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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: I like self-delusion.

John: Are you going to switch your job?

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

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

Craig: Okay. That’s fun.

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

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 It was that overdue and out of date, but they are finally doing direct deposit of residuals into your bank account.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

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

Craig: Yes. I’d love to know.

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

Craig: Really?

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

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

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

Craig: It must have been.

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

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

John: The cost of it all, yes.

Craig: Especially when you would get–

John: The checks would get lost.

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

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

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

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

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

John: What were the real obstacles, yes.

Craig: So strange, but thank God.

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

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

John: Yes. Making them partners.

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

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

John: Cruft, yes.

Craig: Cruft.

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

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

John: Oh, yeah.

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

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

Craig: Yes. And they’re afraid.

John: They’re afraid.

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

John: They gave me one too.

Craig: I downloaded it.

John: Nice. That’s the first step.

Craig: That’s the first step.

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

Craig: Oh my God. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Gather the things we’ve said.

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

Craig: You’re goddamn right.

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

Craig: I can get my glasses on for this.

John: All right.

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

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

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

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

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

John: This is actually perplexity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: I would.

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

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

John: Yes. There’s a little of that.

Craig: That’s what I would set it to.

John: A little shame.

Craig: Because that’s how I learn best.

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

Craig: My love language.

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

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

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

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

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

John: It’s something Githyanki?

Craig: It’s GithHub.

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

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

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

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

Craig: It’s so exhausting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: What was the name of this person?

Drew: SoVeryTired.

John: SoVeryTired.

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

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

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

John: Or boundaries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Of course.

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

Craig: Correct.

John: Don’t say yes to bad situations.

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

John: We have a question about that today.

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

John: Yes.

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

John: On this show?

Craig: Yes. It’s pointless.

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

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

John: This one is so easy to me.

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

John: Take the video game job.

Craig: Oh my God.

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

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

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

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

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

John: I know what dunking is.

Craig: Okay, just checking.

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

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

John: It’s so nice.

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

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

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

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

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

John: I’ve been there.

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

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

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

Craig: No.

John: No. No, absolutely not.

Craig: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Who knows.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Yes, of course.

John: You roll with it.

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

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

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

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

Ten years?

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

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

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

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

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

John: You are in a mood today.

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

John: Let’s move on to Michael here.

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

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

Craig: Congrats.

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

Craig: I feel like I’m dying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Apply.

John: Apply.

Craig: Anyone can apply.

John: Anyone can apply.

Craig: There’s no strategizing.

John: Two questions on IP stuff.

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

Craig: NDA, everyone knows that term.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: There’s no advantage to it.

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

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

Craig: I just had nature’s COVID vaccine.

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

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

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

Craig: Is it a series of two shots?

John: It’s two shots.

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

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

Craig: Your body reaction?

John: Yes.

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

John: My arm was a little bit sore.

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

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

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

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

Craig: I see.

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

Craig: To short circuit the viral kickback?

John: Yes.

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

John: Stay off social media?

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

John: Barf.

Craig: Barf.

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

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

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

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

John: Totally.

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

John: A Little geographic exploration.

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

John: I did. Yes.

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

John: It’s a really tough fight.

Craig: 666 hit points.

John: Of course the special song that plays.

Craig: The special song, which is catchy.

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

Craig: I did.

John: You did?

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

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

Craig: Huzzah.

John: What do we eat for D&D?

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

John: I think some Burger Lounge could be good.

Craig: Burger Lounge? Done.

John: It’s been a minute.

Craig: It works every time.

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

Craig: What?

John: Edited by Matthew Cilelli.

Craig: Oh God.

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

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

Craig: Like GithHub.

John: Craig, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

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

Craig: Decrement?

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

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

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

Craig: I know that it’s not pathos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Desultory.

Craig: Desultory?

John: Have you ever used it?

Craig: No.

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

Craig: Okay. A fancy way of saying random.

John: Yes, random.

Craig: Purposeless. Aimless. Unfocused.

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

Craig: Don’t need it.

John: Induritize.

Craig: Induritize?

John: Yes, to harden the heart.

Craig: That’s just ridiculous.

John: We don’t need it.

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

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

Craig: Ebullient means with bravado and confidence.

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

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

John: Importune. To importune upon somebody.

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

John: Yes. Again, I’ve not needed it.

Craig: It’s not necessary.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: They are not the same word.

John: Consent is agreeing to a thing.

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

John: Expatiate.

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

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

Craig: Couldn’t have been wronger.

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

Craig: Also, I said wronger.

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

Craig: Yes.

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

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

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

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

John: Confidently careless and informal.

Craig: There you go.

John: Censorious.

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

John: Yes.

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

John: Prohibiting, it’s actually criticizing.

Craig: Like censure?

John: Yes.

Craig: I see, interesting.

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

Craig: Stupid, banal, boring, witless.

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

Craig: No, it does not.

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

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

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

Craig: Very few.

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

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

John: Perfidy.

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

John: Yes, have you ever used it?

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

John: Supercilious.

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

John: Nice.

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

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

Craig: They’re part of my life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: It’s just wrong. I hear prefix.

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

John: Prefix menu. Tell me your objection.

Craig: I thought you meant prefix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew: I wasn’t that bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Correct.

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

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

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

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

You don’t know what sedulous means, Neo.

John: I have no idea what sedulous means.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Very good. Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

• Move Over Green Envelopes, WGA Rolls Out Direct Deposits For Residuals by Peter White for Deadline
• WGA Screen Credits Manual
• CDC Recommends Updated 2024-2025 COVID-19 and Flu Vaccines for Fall/Winter Virus Season
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You’re listening to episode 656 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you create a film genre? If you’re a filmmaker, perhaps your work inspires others to copy or remix those elements until the resulting movies feel like their own genre or subgenre. I’d argue that’s how we get slasher movies, for example. While there were definitely antecedents, we probably wouldn’t have the slasher subgenre without John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978. That’s not the only way you can create a film genre. If you’re a journalist or movie critic, perhaps you notice a common thread connecting a bunch of existing films and give it a name, like a scientist discovering a new taxonomy.

That’s the case with a microgenre we’re going to discuss today. I’m happy to have its originator as our guest. Max Read is a journalist, screenwriter, editor, and the owner operator of ReadMax, a weekly newsletter guide to the future. His writing has appeared in various publications with the word New York in the title, including New York Magazine, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, all put together there. He’s also the former editor of some defunct websites, including Gawker and Select All. Welcome to the show, Max.

Max Read: Thanks for having me.

John: As we were discussing on email, you’ve actually been mentioned on the podcast before, correct?

Max: Yes. I have a lot of friends who subscribe and they never ever text me after my newsletter goes out. Then lo and behold, I was on John August’s podcast and all of a sudden I got a lot of texts about my newsletter.

John: What were we talking about? Was this about–

Max: There was a Harper’s piece about the future of labor in Hollywood, I guess, in particular screenwriter labor. It was a riff that I’d been thinking about for a while about YouTube, TikTok, online influencers, a lot of which is my beat as a journalist, thinking about those people as competitors to what we do and thinking about one of the problems that we face as unionized writers is the fact that there’s this huge non-union workforce who are doing remarkably similar jobs to us, similar jobs to actors and directors as well. I gave it a goofy headline that didn’t live up to the promise of the headline. It’s something that has been on my mind for a long time now as a journalist, as a person online, as a person who consumes a lot of crap online, but also as a member of WGA and somebody who is a little nervous about the future of Hollywood right now.

John: Talk to us about why you’re a member of WGA. Is it for feature and TV work or is it because through the Writers Guild East and how that has organized some labor under the journalism?

Max: I am a member through TV writing, though it’s funny you ask that question. I was at Gawker between 2010 and 2015. WGAE organized Gawker while I was there. Then the week I left, the week after I left, they were finally certified. I was never actually a member of WGAE at Gawker. A few years later, I sold a show with a friend of mine based on our time at Gawker as it happened. That was what jumped me into the WGAE.

John: I love that you say jumped into it. Like it is just a mafia thing.

Max: There really weren’t enough initiation rituals in the end.

John: Totally. We have on the show to talk about halogencore, which is this micro genre you brought up. That’s something we’ll get into in a second. While you’re here, I also would like to talk about journalism and the overlap with what we do in film and TV writing, because those are blurry boundaries now. Actually how one makes a living in journalism these days, because it feels like a transition is happening there that’s going to be familiar to anybody working in television, for example.

Because once upon a time, you were a staff writer on Cheers, and that was your entire job for all your year, was doing that. Now it’s about assembling a bunch of jobs over the course of a year. It’s about making your year, earning enough money to actually stay in this business. That feels very much like what so many writers working in other parts of the media are doing these days.

Max: Like you say, I’ve had a number of jobs over the 15 or so years that I’ve been a journalist. My career has both been very traditional and very unorthodox. I got my start working at Gawker as a blogger at a time when that was still a pretty new thing to be doing. Then I went and worked at New York Magazine for five years. That was a fantastic education on how a magazine is made. Some of my favorite things I’ve ever written and worked on came out in that time. Then I left New York to pursue screenwriting, and then also to start this newsletter that we’ve been talking about.

The newsletter is probably the newest of job that I’ve been doing. I’m essentially a columnist. I write two newsletters a week. I’m also the publisher. I have to keep track of subscribers and think about how I’m gaining subscribers and keep track of my numbers and think about all these things. For me personally, I like it a lot. I like the independence. In some ways, it’s motivating to be my own boss in all these ways. It’s not for everybody. I would hate to see a world where this is the only way that journalists are getting work.

Unfortunately, it has not been a good few years since the pandemic. In particular, jobs at newspapers and magazines have just been hemorrhaging. It feels like basically everybody these days works for either the Times or one of the big Condé Nast publications, which it’s good that I can be making money doing this newsletter but it doesn’t feel good. I don’t have a good sense of what the next 10 years look like either.

John: I definitely want to dig into that. We’ll take care of some news and follow up first, but then we’ll get to halogencore. Then we’ll get into what it’s like to make it living as an independent writer. And in our bonus segment for premium members, I’d like to talk with you about the acceleration of time and events that we’re going through right now, because it feels like the last eight weeks, something broke and everything is now just happening faster than it’s ever happened before.

I know you’re a person every year who does a recap of what happened over the course of the previous year. I fear for you because it just feels like so much has happened so quickly that as you’re bringing down the months, like January and February and March might look normal. Then just the length and volume of what’s happened in the last period just seems unfathomable. I’d love to get into this sense of the acceleration of time with you.

Max: In some ways, it’s very good. If your job is working off the news, the more material, the better. There was a time when August was just absolutely dead as a month to do it. Now it’s like, “Oh, there’s always something to write about every week.” I don’t have to spend all weekend worrying about what my column’s going to be like the next year. It’s also it’s exhausting. It is a really good way to bring yourself out.
For a long time, I’ve said to myself, I don’t want to be a weekly columnist, I need to work on longer projects or whatever. I also just think, personally there’s just something about my metabolism, my processing metabolism, that really helps to just when stuff is happening to be able to take it, put something on the page, work out how I feel about it in writing, think it through, and then be able to move on instead of– The writing actually helps the sense of being buried under all this stuff.

Look, if you’re reading a lot of things, you’re getting a lot of ideas. If you’re also doing fiction at the same time that you’re doing nonfiction, you’re just constantly getting stuff that might work or might not work for something you’re doing in the future. If you can’t sort that out well, then maybe that’s a bad thing. I think it can be nice to know that you’ve got this big, I don’t know what people have, a bookmarks folder, or just a document where they’re pasting links or whatever, it is that people are doing to just know next time you’re stuck, you’ve got something you can go scroll through to remember everything that happened in July that might be useful to you.

John: Let me make a note, because I do want to get back to how you organize all the stuff that comes in and how you think about that stuff. First off, though, we have a little bit of news here. Highland, which is the screenwriting and general purpose writing app that my company makes, has an amazing new version that’s out in beta now. I’ve been using this version of it for some 18 months or so. Now you can too. It’s really good. It’s for the Mac, it’s for iPad and iPhone. Drew, you’ve been using it?

Drew: Yes. I love it. It’s so clean, and it’s gorgeous, and it’s fast. I’m excited for people to try it.

John: Over the summer, Drew had to do some work in Final Draft because I was working on a project where he had to deliver some Final Draft files as well. That was brutal to transition to Final Draft after that.

Drew: It hurt to go back.

John: Anyway, if you would like to beta test this, we’ll put a link in the show notes for how you sign up for that. It’s not going to be a very long beta. It’s only a couple weeks before we get this out into the world, hopefully. We’d love to have some more people out there testing it. Max, what do you write in? The columns you’re doing, what has Read Max written in?

Max: This is a sin for most journalists, but I write directly into the CMS, the content management system that the blog publishes to. For a long time, you were never supposed to do that because there was no way to save things on the web. If it crashed, you would lose the whole post. I have to say, I write on Substack as the platform I write for, and they have created what, as far as I’m concerned, is the best CMS I’ve ever used in all my years working in these things. It auto-saves. I never feel uncomfortable. It’s a little like when you’re writing a screenplay, you like to have it formatted as it’s going to be in the end. It’s much easier to do that. I like being able to see how it’s going to look on the page as I’m writing it. When I do longer magazine features, I go in Google Docs, partly just because the sharing is the easiest way to do it, and commenting is really easy for editors. My editors always take it out of Google Docs and put it in Microsoft Word. I just have version of this everywhere, basically.

John: No, it’s brutal. We’re testing this one and see if there’s stuff in Highland that you like. Other follow-up here, Drew, back in episode 582, we were talking about this playwright who wanted to move into screenwriting, and we had someone write back with some extra advice for that.

Drew: Yeah, Laura wrote, “As a playwright turned TV writer and feature writer myself, I wanted to offer some advice to Bethany. It sounds to me like her impulse to put people in a room and let things explode comes from an exposure to a lot of single-set, single-room plays, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, August Osage County, et cetera. I highly recommend she does some deep study on films that essentially do the same thing to see how she can begin to adapt from one medium into another. Shiva Baby and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande are great places to start. Leo Grande feels the most like a stage play, two characters, one location, except for the final scene, with time passing in between each scene. Shiva Baby is a great example of how to chuck a bunch of people into the same shared space and keep things propulsive because the protagonist is trapped in a house with her antagonists.”

John: I was also thinking about My Dinner with Andre is it another classic film where there’s a bunch of people in one space doing one thing. Those are all great examples. As I thought more about this initial question, see it feels like Bethany is struggling not so much with keeping people in one location, but understanding how to jump forward in time and that it’s really about the ability to cut forward in time and to eliminate those moments in between stuff that is the power of film, the ability to cut. It’s really understanding how cutting works and how things can move forward.

Some of these movies that Laura was mentioning here have examples of that where you’re in one location but you’re jumping forward in time. I think you just need to be more comfortable with the form of not having characters walk in and say their thing than exit, but rather the movie itself is telling its story through cutting and through time. She’s just going to have to experiment with that and just write some things that necessitate cutting.

Also had some follow-up on Hallmark movies. We talked a little bit about like Hallmark Christmas movies. Craig had wondered aloud how many Hallmark Christmas movies there were. Stephen Follows, who’s the guy who does all the data analysis of film and stuff, has done other projects with us before. Stephen Follows wrote this great blog post about just how many Hallmark Christmas movies there are and really detailed into the tropes and the expectations of a Hallmark Christmas movie.

Drew: In his blog post, Stephen Follows says he found a total of 307 Hallmark Christmas movies with production reaching an average of 30 a year over the past few years.

John: He included some great charts to talk through how much the production of these movies has grown over the years. 30 in a genre per year is crazy that there’s 30 of these being made each year. He listed the genres within them. Obviously romance is very high for these Christmas movies. Most of them come out in November and December, which also makes sense. If you’re curious about holiday movies on Hallmark, this is the definitive source, the definitive article, I think, for the data behind this. 180 degrees, I think, not as opposite as you can get from a Hallmark Christmas movie is this genre that Max Read has described in, I think originally on your Letterboxd, but then became a blog post. Can you tell us about what Halogencore is? Try to define this genre for us.

Max: If you don’t mind, I can just read a little bit.

John: Sure, go for it.

Max: I’ll just read a short thing that I wrote, partly just me trying to list out what I liked about these movies.

“Halogencore movies are stories of corporate intrigue and malfeasance told from the point of view of characters on the outside of the inside, low-level apparatchiks, functionaries, subordinates, and middle managers, navigating crisis from the periphery of real power. They usually take place over a short timeframe, day or a night or a weekend, and against a ticking clock. They are not stories of lasting change, stunning revelation, or dramatic reversals of fortune. They’re stories of beaten-down people acquiescing to or negotiating compromise with power. The victory of a happy ending in a Halogencore movie is not that power has been toppled, but that our compromised hero has managed to survive inside the machine without being crushed. As the name suggests, Halogencore movies feature lots of fluorescent lighting and nighttime city shots. The action is largely office-bound.”

John: At this moment, I’d love to actually play a clip from Margin Call. Margin Call is one of the ones you identify. Let’s take a listen to this moment from Margin Call, which I think actually does hit a lot of these beats. I think you’ll recognize it once we play it.

[plays a clip from the movie Margin Call]

John: Max, that to me feels like what you’re describing here. You have a bunch of folks who work for this investment firm. One of them has discovered something that is highly amiss, but they’re not classic outsiders coming into a space and having to learn about a space. They were already part of the system and they’re discovering a new flaw. They’re discovering a new way that the world is broken. Is that a fair description?

Max: Yes. And you’ll notice they don’t quite know what’s going on themselves yet. They’re ahead of you, the audience, but they themselves are still behind somebody else who’s not on screen. Their first action when they uncover whatever secret or whatever revelation they’ve just found is they have to call their bosses. It’s not like a, “Let’s go get this published.” It’s not like whatever. It’s like the subordinates have to find the guy, the middle manager has to call the middle manager above him. Margin Call is a movie that’s great with working through hierarchy and establishing and demonstrating hierarchies in that way. The music does a lot there. It’s a great music cue, but you can feel the tension mounting just through the dialogue in that scene without really ever learning. If you’ve never seen Margin Call, it’s about banks, but if you didn’t know that, you don’t need to know what they’re talking about or what’s happening to understand just through what they’re saying to each other how serious everything that’s happening is.

John: Yes. Let’s talk about some of the other films in the genre because if it was just Margin Call, it’s like, oh Margin Call is a one-off. It’s an example of this thing, but it’s not a genre until there’s many films that can be categorized with it. Talk to us about the other things you identify as being, oh, this feels like halogencore.

Max: To me, the big one is Michael Clayton. Michael Clayton, in some ways, this was me attempting to define movies that are like Michael Clayton because it’s just one of my favorite movies. Michael Clayton is similarly, again, it’s about a lawyer who’s on the outside of his own law firm. At one point, his brother says to him, all the lawyers think you’re a cop, all the cops think you’re a lawyer. He’s in this liminal identity space. He’s working against time to find his mentor. It’s all in offices. There’s the similar droney music making you feel anxious the whole time.

I actually didn’t write this out, the set of observations out till I’d seen The Assistant, which is a relatively recent movie where Julia Garner plays the assistant to an unseen and unnamed, but very clearly Harvey Weinstein-based movie producer. The movie is about the office environment under a tyrant like that, where everybody knows something bad has happened or is happening and nobody is able to talk about it or do anything about it. Again, it has the same sense of like, you the audience are a little bit behind the characters. They do this in a really enjoyable feeling. You don’t quite know what’s going on.

Part of the reason it works is that the characters themselves are also a little bit behind. They themselves don’t quite know the depth of wrongdoing or exactly what’s happening. They’re trying to figure it out themselves, but also to figure it out without getting in trouble. They’re not crusading. To me, that’s three that really hit the mark. There’s a bunch of others that have a similar, let’s call it a vibe. There’s earlier movies, movies that were made– Shattered Glass, it’s a great movie about the New Republic and Stephen Glass, who is famously identified as having fabricated a bunch of stories.
Syriana is a total favorite of mine, is a Stephen Gaghan movie about– It’s a little like Traffic. It’s all these interconnected stories about geopolitics, extremely depressing movie, just unbelievably politically bleak movie, but similarly has a lot of these– Jeffrey Wright plays a high-powered corporate lawyer who suddenly steps into the world of oil money and political assassination and realizes how much more insane everything has gotten than he understood.

Even a more recent movie, High Flying Bird, the Steven Soderbergh movie, which is a very different arena. It’s not banks. It’s not oil. It’s about an NBA agent who’s trying to break the owner’s cartel in the NBA. It’s a little more fun than these other ones, I suppose, but it has the same rhythms because a lot of people are on the phone all the time, they’re having these secret meetings. You’re constantly catching up to the action as it happens.

I could keep going on, there’s another movie that I want to really recommend, because I don’t think many people have seen it, called Azor, which is, to me, one of my favorite movies of the last few years. It’s a Swiss-Argentinian movie, Swiss director, set in Argentina about a Swiss banker who comes over to Argentina during the Dirty War, under the military junta, and is looking for his partner, who’s disappeared. He spends the whole movie in these shadowy meetings with these very scary Argentinian fascists and military apparatchiks, trying to uncover what’s happened amidst this world where kids are disappearing, students are disappearing all the time.

He’s recognizing and uncovering, and unlike what you might expect from a Hollywood movie, it’s not about, “I’m going to uncover this, bring everybody to justice.” It’s, “I’m going to uncover this and then cover it right back up because I didn’t really want to know in the first place and I just need to get my own thing and get out of here.” Those are some good ones. There’s a Letterboxd list, there’s my newsletter, people are welcome to come suggest ones to me, too, if they’ve got them.

John: Let’s talk about the common elements we’re seeing here, because there’s structural elements. We talked about how these tend to be stories that have a protagonist who’s already part of that world. I love that you say they’re on the outside of the inside. They’re already part of the system, but they don’t know quite how the whole system works, but they’re ahead of us as the audience is. But really, the vibe is what’s crucial. The vibe, you say anxiety, you say dread, paranoia, this pessimism, this sense of a crushing doom. In this setup, I was talking about slasher films, and in a weird way, there is an aspect of a slasher. It’s not about bringing down the system, it’s just about surviving.

It’s just being the person who actually emerges at the end, and there’s not a sense that you’re going to topple this regime, you’re just trying to get through it. I think back to the end of Michael Clayton, and we do see Michael Clayton, the George Clooney character, be able to get a victory over Tilda Swinton’s character, but then as he’s in his cab ride leaving, he recognizes he didn’t really do all that much. It’s not like the problem of the movie is fully solved, it’s just he got through this one situation, he got through this one moment.

Max: Yes. One really obvious antecedent to these is paranoia thrillers of the ‘70s. Three Days of the Condor is a really classic one that has– What’s the final line? Something like, “But are they going to print it?” He’s got all his documents, he’s taken into the Times. What’s one of the things that’s interesting to me about this is that, as we’ve been saying, there’s not a do-gooder figure. It’s really rare that there’s a crusading — It’s not Pelican brief. There’s not a Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington crusading to uncover something. It doesn’t have like a journalist at the center.

It’s guys who work at law firms or at banks or in big glass offices who are forced to compromise whatever small measure of integrity they have left. That’s the vibe of that, like you say, of that pessimism and bleakness is, to me, all about that sense that you can’t do anything. You can save yourself, maybe. That’s maybe the best thing you can do. Otherwise, the best thing you can do is get out of there.

John: The relationship between these movies and the paranoid thrillers, which tended to focus on investigators or on journalists is really interesting because in the journalism thrillers, it tends to be, we have our crusading journalists going in and looking for answers. The point of view is from the journalist. Look at Spotlight, which is a movie that feels like it’s close to this in some ways, except that they are an outsider looking into a system. In those, the POV tends to be, in my estimation, fairly well locked to the characters investigating. But as I think to Margin Call, or I think to Michael Clayton, the movie is willing to switch POVs and show us things that our central protagonist does not know yet.

We’re able to cut to Tilda Swinton’s POV and see how she’s freaking out in the restroom stall. In Margin Call, we’re able to cut to Kevin Spacey’s character trying to get his way out of the situation. We as an audience have information that at times even our protagonist doesn’t have. I think that leads to this overall greater sense of dread, the same way in a horror film, where sometimes we’re cutting to the killer’s point of view and we know where the killer is in relationship to our hero who’s trying to hide or succeed or get away from the killer.

Max: Margin Call does something I think is absolutely brilliant, which is it hides– It’s about the Lehman Brothers crash in ’08. You know what’s going on. It effectively hides the actual mechanics of the secret and the problem. You focus is almost entirely on internal personal dynamics at the bank and fear and frustration and paranoia until the bank’s CEO arrives with an unbelievably great cameo by Jeremy Irons, just being the most Jeremy Irons he possibly can be. And he’s the guy who’s like, “Can somebody please explain to me what the fuck is going on as though I were a dog or a small child?”

It both works really well because finally the audience is clued in, and they’re clued in a great, natural and organic way. We get the explanation from Kevin Spacey and Zachary Quinto about exactly what’s been happening. But it’s also thematically great because you finally see that, even the guy at the very center, even the inside of the inside, doesn’t really know what’s happening. Everybody is out on a limb. Everybody is piecing together information as it comes in. Everybody’s fearing for their own ass. Everybody is trying to get out. To me, that’s the best scene in the movie. It’s a boardroom scene. It just works really well. It just nails exactly what’s happening.

John: Let’s look at other movies that are doing similar things, but sometimes funnier or sometimes just in a different way. We talk about financial shenanigans, The Big Short, of course, is a great look at the collapse of this housing bubble and how everything goes awry. We have those moments where we need to explain to a character on screen, but also to the audience, what’s really happening here. I think the difference is that while some of our characters are complicit in what’s happening here, there’s not that same sense of dread to it. We know that a calamity is coming, but there’s not that sense of impending doom.

Another example would be Moneyball. Moneyball is very insider. You have characters who know things that the audience doesn’t know. They recognize how complicated the situation is. Yet the movie ultimately lets itself have more fun than it’s not just all dread the whole time. There are moments of real tension and suspense. That’s not the overall goal of the story.

Max: It’s funny because there’s a bunch of techniques. Moneyball, for example, looks– It’s got that Soderbergh digital camera washed out look and the post-rock soundtrack to give you a little bit of that feeling. But it subverts the expectations of that in a nice way, that it’s funny and it’s a little inspiring, even if it’s ambiguously inspiring. It’s not like the A’s won the World Series. I like a movie like that, that can magpie pick things that create certain expectations in the audience and then subvert them a little. Soderbergh is, to me, a huge influence on this general genre, probably because of his use of digital cinematography. Early traffic is probably an early version of this. He loves his really intricate screenplays that are hiding all kinds of things from all kinds of characters.

But probably his most halogencore movie is actually The Informant with Matt Damon, which is a great, very funny and probably underseen movie that takes all the halogencore ideas and tropes and then just plays it like a straight comedy. It’s a really interesting exercise in what you can do when you set up a set of expectations and then just tweak one of your knobs a little bit. You’re like, “What if we accept that this is actually quite funny and we make it and we just play that up a little bit?”

John: As we were listening to the clip from Margin Call, I was also thinking about Glengarry Glen Ross in the sense of the overlapping dialogue, the sense of characters never fully completing a thought, but they’re recognizing they’re building on top of each other. There’s a sense of power that’s created by ideas not being fully expressed, but recognition that this motion is happening. Or The Insider, which is another great story, identified as being a proto-halogencore, because it has a journalist at the center of it, it’s not quite the same situation as being trapped inside the space with these characters, but those are all aspects of that.

Going back to Soderbergh, I think you’re right to nail his digital cinematography, but it’s also it’s pulling a documentary aesthetic into a classic narrative space. He didn’t end up directing Moneyball, but Moneyball is often shot like a documentary. It’s shot and has that aspect that you feel like you’re wandering into conversations that were already happening. Even the scouts are talking around the table, it feels like, “Oh, this could have just been an actual real thing that they just set up some cameras and shot.” I think you get that in a lot of these movies where it feels like the camera happened to find these characters having this conversation, which is an aesthetic on that.

Max: Pretty true to most of these. The immediacy, I think, is really important because, to me the ticking clock is one of the most important things of movies like this, that there is a deadline that people are working against and that creates all the urgency and the camera wobbling and turning corners, that Wiseman documentary, it’s like very Frederick Wiseman, like just a guy with a camera wandering around the high-powered lawyer’s office for some reason. It heightens that sense. There’s no stately compositions or anything. It’s just like, we got a snippet of this conversation. It mimics the idea that you might overhear something at the office and realize that– The Assistant is particularly good at this, because so much of that is she hears things going on behind the closed door and your acid reflux starts to activate because you’re feeling just as stressed as she is.

John: We’re talking about feature films. Feature films obviously are a story with a beginning and an end in a short period of time, which feel like they’re crucial aspects to the structure of the halogencore movies. They’re not necessarily in real time, but they’re at a compressed period of time. Yet, I see some of these aesthetics also being done in series television. If you look at Succession, I think there’s an aspect of this dread happening in many individual episodes of Succession. I think Severance has aspects of this too, where there is this sense of crushing dread and characters who are the part of it, but they don’t see the whole picture. They’re touching a piece of the elephant, but they don’t know what the whole elephant is. Even though we’re talking about something that is a film or genre, aspects of that can absolutely apply to series television as well.

Max: We joked about proto-halogencore, about movies that are maybe a little too early to be considered the genre but are obviously like serious influences. A few that come to mind are actually ‘70s and ‘80s BBC television series, which are limited series. It’s in this ambiguous space between endlessly serial and the TV. The original BBC, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is very– John le Carre as a novelist and all the movies that have been based on his novels are also very important, I think to– Nobody’s better at cultivating that sense of rot on the inside than John le Carre.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, there’s a great series called Edge of Darkness from the ‘80s about a detective, it’s a nuclear paranoia, a detective looking for his daughter, that have a lot of these things. It’s like 1980s England in the minds of filmmakers of the time was one of the bleakest places imaginable. They nailed it, I suppose. Those are great examples of ways to, even if you don’t necessarily have a ticking clock to draw out these threads of bleakness, of paranoia, of despair, of just mopping up a mess that is never really going to be fully clean.

John: I want to close this up by talking about the actual practical takeaways from this, because it’s one thing to identify a genre, but it’s actually can be useful for people who want to make movies, because it’s hard to say, “I want to make a movie like Michael Clayton. I want to make a movie like this.” Once you identify it’s in this space, and so you don’t necessarily need to use the term halogencore, but once you can identify multiple examples of this thing, and what is the aesthetic, what is the choice that you’re going for, that’s really, really useful.

If you’re setting out to write a project that is in this space or you have written a project that is in this space, to be able to talk about how it fits into the overall landscape is really useful. I do hope, and I think it’s a plausible hope, that some folks are out there writing films that could fall into this genre. Just by having this conversation and by giving a word for it might make it a little bit easier for them to find the financing, find the champions for the project, because they see like, “Oh, I get what this is.” This is not a one-time unique thing.

Max: I’ve taken generals and tried to explain this concept to executives, and there’s a lot of executives who love these movies. They’re great movies. Who doesn’t love Michael Clayton? The more we can spread the gospel of halogencore, the easier it’ll be to sit down across from somebody and say, “I’m writing a halogencore movie.” I would like to watch more of these personally. I would like to get more made. So I hope that’s true.

John: Talk to me about halogencore as a title. I’ll confess that it took me a beat to figure out what it was that you were going for, because halogen, to me, I think of my dorm room that had the torch here, halogen light, that always, word was going to set the whole room on fire. There’s that light aesthetic. I see what you’re going for there.

Max: This is the problem with doing this as a one-off letterbox list before it became a running theme on my– If I had thought it was going to come back, I would have sat on it a little bit longer. I didn’t let my New York Magazine packaging instincts really take over.

I do think we talked about this documentary, the washed-out digital, like Michael Mann and Soderbergh, early digital cinema pioneers, the documentary aesthetic, that feels so important. Just trying to communicate that idea of the establishing shot of so many of these movies is a huge tower in the city at night, and one floor or one office is lit up. You’re in for a good ride if that’s the establishing shot for your movie. That was what I wanted to get at, was that halogencore. That’s what I’m looking for when I start my movie.

John: Great. Let’s transition to talking about the– Oh, what is the New York Magazine package for it? You have to have an image for it. Let’s talk a little bit more about journalism and what your history has been, writing for other people and writing for yourself now, because most of the folks who are listening to this podcast are probably writing for themselves. As a screenwriter, I’ve always been writing for myself, going from job to job to job. More classically, as a journalist, you were employed at a publication. You were there exclusively for a time. That’s not the reality now. Can you just quickly chart through how you got started and what the trajectory has been for you?

Max: I had a normal start. I was an intern at the Daily Beast back when Tina Brown ran it. I met a woman named Maureen O’Connor, a great journalist who had gone to Gawker. She was working nighttime. I wanted to leave Daily Beast. She said, “Come take my night shift.” So I spent a year doing 8:00 PM to 4:00 AM. That was the entrance. Once I had that job and could demonstrate that I could do it, I was able to advance in Gawker and then get this job at New York Magazine. I love both experiences, but in terms of working for people, Gawker was a much more independent place, and I think prepared me for my current, much more independent job in a lot of ways.

We had editors but not at every moment was every single thing cleared. Certainly, very few things, until the later stages, were deeply read through or crossed out. We were mostly writing 200, 300 words. A lot of the training there was activation energy to find things, come up with an angle, write them fast, whereas New York Mag, in general, especially on the print side, was a much more collaborative thoughtful place. It was still a little bit helter-skelter because we were putting out a magazine every two weeks, but you’d have a month, two months, three months of lead time. Oftentimes, you’d spend a lot of time reporting. You’re in meetings with your editor. You’re in meetings with the art department. I really loved that. I love that collaborative work.

A good TV room can be very similar where you just have a lot of people with a lot of great ideas, able to bounce off one another to really craft something that feels like it’s the best possible version of what it can be. Now my job is like, I don’t even have coworkers. I’m here at home. The closest thing I have to coworkers is a bunch of group chats that I just am constantly hitting every day that function as the slack room of my coworkers. It’s a challenge in some ways.

I have a three-year-old, and it’s been really useful to have a very flexible schedule when I have a toddler. That, to me, is the best thing about working by myself with no real obligations. It is hard. I find this when I’m trying to write spec scripts or whatever, that it can be really hard. Everybody who’s listened to the podcast knows how hard it can be to force yourself to work when there’s no stick and maybe no carrot either. You’re just like, “I got to go put some words on the page.”

But the structure of, I obligate to my subscriber, I am obligated to produce one post or two posts a week to my subscribers, is really useful to just keep my brain moving, keep the wheels greased, so to speak. But Journalism is so volatile right now. I hope the newsletter process can sustain itself and people will keep wanting to pay for years to come. I feel like I may have to jump back into the office world sometime soon, or who knows.

John: Talk to me about making your year, making your month, because you’re publishing through Substack. For that, you have a certain number of subscribers and the subscribers are paying you a certain amount per month. You can expect how much to get in, which is our premium members to Scriptnotes, they are paying us five bucks a month, and that is income that we can count on, which is great, it helps stabilize things. That’s not the only thing you do. You can also write pieces for existing magazines if you want to, you can do special things. What do you find is the balance there, and how much are you pursuing just writing for yourself versus outside work?

Max: I’m trying to do a couple feature, like magazine features a year. It depends a lot on the work itself. If I get a freelance offer that I am passionate about, that I know I can complete quite quickly, then I will usually say yes, just because why not? It’s not going to take a lot of my time. But I find that a long, full-length magazine feature really takes it out of me. Whether or not I was doing the newsletter, it requires a lot of work. Despite producing two newsletters a week, I am a pretty slow writer, and I don’t want to be tearing my hair out. It’s good, I think, to challenge yourself. It’s good for me to challenge myself and make sure that I have some end of year or end of quarter, or whatever it is, goal.
I’m going to finish this piece, I’m going to finish this script, I’m going to do this. But I don’t like the system changes every six months. It’s like some months it’s really nice to have, Monday is the day I work on this project, and then Tuesday I do the newsletter, and then Wednesday is the whatever. That just isn’t going to work. Especially because when you’re doing the newsletter, if something happens in the world that you have a quick response to, you have to listen to that, that’s the best, quickest, easiest way that you’re going to get a newsletter out that week. You might think Monday is my script day but then news drops that you’re like, “I have a 1,600 word idea about that I can just bang out right now,” and now Monday’s not your script day anymore, so I hope Tuesday can be your script day or Friday or whatever it is. It’s hard. If somebody out there has figured out a solution to this, please let me know. It’s a matter of picking projects that I don’t dread working on in the end of the day.

I shouldn’t say this. I hope my manager’s not listening. If I have a pilot spec that I’m working on, and it’s taking me a lot longer than it should, it might be because I don’t actually want to do this pilot spec. That I had this idea and it– maybe it’s just time to throw it in the can and say, let’s find something that I actually will want to work on after my kid goes to bed or that I’ll want to work on in the middle of the day or after lunch or whatever. It’s the hardest thing about being a writer, I think.

John: For the Scriptnotes book, I was just editing the chapter with Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Like you, is a writer who works both in journalism, doing celebrity profiles, but also writes her own stuff, or writes her own books, and now runs her own TV shows. She talks about sort of the challenge of figuring out like, how am I spending my time right now? What is the best use of my– thing to do right now? Unlike you, she’s a very fast writer, so she can do all these things at once, but it is that juggling act.

One thing you mentioned is that you have group chats with other writers and that that becomes, essentially, your Slack channel, your newsroom. It’s the people around you. But I do notice that there’s an ecosystem within these writers who are doing Substacks and doing other things that I feel like you’re also always in communication with each other. I think I probably first found you because Today in Tabs have linked out to an article that you had done.

There’s also like the Noahpinions and the Tyler Cowens. There is this web of independent people writing stuff that does feed on itself and sort of supports itself. Do you actively try to sustain that or is that just a thing that naturally comes up?

Max: That’s a good question. We used to call that the blogosphere when they were blogs.

John: Sure. Back in the day, yes.

Max: From a business perspective, it’s hugely important. Actually, if I’m just separating out the creative process part of it, I get new subscribers like you because these other people link to me, so I need that as a growth plan. From a stuff perspective, I presume that I could. It probably wouldn’t be great if my newsletter every week was just something I came up with completely off the top of my head.

This dialogue with other writers, the ability to hear what they’re saying and respond to it, I think not only gives me– means that I’m doing a little bit less work every week in terms of ideating, to use a horrible neologism, but also that I’m responding to things out there in the world that are actually happening. It brings in new readers, and I actually think readers enjoy it.

One of the weirdest and funniest things about my job as a newsletter writer is that, a lot of ways, what I do is I’m like a YouTuber for Gen-Xers and elder Millennials. It’s as much about me and the way I think about things and my personality and my preferences as it is about the specific topics under review or my arguments or whatever else. That makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m just at the very early end of a generation that is comfortable with being a social media influencer.
I think you have to make a little bit of peace with the fact that this is how people get to know you. This is how they follow you and why they follow you. When I have an article, I have 40,000 people on my list who will go read it because I say, “Here’s an article I read.” If I were to write a book or what– any other project that I want people to get to, I now have this audience.

Part of that is just they know me. They know how I think about things, they know what kinds of things I like. I don’t like to do super personal — I’m not really a personal writer, I like to give my son and my wife a little bit of privacy, but it’s the sense that I have a particular way of thinking about things and people like to read me think through things in that way that I think is the kind of thing. Just to connect it back to your first question, I think that’s true of a lot of these writers.

There’s these sort of personalities who are like, I don’t always agree what Tyler Cowen says, but I think he’s somebody who– he gives me a valuable perspective from that particular kind of person he is and the expertise he has or whatever, and I want to read him because it allows me to set my own, to think about how I feel about something. The more people there are in that kind of network or ecosystem the more fertile and fruitful it can be.

John: You’re making your living through the Substack and yet that’s not the only place you express your ideas. There’s this aspect of like we’re expected to do multiple things at once or sort of have multi-media presences at once. I was a blogger, so my johnaugust.com was a blog and for many years it was a blog. The whole reason we started the podcast was that a blog is just a monologue. It’s just me having a conversation with myself.
There were comments on the blog for a while and there was that sense that people were reading it and there was some feedback there. It wasn’t until there was a podcast that it could actually be a conversation and people could engage and dig in on a topic. The overlap between what we do on this podcast and what I do on the blog versus an influencer or a YouTuber is really interesting. It’s a generational shift.

I would say that one of the real advantages, though, to doing it as a print is it’s easy for me to go back and look through your old posts on Halogencore. I could see what you’ve written on Halogencore before and YouTube would be almost impossible for me to go back and assemble like what all that stuff was before. It’s just a real advantage to print. One of the reasons why we’ve had transcripts of the podcast since the very beginning is because it makes it simple for us to actually go back and find what was there and what the history was.

Have we talked about this topic before? What did we say then? How has our thinking changed? That’s just a huge advantage to writing stuff down versus a YouTube video or even tweets. I sometimes see and Tyler Cowen will often link out to things that I think are going to be blog posts were actually just a thread of like seven tweets. Well, is that an article? What is that? Do you ever struggle with the idea of like, is this something that should be a newsletter or should this be a tweet?

Max: Well, I quit Twitter. I quit Twitter in 20– like during–

John: Yes, I noticed you’re not on there.

Max: No.

John: You’re not really on threads either so you–

Max: No. One thing I can say for Substack is, once I had– once I recognized that I could make money from my tossed-off thoughts, as long as I expanded them to 600, 800, 1,200 words, I’ve– there’s no looking back. I was like really active on Twitter when I was at Gawker and New York Magazine. In a lot of ways, I owe a lot of my career to Twitter. I don’t think I would have been able to start this newsletter without the audience I’d already built up on Twitter.

At some point, it became clear that I just, like many people, did not really have a healthy relationship to it, spent too much time on it. I would find myself, before going to bed, looking at my phone and getting furious at somebody I didn’t even know. It’s like, what a waste of my energy and time. I quit and around the same time I started the Substack. I wasn’t really thinking of the Substack as a replacement for Twitter but now that I know that I can put out to an audience that really wants to receive it, my thoughts, and I will probably get money for doing so, it has helped nip in the bud–
In addition to the fact that the Musk takeover has scattered everything that was special about Twitter to the winds, and Threads and Bluesky haven’t quite hit the mass or the whatever it is that allows them to replace it. To answer your question, this is something that I think I learned really well at Gawker, is that if something occupies your mind for a certain amount of time, for five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, it actually probably is worth writing about.

Maybe you don’t have anything more to say about it in a sentence, but I bet you could squeeze a paragraph or two out of it. You can have multiple items in your newsletter. You could do blogs where you just do a short thing every time. We used to have this joke, Slack is a workplace chat app There was a rule- It wasn’t a Gawker rule, it was for Deadspin, the sports blog. -there’s a certain number of Slack messages, if 10 Slack messages about a single topic went by, somebody had to write about it for the site.

If it was interesting enough for 10 messages, then it needs to go on a site. Don’t hem and haw, don’t think about it. If you’re a writer, almost– you’re almost guaranteed to be overthinking this kind of thing all the time, just go for it.

John: The reason this episode is this is because I posted a link in Slack to Drew saying like, “Hey, this is a really interesting article,” and I realized, as I post, it’s like, “Oh, you should probably have him on to talk about Halogencore.” It does circle all back around. I want to wrap this up by talking about, you are also a person who wants to write film and television.

You have a manager, you have that as an aspiration as well. How do you think about balancing what you want to do there versus what your– what is your day job, at a day job you actually really like which is running the Substack, because there’s an opportunity cost to doing all the 600, 800,000 words on a topic because that’s time you’re not writing a script.

Max: Yeah. The newsletters only two years old. I haven’t been in a room while I’ve been doing it. So far, it’s been like a, “Well, that’ll be a good problem to have whenever I have it.” For me, the real balance is the having a family and a social life and all these other things. If I had no other obligations, I could easily be in a room all day or do punch-ups on a script or whatever, and then write the newsletter at night, but I want to spend time with my son and my wife, and I want to go out and have dinner and all these other things.

To be brutally honest, right now, the way TV writing in particular is looking in Hollywood, it feels like I should be concentrating my energy on the guaranteed income I make from the newsletter versus the sort of possibility that I might be one of the 10 TV writers getting work this year. Part of the thing I was saying before about passion, the passion stuff, is I hadn’t written fiction, until I started writing this show with my friend back in 2018, I hadn’t written fiction since high school, basically, and I’d forgotten how much I loved it. I’d forgotten how those muscles worked and how much I enjoyed being able to exercise that part of me. And so in some ways it’s like, I’m having ideas throughout the day- It’s similar to what we were just talking about, -I’m having ideas throughout the day, so why not?

Even if it’s a slim chance that this thing’s going to get made, or it’s going to get me in the right room or whatever it is, why not, therapeutically, just for the hobby sake, do that? But again, as we keep saying, the balance is impossible to figure out. There’ll be weeks where it’s like I won’t do anything on the newsletter, but I will get 40 or 50 pages out on a script that I’m interested in.

Then there are months where I’m like, it’s just a newsletter every week and maybe a magazine feature. I haven’t opened final draft, it’s just the moldering on my desktop somewhere.

John: Maybe not opening a final draft is the right choice, we need to get you writing in Highland instead.

Max: Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe that’s what I need.

John: That is the secret. That’s what’s going to change everything for you. Everyone was listening to the moment that his whole life changed.

All right, let’s get to our one cool things. I have two one cool things this week. First is an article by Sarah Schaefer about leaving Los Angeles. I guess it’s actually a blog post. Maybe it’s even a Substack post.

Sarah Schaefer has been on the show before. She is super smart. She’s a comedy writer, and she writes in this post about her decision to leave Los Angeles, basically. That Los Angeles was so expensive that she decided to move with her husband to Virginia and why she decided to do that. Also, the weird way that you have to talk about like, I’m not giving up on my writing career, it’s just I’m moving to Virginia, but that’s not a change from that.

The question of, what are you doing right now in a time when, especially in TV writing, it’s so tough, that maybe we should stop asking, “What are you working on,” and instead be asking, “Where are you? Like, “What’s happening in your life?” It is a Substack. I look at the URL, it is a Substack, so another Substacker to follow.

Second one cool thing was, I went to the show, Mike Birbiglia had the show in Los Angeles at Largo, invited me to. It was Mike Birbiglia and a bunch of other really incredible standup comedians.

The final act was this guy Billy Strings who I’d never heard of before. He’s a Bluegrass performer. I would never have guessed that I liked Bluegrass. This guy was just remarkably talented and just the fastest picking playing I’d ever seen. Really good song craft, so it’s a thing you probably don’t know that you would enjoy, but I’ll put a link in the show notes to this video so you can see a sense of what this is like. Let me play a little clip for you right now just to get a sense of what this sounds like so you’ll, hopefully, click through to the video.

[music]
I ain’t slept in seven days, haven’t ate in three
Methamphetamine has got a damn good hold of me
My tweaker friends have got me to the point of no return
I just took the lighter to the bulb and watched it burn
This life of sin (life of sin) has got me in (got me in)
Well it’s got me back in prison once again
I used my only phone call to contact my daddy
I got twenty long years for some dust in a baggie
[music]

John: If that’s at all intriguing, click through the video and take a listen to Billy Strings. Max, what have you got for us?

Max: I just read a book that I am trying to push on everybody. I’m a big sci-fi guy, and the book is called In Ascension. It’s by a guy named Martin McInnes. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, but I haven’t seen it get a ton of attention or reviews. If you’re a sci-fi guy like me, it’s sort of a– it’s a little bit Jeff VanderMeer, it’s a little bit Ted Chiang. It’s even a little bit Carl Sagan, but it’s also its own thing.
It’s about a Dutch biologist who first investigates a mysterious crevice at the bottom of the ocean and then is sent into space to investigate a mysterious object on the outer edges of space. I don’t want to say too much more because I don’t want to give it away, but there’s also– it’s just a beautiful, beautifully written, beautifully structured, beautifully composed story. I can’t wait to read more by McInnes, and I highly recommend this one.

John: That sounds great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tim Brown. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.
That’s where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the acceleration of time.

If you’d like to sign up for the Highland beta, there’s a link in the show notes for that. Click through to that, and you can take a look at the next version of Highland. Max Read, thank you for coming on the show to talk to us about Halogencore and journalism and other writing topics.

Max: Yes, thank you so much for having me.

John: If you would like to read more from Max, you should go to his Substack. It is maxread.substack.com. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it, too, but you will find him writing twice a week about all sorts of topics on the future.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, in our bonus segment, we are recording this on the Friday after the Democratic National Convention. Kamala Harris has just received the nomination of the Democrats to run for president. This caps off a month of her being the candidate, which is just crazy. It’s crazy how much has happened this summer, and it feels like things are only happening faster and faster. Max, as a person who has to– takes it upon yourself- You don’t have to do this. -but you’ve taken it upon yourself to recap the events of the year each year, man, it’s going to be a very long block for this summer. It’s just so much has happened.

Max: As a journalist, this is actually what you want. I can’t take my journalist hat off here. Just there’s more stuff to write about, more stuff to talk about, more grist for the content mill. It is going to take me a long time to sort through everything. At the end of the year, I do these– I call them the year in weird and stupid futures, and I try to round up everything that’s like a harbinger of our very weird and stupid present, let’s be honest, but also future. My bookmarks folder is already basically full. I’m going to have to be deleting stuff rather than searching it out at the end.

John: I want to talk about how you organize your stuff. You say a bookmarks folder. Is it literally just in Safari you have a folder of all the bookmarks for things? How are you organizing things?

Max: It’s like MTV Cribs, and you walk into my room, and it’s like such a mess it feels so embarrassing. Right now, I’m using a product called Aboard, which is made by a friend of mine named Paul Ford, who’s a great writer and programmer. Aboard is a bookmarking service that creates little cards with images and links, and you can put notes, and you can tag them, and you can sort them and whatever you want.

It’s a really useful way for me to just be saving snippets of things that I might use for future articles. I’m working on a piece about generated AI slop right now, and I’m tagging stuff that I find so that I can save it for later. I’m tagging weird futures things. I see a link to a musician I want to listen to or a book I want to read, I’ll throw it in there too. It’s just a bucket for everything.

I’m using a browser called Arc that I really like. It’s got a really great tab system where you can separate– you can save tabs, and you can separate them out and do sort of things. Some stuff is getting saved in the Arc tab system-

John: Yes, it’s dangerous.

Max: -and but some stuff’s getting saved in the board, and I’m going to lose a lot of stuff, I’m sure. It feels very clean because everything’s designed so well.

John: I’m using Pinboard for all these sort of things that come up. I see something, I make a pin, and it goes to Pinboard, which is like a very bare bones. It’s been around for 20 years. It holds together.

Max: Yes, well, so I was a longtime Pinboard user, and I switched to a board because I wanted to support Paul, and I just have been sort of stuck in it, but I love Pinboard too. It’s just very straightforward, easy, to the point. I think I still pay for mine because I’ve got eight years of Pinboard links to look back upon.

John: Absolutely. As you think about all of the links that are now being put into Pinboard or a board, it does just feel crazy. There are moments in time when it feels like, oh my gosh, I’m actually in a part of a story. I remember, obviously, the 2016 election, the moment like, oh shit, like I could feel that everything has changed around me. Start of the pandemic felt like that as well. This summer, Craig and I were recording this podcast when Trump got shot.

Trump got shot. It’s so weird that a presidential candidate was a attempted assassination, and his ear got bloodied, and could have died, like inches away, he could have died, and we barely remember that as actually even happening this summer. Just so much has happened so quickly. The other thing I would say is that I feel like the advent of ChatGPT and just the realization like, oh shit, like AI is like much better and faster than we ever had anticipated, accelerated the sense too that we are– that line between like here’s where we are now, and that’s the future, instead of like, oh, we’ve jumped into the future, and we really weren’t quite ready for it.

Max: Yeah. I think about this sometimes just as a journalist. We live in a relatively fragmented media environment. It’s not like there are three networks that we all sit down in front of every night to help us sort of memorialize things that happened. Which means that if it was, obviously, if it was 50 years ago, we probably would still be hearing about the Trump assassination attempt because that– we would have our agendas set by three networks and five major metropolitan papers.

Now, novelty is such a premium in this kind of environment where you’re getting your news from whoever and whenever and wherever. For the worst, usually, not for the better. Novelty is such a premium that the collective boredom of the internet sets in so much earlier on everything. It’s like hard to grapple with, kind of. One of the funniest things we noticed at Gawker when I was there is that we could do incredible traffic with a rubric we called remember when, and we would just we would just lift tabloid stories from maybe 10 years earlier.

Some of this is sort of urban legend stuff, like remember when Tim Allen was busted for doing cocaine. I mean, that’s not an urban legend, but it is a story that everybody knows, but not everybody knows it online. There’s this funny thing where not only is everything happening and being forgotten all at once, everything is also being remembered all at once right now, too.
The remember when thing is now you go on TikTok and there’s TikToks constantly of Zoomers describing the first World Trade Center bombing or other things, other ‘90s news stories that were part of my childhood that I remember relatively well, but the Zoomers have never heard of and are now sort of breathlessly telling each other about. A total flattening of time in this very funny way.

John: Yes. Obviously, there’s going to be peaks and valleys and things will probably normalize to some degree, things will slow down a little bit, probably, and yet we’re racing up to an election. September, normally is– like you said in the setup here, August is usually a very slow month. No one deliberately does anything in August because people are gone and there’s sort of nothing happens in August. People are on vacation.

Now, suddenly, things are happening. It’s not just in the US. UK calls for snap elections and suddenly they have a new person in charge of the UK. Macron calls for elections in France and suddenly, like three weeks later, they’re voting, and they have new people in power. I think as it became clear that, after Biden’s disastrous debate, everyone’s like, well, we can’t actually do something that’s dramatic and swap out the candidate because it takes years to do that stuff and there’s the whole expectations.

I would point to Europe and say like, yes, but like Europe just does it. We can suddenly just do it. The result of this DNC process was just a reminder like, oh yes, we can actually do things quickly when we need to. So many of our systems are there because of just inertia and because we’ve always done it that way, but it doesn’t mean we couldn’t do it much faster if we needed to do it much faster.

Max: This is the sort of acceleration of time, like increases itself, right?

John: Yes.

Max: When that you can accelerate it, you’re like, well, let’s just keep on doing that, maybe.

John: Yes, let’s go faster and faster and break things and see, sort of see what happens there. It sets a weird expectation. If nothing happens in a week, it’s going to feel like, wait, no big thing happened? Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck filed for divorce this past week, and I would have totally missed it except that it showed up on one little thing, but like it was the perfect time to announce that you are separating because like, who can pay attention to that?

Max: I know. Really, if you’re a crisis PR person, and your first advice isn’t, “Don’t do anything,” then you’re not good at your job. Whenever a bad thing happens just ignore it and see if it goes away, because it probably will.

John: Yes, it probably will. Yeah, that is the cycle these days. Max, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about time and the acceleration of time and Halogencore. An absolute delight getting to know you.

Max: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, John.

John: Cool. Thanks.

Links:

• Beta test the new Highland – sign up here!
• Max Read’s newsletter READ MAX
• Shiva Baby and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
• How many Hallmark Christmas movies are there?! by Stephen Follows
• The Read Max ‘Halogencore’ Guide
• Max Read’s Halogencore list on Letterboxd
• Where Are You Now? by Sara Schaefer
• Billy Strings – Dust in a Baggie
• In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Tim Brown (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.