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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/how-would-this-be-a-bio-pic).

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

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

**John:** It is Episode 621 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

The past few weeks have offered up a lot of big personalities in the news, with some of these individuals dying or being fired or removed from Congress. Today on the show, we ask the most important question, of course: how would this be a biopic?

**Craig:** Thank you for saying BAI-oh-pik and not bai-AH-pik.

**John:** A film that is a biographic is a BAI-oh-pik, but sometimes it’s written out as without a hyphen, and it becomes bai-AH-pik. That’s not a thing.

**Craig:** That’s not a thing. I think people are confusing it with myopic, which is understandable, but also not understandable, because it’s not like we refer to people’s bios as bai-AHs.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So BAI-oh-pik, everyone.

**John:** BAI-oh-pik.

**Craig:** BAI-oh-pik.

**John:** We’re making a strong stand here for that.

**Craig:** Damn right.

**John:** We also have some follow-up on AI and inner monologues. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, I want to pontificate about which event in history has had the biggest negative impact on human civilization.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah, so some college stoner talk here.

**Craig:** Woo! Okay.

**John:** Maybe think about some alt histories there. We also have some news. We have a live show coming up, this Sunday, December 17th, at 4:00 p.m. The show’s going to be sold out by the time you’re listening to this.

**Craig:** Of course. We’re the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts.

**John:** It’s going to be at Dynasty Typewriter again. There will be some streaming tickets available. If you’re listening to this on the Tuesday that the episode drops, check the link in the show notes for our live show at Dynasty Typewriter. We’re going to have some great guests. It’s our holiday show. It came together kind of last minute, but we’re very excited to do it.

**Craig:** Who is it benefiting this time?

**John:** This time it’s benefiting the Writers Guild Foundation.

**Craig:** Fantastic, which does excellent work supporting veterans and the writing community in general. Just so people know, it’s not the Writers Guild. It is the charitable nonprofit arm of the Writers Guild, vaguely associated.

**John:** We’ve done a lot of shows with them, for them over the years. It’s nice to be back doing one for them. Now, before we get into the work follow-up here, apparently there’s an important bit of Melissa follow-up about Thanksgiving.

**Craig:** We are recording this on December 3rd. It is Melissa’s birthday, by the way. Happy birthday, Melissa.

**John:** Happy birthday, Melissa.

**Craig:** She said, “I have follow-up for you.”

**John:** We should say that Melissa Mazin is your wife.

**Craig:** She is my wife, and has been for quite some time. She said, “In your last show about Thanksgiving, you said that the women,” meaning her and our friend Beth, “were not allowed to cook,” that Josh and I were the only ones who were allowed to cook. She said, “That’s not accurate. We chose not to cook.” Now, I’m going to say, in follow-up to that follow-up, we haven’t ever gotten to the place where we would need to say to her, “You’re not allowed to cook.” If she chose to cook, there would have to be a discussion. But she wanted it to be clear that she didn’t need permission. She simply wasn’t interested.

**John:** That’s a fair distinction there. I think many cases in life, you can see, was that actually a choice, did she actually have the ability to choose to cook, and was that denied from her.

**Craig:** She feels she had the choice. There’ll be follow-up to this one on a subsequent podcast.

**John:** Apparently so. It’s nice to know that Melissa does listen to the show.

**Craig:** Religiously.

**John:** That’s great. By religiously, you mean that she listens with votive candles burning around her.

**Craig:** With my face on them. Absolutely.

**John:** Let’s get to some less controversial follow-up. We’ll start with David. This is back to Episode 620. We were talking about visual effects and digital doubles and AI. David writes, “The bad crowd work mentioned in Prom Pact, that was meme-ified as, quote, ‘Disney put AI people into this crowd.’ That wasn’t AI. That was just cheap VFX, likely done at the last second.”

**Craig:** That sounds right. In looking at it again, they did seem like were sort of the kinds of people we see in previs stuff. We used to just have storyboards, and now for complicated sequences, we can do previs, where you do get these horror-looking humans. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not meant to be seen by anybody except for you, for planning purposes. I think David’s probably right there.

**John:** I would also say that the differentiation between this is AI versus VFX is increasingly irrelevant. A lot of visual effects are going to have AI components built into them. The fact that it looks terrible doesn’t… Whether it was done with visual effects or AI, it’s not actually so important. It’s the fact that they put something on screen that look like human beings, that were not human beings. That’s the concern.

**Craig:** If we get used to it, if we normalize it, as the kids say, we’re in trouble. Reasonable distinction to make.

**John:** You want to take Alana here?

**Craig:** We’ve got some follow-up from Alana. She is commenting on Episode 611, where I apparently mentioned a screenwriting format that’s divided into two columns, one for what you see and one for what you hear, and that it might make more sense for screenwriting than the current standardized format. “In Mexican telenovelas, the two-column format has been used for decades as the standard screenwriting format, though apparently in recent years, people have turned to the standard format that’s used in most places.” I wonder if perhaps the folks writing the Mexican telenovelas may have gone backwards here, because I think that makes sense. I think it makes sense.

**John:** I was trying to find an example of Mexican telenovelas in the two-column format, because I’m familiar with two-column format, which is often used in commercials.

**Craig:** Commercials.

**John:** Other things, you see it there. Left-hand side is the visuals. The audio, and including the dialogue, is on the right-hand side. Yes, it does kind of make sense overall. I think our current screenplay format, which it’s all one big flow, it reads really well. You can actually read and get a sense of what’s happening very cleanly and smoothly in our current version. There’s trade-offs to doing that two-column format.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I think maybe the two-column format might be best used by production. There are times where it’s hard to create simultaneity. We can do it in dialogue, with double dialogue, which I just sort of hate doing anyway, because it just sends the actors into a shouting over each other tizzy. But what’s almost impossible to do is simultaneous action and dialogue. You can do a little bit of it. But even then, if you put it in parentheses, it’s still like there’s a temporal thing. It’s a bit linear. The two-column format does allow for something that’s simultaneous. But I agree with you. It is easier to read. Maybe not as useful for production, but more useful for reading.

**John:** Going back to simultaneity, even in dialogue, when Greta Gerwig was on the show, she was talking about how in her dual dialogue, she had very specific points where she wanted the actors to be overlapping and how things fit together. She put these little slashes in to indicate where these things are supposed to fall. That is the kind of micro-control you would love to be able to have. You’re always going to bump up against the hard limits of how you can portray speech on page.

**Craig:** At some point, you are going to have to explain it to the actors and make sure they understand that this is a technical thing you’re aiming for. I find that actors in general appreciate it if you put it in that context. If you say this is actually going to be a bit technical, then they get it. If you try and convince them that this is about art, then I think reasonably, they’re like, “No. This is not how I would do it. Humans wouldn’t normally do this.” But if you put it in technical terms…

**John:** Follow-up from Joe in New Zealand talking about Episode 615, called The Mind’s Eye. He says, “The discussion about inner monologues hit home for me, because my lovely wife has a primarily outer monologue.”

**Craig:** What?

**John:** “She goes about her days speaking aloud near constantly-”

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** “… whether she’s in the room alone or in a room with me.”

**Craig:** Oh, Joe, no.

**John:** “Early in our relationship, it caused confusion, because she’s mostly unaware of it. To her, it feels like going from silence to talking when she addresses me, but my attention filter doesn’t always pick up on it. I thought of it as a singular quirk until we visited her family. I found myself in the living room with her, her brother, her father, and her mother, four adults all wandering around, playing with a dog, going about their business, talking constantly.”

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** “Not to each other, not engaging, not questioning or responding, just a stream of conscious thought flowing out of each of them. It was so funny and so charming in the moment, but I definitely lied about why I was smiling and chuckling. It’s still a minor source of confusion 18 years later, but ever since then, the music of her chatter from the other side of the house is simply one of the many joys of our home.”

**Craig:** This is the most kiwi thing I’ve ever read in my life. Joe, the good news is that your wife, who I will refer to as Mrs. Joe, found the best possible husband. The fact that you consider it a joy is why you are still married 18 years later. I would go insane. I love a quiet house. I don’t know about you.

**John:** I like a quiet house too. It’s nice.

**Craig:** It’s wonderful. I will admit that there are times where I have an outer monologue, and those times are very specifically when I’m working on puzzles. I will start to talk. Melissa will say, “You’re sitting there saying things like, ‘But what is that about? Why would that be there? Oh, okay, so this is absolutely this kind of… Okay, so if I do that…'” I just do it because I’m working weirdly. But if I were to do that constantly-

**John:** You’d be divorced?

**Craig:** No, I’d probably be the victim of a accident.

**John:** This is reminding me of some interview I saw with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. They’re talking about their producing partner who apparently had a bit of this, and if they were driving someplace, would have to read aloud every sign that they saw, that they passed. It’s a thing. They have to externalize that stuff.

**Craig:** Just going to have to just bear with them, I guess.

**John:** To some degree, I am talking. I definitely talk to my dog a lot if it’s just me and Lambert.

**Craig:** Everyone talks to their dog.

**John:** Because they’re such good boys.

**Craig:** Lambert is such a good boy. We got some follow-up from Greenhorn from back in 615. Greenhorn says, “My thanks to John and Craig for their helpful advice.” Oh, I remember this. This was the second unit director who was trying to claim co-writer credit.

Greenhorn says, “The pushy second unit director backed down in trying to claim co-writer credit. He said a production company wanted to see a script. I said that I’d need to be paid to write a draft, and then that would also clear up any confusion over our roles. I am the writer, writing a project for you to direct. He accepted this. In his trying to squeeze writer credit, either he as a second unit director thus far was just ignorant of what was fair, as Craig suggested, or he was trying his luck. If the latter, that does not bode well for a working relationship, but I’m so keen to get my break that I’m kind of taking the view that if swimming with sharks is what it takes, so be it, so long as I can protect myself.

“Now, the director said he relayed my response, which is, ‘Pay me for a draft then,’ to the production company, and they replied that they didn’t have a development budget. This company makes $100 million movies, so it’s hard to believe that they can’t afford to pay a writer to write up a script for a project they’re interested in, or is this standard practice in the US?

“I’m a London-based British writer, and happily, I’ve started to get paid to write outlines and scripts, but only today I’ve had a reputable US producer put a writing brief to me. I’ve offered a take on it, which he likes, but he says he’d need a spec, not an outline. I said, ‘I’m being paid to write scripts now, so I’m not looking to write on spec.’ The UK producer I’m speaking with on other projects gladly seem to get this, but this guy just repeated that he’d need a script. It feels wrong and, frankly, insulting that he’s expecting me to give weeks or months of work without any kind of pay or commitment, or is that something that US producers can get away with when a writer hasn’t broken in yet and indeed join the WGA?” Oh, there are some facts we can lay out here, John.

**John:** Yes, there are. Greenhorn, it’s good that you are being paid to write stuff in the UK. You should be paid to write stuff everywhere. Writing something on spec for somebody in a situation you don’t control is not a good practice to get into. For, certainly, a US-based producer, someone who’s a WGA signatory, they should not be doing that at all.

**Craig:** It is a violation of our contract, very specifically, a violation of our minimum basic agreement, our collective bargaining agreement. It also is a violation of the WGA working rules. You are not allowed to write anything on spec for a signatory. You can pitch stuff, but you can’t write. Now, of course, Greenhorn is British. Greenhorn is not in the WGA. This US producer is fully aware of what the deal is. Can they get away with asking a British person to do this? Sure, but it’s wrong. I’m not sure that I would use the word reputable in front of this US producer’s name. If you’re reputable, you don’t ask for this, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** As a reminder, when we talk about writing on spec, this is a thing where you as the writer are choosing to write a project. Ideally, it’s something you own and control. It’s entirely your thing. Now, there could be situations where a producer comes, is like, “I really want to do a movie set at McDonald’s in space.” It’s like, great. You could go off and write that movie, and that person could be interested in your thing, but you control this fully. You cannot do that situation where that producer somehow owns this thing without having paid you money to write it.

**Craig:** That’s right. If you hear an idea and think, “That sounds amazing. I really want to write this,” the deal is that producer is going to attach themselves and maybe just be a dead weight on it. But it’s yours. You own it. They don’t own the copyright. You wrote it. By the way, you shouldn’t write an outline either. You should write nothing unless you have an employment agreement.

Now, that’s how we do it here with WGA writers in our business. The British system is not as protective as ours, which is odd, because they don’t have work for hire. And yet, as we’ve said many times, in exchange for giving up copyright, we get all the protections a union can afford, and it’s clear that they don’t quite have that in the UK.

**John:** Let’s get to our main topic this week, which is how would this be a biopic.

**Craig:** It’s not bai-AH-pik.

**John:** Not bai-AH-pik. It’s a BAI-oh-pik. We had a whole series of deaths happen recently. People who live long lives are just fantastic. We love people living a long time.

**Craig:** Rosalynn Carter.

**John:** I thought we’d start with Sandra Day O’Connor. Sandra Day O’Connor, for folks who are younger or not American, she was our first female Supreme Court justice. She died recently at 93 due to complications related to advanced dementia. She’d been public about the fact that she had dementia coming on.

**Craig:** Yes, so she has not been-

**John:** In public life.

**Craig:** … in the public eye for many, many years.

**John:** She obviously was an inspiration to a generation of female lawyers, as this pioneer there. She grew up in Arizona. She was a graduate of Stanford, went to Stanford Law School. She was dating William Rehnquist while she was there.

**Craig:** So hot.

**John:** So hot. A belated chief justice. But then she went on to marry another classmate, John O’Connor.

**Craig:** Well done. It has to have been an upgrade.

**John:** When she graduated from Stanford Law School, she was turned down by law firms, because she was a woman. She had to start her own firm with her husband. She was an Arizona state senator, first female majority leader. She became a judge through the Arizona system and then was appointed by Reagan to the Supreme Court. She was a deciding vote in a lot of crucial cases. She was a conservative, but she also voted with liberal majority on other situations, in controversial cases.

Probably the thing she’s most noted for is Planned Parenthood versus Casey, about a woman’s right to abortion and the term “undue burden” on a woman seeking an abortion. Undue burden felt like a good phrase to hang around a story told about her. Craig, how would this be a movie? Is there a movie? What are some comps that you’re thinking in your head?

**Craig:** I think there is a movie. They made a movie about Ruth Ginsburg.

**John:** Yeah, On the Basis of Sex.

**Craig:** Correct. I actually think there may be a more interesting movie to be made about Sandra Day O’Connor. The reason why is, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a progressive firebrand who served faithfully and brilliantly for many, many years, doing exactly what she said she would do. It was one of those stories where somebody is principled, and they stay principled. They face people, obstacles and things in their way. They surmount, and they thrive. Sandra Day O’Connor was far more sneaky. She’s an interesting case of somebody who came up through what you and I knew to be Republicans. That party’s no longer in existence. Might as well call it a different name.

The party of Reagan. In the “only Nixon can go to China” thing, Ronald Reagan, being the first president to appoint a female Supreme Court justice, did so under the aegis of, “This isn’t about women’s lib stuff, of course. She’s a good, staunch conservative in the Ronald Reagan mold.” Like many Supreme Court justices, including some that we have today, she began to surprise people, because while many people disagree with the lifetime appointment clause, what it does is it lets people just do what they want.

**John:** It’s like tenure.

**Craig:** It’s tenure. Sandra Day O’Connor showed an evolution and a wisdom and began to change the way the court was thinking. I love the fact that she dated William Rehnquist. That’s really cool, because then they’re on the court together. That’s fun. There’s cool moments and scenes like that, and also ,somebody wrestling with their own conscience and wrestling with their own principles. The fact that she had to take her husband on just to get a law firm, it’s…You can see somebody compromising until they didn’t have to anymore. That’s really interesting.

**John:** The question of any biopic we’re going to wrestle with a lot-

**Craig:** BAI-oh-pik.

**John:** BAI-oh-pik, gotta say BAI-oh-pik. The question is always where are the edges of this, where do you start the story, where do you end the story. There’s that temptation to do cradle to grave, which I think is generally a mistake. Those are not going to be the most interesting moments of a life. Once you do decide what the more limited window is, do you stay within it, or do you jump out to trace other things? You’re trying to thematically fold this all together.

I can imagine a Sandra Day O’Connor movie that is essentially just about the decision to appoint her and her going in through this moment and surviving that little crucible. I don’t recall her nomination process.

**Craig:** Very smooth.

**John:** So probably not that.

**Craig:** Ronald Reagan had full control.

**John:** He had control of everything.

**Craig:** The Republican Party was a corporation back then and ran like one. The thing I would need is actually information about her marriage, because at the heart of it, you do want that relationship. You want some sort of love story. Same thing that happened with the Ginsburg story. I think also there is something brutal about the greatest minds succumbing to dementia and fading away and what that means for the person who loves her and loved her all that time. That I think is valuable, but it’s also a story of legacy, and that’s really interesting to me. There is no Ruth Bader Ginsburg without Sandra Day O’Connor.

**John:** Absolutely. Depending on where the edges are of the story you’re telling, she was the first, but then Ginsburg is the second woman, I think, on the court.

**Craig:** That sounds right.

**John:** That sounds right. After she’s broken this through, what is it like to have a second woman, once you’ve actually been through there, and how do you-

**Craig:** A woman who’s from, quote unquote, the other side. That’s where it gets interesting. The Supreme Court is notable for very odd bedfellows, weird friendships that form. Kavanaugh, fascinatingly, has become a slightly weird swing vote at times. No one can seem to predict what happens when people get on the court.

**John:** Yeah, because important to recognize that you are appointed because they believe you’re going to have one set of facts, basically that you’re going to be the same person. But of course, people do change over time. That’s why stories are interesting.

**Craig:** Absolutely. When you watch Supreme Court hearings, they are a study in political non-commitment. Everyone knows what’s going on. The job is to be slippery without seeming like you’re slippery, until we all vote yes, and then you’re going to do whatever you want.

**John:** Next up, not controversial at all, Henry Kissinger died recently at 100 years of age.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think this is going to be too… Yeah.

**John:** 100 years old. Actually, you listened to audio this last week of just him at events, coherent and talking at 100 years old, which is great. Statesman, war criminal. Movies have to make choices about how they’re going to portray the complexity of a man’s life.

**Craig:** Kissinger is going to be a movie. That will be a movie.

**John:** 100%. A movie or a mini series. That’s worth talking about.

**Craig:** Movie or a mini series.

**John:** I feel like Sandra Day O’Connor is a movie.

**Craig:** Movie. Kissinger probably you could do a mini series. I’m sure it’s in development already. He falls into the category of monumentous people, for better or worse. He was just this fascinating character, working for a president that openly detested Jews. Here was Henry Kissinger, the most Jewish of Jews.

**John:** Born in Germany. Born Jewish in Germany, fled-

**Craig:** Fled.

**John:** … with his family to New York.

**Craig:** But notably, never lost the accent. He was always an immigrant. For Jewish people, there are levels of assimilation, like there are for any ethnicity in the United States. Having that accent, it’s just remarkable to me. That Nixon-Kissinger relationship is fascinating. There are moments, I think, where Kissinger probably did good, in the way that Lindsey Graham, in his bootlicky way, probably kept Trump from doing some terrible, terrible things. I think Kissinger probably did halt some horrible things. There were some things where he didn’t let Nixon get on the phone because he was drunk. Having somebody that is such an outsider be so inside is fascinating, from a dramatic point of view.

**John:** Absolutely. I was going through the incredibly long Wikipedia article on him, pulling out some little moments. He became a US citizen after he joined the Army to fight in the war. There was a moment which he was just a private during the American advance into Germany and was put in charge of administration of the city of Krefeld, because he was the guy who could speak German, and actually, apparently, did a really good job. It’s just those weird moments of, oh, now we’re fighting the Germans, and you speak German, and that is the moment where you can pick up and shine. That feels like the kind of thing that is in the longer version of this, which is probably the mini series. I don’t know that this fits into the movie.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s why you do want it to be a mini series, because for somebody like Kissinger, you want to walk away… It’s a little bit like the way Sorkin ended Social Network. You feel like you’ve known the spirit of somebody, but you also pity them and loathe them all at the same time. There’s just a core of something that’s sad there. But you can’t make a mini series merely to say, “Bad. This person bad.” That’s not the goal, I don’t think.

**John:** We have some insight into his character, obviously. He gave a lot of interviews. This one interview I wanted to pull out was with an Italian journalist. He writes, “The cowboy doesn’t have to be courageous. All he needs is to be alone, to show others that he rides into town and does everything by himself. This amazing romantic character suits me precisely, because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like it, my technique, together with independence. It’s very important for me, and conviction. I’ve always been convinced I had to do whatever I’ve done.”

**Craig:** Yes, which a lot of terrible people also have. Certainly, Kissinger did not lack any conviction. But I would suggest that that is bravado, in that everybody has a dark midnight.

**John:** What does he fear? That’s a thing I don’t think we have a sense of yet, but what the movie or mini series would have to get into.

**Craig:** Given the decisions he was making and the lives that he destroyed, particularly in Cambodia, but all over Southeast Asia, there had to have been moments of doubt, had to, because ultimately, it didn’t work.

**John:** Thinking about the edges of this mini series – it’s going to be a mini series – I think you have to pick an exit point, because he ended up staying in governmental life and policy life up until months ago. He was always an advisor to people. But I don’t think that’s going to be interesting. I don’t think that’s relevant.

**Craig:** Agreed. The meat of it ends with the fall of Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War. Then I think you jump ahead to him much, much later in life and see him trying to rehabilitate or defend or whatever, and yet still, again, there is that last moment where you have to ask, where is the humanity of this person, and what happened? How does it feel?

**John:** So question of how many actors. Where do you break up his life? Is it three actors? Is there a 20-something, is there a 40-something, and then an old man version? Where are the splits?

**Craig:** If I were doing it, I would probably want just one actor, if I could. If he’s very young in the war – I don’t know how old he was when he was in World War II – then it’s hard. Then you want two. But if he’s a full adult, then I think… Because also, you’re going to need to do some prosthetic work and makeup on somebody to play Kissinger. Nobody’s just walking in the room looking like him. You don’t necessarily want to drift into the whole Saturday Night Live, “Look, I look exactly like the guy.” We had to deal with this with Mikhail Gorbachev in Chernobyl. It was a tricky thing. I feel like you could probably get away with one really, really good actor, because the great bulk of the work is going to be-

**John:** The Nixon era.

**Craig:** … 60s and 70s.

**John:** I’m surprised there’s not a movie out there yet. There’s a documentary Alex Gibney did, The Trials of Henry Kissinger. The comps I was thinking about for this, it’s obviously Oppenheimer, a recent version, which was focused though on one moment in his life. I think we’re expanding beyond just the one focal point. It also made me think of, there’s a Michael Jackson biopic coming out. It reminded of just like, wow, you are walking into a minefield there. Talk about someone who’s a hero and a villain.

**Craig:** Yes, and you have to go in knowing that people are going to be critiquing this heavily no matter what you do. There’s no way that you put this out and everybody goes, “Yeah.”

**John:** “Yeah, that’s good.”

**Craig:** “We all agree.” It’s not as simple as something like Frost/Nixon, for instance, where Nixon’s clearly the villain, and really the hero journey there is, will David Frost get this guy to spill it or not. This is different. It’s also different than, the other thing I was thinking about was the John Adams mini series, Paul Giamatti. The point of that was that John Adams, crusty and grouchy and miserable as he was, was perhaps the most important Founding Father. That’s not the case here. This is something else.

**John:** Simpler story perhaps, Rosalynn Carter passed away recently, also in her 90s. She was the First Lady when her husband, Jimmy Carter, was the president. Born in Plains, Georgia, married Jimmy Carter, was politically active during her husband’s entire governorship and presidency. She was very involved as a First Lady. She was in cabinet meetings in ways that was controversial at the time, although there’s precedent for that before then, of course. Active with the Equal Rights Amendments. One of the first modern feminists who was in the White House there. Portrayed as a Steel Magnolia, sweet and loving but spine of steel.

**Craig:** Tough.

**John:** Tough. Criticized for lack of attention paid to fashion, which I think is an interesting thing, the sexism that goes in there. Hard to point to achievements in and of herself. It’s hard to imagine the Rosalynn Carter story that isn’t largely about Jimmy Carter, although I would say a comp for me would be Priscilla by Sofia Coppola, which is looking at the wife of Elvis, rather than that whole story.

**Craig:** But even there in Priscilla, the point is she was a child, that we have forgotten that Elvis essentially was a pedophile, I guess, by modern standards.

**John:** Yeah, by modern standards.

**Craig:** It’s funny. Melissa went to the Stevie Nicks concert last night. Apparently, Stevie’s still crushing it in her 70s. I was like, “Did she play Edge of Seventeen?” “Oh yeah, of course.” I’m like, “That’s about a boy who’s 16, so I guess technically it’s still pedophilia by today’s standards.”

In the case of Rosalynn Carter, to me the story is probably about the relationship between Rosalynn Carter and Jimmy Carter. It’s a little bit more like Johnny Cash. I don’t know. It just feels like on her own… By the way, in a weird way, on Jimmy Carter’s own, even though he was president, I’m not sure there would be enough there. But their relationship was fascinating, so long-lived and so beautiful and decent, and the way that they both just walked the walk. Also, the two of them defined a kind of Christianity that is what I would think of as actual Christianity.

**John:** When you look at the Habitat for Humanity work that Carter was doing later on in his years, it’s literally building houses for people, just like, be a carpenter.

**Craig:** Following the teachings of Jesus and giving and giving and giving. You’d like to think that, in part, that’s why they both made it so far in life. They were fulfilled with each other and by life and their good works, which is in stark contrast to some of the people that we now deal with, these social media-baiting idiots. It’s almost like a different species of person. The sadness of her death to me was more in the context of end of an era.

**John:** I worry about lack of conflict. I don’t know where the source of the conflict is. The conflict doesn’t feel like it’s between the two of them. Who is the antagonist here, and how is she growing and changing? I don’t have a sense of that yet. Any movie is going to need to figure out what that is, because right now, it’s almost Hallmarky in the sense it’s just smooth sailing.

**Craig:** One of the things that drama struggles with is to portray decency, steady, reliable decency, because it’s not interesting. We simply aren’t entertained by it. Neither one of them seemed interested in interesting anyone. They just wanted to do good things. I do think a Rosalynn Carter biopic would be a challenge. Jimmy Carter, you know that he was involved in this insane nuclear accident?

**John:** No, I don’t know anything about that.

**Craig:** Not that he caused it, but he was a nuclear engineer. He worked on nuclear submarines. There was an accident at a reactor. Jimmy Carter and his team was sent in to clean it up, and they did. It was Chernobyl-ish in the fact that they were exposed to quite a bit of radiation and all the rest of it. He was an heroic guy, and I think more than any other president, has received a little bit of historical rehabilitation, at least any other from my lifetime.

**John:** Going back to the whole issues of conflict and where is the conflict in this story, I am aware that we on Scriptnotes are always talking about the hero’s journey, the sense of, oh, this is the character who grows up in a place, leaves the place, is transformed, goes through these trials. That’s not the only way stories can work mythologically. There’s things called the heroine’s journey and other alternative ways of thinking about what a central character’s journey might be. We’re trying to put together an episode talking through these alternate ways of thinking about that.

**Craig:** Listen. Anything that interests people, I think, is the goal. It doesn’t have to be from one perspective or another. What’s fascinating to me is that, as varied as world cultures are, storytelling and mythologizing are incredibly similar. The Hero’s Journey ultimately really was just saying that. The word hero was applied to all genders. It is kind of incredible. It makes me wonder if this way we think about storytelling, it’s just imprinted in the brain. It’s not necessarily cultural. The brain has a way of organizing drama. But that said, I’m open to anything. If it makes people sit forward and engages them, yes.

**John:** I think some of the overlooked stories in mythology would be Demeter’s story, or the kidnapped woman who has to adapt and survive in a place, Medea as a woman who is not a classic protagonist story, yet is a part of foundational.

**Craig:** Great story there.

**John:** It’s a great story though.

**Craig:** Those kids die.

**John:** They do.

**Craig:** She’s angry.

**John:** She’s very angry.

**Craig:** Oh, man, does she get angry.

**John:** You know who else is angry?

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** George Santos.

**Craig:** The Pope, George Santos?

**John:** Pope George Santos. For folks who are listening to this years after we recorded it and are going, “Who is George Santos?”

**Craig:** “Who is George Santos?” George Santos, I believe he was the Pope. He was a Jewish, not-Jewish, astronaut, physicist, professor. I think he was the president and also none of those, just a liar.

**John:** George Anthony Devolder Santos we believe is his full name.

**Craig:** Maybe.

**John:** Spent his early life in Jackson Heights and also in Brazil. He was elected as a US Representative from New York City as a Republican, openly gay. Everything that basically he ended up saying turned out to be a lie.

**Craig:** Lie.

**John:** This was all revealed after he was elected. The New York Times reported how much of his life was misrepresented. There was really a sense of failure of journalism to have not investigated any of this stuff earlier on. He was the sixth person ever kicked out of Congress.

**Craig:** Congress is enormous. 535, I think, people. Over the course of 200 and whatever many years, he’s number six. He not only was a serial fabulist, who for instance eventually would say, “I’m Jew-ish.” He also was a fraud. He was misusing campaign funds to buy fabulous things. We’re talking about him like he’s dead. He’s still alive. He is fascinating.

**John:** Yes. I think he’s a great character.

**Craig:** He is. I love listening to him, because it’s like somebody coming out and saying, “And now, the dumpster fire show.” It’s weirdly funny.

**John:** It’s funny because you recognize he actually has no power. With Trump, it’s terrifying, because like, oh shit, people are actually going to vote for him. Everyone recognizes this is absurd.

**Craig:** It is a remarkable clown show. You’re right. He does feel vaguely innocuous. He did misuse campaign funds, and that’s a crime.

**John:** That’s a crime. He’s indicted. He will probably go to jail.

**Craig:** He will go to prison, as well he should. I hope he does. But he’s also kind of ridiculous. Even when Saturday Night Live would make fun of him, it seemed like they were enjoying it.

**John:** Absolutely. Bowen Yang’s portrayal of him was delightful and funny. You’d worry, oh, it’s softening him too much, but not really. It’s not like the thing you worry about with Trump, where you’re making him likable. You’re not making him likable, because he’s absurd.

**Craig:** He’s absurd and he was ejected from a Republican-controlled Congress, and he was a Republican. He is now starting to accuse other people of things. He’s like, “Okay. If you kick me out, I’m going to say that one’s gay and that one did this and that one beat his wife.” There’s a great exchange where he accused a guy of beating his wife. The problem with George Santos is he’s like the kid who cried wolf times a thousand. Who knows what anything coming out of his mouth-

**John:** You can’t believe anything, I think-

**Craig:** Nothing.

**John:** … which is part of the fun. Looking for comps with this, Shattered Glass, in terms of a fabulist, is just watching it all come crashing down. What’s so weird though is, in the movie Shattered Glass – Billy Ray wrote and directed that – it’s over the course of one day, it just all comes crashing down. Here, the story comes out, but it just keeps going and going and going.

**Craig:** It just keeps going.

**John:** It reminded me a little more of Tiger King, where it’s just like, you’re an absurd character here, and somehow the world has to go around.

**Craig:** Great comp. That’s a great comp. That’s why a documentary that would follow, if it had followed George Santos around-

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** … and picked up his reaction and his bizarre lies and then showing how he was lying with a simple edit from what he says to what is real would’ve been amazing. Shattered Glass, Billy portrays Stephen Glass as a tragic figure who wants applause and love and can’t get it. Peter Sarsgaard does such a beautiful job of playing somebody who beats himself up for getting suckered.

Everybody knows. There’s no conflict. Everybody knows. He knows. He knows he’s lying when he’s lying. He’s basically saying, “I’m lying.” There’s a great clip from Fox News where someone asks him something, and he gives an answer, and she goes, “You just can’t tell the truth.” That is literally on Fox News. No one ever believed anything he said, and then that’s it. Then he got kicked out.

**John:** There is a movie in development.

**Craig:** You’re kidding me.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Oh, come on.

**John:** It’s HBO. It could be really fun.

**Craig:** It’s on HBO? Who’s doing it?

**John:** It’s written by Mike Makowsky, who came on Scriptnotes. He’s the guy who did-

**Craig:** Oh, I remember.

**John:** … Bad Education.

**Craig:** He’s a good writer.

**John:** Good writer. Episode 448, he was on for that. Here’s the write-up that we have so far. “The film tells the story of a seemingly minor local race that wound up a battle for the soul of Long Island and unexpectedly carved the path to the world’s most famous and now disgraced Congressman. It follows the Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on the truth, and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American dream.”

**Craig:** I wish Mike all the luck. I don’t know how I would do… I also don’t know how to do a lot of things. Then I see them and I’m like, “Oh, that’s how you do it.”

**John:** It feels like the HBO movie is the right way to go. It’s Frank Rich who-

**Craig:** It’s a movie?

**John:** Yeah, a movie.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It looks like it’s a movie.

**Craig:** You said Frank Rich?

**John:** Frank Rich. Veep and-

**Craig:** Now I’m in.

**John:** … Succession.

**Craig:** No offense to Mike. He’s a really good writer. But Frank Rich just simply to me, he doesn’t just signify quality, he creates quality. I can’t imagine that anything involving Frank Rich will be anything less than excellent.

**John:** Now you’re excited.

**Craig:** Now I’m sitting full-

**John:** Now you’re on board.

**Craig:** I’m going to watch this.

**John:** The last one is Sam Altman and OpenAI. The short version of this, we’re recording this the 3rd of December, 2023. Who knows what the next-

**Craig:** Week or two will bring.

**John:** New stuff always happens. Essentially, Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, which is one of the big AI companies as of 2023. His rise to this position, at 19 he founded Loopt, which is a location-based social networking mobile application, raised $30 million in venture capital, ultimately sold it for $43 million. Was president of Y Combinator, the big venture startup, and then OpenAI, which was founded by him, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, other folks in there.

**Craig:** Veritable rogues gallery.

**John:** Absolutely. You’ve got some really fascinating personalities in there. Then of course, the big thing that happened recently for us was that OpenAI’s board, which is a nonprofit, which is really confusing, voted to oust him. His employees rose up and said, “No, you can’t get rid of him,” and so he came back in.

**Craig:** Now, in the traditional version of this story, what happens is the evil board decides to push AI into dangerous territory to make more money, and the courageous CEO, backed by his faithful workers, rebel. It is the opposite of what has happened here. What appears to have happened is the board was worried that things were getting pushed too far, and Sam was like, “No.”

**John:** We don’t honestly know. One of the things that’s so fascinating about this moment we’re in right now is that we don’t know they actually fired him, because they’ve been so, so vague.

**Craig:** I guess maybe I’m saying a rumor.

**John:** You’re saying a rumor. It’s been so, so vague. The best explanation I’ve heard most recently is the board realized they couldn’t control him. It wasn’t about a worry of a specific thing. They just figured out, “Oh, we have three votes. We could oust him.” They just did it without thinking through stuff.

I think my question is, when a version of this story is told, which I think probably will be told, again, where are the edges of this? Do you just really focus on those few days and all of the drama around it? It’s a really tight thing, like Margin Call, which is really a tight, little story, or do you go bigger and broader? Because we’re still in the middle of it, we don’t know what is actually going to happen with OpenAI. I think that’s probably a mistake. I think you do need to put some edges on it.

**Craig:** We should ask ChatGPT what it thinks.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I feel like it’s a sequence in a movie. I don’t think in and of itself, a board ousting somebody and then putting them back in feels… I wouldn’t tune in.

**John:** It feels like part of an episode of Succession. It doesn’t feel like enough of a story in itself.

**Craig:** In fact, it’s part of seven episodes of Succession.

**John:** It’s happened a few times on Succession.

**Craig:** Just a few. The board voting and getting rid of somebody and not getting rid of somebody, we’ve definitely seen that. It does work as a dramatic device in fiction. In reality, in some of the Apple movies, they’ve said, “Okay, we’re going to get rid of Steve Jobs. Oh, we’re going to put Steve Jobs back in.” But it’s never the focus of the movie.

**John:** The other comps obviously are Social Network, Blackberry, which I really enjoyed.

**Craig:** I want to see Blackberry. I haven’t seen it.

**John:** Blackberry’s fun. It’s like, “Oh wow, we’ve built this amazing thing.” Then the iPhone comes out, and everything comes crashing down in ways that are delightful.

**Craig:** Yeah, and they’re Canadian.

**John:** They’re Canadian. It’s a thoroughly Canadian movie.

**Craig:** So Canadian. I love that.

**John:** It’s so good. The appealing thing about trying to do this movie is it gives you a chance to also include a bunch of other famous people. Peter Thiel and Elon, Satya Nadella. There’s lots of people you can stick in there.

**Craig:** So many people that will sue you.

**John:** Let’s talk about that.

**Craig:** Thiel’s going to sue you, for sure.

**John:** Thiel, he’s already sued-

**Craig:** He may sue us for even talking about him.

**John:** Absolutely. We have no criticism of Peter Thiel on this podcast.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** But I will say, let’s talk about who can sue you of the people we’ve talked about’s things. The nice thing about the dead people is they can’t sue you.

**Craig:** Dead people can’t sue you.

**John:** Santos is going to have a hard time suing you.

**Craig:** Santos, he could try, but he doesn’t have the money anymore, and he’s going to go to prison probably. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk can sue you in the blink of an eye, and in doing so, wreck you if you fight back, because obviously, they have essentially unlimited resources. That’s terrifying. It is one of the reasons why we need an independent, free, and thriving press in this country, because the press really is protected in ways that individuals aren’t. I’m sure that any company making something like this would be a little concerned. Elon and Peter certainly have been litigious before.

**John:** Of the biopics we talked through today, which ones do we think are going to actually happen? You were pretty thumbs up on Sandra Day O’Connor.

**Craig:** Yes. I think that Sandra Day O’Connor feels like it could be a decent movie.

**John:** Henry Kissinger?

**Craig:** Definitely.

**John:** 100%. Multiple versions of it probably.

**Craig:** Yes. That’d be a good HBO mini series, I would imagine. Limited series, I should say.

**John:** Rosalynn Carter?

**Craig:** I don’t think so.

**John:** I don’t think so either. I think you’d have to find a very specific way into it. George Santos is actually already happening.

**Craig:** It’s happening.

**John:** It’s happening.

**Craig:** Frank Rich.

**John:** Frank Rich.

**Craig:** Mike Makowsky.

**John:** Sam Altman, I don’t think yet.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** People are trying to do it. I know there’s people milling around.

**Craig:** He’s also just now emerged as a name people know because of this. Prior to that, he wasn’t TV famous.

**John:** He’s also young. There’s a lot of runway ahead for him.

**Craig:** Absolutely. I assume that he, like all of the Silicon people, uses a blood boy to refresh his blood.

**John:** A thing I didn’t talk about is, in addition to OpenAI, he has that service that’s scanning people’s eyeballs for identity and cryptocurrency.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** That’s good stuff.

**Craig:** Can’t wait to-

**John:** Can’t wait for that.

**Craig:** … see what’s coming on the horizon.

**John:** Nothing ominous about that.

**Craig:** Nope. Going to hide in my house.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the International Phonetic Alphabet, which I’m now learning, because I’ve never learned it. The IPA is a way of describing all the sounds in human languages. It’s a very distinct system for how you write that down. I’ve always seen it, and I’ve never been able to interpret it or understand it. I’m writing my flashcards, and I’m just learning how to do it.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** It is really clever and cool. You recognize the similarities and differences between languages and between dialects and accents, because the same word in English, based on different accents, would have very different written versions in IPA.

**Craig:** Notations.

**John:** Notations in IPA.

**Craig:** I just did a puzzle recently where part of the deal was you had to use one of the IPA diacritics, a single dot, two dots, or a line, to change the pronunciation of a word-

**John:** Oh, neat.

**Craig:** … in the clue to be able to solve the answer. Then later, when you looked at all of those things, the dots and the dashes form Morse code letters.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** It was fun to sit with the IPA notation there and do that. It’s very cool for nerds.

**John:** For nerds. For nerds.

**Craig:** For uncool people like us.

**John:** But also, those are homonyms. What’s one-

**Craig:** Homophone?

**John:** When a word has two different pronunciations, but it’s written the same way, that’s a homonym?

**Craig:** That is a homonym, right.

**John:** Homonym.

**Craig:** Homophones are the ones that sound the same but mean different things.

**John:** Present versus present. They track those differently. It’s not just where the emphasis is. Literally, the vowel sounds have changed.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. I’m with you. I support your One Cool Thing. I think it is cool.

**John:** Every January 1st, I try to have an area of interest for the new year.

**Craig:** That’s very John August of you.

**John:** IPA is going to be my area of interest.

**Craig:** I did a variety writers thing a few days ago, and Nathan Fielder was one of the other writers on the panel. He listens to our show.

**John:** As does Bowen Yang, who played George Santos.

**Craig:** Bowen listens to our show?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He’s a genius. I’m obsessed all the way back to his lip syncing videos. You’ve seen those, right?

**John:** Oh, 100%.

**Craig:** They’re amazing.

**John:** That’s where I first became aware of him.

**Craig:** He’s amazing. Okay, so Bowen, hi. Come on our show. You’re awesome. Nathan wanted me to pass along hello to you. He also said, in his Nathan, he’s like, “I feel like John August is a very organized guy.” Then he said, “I don’t mean to say that you’re not organized. I just feel like, you know.” I was like, “No, you nailed it. He’s a very organized guy.” You’ve organized your new topic for 2024.

**John:** Yeah. I’m prepared.

**Craig:** Well done. My One Cool Thing is a trailer for a television series that just came out, I believe two days ago, as of this recording. It is for the show Fallout.

**John:** I’m excited to see Fallout. Our friends have made that show.

**Craig:** Fallout is executive produced by Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, who have been on our show before. Jonah, I believe, directed the first couple of episodes. I don’t think they’re the showrunners. I just know them. I’m so sorry to the showrunners. We’ll get you in the show notes, I promise. After The Last of Us, there seemed to be this, I don’t know, epidemic of sudden development of video games into shows and movies and things. I suspect quite a few of them are not going to work very well.

What I loved about the trailer for Fallout was the vibe, which I think is different than tone. Tone is sort of like, what kind of comedy, what kind of drama, is it melodramatic, is it realistic. Vibe is this other stuff. It’s just like, did you capture the soul of something. As a Fallout fan, I watch that trailer, and I’m like, “Yeah, they got the vibe.”

Now, I can’t say anything yet about the story they’re telling. They have to create a central character, because when you play, it’s just you. You don’t have a name, and you don’t talk. We’ll see how that works. The vibe, that retro futuristic thing, and how they smartly knew to say, “Okay, the power suits have to look exactly like that, but the ghouls don’t have to look like the ghouls in the game. We want to maintain Walter Goggins’s face so that he can act.” These are the decisions you have to make when you’re adapting video games. So far, from what I’ve seen, looking awesome.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** That’s on Amazon.

**John:** Feels like Amazon. We’re guessing. It’s on a streamer.

**Craig:** Amazon? It’s Fallout. Whatever. It’s Fallout.

**John:** I’m excited to see it.

**Craig:** Yeah, very much so.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from James Llonch. It features Craig Mazin ranting about his least favorite screenwriting app.

**Craig:** Which one? Oh, yes, that one.

**John:** That one. If you have an outro, you could send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We always love to hear your outros. That’s also the place where you can send questions and follow-up. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. They ship in time for Christmas, so get those.

**Craig:** Great Christmas gift-

**John:** Great Christmas gift.

**Craig:** … for the dork in your family.

**John:** Also, Christmas gift, Arlo Finches are still out there for the kids out there.

**Craig:** I don’t know if Finches is… I want to make it different. I want to give you a different pluralization.

**John:** Arlos Finch?

**Craig:** Arlo Finchae.

**John:** Finchae?

**Craig:** I like Arlo Finchae.

**John:** All right. They’re good. You can get them signed. There’s a link in the show notes for those. Writer Emergency Pack, they sell really big on Amazon. Craig-

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s weird making a seasonal product, because literally, our chart is just like a straight line up. It’s like a hockey stick. It’s a gift. People give it.

**Craig:** I don’t think people who don’t sell things understand what Christmas is really about.

**John:** It is crazy.

**Craig:** Christmas is an economic phenomenon.

**John:** 80% of the money we make on Writer Emergency Pack is holidays.

**Craig:** You are hardly the only business that does.

**John:** You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net. Also, a good gift, you could get somebody a Scriptnotes gift. At scriptnotes.net, you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on which event in history had the most negative impact on civilization.

**Craig:** Heavy.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This Bonus Segment topic I’m stealing from Electoral Vote, which is a website I read every day about what’s happening in US government. It’s a good site for that. Their question was, which single event at any time in history has had the biggest negative impact on civilization? They had good suggestions from their own listeners, but I wanted to hear from you, what you were thinking about. We also have to discuss, what is a single event? Is this a thing that happens in the course of a day, or can it be over a couple years? Is World War I an event?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah, sure.

**Craig:** Sure. You could, if you wanted to, just squish it down to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which kicked it off.

**John:** Yeah, but there would still probably have been a World War I. It was going to happen.

**Craig:** It was a pile of gasoline-soaked rags.

**John:** I’m saying the African slave trade is not an event. That to me is too broad of a thing.

**Craig:** It is not an event. We’re looking for an event. That’s a tough one. It also eliminates things like disease, which has had a greater impact on us than anything.

**John:** The Black Death.

**Craig:** Bubonic plague, smallpox, all of these things. The adoption of Christianity by the Romans and the transformation of this-

**John:** Theodosius, I think, was the-

**Craig:** It was Constantine. I believe it was Constantine.

**John:** The Romans, they were taking this, what essentially was a kind of obscure cult, and making it the state religion.

**Craig:** Just made it the state. I thought it was Constantine, but I could be wrong. Either way, whoever did it suddenly turned this cult of sacrificial, the worship of the poor, and made it imperial. The Holy Roman Empire then spread and essentially took over all of Europe and went to war with the Ottoman Empire, and also imparted what the Americans called manifest destiny, a religious aspect to the concept of domination, dominating other cultures because they were not appropriately religious. The Holy Wars were incredibly costly. Then the sectarianism, where the church had a schism, and that created wars, all the way through to what was happening in Ireland. That, I think, as an event, it’s… Listen. There’s another way of looking at it, which is if the Romans hadn’t done that, and they spread the Roman mythology across, that it still turns out terrible.

**John:** There’s plenty of alt histories, which is basically like, what if they hadn’t done that? We’re living under a more standard Roman mythology of stuff. That would be weird as well.

**Craig:** We worship Jupiter.

**John:** Exactly. Along the thread of conquering the world, you also have Genghis Khan and say his birth or his rise out of that place. You look at the transformation of Asia and the fact that some astonishing number of percentage of people have Genghis Khan’s DNA because of what happened there.

**Craig:** You could point to Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In terms of hard-to-comprehend numbers of deaths, maybe 20 million people. Numbers that we really can’t get our arms around.

**John:** Columbus visiting America. Would Europeans have gotten to America at some other point? Yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But Columbus’s arrival and then subsequent voyages and having the Crown behind him and the resources to really annihilate indigenous peoples.

**Craig:** Annihilate them largely through disease, although I would still trace that back to the notion of we must spread Christian values to the world of nonbelievers and pagans.

**John:** I don’t have a good sense, honestly, of when the missionaries actually became part of it, because I perceive it as being a gold rush at the start.

**Craig:** Yeah, the missionaries were right there. The conquistadors. Everybody went under the banner of Christ. Everybody was there to spread the word. Justin Marks, we’ve had Justin on the show.

**John:** I think so. He was on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s got Shogun coming out, which also looks fantastic. I love Shogun, by the way. One of my favorite novels. The Jesuits were there in Japan in the 1800s. They go everywhere. The missionaries find themselves all over the world. That was the tip of the spear of colonialism and the slave trade and all sorts of terrible things. Oh, man, one event.

**John:** The burning of the Library at Alexandria.

**Craig:** Brutal.

**John:** Brutal, brutal loss. It’s a little unclear how much those were the only copies of those documents and how much other stuff could be found.

**Craig:** Why didn’t they back it up in the Cloud?

**John:** Come on. Cloud storage, man.

**Craig:** Guys, it’s Cloud storage. It’s free.

**John:** Absolutely. Dropbox.

**Craig:** Wouldn’t it have been cool to go back and say, “You guys can back this up in the Cloud.” They just look up.

**John:** Let’s talk about inventions. The steam engine, obviously, as an instrument of war. A lot of these things, you could see there’s the pro and the con. The printing press allowed for misinformation and the Bible, but it also allowed for literacy and development of culture.

**Craig:** One of the great events that transformed the world, I think again, probably for good and for bad in equal measures, was industrialization, the concept of the assembly line. In the Revolutionary War, Americans kind of invented assembly lines to create arms, to create armaments. It was one of the reasons we won. You could certainly point to gunpowder as being a huge problem.

**John:** Or the first mass-produced revolver was 1836. That’s a huge change. Before then, you’re making a gun one at a time.

**Craig:** Exactly, and you’re firing one shot at a time and loading in your things. Yes, all absolutely true. Then there’s the open question of nuclear weapons.

**John:** Is Hiroshima the event?

**Craig:** There are people who argue that Hiroshima prevented the invasion of Japan and even more Japanese deaths and more American deaths. There are people who argue that Hiroshima prevented the Soviet invasion of Japan, and then the Stalinist oppression of that country. Then of course, there are people who say, “Sorry, you just murdered tens and tens and thousands and thousands of innocent people who had nothing to do with this war. They were just civilians.” But also, notable, we haven’t had a world war since the invention of nuclear weapons, because it seems untenable.

**John:** Maybe some future topic we’ll talk about the good things, the single best things that have happened, because I can think of a couple off the top of my head. The contraceptive pill changed society for the best.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Just the ability for women to head to the workforce and have control over their fertility.

**Craig:** Vaccination.

**John:** Vaccination.

**Craig:** Vaccination on its own is a miracle. A miracle. So of course, idiots have to blame it for things. It’s unbelievable.

**John:** It’s the worst. Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Sandra Day O’Connor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Day_O%27Connor)
* [Henry Kissinger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger)
* [Rosalynn Carter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalynn_Carter)
* [George Santos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos)
* [Sam Altman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman)
* [What happened at OpenAI? The Sam Altman saga, explained](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/20/openai-sam-altman-ceo-oust/) by Rachel Lehman for The Washington Post
* [International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)](https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/)
* [Fallout – Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kQ8i2FpRDk)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/621standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-minds-eye).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 615 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what are you seeing when you read or write or remember? We’ll talk about the importance of visualization for screenwriters, and the fact that some very successful writers can’t do it. We’ll also be answering some listener questions on choosing a medium and directors demanding writing credit. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what’s it like getting what you always dreamed of? We’ll discuss the pros and cons of answered prayers.

**Craig:** Oh, my. Answered prayers, oh, okay. We’re into the power of prayer on the show now. I like it.

**John:** Answered Prayers was I think the famously unfinished or unwritten book by Truman Capote. I always loved that as a title.

**Craig:** Apparently, his prayers to finish were not answered.

**John:** They were not answered. A little bit of a news hook this week. An article was in the Hollywood Reporter this past week talking about Marvel changing its whole television model, moving the way that they’re doing their series from the features division to an actual television division and really treating the TV shows more like TV shows. Craig, what did you make of this?

**Craig:** It was a little bit like reading about a restaurant that said, “You know what? We’re not going to make spaghetti anymore using beef. We’re going to use pasta.” Their method was… Look, I’m sure they felt it worked for them or that it was going to work for them. I think sometimes when a company is very, very successful, it can begin to embrace the delusion that everybody else is done and their way is always better, and sometimes break things, move fast, break things.

In the case of the way they were doing their television, it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working creatively, I don’t think, for a number of those shows, by their own admission, it seems. It also wasn’t working procedurally for the people that were working on the shows, neither writers nor directors. It was kind of good to see, but also a little bit like, yes, you mean you’re going to move to the way that the rest of us do it? Yeah. It works.

**John:** Yeah. Some of these changes will be actually calling the head writer the showrunner and making it clear that they are more the person responsible for the overall creative direction of the series, which makes sense. People always talk about television is a writer-driven medium. Thinking about the series not just as limited series, special events that have to work like movies work, but also thinking about the season-to-season, ongoing longevity of a series, it just makes sense.

**Craig:** To be clear, even though some of this is about empowering showrunners to be showrunners, the prior system wasn’t particularly great for directors either. Hopefully, this turn towards the normal will reap benefits for everybody involved, and of course for the audience too. Marvel is capable of making outstanding stuff. I have every reason to believe that this will go well for them.

**John:** I hope so too. Obviously, a lot of these things happened before the strike. In the story, they talk through some of the challenges these series were having and the issues they were facing with the way they were trying to make the stuff. It’s also worth noting that some of the changes that are going to be just put in place by the new Writers Guild contract would’ve had an impact anyway. In terms of going from a mini room situation to an actual writers’ room, that transition is different now. It’s more contractually mandated than it was before. If you’re going to make changes, this feels like the right time to make changes.

**Craig:** I suspect that the pause gave them a chance to evaluate, more than anything. Just having a few months to stop and say, “How are we doing this? And why are we doing it this way again? And why aren’t we doing it the other way that other people are doing it?” must have given them a little bit of perspective that they didn’t have before. It is helpful that we have new terms that will help them as they move towards the normal. But like you, I suspect the move towards the normal predated the contract.

I’ve never worked at Marvel. We’ve had Kevin Feige on the show. He’s a terrific guest on our show and obviously an incredibly powerful guy who’s overseen one of the most successful runs in Hollywood history, period, the end. I’m only talking secondhand, but my understanding was that there was this sense that it was the executives that ran the show. I find that the most valuable television executives not only don’t run the show, they’re not interested in running the show. What they’re interested in doing is being an advocate for their audience. More than anything else, their job is to say, “We’re supposed to reflect our audience’s taste. Here’s what we think about what you’re doing. Here’s a suggestion we have, a request we have, a question we have.” That what they’re best at. I don’t understand a world where executives are running shows. That’s not what they’re supposed to do. Seems like they’ve made the correction there. Very pleased to see it.

**John:** Obviously, a challenge with what Marvel was trying to do – and I’m sure they’re going to still be trying to do it, but maybe a little less a mandate and a focus – is their movies and their series were supposed to dovetail together in very specific ways. Things would be set up in a movie that would then pay off in a series and then go back to a movie. That’s really challenging to do. Dates shift. The needs shift. You’re trying to make each individual project the best it can possibly be. That’s very hard to do when they all have to fit together in a specific, magic way. I would not also be surprised if there’s going to be less of a focus on making sure everything pays off from this series to that movie to this next thing. Just that may not be the best way to make the best individual projects.

**Craig:** I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this, but when has that ever stopped me?

**John:** It never has.

**Craig:** Never has. I feel like the universeness is smelling like a relic of the 2010s. I think as we are progressing into the 2020s, the whole extended something universe, it just feels kind of done. I don’t think the audience needs it. I think what they want is a good show or a good movie, really. I don’t know why everybody feels the need for everything to be interlocking that way. Yes, it helps you promote things, but nothing seemed to help the ones that didn’t work. I think just something good is good.

**John:** Good is good. Marvel was not the only entity making mistakes, apparently.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** In this bit of follow-up here, we get to learn that actually, even I can make mistakes.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Drew, can you help us out with this?

**Craig:** No, no, no. Don’t do this to me.

**Drew Marquardt:** Eliza writes, “On occasion, John misuses reticence and reticent. In the recent replay of Episode 463, John says, ‘Just to get over people’s initial reticence to read this different kind of scene description.’ Although reticence can seem like a fancy way to say reluctance, it’s not. Reticence is a reluctance to speak or share of one’s self. The words sound and function like cousins, but just like cousins, they are not interchangeable. Since John is so wordily wise, I couldn’t let him continue this spread of linguistic misinformation. But no one’s perfect, not even Duo SN.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Eliza’s absolutely right. She’s right. I looked it up. I went back through the transcripts, and not only did I use it in 463, Episode 569 I said it wrong. I said, “I wonder if some people who would otherwise make shows are reticent to do so because they are just not social people and don’t want that responsibility.” I was using it as a synonym for reluctance. Instead, it is a very specific instance of reluctance. I’ve learned my lesson.

**Craig:** I want to say that I knew this and declined to say anything out of just the milk of human kindness. While I don’t think I’ve made this particular error myself, I also did not catch it when you said it. It just sort of flowed, and I didn’t notice it. By the way, if I did, here’s a question for you, John. Let’s say you do misuse a word. Do you like it when people correct you, or are you like, “Just shut up. Leave me alone.”

**John:** In a podcast situation that is fully editable, I think it’s fair for us to make those corrections. Occasionally, we will make those corrections, if a misstatement of fact. I’m glad to know that I was using this word incorrectly, and so I’m happy to have that be fixed.

A thing I’ve noticed about podcasts, listening to a lot of podcasts, is a lot of time you hear people use a word that they’ve never actually spoken aloud, like a word they’ve typed a lot but they’ve never actually spoken aloud, and they will mispronounce it. I find that fascinating. Sometimes I will look it up. It’s like, “Oh, that is an alternate pronunciation, so maybe it’s valid they did it that way.” But in many cases, they clearly just-

**Craig:** They didn’t know.

**John:** … didn’t know how to use the word in practice.

**Craig:** I’m not going to say I like it when people correct me, but I appreciate when they correct me. What I’ve noticed is, when people do correct me, I remember that correction much more vividly and reliably than I would if I, say, read it in an email. I still remember the screenwriter Stephen Schiff telling me that I was using comprise incorrectly. It’s very common to say, “This is comprised of blankety blank blank blank. This sandwich is comprised of peanut butter and jelly.” But in fact, comprise is a transitive verb. “This peanut butter sandwich comprises peanut butter and jelly.”

**John:** Comprises.

**Craig:** It contains peanut butter and jelly. I didn’t know that. He corrected me. I was like, “What?” He is correct. I’ve never forgotten it. I use comprise correctly all the time now.

**John:** I hear that, and also, I do wonder if it’s comprises and is comprised of. I bet if you actually were to look it up, “it is comprised of” is such a common usage that it’s become almost default usage. While I agree with Stephen Schiff that this is the actual, correct way to use it, in modern usage it’s not that. You and I, we haven’t fully given up on, but we’ve softened over the course of our 10 years of doing the podcast… You and I, over the course of the last 10 years, have argued about begging the question, and I’ve just sort of given up trying to point out when people are using it incorrectly.

**Craig:** It’s just me and Peter Sagal left now on that mountain, fighting hand to hand. I will never. Never! But yes, these little-

**John:** It’s always fun when you get a chance to use begging the question properly. It’s just delightful.

**Craig:** It is, and then no one knows what you’re talking about. There are certain orthodoxies that I think are just enjoyable unto themselves. Certainly, I guess this is unlike Stephen Schiff, if I hear somebody say, “It’s comprised of blankedy blank,” I don’t say anything, because I don’t know them. Stephen knows me, so he knows I’m going to enjoy it. But a lot of people are like, “Just shut up.”

**John:** I think what you’re pointing out though is, it’s pedantic if you don’t know the person. If you don’t have a relationship, then pointing it out is pedantic. If it’s Craig or Drew, you talking to me, saying, “Oh, John, you’re actually using the word incorrectly,” that’s not pedantic, that’s actually delightful and helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Great.

**John:** Craig, back in Episode 612, you talked through your diabetes diagnosis, and we have some follow-up on that.

**Drew:** James writes, “My mother was diagnosed with diabetes later in life than you, and no one thought to check out the state of her pancreas. Unfortunately, her doctors assumed it was type 2, and consequently, they missed discovering its underlying cause, which, unfortunately again, was pancreatic cancer. It might be worth listeners being aware of this. The people are getting fat and lazy narrative is too often relied upon.”

**Craig:** I am so glad that James wrote in about this. I am kicking myself, because when we talked about my diagnosis, which is this adult-onset type 1 diabetes, one of the things I failed to mention and should’ve mentioned is that there are two typical causes of certain elevated antibodies. One is type 1 diabetes, and the other is pancreatic cancer. In fact, we had to check that out for me to make sure that that’s not what it was. I don’t know why it slipped my mind, but it is absolutely true that it’s going to be one or the other, typically, when you have these certain elevated enzymes. Pancreatic cancer is brutal. It’s just a killer.

James has put forth one of the best arguments for antibody testing when dealing with evidence of diabetic pathology. I don’t care what age you are. If they tell you that you are prediabetic even or diabetic, you have to talk to them about testing these antibodies to see if indeed you are type 2 diabetic or if you are either type 1, which is a different treatment, or if you have hopefully what would be a very early stage of pancreatic cancer. Sorry to hear about what happened to James’s mother. I am terrified to imagine how many people this has happened to, but I suspect a lot. A lot.

**John:** One more bit of follow-up here.

**Drew:** Christopher writes, “I appreciated your openness in sharing your story about diabetes. It resonated with me, as I was also diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder as an adult, and similarly, only after a thoughtful doctor ordered proper testing. The diagnosis changed a great many things, but many months after life leveled out and I started feeling like myself again, I realized I was now one of around 27% of Americans who have a disability. And I mention this only because I didn’t hear you use that particular D-word during the conversation.

“I realize that being a straight white man with an invisible disability is complicated, but still, that shouldn’t be a reason to deny or minimize your experience. In my case, I initially dismissed the idea of being part of the disabled community, because I had always considered myself perfectly able-bodied and physically fit, and it felt incongruous with my identity to change that as an adult. I took great inspiration, however, from your episode with Jack Thorne. His advocacy motivated me to make some overtures to other disabled individuals to see if it was a place in which I fit. What I found was perhaps the most accepting group of people who I have ever encountered. None of them ever questioned my place among them or seemed dismissive of one’s struggles relative to another’s. We were all in it together.

“Publicly being willing to identify as disabled is a big step, and I’m not sure if you fully realized that when you volunteered the information about diabetes, that this is part of what you are doing. Going forward, it might feel a little ridiculous to say things like, ‘I am a disabled person,’ or check the accompanying box on standardized employment forms, but I encourage you to do so whenever possible. Put simply, when you identify as disabled, you naturally encounter more disabled people. You share stories together, and everyone’s experience is better off for it. We learn from and support each other most when we directly engage. You have already always demonstrated empathy in your work and a desire to be inclusive, so you should allow others the courtesy and opportunity to extend the same to you as well. Thanks for being so brave and sharing your experience with the Scriptnotes audience.”

**Craig:** Christopher, fascinating. I must admit, when I saw this statement here, the first thing I thought was, is it a disability? Obviously, we know diabetes is a disease, but is it also a disability? I went to the Googles, and the Googles sent me to the American Diabetes Association. And they have a page that says the following. “Is diabetes a disability? The short answer is yes. Under most laws, diabetes is protected as a disability. Both type 1 and type 2 diabetes are protected as disabilities. People with diabetes can do any type of job, sport, or life goal.”

That got me thinking about what Christopher was saying, because there are some bioethics here. Disability we can look at as a binary question, which I think is sort of the way Christopher is approaching it. Either you are disabled or you’re not. I’m saying all this to explain why I didn’t use the word disability. It wasn’t even a choice. It just wasn’t something that seemed in my brain to align with what was going on. It may be because I don’t necessarily see it as a binary, but more as a continuum. There are places you get to where, yeah, it’s a thing. Look, if I’m walking around with an insulin pump and I need time at work to go and change the pump or replace a tube, yeah, then I’m a disabled person who needs an accommodation to do my job. People around me need to be aware of that.

The question is, right now, given where I’m at, should I be checking that box, as he says, or not? The balance here is, am I going to be taking resources or opportunities from someone else who has a more impactful disability than mine, because there are some disabilities that are more impactful than others.

My instinct is, currently, Christopher – and I appreciate what you’re saying, and I thank you for it – but I don’t think that I’m comfortable checking that box yet, because I don’t need to. I don’t think I need any accommodations right now, and I’m very wary about taking them from somebody else who does. If anyone says, “Look, I have a disability. I want to check the box,” check the box. I have zero problem with that. But I guess this is mostly me explaining why I didn’t say it, because I don’t necessarily think I’m there yet. What do you think? This is a tricky one, John. What do you think?

**John:** I think you’re right that it’s tricky and that it’s hard to have blanket advice here. Looking back at Episode 530, we had Jack Thorne, and he was talking about how as somebody with an invisible disability, he’s had it hard to speak up for himself and advocate for himself. Then he’s really talking about the importance of having a disability advisor as part of a production, just to make sure that anybody who’s involved in production, be it cast or crew, feels like they have a person who they can go to, to talk about the accommodations they may need or to help them think ahead for a production going forward, which is great and smart. In the UK, they’ve been able to enact some of those rules, which is great.

I hear you, Craig, in terms of, I think the choice of how you identify is a personal choice. It applies to disability, but it also applies to many other issues. The fact that you have a diagnosis doesn’t necessarily, to me, mean that you have a responsibility or a requirement to identify as that diagnosis. I just want to make sure that we always leave space for people to say what they want to say about their situation.

**Craig:** Look, I have no doubt I’ll get there. Clearly, I don’t have any shame about it, because I talk about it on the show, nor do I think anyone who has diabetes, type 1 or type 2, none of them should have any shame. On that front, I agree. If Christopher’s point is you shouldn’t be ashamed, shame shouldn’t keep you from identifying as disabled, I completely agree, 100%. There may be other things, but shame is not a good reason. You do not need to feel shame about having any disease or disability.

**John:** Pulling back a little bit, I think your ability to publicly identify as what you want to identify as feels like a fundamental right. I just want to make sure that whether we’re talking about disability or someone’s gender, sexuality, or ethnic background, you are going to present yourself in the world a certain way, but you also should have some measure of autonomy in what you are saying about yourself. I just want to make sure we always leave space for people to be themselves and to speak up how they want to speak up. I honestly hear you, Craig, too, in terms of you don’t want to pull resources away from folks who may need more accommodation than you. It’s tough.

**Craig:** I certainly want to do my part to protect the workplace for people who need accommodations, but we do live in a world with limited resources and limited opportunities. I think we all understand if there is special consideration or opportunity for people of a certain class, I think we all understand that that protected class, that’s about helping people who really do need the help. It’s not simply about helping people who satisfy some superficial criteria. Steve Wynn, the guy who owns Encore, did he die?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I can’t remember. I think he died. But he was blind.

**John:** He was blind.

**Craig:** Did he need special financial accommodations? Probably. He was a billionaire. Yeah, I’m sure he did. Should he be getting grant money and such? I don’t think so. I think it’s reasonable to do a needs analysis, especially when we’re dealing with limited resources for a lot of people.

**John:** Agreed. Our last bit of follow-up is related to Episode 610, where we talked about what do studios actually do.

**Drew:** Mallory writes, “How do successes like Sound of Freedom and the Taylor Swift movie figure into the major studios being the only route to successful distribution?”

**John:** These are two examples of movies that were made outside of the traditional studio system. I guess Sound of Freedom was actually made inside the studio system, but then that got released outside of the studio system. Of course, the Taylor Swift movie is making a bazillion dollars. It was just self-financed and put together. I think there have always been those oddities of things that were just done outside the system, but when we’re talking about alternatives to the studio system, it’s really about an ongoing basis, not just one-off projects.

**Craig:** First of all, Sound of Freedom, the success is in dispute, because-

**John:** It’s a real question of how many people were actually in the theaters watching that versus buying tickets.

**Craig:** That’s right. Hard to say exactly. But yeah, there have always been these strange things. In the case of Taylor Swift, she really is an independent film studio. She has enough money to finance… I think it was $20 million budget. What that means is that she can finance anything and then release it however she wants. She’s also her own studio, because she can advertise and promote her own material. She goes on tour, and that’s how that works. Taylor Swift is her own business empire. That makes sense that she can compete with movie studios.

The major studios are not the only route to successful distribution. I don’t think we’ve ever said that. There are independent studios that do it. There are one-offs. We find them notable for a good reason, because they’re rare. Really, I guess the position that I’ve had, that I’ll maintain, is that major studios are, generally speaking, the most effective and most prominent way to distribute a film.

**John:** Yeah. In that episode, we talked about how, obviously, the studio is bankrolling things, but they’re also providing the marketing function. They’re providing the collection of funds function. Sound of Freedom, it made a lot of money. Did it actually pull that money back out of theaters? That’s going to be a little bit more challenging for them, because they don’t have the next movie coming down the pipe to say, “Okay, we’re not giving you the next thing until you pay up what you owe us.” Same with Taylor Swift. Apparently, it’s a deal with AMC Theaters, which was probably the bulk of the incoming money. But shaking that money back and bringing it home will be more challenging for her company than it would be for Sony, because she has no next thing coming out.

Obviously, the Sound of Freedom marketing function and the viral way they were able to make that happen was exactly perfect for their movie. Taylor Swift is her own marketing machine, so she didn’t need that function of the studio.

**Craig:** Correct. And she was smart, because what Taylor Swift, who is overtly, apparently a savvy businessperson, understood was that distributing the movie through a studio was going to cost way more than it would earn her. Way more. The studio’s cut is massive. Why do you need to go have a bank finance the purchase of your car if you are a billionaire and you want to buy a car? Don’t. Just buy it.

**John:** Just buy the car.

**Craig:** Just buy the damn car.

**John:** Our marquee topic this week stems from a series of tweets that John Green, the bestselling author, put out at the start of the month. He’s the author of The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska. Some of these books have become movies and series. His tweets read, “It’s baffling to me that some of y’all see stuff in your mind. You see it? The way your eyes see? I always thought visualize meant thinks of the words, ideas, feelings associated with the thing, not actual visuals. This may be why I’m so often wrong about what’s behind a particular cabinet in our kitchen, even though I’ve lived in this house for a decade. I also cannot tell you the layout of a room unless I’m in that room and looking at the layout. And I have no sense of direction. None.”

Somebody writes in the Twitter thread, “So when you’re reading, does it turn into a movie? Can you see the characters?” He says, “No, it’s just text. Very occasionally – I count the number of times it’s happened on one hand – I will suddenly feel as if I can glimpse something visually that’s in a story, but 99.99% of the time, it’s just text. Is that unusual?” And it is unusual, but it’s not actually unprecedented. It’s actually more common than I thought.

We’re not a science podcast, so aphantasia as a condition is not a thing we’re going to go into much detail about. But it’s hard for me as a writer to envision myself being able to do my work without being able to visualize. I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about visualization as part of our process.

**Craig:** It’s an incredibly important part of my process. I can see how if you were aphantasic, being a novelist wouldn’t necessarily be problematic. The reason we who write for screen I think really do rely on our ability to visualize is because somebody’s going to have to actually make it.

Also, we are writing things for people to portray and act in three-dimensional space. Where are they standing? This is the great Lindsay Doran question that she would ask all the time when I wrote a script with her. Where is he standing? Where are they standing? How big is the room? How do they get from here to here? Describe the space, because there are going to be a thousand meetings where someone is going to have to figure out how to build that thing. The more you can see…

You may not be able to put every detail down on page. First of all, it’s not advisable to do so. Second of all, you just won’t have the room. The more you know, the more you can answer the question, and also the more internally consistent the work will be, because a scene is written in a space, and the scene follows the rules of that space. It doesn’t just change in the middle of the scene. For me, not only is it important, but it’s kind of essential. If I can’t see the space, I can’t start to write the scene.

**John:** 100%. I think one of the reasons why people may not immediately click to that in terms of screenwriting is because we’re not describing the whole space. Sometimes we are more, but sometimes it’ll be a slug line. It’ll say interior house, this, and it may give a little painting of what the space is like. But even if I’ve not put out all that scene description there, I have to, in my head, know where this scene is.

The first step of writing a scene for me is literally creating the space in which the scene happens, figuring out roughly the layout of the room, wherever this is, putting people in that space, figuring out their general blocking, and only then do I start being able to observe what are they doing, what are they saying, what is the movement, how does it all work. I call this looping in my head. I’m just seeing the scene play out. I can’t imagine writing a scene without that. If I’m doing a surgical rewrite on someone else’s script, I do need to build that space out in my head, or else I can’t do it.

It may have been Aline who said it first on our podcast, the joke that the screenwriter’s the only person who’s already seen the movie. Yeah, I’ve definitely already seen the whole thing before I’ve put it down on paper.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, I’ve seen it. This is this thing that’s happened to me a thousand times. When I get to a set or a place, everything’s always the other way. I don’t know why.

**John:** 100%, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s always the other way.

**John:** The phone is on the wrong side of the bed. How could you not know that?

**Craig:** It is so routine that I just laugh, and everyone’s like, “Wrong side?” I’m like, “Yeah.” Obviously, it’s not relevant. If it were relevant, I would make a point of it. The episode with Bill and Frank, I had their house in my head. This was the entrance. That’s where the dining room. That’s where the kitchen is. When you walked in the front door, the dining room was on the right, and then the kitchen was through the door, past there. And when I got their plan, they had put it on the left. They put it on the left for a reason. I couldn’t remember what it was. It had to do with something and building and blah blah blah. Every time without fail. Without fail, every single time. I think I’m very good at visualizing things, but I visualize them in the opposite direction from everybody else. The chirality is off.

But yeah, it’s essential. It’s just essential. Also, visualizing spaces allows you to write beyond the limitations of dialog. It gives you what are actors looking for, how to use the space, how to move through the space, picking objects up, what does it smell like, what is the humidity in the air, what do they lean against, can they tap their fingers on something that makes a sound, all of these things that you could do. None of them are there and accessible to you as you’re writing a scene if you can’t see the space. For what we do, I think it’s essential.

**John:** You said at the start that as screenwriters, obviously that visual thing is so important, but in writing the three Arlo Finch books, I would say that visualization was just as crucial to me, the ability to not only see what Arlo’s house was like and what the layout was and know where everything was in that place, but also what it sounded like, how the floorboards squeaked, and in the book, what did things smell like, what was the texture of stuff, how did things taste. In my head, I can do all those things. I can create tastes that I’m not experiencing. I can create smells that I’m not smelling. That was really important for me in writing those books, to just really ground you in what those spaces were, which in books have more than just what you see and what you hear. John Green is a very successful novelist who’s done all this without the ability to do that.

He’s not the only very successful person who has this condition. Ed Catmull, who’s a big Pixar director and animator, he has that same kind of mind blindness. Some very successful architects have it too. That doesn’t seem possible to me. Just me thinking about how my brain works is that these very, very visual people can’t see things in their head. They actually have to do it on paper to see the thing. That’s true. Clearly, the condition is a spectrum. They have a rating here from one to five. We’ll include it in the show notes. It’s not a disorder. It’s just a situation, like left-handedness. It’s not anything is necessarily wrong. It’s just that most people can visualize, and some people can’t.

**Craig:** Oh, I think there’s something wrong with lefthanded people.

**John:** Yeah, disaster.

**Craig:** Something needs to be done. We gotta get our country back, John.

**John:** This is just a wild theory I’m going to throw out there, and maybe somebody has tested this. I don’t feel a particularly compelling need to rewatch movies. Given a choice between rewatching a movie and watching a new movie, I’ll always watch a new movie. I wonder if some people who compulsively rewatch movies, it’s because they actually can’t see the movie in their head, and so the only way they can experience the movie is actually watching the movie, versus me, I can pull up any scene in one of my favorite movies and I can see the picture. I can tell you exactly what it is. I remember what direction characters are facing. A person who doesn’t have this visualization ability, it’s not just they can’t imagine new things. They can’t pull up memories of old spaces and times.

**Craig:** That may be true. If The Godfather comes on, I’m watching it, most Tarantino movies, and I can remember them. I can play them back. I can play back the entire scene where Samuel L. Jackson is yelling at Frank Whaley. I know where everyone is. But I still like watching it, because it’s fun.

**John:** I do wonder if down the road, algorithms will be able to figure out who is aphantasic, because it seems like the word choices we’re using and how we’re describing things ultimately may reveal… The same way they could figure out that Robert Galbraith was actually JK Rowling. I do wonder if there are certain patterns in people’s usages that will point to what’s actually happening inside their heads.

**Craig:** This is the next frontier, interfacing directly between our brains and the hardware that our brains have devised and created. I don’t know if I want to stick around for it or if I want to check out. I don’t know. The next few years are going to be nuts.

**John:** Ryan Knighton, a friend of the show – he’s been on a couple times – is a blind writer. He once had vision, but he lost his vision in his early 20s. I do notice that in talking with him and emailing with him, he uses visual words all the time. He was like, “I see what you’re saying. I’ll have a look.” He’s still using those things. I haven’t talked to him about this recently, whether in his writing he’s still seeing things in his mind, or if it is just all metaphorically seeing things rather than actually visualizing stuff.

**Craig:** I’m sure we have blind listeners. I’m curious. If we do have blind listeners who have been blind from birth, so they’ve never seen, I suspect they are doing some kind of internal visualization. Not all of them. Maybe some of them are also aphantasic. But what is happening for blind folks when they visualize things? Are they visualizing them based on the heard description or the read description? Curious. I’d love to know.

**John:** It’s good to see. Related, also there’s the phenomenon that some people don’t have internal monologues. They don’t hear things in their head. Sure. Again, there’s nothing wrong, but it’s just really unusual. I can’t imagine not being able to preview a conversation, not being able to have some ongoing chatter in your head.

**Craig:** I don’t actually hear it, hear it, but it’s there.

**John:** For sure. Let’s get on to some listener questions. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Oh, I feel the umbrage clouds on the horizon on this first one.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Drew:** Greenhorn writes, “I’m a repped screenwriter but rather in limbo at the moment, since I’m switching reps, and I don’t have the appropriate person to speak to right now. A few years ago, I was introduced to a second unit director who has worked on some big movies. He’s looking to make his directing debut, so I pitched him a few ideas. One of them he loved, so I worked up a four-page outline and was in touch with him through that process. Indeed, he gave some feedback along the way, but to be frank, his contributions were minimal. The idea, title, characters, story, and set pieces are all mine. And indeed, every word on the existing document was written by me. As far as I understand, I am therefore the writer. All this writing I did pre-strike, by the way.

“He called me last week to say he just pitched the idea verbally to a major studio who love it and who want to see the outline. But he’s saying that he’ll only pass it on if I say he co-wrote it. This doesn’t feel fair, let alone true. From the conversation we had on the phone, I know that he’s doing this out of fear of the studio buying it from me and then just hiring a more experienced director to replace him.

“I’ve told him that the solution to this is for him to just option the project from me. I also told him that it isn’t fair for him to try to claim co-writer credit. He has responded petulantly and with a hostile tone, doubling down on his claim to being co-writer. And more worryingly, he said he’s now pitched the idea to another studio. But even though I’ve asked him, he won’t say which. I’m now concerned to protect my idea, since it’s the kind of high-concepty, laugh-out-loud kind of idea which you can imagine suspiciously resurfacing at a studio a little later down the line. And there’s no paper trail if he’s pitching verbally and indeed refusing to tell me where he’s pitching. So my questions: am I right to deny his claim to co-writer credit? And short of getting a lawyer on the case, how best do you reckon I respond to him while I don’t have a new rep yet?”

**John:** Greenhorn, a couple things to do right away, and then we can also probably back up to more general advice. I thought Greenhorn’s suggestion of, “You could option it from me, and that’s a way to attach yourself more fully to it,” that makes sense. He should’ve said yes to that. But he didn’t say yes to that. Now you’re concerned that he’s going to, having gone out to pitch this to different places, he’s going to try to set up this idea without you. That seems kind of like a thing he might try to do. This is a time where you actually need to make sure your outline, your four-page thing is actually… I would say actually register it with the Copyright Office, which we don’t often say. But you do need to protect yourself here and make sure that it’s clear that this really was your idea. You also have all the emails back and forth between the two of you. It sounds like there’s emails. That’ll also be in your defense. But you don’t want to be going into this planning for a lawsuit down the road. You want to stop this now if you possibly can. Craig, I’m curious what you think he should be doing right now.

**Craig:** Right now, we’re dealing with crisis management. Let’s jump in our time machine first and talk about what should Greenhorn have done. You pitched this idea that you had, and then you wrote an outline. Now, by the way, we’re not talking about an idea. Now we’re talking about a unique expression in fixed form. Now we have-

**John:** Literary material.

**Craig:** … literary material. “He just pitched the idea verbally to a major studio who love it.” I don’t believe him, by the way. Don’t believe him. I’m just going to say that right away, Greenhorn. Do not believe that.

**John:** He’s lying to you in other ways, so he’s probably lying about this.

**Craig:** “Verbally to a major studio who love it and want to see the outline.” They love it? Really? “But he’ll only pass it on if I say he co-wrote it.” Now, at that point, Greenhorn, I would have lawyered up, right then and there. I wouldn’t have offered options or anything. I’m like, “That’s it. You’re out. You’re done. Bye,” because he didn’t co-write it at all. That’s not what he did, nor do I understand why he needs to.

Greenhorn, your theory is that he wants to do this so that they can’t kick him off the project. They kick writers off of projects way easier than they kick directors off. They kick writers off of features on a daily basis. They hate kicking directors off of features. So, no, that’s not going to help him at all. At all. This is just lame. It’s not even a discussion, by the way. It’s literally not even a discussion. I’m sure he is petulant and hostile. Don’t care.

He’s a second unit director, so what do I know? I know then that he does not have experience necessarily developing material with writers as a first unit director. Second unit directors, by the way, are incredibly important, and the best ones are remarkably skilled, so in no way am I undermining what they do. They are necessary and amazing, but they do what they do.

**John:** We should say for our listeners who may not know, second unit directors generally, particularly on bigger action movies, they are filming a lot of this stunt work. They’re doing a lot of stuff that doesn’t involve the principal actors doing the main scenes. Every action movie you’ve seen has had an amazing second unit director doing that stuff. In television, they’re also doing a lot of pickup stuff for things that aren’t being hit by the main unit, so they’re crucial to things, but these are not people who are generally doing big storytelling scene work kind of things.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you go to a movie and you see a big car chase, all the shots where they’re cars, so not inside the car… Mark Wahlberg’s inside the car. The director, the first unit director is directing Mark Wahlberg inside the car. He’s going, “Whoa. Huh.” All the other stuff, zoom, ram, rah, crash, smash, that usually is the second unit director. Second unit directors sometimes are also stunt coordinators, because they are shooting fight sequences and things like that. The guys that went on to make John Wick were stunt coordinators who operated second units and then moved up to make John Wayne. It can happen, but it sounds like this particular second unit director does not have experience working with writers developing things, because if he did, he wouldn’t have said any of this.

Now, John is right, you should submit your work to the Copyright Office, and then you should call a lawyer. Now I know you say, “In short of getting a lawyer in the case,” but this is the frustrating part, Greenhorn. Sometimes I feel like John and I have a medical show, and people write in and say, “I’m bleeding out of my butt. Short of going to a doctor, what do you reckon I do with this?” You’re like, “I think you need to go to the doctor. You’re bleeding out of your butt.” You’re sort of bleeding out of your butt here. You need to go to a lawyer. It is going to cost money, but do you care or not?

The bottom line is, look, if you read about this thing happening in a newspaper, you can call a lawyer then and say, “Look, I’ve got this thing.” Then the lawyer will be like, “Great. Okay. I’m taking this on contingency, because it’s going to work, and we’re going to get money.” Or you can do it now. Personally, I would do it now. If that guy happens to be listening to this, if Greenhorn’s account is accurate, dude, act like you’ve been there before. This is ridiculous.

**John:** I would suspect Greenhorn’s lawyer will send a letter to this second unit director saying, “Stop misrepresenting your involvement in this project. To clarify, you did not write any of this project, and do not represent yourself as a writer on this project, and maybe don’t contact my client again.” There’s no salvaging this relationship. Greenhorn, I wouldn’t worry about trying to make good with the second unit director. You’re not going to end up in a happy place with this guy.

**Craig:** No. Also, to be clear, this guy is trying to sell property he doesn’t own. Once you start thinking about this like property, you can realize how offensive this is. He was like, “Hey, I want to be a car racer,” and you’re like, “Great. I like building cars. Here’s my plan to build a car.” Then he’s just going around going, to car companies, “I have a car that I made.” No. No. It’s not yours.

**John:** There are producers who are pitching projects they don’t own, but they are producers pitching projects they don’t own, and they’re not trying to claim that they are the co-writer on the project. That’s where they overstepped.

**Craig:** Correct. Also, producers that are pitching projects that they don’t write, generally speaking, have the consent of the writer. I’m not aware of any producer that’s going around there pitching IP that they have no association with. That’s just scumbag stuff.

**John:** There are a lot of scumbag producers who do that.

**Craig:** I guess that’s true. They’re scumbags.

**John:** Here’s the thing. They’re scumbags. This is a scummy thing to do.

**Craig:** Yeah, so lawyer up.

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** Sorry, Greenhorn. Lawyer up.

**John:** What else we got, Drew?

**Drew:** Ripley writes, “One struggle I continually have is what medium to write in. I feel with any idea I have, I can see how it would work as a cartoon or a horror feature or a comedy series. I’ve so far written a sci-fi comedy feature, an animated pilot, and a scattering of mostly drama shorts. I’m currently working on an idea that I’m on page 20 of and am still not sure what it is or should or will be. I suffer from ADHD and am often paralyzed with decision. I can see how a hundred different ways could work and never know how to narrow it down. Do you have any specific advice for this dumb issue?”

**John:** It’s not a dumb issue. I think a lot of people struggle with… I’m re-framing your question. It’s like, I don’t know what project I should write. Really, what it comes down to is you have a general story area, but you’re not sure what specific version of it you should write. That’s a really common situation. I think you just need to let yourself sit for a second, really think about what do you want to write. Is there a genre that particularly speaks to you, that you really enjoy writing, that you actually feel connection to? Is there something you’ve always wanted to try that you’ve not had a chance yet to do, that you want to experiment with? The things you write for yourself can truly be experiments. They’re a chance to take a flyer and see what works. Don’t be afraid to do that. Just try to be deliberate in your choices.

**Craig:** I think that’s excellent advice. I would only add this. Sometimes we struggle with the quantity of possible decisions, because we’re making the decisions kind of backwards. You have an idea, and then you say now, could be a cartoon, could be a horror, could be a comedy, could be animated, could be live, could be drama. Okay, sure, it could be a thousand things. We all have the same thousand things, so what’s the difference between people who are migrating firmly towards one thing, as opposed to you, Ripley, who are just like someone at Cheesecake Factory going through that massive menu, is that you are trying to stick that on top of what you’re doing. But it really shouldn’t be a decision. It should be a therefore.

You think about your idea, and you think about what the point of that idea is and what you’re trying to say with it and who you’re trying to reach, who you’re trying to talk to, and how you want them to feel. You think about all those things. As you think about them, it should begin to emerge that it would be best as blank. Anything that you and I have done could be a cartoon or a live action. Literally, Chernobyl could be a cartoon if you want it to. It wouldn’t be good, but you can do it. We make our choices for reasons. I think that’s the key is you need to figure out what it wants to be by asking what it is.

Sometimes the decision paralysis, and I’m not discounting the fact that you have an additional challenge because you have ADHD, but beyond that additional challenge, the reason you’re asking us is because you feel like, “Hey, I can get there.” I believe you can too, if you dig a little bit deeper into what exactly the thing is about. Then I think maybe you’ll have more clarity. I hope you will.

**John:** I agree. Looks like we have time for another question here.

**Drew:** Taylor from Arkansas writes, “I wrote an eight-page script that is part of an anthology feature film. The film is in post, and the producers are in talks with multiple streamers to buy it. I am not part of the WGA yet, and I cannot find on the WGA website how I should receive credit or maybe points. Any insight would be appreciated. To clarify, I wrote this script specifically for this film. These are not preexisting short scripts or films pieced together.”

**Craig:** Just to be clear, Taylor, at least this is how I’m reading your question, the project itself is a WGA-covered project. It’s just that you’re not in the WGA yet, I think.

**John:** Possibly. It’s not entirely clear from Taylor’s question. Let’s take that as the premise, and then we can modify at the end if we need to.

**Craig:** Taylor, you’re trying to figure out essentially how to qualify for full WGA membership, and indeed it works on a points system where certain kinds of work earn certain amounts of credits, like tokens, kind of, towards membership. And once you hit, I think it’s 24 of those, boom, you become a current member in good standing for, I think, seven years.

There is a manual that you can find on the WGA website, and we can, I’m sure, find a link for that that does show that. But you can also call the Membership Department at the WGA. They are there to help, because what you’re writing is a quirky little thing. It’s part of an anthology feature. Okay, so does this qualify as a short? Are you credited instead for the time you are employed? You need to call the WGA Membership Department and ask them this question, and they will give you the full answer.

**John:** Yes. Thinking about this project, whether it’s a WGA project or not a WGA project, your question of how you’re credited on the film is going to be relevant. I’ve seen anthology films where in the end, they list the different segments and then the writer and director of that segment and what the crew is, and they treat it like this was a bunch of shorts all put together. They may be an appropriate way of crediting writers in this project. Alternately, they could choose list all the writers together.

If it’s a WGA project, what’s going to happen is it’s going to be a list of participating writers, so you’ll be one of the participating writers in this, and then figure out how to assign credit. It’s tough in an anthology. Even having been on that committee, I’m not quite sure what the consensus decision would be, how they’re going to assign that credit. My guess is this is ultimately not going to be a WGA project, but we’ll see where it shakes out.

**Craig:** If it’s not a WGA project, then it doesn’t matter, Taylor, how much work you do. It’s not going to earn you towards membership. If it is a WGA project, the good news is, your credit credit, meaning written by or not, is actually irrelevant.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s just employment. The question is, were you employed under a WGA contract? Even if you’re not in the WGA, if it is a WGA project, you have to be employed under a WGA contract. Let’s say that’s a yes. Then the next question is, what was the structure of that deal? Were you paid for time? Were you paid for a draft? Were you paid for a polish? What were you paid for? And then lastly, how long did that run for? Did you do two polishes? Did you do three rewrites? All of that stuff ultimately gets processed by the Membership Department.

Since we’re missing a whole bunch of details here, easiest thing would be for you to call the WGA. But don’t call them if this project is not covered by the WGA, because then it’s sort of like calling… You might as well call the US Post Office. We will have no more information or relevance to you if the production company is not signatory to the Writers Guild.

**John:** I would ask the producer or whoever it is who’s making the film whether it’s a WGA project. Also, take a look around as to who the other writers are. If none of the writers involved in the project are WGA writers, I think it’s a good guess that it’s not being done under WGA contract.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a series of, I think they’re originally TikToks, but I saw them on Instagram reels, by this comedian named Bonnie. I don’t know her last name. Her handle is Boobie Klapper, which is-

**Craig:** That was my handle.

**John:** That was your handle. The premise of these videos, it’s a class in teaching product packaging. It’s in that form where she’s talking to camera, but then she’s also playing the other two characters in this class. They’re really good. I’m going to play one little clip here so you get a sense of what this feels like.

**Bonnie:** Next on the list we have chips. They come in large bags, so most people aren’t going to eat the whole bag at once, and any exposure to moisture in the air will cause them to go stale. What are we going to package this in, you guys? Dylan?

**Bonnie as Dylan:** A resealable bag?

**Bonnie:** Good guess, Dylan, but no. Ruth?

**Bonnie as Ruth:** A non-resealable bag so that everybody has to buy other tools specifically designed to seal off the big gaping hole at the top?

**Bonnie:** That’s exactly right, Ruth. We want to create a headache so universal that an entire market of products emerges to try to address it. Well done.

**John:** She’s done this as a series, as an ongoing series of things. I just like the form of it. It reminds me of the Ikea cashier kind of thing. It’s just creating a premise and a situation, and the little three-man sketches are just the perfect way to manifest them. Loved it.

**Craig:** Excellent. My One Cool Thing is the most mundane One Cool Thing I’ve ever had. But John.

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** I bought a whole bunch of socks.

**John:** You deserve socks.

**Craig:** I deserve them. I’ve always been just like, buy the white socks. I’m trying to spiff myself up. I want some colored socks. Dress socks are too thin. I don’t like the way they feel. They go too high on your leg. I like a comfy sock, but I also want a splash of color, John, so what do I do? I go to Uniqlo,Uniqlo in the Beverly Center, but they’re all over, of course.

**John:** They’re everywhere.

**Craig:** In the Beverly Center, they have a wall of socks, 5,000 different colors. The specific kind of sock, it’s called Uniqlo Colorful 50 Socks. I don’t know what the 50 stands for. Gotta be honest. Maybe they have 50 colors. I don’t know. Don’t care. They’re cheap. They’re comfy. They come in every possible color you can imagine. I bought a big mess of them. Secondary One Cool Thing. I get all these socks. I’ve never been to Uniqlo. By the way, I haven’t been to the Beverly Center in like 20 years.

**John:** Now that you’ve moved to our neighborhood, you’re closer to the Beverly Center.

**Craig:** There you go. I’m in there with Melissa. We bought our socks. She got something. I got a hoodie. All right. Great. So we have all of our stuff. Where do we go check out? Oh, no. All they have is self-checkout. That’s all they have. I’m like, “Ugh.”

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I have all these socks, because there was a deal where if you buy four pairs of socks, it cost $8, something stupid, which is great. We’ve got to scan all this. There’s a guy waiting there, and he goes, “Oh hey, have you used these before?” I’m like, “No.” He goes, “Okay. You just dump all your crap into this huge white bucket that’s connected to the machine, and that’s it.” John.

**John:** Amazing.

**Craig:** I am still freaked out by this.

**John:** Does everything have an RFID tag, which is how they know what it is?

**Craig:** No. They’re fricking socks. Here’s how the socks are packaged. There’s a sticker on them that you can peel off. Then there are these two little metal brackets to hold the socks together. That’s it. There’s nothing.

**John:** Does the sticker have an RFID [crosstalk 00:55:42]?

**Craig:** No. It’s a fricking sticker.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Sometimes you could see inside, oh, there’s some sort of… No. I don’t understand what this machine is doing. We dumped in 20 pairs of socks, a hoodie, and a bra, and it somehow knew exactly what was in that bin instantly.

**John:** That’s incredible.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** I’m terrified.

**John:** When I was in Boston a couple weeks ago, I did buy something at Uniqlo, and the checkout was a hassle and a pain. I’m happy that they found some way to do it.

**Craig:** Get thee to the Uniqlo in Beverly Hills and try out this technology. It’s pretty remarkable. My One Cool Thing mostly is the socks, but secondarily-

**John:** Mostly the socks.

**Craig:** … the magic bin that knows what you bought.

**John:** I’m debating on how I think about this, because we mostly have white socks. We mostly wear white socks, and so we don’t have to match them. As we do laundry, any two socks are their pair. With colored socks, you do have to match the pairs. It’s not a huge hassle.

**Craig:** It’s really not. It’s really not.

**John:** I’m excited for your socks. You deserve colorful socks.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Han Lundberg. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for the weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. Someone actually wrote in specifically about the new Scriptnotes University hoodie and how much they love it. I’m so happy people love the hoodie. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. 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 getting the things you always dreamed of. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Great. This had a prompt. Drew, somebody wrote in with a question for us.

**Drew:** Yeah, a photojournalist wrote in. She wrote, “Craig talks about his career and how he knew he could do something like The Last of Us but didn’t know or imagine he would ever be given the opportunity. I think about myself in a different industry. I spent years, jealously, I hate to admit, watching other people do what I wanted to do. I looked at their work and thought, ‘Just put me in, coach. I can do it.’ Then one day, while I was standing in the middle of a river, photographing migrants as they crossed into Mexico on their journey north, I had a realization that after 10 years of hard work, I’d made it to the opportunity I’d always hope I’d be given. And for a moment, it was like getting a case of vertigo, like glancing down while you’re extraordinarily high on a very dangerous mountain climb and suddenly realizing where you are. Can y’all talk about if you ever had that moment and how you emotionally reassured yourself so that you didn’t suddenly lose your footing and tumble back down from where you came?”

**John:** Oof.

**Craig:** Heavy.

**John:** I have a lot of stories, anecdotes, and related feelings about that. I became successful pretty early on in my career. I got my first movie made. I definitely remember walking up to set for the first day of Go! and thinking, “Wow, there’s all these trucks around. Oh, these trucks are for my movie. Oh, crap, I’m making a movie.” I felt like I wasn’t worthy to be there, and overwhelmed that I was going to be found out. There’s definitely a lot of imposter syndrome, and then realizing, “Oh, no, actually, I do know how to do this. This is going to be fine. This is going to be okay,” and a series of those sort of steps, like being on set for my first TV show and all those issues, being around famous people and being in those rooms and realizing, “Oh, this is sort of the dream. This is what I’ve always wanted. It’s kind of what I thought it would be, but also just a lot of hard work.” Craig?

**Craig:** It’s an incredibly common thing, and I think if you don’t experience it, you might be a sociopath. It’s pretty normal to think, “Wait, I’m the thing that I was dreaming of being. If I was dreaming of it, then I shouldn’t be it. That’s why it was a dream. Now what do I do?”

There’s a couple of things that hopefully will help. One is, at some point you begin to realize, I haven’t changed at all. The key is, like you said, “Okay, I had made it to the opportunity I had always hoped I would be given.” That’s a great way of putting it. What you didn’t say, and I’m glad for it, photojournalist, is, “I became a success.” You’re the same person. The circumstances around you are changing.

But one thing that’s happening is a re-balancing of the karmic scales. You’re being evaluated in a different way. Sometimes it’s not fair. Particularly early on in our careers, we can be discounted. Later on, we may be over-counted. There’s this thing that happens where suddenly you can do no wrong, until of course you do. Then it’s important to remember again, I haven’t changed; the circumstances have. The way the world evaluates you is not necessarily your worth. It almost always isn’t. It’s important to remember you’re the same person. That’s good news. What it means is what you were doing then, which they might have looked down on, came from the same brain as what you’re doing now. Keep that continuity in mind.

I run into this all the time when I’m doing interviews for press for our show. I can’t tell you how many times, a million, someone has said, “You used to make comedies, and now you do this. What? How? What? How?” I’m like, “Okay, here we go again.” See, have you never met anyone? You never met anyone who was a funny person who also felt sad sometimes or got angry or about something or had moments of seriousness? Do you think that Jim Carrey walks around all day like he’s in Liar, Liar? What? What do you mean? We hold multitudes with ourselves. But it’s hard for people. I understand why they ask me this question, because they evaluate us by what we do and then imagine that we had to change to do this thing. We did not. They did. They had to change.

Just reconnect with the consistency of who you are, and the fact that when you were doing the things that you were like, “I’m doing this for money. I wish I could have better opportunities,” that you did that work well enough to get you into this place, where people are now giving you the opportunity to do this. Just keep doing the work. Keep growing. Always be humble. Always remember you can get better, always. Study the people that do what you do, and do it so beautifully that you love it.

And never lose that excitement for other people’s good work. That’s so important. You see somebody else crushing it. Okay. You said you used to be jealous. Fine. But now you are where you are. Stop being jealous. Start appreciating it, because it makes you better when you see these things. It makes you better. You learn. It inspires you to up your game, which is fantastic.

Then don’t worry too much about the fact that you are, like you said, on a very dangerous mountain climb. You’re not. There is no mountain. There is just this long walk that we begin when we’re born, and we end it when we die. The walk is going well for you. Keep walking. Keep looking at it.

**John:** In the initial setup for this, I said answered prayers, that sense of, oh, you had this wish, this hope, this dream. You were a protagonist in the story. You had this vision of what you wanted to achieve. In that vision of what you want to achieve, you probably had markers and milestones and, “Oh, if I’ve done this thing, then I will have made it.” In the case of you as a photojournalist, if you’re being hired and sent off on these assignments to do these things, that’s great. In the case of people who want to make movies and TV shows, you’re on set, you’re at the premiere, where you have those pinch me moments.

The same way Craig was saying you’re still the same person, I think one of the dangers is that in that vision, in that prayer you put out there, you were going to achieve these things, and in achieving these things, you were going to be happy. You were going to feel good about yourself. You were going to feel like you were worthy, that life would be good. I think one of the things you notice over time is that the most successful people you end up meeting in their fields aren’t necessarily the happiest. In many cases, they are not happy. We know many very successful people who are kind of miserable.

There’s a certain thing that happens when you’ve achieved that success and, “Wait, I should be happy, but why am I not happy?” I can point to all these things that I have achieved, and yet I still feel like a miserable failure.” I think you’ve got to make sure that you are aware that some success, financial success, career success, the accolades of others, they feel good. They’re useful, but they are not going to fundamentally affect your own self-perception or your ability to feel good about yourself, and in some cases, that kind of success can only emphasize and magnify those feelings until you become kind of monstrous. Just be aware of that too. Success is not going to make you happy. That’s a crucial thing to remember.

**Craig:** It’s not going to change you fundamentally. It’s not going to cure your shame issues. They will still be there. Everything that John just said is really important to understand. We, especially in American culture, imagine that there is a win. It’s not really that way. Here’s the best news, I guess, is that when you become a success at the thing that you are compelled to do, because I assume, photojournalist, there are days where you’re like, “Oh my god, it’s hot, and I don’t want to go out there,” but also, “Oh, if I see that, I got to get my camera.” Okay, there’s the compulsion. That’s the way I am with writing. That’s the way John is. You’re compelled to do this thing. When you achieve a certain amount of success, it becomes easier to pursue your compulsion. It doesn’t become happier. It doesn’t become simple. You will still have moments where it hurts. You’re going to be doing it anyway, and now it’s gotten easier to do, because you can focus more on it. You don’t have to worry as much about other things, like paying the bills, being kicked out of a house, food, medicine, health care. Those things get solved by success, so that you can concentrate on the work you do.

With success also comes opportunities to work with better people. Working with better people is the instant Hamburger Helper to doing better work. Let’s say I get a call from Martin Scorsese. I haven’t, by the way, and I’m stunned. But let’s say he did, and he’s like, “Craig, I want to make a movie with you,” in his fun, fast-talking way. I would get better as a writer working with Martin Scorsese. How could I not? That’s exciting. There are all these benefits to success, but none of them include happy. That’s not the end result here.

**John:** Looking at this last paragraph here, she writes, “For a moment, it was like getting a case of vertigo, like glancing down while extraordinarily high on a very dangerous mountain climb and suddenly realizing where you are.” What I hear in that is also fear of loss, loss aversion, like, “I made it to this place, and now it’s all perilous, because I could fall from this high of place. I worry about losing it all.” I definitely see that happening among some of our peers. They’re really worried about, “If I don’t maintain this pace, if I don’t maintain this level of success, it’s all going to come crashing down.”

I think over the course of our 10 years, we’ve tried to be consistent about saying, “Listen, be ready to be successful. Here’s some things to be thinking about when you actually achieve some financial success, when you achieve some career success, but you can’t let that paralyze you, and you can’t get stuck or trapped in this way of thinking.”

Craig, that’s one thing I want to commend you for is that you were a successful comedy writer, you weren’t happy doing it, and you said, “Listen, I’m not going to worry about losing my status as a comedy writer. I’m going to do some other stuff here and scratch the itches I actually really have.” I would say the same to Photojournalist. Don’t worry too much about losing what you have. Keep thinking about the kind of work you did to get to this place, how do you keep that work going.

**Craig:** All true. I guess I’ll finish with my one last bit of, I don’t know if it’s advice, but commiseration, one human being to another. When you arrive at this place that you’ve imagined arriving at for so long, you can also get depressed, because there is no cake. The cake is a lie. If you have something to dream about, that is warm and comforting and exciting. If you get there and, as John suggests correctly, it doesn’t make you instantly happy, it doesn’t change who you are, transform you from inside, you can get depressed, because suddenly you start to wonder, what’s the point of all of this? We are trained to have a destination. There is no destination. If you think that you have, quote unquote, arrived, and then you look around and go, “Wait, is this it? It’s a lot like when I hadn’t arrived, just better hotel rooms,” that’s normal. You have to mourn the loss of that childlike hope.

Then on the other side of that hopefully brief spell, there is something better, which is an acceptance of the way things are and that the work itself is, he said cliché-ably, the work itself is the reward. That’s the reward. There is no other reward. Hopefully, we have helped a little bit there, photojournalist. We’re certainly very proud of you. Keep walking your walk.

**John:** Indeed. Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [‘Daredevil’ Hits Reset Button as Marvel Overhauls Its TV Business](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/daredevil-marvel-disney-1235614518/) by Borys Kit for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Episode 530: The One with Jack Thorne](https://johnaugust.com/2022/scriptnotes-episode-530-the-one-with-jack-thorne-transcript)
* [John Green Tweet](https://x.com/johngreen/status/1708515024275189884?s=20)
* [Discovering aphantasia](https://austinkleon.com/2023/10/03/discovering-aphantasia/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) by Austin Kelon
* [Aphantasia – A Different Kind of Blindness](https://leelefever.com/aphantasia-blindness/) by Lee LeFever
* [Here’s What It’s Like To Not Have An Internal Monologue](https://www.bustle.com/wellness/does-everyone-have-an-internal-monologue) by Caroline Steber for Bustle
* [WGA Membership Department](https://www.wga.org/the-guild/about-us/contact-us/departments/membership)
* [Boobie_Klapper](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cwv-uusPR5D/) on Instagram
* [Uniqlo Colorful 50 Socks](https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E434187-000/00?colorDisplayCode=62&sizeDisplayCode=027)
* [Uniqlo RFID Automated Checkout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqPfYnVKwGI)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Han Lundberg ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/615standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/scriptnotes-live-at-dynasty-typewriter-in-la).

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

**Emcee:** All right, now without further ado, the hosts with the most, John August and Craig Mazin.

**Craig Mazin:** Wow. Wow.

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

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

**John:** You are here for Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are…

**Audience:** Interesting to screenwriters.

**John:** Wow. Incredible here.

**Craig:** Incredible.

**John:** First off, we need to thank the LA Philharmonic Orchestra. It is remarkable to be here at the Hollywood Bowl, a dream come true.

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous. Probably the mics that we’re talking into are pretty close to the stage, so we’re probably only picking up maybe the first couple of rows-

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** … in the Garden Boxes.

**John:** I can the energy out here in this-

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** … iconic location.

**Craig:** What a dream.

**John:** 15,000 people?

**Craig:** Thousand.

**John:** I’d never envision this in our-

**Craig:** And the weather.

**John:** Great. A few sprinkles, but just the best thing.

**Craig:** Lovely.

**John:** Needed a little rain here.

**Craig:** You know what? That felt so good, because everything’s been going so great lately, so it’s nice that we have this going on for ourselves.

**John:** It’s nice that we have a little bit of a moment here. Today I was out on the picket lines, and we were talking about-

(Audience cheers)

**John:** Oh, hey. Phew! I worried we were going to have some anti-writer people here in the crowd. I was out on the picket lines. I talked about, oh, we have a live show tonight. It’s like, oh, did you plan for it to be on the 100th day of the Strike? Today is the 100th day of the Strike. Did we plan this?

**Craig:** We did.

**John:** A hundred percent. Craig said, “John, whatever you do, make sure the Strike goes on for at least-“

**Craig:** Slow walk this thing.

**John:** Yeah, 100 days. Now, it’s smooth sailing from here on forward.

**Craig:** John, to be clear, you do have a little bit of a weird and creepy, and what I honestly think is somewhat a bit of an anti-union secret. I think it’s probably important for you to come clean about it.

**John:** I thought that was green room rules. I thought we didn’t-

**Craig:** No. Fuck that.

**John:** All right. I think people could agree that I’m generally a pro-union, pro-WGA person.

**Craig:** That’s what I thought.

**John:** I would never disparage anything about the WGA. But 100 days in, there’s something I want to get off my chest, is that I believe the iconic blue official WGA Strike T-shirts… I love them as an image. I love wearing it there. I love seeing a field of blue. Fantastic. They are not comfortable shirts.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** They are really uncomfortable shirts.

**Craig:** In fact, they may have been manufactured by the AMPTP.

**John:** The official blue shirts are union-made, and the union is not the probably here. They are 100 percent cotton. We learned from our own Scriptnotes producer, Stuart Friedel, his sense of softness, what do we need for a T-shirt to be comfortable?

**Craig:** You need a tri-blend, John.

**John:** You need a tri-blend.

**Craig:** You need a tri-blend.

**John:** You need a tri-blend.

**Craig:** Tri-blend.

**John:** They are not tri-blend shirts.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** They’re not comfortable to wear.

**Craig:** No. They are hair shirts. I don’t like them at all. They chafe your nipples. Do not wear.

**John:** Here’s what I think about it. I have shirts that I wear because I choose to wear them, and there are shirts where like, you’ve now joined the army, here’s your uniform. They don’t ask soldiers is your camouflage comfortable. That’s not their concern.

**Craig:** They actually might. I got to tell you, I think that we have the worst of it.

**John:** We have a show that’s chockablock full with amazing guests. Quinta Brunson is here.

**Craig:** Someone named Natasha Lyonne is here.

**John:** These are guests who are not only incredibly talented writers, they are also actors. As members of SAG-AFTRA, there are certain specific restrictions on what they should be talking about. They are not going to be talking about their specific shows and programs that you know them for, but instead, we can talk about the craft, the art.

**Craig:** Which we do anyway. We’re not really press junkety question people. As we go through the show, if you’re wondering, hey, why don’t they mention muh or meep, it’s because we just don’t want to get them in trouble with their union. Also, I’m in that union too.

**John:** You are, yeah.

**Craig:** I’m in SAG.

**John:** You’re in SAG.

**Craig:** I’m in SAG. I’m an actor.

**John:** You’re an actor.

**Craig:** I’m a real actor.

**John:** I almost said the word. I said half the word of a show that you were in.

**Craig:** You can say it. That didn’t break the rule. You’re not in SAG.

**John:** Duncan Crabtree-Ireland is sitting right out there. He’s got a sniper rifle, so if we say the wrong thing-

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We are going to talk about how they got started, how they got to this place they are today, but we are also going to have some fun. We’re going to play some games. We’ll do some audience Q and A.

**Craig:** With slightly stricter rules, because you guys really can’t talk about those shows either. That’s fine. That’s no big deal. I wanted to introduce somebody really quickly who’s going to be with us today. You’re going to be seeing him floating around over there. That’s Elliot Aronson. Elliot is going to be our ASL interpreter tonight. Elliot also was the ASL interpreter… I can say a show that was on the air, right?

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:05:31].

**Craig:** I’m going to do it. He worked for The Last of Us. He was Kevionn Woodard’s ASL interpreter.

**John:** I think he’s a former One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** He is a One Cool Thing. He will always be One Cool Thing. I’m sort of annoyed that he’s not signing right now, because I would force him to have to sign about himself and talk about himself as an incredibly handsome person and a wonderful guy whose name is Elliot. This is me. I am Elliot, and I’m amazing. He’s never going to get a chance to do that again.

**John:** Let’s get started, Craig. Our very first guest is a writer, a producer, an actress, a comedian. Last year, she was listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year. We’ve wanted her on the show forever, Craig, and now we can finally have her. Welcome, Quinta Brunson.

**Quinta Brunson:** Hi, everybody. Hi. How’s it going?

**John:** Quinta.

**Quinta:** Yes?

**John:** Backstage you talked about that you are not a huge podcast listener.

**Quinta:** No.

**Craig:** Me either.

**Quinta:** Or doer.

**John:** Or doer. Thank you for making an exception for us here.

**Quinta:** Of course.

**John:** You actually have some history with Hollywood Heart.

**Quinta:** Yes. I used to do improv at Hollywood Heart. This was probably the summer of, what’s this called, 2023. Then that was probably maybe six, seven years ago. I did improv shows with my troupe, Summercon [ph]. It was four of us. We would just do improv and then have the kids come up and join us at the camp, which is on a really scary… You guys, it’s on this hill.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** We’re trying to raise money to get them off the hill.

**Quinta:** It is terrifying.

**Craig:** Describe the hill.

**Quinta:** The hill is something of your nightmares. You know when you go in those canyons around here, and you’re like, “Whoa, this is crazy,” but then you get used to them because you’ve been in LA for a while? This shit, it’s like going to Bowser’s castle. It is insane. It’s windy. You feel like you’re going to… Kids, because we just talked about mortality back there, they don’t know that they can die, so they’re not afraid.

**Craig:** You’ve told them.

**Quinta:** Yeah. I think that’s why Hollywood Heart didn’t invite me back, because I put it in my improv. I just was motivated to tell the truth.

**Craig:** I like that most of your bits were just about how shitty that camp was. That’s pretty awesome.

**Quinta:** The camp is beautiful. It’s just the road on the way up there.

**Craig:** I see. It’s getting there.

**Quinta:** It’s in heaven. It’s so high up. This is why I don’t love to talk. I’m not talking correctly, you guys, because I’m not-

**Craig:** You’re out of practice.

**Quinta:** I should be a writers’ room. I’m not doing well with sentences.

**Craig:** We’ll work you through it. It’s going to be all right.

**John:** Quinta, before you were traumatizing children in this improv group, what is your comedy background? How did you get started? What was the spark? How did you actually go from like, “I like comedy,” to, “I’m doing it.”

**Quinta:** It was the connection between my siblings and I. My siblings are all significantly older than me. My closest sibling is eight years older than me. He hated me, because he was the baby for so long, and then I came along. He really didn’t like me. I was like, “I gotta win this guy over,” truly. That was a big motivator for me. He really liked Ace Ventura. He hated me. We had a Jack and Jill door. Do you guys know what that is? Between our bedrooms.

**Craig:** I had one of those.

**John:** Like The Brady Brunch.

**Quinta:** Yeah. He just couldn’t stand that he was sharing his space with this freaking baby. Then I would see him watching Ace Ventura and laughing really loud with his friends. I was like, “I can make my butt talk too. I can do that.” I started mimicking what was happening in the movies, and he would laugh, and he would like me.

I just started liking comedy, because that was a connecting factor between all of my siblings and I. My oldest brother, he loved the Kings of Comedy, so I would do impressions of Steve Harvey on that. Then my sisters, they were great, because they had different tastes. My one sister loved In Living Color, but the other sister loved SNL. One sister loved Martin. The other loved Conan. She was into late-night shows. It just became a way for me to connect with everyone. Same thing with my parents, who are also really old. I watched The Brady Bunch with them. I just like this.

Then high school, when it became taste to me, because I loved it so much, and I knew so much more about comedy than everyone else that I would bring DVDs to school and be like, “This is what you need to be watching. This is the new shit in the streets.” They’re like, “What the fuck is Napoleon Dynamite?” I’m like, “You’ll learn. You’ll learn.” Remember that? Remember when you gave someone a DVD, and it meant something?

**Craig:** I don’t know how young they are. DVDs were these round things.

**Quinta:** You gave it to them. You were like, “Return it.” You trusted them to return your only copy.

**Craig:** Not scratched.

**Quinta:** Not scratched.

**Craig:** Not scratched.

**Quinta:** That meant something to me to bring that. Then college, I was really good. I was a good student all my life, but then I just started fucking around. I was like, I don’t care about what I’m doing. I was an advertising major. Then I was just watching SNL one night and was like, where did these people all go to do this? That’s when I learned about Second City. Then that’s when I actually learned that I could do it for a living, because that was the change, and like, okay, this can be my career.

**Craig:** You mentioned growing up in Philly.

**Audience member:** Woo!

**Craig:** All right.

**Quinta:** Yay!

**Craig:** Philly’s got its own… It’s got an interesting comedy tradition. One of the things I’ve noticed about people that come out of Philly, especially people in comedy, like Kevin Hart or Rob McElhenney, is that it’s not a chip on the shoulder as much as, “You underestimate me at your own peril,” which is a very Philadelphia kind of vibe.

**Quinta:** Yes, absolutely. Love it.

**Craig:** I just want to ask you how you bring a little bit of the place you came from to your voice and how you apply that to writing and what you do.

**Quinta:** That is an excellent question.

**Craig:** Thank you!

**Quinta:** I love this.

**Craig:** Show over.

**Quinta:** I feel like I live my whole life like an underdog. I think my comedic voice, the projects that I have done all deal with underdog, underestimated characters and stories. Philadelphia as a city is the little cousin to New York. No one thinks of us until we…

**Craig:** Until you get stuck there.

**Quinta:** Get stuck there, or when you make it to a Super Bowl, everyone’s like, “Oh.” It’s like, yeah, we have a good fucking team. What are you watching? I was so mad during the Super Bowl last year when people were like, “Oh, the Eagles.” Bitch, the whole fucking season-

**Craig:** They won just a few years earlier.

**Quinta:** … was incredible. What are you talking about?

**Craig:** That’s Philly.

**Quinta:** It’s really frustrating. It’s also a really foolish city. We have that statue of Rocky. That is so foolish. We believe in ourselves so hard that even when you come… Allen Iverson is an honorary Philadelphian. I don’t think of where he’s from. To me, he’s from Philly, because he became a part of the underdog story. I say all that to say it’s just a city that makes you believe in the underdog more than any other city I think in America, but I still want to be the underdog, so maybe not as much as any other city.

**Craig:** You have to be an underdog in the race to be the underdog.

**Quinta:** Yeah. I had a hard time during the last two years of my life, where I was losing my underdog status.

**John:** Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a little rough.

**Quinta:** My friends started clowning me a little bit. They’re like, “Bitch,” because I’d be saying stuff like, “Oh, man, I don’t know if I can get in this club, but we going to try.”

**Craig:** They’re like, “Bitch.”

**Quinta:** Like, “Yeah, you’re going to get in the club.” Stuff like that. I’m dealing with that.

**Craig:** 100 Most Influential People of the Year.

**John:** This underdog thing of yours, the first thing that broke for you was Girl Who Had Never Been on a Good Date.

**Quinta:** On a Nice Date, yeah.

**John:** On a Nice Date, which Instagram video, not even reels, an early Instagram thing. Talk to us about decision to do those and what happened when those caught.

**Quinta:** Instagram wasn’t Instagram yet. It was 2013. The platform had just gotten video. I was just fucking around. I just wanted to make my friends who followed me… I might’ve had, I don’t know, maybe 1,000 followers, just friends from college and friends from high school and stuff. I just wanted to put up videos to make them laugh. I really was just testing out the platform, I guess. We didn’t even speak like this back then.

**John:** I know.

**Quinta:** We weren’t saying platform. We were just like, “Yeah, my Instagram account.” The first video that I posted had just gone viral, which that wasn’t even a thing besides describing YouTube, virality in that way. I saw an opportunity to capitalize off of it. I was like, “I’ll keep making them. People like it. This is the same as garnering an audience where people come to see you at shows. It’s word of mouth.”

I was a person who was really, really against the internet. I despised YouTubers. I despised just the internet. At the time, I was doing improv at ImprovOlympic, which no longer exists. I was like, “I’m a stage performer. I can’t be doing this.” But I came to accept it. It really helped kick off my career, so I’m very grateful for it.

**Craig:** We have spent a long time, over a decade now, teaching about writing and our business, to people, through this podcast. Your mother was a public schoolteacher?

**Quinta:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Both of my parents were public schoolteachers.

**Quinta:** Oh.

**Craig:** We have that shared experience. I’m curious if coming from a teacher the way you did, what you think about the way writing is taught, because we have an issue with the way writing is taught and the general education of writers, and I guess also the education of how to work in the entertainment business. I’m curious, as somebody who comes from that tradition, what you think about how we are doing things and who we’re bringing in and how we’re helping them or teaching them.

**Quinta:** I think there should be a little bit more focus for writers on, you said it, how to also do business and how to communicate with partners, whether it be other people in a room, a writers’ room or a studio or a network, because you can be really talented and not know how to communicate your idea, not know how to communicate it even on paper. You could have just such an incredible story in your head and write it down. Sure, amazing to you and your two friends. Do you know how to communicate it to other people who don’t come from the same background as you, who don’t speak the same language as you? When I’m writing-

**Craig:** A show. Let’s just stipulate.

**Quinta:** When I’m writing a show-

**Craig:** A show.

**Quinta:** … and I decide that I would like it to be for a broad audience, I think, will a person in Korea understand this? Yes, it’s in a different language, but will they understand it if it’s translated into their language?

I think that’s a huge thing that people miss out on. Even if you’re writing it in English and you’re writing it for Americans, why don’t you test and see if someone in France can understand this story, because I think that’s such a huge part of writing is just clearcut storytelling. It can be done on a wide, complicated scale. We’ve seen huge movies do it very, very well. It can be done on a small scale, like with a TV show. Does the story make sense to other people who aren’t you and aren’t your friends from school? Is that a good answer? I wish that was taught more.

**Craig:** I think it’s a great answer.

**John:** It’s a great answer. Before you started working on official Hollywood things, you were working at Buzzfeed for a time. It seemed like you had a chance to do a lot of stuff. Were you writing, performing, editing, all that, the whole cycle?

**Quinta:** Writing, performing, producing, editing. Producing was the biggest thing I got out of Buzzfeed, because we had a $300 budget to make videos. Man, that made me scrappy. My brain is just forever scrappy in that way. Even if I receive a big budget, it’s just still working on that $300 in a way. I have to be told, “Expand your mind. You have more money.” Those are the things I…

Editing too. I’m so grateful for learning how to edit there. That is another thing that I feel like anyone who is making something, if you can, spend time with an editor. Make sure you take yourself to an editor suite. Just get on the equipment yourself and start fucking around, just to see. It’s another part of it. Is your story communicating to the editor? It’s such a huge-

**Craig:** It’s how you finish. It’s the end of the writing. We think writing ends when we stop typing. If the point is to make, so there’s your production, and then the editing really is, it’s your final draft.

**Quinta:** Yeah, but if people never sit with an editor or-

**Craig:** They don’t know.

**Quinta:** … get on the programs themselves, they don’t know.

**Craig:** I remember the first time I saw the things that I was writing being edited, I wanted to barf, because I realized how far off I was, or also just how impotent my plan was. In my mind, I was like, “I have thought of it, and therefore it will be.”

**Quinta:** I think that I got a real appreciation for editors from Steven Spielberg. I was obsessed with Jurassic Park when I was little. I found everything he ever talked about, wrote, did, any video I could find. When YouTube came around, I just got on… Who’s that guy?

**Craig:** He is our ASL interpreter.

**Quinta:** Oh, hey.

**Craig:** You weren’t here for that part.

**Quinta:** I wasn’t.

**Craig:** Did you think he was-

**Quinta:** I was like, “Everybody’s cool with this?”

**Craig:** You think that we were about to get jumped?

**Quinta:** I did. I carry my purse because my shank’s in here. I was like, do we need to-

**Craig:** Like I said, Philadelphia.

**Quinta:** Seriously.

**Craig:** That’s how it used to be at the old Veterans Stadium.

**Quinta:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Someone runs out there.

**Quinta:** Hello. Thank you. Where has he been the whole time?

**Craig:** He was down there, but I think the person that he’s interpreting for has arrived is my guess.

**Quinta:** Wow. That’s amazing.

**Craig:** He sprung into action. His name is Elliot. He’s wonderful.

**Quinta:** Hi, Elliot. That’s amazing that you have that. That’s great.

**Craig:** I’m glad that he’s up there, because now I once again-

**Quinta:** It’s really cool.

**Craig:** … have to say that Elliot is a wonderful, handsome person, and once again, he needs to sign it, which is spectacular.

**Quinta:** You should tell people that. I think Natasha’s going to lose her shit.

**Craig:** No, I’m going to going to. I want to see that.

**Quinta:** Wait. I watched Steven Spielberg talk about editing when I was younger. I was like, “Man, the editor’s the final part. He said he couldn’t do this without the editors.” There was a video of him sitting with the editors, working on Jurassic Park. The editor that really blew my mind when I was little, I was like, “Oh my god, he worked on Star Wars too. This is fucking crazy.” It just really painted the picture to me that they were a vital part of the process.

One of my favorite editors, Richie, he and I share a brain. I did one show that I sold to… It doesn’t exist anymore. It was Verizon’s platform. I had an editor who was Argentinian.

**Audience member:** Woo!

**Quinta:** Okay. Yeah. What a diverse audience.

**Craig:** One person from Philly, one person from Argentina.

**Quinta:** Super diverse.

**Craig:** Everyone else from Silver Lake, I presume.

**Quinta:** Some from Echo Park.

**Craig:** Yes, of course. It’s West Echo.

**Quinta:** I made this show. It was poorly written. I’ll say that. I think it’s great to get an opportunity to poorly write something for a digital platform that won’t exist anymore. The editor didn’t get it. I was like, “This rhythmically is missing something then. I’m going to take myself back to the drawing board of writing.”

That show was actually my first attempt at a mockumentary. That taught me another thing, like, okay, the rhythm of a mockumentary is different than the rhythm of another single-cam, which is different from a multi-cam. I have to write with that in mind. I have to make sure I can communicate it to someone who is an editor, who is not from where I’m from and may not pick up the same cues. It needs to be in the script properly, so that they know how to cut and know what they’re doing. That was such a big learning experience for me at Buzzfeed.

**Craig:** Do we have time for one more question?

**John:** One last question just for Craig.

**Craig:** One last question real fast. Speed round. You mentioned failing.

**Quinta:** Failing, yeah.

**Craig:** One of the things that’s interesting about people that work in a room, as you might, on a show, if you’re going to be failing, a lot of times you’re failing in front of a lot of people. I wonder, do you give yourself some space to go fail privately in quiet and then come back-

**Quinta:** Yes.

**Craig:** … into the room to be like-

**Quinta:** Oh, in the room?

**Craig:** I’m saying can you give yourself a place to go dance like no one’s watching and then come back and dance like other people are watching?

**Quinta:** Hm. That’s such a good question. I like to find safe spaces to fail. That used to be stand-up. I don’t feel comfortable failing at that anymore. I recently did a show with Brett Goldstein from (bleeps).

**Craig:** Other shows.

**Quinta:** In (bleeps).

**Craig:** From some shows. From some shows.

**Quinta:** From (bleeps).

**Craig:** She’ll get it. [Indiscernible 00:23:27].

**Quinta:** Oh, shit, I can’t talk. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** It’s okay.

**John:** Duncan, put down the rifle.

**Quinta:** Safe space to fail.

**Craig:** Safe space to fail.

**Quinta:** That helps make my point. This feels like a safe space to fail. The stage feels like a safe space to fail for me. Brett’s show, first I didn’t want to do it. I’m like, I’m not ready. I was like, you know what? I need to go on a stage and fail out loud and fail with an audience. It’s almost never a fail. It’s a good experience. We have a human experience together. I got to do improv for the first time in forever. That felt really good.

I like to play video games that I’m not good at, because that makes me feel like I’m failing. I like to lose, but I’m competitive, so I like to win, so that makes me better. I try to make food. I’m not good at that. Fail every single time in the kitchen, but I keep trying. I just find other spaces to fail in. In my room, I’m A1. I’m not a failure.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Quinta Brunson, thank you for the most [crosstalk 00:24:28].

**Craig:** Thank you, Quinta. Thank you.

**Quinta:** That was really fun.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Come back at the end. We’ll do some questions.

**Quinta:** I’ll see you in a little bit.

**John:** That was the fun part of the show.

**Craig:** Now it’s going to get weird.

**John:** Craig, this is the 608th episode of Scriptnotes that we’ve done.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

**John:** In addition to the main show, for the last year we’ve had the Scriptnotes Sidecasts that Drew and Megana have been helping out with. Huge props for them.

**Craig:** Let’s give them a hand. Amazing.

**John:** Drew and Megana! I think understandably, we’re always approaching things from the writer’s perspective.

**Craig:** Of course, yes.

**John:** Tonight I was hoping we could hear from the other side, which is why I reached out to the AMPTP to see if we could get their response to some of our concerns. To my surprise, they said yes. Everyone, if you could please welcome AMPTP spokesperson Nancy Sullivan.

**Craig:** Yay-ish. There she is.

**John:** Thank you for being here. Thank you.

**Craig:** Hi.

**John:** Hi.

**Nancy Sullivan:** Wow, this is a theater. I’ve only been to the theater one time. I saw Cats when I was seven. I love that show.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Nancy, thank you so very much for agreeing to be on the show.

**Craig:** I should warn you, this may not be the friendliest audience for you.

**Nancy:** I have to say, it’s just such an honor to be here. I’m such a fan of your show.

**Craig:** Really?

**Nancy:** Oh, of course, a huge fan, especially those episodes where you sit down with filmmakers and showrunners and really get into the minutiae of the craft. Huge fan. Huge fan.

**Craig:** I have to say, that is legitimately a surprise. I would not have pegged an AMPTP person as a cinephile.

**Nancy:** Oh, no, no, you have me wrong. I’ve always been obsessed with film and TV. I remember, in fact, watching Amadeus with my father. I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. I was just being blown away by what Miloš Forman accomplished with the cinematography and the mise-en-scène and his reversal of the classic protagonist-antagonist relationship not just in dialog, but in the blocking and the framing of these two candlelit warriors always in a battle that they didn’t know it was about.

**Craig:** You were eight?

**Nancy:** Or nine.

**John:** Nancy, honestly, I was probably watching The Love Boat when I was nine. That blows me away.

**Nancy:** I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Is it just me, or is her smile terrifying?

**John:** Yeah. You were watching Amadeus?

**Nancy:** I was watching this masterpiece, Amadeus. His name is Miloš Forman, so it’s actually pronounced Amadeus [ah-mah-DAY-oosh]. I said, “Daddy! I know what I want to do, Daddy! I want to do this. I want to work with the greatest writers and filmmakers in the world and find a way to crush them economically for the benefit of multinational corporations.”

**Craig:** There it is.

**Nancy:** Let me explain. If you look at great artists throughout history, what is the unifying theme? Hardship. Suffering. Emile Zola, I believe it was, wrote, “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” If I can help make that work almost unsurvivable, if I can bring filmmakers to the edge of ruin, take away every bit of comfort and safety that they have, then true art is possible.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Nancy:** Thank you.

**John:** That is some Fountainhead shit there.

**Nancy:** Fun fact, my bat mitzvah was themed around the works of Ayn Rand.

**Craig:** Your name is Sullivan, and you had a bat mitzvah. Okay, anyway. Let me get this straight. You’re saying that you joined the AMPTP because you wanted to make great art by punishing the people who make it?

**Nancy:** Oh, no no no. No no no. Craig, Craig, I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’ve dedicated my career to the genius visionaries who make film and television. By that, of course, I’m referring to the studio bosses, because they write the checks. They’re the ones saying, “Let’s make a show based on a zombie video game.”

**Craig:** They’re not zombies.

**Nancy:** They’re not, right. That’s so sweet. You’re so sweet, because here’s the thing. If I’d shown a picture of one of those, whatever you call them, creatures to 100 people and said, “What do you think this is?” do you know what all 100 would say? They’d say they were zombies. They’re zombies.

**Craig:** They’re not zombies.

**Nancy:** They’re zombies with mushroom hats.

**Craig:** They’re not zombies. They’re not zombies.

**Nancy:** They’re zombies with-

**Craig:** They’re not zombies.

**Nancy:** They’re zombies-

**Craig:** They’re not zombies.

**Nancy:** … with mushroom fascinators.

**Craig:** They’re not zombies. They’re not zombies.

**Nancy:** They’re zombies.

**Craig:** They’re not zombies!

**Nancy:** They’re zombies!

**Craig:** They’re not zombies.

**John:** Back to the topic here. I think it sounds like what you’re saying, Nancy, is that you’re okay imposing unnecessary-

**Nancy:** Necessary suffering, go on.

**John:** … suffering on writers and actors, and not in the pursuit of profit, but instead, of some kind of warped vision of artistic integrity?

**Nancy:** I never said actors. As Alfred Hitchcock [hitch-KAAKH] I think once said-

**Craig:** Oh, come on.

**Nancy:** … actors are cattle. Of course they’re cattle. You don’t see them typing with their hooves. For actors, our approach is basically herd management. You want to make sure you have enough, but not too many. That’s why we’re so excited about AI, about scanning actors’ faces and bodies so we can recreate them digitally. It’s like having all the free beef you want.

**John:** That’s horrible, but not surprising. Last month, an anonymous studio source was quoted saying the endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.

**Nancy:** I know. Horrible. We would never say anything like that on the record. Off the record, we might float that out there, see what kind of reaction it gets, and then maybe walk it back. Back to Amadeus, Mozart was on the edge of ruin for most of his career. While Salieri is portrayed as complicit, in reality it was systemic under-evaluation of the arts and the misaligned incentives of the patronage system that put Mozart in that situation.

**Craig:** You’re saying that like it’s a good thing.

**Nancy:** I’m saying we have to change the system so that writers and filmmakers, and sure, even actors, are properly oppressed, so that great art can flourish. There was no WGA back when Orson Welles made Citizen Kane.

**John:** Let me guess, Charles Foster Kane-

**Nancy:** Hero.

**Craig:** Okay. Nancy. Jewish Nancy Sullivan, let’s cut to the chase. We’re now 100 days into the Writers Strike. The companies are facing growing pressure, because the pipeline is empty, and the projects that aren’t finished cannot be promoted. When is the AMPTP going to get serious about coming back to the table to resolve this?

**Nancy:** Sorry. No comment on that, guys. Wouldn’t want to leak it to the press. Wink.

**John:** AMPTP spokesperson Nancy Sullivan, everyone.

**Craig:** She does look a whole lot like Rachel Bloom.

**John:** Rachel Bloom, everyone.

**Craig:** That was hard. I almost didn’t like Rachel Bloom.

**John:** It’s tough. That’s tough.

**Craig:** You make it hard. You make it hard, kid.

**Rachel Bloom:** To like me?

**Craig:** To not like you.

**John:** Rachel Bloom, you are often at this theater, because you have been doing your one-woman show, which is here for a little bit longer, then you’ll go to New York. Tell us about your show. You can say this because it’s a stage thing.

**Rachel:** It’s a stage thing. It is not in the union. It’s such a weird time we’re in where theater is the most stable industry you could be in. For the past couple years, I’ve been working on this show that is now called Death, Let Me Do My Show, which is about various experiences, thank you, that I’ve had with death. I’ve been using this theater primarily to workshop it a lot. It is going off-Broadway in September. We will be at the Lucille Lortel Theatre September 6th through the 30th. It’s a very beautiful theater. We just decided to do one more show in LA before we go. That will be here on August 26th. All of the proceeds are going to go, I believe probably to the Entertainment Community Fund.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Rachel Bloom, thank you so much.

**Rachel:** Thank you.

**John:** You’re going to come back for questions.

**Craig:** Now shit’s about to get real.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** This is the warmup.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Do you want to do this one?

**Craig:** Sure. Our next guest is an actor, writer, producer, and director. She was also listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year. What the fuck are we doing wrong, by the way?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Let us welcome out the great, one and only Natasha Lyonne.

**Natasha Lyonne:** Hello, everyone. I brought a lot of supplies.

**Craig:** You can share my table with me if you want.

**Natasha:** You know what? You’re a real sweetie, cutie, honey-baby.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Natasha:** So are you, John. So are you.

**John:** Thank you. Natasha kept apologizing to me backstage in the green room like I was offended. I’m not. I’m delighted by you.

**Natasha:** It’s just that Craig and I, we get very riled up when we’re together.

**Craig:** It’s a situation.

**Natasha:** Then I felt apologetic that maybe we’d gone too hard, too fast. We were doing bits about shekels. There was a lot of bits.

**Craig:** There was a lot of stuff going.

**Natasha:** If you don’t know what a shekel is, you don’t need to.

**Craig:** She brings the State Island out of me. I don’t know what to do. It’s just what happens. I get very Staten. Then I start talking like I used to talk. Then it’s a whole fucking thing.

**Natasha:** Then we get into a whole thing. The next thing we know-

**Craig:** Let’s code switch back. We’re code switching.

**Natasha:** We’re code switching.

**Craig:** Here’s my neutral podcast voice.

**Natasha:** The thing is, I don’t know, as the second Time 100 guest, I like to keep it very neutral.

**Craig:** That’s actually creeping me out.

**Natasha:** This is how I talk. I’ve always been this way.

**John:** NPR host voice. I love it.

**Natasha:** I architected a thing, a building. I’m an architect.

**Craig:** We’ve failed to mention that in your intro.

**Natasha:** I do think it was weird that you didn’t bring it up, because I dropped out of architect stuff in order to get into the biz.

**Craig:** Yes, just like most architecture students who refer to it as stuff.

**Natasha:** I was like, “Blueprints, blueprints, a script,” I said. You’re welcome. I was 4, and now I’m 44. That means I’m getting younger every day. This is what it’s like. You just don’t care anymore. It’s day 100 of the Strike, folks. I have not worked since December.

**Craig:** Everyone’s going a little nuts.

**Natasha:** We are heading towards September.

**Craig:** You’re doing great.

**Natasha:** I thought I was going to get a lot done this year. I’ll be honest.

**Craig:** No, nothing’s happening.

**Natasha:** All those years, but really. Anyway. Quit smoking. Endure this. I’m going to be like John Houston with a cigar in an interview, or Sean Penn anywhere I guess.

**Craig:** Keep going.

**Natasha:** I’m just saying people that smoke publicly in interviews.

**Craig:** You can hear it, I think. You can literally hear the vape on the microphone.

**John:** We know this because Craig used to vape in the early episodes.

**Craig:** I still do.

**Natasha:** You know what? It’s the ride of life. Take the ride. Buy the ticket. Take the ride. Anyway.

**Craig:** We’re not going to ask any questions, are we?

**John:** I’m going to try to ask a question.

**Craig:** What’s the point? Why bother?

**Natasha:** What it’s about is community.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**Natasha:** If you look at Bergman’s birthday, Stanley Kubrick writes him a letter and he says, “Great work.” Now we’re seeing it freaking dying. Everybody’s coming out. Coppola’s writing notes. You know what I mean? It’s about community.

**Craig:** I don’t.

**Natasha:** That’s my point. That was the answer to your question. I thought this was a Jeopardy format.

**Craig:** Hang on.

**John:** It is a Jeopardy format.

**Craig:** Just hang on, John. Just hang on, baby. You’re doing great. Amazing. I legitimately have a question.

**Natasha:** I’m from New York.

**Craig:** What?

**Natasha:** Yes, please.

**Craig:** This is a legit question. I looked on IMDb.

**John:** He did research.

**Craig:** I did research for this. They list your writing credits, your directing credits, acting credits. I have 26 credits. Natasha, do you know how many you have?

**Natasha:** 27. It’s like that game where you go one … The Price is right.

**Craig:** Just say one, $1.

**Natasha:** $1. $1.

**Craig:** You have 152 credits.

**Natasha:** Thus the attitude problem. There’s been many, many, many years.

**Craig:** I haven’t gotten to the question yet.

**Natasha:** It’s an endurance test. If you just stick around long enough, it’s like being an old, old turtle. What’s the question, please?

**Craig:** Thank god.

**Natasha:** Yes, Craigy.

**Craig:** It strikes me that after all these years, almost 30 years, I’ve got these 26 credits, I’ve worked on these things. There’s so much that I can learn from experience. Actors, especially somebody that started as a kid, you will, as an actor like yourself, get so much more experience on set and in production, acting. I’m curious, what wisdom have you learned from all of that time, that writers who have maybe only been on a set once or twice might not know? What can you share with us that you’ve learned every?

**Natasha:** I’m not going to look at you I think for the rest of it.

**Craig:** I think that’s a great idea.

**Natasha:** I’m also look out at the distant … Just so you know, I’m nearsighted. Genuinely, it is a Fossie-esque experience. I would say something I learned when I transitioned into the writers’ room, for example, on… I guess I won’t mention any shows. Let’s say on certain shows or certain movies, I would see an ellipses, and I would think, oh my god, I’ve gotta nail this.

I’m somebody who, despite my personality, is actually quite obsessive and a workaholic and perfectionist, obsessive about the work, and in all areas, too much so. I would think that there was something in there that I was missing. I would go to the writer, or I would go to the monitor area.

**Craig:** Video village.

**Natasha:** Video village. I would try to go searching or something. I think then later, as a writer, the great discovery was there was no there, that oftentimes, it was a cheat for any number of reasons, especially when in showrunning or in directing, once you’re doing that, you’re like…

The great gift about acting while you’re doing that is you know why scenes got cut, or why entire storylines or a C-storyline, so that actually, the connection between this moment to this moment, we had to cut that entire deli sequence for budget reasons, that’s why it’s not there.

Weirdly, it was like once I started writing for myself, or even if… First of all, I’m usually collaborating, so I wouldn’t want to take that credit for myself. I would say that as I was working with writers’ rooms and working with other creators and things like this, that was when I really became a good actor, in a way, because I understood the space in between, of the motivation, or even the backstory of how we got there, because I was the guy in the room on the whiteboard or something.

**Craig:** Actually, it’s the other way for you, in a sense, that the writing helped you be a better actor.

**Natasha:** It’s funny, because I’m only so old relative to how young I was-

**Craig:** Great insight.

**Natasha:** … on some level.

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:41:13].

**Natasha:** Which is to say, it would’ve been great if show biz was like, hey, we’re going to give this to you at 24 or 34, but they wanted to really hold out. I think in many ways it’s because of that fallback energy that we respond to so much as actors that are so seasoned, of a Gene Hackman in Night Movies or Jeff Bridges in Lebowski, or Bill Murray has that sort of energy, or Harry Dean Stanton, a sense of like, “I don’t even really want to be here.” Like Peter Falk. Like, “Please, film anything but me.” I think that comes from also that, if you truly understand the motivation.

Then I would say as a writer, additionally what I learned, and as a director, just from loving actors… Sam Rockwell made me start working with his acting coach against my will, because I’d never taken a lesson. I was at film school at Tisch at 15, but I never did anything with it. I dropped out. I was very offended that they wanted me to pay tuition, because the teenagers, they were watching Apocalypse Now. I was like, “If you’re watching Apocalypse Now, why are you in film school? You should’ve already seen this movie. That’s what would make one go to film school, theoretically.”

**Craig:** It’s a little weird.

**Natasha:** I was supposed to be a double major with philosophy, and they were out of classes. Their classes were full up. I just didn’t understand why they wanted my money at that point. I was like, “This is not what I came here for.” I was like, “Are you going to pay?”

**Craig:** They weren’t going to pay you. Elliot, do you need any Gatorade? How are you doing over there?

**Natasha:** Sam introduced me to this guy, Terry Knickerbocker, who’s a great acting coach. What I would do with him is I would actually sit there with the laptop open and go over every other character’s motivation as well and type in real time, to make sure that I wouldn’t be this jag-off on set who was only taking care, let’s say, of… So that way, I had answers for other people. I don’t know that I always succeeded, but I would try to really build out and make sure that everybody was protected in terms of their motives, basically.

**Craig:** Exactly, that you understand that both sides of-

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**John:** What I hear you saying though is, as an actor you’re approaching character from one perspective. You’re approaching what is it that I’m going to do. As a writer, you’re approaching character from a much more macro, whole perspective, because you have to think about-

**Natasha:** I gotta tell you, first of all, what’s most challenging about the Strike I think for all of us is the atrophying of the brain that you’re experiencing here in real time. It kills me to not be at a whiteboard and in a room. I love the excitement of ideas. I love all of it. I love storyboarding. I love this big, holistic thinking about things and making sure that it’s okay. I love the math of it, whenever I’m doing music budgets and trying to calculate it all. I love it so much more in 3D.

Also, weirdly, I think as just an actor, this weird thing happens where you need other people’s approval, and also you need to get hired. It’s incredible to have that autonomy suddenly. It’s such a gift.

Also, I would go to video village, seeking the feedback. Really, what you find out is that if you’re doing a good enough job, nobody talks to you. Once you’re at video village and you’re actually a producer, being a writer, producer, whatever, director, you discover that usually what’s happening in video village is a panic attack about something the next day, like so-and-so did not make their flight, we’ve gotta rearrange the day. What’s happening there is everybody’s talking about tomorrow with the first AD and trying to figure out how to fucking save this fiasco. They’re not talking about your scene. Otherwise, you would know, because you’d fucked up your scene, and they would be talking to you.

It was also a big revelation that I think made it much more fun for when I was just acting in something, because it was no longer a head trip of a curiosity of, did I do okay?

**Craig:** There wasn’t this constant loop of, the director comes over and gives you a thumb up or thumb down.

**Natasha:** Exactly.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. If you’re doing a good job on the day, directing, it’s a little bit like being a parent that’s driving a car, and everybody in the car trusts that the parent is a good driver, and so they can fall asleep.

**Natasha:** I would say also other things made me a better actor to work with, for hire. I’m looking for work, obviously. I’m hoping somebody has a job.

**Craig:** Can’t work right now.

**Natasha:** Oh, right, SAG Strike. Anyway, so the other thing I would notice is, it’s so funny now, when I’m directing, and I’m sure it’s the same for you, that when you try to convince somebody of whatever, especially if you have a heavyweight or like an Ellen Burstyn or a Nolte or something, and you’re like, “I was sort of thinking, what if you were here. It’s just an idea. Maybe then we went there,” but really it’s because there’s a fucking window there, and the light’s going to change, and if you sit here, I’m fucked or whatever.

**Craig:** Have you ever tried to just say that?

**Natasha:** Sometimes I do. I think the reason I bring up people that are such giants is because it’s very intimidating to-

**Craig:** Yes, it is.

**Natasha:** … try to explain to somebody that’s a giant. Usually, the way I came up, there was time. I think it was probably because it was film, not digital. There wasn’t a sense of like, let’s just go.

**Craig:** That’s a good point.

**Natasha:** If you think about Raging Bull or something, this final monologue, they probably really had to rehearse, I don’t know, so that they didn’t-

**Craig:** Run out the mag.

**Natasha:** … run out of film, run out of the mag, and make sure that everything, the lighting was perfect and all that stuff. Usually, it was about a private rehearsal, and then everybody else comes in and that kind of thing. I’m sorry, now we’re not getting to the game. I see you’re stressing about time.

**John:** No, no, no, no.

**Natasha:** It’s okay. I’m just trying to tell the kids the truth.

Once upon a time, it used to be that it was this private thing, where the actors would work with the director on figuring out the blocking. As it’s evolved, especially in television, I think, it’s more about things are pre-shot-listed in order to make these impossible fucking days, because Prestige TV especially has become so dense that it’s unmakeable.

You’re doing everything you can to be like, “Hey, I really need you to sit here, because the sun is going to set.” It’s easier, I would say, to do, and it’s easier to understand then. I’m like, “Oh, so you want… Got it. Let me help you. Okay. I’ll just sit right here, and then you have your shot.”

**Craig:** I do love a pro.

**Natasha:** It’s interesting in so many ways, the evolution of that. Sorry for the long answer.

**Craig:** No, it was a great answer.

**John:** A fantastic answer.

**Craig:** That’s why you’re here, my friend.

**Natasha:** I’m here to party, baby.

**Craig:** We did not bring you on for the short little bursts.

**Natasha:** I am sorry.

**Craig:** I like that you assumed this, “I have finished. Now you will entertain me.”

**Natasha:** I just felt like I talked a while.

**Craig:** You did a great job, kid.

**Natasha:** I just felt like the answer needed to be complete.

**Craig:** It was.

**Natasha:** I didn’t want to give you a fake answer.

**John:** Let us welcome back out Rachel Bloom and Quinta Brunson. Hi. You can ask from there. Ask from there, and we’ll say it out loud.

**Audience Member:** This is a question about adapting a book. My question is, how often do you run into problems as far as what characters to pick in the screenplay itself? How much push back do you get from the authors as far as what percentage of essentially characters you’re using from the book itself and what percentage of characters you’re coming up with whatever is best for the story? How does that work?

**Natasha:** Actually, I don’t know if I can say the name of this person, but she’s wonderful. She’s like the lady Thomas Pynchon or something. She’s brilliant. It was so intimidating to write her this letter to ask for this book that I wanted to do since I was a child. I wrote it with two lovely ladies. I’m not even sure if I can say who they are. I’m not sure the rules of the game.

**Craig:** I think you can say people’s names.

**Natasha:** Oh, great. I wrote it with Liz and Carly, who created GLOW, and who I love. I love those ladies. It’s a bunch of short stories. We really had to make those questions. We ultimately went a certain way. I think it’s excellent.

The funny feedback I want to give you is… It is a very high-concept thing, almost magical realism, let’s say, without being too specific. In the first seven pages of the book, she’s a loser lawyer, this character. Then we were told by the studio that really what they responded to, even though they had greenlit and paid for it, that really what they responded to was the lawyer part.

I just want to say that what was weird was it took so much nerve to write this lady Thomas Pynchon this letter to beg her for this book I’ve loved my whole life, and then to have Liz and Carly be down to, all of us write this thing together, and the amount of work we put in to create this lady Cohen brothers meets Guillermo del Toro world, and then be told that really it was …

The oddity of this business is that the thing that you think is going to be the trouble spot, it’s usually some fucking eighth thing over there, inevitably, that’s like, literally, “Oh, we really liked the part that she was a lawyer and that she was dating this guy.” I said, “Do you mean you want The Practice or Abby McBeal or something?” They were like, “That would be great.” It was so weird. The three of us were texting each other like, “What is happening in this moment?”

**Craig:** It sounds like what she’s saying is you’ll never see the person that kills you. That’s comforting advice.

**Natasha:** Do you find that?

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. There are circumstances where the network or the studio may have strong feelings like there, but there are also circumstances where sometimes everybody’s aligned except the author. That’s not uncommon. Authors can be precious about things, just like we all can. I have been lucky to adapt something with someone that was great and understood the point of the adaptation.

I think our job is probably not to worry too much about the author. If you actually love it, you love that material, you would … I think grown-up, responsible artists will understand that a different medium has different needs, hopefully.

**Natasha:** It is really challenging. I’m thinking actually about another book that I really wanted to adapt, that at first seemed like it was going to be a go, and we were so in sync, and then really it did fall apart.

**John:** I had one of those too, where I went in, I got the book set up at a studio, and then I was in conversation with the author about, okay, as we introduce this character, we have to think about cinematically how we’re going to first encounter this character. She’s like, “Oh, no, no, you can’t change a thing. It has to be exactly the way it was in the book.”

**Natasha:** That’s what was so weird was I thought that we were having the same conversation for so long, and then suddenly, we weren’t. The other thing I think that’s interesting, which is not exactly an answer to your question, but that’s obviously not my bag, is that so much of what I was so in love with in this book was the dialog and how dense it was and just how brilliant of a writer she is, and realized that in script, that dialog felt insane. It just didn’t feel necessarily like people talking, so that we had to actually change so much of … Do you know what I mean?

**Craig:** Oh yeah, for sure.

**Quinta:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You have to adapt. Smart authors understand.

**Natasha:** I’m like, there’s so much material here, and then you get in there and-

**Craig:** Not as much as you thought.

**Quinta:** I feel like that reminds me of what I was saying earlier about communicating to the audience. Sometimes with a adaptation, you just can’t have that same monologue from the book. Maybe you can. God bless if you can. That’s incredible, or the same amount of dialog. It has to be able to translate on screen in a certain way.

I haven’t adapted yet, but I have been in material that’s been adapted. I’ve had the feeling of wanting to express, this feels like too much for anyone to want to listen to on camera, in a comedy especially. Nobody feels like fucking sitting there and hearing you say something that was written for that long. I have nothing else to add to that, by the way. I haven’t adapted anything, but as an actor, I [00:54:04]-

**Natasha:** The other one is … Sorry. The other one that I think is interesting is when you try to adapt inner monologue. That’s so tricky, that you realize that the book that you fell in love with, it’s like you can see it in your mind. You have the vision of it, so you can see the world you’re going to build. Then you realize that it’s essentially internal.

**Quinta:** That’s exactly what I mean.

**Craig:** There are some great novels that have made some bad movies. Then there have some … The Godfather was pulp. It was just a pulpy novel that made a great movie. It was just awesome plot, big, awesome characters.

**Natasha:** Arguably, Raymond Chandler, why he’s-

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Natasha:** … so good at … That genre translates well.

**Craig:** It just goes right-

**Quinta:** Have you read the Jurassic Park book?

**Natasha:** No.

**John:** No.

**Rachel:** It’s pretty good.

**Quinta:** Rachel.

**Craig:** That doesn’t seem like what she was going to say.

**Quinta:** Rachel. That is the most boring-

**Rachel:** Yeah, it’s plodding, but it’s not terrible.

**Quinta:** Lord.

**Rachel:** It’s Jurassic Park.

**Quinta:** That’s a book I’m like, they say pterodactyl one more time, I’m going to throw this fucking book out the window.

**Craig:** You had to know they were going to say pterodactyl a few times.

**Quinta:** Too sciencey. I don’t want to see all that science on screen, something that they understood. We don’t want to see that. It’s good.

**Craig:** It was a good adaptation.

**Rachel:** I think also, when this struck, I was in the middle, for the first time of my career, of working on some adaptations. I’m actually working on something right now that’s a podcast/musical, so not in WGA, that I can talk about a little bit.

What I think is interesting about adaptation is … I learned this when I took my first musical theater class. I’m going to relate everything back to musical theater. I apologize. When you’re writing a musical, the first question you’re supposed to ask is, what about making this a musical improves upon the subject matter, or am I just making it a music because IP sells?

I think that that should be the question for any piece of adaptation is, what can I add to this material, what’s my point of view on this that can add to this canon of material, as opposed to being redundant or worse?

**Craig:** Good answer.

**John:** Good answer.

**Craig:** Good answer.

**John:** This is normally the part of the podcast where we’d do One Cool Things.

**Rachel:** Wait. Didn’t someone win the right to ask a question?

**John:** Oh, shit. We completely forgot that. Who won it? Back there. I see the hand waving. Rachel Bloom saving the podcast yet again.

**Quinta:** The right.

**John:** You.

**Craig:** Nice.

**Quinta:** Didn’t someone win the right to ask a question?

**John:** Do you have a question for us?

**Audience Member:** I do.

**John:** Ask your question. Thank you so much, Rachel.

**Audience Member:** Oh, I’ve got a microphone too. I actually have a question about directing. Natasha, you talked about how the schedules are crazy, and there’s this constant push to go, go, go, go. One of the things that I struggle with on set a lot is when producers or first ADs tell me to shoot a rehearsal. I don’t know how to respond to them politely with, no, I absolutely do not want to shoot the rehearsal. I wonder if the people on stage had recommendations for how I can politely say fuck no?

**Natasha:** Is that directed at me? I’m happy to answer.

**Audience Member:** Everybody.

**Natasha:** I would just say, in the first place, there is nothing really to fear in the arts. I guess just an illusion of fear. I think it’s always very useful to remember that we’re all going to die. I think that the stakes-

**Quinta:** True. So true.

**Natasha:** There is a sense of false stakes that get created around-

**Craig:** The stakes couldn’t be lower.

**Natasha:** The truth is that you’re just trying to make art and do the best you can. That’s all you can do. In a weird way, it also becomes a question of path of least resistance is sometimes in your favor of being like, “Great, why don’t we shoot this useless rehearsal so we can see why we shouldn’t shoot the rehearsal,” or alternatively, you can say, “Simply because we’re not ready.” I think that both things are valid in a way.

**Craig:** Is this for television?

**Audience Member:** Yeah. I work in both.

**Craig:** For television, we do have the luxury of doing the thing that you were talking about, that a lot of times you can’t. We do get to have a private rehearsal, and then we bring in the crew for crew show, and then we talk about the shots. By the time we start shooting, we’ve already gone through it, which is nice.

If you say to the showrunner, “Look, I don’t ask for much. The one thing I just want that I like is to have a couple of rehearsals. It just makes me feel better and better,” and say, “If I can do that, the actors know there’s nothing running, so they’re not burning all their rocket fuel.” Hopefully, they would recognize that that just makes you more comfortable.

**Natasha:** Or also, the truth is that sometimes you can tell them, “It’ll actually go quicker if we do this.” Sometimes I get very excited, and I’m like, “Oh, let’s shoot this. Let’s shoot that.” If you’re with the right camera operator, sometimes they’ll have fun doing it. Other times, actually, rehearsal really does save time in a way, because it’s not just for the actors and the director. It’s actually so that everybody has focus marks.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Natasha:** It’s going to be a mess. You can tell them also, “Hey, it’ll actually save time.” It’s true that the camera department really does not love that game.

**Craig:** Nobody does.

**Natasha:** Even if actors like to be like, “Hey, let’s just fucking try one.”

**Craig:** You gotta do a walkthrough. They gotta put the tape on the floor. They gotta do all this.

**John:** Quinta, on a show like yours, you might have different directors coming through, doing different episodes. Will they have different working styles?

**Quinta:** You.

**John:** You as an actor in that situation, but also a producer, have to adjust. What is that like?

**Quinta:** The main director that I work with, his name is Randall Einhorn, and he’s fantastic. He’s really great at establishing tone and also relationship with every director who comes in. I think that’s a big part of it too. The other directors coming to set the week before get a hold of how we work. The show that I work on currently is weekly. It’s fast. We’re filming while we’re airing. We don’t really have a lot of time. Our first priority is saving time.

I was thinking about that question. Randall is so good at being like, “I don’t want to do that.” That’s it. He’s like, “I don’t want to do that.” It’ll be like, “Yeah. Okay. Guess what? You’re the director. You’re running the show.” Now, in my state though, it’s a different situation. That’s very family. I would never even ask for that.

For another person coming in, if they want to shoot it, they would say, “I think this would make me feel good, just to get it, just to have.” Especially on a mockumentary, it can be beneficial sometimes. It’s like, “All right, cool, we’ll give it … ” I think it’s just about clear communication, like you said. The stakes are very low. We are not saving lives. Clear communication will help us, just, “What do you need? What do I need? What do you need?”

**Natasha:** That is the weirdest part I think about what we do, and in a weird way, life in general, but certainly making movies and making TV and all this shit that we do and writers’ rooms and studios and networks. It feels like the stakes are just so high. Part of me, as an adrenaline junkie, loves that. Really, they’re just not. That’s where you start losing humanity and all these other things. Everybody is a human being that deserves to get what they need. It’s just making art, so it should feel good, but it feels so scary, the time. It’s always time is the enemy. I would say time is a bigger enemy than money.

**Craig:** Which the director is the person worrying about the most, usually, because as the day drips away, when I’m directing, that’s the thing that I’m aware of is that my options are dwindling. Time is scary. Sometimes, also keep in mind that when you are visiting a show, the producers know things about the actors that you don’t.

**Rachel:** That’s a great point.

**Quinta:** Huge.

**Craig:** Some of them really do not like that rehearsal stuff at all.

**Quinta:** Yeah, they don’t.

**Craig:** They’re just like, “I know what I’m doing. Let’s go. Let’s shoot.” Part of it’s cultural too.

**Quinta:** Some people really want it.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Quinta:** For sure.

**Natasha:** It is also though that thing of knowing, whatever, kill your darlings or whatever. In your shot list, the things that felt like such a dream and being okay, you gotta go through that day, and you’re like, “That’s done, that’s done, and that one’s out, and we’re going to really focus on this.”

It’s so crazy that, also, that’s why preparedness, I just believe in it so much, of being overly prepared so you can be loose, because the more time … Even if I’m a visiting director on a show or something, I always try so hard to spend time with the first AD and the DP, really walking through every single shot we’re going to do, in an effort to be prepared for if the producer, who is really the boss at that point, not the director, if it’s not an auteur special, then really feeling like we’re prepared for the situation.

**Rachel:** On the show I did that I will not name, but it was the show that I did, I have a very small bladder, and I like to drink. I have a steady drip of tea, and I pee a lot. The AD, I found out in Season 4, let every director … My pee breaks were built into the schedule, because they know I needed that, otherwise I’d piss my pants. I thought that was very communicative of him.

**Quinta:** Nice.

**John:** Nice. Don’t know actors would piss themselves.

**Craig:** I think that’s why SAG is on a strike, to get that enshrined in the agreement.

**John:** Build that back in the contract.

**Craig:** Pee breaks.

**John:** Are we doing One Cool Things or not, Craig?

**Craig:** Let’s just roll right to the finish line.

**John:** Let’s roll to the finish line and do some thank yous.

**Natasha:** Not One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** You know what? We’ll catch up on those.

**John:** We’ll catch up on-

**Craig:** We do it literally 608 times.

**John:** I’ll save mine for next week.

**Craig:** We’re good. It’s all good.

**John:** You can email Craig and tell him what you want to recommend if you have a thing.

**Natasha:** All right, I’ll send him some bucks.

**John:** We have some thank yous to get out to people.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced, of course, by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Drew!

**Rachel:** Woo!

**Quinta:** Drew!

**Craig:** Woo woo!

**John:** Who did a phenomenal job putting together tonight’s show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you very much, Drew. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, who is here.

**Craig:** Yay. There you are. Hi.

**John:** Who also did our music this week. Thank you so much, Matthew. Thank you to Hollywood Heart and Dynasty Typewriter for hosting us. For folks listening at home, the thing about being at the Hollywood Bowl, that was a joke. We really weren’t.

**Craig:** We really are not at the-

**John:** The Hollywood Bowl.

**Craig:** I know, shock. Of course, thank you to our ASL interpreter, Elliot Aronson.

**Quinta:** Oh, yay.

**John:** Elliot.

**Craig:** Who remains incredibly handsome and really good at his job.

**John:** We of course have to thank our incredible guests, Natasha Lyonne.

**Craig:** Natasha Lyonne.

**John:** Quinta Brunson.

**Craig:** Quinta Brunson.

**John:** Rachel Bloom.

**Craig:** Rachel Bloom.

**John:** Make sure you get tickets to see Rachel Bloom’s show either here or in New York. It’s at rachelbloomshow.com.

**Craig:** Thank you to everybody in the audience here in the room and listening at home and in your car. It is so much fun getting to do this live.

**John:** Thank you all, and have a great night.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Rachel:** Thanks, everybody.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Natasha and Craig, our experience has been that the film and television industry is full of people who will tell you what you want to hear, whether it’s true or whether it’s not true. To make sure that we’re keeping our skills sharp during this work stoppage, I thought we might play a little game with our audience members. We have three audience members who volunteered to help out in a segment we’re calling That Sounds Familiar. Jax, if we could bring up the house lights a little bit. Our three guests, I see a Number 1. Number 1, if you could make your way around to this microphone stand over here.

**Natasha:** Wow, three boys. All right. I see it’s a Mae West production.

**Craig:** What the fuck?

**Natasha:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t know. What happened?

**Natasha:** I’m not here. I don’t exist. I’m a melting clock. Just leave me alone. I don’t know why you invited me here.

**Craig:** Melting clock.

**Natasha:** I could’ve gotten here at 9:00.

**Craig:** For charity.

**Natasha:** I was on the 101.

**Craig:** You did a great job. Let’s play a game.

**Natasha:** I was bumping into cars like it was The Matrix.

**Craig:** Let’s play a game.

**Natasha:** Yes, gentlemen. I’m ready for the game.

**John:** Contestant Number 1, could you introduce yourself and tell us something fascinating about you?

**Contestant 1:** My name is Eric Wandry, and I’m the oldest of 13 kids.

**John:** What? Oh my god. Contestant Number 2, tell us something interesting about you.

**Contestant 2:** My name is Eric Wandry, and I’m the oldest of 13 kids.

**John:** Oh, shit.

**Natasha:** Oh, I see. This is a little tricky. I’m sorry, sir.

**John:** Contestant Number 3-

**Natasha:** Where is your sticker?

**John:** Could you introduce yourself and tell us something interesting about yourself?

**Natasha:** Where is your sticker, sir, the other gentleman? Thank you. A little respect for the game. Thank you.

**John:** It’s a sticker. Get going. Could you tell us about yourself?

****Contestant 3:**** I’m Eric Wandry and I’m eldest of 15 kids, 13 kids.

**Natasha:** Wow. You know what?

**Craig:** We’ve narrowed it down to two.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s a 50/50.

**Natasha:** You didn’t even want to be here. Is it against their well?

**Craig:** You rattled him.

**Natasha:** I’m assuming they’re volunteers.

**Craig:** You rattled him.

**Natasha:** I didn’t rattle.

**Craig:** You rattled him.

**Natasha:** They were trying to be the same person. He was missing the sticker.

**John:** He was missing a sticker. You rattled him. [Indiscernible 01:08:11]. I’m not intimidated, but I could see [crosstalk 01:08:13].

**Craig:** Also, John’s rattled.

**John:** I’m not. I’m not.

**Natasha:** When people say that, I feel like it’s because I’m a woman, and then I regret my entire life.

**Craig:** No, no, no, it’s not because you’re a woman.

**Natasha:** How can I help?

**Craig:** What are we going to do?

**John:** One of these people-

**Craig:** How can I help.

**John:** … is lying. One of them is telling exactly the truth.

**Craig:** We can eliminate Number 3.

**John:** One of them is telling the truth, and one of them is lying. We can ask up to five questions of these people. What questions do we want to ask? Craig, how do you help narrow this down?

**Natasha:** I want to ask about religion right away.

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Go. Do it. Go.

**Natasha:** Number 1.

**Craig:** This is to Number 1.

**Natasha:** Excuse me, so what religion are you?

**Contestant 1:** I come from a Catholic background.

**Natasha:** Interesting. Another question. Are your parents still together?

**Contestant 1:** No.

**Natasha:** Interesting that you hesitated. Is that because of trauma? The body keeps the score. Or just because of lying?

**Contestant 1:** One of them passed away.

**Natasha:** Wow.

**Craig:** Welcome to the Natasha Lyonne show.

**Natasha:** Touche, Number 1.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Natasha:** Touche.

**John:** Touche.

**Natasha:** All right, Number 2. Are you guys also asking questions?

**John:** We can ask questions too.

**Craig:** At this point it’s all you.

**Natasha:** Please do it as you … I’ll take a little nap.

**Craig:** I’m thrilled with how this is going right now.

**Natasha:** No, no, no, no, no. I’ll be here. Go off on Number 2.

**John:** I’m curious about geography. Eric Number 2, where did you grow up?

**Contestant 2:** Indiana. Small-town Indiana.

**John:** Contestant Number 3, where did you grow up?

****Contestant 3:**** Waterbury, Connecticut.

**John:** Waterbury, Connecticut.

**Craig:** Can I ask a question of Number 2?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Number 2, you said that you were the oldest of 13, is that right? What is the name of the youngest?

**Contestant 2:** Melissa.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Natasha:** Melissa Rivers?

**Craig:** Yes, Melissa Rivers.

**Natasha:** I’m just here to help. I’m just here to help. I’m taking a backseat. What?

**Craig:** I want to ask a question of Number 1.

**Natasha:** Mustache, why? No, I like it, but is it a family thing? Do all your siblings have mustaches?

**Contestant 1:** I’m the only one.

**Natasha:** That was not your question.

**Craig:** How many boys and how many girls?

**Contestant 1:** Seven boys, six girls.

**Natasha:** Again, the hesitation is …

**John:** I have a question. I’ll ask for Number 2. You’re the oldest of 13. Is everyone biologically related, from the same parents, or is it a Brady Bunch situation? Talk to us about the relationship to these people.

**Natasha:** Are your parents in an open relationship?

**Contestant 2:** No, everybody’s together. Everyone’s a big happy family. It’s all biological, everyone.

**Natasha:** What religion are you?

**Contestant 2:** Christian.

**Natasha:** A lot of Christians here. You guys [indiscernible 01:11:07] Craig around.

**Craig:** You and I are the Jewish population of this.

**Natasha:** Don’t tell them.

**Craig:** They know. They know. They’ve looked at our faces.

**John:** Eric Number 2, I’m curious, talk to us about a family vacation and the most that your family’s ever been on vacation and how that went.

**Contestant 2:** It was kind of tricky, obviously, because of how big the family was. We would generally go to areas that were adjacent to where I grew up. We would go to the lakes. We would go in the mountains, if we could get that far. It was generally-

**Natasha:** What do you mean if you could get that far?

**Contestant 2:** Because Indiana’s geographically not that close to mountains, but we could-

**Craig:** There was nowhere to go is what he’s saying.

**Contestant 2:** Yeah. We could get there.

**Natasha:** What kind of a car were you guys in?

**Contestant 2:** We had several because of the size of the family.

**Craig:** This guy’s the guy.

**Natasha:** Hold on. I can’t tell.

**Craig:** This guy is the guy. What are we doing? He’s the guy.

**Natasha:** I’m sorry, what kind of cars?

**Contestant 2:** We had two trucks and a station wagon.

**Natasha:** Only two parents?

**Contestant 2:** Only two parents.

**Natasha:** Until the eldest was driving the third car?

**Contestant 2:** Yeah. I was pretty much the babysitter for most of my childhood.

**Craig:** What are we doing? This is the guy.

**John:** I’m not convinced.

**Natasha:** I’m with you, honey.

**Craig:** I’m sold. I’m sold.

**Natasha:** I’m not sure about-

**John:** Should we vote now?

**Craig:** I’m ready to vote.

**John:** I think I’m ready to vote.

**Craig:** I’m ready to vote.

**Natasha:** I’ll do whatever you guys want.

**Craig:** I don’t care. I don’t care if I lose.

**Natasha:** How much money is in it?

**Craig:** [Indiscernible 01:12:27].

**John:** The stakes could not be higher. It is bragging rights for this segment of Scriptnotes. A lot.

**Craig:** I got 200 Canadian in that wallet [crosstalk 01:12:38].

**Natasha:** You brought your wallet onstage.

**Craig:** Always.

**Natasha:** That makes me very concerned about leaving my passport back there.

**John:** Quinta did bring her purse out.

**Natasha:** By the way, always bring your passport, because you never know when you might need to leave the country.

**Craig:** You never know.

**Natasha:** That’s another piece of advice.

**Craig:** Let’s vote.

**John:** Let’s vote.

**Craig:** Let’s vote.

**John:** Who on stage believes it’s Contestant Number 3? Who believes it’s Contestant Number 2?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**John:** The audience too, applause? Who thinks it’s Contestant Number 1? That’s me.

**Natasha:** A little.

**Craig:** A little? You and I think it’s 2. He thinks it’s 1.

**John:** No, I think we voted for … Who’d you vote for, 1?

**Craig:** No, 2.

**Natasha:** I went 50/50 because I wasn’t following.

**Craig:** I thought you said [crosstalk 01:13:22].

**Natasha:** When you involved the audience, I didn’t realize it was only up to us. I thought it was a-

**Craig:** The stakes could not be higher.

**Natasha:** Sure, I’ll go with 2, honey.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Natasha:** We’re going with two.

**Craig:** Aw. Thank you.

**John:** Contestant Number 2, are you the oldest of 13 kids?

**Contestant 2:** I’m an only child.

**John:** Whoa.

**Craig:** Nicely done. Nicely done! You sick fuck!

**John:** Contestant Number 3, are you the oldest of 13 kids?

**Contestant 1:** When he said that the whole family was in a van, you should’ve known that when you’re the eldest of 13, that the groups of kids don’t all know each other. The younger group-

**Craig:** Is this a yes?

**Contestant 1:** … they were out of the house before I even-

**Natasha:** Is Number 3 the guy?

**Craig:** I think it’s Number 3. You said 15.

****Contestant 3:**** Yeah, I was nervous.

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**John:** Contestant 3-

**Craig:** You rattled him. You rattled him.

**John:** Are you genuinely the Eric who’s the oldest-

**Craig:** You rattled him.

**John:** … of 13 kids?

**Craig:** You’re the one.

****Contestant 3:**** I’m the oldest.

**Craig:** You’re the one.

**John:** Holy shit!

**Natasha:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Contestant Number 1-

**Natasha:** Pathological liar.

**John:** How big is your family?

**Contestant 1:** I’m the oldest of 13 kids.

**John:** Oh, you are genuinely the oldest of 13 kids.

**Contestant 1:** Yes.

**Craig:** What the fuck is happening?

**John:** I thought the game was over.

**Natasha:** Now I’m confused.

**Craig:** What the fuck is going on?

**John:** It was Number 1. It was Number 1. Number 3 was still playing. We’re good. We’re good. The game is over.

**Craig:** Oh, Number 3 was still playing. Number 3 was like that soldier who doesn’t know the war is over.

**John:** The war is over.

**Craig:** You can go home now.

**John:** I was so confused there.

**Craig:** That’s outstanding.

**Natasha:** Wow.

**Craig:** I gotta be honest, Number 2 should be in prison. That’s a dangerous man.

**Natasha:** He’s an only child.

**Craig:** That’s a real dangerous man.

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** The way he said only child, he’s like, “After I killed my siblings, I was an only child.”

**John:** Here’s how we got these people. I emailed out to our Scriptnotes listeners who were going to be in the audience, and I said, “Hey, do you have a really interesting story about your life that we could use on this, or are you really good at playing Mafia/Werewolf?” That’s what you are.

**Natasha:** Have you played the new game, Werewolf?

**John:** Thank the three of you very much for doing this. Let’s give them a [indiscernible 01:15:21].

**Natasha:** I’m just kidding.

**Craig:** Thank you guys. That was outstanding.

**Natasha:** Number 3, I’m sorry.

Links:

* [HollywoodHEART](https://www.hollywoodheart.org/)
* Quinta Brunson on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6708435/) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/quintab)
* Rachel Bloom on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3417385/) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/racheldoesstuff/)
* Natasha Lyonne on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005169/) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/nlyonne/)
* Quinta Brunson’s [The Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op2pK_w8_oY)
* Quinta Brunson on [BuzzFeed](https://www.buzzfeed.com/quintab)
* [Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Show](https://www.rachelbloomshow.com/) at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York City
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Our ASL interpreter was Elliott Aronson
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/608standardv2.mp3).