted.

**John:** Yeah. So I would say all the streaming services on the short run have been good for writers. So we say Netflix, we also mean AppleTV Plus, we mean Amazon.

**Craig:** Amazon.

**John:** Hulu. The folks who are employing writers – that’s awesome. That’s good. More writers employed is really great. The challenge will come when it’s time to figure out residuals for some of these projects which are essentially just made for the services and how we are going to calculate those.

**Craig:** Well, see, it’s hard.

**John:** It’s hard.

**Craig:** It’s hard.

**John:** So somebody on the WGA board in these upcoming years will have to figure out how we’re going to do that.

**Craig:** Somebody is going to have to figure out who to hire to do that.

**John:** Ah-ha. That’s true. It’s not just an elected person’s decision.

**Craig:** Fire fast, hire slow.

**John:** We have come to the end of our eight topics. Man, that was a lot but I think we did well by at least seven of those.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So good on you and me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the Rodecaster Pro Sound Board. It’s a recording studio for podcasts. So it’s not what I’m using right now to record this because I’m just recording directly into my computer, but when Craig and I are live and in person, or with a guest we’re often doing it at this improvised little studio I have at my house. And it’s been a real challenge. And as we were recording the Rachel Bloom episode like the computer froze up. There were real production issues. And so I ended up buying this new board and it’s really good.

So I would say if you’re thinking about doing a kind of podcast where it’s two or three people in a room talking, this is probably the thing to get. Because you just plug in microphones, you plug in headphones. People can hear themselves in both sides of their headphones. Craig, you’ll like that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look at this thing. It’s like a little mixing board basically. So it’s got mic pre-amps already in there. Oh yeah. And I assume it’s just USB to your laptop?

**John:** It’s USB to your laptop, but it records onto a little card itself. And it records separate channels. So you want to record separate channels. And originally this didn’t have multi-channel recording. Multi-channel recording means that each mic is being recorded separately. It is a godsend when it comes to actually cutting episodes together.

**Craig:** Yeah, no question.

**John:** So, buy this.

**Craig:** Somebody is always quieter than somebody else and all that. And so, yeah, it’s a huge help. No question.

**John:** And so next time we have you out of the studio and you’re calling in, it can also patch in, Skype through the computer. So it should work much better for these things. So, I recommend the Rodecaster Pro for folks who are considering a podcast.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**John:** Brilliant.

**Craig:** Brilliant. Well, my One Cool Thing is a lot of people’s One Cool Thing, but you know, I struggle to keep up with television. I do. But I was traveling back and forth last week and I took the opportunity with some extra free time to watch Russian Doll from Natasha Lyonne and Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler. And I loved it. I loved it. I thought it was awesome.

And, you know, OK, one of my least favorite things about peak TV, someone comes, “Have you seen blah-blah-blah?” No, haven’t seen it. “OK, it’s amazing. You have to get through the first 4,000 episodes, but then the next 12,000 episodes are incredible. And I’m like, uh, that sounds like a lot of work man. And in this one, I’m like I enjoyed the first three episodes, clearly. You got to get to the end of episode three or you’re not going to ever get to the absolute joy and shock and dismay of the rest of the show which is at times really funny and at times really beautiful and at times terrifying.

And Natasha is a force of nature. Just remarkable on it. So, yeah, I couldn’t love it more.

**John:** So you realize sort of like your connection to Russian Doll? So we were on the Slate Culture Gabfest and Natasha Lyonne was the other guest.

**Craig:** I remember.

**John:** On the Slate Culture Gabfest. And she had recommended Black Mirror. That was her sort of equivalent of her One Cool Thing. So I feel like there is a synchronicity here because I don’t think you necessarily get to Russian Doll without Black Mirror happening first and sort of like shattering some glass around there, sort of make it possible to make such a weird, great series.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so I think it all comes together in a very great way. But I agree. Russian Doll is one of my favorite things of the year. Just geniusly done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just beautiful work. I just loved it.

**John:** Give them money to do whatever they want to do next because we want more of it.

**Craig:** Well I think they’re doing a second season of Russian Doll. I was like, how? But yes.

**John:** But more please. Cool. And that’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Arbitrary Jukebox Experiment. And a correction, on a previous episode, Episode 397, we accidentally credited them with Thomas Johnstone’s outro. So fixing that. Sorry Thomas Johnstone. Sorry Arbitrary Jukebox Experiment. But thank you for everyone who sends in outros because they are fantastic.

You can send your outro to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But for short questions, Craig is on Twitter @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

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

Folks do recaps of our episodes on Reddit. So go there and check out the recap if you want to see what people are talking about with the show. You can find all the back episodes of this show at Scriptnotes.net, or you can download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

And you might want to check out the Listener’s Guide there if you’re new to the show because people have recommended their favorite episodes. So if you want to catch up this will tell you what episodes to prioritize as you’re doing your catchup.

**Craig:** Brilliant. You know, we have 4,000 – you’ve got to get through the first 4,000 podcast episodes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But the next 20,000 are great.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, because you have to listen to them all in order because as you know it builds episode by episode.

**Craig:** Builds.

**John:** And there’s no randomness. It’s not like we’re rolling dice to figure out what we’re going to talk about.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s all planned.

**Craig:** You won’t understand why Episode 378 is genius unless you hear the setup in Episode 16. So good.

**John:** It’s really, really elaborate.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you John for a wonderful dice-rolling show.

**John:** Have a good week. Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 406, Better Sex with Rachel Bloom](https://johnaugust.com/2019/better-sex-with-rachel-bloom)
* [Verve Talent and Literary Agency](https://www.vervetla.com/) and [John’s Tweets](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1144754149763850241).
* Find Chernobyl scripts [here](https://johnaugust.com/library)!
* Watch [Chernobyl](https://www.hbo.com/chernobyl), listen to the podcast [here](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chernobyl-podcast).
* [WGA Financials](https://www.wga.org/the-guild/about-us/annual-report)
* [Dots, Dashes, and Parentheticals](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7XUNvtNSt8&feature=youtu.be)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 403, How to Write a Movie](https://johnaugust.com/2019/how-to-write-a-movie)
* [Aladdin](https://movies.disney.com/aladdin-2019)
* [Rodecaster Pro Sound Board](https://www.rode.com/rodecasterpro)
* [Russian Doll](https://www.netflix.com/watch/80211627?source=35)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by the Arbitrary Jukebox Experiment ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_408_rolling_dice.mp3).