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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/what-is-good-writing-2).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 581 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what’s this?

Why, it’s a clip show. Producer Megana Rao has been working on a forthcoming Scriptnotes book and has found three vintage Scriptnotes segments, in which Craig and I try to answer the question, what is good writing, and how does one do it. Megana, can you tell us what segments you have picked, and more importantly, why?

**Megana Rao:** Great. I picked three segments that talk about the components of good writing and what elements need to be there and what immediately turns you guys off as signals of things you don’t have confidence in the writer in. We start with Episode 239, which you guys recorded in March of 2016. You guys talk about what good writing feels like.

**John:** I suspect that we were talking about good writing involves an element of surprise, confidence. It’s not just the words you’re choosing to describe a story but how much we believe that you are telling a story that we want to keep turning the pages on.

**Megana:** It’s interesting because you guys talk about how these elements function on a sentence level but also structurally. You talk about how you want to surprise and delight your readers in scene description, but also with a plot twist at the end of act two or whatever. It’s cool to see how good writing, that sort of DNA exists in every aspect of a screenplay.

**John:** Cool. Great. That’ll be our first segment. What’s the second segment we’ll listen to?

**Megana:** The next one is Episode 76, called How Screenwriters Find Their Voice, with Aline. That one was recorded in February of 2013. You guys are a little bit younger but really consistent in some of the advice that you give. It’s interesting, because you guys talk to each other about your perceptions of each others’ voices. You talk about your impressions from the first times reading each other’s scripts too.

**John:** It’s interesting, because at that point, Craig was just a comedy writer really. He was only known for the bigger, broader comedies that he’d done. I’m sure it’ll be a good time machine for people to listen to. You say we’re younger, which I’m rather offended by, but it is weird to think we’ve been doing this so long that we were actually younger back in those days.

**Megana:** You’re a full decade younger, basically.

**John:** Yeah. Wow. How about for Segment 3? What’s our third segment?

**Megana:** The last segment is from Episode 432, Learning From Movies. That one, you and Craig talk about your techniques for watching movies. You introduce this concept of mindfulness around movies. What’s interesting is, as you’re talking about the framework for how you analyze a movie, you also teach people what are the key things to be thinking about when you write a movie.

**John:** Great. It’s important to remember that before we were writers, we were all readers, and we were watchers of movies. We have a sense of what is supposed to happen in a movie. We have a sense of what we’d love to see happen in a movie. As writers, we have to be aware that our audience is doing some of that work too. Just as we’re learning from the movies that we’re watching, we are hopefully writing movies that are aware of how they’re going to be taken in, that they’re not just going into a void, they’re meant to be projected into somebody’s brain. We can learn a lot from thinking about how we watch our movies.

**Megana:** I think for newer writers, it offers a useful way of pulling out the tools to see how the sausage is made.

**John:** Cool. We’ll have these three segments. Then we’ll be back at the end of the episode to do our One Cool Things. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Megana and I will be talking once more about the Scriptnotes book and rumors of industry strife coming in 2023. Megana, thank you for picking these segments.

**Megana:** Thank you. Hope you guys enjoy this craft compendium.

——-

>**239 – What Is Good Writing**

**John:** So the idea for this topic came up because I read this piece in Slate and which is originally from Quora. It was by this guy, Marcus Geduld. And he was trying to answer the question, how do you differentiate good acting from bad acting? So I’ll put a link to the show notes for his original piece but I thought it was actually a really nicely designed explanation of sort of what he’s looking for in good acting.

And what I especially liked about it is he says, “If anyone tells you there are objective standards, they’re full of crap. This is a matter of personal taste. There are trends — there are many people who love Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acting but if you don’t, you’re not wrong.”

And so, as we get into the succession of acting and writing, I would back up what he says. It’s not there’s a one objective standard, but there’s things that I tend to notice when I’m saying like, well, that’s really good acting or really good writing and it may be useful to point them out.

**Craig:** This is a large philosophical discussion but I do agree with this gentleman as well. When it comes to writing, it’s not possible to say that this is capital G good and this is capital G bad. What you can say is that this is to my taste or it is not and here’s why. We do know that there are certain kinds of writing and the writing of certain writers that tends to be toward to most people’s taste, to a lot of people’s taste. There are some writers who appeal to the taste of those who consider themselves refined. There are some that appeal to the average man or woman.

But I’m with this guy completely. That’s why anytime I talk about a movie, I’m like, “It wasn’t for me.” That’s the best I could do.

**John:** Let’s take a look at his criteria for good acting. He says, “Good actors make me believe that the actor is going through whatever his character is actually going through.” So there’s a believability. You really believe that he has been shot, that he is terrified in this moment. And he singles out sort of like if you can tell they’re faking it, then it’s honestly kind of worse. Like you can sense that they’re acting.
And that’s very true. I mean, the performances that I admire the most, I genuinely believe that they are experiencing — obviously you know there’s artifice, you know that they’re in a movie — and yet the moment feels incredibly real because they’re responding to things in a very real way.

**Craig:** And ultimately verisimilitude is kind of what we do, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re trying to create a fake world that at least seems real to you while you’re experiencing it or is real enough that you can suspend your disbelief. And this advice I think is perfect for actors or writers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Actors, obviously it’s immediate. We see and hear them and so we know that they’re believable or not. But for us as writers, believability, that probably is my number one problem with most screenplays I read. I read something, I read a character’s line or I witness their choice and I think, “I just don’t believe that that’s what a person would do in that circumstance.”

**John:** Absolutely. You say like, “I don’t believe it. I don’t buy it. I don’t get it. It doesn’t connect for me.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s because you don’t believe that character is performing that way in that moment. But very related to that, Geduld is looking for surprise. The great actors surprise him. So out of all the choices they could make, they are making really interesting choices.

So he singles out sort of like if there’s a bank teller, you sort of want that bank teller just to be believable as a bank teller and not draw any attention or draw any focus to himself.

But your main actors in your piece, they should be making really fascinating and interesting choices at times so you don’t know what they’re going to do next. Because if you can predict perfectly what they’re going to do next, you get bored.
I think I see the same thing with writing. If I can tell you what’s going to happen three pages later or three sentences later, then I stop being so intrigued. I’m not curious what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s where the boredom happens. And when we see characters doing these things that are sort of obvious, right, there’s the lack of surprise, this is when you tend to hear things like, well, tropey or just sort of, “I’ve seen it before.” The element of surprise isn’t so much about leaping out and going boo at the audience as much as it is delighting them with something that they were not expecting.

All comedy is surprise. You cannot get a laugh if there’s no surprise, right?

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Everybody knows that. If you tell somebody a joke and they’re like, “I’ve heard it before,” don’t keep telling the joke. There will be no surprise. All actors surprise, all emotion I think is surprise. It creeps up on you. Even when you are not surprised by the thing that happens, the intensity of it surprises you, and thus, the tears come.

**John:** And there’s no surprise without expectation. So the reason why a joke works is because you set up an expectation for what the natural outcome is and the punch line is a surprise.

The same thing happens in drama. You set an expectation for what is going to happen next and the surprise is something different happens or a different choice is made. So you don’t get those moments of surprise unless you’ve set expectation really well.

That’s one of the things I enjoyed most about Drew Goddard’s adaptation of The Martian is he was very clever about setting up expectations about what was going to happen next so that all the calamities that would happen to poor Matt Damon on Mars can still be surprising. You don’t get those surprises unless you’ve very carefully laid out for the audience what he thinks is going to happen next.

**Craig:** It’s remarkable how similar what we do is to what magicians do, because there is no surprise for the magician and there’s none for us. We know how it ends. We know everything. So there’s this careful craft of misdirection and misleading and setting up one expectation only to deliver something else. It’s all very crafted.

You know, if you spend any time reading Agatha Christie, she is just a master of this because in her case, think about what she has to do. She has to surprise the reader at the end and the entire time they are battling her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are not surprised that there’s a surprise. So it’s a bit like watching a close-up magician at work. You know he or she is trying to fool you. And then they fool you anyway.

**John:** Yeah. I think the other crucial thing to remember about surprise is if everything is surprising, nothing is surprising. And so if you don’t allow characters to behave in a way that we can have some ability to predict what’s going to happen next, we will stop caring or just stop trying to put our confidence in you that they are going to do something worthwhile. That there’s going to be a payoff to this.
And you see that sometimes in writing as well, where it’s just such a scramble of different things, it’s going in so many different directions. The rug is always being pulled out from underneath you to the point where like, “You know what, I’m not going to stand on that rug because I just know you’re going to pull it out from under me.”

**Craig:** No question. And in acting, we know this feeling when we’re watching a movie and we want to turn to somebody next to us and say, “Do you have any idea what this person is doing or talking about?” I love Apocalypse Now. I love that movie and my favorite book is Heart of Darkness. And I think there’s more great performances in that movie than practically any other movie I can think of.
But Marlon Brando’s performance is essentially surprising constantly to the point where I can’t quite get a handle on him at all as Kurtz. For me at least, that performance, it’s just all surprises and nothing to push against.

**John:** Yeah. It can be the real frustration. And of course, when you talk about an actor’s performance, we really are balancing what was written, what was the scripted performance and what was the actor actually doing. And in the case of Apocalypse Now, that was just a huge jumble.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. [laughs]

**John:** But there’s times where, you know, you’re trying to look at a character in a movie and it becomes very hard to tell, like, did that not work because it was bad on the page or did that not work because the actor made bizarre choices that made it impossible for that to function? And it’s one of the reasons why it can be so crucial to have a writer around on a set to sort of be that set of eyes to let the director know and everybody else know, like, “Okay, what they’re doing is fascinating but it will not actually add up and you’re going to be in real trouble when you get to the editing room.”

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s no question. I think Brando famously showed up on that set like 100 pounds overweight, hadn’t read the book, probably hadn’t read the script, didn’t know any of his lines. [laughs] Yeah, that one was a disaster.

**John:** Geduld’s next point is that great actors are vulnerable, which is very true. You feel like the great actors are letting you see parts of themselves that they might be embarrassed by or essentially that they’re not embarrassed to show you those things that are sort of icky inside them and they’re not trying to be perfectly put together at all moments. They’re letting you in and showing you the cracks.
And good writing does that, too. Good writing isn’t trying to impress you at all moments. Good writing is trying to explore uncomfortable emotions and uncomfortable feelings.

**Craig:** Yeah. This can be a little bit of a trap for writers who work in comedy because comedy is one of the great defense mechanisms of all time. And there are very funny movies that essentially truck entirely in comedy and they never show vulnerability and they never get you in a moment where suddenly you feel, you deeply feel. You’re there to laugh. And by the way, it’s perfectly fine. I mean, you know, there are a lot of terrific movies that are just there to make you laugh.
But if you are trying to do a certain kind of comedy, you need to be able to access your vulnerable side and put aside your humor armor and just be real. Sometimes, it’s those moments inside of comedies that are the most touching because of the contrast.

**John:** Absolutely. I mean, you obviously had that moment with Melissa McCarthy in Identity Thief but I’m also thinking about Melissa McCarthy in Spy. And I think one of the reasons why Spy worked so well is you definitely see what she is longing for and sort of her obsession with her boss that she doesn’t really want to own up to and her own fears and frustrations sort of bubbling out. And so they find great comedic moments for it but they also really let you deep inside. And that’s why you can sort of identify so closely with her character.

**Craig:** And Melissa’s really good at that. I mean, Melissa, you know, she has one of those faces, like Zach Galifianakis and Steve Carell, these are people that you want to take home and hug, and yet they’re also so funny.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then there are some really funny people that I don’t want to take home and hug. Like Ryan Reynolds is really funny. But he doesn’t seem to need my emotional support. [laughs] He seems to be just fine, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Whereas like Zach or Steve Carell or Melissa, I’m like, “Okay, come here, here’s some soup. Let’s talk it out.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, let me take care of you.

**John:** Yeah. His next point is listening, that the great actors watch them when they’re listening to other characters speak, which is a thing I’ve definitely noticed is that there are some people who just seem to be waiting for their turn to act next and there’s other actors who you feel like everything they’re saying is in response to the previous character, that they’re engaged in this moment, they’re engaged in listening. And those actors help the other person’s performance so much because they direct your attention back to what the other character is saying.

It’s such a simple and kind of obvious thing, but if you look at scenes that aren’t working, it’s often because you don’t believe that the other character is actually listening to what the first character is saying.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is acting school 101, you know. Sometimes all you do is just sit and listen and learning how to listen seems weird. Like why would it be so hard for me to do something I’m constantly doing anyway? But in the moment, when you are required to say things that you didn’t think and they are not extemporaneous, they were written down and studied, the act of listening in and of itself is a challenge, because suddenly you’ve lost yourself listening to this other person and you forgot you have something to say. That’s really tricky but what it comes down to is essentially putting your ego aside and not feeling like it’s more important for you to be in command of your moment when you say words.

Sometimes the big moments are the ones where you listen. Film actors, the ones who’ve been around the block a lot, they know that oftentimes the camera is on them more when they’re not talking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So listening becomes crucial.

**John:** From the writer’s point of view, you are often writing those words that they are saying. And so if you are just batting a ball back and forth, it’s unlikely that you’re writing your very best dialogue for those actors because it doesn’t feel like they had to hear what the previous person said to respond to it, didn’t actually need to process it, but rather is like, funny line, funny line, funny line, funny line, that scene is not going to work or this is not going to work as well as it could. And the actors are not going to be able to bring anything special to it because you’re not giving them any things to hold on to. There’s just no handholds in that kind of dialogue.

**Craig:** There are exceptions. Sorkin is very good at putting lots of dialogue and not giving his characters a lot of time to listen because he demands that they’re fast and smart. So I think of the first scene of Social Network, it’s very ratatat. It’s very verbal. But then in that scene, when there is a moment where somebody suddenly stops, it means something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You realize that they’ve been knocked back on their feet a little bit. Those are very challenging scenes for actors to do.

**John:** Yeah. Well, you know, if you’re writing things where the point is that they actually sort of aren’t listening, where they are basically two simultaneous monologues directed towards each other, that can be great and be fascinating. But if your whole movie is built of that, you better be Aaron Sorkin.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and even Aaron Sorkin understands that after a scene like that, you need a break.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. His next point, the great actors use their instruments to their best effect. So by instruments, he means their body, their voice, basically what they came to the show with. And so it’s recognizing what you have and how to make the most of what you have.
So his example is Philip Seymour Hoffman who was overweight and not conventionally attractive but definitely knew how to use his body to best effect to, you know, be that character or sort of provide that character a reality within that world. And I think that’s something we’re always looking for with our own writing and with the characters we’re creating is how do you use who they are and what they bring to best effect.

**Craig:** And also for ourselves, there are things that we know we do well. John Lee Hancock, he always says that when he is sent something, a script for consideration to direct, the first question he asks while reading it or after reading it is, “Is this a pitch I can hit?”

**John:** Ah, yes.

**Craig:** You know, and the truth is, not everyone can do everything. And there are things that sometimes we want to do for a change because they’re exciting, and those are terrific. But there are also things we know we can do. And this is why some great actors have been bad in movies because they were miscast. That’s what miscasting is, right? So for us as well, we have to kind of cast ourselves into what we write to make sure that we’re writing with the wind at our back and not in our face.

**John:** For sure. So let’s go on beyond his suggestions and think of some of our own suggestions for the things we notice about good writing that are sometimes lacking in writing that is not so good. Do you want to start?

**Craig:** Sure. For me, just a few things that came to mind that don’t really apply for the acting model of things. One is layers. Good writing I think is accomplishing more than one thing at a time. Usually, I’m watching plot happen while I’m also watching a relationship change or watching a character grow. There’s just layers to things. I think audiences appreciate those complexities when it’s very — okay, this, now we stop doing and we talk and we have a relationship. Now we do talking again. It starts to feel very simple to me.

**John:** Yeah. And sometimes in procedural dramas on television, you’ll notice this, like they’re just doing the one thing. They’re basically like just putting out information about the next thing they’re going to do. And that’s sometimes how procedural dramas need to work but it’s not sort of the best writing we could aspire to in other forms.

**Craig:** Agreed. The other thing I think is a hallmark of good writing is hidden scenes because, you know, we are trying to create the illusion of something that is whole and of one piece because it really happened even though it didn’t. Of course, that requires us to stitch things together. And sometimes we have to do things in our stories to make them work that aren’t completely organic to what happened before. And I think good writing knows how to hide those scenes so that they’re not even visible at all. It’s like a good tile guy knows how to fit two slabs together so you don’t even notice that it’s two pieces and it looks like one.

**John:** Yeah. You brought up magic before and I think of sort of what David Kwong does in his close-up work. And I don’t ever want to ask him how he does what he does because I’m never going to be able to do it. It’s sort of more fun for me not to know. But I’m sure some of the misdirection is a real vigilance about where the audience’s attention is going to be.
And so when you talk about hidden seams, you’re really basically being very mindful of like what are they going to see and what are they not going to see. And by putting something over here, they’re not going to be paying attention to this thing that I’m doing over sort of down here on the page. It’s being very aware of like where they are at and their experience of reading the story, of watching this movie so they’re not going to see what you’re actually needing to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of times when people talk about good craft, I think this is a big part of it, is just hiding the artifice and avoiding all those — you know, there’s a common thing people say in Hollywood when they want to say they had a problem with something in a script. They’ll say, “This bumped me.” And bumped means, literally, I felt the seam, you know. Like I was in a car, I was on what I thought was a smooth stretch of road and then bump, right? So those are the things we try and hide.

The other thing that I think is part of good writing is a point of view that unlike a performance which is delivering one character and making us believe that character, the writer needs a point of view because otherwise the story isn’t really about anything in particular. The writer needs something interesting to say and they have to have an interesting way of saying it. It doesn’t need to be text, it could be subtext. And it doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to be unsaid by anyone else before. But we do need a point of view.

**John:** Yeah. On the blog about two weeks ago, I addressed this article that Michael Tabb had written about — he called it premise and I sort of disagreed with him calling it premise. But what he was really talking about was this idea like what is the point, like what are you actually wrestling with in the story? Even if characters aren’t speaking aloud, even if it’s not even sort of obvious subtext, it’s the reason why you wrote the story, it’s the question you’re trying to answer. It may not even be like the dramatic question that a character is going to ask or resolve. It’s not the plot. It is sort of the point.

It’s like, I want to believe that the story is about more than just the surface plotting of it and that there’s a reason why you wrote this story, there’s a reason why I should be spending my time on it. That even if there’s not necessarily one answer, that you’re going to try to convince me of some point of view.

**Craig:** Yeah. I call it the central dramatic argument. Everybody’s got a different, you know, phrase for it.
Scott Frank told me he wrote a script once and he sent it to, I won’t say who, but a big screenwriter, to get their opinion and that person’s response was, “This screenplay is well-written but it’s answering a question no one is asking.” And I thought that was a really tough love way of saying that whatever the point of view was there, it wasn’t something that would connect universally.

And we talk about this a lot. When you’re writing movies, you are creating the uncommon and the bizarre and the remarkable and notable because those are the stories worth seeing. But buried in there, something that is the opposite, incredibly common, completely universal, applicable to everyone’s life experience.

So that’s where the point of view comes in. And similarly, I think that connects to another part of what I consider to be good writing, and that’s a general unity, that there’s a cohesion of the narrative, the end feels like a proper resolution of the beginning. The phrase coming full circle. A good movie comes full circle.

**John:** Yeah. And when we say coming full circle, meaning both in terms of like story and plot. So like we started some place and we got some place, the characters went through a journey, we actually saw them do something, we saw them accomplish something or failed something in an interesting way.
But also, thematically, that there was like these were the themes we were exploring and we succeeded in exploring these themes through different characters, through different situations and we got someplace. And it all feels like it’s of one piece and it’s not just like a bunch of things that happened and now the credits are rolling.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ideally, the beginning informs what the end is and the end informs what the beginning is, the two of them are yin and yang. And those pieces fit together gorgeously. By the time you get to the end of the movie, you go, “Yes, it had to start that way, it had to end that way.”

**John:** And yet, at the same time, ideally, starting at that place, you should not have been able to predict that it got to that place.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** And that’s the narrative trick. That’s good writing.

**Craig:** That’s good writing. And the way to, I think, your best friend in achieving that trick is having a point of view, because that’s what you’re bringing that the audience doesn’t walk in with.

**John:** Yeah. The thing that I think I’ve noticed about good writing is confidence and that the writer has confidence in his or her words and that his or her story is going to be interesting enough that me as the reader should be spending my time to follow them on this journey. And it’s a hard thing to describe because you don’t sort of see it, you just feel it. You feel like, okay, this writer is confident, I am confident in this writer that this is going to be an interesting journey worth taking.

Some of the things that make me lose confidence at times are simple mistakes. And so, you know, a typo here and there isn’t going to kill you. But a lot of typos makes me wonder like, “Wow, are you really that dedicated to your story? Did you not even proofread this?” And sometimes it’s sort of more they’re not typos but they’re just like things they didn’t think through, like logic flaws that make me question whether this is going to end well.

And so, confidence is a thing I look for in writing. And when I see it, I sort of lean into it. I’m excited to see where they’re going to go next.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you say that the idea that the writer is in control of the story and that’s exactly right. When you read a well-written script, you’re turning the pages knowing full well that when you turn the page, the next one is not going to be the one that makes you go, “Oh, god, really?” Whereas in bad writing, I’m feeling that on almost every page.
I mean, all of your triggers that you mentioned are correct. The one that always gets me is when I see the writer solving a problem in an evident way. And then I go, “Okay, I get that you had a problem and I get you needed to get out of that problem so that you could do blah, blah, blah, blah, but I don’t want to see that. Now I have no confidence in your story. Now I see the artifice.”

You know, I’ve been starting to create crossword puzzles because I’m not a dork enough, I guess. And when you’re building crossword puzzles, you have your big theme answers and then you’re going to fill in words around it. And sometimes you get jammed in a spot where, in order to make everything work, you need to stick a word in that’s just a really bad dumb crossword word.

**John:** What’s an example of a bad crossword word?

**Craig:** Well, there are so many. Well, there’s the crossword ease words like Etui and Esai and, you know, ero. And then there’s ones that are just like, you know, NGP and then you’re like, “What the heck’s an NGP?” And then it’s like, okay, one person once said it and it’s like this bizzaro thing or some foreign capital no one even knows.

And people do it because they have to solve their problem. But the good crossword puzzle creators, they just go, “Nope, let me undo this section and do it again because I don’t want people to hit that thing where they go, ‘Oh, that’s right, this is fake and you just magneted a solution on here so you could get to the next page.’”

**John:** Yeah. So things that make me lose confidence — typos, those kind of just like hacky solutions to things, and clichés which is a general kind of hackiness where it’s like, okay, that’s a really obvious tropey either plotting device or just a bad phrase that you just didn’t spend the time to think of a better way to say that thing.

And so, cliché can be great if you’re going to explode the cliché or sort of like play against the cliché. And if I have a lot of confidence in your story, in your writing, I will see that cliché and like, “You know what, that’s fine because they’re going to do something great with it. I’m going to keep turning pages because it’s going to be awesome.”

But if I was starting to lose confidence and then I encounter one of those cliché’s, I’m like, “Oh, it’s dipping low.” And remember in our last live show or two live shows ago, we had Riki Lindhome up. She was talking about when they were staffing for Another Period. And it’s like, oh, how many pages of a script do you read before you say yes or no? It’s like, well, about three.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, if she encounters a really hacky cliché on page three, she’s done. And that’s what you have to be so vigilant about.

**Craig:** Yeah. This idea of confidence in what the writer is doing is going to come up in one of our Three Page Challenges. I think we’ll see it pretty clearly. Part of what happens is when you feel good about the writing and then something comes along that’s a little squidgy, you give the writer the benefit of the doubt, “This must be intentional, it will work out.” And then, in well-written scripts, it does.

Think of like a script as the Titanic and it’s sailing along and it’s got its watertight compartments. You can hit, you know, one or two things and if you fill one or two watertight compartments, you can stay afloat for a while. But when you’re dragging something across all of them, you’re going to sink.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when I read scripts where characters are, their voices are changing from scene to scene, characters are behaving in the middle of situations that are just bizarre and not realistic at all or inconsistent with what they did before, suddenly, the Titanic is being ripped in half, Jack is drowning, Rose is on the piece of door.

**John:** Spoilers.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, the Titanic does go down.

**John:** Sorry, man.

**Craig:** Yeah, spoiler.

**John:** It’s good to bring up voices because voice is one of those things — we talk about characters having voices and making sure the voices sound believable. But writers also have voices. And good writing, that writer has a voice. And so I don’t care if it’s a non-fiction piece in Slate or something in The New Yorker or a Hemingway short story or Faulkner, or just any screenplay. You know, you read a Tarantino screenplay versus an episode of Game of Thrones, you read one of their things, they’re all very different but they all have a voice. They all sound like they’re written by a person who is confident about the words that they’re using to describe their world.

And as we get to the Three Pages, I think this sense of voice is really crucial. It’s a thing that keeps you turning pages because like, “Oh, even if I don’t necessarily love the story, I love hearing this person’s voice.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And there are writers who like, I’m not actually nuts about some of their plotting but their voices are just so fantastic. You want to talk about an amazing writer, someone we both follow on Twitter, Paul Rudnick.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** What an amazing voice he has.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**John:** So Paul Rudnick wrote In & Out and lots of other movies.

**Craig:** Addams Family.

**John:** Was it Addams Family or —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, you’re absolutely right. But he also used to write as Libby Gelman-Waxner. It was a column for Premiere Magazine which was the big film magazine at the time. And it was written for the point of view of this film critic kind of. She would review two movies in every issue. But it was mostly about her life and sort of her daughter and her dentist husband, Josh, I think.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And basically, it was all about sort of her even though she was technically reviewing these films. And it was all just a wonderful exercise in voice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m just such a fan of his. In & Out is such a good movie. I love that movie. I mean, that’s a great movie, by the way, for anyone to study in terms of structure because it’s structured perfectly. And talk about, it’s loaded with surprise. I mean, you have a movie where someone is gay but isn’t ready to come out of the closet and you’re like, okay, it’s going to end with him coming out of the closet. Yeah, but that’s not where the surprise is, you know.

And then his voice, look, he’s one of the wittiest people ever. [laughs] He’s like Dorothy Parker witty. That guy is, he’s great.

**John:** He’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My last little thing I’ll say about good writing, and this is not an exhaustive list, there’s probably other things you can think of, but I want to talk about finesse. And this is a thing that you maybe only kind of recognize when you have written a lot. But when I see a writer doing something that’s actually really difficult and they make it look so easy, you’re like, “Wait, how did you do that?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that’s the thing that I start to really appreciate. And so, two recent examples I can think of, over the Christmas break I read To Kill a Mockingbird. And obviously the book is great on many levels and that’s why you study it in high school.

But looking at it now, Harper Lee was able to do these things, these transitions where she was in a scene and it was like really a detailed scene and like every moment, every sort of gasp and every, you know, scratch on the floor, and then like within just a few sentences, several months could pass and then we’re off to something completely new. She was able to transition in and out of these sort of close-up moments in ways that were just remarkably subtle and clever and adept that you didn’t even sort of notice. Like, “Oh, wow, just months passed and now Scout’s older and like two sentences have gone by.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a really remarkable thing.

**Craig:** It is. I think that the idea of making the difficult scene easy is more a hallmark of great writing. You know, the person that confounds me time and time again is Neil Gaiman. I read this guy and I’m like, “How did you just do that? How did you pull that off?”

You know, just reading through the entire Sandman series at least once in every issue, I’d go, “Wow. Wow. How did you — ” especially later on when you’re like, “Wait, did you set up something three years ago and it just paid off?” [laughs] I mean, his mind is just remarkable and he makes it look so easy.

**John:** Yeah. And I had this filed underneath the finesse category but it speaks back to sort of all these things, so maybe my final example will sort of talk about how well she did on all these different levels.

So Gillian Flynn in Gone Girl, both in the book and in the movie, and different ways how she did it in both the book and the movie, there’s this narrative handoff that has to happen halfway through. And when you see what she did, we’re talking about the layers, there was actually much more going on than you sort of thought was going on. There were these hidden scenes that she was just masterful.

She had a point of view as an author about what she was trying to express but also very clearly you could understand the characters’ points of view on this. There was a unity, there was a deeper thing that this was all sort of connected to. And she had confidence and it’s only because I had confidence in her writing and sort of what she was doing that I was able to take this giant leap halfway through the book and halfway through the movie that like, “Okay, everything has completely changed and I’m so excited to see where this is going next.”

**Craig:** It’s such a good feeling knowing that every page you’re reading has been thought out and is part of a larger plan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you never get that sense of — because I’ve read some novels where — I read one in particular recently where I was so happy halfway through. And then I got into the second half and it just seemed to me that the author had kind of gone, “Okay, that’s enough craft. Let’s just wing it.” [laughs] And it just fell apart.

**John:** I will tell you quite honestly, there was a book I was sent as an adaptation, I had this two years ago maybe, maybe even more than that. And it had sold for a fair amount and then I heard back — so I read it, it’s like, “Well, the first half is really good and the second half is not really good at all.” And the backstory was like, yeah, people only read the first half. They bought it at an auction, they only read the first half. And so no one sort of knew how it ended. And then they got the rest of it and they’re like, “Oh, oh, no. Oh, no.” And it just wasn’t a good ending.

**Craig:** No. And that’s a real challenge for us when we’re adapting these things because, like I said before, the ending must be fundamentally there in the beginning. So it means that the beginning that you like so much, you might have to change that a little bit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

>**76 – How Screenwriters Find Their Voice**

**John:** Absolutely. Well, the reason why I wanted to start off with voices is I thought today we might start talking about when you first discovered a writer’s voice, or sort of your own writer’s voice, and sort of what that process was like.
Because I remember reading books and reading magazines and enjoying them and recognizing that people wrote in different ways, but never really got a sense of what a voice was until I started reading Spy Magazine. And Spy Magazine, the entire magazine was written with such a specific sardonic, snarky voice. And like that first introductory “Welcome to this Month” kind of thing was written so specifically that I was like, “I want to write like that.” It was the first time I started experimenting writing in someone else’s voice.

But it got really clear when I sort of switched into having a voice of my own. Because I feel like if you read through most of my scripts, there are things I write, they’re consistent, but I’m not quite sure why they’re consistent or sort of how that develops. So, I want to talk about voice and how writers find their voices.

Aline, do you think you have a voice that persists from script to script, or is it different every time?

**Aline:** That’s all I had when I started, really, was just a way that I spoke, or the characters spoke. And, you know, one of the downsides of that is all the characters spoke the same way. And they all sounded like the scene description. And I have a tendency to put the best jokes in the scene description, too.

But, you know, I had a point of view. The other stuff was stuff that was more of an effort — the plot, particularly the plotting stuff, and differentiating the characters. But, you know, even before I became a writer I just tend to have a particular way of speaking. So, that was I would say the part that came to me the most easily. Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s funny. I almost had like an opposite problem. Because the movies I was writing initially were very broad comedies, everything was about jokes. And in the jokes, yeah, definitely, there is a specific kind of joke that my wife will say, “Oh, that’s such a you joke.” And it’s funny — she’s now so good, like she’ll pick them out from trailers or from movies. She’ll just turn to me, “That was you, that was you, that was you.” She knows those things.

But, did I have a voice, like a dramatic voice? Early on, no. And in fact that was something I had to kind of get to. On the plus side, it was helpful to actually… — I never had the problem with characters sounding the same. And in a way I looked at it like it was mimicry, you know, like how does this person talk, how does this person talk, how does this person talk? Because I’m fascinated by the way people talk and I like to do impressions of people.

But over time I have noticed, and lately more so, there is a dramatic expression, maybe is the best way I can put it. There’s a certain way I like the story to unfold that is, I think, kind of like my voice. But it’s funny. It’s not like…

**Aline:** That’s so interesting. Because you have a very distinct authorial voice in your non-screenwriting that’s extremely distinct, your emails and your prose is extremely distinct.

**Craig:** Well, because that’s me. And if I’m writing a character I want them to just be true to them.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** And not be me. And sometimes I also feel like I’m, yeah, I guess I just sort of go from that point of view. I’m more interested in other people, so I like to go that way. But some voice-like thing has occurred over the years.

**John:** It’s challenging with screenwriting because when we talk about voice, are we talking about the way characters are speaking? Are we talking about the authorial voice? And when you’re saying in early scripts you didn’t have the technique, you didn’t have the skills, you didn’t have the plot and all that stuff, but you had a voice is, I think, part of the reason I became a writer is I apparently had a voice, and I had confidence on the page. I felt like, you know, people would read through the whole thing. And it felt like it was all of one piece, and it was not just desperate to get to the next thing.

It was enjoyable to read on the page. And it was sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because I had somewhat of a voice people would say, “Yeah, you should keep writing.” And so then I would write more and it sort of developed into that thing. Same way people develop styles or fashions or ways they present themselves, people get reinforcement for the way they talk.

**Aline:** Your voice is kind of badass. I mean, I had read Go and then when I met you I really expected you to be a little bit more of a hipster badass than you are.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, for sure. He’s not what you think from reading your work. Which is cool. I actually like that. You know, I mean, for me because it was comedy, you kind of get a little screwed over in comedy because people laugh. And they go, “I laughed.” But all the work around the laughing, they tend to either not see or not give you credit for, and they certainly don’t reinforce. They don’t teach you how to do it. You’re kind of left to figure it out on your own.

And in a weird way you’re left to figure it out from non-comedies. And it’s the rare comedy like Groundhog Day where you look and you go, “Oh, look how, at least I can see what’s happening around the jokes here…”

**Aline:** But it took me awhile to learn that the jokes don’t play if the scene work and the dramatic structure doesn’t play. And you know that from your own work, and you know that also from going to countless punch-ups where if the scene doesn’t work, or the characters don’t work, the jokes don’t stick.

**Craig:** The jokes won’t work. And, unfortunately, no one tells you early on, “I love this joke because of all this wonderful dramatic context around it, or character context, or the way that it served some moment in the scene to connect to the next scene.” No one ever says that. They just say, “Oh my god, that line was so funny.”

**John:** I was looking up some lines last night for this other project, and so I’m on like great classic movie dialogue lines, a lot of them were from Star Wars. And one of them was like, “You’re awful short for a Storm Trooper, aren’t you?” And that’s actually not that funny of a line, but the only reason it’s memorable is because that movie is really good and the moment worked. And so therefore that line feels appropriate for that moment. So, “Oh, it’s a good line,” but independently it’s not a great line.

**Aline:** Oh, “I begged you to get therapy,” is one of the best jokes in any comedy, and in and of itself it’s not a joke.

**Craig:** Yeah. There you go.

**John:** “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” That’s a great line independent of a really great scene, but so many things aren’t.

**Craig:** Right. I know. And also now the way that we write movies now, they’re a little less written, I don’t know how else to put it. They’re obviously written, but that’s such a written line. You’ll hear sometimes people say, “Oh, that just feels like writing. It doesn’t feel like actual human talk. No one is that witty.”

**Aline:** I love written lines.

**Craig:** I know. I mean, the problem is, it’s like so many times I see them play out on screen and I go, “Yeah, congratulations to me for being clever.”

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that human didn’t say that. And so there’s…

**Aline:** Fine line.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s a thing between the audience and the line.

**John:** That’s the luxury of writing a period movie or something that’s set in an alternate thing that’s not meant to be here and now, because you can get away with those lines.

**Craig:** You can.

**John:** There’s probably not a single line in Django Unchained that an actual human being would say, but it’s really enjoyable to see in that context.

**Craig:** Or any Tarantino movie. I mean, everybody speaks, it is understood that we’ve signed a contract with Tarantino that all of his characters are, it’s like it’s opera. I don’t know how else to put it. They speak like the way that recitative is sort of to opera. It’s not human dialogue. It’s awesome.

**John:** I mean, Tarantino is a great person to bring up, because you want to talk about voice, that’s what he had more than anything else. I mean, I think there was interesting plotting and interesting stuff going on, but if you just plunked down and read one of his scripts — I remember reading Natural Born Killers as a script when it was just his script. And it was the first script that I ever read to the end, flipped back to page one and read through again, because it’s just a great voice that you love to hear. And it’s not about the dialogue. It’s about everything that’s fitting together, that the world feels.

And I think people can learn a lot of the other things. You can learn the plots. You can learn how to sort of get through the story. But, when you read a sample that has really good writing, really good voice, that’s what you sort of get to.

**Aline:** Can we all say the word “recitative.”

**Craig & John:** “Recitative.”

**Craig:** Is that right? It’s “recitative” is what it is. “Recitative.”

**Aline:** Recitative.

**John:** Oh, “recite-a-tive” is how it’s pronounced.

**Craig:** Yes, “recitative.” Why are you looking at me like that?

**John:** On NPR yesterday, or actually one of the other podcasts I was listening to, they were doing a thing about Les Mis, and they went into the “recitative…”

**Craig:** Recitative.

**John:** And they played a little clip of it. Like out of context with the whole movie it just sounds crazy.

**Craig:** It’s hysterical.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Like, why is this person singing, “What’s this? It’s sunny. Where is my hat!” It’s ridiculous. But, you know, once you’re in the middle of it… — I mean, frankly, that is the worst part of Les Mis for me. I mean, when I went to go see Les Mis for the first time I’m like, stop all the sing talking, just talk, then sing the songs. I’d be much happier. I really, really would. Or, just sing the songs, [laughs], and I’ll figure out what’s going on between them. Or hand out a pamphlet and I’ll just read what happens in between them.
I would have been happier. The recitative is a tough one.

**John:** But don’t you sometimes read scripts from people who, like, are aspiring writers and they’re — you don’t know what to say to them other than the fact that like, “You don’t have a voice.” You’re like, “At least I’m not getting any sort of voice from you.” And that’s one of the hardest things; there’s no nice way to say that.

**Craig:** Well, other than to say, “Look, you’re not the only person. And it’s not fatal. Because people have pulled out of that flat spin before.” But if you read something, I mean, you’ve had this experience where you read something and you think, “Yeah, I could write the next five pages just like you did here, in a minute.” Or, anybody could write these pages. There’s no reason I need you to write the rest of this story. You’re not expressing it uniquely.

**Aline:** Right. But some people have a voice in life as they walk around. They just can’t get it onto a piece of paper.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And so partly it’s about learning what your point of view is, what makes you interesting to people, and being confident that that’s going to interest a reader.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing right there. Because I think people are just scared that their natural expression is boring. And what they do is they chase. And everybody has to sort of start like that with rare exception. There are prodigies, but so many people start by copying. You know, that’s how we learn to speak, by copying. So, it’s natural that we learn to write by copying, but at some point you got to kind of take the training wheels off, because all you’ll ever be is a copyist at that point.

**John:** Yeah. It’s having the courage to speak as you actually see the world.

**Aline:** Some screenwriters have been incredibly influential. I would say William Goldman, Shane Black, just in terms of having a very distinct way of writing that people then imitated. I mean, Goldman was huge for a very long time and people would write in that kind of epigrammatic way that he wrote. And then Shane Black, obviously. I mean, I think people are still writing in that tone.

**Craig:** Yeah. To me, it’s the first mistake. It’s the mistake of page zero is that you’re copying. I mean, all it says is it looks like I’m going to have to go get Shane Black, I guess, to fix this script, because I just got ersatz Shane Black.

There is nothing else you can offer as a writer except that which is unique to you. If it’s not unique to you, I don’t need it from you.

**John:** I’ll say it’s useful to look through the writing that you like a lot and figure out why you like it that way. And there may be aspects of that that you can completely use. Rather than sort of aping Shane Black’s short sentences and overuse of periods, find your way of getting that scene description on the page in a way that’s meaningful. Find your dialogue that is useful in those ways.
A writer who we both, Aline and I both — I’m pointing to Aline. Pointing doesn’t do any good on a podcast.

**Craig:** Right. This one over here.

**John:** This one over here. — We both talked about Lena Dunham and how much we enjoy her stuff. And you want to talk about somebody who has perspective and a voice, this feels like, you know, her world and what’s interesting to her being nicely put together on screen.

**Aline:** And you feel like you could see a line — someone could say something in life and you’d be like, “Oh, that’s such a Lena Dunham kind of moment.” You know, she already has, at such a young age, she already has a signature style/way of looking at the world perspective.

I mean, what’s amazing about her is when you see Tiny Furniture, it was all there. It was always all there. And she has such a distinct point of view. And I think, you know, because people do start out often by copying, I think we’re going to see a lot of stuff which is…

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**Aline:** …you know, young women in their 20s. She, though, will free other people who have different… — You know, that’s what’s interesting about somebody like a Quentin or a Lena or somebody. If you have a distinct point of view you kind of give other people permission to find their own voice and to be that.

**John:** Absolutely. I get very frustrated by the knocks on Go as being like Pulp Fiction light, but I’m fully willing to acknowledge the fact that it would have been very hard to make Go without Pulp Fiction, because restarting the story twice and our structure, everyone would be like, “Well that’s not going to work. You can’t do that.” And once you’re like, “Well, there’s a very successful movie…”

**Craig:** I don’t think of Go, I mean, I don’t think of it that way. Maybe in the moment…

**John:** In the moment it was. That’s what people compared it to.

**Craig:** Well, and that’s what people do. It’s pattern bias. You know, “Well, that thing just happened so it must have caused this.” But it’s important to know the range of your own voice. There are people that have really specific voices like Tarantino or Dunham, and they write that kind of thing.

But it’s also okay to be the sort of person that is the Jack of all trades, who can kind of move in between, as long as there’s something unifying. It might not be dialogue, but unified in a way you tell a story, how you structure you out, what themes you dwell on. There’s all sorts of ways to express yourself, but you have to at least express yourself.

**John:** Now, Aline, most of your produced movies seem to fall into a certain kind of, not even genre really, but a certain kind of mold. Is that because you’ve picked those movies, or those are the movies that have gotten made? What’s the through line?

**Aline:** Well, the first couple movies that I wrote were pretty straight up rom-coms, I would say. And then The Devil Wears Prada is not, and well, 27 Dresses also is a straight up rom-com. But then I wrote a few that were sort of women in the workplace trying to balance their life. And that was just, Prada was brought to me. Morning Glory was something that I wanted to show the first time a woman has real responsibility in a workplace, so that was a different spin on that.

And then I Don’t Know How She Does It is a work/life balance thing. But, it’s funny, I don’t think of myself as being a genre writer, because I don’t think of myself — I think of myself as writing pieces that are essentially dramatic, even if they have jokes in them. Dramas with jokes.

And, so, I sort of — I did We Bought a Zoo, which is a family movie.

**John:** That’s also a drama with jokes.

**Aline:** It’s a drama with jokes. Yeah. So, some of the other stuff that I branched into, I just approach it as sort of characters/character dilemma. So, I never think of myself as a genre writer. But I don’t think anybody does.
So, it’s funny, you know, I’m doing a broader range of stuff, even though I’ll always love — I love single lead comedies. I love romantic comedies. But one of the things I’m writing is a robot movie which one of our samples today is a…

**Craig:** Yeah, a robot movie. So, we’ll get into that.

**Aline:** So, I’m writing a robot movie. And what’s been interesting is working in different genres. I mean, I think I still have a lot of the same concerns and interests irrespective of what kind of material I’m dealing with.

**John:** Because I got pigeonholed right from the very start as a kid’s book writer — the first two projects I got were kid’s book adaptations, which didn’t get made, but I was only being that guy. I’d written Go largely just to break out of that box.

**Aline:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** And so I very deliberately, consciously wrote that, saying like…

**Craig:** To not be the Fried Worms guy.

**John:** Exactly. And so with that, the weird luxury is everyone saw whatever they wanted to see in it. And so they’d say, like, “Oh, you are the edgy action movie guy.” “Oh, you are the comedy guy.” “You are this guy.” And so I was able to quickly get a lot of different things.

And I don’t think it hurt my sort of craft, but it did make it harder to sort of figure out what — ultimately what box to put me for other things. Because I didn’t become a brand in comedy, I didn’t become a brand in action. I just became the guy who does the various different kind of things.

What’s weird is that when you sort of take a big step back and look at the movies that actually got made, almost all of them are sort of “Two World” movies, where like there’s a normal world and the character decides to cross into this other world that has special rules, and ultimately sort of comes back out of it. And it’s very much sort of —

**Aline:** Yeah. I would probably, in my own stuff I would play more to thematics and layers than genre similarities.

**John:** Yeah. I described your movies in the previous podcast as want-coms.

**Aline:** I remember that.

**Craig:** The want-coms. Yeah, I’ve been all over the map. I mean, I’ve been very, remarkably uncalculating in my own career for somebody that’s kind of like, I have a tendency to calculate. But really kind of I just like making movies. So, I’ve always gravitated towards what’s getting made. And I had some really rough experiences. The best things I think I’ve ever written haven’t been made.

So, I started to be more interested in just writing movies. I just don’t like writing scripts that don’t get made. It just feels so awful.

**Aline:** My husband calls that the Document Production Business.

**Craig:** Yeah, pretty much. You’re just pushing paper around and then in the end it’s a booklet that no one reads. You know, I adapted Harvey and I wrote a movie called Game Voice at Bruckheimer. I love those scripts. And they meant something to me. And I adapted a Philip Dick short story. These are all really the ones I cared about, and then it just didn’t happen.
So, I started, basically, okay, well what’s in front of me that’s getting made? And I think the downside is sometimes what’s getting made isn’t that great. But, it then got me to a place where now some of the things that are getting made I really do think are great, and I love them. You know, so, I don’t know. I always feel like, I swear, maybe it’s just me — I always feel like I’m just a rookie still. I don’t know how many times… — I always feel like the next ten years are the ten years that count. In any given year, I always think the next ten years are the ones that count.

Until I finally get to retire, which as you know I’m really looking forward to. That’s my big thing.

**Aline:** Yeah. Nobody wants to retire more than you.

**Craig:** Oh, I can’t wait. I cannot wait. So much fun to think about all the things I can do.

**John:** You’re being serious? You’re actually thinking about retirement?

**Craig:** Always.

**Aline:** He’s always talking…

**John:** Oh, god, I never talk about retirement. I cannot ever imagine retiring.

**Aline:** Me neither.

**Craig:** Oh, no, no, it’s going to be the best.

**John:** Yeah. I will die mid-draft.

**Craig:** Now, listen, I’m not going to retire next year. I’m not going to retire in five years. But once I hit 50, then I’m going to start thinking about it. And then I’d like to have a nice regenerative breaking down kind of vibe towards 60. And then I’m out.

**Aline:** There’s a good recitative in that.

**Craig:** There is!

**Aline:** [singing] Here I am. I’m a…for 50.

**John:** [singing] But what will you do?

**Craig:** So many things! [singing] Anything I want. [laughs] Why do they do that?

**Aline:** Do you have enough hobbies?

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. I have a lot of hobbies, and there are a lot of things I want to learn. Like I want to learn some languages. I want to learn to play the guitar better. There are things I know how to do, just not well. And I want to be able to do them better. So, I’d like to learn things, go places, check stuff out, see my friends, hang out.

And, by the way, I would still write, but I would write for myself. I would write things that aren’t screenplays. I would just do stuff because I wouldn’t be worrying about saving for my kids, and my family, and retirement and all the rest of it.
And also, frankly, I like what I’m doing right now. I do. I just feel like — this is a whole separate therapy discussion — but at some point you have to stop doing what you’re doing. You can’t do it for your entire life. You can’t.

**Aline:** You can if you’re my dad.

**Craig:** I know. You can if you’re my dad, too. But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that. I’m saying you shouldn’t.

**Aline:** He loves it.

**Craig:** Yes, some people do. Here’s the thing: I don’t. Like I know, sorry — I know that I need something new at some point. I get excited when things change. I love chaos and mayhem, basically. And I think I want to change it up. You know, I can feel change coming. You know what? There’s a wind of change in the air.

**Aline:** [singing] There’s a wind…

**Craig:** Recitative. You want to talk about…?

**John:** I want to talk about one more thing before we get into that. I could imagine at some point not writing screenplays, but I’m also sort of — part of me lives like ten years in the future where there’s some movies I’ve already directed. Like I already know, like, well that’s that movie I’m going to direct. And so at some point I’m going to get to that point. So, retirement is always way beyond these other movies that I’m going to be doing.

**Aline:** You have lots of hobbies and interests.

**John:** I have a lot of interests, yeah.

**Aline:** Your hobbies are businesses.

**Craig:** You’d be better at retirement. You love making apps. You’re a little app-making elf.

**John:** But I would never stop my current career to do that. So, I enjoy it, but I want everything to happen simultaneously.

**Craig:** The world needs apps.

**John:** I mostly just want to clone myself and send out the army of John Augusts to do different things.

**Craig:** What a horrifying thought.

**John:** It would be great.

**Craig:** And army of John Augusts.

**Aline:** I think it’s already happened.

**Craig:** It might have. Which one do you think we’re talking to now? Which generation of August is this?

**Aline:** The relaxed fit.

**Craig:** Oh, this is Relaxed Fit August?

>**432 – Learning From Movies**

**John:** So Craig, one thing I’ve done in 2019 which was helpful and I’m definitely carrying it with me into the new year is when I watch a movie I try to take some notes afterwards about what worked in that movie for me. And so this first segment I want to talk through this idea of what we can learn from movies.

So I think so often we’re talking about screenplays or like reading scripts and all that stuff but really what all of us do is we watch movies and we take things from movies. And I want to have a discussion about how to be a little bit more systematic and really thoughtful about what we’re taking from movies as we finish watching a film.

**Craig:** Mindful viewing of movies. That’s a good idea. Everybody that does what we do uses other movies as examples or inspiration. Sometimes we use them as negative examples.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** But the movies that we love we tend to really think about carefully. It’s a little bit like what you and I do when we walk through one of these movies.

**John:** Exactly. And so we did our walkthrough of Die Hard and that was really trying to look systematically at what the movie was doing and how the movie was working. That’s a thing that people can do by themselves with every movie that they watch. And really if you’re aspiring to be a screenwriter, or you are a screenwriter, it’s not a bad practice to get into with everything. So if you watch a pilot of a TV show or you watch a movie, just take a few minutes and really look at how that movie worked. Because when you don’t do that it tends to be only the most recent thing you’ve watched is the only example you have in your head. And if you do it more systematically it will work for everything.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my questions I want to ask myself when I finish a movie is what’s working in it, what’s not working for you in it? If it’s not working why is it not working? Really troubleshoot for yourself what didn’t click for you and why didn’t it click. And what could you have done differently in that movie to make it click?

Really you’re trying to focus on the how questions. How is the movie working and how could the movie be working better if you were to have access to the engine underneath it?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this saying that people put out there about social media. Don’t compare your inside to other people’s outside. And sometimes if we watch movies, particularly ones that we love, and we don’t think about them in a gear-watch-works way then we may suffer from that. We may think, OK, I’m currently sitting here with a pile of tiny little gears and cogs and springs and it’s not a watch. And I just saw the most beautiful watch. I suck.

If you start to really look at it from the point of view of a craftsperson then you can see that they had the same problems and limitations you did. And it’s really helpful I think to start to strip away stuff that isn’t purely writing. Start to strip away the lighting. Start to strip away the music. Start to strip away the performances. And just think about the movements of things that were commanded by text, because that’s what you’re doing.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s start at the fundamental. Let’s start at the hero. Let’s take a look at who the hero is in this story and what the function of that hero is. So, as the viewer do you understand who that hero is? What they want? Both on a macro scale, the overall arc of their journey through the story, but on a micro level. On a scene-by-scene, moment-by-moment do you understand what that hero wants? And if you do how is that being communicated? What information are they giving you to let you know what that hero wants?

And that is purely craft. That is the screenwriter’s job is to make it clear what that central character is trying to go after.

**Craig:** And it’s perfectly reasonable to study how people do that elegantly. So Damon Lindelof and his team did Watchmen which I loved and a lot of people do. And one of the things that I thought was so good about it was what I call non-expository exposition. They were so clever – and that is craft – about making the information release interesting and meaningful beyond just you need to know this. They managed to weave it into other things. Really good lessons learned from that. And I think that when we watch movies it’s fair to look at those really hardcore craft things and say, oh, you know what I’m not going to steal the way, like their movie there, but I’m going to steal their ambition. Like they clearly aspire to do better than the usual. I should, too.

**John:** Absolutely. Watchmen is a great example for my next question which is how does the hero fit the story. So thinking about what story do you want to tell and which hero is the appropriate hero for telling that story. The fit between hero and world in Watchmen could not have been better. So you had a character whose grandfather was part of this sort of long story, this long struggle, to get us up to this present moment. So she was uniquely qualified to be the central character in the story.

**Craig:** And you can sometimes struggle when you watch a movie because you’re looking at the wrong person. This is another thing that movies do all the time, we just don’t notice it until we really watch meaningfully. And that is they have us following somebody that isn’t the hero. We think they’re the hero. They’re not the hero.

Sometimes the hero is this side character or somebody we think of as a side character because they’re not occupying this huge space in the story. But the story is really about this smaller – I mean, the most famous example that people kick around is who is Ferris Bueller about? Who is the hero of Ferries Bueller? And it’s Cameron. It’s the friend. Because he’s the only one that has a choice to make. He is the only one who has a problem, who is running away from his problem, who has to confront his problem, and overcome his problem. But he’s not Ferris Bueller. He’s not in the title. Nor is he the guy we watch in the beginning, or the end. It seems like Ferris Bueller is the hero but he’s not. So meaningful watching helps you get there.

**John:** Absolutely. And finding those situations where the central character of Ferris Bueller is not the protagonist. It’s not the one that actually undergoes the transformation, the journey. So really being deliberate to look at sort of who is playing what role in the story. And once you do that figure out how are they introduced. How are you as a viewer first introduced to these characters? And how quickly do you understand who they are and why you should be interested in them. Those initial scenes of meeting those characters we all know as writers are so crucial. Well, how did this film do it? And ask yourself what are the other choices they could have made and why was this the right choice or the wrong choice?

**Craig:** Introductions are something that I think writers probably glide past all the time and should not. Maybe it’s because they think their “directing on the page.” As you know I’m a huge fan of directing on the page. I think that’s our job. And I think of movies that are delightful and how often their delight is conveyed to us through an introduction of a character. Like so when we first meet Jack Sparrow in the very first Pirates of the Caribbean movie he’s on this ship, he is a proud pirate, he seems like just one of those plot armored heroes where no wrong can. And then you reveal that his boat is sinking and he literally steps off the top of it onto a deck as it disappears below the waves. That says so much not just about him but about this world, the tone. It’s delightful.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** In the second movie I believe he shoots his way out of a coffin. It’s another just – it’s surprising. So, another excellent thing to keep an eye on for all movies. And sometimes they’re not flashy like that. The introduction of the family in Parasite–

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Just the way that they’re living in a basement sort of, and how their day is consumed by trying to steal wifi. Brilliant.

**John:** It’s really talk about all these aspects, like who are the right characters for the story, how are we meeting these characters, and do we understand what they want? And Parasite is a great example of how you’re seeing all three of those things in one initial sequence that’s really telling you this is their situation. These are the people you’re going to be watching through the course of the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you’re watching a movie and you feel good at the end of a scene, stop. I don’t mean to say that you should do this the first time you see it. But when it’s time to watch it meaningfully and thoughtfully if the scene works for you stop and then roll back and then watch it again. And just think about the layers and why.

This is so much more important than why – I feel like our culture is just obsessed with people explaining why they hate things. They’re rewarded for it, I guess. It teaches you very little. It really does. I’ll tell you, more than anything when I watch something I don’t like I get scared. I get scared because I think would I have done the exact same thing in that situation? How would I have done it differently? I’m starting to get scared. Better to look at things you love.

**John:** Looking at any of these characters, a useful metric for me is could I describe this character independently of the actor? Do I have enough information about that character at the start and as the story progresses that I could talk about that character independently of the actor who is playing him? So I think Jack Sparrow is actually a great example. Because we think of him as Johnny Depp, but that character is very, very specific independently of the performance of Johnny Depp.
Same with all the family members in Parasite whose names I don’t know. And so they are such strongly drawn characters that I don’t have to fall back on a description of who the actor was playing them to be able to describe them as what they’re trying to do in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Disney, the folks who are running Disney very famously they knew they had hired Johnny Depp and when they saw what he was doing and what he looked like and how he sounded and walked they freaked out, because that was not some sort of inevitable thing that travels out of Johnny Depp. That was something specific and different. And it is a character that could be played by another person. It could be.
Would it have been played the same way? No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I think he was perfect. I really do. But in some alternate universe someone else is playing it and people also love the movie.

**John:** Agreed. So we talked about the hero, let’s talk about the antagonist. How does the antagonist arrive in the story? How do they challenge the hero? And in movies that work well the antagonist is so specific to the story and so specific to the hero that it’s hard to imagine them existing outside of that universe. So we talk about this in Die Hard. We talk about it in almost any of the movies we love, they have a villain or a chief character who is challenging the hero who is so specific to that story. So always look for how is that antagonist introduced and how specifically drawn are they to challenge your hero in the story.

**Craig:** And if it works for you, accept that. You know, you could fall into a trap of trying to fit things into categories and saying, well, sometimes I’ll see people say, “You know, I really liked this movie but it doesn’t follow the rule of blankety-blank.” Correct. It does not. Because that is not a rule. The rule that you just cited isn’t a rule. There are movies where the villain, the antagonist, is the weather. There are movies where it’s a dog. There’s movies where it’s a ghost. There’s movies where it’s fate. There’s movies where it’s the person you love the most.

It’s defined in so many different ways, so start with the fact that it worked. And then say, OK, I’ve just learned a new way of conceiving of what an antagonist is. The word villain, also, a bit of a trap.

**John:** Agreed. So then we have our characters. Let’s talk about the storytelling of the movie. So, how quickly and how well does it establish who is important and what they’re going after? How does the movie move between storylines? And this I think is the most crucial kind of craft question. Obviously there’s multiple things that are going to be happening. How does the movie decide how to switch back and forth between? Does it limit POV to only things that the hero knows? Or does the audience have omniscient POV? How is it working in terms of telling you its story? And how quickly – going back to the Pirates example – does it set up what its tone and genre are really going to be?

And these are fundamental things. And if the movie is not working you’re going to notice it here.

**Craig:** Correct. And that’s why it’s so important to carefully watch a movie that is working for you. Because when it is working it is designed for you to not notice any seams whatsoever. You won’t notice cuts. You won’t notice that one scene has changed to another. You won’t notice transitions. It will all seem inevitable and purposeful and of a single whole.
So take the time to now go, OK, but it’s not. So let’s be amateur magicians that are invited to the magic castle and we’re asking the really good sleight of hand guy, OK, slow it down for me. Let me see it bit by bit, move by move. That’s how you’re going to learn.

**John:** Absolutely. The last bit of technique which I think is so crucial to be monitoring is how does the movie surprise you? Because by this point you’ve watched thousands of movies. You are a sophisticated movie viewer. The movies that succeed are the ones that still manage to surprise you. That you feel like you’re caught up with them and they still have some more tricks up their sleeve. So how do they do that? How did they deceive you in a way that got you to that moment of surprise?
And those are the moments to really go back and really figure out what was the set up that got you to that misunderstanding.

**Craig:** Setups, payoffs, misdirections, but also just as important clues, hints. We will not feel as satisfied if there were no hints. I was watching, so Knives Out, written and directed by our friend Rian Johnson, which has done extraordinarily well and for good reason. I watched it again and there’s a moment that happens during the reading of the will when the lawyer announces that the old man has left all of his stuff, all of it, to Marta, his nurse. There’s one little thing that happens with one character that is a clue. But you sure don’t know it at the time because it’s a clever clue. It’s a smart clue. And I thought, OK, there’s intelligence at work and there’s also an understanding of how fair play actually improves the misdirection and the surprise.

It is, again, a very calculated, careful crafted bit. And at its best moviemaking is about marrying this really hardcore calculating craft with a kind of inspired wild creative abandon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s what good things like Knives Out do.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think a crucial thing about Knives Out is to remember like, so Rian Johnson is both the writer and the director. That scene is incredibly well directed, but that moment that you’re describing is a written moment.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It was very clearly an idea that occurred in the writing stage of this. And so I think it’s also great to have a separate discussion about what works on a directing level, on a cinematography level, on casting, costuming. Think about all those things but as a separate conversation. Really just focus on what is it about the storytelling, about the writing that is working for you so well in this part of the process.

**Craig:** Whodunits are amazing for this. If you want to really study the craft of surprise and misdirection just watch whodunits. Because that’s all they’re about. I mean, they are about some other things occasionally. I mean, Knives Out has a certain commentary about class and what it means to be an immigrant in the United States and inherited wealth versus earned wealth. All of that stuff is there. But mostly it’s about the machinery of who did it. And that’s what’s so satisfying about it.

**John:** Well it’s also a meta examination of sort of the whodunit as a genre, because it ultimately is not so much a whodunit.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s sort of like we know who did it, but whodunit. And I love those movies because they really do instruct you. Comedies, also, I will say comedies are oftentimes–

**John:** Well, there’s setup, payoff.

**Craig:** It’s machinery.

**John:** Yeah, it’s machinery behind.

**Craig:** Study the machinery.

**John:** So we’ve watched the movie and now we’re trying to focus on it. Obviously if you have someone there to go have a drink with afterwards you can talk through all that stuff, which is great. But if you’re watching the movie by yourself what I found to be really helpful and I’ve started doing it much more for the last couple months is just one page of notes, bullet points of like these were the things I learned from this movie. And if it’s a movie that I loved, great. These are some things I loved and some things that this filmmaker was able to do in the writing that really worked for me and things I wanted to remember from this.

If it’s a movie I didn’t love, I find that also to be really helpful. This thing they tried to do just did not work, or I was confused by these moments. This isn’t a review. This is like what is it that you can take from this thing you just watched and apply to your own work. And what you said before about when you watch a movie that’s not working you get that moment of fear. Would I have made the same mistakes? And as I look at the movies that didn’t work, yeah, I definitely see some things where I probably would have tried that in that situation, too. So it’s helpful. It’s a chance to sort of have the experience of having made that movie that didn’t work and learn from it without having spent years of your life making a movie that didn’t work.

**Craig:** How nice is that, right? I mean, it’s hard enough doing these things. So if there’s anything we can do to save ourselves from a trap. By the way, we probably can’t. I mean, if we’re going to fall into a trap we’re going to fall into a trap. But studying other people’s good stuff but help I think but make us better. And if you do see, well, I guess here is how I would put it with the negative things. I do think of these things as relationships. We have a relationship with something. A movie. This is why very, very smart, cultured, tasteful people can have violent disagreements about the same movie. Because it’s not about the movie being good or bad, or you being a good or bad viewer. It’s about this unique relationship that forms between you and it, which is the sum of all of what it is and all of what you are.

So, when we watch these things and we find ourselves in a good or bad relationship, what’s worthy there is it will help us craft something that we have a good relationship with as we write. Because I’ve written things before where I just thought I’m fighting with this thing. I mean, this thing doesn’t want to exist, or it shouldn’t exist, but I’m being paid to make it exist and I am fighting with it. I am at war. And it’s not a good feeling. Figuring out how to have a good relationship with what you’re writing is something that you might be able to be helped to do by thinking about the good relationships you’ve had with other things.

**John:** Absolutely. One unique thing about the time people are living in now versus when we were starting out is that pretty much any movie you’ve really enjoyed you can read the screenplay of. And so if you have questions about how it worked on the page you can go back and look at those scripts. This is the part where you and I come clean and say we don’t read the scripts. We’re not reading those For Your Consideration scripts.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But they’re available there for people to read. And it was very important for me when I was starting to write to read a bunch of those scripts. And so definitely go out and read those scripts if you are new to the craft and learning how it all works.

Craig and I tend to watch movies and we can sort of see the script coming through there. So, obviously we don’t know what the drama was and what changed on the set, but we get a pretty sense of what the storytelling was on the page that led to that movie. But if you’re new to this that’s a great place to start. And so I would recommend watch the movie, read the script, and see how it compares. Or if there’s something that you’ve not seen, reverse it sometimes and read the script, see the movie in your head, and then watch the final movie to see sort of how the filmmakers did the job of converting that screenplay into a movie.

**Craig:** I mean, really what you’re advising people to do is their homework.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Do you homework, people.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is a job. They don’t just pay you for nothing.

**John:** And I guess–

**Craig:** You got to know stuff.

**John:** In my taking notes on movies that I’m watching now I’m just sort of trying to do my homework a little bit more. I feel like I’ve been letting it slide for a few years and just like watching the movie just as a fan. That’s why I like to watch a movie just to enjoy it, but then afterwards take those notes. I’m not taking notes during it.

**Craig:** Well that’s a really good way to keep yourself relevant also. I think as people get older sometimes we think of them as losing a step or losing some zip on their fastballs, as we say, but sometimes I think all that’s happening is they’ve just disconnected from the churn of culture and what is relevant and what’s happening around us that is new and different. Because people are constantly kicking over the old stuff.

Like for instance what Rian did with Knives Out. It sort of kicks over the old stuff a bit. And if you’re not paying attention to that you will just make more old stuff. Sometimes I read things, I’m sure you have too, where a studio will say we really like this idea. It’s not quite working. Can you fix it? And you read it and you think, well, I get it. This is a good idea. It feels like it was written 30 years ago.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** It just seems like whoever wrote this stopped at some point and you can’t.

**John:** Move forward.

**Craig:** Move forward.

——-

**John:** We are back in 2023. It’s time for our first One Cool Things of 2023. No pressure whatsoever. My One Cool Thing is a blog post that I saw a bunch of people linking to this past week. A lot of the newsletters I subscribe to had it. It’s called the Dangers of Elite Perception by Jarrett Walker. He is an urban theorist, a philosopher, a person who talks about public transit. His concept of elite perception is that the folks in elite positions often believe they actually understand how things work overall. They have this natural bias. They can only see what their experience would be.

The example he gives is that someone would say, “How is this new subway going to help me, a guy with a BMW parked in my driveway?” and not understanding not everyone has access to a car and that it’s not going to be useful for him necessarily. He’s not going to directly benefit but everyone else might benefit.

I think you can really broaden this idea of elite perception beyond just urban transportation to a lot of situations where it’s so easy to get caught up in the solipsism of everything in the world functions the way it functions to me and really stresses the importance of going out and just asking questions and figuring out different people’s perspective and needs and wants, because it’s very unlikely that your experience is the same as other people’s experiences.

That feels especially true for anyone writing stories, anybody who has to really think beyond what their immediate needs are. Just be aware that there’s a lot of other things out there, and just always be asking yourself, “I think it’s this way, but why do I think it’s this way? Is there some other people I can ask about how they really see the situation?”

**Megana:** That’s so interesting. It seems so obvious that if you’re designing public transit, you would be thinking about the people who are already using public transit the most versus yourself who owns a BMW or something.

**John:** I think the same thing can be applied to any industry-wide thing. We have a bunch of different people who are involved in the process of making movies and TV shows. The needs of one group may not match up with the needs of other groups. Recognize that if you’re pushing for one thing that you really want, it may have harmful effects to other people as well. Always good to be looking at what are the needs of the whole and not always prioritize what are your immediate needs.

**Megana:** I love that. I feel like as I learn more about design, it really comes down to asking more questions of people making sure that the design’s actually functional.

**John:** Absolutely. Some of the software stuff that we’re doing, I have persnickety taste, and so a lot of things in Highland or Weekend Read are very much what I want. It’s only when we actually have betas out there that other people can use or people who are trying to use the software for different things than I’m trying to use it for, that we can really see what’s useful. Ryan Knighton, who’s been a frequent guest, tests out our iOS apps to make sure they actually work for blind people, for example. We can turn on the simulators to see what would it be like for a blind person, but we are not a blind person who can use this app. He’s our guinea pig there and really lets us know what he needs.

**Megana:** Great. In keeping in theme of broadening point of view, my One Cool Thing for this week is a book by Gabrielle Blair. It’s called Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion. It’s this short, funny, thought-provoking read. You could probably finish it in one sitting.

In the book, she lays out these 20 arguments where she makes the case for why we should move the debate away from legislating/controlling women’s bodies and instead focuses on the role of men in sexual health. I think what she does so well is she takes away some of the political and religious weight that we bring into these conversations, and instead, really roots it in these biological and scientific arguments around fertility. I learned a lot from it. It was a really interesting read. I think it’s an important perspective to consider.

**John:** Absolutely. I think you’re right to tie it into this dangers of elite perception. I think we have this sense when it comes to fertility and abortion and all these things that it’s strictly just a women’s issue.

**Megana:** Really helpful way to frame this conversation.

**John:** It all comes from just an act that happened on one day that has these long repercussions, and that we should probably be thinking about that moment rather than all the other stuff around it.

**Megana:** She really gets into the science of the fertility and the difference between it. These are things that I have known and felt, but to see these arguments written out in this way was just really powerful. I think it’s really smart the way that she does it.

**John:** Great. I’m looking forward to reading it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, and two of our segments were produced by Stuart Friedel way back in the day.

**Megana:** Yay.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli as always. Our outro is by Martin Kubitsky. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You 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 weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can 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 the Scriptnotes book and other things coming in 2023. Megana, thank you for putting together this episode.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, this whole episode came to be because you were working on a chapter for the Scriptnotes book. We’ve not had a lot of big updates. We’re still not talking about delivery dates and things like that, when we have to turn it in to our publishers at Crown. It’s been fun going back through the archives and seeing who we were then and what advice we had. I’m sure our writing advice is pretty consistent, but other stuff has changed. What are you finding as you’re looking through things?

**Megana:** It’s interesting to also hear how much more confident you guys are in talking about these things as time goes on. There are kernels of truth that you’ve been saying since Episode 70 of the podcast, 500 episodes ago. That’s really cool, because I think that these lessons that you’re teaching are consistent, but they’re also really difficult to learn, which is why we have to keep talking about them.

**John:** One of the goals of the Scriptnotes book is that it can be a little bit timeless, that it’s really screenwriting advice that’ll be applicable in 2023 or 2043 hopefully. There’ll be things that’ll still be the same. Other stuff does keep evolving and changing.

One of the things that you and I have been trying to figure out is that… Over the next year, we’re going to be coming up on a new WGA contract. There’s going to be all the questions of stuff about what happens around that. That’s a difficult thing for us to do on the show, because we’re not that timely of a show. We record a week in advance sometimes. We can’t be especially responsive. We have international listeners and listeners who are listening just for the fun of it, who don’t necessarily need to know about the intricate details of WGA stuff. It’s not cool for them.

What you and I have been talking about is maybe just doing short little side-cast episodes that are not a full hour, not our normal thing, but are just about WGA topics that come up related to this new contract that don’t have to be about everything else. If you want a normal Scriptnotes episode, you’ll get your normal Scriptnotes episode on Tuesday, but there may be some extra little bonus things that come out not on a Tuesday, about just this WGA stuff.

**Megana:** Absolutely. I think the one common thing of everyone in Hollywood is they’re incredibly dramatic. As we are coming up to some of these conversations, I have been hearing crazy, wild takes. I think it’ll be nice to have a really measured, responsive way of hearing what’s true or not, because you’ve had so much experience with the WGA, at least negotiations, to shed some more light and insight into what’s actually going on.

**John:** Absolutely. I’ve been through many negotiation cycles. I’ve been on the negotiating committee. I’m on the negotiating committee this year. I can’t comment specifically about some stuff in this negotiation, because that’s just not appropriate. The only place that you’re going to hear the real scoop from the WGA side is going to be from the WGA itself and from the folks who are in charge of things. What I can hopefully do is offer some just broad frameworks for thinking about the timelines of things, how stuff works, because there’s terminology that is just facts, but it’s not necessarily obvious to someone going through it for the first time. I see here in the Workflowy you have two questions from people who’ve written in already. Maybe we can try to just break the seal with these two.

**Megana:** Chris wrote in and asked, “I’m a new pre-WGA arrival to LA and have been taking some general water bottle tour meetings with execs at various studios and production companies. During my last three conversations, the execs all mentioned that they were concerned about the uncertainty of a pending writer’s strike in May, with two of the three saying they believed it likely to happen. I’ve not heard this possibility discussed on any recent Scriptnotes episodes, and I’m wondering if you can share your thoughts.”

**John:** What Chris is experiencing is probably what Megana’s experiencing, what I’m experiencing too, is that when you have conversations in general meetings with people who work in the industry, film or television, they’ll ask like, “Oh, it’s getting crazy. There could be a strike.” People will weigh their percentage odds on what that’s going to be.

Here’s the very general thing that people are looking at and talking about timeline-wise is that the the WGA works under a contract with all the studios, all the big studios, everyone who makes film and television. That contract is renewed every three years. We have a negotiation to update and revise and renew and approve a new contract with the studios. The existing contract runs out May 1st.

In the time leading up to that, you would expect there to be negotiations with the studios between the WGA and the studios to figure out what that new contract will be. In some years it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be a very contentious contract. In some years it feels like a more contentious contract. There’s a lot of discussion this year about what’s going to be in that, but there are no proposals from either side. We don’t know what it’s going to look like. I just think there’s a general feeling that it looks like there’s a lot of stuff to be figured out.

We’re not the only people negotiating contract. It should be noted that IATSE, who represents most of the below-the-line decisions, they’ve already negotiated a contract. The DGA may be in negotiations to work on their contract. SAG, the actors generally go after us. There’s a lot of negotiations happening this year about contracts. It’s very normal for someone like Chris to be hearing these conversations as they go in and have these just general chitchatty meetings about what’s going to happen and thinking about head to if there were to be a strike, what that might look like. Megana, are you hearing these conversations too?

**Megana:** Yeah, and I would say that they’re a little bit further, where people are banking on the inevitability of it. I just heard someone at a party recently saying that they were planning a vacation around when they think the strike would happen, because to me that feels like putting the horse before the cart. Wait, no, that’s where you’re supposed to put the horse.

**John:** The horses generally do go in front of the carts, but you do you.

**Megana:** Putting the cart before the horse. You and I had an interesting discussion about this. I was hoping you could talk about why we shouldn’t presume an inevitability of a strike.

**John:** I don’t think this idea of inevitability helps anybody, because I think what it could do is back some producers and some studios into rushing or making some hasty decisions that they’re going to regret. I also think it doesn’t do well for writers, because if everyone assumes there’s going to be a strike, then maybe the other side isn’t negotiating with best intentions of actually averting a problem. I just don’t think inevitable is a great word to be thinking about, especially when, again, there are no proposals. There’s no deal to be discussing. It’s just a lot of speculation at this point. I don’t think it’s especially great to be doing that.

Listen. All writers I think at some point have this dream list of like, what if there were a snow day and I didn’t have to do my other work and I can just do whatever I wanted to do. That’s natural. That’s a natural fantasy in film. I’m sure executives have that too. Presuming that there’s going to be a giant blizzard and that the school’s going to be canceled for a period of time isn’t a great way to be approaching the works that you actually need to be doing.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh, and it sets you up for so much disappointment.

**John:** I don’t think inevitable is a great word to be throwing around here. I see a second question here from Liliana.

**Megana:** Liliana from Los Angeles wrote in and said, “A few episodes ago, Craig mentioned a potential writer’s strike next summer, and it made me curious what you all think it means for assistants. I currently work for a writer under her overall deal, and she warned me about the strike as well. If her deal ends, I’ll be out of a job. What can pre-WGA writers/assistants do to prepare? What was it like for them in ’07 and ’08?”

**John:** I can’t speak specifically to how things worked for below-the-line staff, writing staff, in ’07 and ’08, folks who were writers’ room assistants, who were showrunners’ assistants. What I will say is that I think given Pay Up Hollywood and our general better awareness of the issues faced by folks who were working in those rooms, there will be some more awareness of how do we keep those people solvent during any sort of work stoppage if it were to happen.

There’s not a lot I can advise Liliana to do other than to be frugal with her money, which is a hard thing for me to say, because I know she’s not probably being paid a lot, to be aware and open, and to be maybe ready to shift to something else if she needs to during a time if work were to ever stop, if there were to be some sort of strike or some sort of other action.

If there were to be a strike or work stoppage or a lockout or anything like that, if there is to be a disruption, it stops for everybody. Studios will look to trim costs where they can, and they will fire people. They will not employ people. In some cases, they are able to keep productions going for a little time, but it’s tough. Liliana could be out of a job for a time. I do recall something from the last strike that I was involved in. Things also ramp up really quickly again. It’s not going to be like the pandemic where you just don’t know what is possibly going to happen. We do know how to get out of these things and how to get back to things.

**Megana:** Resuming production after the pandemic had so many questions, and we introduced this whole new role of the COVID safety officer, but you’re saying that this is like, as soon as it’s back on, it’s on.

**John:** Yeah. After the ’07-’08 strike, the next day, rooms were reopening and things were getting back into shape. Did people need to figure some stuff out? Sure, but a lot of stuff did just resume, pick up right where it left off. Not everything. People did lose overall deals. There were other things that were trims and there were [inaudible 01:32:11]. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture, but it did kind of get back to the way it was, and just with a better contract. It certainly is doable. It won’t necessarily feel like a dramatic change if there’s a stoppage and then it comes back.

**Megana:** Got it. Basically, you’re saying maybe don’t think on it, but also put more money in your bank from your savings for the first part of the year.

**John:** Yeah. To go back to the storm metaphor, don’t count on a blizzard that’s going to close schools, but you should also have some emergency mac and cheese in your cupboards in case it does happen.

**Megana:** Yeah, or study for the English test that you’re hoping will get canceled.

**John:** That’s exactly it. Somehow I have a feeling, Megana, you were always prepared for those things. Do you long for snow days or do you rue snow days?

**Megana:** I think it depended. I loved a snow day, but if I had a big test, I’d rather just get that over with, because you’re delaying this terrible thing you have to do. We would usually have one really cold week in January where we would just have a week full of snow days, and that is incredible.

**John:** I loved a snow day where it was enough to close school, but I could still get over to my friend’s house and hang out. Those were the ideal snow days for me is the ones where… They were less fun as I got older. I just remember the grade school snow days just felt like, “Wow, this is a thing I can’t even believe has happened.” I definitely agree with your point where there’s times where you’ve crammed for the test and you’re so ready, and if you had to delay and then cram again, it just felt like wasted work, because you knew that you weren’t going to hold onto those facts about chemistry.

**Megana:** Yeah. This is all short-term memory. None of this is being-

**John:** None of this is sticking.

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** Now, our poor kids these days, they can just Zoom into school or they have to just turn in their paper digitally.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** They don’t get it.

**Megana:** Oh, wow.

**John:** It’s unfair. The world has become unfair.

**Megana:** That is one of the biggest joys of my childhood.

**John:** Hopefully, there’ll be no snow days that derail the delivery of the Scriptnotes book, but that is another thing. We’ll be working on it very hard. We don’t know exactly when it’s going to ship, but we know our delivery day is going to be sometime this year. We have a lot of work ahead for us. I’m not saying I want any sort of labor disruption, but if there is a labor disruption, that’s a little more time we can be working on the book.

**Megana:** I feel like that’s what we just advised against talking about.

**John:** I’m not saying I’m looking forward to it. I’m just saying a writer can’t help but theorize, if something were to go awry, this might be something I would do in that gap period of time and that might be something I’d work on in that gap period of time if it were to happen.

**Megana:** That’s fair. I just feel wizened from the pandemic that I know that that will never happen for me.

**John:** Absolutely. You always think, “Oh, I’m going to have all this luxury free time.” Then it’s like, no, I’m not.

**Megana:** Absolutely.

**John:** If there’s a strike, I’ll be marching outside of Paramount like I did last time. Who knows? Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 239 – What is good writing?](https://johnaugust.com/2016/what-is-good-writing)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 76 – How screenwriters find their voice with Aline Brosh McKenna](https://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 432 – Learning From Movies](https://johnaugust.com/2020/learning-from-movies)
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* [Dangers of Elite Projection](https://humantransit.org/2017/07/the-dangers-of-elite-projection.html) by Jarrett Walker
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/581standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/adapting-station-eleven).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 553 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Station Eleven was one of my previous One Cool Things. Today on the show, I’m very excited to chat with the series creator, Patrick Somerville. Patrick, welcome.

**Patrick Somerville:** Thank you for having me, John. 553, intense.

**John:** 553. 553 episodes.

**Patrick:** That’s a lot. That’s a lot of podcasts.

**John:** We finally get to you. Now in addition to Station Eleven, we should also say you are a TV expert, because you wrote on Leftovers, Maniac, Made for Love. You’re writing a new thing called The Glass Hotel, based on another book by the same author. I’d love to talk to you about adaptations in television and getting into it. You actually started as a novelist. Isn’t that right?

**Patrick:** I did. I never actually had any plan or thought that getting into TV and film was even possibly, honestly. I think 12-year-old me went down to the Brown County Public Library in Green Bay, Wisconsin and got George Lucas and Steven Spielberg biographies and desperately wanted to be a movie director and wrote letters to both of those gentlemen. I think when I was 16 or 17, I think being from Green Bay, just not having connections, I just was like, “Writing fiction seems like the way to go if you have no resources, no connections at all.” I went all in in that direction. It wasn’t until my early 30s after I’d published 4 books that a manager cold-emailed me and asked if I liked TV, and I said, “Yes, I do.” Then I ended up in Hollywood.

**John:** That seems impossible. I do want to get back into the origin story of you and how you started writing for film and television. I want to actually really drill in deep on Station Eleven and the process of going from here’s a book you read to here’s a book you’re adapting to assembling a writers room, putting this show up on its feet. I really want to do a deep dive in that. We haven’t had a chance to really deep dive on a project for a while. Also, we have some listener questions I think are right up your alley, because there’s TV stuff that I won’t know the answer to, but you definitely will.

**Patrick:** Maybe. We’ll see.

**John:** If you’re willing to, in the Bonus Segment I want to talk about making a pandemic show during a pandemic, because that just feels like an extra weird complication on top of complications.

**Patrick:** You’re right. That’s exactly what it was.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get back to… You were growing up in Wisconsin. You are a kid who reads books, like pretty much everyone who’s listened to this podcast. I’m guessing you were always a writer, you were always singled out for being good at writing, and yet you didn’t have any way to approach film and TV writing, so you started working in books.

**Patrick:** A lot of those details are exactly right about me. I decided to be a writer when I was seven, standing in I guess my 1st grade classroom. I had written a short story called How to Be a Molecule. I loved writing it, but the thing that got me was reading it out loud to the audience, to all my fellow students, and them clapping afterwards. Something in there, in that whole mix, just sparked me in a way nothing ever had and hasn’t since then, honestly. I didn’t know how to do it, but I think my heart knew what I wanted to be really early, which is a gift. There’s lots of people who I meet now in our business and otherwise. I think there’s something about those 10 years of insane teenager energy devoted to being a writer that I actually think matters.

**John:** If you were a person who was great at basketball and you didn’t spend those 10 years playing basketball, you wouldn’t have developed all the skills and the muscle memory for how to do these things. Like you, I was the kid who was writing in 1st grade and declared myself a writer. I didn’t know what I wanted to write, but I definitely knew I was a writer, because that’s the thing that I was good at that people kept telling me that I was good at.

**Patrick:** You were good at it. I think it wasn’t just feedback. You had some special ability with the language that put you ahead.

**John:** Now, did you study writing? Did you go through a writing program? How did you go from this kid who was writing a story in 1st grade to a guy who published four books?

**Patrick:** I was standoffish about the profession of writing, especially growing up in the Midwest. There’s a bit of an eye roll when you say, “I’m going to be a writer,” just because like, good luck, kid. My dad was a doctor. I had this plan that I would go and be an English and biology major and go to medical school and then also write fiction. I don’t know if it was my cover. Actually, I think I believed it until about sophomore year of college, when I just dropped the bio part, because fruit flies, counting fruit flies, John. I was like, “I am guesstimating these fruit flies right now. I don’t like this. I’m not detail-oriented in the right way. I’m going to kill someone if I’m a doctor, because I’m going to, I don’t know, eyeball something that I shouldn’t be eyeballing.”

I didn’t really get the idea of creative writing as a subject. I just was an English major. I just was like, “If I want to be a writer, I should just read as much as possible.” I was an English major. I didn’t really take creative writing classes, but I did then move to New York for a year in 2001. I was a waiter, and very quickly realized that I needed to be back in academia to somehow insulate myself from the job market and the regular world. It was also 9/11 three weeks after I’d moved to New York. It was a strange moment. I applied to MFA programs. I got into Cornell, which was a great one, and went up there for three years.

**John:** My perception of writing programs, and this is probably a broad stereotype, it’s just a bunch of people who were always told they were good writers, who were then put in a hothouse environment to… I don’t think it’s a Survivor situation. You’re theoretically trying to help each other, but at the same time there’s a competitive aspect between you guys. What was it like being in an MFA writing program?

**Patrick:** It’s a bit that, but for Cornell, it’s a very small program. The cohort is only four people of total fiction writers and four poets coming in each year. There’s eight total in the program. Unlike other programs, everyone’s totally funded. There isn’t a tiered list of funding. Everyone has the same deal. Everybody’s getting paid and getting a stipend to live in Ithaca and teach and write. We weren’t competitive for resources. We were friends. It was a pretty good vibe there, even though there were different approaches maybe to using the time from different people. I was young. I was 23. Everyone but one other incoming writer was 27 or 28 and had been in the workforce. I just was in psycho devoted writer mode. I would just hole up in my apartment for 12 hours, not see the outside world, and write a short story over and over and over again. I was feasting on my hermit fantasy of writing.

**John:** What was your output during that time? You say you’re working on a short story and rewriting it. On a given week or a given month, how much were you generating?

**Patrick:** A lot. More than is realistic to be good. Too much probably, but my imagination was really firing. I think it was that moment when your technical skills starts, just to get to a place where you’re like, “My taste thinks this is good.” It’s very frustrating when you’re young because you can’t… I couldn’t make it feel like the books that I read when I was writing yet, but it was coming. It’s just slow. In the end you leave with a thesis, which became my first book, Trouble, pretty soon thereafter. I probably wrote three times as much as that thesis.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** I probably wrote a thousand pages of fiction while I was in my MFA program.

**John:** Circling back to what you’re saying there, you were describing what Ira Glass describes as the crisis where you have taste, but you don’t actually have the ability to reach that taste. You know that you’re not quite good enough. Maybe that program gave you the chance to actually get your skills up to what the level of your taste was.

**Patrick:** It helped. Also, I’m funny in that my taste was stunted, I think, which was a gift also. It took me a while. I was behind in cultural matters, I think, in a lot of ways. Also, just the way my brain is built, I don’t overwhelm myself with self-criticism that much, which I think is unusual for writers. My problem’s in the other direction. I think everything is good. Then it takes a little while for my taste to settle in and be like, “Actually, that’s not good, Pat.” I didn’t crush myself, but I did know that my technical skill as a prose writer was a ways off from the caliber of fiction that I wanted to be producing. To me it’s just read and write and read and write and do reps in that time.

**John:** You started writing prose fiction. At what point do you become aware of screenwriting, or at least the form of screenwriting, and what it’s like to write for film and television? Was that during this program or after?

**Patrick:** No, it was 10 years later. One thing that was happening at Cornell, it was right when the last season of Sopranos was premiering. I got cable, I remember, so I could watch that. The Wire and Deadwood were both on then too. I was like, “What are these shows?” because I had loved a choice selection of TV shows, like Northern Exposure, growing up. What else? Six Feet Under. I guess Dream On from the old HBO days, The Larry Sanders Show. I had glimpsed kinds of TV that I loved. That year it just was like everything on HBO was as good as any book that I was reading. I was like, “This is the same.” I watched those then. I just continued on the fiction road. It wasn’t until that manager, Brian Steinberg from Artists First cold emailed me and asked me if I was interested in writing for TV that I read a script, I think. Then I downloaded Breaking Bad and Mad Men and Six Feet Under and Sopranos I think. I read them all, and I wrote a pilot of a TV show.

**John:** Right now, a bunch of listeners are throwing their phones across the room, that a manager cold emails you, a person who’s not even a screenwriter, to offer to represent you.

**Patrick:** He didn’t quite do that. He had read one of my novels, and he had noticed that the dialog I wrote lent itself to screenwriting and was curious. I was like, “Are you real?” I had to look up… I felt like it was a phishing scam or something, but it wasn’t. It took I think a year and a half to actually get repped by them and another year maybe for WME to decide they wanted to sign me.

**John:** You’ve now downloaded these scripts. You’re reading these scripts. You’re learning about the form. What were the first scripts that you wrote?

**Patrick:** The first script I ever wrote was called Very Honest. It was a pilot. It was an idea I had for a short story that I did as a show. It was about a right-wing radio guy, Bill O’Reilly at the time was the comp, who received a phone call from a Speak and Spell that basically said, “I know what you did. Tomorrow on your show I want you to say, ‘I am a fucking asshole,’ and I want you to turn your show into a show about how you are a fucking asshole. Unless you do this, I’m going to reveal what you did.” The guy’s such a dick that he has to make a list of the 10 people it could be who are blackmailing him. Then the shape of the show is him trying to figure out whether it was someone inside his family, his son, his daughter, his wife, or various people he’d run afoul and had problems with in the past. He does, in the end of the pilot, lean into his mic and start talking about what a dipshit he is, which I think is very wish fulfillment on my part at that time.

**John:** Now, this very much feels like it was in keeping with the HBO shows at the time. You have this antihero at the center of your story, a person who should be unlikable, and yet because we are laser focused on him, we can see through the bad stuff into the good side.

**Patrick:** I think actually what you just said is why it wasn’t a good project ultimately, because I didn’t have the vision yet to see the wall I was going to run into about how my political anger was aligned with the blackmailer, not the protagonist. I think ultimately that was going to end up having to make me humanize a bad person that I didn’t want to make a whole show or write a show about or watch a show about.

**John:** After this script, how many more scripts had you written by the time you got repped, by the time you started meeting on shows to be working on?

**Patrick:** I probably wrote a half dozen pilots in that period. This is right after my son was born, my first son. I was 32, 33. We were living in Chicago. We had no intention of ever leaving Chicago. It was Pat’s dabbling around in Hollywood things, I guess. When you’re a fiction writer on that side, you tend to get real skeptical of like, “Oh, someone’s optioning my novel. Oh, someone wants to work with me.” That stuff comes and it seems like it’s life-changing when you’re on the fiction writer side. Then you realize when you get here, oh, that was just someone taking a shot at something. There was never any chance of that turning into anything. When you’re a fiction writer, you’re like, “My life has changed forever. I am going to be rich. They’re making a movie out of my novel.” The movie didn’t come ever.

When I did actually get a job suddenly, on The Bridge on FX, via a Skype meeting with Meredith Stiehm and Elwood Reid, I had to go home from my office and tell my wife I’d just been hired for a job in Los Angeles that started the next Monday.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** She said, “What the fuck?” I ended up commuting for a whole year. I flew to LA on Monday mornings, went to the room all week, or set, came home Friday nights and helped my very, very brave and loving wife take care of our son.

**John:** The first show you’re working on is The Bridge. I know Meredith. This is an adaptation of a Scandinavian show. It was a show in its first year, right? This was still all being figured out. What did you learn being in that room for the first time? Being a novelist is always a solitary job. You’re just doing this all yourself. Suddenly, you’re having to be in a group environment, figuring out this show. What did you learn?

**Patrick:** So much. It’s almost like waves of learning, because I had no context. Unlike the other track of assistants, I think, witnessing rooms for a while and then getting it, getting the language, I was completely in the dark. I think I learned that listening is really good early. I learned that it was very, very, very good for me to come in at the staff writer level way down on the bottom rung and have to learn and do the work to learn how to be a screenwriter, because what I also learned is I had no idea how to be a screenwriter. I was good enough I think to earn my place in that room that first year. I didn’t really know what pitching was. I didn’t really know what a scene was. It took me that year of watching it and listening to understand that the fundamentals of fiction writing are just not the same as screenwriting. There’s an overlap, sure, but I needed to pay my dues. I think that first year was paying my dues.

**John:** The Bridge, you were on that for just one season, and then what was your next job after that? How did you get from that to your next job?

**Patrick:** I was at The Bridge for both seasons. Right around the end of the first season of The Bridge, Meredith introduced me to Howard Gordon. He had a need for a young writer in the 24 room for the limited series, the last episode of 24 that Jack was in. I went over and met those guys one day at the Fox lot. I was like, “What is going on?” because I love 24 and that kind of storytelling, more specifically, just the intensity and drive and clarity and just like da da da da da da da da da da. I didn’t know how to do it. I was a literary fiction writer, but I was a fan. That’s how I met them. They offered me a job. Right when I was coming back, I had to tell my wife I got another job. That’s when we decided to move, when we moved to LA. I went right from the 24 room back to The Bridge Season 2 room.

**John:** Great. That was between two seasons you were doing this 24. Was Leftovers the next show after The Bridge?

**Patrick:** It was. The Bridge got canceled in the summertime I think of 2013. I was always wanting to get to the showrunner level and not ready, but wanting nevertheless. I think when The Bridge ended, I was going down that road. I wrote a cop show set in Chicago that I was into and trying to get set up. Then The Leftovers came around. That show in particular, the combination I think, Tom Perrotta and Damon Lindelof, and also just it had everything that I wanted in terms of what the next step was. I didn’t think I was going to get that job. It took 400 meetings to even get to Damon to have lunch with him. We hit it off when we met. I think it was only after spending two years in that room with so many amazing writers that I realized I wasn’t ready for anything at that moment before Leftovers. I needed that time. I needed those two seasons to really learn the last things I needed to learn before I took a crack at it.

**John:** We’re working on the Scriptnotes book right now. Just yesterday I was reading through the Damon Lindelof interview I did a zillion years ago where he’s talking about The Leftovers room. It’s weird to hear Damon talking about this. This is pre-Watchmen. Leftovers was still on the air. He doesn’t send writers to set. He believes that he wants writers in the room. He himself doesn’t seem like he wants to go to set. He’s a creature of the room. How different was that from your experience on The Bridge or on 24? It just feels like there’s so many different ways that showrunners run shows.

**Patrick:** It was the complete opposite as what Meredith and Elwood did and thought. I was sitting on set within a month, and I didn’t know what to do there. I had too many jobs to enforce and not enough context. It’s a great way to learn, especially if you’re humble about it and read the room well and understand it’s the director’s set but you’re there to support the script. It was great. The thing about Damon’s point of view that I think is right is it does make it so the script has to be the script. That requires a very complicated system to make that true. It was good for me to have that two-year period where it was very room-centric, but now I am not like that at all as a showrunner. I am very present on set. I very much believe in having the writers come to set too. I couldn’t for Station Eleven because of the pandemic. I’m active on set, in rehearsal, in the dialog with the HODs and with the actors.

**John:** Now, I want to get to Station Eleven, but I don’t want to skip over completely Maniac or Made for Love. What were those experiences like? My hunch is that Maniac was completely scripted before it was shot, but maybe there was some stuff along the way. What were those room experiences and development experiences like?

**Patrick:** Different. Both of those shows were specific situations and different setups. Maniac was ordered straight to series before they had a writer. That was complicated. We incubated all 10 scripts in a room, the way I had learned it. They changed a lot once we got into prep. That largely had to do with the collaboration with Cary, my creative partner on that show. That was a whole different kind of experience that I would characterize probably more like a movie.

Made for Love, we had a great room and did a lot of the work up front. I think that’s the one where I learned, I think, about budget and production realities and how you have to protect your show and your people by acknowledging the cost of scripts at the front end and insulating them from being deconstructed during prep, because that’s a dangerous thing.

**John:** When you say acknowledging the cost of scripts, basically acknowledging what in the script is going to be expensive, what is going to push it over the edge, that’s going to force dramatic cuts or compromises down the road?

**Patrick:** Yeah. I think putting your producer cap on when you’re in the writers room or privately doing it, because it infects the conversation if you do it too much. You won’t end up in the right creative place. I think I was coming from more maybe a purist point of view where we don’t talk about that when we’re in the room, we’ll figure it out after. Now that I’ve been through it a few cycles, and I can even feel it, the way I pitch, the way I think about scripts now is some part of my head is always thinking what’s this going to cost and what’s the core of this beat and how are we paying for it in another part of the season, how do we get it back or how do we do it in the one tenth of the cost way. I think that’s just about experience too. You learn a new layer of this business every time you go through the cycle. That one, I was learning about being a producer at the front end.

Then Station Eleven came along right on top of the beginning of Made for Love. I transitioned over to exclusively being the showrunner of Station Eleven when we were in prep in the fall of 2019 in Chicago.

**John:** I want to talk to you about how you came upon the book and whether you knew from the start the shape it was going to be in. This is a book by Emily St. John Mandel, which I’d read early on in the pandemic. I think my first conversation with you, I DM’ed you on Twitter saying, “Hey, just read this.” I think my question was, “Does COVID exist in your world?” I was just really fascinated by how you were going to do this thing. How did the book come to you?

**Patrick:** I just loved the book. I read the book when it came out, because I very, very barely knew Emily from the fiction world. We had read together once in Chicago and had a great conversation, in which I said, “I don’t think I can support myself and my family or pull my weight as a fiction writer, even though my books are getting reviewed in the New York Times.” I was successful by all metrics, at least that I’d built for myself. I was broke. I was like, “Emily, math doesn’t make sense.” She was like, “I know. I’m going to try to write one more and see how that goes.” I went to the Bridge job, and about a year later I see her book just everywhere and on the bestseller list. I was like, “Oh, okay, Emily figured it out.” When I read it, I just loved it. I loved the element, the weird combination of post-apocalyptic Shakespeare at Hollywood, the idea of, I don’t know, the minutia of everyday life in the apocalypse instead of death over and over again. I loved it.

**John:** For folks who haven’t read the book or seen your show, what’s the quick elevator pitch version of the story? How do you describe it?

**Patrick:** This is how I pitched it. Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic show about joy. I think story-wise, a flu descends very rapidly on the world in our modern era and wipes out 99.9% of the population. Most of the book takes place around the Great Lakes with a traveling group of artists putting on Shakespeare plays to little villages 20 years later. It’s not about the horrible survival times. It’s about the rebuild times. It’s actually life-affirming, even though so many people die in the beginning.

**John:** It’s not The Walking Dead. I think whenever you hear post-apocalyptic, you assume it’s going to be this. I would say some of the choices you made in the adaptation make it a little less ominously The Walking Dead. You made some clear choices. I’m wondering when those choices came about. For example, keeping Jeevan with Kirsten through much more of the story, the changes with the prophet, who Miranda is and how she comes upon the graphic novel. How early on into this conception of like, oh, if I took this book and could make it into a series, when did you know you were going to make those changes?

**Patrick:** Right after Maniac, I called Emily, because I had heard that the book was coming available again. They’d been trying to make a movie script out of it and failing. I got a meeting on the books with Scott Steindorff, the producer who had the rights for something else. I just went to his office, and I was like, “Hey, Station Eleven, how about a limited series?” I told him what I thought it should be, and he agreed, and we made a deal with Paramount. I was in an overall with Paramount then. They paid for a mini room for me. It was just two weeks.

All those ideas, the big ideas that you’re talking about, the Jeevan Kirsten stuff, their separation and reunion, the change of Tyler as a standard cult leader into a different kind of cult leader, and how to handle the airport, the big ideas, we cracked a lot of the huge ideas in that two weeks. That was enough to help me write the first two scripts on my own. That’s what was the document that I sent to Hiro when he signed on. Then we sold the show, all on the energy of that early development.

**John:** Hiro Murai, who’s the director who did the first two episodes.

**Patrick:** Yeah, and really a creative partner at the development level for months and months and months beyond his duties doing prep for those two episodes. It was a very close partnership I think to crack that show, the tone of that show.

**John:** I want to go back to this mini room you put together, because it’s two weeks. How many writers did you have together to tackle this?

**Patrick:** It was just four writers. It was Nick Hughes, Gina Welch, Mauricio Katz, and Kim Steele and me.

**John:** I recognize two of those writers who wrote scripts later on on the show. What were you actually doing in that room? Was it just filling up whiteboards of stuff? Was it chatting? What happened in that room?

**Patrick:** There was one whiteboard. There was a big couch and a table and one whiteboard. We just would chat. We were just talking. They had all read the book. We just came together and like, “How would we do this?” It was just putting the big ideas up on the board.

**John:** The end result of this two weeks, you come out of there, and did you then need to pitch to Paramount and to other places about what the show’s going to be? Obviously, Paramount had gotten involved here, but had it already been set up at HBO Max? What was the status of the show at this point?

**Patrick:** It was not set up at HBO Max. It was an in-house Paramount development. I’ve always gravitated more toward writing scripts than pitching verbally. I think I’ve gotten much better at pitching verbally, but I like to lead with the text to show people what the show is. I wrote those two. We talked with Scott and the early producers about them. Eventually, right in there, the head of Paramount Television changed over and was just a reset for everyone who’s under an overall. Nicole Clemens came in and really doubled down on Station Eleven and endorsed the project and said she was very excited about it. We lined up the pitches once Hiro was attached and went around and pitched in April of the following year. I sold Made for Love in between in that story.

**John:** Just to make sure we’re clear on the timelines, so you’d gotten together this writers room. Two weeks coming out of it, you had a whole bunch of notes. With those, you wrote two scripts. You wrote these first two scripts, then attached Hiro to direct, and then went out to pitch?

**Patrick:** Yeah. I wrote Episode 1 while the room was going, in the background of the room. Then we internally talked about it, the producers and the studio, and everyone decided we wanted a second script. That took another month. I think I was on my own for that. Then Hiro, and then we went and pitched.

**John:** The decision about the second script was that the first one was entirely in present day, and the second episode jumps forward 20 years. You really could get a sense of what that world was going to look like and feel like.

**Patrick:** We needed the second world, but we also needed to understand the lead, adult Kirsten.

**John:** She’s not in that first episode. She shows up at the very end.

**Patrick:** Yeah, we needed a full episode with her. I was into it. It was hard. It was daunting to do it by myself, especially because you are faking the world building. When you’re there, you have guesses, and you have the novel. I didn’t know some truths about the traveling symphony or about the characters yet. You have to leap of faith your way through a script in those early days.

**John:** You’re taking us around to the various streamers and networks. How quickly did you end up at HBO Max? It sounds like based on your experience in the shows that had informed you so much, HBO felt like a great home for this.

**Patrick:** HBO Max didn’t exist.

**John:** That’s right, so just HBO.

**Patrick:** The first day we pitched was to HBO and to Warner Media, which I didn’t really know what the difference was. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure they did. Then throughout the next week, we pitched to all the places and had a number of offers that coalesced down into Netflix and Warner Media. We went with Warner Media for a lot of reasons. Sarah Aubrey was there, who I knew from The Leftovers and also from the sale of Made for Love. They felt like a good home for the show.

**John:** Cool. I want us to start talking about the pilot script for this. In the show notes for this, people can see, we’re going to have links to the pdfs of all eight episodes so people can read through the scripts and really see what the show looked like on the page. I really want to, on this episode, talk about the pilot script and some things I’ve noticed from this. Episode 1 of 1, Wheel of Fire. Why is it called Wheel of Fire?

**Patrick:** There’s a burning Ferris wheel at the end.

**John:** That’s true. There is a burning Ferris wheel at the end. There you go.

**Patrick:** That term has some older connotations as well. The wheel was going to be a motif and theme.

**John:** For the traveling circus.

**Patrick:** For the whole show. I wanted it to be in there. I just thought it sounded cool too.

**John:** It does sound cool. Do you call this a pilot or not a pilot? If it’s a limited series, does it actually have a pilot or it’s just the first episode?

**Patrick:** I don’t know. It depends who you’re asking, because they ordered the series straight to series, but that doesn’t mean straight to series, I think. There’s always an opportunity for the streamer to bail at any time. I did call it Episode 1 on principle. I think collectively 1 and 3 operated as pilots for the show.

**John:** Just because we’re not looking at TV production scripts very often, this second page is revision history. The draft we’re actually looking at is the third white revisions. As I look through this revision draft, there’s 12 revisions here. There’s a noticeable gap here. The second pink revisions were December 1, 2020, which would’ve been production-ish. Then more than a year later, we have second yellow revisions on 1/4/21, which would’ve been production post-pandemic or once you can get back into development. We show also what pages are revised in each of these scripts, which is so helpful, so people can zoom right to what might be different.

**Patrick:** You know what happened between 12/1/20 and 1/4/21.

**John:** The actual pandemic, the thing that eclipsed a lot of what you were trying to talk about in the show.

**Patrick:** Yeah, but we also shot the episode between those two dates. The reason it kept getting revised after we had shot it is there was one piece left to do in Canada. We had to keep adjusting and adjusting and adjusting that.

**John:** What is the sequence that was left over from that first episode?

**Patrick:** On page 53, after we’ve gone to space, we’re coming back, and scene 47 we land on a stage, different version of a stage than where our story began. We see wagons. We hear actors. We’re hearing lines from the play King Lear. Then we’re finding people playing King Lear, but not at all in the context that the episode began in Chicago. This is the traveling symphony out in the wild and Kirsten playing the same part Arthur played at the beginning of the episode. That was the wheel. We were trying to close that loop in the script.

**John:** It was meant to be a clean bookend, where it starts with King Lear and ends with King Lear. That’s not how the actual episode ends, as I recall what I watched.

**Patrick:** It’s not. It’s not at all. We shot this. Our costume team made an amazing new set of costumes for Lear, and Jeremy shot the shit out of it. Mackenzie and company crushed it. When we put it all together, we didn’t feel like it was quit capturing the bang of the year 20 feeling that we needed. I think actually, this is so superficial seeming, I guess, but simple, I don’t know. We shot this at night. That was a problem, I think, because all of Episode 1 is dark and night. I think we needed it to be day. We needed to see the green, and we needed to see the lushness of year 20. We needed to know, just to know that that was Kirsten inherently.

**John:** You needed someone to yell Kirsten and her to look over.

**Patrick:** Yeah. That’s actually a piece from Episode 4 that Helen Shaver shot. It’s a scene that we come back to by Episode 4. One of our editors had that idea. What’s so great about it and what Hiro loved too is that the book is there. That is the linking piece that has been the thread through the whole episode.

**John:** The book plays a much more important role in the series than it does inside the book, I think partly because it’s a visual medium. Seeing who has the book, who has exposure to the book becomes incredibly important in the series. You’re letting the audience know, pay attention to this graphic novel.

**Patrick:** Who wrote the book was the other thing. We had to write the book, basically, to make the show make sense to us.

**John:** That’s a lot. Second page of the script, or sorry, third page I guess, is the cast list, so showing who is in our episode. We have a scratch through for the conductor, Lori Petty, because she’s no longer in that first episode because of changes that you guys just described. That makes sense. Locations list, this is where you’re talking about the producer hat and where the money’s going. Locations that you’re only going to see once that are expensive are costly. People that are getting the script, who is going to be focused on the location list? Obviously, your location manager, but why else is this page important in the script?

**Patrick:** I think your production designer and art department is going to sit down and get a feeling for this spread of the episode. We talk about world building in terms of big fantasy and big tent pole stuff, but every episode has world building to it. What is the world of Episode 1?

I think for Ruth Ammon, our production designer, Frank’s apartment was critical, not just for this episode, because we have a big VFX shot in it, but for the whole series. Lake Point Tower is a very specific building that we fell in love with and communicated a lot about the show. You can see it stacked there, how many Lake Point Tower locations there are. That’s a pretty quick sequence. That’s on the way in, which we shot really there. In the lobby we shot. To the elevator we shot. Then we built Frank’s apartment. That one is on our stage. The hallway we also built. The stairwell was a different stairwell. It’s a very important sequence, stacked as dense as the theater, which we also constructed out of four Chicago theaters.

**John:** As you watch the whole run of the show, you start to realize, oh, these are the standing sets that we’re coming back to. Frank’s apartment is an incredibly important standing set that we’re going to come back to. The airport is incredibly important standing set that we’re always going to be able to base ourselves around. Even as a person who was just watching the show, the producer brain does kick in, and I start to realize, okay, these are the things they actually built or found or headquartered in versus some place they traveled to to shoot for a couple days.

**Patrick:** Actually, the crazy thing about Frank’s apartment is we trucked it from Chicago to Toronto during the pandemic and rebuilt it as well. It traveled. Our standing set traveled.

**John:** Anything can travel. On this last page here is a day and night breakdown. Tell me, who is responsible for making these pages that are going at the front of the script? Who was doing these pages?

**Patrick:** Katie French, who had gone from our writers assistant in the room to our script coordinator through the whole run of the show and who ultimately was promoted to staff writer right at the end of production. She’s in the mini room for The Glass Hotel now.

**John:** Fantastic. Finally, on the sixth page of the pdf, we’re actually at the first page of the script. Some things I notice right from the start, you are a double spacer. You hit that space bar twice after every period. That’s fine.

**Patrick:** That’s correct.

**John:** Some people do.

**Patrick:** We can talk about it if you want. We don’t have to talk about it.

**John:** There are no wrong choices about spaces. I used to be a double spacer. I famously gave up my double spacing and never looked back, but nothing wrong with-

**Patrick:** I’m not as passionate as I once was.

**John:** You might be the last one. You might be the last one.

**Patrick:** That’s fine too. It’s just I think that I’m wrong. I actually think that I’m wrong. I keep doing it. I don’t know why. I can’t tell you why.

**John:** Because you have muscle memory. If you try to stop it, it’ll feel weird for a sec, and then you’ll get over it.

**Patrick:** What happened to you? Are you a fundamentalist now? Are you open?

**John:** I used to be a fundamentalist about double spacing, to the degree which I would actually do a find replace in my script before I turned it in, make sure all the spaces were double spaced. Then I started to realize I’m the only person left doing this, because double spacing went away completely on the internet. Html actually gets rid of double spaces. At a certain point I was like, “You know what? I’m going to stop fighting this fight.” I gave up. It’s smooth sailing. Here’s the reason why we don’t need to do it anymore. Our eyes are used to seeing capital letters start sentences. We don’t need that double space anymore. It’s just a vestige of how we used to do things with typewriters, truly.

**Patrick:** As insane as I am about the way the script looks personally, I don’t care also. Every writer who’s ever been in my room is rolling their eyes right now because I made them do it. I think I’m done fighting this fight. It’s stupid.

**John:** I want to talk about how good this first page looks, because I answered a question on Twitter this last week about… Someone said, “Is it wrong to not have any dialog on your first page?” Here’s a first page that has no dialog on it.

**Patrick:** Not a great sign. Not a great sign, I got to say.

**John:** If you’re going to have a page without any dialog on it, your choices of when to bold stuff is helping a lot. It’s helping me get my eyes down the page and make me less terrified about reading just a wall of text. A thing I notice as I read through this, because I just read this this morning, versus watching the show, is we have post-apocalyptic guy, post-apocalyptic boy, who are set up as these recurring characters throughout the pilot. They don’t actually recur throughout the pilot as shot or as shown to us. When did that idea drop down or diminish?

**Patrick:** In post we shot them. Hiro was having an instinct that there was something wonky about them coalescing in his head. He liked them too. It was almost too cute in the way that it was pretending to be The Walking Dead. They looked unlike any of the traveling symphony people. they looked ratty. They looked like the dad and the kid from the road. We were trying to tell a little bit of a story with the boy. I think Hiro’s instinct ultimately was the right one, which was it’s too much story freight to be asking the audience to track too soon about people who don’t matter in our story. Hiro I think also knew that these opening moments are about place, not about people. The ferns were doing the work. We didn’t need a boy and a dad too.

**John:** A thing you do on the second page here… I’m going to just read aloud this paragraph. “Somehow the boy didn’t even hear that. Watch out, boy. Where is your father? You are about to be eaten by a man in rags who has teleported from another network’s very earnest, self-serious prestige cable limited series about pain, starvation, and how all humans are horrible at their core.” You spent five lines just talking to us as the reader about what your show was opposed to another post-apocalyptic show would be. I like it. It reminds me of… Lost scripts would do that, where they would actually just really give you a sense of, this is what it’s meant to feel like as a person watching the show.

**Patrick:** I think obviously I watched Damon do that for years. I had been doing maybe a version of it myself. It fought the screenwriting advice that’s pretty standard, which is don’t do that. I think the reason I do it, I have to do it, because my writing is really, really dependent on tone. Whether or not a scene, any given scene I write works is entirely up to getting the tone right. Therefore, I think I need the person reading the script to understand it a little bit more than what the very skeletal version of the scene would do.

Some of it maybe reflects my anxiety changing over from the novelist to the screenwriter and not knowing how to make tone happen because of the scene, if that makes sense, or I’m still learning, I think, in that regard. I think part of it is also these are sales documents. You have to attract your crew. You have to attract your actors. You have to get people to want to buy it. The script has to be a read in and of itself.

**John:** Yeah, because you’re asking someone to take an hour of their day to read the script. You’re trying to make it a worthwhile hour of their day, and not having them skim, not having them skip through things.

**Patrick:** In this case too, post-apocalyptic genre comes with a lot of baggage. I think very early I wanted to make it very clear that we both had a lighthearted and wry point of view about all this, and we’re not doing the thing that that genre often did do.

**John:** I don’t want to talk about every page. There’s a moment you have happening on page 8, near the bottom of the page. “Jeevan moves away, crosses past Arthur’s body, and asserts himself between it and little Kirsten, who’s still staring, fascinated and unable to look away.” You’re doing some very specific blocking of two actors. It works really well. I remember that moment working as shot. On the page I can see he’s trying to physically do something here to keep this girl from seeing this. We’re learning about both Jeevan and Kirsten in this moment. I just wanted to single that out, because it’s the kind of thing that I think a lot of writers feel like, “Oh, that’s overstepping my boundaries. I’m directing too much from the page.” It’s not at all. It’s absolutely essential to make that beat work.

**Patrick:** Blocking is unbelievably important. Whole scenes can crumple when the blocking changes. On top of all that, this is just how I imagine. I think that blocking says a lot about Jeevan and who he is and how he’s safe and how he’s driven fundamentally by concern for the well-being of a stranger. That’s happened twice now in the last couple pages. I think in terms of the director conversation, any confident director will just say, “That blocking sucks. Let’s do it this way.” Any confident writer showrunner who knows what they’re doing will either say, “You’re totally right,” or, “No, we got to keep it.” I think if you’re all there doing the same thing, the blocking will end up what it needs to be.

Hiro, Christian, every director, Jeremy, they all knew they could change it if they needed to, from what I did. I often was lurking too. I would be like, “The problem with that though is this line doesn’t make sense anymore.” We worked together. Half the time I’m wrong on the page here, but I was doing it for a reason all the time. I think that’s the key in the collaboration. If everybody knows that, then we’re good. We changed a ton of stuff left and right.

**John:** What you’re doing on the page has set the tone. It’s the pre-tone meeting in terms of what is this scene actually really about. You can tell because of the specific stuff that you put in the scene.

**Patrick:** I find directors, actually that’s what they’re looking for, what is the core essential truth in this scene. I think the hard thing about being a director in Hollywood is getting scripts that just don’t speak to that at all.

**John:** We could focus for another hour on the script, but let’s actually turn our attention back to the room, because you’ve now set up the series. You are going to be going straight to series, but you need to actually write all these scripts. This is where you’re assembling a new room to put together the scripts for this 10 episodes. How many weeks was that? How did you find your writers? What was the process for putting together a room on Station Eleven?

**Patrick:** It was a 20-week room.

**John:** 20 weeks, that seems like a lot.

**Patrick:** It wasn’t enough. At the same time, yes, in today’s conversation I think that’s just… Leftovers, Season 2 was 42 seeks, and Season 3 I think was 44.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Patrick:** We moved slow. When the script came out of those rooms, it was the episode. There wasn’t any fluctuation in prep or in production. That was the show. We moved slow. Damon really believed in collective consents. We wouldn’t move forward if someone was bumping anywhere. We would overcome it as a group. You often would bog for three days on one scene because of that.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** The problem though I faced at the beginning of this fall of 2019 was that because of Hiro’s coming schedule with Atlanta, because of my various entanglements in Los Angeles where Made for Love was shooting, the room was starting, and we had 20 weeks to go. We had 2 scripts, and we needed to output a bunch of them. I was getting pulled to Chicago and a set in LA. We had originally planned to shoot Station Eleven much later but had to pull it up into the fall of 2019 because of what Hiro’s coming schedule was going to be. It’s crazy to think about it, because it created a very difficult situation for the room. I was not in it all the time. I think that made it hard for the room sometimes. It’s crazy to think, had we not done this, we never would’ve made Station Eleven, because there’s no way in hell HBO Max would’ve said go ahead if we had shot nothing and the pandemic descended.

I built the room out of writers I knew and new writers to me. Nick Hughes came, a writer named Shannon Houston, who’s brilliant, who I’d been talking to for a while, Cord Jefferson, Kim Steele, Will Weggel. My former assistant also came in. A few other people. We were underway together, and September rolled forward for about a month before I started popping around to different places, and they tried to keep hacking away at it.

**John:** Looking through, just on IMDB, some of these people who I don’t know, it felt like the room was bottom-heavy. So often with small rooms, you see here’s a consulting producer or these are near showrunner levels. These were a lot of people who felt newer, or newer to their career.

**Patrick:** That’s true.

**John:** A deliberate choice?

**Patrick:** Sarah McCarron I forgot to mention, who’s also a brilliant writer. A deliberate choice? Maybe not consciously aware. I trended that way. Honestly, all these people are brilliant people who are in the room. We had plenty of brain power to get the show baked enough. I think a mistake I made as a younger, inexperienced showrunner was often to do this, and I think honestly reflects more than anything my own insecurity being able to run a room and being intimidated by the idea of someone more experienced than me in the room with me. I think this room reflects the end of that time for me when I was starting to realize that it was a mistake to not embrace as much experience as I could around me and take the wisdom and help of people who’d done it and been through 10 cycles of production. It was silly, but I think I didn’t quite know that that was happening consciously. I don’t think if I time traveled to me and confronted me about it, old me would admit that that was what was happening. Does that make sense?

**John:** Absolutely. We had Liz Meriwether and Liz Hannah on the show recently. They were talking about the rooms for their two limited series and how incredibly important it was to have a writer on it who’s like, “Okay, that’s all well and good. Here’s how we make a TV show.” It was important to have a writer who just really knew how stuff got done. That was useful.

**Patrick:** I thought that was me. I think I was overestimating that too. You need help. You need experience. You need people who have gone through it a bunch of times who can guide you. It doesn’t mean that you’re not a good leader, I think. I think it probably means you’re a better leader to know that.

**John:** What internal documents or tools were you using to get the show figured out? I assume there was a whiteboard, because you’re actually recording this in the room where you put the room together, I guess. You have whiteboards, but what were the internal documents or what things were you guys looking at as a group?

**Patrick:** We had a bunch of stuff going at the same time. If I had to do it all over again, I would’ve started in a different order. We had whiteboards. We had a board that had a guess at what the 10 episodes were wanting to be, what the flow of the season was wanting to be. One thing that was very right was Episode 103 firmly planted as Episode 103, which later became a point of discussion a lot about whether that was the right place for it. We always thought that Miranda’s story needed to be right there early, even though it was a departure from the central story. The break was going for whatever episode we were on. Damon always likes to do a scenes we like board, which was the pre-break conversation for a few days. There was that going. We only got through the break of Episode 5 before the show was in production, 5 or 6.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** What happened was the amount of world building was unbelievably gigantic, more so than I think I ever thought it could be, between Tyler, the airport, the way to separate Kirsten from the troupe, the way to reunite everyone, the scenes of the show. There was a lot to talk about. I think it was like, “I’m going to go out for a hike,” and then walking up to the base of Mount Kilimanjaro and realizing at the last minute that you hadn’t brought some important climbing gear or tents and stuff. Do you relate to that experience?

**John:** Oh my god, yeah. Backstory behind all of this is that my first and really only experience running a television show was a disaster, back in the year 2000, 1999, where I was the hotshot young screenwriter who set up a show at the WB and was running the show that I had no business running, and just this slow-motion car crash of trying to do all this. I’m nodding as you’re saying that fear of having more experienced people in the room. I didn’t have more experienced people in the room. I surrounded myself with just the wrong folks.

**Patrick:** In my case, I was surrounded by the right folks, but I think I needed to be surrounded by more folks.

**John:** Exactly. You were too lean.

**Patrick:** I’m not sure my health was okay as those months of prep continued and I kept flying back and forth on red-eyes and not sleeping. I definitely was thinking that I was totally okay, but I was, I think in hindsight, slowly getting pulled into a whirlpool down. I think it was one of those things where we had just enough. I had the support I needed at the critical times I needed it. I think Hiro and his team and Christian and the HODs we had hired together in Chicago were so good. They were so brilliant and so pursuing the right questions, the times I wasn’t there in Chicago. The studio and the network ultimately had my back, just enough to get us rolling.

When we were rolling, I don’t think we ever missed on a day of dailies. I don’t think there’s a bad take in anything Hiro shot for the first 28 days of production that he directed 1 and 3 for. I think that’s when the Schrodinger’s box of is this showrunner a conman or not gets opened and that you start to show episodes, and they work and they’re good. Our cast also, they were so incredibly grounded and on it emotionally. Everyone knew what they were playing so well, so intuitively that I was learning from them as they shot scenes, to tell you the truth.

**John:** You said before, you couldn’t have actually waited any longer, because the pandemic would’ve happened, and you would never be making the show. The show would not have existed if you hadn’t started shooting before the actual real-life pandemic. In a perfect world, what would you have wanted to do or what would you want to do in the future. Would you want to have clear separation between the writing phase and production phase? What would’ve been different about how you would set up a show like this?

**Patrick:** Station Eleven is special in that the way in which things happened in the wrong order created the magic of it. I don’t mean to say that it should be that way. It’s hard to think about… For example, Danielle Deadwyler shot the end of Episode 3, her speech in the boardroom in Malaysia on day 3 of our shoot.

**John:** That’s crazy.

**Patrick:** I had that to aim for as an idea of the show always. I couldn’t have written some things without seeing what Danielle did. The right way to do it to me is the room outputs all the scripts that are at production draft level and ready to shoot before prep starts. That’s the right way to do it, I think.

**John:** That’s the fantasy. You’re actually prepping a thing you know how to make.

**Patrick:** Stability too, for the actors, for the sake of the departments and everyone’s ability, because people below the line in our business can pivot amazingly. Sure, they can do it. Do you want to do that every day to people? No, it won’t get you the best show. It’s not okay. It’s ultimately the showrunner’s responsibility to be good at his or her job and prevent that from happening. I’m learning. I’m trying to get better at that.

**John:** My cohost, Craig Mazin, has been away for the better part of a year making his own show up in Calgary. He’s obviously having to do a lot of writing on set and producing on set. Talk to me about your experience of being on set as the writer, creator, showrunner, and what you see as your function there.

**Patrick:** There needs to be someone there who just knows the answer. That’s both a creative thing and I think a leadership thing and a morale thing too. Scripts were still changing all the time, even the next year when we were in Toronto. Somehow in that year gap and having the two episodes and having written it all, something had internalized in me where I just understood the show. I felt like I was ahead of everyone in a weird way, because I just had been in the scripts. I felt like I could come to set, I could see if something was off, maybe with the blocking or with set deck, or someone needs to be there with the director when he says this scene isn’t quite right in the writing. There’s got to be one person on set who knows. I felt like every scene of the show, there’s some little nudge or change or alteration that I think I’m not sure it would be unified in the right way if I hadn’t been there.

**John:** Talk to me about post. Were you posting while you were shooting? Was post up in Chicago and then Toronto or was it back in Los Angeles? How did all that work?

**Patrick:** The first part of the show, the Hiro episodes, we shot them and then we posted them linearly. That’s when the pandemic descended in the middle of the post process for those two eps. Then post came back up online in January right when I flew to Toronto. A few weeks into the shoot, here’s my morning. It’s 5 a.m. in Toronto. It’s dark. It’s 1 degree. Go to the stages, which is an airport and a facility near an airport. I enter my trailer, because it’s COVID. I have three monitors up. I have post back home, which will come online at noon. I have the sets, which is 150 feet away from me, but I’m not in it, because it’s COVID. I would need a reason to be in it, which usually just means your rehearsal and then I go back to my trailer. Then I have prep meetings on the third monitor happening about concept meetings for Episode 9.

**John:** Zooms.

**Patrick:** Yeah.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** My day is in there and then going to set and then coming back into the trailer and then going to set, in that case when Lucy needed me. We shot Episode 7 first.

**John:** Throughout all this whole process, what is HBO Max seeing? What is Paramount seeing? Are they getting outlines? How do they know what the show is that you’re making?

**Patrick:** By Part 2 in Canada, they had all 10 scripts.

**John:** That’s true.

**Patrick:** On Part 1 when they had a total of 3 scripts. They had 1, 2, and 3 when we shot 1 and 3. Soon after we started, I published 4 and 5. Then I published 7 during the January and February shooting period. I went and gave a big presentation and pitched the entire season out right after we wrapped that first iteration. We got behind in the room. We were supposed to have outputted more than that. That’s not on the writers room. That’s just on me not wanting to publish a script that felt not right yet. You know that thing, where it sometimes feels like it’s going to do more damage to your show to publish the wrong script than to publish no script? Like I said, the world building feat was just more gigantic than I think I had realized. That was what was happening slower back in the room, back in LA. Ultimately, that’s what I used to write the rest of the show, the work that the room did.

**John:** At what point do writers who are in that room get assigned, “Okay, you take this script. You take that script.” When is that decision made?

**Patrick:** That was pretty early. I think everyone in there got a script, and everyone knew what their script was going to be. It was tougher for 7, 8, 9, for Kim, Sarah, and Will, because the break, we really had only gotten to an outline place for those ones by the time the room was wrapping. What I think the room ended knowing and getting right was what emotionally each episode needed to be and a basic break of it. Then I think in all those different cases we continued, or I continued to do the writing.

**John:** Great. We have a listener question here which is right up your alley. Megana, do you want to help us out with that?

**Megana:** Nicole asks, “I have my first interview ever for a staffing position on a legal drama. I listened to your episode Advice for a New Staff Writer and was just wondering, do you have any tips for preparing for the interview? This is a new series that’s just been ordered. Any tips of advice would help.”

**John:** Pat, you’ve been through both scenarios here. You’ve been the new person interviewing for a job, and you’ve had to interview someone who wants to be a staff writer on a show. What advice can you give for Nicole? What should she be thinking about as she goes in that room?

**Patrick:** I’m thinking back to that Skype I had with Meredith and Elwood. I’m trying to remember. I’ll say it this was as the hirer. I think what I want is someone who seems to be both sophisticated socially, someone who can read a room and feel their way through a situation, just getting the sense of that, the life skill, and then someone who seems to have clear ideas, whether or not they agree with me. I think it’s very easy to get into this thinking that you’re supposed to serve the showrunner. Then sometimes that feels like without critical thinking. I don’t know. You need to show them that you’re not necessarily pliable, you’re not just there to please their imagination. It’s a tough needle to thread, honestly, because you got to be a good worker too. You got to, quote unquote, get it, whatever the fuck that means.

**John:** When Nicole goes into this room for staffing, how quickly does she bring up how much she loves the script that she read, the other writers’ previous work? What are the kinds of things that Nicole should just have cued up, ready to go when she walks into the room?

**Patrick:** I think if someone’s read the script, and if someone says one sentence… It doesn’t have to be, “I loved it.” It just has to be something that catches me like, whoa. If someone says, “I think this show is about blank,” and it dings a bell in my head as the creator, then I’m really paying attention. If someone has a thematic understanding of the story in a way that feels new to me, that’s really great. I don’t think it’s about praising it. It’s about understanding it. That’s when I feel as a showrunner someone’s going to come in the room and really help me.

**John:** Great. As the showrunner, you’re looking for somebody who can help you. That doesn’t just mean flatter you. It’s somebody who actually can bring something that you sense that you need. How could Nicole communicate that I guess is what I’m trying to get to. What does she say?

**Patrick:** I think it’s about the read of the script, honestly, what do you think this show is about, because the person doing the hiring in that situation doesn’t know the answer yet, usually. I think the anxiety best served is how do I help the showrunner know what this show is and find her vision, find his point of view.

**John:** Wonderful. It has come time in our podcast for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article I’ve just read this last week about the time in Ethiopia. I know that different cultures will have different calendars, just for cultural reasons. If you’re in Ethiopia, 1 a.m. is when dawn happens. Dawn is 1 a.m. It goes through 12 hours and then starts over again after 12 hours. It just made me realize it is so arbitrary that we start our days at midnight, in the middle of the night, as opposed to starting it at dawn, which feels like a very natural way to start your days.

**Patrick:** I got a good one.

**John:** Tell me.

**Patrick:** I’m not an expert, but this is what I’m doing lately in the last week. I saw a tweet last week that was a quote from Bell Hooks about friendship. I texted my friend who knows a lot about Bell Hooks, and I asked her about the quote, and she put me onto All About Love. What the quote was about, and why I’m fascinated, I’m about to dive into Bell Hooks, I guess, what she was saying is we live in this world of systems right now that we’ve already lost in a lot of ways in terms of power, just as a democracy. This is why friendship is so important, that we should treat friendship like the stakes are as high as anything else.

In the pandemic, I found it was really easy to let go and not put energy into a certain tier of friendships, the kind that you would maintain in regular life. I don’t know, I just started to feel that loss as very important, myself personally. Showrunning does this to you too. You can’t keep up with friendships properly, which it’s nefarious. It’s actually really important to find a way to keep balance in your life. Read All About Love, but also listen to Bell Hooks on friendship. That’s my one thing.

**John:** Your show is a lot about friendship as well. Arthur’s friendship and the trials that he goes through with their relationship is crucial story points there.

**Patrick:** It’s weird stuff for TV. It’s like Clark saying, “I miss friendships. I just miss friendships,” which just kills me still the way David Wilmot did that, because I do. There’s usually not a good way to frame that in TV and movie storytelling, but it’s a powerful emotion if you can get to it.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is Pedro Aguilera. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Patrick, what are you on Twitter?

**Patrick:** I am @patrickerville. It’s Patrick E-R-V-I-L-L-E.

**John:** Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find all eight episodes of Station Eleven scripts that you can download and read at your leisure. You’ll find the transcripts there and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 are about to record talking about making a pandemic show during the pandemic.

**Patrick:** Don’t try it.

**John:** Thank you so much for coming on the show.

**Patrick:** Thanks for having me. 553 represent.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** We’re back. Patrick, as I said in the main body of the episode, I first reached out to you during the pandemic because I had just read Station Eleven and wondered how the hell you were going to make a show about a pandemic after a pandemic had happened, whether you were going to acknowledge COVID. I think you said, “We’re in a separate timeline where that pandemic never happened.” Is that where you ended up?

**Patrick:** Yeah. What’s crazy was that our date I think for the pandemic was December 12, 2020.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Patrick:** That was just what we had done well before it was even happening in Wuhan. We were shooting then in January in 2020, and then the show premiered December 16, 2021. I had no idea when you texted me or when you tweeted, DMed me… You couldn’t tell. We were watching cuts of our own show and being like, “I literally can’t tell if this will be tone deaf or not a year from now.”

**John:** It came out at just the right time. It came out at a time where it’s like, oh, it’s beautiful, and a memory of a different world, in a weird way. The most jarring moments for me watching your show were when we were in the hospital with Siya, his sister, and no one is wearing masks. I’m like, “Of course they’d be wearing masks.” At the time you were shooting that pilot, that first episode, it was reasonable that they wouldn’t be wearing masks.

**Patrick:** The other crazy thing about that scene is the kids are wearing masks. That was the thing in the script. It got erased by the pandemic. What was chilling about that scene was the idea of seeing children in masks. Now that’s normal. It doesn’t read right anymore, but it doesn’t matter.

**John:** I’ve finally gotten to the place in watching film and television where I don’t bristle at, “Oh wait, these people are standing too close to each other in the elevator.” I’ve gotten past some of that early pandemic fear. A question for you is how far were you into shooting, what was the last thing you shot before you had to shut down because of COVID?

**Patrick:** I think our last day of shooting was Arthur’s house at the dinner party. We were finishing up the dinner party and the fire. That was the pool house on fire. That was somewhere around February 20th or 25th of 2020. What’s crazy to me is the first shot of the show, the theater that’s full, that’s practical. You can’t shoot with that many people in a place anymore. That’s 300 people. Our before is the before, if that makes sense. We shot all that in the time when no one had heard of COVID yet.

**John:** That’s wild. Talk about the day when you had to shut down, because I’ve talked with other friends who’ve literally had to… They got the call, and 10 minutes later they’re packing up the trucks. What was it like for you?

**Patrick:** We were in post. It was very memorable, because post is a place where you go down into this hole, and in reality it doesn’t exist. It’s alarming to say this, but that morning, Friday the 13th, my wife had stopped by with my two-year-old daughter to say hi in the morning. It was like, this feels scary, but we don’t know what’s going to happen. We had just I think heard the term shelter in-place a day or two before when San Francisco closed down. That’s how oblivious and not at the same time we were.

Hiro and I, we had really been grinding. We were at some microscopic stuff in 101. We worked all day with Isaac Hagy and the editor of Episode 1. Right around 5 p.m., Hiro’s producing partner and one of our EPs on the show, Nate Matteson, just burst into the bay. His hair was just wild and everywhere. It was scary, because you could see a person who had been spending the day in a different world, and he was like, “What the fuck are you guys doing?” That kind of energy. He had to come down, I think, to properly communicate to us that we had to go. It was scary. It was really human. We’d been through a lot together making the show. I hugged Hiro goodbye in the parking structure. I don’t know when the next time I saw him in the flesh was, a long, long time. We got back to work I think a week later online and continued editing Episode 3.

**John:** This was in Los Angeles or this was in Chicago?

**Patrick:** That’s LA. That was all in LA.

**John:** That’s LA. You were basically the grocery store cashier, and someone had to come and tell you, “Oh no, no, you should probably just leave. The world as you knew it no longer exists.”

**Patrick:** Is this that thing, that flu thing? Greatest day player of all time, that dude. Holy shit, he’s good. Yeah, that was me. That was all of us. We were at work. We were head down in the show.

**John:** Talk to me about the decision to go back into production. Were you ever worried that they were just going to pull the plug and say, “We’re just not going to make the show at all.”

**Patrick:** As much as everyone was about everything.

**John:** Because of the subject matter. Basically, you were thinking-

**Patrick:** No. That part I wasn’t worried about, because 1 and 3 were just too good, I thought. Also, we always were set up to be… If any show was going to be continued, it was going to be ours, because it was about rebuilding. It was about connection and joy. It wasn’t about pain exactly. I think if either of those episodes had been distressed episodes, that would’ve been a problem. I think Hiro, the cast, everyone delivered. I think people just wanted to see the show. What we had to decide was where to shoot. We had to wait for a while, and then we had to make a choice about where to go, because it didn’t feel like Chicago was going to be safe on the timeline they wanted to shoot. That was the big conversation over the summer.

**John:** Had there been no pandemic, you would’ve done those two episodes and then immediately gone into shooting the rest of the show or was there always going to be a break between the two episodes that had been shot and the rest of things?

**Patrick:** We had eight weeks more prep in Chicago and time for me to write. We were going to come back up in the late spring and shoot year 20 stuff with Mackenzie in and around Chicago. That plan went out the window.

**John:** All the prep you’ve done for Chicago is moot, because you had to prep completely from scratch in Toronto to figure out here are our exteriors, here are our locations, here’s how we’re going to do everything.

**Patrick:** It wasn’t moot. It wasn’t moot, because the prep we’d done in Chicago was conceptual about the show. It was about the space station. We hadn’t even gotten to the wagons and the airport yet. It was deeply valuable, that prep in Chicago. The loss of those eight weeks was-

**John:** You knew what you wanted to do. You didn’t know what the specific locations were and such.

**Patrick:** We hadn’t scouted yet for the next stuff, so we didn’t lose that. The loss of that eight weeks was horrific. We needed that. We got some of it back in the summer online with art and costume. We needed all of it. We were playing catch-up all through the shoot.

**John:** I wish you no pandemics for the next things you’re going off to shoot. You’re in the room right now for the next Emily St. John Mandel book?

**Patrick:** We’re working on The Glass Hotel. We’re working on a different version of The Glass Hotel that fits into the Station Eleven world that we made.

**John:** It’s set around Miranda, right, so a character who exists in Station Eleven?

**Patrick:** Yeah, that’s right. I think unlike in the novel, the role that Miranda plays in the story is much bigger.

**John:** Great.

**Patrick:** It’s the financial collapse in 2008. It’s new zone for us. It’s also, this is my favorite, it’s a mystery. We’re learning all those new kinds of story moves, but in our way.

**John:** That’s great. How far are you into the process of the room, this new product?

**Patrick:** We’re early. We’re finishing up what’s been a six-week mini room. We’re going to output the first two episodes and we’re going to go talk to HBO Max about making the show.

**John:** That’s awesome. Good luck with that. Absolute pleasure talking with you, Patrick.

**Patrick:** Thank you, John. This has been great.

Links:

* Follow along with the [Station Eleven pilot](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/S11_101_3rd-White-Revisions_6.15.21_Collated.pdf) discussion! Read all of the Station Eleven scripts [here](https://johnaugust.com/library).
* [Station Eleven](https://play.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GYZWoOQ6F9cLDCAEAAABP?camp=googleHBOMAX&action=play) the series on HBO
* [Station Eleven](https://bookshop.org/books/station-eleven-9781594138829/9780804172448) the book by Emily St. John Mandel
* [Patrick Somerville](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5821126/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/patrickerville?lang=en)
* [All about Love: New Visions by bell hooks](https://bookshop.org/books/all-about-love-new-visions/9780060959470)
* [Time in Ethiopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Pedro Aguilera ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/553standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/writing-as-acting).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, oh, right, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 568 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, there are actors and there are writers, but deep down, what is the difference between writing and acting? How can writers use the techniques of acting to help build effective scenes? We’ll also discuss retirement, cutting characters, and how the central dramatic argument applies to TV. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll discuss the future and what we owe it.

**Craig:** Nothing!

**John:** Nothing. No, we owe the future something. It’s a question of how much and how much we should prioritize near-term solutions versus long-term solutions and other such things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Great. We’ve got some follow-up here. First off, Writer Emergency Pack XL, which we launched last week, is now fully funded. Thank you for everyone who backed us on Kickstarter for that. You still have a couple, maybe 20 days left to back us if you’d like to. We funded it in the first couple hours, which is great.

**Craig:** Great. Congrats.

**John:** Thank you for everybody on that.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Hooray. Some more follow-up. Last week we were discussing burials for some reason and coffins and concrete vaults.

**Craig:** Just stupid.

**John:** We have some feedback on how to do that in a more environmentally sound way. Megana, help us out.

**Megana Rao:** Ben wrote in and said, “I just heard the September 19th episode, and your dislike of caskets/concrete burials reminded me of the Green Burial Council and other organizations/movements. In case you didn’t know, there’s folks trying to reduce the carbon footprint of laying people to rest. I’m definitely planning to be memorialized this way. Hope you check it out, and maybe I’ll be a One Cool Thing or Premium bit.”

**John:** Great. We’ll put a link in the show notes to Green Burial Council. There’s also an LA Times article about human composting as an alternative, where they put you in a muslin bag and stick you in the ground. I’m for it. Good for me.

**Craig:** Until we get the instant atomizer, which would be fun. I would love to be atomized.

**John:** Cremation takes a lot of energy. It’s not as much energy as making a casket and burying it. As energy becomes cheaper and cheaper, cremation will get cheaper and cheaper too.

**Craig:** I would like to be shot into the Sun.

**John:** That would be nice, but that’s experience. Isn’t that what Johnny Depp got in trouble for with Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes?

**Craig:** He tried to shoot them into the Sun?

**John:** He put them into space.

**Craig:** Oh, Johnny Depp.

**John:** Oh, Johnny Depp. That’s the most controversial thing he ever did.

**Craig:** Otherwise, spotless record.

**John:** Spotless record. Hey, let’s go right to our main topic, which is actors and writing. This is all based around this article we ran in Inneresting this last week, which is an old blog post of mine from 2010 where I was talking about my then young daughter was trying to practice how to seem sad, how to cry. It’s this thing where little kids, they’re like, “Oh I’m so sad, I’m crying,” and they’ll cover their eyes, but they’re not really tears. They’re trying to get you to see things. It got me realizing that she’s trying to act, she’s learning how to act.

I was thinking about how as writers we are acting all the time. We’re all experimenting with how do I portray these emotions that we’re putting on the page rather than on the stage. Craig as a writer and actor, I thought we might have a few minutes to talk about the experience and what you see as the similarities between the craft of pretending something is real for the purposes of writing a scene versus pretending something is real for the purposes of staging a scene.

**Craig:** Thank you for introducing me correctly as a world-famous actor. I think that actors probably have as much diversity in their approach to how they perform as writers do in their approach to how they write. Some writers are organizers and thinkers, and then they write. Some writers are just, “Wee!” and they write and see where it goes. Most people are combinations of the two.

I think that holds true for actors as well. There are actors that are very thoughtful and are perfectly aware that they’re acting. This would be the Laurence Olivier, “Have you tried acting, my boy?” school. Then other actors seemingly can’t do it unless they disappear inside their character and just go bananas. Everybody’s different. For me, I guess my approach is pretty similar to the way I write, which is to think about what I’m supposed to be feeling and thinking and then feel and think it.

**John:** That is a relatively modern incarnation of the actor’s, I don’t want to say method, because that breaks into a whole conundrum of other things that are involved in the actor’s method. The idea that a performer on stage is supposed to be believably in the moment that they are portraying isn’t actually all that old of an idea. If you look back to old plays, there was a more presentational quality to it. You were playing to the back seats there. Now, also I think partly because of the arrival of film cameras, we’re in close, and we’re hearing whispers, this sense of like, oh this is a real person in a real situation is much more crucial. That’s often what we’re trying to do on the page as well.

**Craig:** Over time, I think there has been a general movement towards realism, which was not always a thing, as you point out. For a long time, drama was never intended to be real. It was entirely representational, and it was intentionally so. It would’ve been strange for people to see things presented hyper-realistically. They would’ve been bored to tears or confused. As time has gone on, we seem to have found our way more and more towards a very naturalistic style, some more than others.

I think that holds true for writing as well. The vast quantity of television I think has done more to advance a naturalistic writing than anything else, because there’s so much of it. It all seems to be trending in that direction, not all of it, but some of it, and to varying levels of success. Naturalism and truth, trying to create something that seems real and believable, while yet being not at all real, and rather dramatic, that seems to be the name of the game.

**John:** It strikes me that so much of what we learn about how an actor prepares goes back to whatever their education was, whatever the techniques they learned along the way. This is how an actor approaches a role. They’re doing some work to figure out, okay, this is how this character stands, this is how this character sits, this is how this character relates to a space, this is the vocal affectations this character uses, this is how they approach these things. To some degree, we may do that as writers, but writers don’t tend to study the same way that actors study. I think there is some things we could probably take from that. Actors practice. They go through rehearsals playing many different characters. They have to swap roles. They have to make changes on their feet. They have to respond in ways that I think sometimes as writers we’re not being forced to do that.

So often as writers, we’re always being pushed on structural things or like, “Oh, this scene should move here.” We’re always looking at the bigger picture. We’re not necessarily doing that in-depth scene work, which I think is part of the reason why we keep coming back to these Three Page Challenges, is that we’re really looking at, moment by moment, how are these dots connecting on the page.

**Craig:** You can do similar exercises with acting when actors perform a scene and other people watch and then they critique. That’s what acting class generally is. It’s like endless Three Page Challenges or scenes. You’re getting at a fundamental difference. Acting is interpretive. Writing is purely creative, meaning unless you’re adapting, even in an adaptation, you are creating. There’s nothing there, and then there is something there. That is very different. So much of what acting is is about the choices you make of how to interpret the text that is there. That’s where it gets interesting.

You’re right, they do have to incorporate elements of themselves that we generally don’t, like their bodies. When we’re writing, our bodies probably do very similar things, form terrible postures. Not you, I guess. The rest of us. You apparently get even better posture when you write. Everybody else is just slouching and tightening up their neck muscles. It’s all mental. Acting is very physical.

One of the things that you do think about when you’re acting is what do I do with my arms. The answer is nothing. Unless you have something to do with them, just ignore them. Normally, during the day, when you’re talking to people, your arms are just there. You don’t think about them. Suddenly the camera goes on and everyone’s like, “My arms. What do I do with my arms?” They’re just fine. They’re fine. You’ll be okay. Just ignore them.

Figuring out all that stuff is about making choices based on something that has already been created, and you are bringing it to life. That is an aspect of things that we don’t quite do, or sometimes I think we also misunderstand how complicated that process is.

If you are a writer who is dealing directly with actors, the best advice I can give you is respect what they’re doing, even if you think it looks silly or sounds silly or sounds pretentious or confusing or pointless. Doesn’t matter. Respect what they’re doing, because it’s what they need to do to get where they need to go. You, when you were writing, didn’t need to do anything other than the stuff in your head, including get dressed, take a shower, or stand.

**John:** Let’s talk about the stuff that you were doing in your head as a writer, because I find that so often, I’ll be doing press on a movie, and they’ll say, “Oh, what was it like to have this person play this character?” or, “What was your relationship with the director? How do you talk to the director about the characters?” and stuff like that. I find myself saying, yeah, it’s a weird thing that I am all the characters in the movie, and then one by one, they get assigned away. It’s not like it goes through the directors. It was my character, and now suddenly, it’s their character. I have to watch what they’re doing with their choices of the choices that I made. There is this strange handoff.

I played Edward Bloom for many, many years. I played Will Bloom for many, many years. I knew internally how all those scenes worked and played and what the dynamics were that are driving them. Ultimately, I can do no more to affect that down the road than what I could put on the page and what I could help communicate to the actors if they ask me questions, but I can’t do that for them. Ultimately, it is entirely in their hands now.

**Craig:** You will find yourself landing in a strange middle world where if you are directing things you’ve written, you have to pay attention to the intentions and the imagined performance that went on in your head, because it does inform how things ought to be. You also then have to pay attention to the reality of the actors in front of you. Then you have to guide those actors towards what would be a better performance that gets more truly and cleanly and interestingly to the heart of what you’re trying to do but isn’t necessarily accountable to the imaginary performance in your head, but rather accountable to them. It’s a really interesting emotional and mental gymnastics routine you have to do inside your head.

On top of all of that, there are trust issues, because you need to make sure that actors trust you. Trust is everything. They’re not going to trust you if they feel like you have an ulterior motive. For instance, let’s say that I cast a movie with, we’ll go with Harrison Ford. I shot a week with Harrison Ford, and then he died. Sorry, Harrison. In this story, you die.

**John:** Bleak.

**Craig:** We have to replace Harrison Ford, so I get somebody else. Who would be a good replacement for Harrison Ford, by the way? Who should I go for here?

**John:** That’s a good question. Not too far off in range. Josh Brolin?

**Craig:** Great. I get Josh Brolin. We’re halfway through the day, and I keep saying things to Josh Brolin that make him think, “He just wants me to be Harrison Ford. I get it. He doesn’t want me. He didn’t want me. He wanted Harrison Ford. Harrison Ford died. I can tell he’s just pushing me to do a Harrison Ford impression, but that’s not what I do. It’s not even fair to me. I’m Josh Brolin. I’m my own person, my own actor. I need to get to this part naturally, or else it’s going to stink. It’ll just seem like I’m doing a bad impression of another guy. I’ll never be connected to it. No one will like it anyway.”

That’s kind of the same thing. If they feel like you keep steering them back towards whatever was going on in your head as you were writing this, then that is not the same as acting for them. That’s just chasing your phantom, because the phantom that you have in your head, they don’t have to be accountable to being in physical space, standing there, doing anything you don’t want them to do. They literally disappear into your blind spot when you don’t want to see them. You have to work with the people there. They have to trust that you are working with them and not someone else in your head.

**John:** A thing that strikes me that actors and writers are both responsible for doing, that’s a difficult skill, and they’re analogous skills, is they have to remember and forget at all moments. For example, actors have to forget that the camera is there. They have to forget that one of the walls is missing. They have to pretend that the space is real so that it feels natural, all the while also being aware of where the camera is, because that is important, also being aware of what the other people’s lines are, even though they need to be able to react as if they’ve never heard those matching lines before.

Writers have to be aware of what is the purpose of this scene, what is going to happen next, what’s going to happen 20 pages from now, why is this scene here, and at the same time, make it feel like this is just a natural moment that’s happening between these characters that is not there just to set up the next thing. That kind of remembering and forgetting at the same time is a skill.

**Craig:** Good actors, I think, know that they need to divide their attention in weird ways. They need to have an external understanding of what the whole point of the scene is. Good actors need to understand where they sit in the scene. Are they in the middle? Are they the person that’s being shot against the middle? They need to know why the other person’s saying the things they’re saying. Then they need to forget all that and just be them. They need to know those things before they can forget those things.

When you are writing, you are hearing music in your head, and you’re putting notes down. Then you show up with performers on stage. There they are with their instruments. Now if you’re directing, you’re a conductor. Your job is to make sure that they’re all moving in the same fashion, towards the same goal. There you have it.

**John:** I like it. Director’s conductor. Composer is writer. Actor is the first chair violin.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Good analogy. Reaching back to another Inneresting blog post from the past, this was on cutting a character and saving a scene. It actually feels related to what we’re talking about with actors. I found myself in a situation where I could not make this scene work. I realized there was just one more character in there than I could actually support. Once I cut that character out, the scene felt very natural.

Similarly, just this last week, I was working on a scene where because of changes, I actually had to add a character into the scene. It was important this character be in the scene. It was impossible to take the existing scene and just add that character in. It seems like it should be the simplest thing, like we’ll throw one line to this new character. It just never works that way. A development person’s note might be just to stick them in there. If you just stick an extra body into a scene, it tends to fall apart. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this great video of Patton Oswalt on King of Queens. He was a small part of King of Queens.

**Craig:** He was the best. He was the greatest.

**John:** There’s this one scene where Patton Oswalt is in this scene. He has to be there, but he has no lines for a long time. He chooses to stand just completely still the entire time.

**Craig:** Frozen.

**John:** Frozen.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**John:** No one notices.

**Craig:** No one notices. I could be wrong, but I feel like when he did it, he didn’t tell anyone either. It wasn’t like he said to everybody, “Hey, let me just do this. It’ll be funny.” I think no one knew. It’s wonderful. He’s the best.

**John:** He’s fantastic.

**Craig:** I think he’s such a great stand-up comedian. He’s got a new Netflix special.

**John:** Let’s plug his Netflix special.

**Craig:** He’s not even on the show. I’m plugging his stuff.

**John:** One day.

**Craig:** One day.

**John:** Let’s talk about that. Craig, you’ve had this experience throughout your entire career, I’m sure, is that so often the challenge is not just what is the scene about, it’s who’s in the scene and how do you support those people being in the scene. There are times where this would be so much easier if I could get rid of this character. You can find a way to get rid of them if you can. Other times, the simplest version is impossible because of who’s there.

**Craig:** Everything is a souffle. I say souffle all the time. When things are arranged correctly… It’s very hard to get things to be arranged correctly. It’s very hard to make a souffle. It’s hard to get the souffle to rise. Then someone comes along and says, “Oh, but just throw one more thing in,” or take one thing out or do this or do this or do that. It seems very small to them, and it’s not. It makes the souffle fall apart.

By the way, this goes right to acting again. There are things you can do where you might ask an actor to do something, and you can see them tense up. I think for a lot of people who don’t quite get what’s going on there, they may think it’s just a defensive actor being defensive, but sometimes it’s just, in fact most of the time I’d imagine, it’s just I’m going, “Oh, you’re going to mess up the souffle. It’s a little tiny thing, but you’re messing it up. Now I know it’s just not going to be as good.”

There’s no magic to removing a character and suddenly everything’s amazing. You probably put that character there for a reason. There’s nothing wrong with being right. Sometimes we’re right. We’re allowed to say, “I know, it seems like you could just move that one little piece, but as it turns out, it’s a load-bearing wall.” Just fill in whatever, souffle, structure, metaphor you’d like.

**John:** I can talk about the sets I’ve been on in my experience as directing, but I’m curious what yours has been. Do actors know when a scene is working, or do they sometimes not know when a scene is working? I’ve definitely seen cases where the actors are convinced this is great and golden, and what we’re seeing on the monitor is like, “Oh, that’s not the scene. We’re not there yet.”

**Craig:** It’s been my luck or good fortune to work with actors that tend to worry that it’s not working than rather just be thrilled with themselves. We’re all the same way. We’re all very nervous and trying to make sure it’s great. There are times where it’s easy enough when you’re behind the camera to go, “That’s it. Cut. I have it.” Then they’re like, “Do you? Do you? Do you? Do you?” “Yes, trust me. I have it. We have it.” There are also times where they may say, “We had it on take two, and now it’s take five.” There can be disagreements.

By and large, I think good actors question more than they presume that things are great. They are reasonably concerned that they’re going to look stupid, because no one’s going to see me. They’re not going to see me. They’re not going to see the screenplay pages. They’re going to see the actors. In movie theaters, they’re enormous. If they look stupid, everyone makes fun of them, especially now. Now you can’t even be stupid and be made fun of briefly. You’re made fun of forever. You live forever on the internet.

**John:** You become a meme.

**Craig:** You become a meme.

**John:** You’re this little slice out of there.

**Craig:** It’s not fair.

**John:** I would say that like you, more cases, the actors are not convinced it’s working when it actually is working, because they’re just not seeing what we’re seeing. They may feel and think about the space between this character and I, the lens is just seeing things differently. I’ll grant that.

There’s also times where an actor is making a choice that they believe is great and it’s working, and it just comes across differently. Those are just difficult conversations to have, because you as the director, you as the writer, you know how all the pieces also need to fit together.

So often, actors are only thinking about this one moment, this one scene, where am I at in this one scene. They don’t know emotionally where they need to get to, what came just before this. Those can be the challenging conversations to have, because it’s not even necessarily that they’re making a wild choice for this moment. It’s just that choice is not going to fit overall what needs to happen around the scene.

**Craig:** I do try and talk about the moment before and the moment after. I think the moment after is just as important. I just remember everybody what’s happening before and what’s happening after, because we don’t shoot things in order, especially when you’re shooting across lots of episodes, where it’s a lot of stuff. Yes, there are times where they think something is spot on, and maybe you disagree.

Other people are different, but my general philosophy is that directing actors is a little bit like being a parent and thinking I can guide my kid as I’m raising my kids. I’m not saying actors are children. Just go with me for this. I can teach them some things. I can give them some values. I can say I don’t like that or I do like this. Basically, they are who they are. I can gently nudge this way or that. What I don’t want to do is parent them in such a way that I’m saying you should not be who are you, because that’s not possible, and everything will go bad.

I think with actors, you can nudge, you can massage. If you know they have three different gears, and they’re in the wrong one, get them to the other one, but don’t ask them to be in a gear they don’t know. Don’t fight against their natural nature. Oh my god, I just said natural nature. Let’s leave it in. I think people need to know how bad I am at talking.

**John:** I’ve had a few mistakes this episode too, so I think we’re all good.

**Craig:** No. There are none in evidence. See, there are none in evidence. Mine will stay there forever.

**John:** Craig, what you’re really saying though is that casting is absolutely crucial, because casting is when you actually decide what is the fit between this actor or this role, and who is the person who can basically… They have the innate sense of how to play this character. Within that, you could make some changes. You could amp some stuff up and down. They have to be able to be that person on the camera.

If you have the wrong person, it’s just not going to work. That’s why sometimes you start shooting with somebody and recast them, because that’s just not going to work. It’s just not going to fit. There’s nothing you could do to change that person’s performance along the way. They were just the wrong person in that role.

**Craig:** There are times when somebody above may send a note. This didn’t happen to me, happily. There was a movie I worked on where this did happen, where the studio said, “Listen, we’ve been watching the dailies for two weeks, and we think the actor should be more like this.” I wasn’t directing the movie, but I remember thinking, “That’s not going to happen. You don’t even want it to happen.” In fact, the worst possible thing would be if that actor went, “Oh, okay, got it,” because then they wouldn’t be themselves. They would not be acting out of their own body and face and brain and heart. They would be just acting towards something artificial. You got to dance with the date you brought.

**John:** I had a situation early on in my career where there was an actor in a role, and the big studio note came like, “This is not the character we want. This is not the performance we want. This is not working.” I had to go and try to do as much as I could in what days were left shooting it, but also in ADR to bring that performance up to a more comedic place. We did get 10% of the way there, but ultimately we had to recast and re-shoot. That was the wrong person in the role. I hadn’t picked this person for the role. It had been forced upon me. The other alternative could’ve been, if we had to keep that actor in the role, was just rewriting what they were doing, because it just wasn’t going to work with this actor.

**Craig:** That’s okay. While it may be disappointing, I’m sure it would be disappointing for that actor, the only thing worse than being recast is being forced to be something that you can’t be, and every day, day after day, 12 hours a day being told you’re not doing it right, do something that you don’t understand how to do. That would be terribly frustrating.

**John:** Our friend Rachel Bloom is in a new show called Reboot on Hulu. It’s delightful. In the second episode, there is an actor who’s cast in a role onto this rebooted TV sitcom. She’s wildly miscast. Everyone has to scramble around to figure out, “What are we going to do with this character who cannot possibly play the scene? Do we rewrite the scene or do we somehow teach this person how to act in a completely different way?” To its credit, it goes through all the different permutations of what it could do, including have her act with her hands or not act with her hands. As Craig would teach you, don’t act with your hands.

**Craig:** Don’t act with your arms. You can absolutely act with your hands.

**John:** Hands, but no big arm movements.

**Craig:** Between shoulder and elbow, you really just want to isolate that.

**John:** You got to keep it small. I would recommend anybody who’s enjoying this conversation to check out this show called Reboot. Rachel Bloom is not the only great actor in it, but Rachel Bloom is a friend, and so you should see it for her.

**Craig:** You should always see Rachel Bloom.

**John:** Let’s go to some questions. This first one is a big one from JP.

**Megana:** JP asks, “Quick question. While listening to Episode 76, How Screenwriters Find Their Voice, I was shocked, simply shocked to hear Craig say that after turning 50 he was going to start seriously thinking about retirement. Does that plan still stand, or is it safe to say Craig’s shift from feature writer to TV writer/producer/emperor changed his view on things?”

**John:** Craig, did you renege on your promise to retire at 50 because Chernobyl did well? What happened?

**Craig:** No, I didn’t promise anything, first of all. I said I would seriously think about it. I think about retirement all the time. I think most of the time when I talk about thinking about retirement, what I’m really talking about thinking about is failure and everyone just going, “Oh my god, enough of this guy,” and then that’s that, so then I have to force retire.

I’m not currently thinking seriously about retirement. I’ve got a few more things to do. I just turned 50 not too long ago, year, year and a half ago. That’s not to say that five years from now I might be like… At some point, I have to decide, what do I like more, working or not working, which is a nice problem to have, because I do really enjoy what I do a lot. There are days, man.

**John:** There’s days you prefer to play D and D.

**Craig:** By the way, honestly, that’s what saves you. D and D saves you. If I didn’t have D and D, I’d probably be retired by now.

**John:** I don’t consider retirement at all. I think Mike would probably love me to take some time off and just be more freely available to do other stuff. I intend to be one of those people who I die with a script half written and 19 things. I want to die with things being messy and unfinished because there was stuff. I want to owe somebody a script when I die.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s just aggressive. That feels hostile. That feels like you’re punishing everybody, like, “You! You!”

**John:** Writers could write for a very long time. Directors can direct for a very long time. We see people in their 70s and 80s working hard. I want to be one of those people. I really enjoy what I do, so I can’t think of that. We also have friends who are involuntarily retired. Basically, the phone stops ringing. It becomes harder and harder to make a living. That also happens. I think we have to make sure that we are structurally planning for the work may not come forever and that we are setting aside our own money, but that we also have Guild money and other things that are keeping us potentially afloat in our later years.

**Craig:** You certainly plan for forced retirement, and then make your choice. If you’re not forced, then it’s a choice. I think right now I can’t imagine retiring, because I feel like I’m getting better. I think I’ll think about it much more if I feel like I’m getting worse. If I get worse, I’ll just stop.

**John:** If for whatever reason you are not allowed to write film and television anymore, is there a career switch you would make?

**Craig:** A career switch, I don’t know about that. I think I would do a lot of volunteer stuff. A bit like this podcast, I like that we don’t have ads, so it’s not a job. We don’t work for anybody. We don’t have to listen to their nonsense. We don’t take any guff. We can take guff from Megana.

**John:** I really liked teaching my daughter to read. I think I would probably do more volunteering in teaching elementary school kids to read, because I really dig that. Once a kid can read, they can do everything.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t do. What I wouldn’t do is go teach at USC or anything like that, not that they would have me. I wouldn’t do it, because it’s sick enough already. How much more can I talk about this stuff?

**John:** I would consider teaching one semester at a time at different universities around the country, because it would be fun to just live in different places.

**Craig:** It’s not about them.

**John:** It’s not about them. It’s about me.

**Craig:** Just the thought of having to stand there and have people ask me questions about the central dramatic argument and such, I can’t bear it. Anyway, what’s our next question?

**Megana:** Taylor wrote in. She says, “In Episode 403, Craig discusses how to write a screenplay beginning with the central dramatic argument. Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before, but I’d love to hear thoughts on how the central dramatic argument maps onto a television series. If the protagonist is undergoing change in each hour-long episode, does that mean there’s a unique dramatic argument for each episode and an overarching dramatic argument for the entire season, or is there simply one dramatic argument that you continuously work towards in each episode. Mad Men’s Don Draper is put through a new ringer in each episode, but every episode is also part of a unified whole, his season-long journey.”

**John:** Craig, let’s talk about this, because you just did a TV series. Is there a central dramatic argument? How does the central dramatic argument map onto either Chernobyl or Last of Us? What were you thinking along those lines as you were doing it?

**Craig:** I think you basically have it right, Taylor. There is a big one, and then there are little ones episodically. I’m not a big fan of the whole, “My television series is just a really long movie.” I hope not, because then how do I know why did an episode end in a particular way?

I think every episode does need to be its own short movie with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and there does need to be some sort of resolution. The characters that are undergoing those things change very typically from episode to episode. There is one character who’s probably the central protagonist. That central protagonist’s central dramatic question is the one that gets answered by the end. You have a circle made up of circles. You don’t need to be particularly pedantic about it. You don’t have to make drawings or sketches. You just need to know. Otherwise, it’s like, “What was the point of that episode, and what did I learn? What was the point of this whole season? What did I learn?”

There are shows where it’s different. Purely episodic television cannot have a central dramatic argument, can’t, because it needs to go on forever. Soap operas need to go on forever. Soap opera covers all sorts of genres. There is this new limited series-ish vibe that goes on where certain television shows are not meant to go on for 20 seasons, but maybe 3 or 4. Each one of those seasons has a point and an impact and a statement to make. All those questions need to be thought through and answered. I think if you’re doing a television series that has an ending, a circle made up of circles.

**John:** Craig, while you were off doing Last of Us, I’ve had a bunch of showrunners on, talking about their process. I think they would largely agree with what you’re saying. When you talk with them about how they were setting up their writers’ rooms and how they were thinking about the season, how they were thinking about each episode, they really would come down to, either call it theme or call it central dramatic argument, what is the unifying principle behind this episode’s story, and how is it progressing the character development and what we want to see these characters be doing over the course of this season, be that a 6-episode season or a 22-episode season. They are mapping out where they are going overall, what are their arcs that are happening.

These were shows that were long movies in the sense of characters would have big transformations and enter one place and exit another place. You look at Girl From Plainville or you look at Liz Meriwether’s show The Dropout, they were movie-like arcs, but they were very clearly set up to have each episode have a point of entry, a point of exit, and you could really feel like that was the conclusion of this episode, that was the conclusion of this part of the story. It was all fit together. That’s from the outlining stage. That’s when you’re on the whiteboard figuring out what are the important beats in this episode. You figure it out then.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s how you get to interesting ends of episodes. That’s also how people get a sense that you’re being intentional and thoughtful, that it’s not haphazard. You’re not just going, “There, stop this one here. We’ll start it up again next week.” Everything’s crafted, should be ideally crafted, so that every single episode feels satisfying in its own way and yet drives you with interest to the next one. Then after all is said and done, when you look at all of them as a whole, you go, “Okay, everything that was being said here and here and here and here and here was all being reflected back here, here, here, here, here. This was all part of one big thing and not just a haphazard bucket of narrative bolts.”

**John:** It’s also much easier to apply this kind of framework to an 8-episode season versus a 22-episode classic broadcast show. You look at what Lost had to do or what Buffy the Vampire Slayer had to do. They could start a season with real intention, but they couldn’t really know where the end of their season was. They couldn’t quite know how things were going to progress, how quickly they would burn through storylines. Sometimes they do have to do a mid-season reset to get you to a new place. I think that’s incredibly difficult to do that level of quality for 22 or 24 episodes per season. I’m glad we’re not trying that hard to do those giant mega shows anymore.

**Craig:** I just don’t think it’s possible.

**John:** No, not with the expectations we have, both in terms of what has to happen narrative-wise but also what production value has to be. We just can’t do it.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Another question, Megana.

**Megana:** Citizen asks, “I’m a writer living and working outside the US. A pilot I wrote was optioned by a company based in Los Angeles with the intention of selling it to a bigger production company. After a couple years, things seem to be gaining momentum, because they recently approached me to discuss the fact that if they sell the series, then I would most likely be replaced as the writer. I’m realistic. I know most things don’t happen. I know my leverage as a new writer from another country is very little. In any case, I would like to know, what would be the best-case scenario for me or someone like me? Is it possible to even get hired as a writer? Can I get proper credit as a creator if I’m not WGA? Can I be WGA? I have no idea. I suppose it’s all up to whoever negotiates my contract, but any guidance on what’s possible or what to look out for would be immensely appreciated.”

**John:** Oh, Citizen. Let’s talk about the good news. Apparently, you wrote something that was so good that they feel like they can get this set up, and they were optimistic, and they’re trying to warm you up to the idea of being replaced, which is shitty, but also it means that there could be some interest in you going forward, this project going forward. What is your contract with these people? They’ve optioned this thing, but in what way did they option it? Is there anything in there about keeping you on as a writer? It feels like there should be. It’s not clear that there is. At the very least, if this project gets set up someplace and might have a different showrunner or something, you created the underlying material, and that is always going to be there. Your name is always going to be on it in some way. Craig, what’s your thinking for Citizen?

**Craig:** There’s a term in the feature side of the Writers Guild minimum basic agreement that says that if a writer sells literary material, meaning you’ve written it, you’re not employed to write it, but rather you’ve already written it, and then you sell that like a spec, and copyright then gets transferred over to sign, the purchasing company is obliged to hire you to do the next rewrite of that material. They can’t just buy it and then kick you off. They buy it, then they employ you, and you write the next draft. I don’t know if there’s a similar version of that for the television side of things. There should be. I wish there were, if there isn’t.

**John:** Citizen, you definitely can become a WGA member. There are people all over the world who are WGA members. The fact that you’re living outside of the US is not going to prohibit you from doing that. Ultimately, the work you’re doing for this company, if they’re [inaudible 00:39:43] this will be US work, so it will still count. You can become a WGA member.

**Craig:** Yes, if you are employed by a signatory, then yes, you will be a WGA member. If they’re saying you will most likely be replaced as a writer, the thing you need to be aware of is that the people that optioned your pilot may have optioned it because they love the idea, they like a character, but they may not love the writing. It seems a little odd that they’re immediately saying this now. It may be that they’re also thinking, “Oh, nobody’s going to want to develop the show with you, because what have you done?” to which I would say, “The thing that you optioned, and the thing that they would be buying.”

Hard to say without more details, other than yes, it is possible to get hired as a writer. In fact, it may be mandatory. I would have to take a look at the MBA on that. Getting proper credit as a creator if you’re not WGA, I’m not sure. Can you be WGA? Yes. You need a lawyer. You should probably have one already, since you’ve signed an option agreement.

**John:** It would be a great idea to have, either if you’re in the UK, a UK lawyer who’s used to working with Hollywood companies, if you’re not in the UK, I would say just see if you can find an LA-based lawyer who has some experience in this field, just because I just worry that a French lawyer coming into this is not going to have the expertise that would be useful for this situation. You can do it.

The general case for Citizen, let’s say you were an American writer, you wrote this thing, and you get the call like, “We would need to bring in another writer.” The idea like this is going to be a TV show, this is going to need a showrunner, so we’re going to bring in a showrunner, that’s really common for some writers, for a new showrunner to come on board. That can be a good experience. It’s also possible that that was the conversation they meant to have with you, that they weren’t going to just toss you aside. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Hard to say.

**John:** Hard to say. Craig, should we do our One Cool Things? I feel like jumping ahead to that.

**Craig:** I have no problem with that.

**John:** I have two One Cool Things. First off, this article by Dino Grandoni, which I’m sure you read, for the Washington Post, about how many ants there are in the world. Craig, do you know how many ants there are in the world?

**Craig:** You’re talking about the sisters of your mom?

**John:** The sisters of your mom, no. I’m actually talking about the small insects who ruin picnics.

**Craig:** Oh my god. It’s got to be like a trillion.

**John:** 20 quadrillion.

**Craig:** There we go.

**John:** It’s an unbelievably massive number.

**Craig:** That’s too many ants.

**John:** There’s more ants than there are all other birds and mammals on Earth combined.

**Craig:** Combined.

**John:** The mass of it is immense. For every person on Earth, there are 2.5 million ants.

**Craig:** That’s awesome. That’s so great. I want mine. Where are mine?

**John:** All of my ants. Sometimes during these hot days, it does feel like I can feel all 2.5 million of them in my house, because Megana will testify we have ants certain times.

**Craig:** You have an ant problem.

**John:** We have some ant problems. The little bait things do work, but it takes two days for it to work. That kills off the colony.

**Craig:** I hear you. Ants.

**John:** How do you feel about ants?

**Craig:** I have no strong feelings about ants. I know this is probably shocking. It’s just not a thing I think about. I don’t think about ants, although I did enjoy that, I don’t know if it was one time they did it or multiple times, where they pumped an abandoned ant colony… They put a bunch of concrete in there, and they just kept pouring concrete in, and then they excavated it. It’s insane.

**John:** It’s like tree roots everywhere.

**Craig:** It’s huge. It’s huge. It’s quite beautiful.

**John:** I’m sure it is. Ants versus spiders, which do you prefer?

**Craig:** I like spiders.

**John:** You like spiders?

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** I think Megana must love spiders, because she’s now decorated her desk area with spiderwebs for spooky season.

**Megana:** No, I hate spiders. I decorated with that because it’s spooky and scary.

**Craig:** Spooky season is upon us.

**Megana:** It is upon us. Why do you like spiders?

**Craig:** They’re brilliant. They can weave webs. Look at the webs alone.

**John:** Webs are cool.

**Craig:** They’re incredible. They’re predators, which is cool. They wrap you up, and they drain your blood and such. They eat annoying bugs that no one likes.

**John:** Whenever I see spiders in the house, I always remind myself, “Oh, that’s right, they’re here to eat some other bugs that I’m glad don’t exist.”

**Craig:** When they are combined with other creatures, they become like the driders, the drow spider creatures.

**John:** Or they become Spider-Man.

**Craig:** Or they become Spider-Man, exactly. Now, there is an Ant-Man, but he’s just big. He’s big.

**John:** He’s just big. He really has nothing to do with ants. They try to retcon into some ant-

**Craig:** Ish.

**John:** It’s not the same.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I have a second One Cool Thing, which is a question for you. In English, our question words start with W-H, generally, so when, which, where, why, what.

**Craig:** Who, whom.

**John:** Who. Why is that?

**Craig:** John, I don’t know.

**John:** It actually goes back to proto-Indo-European, the root of all our European and Indian languages. A thing I just learned this last week, [inaudible 00:45:17] a podcast, but I found a good article about it, is it’s actually the same system that gives us, in Spanish, quien, quando, all the Q words, and same in Italian and same in Latin, because it’s just how English drifted and changed. The W-H used to be a hard H-W. That hard H was more of a K. It would be quich, quen, quere. That was the thing.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** With spelling reform, they switched the W and the H, but W-H is really the same thing as Q-U. Isn’t that cool?

**Craig:** Quow?

**John:** Wow, quow.

**Craig:** Quow.

**John:** I just like the fact that in every set of languages, it’s so tempting to look at the letters that are written down, but it’s generally the sounds are how you figure out how things are related, because spelling has just drifted so much over the years.

**Craig:** Here’s a person who’s drifted so much over the years. Bo Shim.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** I don’t have a One Cool Thing this week, so I said, “Bo, can you help me out and give me a One Cool Thing?” What resulted was a cascade of restaurant recommendations, which if you know Bo-

**John:** Bo is a foodie. Am I correct to say she’s a foodie?

**Craig:** She’s both a gourmet and a gourmand. No one eats more than her. No one. She is the tiniest person. This isn’t like a, “Oh, you little thing, you ate a lot.” No, I mean I have seen her eat food that would make me barf in quantity terms. It’s amazing.

**John:** Give us some recommendations, because Mike will add them to our shared note of all the restaurants we want to go to.

**Craig:** These are all going to be for local folks who listen to us here in the Southern California area. Her favorite K-Town noodle spot is MDK Noodles.

**John:** I’ve been to MDK Noodles. I completely back that up.

**Craig:** Her favorite hole-in-the-wall spot is Western Doma Noodles. Western Doma. Her favorite fried chicken is KyoChon, honey wings she says. KyoChon honey wings. Zzamong for Jjajangmyeon. Jjajangmyeon is my favorite Korean food. Have you ever had Jjajangmyeon?

**John:** I don’t know what it is, no.

**Craig:** It’s Korean comfort food. It’s noodles in a fermented black bean sauce. It’s ramen-like but not soup. It’s more spaghetti-ish, but with this delicious, salty black bean sauce, and with little bits of tofu and flakes and things. It’s so good. It’s so good. It’s bad for you, but it’s really good. Now I have to go there [inaudible 00:47:55]. She said she recently went to Mandarin Noodle House in Monterey Park and it was three fire emojis. Finally, also incredibly beautiful, but also delicious, lava mooncakes that she got Mid-Autumn Festival a couple weeks ago from Aliya Lavaland in Monterey Parks. She showed some pictures, including a mooncake that is in the shape and design of an orange. It looks amazing.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** Lots of recommendations for people.

**John:** For our listeners outside of Los Angeles, some geography to help you understand where things are. What Bo’s describing, the Korean places are in Koreatown, which is the edge of where I live and where Craig is going to be living soon. Koreatown’s great. I love Korean food, but it’s hard for me to eat a lot of Korean places, because beef and pork tend to be in everything, and I don’t eat beef and pork. I have to find the vegetarian options there at those places. I love Korean food. Monterey Park has a big Chinese population and a lot of really amazing Chinese restaurants. Those are places you want to check out if you’re in Los Angeles and want that kind of cuisine.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Thank you, Bo.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 the future. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, the future.

**Craig:** Future.

**John:** The future and what we owe it. I guess this got put in my head because on the New York Times podcast, The Daily, they’ve been hyping this book called The Future and What We Owe It by some person. I should remember it as often as they’ve said it. I’ve also been reading articles about long-termism and this notion of thinking about how much we should be making policy choices or taking actions that affect the short-term versus the long-term and how we find the balance between what we want to do in the world right now versus what’s going to be important for people living a hundred years from now, 300 years from now, our children versus our grandchildren. What’s your general thinking about how much we should value a person’s life 50 years from now versus today?

**Craig:** It’s a fairly privileged question, because I think that people that are struggling can’t really afford to worry about the rest of us 50 years from now. They’re just trying to take care of themselves and their kids. This is a legacy question that I think is certainly something that people of means ought to be thinking about.

There are people who are very wealthy who just think about transferring the wealth generationally to their children and their children’s children, which is the way it’s generally always been, but perhaps not for the best, in fact almost certainly not for the best. Then there are other people who are very, very wealthy, and they do think about legacy. They create endowments. Endowments, from a financial point of view, are an interesting way to blindly but eternally give to the future. They grow. As they grow, they kick off funds. Those funds go out to support things and so on and so forth for eternity.

Then there are these other choices that we have to make that are based on guesses. We don’t have to guess that money would be helpful to people in the future. We do have to guess whether or not stopping A versus B will have a better impact on things for the future, because sometimes we guess wrong.

I think we collectively should be thinking about the future. We tend to define it entirely in terms of our children. If you listen to politicians, they’re always talking about a better world for your children. I think people who don’t have children are also interested in a better world for the people that are coming. Seems reasonable. The more we can disconnect it from our immediate children, probably the better. Let’s just try and help as many people as we can with the choices we make. We think about these things, and we work on these things, but it’s very difficult to disentangle them from our current situation if our current situation is lacking.

**John:** I find myself alternating between pessimism and optimism about the future and the future being 10 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now. Compared to some of my friends, who believe that the world won’t exist in 100 years, I’m certainly much, much more optimistic. I think I always go back to, I’ve mentioned this on the show many, many times, The Big Book of Horrible Things, which lists the 100 greatest atrocities in history. You realize the world has been through some terrible shit many, many, many times. Stuff gets really, really bad, and then we come out of it. If you look at how bad things could get, they can get really bad. You look at how things could bet better, they could actually get a lot better. I totally understand why some people would say, “I don’t want to have kids.” Great. To say, “I don’t want to have kids because I think the world is going to be on fire and terrible,” I don’t vibe with that, because I don’t think that’s accurate.

**Craig:** No, it’s defeatist. I think it’s selfish, actually, in a weird way, selfish and indulgent to go, “Oh my god, everything’s so bad. We don’t have to do anything. What’s the point?”

**John:** Weirdly, sometimes the most pessimistic and the most optimistic make the same choices. You see some of these [inaudible 00:54:00] saying, “We have to think about where humanity’s going to be 1,000 years from now and plan for that.” They’re using that to skip over worrying about the people who actually need the help right now. That’s incredibly frustrating.

**Craig:** Yes. As always, even though everyone hates the middle, the mushy moderate, that’s where the truth generally is. You’re absolutely right that things have been horrible in the past and I think in many ways are improving. Obviously, there are areas where things are getting worse. Climate is the big one. I think that sticks out for everyone. Here we are. It is 2022. We are about 80 years separated from World War Two, which is not a long time. There are people obviously who were alive during World War Two who are still alive now. John, do you know how many people died during World War Two?

**John:** God, I knew that number at some point. Is it 40 million?

**Craig:** Depends. There’s a range. 40 million is the bottom estimate. Top estimate, about 85 million.

**John:** I know that people always under-count Russia. Russia took the huge brunt of losses there.

**Craig:** Soviet Union took an insane amount of losses, probably about 20 to 30 million people. Then there are these associated deaths that aren’t necessarily attributed to World War Two but were almost certainly exacerbated by World War Two. Bengal Famine comes to mind. Things were so horrible all the time, and that time still was somehow better than all the times before, when things were even worse. We don’t get how great it is. We don’t get it. We don’t get it. All the complaining and whining that we do, I think… We’re allowed to complain. Don’t get me wrong. I’m Jewish. It’s part of our religion. You can’t excuse then trying to figure things out.

I think it’s important to think ahead. I’ve always been a think-aheader and a planner. We think about the future. Like I said, endowments I think are wonderful things. I’m a big fan of the concept of the endowment.

**John:** I used to be a bigger fan of the endowment. Give me your pitch for why endowments versus just pay the money to the government and get rid of the generational wealth.

**Craig:** An endowment isn’t really about generational wealth. A trust is about generational wealth, where you’re saying, “I’m going to put this money into a trust. It is going to accrue, to the benefit of my children and their children,” and so on and so forth. An endowment is ideally a charity that supports some cause or segment of society that is not about your blood relations. It grows in time with the marketplace and continually puts money and funds out to that end, and in theory would do so in perpetuity, and is not subject to the whims of various governments.

The federal government is not a particularly brilliant manager of funds. We know that. Simply just take a walk down Defense Department budget road, and you will see some shocking things. Also, government has a lot to do.

Let’s say your passion was female reproductive health. Creating an endowment might be really valuable. It could kick out money. The endowments don’t have to just send money off to individuals. The endowments can also, as part of their charter, send money to other charitable organizations. An endowment can make an annual donation every year to Planned Parenthood.

We have an endowment that supports our public schools in La Cañada. Every year, that endowment makes a gift to exactly one organization, which is the annual charitable fund that supports the public schools in La Cañada. This is a good thing, I think.

**John:** I think people can [inaudible 00:58:18] better con case. To me, they can be a way of sheltering money that should be the public’s money, that ultimately was generated through the possibilities made possible by government and other things to specific causes. While it’s great to think here’s this endowment that is supporting this noble cause that we want to believe in, like education or reproductive health, endowments can also be used for less noble purposes and can have salaries to pay certain people to do certain things that are not maybe good for the function of society. Basically, it’s a way for wealthy people to maintain their power and control after their deaths. That’d be the case against endowments.

**Craig:** I think if there is a, and this is a big if, if there is a fair taxation system, then the money the people are earning is fairly taxed, and the taxes go to the government, and that’s the government’s share. Then what’s remaining behind is up to people to do with as the would. Whatever it is, we can choose to leave what remains just to our children. We can choose to light it on fire. We can choose to leave it to our cat.

**John:** The Patagonia CEO who created basically a charity that now owns the company.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Which I guess is really a form of trust or form of endowment.

**Craig:** Exactly. If you want to eliminate the concept of the endowment, you have to essentially presume that government will always be the better manager and distributor of funds. I have not seen strong evidence for that.

**John:** Megana, how far away do you think of as the future? Is your notion of the future 10 years from now or is it 50 years from now? What is the future to you?

**Megana:** That’s interesting. I guess it’s 10 years down the line.

**Craig:** You’re young.

**Megana:** Also, I don’t know, tomorrow feels like the future. I feel like as I’m getting older, I see more immediate consequences to the decisions I’m making, mostly in terms of candy I’m eating or how much I’m sleeping or drinking.

**John:** The present and the near future do muddle in a way. I feel like the near future comes quicker and quicker and quicker in terms of like, “Oh, this thing that seemed like it was going to be five years away, that happened just now.” That speed does seem to be increasing. There’s the distant, more murky future, where it could be one of a thousand possibilities. It’s harder to ascertain and unavoidably vague. We can have some broad prognostications about what is possible, but we don’t really know. Just for a little humility, you look back and look at what everyone thought 2020 would be like, and they were not correct.

**Craig:** No. We’re actually quite terrible at it. That’s probably not going to change. I think the best we can do is have a little care in our hearts for the people that are going to be here after we are. That’s about all we can do.

**John:** Just to leave it on a more hopeful not, the UN Secretary General was talking about extreme poverty in the world and how we need to continue the progress we’ve made. In that, the number of people in the world living in extreme poverty has dropped hugely since our childhood. That’s real, meaningful progress. It’s always confusing to look at things from our privileged Western perspective. When I went to visit Malawi, it was tough, and yet it was better than it had ever been before. Recognizing that you’re coming from a place and you want everyone to keep moving up that ladder, but at least in most parts of the world, there are ladders, which is progress.

**Craig:** Megana?

**Megana:** Mm-hmm?

**Craig:** I was thinking about what you were just saying about looking ahead to tomorrow and the candy you eat and drinking. I was thinking about how it’s spooky season. I thought I would just Google this, and it paid off.

**Megana:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Would you like a recipe for candy corn-infused vodka?

**Megana:** Yeah, sure. Those are both things that I enjoy.

**Craig:** They might as well call this the Megana.

**Megana:** I really love candy corn. I can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet wax.

**Craig:** What is it? What is it? It’s corn starch, I assume.

**Megana:** I don’t know. It shouldn’t be edible, but it is.

**Craig:** It shouldn’t be. I’m with you. I like candy corn. I’ve always liked it.

**John:** I liked it as a kid. I can’t take something that sweet anymore. As a kid, I really loved candy corn.

**Craig:** What is the flavor of candy corn, actually? What is that flavor?

**John:** I don’t know. I associate it with a color, but that’s of course not what it actually is.

**Megana:** It’s white, orange, and yellow.

**Craig:** Somebody asked The Jelly Belly Company, because they’re obviously amazing with candy flavors. This is what they said. “Candy corn is meant to be a blend of creamy fondant, rich marshmallow, and warm vanilla notes.”

**John:** That feels right. Wikipedia has it as a waxy texture and a flavor based on honey, sugar, butter, and vanilla.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Those are all there.

**Craig:** That’s about right. I think it’s delicious.

**John:** Megana’s future is going to involve some candy corn vodka.

**Craig:** They’re going to find her facedown on her carpet.

**John:** It’s going to be the new Nyquil chicken. That’s what killed her.

**Craig:** Candy corn vodka and Nyquil chicken, what a night.

**Megana:** This is what my future has in store for me.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Thank you both.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Writer Emergency Pack XL](https://writeremergency.com/) is funded! Support [here on Kickstarter!](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnaugust/writer-emergency-pack-xl)
* [Green Burial Council](https://www.greenburialcouncil.org/) and [Is California ready for ‘human composting’ as an alternative to casket burial, cremation?](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-30/is-california-ready-for-human-composting-as-alternative-to-casket-burial-cremation) by Anabel Sosa for the LA Times
* [John’s Blogpost on Fake Tears](https://johnaugust.com/2010/fake-tears)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 76: How screenwriters find their voice](https://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 403: How to Write A Movie](https://johnaugust.com/2019/how-to-write-a-movie)
* [Patton Oswalt on King of Queens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA90rOwmkJ4)
* [Cut A Character Save A Scene](https://johnaugust.com/2010/cut-a-character-save-a-scene) on John’s Blog
* [Ants Outnumber Everything](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/19/ants-population-20-quadrillion/) by Dino Grandoni for the Washington Post
* [Why Question Words Start with Wh](https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/61ijtu/why_do_question_words_why_who_where_when_etc_all/) on Reddit
* [Bo Shim’s](https://twitter.com/byshim?lang=en) LA Food Guide: [Western Doma Noodles](https://www.yelp.com/biz/western-doma-noodles-los-angeles) hole-in-the-wall treasure, [MDK Noodles](https://www.yelp.com/biz/mdk-noodles-los-angeles?osq=mdk+noodles) in K-town, [Zzamong](https://zzamongrestaurant.com/) for Jjjangmyun, [KyoChon](https://kyochonus.iorderfoods.com/users/login) for fried chicken–especially the honey wings, [Aliya Lavaland](https://www.toasttab.com/aliya-lavaland-141-n-atlantic-blvd-ste-103/v3/?mode=fulfillment) for (lava) mooncakes, [Mandarin Noodle House](https://www.mandarinnoodlehouseca.com/) in Monterey Park
* [What We Owe the Future](https://whatweowethefuture.com/) by William Macaskill
* [Candy Corn Infused Vodka](https://www.kitchentreaty.com/candy-corn-infused-vodka/)
* [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](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/568standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/why-now).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 561 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, why now? We’ll ask the question every development executive asks at your second meeting and why writers need to think about it in their own work. We’ll also talk about reversals and answer a bunch of follow-up.

**Craig:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll discuss when to engage with stupid people and when to just ignore them.

**John:** That is crucial advice.

**Craig:** I have thoughts.

**John:** You have thoughts.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Also, our Premium Members, we should say we sometimes send out emails to Premium Members, and one of the emails that Premium Members will be getting pretty soon is about upcoming live shows.

**Craig:** Live shows are back.

**John:** If you would like that information about when those live shows are coming out and how to get those first tickets, it’d be great to be a Premium Member. Little tip there that those people are going to get the first notice. The venues are not huge, so they could sell out.

**Craig:** Just remind people, because it’s been a while. We are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts. We sell out stadiums. You people, take heed.

**John:** That’s so interesting, Craig, that now we are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts, but we used to just be the Bon Jovi, like Bon Jovi the band. Now it’s come down to the singular-

**Craig:** I feel like people are showing up for Jon Bon Jovi. No offense to the other guys. We are the Jon Bon Jovi. I’m changing it. Hey listen, man, the pandemic happened.

**John:** It did.

**Craig:** Changes had to be made. Simple as that.

**John:** Our world shrunk a little bit during that time, and we really focused on the individual rather than the group. I get it.

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

**John:** Very nice. A much less fun topic to start off our show this week is abortion and abortion rights and abortion access. Two pieces of news to talk about as related to writers. First off, the WGA Health Plan announced this week that they will be covering travel for abortion-related expenses. If you are a person who is working, a WGA member who’s working in a state the restricts abortion, and you need to have an abortion or someone who’s on your health plan needs to have an abortion, the WGA Health Plan will reimburse the travel expenses for getting you to a state where you can have an abortion.

**Craig:** This is becoming fairly common for a number of businesses as well. What do we do? We can’t pat ourselves on the back for doing this, because we’re all soaking in the shame and stupidity of what has happened. At a minimum, our health plan is doing what they can. Personally, I think we got to get out of any place that is banning abortion, because it’s gross. You have to plant your flag somehow. We just can’t keep doing business with these places.

**John:** That’s a nice segue to the other thing that happened this last two weeks was that first a group of 400 mostly female showrunners signed a letter to the studio saying, “Hey, we are demanding answers for how you’re going to handle production in states that are outlawing abortion,” and asking for specific guidance on what they were going to do to address the problem. Another 600 or more showrunners, including you and I, signed onto a follow-up statement saying yes, we really do need these answers. As we record this, we don’t know what the individual plans are going to be for different studios. The WGA can talk about its members, but the writer is one or five people on a production. Productions have hundreds of people who are all facing the same problems. We need to have a bigger conversation about how we’re going to handle these situations when they occur on sets that are shooting in Georgia or some other state that could restrict abortion.

**Craig:** I think it’s probably best for us to say that while abortion immediately impacts people with a uterus, abortion fully impacts everyone.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** That’s why ultimately so much of what was happening… A lot of women in our business came together and raised a lot of money and did a lot of work on this behalf. Aline Brosh McKenna, the Joan Rivers of our podcast, was key in that, and then a lot of guys. They asked. They said, “Guys, step up, because this is about all of us.” It’s true. I don’t think anyone thinks that, for instance, breast cancer is a problem that guys don’t have to think about. I had to think about it quite a bit when my wife had it. It impacts everyone’s life. Prostate cancer impacts everyone’s life. This is something that is about our human nature and about the people that we are and the people we love.

I’m not comfortable going to a state where the legislature has decided to be cruel and stupid. You have to put your foot down somehow. You just do. This is crazy. We’ll keep raising money for abortion, by the way, not for choice, because I hate that word. For abortion, which is an excellent and necessary health procedure that saves lives and preserves the rights of individuals. We will try and do what we can as individuals in our business to advocate getting away from people who don’t see it that way.

**John:** Obviously, we’re going to continue to follow the story. We should have answers back from what the different studio’s plans are for this, not only in dealing with travel situations if those need to come up but also the privacy implications of this. It’s weird that you’re going to have to tell your employer specifically why you need to do X, Y, or Z. That just doesn’t feel right in the situation that we’re in right now. To be determined how it all sorts out.

**Craig:** Just crazy.

**John:** Let’s go to a less dire topic. Let’s talk about Netflix and Stranger Things. This was an article that was a nonevent. In the Stranger Things canon, I guess a character’s birthday had been set at one date, and years later they moved it to a different date. They went back and retroactively changed a line in an earlier episode to make it match, which has echoes of Lizzo changing a lyric or Beyonce changing a lyric, realizing that there was an ableist slur in there. That feels innocuous. At what point do we say no, this art is finished and we should just leave it as it is?

**Craig:** It is innocuous. I think it reflects the way that people absorb culture now, which is all as a piece. They like to pick it apart, especially things that they obsess over like Stranger Things. You mentioned the word canon. Canon used to be preserved for literary works and religion and classical music. Now it applies to television shows. It’s clear that people take all this very seriously.

I’ll give you an example that I was involved in. On Mythic Quest, I wrote the episode called Backstory, where we learn the backstory of F. Murray Abraham’s character. We go back in time. There is this big deal that had been made. In the first season he kept boasting about his Nebula Award. In the episode I wrote, we see how he came to get that Nebula Award. There was a photograph in the first season of him winning the Nebula Award. They just took a shot of young F. Murray and PhotoShopped it in. Josh Brener wonderfully played young F. Murray Abraham in Backstory. They went back and they changed the photo in the first season, which I thought was completely innocuous and fine. It just didn’t seem like somebody was making the smile on Mona Lisa a little bit bigger.

Little things like that for consistency I think are actually fan service and show a little bit of respect to people, because sometimes stuff happens. The last thing you want to do is say, “Oh my god, we can’t do this storyline, because some dumb picture was… ” It doesn’t work that way. We have to call it as we see it. Very famously, Spielberg took the guns out of ET.

**John:** ET, yeah.

**Craig:** Replaced them with walkie-talkies. I don’t agree with that. That feels like a very different kind of thing.

**John:** Let’s pull it apart, because I was also thinking about that. In both cases, it is the creator of the actual work itself going back and saying, “I think that the choice they made at that point wasn’t the right choice.” It feels like a Lizzo or Beyonce changing the lyric more than a studio coming in and sanitizing it. Tell me about why you think that’s a bigger change.

**Craig:** Beyonce and Lizzo were not aware that a particular word was offensive to a lot of people. The song came out, and people went, “Hey!” They were like, “Oh, okay, didn’t know. I’ll take the L, and I’ll go back in there, and I’ll change it.” It was immediate. It was essentially immediate feedback, which again is a modern cultural phenomenon.

**John:** It’s like they had an edit tweet button. They could just go through.

**Craig:** Basically. It’s the cultural version of the seven-second delay where you get an oopsie. We never had that kind of feedback loop before, so this is a new phenomenon. In the case of ET, decades, I think, after ET came out, Spielberg made the choice to say, “You know what? My opinion about things has changed. I’m going to go back in and do this.” The issue is it had been out there for so long in that way, and it’d been seen so many times in that way that it felt a little pointless, because ET is beloved. If nobody cared about ET, it wouldn’t have mattered. It was beloved. It was studied. That change was not to do fan service. That change was not to coordinate the canon. That change was simply because he had an opinion about something. It just didn’t feel very good or reasonable. Similarly, the decades later, “Oh, now I have the money to do that the way I really wanted to do it,” Lucas style adjustments. I just find you could it, it’s your movie, but I don’t think anybody was applauding it. Anyone.

**John:** In both these cases, with ET and with Star Wars, the question of ownership becomes a little bit more forefront, because at a certain point, yes, they are the creators of the original work, but they feel like they’re owned by culture in general. We all own Star Wars. We all own ET. It feels like a bigger violation to make a change to a thing we feel like, “Oh no, I already have this in my house. This is a thing I own, and you now are changing it.” Maybe that’s what it comes down to.

**Craig:** This, by the way, is why I’m not a huge fan of director’s cuts or other things like that, because even though on occasion the director’s cut is vastly better than the movie that existed otherwise, usually when the studio has chopped it up completely, and so you never really did see the movie at all, but most of the time it’s like, “Oh, we threw back in a bunch of crap that we cut out.” There’s stuff that we cut out of Chernobyl that I really liked, but it just didn’t ultimately fit. We were better off without it. I’m not putting that stuff out there as an extended edition or any of that stuff, because the show that I did is the show I did. That’s the one people watch. That’s it. You get one show.

**John:** Last bit of news to talk through, this is happening right as we’re recording, so we don’t know all the details. Batgirl, which was a $70 million Warner Bros movie, was announced it is never going to come out to be released.

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** It’s not going to release on HBO Max. It’s not going to release in theaters. I cannot think of another example of a movie with that kind of budget that has just been killed in post-production. It’s already shot. It’s already done. It’s a big move to not release it.

**Craig:** It’s pretty crazy. Obviously, people can take a look at the way movies are made and make an argument that we’ve spent, let’s say, I don’t know, what have they spent on this thing?

**John:** 70 they said.

**Craig:** $70 million has been spent. It’s easy to say, oh my god, just put it on fricking HBO Max and forget about it, but do get something out of it. The issue is it’s probably not done. There’s probably more work to be done. Then there’s marketing. Obviously, if they wanted to put it on streaming, they wouldn’t have to deal with the expense of a theatrical release. It seems like there’s this weird financial thing going on based on the merger and stuff before August 15th. Do you know I know less about accounting than basically anything else?

**John:** Thank you for saying that, because I really don’t understand accounting.

**Craig:** Nothing.

**John:** Or cost-based accounting or depreciation. Right over my head. I can do a lot of mathy kind of stuff, but I don’t get that.

**Craig:** The term write-off, I’m 80% on it. I think it means that they just say it’s a business expense that we can then, as a loss, discount from the taxable income or something. When they say these things like the books, like when they talk in movies like, “Oh, there were two sets of books,” I’m like, what does that mean? I really don’t know what… Megana, are you better at accounting than we are? I hope you are, because we don’t know anything.

**Megana Rao:** Oh my god, I tried to do math in the office, and we left it on the whiteboard for a while.

**Craig:** The whiteboard of shame?

**Megana:** Yeah, so absolutely not.

**Craig:** Wow. No one should be hiring the Scriptnotes gang to do their books. I don’t even understand what a book is. All I can say is this is pretty nuts. I don’t recall anything like this in all my time in Hollywood, where an entire… By the way, John, you and I both, I know this for a fact, have been asked to work on movies that are in post-production that are so bad that I have said at least three different times on films that have come out that they should not have come out. I have said three different times, “Don’t pay me. Don’t hire me to do anything. Take this and just put it away.” They didn’t. They spent more money, and they put it out there. In each of those cases, they would’ve been far better off financially by putting it away. I guess in this case, this feels more like a merger thing. I just don’t understand it.

**John:** We don’t know if the film is good or bad. We just know that they’ve decided not to release it. It could have relations to other things in the DC universe. We don’t know. I feel bad for the writers, directors, everyone who worked on that movie for a year, because yes, you got paid for working on a movie, which is great, but to not have the movie come out… We’ve talked about this before on the show, is that some of your pay is generally based on the movie actually coming out, so delivery of the finished negative or a box office bonus. When it’s released theatrically, if it hits $100 million, you get this bonus, residuals. None of that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** That’s right. The director’s almost certainly fulfilled their obligations by delivering a cut, and they will be paid. You’re correct, whatever residuals have become will obviously no longer be a factor. It’s an interesting question for the screenwriter. Almost always there is a bonus for screenplay credit. The credit may have been determined for this movie, but may not have been, because the credit is determined by a process that begins with the studio submitting a notice of tentative writing credit. If the studio hasn’t submitted that, there is no writing credit for this, and then there is no bonus. This is a really weird one. I have to just hope that this is a weird eclipse shooting star moment here that won’t happen again.

**John:** I will say though it’s unprecedented for this to happen in movies or television. I guess there have been some TV series that have shot and never aired. The pilot process is a form of this, where we shoot a pilot, and most pilots never air. Other industries, they will just do research and development. Apple will spend a billion dollars developing a car and say, “We’re not going to do a car.”

**Craig:** That’s right. The difference is that the car would need to still be manufactured over and over and over. They’ve manufactured the single car that is then required to show people. That’s the business we’re in. We build one thing, and everybody comes, stands around, and looks at it. To not put it out there is a very surprising decision, but I think this is one of those stories that’s tailor made for the phrase “above my pay grade,” because I don’t understand this stuff.

**John:** Let’s do some follow-up here. Last week we talked about IMDb. I was complaining about the new IMDb redesigned. We agreed that the redesign was terrible. You said, “John, why don’t you just scrape IMDb and make your own website?”

**Craig:** Scrape it.

**John:** I said that was completely impossible and that copyright law would prohibit that. A bunch of people wrote to us who know more about this than we do. We’ll start off with Cory Doctorow, who is an author and online person who said that I was… He’s an online person.

**Craig:** He’s an online personality.

**John:** He’s an online personality.

**Craig:** He’s very online, as Aline would say.

**John:** Who’s very strongly said that I was wrong. He pointed to court cases that would indicate that you could get by with scraping IMDb. Chris Reed, who’s an actual copyright attorney, wrote in and explained why that’s true and also there’s other complications along the way. Craig, where are we standing now with your fantasy of scraping IMDb? Where do you think we’re at now?

**Craig:** I think that we’re in a decent place. I think that you have to be careful when you’re scraping IMDb to not scrape up the wrong stuff. Basically, if you work at IMDb and you create anything for that site that isn’t just a fact that you scraped yourself from credits of a film, that may be protected. In fact, it likely is. Basically, IMDb is a service that already scraped another service. It scraped all the credits from all the movies. I think a re-scraping feels like you’d be on solid ground.

**John:** Chris, the copyright attorney, says that, “John is correct that there is copyright protection available for compilations of data and databases, but Craig is correct the facts are not generally copyrightable.” It goes down back to the phone book. The information in the phone book is not copyrightable. The argument would be is the organization of facts in IMDb and how it’s put together and is there essential stuff in it that is copyrightable that is not just the facts themselves. That would be the live court case.

Interestingly, there is a case that’s similar to it, which is that LinkedIn sued a company called HiQ. HiQ was scraping LinkedIn. It went through a bunch of iterations, made it to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court kicked it back down. HiQ won or has been winning this live challenge for its ability to scrape LinkedIn to get information off of public-facing pages for that. That seems relevant, except that HiQ is not a direct competitor of LinkedIn, which is Craig’s service. Craig movie database would directly compete with it, which feels like that could be another live issue there.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know why. Basically, whether I’m competing or not, either what they have is ownable or not ownable. I do think that if you were scraping IMDb and then your website looked a whole lot like IMDb, you’d be in trouble.

**John:** There’d probably be trademark and trade dress and all those kind of problems too.

**Craig:** Even the general design and layout of tabs and things, these are trademarkable but also copyrightable I think is more important. The layout itself is probably protected. I’m just talking about the raw data. I’ll just come back to IMDb itself is a scraping service. You point out here in our notes that IMDb has a term of service, which says, “Robots and screen scraping. You may not using data mining, robots, screen scraping, or similar data gathering and extraction tools on this site except with our express written consent as noted below.” Lol. Lmao. Unenforceable. I don’t believe that. What does that even mean? You violated their terms of service. Who cares? What are they going to do, kick you off? It’s free. That’s the thing. It’s not like terms of service are a law where you go to prison. They’re just saying you’re not allowed to use their service if you do this. I did it, and I guess I won’t use your service anymore.

**John:** What Chris points out though is that by violating the terms of service, they might be go after you criminally for, it’s called CAFA, computer abuse and fraud, that you’re using their service, that you’re potentially stealing. That’s a stretch, but that’s what they would try to do.

**Craig:** Sure, they could try to do it, and they would lose, because you’re not doing what that law was intended to do. Generally speaking, it’s not all technicalities. Everybody understands what the intention was. You’re not breaking into their website. For instance, one of the terms of service might be you can’t violate our security layers to steal the information of other users. If you do that, it’s not just a violation of the terms of service. I could see where that goes into CAFA. This, I’m just copying stuff that’s on the screen. Anyway, we’re armchair lawyers, but I’m pro-scrape. I think our service should be called scrapey.scrape. I think people would love it.

**John:** To clarify for our listeners and for Amazon’s lawyers, we are not actually planning on building anything here. This is never going to happen.

**Craig:** John has already built it. He’s already built an Amazon. It’s in his backyard, getting ready to launch.

**John:** It got me thinking about… Craig, you’re of course familiar with the Fermi Paradox, which is basically it feels like there should be other alien civilizations out there, and why have we not seen alien civilizations. I think there’s a similar thing that you can think about with a movie service that is like IMDb, is that if it were simple and easy to do just by scraping, someone else would’ve done it, which leads me to think that there’s probably some reasons why there’s not a big competitor to IMDb. The fear of litigation, that it’s actually technically harder to do, to actually run the site than you think, that there’s no way to make it profitable might be factors.

**Craig:** That’s the big one, I think. I think that IMDb is a decent platform for advertising, but it is not a business that… They try, but it’s not really an expandable business. It’s more of a public servicey kind of thing.

**John:** That’s probably why my frustration is so pointed towards the UI changes they’re making to it. It’s because I think they’re trying to make more money off of it, and by making it actually worse for people who need to use it.

**Craig:** They’re like, “What are we doing here with this thing?” Really, IMDb or whatever its eventual competitor or new form would be should probably be more of a public utility like Wikipedia is.

**John:** I want that to happen too. Let’s talk about the alternatives that are out there, because we didn’t talk about this last week. The one that you and I both agree is probably the closest to what we’d like to make is a TMDB.

**Craig:** It’s nice. TMDB. I don’t know where they got all their information from.

**John:** They say it’s user supplied. It feels like it’s a little bit more homegrown. It felt accurate.

**Craig:** I assume they have the same kind of publishing structure that Wikipedia folks have. They have regular contributors. Then they have editors, and they have uber-editors and people above them. These things sometimes, they just grow and grow and become amazing. I find that there is often this weird cultural moment. I remember the cultural moment where Google was a thing, because prior to Google, most people were using Yahoo or Alta Vista or Lycos. Then I started using Excite.

**John:** I remember Excite.

**Craig:** Excite was way better. There was a brief Excite moment. Then people started talking about this Google thing. The moment you used it, you were like, “This is so much better.”

**John:** “This is so much better.”

**Craig:** Then it just happened. It happened so fast. Until it happened, there was no Google. It was just a stupid, silly word. That may happen with… Who knows? Maybe this is the beginning of TMDB’s moment.

**John:** It could totally be there. I’ll also point out that Studio System, which is their other credits thing, they pay money for it. It’s a paid service. Variety has Variety Insight, which is a paid service. There are alternatives there. Realistically, everyone you and I know is using IMDb and begrudgingly going through it.

**Craig:** Yes, and IMDbPro, which I subscribe to, which has some interesting information at times.

**John:** It does, but not-

**Craig:** It’s not worth it.

**John:** It’s not worth it. It’s not as good as it should be.

**Craig:** No, I’m passively subscribing to it at this point. I wouldn’t suggest anybody actively subscribe to it.

**John:** Really the reason why I think we subscribed to it in the first place, to fix mistakes in our own listings or friends’ listings.

**Craig:** I don’t do a ton of that. What I use it for mostly is when we’re having casting discussions. They do have a decent searchable actory thing that then organizes people by their stupid star meter, which is not a reflection of anything at all. If I say I’m looking for an actor between 45 and 65 who is between this height and this height, whatever I put in, it’s a decent spit back for me. Maybe TMDB will offer that as well.

**John:** That’d be nice. Hey Megana, can you give us some follow-up on dating your writing partner?

**Megana:** Dangerous wrote in to us with an update. She said, “I wanted to say thanks so much for discussing my letter and all the thoughtful advice. I was genuinely touched. I have a darkly funny updated. While I still haven’t decided what to do on a personal level with this complicated situation, though I’m leaning towards Megana’s none of the above advice, I did pitch this idea to a producer dressed up as a sexy rom-com, and they loved it. I’m now getting some development money. While my therapist probably wouldn’t approve of how this is being handled, at least I can sort out some of my crazy emotions through art, and hey, that’s something, right?”

**Craig:** That is something.

**John:** That is something.

**Craig:** That is the most screenwriter resolution ever. “I’m in a terrible spot. How can I turn this into a movie and get a lot of money?” That’s a thrilling update.

**John:** Craig, you don’t listen to other podcasts, but on The Writing Life podcast, they talk about using the drama in your own life to channel your writing and use your daily writing to sort through your problems. It feels like Dangerous has taken that advice, in addition to our advice, and made gold out of this.

**Craig:** I never would’ve recommended you do this on purpose, but you did it, and I’m so happy you did. Congrats. I hope that this all works out well for you, both for the movie that you’re writing and also however you wish your relationship to go.

**John:** Let’s do one more piece of follow-up here from Annie. This is about Rodney Stotts, which is one of the How Would This Be a Movies.

**Megana:** Annie wrote in and said, “I’m Annie Kaempfer Brooklyn, New York. I just listened to your new episode, big fan, and was so excited to hear about Rodney Stotts in How Would This Be a Movie, because I recently made the feature documentary, and yes, there’s a bird trapping scene.”

**Craig:** There you go.

**Megana:** “Your discussion was so interesting and spot on. I especially appreciated the point that this could easily become a paint by numbers story we’ve all seen a million times before. It was a lesson I learned the hard way, cutting the film down from full length to make it a one-hour TV version. It made me realize my story arc/Rodney’s life story was in a lot of ways the least interesting part of the film. The parts you lean into were the portrait film scenes, Rodney’s stance on parenting, why he’s not interested in romantic relationships, his poetry, etc, anywhere where he’s just being himself and talking about his views on the world, because he really is an amazing character.” Then we’ll link in the show notes to the film and the trailer.

**John:** The film is out on Amazon right now. People can see it if they want to see it. Watching through the trailer, one of the questions you and I had, Craig, was what is his voice like, what does he actually sound like. His speaking voice is cool. His accent is interesting. He carries himself with a cool energy, which I think is going to be great.

**Craig:** I’m excited. I have to say this is very gratifying, because I think you and I wanted to see a version of this, and it turns out it already existed, which is great. We maybe need to go back and ET style rename that segment How Would This Have Been a Movie.

**John:** You definitely wanted the documentary for this. Someone who’s curious about making this movie obviously as a feature, as a narrative feature, you’ll look at the documentary to get a sense of who that is as a character. I think you’re casting Mahershala Ali in that role. I think you’ve got a winner if you’re going to make this movie. I’m excited to see the documentary first.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Let’s get on to our marquee topic. This comes from a question from Matt. Maybe Megana could read us the question and set up the issue of why now.

**Megana:** Matt wrote in and said, “I could be wrong, but I don’t recall you guys discussing the question of why now. I’ve been pitching new TV ideas for the last few years and often struggle working out what my characters and story are saying about the world we live in and why this show needs to exist beyond its entertainment value and my enthusiasm and need to work. How much does why now inform your choices and development of new ideas? Did Craig have discussions about why the Chernobyl story needed a TV show in 2019? If yes, at what point in the show’s development was it considered? Developing/discovering a why now feels different to a theme or central dramatic argument, which has universality without necessarily commenting on the world in 2022.”

**John:** What a smart question.

**Craig:** Yeah, although I must admit I’m a bit confused, because this is not what I think of when I think of the why now question.

**John:** Tell me what you think of with the why now question.

**Craig:** For me at least, typically the why now question is never about why are we making this show or movie now for the public. The question is why are these things happening to this character now. What is the relevance inside of the story? I would rephrase this as why should we make this.

**John:** I see that. Let’s talk about this why now in terms of the development is a question of-

**Craig:** Why should we make this?

**John:** Why should we make this now? Also, you could think about it from the writer’s perspective, like why is this a story that I’m drawn to telling now?

**Craig:** Which is very valid.

**John:** I think we’ve talked in other episodes a lot about why does the story start now, why is it starting for this character right now, why is this change happening right now, why are we starting it.

**Craig:** This would be why should we make this now.

**John:** Why is this worth my time and energy to be making this? Let’s think about it from the development side, because this is coming up a lot, this stuff around, that I’m involved with, is something else just happened, some other movie just happened that was a huge success, and so therefore looking around, saying, oh, so another movie in the same genre or the same basic idea feels right and relevant. If there’s a bunch of zombie movies that are hits, okay, this feels like a good time for a zombie movie, or if suddenly two Westerns hit, then we’re making some more Westerns.

**Craig:** I think we have cautioned writers before to not try and time the marketplace this way, because you’ll probably be late. By the time you hear about it, it’s too late. Often what happens is a studio will be well aware that let’s say a Top Gun: Maverick is going to be huge. Other studios immediately start moving into position, because they’ve heard and buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz. The movie comes out. It confirms it. Then they go, “Great, these 300 other things that we have that we’ve copied,” and obviously that’s an exaggeration, “let’s start moving them forward.” By the time it filters to you at home, it’s too late. They’ve already shut the door on the Top Gun: Maverick kind of things. This is why they will occasionally do this, but it’s not necessarily going to be information that’s useful for us as writers.

**John:** I would say the lesson people are taking from Top Gun: Maverick of the summer is not like, oh, we need to make more movies with fighter jets. It’s that, oh, maybe it’s a good idea to make Legally Blonde 3, because we’d be curious to catch up with that character now 20 years later to see what’s up in her life. There’s still that nostalgia, but a new chapter of it can feel right. You can take the same lesson from Creed or other movies like that.

**Craig:** Absolutely. It’s a bit of a revision of the way we used to do things where we would just remake stuff. When you and I were starting out in the ’90s, they would come to us and say we want to remake blah blah blah from a movie, or a television show into a movie. That’s when they were trying to do things like My Favorite Martian into a movie. You’re like, “Who remembers this?”

**John:** I remember pitching My Three Sons.

**Craig:** There you go. My Three Sons, Flubber, and all that. Now they’re like, “You know what? Let’s not remake these things. Let’s just bring back that person but older and see what it’s like now.”

**John:** Extend, yeah.

**Craig:** Exactly. It’s the same vibe.

**John:** Another reason for a why now would be it’s related to a current cultural moment. I was thinking about Jordan Peele’s Get Out and the idea of good white people and the sense of oh, they couldn’t be bad white people, because they voted for Obama. That felt like a very specific moment to make that movie, that you couldn’t have made that movie 10 years earlier, 20 years earlier. It was specific to that moment. There was a thing going on in culture that is like, “Okay, this is the right time to make this kind of movie or this kind of perspective on this kind of movie.”

**Craig:** I will probably repeat this a few times as we have this conversation. That’s not a cultural moment that studios tend to recognize as existing until a movie like Get Out comes out and surprises them all. Nobody behind Get Out, other than Jordan Peele and the filmmakers that were doing it understood quite what was going to happen, because they just didn’t. I’m not surprised. Sometimes in the best way, movies announce that there is a cultural moment.

**John:** Absolutely agreed. Another reason for why now is just there’s a notable filmmaker who wants to make it. There’s really no reason other than that person wants to do it, so therefore we’ll do it. I’m thinking back to one of the streamers came to me with a book that they wanted to make into a movie for their service. They had this director attached. I read the book. I’m like, “Oh.” I was pretty candid on the phone call with them. I was like, “I don’t understand what it is about this book that you want to make.” It’s like, “Oh, she wants to direct it.” Like, “Oh, okay, that’s the whole reason.” This wasn’t the movie that needed to happen right now. There wasn’t anything about this relevance to this, particularly time. It was just simply, oh, this is a thing that she wants to make, so therefore we want to make it.

**Craig:** There are definitely things that come into existence because of ego, whether there is a big star attached, or sometimes it’s just the pet project of the person who runs the studio. I will not say what the movie is. I will not say what the studio is or the name of the studio executive. I will tell you a little story.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** There was a film that had been in development for over 20 years. It had been green lit. It was a month away from shooting. The person who ran the studio asked me to work on it and to do a lot of work on it, because it needed a lot of work, and to do it fast. I said I could not, and in that discussion, just said, “Hey, why are you still making this a month from now if you know the script needs to be completely rewritten?” This person said, “Sometimes the best way to make a movie is to just start making a movie.” I never forgot that, because I actually understand it. It wasn’t like I went, “You idiot.” I get it, but also, oh no, and spoiler alert, it didn’t turn out well. Generally, it doesn’t. That said, sometimes it does.

**John:** Sometimes it does.

**Craig:** When you watch Heart of Darkness, the documentary-

**John:** Chaos.

**Craig:** … about Apocalypse Now, you can’t believe that they ever agreed to do it in the first place. They just started making a movie and ended up with something incredible.

**John:** Last reason I’ll give for a why now is that there’s a chance to change formats. Look at Lord of the Rings. We’ve done those as movie trilogies. Now you can do Tolkien as a series. Changing the format feels like, oh, there’s a really new way to explore this material by going to a different format. I think a lot of times the why now is just because there’s a new place for us to do this thing and to do it differently. That could be a valid reason.

**Craig:** Primarily, I would say to Matt, this why now thing is not our problem, because most of the things we’re talking about are justifications that executives will have to give to each other and to the person above them, because they often do need a why should we be making this, because they’re the ones that are spending all the money. What we do ultimately is probably best when there isn’t an obvious why now, but rather people tell you the why now. They appreciate it for what it is. Quality itself is the best justification for existence. We probably should just work on that and be less concerned about the why now, because it changed constantly anyway.

**John:** There’s the why now of who’s going to make this movie and why are they going to make it. I think there still is a valid why now question for a writer to ask before they’re even sitting down to start working on a project or to really think through a project is to ask themselves… Matt was talking about theme and dramatic purpose and dramatic question.

I think it’s worth asking yourself just for your own purposes what is it about this film that speaks to me in this current moment or this America right now or the world right now that would be different than if I were to do this 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Is there something that feels relevant and interesting to me about setting the story right now that this film can comment on? Those are valid questions to ask. Are there cinematic techniques that are going to be different and interesting because they are modern cinematic techniques? How are the female characters used? How are you looking at race and gender overall in your film? What’s your perspective in this film on policing and authority? Are there 2022 issues that are interesting to you in this film that you think you can expose? That’s worth asking. It’s not the same kind of why now question, but it’s really asking what is the current relevance for the story you’re thinking about telling.

**Craig:** A lot of stories, movies, and television shows demand a discussion of relevance. If you’re going to adapt X-Men for instance, X-Men is just an obvious allegory for racism and genocide and all that. Then it got even more obvious as it went on. You can’t really ignore that. You need to have that kind of commentary. There are also stories that are simply about universal relationships and experiences that are not about relevance. In fact, they transcend the why now because the answer is because always. For instance, death, love, betrayal, greed, all the good Bible stuff, that’s always why now.

**John:** Timeless.

**Craig:** It’s always why now. The question is really not why now, but what will be different about this. How will this connect to us in a different way? What will be teaching us something about ourselves in a way that we didn’t have before. Then there are other shows, where you’re like, yeah, of course you have to think about why now.

**John:** When I first got pushed to do Aladdin, I asked myself, is it a really good idea? Is there anything to do that is important to do that will be than the animated film, because I love the animated film. What else we came down to is there were a couple things I felt like were contemporary things that could be different and would be better served doing this movie in 2018, 2019. Giving Jasmine agency, because in the animated film, she doesn’t talk to anyone other than her tiger and her father and Aladdin when he finally shows up. Giving her some control over the story, so that decision that she is going to become the sultan and therefore wants to learn how the world works, because she’s been so cloistered, and giving her someone else to talk with. Changing Genie from being the crazy cocaine uncle to a bro, and what that dynamic would shift, and what it’s like to be at fraternal levels. How you position a fantasy world within existing cultural frameworks, because that’s a tricky thing to do. How you land this Agrabah in a place that feels like you could see the connections to existing cultural things, but you’re not stepping on landmines. Those were the things that were interesting to me before I even went in to pitch to Disney what we were going to do with the film.

**Craig:** Honestly, I would put those under how now as opposed to why now-

**John:** That’s a smart framing.

**Craig:** … because if you look at what you have there, that you were saying, “Hey look, this needs to change,” those are actually arguments against why now. Then you provide a how now, and you can see the method in front of you. How now is probably the more important question for adaptations and remakes, I would imagine, because the world has changed dramatically, and generally for the better. You do have to ask these difficult questions that back when you were pitching My Three Sons probably didn’t have to worry about.

**John:** For sure. Let’s get to some reversal. This comes from a question that Leah Saint Marie, or Leah Welch, asked you on Twitter. You said, “Oh.” You flagged me, like, “Let’s talk about reversals on a podcast.”

**Craig:** She said, “Is there anywhere regarding Scriptnotes,” 403 how do you write a movie, “Is there anywhere you specifically walk through the scene-by-scene thesis to antithesis to synthesis creation process, and how these sub-theses generate from the overall theme and then cascade towards the protagonist’s embodiment of that theme?” That’s a good question. I thought, “No, there isn’t. I guess maybe we should do that.” The easiest way for me to do it is to do it with something I’ve written, because I can say this is how that worked.

**John:** We’re going to take a look at two related scenes from Chernobyl. This is Episode 3, I think.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Talk us through what happens in these scenes, because we were going to try to pull audio, and the audio was going to actually be more confusing than just talking through the scene. Tell us what’s happening in these scenes.

**Craig:** In this first one, Legasov is with Schcherbina, the Soviet bureaucrat. They have a problem. They need to have miners dig under this nuclear power plant that is burning and install a heat exchanger so that it doesn’t get too hot and doesn’t boil down, melt down into the groundwater. The problem is they need miners to do it. They have to ask the head of the miners to do this without having him go, “No,” because they already have gotten information that these miners are tough and have no problem saying no.

**John:** Let’s talk about the reversals, what you’re setting up and what you’re reversing in the scene. There’s a payoff scene later on that’s a traditional reversal to it. What are the dynamics going into this that need to get flipped?

**Craig:** In the context of what Leah’s asking about, the big theme is about lying. It’s about lies and truth. Legasov is self-professed, says right at the beginning, “I’m not good at lying.” The implication is, “I’m going to need to, because there’s no way we’re going to get this guy to do what we’re asking him to do without lying to him.” Shcherbina is cautioning him that that’s not going to work. He says, “Have you ever spent time with miners?” Legasov says, “No.” He says, “My advice, tell the truth. These men work in the dark. They see everything.” There’s the warning shot. Legasov is warned. He is going to attempt to lie in a different way. He’s going to fire that bullet. “I’m going to lie somehow.”

This guy walks in, Glukhov, tough guy. The first thing he says without saying hello or anything is, he holds up this gas mask and says, “Do these work?” Legasov says, “To an extent.” The lying has begun. The problem that Legasov is going to find is that this guy keeps hitting him back. He hits him back by saying nothing, weirdly, but just asking for a cigarette. When Legasov offers him one cigarette, Glukhov takes the entire pack, which is him saying, basically, “I’m actually tougher than you even thought. Go ahead, keep lying to me, buddy. Let’s see how that works for you.” He asks him what the job is. Legasov explains it without telling him why it’s a problem. He just says, “We have to do this. We can’t approach it from the interior. We have to come in it from underground.” Once again, he is lying with a scent of omission. Glukhov questions him, “What’s above the pad?” Shcherbina says, “Tell him the truth.” Legasov tries a different tact, which is to tell him the truth.

Then Glukhov asks for the dimensions and eventually gets to this question, “How deep do you want the tunnel.” Legasov says, “12.” Glukhov says, “12 meters. Why?” Legasov says, “For your protection. At that depth, you will be shielded from much of the radiation.” Legasov things again that his… He’s gotten to a place where he lied. The guy called him on the lie. He told the truth. We’re in a new place where now we’re okay. He’s gotten where he’s like, “Okay, I’m able to tell you enough truth, but I can still leave stuff out.” It doesn’t work. He tries it, and it doesn’t work. This guy fires more at him. “The entrance to the tunnel won’t be 12 meters down.” Very smart. “No.” “We’re not 12 meters down right now.” “No.” Aha. There we go. Glukhov stands up, says he’s going to do it, but he knows what the truth is. He knows that Legasov was lying to him.

Then the final thing that he says, which is the final synthesis, is he looks at the gas mask and said, “If these worked, you’d be wearing them.” He goes all the way back to the beginning, the very first thing he asked when he walked in, which was, “Do these work?” He might as well have been saying, “Are you a liar or not?” At the end he says, “Aha. Through batting this thing back and forth, we have now established you’re a liar.” That’s how he leaves him. It is a little battle over what the truth is and how to get somebody to do something. In a way Glukhov essentially says, “I would’ve done it anyway if you had just told me the truth, but you didn’t. I don’t respect you.”

**John:** Craig, great scene. We’ll applaud the scene.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** It fits very well into the overall theme of the series. The dynamics within the scene itself are terrific. Obviously, this is not the most efficient version of the scene. The most efficient version of the scene is like, “We need you to do this thing.” He says, “I don’t want to do it, but I’ll do it,” and then he walks out the door. There’s a two-eighths or three-eighths of a page version of the scene that does the same plot purpose. It doesn’t do the actual dramatic purpose, which is to move our story along and to create rhythms within scenes that feel like they are part of the DNA of the whole series. Talk to us about in writing the scene and figuring out the flip within this, how did you approach the scene?

**Craig:** I thought about how frustrating it is to talk to somebody who doesn’t need you, who doesn’t need anything from you. We had created this character and already established that he was completely immune to the normal Soviet stuff. He couldn’t be bullied. He couldn’t be threatened. Furthermore, what he did and what his men were capable of doing was essential work no one else could do. He’s got you. Now what do you do to get that guy to do what you want? To me, everything should always be about the main character in one way or another. Legasov is meant to learn a lesson at the end of the scene that Shcherbina already knows, because Shcherbina’s been around these guys. He knows the deal. Legasov is an academician, an academic. What’s the difference between academic and academician? I don’t know.

**John:** A couple letters, but I don’t actually think it makes a difference.

**Craig:** He’s from the academy. He is struggling with his own need to be a truth teller and also to get things done. He is learning how difficult it is to move through the world telling the truth, that there is always a cost to telling the truth, and so there is fear of telling the truth. In the end, that’s exactly what he conquers, his fear of telling the truth. In the eventual ending of the whole thing, he’s there in a courtroom, his life or his freedom is at stake, and he makes the bold decision to tell the truth. In this moment, which is pretty much smack dab right in the middle of the five-episode run of this show, he is not yet capable of doing it. He gets a little glimpse of how it could’ve gone otherwise if he had. He’s meeting a guy who embodies the truth. Glukhov is literally incapable of lying or he’s guileless. He just wants the information.

**John:** Now we often talk about what rights you need and what rights you don’t need and using real people, using not real people. Of the people who are in this scene, who’s real, and how much of the situation is as it happened? I’m guessing that the miners actually did that work, but no real life moment happened which is the scene.

**Craig:** No. Shcherbina was a real person. Legasov was a real person. This is entirely a dramatic invention that I made. I have no idea if they ever even met with any miners. It’s a work of historical fiction. This task that they were given is correct and is true. Furthermore, the fact that most of them did not understand how dangerous it was was true. The fact that a bunch of them understood it was dangerous but they were still doing it is also true.

I thought it was just fascinating that, this is a very Soviet thing, they did have to dig the tunnel deeper to protect themselves from the radiation that they would experience the second they walked out of the tunnel. Very Soviet. Very strange. A weird kind of denial. If you’re mostly at 12 meters, then maybe it won’t matter that you’re not going to be at 12 meters a lot. All that stuff is correct. Also, the attitude of the miners was something that I took from research, that in the Soviet system the coal miners were incredibly tough, knew that they were essential to the operation of the Soviet state, and in fact gave Gorbachev massive problems with strikes and things like that. They were not afraid at all.

**John:** Obviously, all of the Chernobyl scripts are available at the library, so just johnaugust.com/library. You can read all of them. We’ll put a little pdf snippet of this scene and also the corollary scene, which is 335, which is the payoff of what the miners actually did at the moment, and a funny payoff to that. If people want to see those scenes, there’s a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** Hopefully, that helped you understand how I do these things, Leah. It’s always different from scene to scene and moment to moment and show or movie to show or movie. That’s the general idea, watching somebody confront their basic fear and failing at it, but maybe making some incremental gains or learning a lesson or seeing somebody else be truer than they are and learning and finding a new place at the end of it.

**John:** Love it. It’s come time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Woo.

**John:** Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing to share?

**Craig:** I do have a One Cool Thing to share. You know I love The Room, the games, The Room games. There hasn’t been a new one in a bit, although I’m aware that probably to the people who make them, they’re like, “Oh my god, we just made the VR one. We’re working on it.” Work faster. There is this other game called House of Da Vinci.

**John:** I’ve played that.

**Craig:** There’s been House of Da Vinci 1 and House of Da Vinci 2. They are shameless copies of The Room, and yet also I have to give them credit for being good. You can make a copy of something that just isn’t very good. It’s just a bad knockoff. If you make a copy of something and you clearly put a lot of time, thought, energy, and care into it, then I have to say, enjoyable. House of Da Vinci 3 has just come out, last week I believe. I am currently playing it. It’s tough, but it’s good. Again, it has a lot of those Room elements that I love, great sound design, interesting puzzles, and very simple but satisfying UI. If you are a fan of The Room games or if you’ve played the House of Da Vinci games, give House of Da Vinci 3 a shot.

**John:** Very nice. My One Cool Thing is an article by Katherine Wu in The Atlantic. It’s about antlers. It’s about why deer grow antlers, and elk also grow antlers.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Are you aware of antlers and what their deal is and why they grow?

**Craig:** I’m going to give you a huge no on that one, John.

**John:** I grew up in Colorado, so I’ve been around deer and elk and giant antlers all this time. They grow every spring. They are bone. They are bone. They’re not just like keratin. They’re not just like fingernail stuff. They can grow one inch per day, which is incredibly fast. That’s faster than any other bone can grow in your body. It’s faster than cancers can grow. What the article makes clear is that the male deer and elk are spending a tremendous amount of energy, of bodily resources, to create these giant racks to fight other men for breeding and dominance. It seems to wasteful evolutionary-wise, and yet it persists. Scientists don’t quite know why it happens. They don’t quite know why the racks are shed at the end of the season, because some animals don’t shed them. It is fascinating.

Again, this is not a How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s interesting to see that biologically, giant, wasteful male displays have always been there. It happens to peacocks. It happens with these running deer. I thought it was just a cool looking sort of thing, the biology behind it, but also the questions that still remain about why these giant things are possible.

**Craig:** Animal behavior is fascinating to me. That’s a really interesting concept of how much energy is required to create these things just so they could fight each other. I guess the point is that toxic masculinity is very much a part of our existence. It’s weird, I hear this and I actually feel slightly better about being a human man, because even though I have a lot of man things in me, violence… I don’t go around punching people, but I feel violent at times. I’ve punched a wall or nine. My general ability to manage the innate toxic nightmare inside that testosterone creates is pretty decent. I’ve done a decent job. I definitely behave better in real life than I do in, for instance, Cyberpunk 2077.

**John:** For sure. One of the points that she makes is that it’s possible that wasting all this energy on these giant antlers actually does serve a purpose because it proves your dominance over other people. It proves, look how much energy I can afford to waste, that I am so powerful and so much bigger than everyone else. Don’t even try to fight me. It may be good for the herd overall to be doing this crazy stuff. I just thought it was fascinating.

**Craig:** Women dig antlers.

**John:** They do. That’s what it comes down to.

**Craig:** I’m going to grow antlers.

**John:** For my Bambi remake, it’s all about antlers.

**Craig:** Oh my god, that would be great. Bambo. He’s just a guy.

**John:** Bambo.

**Craig:** He’s just an angry man. The rabbit comes in and just is instantly gored by Bambo.

**John:** Love it. Good stuff.

**Craig:** Dark.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** The outro this week is by Nico Mansy. You have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We have show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments and emails about when we’re going to do our live shows. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Our bonus topic here is about when to deal with really annoying, stupid people. Maybe set us up with a question, Megana. We got this in from a guy.

**Megana:** Bald at an Early Age asks-

**Craig:** Love him already.

**John:** That’s me.

**Megana:** “I work as a manager at a running shoe store. Today I got a customer who came in, and I literally don’t know how the topic came up, but he started talking about how all of the bombing in Afghanistan has shifted the axis of the earth, resulting in mass tornadoes and environmental hell, specifically north of Kansas. I’m not sure how that detail helped his case, but I like the specificity. All the while, my soul was melting out of my ears. Of course I wanted to say, ‘That’s not how physics works.’ However, I felt like I was about to poke a bear. He was fairly large, and I’m also certain he was chewing tobacco in the store. Not to mention he was a customer. All I could manage was a silent smile. My question is, how do you both deal with stupidity in the workplace? To be sure, this example is mostly humorous, but I’ve had more serious examples with employers as well.”

**John:** I think one of the things that he’s helping set up for us is that the relative power balance thing can be a real factor here in terms of how you deal with these people. If this person is outranking you or if there’s a structural reason why you have to be polite to this person, you may not say something, as opposed to another customer in the store could more easily say, “That actually doesn’t make sense. That’s not actually possible, what you’re describing.”

**Craig:** Bald at an Early Age, you have probably a good, innate amount of disagreeability, which sounds like a bad thing, but I think it’s a good thing. It’s basically defined as your willingness to disagree in situations where other people might simply go along to get along. I think it’s important to be disagreeable to an extent. Otherwise, things go unchecked. We love the guy in the movie who stands up like Henry Fonda and says, “No, I’m not going to vote guilty.” Very disagreeable and ultimately is correct. That’s it. Disagreeability only functions when you’re dealing with somebody whose mind can be changed or who’s at least sane or arguing in good faith or has the intellectual capacity to understand reason.

Now, if someone talks about how the bombing in Afghanistan has shifted the axis of the earth, you can rest assured you are not dealing with somebody whose mind you can change. There are things going on in there far beyond your capability. Therefore, you should relax. Relax your body. Relax yourself. Just imagine that you’re watching a video of somebody else dealing with this person, because when you watch videos of other people dealing with this, you laugh. When you’re in the middle of it, of course you can get very frustrated. You have to just give yourself the pass. There is no point in correcting this person. It’s not going to work. Wait them out patiently until they leave. That’s all you can do in that situation.

**John:** I largely agree with you. The thing I do want to point out though is that sometimes it’s not just those two people. It’s also other observers. If someone is saying idiotic things or racist things or homophobic things, and you don’t call them out or acknowledge that they are doing that or call them on their behavior, other observers, may be sensing it’s okay to do that or it’s not okay for me to… I am not safe in this situation.

You also have to be mindful of who else is in the environment and it’s not saying something actually hurting other people around you. As the kid who’s heard homophobic things around me a lot of my life, that no one was challenging those things kept me in the closet longer. That’s just a reality. I think you have to be mindful of what the kind of content is and who else could be listening, because if it’s just you and this guy, it doesn’t matter. If there’s someone else there who could be influenced by the thing that guy’s saying, sometimes you do have more responsibility in my opinion just to speak up.

**Craig:** That’s a good way of delineating a difference here, because if somebody is saying stuff that’s just stupid and ultimately pointless, you let it go. If somebody’s saying something that is hurting somebody else, then you don’t. Now I will say that as a guy with antlers, who occasionally runs into other guys with antlers, that anybody, any boy I think probably has some sort of built-in mechanism that says this is probably going to go poorly. You have to make some judgments in the moment, including this difficult judgment, how willing am I to be beaten up, because as I like to point out, 100% of men have been physically assaulted by a man. 100%. We know what it feels like to lose an antler battle. It can be very dangerous. It is a very uncomfortable, miserable calculation to make.

I know that on the other side of the gender coin, women are making very uncomfortable, difficult decisions to make about men to trust, whether they should or shouldn’t, because your physical safety is at risk. You do have to also protect yourself physically. If you get the sense that this is an incredibly volatile person, then sometimes deescalation and getting them out and away is the best thing to do. Then turn to the person who’s been hurt by what they said and talk them through that and listen to them. Getting your ass kicked is probably not going to make anybody feel better.

**John:** I want to turn back to the simpler version of this, when someone’s just an idiot. When do you call them on their idiocy versus letting it roll by? This is a good example. This happened a couple years ago. An agent that’s not my current agent, who was never my current agent, but an agent at this agency, we were talking at dinner, and basically this probability question came up. It’s like, let’s say you flip a coin. You flipped a coin nine times, and it’s come up heads every time. What are the odds that the 10th flip is heads?

**Craig:** 50%.

**John:** I think he said, “I would bet all my money on it, because it’s absolutely due for heads and [inaudible 01:03:34] tails.”

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I said to him, “It’s 50/50, or the other alternative you could say is it’s more likely to be heads because something is really goofy about the flipping that it’s happening 9 times in a row.” He could not understand that. I was like, “He should not be making my deals.”

**Craig:** Probability is a concept that eludes so many people.

**John:** It’s true.

**Craig:** It’s a little bit like an optical illusion. It’s an intellectual illusion. We really struggle with it. Not only do regular folks struggle with it, but even very smart people struggle with it. There’s a very famous Marilyn vos Savant case of the Let’s Make A Deal. We talked about this, right?

**John:** I was just going to bring up the Monty Hall problem.

**Craig:** The Monty Hall problem. Megana, are you familiar with the Monty Hall problem?

**Megana:** I’m not.

**Craig:** It works a little bit like this. In Let’s Make A Deal, a game show from 90 years before you were born-

**John:** It’s still on the air.

**Craig:** It’s still on the air. Fantastic. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but the basic idea is there are three doors. Behind one of the doors is a brand new car, and behind the other two doors, useless goats. For whatever reason, the goat was the loser prize. You didn’t actually get the goat. Basically, behind one door is a car, and behind two doors, nothing. Door one, two, and three. Go ahead and pick a door, Megana, one, two, or three.

**Megana:** Two.

**Craig:** You’ve picked door number two. I’m going to show you that behind door number one is a goat. Now do you want to stick with door number two, or would you like to switch to door number three? What do you think the probability is that’s influencing your decision?

**Megana:** I want to stick with door number two.

**Craig:** What’s the probability there, do you think?

**Megana:** I have a 50% chance.

**Craig:** That is what so many people think, and in fact what a lot of incredibly smart people thought. They got into big fights with Marilyn vos Savant. It turns out Marilyn vos Savant is correct. You want to switch to number three. The reason why is because while we think we have a 50/50 chance, in fact when you picked door number 2, you had a 1 in 3 chance of being correct. Showing you what was behind door number one didn’t change that at all. Because you had a one in three chance of being correct when you picked door number two, there’s a two in three chance that you will be correct in picking door number three, because he’s showing you information you didn’t have when you made your choice. This is very hard to understand. If you just think about it as the only way that sticking makes sense is if you think you got it right, and the only way you could get it right is 1 out of 3 times, then suddenly you start to understand, I should switch, and that in fact the probability is now 66/33.

**Megana:** We already established that I’m not very good at math.

**Craig:** I think you are.

**Megana:** This is making my head hurt.

**John:** You aced AP Calculus.

**Craig:** You’re doing great.

**John:** You’re doing great. It doesn’t feel intuitively right.

**Craig:** No, it feels wrong.

**John:** We’ll look up whether it’s actually two out of three things. I know you absolutely change it. I’m not sure it actually works out to two thirds, one third.

**Craig:** It has to be. It has to be, because your odds are one in three when you pick it, and that never changes.

**Megana:** Now I have two options left. One is going to have nothing, and one’s going to have a car. Whether I pick door two again, how is that…

**Craig:** When you pick door two, you’re choosing between two options. When you picked door one, you were choosing between three options. The fewer options you have, the higher the chance is that you’ll be picking the car. If you run this every time, you think about it, if I never showed you that first door, if you just picked door number 2, and you did this over and over and over and over and over, then basically 33% of the time you’d get the car. If I remove that door number one and ask you whether you want to stay or switch, if you switch, you will be right therefore two out of three times, over and over and over. I know.

**John:** It’s only when you do a zillion simulations of it that you see it’s going to work out to be this way. It’s like doing the bell curves of it all. It works that way.

**Craig:** It’s really mind-bending.

**John:** Part of the reason why it doesn’t feel right to us is that we have all been in lines at the grocery store and like, “Oh, should I switch to this line which seems to be faster [inaudible 01:08:00]?” We always suffer for it. It feels like I should just stay put always feels like the right answer. Mathematically, with the Monty Hall problem, it doesn’t happen. I’ve seen versions of the Monty Hall problem in a lot of other game shows and other contests where you get those choices and that the right choice is to switch, although people who don’t switch and get the right answer makes it feel like I shouldn’t have switched. It’s still gambling.

**Craig:** People get frustrated with this stuff. I guess to tie it back into the idea of talking to people who are stupid, there are people who get incredibly frustrated with me when I challenge them on their belief in ghosts or homeopathy, which is a big one.

**John:** Astrology.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** People who believe in science and astrology.

**Craig:** I think that those people really can’t possibly actually believe in astrology. I think it’s more like a fun game. It has to be, because come on, although I run into them all the time.

**John:** Yeah, you do.

**Craig:** With astrology conversations, I just go along with a grin, because it’s so patently and obviously ridiculous. Homeopathy is dressed up as real science. That’s what makes me crazy about it. It also makes me frustrating for people when they say, “It works. That’s all I can tell you is I took it and it worked.” All I can say to them is, “No, it didn’t. It’s placebo.” To the extent that placebo works, yes. To the extent that you’re spending money on a tiny sugar pill that should cost one penny, you’re a sucker. Homeopathy is a bad thing that keeps people from actual effective treatments. People get very frustrated with me, but I make my choices. If there’s somebody who has a very large rack of antlers, I’m probably not going to get really mouthy about it, because I don’t want to get my ass kicked. It’s a tricky one.

To even these conversations up in terms of gender, all women should be allowed to be pointing a gun at a man during all conversations. It would just make things go more equitably, I think. Just as a law. As you start talking, the woman goes, “Oh wait, I’m so, so sorry, give me one second,” and opens up her purse, pulls out a small handgun, points it at you and goes, “Okay, go on.”

**John:** “Make your point.”

**Craig:** “Make your point.” I think then guys would be as gentle and careful with women as they are with men with large racks of antlers.

**John:** It all pays off.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Megana, do you like my idea? Do you like my idea of arming all women in conversations?

**Megana:** I carry pepper spray, so I feel like that does help even things out for me a little bit. Yeah, I think some sort of-

**John:** Maybe every 10 days, you actually take out the pepper spray and aim it at me while we’re having a conversation. Most of the time it’s just a tacit threat that it’s there.

**Craig:** I feel like, Megana, you need to have the pepper spray out and aimed from the start of the conversation or in meetings with people.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Megana:** Most of our meetings are via Zoom.

**Craig:** In real life, I’m just saying if a guy starts talking over you, again, just wiggle the pepper spray, just to remind him it’s in your hand.

**Megana:** I do love that.

**John:** A little bear spray could really speed up development.

**Craig:** Just trying to bring some equity to these situations.

**John:** Thank you guys so much.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

Links:

* Lots of exciting updates for premium members coming up, [sign up for a membership here!](https://scriptnotes.net/)
* [WGA Health Plan covers travel for abortion-related expenses](https://www.wgaplans.org/info/health/forms/TravelExpensesNotification.pdf)
* [More Than 400 TV Showrunners Demand Netflix, Disney and More Offer Safety Protocols in Anti-Abortion States](https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/tv-writers-demand-safety-protocols-abortion-bans-1235327815/)
* [Batgirl Shelved](https://deadline.com/2022/08/warner-bros-batgirl-1235083809/)
* [Netflix Retroactively Editing Stranger Things](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/stranger-things-netflix-retroactively-editing)
* [The Falconer](http://www.thefalconerfilm.com/) by Annie Kaempfer, [watch here!](https://www.amazon.com/Falconer-Rodney-Stotts/dp/B09RTSQSND/)
* Follow along with this discussion on reversals – [Chernobyl scene here](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/CHERNOBYL_561_Reversals_Scene.pdf), full script [here](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Chernobyl_Episode-3Open-Wide-O-Earth.pdf).
* [Antlers Do What No Other Bones Can](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/08/deer-elk-shed-antlers-hunting/671021/) by Katherine J. Wu for The Atlantic
* [House of DaVinci 3](https://www.bluebraingames.com/the-house-of-da-vinci-3) video game
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
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