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

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has a few bad words from Paul Giamatti. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 549 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

In Episode 547 we touched briefly on the Sideways effect. Basically, movies sometimes have a real-world impact, not just in culture but also politically and economically. We see the Black representation onscreen or depictions of nuclear power. Movies can make things seem cool or uncool or scary. As screenwriters, we want to be aware of the influence our writing can have.

The term Sideways effect comes from the 2004 film Sideways, written by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from the Rex Pickett. Who better to ask about the Sideways effect than the writers themselves? Luckily, someone else just did, so I don’t have to. Today’s episode comes from the amazing Slate podcast Decoder Ring, hosted by Willa Paskin. It’s been one of my One Cool Things before, but this recent episode on the sideways effect was so good, I asked Willa if I could run it as a Scriptnotes episode. She said yes and agreed to have a chat afterwards with me about sideways and other cultural mysteries she’s investigated. Stick around after her episode for our conversation. For our Premium Members, Craig and I will chat about what he’s missed these last few weeks that he’s been gone. Enjoy.

**Willa Paskin:** In October 2004, the movie Sideways was released in theaters. It’s about two guys who go on a bachelors week to Wine Country. One of them is a cad who’s about to get married. The other, played by Paul Giamatti, is Miles, a hardcore wine-lover.

****Miles Raymond:**** We’re going to drink a lot of good wine. We’re going to play some golf. We’re going to eat some great food and enjoy the scenery, and we’re going to send you off in style, mon frere.

**Willa:** Sideways is a small, mellow movie, but it got big. It grossed $110 million worldwide and received five Oscar nominations. It also upended the wine industry. Famously, it is said to have done this with one line of dialogue. It arrives about a third of the way in as the guy are preparing to meet up with two women.

**Jack Cole:** If they want to drink Merlot, we’re drinking Merlot.

**Miles Raymond:** No, if anybody orders Merlot, I’m leaving. I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!

**Willa:** At the time this line was first uttered, Merlot was a popular wine people were chugging down by the glass full. Legend has it that after this line, after, “I’m not drinking any fucking Merlot,” Merlot went ahead and tanked.

**Laura Lippman:** It’s like I’m RoboCop and that’s one of my directives now, no Merlot.

**Willa:** Laura Lippman is a crime novelist who saw Sideways when it first came out. Did you notice right away that it just put you off Merlot?

**Laura:** Yeah, right away. Right away. It was like a battle cry. I have literally tried to kind of overcome that, standing in neighborhood liquor stores and looking at what’s for sale. I can’t do it. I bet I would like Merlot. I think I did like Merlot. It’s so weird. It’s like I’m the most susceptible, suggestible person on the planet.

**Willa:** When it comes to Sideways, Merlot, and wine in general, she’s not the only one. I’m Willa Paskin and this is Decoder Ring. In the mid-2000s, the movie Sideways had an impact on the wine industry so notable that it has a name: the Sideways effect. In this episode we’re going to be looking closely at that effect and what it really is. Did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades? Did a monologue jumpstart demand for a whole other varietal? Did Paul Giamatti’s sad sack character change our relationship to yet another wine, one that was barely mentioned in the film? Today on Decoder Ring, all of these questions and this one. Is it long past time to start drinking some fucking Merlot?

The Sideways effect is not just one thing. There are a number of components to it. I’m going to begin with the best known part of the phenomenon, the one I started with, the theory that Sideways shanked Merlot sales. When Sideways arrived in theaters, Merlot was the trendiest red wine in America, but America had not always had a trendiest wine. The country had been largely indifferent to wine well into the mid 20th century. California whites caught on in the 1970s when one of them won a blind taste test against world-class French wines. Then in the early ‘90s, red wine got a boost when 60 Minutes aired a segment on the so-called French Paradox. The paradox was that French people ate very fatty foods but had much lower rates of heart disease than Americans. The 60 Minutes piece came to a definitive conclusion about what was going on.

**Morley Safer:** The answer to the riddle the explanation of the paradox may lie in this inviting glass.

**Willa:** Sales of red wine spiked, and none benefited more than Merlot, which by the end of the decade would become the most popular red wine in the country.

**Tim Farrell:** Merlot is a good candidate because couple of things.

**Willa:** Tim Farrell is a wine buyer for the wine store Brooklyn Wine Exchange.

**Tim:** This is not actually too simplifying to say. It’s an easy word to pronounce. The other part is that it’s fairly fruit-forward and the tannins aren’t very strong, and the acidities are fairly low, especially when it’s made in California. It’s like a very soft, easy-drinking kind of red wine.

**Willa:** Merlot is most famously grown in Bordeaux, France, largely as a blending grape, but the American boom was centered in California, where production of Merlot quadrupled in the 1990s. Merlot is a relatively easy grape to grow, adaptable to a range of climates and soils, but that doesn’t mean it should be grown everywhere.

**Tim:** Grapes are a funny fruit because the more grape vines has to struggle to ripen, the more flavorful the fruit is.

**Willa:** California’s cool coastal areas are good for Merlot, but during the Merlot boom, it also started being planted in California’s breadbasket, the hot, fertile Central Valley.

**Tim:** That’s where Driscoll’s strawberries come from. If Merlot grows too easy in the irrigated, flat, sunny Central Valley, you’re going to have really bad grapes. That’s where the really bad Merlot grapes were coming from.

**Willa:** The mediocre grapes led to a lot of thin, too sweet Merlot, and even the better stuff was often made to be an affordable, easy sipper, the kind of inoffensive fruit-forward gateway wine offered by the glass and sold in Franzia boxes, all of which made Merlot something of a joke to wine people.

**Rex Pickett:** It was uncool to drink Merlot.

**Willa:** In the 1990s, Rex Pickett was a struggling writer living in Santa Monica.

**Rex:** I’ll try to be brief. My life was shit and I made some films and parted company with my ex-wife, whatever. I started going to wine tastings up at a little wine store. There were doctors and lawyers and snobs and whatever. It was just generally conceded that if you liked Merlot, that you were either a wine philistine or an idiot.

**Willa:** Rex regularly went up to the Santa Ynez Valley, just north of Los Angeles. As Wine Country goes, it’s nowhere near as famous as Sonoma or Napa, which are hundreds of miles north, closer to San Francisco. This region in Santa Barbara County was sleepy and underdeveloped, dotted with horse stables, golf courses, and vineyards.

**Rex:** There’s nobody up there. I’d go up midweek. I was broke. I’d go play golf for $25 on a grape course. I’d go wine tasting. It was free.

**Willa:** Rex poured these trips and his thoughts about wine into a book called Sideways. The main character, Miles, shared a lot with Rex. He was also a frustrated, divorced writer whose favorite wine was Pinot Noir, and who had the reflexive disdain for Merlot, of a 1990s oenophile. When Rex finished the book, it was rejected by dozens of publishers, but it ended up getting to Alexander Payne, the director of Election and About Schmidt.

**Alexander Payne:** I read the book actually on a flight from London to Los Angeles. When I’m reading something that I think could be a movie, I’m just praying, “Oh, please stay good until the end. Don’t come up with some gimmick or guns or violence or something. Keep it a good, sad, funny human story.”

**Willa:** When his plane landed, he called his agent and said he wanted to make Sideways into a movie. Payne is also into wine, and when he co-wrote the screenplay, he knew the no fucking Merlot line was a good one.

**Alexander:** People who knew about wine knew how much crappy Merlot there was. Then I think people who didn’t know about wine and always order Merlot were called out in an affectionate way. It had this kind of snowball effect. It was a good snowballing joke.

**Willa:** It seemed to roll right over Merlot’s reputation. What do you guys make?

**Jeff Bundschu:** We’ve been growing these Bordeaux varietals for as long as I’ve been around.

**Willa:** Jeff Bundschu is the sixth-generation owner of Gundlach Bundschu, a family vineyard in Sonoma that specializes in, among other things, Merlot.

**Jeff:** A good Merlot is pretty sexy, voluptuous, round, and intense, without the mouth-puckering tannins or austerity of an ageable cabernet.

**Willa:** Jeff agrees that in the 1990s a lot of Merlot on the market just wasn’t very good. When Sideways called this out, his Merlot, the high-quality stuff, got caught up in it.

**Jeff:** You’d have thought Spider-Man himself had swung in and tossed out Merlot.

**Willa:** Scores of newspapers chronicled Merlot’s troubles. Katie Couric, while hosting The Today Show, said she heard she wasn’t supposed to drink it anymore. People started coming into Jeff’s tasting room and saying they just did not drink Merlot. Pretty much every winemaker and seller has a similar anecdote. Steve Cuellar, a professor of economics at Sonoma State University, has heard plenty of them.

**Steve Cuellar:** It was literally just repeated over and over and over, tasting room after tasting room after tasting room, even to this day. I just figured, okay, let’s try to measure it. What is the effect?

**Willa:** In 2009, he co-authored a paper called The Sideways Effect: A Test for Changes in the Demand for Merlot and Pinot Noir Wines. It looked at wine sales in supermarkets in the four years after Sideways.

**Steve:** The movie was released in October 22, 2004. Prior to that, Merlot was experiencing a really strong growth rate. After that, sales really just collapsed. If we do a percentage growth rate, it literally goes from, I think, 13% growth rate before to almost 0 afterwards.

**Willa:** Steve was showing me a line graph as we were talking, and it’s the shape of a steep mountain that just abruptly flattens out.

**Steve:** When I first saw this, I’m like, holy cow, this is going to be a huge effect. At least I’ll be able to put some numbers on it and all that kind of good stuff.

**Willa:** First, he wanted to check Merlot’s sales against a control, to look at another wine to see what happened to its sales.

**Steve:** We figured, let’s choose something that isn’t mentioned in the movie. Let’s just avoid the red wine and we’ll choose Chardonnay. It’s got large sales. It should be equivalent to Merlot.

**Willa:** In fact, I think of Chardonnay as the Merlot of white wine.

**Steve:** Exactly. It is the big seller.

**Willa:** As big as Merlot was, Chardonnay was bigger. It was and is far and away the most popular wine in America. When Steve looked at the sales numbers for Chardonnay, he found something surprising. He pulled up the graph for me.

**Steve:** When you do that…

**Willa:** It looks the same. The graph of Chardonnay’s sales growth right after Sideways has the same shape as Merlot’s, a steep mountain that just abruptly tables off. After Sideways, in the sample he was looking at, Chardonnay sales had flat-lined too.

**Steve:** Which is just bizarre. This is really the gist of the paper. Yeah, Merlot did crash, but it probably wasn’t the result of the movie Sideways, because Chardonnay, which wasn’t featured anywhere in the movie, good or bad, really experienced the same crash.

**Willa:** Based on these findings, Steve feels strongly that we only think the Sideways effect is real and that there must be another explanation for what happened to Merlot, one that applies to Chardonnay too. In the decade-plus since this paper was published, Steve has asked dozens of people if they have such an explanation, and they don’t. There is a sense among wine insiders that Merlot sales were already cooling off, its low quality catching up with it. Nothing can stay trendy forever. There was no major event, no financial crash, no natural disaster, nothing of note to explain such a dramatic change except Sideways. What does Sideways have to do with Chardonnay? That’s not a rhetorical question. I think there’s an answer to it. Before we can get there, I want to turn to the next component of the Sideways effect. Let’s put a pin in Merlot and Chardonnay for now and talk about a wine that Paul Giamatti’s Miles actually likes.

**Miles:** Pinot’s a very thin-skinned grape that doesn’t like constant heat or humidity, very delicate.

**Willa:** If the first theory about Sideways is that it tanked Merlot sales, the second is that it boosted sales of Pinot Noir. Pinot, wine experts tell me, is a subtle wine that is exquisitely sensitive to the environment in which it is grown. Two Pinots from vineyards just a thousand yards apart can taste really different. This distinct expression is part of what geeks wine people out.

**Kathy Joseph:** Those of us in the wine world feel once you love Pinot Noir, you love Pinot Noir, and you explore Pinot Noir. It’s very sensual and it’s exciting and it’s delicious.

**Willa:** Kathy Joseph is the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars, a vineyard and winery in the Santa Ynez Valley. She makes a Sauvignon Blanc that was name-checked in the film, but she also makes a Pinot Noir, which she readily admits is tricky to grow.

**Kathy:** Probably more than any grape, Pinot Noir does demand a certain environment for it to excel. It needs a cool climate. It needs good drainage. It needs a place that isn’t too rich. What happens is that it’s all expensive.

**Willa:** All of this had made Pinot a kind of specialty grape in America, a fanatics grape, as someone put it to me, grown in small quantities and rarely offered by the glass. Then along came Sideways. See, Pinot Noir is Miles’s favorite wine. He gives a beautiful speech about it, in which it’s clear he’s not just describing a grape, he’s also describing himself.

**Miles:** It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it’s neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. Only if somebody really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. Oh, its flavors, they’re just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet.

**Willa:** Upon hearing this ode to Pinot, Americans started buying it in droves.

**Kathy:** Absolutely. Yes, there was an uptick in immediate interest for Pinot Noir.

**Willa:** A Nielsen analysis found sales of Pinot spiked 16% in the months after the movie came out. Wine producers were caught off guard by Pinot’s overnight popularity, and there was a mad dash to plant more of it. In California, production of Pinot Noir has increased 75% in the years since. There was a lag at first, because it takes four to five years for a grapevine to bear usable fruit. There were other difficulties too, starting with the price. Tim Farrell, the wine buyer you heard from earlier, was working at a sports bar in Indianapolis in 2006 when a customer ordered a glass of Pinot.

**Tim:** I remember thinking, oh, we do have a Pinot Noir, and it’s $12 a glass. I thought, that’s insane. We have Bud Light for $2.50. Why would you ever want a $12 glass of wine?

**Willa:** Pinot grown correctly is expensive. It just takes a lot of care. After the movie came out, not only was there more demand for Pinot, there was more demand for Pinot from casual wine drinkers, the kind of folks who want an affordable Pinot. You start to see a version of what happened to Merlot happening to Pinot. Pinot is planted in places that it probably shouldn’t be and attended to less carefully, and that means less quality product makes it into bottles. Another paper, one from 2021, found that most of the frenzied Pinot plantings of the mid-2000s were in the Central Valley, the sunny, fertile, hot, strawberry-growing Central Valley that wasn’t even good for adaptable Merlot.

**Tim:** Then you have a flood of really bad Pinot Noir coming out by about 2008, 2009.

**Willa:** Even good Pinot Noir didn’t necessarily deliver what a casual wine drinker was looking for, like the person who ordered a $12 glass of Pinot at Tim Farrell’s sports bar.

**Tim:** They returned it. They said, “Oh, this is watery. I don’t like this at all.” I took it back. I didn’t know anything about wine at the time. The flavor profile and the texture and the body of Pinot Noir is not actually what people were expecting. They were Merlot drinkers, and so they were probably expecting a big, rich, full-bodied, powerful wine, and it’s exact opposite.

**Willa:** Wine producers needed to please these customers that wanted a Pinot that didn’t taste like a Pinot. Fortunately, there were a lot of other grapes around, because remember, growers hadn’t been expecting Pinot to be the next big thing.

**Tim:** The less scrupulous producers of Pinot Noir that just wanted to cheapen their production and make a more rich, smooth wine for this market that was sending watery glasses of Pinot Noir back at sports bars, was they started adding 25% Syrah to a lot of these wines.

**Willa:** Blending is a common and accepted practice in winemaking. Some of the very best French wines are blends. In America, the standards are a bit looser. You only need 75% of a wine to consist of the grape that’s named on the label. All of that extra Syrah, it made the Pinot go down easier.

**Tim:** They had to soften up and make Pinot Noir super accessible because real, unadulterated Pinot Noir, in addition to being very expensive, is not what the American consumer in 2006 really wanted. It even confused the market for what Pinot Noir should actually taste like.

**Willa:** I’m not saying Pinot Noirs all became phony baloney overnight, all got bad or all tasted like Syrah. In the long-term, the interest in Pinot probably did push American palates in a new direction. In the short-term and on the low end of the market, Pinot became a victim of its own success. While this made for a bunch of lousy Pinot, the irony is it made for better Merlot.

**Jeff:** What it did mean there for a minute, there was a ton of really good Merlot that was available for super cheap.

**Willa:** Jeff Bundschu, the Merlot maker at Gundlach Bundschu again.

**Jeff:** The red blends in the 10 years that came out after Sideways, that became red blends because no one would buy Merlot, were way effing better.

**Willa:** As you may have suspected, I know very little about wine. I’ve learned a bunch from working on this episode, but I can still barely tell when a wine has gone off. When someone asks me what I think about one, I often don’t know. I think the truth is that none of the wine tastes that good to me, but I feel like it could, if only I knew more, tasted more, tried harder, grew my palate. I honestly feel a little self-conscious about how little I know. I know this isn’t a universal feeling, but I don’t think it’s uncommon.

**Jeff:** Like you could ask somebody, “Do you like that movie? Do you like that peanut butter? Do you like that toothpaste?” They’re going to say, “I hate that movie. I love that peanut butter. I’m down with that toothpaste.” You ask them about a wine and they’re like, “I’m so sorry that I’m not a wine expert, but this kind of doesn’t taste very good to me.”

**Willa:** Why is just uniquely intimidating. I think that’s at least as important to the Sideways effect as whatever was in the script. It helps explain why a little movie that opened in four theaters could have such a big impact. People want guidance about wine, and we’ll take it from a waiter, a wine store clerk, a sommelier, a wine critic, or a movie character. Miles is a man who can barely affect change in his own life. He’s miserable, lonely, and a little insufferable. Listen to him.

**Miles:** Don’t be shy. Really get your nose right in there, really. A little citrus. Oh, there’s just the faintest soupcon of asparagus. There’s just a flutter of a nutty Edam cheese.

**Willa:** He is not at all what you picture when you close your eyes and imagine an influencer, and yet he influenced the heck out of us, even though we weren’t using that word then. His high-strung, forceful, informed opinions make him a compelling authority. His strongest views are about Merlot and Pinot Noir, but maybe thinking his influence stops there is underestimating him, the movie he’s in, and how much hand-holding people want about wine. Maybe it’s all bigger. Maybe it’s even big enough to extend to Chardonnay.

We’re going to get back to that Merlot Chardonnay mystery I pinned back there. You remember the economist Steve Cuellar published a paper that showed both Merlot and Chardonnay sales plateaued, in an admittedly small, regionally specific sample, right after Sideways came out in 2004. No one had really been able to make sense of this. Then I mentioned it to Kathy Joseph, the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars. Should I tell you what the economist said?

**Kathy:** Yes, I’m very interested.

**Willa:** Kathy pointed out that in the 1990s there had been a rise in sales of wine by the glass at restaurants, and those glasses were mostly full of Merlot and Chardonnay.

**Kathy:** The reason, in my opinion, is because of their accessibility and also how they were made. Chardonnay was a little bit sweet. Merlot could be a little bit sweet. They were just like almost a transition wine. They were easy. People didn’t order white wine any more by the glass. They ordered Chardonnay.

**Willa:** Once Kathy flagged this connection for me, I realized she was not the only person who had talked about it. It came up a lot, including with Alexander Payne.

**Alexander:** Those were the two wines ordered by people who didn’t really know much about wine. People who knew wine would start saying, “I’m ABC, anything but Chardonnay.”

**Willa:** Rex Pickett had noted it too.

**Rex:** The waiter would say, “Red or white?” If you said white, it was going to be some really cheap, probably Chardonnay. If it was red, it was going to be Merlot.

**Willa:** Here are these twinned wines. Then Sideways comes along and curses one of them out and ever so slightly shades the other.

**Jack:** I thought you hated Chardonnay.

**Miles:** No, no, no. I like all varietals. I just don’t generally like the way they manipulate Chardonnay in California.

**Willa:** Maybe what happened to Chardonnay is just a minor version of what happened to Merlot. Audiences picked up that Chardonnay was the other uncool wine, and they backed away from it. If that feels a little overdetermined to you, another way to think about it is that Sideways made it very clear to casual wine drinkers our basic choices had been noticed and found wanting, but it also made it clear there was a whole wide world of wine out there. Walking out of the movie, you could think, I’ve got to stay away from Merlot, I’ve got to drink Pinot Noir. You could also walk out thinking, huh, I should learn some more about wine.

Steve Cuellar’s graphs of Merlot and Chardonnay in the wake of Sideways show consumers cutting back, but the wine market didn’t collapse. We just started drinking something else. This is certainly how the winemakers I spoke with saw it. They thought Sideways encouraged people way more than it shamed them. Jeff Bundschu again.

**Jeff:** I think that what happened in Sideways is Miles, who I can’t believe I know of by first name basis, was like, “This Merlot sucks.” He sort of just gave voice to an entire world of people that had been choking down what they think they should have been choking down instead of standing up for saying, “I don’t care. This isn’t very good.”

**Willa:** Do you really think that people were trusting their own palate or they were just like, “We trust Miles.”

**Jeff:** I see it more as permission, but I guess that’s because I’m an optimist. Everybody is like total sheep, like a permission to hate wine that they don’t like.

**Willa:** Kathy Joseph use the exact same word, while being similarly optimistic.

**Kathy:** The movie gave people permission to explore beyond what they already were comfortable and familiar with.

**Willa:** This is based on her experiences in the years after Sideways, years in which the Santa Ynez Valley, where the movie was set, became a bustling tourist destination, when the wine market doubled and wine was diversified way beyond Merlot and Chardonnay. It all amounts to a third theory of the Sideways effect, that Sideways encouraged wine drinkers to branch out. As it turns out, there’s a speech in the movie that makes the case not for any one varietal, but for wine in general. It isn’t from Miles. It’s from Maya, the wine connoisseur and romantic interest played by Virginia Madsen.

**Maya Randall:** I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes, and if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve. If I opened a bottle of wine today, it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive, and it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity.

**Willa:** Maya isn’t relaying rules about wine. She’s praising it for always changing. There’s a contrast between her and Miles, and the movie knows it. It’s why they make a good romantic pairing.

**Maya:** It tastes so fucking good.

**Willa:** Miles’s rigidity is set off against her flexibility, his instructions off her explorations, his acidity off her balance, two ways of appreciating wine and life.
Steve Cuellar’s paper about Merlot and Chardonnay sales only covered the four years following Sideways. Chardonnay sales bounced back. It’s still the most popular wine in America. Merlot production and prices stabilized too, but it’s now often used in America as it’s used in France, as a blending grape. The overall percentage of it, compared to all the grapes crushed in the country, has fallen.

**Jim:** A few years in, our Merlot sales were down and I’m like, “Dad, we got to get out of Merlot. We got to plant something else.” He was like, “Oh, it’s going to come back, Jim. It always come back,” for a decade, two decades. When’s it coming back? When’s it coming back?

**Willa:** This brings us to the final wrinkle in this story, that Miles, the guy that destroyed Merlot’s reputation, doesn’t even hate it.

**Maya:** What gems do you have in your collection?

**Miles:** Oh.

**Willa:** About halfway through the movie, Miles tells Maya that he’s been holding on to this one really good bottle of wine.

**Miles:** I’ve got things I’m saving, definitely. I guess the star would be a 1961 Cheval Blanc.

**Maya:** You’ve got a ’61 Cheval Blanc and it’s just sitting there?

**Miles:** Yes, I do.

**Maya:** Go get it. I’m serious, hurry.

**Willa:** A ’61 Cheval Blanc costs about $4,700. He tells Maya he’d been saving it for his 10th wedding anniversary, but is now just waiting for a special occasion.

**Maya:** The day you open a 61 Cheval Blanc, that’s the special occasion.

**Willa:** In one of the final scenes, Miles finds out his ex-wife is pregnant with her new husband, and he decides to drink that wine. He takes it to a diner, orders a burger and onion rings, and drinks it out of a Styrofoam cup. As he sips it, he lets out an appreciative, “Hm.” Even in these degraded circumstances, the wine shines through.

This shining wine, this Cheval Blanc, as Alexander Payne knew, is made mostly out of Merlot. Some viewers spotted this contradiction instantly. You can read comment threads about how this makes Miles an idiot and a hypocrite. The meaning seems plainer to me. Miles really loves wine. He really knows wine. He doesn’t hate Merlot, one of wine’s essential, noble grapes. He just hates the bad version of it. This love hate thing is right at the heart of why this little movie had such unpredictable and outsized effects. It tapped into the dualities that exist in most of us, people who hate being uncool, but who also love to try new things. We’re sheeple and we don’t want to be told what to do. We’re easily led and we’re curious. We’re Miles and we’re Maya.

When I spoke to Laura Lippman, who rejected Merlot like RoboCop at the beginning of this episode, I told her about the twists and turns of this story and my sense that Miles himself would now have it in for some other trendy wine. The next time we talked, a few weeks later, she’d just gone to the wine store.

**Laura:** There was something going on where I was like, “I should get a really good bottle of red wine.” I was like, “What if I bought Merlot?”

**Willa:** She did it. She took the bottle home, made a nice dinner, and poured herself a glass.

**Laura:** I thought it was terrific, actually. I was like, “I will do this again. I will drink Merlot again.”

**John:** I am thrilled to welcome Willa Paskin, who is the host of Decoder Ring podcast and Slate’s TV critic. Willa, congrats on another great episode of your show.
**Willa:** Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, John.

**John:** Recently we’ve been doing episodes on nuclear energy and climate change, looking at how stories we tell have an impact. The idea of the Sideways effect has come up multiple times. It was just amazing kismet that your episode this last week was on the Sideways effect. How did it come to be? How did you decide to do it for an episode for your show?

**Willa:** At the beginning of every season, I scratch around for ideas. I think I had asked on Twitter if anybody had any thoughts. It had come up. I had looked into it really perfunctorily. It seemed like the answer was really obvious. It seemed like everyone was like, “Yeah, it just tanked Merlot sales,” whatever. I was like, “That’s not interesting enough.” Then, luckily, a couple of weeks later, this other tweet started going around that was a graph of what had happened to Merlot after Sideways essentially. We just started talking about it in Slate’s internal messaging system. There was a wine guy on staff. He’s Jordan Weissmann. He writes about money and economics.

**John:** I know Jordan.

**Willa:** He’s entwined. We just started side chatting. He was my wine guy basically. He has a wine guy. His wine guy, who’s a wine seller in Brooklyn, had basically talked to him a lot about Sideways. It just suddenly became very clear, just from this brief chat on Slack, that oh no, there was enough there for it to be interesting. Had it really affected Merlot? Had maybe it actually affected Pinot? Then I started talking to people, and it turned into this nice little delectable rabbit hole, which is always super fun. I ended up, in the episode, speaking to an economist who had done a study about it.

One of the things that’s interesting and funny about something like the Sideways effect is we all know what it is and everyone talks about it, but of course, it’s not actually hard science or news, and so there have not actually been… Most people who are economists or who study stuff for a living have not actually been like, “Definitely, I need to look into the Sideways effect.” There actually haven’t been that many real papers about it. When I did speak to one of the guys who had done one of the papers about it, it ended up taking me places I was not expecting.

**John:** In the episode you frame three questions, which is did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades? Where do you stand, Willa? How strong do you think the Sideways effect was for what happened to Merlot?

**Willa:** I think the consensus about Merlot is twofold. One is that it did depress both Merlot sales and Merlot plantings. There was another study that just came out very recently, actually, about the long-term effect of it, but not dramatically. It affected it some. Wine, as an agricultural product, it’s interesting in the sense that it takes years to plant a grapevine and then for it to make grapes that are good enough. You just can’t act on information as quickly as you can on like, everybody wants a strawberry or everybody wants a pair of jeans. You have to wait. While you’re waiting, you’re not making any money. No one was ripping Merlot out, basically, because that’s just-

**John:** That’s suicide. It got blended into other wines, as you talked about.

**Willa:** Over time, it did not get replanted at the rate that it had. It does seem that Pinot really did get planted at a huge rate. That’s the first thing. I would say the second thing is much, much fuzzier. Just reputationally, absolutely, it really, really hurt Merlot. That doesn’t mean that it hurt it for everybody. That doesn’t mean that all consumers were suddenly paying attention to this movie. Madmen doesn’t have to be watched by that many people to have a really big footprint or to feel like it has a really big footprint. I think something like that is very similar.

**John:** I always think about Twitter, because not very many Americans are actually on Twitter, but Twitter has a huge impact on the national conversation. People didn’t need to necessarily see the movie to know that, oh, we’re not supposed to be drinking Merlot. It just had a stink to it because of the smart people who saw the movie said, “We shouldn’t be doing this.” It had an outsized impact.

**Willa:** I think similarly to Twitter, there’s tons of people that have no idea what’s happening on Twitter, are never affected by it all, but the people that are paid attention to by the media basically did.

**John:** It was a meme, basically. Don’t drink Merlot is a meme. It just got spread in a pre-internetty kind of time.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to… The Travis Lybbert paper that you mentioned is behind a paywall, but there’s another, Journal of Wine Economics, that shows the graph of the two things. You really see how Pinot Noir just really took off. You can also see that the prices fell for Merlot, which I think is also useful to see that supply and demand… There just wasn’t demand, and so the prices for Merlot fell.

**Willa:** I would say one of the things that was interesting from talking to wine people about it is this isn’t settled. I think if they looked into these papers, it would be, but it was not. Something happened and everyone has a ton of anecdotes, but a lot of the serious people were like, “It’s not clear that that’s really true,” which I was surprised by. I was like, “Oh, isn’t it obviously true?”

**John:** These can all be future episodes of Decoder Ring down the road if you want to. Around the office we were talking about other examples of things that are like the Sideways effect, where movies had had a weird impact in the real world. I wanted to bounce them off of you and see what your instinct is for these.

**Willa:** Is your first one Clark Gable and the undershirts?

**John:** Hey, it was my third one, but yes, let’s talk about Clark Gable and the undershirt, because it happened one night. He takes off his shirt, and he was not wearing an undershirt. Apparently, men realized, oh, I don’t have to wear an undershirt underneath a dress shirt. Snopes says it’s unclear whether that’s actually a real thing or not. What’s your ruling on Clark Gable and the undershirt?

**Willa:** I would love to believe that is true. How can we have any idea? It would be hard to follow that, track that information at the time.

**John:** If you were to do an episode on that, you’d probably need to talk to fashion historians and really figure out where we were at at that time and was the undershirt going away at that point.

**Willa:** If I was doing that, there’s a couple things. There’s immediately, I think, a number of things. One is I start to think about hats. It’s similar to-

**John:** What happened to hats?

**Willa:** What happened to hats? In a way that it’s like, you were going to do a couple stories from one episode. It’s like, what happened to hats, what happened to undershirts. I could imagine undershirts being the open. Then also undershirts, which we’re not allowed to call wife-beaters anymore, but what is the semiotics of the undershirt. I think there’s probably a bunch there.

**John:** It gets complicated.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Two other things that you actually can measure. Super Size Me. We had the documentary Super Size Me. Six weeks after the movie came out, McDonald’s dropped the term super size me from everything. They stopped using the term all together. That’s an impact.

**Willa:** Can I tell you my cocktail party chatter about Super Size Me?

**John:** I want to hear this.

**Willa:** This is truly basically the only thing I remember from Super Size Me. I remember the takeaway was McDonald’s is really bad for you. There’s in passing a graphic about how one bagel is equal to eight slices of bread. It’s a picture of the bagel. It’s a drawing. Then it equals eight slices in bread. I believe in carbs. I don’t have a problem with carbs. It has haunted me. It didn’t ruin McDonald’s. It just really gave me pause about bagels forever. That was my personal impact [inaudible 00:40:40].

**John:** That was your Super Size Me. Blackfish, the documentary about SeaWorld, the stock in SeaWorld fell 50%. That’s a pretty direct cause and effect there. I want to talk about the name Madison. What is your perception of where the name Madison came from?

**Willa:** Oh my god, I have no idea. I do just perceive it as being one of those on the top 20 girls’ names now.

**John:** It came from Splash.

**Willa:** Did it?

**John:** In the movie Splash, Tom Hanks is with Darryl Hannah. “What’s your name?” She looks at a sign for Madison Avenue, and she says, “Madison.” He says, “That’s not a name.” It wasn’t a name. It was the 216th most popular name for girls in 1990, but then it became 29th, and by 2000 it became number 3. It was not a name being used.

**Willa:** It does fit in with a ton of other name trends, which is the last name for first name trend, like Hudson. There’s a lot of names that sound like that, Lawson. It’s snugly right in there, and then also it’s upscale.

**John:** It does fit in with that trend. My very first TV show, there were these twins, a boy and girl twins. I named them Mason and Finley.

**Willa:** You nailed it.

**John:** I’d never seen anyone in the real world named Mason and Finley. I called that trend. They are now popular names.

**Willa:** I’m really impressed. That reminds in Baby Mama, the kids are named Banjo and… They didn’t call it, but they just made fun of it nicely. Those are perfect. You did it.

**John:** Finley and Mason. We also talk a lot about representation and how depictions of people on screen matter in terms of how people interact with people. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, Sidney Poitier, hugely important, probably the face of a Black man on screen was helpful. Philadelphia, for just Tom Hanks playing a person with AIDS was important. We can have our faults with either of those movies, but they were important in their times. It’s always hard to remember what it was like before that movie came out.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Jaws and perceptions of sharks, perceptions of shark safety. We can’t go back to a time pre-Jaws.

**Willa:** No, we definitely can’t.

**John:** People weren’t worried about sharks. Now my daughter was scared to be in the pool because of sharks.

**Willa:** Sometimes when I’m just swimming out, I hear the song in my heart. You feel it. It’s coming for you. I think I talked about this in the episode pretty directly. A thing about Sideways that really tickled me and that I thought was really fun about this episode was we don’t imagine that someone like Miles would have an impact upon us. He just is not a poster child for that. That’s just not how things work. Sometimes it’s who you least expect. I like that. I like that it’s unpredictable in that way, because if it was just up to people who make decisions based on what you think is going to happen or what’s happened before, you’d never cast… You’d make Miles be totally different. You’d sand off his edges and you’d make him someone else.

**John:** We often talk on this podcast, what is the nature of a protagonist, what is a hero, what is a hero going through. Also, Miles feels like a sidekick character to somebody else, and yet he’s centered in this movie. He’s like a Shrek at the very center of this movie, who is grumpy and angry, and we learn to love him because he’s just center frame the whole time. One of the things that I really liked about your episode is that you bring up Maya, who is his antagonist, who’s this person who’s challenging all his beliefs and actually genuinely loves wine in a way that’s more approachable than maybe he does. She’s not strident. She’s embracing of like, let’s celebrate wine, rather than pit them against each other.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Which is fun. I want to talk just a moment about some of your other episodes.

**Willa:** Please.

**John:** It’s been a One Cool Thing repeatedly on the show for me. You have a two-part episode on the Jane Fonda workout, which was a really fascinating deep dive in terms of it’s so strongly associated with her and yet she’s really taking this work that someone else has done and repackaging it. You broker a conversation between the two women.

**Willa:** That’s one of my top two episodes we ever did. It was totally not what I was expecting to happen. I basically had decided that the Jane Fonda workout itself was fascinating and that Jane Fonda’s story is fascinating, because it is. When I started looking into it, the woman who actually created the workout is named Leni Cazden. Jane Fonda had cited her in a couple places and in her biography, but also she’d thanked her at some awards show. She was findable, essentially. It wasn’t a secret. Then a lot of things just fell into place that I didn’t have anything to do with it. My timing just happened to be really good. I got to speak to both of them and then got to follow up with Leni. I just felt this delicious psychological long-term relationship just fell into my lap. That doesn’t happen that often. That was super fun. Then we basically did the episode that I had been imagining second. Then we did this other fun one that I hadn’t been expecting first.

**John:** A lot of them are just one-offs that are just great and fun. The history of Gillette razors, let’s go to five blades, then the razor wars was just weird and how we got into that and the history of razors. It feels like there’s some, not necessarily a movie, but there’s some version of that absurd way we got to it. It feels like a Soderbergh movie, where it’s just like how we got to five blades eventually.

**Willa:** Some corporate espionage. The thing that I always want is there to be an actual idea, that’s not just the idea that the show purports to be about. It’s not just the topic. With that one, with the five blades one, the big idea was just like, oh my god, capitalism is so silly. Why do we keep doing this? It’s cool, a single-blade razor actually works pretty well. It lent itself to that. I usually find those things as I’m looking into them, but that one was very clean in that way.

**John:** I want to talk to you about the making of the show, because unlike Scriptnotes, which is exactly what we’re doing, which is just a conversation between two people, and there’s an outline I’m looking at, you are fully scripting the whole thing. It’s starting with research, and then you’re doing your interviews. You’re figuring out what parts of those interviews you can use. Then you’re having to write every word you’re saying to get that right and make it all fit. What is the process for you? You’re figuring out your ideas for the season, but what are you actually doing on a daily basis to get this stuff written?

**Willa:** The process is, I’m like, okay, what sounds like a good episode? As I said earlier, I start to dig around about a subject, just Google around about it. The ones that are right, they feel like, you know when there’s things hollow, like there’s a trick door or something, it’s going to spring back at you? It actually feels that way. You’re like, “Oh, this has a little give. There’s stuff here that I wasn’t expecting.” Once it starts to feel that way, there’s just… I just have to have one idea about it or just a sense that there’s a layer.

Then I just start to report. I do a lot of research. I’m also having a lot of conversations as I’m doing it. It’s not like a one and then two. They’re together. Then ideally, I would do all the reporting. I now report a couple of episodes at once, just because it’s just a better use of time. Then I essentially sit with all the stuff that I have, all the actualities, all the research, all the audio, all the interviews, and I write from the beginning. I listen back to the tapes and stuff, to the tracks. I’m trying to get somewhere, usually. I’m trying to make a point or explain some history.

It feels really written. It feels sculpturally written in a different way. It’s pretty that. Then I just spend a bunch of time writing it, however long it takes. It always takes longer. It’s the part that still hurts, as writing anything does. Ideally, that doesn’t take more than two weeks, but it’s been to. In some ways, it’s hard to track it. Then it still takes a pretty long time, because basically it’s-

**John:** It’s all the post process. You had this plan going into it. Then you’re listening to this thing. These episodes are scored. They have ins and outs. You have to figure out breaks.

**Willa:** A hundred percent. It’s all those things, but it’s not even that. It’s almost like when you turn in a first draft to an editor, they change it. They tell you all these notes. They give you all these thoughts. Weirdly, putting it on tape is the same thing. Suddenly, you just hear all these things that are wrong with it. You hear all the places it’s paced wrong. You hear the information that’s in the wrong order. You hear the beats that aren’t quite working right. Because a show is trying to build and often is about ideas…

Just with the Sideways episode, for example, there was a third sections that’s about… It’s after Pinot. It’s after the Merlot section. It’s after the Pinot section and trying to resolve what happened with Chardonnay. I knew where it was going. I knew what the end was. All that stuff was written. There was something about the pacing that was making that pay… It just wasn’t working. On paper, it was working fine, but it’s not working fine when you actually hear it. That takes a long time. I think that takes longer than it probably should. I think it takes longer than other people’s process. There’s a lot of iterations basically. The music comes in later. The breaks are written in. It’s a lot about making sure the arc works. I have found that that is not… It’s supposed to be written to be heard. When you’re just writing it, it’s not in the form it’s supposed to be at. Something really changes there.

**John:** The closest I’ve done to this is I did a podcast called Launch, which was a six-episode series about the creation and printing and release of my book series. It was great, but it was such a different experience. I was not prepared for how much time it was going to take and also just what a different workflow it was. We hadn’t transcribed everything, all the interviews, but then we missed out on stuff. Are you transcribing everything you do from all these people or are you just taking these are the bits we need?

**Willa:** This is a thing that I don’t know what would’ve happened in the past, but we use basically an automated transcription program. A computer does it. You get them back fast. There’s use cases that I don’t have, where you would need it to be really precise. It’s pretty good actually. Because I’m listening back to it no matter what, the transcript lies, you still have to hear. It sounds like it’s great, but then you listen in, they’re talking in a monotone. You still have to listen back to it. We do transcribe everybody, but that’s because it’s not what it was.

**John:** Once you’re writing it, is this in Google Docs? What program are you using when you’re writing?

**Willa:** I was a faithful Microsoft Worder for all my writings, and I still am. Google Docs, it’s just if other people have to get into it, which obviously the producer and editors do at some point. Then also, just when the drafts were just changing so much, after you’re going through, we basically listen and we make changes and then retrack. It just became so much easier to just have it all just in this one place. You just need the link, not to email the document every time it changes.

**John:** That’s brutal. The episode we listened to, how many hours of work on your side was that?

**Willa:** I couldn’t…

**John:** Is it three weeks?

**Willa:** I work really hard.

**John:** It was a ton of work.

**Willa:** That one I will say, it was a lot of work, but in a different way. The writing of that one was the smoothest, cleanest writing experience I’ve had in a long time. I think it took me, not counting the day that I just went back through all the audio that I had… I also didn’t over-report that story, so that helps a lot. I wrote that piece in four days, which never happens. Then I got stuck with it at different stages once it was whatever. It’s almost like I’m almost sad it happened. I’ll be like, “I can do it in four days.”

**John:** [inaudible 00:52:42] “Maybe I can do it in three days.”

**Willa:** It hasn’t happened in a long time that I’d done it that fast, and it’s not going to happen again. It was nice. That one was just very structurally, very clear in my mind as I was doing it. That’s not always the case.

**John:** Willa, so many of your episodes are just incredible fodder for our segment How Would This Be A Movie. In a future How Would This Be A Movie, would you mind coming back and talking us through some of these things?

**Willa:** I would love to. Anytime.

**John:** Fantastic. Willa, thank you so much.

**Willa:** Thank you.

**John:** That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts 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’re about to record on what Craig’s been up to. Now, let’s roll the credits for the original episode of Decoder Ring.

**Willa:** This is Decoder Ring. I’m Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is written and produced by Willa Paskin. This episode was produced by Elizabeth Nakano. Derek John is senior supervising producer of Narrative Podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our technical director. Thank you to Jim Taylor, Jordan Weissmann, Peta Work [ph], Lo and Lou, Josh Levine and Travis Lybbert. The 2021 paper Travis co-authored called A Sideways Supply Response in California Wine Grapes also corroborates the Sideways effect, and we’ll link to it on our show page.

If you’re a fan of Decoder Ring, please sign up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get to listen to this show without any ads, and they’re supporting the work we do to make Decoder Ring. Members will also get to hear a special behind-the-scenes episode with me at the end of the season. Please go to slate.com/decoderplus to sign up now. I really appreciate your support. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig is back. Craig has been gone for weeks and weeks and weeks. Now Megana, last week I asked you, “Hey, is anybody wondering where Craig’s been?” You are the person who’s responsible for the ask@johnaugust email account. I was wondering whether people were wondering where Craig has been.

**Megana:** Yes. We had one person who wrote in, curious about where Craig has been.

**Craig:** One person was wondering where I was.

**John:** By the time this Bonus Segment is out, I guess the news will be out. Craig, you were in space. You were the first screenwriter to fly on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spaceship. I guess my real first question is, what was it like to leave the bounds of Earth? What was that experience like? They always say to send a poet, but a screenwriter is the person to send.

**Craig:** Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid. In fact, it’s cold as hell. Anybody? Anyone?

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

**Craig:** That’s Elton John’s Rocket Man. It’s a popular song.

**John:** It’s a popular song. I’ve heard it once or twice.

**Craig:** 1970-something. God, this is just one kind of sadness upon another. One person cared, and neither one of you know Rocket Man. I think it’s going to be a long, long time until touchdown brings me around again-

**John:** That I do recognize.

**Craig:** I’m not the man they think I am at home.

**John:** You were not on Mars. You were instead in night shoots. You were in night shoots for your TV show, which is just a lot. Your schedule, which was difficult, became impossible.

**Craig:** I’ve been doing pretty well, I think, all things considered, by when you go into three weeks of nights, you’re no longer on the schedule that any other normal human being is on. It’s amazing actually how fast you can get used to it. Much easier to get out of it than to get into it. I would say that much at the very least.

**John:** While you were gone, you missed some episodes. I don’t think you had a chance to listen to the episodes. I thought we’d review what we learned and get your opinions on some things. The first episode, which I really missed you for, was on nuclear issues. We had two experts on to talk about nuclear war, nuclear arms, nuclear energy. You obviously have a background in this stuff. We were looking at what the current landscape was, and of course with the war in Ukraine, the growing escalation of possibilities of nuclear war. It was not a fun episode. I wouldn’t say it was joyful.

**Craig:** No, never joyful to talk about things like nuclear weapons. I don’t really know what the point is of talking about the possibilities. Either they will or will not occur, and if they occur, we’re all dead. That’s basically the deal.

**John:** I would say going into it, I was of the mindset that because of the reduction in number of nuclear arms that are out there in the world, nuclear war wouldn’t be as bad as what we grew up expecting. It’s still terrible.

**Craig:** Oh lord, yeah. The arms race that occurred, I’m sure you guys covered this, largely in the ‘80s, between the Soviet Union and the United States, led to a situation where both nations had this absurd surplus of nuclear warheads. We don’t need that many. We know that a single large nuclear weapon can destroy most of a city. There are only so many cities. Once you start lobbing them, the destruction that occurs is dramatic not only to the people that live there. Obviously it’s fatal. Then you have long-lasting effects around it. Economies are shredded. The environment is destroyed. It’s almost impossible to imagine a situation where one nuclear weapon is intentionally fired and set off and is not followed by a retaliatory strike. Essentially, nuclear weapons are unusable or usable all at once. It’s actually amazing that we have these here and have had them for our entire lives and they haven’t been used in our lifetime.

**John:** Let’s keep it that way.

**Craig:** That would be nice. Unfortunately, we are not in charge.

**John:** Craig, are you familiar with the story of Stanislav Petrov?

**Craig:** Was he the guy who said, “I’m not going to fire that nuclear weapon.” The Soviet said, “Fire nuclear weapon,” because they had misunderstood a test, and he was like, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

**John:** Yep, it’s that guy. That was brought up as one of the potential stories that has not really been very well dramatically told. One of the things I brought up is that I think it’s sometimes really challenging to tell a story about a thing that didn’t happen. The guy who stands in the way of a bad thing happening is a little less dramatic than the guy who does the thing.

**Craig:** There’s one movie that I think does that very well is Crimson Tide, 1994’s Crimson Tide, which I think probably drew quite a bit from the Petrov incident and is very much based on that idea that a submarine receives orders to fire a nuclear weapon and then there’s another message coming in, but the radio’s damaged. They don’t get the rest of it. It might say, “Wait, actually don’t,” but they don’t know. There is essentially a debate and mutiny over whether or not they should fire those nuclear weapons. They made it very exciting. A fine Tony Scott film.

**John:** Agreed. Other episodes you missed. Episode 546 was Limited Series. We had Liz Meriwether on the show, finally…

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** …and Liz Hannah. They both recently had limited series out there. We had a talk about what that was like. You of course did a limited series for Chernobyl. One of the things I think was so key from their descriptions of why tell this story now was that feeling that in a limited series or a dramatic series versus a documentary series, you can tell that central character’s internal POV, that you just couldn’t if it’s strict documentary. They had a chance to really explore what was inside the character, rather than what just the facts were.

**Craig:** The difference between a limited… Any kind of fictionalization, doesn’t matter whether it’s a limited series or an ongoing series or a single movie, but any dramatization affords you a wildly different palette than you would have as a documentarian.

**John:** Lastly, the episode that we are going to be putting this Bonus Segment on, was about the Sideways effect. I think we’ve talked about the Sideways effect just between you and me, or maybe on the air as well. Of course, that’s the impact of the film Sideways on Merlot and Pinot Noir in America and around the world and how one character’s rant, or he rants twice, can have a measurable impact on popular culture and economics. We talked with Willa Paskin about that.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting thing. I remember seeing Sideways. I remember that happening. I didn’t know anything about wine then. I barely know anything about wine now. I know the kinds of wines I like. Interestingly, I don’t like Pinot Noir.

**John:** I’m not a fan.

**Craig:** I don’t know about you, John. I like a huge, big, red, stupid wine. I like a dumb, big Cabernet. That’s what I like.

**John:** That’s what I say too. Whenever somebody’s coming over, “What kind of things you like?” I just say, “I like a big, dumb red.” I’m not apologizing for that. It’s just actually what my taste is.

**Craig:** I like to be hit in the face with a Cabernet bat. That’s me. That’s just what I like. Am I a cretin? Probably. I don’t care. I don’t like Pinot Noir. It’s thin. It’s like it’s not really there to me. Merlot, it’s not offensive to me. I don’t mind it. It’s fine. Actually, there are some fantastic wines that use Merlot as part of their blend.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** There are some great blended red wines out there. Sideways, I don’t know. By the way, I love that movie. It’s amazing. Why was it so obsessed with Pinot Noir? I don’t know.

**John:** Basically, Willa’s argument is that Pinot Noir was really just meant to be a stand-in for the Miles character himself, and that he’s difficult, but there’s actually something good underneath the surface, and you have to really come to appreciate what it’s trying to do and take it as what it actually is. He feels like he is a Pinot Noir that people are not appreciating properly.

**Craig:** Thus an entire industry was disrupted.

**John:** It was. Now, part of the reason we got into the Sideways effect is on Episode 547 we had Quinn… You know Quinn Emmett.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** The other folks behind Good Energy were coming on to talk about how we talk about climate change in our films and TVs and how we can put messages out there that have an impact. We talk about how sometimes things really do have an impact, but in terms of representation, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner or other films along the way have that impact in terms of showing a different way of people interacting, dramatizing situations that people may not have thought of, and certainly for LGBT representation. There’s important films along the way like Philadelphia that get people to address their prejudices.

**Craig:** I don’t know how good of a tool movies are going to be for climate change, because the thing is most people recognize that it exists, most people are concerned about it, and most people, meaning almost everyone, feels that they have no direct impact upon it, and they’re right. It’s going to take large governmental action and sweeping changes globally to prevent this situation from getting worse. I think that’s not going to happen. I think the situation will get worse. I don’t know what it is. With something like climate change, where we can see it’s there and we’re just not sure how to deal with it, it very quickly can turn into lecturing or it can be parody or satirical. We can make fun of people for being stupid and ignoring climate change.

Ultimately, I’m not sure how you’re going to do, because the problem is you don’t see the end result. Philadelphia, you see a man change. You see the way he thinks about another human being change. You see how that human being’s death changes him so that theoretically, moving forward, he will be a better person. We can identify with him because he’s Denzel Washington and he’s a great actor. That’s impossible to do with climate change, because they’re not going to see it happen.

**John:** I would debate the premise that it’s impossible for it to be done with climate change. I think it’s a question of what are you trying to do. Are you trying to make a movie that is specifically about climate change or are you trying to normalize things that you wish people would normalize in their real lives? An example would be, if you have characters who are going onto the roof of their building, are there solar panels on that roof, and normalizing that expectation. Are you seeing people do small things like take public transportation rather than be in a car? Those are some small steps. Then there are also… We’ll put a link in the show notes again to the Good Energy playbook.

There are things that don’t feel like climate stories, but of course really are climate stories. Anything about disasters have a climate element to it. One of the points they try to make is that in anything we’re doing in film or television, if you’re not addressing climate change, you’re making science fiction, because a reality of the world is climate change. To not address it is science fiction.

**Craig:** Sure, unless you’re telling a story that really doesn’t have anything to do with outside. Even if it does have something to do with outside on any given day, you’re not going to be experiencing this specific aspect of climate change. I don’t know. I don’t know about that. I love Quinn, and I get what he’s doing, and I appreciate how devoted he is to this. To me, honestly, the thing that we could do, the thing that I could do, I try to do this, is talk all the time about how positive nuclear energy is.

I feel like I have a somewhat privileged position in that regard because I made a show about a nuclear disaster. I’m saying nuclear energy is a good thing. In fact, if the United States invested heavier in nuclear energy, and I know that Quinn and I agree on this, that would matter more than anything else. That would matter more than solar panels. That would matter more than wind turbines. Just putting us back on a nuclear grid would change everything. I try and talk about that. It’s hard to put that into… Maybe I’ll have a character yammer about it in a show. I can do that, I suppose.

**John:** Talk about your show, because your show’s going to have some connection to climate change, just by necessity. There’s fewer people on this planet.

**Craig:** Climate change stops. Once we stop driving cars and pumping coal carbon into the air and burning fossil fuels like oil and gas, then climate change essentially gets reversed. I think it’s fair to say, without giving too much away, that climate change is not irrelevant to what happens. That’s as far as I’ll go.

**John:** That’s as far as you’ll go. Craig, it is wonderful to have you back on the show. Next week we’ll have you back for a full episode. Anyway, congratulations on surviving your night shoots.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I’m looking forward to having you back on the show and back in Los Angeles before too long.

**Craig:** I’m almost home.

**John:** Cool.

Links:

* [Decoder Ring](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring) and the [Sideways Effect Episode](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2022/05/sideways-the-movie-had-lasting-effects-on-the-wine-industry-and-casual-wine-drinkers)
* [Sideways Movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375063/)
* Willa Paskin [on Slate](https://slate.com/author/willa-paskin) and [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/willapaskin)
* [A “Sideways” Supply Response in California Winegrapes](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-economics/article/abs/sideways-supply-response-in-california-winegrapes/FE14CECD927047BD0582207D77F1B09E) by Travis Lybbert for the Journal of Wine Economics
* [Snopes on Clark Gable and Undershirts](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-shirt-off-his-back/) and [Madison Name from the Movie Splash](https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/bp/splash-joke-lead-madison-baby-name-boom-190720175.html)
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([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/549standard.mp3).

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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 547 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting screenwriters.

Today on the show, we live on a planet experiencing climate change, yet the stories we tell tend to ignore this uncomfortable fact. We’ll look at ways writers can address that with two of the folks behind a new campaign to put some good energy out there. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk about how you ask for money, be that for making a movie or for launching a campaign to save the planet.

First, producer Megana Rao is here, and we have some follow-up to get through. Megana, what stuff has come in through the mailbox that we need to address on this podcast?

**Megana Rao:** Tony wrote in regarding Episode 545, the nuclear episode. He recommended this great film about Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World. I’ll include a link in the show notes.

**John:** This had come up as like, oh, someone should make a movie about Stanislav Petrov, who’s the Russian who did not start a nuclear war. I said on the thing, “We don’t do movies about people who didn’t do things.”

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** Who stood in the way of things. I looked through the trailer of it, because it says, oh, all these famous people are in this. Wow. How did I never hear about this? It’s a documentary that has reenactment footage in it. It’s a hybrid in between, but it’s not a full-on normal feature.

**Megana:** Scripted, exactly.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. What else have we got?

**Megana:** In Episode 530, Jack Thorne introduced us to the 1in4 Coalition, which is an organization that focuses on accommodations for disabilities in the UK entertainment industry.

**John:** That’s right. He was talking to us about simple things like bathrooms that are accessible for everybody and making sure that there’s a person on set whose responsibility it is to really focus on making sure that people can do their jobs and that there’s nothing holding them back because of accessibility issues. They’ve made some good progress in the UK based on his speeches and other people doing work on the ground.

**Megana:** Absolutely. Then the Inevitable Foundation, which is the American equivalent of that 1in4 Coalition, just released an accommodations report this week. They created a calculator to look at the cost of what it would actually cost production to have X percentage of disabled people on their sets or in their writers room. One of their missions is that they want to close the disability gap between real life and film and television, because disabled people make up over 20% of the population, but represent less than 1% of writers behind the screen. They mostly focus on mid-level screenwriters. In this project they looked at two budgets. One was for a 24-week writers room. They looked at the cost if there were 25% disabled writers versus 100% disabled writers. Then they looked at a 20-week budget for a 10-episode show and then did the same thing and calculated the cost there.

**John:** Great. We’ll put a link in the show notes and to the report, and also to this Hollywood Reporter article which does a good job of walking through it. This is Richie Siegel and Marisa, who you and I had actually spoken with before, because I did a little thing with them for the Inevitable Foundation.

One of the things that’s interesting is they’re putting some real numbers on what those costs would be, because I think sometimes you’re scared to walk into those conversations. It’s like, “Oh my god, it’s going to be so expensive.” What I like about the report is they’re focusing on some of the really small things. It could just be adjustable chairs for different height people. That is a simple thing. Some things are more expensive like ASL interpreters for a thing. Also, it scales differently with how many people need that thing on your set. If you need an ASL interpreter for one person, that can scale up to more than that one person. It helps the whole production when you have that stuff figured out in advance. Some of the costs really weren’t that big. I think the percentage cost for those writer rooms, it was sometimes 1% to 12%, but it wasn’t a crazy, crazy number. Compared to the things we spend money on in Hollywood, it was not a huge number.

**Megana:** Totally. They break down all of the costs in this really easy-to-read way that feels so obvious, like some of the things that they’re asking for are $4. It also brings up that I think when you are someone who is lower level on a production or it’s your first day at work, you’re like, “Who do I ask for these things?” It can be so uncomfortable to ask for really small things that might make going to the bathroom easier.

**John:** That’s what I think Jack Thorne was really emphasizing, I think, in their report. They were talking about having trained disability coordinator people, so that you know there’s a person you can go to to ask for that thing, so you’re not the person who has to go ask the producer for the thing. You can go to the specific person, just the same way we have a COVID testing coordinator and we have intimacy coordinators. There’s a person whose job it is to really think about that for the production, and so it doesn’t fall on the line producer or some other job.

**Megana:** In the report they survey 35 artists, writers, directors, showrunners, actors, and the combined projects that those people have worked on are 600 productions. Something that I was so struck by is that productions are spending money on accommodations to make things more accessible, but it seems like the people that they’re trying to help are being left out of those conversations. In one example, the production had hired an ASL interpreter, but this person actually didn’t-

**John:** They learned ASL on YouTube. They were not actually qualified to be doing the job that they were trying to do.

**Megana:** Someone had Celiac’s disease and someone gave them a gluten-filled doughnut and lied to them about it. I was so surprised by, and I guess it makes sense, that it seems like the discomfort around dealing with people who are differently abled is preventing any sort of communication from happening, whereas it’s very normal for us to now ask, “Do you have any dietary restrictions?” I think it’s just a new way of framing how we approach people and set expectations before going into things.

**John:** That’s actually a good segue to framing expectations about how we are going to be working on sets and telling our stories as we transition to talking about climate. Maybe we’ll introduce our guests for this week. First, I’m going to introduce Anna Jane Joyner. She has been working for over 15 years in climate communication strategy and campaigning. Her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Glamor, MTV, the Associated Press, New York Times, and more. Most recently, Anna Jane is the founder and director of Good Energy, which has released a playbook for how film and TV can welcome feature storylines on climate issues. Welcome, Anna Jane.

**Anna Jane Joyner:** Thank you so much for having me.

**John:** An absolute pleasure to be here. I saw you first at a presentation that happened this last week where you’re rolling out this big playbook, which is a big, giant event at the Academy Theater. I want to get into how this all came to be and where you’re at. Where are you at at this very moment? Just this past week, are you on a high? Are you trying to get your energy back? How are you feeling?

**Anna Jane:** Yeah, a combination. We’ve been working on the overall project for about three years, but on the playbook itself for a year. It was a whirlwind year. It felt very surreal to see it actually come to life and be out there in the world and have this great reception, both at the event at the Academy Museum, but also a lot of press around it and just general excitement, so definitely on a cloud.

**John:** We’re going to be putting a link so people can read it, but I really want to talk through some of the workable ideas from it on this podcast. To help us out with that, Quinn Emmett is a screenwriter, investor, father of three small humans. He also created Important, Not Important: Science for People Who Give A Shit, which is both a podcast and a newsletter. It covers science news, from climate to COVID, heat to hunger, agriculture to AI ethics. Quinn Emmett, I can’t believe you’re finally on the show. Welcome.

**Quinn Emmett:** I know. I was wondering how many times my wife would make the cut before I did. Then every time I think about that, I think you should just keep having my wife on the show probably.

**John:** Quinn’s wife is Dana Fox Emmett, who is one of my favorite humans in the world. I got to see her married off to you at a great celebration in Virginia many years ago.

**Quinn:** So long ago. So long ago. Thank you for having me. You are a mentor to me. I’m delighted to be here and to help Anna Jane any way I can.

**John:** The hook for this episode really is that this thing has just come out. Can you tell us what the playbook is, Anna Jane?

**Anna Jane:** It’s a playbook for screenwriting in the age of climate change, which is really just an array of both inspiration and information. It has all the classic things you would think of, information on impacts, the science, solutions, but all of it ties back to story itself, in screenwriting in particular. Then it has a lot of fun sections on characters and a cheat sheet, a lot on climate psychology, because obviously that’s very related to character development. It’s really just an array of both great information and tips, but also a lot of just inspiration and ideas that we hope people steal.

**John:** Now when Quinn first described it to me, I was expecting it to be a book or a pdf, some sort of physical printed document. While there is a small version of that, it’s mostly a website. If you go to goodenergystories.com, you’ll see all the stuff that you have built out. It’s a very elaborate array of… I think it’s designed so you can just fall into it and spend hours inside it, looking through stuff. Quinn, you’ve been writing about climate issues for all these years for Important, Not Important. How’d you get involved with it, and what was the hook for you?

**Quinn:** Time is a flat circle, and I don’t remember much. I don’t remember how I got roped into this/inserted myself, but I have been aware and so impressed by Anna Jane’s journey over the past decade and all the contributions she’s made to the movement, from her personal story to her greater effect in climate communications. I got into this because I was screenwriting, and mostly sci-fi and tech and things like that. I devised this fire hose of, hey, what’s the latest in science and tech and medicine and things like that. I realized a lot of my friends weren’t seeing that same news, folks who were interested in it. They were getting their news from Facebook, which turns out, not so great for everyone. That’s just what it’s been. It’s been this journey of, hey, how do I help people keep up with these things, but do something about it?

What Anna Jane was working on was such a bizarre intersection of my two jobs, which was it’s very difficult to keep up with what’s happening with this stuff to truly try and understand it, to decipher disinformation from what really matters, and if at all possible, to guess where we’re going, but more importantly, to really identify with the folks who were already being affected, whether by choice or not, and the folks that are working, as I like to say, on the front lines of the future, to do something about this, whether through mitigation or adaptation. There’s a million different ways. That’s people and stories and characters and struggles. Anna Jane said, “We need to build something so that the folks in Hollywood who have a hard enough time making movies and TV and all that can find ways to build the most important story of our time into the most prolific storytelling mediums of our time. I feel like what you built is just an incredible version of that.

**John:** Quinn, you’re trying to distinguish between news, which is information and facts, it’s a kind of storytelling, but it’s not the kind of storytelling that involves characters. Anna Jane, we often do a segment on this show called How Would This Be A Movie. Imagining you as a protagonist who’s building this organization, what is your character origin story? What gets you into doing this kind of work for 15 years?

**Anna Jane:** It’s a journey. I grew up in a conservative, evangelical community. My dad is a megachurch pastor, so definitely not who most people think of becoming a climate activist and communications guru. I went to UNC Chapel Hill, and I took environmental science, because it was supposed to be the easy science class, and learned about climate change. For me, the actual entry point was mountaintop removal coal mining, which is this kind of coal mining where they blow the tops off of mountains in Appalachia. I grew up in western North Carolina in the mountains, and then on the summers on the gulf coast of Alabama. That hit me in a very visceral, emotional, personal way just imagining the mountains near me being blown up and those communities being impacted. That’s what really got me into working on coal and environmental activism and climate.

A few years later, when I was the campaign director for a regional nonprofit in North Carolina, I was approached by Years of Living Dangerously, which is a Showtime documentary series on climate. They wanted to follow me trying to convince my dad that climate change is real for a year. We had a celebrity cohost, Ian Somerhalder. We spent a year trying to convince my dad, by introducing him to faith leaders who are climate leaders, but also some of the best climate scientists in the world. I intellectually understood the climate crisis and how severe it was, but when I did that, I was like, “Okay, I really need to read up on all of this and really immerse myself in the latest climate news.”

I was just listening to a TED Talk by David Roberts, who’s an amazing journalist. He just went through it in such a simple way, the climate crisis and the impacts. It just hit me. I just had this moment, I remember, where I was driving, where I really emotionally understood what we were up against, and from that moment on, knew that there was never anything else I could do. Also, working on Years of Living Dangerously introduced me to just the power of cinematic storytelling and the fact that we don’t have enough of it. That is what really turned me more. I was also passionate about climate stories. Growing up in religion is a masterclass in storytelling, so I knew the power of it. That’s what really got me into TV and film and thinking about how to portray it on screen.

**John:** Thinking about you as a protagonist, we always talk about a protagonist has to leave home and go on a journey and be transformed in this. Was it that speech that was the transforming moment or was it the first class that transformed you? What are the moments along the way that made you feel like, oh, this is what I meant to do, this is what scares me, maybe this is the cave I fear to enter that I must enter? What were those moments?

**Anna Jane:** That was definitely a big one, David Roberts. It showed you, if we’re at two degrees, this is the world, and six degrees, and just in this powerful, simple way, and that just showed how terrifying it was, frankly. It was a bet that somebody on Twitter had waged at him that he couldn’t talk about climate change in 11 minutes or explain it in 11 minutes. At the end he just said, “Your job, anyone who knows this, is to make the impossible possible. That is what we are up against. That’s all of our roles.” I really took that to heart. There’s that car moment listening to a TED Talk.

Then I would say the other piece is, so about six years ago I was working in New York for a company that was a B corporation, had a nonprofit climate arm, and we had a creative agency in-house. I got to do a bunch of my own documentaries and short films and work with a really amazing creative team. I decided to move back to the Gulf Coast of Alabama, which is where my mom’s family’s from. I had this romantic idea of, I’m going to move back to this place that my family’s been for five generations, that’s very sacred to me, that’s beautiful. It’s right on the water and is also on the front lines of climate change. My little town of 500 people is a peninsula, and it’s been called one of the most vulnerable places in the country to climate.

When I got down there, I was not anticipating the real trauma and stress of living on the front lines of climate changes. It’s now six months a year of hurricane season. It’s just every couple weeks, one of these starts forming, and you just have to stop everything you’re doing and prepare. It’s traumatic. It’s also morally complex, because you’re praying that it doesn’t hit you, but that means that it hits somebody else. Being down on the Gulf Coast has certainly brought climate home to me in a very, very personal way. I already had a lot of emotions and feelings about it, but it certainly upped that experience of just really profound grief and anxiety about how this is already impacting us.

**John:** Let’s talk about the emotions, because you said grief and anxiety, but also it sounds like this initial TED Talk was fear. Basically, they’re showing there’s a monster there and we have to fight this monster, yet the storytelling can’t only be about fear and grief and anxiety. There has to be positive things to talk about there as well, and hope and optimism and courage. As you’re trying to develop this playbook for people to be telling the stories in the space, how do you find those other emotions? I feel like the movies we’ve seen have always been about just doom. How do you key into those other things?

**Anna Jane:** I think you’re right. The tropes that we do see are the apocalypse and doom, or they’re a character who’s shaming another character about their plastic straws or SUV or what you, or they’re ecoterrorists. There’s a lot of those too. We would love to see some more versions of climate stories, which is really the purpose of the playbook is to expand that, and then you have possibilities. I have two feelings about it.

Dr. Britt Wray, who’s an expert on climate psychology and mental health, has this great line of thinking or quote that grief and anxiety isn’t inherently bad and hope isn’t inherently good. Grief and anxiety are pointing you toward something. She says this: climate, it’s not a pathology to feel anxiety about it. There’s a reason we feel anxiety about it. If you can really process that and turn towards doing something that this anxiety is pointing you towards doing, that is a really amazing transformation. Seeing characters go through that and really reckon with their difficult emotions around climate can very much not only help the writer process their own difficult emotions, but the audience as well. I really love those stories where the emotions show up and it’s hard and you see how people work through them and reckon with them. That’s a form of finding courage. A lot of great stories are that dark night and then you come out of it and then you find courage to go up against the impossible odds. I think that that’s huge.

Dr. Kate Marvel, who’s a climate scientist and was one of our advisors and wrote the climate science section. She’s also a beautiful essayist and storyteller. She has this great quote that we need courage, not hope to fight climate change. Re-framing it that way for me was just so powerful, because there are moments where it’s hard to find hope. It is a really big challenge. Even just what we’re already seeing with Hurricane Ida when it hit New Orleans last years, I just cried for two days. The Gulf Coast is going to change. There’s nothing we can do. For me, it’s more about finding courage, like how do we face this thing, which is such a lot of what stories are about. Everything from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings to the Jesus story is about going up against really big odds. I do think you can find hope. There’s definitely still hope. We can still avoid the apocalypse outcome for our children. No matter what direction we’re going toward scientifically, we can build a society that can actually take care of each other, so that as we’re going through these impacts and transformations of our physical world, we can still take care of each other.

**John:** Now, obviously, the actual changes need to happen. There are some individual changes, but there’s more societal changes, political changes. Those are the wheels that need to turn. You’re focusing on what Hollywood’s role is and what the storytelling can be. I want to take a moment to think back about what impact has Hollywood actually had over the years in social issues, and to what degree is it just reflecting things or to what degree is it actually moving the needle. At our meeting we were talking through trying to brainstorm what are examples of situations where Hollywood and film and TV actually did have an impact. One of the things I was thinking about was smoking. People used to smoke on screen. You just don’t see smoking on screen. Smoking numbers have gone down. I think that is related. I think there’s less smoking and it’s not perceived as being cool anymore. That’s an example.

A negative example, we see the CSI effect. Because everyone watches CSI shows, in which there’s perfect crime forensics, the expectation for juries is that there should be perfect crime forensics. It should be fast and easy, and there should be DNA tests for everything. It should be easy and infallible. There’s definitely an impact that Hollywood can have in terms of what Americans think is normal. I think you’re trying to move the needle in terms of what Americans are thinking about in terms of climate.

**Anna Jane:** Absolutely.

**John:** Quinn, help me think through some of these other examples of bigger issues. Designated drivers, that’s a thing that I think I see in movies a lot now and in TV shows. It’s not okay to be driving drunk. That’s one. Other examples that you can think of?

**Quinn:** You guys have covered… I don’t remember, it was sometime in the last 100 episodes. You talked about the portrayal of dark government and those sort of things and realizing, hey, it might not be okay to keep showing these sort of things with how little we trust institutions these days, for better or worse.

Also, the goal of this isn’t to put the onus completely on Hollywood. I think one of the things Anna Jane and I talked about a lot is it was really important, in the language and the tone and the vernacular, to not say, “You’re not doing a good enough job.” It was important for us to say, “We need you. You’re the best in the world at this. If there’s anything you can get out of this, if one line prompts you to include one line in your movie or TV or you have an entire show, entire movie, entire series you want to bring out of this, that’s great too,” because as Anna Jane was alluding to, 30,000 feet to come on down.

In the past 15 years or so, as we’ve scaled up solar and wind and batteries and things like that, we’ve actually gotten rid of a lot of the worst-case scenarios with these eight degrees of warming, seven, six, five, four. Just this week there’s a big article in Nature saying if every government fulfilled just their current pledges, which to be clear, aren’t that great, we can keep it under two degrees. Of course, that’s a big ask. That’s actually enormous. Every tenth of a degree really does matter. When you ask the question, okay, what is it going to require for those governments to do that, it’s going to require the kitchen sink, just like defeating smoking wasn’t just not showing people smoking on TV and movies anymore. It was the warning labels we put onto the packages. It was all the lawsuits. It was all those things. It was banning it in restaurants and all these different places.

The answer, and where I work a lot, is people saying, okay, this is all great, but what can I do? The best answer to that, usually, whether it’s COVID or climate or whatever it might be, is what can you do, John? What is the intersection of your interests and your skills, and then I’ll give you 70 different ways that are very measurable where you can have an impact. What Hollywood screenwriters, or if you live in the UK, wherever it might be, Bollywood, wherever it might be, what you do is so impactful and has such reach and can have such exponential impact. Any publicity is good publicity. Look what happened with Don’t Look Up. That matters so much.

Again, the onus isn’t you’re not doing well enough. It’s we need you because you do this one thing so well, while people like Kate Marvel, who’s again an incredible essayist but also one of our most impactful atmospheric scientists, all of these people are going to make a difference, and the impact that screenwriters can have, and showrunners and story editors and people who work below the line to build these worlds that writers imagine. Everyone can have such a substantial impact. If we can provide a tool for people to answer that question of what can I do, then that’s the least we can do. It just will help move the needle so much. The answer is we’ve made a lot of progress, and we can make so much more, but we need everybody on board.

**John:** Let’s focus on some of the smaller things and bigger things in terms of what screenwriters and TV writers can do to show impact of climate change and solutions to climate change on screen. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the page we’re talking through. This is Climate Solutions On-Screen. Anna Jane, can you talk us through just some of the simple things? Then we can also get into the bigger things. I know Norman Lear is involved in this organization as well. I think what he did with The Jeffersons, which was portraying a successful Black family on screen, and putting it in everyone’s living rooms, did have an impact. There could be as big a thing about a climate-centered series like Scott Burns is doing, or we also had Gloria Calderon Kellett on the show to talk about One Day At A Time and how she did little small things on the show, like if they’re on the roof, they’re going to show some solar panels. There’s bigger things and smaller things. Can you give us a sense, from this playbook of these smaller things that we could be looking at for our characters in existing shows or movies?

**Anna Jane:** Definitely. Lynn and Norman Lear have been great champions of seeing more climate on screen. You’re exactly right. We talk about it as a spectrum. On the smaller things are almost more the set dressing. If you’re showing a roof, show solar panels on it. If you have a kitchen scene, show an electric stove, not a gas stove. If you have a car scene, have an EV. When on set, don’t have single-use plastic in your scenes. Have a water bottle. Those are just the really easy things that almost any production could do.

**John:** Those are things you’re not even really acknowledging in the course of the scene. It’s just normal to see that there.

**Anna Jane:** We know that that works, because it’s worked with smoking and it’s worked with other issues and it normalizes these behaviors and makes them sexy, depending on the context. Of course, that’s what we want. We want to make these things really desirable and sexy. Then I think from there it’s talking about it just in passing. You’re seeing that show up more, just in shows where it’s an ongoing story that isn’t about climate, but the character brings it up in passing conversation. We know that that is powerful, because again, it normalizes talking about it.

There’s this really strange dynamic that’s happening in the country where now according to Yale’s most recent research, 75% of American adults are concerned about climate change, everything from cautious to deeply alarmed. The deeply alarmed is now the biggest American audience of all the audiences they study. It’s a really small percentage of people who ever talk about it in their normal, day-to-day lives. It’s creating this sensation of feeling very isolated and also like you’re being gaslit by the world, which how the characters in Don’t Look Up felt, like there’s a meteor headed towards us and nobody seems to care. We also consistently, according to research, underestimate how much those around us care about it. We think that we care more than the other people around us, but that’s not true.

Just having it come up in passing conversation for a character that you’re already attached to and a story that you’re already attached to is really, really powerful. Then I think we see the more in-depth engagements with shows like Years and Years, where it’s not focused on climate, but it’s a consistent theme that impacts the family and the story because it’s set in the future.

**John:** Let’s go back and take a look at that middle ground thing where it’s not just set dressing, but it’s coming up in conversation, because I think the classic example you go back to in terms of one character makes a comment and that changes the whole industry is Merlot. In the movie Sideways, Paul Giamatti has his tirade against Merlot, and it actually has a demonstrable impact on Merlot sales for decades afterwards. It literally changed what grapes are planted in California based on the result of that movie and people not buying Merlot. If you have characters you care about, who you believe would be saying this thing, but are voicing a concern about this thing or that thing or a preference of this over that, that could have a real impact if it’s the right show, the right message, the right timing of it. It’s being judicious when you’re doing that.

**Anna Jane:** It’s huge. Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, another amazing climate scientist, says that the number one thing that anyone can do about it is talk about it, is really being honest about the fact that this is impacting our lives and our psychology and our mental health and our physical environment. Having your characters do that I think also is just an honest portrayal of the world we’re living in now. If these characters were out there in the real world, it would be impacting their lives, and they would be thinking about it. Also, just for the impact on the audience, it really does a lot to normalize people’s own concerns and courage and thinking about it and saying it’s okay to be worried. These characters are also worried.

**John:** Choices in transportation feel like a really natural way to do that, because the choice of whether to get that bigger car, to get the smaller car, or to not get a car and use public transportation, those are things that are moments we can see on screen where characters are making choices. We can think about like, oh, what choice would I make if I were in that situation. You might make a different choice. Just because you see a bunch of big trucks around you, you might be the person who doesn’t get the big truck because of something that you saw on screen or a choice that someone else made that was different, because of a show you saw or a movie you saw.

**Quinn:** Going from the ground level back up, there’s some fascinating research that says the single most influential lever for why someone might get solar panels is whether their neighbor has them. That’s been measured a thousand times. We know that the biggest levers to pull, no question, are elections, legislation, and candidates who might be able to win races, that will vote for that sort of legislation that pulls a lever. We also know that that really doesn’t usually happen until it’s swelled from the ground up, until social norms have been changed, so when there’s been a paradigm shift.

If TV is like the friends that are in your living room every week or you’re binging them or whatever it might be or these big impactful movies, if we’re able to show those things more and more, whether it’s solar panels or a smaller car or it’s water issues or whatever it might be, that’s going to help build that. That’s going to help build it up to the point where it’s really tough for the folks who are in charge, who are able to have the biggest impact to ignore. Again, there’s a million different roles that people can play. When you ask, what can I do, it’s the same thing.

I reread Anne Lamott’s book Bird By Bird recently, which I love and I’ve dogeared a thousand times. It’s just these wonderful character questions like what do they dream about and what are they scared of and all this. It’s the same thing, just looking at your characters and going, “What can they do? How can they get involved in some way, whether it’s subtle or not?” The more you see that, the more you go, “That’s a job I didn’t know existed.”

**Anna Jane:** I think the way that we talk about it in the playbook is a climate lens, which is also just another generative, creative opportunity, thinking through how would this be impacting my story world, and my characters can open up all these new possibilities around plot and character development. I think that that’s exactly right. It’s just thinking through, if this character was alive in our world today, what would they be dreaming about, and how might they be engaging or thinking about this. Then I think Gloria Calderon Kellett at the event did such a good job of showing what that looks like in her show, where it’s a sitcom. It’s not about climate change, but one of the characters is really passionate about social justice issues. It was very natural to have that character dress up as Greta Thunberg for Halloween. There were some great jokes. It was funny. It totally worked for their characters and their story.

Then also talked to Scott Z. Burns, who just created an Apple Plus show that will come out I think next year, that’s heavily focused on climate. His co-showrunner and writer Dorothy Fortenberry has this great line that if climate isn’t in your story, then it’s science fiction. I think that that’s going to continue to be the case. In 10 years, if your characters aren’t acknowledging climate, it’s going to feel so outdated, because that is just going to increasingly impact our real lives and our real world.

**Quinn:** Now when I watch any show that is about an oncoming pandemic or something, or I see medical situations where people aren’t wearing masks, I’m like, “Put on your mask!” It feels really crazy. I love love love the show Station Eleven, but it started to be filmed before our pandemic. We see all these medical situations, and there’s a pandemic coming. I’m like, “Where are your masks?” It does feel like some sort of weird alt timeline universe that people are not acknowledging what we all know to be true.

**Anna Jane:** That was one of my favorite shows recently, because obviously it’s not a climate show but it does show how do these characters find beauty and joy in the midst of pretty harrowing circumstances. I think we need a lot more stories about that, around climate. That stuff can’t go away, as things continue to get more intense. We’re humans. We need stories. We need art. We need joy and beauty. Also, on the flip side, I was like, “This is set 15 years in the future. There’s a lot of climate change happening. They just don’t talk about it.” It would be so easy to just have thrown a little bit in there to acknowledge that their world is very changed.

**John:** We’d be focusing on the little things we can do or how the characters talk about it. Let’s zoom back out. There’s a page in your playbook called the Cheat sheet, which is bigger, broader things to be thinking about. One of the big frameworks you have for it is the climate crisis is here now. I think so often we talk about it as the day after tomorrow. We’re always jumping ahead 10 years like, “Oh, this is how bad it’s going to be,” and not acknowledging what you’re experiencing on the Gulf Coast, which is that it’s happening to you every day. There’s constant problems. The wolf’s not at the door. The wolf’s in the house. We have to deal with the wolf that’s in front of us.

Let’s talk through some of the other things in this cheat sheet, because there are things you might skip past but I think are important for us to be looking at. One of them is your idea of no shame, because I think so often it’s easy to think about, oh, they’re saying that, but then they’re also flying someplace, so they’re hypocrites. You have a quote there from Bill McKibben that says, “Everyone’s a climate hypocrite. The hypocrisy is the price of admission in this battle.” You to be doing this, you had to fly here to Los Angeles to do this presentation. You have an impact as well. That doesn’t negate the good that you’re doing.

**Anna Jane:** Yeah, it’s really huge. I think it’s actually an intentional narrative that’s been seeded by the fossil fuel industry, who very much understands the power of storytelling. They commissioned a movie glorifying oil in the 1950s. It’s intentional. BP actually coined the term carbon footprint, and it was very much to put the onus of guilt and shame on the individual instead of the systemic problems, the fossil fuel industry, the governments that are allowing this to happen.

I think that when we do shame each other over flying, plastic straws, what have you… In the Deep South some people need trucks. EV trucks haven’t become affordable. Shame is a very good emotion for shutting you down. It doesn’t provide a psychological mindset for moving into a place of agency and action. That’s a very intentional thing that was done by the fossil fuel industry. I encourage people not to play into that. It’s easy to fall into. It also tends to set up the character who does care as the nag, like a lot of the annoying neighbor bitching at you about your recycling. We want to show characters who care who you like, or you don’t like, but they’re somebody who’s fascinating and not just bitching at you, ideally.

**John:** I think one of the other tropes and expectations we get to is that character, that nag, is a white person who is going after you. One of the things that I see you doing in this is that you’re trying to really center Black and indigenous people in this conversation. You had Reverend Lennox Yearwood Jr., and one of the lines he said that I thought was so smartly crafted was, “From the front line to the fence line,” and really focusing on communities that are impacted by these things and centering them in the solution to it, and not just the victim of the problem.

**Anna Jane:** It’s huge. I think it’s very in line with a lot of representation and diversity conversations already happening in Hollywood. When it comes to climate, historically marginalized communities, largely BIPOC, are the ones who are near the fossil fuel industries that are poisoning air and water, Cancer Alley in Louisiana, largely Black communities. They’re also in the front lines. We see Standing Rock and all kinds of pipeline fights and fights against different fossil fuel infrastructure led by Black and indigenous leaders. It’s really important when we’re telling climate stories, those people are leading on the stories that they’re in.

**John:** There’s not a white savior who comes in-

**Anna Jane:** Exactly.

**John:** …just to solve the problem for them.

**Anna Jane:** They’re a part of the actual storytelling process, because they are largely the ones who are experiencing it first and worst.

**John:** Let’s try to wrap this up with some action steps, because this feels very much like a Quinn newsletter thing, like here’s what you can do. Obviously, any of our listeners can go to the climate playbook right now. It’s goodenergystories.com, and take a look at those things. What are some steps that you’d like people to take this week, this month, in terms of if you were a showrunner working on a show, what are some practical things they could do to start having these conversations in the room? What would you like them to do?

**Anna Jane:** Certainly reading it, but also sharing it with your writers and making sure that other people have access to it and are aware of it. We’re definitely trying to distribute it far and wide. The more that folks can do that, the better. We’re also offering workshops, and we’re happy to come into writers rooms and bring it to life off the page. Happy to do that. Definitely reach out to me if you’re interested in that. It’s like climate change, just talking about it, sharing it.

**John:** Great. How will you know if what you’re doing is successful. How will you know whether this good energy playbook has had the impact that you want to have? I know you have people involved who are data folks. Will you have a sense of whether this has worked?

**Anna Jane:** Yeah. We worked with USC’s Media Impact Project to study how often climate and any adjacent conversation is showing up in TV and film. It’s 2.8% between 2016 and 2020 showed up in scripted entertainment. We are going to continue measuring that to see how it’s going up. That was before Don’t Look Up. I’m curious how much that impacted audiences. Just looking, definitely going to study how does this change over time, and not only just the frequency, but how are the stories showing up. What are the narratives that are showing up?

**John:** Small sidebar. You don’t have to weigh in on this. I fully respect Don’t Look Up, and I’m so happy Don’t Look Up happened, but I do worry that it’s going to feel like that’s how you make a climate change movie. I don’t know that you’re going to have the impact you’re going to have, because I do worry that those people involved telling that story has just made it feel like it’s a Hollywood movie about this thing that’s really… It’s a metaphor. The meteor’s a metaphor for something else. I don’t know that it’s going to connect the dots in the ways that it all could. I’m happy that movie exists, but I think we could do so much more granular work to actually get some stuff happening.

**Anna Jane:** On Don’t Look Up, I do think that it opened a lot of doors by having a successful movie that was a metaphor, also for climate explicitly. They were very clear about that. Definitely want to see climate show up more in non-analogies, in real ways. One of the movies that I just loved that did that was First Reformed. I just re-watched it, because we do a bunch of case studies in the playbook. It’s just so beautifully written. I just feel like anyone who says that you can’t write climate without being preachy or didactic or boring or too technical, that movie just to me completely debunks that, because it’s just gorgeously written. That’s a lot of faith and climate intersections too, which I always find fascinating. I really love that one. It’s dark, but it ends on this moment of possibility and expansiveness. I really love those stories, where it’s helping you to befriend uncertainty but also letting you imagine something that happens.

**Quinn:** I always try to take the perspective of we’ll take whatever we can get here. One of the things I tried to emphasize as Anna and her team constructed this incredible tool, is we always have to remember how difficult it is for anyone at any stage in their career in Hollywood to get anything made. I watch my wife, who is the most hardworking, incredible human, and about as successful as it gets, struggle to get things made. One of our goals was literally anything you can get out of this, great, we’ll take it, because that 3% number can only go up. If you skim one page and you grab one thing, that’s something else, and that starts to change that social norm. We’ll take whatever we can get. Don’t Look Up felt the same way, whether it’s something more fantastical like Beasts of the Southern Wild about the Gulf Coast or it’s First Reformed or whatever it might be, the movie about the big forest fire last year.

**John:** Angelina Jolie?

**Quinn:** Yes. The point is, if you think there’s a limited number of stories to tell, you are just incredibly off base, because the folks that are already being affected by this have such a wide, beautiful variety of lived experiences who have stories to tell, who are already contributing, because their answer to what can I do is, it’s what I have to do. I have to make sure that my frontline community is getting the money or is electrifying buildings or whatever it might be. We’ll take any of these stories, because all of them make a difference.

**John:** They do. The other thing I would just stress is that you don’t necessarily have to announce your intentions. You don’t have to say, “Oh, we’re going to put a climate change story into this episode.” No, just do those little, small things. The network, or the studio, they’re not even necessarily going to notice that you did it. You’re making choices for your story that are the right choices, but also help tell the message.

**Quinn:** This’ll date me. It doesn’t need to say, “A very special episode of Parks and Rec.” We don’t need that. Just make it part of the world, and people will identify with it so much more.

**Anna Jane:** I really love it when it shows up very authentically. I think that’s really powerful. I do think people love the drama of my story, like the climate activist goes up against climate denier megachurch pastor father. All of us have fascinating stories. All of us are experiencing this in unique ways. There are literally billions of climate stories, because every single person in this world is affected, and every person to come will be affected.

**John:** Cool. It has come time for our One Cool Things, where we share something with our audience. I’ll start off. I’m going to start with Redactle, which is a new daily game, in the tradition of Wordle, because now there has to be a daily everything, a place you go to. Redactle is really tough. What it does is it takes an article on Wikipedia, one of the top 10,000 articles, so not something super obscure, but then it redacts almost all the worlds. Then you plug in words to uncover what it is. You have to figure out what is this actual article about. It’s really hard, but really challenging. If you’re a puzzley kind of person, you’re just trying to figure out what this could possibly be. I spent about a half an hour yesterday trying to figure out what an inclined plane article was, also known as a ramp. It’s rewarding. You do feel that sense of accomplishment when you actually have uncovered the thing. Redactle will be my One Cool Thing for this week. Quinn, why don’t you go next. What do you have for yours?

**Quinn:** I’m going to cheat. My One Cool Thing is my wife.

**John:** Aw.

**Quinn:** Besides just being an incredible human on her own, I was privileged enough to choose to do this work. She has been supportive in 10,000 different ways, including there’s really no way to get into this work without having some dark moments, even if you’re as privileged as I am. I deal with air pollution a lot less, now that I left California. I don’t want for clean water and food and things like that. The scope of it and what’s here and what’s coming can be very difficult. She’s found me under a blanket on the couch some nights, going, “Oh boy.” She’s the most incredible human alive. On the other hand, if you want to laugh with everything that’s going on, her new movie is fantastic. It’s a blast. It’s a throwback. It’s a delight.

**John:** That would be The Lost City. You have to actually name the movie.

**Quinn:** Yeah, The Lost City.

**John:** The Lost City.

**Quinn:** Yeah, that’s helpful. Sorry. It’s been so long. We’re so in it. Lost City, Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum. He takes off his pants. I don’t know what else to tell you.

**John:** Good stuff. Anna Jane, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Anna Jane:** I’m going to go with Russian Doll Season 2.

**John:** I’m excited to watch it. Are you enjoying it?

**Anna Jane:** I loved it. I binged it. It was my treat after launch. We launched on Tuesday. I was bringing on Wednesday. I’m like, “The universe gave me Russian Doll Season 2 as a gift.” The first season was really profoundly moving to me.

**John:** I watched it twice.

**Anna Jane:** I think I watched if four times. Just personally, I was going through stuff that it really helped with. On a global scale, working on climate can feel like you’re in this crazy death loop and like you’re going a little crazy, especially the first 10 years. Now everybody else is waking up too, which is great. This season goes back into her story. She is working through trauma from her family and history. I have a lot to do with that as well. I hear rumors that if they get a next season they might jump into the future. If you want to talk about climate, reach out to me. That show has just been profoundly life-changing for me.

**John:** Fantastic. Great. 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 Jade Carta. 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. Anna Jane, are you on Twitter? Are you a Twitter person?

**Anna Jane:** I am. I’m @annajanejoyner.

**John:** Fantastic. We can also follow, is it @goodenergy?

**Anna Jane:** It’s @goodenergystory.

**John:** @goodenergystory. You can follow their Twitter account as well. Quinn Emmett, you are on Twitter? I don’t remember now.

**Quinn:** I am, yeah. Yes, when I’m not dealing with my children. It’s @quinnemmett.

**John:** Fantastic. 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. While you’re signing up for newsletters, you should also sign up for Quinn’s newsletter and podcast. Quinn, plug away.

**Quinn:** You can find that newsletter at newsletter.importantnotimportant.com. You can find the podcast there as well. It’s weekly. It’s free. I don’t know. A lot of folks find some value in it.

**John:** Of course, goodenergystories.com is the place where you can get the playbook and find all that information there. If you would like a T-shirt, we have T-shirts. They are great. They’re available at Cotton Bureau. We have hoodies like the one I’m wearing. They’re very comfortable. Are you wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt at this moment, Quinn?

**Quinn:** No, I should’ve. That was a real mistake, because I have a closet full of them.

**John:** Yes, we all have our closets full. 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 asking people for money. Anna Jane and Quinn, thank you so much for coming on the show.

**Quinn:** Thanks, John.

**Anna Jane:** It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Anna Jane, to do this work, you had a vision, you had a goal, but again, we talk about you as a protagonist. At some point you, to enact this vision, had to get people to give you money to do this thing. Can you talk to me about how you approach people and say, “Hey, would you give me money to do this thing, this vision that I have for this organization?”

**Anna Jane:** I would say I’m still learning the art form, but I have been pretty successful with this particular project. I basically had the idea after consulting on Madam Secretary, on a storyline that was loosely based off of my story, but was like, why aren’t we seeing this show up more, and just started a personal… It really came from a very personal passion. I love TV and film. I’ve been a book nerd since I was little. It was very much like you follow your personal passion, and that opens up doors. I just started talking to as many writers as possible to figure out how we could help, what was going on.

From there, I went to the Sierra Club, who was my first climate home. I’ve worked with them off and on over the years a lot. I was like, “I think this is an opportunity that nobody seems to be looking at.” I think just the uniqueness and the fact that it intersected with what felt like we were craving more and more, that certainly opened up doors. The art of going out and dancing in front of billionaires to get money for work that you care about, I just… I think stories are powerful. We worked with a story scientist as an advisor, and just learning with him about the psychological reasons that stories impact you so much more than facts or data and can lead to action as a result of that. Not only was it just a vision for something that was missing, we really did the deep work of making the case from a just practical, psychological space that was really needed.

**John:** Vision is great, but at some point you are probably writing things. You can talk to us about writing podcasts. Talk to us about what you were writing and meeting with and slides. What was the work from, “Okay, we have this vague vision.” You went to the Sierra Club. With Sierra Club, did you go in and have a meeting? Did you have a pitch deck? Did you have a written document? What were you going into them with? When did you have the name Good Energy? How does all that stuff come together?

**Anna Jane:** That was in the spring of 2019. They were fairly easy, just because I already had a relationship with them. They could pretty quickly see the vision. Certainly in working with Bloomberg Philanthropies, who was our next big partner that came on, we had to be really intentional about piloting. That’s what we did with the Sierra Club was we talked to so many writers. We did two events. We really made the case that there was an opening for this and there was an appetite for it, but also practical things. Our creative director is a magician. All of our materials, including our pitch deck-

**John:** Your materials look great.

**Anna Jane:** It’s beautiful. I think we just created… It wasn’t just a vision. It was how we packaged it. We’ve tried, and some things didn’t work, and we learned from it and we tried again. Definitely when you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before, there’s a lot of trial and error. Certainly, I think not only leaning into the vision and getting evidence, scientific evidence and also just qualitative evidence based on interests, but also really packaging it in a super beautiful way.

**John:** Sierra Club is seed money to get you started and do some little small events that are test of concept, proof of concept for a thing. Then you’re going to Bloomberg. Also I see you have Annenberg. You had that USC connection, because they could do some researchy stuff for you. It feels like there’s places out there that want to do things, that they want someone to come to them saying, “This is how we do the thing.” Is that what your function is?

**Anna Jane:** Yeah, I definitely think people, including foundations, have this esoteric, like storytelling matters, but doing research on other organizations who do this… Define American was a huge inspiration for us.

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Anna Jane:** Sorry. It’s very similar. They do story consulting for immigration storylines. They’ve done research on the impact. It’s very significant. Looking at other organizations who do similar things, adopting it for climate, and showing that there’s this very practical model really helped. We took this esoteric vision and we brought it down to what does this actually look like.

**John:** Talk to us about going into a Bloomberg, going into a big foundation. How do you get the first meeting? What’s the process for going in there to ask for money? Do you know what dollars you’re asking for when you go into those things where you’re just saying, “Hey, please be a partner.” What’s that like?

**Anna Jane:** I want to acknowledge that there’s a lot of privilege inherent in this. I had been working in the climate space for a long time and I had a reputable name. I’d done work that had done well before. I just knew a lot of people. I met the woman at Bloomberg, Lindsay Firestone, who’s been just pivotal not only for getting us money, but also just helping us really think through the model and grow it. Bloomberg is very data-driven. That is their thing. We really had to show that we could measure this, we could measure the impact, in addition to presenting the vision and really the practical steps for what this could look like. That continues. We’re getting better and better at it. We’re getting more evidence. We’re getting more data that shows that this is possible to do. It’s like Hollywood. A lot of it is relationships. That has to be combined with something, a really solid idea, and that’s packaged very well.

**John:** Now, as I went to this event, I noticed that there were a bunch of other organizations that were part of it. Bloomberg is obviously writing big checks, but you clearly partnered with a bunch of other organizations who are doing related things. Are they advisors? When did those people come on board with the process?

**Anna Jane:** Absolutely. Our other big funder is Walton Family Foundation and Doc Society. Then we have a bunch of great funders at smaller levels. Our network of partners is so critical for just bringing diversity of voices and a lot of stories. A lot of these organizations work with people on the ground. A lot of them work with BIPOC communities, so access to character inspirations and stories. Hip Hop Caucus is one of our partners who does incredible work not only on climate justice, but also on racial justice. They’ve worked with a lot of musicians in the hip-hop community. They really get the impact of culture work. Now they’re doing more and more storytelling work as well.

Then Center for Cultural Power is our anchor partner. They’ve done a lot of amazing work at the intersection of art and story and climate, but also gender justice and racial justice. They’ve just been pivotal. They were editors on the playbook, advisors. Then the Sierra Club. CA Foundation, the Writers Guild East has really helped us. Both of those organizations really helped us think through the audience. What really helped too is that my two co-writers on the playbook were TV writers, or are TV writers. That’s Carmiel Banasky and Rae Binstock. We not only were connecting with advisors who were writers the entire process, we actually brought in writers to help us craft it. That was hugely important. Writers Guild East also just really helped us think through.

**John:** Just going back to the writing again, so when we say writing, are you guys writing in Microsoft Word? Are these Google Docs? How are you putting together this very complicated site? How are you gathering all of this material and making sure it all feels like it has a consistent editorial voice?

**Anna Jane:** It was a herculean effort. It was a huge Google Doc that we were inputting into. We had a ton of guest writers. We also brought in Kate Marvel. One of my favorite sections is we worked with a consultant to Marvel’s world-building empire, and then also climate scientist Dr. Pete Kalmus. They really took the science and worked to project what these two worlds that we’re heading towards, one or the other or somewhere in between, would look like. We follow a character who’s born today and grows up in the best-case scenario, which is honest. It’s still harrowing. It does get worse. There’s nothing we can do to avoid that. It’s a lot better than the scenario we’re headed towards right now, which is more three degrees. You get to see what do these two different worlds look like at 2050 and then towards the end of the century. We brought in just a lot of amazing guest writers and also worked with TV… It was really intentional and important to us that the tone was… Fun is a weird word when it’s coming to climate, but there are moments of humor in there.

**John:** It’s inviting and it’s engaging. You’re not screaming as you’re going through it.

**Anna Jane:** Not too technical. We wanted it to be very accessible to storytellers and writers. It was important to us that the writing was really good, because our audience was writers. We also worked with a really amazing copywriter. We were intentional the entire time about making sure the writing was really solid.

**John:** Quinn, you got cut out of that whole segment. Anything you want to say?

**Quinn:** That’s the way it should be. Are you kidding me? I’m just a paperweight here.

**Anna Jane:** Quinn was an amazing advisor throughout the entire process.

**Quinn:** Anna’s amazing. Every time I read something new, it was just like, oh man. It’s incredible. My whole goal was just trying to always come back to the measurable outcome, which was is this section designed so that a screenwriter can easily and understandably get something practical out of it. It wasn’t, hey, let’s write 100 pages on all the climate science. That’s not going to be as helpful. It was always with that goal in mind. What’s out there is just so helpful. Again, it’s one of those things that seems so obvious once you have it. It’s because of course, this is a tool for these people to use. It just didn’t exist.

**John:** When you see it at the final product, of course that’s how it was going to be, and then you don’t see all the process that got you to that point. At what point did you know it was a website and not a printed thing?

**Anna Jane:** I have to shout out the Walton Family Foundation who made that possible, as well as the research. Originally, we only had funding for a pdf version. When we got maybe a third of the way in, we were just like, “This has to be a website.” Also, we talked to over 100 TV and film writers to inform the playbook and just realized through those conversations that it would be way more accessible on a website, so we shifted maybe four months in and were like, “We’ve got to figure this out.” We raised more money so that we can make it a website.

**John:** Great. Again, thank you very much for coming on the show and talking through this whole plan, and especially that’s how we raise money to make these things happen.

**Quinn:** Absolutely.

**Anna Jane:** It’s an art form. Still learning.

**Quinn:** Thanks for having us, John.

**John:** Cool. Thanks.

**Anna Jane:** Thank you so much.

Links:

* [Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2277106/) Documentary
* [Download The Cost of Accommodations Report](https://inevitable.foundation/cost-of-accommodations/download) from the Inevitable Foundation and read more on [The Hollywood Reporter](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-inevitable-foundation-disability-accommodations-cost-study-movies-tv-1235131680/?_hsenc=p2ANqtz–L2n-kjr_qiSGqFieZri6yrMikpnCpb_V7he_SrT2rQcnerEPKQAfUJHYpZkE3lJxquHEz)
* [Good Energy Stories Playbook](https://www.goodenergystories.com/playbook)
* [David Robert Ted Talk on Climate Change](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ktYbVwr90)
* [Years of Living Dangerously Clip with Anna and her Dad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0d09DIv8vY)
* [Subscribe to Important, Not Important](https://www.importantnotimportant.com/)
* [Dana Fox](https://twitter.com/inthehenhouse) on Twitter and checkout [The Lost City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfKO9rYDmE8) Movie
* [Russian Doll Season 2](https://www.netflix.com/title/80211627?source=35)
* [Redactle Game](https://www.redactle.com/#)
* [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/)
* [Anna Jane Joyner](https://twitter.com/annajanejoyner) on Twitter
* [Quinn Emmett](https://twitter.com/quinnemmett) on Twitter
* [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 Jade Carda ([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/547standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/nice-to-meet-cute-you).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 540 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do we get characters to meet each other, and can we make it adorable? We’re looking at the history and mechanics of the meet-cute in rom-coms and beyond.

Then we’ll be digging into our overflowing mailbag to take a look at listener questions on brands, managers, and what a novelist should expect when selling a book to Hollywood.

In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll discuss onboarding. How do you get somebody started in a story, and particularly in reference to a new game called Elden Ring, which Craig and I have been dying in a lot.

**Craig:** Yes, indeed. John, I just noticed that I should bring this to everyone’s attention that because we’re going to be doing some listener questions, that means that Megana’s going to be with us. You mentioned that we had some questions on managers. I just noticed that managers anagrams to Megana Sr, so I thought it was important to share that with her.

**John:** Oh my gosh, that’s really important. Now we know.

**Megana Rao:** You have such a special brain.

**Craig:** Isn’t it?

**John:** It’s a good special brain.

**Craig:** It sure is.

**John:** We can’t get started on this show that we’re recording on the 5th day of March, 2022, without talking about the change in the world order that’s happened this last couple weeks. Your boy Zelenskyy of Ukraine, who you met doing Chernobyl, is trying to keep Ukraine from falling to the Russian invasion. It’s a lot going on here.

**Craig:** It’s such a mess, and it’s so tragic. Ukraine, which regardless of what Putin says, is in fact a nation with an incredibly long history, has been invaded for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than Putin being a dick. Currently Ukraine is fighting back. If you know Ukrainians and if you’ve been to Ukraine, that part shouldn’t be a surprise. Similarly, the kind of Keystone Cops clown party that is the Russian military is also not surprising. If you have an incompetent massive army versus an incredibly competent and small amount of people, of course it means that there are going to be and there have been Russian casualties and Ukrainian casualties, but also quite a number of civilians have died in Ukraine. This is absolutely heartbreaking.

President Zelenskyy, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has proven himself to be just about the most remarkable leader I think I’ve seen in my lifetime in terms of a political leader. I just don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this in my lifetime. There were people that you and I have been taught about in school and Megana’s been taught about in school, and they seem so fricking far away from what we’ve had. Here is this guy who’s just been absolutely heroic, dodging assassins, remaining with his people, and rallying the world. He’s a wonderful person.

He’s also one of us, John. He’s a writer. He’s a performer. He’s an actor. He came out of the industry. He very famously played the part of the president of Ukraine. He was a comic writer and a comic actor, and a very good one. I was actually supposed to meet with him again when he came to the United States a few months ago, but he had to change his schedule so that he was going to meet with Biden. There’s your answer.

**John:** He made choices. It’s a tough choice but he made his choice.

**Craig:** There’s your answer. Anybody was wondering who’s more important, me or the President of the United States, Joseph Biden, the answer is Biden. I’m very grateful that he’s still alive. For all the people that I have met in Ukraine, I’ve talked to a few of them who are there or have left but are safe and sound, I’m very pleased that they are all still alive. I don’t pray, but I surely do hope fervently that this ends quickly.

**John:** Watching this over the course of the last week, I’ve just really been struck by the degree to which it does feel like we’re seeing history being made, because clearly, one order is falling and a new order is beginning. Whenever you’re seeing history happen, you’re always wondering, okay, how is this going to end. You try to think of this as a story, try to think of what are the next beats, how does this all go. It’s a natural instinct. I was frustrated by the desire to cast the movie at the very start, because it’s just in the opening pages of this.

It can be useful to look back in history and find the story in it, but finding the story in the moment as it’s actually happening I think can be a very dangerous and destructive thing, because it can take you away from the actual realities of what’s in front of you, because then when reality doesn’t match the story you’ve had anticipated, you’re caught flatfooted. I felt caught flatfooted by when Russia clearly going to invade, I kept thinking every morning I was going to wake up and see, okay, Ukraine has fallen. Then when I didn’t, I was like, oh, it’s awesome that they didn’t. Then it sets this pattern for… I keep trying to rewrite the story and it doesn’t match my expectations, rather than looking at what the actual facts are on the ground. Stories are fantastic, but facts are more important.

**Craig:** Just the way that when you and I were kids, nobody really cared about the Box Office. The news didn’t report the Box Office. Then suddenly it became something that everybody talked about and cared about. The adaptation of history into the dramatization has become so prominent and so frequent, and the window between event and dramatization has shrunk so dramatically, that people immediately start doing this. I find it rather upsetting actually. People are fighting for their lives, and I’m getting tweets like, “You should do Chernobyl part two.” I’m like, guys, that’s not how this works.

**John:** When we do a How Would This Be A Movie segment, obviously we’re not doing one on Ukraine. When we do those, it’s because there’s a unique slice of story that is finished, that we can look at and have some relatives to things. I don’t think anything about the Ukraine situation is finished to a degree that we should be looking at the adaptation.

**Craig:** No. There are small events or interesting bits of true crime or weirdness that you can just go ahead and make a story about, but when you’re dealing with unfolding history, the most important gift to the dramatizer, assuming that they are doing the right thing, is perspective. Perspective requires time. How in God’s name could anybody write a… You can’t write Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List in 1943. It’s insane. We need time to see what happens and to absorb it. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but in the long run I have to believe that Ukraine, a nation and a people that have suffered dramatically throughout the 20th century and now here in the 21st, will prevail. That’s just my great, great hope. I don’t know how, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take, and I don’t know what it’s going to look like.

**John:** All you can do is watch and take the actions that hopefully will get you to the place you want to end up, rather than assuming the story’s going to end up there.

**Craig:** You know the way people now will go back, listen to early episodes of our increasingly long running podcast and say things like, “Oh my god, listened to you guys before Donald Trump was elected, ha ha. Lol so innocent.” That’s the point.

**John:** We didn’t know what was going to happen.

**Craig:** No, and we don’t know now. If you’re listening to this 12 years from now, you might be giggling at how absolutely stupid we were, because it turned out that everything ended on… They recorded it on March 5th. March 6th the Russians left and then blah blah. Then it turned out that Zelenskyy was terrible.

**John:** Zelenskyy was not who you think.

**Craig:** I’m sure you are laughing at us. That’s the point. We don’t have perspective yet at all.

**John:** That’s why you should not even be thinking about making the movie now or telling the story now, because there’s not a story to tell.

**Craig:** What we’re saying, Megana, is stop writing the script.

**John:** Stop your adaptation.

**Craig:** Stop it, Megana.

**John:** Megana, what you can do for us is give us some follow-up. We have a letter here from Derek in Provo, Utah.

**Megana:** Derek wrote in and said, “In Episode 536 you gave a lot of great explanations for why the movie is never as good as the book. I just watched a really interesting video that explained the human mind’s bias for thinking that, even when it’s not statistically true. Here’s where the bias comes in. We humans don’t generally care about bad adaptations of unremarkable books. When thinking of adaptations of good books, we can think of lots of good and bad examples. It’s likely that the only adaptations of bad or unremarkable books you could think of right off the bat are all pretty good, because that’s the only situation in which that kind of adaptation would be remarkable.

“It turns out this is a phenomenon that applies to various attribute relationships called Berkson’s Paradox. That means these biases act sort of like a filter, accentuating the correlations that are already there, to the point where people feel totally comfortable making ridiculous claims like the book is always better than the movie, or even Hollywood ruins books.”

**Craig:** Makes sense.

**John:** I wasn’t familiar with Berkson’s Paradox, but it also reminds me of the phenomenon of silent evidence, which is that you can see these two things and say, oh, there must be a correlation here, but then also you’re not actually looking for all the other examples of things that would show those aren’t correlated or that there’s other things out there that you just haven’t paid any attention to because they weren’t what you were looking for. That does feel true to this idea that all book adaptations are bad book adaptations, because you’re only looking at the ones you happen to notice.

**Craig:** That is really interesting. Thank you for sharing that with us, Derek. Let’s file Berkson’s Paradox under our big header Our Brains Stink, because they do. Every time I hear about one of these things, I do think, oh, I’m going to try and avoid doing that.

**John:** I’ll push back. Our brains don’t stink. Our brains were designed to do very specific things. They’re designed to keep us alive, to regulate our body temperature and our internal processes and to make sure we didn’t get eaten by predators. The things that we were selected for got us here. They’re great, but they’re not really good at judgment calls about which book adaptations turned into movies in a good way and whether that’s systematically true.

**Craig:** What’s more important than that though?

**John:** Nothing’s more important than that. Literature to film adaptation, the cinematic history of that is the most important thing. It’s much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, absolutely at the top, or the base. It’s the whole pyramid.

**Craig:** We can do calculus, and that’s super amazing, but we’re blowing this fundamental requirement we have to properly analyze the relationship. Anyway, I like hearing about these new biases and logical mistakes that we make.

**John:** We’re all fallacies. We’re all fallacies. Let’s get to our marquee topic. This is the meet-cute. This is based on last week’s installment of the newsletter Interesting, where Chris looked at the original of the term meet-cute. It turns out, I didn’t know where this actually came from, but it goes back to 1941. I thought it was much more recent. There’s this book, this mystery novel, Case of the Solid Key, in which a character says, “We met cute, as they say in story conferences.” It’s already in existence by 1941.

From Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter, a character explains, “Dear boy, the beginning of a movie is childishly simple. The boy and the girl meet. The only important thing to remember is that in a movie, the boy and the girl must meet in some cute way. They cannot meet like normal people, perhaps at a cocktail party or other social function. No, it is terribly important that they meet cute.”

**Craig:** I actually thought that this phrase meet-cute or this term meet-cute was older than that, because it is so damn weird. It has always bothered me. It should be meet cutely or cutely meet. Why is it meet cute?

**John:** Cute may be one of those words that can function adverbially.

**Craig:** It cannot.

**John:** Maybe it could at one point. I think that’s why you thought it was archaic.

**Craig:** I refuse. I will not use cute as an adverb. Also, it’s backwards. It’s German. Instead of cutely meet, it’s meet cute.

**John:** Meet cute.

**Craig:** It’s meet cute. It always bothered me. It was one of those terms, Megana I’m curious if you have had this too, when you first get to Hollywood and people start throwing jargon around, I had no idea what the hell they were talking about when they said meet cute, to be honest with you. I also didn’t know what a set piece was. They kept talking about set pieces, and I was like, “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.” In my mind I’m like, “What’s a set piece?” Megana, see, back then we did not have the internet. Actually, there was an internet, but it wasn’t really the internet. There wasn’t even Google. I don’t know, Megana, now does everybody know everything because of the internet before they get here?

**Megana:** You would think, but I don’t think that the internet has really helped people.

**Craig:** That’s curious.

**John:** I’d be curious whether a non-screenwriter person would know what a meet-cute was. Is that just a thing that’s just out there in culture? I think we’re going to commission a Scriptnotes survey of a thousand households and figure out whether they know the term meet-cute and if they’re involved in the film industry at all. It’d have to be a non-Los Angeles sampling of people.

**Megana:** As rom-coms have become more self-aware, I feel like they do reference them in The Holiday, the Nancy Meyers classic. They have a whole scene about the meet-cute.

**Craig:** It’s become meta, in other words. Got it.

**John:** When we had Greta Gerwig on the show, she was talking about the structural changes she made to the adaptation of Little Women so that she could introduce the eventual love interest very early on in the story, because she said that the first person you see that character with is the person you feel like they need to end up with at the end. I think that is also just what we’ve learned about romantic comedies, watching romantic comedies. She recognized that the audience was not going to be happy with her ending up with this guy who showed up late in the story.

**Craig:** That makes total sense.

**John:** They need to have a meet-cute.

**Craig:** They need to have a meet-cute. I guess part of this concept, and it connects back to what we were just talking about with stories and history and things, when we meet other people in a non-meet-cute way, another couple, eventually someone’s going to say, “How did you guys meet?” with the expectation that there’s going to be good story, when in fact it’s never really good.

**John:** Almost never. Puts weird pressure on things.

**Craig:** You know how I met Melissa? I was running across the street because I was late for a big meeting where I was going to get a promotion or be fired, and she was running the other way with an armful of books, because she was on her way to an exam, and we smashed together and everything fell down and I picked up and I met her in the eyes. Then somebody honked at us and we laughed and then we left each other and then I had to find her. No.

**John:** I met Mike on a gay dating site that doesn’t exist anymore. He had a profile. I responded to it. We had talked on the phone before we actually, because pre-texting. We exchanged emails. We talked on the phone. We met for a coffee at The Abbey.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** The Abbey was not even a bar at that point. It was just a coffee shop.

**Craig:** It was a coffee shop, I remember.

**John:** Before they had a liquor license. That was our first. That was our meeting.

**Craig:** The Abbey was such a coffee place that I would just go there for coffee sometimes, because it didn’t feel like a club. If I went to The Abbey now, I think I would feel like, okay, I’m–

**John:** You would have to push all the bridal parties out of the way.

**Craig:** Oh my god, there’s so much bitterness smashed into that sentence. So much gay bitterness. Get out of my club. This is how it functions. It’s not cute. Of course, the entire concept of a romance or a romantic comedy is the enormous lie that gives us the most, as you said, adorable, heart-swelling, awe golly gee version of human relationships possible, so of course it must start in a wacky way.

**John:** Let’s take a look at first the rom-com meet-cute and then let’s generalize it back out to any two characters meeting each other, because that’s going to happen in all of our scripts. We’ll start with rom-coms. There’s basically four different patterns you can see with this character meets that character and what is the dynamic there. Sometimes they immediately have chemistry. You can see, oh, they should be together and there’s an obstacle in the way. A great example of that would be Her, is that you have Joaquin Phoenix’s character and you have the AI character, and they clearly have a spark and a thing, but she’s just an AI, so there’s an obstacle in the way there.

**Craig:** It wouldn’t be an obstacle for you.

**John:** No, not for me. Just 100%, just plug right in there.

**Craig:** Just one subroutine running into another one.

**John:** They have their mutual attraction. There’s also the mutual hatred of each other. When Harry Met Sally is a great example of that. We meet the two characters at the same time. They just do not like each other.

**Craig:** (singing)

**John:** Another dynamic that’s common is one is really into the other, and the other can’t stand the first person. The Notebook is very much that, where he’s a stalker pursuing her and eventually wears her down. Then the fourth dynamic I’d say is when they don’t know who the other person is. That’s what they did in Big Fish. That’s also Romeo and Juliet, where these two characters have this immediate spark. They don’t recognize what the obstacle is between the two of them. They can’t find each other.

**Craig:** All of these are way outside the bounds of normal human relationships. It’s actually quite rare that people meet each other and hate each other instantly or people meet each other and one hates the other instantly. The only time in my life I think I met somebody and hated them instantly was Ted Cruz. Instantly. Does that count as a meet-cute? I don’t think so.

**John:** It would count as a meet-cute if ultimately you did, down the road, fall in love together.

**Craig:** Exactly. All the vomiting has just happened. In general, when people meet each other and hate each other, they will continue to hate each other. What we like about these circumstances is the notion that we as humans just can’t quite get to where we belong, and so God or fate is going to nudge us together, because like most of the stories, ultimately it boils down to fear. I’m afraid of something, and so I am not living the best life I can. I’m living according to a different theory. Fate smushes me together with another person. If it were easy, there wouldn’t be a story. It actually has to be hard.

The point is, the nature of the meet-cute sets up, in a way, or exemplifies, in a way, the problem, that one or the other or both people have. That meet-cute is a little microcosm of why they are not with somebody that they love. By the end of the movie, they will overcome their problems and be with each other.

**John:** In any rom-com or any romantic movie, the premise of the whole thing is that central relationship. It’s understandable that there’s such a spotlight on how those two characters meet. Of course, all of our scripts and all of our stories have characters meeting each other for the first time.

Let’s generalize this to look at how you introduce two characters to each other. This can be, a few examples that Megana and I were thinking through, 21 Jump Street, how those two guys meet the first time. Only Murders in the Building was all about how those three characters meet and get hooked up. There’s this whole special mentor meet-cute situation, Training Day, Devil Wears Prada. In all these cases, you’re setting the audience expectations for where this relationship is going to go. Even though it’s not a romantic relationship, we know that that relationship is going to be important, we’re going to be following those two characters and ups and downs together throughout the course of the story.

**Craig:** For our friends out there who are writing, hopefully most of you, let’s talk about how we start. As is so often the case, we have to think about how we want it to end, and then go all the way backwards, as far as you can, as close to 180 degrees as you can get. It doesn’t have to be 180 degrees in some obvious way, but really more about the internal thing. Don’t think so much about how they care about each other in the beginning of the story or how they care about each other in the end. Think about who they are in the end. Think of who they must therefore be in the beginning. Then you might get a sense of what would be the most natural kind of thing. Even though the meet-cute is an extreme circumstance or a weird circumstance, the characters in that moment behave in the most them way possible. That’s the problem for them. That maybe will help you build your meet-cute.

**John:** Indeed. Obviously, we talk about protagonists. These are the characters who have to grow and change and face the obstacles. You can also think about that relationship as being the protagonist, the idea of that relationship growing and changing over the course of the story and facing struggles. If you think about that as idea as the protagonist, you can maybe really see the arc of what that relationship is changing to over the course of the story.

Let’s think about the situations in which characters meet. The most common one in our stories is that the audience knows one character, generally your hero, and is being introduced to the second character. That’s going to happen not in every scene, but so many scenes, where we’re getting information about this new character the same time the character, our hero is getting information about it. As a writer, we can just choose what information we want to get out, because we don’t need to tell the audience anything new about our hero necessarily. Our hero is pulling information out of this other character, or if anything, we are seeing some new side about our hero about how they are describing themselves, how they are introducing themselves to this new character.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting question, I guess, listening to you talk about that. Are there examples or would it be advisable at this point, given how many meet-cutes there have been and how now, like Megana says, there’s a meta meet-cute discussion that happens in these movies, to meet not cute, even to disregard or violate the rule that George Axelrod laid out and say meet boring? Is there value in a meet-boring?

**John:** Megana and I were talking about this. I think there’s an example of characters who know each other, but over the course of the story, that overlooked character or recontextualized character becomes important. That red shirt in Star Trek who actually does have a name and becomes useful, Hermione when she shows up in the dress. She was always just a friend. Now you’re seeing her now as a romantic character. Paul Rudd’s character in Clueless, which is that he wasn’t perceived as being a romantic character, so therefore he doesn’t get a meet-cute really as we introduce him into the story, I think very cleverly, not making him seem like a potential love interest down the road.

**Craig:** That’s an interesting method is that it’s not so much about a meet-boring, it’s about a not-meet-at-all, that even though characters are meeting, there are meetings and there are meetings. If you happen to be introduced to somebody, along with three other people in a scene, then you haven’t met that person in a meet scene. Now you just know them. That’s an interesting notion of just avoiding. It’s not so much the cute you might want to consider avoiding. It’s the meet itself.

**John:** Now, we were trying to think of examples of situations where we as an audience meet both of our central characters at the same time. This is how we’re getting information now. When Harry Met Sally is basically that situation. We’re with Billy Crystal for moments before they get in the car together. Licorice Pizza from this year literally just is this long tracking shot where we’re meeting both of these characters for the first time. They have this very long conversation, where we’re getting all the information about both of them. That’s an example of they really are setting this up as a two-hander, like these are the two people we’re going to follow and we’re starting this on equal footing.

**Craig:** As we get smarter and smarter and more and more sophisticated, because we have seen more and more versions of the same things over and over, the idea that maybe the way we approach shopworn but necessary moments like two characters meeting is to just fling ourselves in one direction or the other really far, just triple down or underplay it completely, because I don’t know if there’s room any more for Matthew McConaughey to bump into Jennifer Lopez in the middle of the street. I don’t know if we can do it anymore.

**John:** There’s no way to do it without making it feel like it’s that kind of moment, where just you can hear the music behind it. I was watching Worst Person in the World, which is I think one of the best movies of the year. I really absolutely loved it. Norwegian film. Everyone should check it out. Nominated for Best Screenplay for the Oscars, which is pretty remarkable. It does a really interesting thing about the two love interests, the two men that she meets up with and connects with over the course of the movie. Both of those meet-cutes are handled in… The first one’s just an offhanded way. She’s just talking to different people, and she talks to this guy, and that becomes the guy. The second one is a much bigger spotlight on this meet-cute moment that just extends and extends and extends in a way that’s really rewarding. The example of the first one slips in through the back door and the second one is just really aware of the tropes that… The characters are aware of the tropes that they’re entering into, which is fun.

**Craig:** That’s good, because I think smart filmmakers, smart television makers are aware, at least in part, of all the stuff that’s come before them. It’s harder and harder to say I’m doing something in a new way that hasn’t been done before, but that’s not necessary. Sometimes you just need to let the audience know that you know. I never want people to think, does he not know that that already happened a thousand times? Does he think he invented that? Because that’s just an annoying, prideful sort of thing.

**John:** Last scenario. We talked about the audience knows one character’s meeting another character for the first time. We’ve talked about where the audience knows neither character. The last example is where the audience knows both characters separately, and then we see the characters meet each other for the first time. This happens a fair amount. It happens, obviously, if you’ve seen the villain separately, and you’ve seen the hero separately, and they’re suddenly crossing paths. Think about Jack and Rose in Titanic. We establish both of those characters for a long time separately before we see them together.

**Craig:** That’s a good point.

**John:** Crazy Ship of Love does that. You’ve Got Mail does that. Even later seasons of Game of Thrones, it was just really weird when Jon Snow and Dany finally met. We spent years with these characters and they’re just meeting each other for the first time. It’s a thing that does happen.

**Craig:** That was weird.

**John:** It’s also just strange how we are so ahead of the characters in that moment, that if they were to talk about where they came from, what this stuff was, it’s not interesting to us, unless you can find a way to make that interesting, because all that we’re learning new about the characters is how they interact with this character we’ve already established.

**Craig:** It’s funny, I was just thinking about one of the strangest and most effective meet-cutes in cinematic history is in Titanic. I don’t think you would be able to do it like that today.

**John:** Remind me of the actual scene, because I’m not picturing where they first meet.

**Craig:** Rose is going to kill herself. She’s preparing to throw herself into the ocean to avoid having to marry this awful man. She is seconds away from committing suicide. Then Leonardo DiCaprio wanders out, being all cool and everything and like, “It would sure be a shame for you to suicide yourself there.” Then he pulls her back and she’s like, “Oh, sir.” The thing is, I don’t think you could do that today. On the other hand, for the tone of that movie it was perfection, just utter perfection [crosstalk 00:27:24].

**John:** Everything being elevated to where it was going.

**Craig:** You got the sense that she wasn’t actually going to jump, that she actually suddenly panicked and didn’t want to jump, which I think was very important for the tone of that, but you remember it. Actually, you didn’t.

**John:** I forgot in the moment.

**Craig:** I remember it.

**John:** Gave me an extra 20 seconds, I would’ve remembered it.

**Craig:** There you go. Very good.

**John:** It’s got that iconic imagery there. Takeaways from meet-cuting, I think it’s useful to think about all the ways characters meet in rom-coms, because if you’re writing a romantic comedy or something that deals in the general space of a rom-com, you’re going to be dealing with all the expectations of what that initial meeting’s going to be, but then to just generalize it back out to your characters are always meeting each other, so what are the situations that they’re meeting, and can or should this be an interesting, unlikely, surprising way of these two characters meeting, or should you deliberately not do that, because otherwise it sets this expectation of some kind of future for this relationship which may not be realistic.

**Craig:** Certainly don’t think that you are limited to this question for romances. There are meet-cutes across almost every genre, but in particular, when there are people that are partnering on a job together, when they are thrown into some sort of collective dramatic scenario that they didn’t know each other and now they do, whatever it is, it doesn’t have anything to do with romance. It’s really about relationship. It’s about two people who are going to have a relationship. It doesn’t matter if there’s romance. It doesn’t matter what their age is, gender, any of that stuff. Think about the meet-cuteness of things and how to apply it to the specific situation that your characters are in, as it relates to who they are and what their damage is.

**John:** Last takeaway I’ll give you is that whenever you’re introducing characters to us as the reader, as to the audience, and there’s another character there to talk with, don’t do the thing which I’ve seen in so many bad movies and so many bad scripts, where characters feel like they’re introducing themselves to a character they already should know, where you as a writer are trying to get information out, and so they’re saying it to a character who would already know that. That’s just a bad habit we need to get out of. You can feel the development notes that got into that.

**Craig:** “It’s John, the assistant DA in Trenton. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you. As I recall, we didn’t get along too well last time.”

**John:** “How’s the wife and the kids? How’s your dad who’s suffering from PTSD?”

**Craig:** Boo.

**John:** Boo, don’t like it.

**Craig:** Boo.

**John:** Now, we’ve done a lot of shows. I kind of feel like introducing a new segment to the show.

**Craig:** Great, let’s do it. (singing)

**John:** Love it. Megana, do you have a question for us?

**Megana:** I do. I had a busy week this past week.

**Craig:** (singing) On to our next thing.

**Megana:** For me, because of my entry point, I think of the writing behind a project as the genesis. I guess I had this naïve assumption that everyone else also thought that the writers and their idea or take was the most important part of a project, the foundation, but through some of my recent conversations, I am realizing that that’s not necessarily, in fact it’s very rarely the case, whether it’s this hot piece of IP or a talent attachment that’s driving the project. I guess I just had this moment where I was like, oh, that’s the shiny thing, and the writers are just this tool you can slot in to make the shiny thing shine. I’m curious whether that’s always been the case. Is that just normal for the industry? Is it normal to feel that way? Is this a more recent shift? Have I just been sheltered?

**John:** In the context of general meetings or meetings on a project, to realize, oh, okay, I’m not the most important part of the project, yes. I would say yes, certainly at my early stages in my career, but even as recent as this past week. There was a project that was sent to me. It was a book adaptation, a good book. I wanted to meet with the producers ahead of time to see what is it about this book and why are they coming to me. It became very clear that these producers, they like me, they like this book, but man, they really, really, really like this director who’s attached to the book. That was the most important part of the project, really, honestly. That was fine. That’s the way sometimes these projects go. It did influence my decision about is this a project that I should necessarily pursue based on relative value of things? At an early stage of my career, but even as of this past week, yes, I’m rarely the most important part of the project.

**Megana:** To Craig’s earlier point about jargon that you learn in Hollywood, mandate is a fairly new word for me.

**Craig:** What the hell? What does that mean? Oh, like the company’s mandate is to create a franchise-friendly event film that blah blah blah?

**Megana:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Oh, lord. You mean like what you want? Mandate.

**Megana:** I’m not saying this against… I’ve met such lovely people. This isn’t anything about them. It’s more like this coming-of-age realization where you realize the world doesn’t revolve around you and Hollywood does not revolve around writers.

**Craig:** This is fascinating. This never occurred to me. I always presumed that I had to work my way up from the baseline, which was here’s a writer that we don’t care about, who we want to spend as little money on as possible, and unless they save everything for us and make a green light happen, we want to fire them into the sun. It never occurred to me that I would be the most important part of anything. Now in television, yes, if I say, “Look, here’s a project. I want to do this thing. It’s going to be this many episodes. I will be the showrunner. I will write the episodes. I will be there every day,” then yeah, okay, clearly then I’m the producer, I’m the boss. I’m the most important part of the thing. In movies or anything else, it just never seemed possible.

**Megana:** I don’t know, we’re all writing heads over here. Even if I wasn’t in this industry, the storytelling is usually the thing that I am most attracted to in a movie anyways.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** Not that I as the writer would be the most important thing, but that’s what I think is most important. It’s a weird recontextualization where, oh, actually nobody else feels that way.

**Craig:** I’ll pretend to.

**John:** Everyone pretends to. Here’s the useful thing I think you can take out of that, is that in any project, you can just look for what’s really driving it and what is the reason why this project is exciting to this studio, these producers at this time. It goes back to what you’re asking about a mandate. What are they trying to do? What is their overall stated goal of the things they are trying to do? What things are they trying to not do? For example, this place is like, we’re not doing musicals. That’s just clearly a mandate. It’s like, great, it’s good to know that musicals are not part of it.

If you can go into a project and get a sense of what are they actually looking for and who is driving this and are they trying to make this kind of movie or that kind of movie, is incredibly helpful just in terms of both which projects you’re going to pursue and figuring out how you’re going to pursue these projects and whose notes you’re going to listen to the most. Is this really being driven by the producer? Is it being driven by that director? Is it being driven by the studio head, the actor? You got to know those things, because that’s going to really influence the work you’re going to be doing for them.

**Craig:** Megana, have you ever seen Barton Fink?

**Megana:** No, I haven’t, actually. It’s on a long list of movies.

**Craig:** It’s on a long list of things. Move it up to the top, because aside from being an absolutely brilliant film by the endless brilliant Joel and Ethan Coen, it is a fantastic exploration both of what it means to be a writer in Hollywood and what writing is and what writers block is about, and about managing your desires with what is required of you and also managing your own romantic notions of writing with the reality of writing. It’s brilliant.

There’s a couple of scenes with Tony Shalhoub. John Turturro plays a playwright, loosely based on Clifford Odets, named Barton Fink, who’s brought up to Hollywood in 1941. He’s brought out to Hollywood, which was often the case. They would bring out these playwrights to put them to work, like Fitzgerald, also a novelist. Of course these brilliant people were then put to work writing nonsense, and really struggled with it. John Turturro’s struggling a little bit. He’s been assigned a job. He’s supposed to write a Wallace Beery wrestling picture, which would be the equivalent of a Steven Seagal movie now or 10 years now. He’s struggling with it. Tony Shalhoub plays his producer, Ben Geisler, who basically says something to the effect of, “What are you talking about? It’s Wallace Beery. It’s men in tights. He hits him, he falls down. Write it.”

This is where Barton Fink just suddenly realizes, this is machinery. I’m in a machine and nobody cares about me at all. The way that the more sinister studio head, played by Michael Lerner, makes him feel like he is the center of it, and then what happens after is so brilliantly, wonderfully true. Highly recommend it. It’s a very funny movie. It’s a very weird movie. John Goodman is incredible in it. Strongly recommend Barton Fink.

**Megana:** I can’t wait. My new analogy for how I’m feeling is like a sunglass salesman at the beach. You know when you’re hanging out at the beach and these guys come up to you with their tarps full of sunglasses? I just feel like I’m going up to these different companies and I’m like, “I can unroll this and show you all the cool things that I’m working on.” They’re like, “Yeah, I’m good. I actually brought sunglasses to the beach.” I’m just going to continue bumbling down.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** There’s also a moment in those meetings where they are unrolling their sunglasses. It’s like, “Here are the sunglasses that we have that we like.” You’re not sure if you’re actually allowed to touch them or put them on. They’re talking about the things they’re working on. I do find though, looking at their sunglasses that they have laid out gives me a sense of what I could actually provide for them and what they think they need. That’s useful as a part of that conversation too.

**Craig:** It’s like some weird singles bar, where every time you show interest in somebody, they run away from you until they finally show interest back, at which point you run away from them. It’s so weird. The worst thing you can do in Hollywood is actually get what you wanted, because I always feel like… John, you’ve had this thing where people pursue you and they’re like, “Oh my god, we need you, we need you, we need you. You’re everything,” blah blah blah, “Anything, anything.” Then you’re like, “Fine, I’ll do it.” Then they’re like, okay, now we’re going to treat you like crap.

**John:** 100%. Situations like there was an animation project that was stalking me for so long. I finally said, “Okay, yeah, great.” I went back in and pitched them the thing. They were like, “Oh yeah, I don’t think we could do that.” It was like, ah, so much time has passed doing this.

**Craig:** So much.

**John:** So much time.

**Craig:** Basically we’re all Barton Fink. (singing) and it was good.

**John:** Let’s do our other listener questions. Let’s start us off with Katie here.

**Megana:** Katie writes, “I’m a novelist and an avid Scriptnotes listener. My husband’s a screenwriter. While my career has taken off, a book deal with the Big Five, healthy advance, lead title status, and a film TV agent at WME, my husband’s has not. We both understand that we’re just at different stages right now, but I have so much confidence in his talent. I know with hard work, he’ll break through. I’m at the beginning of my career, so I’m reluctant to shove his scripts at my agent. At a certain point, I’ll feel comfortable doing so. How do creatives at different points in their careers manage the early/late/staggered arrival of success? How can I practically support him when screenwriting seems so much more Sisyphusean than traditional publishing?”

**Craig:** I don’t know the answer to this, because I’ve never had any experience with it.

**John:** No, but it feels like a good story. I can visualize the tension between these two people, in one person being successful, one person not being successful. I guess Marriage Story had a bit of that, where her career was taking off in one way, his career was taking off in another way, but not as quickly. You don’t want to be in a story. You want actual practical advice right now. I can’t give you great practical advice right now other than to be there and positive and supportive to what he’s doing. Make sure that it never feels patronizing. Help him where you can help him. Introduce him where you can introduce him. Also, he’s going to have to find his own way into his screenwriting career, and just as you found your way into your novel writing career.

**Craig:** There’s some danger here, Katie, it seems to me, that you have to be aware of. While you’re asking the right questions, I would strongly advise you to be directing these questions towards a professional, rather than your favorite podcast hosts, because this is the kind of thing that can wreck stuff.

Don’t think that if I just say or do the right things in the right order, it won’t wreck stuff, because it can, because what happens is, you are people who have dreams and desires and hopes. You meet each other and you fall in love with each other, and then it happens to somebody and that person is changed because of it. I’m not saying you’re changed because suddenly it went to your head. Not at all. It’s just your life changes. When you become successful at this particular thing, your life changes. Your partner can feel left behind or shut out or less than if they’re trying to also change their life in the exact same way. The cascade of issues, I don’t have to list them for you, quite large. Regardless of who gets there first, there are so many issues.

I would urge you, if you have concerns about this or if you feel like your husband has concerns about this now, start talking about it now with somebody. I think that’s the important thing is communicate. Really communicate about this. Honesty is incredibly important. What you will never want to feel, I think, I hope, is a sense that maybe anything that does befall him was only because you begged and somebody threw you a bone.

This is a storyline we did in Mythic Quest where a woman gets married to a man, she becomes this incredibly successful novelist. He is not. He only publishes a series of books that are not well-read, and only with the publishers that she was publishing with. Clearly, people were throwing him scraps, and he knows it. This can be a real issue. I feel for you. I don’t know the answer myself, other than to say take it seriously. Don’t let this fester.

**John:** I would also want to acknowledge there’s a gendered component to this. The valance shouldn’t be any different, but I think societally the valance does feel a little bit different when the woman is so successful and the man is not successful. I agree with Craig that I think getting some help now and just talking through it will be helpful down the road. Also just make sure, Katie, you’re not ever self-sabotaging to make this feel better, because that is another worry I would have is that you might not take some opportunity because you feel like it’s going to feel bad for your husband.

**Craig:** Just take it seriously. It sounds like you are. I would say escalate it. You’ve called the first level of customer service, which is your favorite podcasters. You haven’t said that we’re your favorite podcast. I’m just deciding. We’re going to escalate this to a supervisor, aka therapist.

**John:** Next question, Megana.

**Megana:** Baggage asked, “For the first time in my career I’ve been asked to be on set for several weeks of international filming. Do you have any packing advice or travel hacks? Should I only bring athleisure and sensible shoes, a jacket for every possible weather? Are there certain items you’ve learned to never leave home without, things that can help make an extended stay in a hotel feel more cozy?”

**Craig:** Oh boy, I wonder what this would be like, to figure how to live somewhere else for a long, long time.

**John:** For a long time. A couple things that Baggage is already suggesting is that you need to make sure that you’re going to feel comfortable on set, and so wearing stuff, honestly dark clothes that you can keep wearing a lot can work great. You may not always have great laundry facilities, so always be thinking about, okay, if I need to use hotel laundry that takes two days to get back, how I’m going to get through that. Make sure you have enough changes of clothes.

Make sure you have something nice to wear out to the occasional dinners with actors or producers and anyone else who comes in. Depending where you’re at, that may mean a jacket and a tie or it may mean a dress or whatever it is that you need to wear to be a little bit more formal.

Shoes for on set, just think about you’re going to be on your feet a lot. Think about how to not be on your feet. Think about actually sitting down where you can sit down. Just be comfortable. I would say layers is good, and if you’re any place that can get cold, just anticipate being cold, because being on a set is honestly standing around a lot, and that can just get really cold.

**Craig:** I suspect that Baggage is a lady. Men generally are slobs and have way less… We just get caught unaware all the time. We just show up somewhere and it’s freezing, we’re like, “I got my hoodie.” Here’s the thing, Baggage. When you’re on set for several weeks, you will have access to the lovely folks in the costume department. If you need a hat or something, they’ll just give you one. You can’t keep it, but they can lend you something. Don’t feel like you need to cover everything. You don’t. Cover the basics. Make sure you’re comfortable.

Going to dinner with actors, lovely, happily, most actors that I go to dinner with are also slobs, so everybody can be a slob together. Sloppiness, it depends on your role. If you are a producer, executive type of person, generally yes, you do dress a bit better. Everyone expects the writer to dress like Barton Fink.

I am a big believer in comfort items. Here’s what I have learned to bring with me: my slippers, my robe, because my slippers and my robe are my morning things, and my pillow. I like my pillow. I want my pillow. I don’t want their pillow. I want mine. Then just remember the little things, sometimes it’s just easier to just buy them there. Yes, you can absolutely pack your luggage full of every possible little, tiny, tiny thing you would need, or you can just remember that unless you’re going somewhere particularly remote, you can just buy some stuff that’s cheap there and you’ll be okay. Just remember, you’re not going to the moon. You’re going probably to a place that has lots of other stuff.

**John:** If you’re filming Mad Max: Fury Road, then yes, you’re going to the moon, but anywhere else, you’re in a city where you can do stuff. I was thinking about a pilot I shot up in Vancouver. I thought I had rain gear, but I did not have Vancouver rain gear. I did not have Vancouver production rain gear. I needed the absolute, not just breathable GORE-TEX it needs to just be pure rubber that you’re wearing and the rubber boots and the rain pants and everything. That stuff you get there, because that’s the place where they sell it. The producer just sent me off with a PA, saying, “Go get him… ” I went, tried on the stuff, put it on the card. That became my rain gear. Some stuff you’ll just pick up locally.

Do think about what’ll make you comfortable. For Craig it was his slippers and his robe. Maybe the kind of tea you like that’s hard to get other places, pack a bunch of that so you’ll at least have the tea that you like there and have a way to get started in the morning or wind down at the end of the day, something like that to enjoy yourself.

**Craig:** Way more important to have those little things than 14 different weights of pants.

**John:** I will say, we do travel with our Apple TV. Apple TV is a nice way to get all the stuff that I want to see at home. It’s a little bit of a hassle to set it up on a hotel WiFi, but I’ll put a link in the show notes for how to get your Apple TV to connect to hotel WiFi, because when you don’t have the ability to type in the WiFi password, it can be a hassle, but there’s ways to do it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. Another question.

**Megana:** Luke from LA asks, “I’m another aspiring screenwriter currently doing a screenwriting graduate program at UCLA. The other day a professor in class said something that troubled me. He said when we’re starting out, we have to know our brand.”

**Craig:** Oh for God’s sakes.

**Megana:** “When trying to get an agent, the two or three scripts that we show them should be of the same type/genre, instead of, for example, trying to show our versatility, and go with a couple of different types of products. That way the agent can quickly see how to sell this new writer.”

**John:** The question is should your samples be similar to each other or should they be wildly divergent? I remember at the Austin Film Festival we had an agent and manager on the stage with us, and we were talking through that, did they want to see the range of what you can do or do they want to be able to target and focus you. I think the answer we got from them was a little bit more focused. It wasn’t all that dissimilar to what this professor in the class said.

**Craig:** The dissimilar part was that, the key was you had to have a script that they could sell. If you had five scripts that were all B minuses, then they were probably going to look at you and say, “I don’t know what you are. I don’t think you know what you are.” That’s not about brand. That’s just about your voice. If you walk in and you have an A-plus script and a C script, they’re going to say, “Okay, guess what? We actually don’t like that script at all, no big deal, but we do love this one. We’re going to put you out there with this one. You may get offered jobs in the genre that this one is in because it’s a good script.”

My thing is, how in the hell are you supposed to know beforehand? How do you know beforehand? If you write two or three scripts that are all the same genre and type, they might also say, this person really just is writing the same script over and over again. Maybe one day a professor at one of these places will say something that I like, but we’ve been doing it a long time, and I just find that all of this advice is circling around the most obvious thing, which is they don’t sell you at all. They sell a script.

**John:** I’ll put an extreme example, but an example that could make a little more sense here. Let’s say your samples are here is a historical war drama, it’s a retelling of 1812, battles of 1812. They have a half-hour multi-cam script, and they have this weird quirky sci-fi indie thing. That is a hard thing for an agent or manager to put their hands around and say, oh, you need to read this writer, because, oh, I’d love to read another thing, something completely different that won’t actually validate this experience.

The other thing, I’ve talked with a lot of writers who are thinking about, oh, I want to be starting TV, give me examples of some things you think I should be writing for this. I often say, I love to read a sample that is so, so good that I cannot wait to meet this person. Then when I meet this person, I’m like, “Yes, that’s exactly the person I hoped wrote that script.” Something that feels like it introduces you and your voice and why you would be asked to be in that room, these are great things. Writing something that is unique to your experience is a great choice if you’re thinking about how am I going to be an asset in that room or on this project. If my script can give a sense of what my personality is like, what my unique voice is like, that’s great. There are going to tend to be things that will speak to a genre.

**Craig:** I don’t see it that way.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Craig:** I just think that basically everyone is reading a fire hosed volume of crap every day, every script stinks, and then one day they read one that’s good. I don’t think they’re going to even care what the other ones are. They’re so happy that they found somebody who can write. If that person has written other scripts, and they’re like, “I want to read another thing that you wrote,” and it’s completely different, then that person might say, “Okay, you know what? I just like this one.” Reading two scripts and going, “Okay… ”

Here’s the deal. If you can write a good script, you’ll write another good script. Any good writer can write at least something that is competent in any genre. I may not say I want to make this movie. You give me a genre to write, I’ll write it. At least I will apply basic writing skill to it and things like characters and relationships. Everyone’s trying to figure out the secret or the way you’re going to get through. The way you’re going to get through is you’re going to write something good. I’m not sure if you have a script that you love and you wrote, and then someone’s like, “You got to write it again in that genre,” and you want to write something in another genre, your thing in the other genre might be even better. I would never dissuade anybody from that, nor would I ever ding anybody for having things in different genres. I guess then again I’ve weirdly become the poster child for somebody whose genres are completely all over the place.

**John:** Now I will say I was hired and getting work before Go, and my script was a romantic tragedy. It was funny enough, but it wasn’t a great sample for some of the things I was getting, which were How To Eat Fried Worms and Wrinkle In Time, kids book adaptations. My other sample was the novelization of Natural Born Killers, which was not a laugh riot. The useful thing about the script for Go was that people could read it and see anything they wanted to see in it, and so it could serve as a sample for any kind of genre you wanted to put me out for.

**Craig:** It was good.

**John:** It was good. I would say just write Go, and then your problems are solved.

**Craig:** Write Go and then add an OD to it and you’re there. Just write something good. That’s your brand, good writer, because literally everyone else’s brand is bad writer.

**John:** Megana, another question.

**Megana:** Cranky Screenwriter writes–

**Craig:** That’s me.

**Megana:** “I started working with a manager a year ago. My manager has not set up a single meeting for me in this time, although there’s always an excuse, and usually ignores my emails unless they pertain to projects on which director she also represents is attached, meaning the manager would get paid twice if they’re successful. Recently she had me write a treatment for a remake of a major studio picture for a Hollywood super producer with an all-around streaming deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I was not paid for this treatment. My manager didn’t provide notes, nor did she ever even confirm that it was even sent to the producer. Obviously, there’s no meeting forthcoming either. Is this sort of behavior normal and do I just need to be more patient, or is it time for me to cut her loose and find someone who will work harder on my behalf?”

**John:** Craig, I don’t know, it sounds like… Cranky Screenwriter is so lucky to have a manager. I don’t know why they’re… Why are they emailing us? Because listen, you’re so lucky you have a manager.

**Craig:** What’s the level below cut her loose? What can you do that’s even more extreme than cutting her loose?

**John:** You need to fire her into the sun.

**Craig:** Fire her into the sun. By the way, this behavior is normal among terrible, predatory, crappy, peripheral managers. She’s awful. She’s awful. Having her as a manager is worse than having no manager. She is exploitative. She’s not helping you at all. While she’s hurting you, she’s also not even balancing it out with help. She’s terrible and you should, yes, cut her loose.

**Megana:** Angel of After School Specials asks, “Last year a script of mine was produced for what I thought would be a streamer, but ended up being a cable channel. I was a little bummed, as it wasn’t what I’d envisioned, but something made is a win, right? Another script was recently optioned is gearing up for production on a streaming service, but through their TV arm. Two scripts, two TV movies. I kept telling myself I didn’t need to be nervous, but something just happened that has me wondering. I’ve sold two projects and pitches, one to a major studio and another to a streamer. Yet, I just had a call with my reps about a project I’m really excited about. I saw it as a big theatrical play, but they told me I should aim for cable, again. I’m not sure if that’s because that’s where they have more relationships or if this is the box they’re putting me into, but either way, I’m not happy about it.

“Honestly, I’m scared. Currently, I have a team. That sounds good. It feels safe. They know me, and I don’t feel like I have anything to prove. Honestly, no other reps have shown interest. When you’ve had success that’s quantifiable in sales, but not produced work, how do you move up the ranks, and what should my expectations be? I think my biggest concern is that I see myself one way, but they’re pushing me into a smaller category because that’s where my work actually belongs.”

**John:** A lot going on here. Angel has some self-doubt, but also some success and some perspective, but also is feeling frustrated and trapped. It’s the flip side of our last question. You don’t have a terrible manager. The manager’s getting you work. Stuff’s selling. That’s great. You got a career started, but you’re also getting pigeonholed as being a cable person, and you really see yourself being able to do bigger, more exciting things than that. Craig, what do you advise?

**Craig:** Angel of After School Specials, the one thing that you said that made me the most nervous for you is at the very end. You said, “I think my biggest concern is that I see myself one way, but they’re pushing me into a smaller category because that’s where my work actually belongs.” I want to tell you, that is not why they’re doing that. Your work doesn’t necessarily only belong on cable. By the way, cable used to be good. We’re talking about smaller cable channels here.

You may feel like, am I missing something? Is there something super cabley about what I’m doing? No. They’re moving you there because that’s who’s paying them. That’s who’s paying you, so that’s who’s paying them. Representatives in general will take the path of least resistance to money. There are some that are smart enough and have enough perspective to take the long view, to turn things down, to aim higher. Most, especially when you’re starting out and you’re early on, do not. They just want to go where they know it’s easiest. What they’re telling you is that’s what’s easiest. Certainly when you say, I want to write a theatrical play, what they hear is, oh, we’re not getting paid at all, because–

**John:** [Unclear 00:58:34].

**Craig:** 99% of theatrical plays don’t generate a penny. They’re saying, look, over here are people who basically they have a checkbook out and they want to do it again. Let’s go over there where the checkbook’s at and let’s do it again. I understand why you’re scared. It is scary. Here’s my very practical advice for you, Angel of After School Specials. You can divide your time and work and energy into two modes. You can write things that you know are going to get picked up and put on that thing, table, and you’ll get money in your pocket and you pay your bills, but write the other thing. Write the other thing too. See what happens. If you see this one as a big theatrical play and they say aim for cable again, you can say, “You know what? I actually am going to aim for cable again with another thing that’s very cabley, because I like getting paid too.” Then you work on your big theatrical play.

You can’t live only by one way or the other. You won’t survive if you’re just writing passion projects for yourself that nobody’s going to pay you for. You also won’t survive if all you do is what you’re being told to do. Carve out some time, one for them, one for me. It’s a classic bit of advice that I probably should’ve heeded sooner in my career than I did, and protect that. You will feel much better. If they don’t get it and they don’t want you to do that, they don’t even need to know about it, do they?

**John:** No. I agree that you should be doing this, writing the stuff that you actually want to see happen on your own time. Make sure you’re splitting your time. I agree with Craig with that completely. I think there’s an opportunity to switch agencies though. I think that time is probably going to come pretty soon. It sounds like you have another thing that’s going for a streamer that’s ramping up to be in production. Once that’s in production, once that’s closer to coming out, that may be a good moment for you to start meeting with other places.

How do you find those other places. How do you find people who might be interested in working with you? It’s talking with the executives and on projects you’re working on or projects that are in development, to see, hey, where do you think is a good place for me to end up, or talking to other writers who are having good experiences with their agents or managers, because switching agencies, Craig will tell you, I will tell you, is an opportunity for a bit of a reset in terms of how the town is seeing you, going out on new generals, meeting with new people, and getting people re-excited about the next thing that you want to do. I think you need to do the work for yourself, but then you also need to really look at changing agencies, because it’s going to be hard for you to make that change at the same agency where you’re at, because they’re just used to you being a certain kind of client.

**Craig:** There’s going to be a space open with Cranky Screenwriter’s manager soon.

**John:** That one seems fantastic.

**Craig:** Sounds amazing.

**John:** Those are our questions. It’s now time for our One Cool Things. Craig, start us off. What’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is just a little shout-out to a very faithful listener of ours over the many years. Her name is Cara Anderson. I’m just flagging her for everybody, because she is also not only a listener, but a fantastic member of our special effects squad on The Last of Us. She’s based out in Vancouver. Special effects people spread out all over the place, because they have their laboratories where they’re blowing things up and then they have their places where they’re buying things and moving stuff in and out of warehouses. Then of course we have our team that’s on set blowing things up in person or spraying blood on things. I’m giving away stuff. Spoiler alert, there’s blood in The Last of Us.

**John:** I can’t believe I can’t watch the show anymore.

**Craig:** Let’s see if [cross-talk 01:02:22] deadline. Cara Anderson has been doing such a good job for us for so long. I just wanted to say hi to her and let her know we’re very happy to have her as a listener.

**John:** Now Craig, just because you brought this up, special effects versus visual effects, at what point in the pre-production process do you figure out which team is handling this thing that you’ve written into the script, like this is an explosion. When do you know that it’s going to be special effects being done on set versus something that’s being done later on in post?

**Craig:** The interesting thing is pre-production never ends when you’re making television. You’re always in prep and production and post-production. This conversation never stops. Once the script comes out, everybody breaks it down, goes through it. The first AD usually spends a little bit of time with the effects and special effects, asking the questions. Some things are obvious. Some things are clearly going to be visual effects. Some things are going to be special effects. A lot of times the real question isn’t should this be special effects or visual effects, the question should be is this going to be visual effects or should we just build it or should we be there? That’s more of a discussion. The special effects stuff is pretty well defined. There was one, actually just shot it last week, the sequence where there was a huge discussion about whether it should be special effects or visual effects, and where we landed was it should be both, and indeed it will.

**John:** Nice, I love it. My One Cool Thing is the half-marathon, just the half-marathon as a concept. This last week I ran a half-marathon in Las Vegas.

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** It was really fun. It was called the Run Rock and Roll Half-Marathon. What I loved about it, it was a nighttime one. I hate the sun. It was nice to be able to run at night, and the Strip is a fun place for that. I don’t like the sun.

**Craig:** You look like you don’t like the sun.

**John:** I’m a very pale person. This was fun because it was all on the Strip, and it was pretty well lit. You could see things. It was a giant crowd. It was fun for all those reasons. I want to talk about the half-marathon as a distance, because I think it’s actually one of those really good benchmark things, because it’s difficult but it won’t kill you. I don’t think I could ever do a marathon, but a half-marathon I can do. It’s 13.1 miles. If people are curious about running, because I was never a runner until [unclear 01:04:37] so during the course of this podcast I became a runner.

The first app we used was called Couch To 5k, which basically just trains you how to start go from walking to actually being able to run short distances and ultimately run a 5k. During that first year, I did a couch to 5k, then 5k to 10k. I ran my first 10k. I ran a 15k. Now I’ve run two half-marathons, which is 21k. Running is pretty great. I’m surprised to be saying this now, because I was never a runner before this time, but human beings are uniquely well-designed to run. Once you learn how to do it, it just feels great to have that kind of fundamental skill under your belt. If you’re curious ever about running a marathon, I would say don’t. Don’t run a marathon, but try to build up to run a half-marathon, because it’s a thing I think most people could probably do.

**Craig:** It’s just a quirk of history. Maybe the half-marathon should be the marathon, and the marathon should be a double marathon.

**John:** Sure. That would make a lot more sense, because a half-marathon’s, it’s 13 miles, but 10 miles is also a pretty good distance. It’s a lot of work, but again, it’s two hours of your day, rather than four hours. In fact, four hours really kills you in a marathon.

**Craig:** Four hours and heat stroke.

**John:** Heat stroke, yeah, all those things. Never good. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** You know it.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. A special thanks this week to Chris Sond [ph], who put together all the initial research for the meet-cute segment. 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 a place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. 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 weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. Almost all the T-shirts we’ve made, you can now get as a pullover hoodie. Our special zip-up hoodies are… Craig, I guess you still haven’t gotten your zip-up hoodie.

**Craig:** Not yet.

**John:** Our special zipper hoodies are back to print. For the next two weeks, you can order a zipper hoodie. You can find those 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 onboarding. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, this week as we were preparing to play Dungeons and Dragons, you and I got into a long discussion about Elden Ring, which is the new video game that we’re playing. I think the short review of it is that it is a gorgeous-looking game, it is a game in which you die a lot. You know that you’re going to die a lot going into it. We were also both struck by the weird onboarding and, to me, unsuccessful onboarding in this game. I thought we’d talk about onboarding as it relates to video games, but also of course every movie and every TV show has an aspect of onboarding too, where you’re getting the audience familiar with how your show is going to work.

**Craig:** This is a term I’ve become obsessed with ever since I heard Neil Druckmann say it. This is a concept in video game production. How do you get the player from I just hit start for the first time to where you need them to be to start playing the game? We deal with this all the time. Somebody sits down, presses play, probably on their iPad or their television or weirdly maybe sits in a movie theater, and they have to go from nothing to something. You have to get them there so it’s okay. Elden Ring is an extension of the Dark Souls series, which the company FromSoftware is notorious for this kind of brutal format where you’re constantly dying. I knew that part was [unclear 01:08:39] but what I didn’t expect was that I would have no goddamn idea who I was, where I was, and why I was. It’s really weird, because there’s an incredibly long opening sequence that you have to watch.

**John:** Written by George R.R. Martin apparently.

**Craig:** It explains nothing. No offense to George.

**John:** It’s like, what is the Elden Ring? I have no idea. Is it a person? Is it a place? Is it a thing? I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I can’t blame it on George, because he probably wrote quite a bit, that then they took and put together. There’s so much happening. It was the weirdest thing, because they told you everything and nothing at the same time, because there was no progression. I think about how the Lord of the Rings, I still think about how brilliant that screenplay was for Fellowship of the Ring, because they onboarded you through this narration by Galadriel and an explainer about the rings and what they were, who made them, why there was a problem, how there was a big fight, how one of the rings got lost. By the time you get to the hobbits, you basically know what you need to know.

I think, weirdly, everyone’s been chasing that forever, and now it’s at a place where there was so much of that crap in there and none of it connected to anything. It felt like it was written by somebody who didn’t speak English, to be honest with you. I thought it was a bad translation maybe.

**John:** It felt poetic. It was a poem that took me to a good place. One of the real challenges here, and we should both acknowledge that we’re in the early stages of playing the game, and so as I look at these reviews, everyone’s just like, oh, 40 hours in you realize, oh my gosh, what a big world this is and how it all fits together. I’m like, I’m looking forward to that, but also, just as the screenwriter in me, I think I should be beyond the inciting incident by now. I don’t think I am. I don’t know what my objective is. I don’t know who I am or what these forces are around me. That is frustrating. Now, it’s unique to video games but also to apps, because I am building Highland for the Mac. There’s also an onboarding process where you’re teaching people how to use the controls, how to do the things that they want to do with that.

**Craig:** Tutorials.

**John:** Tutorials. There are tutorials in Elden Ring, just as there are tutorials in Highland to get you started. I largely figured some stuff out, but I think I would not have been able to figure them out if I didn’t have my phone next to me and I could Google, how do I do this thing.

**Craig:** It’s a failure of onboarding then.

**John:** Is it a failure of onboarding in 2022?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We have an expectation that people can look stuff up. I just feel like they were expecting I would look some stuff up other places because I couldn’t figure out where these controls were.

**Craig:** That’s just crazy at that point, or just say to people, “Google it.” Literally have the video game by like, “Sorry, Google it.” I’m okay with them wanting to throw you in the deep end and everything, but for instance, in Elden Ring, after you watch the endless and indecipherable prologue, you’re asked to choose what kind of character you want to be.

**John:** Essentially a character class.

**Craig:** What character class. You have no idea what any of them mean. They don’t tell you what is interesting or special or good or bad about any of them. It seems almost like it’s just a random choice.

**John:** Of course what I did is I Googled to see what do the choices mean, what are they good for.

**Craig:** My whole thing is, no, you owe me.

**John:** That’s not how it works.

**Craig:** I bought this. You owe me. What’s next in television or movies? We put up a card that says, “Press pause here and Google what is confusing to you,” or, for instance, at the end of the second Matrix movie, it should just say, “If you didn’t understand what the architect said, please Google it.” No. That’s a failure. In my book, it is a failure of onboarding.

**John:** I do get and acknowledge that. The other experience of onboarding I had recently is I switched over from using Mac Mail to using Superhuman, which is a web-based mail system which I really like a lot. They do not let you use the app until you go through onboarding with a live person on Zoom talking you through how to do it. This seems incredibly restrictive and silly, because I should be able to figure it all out just through the app, but you can’t, or you could figure out how to do it, but you wouldn’t actually recognize the smart ways to do it. It’s like in Elden Ring, someone came to your house and sat beside you, Craig, and said, “Okay, let’s talk through this and let’s figure out, get you really good on controls. Let’s try to do some dodge rolls and do a guard so you can actually get that power attack in there.” It was strange to have this experience with Superhuman, because honestly kind of great, because I feel like I’m a really good user of the app now, because they forced me to go through that training.

**Craig:** Do you think that I would like it?

**John:** Superhuman?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, I’ve told you about this before.

**Craig:** I know. I remember. I think I probably stumbled over the, sorry, you’re making me do what? I guess I would say to you, is it way better than the other experiences? I ditched Apple Mail years ago.

**John:** I would say it’s way better. In terms of the actual being able to replay to things and get down to inbox zero, just not have stuff sitting there, is really good. How it filters stuff out, and your important stuff and your not important stuff, is really good. It’s worth a shot. Should you stop your life right now to do it? Maybe wait until after you’re done with some production.

**Craig:** Done ruining my life.

**John:** It was Rachel Bloom who put me on to it. I think that she and I both agreed it’s a good app.

**Craig:** Rachel Bloom was already a superhuman, so it makes sense.

**John:** Back to our Elden Ring experience, I feel like also part of what you’re dealing with with any video game or any sort of piece of entertainment is you’re dealing with expectation. I have certain expectations about what buttons are going to do what kinds of things. I find myself drinking all of my potions because I’m expecting the square button to be–

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** It’s not just me.

**Craig:** No. It’s so frustrating. Megana, I know that you’ve literally slept past into the ninth level of coma at this point, but hear me out. You’re wandering around in a world where you have no idea where you’re supposed to go really and whether or not you’re facing off against creatures that are way too strong for you or not. All you have to keep you alive are three swigs of your potion.

**John:** Your vile of crimson tears.

**Craig:** Which they don’t tell you that’s what it is, but you eventually figure it out.

**John:** It was red so of course it’s [crosstalk 01:15:11].

**Craig:** It was red, yeah. The way they’ve said, usually in these games, you’ll have to hit a button to bring up a little menu, and then you press a button to drink it. You can’t mistakenly do it. In this game–

**John:** Glug glug glug.

**Craig:** The button that generally is crouch for every other game is drink your very, very limited amount of health potion. I’ve done it twice. I’ve drank two health potions within seconds and just wanted to just jump out my window.

**John:** I’ll be in the middle of a fight and my character will stop to drink a health potion and I’ll get stabbed in the back. That’s what’s going to happen.

**Craig:** I’m at full health. Everything’s fine. I’m walking across the thing. I come to something, and then I just drink a health potion for no reason. The other thing is, most video games will not let you drink health potions if you’re at full health. They’re like, no, you don’t want to do that. This game’s like, do it, lol.

**John:** Lol.

**Craig:** Lmao.

**John:** We’re going to get so much email about this, because we’re–

**Craig:** Video game players.

**Megana:** No.

**Craig:** Sorry, Megana.

**John:** Megana’s going to get so much mail about this.

**Craig:** Megana, if it makes you feel better, the fans of FromSoftware games are even more intense than most video game fans. The thing is I’m going to keep playing it. It is gorgeous. I can see where after 40 hours, once I get out of this training area, that I’m also ill-equipped to survive in, it’s going to be amazing. Neil Druckmann has been playing it, and he tweeted some things. He’s gotten pretty far. He’s really good at video games, isn’t a big surprise.

**John:** No surprise there.

**Craig:** He’s gotten pretty far, although now that I’m thinking about it, I’m like, hey, I emailed him the other day, and he was like, “Oh sorry, it took me a while to get back to you.” I’m like, you know what?

**John:** Game.

**Craig:** I know what’s happening. I know what’s going on here.

**John:** I limit my time to 30 minutes. I will set 30 minutes on my watch when I play and then I will just stop at a certain point, because otherwise hours just dissolve.

**Craig:** For me, I don’t think I played more than one hour at a time, because it’s so frustrating. Instead of setting an alarm on my watch, I just listen to myself wanting to kill myself, and then I think, oh, I should probably stop playing this right now.

**John:** I’m playing this video game.

**Craig:** This video game is way too frustrating for me. There are some wonderful videos online of people almost beating a guy and then losing it and freaking out. It’s wonderful. Sorry, Megana. I apologize for everything, Megana. I got to be honest. Everything. Everything we’ve just talked about.

**John:** That’s Megana’s job to apologize for everything.

**Craig:** She’s like, I’m sorry that you’re so sorry. We’re sorry. We’re all sorry.

**John:** Everyone’s sorry.

**Craig:** Everyone’s sorry.

Links:

* [Volodymyr Zelensky](https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/25/europe/volodymyr-zelensky-profile-cmd-intl/index.html) and the ongoing war in [Ukraine](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/07/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-live-updates/)
* [Does Hollywood Ruin Books?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUD8h9JpEVQ) by Numberphile on Youtube on Berkson’s Paradox
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://us9.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=2b0232538adf13e5b3e55b12f&id=aeb429a997) and the [Meet-Cute edition here](https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?u=2b0232538adf13e5b3e55b12f&id=edbc06bed5)!
* [Scriptnotes 433: The One with Greta Gerwig](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-one-with-greta-gerwig)
* [Elden Ring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elden_Ring) (https://www.fromsoftware.jp/ww/products.html)
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* [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/540standard.mp3).