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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/there-is-no-conspiracy).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 512 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge where we take a look at the first three pages of scripts submitted by you, our listeners, and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be looking at lecture scenes, mega deals for creators, and the ethics of writing conspiracy thrillers. And in our bonus segment for premium members I’ll be taking with comedian Sara Schaefer about her three simple steps for getting your TV show on the air.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**John:** Craig, you’ll want to listen to this.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are only three? I’ve been doing like six steps.

**John:** Yeah. Spoiler, there are many more than three. It’s sort of part of the joke is that it’s incredibly hard and frustrating at every step.

**Craig:** Yup. Yup. It is.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So that’s an extra from the Schaefer Shakedown podcast which you should also listen to, but really it’s a great little bonus segment if you are a premium member. Stick around and listen to that after the credits.

But first Craig it’s great to have you back. We’ve been sort of hit or miss the last couple of weeks because you’ve been working, I’ve been traveling. But now we are back recording the show.

**Craig:** Yup. So it’s going to be a little bit like this while we’re making The Last of Us just because it’s hard to produce a television show. It’s a fulltime job, and then some. So every now and then I will be amiss. But hopefully I can get into a good rhythm and stick with you guys regularly.

**John:** Very cool. Now over the past couple of weeks it’s been a very good time to be a creator of television shows, or at least a very successful creator of television shows. Because you are that kind of person you are going to be able to make a mega deal with one of the streamers. There were three of them just in the last two weeks which were pretty exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Courtney Kemp, creator of Power over at Starz, made a new deal at Netflix listed as high eight figures, possibly rising to nine figures. I had to actually do the math to figure out like oh that’s a lot of zeroes.

**Craig:** It sure is.

**John:** That’s a lot of money.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s amazing news for Courtney who is a fantastic person. I got to know her a little bit a year or so ago. And this is – I guess we can call it the Netflix Effect. I mean, Netflix has definitely driven the price of the reliable showrunner up quite a bit. When we get these reports of high figures, possible rising to nine figures, it’s a little bit like dealing with these big sports contracts. You do have to look at how many years it covers. Typically it is about exclusivity. Sometimes inside of those deals there are incentives. They rely on the continuation of a show being produced, or such and such.

But generally speaking I think we can say that Courtney Kemp just made a massive mega truckload full of money and I am thrilled for her. I think it’s fantastic. As long as this lasts let’s just keep doing it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s a good time to be a showrunner in television.

**John:** Indeed. People who have been doing this for quite a long time, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame, reached a $935 million deal that will keep them at – what’s crazy it’s not actually for South Park. It’s for like things related to South Park. So they’ll be making 13 or 14 South Park movies for Paramount+ which is good.

Here’s the point where I think I’ve said this before on the podcast but back when I first starting out in Hollywood, so I was still in the Stark program. I was at a bar called Three of Clubs which still exists and a friend introduced me to this other guy who was also from Boulder, Colorado. I was talking to him. He seemed kind of down on his luck. I said what are you working on. He’s like oh I’m doing this Christmas card for this guy who works at MTV. I felt kind of bad for him because he seemed to really be sort of struggling. But that Christmas card was of course South Park and that was Trey Parker.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I said, “Troy, it was nice to meet you,” at the end of our conversation. That’s the last time I talked to Trey Parker. But you know what? Things are going great for those duos.

**Craig:** He’s doing OK. Yeah, so Trey and Matt have created an empire and what’s fascinating about what’s happened over the last few years is that something like South Park is – it’s the perfect storm for deal-making in the modern era. Friends we all know was this enormous drive for Netflix. And it was probably one of the reasons that HBO/Warner Bros suddenly said what are we doing. Why are we giving all of our stuff to Netflix? Let’s just make our own thing.

South Park, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, the things that they make, the world they’ve created has a library that’s enormous already and it will continue to grow. That is a perfect situation for a new streamer like HBO Max because it just creates tremendous value for everybody who is showing up and promises tremendous value to come.

We are starting to see what our work is worth. And that is exciting. Part of the deal that they made has to do with revenue sharing and ad sharing. It’s very complicated. Every time one of these things happens everybody else stops, looks at it, and goes well why don’t I have that. It will also continue to drive things up. It’s exciting.

I’m excited. I’m looking ahead to things. I am not worth a billion dollars. I can assure you of that. But those guys are.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So congratulations to Trey and Matt. It’s exciting. And they are brilliant. And the work they do is brilliant. And I have to believe – I’ve just heard that they’re good guys. I’ve never met them personally but I’ve heard they’re really solid guys. I have to hope and believe that the people that are important to the creation of their stuff are also being taken care of well.

**John:** Well I’ll tell you when I met Trey 25 years ago he seemed perfectly nice in the five minutes I had.

**Craig:** Oh, well, nothing changes, right? Yeah, hundreds of millions of dollars and success doesn’t change anyone.

**John:** Has never changed anybody.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** All the people we knew back when are exactly the same people they are now.

**Craig:** I have to say if there were a person to bet on not changing I feel like it’s those guys. Because you know so much of what they do is about taking the piss out of people and not being too serious and not being too self-important. So I hope.

**John:** So, you mentioned the Friends at Warners kind of situation, and the South Park situation is kind of weird and interesting because HBO and HBO Max/Warners had bought the library of rights to South Park and so they have it on HBO Max. But, this deal is with Paramount+. And so it’s a weird thing where they’re not getting the library back yet. So they can get all of the future sort of South Parky things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s honestly sort of more like when the cast of Friends renegotiated their deals for a million dollars apiece, to keep them there in the family.

**Craig:** That makes total sense. They seem incredibly reliable. I mean, year after year after year they just keep putting content out. And people like it. So, it’s a good blue chip story even as you say if the entirety of the library isn’t there, what’s coming is going to be there.

**John:** And plus they’re buying Casa Bonita in Denver which is very exciting for me as a Coloradoan.

**Craig:** That is so awesome. Awesome. Oh my god. Casa Bonita.

**John:** Finally we should talk about the $900 billion sale of Hello Sunshine which is the Reese Witherspoon production entity which has made a ton of really well regarded shows, some of which star Reese Witherspoon but some of which don’t. We have other friends who work for that company. Good on them.

**Craig:** Yeah, totally good on them. This one is a little confusing because they have made a lot of good shows but they don’t own those shows. So, this was an outside investment. This is private equity coming in and purchasing the company. And there must be a plan beyond just the show Hello Sunshine and I guess they also have a little bit of ownership in Little Fires Everywhere. But I have to believe that this is really about Reese Witherspoon expanding her brand the way that for instance Jessica Alba became a billionaire by expanding her brand. That has to be what’s going on here. That this is not just about television shows but about more.

**John:** Yeah. Because Reese Witherspoon is an influencer in the literary space as well, so her book club is successful. In many ways she’s kind of an Oprah for a new generation and that could be really sort of what this investment is for to enable more stuff along those lines to happen. So, this is a situation where it’s not about a writer-creator-showrunner but really a place that could make stuff for your entity.

**Craig:** In retrospect all will be kind of judged and evaluated when there are big gold rushes in Hollywood, and this is not the first time there’s been a big gold rush, there are winners and there are losers. There are good bets, there are bad bets. Sometimes the good ones turn out bad. Sometimes the ones that seem bad will turn out great. I don’t envy anybody that’s making billion dollar bets on things. I’m glad I don’t have to do that sort of thing. I just have to sit here and right.

**John:** Yeah. Back in our day when we were first starting out to make an overall deal at a place was kind of a big deal. We were very excited to do it. Actually I first got to know you because you and I made a deal for a bunch of writers over at Fox. We sort of pitched around town about doing this writers deal at various places and Fox was the one that took us up. And that was really exciting and important.

I think what’s changed so much is that with the rise of these streamers and they need so much content that outside of the feature space it does really make sense to lock down some creators to make sure they’re making stuff for you.

**Craig:** Yeah. And to take care of the ones you have. I hope HBO is listening. No, they’ve been very nice to me. When you and I were starting in the feature business I think you probably had at least a few moments like I did where you look over at the people in the television business and went, “What? You’re making how much?” It just seemed like these insane numbers. And oftentimes they wouldn’t have to do anything for those insane numbers. They were just like sitting in an office and, I don’t know, getting high and earning crazy amounts of money.

Well, it’s still that way except more. More money. The deals that were always good for television writers have become vastly better. The numbers are eye-popping. And this is going to continue while Hollywood is building a new kind of business. And that is excellent for creators. It’s important for us all as we go through this, and as I just mentioned with Matt and Trey, to continue to think about the people who are not creators, that are not showrunners, but who are doing creative labor in our business because it is fairly typical of Hollywood to start handing out crazy amounts of money to individuals and then sort of recoup some of that on the margin by cheaping out on everyone else.

So, hopefully that’s not what happens here and it’s important for showrunners to make sure that people are being compensated fairly.

**John:** What was different as we started is that a lot of producers would have deals at studios. And so you’d say like, oh, Mace Neufeld would have a deal over at Paramount and so you’d go there to make your movie there. There’s much less of that now. And so this is really taking the place of producers doing those things. The challenge is a lot of these writer-creator-showrunners they have limited capacity.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** If they’re actually creating shows they can’t sort of also do a bunch of other stuff. And so as a person right now who is taking out a project or looking at places to go with this project I’m really mindful of like, oh, I really like that person as a writer but I don’t think they actually have the capacity to produce this thing. And that’s going to be – I think we’re going to see more challenges around that area coming up in the next couple of years where people have these great deals and they’re so talented but they cannot actually make stuff with other people.

**Craig:** I suspect that for most of these deals these companies are actually paying for shows. They are not paying for empires. There are a few people that can empire run. So our friend Greg Berlanti is just the king of empire running. I think there’s no amount of shows that he’s not capable of producing. Courtney is the power behind Power.

**John:** And all the spinoffs of Power.

**Craig:** Correct. That franchise is kind of I think really what they’re paying for there. Although of course they would be thrilled to get even more from her and I have no doubt that she has more coming. And we know kind of what they’re looking for from Trey and Matt. They’re looking for the sort of things that Trey and Matt do, whatever is that next show. This is kind of a good thing I think. There was a time when the best paid people in the business were people that were not writing or acting or directing, which is crazy.

I think when we all look back on it we’ll go, “What? Why? Why those people?” It’s good that the money is now flowing into the pockets of the people who are creating the shows, who are key elements of those shows, like Mike Schur for instance. He has his show, and then he has another show. And that’s how it’s going to function. That’s what they’re paying for.

**John:** But he can also help out on other people’s – he seems to have the capability to help out on other people’s stuff as well. And Mindy Kaling has other shows as well. There are some of those people who are talented creators themselves who can also help out, but it’s different than sort of the old days where you had just a producer who was sort of running a fiefdom.

**Craig:** Yeah. And one thing that I think is really positive about writers and writer-producers being the people that get paid the most is that writer-producers really do care mostly – I would say most of them really do care about the show they’re making, or the two shows they’re making. They care less about amassing insane amounts. Nobody gets into the writing business to become a billionaire. If you want to be a billionaire go into the hedge fund business. We care about things.

So, that’s positive. Whereas I think the non-writing, non-directing, non-acting producers, a few of them truly did care, truly do care. Lindsay Doran is my favorite example. A whole bunch of them just wanted more. They were just amassing money and clout. And I will not miss those. There are people that I think became very powerful and also really were – like Jerry Bruckheimer is in many ways a creator. He’s like a showrunner of the movies. I mean, that’s why there’s this continuity among Jerry Bruckheimer films. But you and I know a lot of producers where it’s like, “What? Really? You?”

**John:** They’re really good scrappy – they’re good at attaching themselves to things. They don’t actually add a lot of value.

**Craig:** No. Their genius is in convincing people that they’re necessary and worth a lot of money when they’re not. So, bye.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** All right. Let’s take a little bit of follow up here. This is a listener question, a listener suggestion. So let’s take a listen to what Greg Beam wrote in.

**Greg Beam:** Hey John and Craig. This is Greg from El Paso. I thoroughly enjoyed the rebroadcast of The Worst of the Worst. As a relatively new listener I didn’t catch it the first time around and I was glad to hear your thoughts on why protagonists need to suffer so much. But I did want to suggest that – I think you could have taken your analysis one step further and to demonstrate how I’m afraid I’ll have to invoke the hero’s journey.

According to Joseph Campbell the outward transformation and corresponding triumph that heroes of myth experience is the external representation of a deeper inner transformation. The hero not only overcomes their personal shortcomings or the evils of their society but transcends all limitations of the human condition.

Doing so requires a stripping away, not just of all they have, but of all they are. The death of their individual identity. Their sense of self. Their ego. And only once the hero’s whole self has been hallowed out can they become a vessel to be filled with the light of god to recognize the oneness of all things. It’s a radical conversion of root and branch break with their previous mode of being and one that is only possible following a total loss of self.

Now this isn’t meant to critique or diminish narratives that don’t have overt spiritual content. They’re perfectly valid and valuable as they are. But being aware of the transcendental sources from which their patterns spring can in my mind and Campbell’s add some depth to our understanding of what these stories represent and how they work in our minds and hearts.

Anyway, no question here. Just a thought. Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Well, thank you Greg.

**John:** Yeah. So we were talking I think two episodes ago about you mentioned Song of Roland as that sort of first mythic quest in sort of a modern context idea. How do you respond – how do you feel about Greg’s suggestion that really the worst we should be thinking back to the archetypal, the demigod level of everything being not just destroyed externally but destroyed internally for that journey to begin?

**Craig:** Well interesting. The Chanson de Roland I don’t think he has any change whatsoever. He’s awesome. He continues to be awesome. And then he finishes awesome. There were some very simple things like that. But Greg is right. I mean, the old, very traditional, very basic narratives were far more broad in the character swings that occurred. You had to die to live. It’s kind of how it works. Jesus had to die to live. He didn’t have to get super sick. Whereas in Unforgiven William Money gets a fever. And he has fever dreams. And then he wakes up and he’s sort of a different guy.

The important thing is that the concept of being reborn – I think everybody is fairly familiar with the notion that that is a flexible and extendable concept. You can mush it around and drag it around and metaphorize it however you want. But killing something within you and having something being reborn in you, yeah, that’s basically underneath it.

I think the modern narrative tends to avoid full hallowing outs. But if Greg’s point is that you kind of need to know where it all comes from I don’t disagree. Look back at the old stories. You know, you don’t send a flood to kill a third of the people. You send a flood to kill everyone. And that’s how it used to be.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not hard for me to think of examples of non – well, they’re mythic movies but they’re contemporary movies, or contemporary-ish movies that do sort of destroy everything about the characters and rebuild them. So you look at Terminator and sort of what happens to Linda Hamilton’s character. She’s living a normal life and everything about her normal life has to be stripped away and destroyed and she has to become a completely new person because of what’s happened.

You look at The Matrix and Neo and everything he believed about his life can no longer exist. He cannot be the same person he was at the start of the movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that transformation is complete. I agree that it’s good to understand that in the archetypal, epic versions of these characters it’s going to happen. I think we cannot have that be the litmus test for most heroes in most movies. Because I think the audience just won’t accept that in a rom-com or some other sort of contemporary movie that a character would really go through such a huge transformation where everything actually has to be destroyed in their lives, or they have to be completely divorced from where they are because in many ways in our modern films we do want the characters to change and to grow, but we want them to be able to go back to the place where they began, you know, as a person who has learned something but not necessarily with everything they knew before destroyed.

**Craig:** I think that’s perfectly said.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s go to a question from Sarah Folks. Megana, could you read this for us?

**Megana Rao:** Sarah writes in, “I have a question about writing the ‘professor gives a lecture’ scene in movies. I’ve seen a number of films in which a high school or college student sits in a classroom and listens to a lecture, participates in a class discussion. Sometimes it’s math and the student looks bored. Sometimes the professor is reading poetry and the student looks enraptured. I’ve also watched scenes in which the professor is giving a lecture on the subtext of the film. For example this is a film about colonialism so the professor is giving a lecture on colonialism.

“Sometimes this works as in I would argue Kenneth Lonergan’s fantastic scenes in Margaret and sometimes it really doesn’t. But what is it that doesn’t work and what is it that does? How can a seminar/classroom scene build character and mood even if the student is just listening and when is it just lazy writing?”

**John:** That’s actually a really great question. And I think it’s actually a specific case or the general case of whenever you have your hero listening rather than talking, so there could be situations where there’s a coach talking, a pastor, a commanding officer. And those are scenes that are common and I don’t think we’ve really spoken about them very much on the show. They can be good. They can be bad, as Sarah points out. But maybe Craig and I we can figure out what are the characteristics of that kind of scene that work well and what are the kinds of characteristics or like oh you need to really rewrite that or rethink why you’re doing this scene.

**Craig:** Well, it’s easy to write the scene where the student is bored. You just write the professor being boring. And that’s the point. And you also know just by definition that that scene is not going to go on that long. Otherwise the audience will be bored. You just need enough to know that our character, our hero, is bored.

When you’re writing the version where they are enraptured/inspired/moved it requires you to write well. You need to write something that actually inspires and moves the people in the audience. So if you want to put Robin Williams in front of a classroom and have him talk about poetry it’s got to be awesome. And Tom Schulman made it awesome.

And that’s how you get them. Isn’t that awful? You need to write well. It’s such a pain in the ass.

**John:** Well here’s I think what you’re describing though is that the hero, the established hero of the film who is sitting in that audience is a proxy for us as the audience. So we have to be with our hero in experiencing this. And so if it’s boring then we’re bored with him. But more likely we’re enraptured or compelled or feeling confrontational to the speaker. We’re there with him. We’re responding the same way that he’s responding to what is being said. And that’s just going to be writing.

In many cases it’s like responding to a monologue. So, it’s a situation where whoever is talking is going to be largely uninterrupted and is going to be presenting this information. Now if that information feels like an info dump, that it’s exposition, there’s a ticking clock for how much exposition we’re willing to take. But if it’s something that is actually meant to engage and transform our listener, great, we just have to be able to see it. And so I think you should always be thinking about those scenes, not just focused on the person who’s talking but how and when is the camera going to be aimed at our hero taking in this information and processing this information. What is the reaction that we are seeing on the hero’s face as this is happening?

**Craig:** Yeah. And that means that that person who is hearing this needed to hear it. There was something in them that was missing and this lecture is filling it. Or there was something in them that they were wobbling on and this lecture is challenging it. But there has to be context. It can’t just be well this is a great freaking speech. It has to turn on whatever the character needed so that we understand this is the moment that matters. Now the character is changing.

**John:** Another thing that distinguishes some of these scenes from other scenes is like is that person who is speaking, the lecturer, is that a recurring character? Is that a character who is going to show up later on in the story or is this the one shot they have? If it’s the one shot they have then who that person is is not so important down the road. But in many cases that teacher character will recur and so be thinking about what are the beats and how are we going to see them in this way in this context in this classroom scene versus later on in the film. And what is the relationship really between your hero and this lecturer? That matters a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let me play a clip from Frankenweenie because Frankenweenie has a teacher character I created called Mr. Rzykruski who challenges the classroom and I think it’s an example of the kinds of things we’re talking about. So this is early on Frankenweenie, the character will appear twice more, but this is his first scene.

[Clip plays]

**Mr. Rzykruski:** Lightening is simply electricity. The cloud is angry. Yes, we make it storm. All the electrons are saying I am leaving you. I go to the land of opportunity. The ground says yes we need the electrons trained in science just like you. Come! Come! Welcome! So both sides start to build a ladder. This man, he comes out to look at the storm. He does not see the invisible ladders. When the two ladders meet, BOOM! The circuit is complete and all of the electrons rush to the land of opportunity. This man is in the way. Yiii!

[Clip ends]

**John:** So in this scene what was important is that we’re introducing this scary new substitute science teacher and he’s going to be doing an info dump about what electricity is because electricity has been powering these monster creations. But it’s really about the kids’ reaction to him. And they are so excited to have this scary man as their science teacher and how inspiring it is to Victor who is going to be the kid character that we’re following. So it’s setting up that there’s a new character here, but also that they’re responding to him sort of the way that we would respond to him. The kids in the classroom are the same place that we are in terms of like oh my gosh this guy is crazy.

**Craig:** And you needed those kids to be scared. It was important.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So that kind of guides the way that person is going to do what they do. So, I suppose if we had some kind of sum up advice for Sarah it would be boring is boring, that’s easy. And inspiring means there must be a space in the character that needs inspiration, that needs to have some kind of impact. Fear. Excitement. Enrapture. Shame. Whatever it is. They needed to hear this and then you have to write it well on the other side.

**John:** Yeah. So with Frankenweenie that scene had to exist in the movie or else a lot of the other dominoes wouldn’t have fallen correctly. But it needed to be a good scene that actually would last in the movie. So that’s the crucial thing.

All right, speaking of crucial scenes that need to stay in their movies. Let’s take a look at the first three pages–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Of some of our different scripts here. We have three entries here. So for people who are new to the Three Page Challenge if you go to johnaugust.com/threepage you can submit the first three pages of a script. It could be a TV script or a feature script. It goes into a big bucket and every once and a while Megana goes through all those scripts in that big bucket and picks several of them for us to discuss on the show. This is not a competition. This is just an exhibition. We are looking at pages that people submitted.

Sometimes they’re great. Sometimes they have real challenges. We tend to focus on the ones that have things that we can talk about, so either things that they’re doing really, really well on the page, or things that could be done better. So we have three of them to talk through. If you want to read along with us you can follow the link in the show notes to the PDFs you can download and go with us. But Megana if you could start us out with a summary of this first one. Trickster: Night of Kitsune by Hiroshi Mori.

**Megana Rao:** In 1920s Japan Tsuneko, a woman in her 20s, hides with her daughter, Etsuko, 13, in the backroom of a house as a mob of angry villagers accuse Tsuneko of being a fox devil. Her husband, Mongaku, relents to the crowd’s demands and the villagers drag her away. The villagers bury up to her neck in the middle of the town square. She’s then ripped apart by dogs. They tell Mongaku to behead her with a blessed spear, but when he approaches the body has already disappeared. We then cut to a Manga comic page.

**John:** Craig, what’s your response to Trickster: Night of the Kitsune?

**Craig:** I am a big fan of Japanese historical fiction. I just love the Samurai Era. I love the Meiji Restoration. I love all of it. So I was excited. I had many, many, many, many problems and all of them I think ultimately turned on Hiroshi Mori’s issue with action. And I don’t mean action as in the stuff that’s happening. I mean the things that aren’t dialogue. I had some dialogue issues, too. But this is a good example of a script that needs to be re-approached from the point of view of description and visuals. And it begins with the very first line, “SUPER: OVER IMAGES OF A RURAL JAPANESE VILLAGE. JAPAN, TAISHO ERA, 1920’S.”

First of all, if you’re going to put a super and there’s a date it must be a year at the minimum. It can’t be a decade. 1920s makes no sense. It’s 1921, it’s 1923. But be specific so that we understand that you cared enough to place it in a year. But most importantly “over images of a rural Japanese village.” That’s useless.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** It’s useless. You’ve got to paint the picture. You must fill my mind. And I know what – I happen to know what those villages look like, and they’re gorgeous, and they’re fascinating. And Japanese landscape is often beautiful because it’s an earthquake and volcano prone Pacific Rim nation. So is it kind of terraced? Is it on the shore? Is it among the mountains? Tell me. I need to know.

The house, “In the storage area of a wood farm house,” wood farm houses in 1920s Japan do not look like wood farm houses in 1970 the US. We need to know what. “TSUNEKO, late 20’s, with haunting, piercing eyes,” we don’t know if she’s male or female unless you are Japanese.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** We don’t know if Tsuneko is a female or male name, so give us a sense of gender.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about how you would do this, because I was looking for how is the easy way to do this, because you’re not going to say female. That feels clunky. So I think as quickly as you can in that next sentence find a way to flip stuff around so you can get a she or a her in there so we know a gender on this character who is so important.

**Craig:** Absolutely. So Tsuneko, late 20s, with haunting, piercing eyes. She crouches down next to…right.

**John:** That would do it.

**Craig:** That would do it. Tsuneko throughout is going to confuse me, emotionally. I don’t know why she isn’t more scared. She seems super calm. Then she’s screaming. Then she’s grumpy. And we go outside to a mob of ten villagers. Just so you know ten villagers isn’t a lot. Ten people on screen looks like three people. It’s kind of weird how that works.

And I want to know more about the mob. Because if you don’t tell me more about the mob then I’m just going to assume it’s like cliché mob.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about villagers and mobs, because there’s happy villagers and there’s angry mob, but they’re so cliché. You do need to just be specific. So one guy is identified as being a shopkeeper or something. Great. But I just need a better sense of what this is because I don’t really quite have a sense of the period either. Because you can say 1920s but I’m not quite sure what that looks like in Japan. How rural is this? Are these farmers? Is this a city? I don’t really know where I am.

**Craig:** Correct. The villagers are going to sort of tell you too much now. Villager 1, and Villager 1 and Villager 2, we talked about before not our favorite thing to see in a script. Villager 1 delivers one of the more expository speeches a villager can deliver. He says, “She is a fox-devil. She is a shape shifter. You had no money until you found her in the forest. You brought her here, made her your wife, and used her fox-devil tricks to make you rich.” Unless this villagers job is literally the village summarizer this is not how people talk, particularly in a high pressure violent riotous scene.

**John:** And Craig I kept wanting this to be night and it’s day throughout.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It feels strange to me that it’s daytime. It’s OK that it’s day. It can totally work in daytime. But it feels like a night scene to me and I feel like maybe I just have the expectations of torches or something. It feels strange. What was the inciting incident that got us to this moment right where we are? And I think all these problems sort of come back to a point of view problem. It’s the point of view, who are we supposed to follow? The husband who is the one who is ultimately going to go out there with the spear to decapitate his wife? Is it the little daughter? Is it–?

**Craig:** Tsuneko?

**John:** Who are we actually supposed to be following here? Because if we knew that then this whole thing could probably be shorter, tighter, and better.

**Craig:** I agree. And one reason to set it in the day counter to the typical mob at the front door of a home, and it’s very hard to do that scene in a way that hasn’t been done four billion times before, is perhaps to have Tsuneko look through a slat of wood or something and see them outside. Right now everyone is so disconnected. And Mongaku – what Mongaku says here, it’s really important to think always, just a simple question, what would someone say?

So villager one outlines in quite startling detail why the mob is here. And villager two confirms that. Adds on she made us poor. She tricked us out of our money. Get her. And Mongaku says, “Please. This is a misunderstanding.” Does that seem like something that would work?

**John:** No. Not in this moment. Not when there’s actually a mob there. You know, early on as things just begin to escalate a little bit, sure, but not when the actual mob shows up there to take your wife and kill her.

**Craig:** Yes. You would beg. You would tell them you’re sorry. You would tell them it wasn’t her. You would accuse somebody else. What you wouldn’t do is talk to them like they were grouching at you because they think you took their latte order at Starbucks when it was really theirs. “Move or we’ll burn your house down.” Um, they want to kill his wife. And what they’re saying is don’t make us burn your house. But it’s like well the house is not the big issue right now. I could build another one of those. I think it’s move or we’ll kill you. Right? Or we’ll burn you and your daughter alive, right? Or we’ll kill your daughter. It can’t just be the house.

So what’s happening, Hiroshi, is there’s just a lot of lapses in what I would call logical human psychology. You have to just really ask yourself every step of the way what would work. What would make sense? What would actually be said here?

**John:** Yeah. I want to pitch, going through this sequence and taking out all the dialogue until we get to, “This forest demon isn’t human. She can’t replace your mom. Forget you ever saw her.” If we took out all the actual real dialogue there other than maybe some pleading just to get to that point. Because it looks like they’re just trying to capture this woman and then you find out they actually think she’s a demon. That’s really exciting.

And so if we saw this action and the first time we get that they don’t think she’s even human is there that’s kind of interesting to me.

**Craig:** I agree. In fact here’s my – I like this, here’s our pitch. Here’s my pitch. My pitch is this thing opens with a woman buried up to her neck and she is swollen and she is dying and she’s looking at this little girl. And this guy sits down next to her and he says, “I know this is upsetting but I want to explain why we did this. She’s a forest demon. She’s not human. You need to forget you ever saw her. This is all good for the village. Here’s what she did.” He just calmly explains the whole thing and then says, “And above all she definitely was not your mother.” And you go, oh, that was her mom.

There’s got to be something about relationship that matters to the girl. It all has to be contextualized in terms of relationship or else it’s just stuff happening and it’s not particularly surprising or interesting.

**John:** Yeah. And that same dialogue delivered by a woman could be more compelling than by a man.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** There’s choices that could sort of make this feel more specific. And it all depends on sort of like what is it really tying into because at the bottom of page three we’re jumping forward and seeing there’s a Manga connection. So this may be a story within a story. Even so it needs to be–

**Craig:** It’s got to be a good story.

**John:** It needs to be super compelling. It’s got to be a good story because this is how you’re starting your movie.

**Craig:** 100%. It has to be awesome. Especially if the idea is that this is a story that somebody is actually drawing in a manga. Or it just happens that we jump ahead in time and that girl has been reincarnated as a young woman who draws manga. It doesn’t matter. Either way the opening here has to be incredibly compelling. That’s just how it goes.

**John:** Two little craft notes here. On page 2, “EXT. Village, Tsuneko’s dragged into a large two-story building.” So it’s apostrophe-S Tsuneko’s. I would say it’s a bad choice to do the apostrophe-S on things that aren’t a possession, especially in this case. Because you’re not saving anything and it’s just confusing. I can’t tell is it a thing that’s being dragged. It’s just confusing. Tsuneko is dragged. Or better yet, someone drags Tsuneko. Just show the active thing.

The next paragraph, “Tsuneko’s head bloodied and bruised sticks out of the ground.” Tsuneko’s bloodied and bruised head sticks out of the ground. Moving the head after the adjectives just makes the whole thing clearer.

**Craig:** Or making it a positive phrase and putting commas around bloodied and bruised.

**John:** Bloodied and bruised, yes.

**Craig:** But Tsuneko’s head, bloodied and bruised, shouldn’t run together. Also she opens her eyes and then she opens them again. There’s a continuity error even within the writing which is something you really want to avoid.

**John:** Yeah. And when you hear like “Tsuneko opens her swollen red eyes. Makes eye contact with Etsuko.” But what is the purpose? What is she trying to communicate?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** This is a case where tell us why she’s doing it. Tell us what we’re supposed to feel because right now I don’t know. And that’s not helpful.

**Craig:** It’s not. And it also veers us away from this next bit which is pretty disgusting but I suppose where dogs eat her face. But if we understood that Etsuko was watching this happen then I would understand why I’m watching it. But if you take away the point of view of her daughter and just show her getting her face eaten which is a weird transition by the way from I’m looking at you to now my face is being eaten, then it just seems like you just want to show me her face being eaten.

Also, if someone’s face gets eaten by dogs they die.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t understand how she’s alive after that. Maybe because she’s a fox-demon.

**Craig:** But then if she’s a fox-demon then everybody should freaking the F out. Like apparently the fox-demon you can eat her face and she still lives. So, it just – yeah, there were multiple issues here and I think the most important thing to take away from this, Hiroshi, is fill the visual picture in. Ground all of the moments in relationships. Think about perspective always. And make sure that everyone says and does things that comport logically with normal human psychology in extraordinary, abnormal moments.

**John:** Yup. Agreed.

**Craig:** All right. What’s next?

**John:** All right. Let’s move on to Martha. If you could give us a summary, Miss Megana.

**Megana:** Great. So we meet plump 45-year-old Martha alone on Ladies’ Night at a Midtown Manhattan strip club. Martha is an enthusiastic and generous regular. She slips $100 bills into G-strings and everyone seems to know her by name. Martha asks Bobby who is “working tonight” and Bobby points him in the direction of the new go-go dancer, Derek. Derek’s friend tells him that Martha is a good time but she’s strong, so he should definitely have a safe word. Martha leads Derek out to her driver and car making several off-color jokes about how this might be the last time Derek sees his friends. In the back of the car Martha pours Derek scotch and condoms fall from the ceiling.

**John:** Great. So this is Martha by Caroline O’Riordan.

**Craig:** John, what did you think?

**John:** I liked that this was a big character. A big introduction on a big character. Martha is sort of brash and brassy and unapologetic and sort of seems very comfortable in her skin in a way that was interesting and compelling. I felt like the men in this story were not nearly as compelling and they didn’t need to be such bright spotlights. But I didn’t know really who Bobby was at all and this last stripper who got in the car. I wanted to have a sense of who he was just so I could sense what is the drama/comedy that’s going to be possible to happen next.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wonder just from the name Martha, I wonder if this is Caroline’s tricky way of saying Arthur. Because it reminds me so much of Arthur. A boozy bachelor who has a butler. And who goes around and lives the life of an utter reprobate. And then is going to meet somebody that kind of sets them straight. And so here we’re doing the distaff version of that. And I thought honestly what was working really well was I understood where I was. I could see the room. Geography made sense. Caroline was making sure that when somebody talked to somebody that they go there first.

The only thing I really would suggest she kind of look at is there’s a broadness in the rest of the world. I like how broad Martha is, but the rest of the world feels broad. So the guys, the issue with the male strippers is that they kind of feel like the waiters in Hello Dolly. Do you know what I mean?

**John:** I do. Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re like, ah, Martha. They don’t seem–

**John:** They’re not in reality. And they’re in sort of her heightened reality and they’re not real to us.

**Craig:** Particularly because they all behave equally the same. Like they all do the same thing in unison. I also think that her largesse should be larger. A wad of $100 – you know, when she got $100 bills from her bra. Generally it’s hard to see, you’ve got to really hit that number. When she throws money you’ve got to realize those are hundreds. That’s a big deal. She’s also been there for a while so it seems like she suddenly pulled that out and started throwing them around.

**John:** A line like, “Don’t worry, I’ve got a second one.” Basically she’s into her second bra roll.

**Craig:** Right. She finishes this wad of $20s and she’s like, “Sorry guys, that’s it. No more $20s.” And they’re like, “Aw,” and she goes, “And so I guess I’ll use these hundreds.”

**John:** Hundreds. Yeah.

**Craig:** Something to just really sell that this is like kind of a life-changing lady to be around when you’re a stripper because there’s a lot of money coming around. But keeping the rest of the world, like Bobby I think needs to be more grounded. The strippers need to be more grounded. Condoms should not fall from the ceiling.

**John:** I don’t understand where they came from the ceiling. I don’t get that.

**Craig:** Also how many condoms do you need?

**John:** You don’t need a lot.

**Craig:** Maybe like maximum three? You know, three seems a lot. Just, whoosh, condoms drop from the ceiling just seems a little broad. So, keep her broad, and keep the rest of the world super unbroad. Because what made Arthur wonderful, and I’m just again assuming that Caroline is kind of going in that direction, I could be totally wrong, is that he was pathetic. That ultimately he was sad. And you knew that because we were putting this life of the party guy in the middle of very regular New York. And that’s why it worked.

**John:** So a couple little small things on the page, just pickups, because I really didn’t mark this up very much because I thought it largely worked. First line, “It’s Sunday night at the “ultimate ladies night” in Midtown Manhattan. It’s not Friday, and this isn’t Vegas.”

**Craig:** I circled that myself.

**John:** I just thought I don’t know what that means. It’s not Friday, it’s not Vegas.

**Craig:** Also, you just told us it was Sunday in Manhattan. So why do we need the rest of this?

**John:** And the next line is great without it. So just drop that out. Third line, “Perched on a stool and cheering on the DANCERS like a blackout proud parent is MARTHA (45, white, big-eyed, plump).” I don’t get the blackout proud parent.

**Craig:** I don’t either.

**John:** So take out blackout. Proud parent, great. Because I get what you’re going for here is that she’s just really into it. She’s like a super fan here. 45, white, big-eyed, plump. Great. I got a visual for that. I would love to know a little bit more, I’m going to talk like Craig here, hair, makeup, and wardrobe. We can get a little bit more specific here. What is her purse?

**Craig:** Definitely.

**John:** How is she styled? If you want to go back and listen to my conversation with Lorene and Mitch about Hustlers, really sort of what these characters are wearing in these clubs is so important to tell us about who they are and why they’re there. I feel like you have the space here on page one to give us more about Martha because this is her movie.

**Craig:** That’s great advice. I also think Martha doesn’t really get a reveal. And with somebody like her you want one. She deserves one. To go back to Hello, Dolly, one of the great reveals in Broadway history when Dolly, even though we’ve seen her before, we haven’t seen her in her full glory. When she comes down the staircase at the restaurant. You want Martha’s reveal to be wow. To really be something. So I completely agree with those bumps there.

Here’s a moment where I think the first red flag on the kind of too broad rest of the world was when she tosses crumpled bills over her shoulder and stumbles away. “The boys lunge like bridesmaids vying for the bouquet.” Nah.

**John:** They can still have some pride, yeah.

**Craig:** And also because what you want is to see that behind her there is no party. The party is around her and what she sees through her eyes. And behind her is actually – they made an agreement to just divide it up. It’s cleaning for them. It’s sad.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve seen both Magic Mike movies and, yes, those guys are working hard for the money. But they’re not–

**Craig:** It’s work.

**John:** But it’s work. And they’re not just going to scrape or pounce on things.

**Craig:** Correct. Exactly. Bobby – I’d love to get a little bit more of a sense of his feeling about Martha. I don’t know what he thinks of her. “Martha,” she goes, “Bobby, great show. Your boys got me dripping as always,” which is pretty funny. “Martha, the reason I’m open on Sundays.” Well that just feels like a couplet designed to tell me that her name is Martha and his name is Bobby. You know? And Bobby has got to have – there’s no reason he should be matching his tone. He’s got to be like, “Mm, Martha.” You know, wow, I can’t throw you out. I wish I could, but I can’t.” It’s like you’re a huge pain in the ass and you’re just extra.

So we just need to see how the rest of the world is reacting to her. Even if he matches her energy, and then when she looks away he and the bartender look at each other like “oh my god, Martha.”

**John:** Yeah. The other woman in his club, like how are they responding to this high roller who is throwing all this stuff? And what is it like to be in her little bottle service area? There’s all sorts of fascinating things you could do here and you don’t have to do all of them, but I feel like it comes back to just making sure that the rest of the world feels realistic so that her bigness can really stand out.

**Craig:** Yeah. Last little thing I wanted to point out to you Caroline is that there’s no reason for Derek, the selected dancer, to not already know about Martha. Even if he’s new, he’s been watching her all night. So at some point earlier one of the guys would have said something. So, what could work is when they get into the car she’s like, “What did your friends tell you? What did the other guys tell you?” And he could be like, “Um, they said that you were a good time but that you’re stronger than you look and I should get a safe word.” Do you know what I mean? And then she sort of laughs and she’s like it’s so true. So that you don’t have to have this kind of feeling that Derek was just apparently checked out all night while this was going on.

**John:** Yeah. On page three he’s described as “half-naked, Derek shivering from the November air.” Be more specific about half-naked. Because is he still just in his G-string? Does he have his phone with him? Some of that information is kind of great because how vulnerable is he is a great thing to see.

**Craig:** Yeah, and again when Derek drinks the scotch, and you should point out by the way that he drinks, you don’t actually say that, he says, “Whoa, this stuff is intense.” That also feels like he’s from Iowa in 1920. He’s a male stripper. He’s drank before. Even if he doesn’t drink much or whatever, it just seems like he’s, again, he’s a waiter from Hello, Dolly. And you want him to be a guy who strips for a living in Manhattan. You know?

**John:** This is not Schmigadoon.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s not Schmigadoon. Bingo.

**John:** All right. Our final entry. The Many Lives of Newton Thomas by Sean Frost. Megana, can you give us the summary?

**Megana:** A mother and father carry a baby boy in a wicker basket out of a station wagon. They leave him in the basket at the entrance of a children’s home at night. They share a tearful goodbye with the father leaving several small trinkets for the boy before the parents drive away in the car. A voice over tells us that he’s imagined this night hundreds of different ways with the parents crying, held at gunpoint, or stopped before they can leave the baby.

We see the different iterations of the scene until the voice over tells us that he suspects that he’s afraid the truth is that his parents were sad but not distraught and decided to leave the baby of their own volition.

**John:** All right. Craig, what was your take on The Many Lives of Newton Thomas?

**Craig:** I really enjoyed this. I liked this, Sean. I thought that there was a really interesting concept here. There were a couple of little bumps in the road that I want to talk about that are somewhat technical. And I think the idea gets across faster and more effective than you might realize, because I think it was probably a bit too much of it.

I’ll start with the real simple things. “A tired looking MUTLI-STOREY BUILDING.” So we’ve got a type on the fourth word which makes us crazy. You also spell story “storey” which is in the British way.

**John:** So maybe he’s British.

**Craig:** Except that he says a parking lot and the British say a car park. So, you either have to be British or you have to be American. You can’t be both. What was interesting was I was confused at first and then when I got to Newton’s line, “I’ve imagined this night a hundred different ways,” I went ah-ha. And that’s fine, except for one bit of confusion and that is she’s holding a baby, wrapped in blankets, and she’s going to put that baby in a basket.

We understand that that baby is an infant. That’s what that is. But the baby says, “Vroom, vroom.” Babies don’t do that. They don’t talk and when they do talk it’s a lot of mama, baba, bebe, but it’s not vroom, vroom about a car. That’s more like a 1.5 or two-year-old, which is definitely not the sort of like I’m going to put you in a little blanket and put you in a little basket. You say baby boy. So I would change that bit.

But I thought it was interesting that the first part seemed kind of off and unrealistic. And then you found out why.

**John:** I took the vroom, vroom as being magical realism. It was impossible for the baby to say that, but it was sort of an imagined.

**Craig:** I would acknowledge that. That’s perfectly fine. But then I would acknowledge that somewhat improbably the baby says. But I thought there was a really interesting kind of iteration of things that happened. The one I would strongly suggest to get rid of is you say sometimes they cry, and so they’re sobbing as they put the baby down. Sometimes they don’t. And there’s a kind of the dad is stone faced and the mom is sad, but noticeably not crying. But the version that you propose is the one that’s probably real is the version where you say, “I do this cause I’m afraid what really happened was more like this.” And then you see that they are not crying and they are just sort of neutral.

And so I wouldn’t step on that. I would keep them happy or sad or scared or Iron Man comes in. And I would strongly recommend that in the bit where at the end, the reveal, Newton says – here’s what Newton says in voice over, “I do this cause I’m afraid what really happened was more like this. No tears. No guy running down the street – and definitely no Iron Man trying to stop a guy from shooting my Dad. Which is why I like to imagine it differently.” And I think maybe all you need is “I do this because I’m afraid what really happened was more like this.”

And then you just see them put the baby down, they don’t really care, and they drive away. And then you go back to the little baby. So the rest of it we’re seeing it. We get it.

**John:** Yeah. So as I was reading it the parents are so vaguely described, and it sort of makes sense that they be vaguely described, sort of generic versions, because he doesn’t necessarily know who they are.

**Craig:** He doesn’t know them.

**John:** But I went back and forth in terms of like should we see their faces or not see their faces. There’s a version of this where we don’t actually ever fully see their faces. But then we can’t really tell if they’re crying or not. So I guess you do have to cast people that you are seeing this. But maybe you just call out early in the scene description a somewhat generic like white man, white woman just so we get a sense of like they’re deliberately not specific. That he’s just sort of remembering them or imagining them as these people.

A bigger issue is I had is Craig how old is Newton our narrator?

**Craig:** Well, that’s a great question. I have no clue.

**John:** I have no clue. And it really does matter because if it’s being told by a ten-year-old versus a 30-year-old it’s a very different feel. And so I think we need to find a place on page one, either after Newton’s first line, or after his second line just to give us a sense of the age of the narrator because it really does change the read, sort of how we’re reading this. If it’s a kid narrating versus an adult narrating it.

**Craig:** That’s a fantastic point. I think in my mind I must have defaulted to young adult. But you’re absolutely right. We do need to know what we’re hearing there. And I don’t know if this is a movie or meant to be a show. It feels like a movie. And The Many Lives of Newton Thomas perhaps implies that here’s somebody who is imagining Walter Mitty style the different paths his life might have taken had it gone different ways. But it’s a really nice start.

**John:** Agreed. It’s a nice start.

**Craig:** It’s a nice start. Oh, one last thing, Sean. New Beginnings Children’s Home. Mm, we can see what you’re doing there. It’s too much. You don’t need that. You can back off the gas pedal on that one I think.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s the other thing. Beyond the name of it, every time we see a slug line with that, because it’s a really slug line and we’re going to be coming back to this a lot, even though we’re not going to really read it every time a shorter slug line I think will just get us through the page a little bit faster.

I would also cut on page two the masked figure says, “Do it or I’ll shoot.” The Mom reluctantly lays the Baby in the basket. The Masked Figure lowers their gun. The Dad sighs in relief. What? Just “do it or I’ll shoot.” Just get out of there on that line. You don’t need the rest of it.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** So both this script and our first script had draft dates on those. Don’t do those. Not necessary.

**Craig:** Don’t need them.

**John:** Have one date on your script. That’s great. But don’t tell us this is the second draft. We don’t care. It should be your best draft. This is the draft we’re reading. That’s all that matters is the draft we’re reading. So on the title page you don’t need to put what draft this is. Just put a date.

**Craig:** I agree. We don’t need to see your paperwork.

**John:** Nope. Not required.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So I want to thank our three entrants this week. Thank you for sending this out. And everybody else who sent in all of these Three Page Challenges, Megana went through a zillion of them. So thank you Megana for reading through all of these.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**John:** And if you have your own three pages you want to submit go to johnaugust.com/threepage. And we might talk about your pages on a future episode.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, we’re running long but I want to get to one question. A question from Chris. If Megana you could ask that.

**Megana:** Chris asks, “In light of so many Americans believing that the COVID-19 vaccine injects sinister tracking technologies into the body or that the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting victims are all paid crisis actors I find myself wondering is it morally wrong to be writing conspiracy theory stories in this day and age? Have writers been inadvertently conditioning the public to think that massively coordinated government misdeeds are commonplace and that it’s good to always mistrust the government and the media because they’re all in on it? Could QAnon have happened without 11 seasons of the X-Files conditioning its viewers to be paranoid? And are we as writers making things worse every time we work a dark conspiracy into one of our stories?”

**John:** Oh, Chris asking a big question.

**Craig:** That’s an amazing question.

**John:** I think it’s a great question. I think we have some complicity in sort of narrativizing conspiracies and building a universe in which there’s always a twist and there’s always a secret bad guy organization behind stuff. So, yes, and here’s I guess the degree to which there’s any evidence to back this up is when you talk to prosecutors or defense attorneys for that matter when juries are in the courtroom and they’re seeing evidence they believe that CSI is real. They believe that all the stuff that they can do on CSI is the standards of how stuff should be working. And so they’re expecting evidence that is actually just impossible. And I think conspiracies are sort of a related thing to that in that people see things on TV and they start to believe oh maybe that’s how the world really works.

So I think I would be nervous writing a conspiracy thriller right now. But Craig I’m curious what you think.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I think we had talked in an earlier episode about the phenomenon of copaganda.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And presenting cops as kind of, I don’t know, just wildly differently than many of them are in the street and not paying any attention to the phenomenon of police brutality and cops as flawed or sometimes completely embedded with ultra-right wing philosophies.

The reason I love this question so much Chris is because I think it is at this point something that is – I’m not going to go all the way and say morally wrong. I’m going to say it ought to give strong, clear pause if you are thinking about writing a conspiracy theory story. Because we have absolutely fed into this. The insistence that the government is portrayed with The Shop. That’s my favorite phrase. The Shop. It’s even behind the CIA. It’s some secret thing behind the CIA and the NSA that basically can do whatever they want. They hear everything. They see everything. They’re completely all-knowing, all-seeing. They can do all this stuff.

Look at The Bourne Identity. The entire concept of The Bourne Identity is insane. It’s insane. And unaccomplishable. And we take that as commonplace. And the insistence that everything that happens in the world has occurred because humans wanted it to happen and that anybody that thinks otherwise is naïve and foolish that’s a problem. It has absolutely fed into this stuff.

I would at this point be so wary of writing a narrative that attempted to undermine what I think is the typical explanation and reason for things going wrong and that is stuff happening, stupidity as opposed to maliciousness. Confusion. Cowardice. Clumsiness. I mean, that’s why Chernobyl fascinated me. It was so human. There was no conspiracy. It was just human.

**John:** And to the degree that there was a conspiracy it was to try to cover up human mistakes.

**Craig:** It was just this mundane don’t blame me. You know? Which seems so true to all of this stuff. You know, I used to laugh at these people who insisted that George Bush did 9/11. And I’m like the same George Bush that couldn’t figure out how to plant one nuclear missile in the desert in Iraq? That guy? Really? No.

And the more we learn about government functions the more we realize that, you know, it’s not always well run. Sometimes it’s no better run than a bad job you had when you were 28. I’m really glad Chris asked this question. If people in Hollywood are writing these kinds of things right now I think they need to stop. And they need to really look at themselves and what they are encouraging.

There are conspiracies. We do know that Russia sends god knows how many bots to try to influence people. That’s a real story. Then investigate it like a real story. Do that. But don’t do the hyper-fictionalized government that knows all, sees all, and controls all.

**John:** Related I think we tend to create stories that are sort of one person against the system. And so the system is corrupt and only one person can bring it down.

**Craig:** Only I can fix this.

**John:** Yes. And I think that only I can fix this problem spills into real life because they start to believe like, oh, they don’t want you to believe this thing, they don’t want you to see this thing. You have to do your own research and really learn for yourself and basically don’t trust anybody. And I think what we’ve learned in this pandemic is that you do need to actually cooperate and work together to get stuff to happen and to get stuff resolved. And so beyond just the out-and-out conspiracy thriller thinking I think we need to just be aware of the degree to which we are feeding into this myth of one person alone makes a difference and that you cannot trust anybody else because the human condition is about trusting other people. That’s what makes us human.

**Craig:** And also just from a creative point of view robs you of relationships, partnerships, people coming together. We love that sort of thing for good reason. Because it mirrors our lives. Problems are not solved by one person. They are solved by people working together.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I’d love to see this change. And I’ve got to believe it is. Like I can’t imagine somebody sitting in a studio right now going, “Ooh, you know what we should do is a conspiracy theory. What really happened to those two planes that crashed, the Boeings?” No, no, it was because Boeing screwed up and they put the thing on the thing.

Yeah, you know, so hopefully.

**John:** I agree with you. I do think there is an awareness of this and I think we should just be vigilant about it and maybe just ask ourselves and ask the folks who are making our entertainment to really think twice before going full conspiracy.

**Craig:** Please think twice.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing comes from listener Tara and she sent through a link to a great collection of TV scripts and not just pilots. And so I will put a link in the show notes to this site. But basically it’s gathering up all of the TV scripts that this person could find online. And it’s really easy to find movie scripts because they’re out for award season. TV scripts, can be pretty easy to find pilots but not easy to find like here’s a random episode from the third season.

So, so helpful if you want to be writing television to just read the scripts and really understand how these scripts work on the page, how shows are formatted. You’ll find that showrunners tend to have a very similar format from year to year, season to season. If you want to copy a style copy the style of the shows that are actually produced. And I think you could spend many hours of your life reading these scripts and be a better education than probably any screenwriting book you could possibly pick up.

**Craig:** That’s a terrific resource. Thank you, Tara. My One Cool Thing is another game. I’ve just been hunting around. Sometimes I go through these dry spells where there’s just nothing good on the app store and then I picked up a couple. You know, the algorithm occasionally coughs up something at me and I go, ooh that.

This game has been around for a little bit. It’s called Circulous. It’s by Chain Reaction Games. It’s for iOS. It might be for Android. I don’t know. I don’t care about Android. And it’s sort of a puzzle game. You play a woman who has just been hired by a company called Circulous. It’s kind of like a Google/Apple corporation. And there is some sort of hacker enemy that’s trying to do stuff and you have to solve a whole bunch of problems.

So it’s kind of escape roomy in that regard. The puzzles are quite fair. They’re difficult but fair. What I love about it is the interface. It does this thing that a lot of games have tried to do and failed. You have your own laptop in the game. And you can tap on a thing that gets you to your laptop and you get notifications and you get emails and there’s like a little mini-browser inside to look up websites. And normally those are just awful in games, it’s almost like they had never seen. And in Circulous they’re quite good. They’ve actually done a really good job of creating that space that we’re really familiar with and making it feel quite functional and good.

So, I’m almost through with it. I think I’m creeping up towards the end but it’s really well done. I play a little bit each night before I pass out. So I highly recommend Circulous. Circulous from Chain Reaction Games.

**John:** Very nice. I will step in. It’s available at least on the Mac and iOS. So it may be available on other platforms as well.

And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Andrew Hart and it is the first appearance by Megana in an outro.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a good one. 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 I am @johnaugust. Craig also sometimes answers questions, but he’s not officially on Twitter anymore.

**Craig:** True.

**John:** We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the Three Page Challenges we talked through so you can download PDFs and read along with us. You’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter also at johnaugust.com. Inneresting has bunch of links to things about writing. So that comes out every Friday.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one you’re about to hear with me and Sara Schaefer talking about three tips to getting your TV show on the air and the heartbreak that will follow thereafter.

Craig, it is a pleasure chatting with you.

**Craig:** Thanks. Good to be back, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Sara Schaeffer is a writer-producer-comedian and standup comic who has worked on a gazillion comedy variety shows, a lot of them on Comedy Central. Nikki and Sara Live. I’m literally going through your IMDb and you have so many credits Sara.

**Sara Schaefer:** It’s actually ridiculous.

**John:** So you know we’ve had people on the show before who have worked on a late night show, on a late night show for years and years and years, but you’ve popped around so many different things and sort of special events where it sounds like you’re getting together to put on one special event. Do you enjoy that?

**Sara:** Yes and no. So, I’ve hopped around so much in part because I’ve always been trying to get my own projects going, which is the big prize. I’ve done it once with Nikki and Sara Live on MTV. And that was an incredible experience and I’m always trying to sell another project that’s my own idea all the way to fruition. And so in order to do that because it is such a long haul to do that I’ve always taken jobs that are a little more short term. Well, I mean, a lot of times it’s not my choice. I will get hired on a show and it just doesn’t get renewed. Like talk shows. New talk shows are really hard to get going now if you’re not one of the institutional shows, or if you didn’t come from an institution. So I’ll just point to John Oliver and Sam Bee. They have been probably one of the only couple long-running shows. Even Amber Ruffin were talent that were incubated on another institution, like The Daily Show, or Seth Meyers. So that’s part of it.

But also I will hop around because I’m also a touring standup comedian. I’ve just always got my hand in so many different things. And so I like can’t be tied down, man.

**John:** No. We had Jen Statsky on the show recently and she was talking about her time.

**Sara:** Oh yeah.

**John:** I think she was on Fallon as well.

**Sara:** Yeah. She started right before I left the show. And I had a little goodbye drinks after my last day and she was there. And she was like, “I feel like we were going to become friends.” And I was like I know. I mean, and we’re still friendly with each other but like we didn’t have that long term working together friendship thing take place. But yeah.

**John:** One new show that you’re working on right now that will not get canceled because it’s entirely your show is the Schaefer Shakedown, the podcast.

**Sara:** That’s right. Nobody can cancel it. Because I’m the only person that works on it. There’s no money on the line. And there’s literally nothing involved other than my own desire to do it, so that’s good.

**John:** So Episode 7 of your show you shared your secrets for getting a TV series to air in three easy steps. And I thought we might listen to a little clip.

**Sara:** Sure.

[Clip plays]

**Sara:** Hi everyone. For today’s tutorial I’ll be showing you how to sell a TV show in just three simple steps. Step one, come up with an original idea or recycle an old idea that’s been done one million times, whatever your personal preference. Step 1A, tell your agent about the idea. Now if you’re curious how to get an agent I recommend checking out my other YouTube video entitled How To Get A Hollywood Agent in 600 Easy Steps.

So now that you’ve got your agent it’s time to tell them about your idea. Step 1B. Get feedback from your agent who will change the idea until it is good enough to pitch. To a network? No, not yet. You must first complete Step 1C. Finding a production. Now you will pitch your idea to various production companies. If one of them likes your idea you will work with them. Step 1D. Prepare the pitch with the production company. They will help you change the idea until it’s good enough for pitching. This can take several months to several years because they’ll also be insistent on finding a big name director or celebrity to attach. Sometimes big name directors and actors go on long vacations or are shooting a movie in New Zealand, so this can take time. While you’re waiting, I recommend taking up a hobby, like drinking.

[Clip ends]

**Sara:** That’s only the beginning.

**John:** Yes. So, I guess I’ll start with a question. Sara, how dare you? Because Craig and I have been doing this for 506 episodes and you just came out and just said it. You just laid the whole thing out. And what’s weird is that there are jokes in there. There’s funny writing within it but it’s also actually just honest about what the whole process is. And it’s just, ugh, I felt sick but seen as I listened to it.

**Sara:** You know, I always write, I fully write my podcast out. And then will riff as I go with it. But I was writing this episode and at first, I mean, I didn’t have this idea in my head. I always usually do on each episode I’ll do at least one little audio sketch like that one. And a lot of times I have the idea and then I’ll build the episode around it. But this time I was just writing my feelings about just being so frustrated with my career at this point. And so I decided to explain like you got to do this and this, because I was talking about how it’s hard for everyone in this business to make it, but if you have like just a little leg in, like if you’ve got fame, power, if you know somebody, if your dad is somebody important that it just greases the wheels a little bit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Sara:** And I was like if I could just get past the first step. And so I started to write that out. And then I was like oh this could be a funny YouTube tutorial. And I had to stop and rewrite that whole part and really think it through. So it really came from me just wanting to explain to people what you go through and it just worked very well in that format with the sort of monotone cheerfulness.

**John:** Step 1H part of it all. What I think is helpful is it’s a useful thing for young writers or people who are trying to make it in this business to send back to their parents to explain this is what I’m going through. Because there are so many steps where it’s like, yay, and I had a really good meeting, and they’re going to make an offer. Or you got a yes but there’s not an official offer. And you’re like what does that actually mean. And you explain it’s like, no, you’re waiting for the official offer even though you have the yes. It could be months and months and months before there’s anything like a deal. And that’s just to go to the next place which is to pitch to the next people.

**Sara:** Yeah. I think that is also why sometimes I feel defensive about that I’ve quit on my ideas sometimes. I go I didn’t quit. I got to a major obstacle that was so heartbreaking that I couldn’t move forward with it on my own anymore. It was too sad. Or I don’t even go out the gate with some ideas I have because I don’t have the energy to go through all those steps again and it’s so frustrating. And I think that I’ve had a lot of people, I had no idea that this video was going to go as far as it did. And I was like, oh, I really hit a nerve with people.

And I got a lot of people saying all those things you said like this is painful, I hate you, why are you trying to murder me. And then I got a lot of like I sent this to my family so they can understand. And everyone is talking about how far in the steps they’ve gone. I’m like I’ve gone all the way to the end once. And I’ve done every step between. And it’s just I think it’s the length of time it takes and how – and I say this at the end, at any moment it can just go away with no explanation. [laughs]

**John:** So in this pandemic, in this age of Zoom, I had a project which we were about to take out and then the pandemic hit, so it became all Zoom pitches. And there were so many times where we’d go out and we’d be pitching to a production entity or to a network or streamer and it would go through and it was like, yay, that was fantastic. And like, oh, they’re going to make a deal. And then, oh no, they changed the entire regime. It’s like twice we went to the same place and it’s like, oh no, the entire management structure has changed, which you referenced in this video. You could actually shoot your entire show and just like it never airs because the new people don’t want it on the air.

**Sara:** Yeah. That’s happened to multiple people I know where they went all the way, and it doesn’t make sense to me still, but even especially to someone who is not in this business. Why would a company spend so much money on something, it’s made, it’s in the can, and then to not put it on TV? It just is wild to me.

And I think you and I know reasons why. There is more money that has to be spent to take it all the way to that final step. And they maybe just want to cut their losses at that point. But it’s so demoralizing and just absurd.

**John:** Yeah. So in some ways it makes me nostalgic for Quibi and just the fact that anybody could get a show on Quibi. It was literally like “Are you alive? Here’s your show on Quibi.” But you actually talk to people who tried to do the Quibi shows and it was incredibly heartbreaking. And then to make one of those shows and like, oh, your network doesn’t exist anymore. Who knows when someone will ever see this thing again?

**Sara:** The tales of heartbreak that I’ve heard from putting this video out, and just from people – it was also, like you said, you feel seen and not alone. I felt seen back because so many people – major stars that I like love and I’m like what problem do you have in your life, Seth Rogan, like why – he retweeted it. And I’m like, oh, this spoke to him. And that just really made me go you know what it’s hard for everybody and it is easier for some people to get the wheels turning, but it’s crazy for everyone. And dreams die all the time. It is just a testament to how – you know, so many people were like oh I’m not even at Step 1C. And I’m like do you understand how hard it is to even get to Step 1A?

You have an agent. That’s why I said at the beginning I was like oh I know if I put this out people are going to go how do I get an agent. And I’m like that’s a whole other thing.

**John:** It is a very, very different thing. A thing I think I would add to a future incarnation, or if you ever make the book version of this is that same giant celebrity who you want to get on your project will make it so much easier to sell. That giant celebrity is a giant celebrity because he’s attached to every other project as well. And so trying to get that person’s sole attention, that’s a thing, too.

And so it’s not just the movie they’re shooting in New Zealand. It’s just will you be his or her first priority ever? And that’s really tough. And so, yeah, even this afternoon I was on a pitch to a production company. And I’m trying to get this production company onboard. And it’s just – you know, at every level you’re still just kind of hustling and you’re looking for that extra element that sort of makes it like, oh, it’s sort of impossible to say no to. And there never is an impossible to say no to.

**Sara:** Yeah. Got to be undeniable! There’s always a way to deny somebody the goods. I’ve learned to take every victory and every yes – to take every yes in this process as a huge victory, knowing that even if it doesn’t go all the way and no one ever sees it, you know, you did something. And it’s hard to do when you’re not getting – in those very first steps you’re not getting paid for a long time, so that’s tough.

And so it’s always a balance between finding a way to make – I always say this to people. You’ve got to have your money maker lane and your dream lane. Sometimes those lanes converge and sometimes they don’t. And, you know, that’s always been my way. It’s tough though because sometimes I have said no to jobs, money on the table, because it was just money and I had a dream that I wanted to work on. And sometimes that doesn’t pay off.

But, you know, I wrote a book. It came out a year ago. And a lot of people were like, oh, this sucks, I’m just going to just stick to books instead. And I’m like what?

**John:** Oh god. No.

**Sara:** It’s just as hard, if not harder.

**John:** Sara, I wrote a trilogy and just the pushing the boulder up the hill for a trilogy is like, oh, you think you’re done. It’s like, no, no, you’ve got two more of those to do. And support. And put it out there in the world. So, it’s tough.

**Sara:** When I went into writing a book I had no idea. And then I was like I wrote eight books in the course of this process. And when the book was done and it came out people were like are you going to make this into a TV show or movie? And I’m like, sure, I’d love to. But do you understand – and that has stalled that process.

But I had one really amazing actress who I loved who I had no idea that it had gotten into her hands. And she read it, loved it, and was like I want to star, produce, direct, I want it all. And I’m like, oh my god, here we go, but knowing this is probably never going to happen. But just the fact that she read it and liked it and I didn’t force it in her hands. Like somebody just gave it to her I think. I don’t know how it happened but I was just like this would be so amazing.

And I had a little celebration just for that moment knowing that it wasn’t probably going to go anywhere. And it hasn’t. [laughs] You know?

**John:** At least this went someplace. So, thank you again for this explanation of the steps of this which I think will live on for many, many years. It will keep getting passed around. So that is a thing we know will exist out there in the world. You’ve explained it once. It never needs to be explained again.

**Sara:** Yeah.

**John:** Sara Schaefer. Thank you so much. I would love to have you back on the show for a full episode.

**Sara:** Anytime.

**John:** Fantastic. Thanks Sara.

**Sara:** All right, thanks John.

**John:** Bye.

**Sara:** Bye.

Links:

* [Courtney Kemp’s Deal at Netflix](https://deadline.com/2021/08/power-creator-courtney-kemp-signs-netflix-deal-lionsgate-1234813246/)
* [Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park Deal](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/south-park-deals-trey-parker-matt-stone-1234995748/)
* [Hello Sunshine Sale](https://deadline.com/2021/08/reese-witherspoon-hello-sunshine-acquired-blackstone-venture-r-kevin-mayer-tom-staggs-1234807439/?fbclid=IwAR2BTj1Qpmgxv7-1rQIDJFObtsTE7noAIKfXqTX3FVaZ1p-s5qUN79BODGQ)
* [Frankenweenie](https://www.disneyplus.com/movies/frankenweenie/msxVowQvL18k)
* [Trickster: Night of the Kitsune by Hiroshi Mori](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F05%2FTrickster-Night-Of-The-Kitsune_3Page.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=1a05c101fbb1b815b66977e9a5a07369a818c6fa2e8e28426a6d08949f1fd148)
* [Martha by Caroline O’Riordan](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F06%2FMartha_Caroline-ORiordan3.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=b0776dca79a91180707f676b8f2900eaa4f962fedaedefde4cf9d6d4aee9578d)
* [The Many Lives of Newton Thomas by Sean Frost](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F05%2FTMLONT-Three-Pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=1e7a0d0abf0e46eb4b9f25ccead6588a5a7850829a1f50e6aa1bf69c717ad53d)
* [Collection of TV Scripts](https://sites.google.com/site/tvwriting/)
* [Circulous Game](https://www.chainreactiongames.org/circulous/)
* [Sara Schaefer’s Twitter Clip](https://twitter.com/saraschaefer1/status/1421622886574395393)
* [Schaefer Shakedown](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-schaefer-shakedown/id1565766154)
* [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/)
* [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 Andrew Hart ([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/512standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 503 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is traveling, so today I’m hosting solo. But I’m hardly alone. Later in the show I’ll be talking with WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer about her amazing series, and writer-director Lance Oppenheim about his acclaimed documentary, Some Kind of Heaven. A question I asked them both is what do you do when you don’t control the characters you’re given. Jac and Lance had very smart ways of thinking about that challenge.

But to kick things off I want to welcome back the writer-producer behind such iconic films as The Wedding Date, How To Be Single, Couples Retreat, and Isn’t it Romantic. She’s also the co-writer of the new film, Cruella. Welcome back returning champion, Dana Fox.

Dana Fox: Woo-hoo. I need my playout music.

John: Yeah. You’ve got to – you walk down, you take your seat, you pick up your mic and you wave to the crowd.

Dana: Ah, big time waving.

John: Dana, I can’t believe I’ve not seen you in person for more than a year. This is not good.

Dana: I miss your face so, so much. Sometimes I just Google you just to see you, because I miss you.

John: During this whole crazy time you decamped to Virginia, right? You’ve been in Virginia for most of this pandemic.

Dana: That is correct. We were in LA for the beginning sort of horrible sudden three children on Zoom school scenario where we were all jammed in like sardines and it was pretty intense. And we decided to come to Virginia because more space, just grass, just outdoor space. And we just told our kids to go outside and never come back. You’re wild animals now. Goodbye. And they became like feral. They stopped showering. There’s zero hair-brushing happening here at this house, including for me.

But we all just needed a little bit more space from each other. We love each other so much, but we needed a little space. Three kids under eight was intense.

John: That’s a lot. So, you were still able to manage your career though. So an interesting thing about this year is that it has sort of shown that people can be in places that are not Hollywood and still get stuff done. You had a whole second season of your show Home Before Dark. That all happened during the pandemic and you did it all from Virginia, correct?

Dana: Yeah. I mean, Home Before Dark season two, which comes out June 11, was literally almost entirely completed from a creepy room in a house in Virginia with just me being sweaty, with a lot of monitors. A lot of Apple products. A lot of whiteboards. So much laundry. So many piles of laundry all around me at all times.

But what I learned was that I’m actually weirdly possibly more efficient this way. I know it’s going to be controversial to say, but the Evercast system which allowed me to sort of watch what was going on on-set I know can be a little bit of a tricky thing for some people, but I tried to make sure that I was calling in more like compliments and cheers than anything else. And the only time I ever really called in notes was just if I had a good idea about something. I was like, oh, that made me think of a different line. Try this, because I didn’t want to use it like a creepy big brother who called in to complain from 100,000 miles away.

But it was incredibly effective because I could watch set. I could write scripts on one monitor while I was keeping one eyeball on set. I could pop into a Zoom to talk to the editors. All of a sudden I’m looking at one episode in one Zoom room and then I’m hopping into another room, watching another cut in a different room with a different editor. And like weirdly I ended up being a ton more productive.

I was also really lucky because I had this incredible woman, Margie Love, who helps me with everything. And she was like – not CJ Craig, but who on the West Wing is the one who orders everybody around and tells them what to do? The chief of staff. She’s like my chief of staff.

John: The Allison Janney character?

Dana: I don’t know who it is. I’ve seen West Wing 75,000 times and I love it so much and god forbid you held a gun to my head and told me to say what everyone’s jobs were. But truly it was like amazing because she was just sort of a chief of staff. She would sort of order me around and be like you’re going in this room next, you’re going in that room next. You’ve got 45 minutes. You’ve got to look at this script. You’ve got to do your changes on this script. So that was sort of what kept the whole train on the track. And it was weirdly I think I got a lot more done which is terrible because it becomes very man behind the curtain-y.

Like I think we all realized a lot of the like getting in your car and driving for two hours to Santa Monica to do color timing is maybe never going to happen again for me. Because I was able to do it from home. They sent me a fancy iPad. I looked at the color timing live. I could say, hey, can you brighten up that window, or hey, I feel like she’s sort of like this, and can you treat that. And, boom, he’s tweaking it and I’m looking at it from my creepy room in Virginia.

John: So Dana what I’m taking from this description is that there’s no reason for Craig to be in Calgary for all these months coming up here. And that he basically just ran away to escape me and the Scriptnotes recording process?

Dana: Literally 100%. That actually is why I was called to do Scriptnotes today. This is so awkward. Craig wanted me to come to tell you that it’s because of you that he’s gone.

John: Yeah. So, with Craig gone, this is normally the part of the show that we would talk through the news. And so maybe you could fill in for Craig on this part. Because I’m sort of struggling here without him.

Dana: I can’t possibly do as well as Craig, but please, try me.

John: So I want to roll out a new segment, it’s really a beta test of a new segment called Did You See in Deadline Where…? So these are all actual Deadline headlines. And so we should make it clear that ten years ago this would have been Did You See in Variety Where, but really Deadline has supplanted that as the thing people talk about when they go into one of those meetings. Like did you see in Deadline where.

So these are all actual Deadline headlines. And I just want to get your feedback on this headline, which may be complete news to you because maybe you aren’t following the trades the way you were before.

Dana: Hit me.

John: Are you ready?

Dana: Yeah, big time.

John: Dana, did you see in Deadline where Timothée Chalamet is set to play Willy Wonka in a new origin tale from Warner Bros?

Dana: Yes, I did. And that was one of the moments where I just Googled your face to think about you because I remember you did that movie. And I love me a Timothée Chalamet. I think he’s actually kind of fantastic for this part. And I was like, all right, I see where you’re coming from. I wonder what they’re going to do with it. What were you thinking? That’s kind of intense. You must have had some emotions.

John: I did. I mean, the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory made like a billion dollars and it was an origin story, so I guess there’s still new territory to explore. But Dana as the writer of Cruella I want to say you’re no stranger to origin stories, but at least Cruella only killed dogs. I mean, here you’ve got Willy Wonka going after Augustus Gloop. You’ve got some Violet Beauregard. You have Veruca Salt. You’ve got the unambitiously named Mike TV. This is like The Joker with chocolate.

Dana: Do you think we’re going to meet those people, or do you think we’re going to be like hanging out with him when he’s in his house before he gets the chocolate factory?

John: I suspect it’s before all of those people exist because they would be too young if it’s Timothée Chalamet. But it’s a good question. It could be the origin story of the Oompa Loompas, which is potentially problematic so you’ve got to find a way through the Oompa Loompa and their sort of indentured servitude to Willy Wonka. Yeah, there’s a lot.

Dana: We were always thinking of ways to sort of tease these future things when we were talking about Cruella and sort of saying well how much do we want to do nods and winks to the sort of canon. So I feel like you can do the math on Timothée Chalamet’s age and I think maybe you could watch Augustus Gloop’s parents make love and know that Augustus Gloop is coming? No pun intended. He’s like coming into the world.

You can always do the math and say well what would be the cool precursor to the thing and the thing. And so I mean I feel like I’m in for that movie. I’m intrigued by it. Who is directing it? Do we know who is directing it?

John: It is I think the guy who did Paddington if I recall correctly, who is great.

Dana: People are like obsessed with Paddington 2. Is Paddington 2 guy the same as Paddington 1 guy?

John: I think it’s the same person. I’ve never seen Paddington 1. I’ve only seen Paddington 2 and it is indeed delightful.

Now, going back to Cruella though, you know, one of the things I found so frustrating about the discourse on Cruella is this question of who is this movie for.

Dana: Oh, god, my favorite.

John: Yeah. And with this movie I guess you can ask that question. Who is the audience? If you want to see a twink navigate a chocolate river you’re probably not going to the multiplex.

Dana: [laughs]

John: I mean, that’s niche content Dana. No judgments. But you’re going to want to VPN for that.

Dana: That’s amazing. I really, really didn’t think about it that way, but now I will never, ever be able to think of it any other way. That’s really special and important.

Yeah, I feel like the question of who is it for is the number one thing I have been asked in the last three years of my career. And I keep just being like, I don’t know, I just kind of like it. I think it’s pretty great.

John: I think it’s pretty great.

Dana: You know, that’s the kind of thing that people ask when they’re scared that they don’t know exactly how much money something is going to make. And I just kind of feel like it’s fun to try to straddle the different worlds and try to say I think young kids want things to reach up to. And I think adults want to feel like kids again. So, don’t ask me that question anymore people. I’m not interested.

John: Speaking of adults feeling like kids, another casting news, did you see in Deadline where Kevin Spacey Will Return To Film In Franco Nero’s The Man Who Drew God. Spacey will play a police officer investigating a man wrongly accused of sexually abusing children. Spacey said he’s been researching the role–

Dana: No.

John: –for decades.

Dana: No. Are you kidding?

John: No, it’s a real movie.

Dana: That’s not what the part is about?

John: That’s what the part is about.

Dana: That’s not the part.

John: That is the part.

Dana: No, John.

John: Yes. He’s a police officer investigating a man wrongly accused of sexually abusing children. That’s the confusing part.

Dana: Oh my god, John.

John: I mean, Spacey, he’s so excited to be in a film that asks the question what if a guy didn’t do what I’m accused of doing.

Dana: I have to take a minute. I actually have to maybe potentially get down on the ground. I tend to sort of go low when I feel dizzy. Are you kidding? I literally thought you were 1,000% joking.

John: No, it’s not a joke. There’s a joke around it, but that’s the actual premise of the movie.

Dana: Oh my god. [Unintelligible]. I saw the headline and I intentionally didn’t click on it because I was like I’m not OK with it. I’m not ready. It’s too soon. Possibly it will always be too soon for me. I can’t do it. Unfortunately I can no longer watch Woody Allen movies. I love a Woody Allen movie. I used to have a secret thing where in the very beginning before I felt like it was like fully confirmed I was like I’ll only watch them on planes where nobody notices I’m watching. Like I’d like get on a plane and I’d immediately look for Annie Hall and then just sort of embarrassingly check both directions and then hit play, and then just watch it on planes where I feel like it was like, look, what happens at 40,000 feet stays at 40,000 feet.

And even that I can’t do anymore.

John: There was a time which I was a vegetarian, but I would eat chicken if it was the in-flight option.

Dana: Totally. Totally.

John: That’s you with Woody Allen.

Dana: And for me Kevin Spacey is chicken, which is that I no longer eat chicken even when it’s a secret, or when nobody is going to know about it. I just can’t do it. Can’t do it.

John: Dana, what are we going to do if this movie is good? That’s my biggest worry is Spacey is actually a good actor. And so this movie could be good and then what do we do?

Dana: I couldn’t agree with you more. But I think it’s like it doesn’t matter if it’s good. I think you just can’t see it. I think people just have to say we’re just not giving – to me it’s sort of like a serial killer writing a book and making money off of it. It’s like no. You don’t get to do that. Not my money. I’m not giving you my money.

And I think he’s a great actor, but you know, I was going to make a horrible joke that I’m not going to make about murderers being like painters. Like so and so is a good painter, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if the movie is good.

John: I know who the so-and-so was, and you know what, it’s right for you not to have made that.

Dana: Exactly. Thank you. Not funny. Never funny.

John: Speaking of restraint, did you see in Deadline where John Cena Apologizes — In Mandarin — To China Over Calling Taiwan A Country?

Dana: [laughs]

John: I get it. He’s got F9 to promote and China is a huge market, but still I have not seen a public figure so fully prostrate themselves to a foreign power since Craig apologized to Liverpool for misattributing You’ll Never Walk Alone.

Dana: Oh my god.

John: That’s a niche joke. That’s for the fans, I’m putting that in there.

Dana: That’s literally for my husband. I’m like you’re welcome, Quinn Emmett. Please enjoy.

I have to say I know I’m supposed to be talking about the headline, but I don’t know anything about it, so I am going to say I didn’t realize you were so amazing at segues. Have you always been this amazing at super natural segues in between stuff?

John: It’s a found skill, a found art. I’m one of those mutants in X-Men who like very late in life it manifests. Oh my gosh, he can do this really unimportant thing. But I became Segue Man only because of Scriptnotes.

Dana: You’re incredible at it. It’s sort of like how Craig discovered he’s an amazing actor. Did you guys both discover that because of Scriptnotes? It’s beautiful.

John: I don’t know. I think he did a lot more voice work sort of because of Scriptnotes, so who is to say. I don’t have a good segue for this next joke though. Dana did you see in Deadline where Amazon is buying MGM for $8.5 billion?

Dana: Oh my god. They have all the money.

John: Amazon vows to keep releasing movies theatrically with the new James Bond movie due out October 8, or October 7 if you check out in the next 30 minutes.

Dana: [laughs]

John: You can throw some batteries in the cart and push it over the limit.

Dana: It’s kind of amazing. But I have to say I know I’m supposed to be cynical, and I know I’m supposed be like ugh they’re destroying the world, but I just love sunscreen and I love being able to just order as much of it as I want anytime I want and five seconds later it’s at my house. So I was like psyched about the MGM thing. I like MGM’s catalog and I like sunscreen. So I was like it’s kind of a beautiful marriage for me.

John: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are freaking out but I don’t think there’s really anything to worry about Amazon entering the movie business because look what they did for books.

Dana: Correct. Can you explain – I got the joke, but I’m moving on from it. Again, I like to order off of Amazon, I’m so sorry. But can you explain to me why people are freaking out about it? Because I didn’t totally understand why everyone was so up in arms. I was sort of like, yeah, there’s going to be a place where you can watch the movies that you couldn’t watch before this, now this other place. It’s all on your thing.

John: I think it’s just the problem of all of the consolidation in the industry. I think it’s people trying to take a do-over for Disney and Fox, which should probably never have happened. And so I think it’s just people recognizing like, oh my god, there’s going to be three buyers and you’re going to go to just the same three places the whole time.

Dana: Right. Right.

John: I think it’s just awareness of how much the industry is coalescing around these giant players.

Dana: I hear that. But I feel like if any of these places had been making these like profoundly amazing artistic films and then had been gobbled up by it I’d be like, oh trag. But, I mean, they’re kind of commercial movies. Here, go buy your batteries and watch your movie.

John: They got their Creeds. That’s sort of it.

Dana: I like that Creed. I’m not going to lie to you. That was a nice Creed. Love that Creed.

John: Finally, Dana, did you see in Deadline where in the new movie Army of the Dead Tig Notaro shot all of her scenes alone? So it was all reshoots and she’s in a bunch of scenes with actors but, nope, she was just in a green screen. It was just all Tig Notaro alone.

It reminds me that Craig was originally supposed to be in those scenes but he got too busy making his new show.

Dana: That’s amazing. That does not surprise me. And I’ll say it’s because I finished a TV show in complete Covid protocols and I was kind of amazed at – you know, in the beginning when we shut down in the middle of an episode I thought, oh, there’s going to be this fun bingo game, drinking game, that everyone is going to get to play after the end of the pandemic where you’re going to be watching your favorite TV show and then you have to drink when you see the character age by like a year in the middle of a scene.

And I thought it was going to be really complicated and everything was going to look crazy. And it’s like I watched the show and you absolutely can’t tell. We have huge crowd scenes that we just did totally safely with tiling and all sorts of stuff. We had to do a bunch of stuff like what you’re talking about. Just kind of shooting people alone so that they could be in scenes with people that they couldn’t breathe around. And so it kind of doesn’t surprise me.

And again I don’t think it’s something that we want to do in the future because I think that actors really feed off each other’s energy and I think it’s a little bit oddball to be up against a green screen for like an entire conversation. But like, OK, I’m buying it.

John: Yeah. The real question is Dana why isn’t Tig Notaro in your show? She could be in your show. What do you have against Tig Notaro that she’s not in your show?

Dana: Well now we know that there’s no reason Tig Notaro can’t be in every show. So it’s like, yeah, there’s going to be a real reckoning with that. I like Tig Notaro a lot. I think she’s great.

John: I think she’s that little bit of pepper you need to sort of spice things up. She’s great.

Dana: I think that’s right. And I think maybe–

John: She’s like deadpan pepper.

Dana: Maybe just send me the footage and I’ll see if I can work it in from the other thing.

John: Done. 100%.

Dana: Some of the green screen stuff. Let’s just stick it in my thing with a different background.

John: Dana Fox, thank you so much for helping me out with the headlines. I’m going to be back talking with you–

Dana: Oh, I love you.

John: –in our bonus segment about naps. And everyone check out the second season of your mystery-thriller series Home Before Dark. It appears June 11 on AppleTV+. Yay.

Dana: Yay. Oh, you’re the greatest John. Thank you.

John: Stick around because after the break I’ll be cheating with Jac Schaeffer about WandaVision and navigating the Marvel universe.

[WandaVision clip plays]

So Darcy may not know what’s happening, but luckily we have someone who does know. Jac Schaeffer is a writer-director whose credits include Time, The Hustle, and the story for the upcoming Marvel Studios’ Black Widow film. She also created and executive produced the hit series WandaVision. Welcome Jac.

Jac Schaeffer: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

John: Now, I emailed you probably after episode two to say how amazingly well-done I thought your show was and just how much I was enjoying it week-to-week. And I’d been curious about your show really early on because as listeners will know we lost our former producer, Megan McDonnell, to your show. She was hired away from Scriptnotes to work on your WandaVision show. And I was just so excited that it turned out so amazingly well.

Jac: Yes. I’m so delighted that I got to poach her directly from you. She is extraordinary. I love her madly. And that was her episode that you were just playing. One of two that she contributed to and many other things on the series.

Yeah, I could spend this whole segment just talking about Megan McDonnell if you wanted to do that. She is very smart.

John: Well maybe we can do that off-mic. But Megan is also an absolute steel trap because she told us nothing about your show or what was happening in it. And even as it was airing she was like I can’t say anything. She revealed nothing.

So now that the show is out and done I really want to talk about the process of putting together WandaVision and we’re not spoiling Marvel secrets. I’m just really curious how it all came to be. Because I don’t have a good sense of was Marvel pitching you? Were you pitching Marvel? What were those early conversations when it came time to think about doing WandaVision?

Jac: Sure. You know, it’s unusual at Marvel. It’s unlike anything else that I’ve experienced in the industry. They have their own system and it has been very successful for them.

They typically develop their concepts in house. And the only other actually place that it’s a little bit similar to is Disney Animation, where there is a lot of dedicated in-house development time. And so when you come in to pitch on something usually they have materials for you and they sort of know essentially what the gig is going to be. And then you’re meant to come in and bring your voice and perspective to the project.

So for WandaVision it was Kevin’s idea. He wanted to blend – to put Wanda and Vision’s characters together with the history of sitcoms and sort of use that to examine her very robust and tragic backstory of loss and grief. And they had a lot of sort of – they had some little ideas. They had this idea of like a milkman who was really scary. And so they had some granular stuff. And then they had big picture stuff of is it a dome, and is it the world, and who is helping, and what’s going on. And so I adjusted all of that material and then came back to them with a pitch that sort of gave shape to all of these pieces.

John: So it feels very much like a feature, you’re also a feature writer, so it feels like situations where there’s a book to adapt, and so obviously you have everything that’s in the book and then they may be bringing you in. And then you say like, OK, here’s how I’m going to do this. This thing you’re pitching towards me, here’s how I’m pitching it back to you. This is what I think it feels like. This is how I think it might work. Is that fair?

Jac: It’s sort of like that. I mean, I haven’t adapted a book, but I’ve sort of gone down the road. And I have felt that for me it’s a different approach. Because I find books are so immersive, especially when they’re very POV driven, if they’re very first person. And so you feel kind of surrounded by a world and a voice and a tone and a character. And this is different than that because it’s so sprawling. Because what you’re pitching on is like a kernel and a tone. Because they often assign genre to their – so the most reductive thing is like, OK, we’re doing a western, we’re doing a heist. So you’re sort of buying in on what, like you know Black Widow obviously is sort of spy genre, in the Bourne world.

John: As opposed to Ant Man which is like a heist comedy.

Jac: Yeah, heist comedy. Exactly. Exactly. With a novel I feel like there’s a little bit more containment. And yes you can depart from the book, but you’re always kind of housed in whatever that original container is. Whereas on this there’s like no container. It’s just an enormous table full of materials. And some of them – it’s sort of like I would imagine, I don’t know anything about cars, but cars before they were computers. If you took apart a car and there were all of these pieces spread out over a table. One is a huge engine and one is a tiny little whatever piece. I’m going to say wingnut, even though it’s probably not that. And this metaphor has gone off the rails.

But do you know what I mean? There’s so many parts to it that – on this one in particular I had to find the sort of spine and through line of it.

John: That’s what I really want to talk about is how did you find the spine and through line, which I guess quite early on you had to figure out sort of a tone and an approach. Because one of the things I loved so much about WandaVision is you watch that first episode and second episode and you’re like I’m not even quite sure what show this is. I’m not sure what the tone is. It’s just so wild and weird and unusual.

So what was the containment device for it? You say that it’s not a heist movie, it’s not a western. What did you feel this was? This surrealist existential drama? What limits did you put on yourself?

Jac: It’s funny. When I was thinking about having this conversation with you today and I was thinking about Craig actually and how amazed I am that he wrote The Hangover sequels and then also Chernobyl, and I always really admire people who can do it all, and can dance all the different – they can do all the different dances at the ballroom competition.

But for me, I just like them all in the same spot. That is really exciting to me. The challenge of can you do the kitchen sink with the one project.

You know, my first way in, I sort of had two points of entry on this. One was I mapped – I broke the episodes according to the stages of grief. It was a very reductive framing device that just helped guide me. And it ended up – we ended up straying from it a little bit, and then kind of returning to it. And now if you look at the show it’s very evident. She is in denial for the first three episodes.

And she’s angry and kicks Monica out. And then she’s bargaining outside, the sequence that we called the hex flex, when she steps out of the hex. You know, and the whole thing was meant to culminate with acceptance. That she has to accept the truth of her circumstance. So that was like one of the ways that I approached the pitch and kind of gave shape to it.

And then the other thing was that I knew that there was a huge risk that it would just feel like parody and just feel like a gimmick. And there was such a risk that we wouldn’t care about these characters. And I just knew instinctively that if we told the linear story of Wanda goes to get Vision’s body, is denied, and freaks out and creates a dome that there’s no tension in that.

John: Yeah.

Jac: So, it was my instinct and I think it was also kind of implied in their early documents of starting inside of the world and then trying to sort of unpack that mystery. But I think their instinct was to kind of parse it early, like in the first episode reveal. And I wanted to hang onto it. And I wanted to try and create an actual sitcom. So that was the driving force is like how long can we keep the cat in the bag and create maximum tension and intrigue and interest.

John: Well tension and intrigue and interest, you’re really talking about expectation. You’re talking about where the audience is at. What does the audience this is going to happen next? How can you reward that and how can you challenge that and sort of move past it? So those first two episodes, the first episode is so very classic black and white and really arch performances and so we’re expecting is this show, and then as we move to the second episode we see the time has jumped forward. It felt like you were from a very early stage anticipating what the discourse would be like week to week and where the audience was going to be at and what the audience was expecting to happen next. Is that fair?

Jac: It is fair. It is fair. We weren’t entirely certain that it would be week to week. When we were making it it was up in the air whether or not it would be a dump and be binge-able, or if it would be week to week. And it was always my hope it would be week to week. And I was so pleased that that’s how it landed.

But, yeah, I mean, it is bizarre writing in this world because you’re not writing alone. You’re writing with the legacy of everything that came before. People say lovely things about the show and I’m delighted that it has resonated, but I also – you know, I didn’t think it would play for people who didn’t understand the Marvel universe. I didn’t think it would play outside of the states. I was like if you’re not steeped in American sitcoms this is going to be Greek to you. And of course I completely under – and it’s actually even in the story she learns English. The character Wanda learns. So I don’t know why I was so sort of shortsighted about it.

But I mean so much of the eeriness and the uncanniness is about going into it knowing that these are superheroes. And that’s part of what’s so kind of delicious about it. So, yeah, I was absolutely playing to the expectations of Marvel fans. But then, you know, I wanted people who weren’t fans to be pulled in as well.

John: Now, one of the challenges of writing these characters though is that you don’t really fully control these characters. These characters existed before you. And they will exist after you. And so you have them for this period of time. It’s like you have them for college and you can do whatever they want to do in college, but they’re going to enter college and they’re going to leave college and you only have them for that time.

What were some of the challenges of taking Wanda and Vision and all the other supporting characters you brought in from the Marvel universe and using them to your best effect, but also knowing that they would have to go on and do other things? Like how early in the conversations with Marvel did that come up as an issue?

Jac: The continuing on you mean?

John: Yeah.

Jac: Well, you know, it’s really not as much of a burden as it sort of seems on the outside. First of all, it was a real surprise to me to discover how much I enjoyed picking up other people’s story threads, especially when they’re peripheral. There’s something about the characters with less screen time that really fascinate me, because you end up being able to make a meal out of these tiny moments. And actors are amazing and they make all these little choices that you sort of pass through but then upon inspection – you know, Randall Parks’ whole thing from what I understand that the moment in Ant Man between him and Paul Rudd where Jimmy makes the mistake that he thinks that Paul Rudd’s character is asking him to go to dinner. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this moment. But it’s this really charming and totally disarming moment of miscommunication between two men who aren’t friends, but it reveals that Jimmy’s character is actually seeking connection.

And it was like so pleasurable to run with that. And also his sort of little interest in magic in the Ant Man movie to then sort of take that. So all that textural stuff is very, very fun.

And then of course with Paul and Lizzie like they’re performers who really operate with an enormous amount of integrity. So they had so much to contribute and there was so much already there.

In terms of where they’re going, I mean it’s an ongoing conversation throughout making your thing, because while you’re making your thing they have an idea about what the next thing is, but it’s not rolling yet. And then once it starts rolling there are conversations. I never really felt – the only place where it sort of made me feel a little bit hemmed in is the tags. The tags are always really challenging because typically they’re iterated and iterated and iterated through the process and then really they’re decided upon so late in the game.

And that’s the handoff.

John: It’s not really wrapping up your story.

Jac: Correct.

John: It’s setting up the next one which you had nothing to do with.

Jac: Correct. Yeah. And I love the tags. I always find them to be so fun. And I’ve written a bunch that I fell in love with that then were cut because it didn’t align with the next thing, or the actor was unavailable. So that’s sort of where you handoff the baton. That’s the only place where it gets a little bit sticky. But really I have felt very fortunate that in the larger scope of whatever project I’m on you’re allowed to do what you need to do to make it the best that it can be.

John: So let’s talk about the characters you’re using, like Randall Parks’ character. How early on did you know that he was going to be a force? Was that already part of the Marvel pitch to you? And same with Darcy or other people who sort of exist in the Marvel universe. Did you need them or did they say like, oh, here’s available people we’d love you to use?

Jac: Yes, so they had a list of possibilities. And it’s funny now. I can barely remember who else was on them. Usually it’s a long-ish list. Randall and Kat Dennings were on there. And high up. And I was like absolutely. That is just an immediate yes to those two performers and to those two characters. And same with Agatha Harkness was on there as a maybe, I don’t know, maybe she’s in the mix somewhere. So those were the ones that I pulled out.

You know, we went down a road with a couple other characters that didn’t end up working out very early, because it’s also like you’re gambling on actor availability, which in the MCU usually that’s not a huge problem because they’re interested in continuing their participation. But it is a little bit tricky. And then sometimes characters get pulled into another property and that on a very small scale happened with us. On Black Widow that was a little bit more blue sky on that.

I was the first writer in on that. In conjunction with my producer on that we sort of set the table on who those characters were going to be. So, the short answer to your question is they have some ideas. It’s sort of like it’s a menu and then you can select and run at it and then if it doesn’t work often it can be modular and you can slide somebody else in.

John: Well let’s talk back to the process for WandaVision. What were the first documents you ended up writing for this project? Do you do an outline for the whole series? Did you do a pilot? What were you writing first?

Jac: Let’s see. That’s a good question. I mean, Marvel has a very extensive pitch process. So I had really detailed pitch documents. Because you pitch multiple times. So I had my pitch document which broke the whole series. And then I got notes on that which just sort of shored it up. Gave it a little bit of shape.

So the next step was putting the writer’s room together. And so when we were hiring writers they would come in and I would pitch the series.

John: So at this point you had not written a script, but you were hiring writers based on the approval of this pitch document and saying like, OK, we’re going to try to make this thing.

Jac: Correct. And it was in broad strokes. I can’t remember. Monica being kicked out. That was always there. The first three episodes, obscuring the truth, and kind of having red herrings. That was all – so I think that that kind of basic shape was there and that was part of what I was pitching to the writers. You should ask Megan. It’s all gone.

And then one of the things that you have to do is like you have to pitch over and over again because you have to pitch to the actors and then when you’re hiring the directors you have to pitch to them. So we ended up having it all on a wall. We had this really fabulous writer’s room with an enormous amount of art which was one of the things I did before the writers came in is I put all the art on the wall because it’s such a visual story and because we were telling such a multi-layered story.

So we had the wall broken by episode and then we had the art, like the posters from those classic shows above each episode. So it was this kind of wall that was a pitch document.

And then once the writers came on that’s when we started producing documents for the studio to receive notes on. And those were kind of series overviews. And then eventually once their episodes were assigned they were writing outlines that were part of the series overview. So we went really, really, really deep before anybody started writing a script.

John: So there were no lines of dialogue written until everything had sort of been signed off on, right?

Jac: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s actually true. You know, the pilot opens with the like “my wife and her flying saucers,” like that kind of stuff was in – those type of cute moments and big moments like “he was killed by Ultron, wasn’t he,” that stuff was in the outline documents.

John: OK. So you had those little moments. And it sounds like the James Cameron scriptment kind of things.

Jac: Correct. Yeah.

John: You have dialogue where you absolutely need the dialogue to sort of show how stuff works, but the scene work is not in those. It’s really showing—

Jac: Yeah, the scene breakdowns. Yeah, I guess scriptment. I mean, the way that I did it, which I don’t know if it’s any kind of formal system, was slug lines and what we planned to do. It wasn’t in Final Draft. It was in a Word document. But we broke out the scenes for everything and what would happen. Yeah, bits of dialogue here and there.

John: Now, finally you feel like, OK, we have a shape for this whole thing. We are signing off scripts. Is this your first time running a room? This is your first time working with other writers? What was that process like for you?

Jac: It was. It was my first time running a room. And it was the very best experience of my career. And I loved hiring these phenomenal people and I loved working with them. And I will keep it in my heart until the day I die. It was so wonderful and so special.

And it was a tricky thing because I needed to hire talented, inspiring, somewhat seasoned people, because I hadn’t done it before. But I also needed to hire people who weren’t going to have a problem with that. And weren’t – I didn’t have time for anyone to have a problem with my authority. I’ve heard on your podcast before that you and Craig talk about kids and having kids and the impact of family on your career. My children were two and four when I got this job. And I live on the west side and Marvel is in Burbank. So I had an hour plus commute every day.

So I was working on an extremely tight schedule. So I needed people who were just going to be in and be excited and optimistic and up for the whole thing. And so that’s who I hired. And I wanted people that I would learn from. And I wanted people who would keep the engine going if I ran out of gas. And that’s what I got. I mean, this team never quit.

And they had so much love for it. And I also chose them based on the kind of people that they are, but also because of their influences. I hired this group that just like they know film and TV in all the ways that you need them to, but the love that they have for it, and the deep cuts that were brought to the table in the room when we were breaking the show, and because it’s such a bananas show I needed those people with those super bizarro frames of reference.

John: I actually was writing down your quote, “I didn’t have time for anyone to question my authority,” because that is just such a great encapsulation of the real challenge of trying to do this job. My first experience running a TV show was this disaster called DC. It was me and Dick Wolf. And my authority was constantly being questioned at all moments. It became impossible for me to do this show because not just the question of authority for the network or the studio or Dick Wolf, but also you’re too young to be doing this. You shouldn’t be doing this.

So to hear you say that is such a smart way to approach how you’re making the decisions.

I want to know how you actually picked those writers. Were you looking for recommendations first and then reading them to make sure they were really good? Were you looking at the words first and then meeting with writers? How did you pick who would be the people in the room?

Jac: So my producer, who is my Marvel executive, Mary Livanos, who is wonderful – Marvel is really great because these executives are always doing the next move way before it’s time for the next move. Because of the way they operate, you know, they plant a flag. This is when this thing is coming out. So they just run at it and it’s kind of amazing whether or not it’s ready to go.

So I think she was reading scripts before I was hired. And also I met with some people who had been up for my job as well, because there were great people in that pool. So she was passing me scripts, things that were her favorite. I told her what my priorities were in the read which were I wanted people with original voices. It was less important to me that the specs stick the landing of whatever the show was trying to do. I just wanted ideas to leap off the page. Or I wanted comedy to leap off the page.

I just wanted it to be memorable. Because those were the brains that I needed in the room. I needed people who were going to constantly be questioning the tradition of storytelling. Megan’s spec was so good. It was such a fully realized mythology. And it was so achingly melancholy. And it had such an original voice to it.

Cam Squires’ spec was such a swing. And I remember when he came in to meet my first question was where does this series go. What even is your plan for this story? Because I can’t see it and that’s not a ding. That’s not a fault. It’s just you bit off so much in the pilot. Tell me what your plans are. And of course he had a plan and it was fascinating to hear what that was.

And I knew I needed people who could do mythology and world-building and genre and procedural. And I knew I needed people who could do sitcoms and comedy. I ended up leaning away from a lot of the straight sitcom writers, because our show was so ambitious. So I did hire sitcom writers. So Mackenzie Dohr wrote on the Mindy Project but she also wrote on Lock and Key. So she’s no stranger to fantasy and genre.

So that’s what I was looking for on the page. That was truthfully 30%. Maybe 30% of what was important to me. It was really so much more about the personality. Coming up in the industry I’ve had my share of bad experiences and being in rooms where I felt small. Whether or not I allowed myself to feel small, or I was actively made to feel small. But I was adamant that the room culture be positive and respectful and joyful. And that everyone would feel heard and valued.

So I hired people who that’s how they operate at. I hired Chuck Hayward because I invited him over to my house. I was like, OK, crack the code. Tell me how I run a room. And he painted a picture of what his dream room would look like and I was like, OK, great, because you’re hired because I need you to bring that energy into the room. I actually hadn’t even read his script. [laughs] And luckily it was great and he’s wonderful and very talented. But it was so much about a friend of mine, Micah Fitzerman-Blue who is wonderful and so talented himself, he was like you know you can write. So what you need is the people to help you break this. And you need people who will inspire you.

And my friend Chris Addison who is an incredible – he directed The Hustle and he won Emmys for Veep and is fantastic, he was like look at your room like a toolbox. You don’t need – every chair isn’t supposed to be a writer who is better than you. Every chair needs to bring something different to the table. So that was very much part of my approach.

I’ve been talking forever John because I love talking about building a room. It’s so fun. And I, yeah–

John: Well it sounds like you’re going to have a chance to do this again because just this last week it was announced you made a deal with Marvel and 20th Television to create some new shows. This is very exciting. Congratulations.

Jac: Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I’m very excited about it and I feel incredibly grateful and honored.

John: So what do you see as priorities? Would you want to do traditional broadcast? Do you want to do more streaming? What do you think is really interesting in television for the next couple years?

Jac: I mean, for me I love this limited series space. I mean, that’s not to say that things can’t have another iteration, but I was so surprised at how much freedom I felt in making WandaVision. That every episode was a chance to redefine the actual show itself. In the years leading up to getting WandaVision, you know, it wasn’t my intention to go into television. That wasn’t the trajectory. But I had been watching these shows that were just blowing my mind with – especially with bottle episodes. The bottle episode of Girls, the Panic in Central Park, I was so dazzled by that episode. And it was the first time that I really sort of looked squarely at the bottle episode and what it could be.

Because prior to that in network television it had always seemed like filler or I remember my parents watching an episode – there was an episode of The Cosby Show. I think it was John Ritter who was on and his wife Amy Yazbek, is that right?

John: That sounds right.

Jac: I don’t know if I’m remembering this correctly at all, but they were having a baby and the enormous amount of show real estate was dedicated to their storyline. And I remember my dad saying, “Oh, they’re lining up a spinoff,” which didn’t turn out to be the thing. But I remember feeling like departures from the norm in network television was like filler or a detour or con. And now, you know, another one that I just couldn’t believe was Escape at Dannemora, the penultimate episode, that was very much an inspiration for the penultimate episode of WandaVision in that it’s a rewind. And you don’t know where you are when you start the episode.

That feeling of disorientation, rather than it being filler, rather than it being just like, oh, watch this instead, that you have to lean forward. I mean, that is what I am clawing after at every turn.

John: That’s how you know you’ve engaged your audience is they are desperate to figure out what’s going on. And they’re with you to solve the mystery. That’s it.

Jac: That’s totally it. That’s the juice.

John: Jac Schaeffer, congratulations again. I’m so excited to see what you’re going to make next. Do you know what that is? Is there anything you can announce yet that you’re going to be making next?

Jac: There are no announcements.

John: Nothing will be announced today on Scriptnotes. But thank you very much for coming on the show. And thank you for hiring Megan McDonnell and giving her that platform, even though we were sad to lose her. Thank you for taking a chance on her because she is a superstar.

Jac: She is. I mean, I’m the one who benefited from that. Let’s be honest. She’s the best. Thank you. Thanks so much.

John: Thank you, Jac.

Stick around because after the break I’ll be chatting with Lance Oppenheim about the writing that goes into documentaries.

[Clip plays from Some Kind of Heaven]

In that clip we hear from Dennis, one of the people in the documentary Some Kind of Heaven. The film follows four seniors living in The Villages retirement community and explores how they cope with later adult life. The film premiered at Sundance in 2020 and is now available on Hulu. And we have with us Lance Oppenheim, the film’s writer and director. Welcome Lance.

Lance Oppenheim: Hello. Thank you for having me, John. Big fan. It’s funny. The writer – I don’t consider myself the writer of a documentary, but I guess all documentaries are written somehow.

John: I want to talk about that. Because sometimes you see writing credits on documentaries and sometimes you don’t. But there’s clearly a lot of character work, a lot of story work that’s happening here. So I want to talk about how you do that in a documentary sense.

But I also want to make sure that people who are listening to this understand that your movie is actually really funny and visual and surprising. And it’s sad at moments, but also that clip might make it seem like it’s all dark and grim, and it has this really kind of weird spirit to it. So I want to make sure people don’t get the wrong idea about your movie.

How early on in the process of coming up with this movie did you know what it was going to feel like?

Lance: Oh man. I think it took a long time to know what the movie was going to be about and how it was going to do that. But I think the feeling of it actually came pretty early to me. And that came from spending a lot of time in the world. The Villages, as most people know of it from how much of a political spectacle it became this past year during the election cycle. It’s a very conservative stronghold of America.

But I think that the thing that appealed to me, I’m a Floridian. I grew up knowing about the place was that it really was kind of like The Truman Show in real life. It’s designed to simulate the 1950s, the 1960s. Kind of like an America that never really existed, but an America that I grew up with in movies, like in Blue Velvet or in Safe or in Edward Scissorhands. And Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life. The suburbia of those movies is the same suburbia of Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America and it’s the same suburbia that is literally brought to life in the Villages.

So I knew that I couldn’t just make a standard cinema verité style documentary that the aesthetics of it were handheld. I wanted to find a way to bring the audience into the world and make it as immersive and make it feel as [transportive] as if you were really there, as if you had stepped afoot in the community.

John: So those choices were about the kinds of shots you’re doing. Just literally the production design, sort of what you’re showing on screen. But you also need to show characters on screen and that’s really what I wanted to dig into. Because that boundary between what is writing and what is directing and what is being a documentary filmmaker and what is sort of shaping narrative.

How did you find these people? Because I keep wanting to call them characters and they’re not characters. They actually are people. But they felt very carefully selected and edited. And over the course of your times meeting with them you are putting them in situations that can help tell your story.

So, let’s start at the beginning. How did you find these people and when did you know these were the people you wanted to follow for your film?

Lance: Well, I think over the process of making the film, it was about four trips over almost 18 months of time spent on and off in the community and filming with a lot of different folks. It only really became apparent I think at the end of our second strip who our ensemble really was. We were following a lot of people. But I think going back to the root of the question of just documentary, fiction, how we watch documentaries, how we watch fiction films. I mean, I think it’s interesting.

A lot of people in documentary – the documentary orthodoxy likes to talk about this word “manipulation” and I think it’s a word that should exist. But I think, you know, I may be stating the obvious but everything in documentaries is manipulated. The moment you put a camera and train it on anybody. And anybody that is living a life and breathing and existing, something happens. Depending on how much time you spend in a place, how comfortable, and how much that bedrock of trust exists between you, the filmmaker, and the subject that’s on camera, there may be some kind of alchemy that gets you closer to real life. But it’s a tremendous hurdle.

And even the way most documentaries no matter how observational they may seem are put together in the edit. It’s a lot of times following the tenets of a thing we call story, which is inherently I think the tenets, the touchstones of how we think about story go back to the things that you talk about so well on the podcast which is narrativizing and the way we even narrativize our lives goes back to that same thing.

So I think a lot of movies, even the film that we made, contain these manipulations. And I think for me the world, the setting of the Villages, felt perfect to drop a camera and to kind of experiment with a more heightened, more stylized way of telling real stories. I guess my process kind of involves a lot of me getting to know people, spending a lot of time with them, and then essentially riffing off of reality. Putting them in situations, as you’re saying. It’s not even a matter of me putting them in situations they wouldn’t normally be in. It’s bringing those situations to life and shooting them in a way that may feel and evoke how a narrative film looks and breathes.

John: Let’s talk about one of the characters in this. So in the initial clip here we meet Dennis. And so the first shot that we’re seeing of him is he’s in his van and he’s going through his daily life and he’s talking to us about the kind of woman he wants to meet. And it’s a character who he can seem like a grifter, he can seem like a hustler. And yet he is kind of a classic protagonist, like a shaggy dog protagonist of a story.

So, when you first meet this person as a filmmaker are you thinking through sort of like where you want to see his arc going? Or are you just observing? Because that’s really the question. So often as a writer we kind of know what track we need that character to go, and so we’re tailoring that character from the start because we need that character to achieve these things.

You as a documentary filmmaker have limited means of actually deciding how this character ends up. So when you’re first meeting Dennis do you have a plan for him?

Lance: I’d say no. I think what compels me to the process of making docs, and also the process of making a doc in this way which is maybe a little bit more unorthodox to how docs are normally made, you know, the process in the beginning is similar. It’s observing someone. I’m meeting them. They’re meeting me. We’re getting to know each other really well. We have a few drinks. We have dinner. We have more drinks. We do that process, that cycle kind of repeats several times over, as many times as possible until we feel comfortable and we are friends with each other.

And once we got to the place where we were in this movie, you know, the film is shot entirely on a tripod, right. A lot of the intention was to make our frames as composed, feel as composed, as manicured as the Villages, as the setting dictates, as the landscaping is. It’s this very meticulously crafted suburban bliss that’s there. And I wanted the camera to feel that.

But in doing that and shooting the movie entirely on tripod it really did not allow for us to be flies on the wall. For one I’m much younger than every subject in the film, including Dennis. The process of shooting it on tripod in a way immediately established this distance and the challenge with the movie was to eliminate that distance and get as close as we possibly could. In a weird way something happened where midway through our shooting, you know, there were times where this process did not feel like it was working and it felt like it was corrupting too much of reality and it felt too artificial, even though we were putting things on screen that normally do happen in their lives.

And there were a lot of times where we were just observing and kind of putting the camera in a place where we would just let it run for a long time until something would happen in the frame. But what happened over time was that in kind of embracing the artifice we got to something more real. You know, the process of shooting on a tripod made me be a lot more honest about what I was shooting, why I was shooting it, and how I was going to shoot it for the subjects of the film. So in a way our process, our relationship, didn’t just evolve – it wasn’t like a mosquito biting someone and sucking up their blood and then painting a portrait with their blood in the edit or something.

This was something far more collaborative. I’m using such a violent example for how I imagine documentaries are normally made. But I think it’s like somewhat true. You get closer, the material you end up making out of somebody’s life, and it’s a very [vampiristic] relationship. So I wanted to do something different. This whole process of shooting on tripod kind of allowed and enabled this sort of collaboration and trust and honesty. I had to be very honest about the places and situations I wanted to shoot. And I had to be just as honest about how I thought it was going to work in the edit.

So in a way these were real people but they were playing a version of themselves that was entirely real and all the things that are happening in the movie are real. The way we’re shooting them, the framework we’re shooting them in, and sometimes even the way a situation is blocked, that is very much planned. And I think that’s the kind of joy of it all is that you’re riffing off of reality. It’s like jazz and you’re trying to shoot actively unfolding things in as stylized and interesting of a framework as possible.

So to answer your question I prefer not to know where a person’s journey goes. I have hopes, I have dreams, I have wishes for where they move, and how they move through a world, but I’m never telling them what to do or how to do something. It’s really more they make a choice to do something and for me the reason I chose these folks was, one, I was interested in some ways of making a movie about relationships, so there was that subtext to each of their stories. But, two, they were actively having things happening to them when I met them.

Barbara, the widow in the film, was trying to get back out in the world again. That was something very active. There’s conflict there. Dennis is someone who is trying to find a woman to move in with. And he needs to find a home essentially. His journey is about companionship and comfort and freedom. And these things that he talks about very articulately and beautifully. And the last subjects of the film are Reggie and Anne, a married couple, who are very different from one another and are about to just experience how different they really are and how there’s so much distance in that relationship. And how she has to deal with the fact that her husband may not just be recreationally dabbling in psychedelic drugs. He actually may be losing his mind.

And to me each of those stories, it took a lot of time to find each of them and befriend them and then get to a place where they were comfortable with me putting their lives onscreen. I’m not interested in taking it I guess to that degree. What’s more interesting and more challenging to me is taking real life and creatively lensing and creatively treating it. And that’s what I think my favorite documentaries do that. And it’s a shame that not all documentaries do.

John: Well, let’s talk about trying to frame it and you’re literally framing it with your camera, but you’re also deciding what parts of their lives are going to be useful for your film to be showing. So you said that initially there were other people you were following and they did not make it into the edit, or you stopped filming them because they were not helping you tell your story. So you said there were a total of four visits, between those visits what was the process for you in terms of like this is what the movie wants to be, this is the story that it looks like we can tell here? And was there writing involved in that? Were there conversations?

Or was it just looking at what you’d already shot in the edit bay? How did you figure out what the movie wanted to be? Because that’s a question that screenwriters are facing all the time. They have all these scenes, they have this stuff, but they may not necessarily know what the movie is from the moments that they’ve found.

Lance: You know, the process of making this – for so long I had no clue what it was. And I knew that we visually found a way to lens the place in a way that felt very expressive and not just representational and that I think was exciting to me and exciting to my cinematographer who I really consider a coauthor of the film. But it was only until I brought on an editor named Daniel Garber who I consider – screenwriting in documentaries, what that really is is the editors of the films.

Daniel is someone who is really well versed in both documentary and narrative films. He edited a film called Cam a few years ago. And I owe a great deal to him. We edited the film together, but he was the person who was making sense out of the lasagna, the cold noodles of footage that was just sitting on a hard drive or sitting in a refrigerator basically forever. And I had no idea how to make sense of any of it, or how all these people, places, and things added up. And he was the person that showed me what the film needed to be.

I think the thing that was guiding him in making those choices and guiding me, after seeing material structured in a particular kind of way it guided the rest of the way we were filming. Daniel came on I think at the end of our second trip and was struggling to figure out what it was.

There was one story that we actually released as a separate short documentary that the New York Times put out. I think it was about two months ago. About one of the stories that I thought the movie was about. I thought the movie was about this little girl who was living actually outside of the Villages and the development was trying to buy her land and turn this home that has been in her family for generations into prefab cookie cutter retirement home essentially, a house in this retirement community.

And there was another thread that I really liked about the ecological devastation this place causes. Sinkholes that were forming in the bottom of the ground. I mean, just like totally unbelievable things that we just kept shooting because that place is just unbelievably insane.

I’m trying to remember how we decided it didn’t work, but I think one of the things for sure that I think I was interested in and existentially so felt when I first got there. I had just gotten out of a long relationship. I felt pretty upset about that. And I was wandering around trying to figure out how these people who are navigating their seventh or eighth decade on this planet are still together. And what romance looks like there. And do we repeat the same things – if you’re returning to a place that reminds you of your youth do you make the same mistakes that you made as a young person?

John: So what you’re describing sort of sound like central dramatic questions. And so it sounds like you didn’t know going into it – you knew what the movie might kind of feel like. You knew what was interesting about it. But you didn’t have a central dramatic question until you really winnowed it down to like these are the people we’re going to follow and these are the questions the movie is going to try to answer, which is kind of what happens – it’s not about the place. It’s about what happens when you’re at this point in your later adulthood.

Lance: Right. Precisely. I think for a long time I was interested in making something that I thought at first was going to be about the place. And I realized over time that this movie, that stories aren’t settings. That this movie didn’t want to be about the setting. It wanted to be about people going through real problems against the backdrop of this unreal place. That seemed more interesting to me and that also – when I first started making the film, before I even rolled a frame on anything, before my crew came, I lived in the community for about a month and a half. These two retired rodeo clowns I found off of Airbnb, I rented a room in their house.

And I think a lot of those central dramatic questions came from seeing how they lived their lives and who their friends were and what they were doing. One of them had leukemia and the reason they were putting their Airbnb room up was to pay for the medical bills. So immediately I was like this is so fucking dark, but also they are still clowning. There was something – the tension between those two things, something that is more tragic through the funniness of it, and more funny through its tragedy. That was really nice and interesting to me and I knew I wanted to bottle that up somehow.

John: Well let’s get a sense of who you are in this picture. Because how old were you when you started this movie?

Lance: I was 22 when I first got there.

John: So you were literally just out of film school when this is happening. You’re straight out of undergrad and you’re trying to do this thing which has got to be both inspiring and also annoying to many of our listeners who are like how can this young kid do all these things. And my guess just from interactions we’ve had is you are not shy about approaching and asking people for this. You hustle. And it’s a thing I admire just in my interactions with you so far is you seem to recognize what you need and how to very graciously approach people about getting that thing that you need. And that feels like that’s Hollywood you get your subjects for your movie. But also how you sort of get the movie out there in the world.

Lance: Yeah. I’m an annoying person. You know, I think even the process of getting this film made, it was not – as I’m sure you would imagine it was not easy. It was I think throughout the process a lot of people were constantly, even in trying just to get the money to keep going back, you know, people could see through what I was doing. They could see through that I didn’t have it figured out yet. That I didn’t have a narrative that seemed like it would satisfy all of their funding needs, especially in documentaries which is a world – financing in documentaries I think goes back to a lot of other questions about issues and advocacy and stuff like that that is important but not – that was not this film.

So, it took time and it took a lot of bullshitting I think to really figure that out. I mean, the film that I thought we were making, the film that is this short film called The Paradise Next Door, that was essentially my pitch was that here’s a movie, you have a younger person, and you have these older folks, and it’s a movie about these two people and when those worlds collide, which was complete bullshit because it never collided. So, you know, after we were able to successfully bamboozle some people, graciously this company called the Los Angeles Media Fund, they were still down for the ride even as I started realizing that that narrative wasn’t the thing that we needed to be shooting.

What we needed to be shooting was something much more intimate and interior and subjective about these people and about this existential feeling of being in a place where you’re supposed to be having the best time of your life and time is running out and tht stress of not feeling that and also when this thing you’ve invested in, this dream – what happens when it becomes a nightmare? And that’s something that I think anybody can relate to, especially anybody who grows old, which is everybody on the planet I guess.

John: Now what I hear you describing though, it sounds like you weren’t asking for permission, and you weren’t waiting to figure out all the things, you just kind of started doing it and you sort of built the road underneath you as you were going. And that applies for a documentary feature, but also applies to a lot of writing. I do feel a frustration that sometimes the questions we get in on the podcast are about like am I allowed to do this thing, is this possible, is this a good idea, and the advice I want to shout so often just like well just try the thing and see if it’s a good idea. And if it’s not a good idea you haven’t lost that much.

And it sounds like as you started to make this movie you didn’t have – you kind of weren’t risking a ton. I mean, you might be wasting your time, but it wasn’t expensive to do the initial things you were trying to do. You could just go off and do it and eventually you had some footage you could show and you could bring in another person and another person. You got to Darren Aronofsky. You could sort of keep the ball rolling by just bringing in new people who could see what you’d already done. Is that fair?

Lance: Yeah. I think that is. I mean, you know, the movie – I started working on the film like kind of [co-curricularly]. It started off as my thesis film in school and that was how I initially was able to go down there. But even when we got the financing, the process didn’t change much. In terms of shooting it still was just me, my cinematographer, and I’ve been working with him since I was like 17. My sister who has a fulltime job, not in movies, but I convinced her to come and help us figure it out. And one of my college friends who coproduced the film. And then I had the sound guys.

So it was like a crew of five basically across the journey. And then obviously on the post side and everything else things started to get a little bigger and just a lot more people to answer to. And wanted to make sure that even though it wasn’t a ton of money to make, they wanted to make sure their money wasn’t being wasted. That’s fair. I feel like all first time feature filmmakers have to go through that process of just getting people to trust you in that way.

But it’s a process of trying things and taking risks and swinging big. And when you are there, when you’re up at the plate you’ve got to swing as big as you can possibly can and be as ambitious as you can. And I think going back to the thing you just said before, like don’t worry about being annoying. No one is going to find you on the Internet and pluck your script or you movie or your short out of obscurity. The only way they’re going to find it is if you sort of get it in their face.

And I remember reading this story about like Gus Van Sant. I think he called, I don’t know if it was William S. Burroughs, so forgive me if I’m screwing up the story, but I remember he found someone he admired very deeply, his name in the phonebook, and he just gave him a call. And they became friends and then he ended up adapting his story into a movie. So I’ve always just been inspired by that and took that to heart.

John: We just spoke with Jac Schaeffer who ran WandaVision and her Scriptnotes connection was that she ended up hiring former Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell as a staff writer there. You also have a Scriptnotes connection. Do you want to tell us what that is?

Lance: I would love to. I grew up with Stuart Friedel. His father was and has been my dentist for my entire life. Stuart was the first dude that I ever knew that was working in movies. He worked for Alexander Payne and exposed me to his films. And exposed me to your films, John. Told me what the podcast was. I didn’t know what the podcast was at all at that point in time, but I had seen so many of your movies. I’d seen The Nines. I’d seen Corpse Bride. I’d seen Big Fish. So I was like oh shit I should listen to that.

And I am devoted listener. Especially as someone who is trying to make stuff that is documentary and nonfiction based but also as I’ve tried to learn and remediate myself on how to write a screenplay which is an art, a dark art that is not easy. So I’m very grateful – I feel like your podcast keeps me going, and I’m sure keeps a lot of people going when they’re trying to figure out how the fuck to do it.

John: You also have Stuart’s vocal cadences, which I find so fascinating, because I wouldn’t guess that there was a South Florida accent, but you and Stuart sound so much alike. It’s jarring.

Lance: Oh, that’s funny. Huh. We’re just two Jewish South Floridian guys I guess.

John: Maybe it’s all that Friedel dentistry on your mouth that has shaped it into a specific way. So, you made this movie, but you’re still very, very young. So, what are you doing next and are you trying to stay in the documentary lane? Are you trying to do narrative features? What’s next for you?

Lance: I don’t know. I don’t feel very young. I feel, if anything I feel weird in a way. This was the thing that I basically went as far in as I possibly could on. And there was a kind of tremendous period of just like, wow, what do I do next. And this feeling of sadness of finishing something I cared so deeply about. And the people in the film, the subjects in the film, I speak with them still once a week. We’re still very close. And I’m always like, god, I wish I could go back and keep making something there.

But I’m working on a bunch of stuff. I am interested in continuing to make docs, but I also am very interested in narrative films and seeing if I can find ways to bridge that gap. So I’m working on another film right now that’s a small narrative film that’s based on a short story that I really liked. And then I’m adapting one of the short documentaries I made a few years ago and I’m writing that right now. And Darren Aronofsky is producing that. So we’ll see. I just want to make movies and I find it so interesting how I think especially in the narrative world it’s like so much time – hurry up and wait. You work and work and work and then if you get to that place where you can set something up it just takes a million years to get it made.

So I feel like I’ll probably just keep making documentaries because at least I have more agency and ownership of the process of just going and shooting stuff. Even if it’s the wrong stuff to shoot, it still feels good to be shooting something rather than talking about it I guess.

John: We’re always big advocates on this podcast of just making the thing. And so I believe you will continue to just make the thing and you will have the frustrations of development hell and all of that stuff, but as long as you can always make some things for yourself you’ll be set.

Lance Oppenheim we can check out your movie on Hulu right now. So everyone on Hulu can see it. I’m sure internationally you can find it through all the other streaming and download places. Congratulations on your movie. And it’s great talking with you.

Lance: Thank you so much, John.

John: Stick around because after the break we’ll be talking about writing while at your day job.

OK, this is the part of the show where we normally answer some listener questions. Megana, do you have a good question for us?

Megana Rao: I do. Cautious from San Gabriel Valley would like to know “Can a company gain partial ownership of something I wrote while at work? I got a day job where I basically babysit a building and my supervisor doesn’t care if I write for the majority of my shift. I was worried when I found out through an episode of Silicon Valley that a company can sue you for ownership of your project if you worked on it on company equipment, i.e. a computer. I thought I was fine because I’m a third party contract worker and continue to write at work, but recently due to my coworker’s constant cellphone and YouTube use my company sent out a scary memo regarding computer usage.

“Though the memo may not hold up in court, I’m uncertain how to proceed working on projects at work. I don’t care if I’m fired or transferred to a different post. I just don’t someone else to already have a bite out of my apple. I’m leaning towards continuing to use company computers to write scripts and only saving in the cloud because if I do sell a script I’d have a whole production company backing in the unlikely event of a lawsuit. As for other writing projects that I might self-publish I’m just writing in a notebook and tediously typing it up at home. What do you guys think? Is the time saved worth the hypothetical risk?”

John: All right, so this gives me a big flashback to my days when I was writing my first script. I was an intern at Universal. And so the first script I ever wrote was this romantic tragedy called Here and Now. And I wrote it basically while I was at work, when I was sort of at work in my job. Mostly I had a really mindless day job sort of like Cautious has where I was just filing stuff all day and really not using my brain at all. And I would go home and I would handwrite pages and then type them up over my lunch break at work.

And I was using my own laptop, but I think the same kind of idea applies is that you’re kind of doing it on company time and the question of could they control or own that work. I think you’re possibly asking for trouble using the company computer. That’s the only thing that gives me sort of pause. I think the fact that you’re still doing your job but you’re also writing at the same time, if your supervisors don’t care it’s going to be fine.

The fact that you’re using their stuff could be the problem. Even just using a browser or saving it online might be a problem. So my instinct would be to either get yourself a cheap laptop you can work on while you’re there. Write on it using your iPhone, your iPad. Write by hand and then type it up when you get home. But I think you could be asking for some trouble just because anything that’s edited in that computer kind of feels like it is their stuff.

Megana, you used to work at Google. What was the policies when you were at Google? If you were using the company’s computer to do stuff did they own it?

Megana: Yeah. I remember this came up during orientation. So my first day they have this policy that whatever you work on Google technically owns if it’s at the office or on company computer. And I remember being so confused. And I was like, well, what if I wrote a poem. Because if I wrote like an application, sure, that makes sense to me. But why would you guys want to own a poem that I wrote?

And the person who was leading our orientation, I think they brought someone from legal counsel was like technically we would own anything like that, and so I never wrote at the office or on my company computer there because I also saw that episode of Silicon Valley and was scared.

John: Yeah. It’s probably not going to be a problem, but this last paragraph you asked I’d only write scripts there because the production company would back you up. That’s not a guarantee. Like you hope the production is going to back you up. And, again, it’s probably not going to be a problem, but it’s like getting vaccinated before going on a trip or something. It’s probably not going to happen to you, but it’s better to ease your mind and not run into those problems. So if you can find a way to not write on their stuff that’s going to be a better choice.

Megana: And something, I don’t know if this is tricky advice, but I would just research a lot while I was at work, or I would do a lot of reading. Because they couldn’t possibly own that, right?

John: No, they can’t own your research. That’s another great point. If you are researching stuff for your project that’s great. And realistically what Cautious is describing, where maybe you’re typing into Google Docs documents, it’s completely on the cloud and no one is ever going to see it. It’s unlikely to be a problem, but still why take the chance.

Megana: Mm-hmm.

John: Cool. Well that’s a good question. We’re a pretty full episode so we’ll save the rest of these questions for next week when Craig is back. But thank you for helping us out with that. Maybe you can help us out with One Cool Things. So this is the part of the show where we recommend something. I’m going to recommend a really great episode of Slate’s Working podcast where they talked to this dialect coach named Samara Bay. Really smart and great.

So she’s the dialect coach who works with actors before they’re starting a role. So they are about to go in to shoot something, a British actor who has to play American, or an American actor who has to play an Irish accent. And she’s really smart about talking through the process and really thinking about there’s not just one accent you’re going for. You’re trying to get into the space where you can inhabit that character and then while you’re in that character have all the vocal ranges and expressions that you need for it.

She compares it a lot to how a costume designer works. You are trying to really suit the voice/costume of that character and make sure it really works for that actor and works for that piece and that period. So, she was just so smart and such a great way of looking at something that’s so challenging.

Because we think about dialogue being just the words we write and sort of these are the words in the right order. But it depends so much on how they’re delivered and how much that voice fits nicely. So, if you’re someone who writes dialogue, which is probably most of the people listening to this podcast, I would definitely check out this episode of the Slate Working podcast with Samara Bay.

Megana: Cool.

John: Now what do you have for us?

Megana: Well, I feel bad because I also was going to recommend a podcast episode.

John: You can do that.

Megana: I can? OK. I also feel like I’m cheating on Scriptnotes. I feel guilty.

John: But Craig is not here and also Craig rarely has one, or fills it in at the last minute.

Megana: So I have this podcast that I really love, in addition to this one. It’s called You’re Wrong About. And it’s a podcast hosted by these two journalists and each week they examine a historical event or a person in pop culture who was misunderstood or miscast in the popular imagination. And then they recontextualize the story with research and information that we have decades later.

And because they’re journalists they’re really good at parsing out what was the media narrative and why was it that way. And then following how the information gets weaponized. So I feel like for our listeners who like the How Would This Be a Movie segment, this is the perfect sort of supplemental listening.

And it’s also really fun. The female host, I picture her as the adult Daria. She’s very sardonic and her voice sounds just like Daria. And my personal favorite episode of this is they have one on the Exxon Valdez oil spill which does not sound sexy or fun, but it is so fascinating. And that’s one I’ll link to in the show notes.

John: So my recollection of the Exxon Valdez is that we did cast a villain. The captain of the Exxon Valdez was sort of penalized for his role in it, but my guess is that’s probably not actually accurate. Correct?

Megana: Correct. And like he actually had alerted Exxon to – like he might have made some errors, but like the way that the system and the company was treating regulations had already degraded so much to that point. And he had already alerted the company to say hey the way we’re running these ships is really unsafe. And there’s like a lot of twists that have happened in the past 10 years that I think, you know, nobody is going to keep paying attention – or most people do not pay attention to a news story 10 years later. And I think that’s how a lot of corporate malfeasance happens is that they can make really huge gestures and amends immediately and then 10 years later repeal all of that work that they’ve done.

John: Yeah. I remember that happening recently. A lot of stories came out about Y2K and it’s like, oh, Y2K was overhyped and it was a disaster that didn’t happen. And just recently I’ve seen a lot of recontextualizations saying like oh yeah it wasn’t a disaster because people spent five years working their asses off to actually make it not be a problem. So it’s those things, the nonevents that were nonevents because we actually did the thing.

Megana: Yeah.

John: Don’t make it into the news.

Megana: And they have a great episode on the Y2K bug.

John: Great. I will check that out. I will add it to my podcast app. And that is our podcast for today. Scriptnotes is produced, as ever, by Megana Rao. Thank you, Megana.

Megana: Thank you.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is also by Matthew Chilelli. 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 I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and the bonus segments like the one we recorded earlier this afternoon with Dana Fox which is epic and we talk about, god, we talk about everything. We talk about sleeps, and naps–

Megana: Teeth.

John: And teeth. And all sorts of things. So you’ll find out about all the secrets behind how Dana Fox kicks so much ass. So sign up for Scriptnotes.net.

Megana: it is a life-changing segment.

John: Megana Rao has already emailed to get links to all the things Dana talked about, because it could change her life and yours as well. So Scriptnotes Premium, it’s good stuff. Megana, thank you for a fun show.

Megana: Thank you.

[Bonus segment]

John: And we’re back and we’re back here with our initial guest, Dana Fox. And I asked you here because I want to talk about naps. So my daughter takes naps, my husband takes naps, I don’t take naps. But you know who takes really god naps? Dana Fox. Dana Fox, can you talk to me and Megana about naps?

Dana: Thank you so much for knowing that this is really one of my best skills. And thank you for having me on the show to talk about the fact that when you asked me to be on the show to talk about naps, I’m not joking I was literally napping. And I woke up and I saw your email saying can you come and talk about naps. And I was like, yup. And I am refreshed as hell and I can’t wait to do it because I just woke up from a nap.

Yes. So napping controversial. I have a lot of things to say about it. I think one of the things that has sort of unlocked, not to be like all what color is your parachute about it, but one of the things that has kind of unlocked my max productivity in recent years is not trying to be someone I’m not anymore. Just being super exactly who I am. And I’m a napper, John. I think you know this because I worked for you. I was your assistant and I slept basically every day, middle of the day. I would so much rather shovel food in my mouth at my desk while working and then use my lunch break to sleep, which is what I did and you were so nice to me.

You would like walk in and I’d be fast asleep on some couch and you would just quietly walk out and you were just the best boss in the entire world.

But for me it almost makes me have two full days instead of just one day where at four o’clock I’m non-functional. I’ve done a lot of research into sleep, because I’m obsessed with it, and I need a lot of it. I think part of it is burn really sort of brightly and spastically when I am awake. So, just being alive is sort of exhausting for me.

And the research I did on sleep is that you need so much less of it in a nap to feel refreshed than you actually think you do. And I think half the reason that most people don’t nap is because they’re like, oh, I’m going to get groggy, or I’m going to lie down and I’m going to feel all this pressure if I don’t sleep, then what’s going to happen, and then I’m going to lie there freaking out about not sleeping for 45 minutes and that seems like a waste.

So the way that I have sort of combatted that is that I have this app that – I can’t think of the name of it – but I have this app that I call Fat Bastard because he’s like a meditation guy who talks in like a very thick Scottish accent and sounds like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers. And I started listening to it when I was pregger-tits because I was working on a TV show. I was a showrunner and I was super pregger-tits. And I was exhausted all the time. And I was like oh my god I have to sleep during the day or I’m literally going to die.

So I started listening to this sleep app that puts you to sleep for whatever number of minutes you have to sleep you sort of program into it. And it puts you to sleep and then it wakes you—

John: Like a digital tranquilizer dart. It just shoots you in the neck.

Dana: Digital tranquilizer dart. Full on Maui blow dart in the butt cheek. And you can do it pretty much any time of day. And you can have it put you to sleep like good night-night and it never wakes you up, or you can have it wake you up. And the key is for the naps is the wakeup. Because as I’ve discovered through my excessive research it’s about waking up not in a REM cycle.

If you’re in a REM cycle and you try to wake up it’s like coming out of wet concrete. If the app wakes you slowly out of the REM cycle and then wakes you up it’s as if – like so much energy. I wake up and I’m like bam. I bound out of bed. It’s incredible. And for me it’s a total game-changer. Unfortunately because I got addicted to the one where the guy was talking to me about being pregnant every time I take a nap he’s like, “Feel your baby in your belly.” And I’m like, mm, all right.

But by that point I’m already asleep so it doesn’t matter. It’s like the Scriptnotes thing. It goes ding, ding, ding and I hear that and I’m asleep.

John: That’s amazing.

Dana: I’ve listened to it so many times. It’s become totally Pavlovian.

John: Yeah, Pavlovian. So, you nap every day, is that correct?

Dana: I try to. But I would say I nap three weekday and both weekend days.

John: And what time do you go to bed? How much sleep do you get overnight?

Dana: Oh my god, John, this is where it’s going to get super weird where all of your wonderful listeners are going to be like she has a medical problem. She should go to the hospital immediately.

I get in bed at no later than 9:30 every night. And I read my book. Right now I’m reading about Ada Lovelace. It’s fascinating. I read on Kindle, which is a whole other conversation that will lead back to an aggressive John August compliment if you will allow me to.

John: All right.

Dana: Which is that I discovered on Kindle that I am dyslexic. I did not know I was dyslexic until I was reading my Kindle one night and I was like why do books make me so tired, why is reading so hard for me? How come reading has always been hard for me? And I was on Kindle and I pressed this button for the font that says Open Dyslexic and I was like I’ll just check out what this looks like. And it was literally like a superhero movie. I was like pow. And there was a light flash and everything was crazy.

And I looked at the book and I was like oh my god I just read 42 books. So I went from being a person who reads like maybe three books a year to I read a book a week now. I’m just a voracious reader and it’s all because of this font. And my sweet, sweet John August who has his incredible app, which is called Weekend Read, sent me an email saying that he put Open Dyslexic onto it so that I could have it. Because you’re nice to me and you like when I have nice things.

John: I do like when you have nice new things. So, the new Weekend Read has Open Dyslexic on it as a font choice.

Dana: Which was amazing. So anyway, back to the sleep thing. I go to bed at 9:30 but I read for about a half an hour to an hour maybe, ish. Sometimes I read for like seven seconds and then fall asleep, but mostly I’m asleep by 10:30 and I wake up at 7.

John: Wow. So you get a lot of sleep.

Dana: I like a lot of sleep. Yeah, it’s weird how much sleep I get.

John: Ricky Gervais apparently also needs 12 hours of sleep. Some people just need it.

Dana: Who does that?

John: And you get a lot done during the day. Ricky Gervais.

Dana: Oh, wonderful. I love that story. And I get a lot done all day. I mean, I don’t want to call it like mania, but I would say when I’m working I am an assassin. What’s next, OK. We’re doing this. I stand at a standing desk. I never sit down. I do yoga for 45 minutes every day Monday through Friday now which has like saved me during the pandemic so I didn’t murder my whole family.

And then when my whole family turns up dead you’re going to have to call the police because you’re going to have this on the thing. I’m totally not murdering my family. I love my family. They’re the greatest. But the pandemic was very stressful for all families, I’m sure. And I started doing yoga which completely saved me. But because it’s so hard it’s also another reason why I have to nap.

Oh, and John, can I tell you the other really embarrassing thing?

John: I want to hear it.

Dana: The first time I was on Scriptnotes I talked about breast pumps, so this is definitely not as embarrassing as that, which I’m so glad you made not embarrassing, because it shouldn’t be.

John: But we also tried to normalize breastfeeding. You know, screenwriters who breastfeed on the podcast. So Rachel Bloom breastfed while she was on the podcast. It’s fine.

Dana: It’s so sweet. I love it so much. It’s the best. These attitude-changing things actually super-duper matter, so I thank you for that.

But, no, this is sort of an embarrassing admission which is because of the yoga my back was hurting one day, so I started sleeping with a heating pad for my back. And now I don’t think I can give up the heating pad. It’s amazing.

John: I want to talk about all the things I now use to sleep and they’re all great, but I do worry if I were ever to be in an emergency situation and didn’t have all my things to sleep I just could never sleep again.

So, here is the things I need to sleep.

Dana: Tell me your stuff.

John: First off, I need the pillow between my knees.

Dana: Classic.

John: Because if my knees are touching each other, not doable. I need the white noise machine which has been a previously One Cool Thing.

Dana: Of course.

John: I’ve got to have the white noise machine.

Dana: Do you do the Rohm? May I ask are in the ‘70s style Rohm? Because that’s the best one I think.

John: Yeah. So the one I like so much is the one from the Wirecutter and it looks like a black little octagon or hexagon.

Dana: Oh, no, I don’t have that one.

John: Oh, I think the one you’re talking about, the one that’s sort of like a dimpled bell. Is that the one you’re thinking about?

Dana: You spin it and you can create hallow-ness based on how much air is coming out of it. It’s pretty dope. You would like it.

John: I know what you’re talking about. Yes. No, this one is digital, but it’s not looping, so it’s generating those noises. That’s important.

Dana: Oh nice.

John: But I started to need a Breathe Right strip, a nose strip, to keep my nose open.

Dana: Sure.

John: And at Scriptnotes producer Megana Rao’s suggestion I tried this mouth taping thing, where you tape your lips together so you can’t breathe through your mouth.

Dana: Oh my gosh. My father-in-law talks a lot about that. Does it work?

John: It works so well. Megana, are you still doing that?

Megana: I’m still doing it. And it really helps with my allergies because I think during allergy season I get stuffed up, so I breathe through my mouth so much more. And this kind of helps me I think regulate that. I don’t know exactly how the science works. But I wake up feeling better.

John: I wake up feeling so much better. So that plus my eye shade. So I need all of these things. And my melatonin. So I need all of this stuff and I sleep so well. But I need all of this stuff.

Dana: First of all, I support you and love you. And I know you enough to know that you’re not packing for anywhere without all that stuff. So I’m not worried you’re going to not have it. I can’t even imagine a scenario where you end up without it.

John: A mouth guard. Oh my god.

Dana: I was literally just going to say mouth guard. So I got a mouth guard and let me tell you guys, first of all, super sexy. My husband is like, yeah, this is great. But second of all I have a mouth guard that completely changed my life. Because I don’t know if any of your wonderful listeners have jaw clenching, but I was clenching my jaw because of stress. And I got this mouth guard that is different from all other mouth guards. It’s like the Passover, why is this different from every other night of mouth guards. And basically what it does that’s different. OK, this is what I learned. This is crazy.

Number one, the guy was like – I went to a specific dentist for grinding of your jaw. And he’s like do you drink sparkling water. I was like I’m a writer in Hollywood. I exclusively drink sparkling water. There is no other kind of liquid that goes in my body that isn’t a different flavor of La Croix. Like of course I drink, or La Croix, or however you’re supposed to say it. I call it the French La Croix because I’m fancy.

John: Yup.

Dana: So he was like, oh, you have to immediately cut that out because apparently sparkling water decreases something about your calcium and is like the enemy of jaw clenching. I was like that’s crazy. So I cut it out immediately and it was definitely helpful.

Then he was like I’m going to build you this mouth guard because 90% – he goes you know how everybody is probably telling you you’re too stressed out and you need to exercise more and you need this, and diet, and blah-blah-blah. And I said yes everybody is telling me that. And he said, well, it’s 10% of jaw grinding is that. 90% is tooth misalignment. And he’s like back in the day when you didn’t have dentists and you were like cavemen if something bad happened to your teeth your teeth would fix themselves. So you would lose a tooth and the other teeth would kind of like slide in to take care of it.

So really when your teeth get misaligned and don’t touch when you close your mouth your nighttime self is trying to fix your teeth for you. So all night long it’s going like let me fix it, let me fix it, let me fix it. So you’re grinding to try to fix the alignment of your teeth.

So the mouth guard I got, all it does is create a fake little tooth connection in the three places where my teeth aren’t touching. Boom. Literally night one the grinding stopped. I was about to have surgery for my jaw grinding because it was so crazy. It was so bad and like night one it was over, fixed.

Megana: I’m sorry. I am going through the same thing and I just had a dentist tell me that I’m going to need adult braces to fix it. And so this is…

Dana: But let’s talk later and I can tell you my guy. Because you’ve got to drive to Calabasas. Thoughts and prayers. But still he was amazing and he solved me because he said most people will tell you to get adult braces. And he said you can do that, but if you can solve it with a $400 mouth guard wouldn’t you rather do that? And I was like, yes, I would rather do that. And so, boom, solved.

Oh my god, we’ve got to sidebar after this.

Megana: Yeah. Well something else amazing I learned is that if you are jaw clenching it’s harder for you to get to REM sleep because–

Dana: 100%.

Megana: Your body is still moving and whatever muscles.

Dana: And do you know why? Thank you. Oh my god. By the way, thank you. I’ve never felt more understood by somebody. Do you know why?

Megana: No, please tell me.

Dana: Thank you so much for asking. The only time your jaw doesn’t do that kind of thing from when it’s trying to fix your teeth is in REM sleep. So it is literally trying to prevent you from going into this state that will make it so it can’t fix your teeth for you.

John: I mean, Dana Fox.

Dana: I mean, I’m not saying I’m an actual doctor.

John: Usually you come on this podcast to solve screenwriting issues, but here you are changing people’s lives, like people who have no interest in writing at all, but have teeth. People who sleep.

Dana: I have some other good advice, too. Some other things that have been really changing my life include color. Have I talked to you about color, John?

John: I love color. We did a whole episode on colors. But what are you doing with color these days?

Dana: Thank you so much. Well I have two different versions of it. Number one, when I’m writing a script I will put obviously like the storyline between this lady and that guy will be one color. Or the character will be one color. So I love to see color in a script because it ignites these different serotonin explosions in my brain. That makes me super happy.

Recently I had to pitch out an entire season of something and I was doing it over Zoom, which is sort of a different thing than being in the room, and I was trying to figure out like, OK, what’s my move. I’m like a good pitcher, but how am I going to do this differently on Zoom.

And what I did was I created this huge document which was very long, because it was obviously a whole season. And I was like how am I going to do this without seeming like I’m reading this document. So what I did is I went through and I took each idea and I did it in the consecutive rainbow colors. So red was the first idea. Orange was the next idea. A darker yellow so I could actually read it was the third. And then the fourth idea was a green. And the next idea was in blue.

And then every time I started a new episode I went back to red. So, I could like glance over with one eyeball and be like I know exactly where I am in this pitch, because I’m on the third thing I was going to say about this episode and now I’m like, OK, now there’s the next one and the next one. And I’m like, oh right, now I’m on the next episode because there’s red again.

John: I love it.

Dana: A delight.

John: Color. Color is good.

Dana: Color.

John: Dana Fox, thank you so much for solving all of our pitching problems, our sleep problems, our jaw problems. You are just the best. I cannot wait to have you back in Los Angeles.

Dana: Is it weird if I want 23 hours of my day to be on Scriptnotes and one hour of my day to be just my regular life? Is that weird?

John: That’s fine. That’s fine. That’s most people. Maybe get the premium episodes, get the premium feed. Get all those back episodes.

Dana: Just binge it. Just crack out on it.

John: I think your husband already has the premium feed, so he can share his URL.

Dana: Oh my god. I don’t believe that. I’d pay for it twice. I support artists. What are you talking about?

John: Thank you.

Links:

• Watch Cruella on Disney+
• Home Before Dark Season 2 on Apple TV June 11th
• WandaVision on Disney+
• Some Kind of Heaven on Hulu
• Didja see in Deadline about Timothée Chalamet To Play Willy Wonka In New Origin Tale, Kevin Spacey Will Return To Film In Franco Nero’s ‘The Man Who Drew God’, ‘F9’ Star John Cena Apologizes — In Mandarin — To China Over Calling Taiwan A Country, Amazon Confirms It’s Buying MGM For $8.45 Billion, Army of the Dead, Tig Notaro shot all her scenes alone.
• Dana Fox on Twitter
• Jac Schaeffer
• Lance Oppenheim on the web
• Slate’s Working podcast dialect coach Samara Bay
• You’re Wrong About Podcast – Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
• Dana’s nap app Positive Pregnancy with Andrew Johnson
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can now be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 504 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show how long should it take you to write a script and how can writers best estimate that work? We’ll try to give you an answer. We’ll also look at new guidance for writers working on features at Netflix and Amazon and follow up on child prodigies, movie theaters, and free will.

And in our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, let’s talk about UFOs.

Craig: All right. You asked for it.

John: Let’s do it. Let’s talk about UFOs. Because I know you are a strong believer in extraterrestrial life visiting earth. And I want to hear your detailed views and I’ll try to bat those wild theories away.

Craig: That is not how it’s going to go.

John: But let’s start with a little amuse bouche. A conundrum that came up on our weekly call this week. What is the statute of limitations on spoiler warnings for movies? Craig, when is it fair to say like, OK, now you should have seen that movie so we can talk about The Sixth Sense, or Fight Club?

Craig: Sure. Well it was a little easier back in the day when there was a somewhat conventional release pattern. A movie would go into theaters. You would see it there. And then it would leave theaters and it would show up on DVD or cable or something. And my general feeling was if you didn’t see it in the theater and it was finished with its run then, you know, sorry.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s the way it is. There will be spoiler issues. You know, now where movies come out the same day, I don’t know. A month? I don’t know. I don’t know.

John: Yeah. I think that there’s sort of two classes of problems. So there’s the movies that are more like TV shows because they’re coming out in different things, people can see them kind of whenever they see them. So for new movies those sort of TV rules apply. When you can talk about Mare of Easttown? I don’t know. I haven’t seen the show and I’m trying to avoid the spoilers, but I also recognize that people need to have that conversation. So there’s that.

But look back to like older movies, like The Sixth Sense, or Fight Club, or Citizen Kane, I just want to argue for there’s no such thing as a spoiler because you should have seen this movie.

Craig: There is no spoiler warning on old movies. And I must admit that I don’t necessarily think revealing the twists or endings of things in fact spoils anything.

John: No.

Craig: Because that’s really not where I get my enjoyment from. I’m a weirdo I guess in that regard. I know how Fight Club ends. I love watching Fight Club. I’ll watch it again. It’s a great movie. It doesn’t matter to me that I know how it ends.

John: I will say it’s sometimes fun to watch a movie with a person who doesn’t know what’s going to happen, so you can see like, ah, ah, did you figure out what was actually happening there. So the Shyamalan movies might be a good example of that. So like my daughter probably has no idea what actually happens in The Village. I don’t know that I need to watch The Village, but I would be curious to watch The Village with her to see if she figures out what’s actually really going on in The Village.

Craig: Yeah. So to that extent it is amusing to watch other people getting fooled.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And, sure. But I feel like the panic over spoilers is – I just think it’s overblown. I mean, you know, anybody that is adapting anything, the spoiler exists. So people would worry about spoilers for Game of Thrones, but the books were there. So, you know, anybody who had read the books knew that at least in the book Ned Stark dies. And in the book there’s a Red Wedding. And a bunch of people get killed at a wedding. So what? That’s not – we’re not watching things for information and data.

John: Yeah. We’re watching them to enjoy them.

Craig: Yes. And I’m so much more interested in watching the people on screen react to what they didn’t know. That’s what’s fascinating. Not that I didn’t know it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So that’s my weird thing about spoilers. I’m not so wound up about them.

John: All right. Well we’ll have no spoilers for A Quiet Place 2, but that movie came out over Memorial Day Weekend and did so much better than people thought it could do. It made $57 million in theaters which is great. So, hooray for them. Cruella also came out and did $26.5 million. And it had its day-and-date release on Disney+ for $30 for subscribers. So, it looks like people want to see movies, which is great news.

Craig: It is. That $57 million is eye-popping, because that would have been a good weekend really at any point.

John: It’s not $100 million, but it’s still just terrific.

Craig: Sure. It’s terrific for a movie that I’m sure didn’t cost a massive amount. I think maybe helped a little bit by the fact that there’s not much else in theaters, so they occupy a ton of screens. If you wanted to see a wide release movie and you didn’t want to see a Disney film then I guess you were going to A Quiet Place. And if you did want to see a Disney film you had the day-and-date to kind of choose from.

What’s interesting financially to – and I don’t know the answer to this – is who makes more money here. So Cruella makes $26.5 million at the box office and then $30 a pop on Disney+. That’s a lot.

John: Yeah. So on Cruella, all five credited writers are previous Scriptnotes guests. And I was talking with one of the them, or texting with one of them. And that $29 for the Disney+ subscribers, the chunk you get from that is actually really good money. So, weirdly our five prior guests who worked on that movie will get more off of that than they would have off of the theatrical box office.

Craig: Well they would get nothing off the theatrical box office.

John: Nothing. You get nothing.

Craig: Correct. I mean, unless you have box office bonuses. But those have pretty much gone bye-bye over time. And, yeah, Internet sales, you know, we have a good rate. It’s basically five times the rate of the DVDs, or close.

John: Premium video-on-demand.

Craig: Yeah. So it’s – well, actually, no it’s not five times. It’s much better. The point is it’s better. It is five times. They will make good money off of that as long as the studios are fair about it and don’t attempt to argue that this primary exhibition, because they can. They can make that argument and we would make the argument that it’s not.

So interesting to see what happens there financially because we may be living in a time where this continues permanently. That most movies come out day-and-date and you have a choice. And I don’t know. I cannot predict.

John: So we also had some other big deals in the news this week. Coming off the success of this box office, it’s nice to see the Alamo Drafthouse is out of bankruptcy. There’s a lot of speculation that AMC might buy out our beloved ArcLight. So it would be lovely to see the ArcLight come back.

Craig: It’s available.

John: Hopefully AMC could run it the way the ArcLight was and not sort of the way AMCs are run. We’ll see. I don’t want ads in front of my movie. That’s really what it comes down to. More than anything else I want no ads.

Craig: Yeah. Look, if the movies are coming back, the theatrical experience is coming back, then it stands to reason that ArcLight would be profitable as it used to be. I think maybe the problem with ArcLight was they just didn’t have the financial cushion to weather the storm of this lengthy shutdown. I don’t know. But I agree with you, if AMC buys ArcLight what would be the point of buying it if you don’t let it be it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Which is I guess something that AT&T should have considered when they bought Warner Bros and HBO.

John: Yeah. I’m not even mentioning the Warner Bros/Discovery merger which has the absolute worst logo. Not since like the initial DreamWorks logo which was–

Craig: The boy on the moon?

John: The boy on the moon is fantastic. But the DreamWorks SKG, some of their initial logo-ing around that was not fantastic.

Craig: Oh, looked like it was made on like an [Amiga] against like a blue sky or something?

John: That’s what it was. The logo-ing for Warner Bros/Discovery, which I don’t understand why you’re keeping the Bros in there. It should just be Warner-Discovery makes more sense. But it looks like it was done in Word Art.

Craig: Oh good lord. Look at that.

John: Describe it for our listeners. Describe what this logo looks like.

Craig: I’m going to get in trouble as I’m an employee of this corporation. But that’s just silly.

John: I’m an employee as well.

Craig: So it is also against a weird dim blue sky with blue clouds. I don’t know why the clouds are so blue. Anyway, and then it says Warner Bros., Discovery. Discovery is underneath it. The letters are three-dimensional, sort of coming out, and they’re this fairly gaudy gold color. They have this bad reflectivity that again feels very kind of [Amiga] circa 1991.

And then underneath is a 2D line that says, “The stuff that dreams are made of.”

John: With no punctuation. The “of” is just dangling there at the end.

Craig: Dangling. I don’t like it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Don’t like that.

John: So I don’t like the main Warner Bros/Discovery logo, but I especially don’t like it against that blue sky. And then the thing underneath it just looks like they stuck it in. They were in Keynote and they were like, oh, we have to find a tag line. Quick, type a tag line.

Craig: I don’t think that’s going to last. I’ve got to be honest with you.

John: I don’t think it’s going to last. I don’t think we need to worry about it.

Craig: I don’t think it’s going to last at all. I’m just looking at the Internet, because I guess the Internet was going bananas about this. I had no idea this was going on. Someone said that it looked like something that was made in Microsoft Word’s Word Art Utility. Yeesh.

John: It does.

Craig: That’s not going to last. There’s absolutely no way.

John: We don’t need to worry about that.

Craig: No, that will not last.

John: But a deal that will last is CAA sold a big chunk of Wiip. So it sold the majority stake in the production company Wiip to a South Korean studio which is great. Good for them. And this is all coming out of the WGA deal with the agencies, basically forcing the agencies to divest themselves of their production entities. And I really wondered who was going to buy Wiip or who would buy Endeavor Content, and I should have been thinking of like, of course, there’s a lot of international money that would love to have some domestic production and they’ve got money. I think those are going to be the buyers for these places.

Craig: Yeah. It’s hard to say what will happen with the larger ones. Wiip was not a big version of this. And like I had said many times in all my years as a client at CAA no one had ever even mentioned Wiip to me. I didn’t even know it was a thing. I didn’t know it existed. So they weren’t pushing it too hard back in the day.

So I don’t know how much Wiip was worth and I don’t know what the sale entailed, but I have a feeling, I could be wrong, but that maybe CAA sort of looked at this part of the settlement with the WGA as possibly a gift. Because I think what happened was WME got into this business in a massive way and everybody else sort of felt like they needed to. But didn’t necessarily commit. Yeah, I’m happy that the people that were employed by that studio, by Wiip, because there’s two Is in it, Wiip, will continue. Hopefully to be employed and they’ll continue to compensate people fairly and all the rest of that.

John: Yeah. And so Wiip I hadn’t realized made Mare of Easttown, so the second Mare of Easttown reference in this episode.

Craig: Well it worked on them. I don’t know if they made them. That’s the thing. Like I never know what these companies actually do.

John: Yeah. You never know. Did they throw in some money, or were they the studio behind it?

Craig: Were they there sort of at the beginning, kind of. I don’t know. I’m still – I don’t even know what Wiip stands for.

John: I don’t either.

Craig: Wiip. There’s two Is.

John: Too many.

Craig: One too many Is.

John: All right. Let’s do some more follow up. So two episodes back we wondered why aren’t there any child screenwriting prodigies, because obviously we have prodigies in chess and athletics and other things.

Craig: Yes.

John: We had several people write in with some good suggestions. Do you want to start with Victoria here?

Craig: Sure. So Victoria De Capua tweets, “In my opinion screenwriting successfully, let alone brilliantly, requires a tremendous amount of emotional literacy. It requires an extremely proactive curiosity about the emotional narrative of others and I think for younger people they’re still really figuring themselves out.

“I went to film school at 18 which was great, because it gave me the energy to do production in a way I really can’t in my mid-30s. But I also did not end up becoming a successful director the way I’d planned. It turns out no one wants to be directed by an 18-year-old.”

John: I think Victoria is making a really good point. It’s that if you’re writing movies you’re probably not writing people who are just your own age, you’re writing a whole range of people, and you have to have sort of theories of mind in terms of like why characters are doing what they’re doing and sort of how stuff works. And that just takes some time to develop and mature.

So whereas there are so many Taylor Swifts in the world and Billie Eilishes who are writing the brilliant and insightful songs, it’s a shorter thing where you’re not writing multiple characters interacting. It’s really sort of a singular voice and it’s a singular point of view. The ability to hold multiple points of view simultaneously may just be something that develops later on.

Craig: Yes. And songwriting occupies a much shorter space. So, you can make a single point and if you make your single point beautifully you’ve got yourself a good song, putting aside the musical aspect of it as well. You want obviously a good melody. But a screenplay needs to make a whole lot of points, every single scene, over and over and over. And all the scenes need to connect. And they need to reflect back on each other. It’s more complicated. It’s definitely more complicated.

John: That ties in well with what Gus writes here. Gus says, “Prodigy conducive mediums like math, music, and fine arts merely require immense talent and intuition, whereas narrative storytelling also necessitates a healthy dose of knowledge, as in knowledge gained from years of observing and consuming comparable material. A four-year-old might dictate a few brilliant lines of blank verse, for example, but would likely stumble over long form rule and structure heavy formats like sonnets.

“All that being said, feature filmmaking also has gatekeeping factors present in virtually no other medium. If a child or teenager writes an amazing screenplay that somehow makes it in to meaningful hands the response will almost certainly be, ‘You’re very talented. Keep at it. Or let me put you in touch with some reps I know,’ as opposed to, ‘We must spend millions of dollars turning this into a movie immediately,’ because that risk adverse exec would then look like a crazy person.”

Gus goes on to write that he sort of was that teenager who wrote that thing and couldn’t get any traction. But just a few years later a similar project when he was in his early 20s he could get set up and that’s how he got started as a writer. So I think he makes a good point. Your ability to write improves, but also your ability to be perceived as a writer and to do all the social aspects of screenwriting comes with age as well.

Craig: Yeah. And it does occur to me that one thing we haven’t talked about is that screenwriting is an art form that is designed for adaptation. And that in and of itself implies a certain amount of complexity. Chess is chess. Music is music. A song is a song and a painting is a painting. So a prodigy is doing the thing that is supposed to be done, and viewed, and seen.

A screenwriter is not. A screenwriter is actually imagining something and putting it in an entirely different format from what it ultimately must become. That is complicated and that may have something to do with it as well.

John: There are some examples of like fantasy novelists who got started in their teens, but even then, yes, you’re writing a very long piece of work, but you’re writing the final thing.

Craig: Right.

John: So what you’re writing doesn’t have to go through another stage in order to become the finished art form.

Craig: Precisely.

John: Peter wrote in and this is something I should have been thinking about when we first discussed it, reminding us of the tale of Riley Weston. Do you remember Riley Weston?

Craig: I do.

John: So she was a writer who was employed on Felicity, I believe. She was 18 years old and it was a big story that like, oh, this 18-year-old who is writing on Felicity which is great because she has such insight as being part of that generation. And then in fact she was not 18 years old. She was 32. And she was passing herself off as 18.

Craig: Yeah. Which then became sort of the premise of Sutton Foster’s television show Younger. I mean, they weren’t basing it on this story, but that is, you know, the idea that in a business where people are perhaps discriminated against on the basis of age, passing for younger could be valuable. But there was not an 18-year-old. And even then in that case the alleged 18-year-old was working on a staff with other writers and not solo writing a movie for instance.

John: Yeah. So like Catherine Hardwicke is 13. She was collaborating with a teenager on that. But it was collaboration.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So someone with the experience of actually making the thing could use the voice of the person who actually knew that stuff. I was also thinking back to Lena Dunham. So I first met Lena right after she did Tiny Furniture, and she was young, but I had to actually Google to figure out how old would she have been, and she was 24. So 24 years old to make a feature as good as Tiny Furniture is remarkable, but that’s not the same as being a child prodigy. And her early work, the short film she did, built up to that. But she was doing the work and learning as she was making short films which are sort of that finished product. They are the poems and songs of filmmaking. She was doing that work before she got up to her first real feature which was Tiny Furniture.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t know how this happened but somewhere along the line in our country we forgot that people who are twenty-somethings are adults. We think of them still as children. But, yeah, I mean, that’s when I sold my first thing was at 24. It was not quite as good as Tiny Furniture, but certainly I could write a movie.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But I wouldn’t have been able to do it at 17. Or even at 21. That was probably about as soon as I could do it.

John: Yeah. Now that same episode we talked about free will and determinism and how it’s OK to not be a screenwriter.

Craig: Right.

John: We had a couple people write in about that including folks who had stopped the ambition to be a screenwriter. Do you want to take Sam’s question here?

Craig: Sure. Sam says, “I’m in my mid-40s and I really wanted to do screenwriting.” I like by the way, just as an aside, I like “doing screenwriting.” I like that idea. Do it.

“And I really wanted to do screenwriting. I’ve always been full of imagination and this seemed like a way to get that on paper and share it. However I’m a senior project manager, which I enjoy doing, at Microsoft with a pretty good salary and it dawned on me that trying to switch seems like maybe a stupid move. So I decided to keep it at the hobby level and make my own movie which has been great because I’ve been learning about other aspects of filmmaking. In looking back at the whole journey I realized I was more in love with the idea of screenwriting than doing the same thing day in/day out to write screenplays. I also realized there’s a difference between screenwriting, writing screenplays, and being a screenwriter, writing Hollywood screenplays.

“All that to say if you’re just looking for a way out of your current work, be careful. It’s much better to run towards something than to run away from something. Make sure you’re in love with writing and not in love with what you think writing will be like. If you’ve never done it before and you haven’t done writing as part of who you are it might not be for you.”

John: Yeah. That point about running towards versus running away is so important to keep in mind for career stuff, but relationships, and so many things in your life. Why are you making this choice? Are you making this choice because you really want that thing that’s there, or because you don’t want the thing that you have and you’re looking for any other option that’s out there?

Craig: Same thing applies even inside of the writing of screenplays. We’ve often said that you don’t want to write away from a problem. You want to write towards something you like. And Sam is pointing out that there’s a romantic view of what screenwriting is, of what a screenwriter does. We’ve seen depictions of screenwriters that even in their portrayal of the clichéd misery seem kind of weirdly attractive and romantic. None of that is correct.

John: Oh yeah. The Barton Finks. All the sort of hacks with Underwoods. Oh, I want to be part of that downtrodden class of scribes.

Craig: Correct. And they’re always smarter than everybody else and more insightful than everybody else. And they’re overlooked until they’re not. And they are underappreciated until they’re not. And none of it is correct. It’s just like everything else. You’ve got to wake up and then just work. And it’s not – it is rare that you have these moments of high drama like any of that stuff.

The grind is the deal.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s the job is the grind.

John: Kara writes that she’s not a screenwriter and that’s OK. She says, “I was an unhappy lawyer and I finally paid off my loans and quit my job to explore other options right before the pandemic. Many of my plans were canceled, but I decided to take a screenwriting class. I know how you feel about those, but it’s where I learned about your podcast, and I’m glad I took it anyway.”

Craig: So now people are paying to hear about our podcast. [laughs] I’m angry.

John: You know how you find out about Scriptnotes? You have to take a class.

Craig: Ugh, so angry.

John: In order to listen to the podcast you have to take a class first. Kara says she wrote a complete screenplay using Highland2, of course. And felt like “my creative side, so long buried beneath soul-sucking contracts was reawakened. While I loved writing and still have potential projects floating around in my mind I don’t think it’s the right career path for me and like you said that’s OK. I’m now an urban gardener and trying to start our flower forming business in New York City. I still listen to your podcast every week while growing flowers on a rooftop out in Staten Island and in a parking lot in Brooklyn. Thank you for all you do and for embracing listeners like me.”

Craig: Hey, Kara, Staten Island! All right. I was born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island, so in many ways I’m like one of your flowers. And I think that’s great. And that’s another example of somebody that maybe was running away from something that she didn’t want to do, like dealing with contract law, and you know what? No big deal. There’s nothing wrong with taking a swing at something. And if you figure out really early that it’s not for you then you cut bait real fast and hopefully she has a little bit more passion for the flower farming business.

John: Well let’s look at what Kara did and did not do. What Kara did is she took a class and she wrote a script and she sort of saw like do I like this or do I not like this. She didn’t quit her job, move to Los Angeles to say I’m going to become a screenwriter without having written a screenplay. I would just urge everyone before making big changes to say like, hey, do I actually enjoy doing this work. Because you can then sort of – again, aspire to a thing rather than just be like I want to get out of the rut that I’m in.

Craig: Yeah. It also seems like Kara did not load this decision with a lot of emotional weight. If I fail than I am no good. I must be…I am called by the universe…you know, these things are setting you up for real trouble. Because any time you’re called by the universe to do something that very few people do the odds are that you’re not going to get there. So, just be realistic.

John: Let’s think about a hypothetical listener out there who might be listening and saying, “You know what? I’m not sure I want to keep being a screenwriter or doing the screenwriter job.” Like they may be here in Los Angeles but they’re not having a lot of success. Trying to think what good advice we’d offer him or her listening to this show right now.

I might start with the same thing that we learned from Kara is that really look at what are some other things that might be attractive to you. Rather than sort of I’m going to run away from screenwriting, or feel like I’m going to give up on screenwriting, say like what is there that is out there that might be really interesting for me to do that I could go and pursue and not be so worried about like I’m giving up screenwriting.

Craig: Yeah, step number one is to put screenwriting in its appropriate position which is a thing that some people do. But it is not the be all end all. And it is not a glorious life. It’s something that if you do it you do it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And if you had a dream of it and it didn’t work out, dream a new dream. Because if you can find something that you both enjoy and other people demand from you then you are fulfilled. You need both of them. And it’s not enough for you to love it, but for no one to want it.

I do like cooking, but if I cooked and nobody liked the food then I would maybe just cook for myself and stop dreaming of creating grand meals. It’s the same for this. And there’s no shame in it. There’s no shame.

John: Zero.

Craig: By the way, even for us, I mean, look, some people like things, some people don’t, you know, of what we do. Nobody is batting a thousand, or even remotely close to that.

John: So Garrett thinks we’re batting far below a thousand. So Garrett has a very long email he sent to us. It would be the whole podcast reading through this email, but Garrett, thank you for sending through this email. He was really focused on our discussion of free will and determinism. And so there is a school of thought that even sort of bringing up free will being an illusion and determinism is sort of culturally self-defeating. It’s bad for the individual to think through.

He writes, “Here’s what determinism does to your listeners emotionally. It grieves, deflates, and discourages. Why am I chasing this dream of becoming a screenwriter when I haven’t had a break up to this point? Maybe I’m not a chosen one after all. It’s just a new breed of Calvinism,” which I thought was actually an interesting point.

He says, “We must all live as if we do have free will.” And I think that was the point we were actually making in the podcast is that we can say that free will is an illusion, but it’s still an illusion that is important to kind of believe in. The same way we believe in consciousness, even though we don’t really understand it. Is that fair, Craig?

Craig: Yeah. I’m a little puzzled by his point. Let’s pause it for a second, Garrett. That determinism is correct. There is no free will. And when he says it grieves, deflates, and discourages, why? Just because you haven’t had it now? When you say I haven’t had a break up to this point, maybe I’m not a chosen one after all, or maybe you are and it’s going to happen tomorrow. It’s not Calvinism. We’re not suggesting – the problem with Calvinism is that Calvinism did look at outcomes and then decide based on the outcome who you were. So if you were poor, it’s very hard to stop being poor, especially in unfair societies.

So Calvinism said, well, you’re poor, you deserve it because you were born bad.

John: Well it’s your fate. It’s your place in life.

Craig: Right.

John: And don’t sort of question it.

Craig: Don’t question it.

John: It even goes back to sort of older times. Yes.

Craig: There’s nothing indicative like that about screenwriting and whether someone has bought a screenplay or not bought a screenplay. That is not the deal at all. We’re not talking about anything like that. There’s actually no valuable information that I get from the fact that I don’t believe in free will because part of my lack of belief in free will is that the illusion of free will is just as determined as everything else.

So no matter what I do I’m still making choices, because I am a determined consciousness that thinks it’s making choices. Just like I think that the sky is blue. But if I were a different animal with different eyeballs it would be a different color. Yeah, it doesn’t mean any of this. You’re reading into it and you should stop. That’s what I think. You should stop.

John: And so I do appreciate long emails, but I agree with you that, yes, I think you can fall into a trap where nothing matters because we’re all on rails and just give up because there’s no point. And I’m actually arguing the opposite of that. Acknowledging that, yes, even if we’re sort of on rails and even if we don’t have the choices that there’s no little monkey inside of us who is actually pulling the levers, who actually has free will. It’s still important that we live that way because also we’re writing characters who must live that way, too.

Craig: We have no choice.

John: It comes back to being the protagonist.

Craig: We have no choice.

John: Be the hero in your own story.

Craig: We don’t have access to the things that determine all of what’s going to happen anyway. So we have no choice. This is how we live. And this is also why I get puzzled when people say, “Well do you believe in any kind of existence after death?” And I say I don’t. And they say, “Well then what’s the point of everything?” And I say there isn’t one. But the fact that there isn’t a point doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy this whole thing tremendously.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I have things that give me joy and pleasure and there are things that are fulfilling and I have experiences and I learn and I engage. And that’s enough for me. I don’t need a purpose or a point in the long run. I don’t. There isn’t one. I think maybe he’s looking for one. I don’t know. But I’m fine with that one.

John: All right. Let’s move on in the spirit of self-advocacy and doing what we can do to look at this last week the WGA put out two articles of particular interest to screenwriters. And I thought these were great. I saw early versions of these and I think they are genuinely useful. The first is the Screen Compensation Guide for Streaming Services which looks at contracts over the last three years from WGA members for features done for Amazon and for Netflix and sort of what common threads we can find in this.

And there’s some really good news here. 90% of these deals were multi-step, so not one-step deals, with two guaranteed steps, up to five guaranteed steps. So if you’re writing for Netflix or Amazon the great precedent is you should get a multi-step deal.

Craig: Yeah. That’s startling and I’m thrilled to see that. And I would direct the attention of the conventional movie studios to this because this is something that I specifically have been beating a drum about for well over a decade. And I got to say, again, hey regular movie studios if you’re wondering partly why these other services are eating your lunch it’s because they actually have a system where things can be developed, instead of your system where they can’t.

John: Yeah. Other good news, Netflix pays more than Amazon on an average, $375,000 versus $300,000 at Amazon. And almost a quarter of these deals begin with a treatment and Netflix is more common to ask for treatments.

So, my Netflix deal didn’t have a treatment on it, but I do see that happening with other writers I talk to where they are turning in – I think Godwin was telling us this. They’re asking for a treatment before the screenplay stage. OK. If that’s what they want. If they pay you for it.

Craig: You know me. I love a treatment. I think that’s actually also terrific. If Netflix can help garner a new farm system, a new bench of new screenwriters who are trained to outline and prepare I think it actually will help – even if those individual writers abandon that practice later on, because they don’t feel they need it anymore, it is a good discipline to learn. I do think there’s great value in it.

John: So the quick explainer on pros and cons of treatments. The good thing about writing a treatment for one of these projects is theoretically you’re all on the same page about what is the movie you’re going to write. And they’re also paying you for this step. So you can resolve some of these story issues before you get into your screenplay. So your first draft of your screenplay should be closer to what they want.

The downside of treatments as an actual step is you could get stuck in treatment for a very long time, and that’s a thing we need to be mindful of and sort of have reps who can push to say, OK, let’s really go to draft. Or producers who can really say like, no, we really need to have him start writing this project.

Craig: Yeah. If they are breaking things out into steps like this then hopefully they are following the basic rules which is we pay you this, you write a treatment. You give the treatment, you have written the treatment. So, a step for a treatment does not mean a step for four treatments. It means a step for a treatment.

And the whole point is that even if there are a bunch of things that people are like, ah, I don’t know about this, you have the discussion, you take the notes. Great. Got it. Done. The job has been done. You have your own new outline that you can use in note cards or whatever for the writing of the draft. But the good news is that they’re giving all these steps.

The numbers are not great, I have to say, for the medians. They’re not awesome. Because if the median for Amazon is $300,000 and most of those are for two steps, you know, that’s down I think from what – that’s a little bit lower than the median at big studios, I would imagine. Although I’m guessing on that.

John: It’s a hard thing to compare apples to apples because there’s so few multi-step deals at studios, at conventional studios.

Craig: Right.

John: So, yes, that’s more math that we can do. But still promising. The second thing that the WGA put out this last week was Screen Deal Tips which actually covers some stuff that we talked about two episodes ago about selling projects, reacquisition, how to get back the – if you’ve done rewrites on a sale how to get that stuff back, which when you and I had that conversation I didn’t realize that there’s actually language in the MBA about reacquisition of originals.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: And reacquisition of the rewrites you’ve done on an original that you sold.

Craig: I mean, yeah, it is extremely hard to pull off. We have talked about reacquisition before. It does happen. But it is very rare. But it exists. So, yeah. Be aware of it.

John: So a couple key points to take through and we’ll put a link in the show notes to this stuff, but we talked on the show before because you cannot be assured that this movie that you’re writing for theatrical is actually going to come out theatrical, try to avoid language that so ties into the assumption of the theatrical release, like box office bonuses.

So, get this in as a deal point and don’t let this drag out to the contract stage because it could be a long time before you get your contract. So in your deal points talk about sort of like what happens if it’s theatrical, what happens if it’s streaming.

Make sure that credits bonuses, if there are credit bonuses, are tied to screenplay by and teleplay by, because there’s a possibility that this movie will be put into a streaming situation where teleplay by becomes a credit rather than screenplay by. So look for that. I know somebody who got tripped up by that.

And if it’s underlying material you don’t control, try to get stuff in your contract that gives you the right to acquire back any material you write. So if it’s based on a book and that book option lapses you have the ability to get the stuff that you’ve written out of that place, if possible.

Craig: And if you have a decent lawyer they are already on top of this. The nice thing is they all talk.

John: Yes.

Craig: So anytime somebody gets speared by an unforeseen consequence, all the lawyers chit-chat together and say red alert.

John: Oh yeah. Don’t let this happen.

Craig: Yeah. So hopefully they’re on it.

John: That sense of like it’s not clear whether this movie is going to theatrical or to streaming, just as recently as a year and a half ago I was in deals with Ken Richmond, my attorney, and was like how do we protect ourselves in this situation. And he’s like it’s all still new territory and we’re still figuring this out. So, it’s important to keep this in mind as a writer, too, that the lawyers are on this but also they’re still figuring out the best ways to handle this.

Craig: All true.

John: Yeah. All right. Here’s a great sort of framework question for us to tackle. Nathan asks, “So I just booked my first professional screenwriting job and it’s with a major studio. I’m grateful and excited but also a bit scared about one important detail. They want the first draft in ten weeks from the official start point of writing. Now I know this isn’t a particularly short professional timeframe, but it’s the shortest I’ve had to execute.

“Putting aside fears of failure, how do I budget time for the writing process with the time I’m given? What self-imposed schedule would you give yourselves with that deadline for a first draft? How much time do I give myself to break the story versus actually scripting it?”

So let’s talk about estimating time overall for a writing project and how to fit writing into a prescribed time, like the ten weeks that Nathan is given.

Craig: Yeah. It is not a short amount of time, Nathan. But it may be a short amount of time for you. Everybody has a different speed. So the question is a little bit of a trap. Some writers are faster than others. It doesn’t mean that the ones that are moving faster are worse than the ones that are moving slower, nor does it mean that the ones that are moving slower are lazier than the ones moving faster. We just sort of have speeds.

But generally speaking your speed needs to roughly be around what they’re looking at there.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: They can tell you they want the first draft in ten weeks. This is where the first job is always tough. Because nobody knows what you’re doing. You can’t say to them, look, the last one I wrote, the one that you loved so much that made $100 million at the box office opening weekend, yeah, that one took 12 weeks. You don’t have the ability to say that.

John: No.

Craig: You want to try and hit that ten weeks number, or earlier. And there are some very simple ways to budget your time.

John: Talk us through how you would budget time, Craig.

Craig: Well, first things first, like you say you want to break the story. Now, some people don’t. Some people just start writing the script, see where it goes. If you’re a break the story kind of person, sounds like you are, then you do want to give yourself a good amount of time to break it. The clearer you are with that and the more you can suss out the potential inefficiency points, those points when you’re writing where you suddenly stop and say I don’t know what to do next, and then say oh my god I realize that the last 20 pages I wrote are wrong, and then solve it, and then realize the last 30 pages are wrong. That all is the stuff that expands your time.

And if you can save yourself some of that time by planning through and fixing the problems, the big problems first early. That’s good. Sometimes you can take three weeks doing that.

John: Now, one thing I should bring up here is that if Nathan has booked this job very likely a lot of the story is actually broken because you probably had to pitch to get this job, if it’s your first professional one.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So you probably do have some of this work done. But it may be expanding that out and looking at sort of like what did you sort of like wavy hands pitch, like OK this is how I’m going to do this thing, because inevitably pitches are sort of skipping over those details. And really fleshing out how you’re going to do this. How you move from A to B to C to D. I would spend maybe a week on that. I wouldn’t spend three weeks on that. But it’s really – you’re going to have to learn what works for you.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, I’ve spent four weeks on that. It depends on the nature of the particular project. But then what you pretty much get to immediately is a very simple math equation. Pages divided by days. It’s as simple as that.

Once you know, OK, I’ve got my rough outline here. I have a sense of how I’m supposed to proceed. You have an amount of days and you have an amount of pages. I personally don’t like to kill myself. I think that the writing suffers. So, you know, start by just imagining a typical five-day-week. So each week – let’s say you’ve spent two weeks breaking a story. Now eight weeks. That’s 40 days. A typical screenplay is 120 pages. Three pages a day my friend. Doesn’t seem that hard anymore, does it?

Now, I will say that three pages a day is the average. Generally speaking, for me, and I think for a lot of people, the first 30 pages you’re not necessarily writing at the same clip that you will later. The end, because it’s inevitable, and because everything has led to it, often does go faster than the beginning where so much is being set up and created. So give yourself a little bit of flexibility and expandability there.

But basically divide the days up and you’ll see like, OK, you know what, and if you hit a day where you just didn’t have it, just OK well tomorrow I need to write five pages.

John: Now, Craig, by your division there Nathan would have finished his last three pages on the day he has to turn it in. So, I would urge that Nathan give himself some buffer for like, OK, and you actually have to make sure your script makes sense and works. Give yourself permission to – if that’s a week, if that’s a few days, whatever it is, some time to actually reflect on the script and see is this actually making sense. Is this script ready to hand in?

Craig: Yes. And, again, this is also part of the function of how you function. So, if Nathan you’re the kind of person that likes to write and move forward inexorably, and John is more like that, then you might need some time at the end to go back and review and tighten up some screws here and there, fix some thingies.

I do the opposite. I kind of go back over everything. That’s the first thing I do in the day is go back over what I did yesterday and rewrite what I did yesterday. If you’re doing that, well then odds are by the time you get to the end you’ve pretty much tightened all the screws up. So you might not need as much time to go through that polishing process. It just depends on how you function.

John: And there are also writers who are very much vomit drafts, just the absolute quickest version I can get on paper is what I’ll do and then I’ll just back and refine and refine and refine. And at this point, if you’re being hired to write a studio feature, you probably have a sense of what kind of writer you are. So I think Craig and I are both talking like we are fixers along the way more than that. And so I’m ready to turn in my script shortly after finishing the last scene.

Craig: Yes.

John: But that’s not some other people.

Craig: Correct.

John: Now, looking at sort of how other stuff gets estimated, this last week I was reading this article by Jacob Kaplan Moss on software development and he was talking about how when you’re tackling a software project you look at sort of what are the small, medium, large, and extra-large areas of complexity. How certain are you that you can design these elaborate plans for these things? And I was thinking about my career as both a software developer and as a screenwriter, and a screenwriter it’s really ultimately just sort of butt in chair time that is ultimately the factor. How many pages are you getting written?

And a thing I did a lot early on in my career is I would barricade myself for five days to a week at the start. I would get a hotel room and just sit and handwrite pages until I’d broken the back of it. So I would write like 50 pages in just a few days. And when I knew that, OK, I understand this script. I’ve written all these scenes. I’ve proven to myself that I know actually how to write this script.

And in those initial scenes I would write I would not let myself go back and edit them. I would just only keep plowing forward and writing the new scenes. That’s maybe an approach that works for you. It’s not a thing I do right now, but it’s a way that you may need to think about achieving a critical mass of pages.

A thing I still do to this day is I will try to write those last scenes earlier on in the process. So I’m writing towards the middle rather than writing towards the end. That just gives me a sense of like, OK, I know I can actually finish this because I know what those last scenes are that I’m writing towards.

Craig: Yeah. Everybody goes about this in their own way. All you need to do Nathan is know your own way. Listen carefully to your own rhythm. Don’t judge it. Just accept it for what it is.

John: Yup.

Craig: And then divide days into pages. It’s as simple as that. And you come up with a number. And that number is pages per day. And you’ll get it done.

John: And it may help to promise your script to some people a little bit early. I always find that deadlines are great. And so you have a hard deadline at ten weeks. But if you had a softer deadline at eight weeks to show it to a trusted reader friend that can be great. Because that can give you the feedback that you need to sort of bring it from the it’s an OK first draft to, oh, that’s a great first draft you’re handing into the studio.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Nathan, could you write back with an update in 10 weeks to let us know what happened with the script that you turned in? We’d love to hear it.

Craig: Yeah.

John: It’s time for Megana Rao to join us to ask some listener questions. Megana, what do you have for us this week?

Megana Rao: Hi guys. All right, Sawyer asks, “When writing an odd couple two-hander do we have to choose which of those characters will be our eyes into the world? I’m having trouble with this and could use some examples. If you take a look at say Lethal Weapon, who would you say serves as our entry to the world?”

Craig: Those are two different questions actually Sawyer. You’re asking who are our eyes into the world and then who serves as our entry into the world. But those are two different kind of things. Because sometimes you use somebody to get in there, but really the perspective of the movie sits with the other person. To be honest with you, you have to do both. You need both of them. You can’t have just one of them be the sole perspective because then the other one just becomes luggage.

John: Well, Craig, let’s think about Identity Thief. That’s an odd couple two-hander.

Craig: Sure.

John: The Jason Bateman character is our window into the world. But does the Melissa character, she still has storytelling power when Bateman is not in scenes, right?

Craig: Yeah. I mean, she gets her own introduction without him, prior to her ever meeting him or knowing him. And in fact that was actually, of any arguments that I had about the development of that, one of them was that everyone seemed to want to take that away from her or limit it. And what we had there was much less than what I wanted.

What I wanted was a much fuller exploration of who she was and why she was doing what she was doing. But both of them had – they existed independently of each other and they both had a point of view. And then really it’s about the relationship. So, the question implies that these two characters are actually two characters, when really when we watch these movies, whether they’re on television, or in a theater, what we’re actually coming to appreciate is the relationship between the two characters, meaning that’s the thing you should be servicing. Relationship. Not so much which one of them is eyes in, or which one serves as an entry.

John: Yeah. I’m working on a project that’s essentially a two-hander right now. And it is interesting how whoever we see first we tend to sort of give more credence to like oh they’re the person who is actually driving story. But in some cases it’s the wilder character who is actually creating more of the incidents, that is pushing stuff along. So, there’s always going to be a push/pull between these two characters and in theory you’re writing a story that can only exist because these two characters are together.

So, it becomes a little bit moot to say which character is really your principal character, which of the characters is the eyes into the world. It tends to be the less wild character, you can sort of relate to them more, we can sort of sit in their point of view a little bit more, but it’s not especially helpful when it comes down to really doing the scene work.

Craig: Agreed.

John: What else you got for us here?

Megana: OK. Hans asks, “A few weeks ago a producer/friend of mine asked if I would be interested in working as a writer and maybe direct one of the episodes on the TV series she’s putting together. From the conversation I assumed that it would be a paid gig where I would be joining a group of professional writers. Last week I went in on a meeting thinking that I would hear the terms and details of the project. However, the meeting was two to three hours of brainstorming on the characters and the storyline. Participants of the meeting were the producer-friend, an actor friend of hers, and myself.

“So only one writer, which was me, in the room. When I asked what the plan is for the project the producer-friend asked us to meet every week for a meeting like this for at least a few weeks. After our first brainstorming session she gave us research homework for our next meeting.”

Craig: Aw, did she?

Megana: “Is this a general process for preparing a TV series idea? What do you think I should do? I’ve written and directed a small feature film before, but I don’t have experience working on other people’s projects. I don’t want to ruin the relationship with the producer, but I also don’t want to spend too much time and energy without getting some kind of compensation.”

Craig: I swear to god if we had a nickel for every time someone said, “I don’t want to ruin the relationship with the blank.” You know who is not worried about ruining relationships? The blank. They never worry about it. They have no problem sitting there going like, “Oh you know what I’m going to do, I’m going to exploit the hell out of a friend of mine and have them work week after week on something that’s some vanity project for me and an actor. And we’re not going to even tell them if they get paid, or not. And we’ll be in charge of the whole thing. And who knows who will own what. And that’s fine. I don’t mind ruining my relationship with that writer.”

It’s so frustrating.

John: Now Hans you’re being exploited. And this is not a real thing. This is not going to become a real thing. They’re asking you to do free labor. Don’t do it. It’s not helping you. This thing will never become a thing.

So, let’s imagine a scenario where the three of you really did genuinely come up with a great idea. Like you came up with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and it’s like let’s figure out what this is and then if you were sort of voluntarily spending these hours to come up with this approach for how you’re going to do this and how you’re going to make this thing that’s awesome. But that’s not what this is.

This is a producer, who maybe has credits, you don’t say, an actor who maybe has credits, we don’t know, and you, the only person who can actually write the thing. And you’re supposed to somehow be the person to make this thing come to life. No. Just stop. It’s not real. You have our permission to tell them that they need to listen to this episode. You can give them this episode and tell them they have to listen to this and say like, no, this is not an acceptable thing to be doing.

Craig: Hans, in television the person who should be in charge is definitely not the non-writing producer. And it’s definitely not the actor. Non-writing producers are incredibly important when they’re great. I appreciate the ones that I work with deeply, because they provide enormous amount of value. But they’re not ultimately in charge of the series.

So when you say this one is pulling together a series, you’re supposed to be pulling together a series. That’s the way television works. The actors, you obviously need great actors. They’re essential to the success of the work, but again also generally speaking they aren’t the people that are pulling together these series. The writer is. Because the writer is the person that is going to be generating the content and the vision over many episodes and ideally many seasons.

The bottom line is you’re getting used here.

John: Yeah. In terms of getting people together to form an idea for a TV series to pitch out, yes, you could go in for a meeting with a producer, a general meeting with a producer, and really spark, OK, let’s work on a pitch for something we can take out on the town. That does happen. That’s real and that’s true. So you go in for a meeting at Berlanti’s company or wherever and say like, OK, let’s figure out what this is we want to do and we’ll take it into the studio to pitch it. That’s real and valid.

What this is is not real and valid. This is an idea that they had and they’re looking for some good writer to work for free on this thing and see if they can get it set up. So, no, stop.

Craig: Yeah. Just the fact that you didn’t even understand how speculative this was. And be aware. If you haven’t written anything down that two to three hours of brainstorming you did, that belongs to everybody and nobody. They can just go and pitch that to somebody. Yeah, this smells bad.

Megana: Do you guys think it’s worth him asking for compensation or should he just walk away because this seems like a fishy situation?

Craig: If you have to ask then the answer is…

Megana: Got it.

Craig: No. Like if you come to someone and you’re like, “Um, can I please be paid?” And they’re like, “Oh, you know what? Yes.” That never happens. Never happens. Nah, they’ll be like, “Oh, you will be. You will be paid. When we sell this for a billion dollars.”

John: But Megana in your question I hear another important question. What should Hans actually do or say next? Because what is that conversation that he has next with this producer? And I think it’s that you say, “Listen, it was great talking with you. I’m not interested in pursuing this as a non-paid gig. And I don’t see where this is going next.” And it doesn’t have to be any more acrimonious than that, but just make it clear that you’re only looking to do paid stuff, otherwise you’re going to focus on your own stuff. That’s fair.

Craig: You could even be less forthcoming and just say, “I’m so sorry, I loved meeting you. This sounds like a good idea. But the stuff that I’m working on right now that I’m buried in is just taking up too much of my time. I didn’t quite realize the extent of the commitment here. So I apologize, I have to withdraw.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: And that’s that.

John: Nice.

Craig: God, it’s amazing how we care so much about our relationships with these people and they just don’t care about us at all.

John: Not a bit.

Craig: No.

John: Megana, thank you for these questions.

Craig: Thanks Megana.

Megana: Thanks guys.

Craig: We care about you, Megana.

John: We do.

Megana: Aw.

Craig: God.

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a special I saw on Netflix this last week, Bo Burnham’s Inside.

Craig: Oh yeah. People loved this.

John: It’s really good. And so Bo Burnham is the writer and director of Eighth Grade. He’s a standup comic and obviously mostly known for that and started on YouTube. This is a comedy special filmed entirely at his guest house during the pandemic. Just him. And just him setting up cameras and lights and doing stuff. And the first half of it is really funny in the way that his specials have always been funny. But it morphs into something very unusual and special. And so it’s not even like a standup special. It’s just sort of a film made by and starring only him and what he’s going through.

So just really so well done and so inventive and so remarkable. And so I recommend people check out Bo Burnham’s Inside.

Craig: Well my One Cool Thing I got from you, John, on Twitter. Megana, have you seen this? Jack Plotnick’s video Disney Made a Tiki Room?

Megana: Oh, yes, is this the one with the women and the birds?

Craig: Yes.

Megana: Yes, I also saw that on John’s Twitter and laughed so much. It’s wonderful.

Craig: It’s amazing. So there was this old television show called, what was it, the Wonderful World of Disney, which would air on whatever it was, ABC, or something. And it would always begin with Walt talking to you about, you know, whatever things they were working on or the park or something. And then some movie or show would begin.

And it looks I guess that this is from one of those. And Disney had the Tiki Room. I don’t know if it still exists. But it was not one of their better attractions. It was kind of known as the thing you would go into because it was really hot and you didn’t want to wait in line.

And he’s talking and in the background there are just four women in very ‘60s/’70s clothing working on building these animatronic birds. And Jack Plotnick sort of puts himself in all of their wardrobe, plays all of them. And through the magic of editing, and brilliant acting, like very subtle shades.

John: Really good acting.

Craig: He manages to make all those women their own person and you know them instantly. And it is brilliantly funny. It’s just so well done. And it even has its own villain. Its own unlikely villain. And it just – we know the song. We know the song.

Anyway, you’ve got to see it. It’s wonderful. Jack Plotnick is a very funny, very talented guy. Disney Made a Tiki Room.

John: So I’ve known Jack peripherally for like 20 years. I think I probably know him through Melissa McCarthy and a whole bunch of those friends. Just so talented. And obviously what we’re seeing here is not even really drag, because the character work is so specific.

Craig: No, it’s acting.

John: It’s just acting and really small subtle details. So if you like this the good news is it’s not just this video. He has equivalent things for the Plaza restaurant. And the Small World ride. And basically all the stuff that’s happening. And so he’s playing all these women who are around Walt Disney while he’s doing these things and their side conversations. It’s just so smartly done.

Craig: It really is. And like, yeah, I would watch a movie of these women together.

John: And actually very much a good match to the Bo Burnham because like he is somehow doing this all himself and is just a remarkable writer and filmmaker in addition to being such a great performer.

Craig: He’s a really good editor. I’ve got to say.

John: Yes.

Craig: Or if someone is working with him and editing, apologies, but the editing was outstanding.

John: The jokes are working because they’re cut so perfectly.

Craig: Brilliantly. Speed. Tempo. Rhythm. All of it. Lovely.

John: Good stuff. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

Craig: You know it is.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Always.

John: Our outro is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro you can send us a link at ask@johnaugust.com. The folder is getting a little bit thin, so we would love some more outros coming in please.

ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on UFOs. Craig and Megana, thank you so much.

Megana: Thanks guys.

Craig: Thanks guys.

[Bonus segment]

John: So, So Craig a lot of news about UFOs this last week. So, I’m linking to a New York Times story here. US Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects But Can’t Rule it Out Either. There’s a bunch of navy footage, including naval video footage, of navy fighter jets seeing this stuff and like we don’t know what that is, but it’s moving fast.

Craig: Why don’t they just title this People Still Can’t Prove a Negative? That’s what this article should be called. I liked it. Can’t rule it out. Yeah, of course, can’t rule anything out.

John: No. Craig, let’s break this down granularly. So these navy pilots are seeing things in person and on their screens. What do you think these unidentified flying objects they are encountering are? What are some possibilities in your head for what they’re seeing?

Craig: Possibilities are things that are very close to the cameras but through distortion appear to be far away. They could be video artifacts. They could be things that through optical illusion appear to be in different places when they’re really in one. Distortion of something. Or they could be aliens flying around in such a way as to be seen, but only by fighter jets, and only vaguely. And never landing or doing anything. Just flying around.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: So those are the choices.

John: Yeah. I have friends who have seen UFOs in person. And they’re not telling me they saw alien spacecraft. But they saw, like at a lake. A bunch of them at nighttime saw this thing that like what the hell is that. And they could not understand what it was they were seeing at a distance.

My inclination is it is something like that. It is something like how mirages form and distortions of things. Stuff that is not where it’s supposed to be. It’s understandable that there’s a real phenomenon that you’re encountering, but that does not mean that it’s an alien out there.

Craig, do you believe that there is other intelligent life in the universe?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes. And do you believe that intelligent life in the universe has at any point visited earth?

Craig: No.

John: I am not so certain of that. I think it’s more plausible that an alien civilization would have visited earth at some time during our whatever billion years the earth has been around. I don’t know that they’re ever encountered our civilization or would even be curious about our civilization.

Craig: I mean, yeah, it’s possible that they stopped over, looked around, said this is a real shithole. It’s full of large lizards and plants and it’s very humid and let’s go. Because humans have been on this planet for a blink of an eye in terms of the planet’s history. Yeah, so it’s possible that they did that. In the way that we landed a rover on Mars and then we die and four billion years from now there are Martians and they’re like I wonder if anybody from another planet got here. Yeah, OK, well we did, but who cares? It was just a rover. It doesn’t matter.

But, no, I think that if you have the technology to fly across massive distances, enormous hard to comprehend distances, and bring your ships here, then you would do so with a purpose. And you certainly would not be doing this, which is just taunting pilots by zipping around weirdly and doing sort of circus aerial tricks. It just doesn’t make any sense.

John: Now, one of the things on the list of possibilities which I don’t think you included was that these actually are aircraft but they’re not aircraft that we are currently aware of. That they could be other countries’ drones, or things like that, that we’re just not aware of how they work.

Craig: Unlikely. Unlikely that other countries have built something that is so spectacularly superior to what we have that we can’t even believe our eyes. And yet still are flying it around in front of us. It’s all very, very unlikely. Doesn’t quite add up.

UFOs, particularly wonderful term for what these things are. They are unidentified flying objects which would cover alien spacecraft, bugs, dirt, drones.

John: Blimps.

Craig: Blimps. Everything.

John: Albatrosses.

Craig: Correct. So, the fact that we can’t explain what our eyes just saw, I know we want to say listen to these pilots when they’re talking, listen to how amazed they are. Well, OK, now go watch Harrison Ford see David Blaine pull a card out of a piece of fruit in his house. It’s the same face. But it doesn’t mean that it’s magic. It just means we got fooled by something. And sometimes we’re fooled by things that we can’t believe. Optical illusions alone, we’ve said many times, just the existence of optical illusions should give us enough doubt about the value of our own eyes.

John: Now, you are a skeptic at this moment. But at any point did younger Craig Mazin like UFOs? Because I remember going through a period, six, seven, eight, maybe all the way up to ten, where stuff like the Power of the Pyramids, loved it. The Bermuda Triangle. Loved all that stuff. And, yes, I outgrew it. But did you ever have that phase?

Craig: Never.

John: Never?

Craig: I never believed any of it. I never believed in god. I never believed in pyramids.

John: You never had Santa Claus.

Craig: No, I mean, I believed in the story of Santa Claus. I mean, I knew that there was a narrative. So like he existed the way that the Grinch existed. They’re characters. But I never believed in angels, demons, devils. The Bermuda Triangle is obviously nonsense. What’s the point? That’s really what would happen is I would read this and go why? Why would there be a thing there where ships go through a hole in the world and land somewhere? What’s the point?

John: Because the City of Atlantis has to be somewhere Craig.

Craig: It really doesn’t. [laughs]

John: It only makes sense that Atlantis would be in the Bermuda Triangle.

Craig: Sure. And that it would need ships to get pulled through? None of it makes sense. None of it ever added up. There is no Sasquatch. None of that crap. There’s no Loch Ness Monster. It’s all nonsense and it’s always been nonsense.

And, yes, I’m aware that I’m lumping God in with Sasquatch. But it’s all the same to me.

John: Hmm. Do you think we will find another cool mammal somewhere on earth? Like a big cool mammal?

Craig: Yeah, that is very possible. In certain remote regions we can discover. Will we discover a mammal that has never been seen before? That is unlikely to me. But will we rediscover one that we thought was extinct? I think that actually has happened a few times. I could see that happening again.

John: It has. Certainly with mammals and also with fish. I feel like the oceans are so vast and we’ve explored so little of them. I think there’s probably very interesting stuff down there that we’ve not even begun to explore.

Craig: Yes. The depths of the ocean. There are fish down there we have not yet laid eyes on.

John: Craig, if an alien spacecraft were to visit earth, let’s assume you’re president of earth. I think that’s a fair assumption. What do you do?

Craig: Oh, well, if an intelligent life form visits the planet I would treat them as visitors. And welcome them to the planet, and tell them how excited that we are that they’re here. We presume they’re here to have an exchange of ideas, cultures, learn about each other. And if they’re here to destroy us, well, I guess we’ll find out if they can. Because if they can, they will.

But I would also just wonder why. Now, of course, I’m sure that a lot of the people who are sitting around in countries that got colonized by the British were also like why? Why are you doing this? And then they’re like, oh, you need stuff that we have. So it’s possible. That’s the standard plot of the movie.

John: They’re going to use us as food or to work in your mines.

Craig: We’re not great food.

John: We’re not great food, no.

Craig: For instance, we have a lot of a certain mineral that they really, really need. It turns out you know what’s incredibly rare in the universe? The rarest element in the universe is iron. And we have all of it. Then I could see that being a huge problem. But short of that I would hope that they were just like, hey, just as we would. I mean, it seems like if we were flying around and we landed a rover on Mars and a Martian came out and said hello that we would be like, “This is amazing. Hi. Don’t watch Fox News. But look at this. Look at this. Here’s a John Lennon song.”

John: So, all right, Craig, I’m a little saddened to not believe in these UFOs, but also I get it. I understand. I don’t want to be a pessimist. I don’t think human beings in our form will ever leave the solar system. I think our bodies are just not meant to be in space that long.

Craig: The solar system is very hard to leave. Yeah, that’s really hard to leave. Just traveling to Mars would be very difficult. Grueling and lengthy journey of many, many months and quite a number of dangers. All to land on the closest planet to us.

John: Yeah. The most hospitable planet.

Craig: Correct. The closest and most hospitable. Exactly. But, yeah, getting out of the solar system. Unless we have our Star Trek First Contact moment where someone invents the hyperspace drive. Oh, I’m going to get yelled at because it’s not called that. The Hyper Warp Drive. I’m sorry.

John: Warp Drive.

Craig: C’mon guys.

John: I predict that within maybe not my lifetime but my daughter’s lifetime we might find the equivalent of a Dyson Sphere or something that’s out there that indicates like, oh, there is actually a huge engineered project out there that shows that OK there’s some other civilization out there.

Craig: My concern is that we routinely underestimate the vast nature of what is out there. That we are essentially an atom inside of an elephant. And we are imagining is there another atom like us somewhere near the tail, or by the toe. Hubble has seen quite, quite far for us. And they ain’t seen nothing yet.

John: But it’s also easy to underestimate our kind of logarithmic progress in computing power and ability to sort of look, look, look, look, look, and as it increases we might actually start to make a dent in our visible area of space.

Craig: John, you know how they say that the universe is endlessly expanding?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Doesn’t that remind you of when you’re walking around in a videogame and the background just keeps filling in on you?

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know what I’m saying?

John: I do. Yeah. When there’s a little lag, a little latency. Like, oh, it’s pixilated now. It’s filling in.

Craig: There it is. The better the telescope, the more nothing it will see because this isn’t real.

John: Oh no. Getting back to that.

Craig: It’s not real. What are the odds that we’re the only, I mean, come on. We’ve been around here. We’ve got all this stuff and telescopes and things and, nope, not even one little tiny thing after all this time. It’s because this is a big show. It’s not real. Simulation.

John: Yeah. And now it’s over.

Craig: Wait, now?

John: [laughs] At least this episode of the show is over.

Craig: Oh yeah. And boy, talk about lack of free will.

John: Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you John and thank you Megana. Megana, I hope I didn’t bum you out too much.

Megana: I hate when we get to the simulation point.

Craig: Excellent.

Links:

• Alamo Drafthouse out of Bankruptcy
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• Warner Brothers Discovery Logo
• CAA Sells wiip
• Screen Compensation Guide for Streaming Services
• Screen Deal Tips
• 32 year old passes for 19 for TV contract
• Jacob Kaplan-Moss on estimating software development
• Bo Burnham’s Inside
• Jack Plotnick’s Disney Made a Tiki Room
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
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• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/patterns-of-success).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 501 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we look at what patterns we’ve noticed in successful writers and perhaps more importantly what things tend to derail careers. We will also have follow up on genres and typos, plus a listener question that I suspect will become a storyline in this, our 11th Season of Scriptnotes. 11 Seasons Craig. This is our season premiere.

**Craig:** I only found out from you yesterday that we have seasons.

**John:** Yeah. So seasons are 50 episodes a piece, so this is our 11th season we’re starting.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. I thought that maybe we were just midseason, mid-season one of a thousand episodes. Are we going to get to a thousand episodes?

**John:** I don’t know, Craig. That’s a long–

**Craig:** That just seems stupid, right?

**John:** That’s 10 years.

**Craig:** How could you possibly say something 1,000 times?

**John:** Yeah. You could though.

**Craig:** That said, 500 is a lot, yet here we are.

**John:** It is a lot. We started working on the book and we talked about the book last week. It’s really exciting, but gosh darn we have just a lot of text there. A lot of stuff to go through.

**Craig:** Yup. And, you know, I don’t want to pat ourselves on the back or anything, but I think we have a decent signal to noise ratio also. We don’t do a lot of empty patter like the kind that I’m engaging in right now.

**John:** We cut all the empty patter out of the book which is so much fun. So, this week we’ll be sending through sample chapters, or at least one sample chapter, to people who’ve signed up at Scriptnotes.net. That’s where you can sign up for the back episodes, but you can also sign up for the mailing list for the book. And the sample chapters look just great. So I was just working on one, a sample one with Greta Gerwig’s interview, and we also have a Craig Mazin special chapter that you can proof before we send out.

**Craig:** Excellent. Oh my.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** Oh my.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for today’s episode we’re going to talk about books, but not the Scriptnotes book, but just what we like in books from physical books, to fonts, to bindings. What we look for in books, not as text but the actual objects themselves. Because I want the Scriptnotes book to be a good book, so let’s talk about what we like in books.

**Craig:** Oh, OK.

**John:** Yeah. Because you like a book. You like the Art & Arcana Book, that D&D book. That was great.

**Craig:** By Kyle Newman. Yes. I enjoy – it’s not the only kind of book I like. [laughs]

**John:** I know. But you like a well-made book.

**Craig:** Oh, sure. I mean in terms of just the quality of a book being put together, yes. Absolutely. No question.

**John:** So we will talk about that. But before we do any of this, Craig we have to start because apparently you have a big thing to apologize for.

**Craig:** Yeah, apparently. I didn’t realize I blew it. I totally blew it. A couple of episodes ago I was talking about how passionate Europeans are about their football and particularly folks in the UK. And I incorrectly assigned the singing of You’ll Never Walk Alone to Mancunians when in fact it is the folks of Liverpool, the Liverpoolians. I’m probably saying that wrong, too.

But it’s Liverpool. The folks of Liverpool are the ones that sing You’ll Never Walk Alone and so what I basically did was award their bitter rivals with their beloved song. This is just a tragic mistake, born out of utter ignorance. Sometimes you know just enough to be dangerous as my father used to say. And in this case I knew just enough to be dangerous. So I do apologize to all of the fans in Liverpool. I did not mean to besmirch your beloved song or your beloved football club.

And similarly I apologize to the folks of Manchester for suggesting that they were like Liverpool fans, since they all apparently hate each other’s teams. But we’re all friends.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So anyway I do apologize for that. That was just a blunder. It was just a huge blunder.

**John:** And a thing which we talked about before on the show is that one of the most important parts of an apology is accepting an apology, so the many people who have written into the show to point out this error hopefully will accept the apology and then we can move on and try to make another 500 episodes of the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. It would be kind of weird if they didn’t.

**John:** No. We’re going to continue to be angry.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I mean, there are worst things in the world. But it was – if somebody, I don’t know, talked with some sense of authority about how the Yankees play at City Field I would have been incensed. So I get it. And I apologize. I am sorry.

**John:** Great. That same episode we talked about in How Would This Be a Movie these professional breakup artists. And so these are folks in Japan who do this for a living. I said that is a good idea for a movie and I would not be surprised if this movie exists somewhere out there in the world. And two of our listeners wrote in saying like, yes, those movies do exist.

Paul wrote in to say that there is a French film called Heartbreaker which is about this idea. And then Fred in Chicago said there’s already an Australian feature about professional breaker-uppers called appropriately The Breaker Upperers. He says it’s pretty good. They go the broad comedy route. It’s sort of like Bridesmaids. It’s produced by Taika Waititi. So I want to see this movie. The trailer is actually great.

**Craig:** I’m not going to do it.

**John:** You’re not going to watch that movie. You don’t watch movies.

**Craig:** Not really. [laughs] I don’t watch stuff anymore.

**John:** But you know the movie now exists out there in the world.

**Craig:** Totally. Breaker Upperers.

**John:** Yeah. But the fact that it was a French and an Australian version does not preclude an American version from being made.

**Craig:** Quite the opposite.

**John:** It’s going to get made.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Do you want to take Frank’s question here about typos?

**Craig:** Sure. Frank in London wrote in about typos and our decision to stop using Three Page Challenges with typos.

**John:** Now do you remember Frank’s situation here? So Frank had a life experience that made it very difficult for him to read and to write.

**Craig:** Yes. I remember. Frank wrote in and basically said, “Hey, it’s hard for me to write things without typos. You’re being unfair.” And let’s see, it looks like Steve had a comment back. Steve said, “While I also sympathize with Frank’s struggles, I agree that unfortunately in the end those are hurdles he has to overcome. I wanted to add that there are tools to help him that are free or inexpensive, Grammarly for one, that he can Google. There are a ton of them specifically for his particular hurdle, but I like Grammarly because it works with almost every program automatically. You don’t have to open it or copy and paste anything. For the most part it’s just there working.”

John, I want to like Grammarly, but I detest it because of those freaking ads.

**John:** Yeah. I detest it because of the ads, too. So, there are people who really like Grammarly and I think it’s maybe worth someone like Frank in London to consider a tool like that to help him out. But also there’s real people who can do this job, too. So, other listeners suggest that you could go on Fiver or one of these sort of hire a person for a quick little job thing and proofreading is a thing you can get through there. But even our listeners reached out to say like, “Hey, I’m happy to proofread if Frank needs help.”

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**John:** So I would say have faith that there are some humans who are out there to help you do your best writing.

**Craig:** Writing is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. Is that what that lady says?

**John:** I think that’s what it is.

**Craig:** Something like that. And then I just immediately – the red mist descends.

**John:** Now, a few episodes before that in Episode 497 we talked about the hierarchy of genres. So my friend and friend of the show, Matt Byrne, wrote in to say, “I wonder if we’re seeing the relationship between suffering and art/genius here. Van Gough. Sylvia Plath. There’s a trail of examples that goes back to Jesus and the Odyssey, up through De Niro fattening up for Raging Bull. We as a society love and celebrate those bits of suffering. They add value. We see the labor. In comedy the labor is mostly invisible. So while a comedy may delight us more, the artistry seems to come at less of a price. I don’t know if it’s specific to our puritanical roots, or if it’s more global and timeless, but that value on labor and suffering seems to be hardwired into our DNA and certainly ingrained into the awards PR narrative machinery.”

**Craig:** Well that’s a really interesting notion. I appreciate that, Matt. I think you might be onto something there. It is absolutely true that we associate self-torture, or a tortured personality, with great art. And I don’t think that’s good.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t think we should. I think it encourages a kind of romanticization of what is actually just, you know, unfortunate mental illness. But that’s a really interesting observation. Well done.

**John:** Do you want to take Spooky from Florida here?

**Craig:** Well, of course I do. OK, Spooky from Florida writes, “I often find that people look down on horror, or if it’s a good horror film they deny that it’s in the horror genre altogether. William Friedkin famously said that he didn’t consider The Exorcist to be horror, which seems ridiculous to me. Using Craig’s own criteria there is only one film that definitely fits in the horror genre that has won an Academy Award for Best Film, The Silence of the Lambs.

“Parasite and The Shape of Water each also recently received Best Film, but might take a Friedkin-esque stance and argue they aren’t horror.” Well, I have a suspicion were Jonathan Demme with us today he would also argue that Silence of the Lambs was not horror, either. So this is an interesting parallel. What do you think about Spooky’s point here?

**John:** I think it’s a really good point and it also reminds me of what Tess Morris told us about romantic comedies is that when a rom-com is incredibly successful suddenly it’s not a rom-com anymore. So like Silver Linings Playbook is not considered a rom-com, but of course it is a rom-com. It’s just that they sort of broke out of that bubble and it doesn’t count as that. Or when a man makes a rom-com it’s not considered a rom-com.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. So Let the Right One In is considered an arthouse film, an independent arthouse film, but it’s a horror movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a really good horror movie. Yeah, I agree. I think Spooky what happens is people have this feeling that genre is somehow a negative.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I would say drama is a genre. Weepy Oscar drama, right? Like, you know, Oscar Movie, that’s a thing. We all know what it is, right? If you say, OK, what do you think an Oscar movie is I’m immediately in my mind it’s Sophie’s Choice. That’s what’s happening. It’s a genre.

**John:** Or you look at a movie like The Artist. The Artist didn’t have all that sort of award season movie kind of stuff around it, like the period film and it’s about Hollywood.

**Craig:** It’s a comedy.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a comedy. It’s just a comedy. It’s a very light comedy. But we don’t think about it as just a comedy because it’s an Oscar movie.

**Craig:** Well perception is a fascinating thing. I’ve just been thinking about it a lot lately only because it’s a rare thing in one’s own life to notice a dramatic shift in perception. And perception is – just a source of injustice, sometimes against you and sometimes in your favor.

You know, I think about the way people talk about things that I do. I think they used to be way too hard on me, and now I think they’re way too easy on me.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Now they’re like, “This show is going to be great because Craig is doing it.” And I’m like, you know, listen man. I’m going to do my best, but I wouldn’t say that. I’m hoping. I’m putting all I can into it. But there is that strange handicapping that occurs, like odds. They minus five points or plus five points depending on how they see you. It’s a curious thing.

**John:** Well speaking of awards and perceptions, the big news out of this past week was that NBC has decided it’s not going to be broadcasting the next Golden Globe awards. So that’s a pretty big shift. That’s a big televised – like the second biggest televised awards show that just goes away. And not just for film but for TV as well. And, see ya. I’m not going to miss it.

You know, some good things about the Golden Globes. I think they’re fun to watch because it’s a bunch of celebrities in a room slightly drunk. And the monologues from the hosts were actually kind of funny in general, had a good mocking tone. But it wasn’t important. It wasn’t meaningful. And the folks who were voting on it had no real skin in the game. So, I’m not sad to see it go.

**Craig:** There are a lot of award shows where the people voting don’t have skin in the game. The critics’ awards and all that. But this is sort of fascinating. The Golden Globes have always had a strange, well, you know, I remember controversy when I was a kid. I didn’t watch award shows when I was a kid, but somehow I heard about Pia Zadora winning the Golden Globe and everybody being like, “The Golden Globes!” But then again the Golden Globes I think were always like you say viewed as a little bit of the kind of chaotic slightly boozy cousin, where things were a bit more fun and casual and I can say from my own experience being there that it is pretty booze and fun and casual.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We had a great time.

**John:** Absolutely. You and Tiffany Haddish up on stage. It was a good time.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Tiffany Haddish was great and we had our table and we were sitting next to the Succession table and we were cheering each other on while we were all drinking. And so it’s a very different vibe than an auditorium based show like the Emmys or the Oscars where you’re sitting in a seat and you are observing a stage.

So it’s like a big, huge Sweet Sixteen/Bar Mitzvah kind of event. But obviously they ran into real trouble here and I’m curious to see what happens because this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing where someone else is going to pick this football up and resume running with it.

**John:** Well here’s a suggestion from Twitter. So this is Noah Evslin who tweeted, “I’m going to pitch this again…this is the moment for all the Hollywood guilds to come together and create a new awards show called The Guild Awards and use the money to help stabilize their health and pension funds. In 2019, the Golden Globes brought in over $60 million.”

So, I hear you laughing, so therefore let’s take the pro and con on The Guild Awards.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, should I do pro?

**John:** I can do pro because I think you have more cons. Is that fair?

**Craig:** I really have one con. I only have one. But it’s a massive con. So go for your pros.

**John:** OK, my pros is I think the guilds should continue to do their own awards for their own stuff and hold back on Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Comedy Series, basically the things that are actually televisable you can hold off on those and let those be sort of the Guild Awards, but do your own local awards for all of the other awards.

But I think there’s an opportunity to create that kind of boozy, smaller, less auditorium-y feel of The Golden Globes but actually have to be voted on by people who do this for a living.

**Craig:** Well, that would pretty much solve the big con. I mean, the strike against this notion which on its surface seems kind of a no-brainer is that the award show would be endless the Writers Guild Awards took I would say most of my life. I think I spent most of my life at that one Writers Guild award show.

**John:** You couldn’t do – and you wouldn’t want to do all the awards. So you should just do the big marquee things.

**Craig:** So then I guess the con junior there is that if you are someone who is not in one of those categories you’re going to – so like for instance the Emmys, there is a craft awards Emmys that occurs–

**John:** The night before.

**Craig:** It’s a week before.

**John:** The week before, yeah.

**Craig:** And they call it the Shemmy’s because it’s not the real Emmys. I mean, it is, you get a real Emmy, but they don’t want to spend time giving Emmys for editing or costume, which they should. Everybody deserves their moment. But, yeah, so I think people might get a little grouchy, like I’m at the WGA, mumble WGA awards.

But if what you did is essentially approximate the kind of awards that the Golden Globes gave out, because they don’t give out a lot of awards, then I mean–

**John:** Yeah, so let directors vote on Best Director. Let writers vote on all the writing awards. Let the actors vote on the actors. It would be great. Do I think it’s going to happen? I think it’s unlikely to happen. I think what’s more likely to happen is that the SAG Awards become increasingly visible, just because they’re actors and they’re famous. But I think the Guild Awards would be lovely and I would watch them and support them.

**Craig:** Yeah. At some point it all comes down to just math and people watch this sort of thing because they like to see the actors. And fewer and fewer people are watching any of these things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The trend is not encouraging. So NBC, I can’t quite award them with the bravery of the year medal because the ratings for these things have just been plummeting. What was the most recent–?

**John:** Well the Oscars was not a huge–

**Craig:** Oh, god, yeah, the Oscars. I mean, I looked at the bar graph of viewers, that’s pretty scary stuff.

**John:** Also they had all the challenges of doing the broadcast, like no one had seen those movies at all. And so I think it’s a weird year to compare sort of the down drop. We’ll see what it is next year. If it’s that same number next year then televised award shows are just over.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I was looking, I don’t follow along, so I saw here is what the progress was even prior to the pandemic and that is a steep slow downward.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Yeah. Not good.

**John:** Not good. All right, let’s get to our marquee topic. I want to talk about patterns of success. And by this I mean that over the years you and I have seen many, many writers. And we’ve seen writers who become really successful and writers who haven’t become especially successful. And I wanted to sort of talk about what patterns we’ve noticed in both of those groups of writers.

So this is just sort of an open-ended conversation, but I feel like it’s something we could come back and visit again in future episodes. The things that we see that are markers of like oh yeah that person has got it, that person has not got it. Because you and I have both said that about people, but what are we actually identifying when we say like, ah yeah, I think that’s going to work for that person.

**Craig:** Well this is a really interesting prompt for a discussion, because longevity in our business is rare. It is rare. There are not many people who are consistently successful. There are people who have moments and then fade away. There are people who feast off of big hits for a while but eventually run out of runway, so to speak. And then there are people who we might put them under the category of their worst enemy.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** Where they had almost all the tools required. There was just one problem. So this is a good topic of discussion because I think people think that success in Hollywood comes down to writing that great script or directing that great film, but that’s the beginning of your success.

**John:** Often it is. So let’s talk about what we even mean by success, and this is something we talk about a bit in my other podcast series Launch. We talk about what is success for a novelist. But what do we mean as success for a film or TV writer? Do we mean the ability to make a living at it? Or for people to say like, wow, that’s really good writing? Does it mean winning awards? Does it mean making blockbusters? Is it the ability to make anything you want to make? Is it autonomy? Are you a successful writer if you are a mid-level staffed TV writer?

And for some people, yes, and for some people no.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, everyone can define it in a different way. But given the context we’re discussing here I would probably say the ability to make a good living. A good living. I think if it’s a subsistence living, if it’s just barely keeping my head above water it’s hard to argue that that is success per se. Because the people who are living that probably wouldn’t define it that way.

But the ability to make a good living and earn more than you spend and be able to save money, own a home, and save money to send your kids to schools and all that seems like a decent definition here.

**John:** It is, but I also wonder about people who see themselves as artists, people who see themselves as like I need to change the cultural conversation. They may not be so focused on just making a living at it. They may actually have another job that pays the bills but they feel like they’re making art that really matters, that they’re writing movies that matter to them.

So I don’t want to be so narrow in having to achieve a certain economic success as being the only thing that we’re looking at here.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess if we put the word career in front of success here then it would help narrow that conversation. Because of course if you write a script that you love that means a lot to you and that was your purpose, that’s what you were going for, you win. If your goal is to have a lasting and productive career, then that’s different. So I guess maybe what we should be talking about is, well, I guess we can talk about all of the kinds of successes.

**John:** Absolutely. Well let’s talk about sort of aspects of the professional life and what we see being especially important or not so important. So we’ll start with work habits, because I think that’s the thing that can often be visible. It’s like this is a person who gets up at 6am every day and at their keyboard and banging away. And in your experience does hard work correlate with success?

**Craig:** Yes. I don’t necessarily define hard work as getting up at 6am, because you’re not going to catch me doing that. But at some point sooner or later a quantity of work needs to be completed. And obviously there are two axes you’re operating with. There’s quality and speed and people who are able to maintain a high level of quality at a decent clip are far more likely to have longevity than people who can’t.

**John:** Yeah. I do think of the silent evidence of all the writers who worked much, much harder than me who didn’t make it, and who didn’t break out and sort of weren’t able to have careers. And I can’t know to what degree the problem was quality or some other aspect of their approach that kept them out of what we are trying to define as success. But I think too often there’s this assumption that if you just work harder it’s going to all work out and that’s not been my experience. There’s some correlation of hard work and success, but I don’t think it’s a perfect correlation because there’s people who worked much harder than me who didn’t succeed.

**Craig:** I agree. I think that you cannot hard work your way to success. But you can un-hard work your way out of success, if that makes sense.

**John:** Yes. I think you and I both know people who just could never get the work done. They were talented when they could actually finish a script, but they just couldn’t finish enough scripts.

**Craig:** And that is more tragic to me. If you don’t have the quality then all of the hard work isn’t necessarily going to get you anywhere. But if you do and any variety of reasons sort of is between you and the ability to apply it, that’s a bummer. Because, you know, we are all missing out at that point.

**John:** Let’s talk about social savvy. Do you have to be good in a room?

**Craig:** It helps a lot, but I don’t think it is necessary. There are plenty of writers who were notoriously and perhaps are notoriously not good in rooms.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s true. I think as things have moved more towards television from features the ability to get along with others and actually sort of have some emotional intelligence in terms of being in a space with others and communicating with others face to face or over Zoom is more important than for the feature writer, but it’s some part of it. It’s different than it would be for a novelist. You have to have some ability to communicate with a human being in front of you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that social savvy is required if you’re going to be at the top of the game. If you want to be – now we’re moving past success into just the people who work at the upper level of this career. Almost all of them have some sort of social savvy.

**John:** At the upper tier, yes. There were definitely jobs you and I got because we were the only people who could stand being in a room with some of those people, who could actually navigate those really difficult personalities. That’s just being honest. The rooms were it was like there’s five 800-pound gorillas and it’s just like, OK, I’m in gorilla city and I just have to be able to wrestle all of these gorillas at once.

**Craig:** Somebody has to do an animated version of that.

**John:** Gorilla City.

**Craig:** Gorilla City. And you wrestling all of them at once.

**John:** But let’s remember that an early part of your career is going to be finding a rep, going into those general meetings. The ability to do that stuff is not an unimportant part of how screenwriters get started.

**Craig:** No. Like they always say a pool doesn’t increase the price of your home when you’re selling it, it just makes the home sell faster. And I think that’s the way social savvy works, too. It’s not going to get you a career that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten, but you’ll get where you’re supposed to go faster.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because early on what happens is these people are meeting all these writers and all of those meetings are boring. They’re boring for everybody and they’re particularly boring when you meet somebody and you just don’t feel anything. But if you do feel a connection with another human being suddenly if that human being was you, you are way closer to getting hired than you would have been otherwise.

**John:** Absolutely. I’m thinking to one of my very first general meetings was with an executive by the name of Jan Finger. She was over at Imagine. And they’d gotten the rights to How to Eat Fried Worms, but my meeting wasn’t specifically about that. But it was sort of a “hey, she read my script” and it was just a general meeting. And I liked her and we got along and she got me. And that’s kind of all it took for me to get in that next meeting to get that project.

So, yeah, those connections are important.

**Craig:** They are. And that reality, that human reality, is another reason why it’s really important that on the hiring side of things that there are all sorts of people.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Because, you know.

**John:** Because it’s not going to be two white people in a room all the time. And, yes, 100 percent.

**Craig:** It’s kind of the deal. It’s just important. Because there are certain connections that people have because they’re from the same place, or from the same background. I mean, there were so many times where I would sit in a room and say, “Oh, I grew up on Staten Island,” and someone was like, “Oh yeah, I grew up in Queens.” And you’re like, huh, great, we’re off and running. You know? Because there’s some sort of thing.

So it’s just good to have all that variety there. But that said, people with social savvy should and do find connections with just about everyone. That’s one of their skills.

**John:** True. Now, getting back to general patterns, let’s talk about originality and voice. We talk about voice in the Three Page Challenges a lot. Craig, do you think it’s more important to have a striking singular voice or to be flexible, the ability to sort of write a lot of different kinds of voices?

**Craig:** I think that you will get more work if you’re flexible and you have an ability to move between genres and also an ability to continue some sort of established voice or expectation. However, that is not necessary. And also I would argue that even if you are the kind of person who can do that sort of thing you then have to be individual and fingerprinted within that. So, I mean I did god knows how many sequels I had to work on. Had to, like somebody had a gun in my mouth.

But I chose to. [laughs]

**John:** I like the other person has a gun in your mouth. Not a gun to your head.

**Craig:** No, in my mouth. So much worse. Because in your head you’re like, eh. Mouth? Oh boy.

**John:** I wouldn’t even see the bullet, but yeah.

**Craig:** Right. So what happens is you’re like I get the drill here. I know what the tone is. I understand what’s been put out. And I can work within those lines. Also, I can do my own thing inside of that that is particular.

**John:** I would say that the people I’ve noticed who have broken out, who have really broken out hard and fast have had original voices. They were just like, oh wow, that is really good. I’ve not seen anything like that before. It feels specific and unique and new. Those people have not always been able to sustain careers because they could kind of do that one thing, or they only did that one thing. Ideally you want to have an original voice and the ability to do a lot of other voices as well.

**Craig:** That’s very helpful.

**John:** How important is copying? So we talk about visual artists. One of the big debates is how much do you need to perfect doing every tree individually versus understanding when it’s the right time to copy and just fill in that background with things you’ve done before? To what degree do you need to be making brand new original stuff all the time or understand what the genre is and just be able to deliver that genre?

**Craig:** Well, there are times where you realize you’re being hired to do a thing. I have always tried to add some sort of value regardless. I know there are times where I’m complicating, or in the past at least. Now that I’m pretty much working on things that are mine, so it’s all my fault now. But when I was working on things for other people I was aware at times that I was making it harder on myself than I needed to, but I have to believe that in the long run you are rewarded for that. That they ask you sometimes for counterfeits, but when they get them they don’t like them as much as things that feel original.

**John:** Yeah. I fully get what you’re saying there. It’s like they’re asking you to make the cheap knockoff and you’re like but it’s actually going to be easier and better if I just make something original here. Like, no, no, we want the cheap knockoff. And I can think of writers who basically all they do is just cheap knockoffs and at a certain point they stopped getting hired because everything that they’ve actually gotten made has been cheap knockoffs and is just clearly cheap knockoffs. It’s not good for your long term career to be doing those.

**Craig:** It’s not. And the bigger problem is there’s no path ahead. If you are in that lane it’s going to pay you pretty well for a while, but at some point they’re going to wise up and go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. We’re spending too much on the knockoff guy. The whole point of the knockoff guy was that we didn’t want to spend money on the original guy. Now we’re spending too much money on the knockoff guy. Find me a cheaper knockoff guy.” And they will.

**John:** Yup. How important is it to be able to embrace constraints? The phrasing I’m saying it actually is incredibly important. But I’ve noticed that the ones who succeed can kind of understand what the constraints are and thrive under those constraints. And the ones who tend to struggle, they struggle against the form of the constraints, or the budget, or whatever. They get paralyzed. They can’t do the thing they want to do the way they want to do it.

**Craig:** Well, this to me connects strangely to a necessary element of empathy. You are hired by people to do something. And what we’re asked to do is hard. It’s hard for us to do it. And we have all sorts of feelings when we’re doing it. And I think a lot of writers have tunnel vision where that’s all they see. And the other people, the people that hired them, aren’t really people or are far too comfortable, and their feelings don’t matter. Well they do. Part of that empathy is putting yourself in everybody else’s shoes and trying to see things from their point of view. So when they put these restraints down, or constraints I should say, and they have certain things they need, a little bit of empathy goes a long way. Even if you’re arguing against it. Because you’re arguing against it while acknowledging that it is a perfectly reasonable thing to want. That is helpful.

Maybe even more than just going along with things is taking the effort to see things from other people’s point of view. Then either accept the constraints as reasonable or talk about why maybe they should go a different way.

**John:** Yeah. I can think of an example of like, OK, I want to do a gritty crime show and they’re like, “We love your writing. Our mandate is now we want to do blue sky, happy, sunny. We want dark things in beautiful environments. So can you take your gritty crime show and set it in the Florida sunshine?” And you could say absolutely no, that’s not a thing I want to do at all, or you could say like sure, I get what that is, I get what your mandate is. I can make it work. And I can use the tension between those two things to step up to the next level. That is the kind of thing that tends to make people more successful and have longer careers is to say like, oh, yeah, OK, I get that, and this is a thing I can change that will let me make this thing happen.

**Craig:** And it’s important to have a realistic view of what it is you’re working on. Because if you’re working on a crime procedural for say a basic cable channel then certain things – you got to know where you are, right? You’re in a certain kind of restaurant, and so you’ve kind of got to go along there. I think that this discussion that we’re having will be viewed by some people as a justification for some kind of selling out.

I think if you want to talk about one of the things that separates successful writers from writers who burn out it’s that writers who burn out, or don’t get there at all, are obsessed with this whole selling out business.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There is no selling out. Everybody is constantly making compromises. You don’t know how to make anything in this business without compromising. Directors know that, right? They know that. Every day is a war to limit the compromises. But they are constant because reality is reality. It intrudes.

Writers, because we have total control over what goes on the page, we have this delusion that there’s some pristine relationship between that and what comes out the other end. And any kind of compromise or negotiation is a failure of will and conviction, it is an indication of artistic failure, and it’s selling out. And that attitude gets your ass booted out of town faster than any other one.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like sometimes these writers they want to be both Charlie Kaufman and Greg Berlanti. They want the huge giant career, making thousands of shows, and to sort of be completely unyielding and singular in a vision at all times. And those aren’t compatible goals really.

**Craig:** I mean, I would argue, and maybe Charlie will come on our show. Because I suspect that Charlie as he’s making his films runs into moments most days when he’s shooting where he does have to kind of just adjust, or in the editing room he realizes he’s got to move a thing this way or that. Everybody is doing it.

**John:** Everyone is doing it. If you watched – you didn’t watch – I’m Thinking of Ending Things, we could watch that and like I don’t feel he compromised that much. I felt like he had a very singular vision and made that singular vision.

**Craig:** So here’s the thing. That’s because what he makes is unique.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It will always seem like it is the product of zero compromise, but it’s not.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** When you read stories about what Francis Ford Coppola was going through and dealing with when he was making Godfather, it’s like well surely he didn’t compromise ever. Oh my god, yes he did. Yes he did. Quite a bit. You know, it’s what you do.

**John:** Let’s talk about taste. I think an important thing is to be able to understand what is good writing and what is not good writing, especially when it applies to what transfers to the screen. The ability to have good taste on the page and seeing how that taste applies to the screen. And that match between your taste and what an audience’s taste is is crucial.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s kind of magic. I mean, there’s no way to quantify that. It is an essential part of what we call talent, I think. There’s talent in creating something. There’s also talent in predicting with some level of accuracy how it will be felt by other people. Because that is the job. Anybody who is creating any art with no concern or prediction or thought about the audience’s reaction is, well I just don’t believe it.

Because that means there’s no intention. And there’s always intention.

**John:** I want to play this clip from Ira Glass where he’s talking about taste and how he finds that there’s often this gap between you have taste, but you don’t have the craft yet. Let’s listen to what Ira Glass says.

**Ira Glass:** Somebody had told this to me, is that all of us who do creative work, you know, we get into it. And we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good. It has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. Do you know what I mean?

A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point they quit. And the thing I would just say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste, they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as what they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. It didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have. And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase, you got to know it’s totally normal. And the most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work.

Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

**John:** So I think back to when I was at USC for film school and one of the great resources that we had was a film library, so I could check out all of these screenplays and just go through and read these great scripts. And my writing was not as good as these scripts. And I recognized that it wasn’t as good as these scripts, but for whatever reason I wasn’t afraid of that. I aspired to hit that level and I kept working to get to that level.

People sometimes get crushed with self-doubt where they just don’t – they recognize that they’re not at that level and they don’t think they can actually get there. And so I like that Glass is pointing out that it’s often just to work to get yourself up to that level of polish.

**Craig:** If you had told me that that was an interview with Chris Keyser I would have believed you. They sound so similar.

**John:** They really do. That’s a good point.

**Craig:** So weird. So, yeah, this is a terrific observation and it’s something that somebody else had sent me a while ago, because it’s one of those things when you read it you’re like, or you listen to it and you go, oh of course, I mean, it’s so obvious and yet it had been kind of floating right there right under my consciousness.

I think that the reality of what he’s describing is one of the reasons I’m so angry all the time at critics. Because everyone who eventually gets to do something good is working through the gap. And while they’re working through the gap there are people who are brutalizing them in print and suggesting you’re never going to get there. Stop. Quit. You stink.

And I wish that would not happen. Because I do think there are probably people who left too soon who were one or two things away from kind of putting it all together. Scott Frank said something to me many years ago that seemed a bit dramatic at the time, but in hindsight was absolutely correct. And that was, he was reading something I’d written and he said, “The thing is you have yet to be really born as a writer.” And I was like well that’s very dramatic. [laughs] That’s a very, very dramatic statement. I’ve been working at this for 15 years Scott. I make a pretty good living.

But his point was that I hadn’t sort of become myself yet. And that maybe you could argue that that’s part of being in the gap. Not only is there a mismatch between your taste and your work, but also there is perhaps not enough of your own self in the work. Because the work that is available almost always has zero interest in who you are.

**John:** Absolutely. I hadn’t really thought about your career in terms of taste, but I would say that you’ve always had much better taste than the movies that we saw your name on.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, some of those movies I love. So my taste actually isn’t that great.

**John:** The breadth of your taste extended well beyond the movies, the kinds of movies that you were making.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you looked at the movies I was making it was easy enough and reasonable enough to conclude that I was a goof.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Some of those movies I really do hold close to my heart and some I definitely do not. And you know some were just work. But I at least for better or worse suffered through quite a lot of public humiliation, even as I was successful. And I really wish I could sit down one on one with each one of those people and explain to them why what they did was harm. And unnecessary, by the way. It’s totally unnecessary. You can absolutely not like a movie but the personal part of it is so anti-art is I guess how I would put it.

You don’t realize it, but you say you love film, you don’t if that’s what you’re doing.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s get back to the choices of what kinds of projects you’re working on and how many projects you’re sort of pursuing. Because a choice I’ve seen writers make is they have some success and they just take anything that comes their way. And there’s the temptation to never say no because you don’t know where your next job is, but I’ve also seen the opposite where people just say no to everything and then people stop asking them to the dance.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it’s that balance between saying yes enough that you’re still engaged as a writer, but not pursuing too much, or pursuing junk, or just becoming overcommitted and then just failing because we both know writers who just collapsed under that.

**Craig:** I was talking with Todd Philips about this. It was after he did The Hangover and it was a massive success. And maybe he was talking to Martin Scorsese. And Martin Scorsese, I’m just going to say he was, because that makes the story way cooler, but I think it was him. And he was telling Martin Scorsese that his world had changed because he had made The Hangover and suddenly he was getting sent everything, all sorts of things. And people were offering him the biggest possible things and he was sort of paralyzed and thinking that maybe he was just going to take time.

And then Martin Scorsese said, “The best advice I can give you is after you have a huge hit of any kind, a big success, jump right back on the horse, as fast as you can. Because if you don’t then the weight of that success grows and becomes almost an unbearable load. Because you’re never going to be able to beat that.” You can’t do that again. And so sometimes you actually have to just do something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And maybe it’s the wrong choice, but doing nothing for too long becomes its own kind of dangerous addiction. And you’re absolutely right. Sooner or later people are going to be like, huh, wait, we forgot about you. And no one wants that.

**John:** Yeah. We should revisit this topic in a few episodes and I want to look at what we’ve noticed never works and sort of what are the pattern of like please don’t do this thing. Because even what you’re describing in terms of like the writer who has a big hit and then just like becomes paralyzed or fearful of doing anything else, or over-celebrates that one thing, I think we’re going to find quite a few of those things that could actually be useful for our listeners.

**Craig:** All right. I agree.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to listener questions and now over the last few weeks we’ve all enjoyed hearing from Oops and the romantic adventures of Oops. And Megana has another question for us today that is not an Oops situation. I’ve got to preface this by saying this is about as opposite of Oops as we could imagine.

**Craig:** Anti-Oops.

**John:** It’s anti-Oops, but I also feel like it’s a good season opener because I feel like we’re going to revisit this topic down the road. Megana, come on and tell us the story of Shocked.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**Megana Rao:** All right. Shocked in LA wrote in about his friend. “Like many aspiring writers a close and talented friend of mine, a lady in her late 20s started her career at an agency. She quickly left and found work in production while pursuing her ambition of writing. She has a few great scripts under her belt and a couple we even wrote together. One of her friends from the agency was promoted this past year and agreed to represent her.

“A few months ago she gets a call from her boss from that agency, a 70-year-old man. He’s upset that she hid her writing ambitions from him. He asks her out to dinner to discuss her career. She was thrilled. He has a ton of industry pull and can really help her. But, he was a very difficult boss who put her through all sorts of inappropriate behavior, from commenting on her looks, to sharing sexual imagery in the office.

“Surprise, surprise, the dinner turned out to not be about her writing. He wants to explore their sexual connection. It was a stereotypical #MeToo moment. He told her that she shouldn’t have a boyfriend if she’s serious about writing and should have a casual sexual relationship with him instead. It was extremely demoralizing and degrading for her. He continued harassing her, basically chasing her out of the parking lot, but she was able to safely make it home.

“But here’s the thing. She’s still a baby writer, no credits or awards, repped at the same agency this guy works at. He’s her agent’s boss and seems pretty powerful. She’s afraid to even tell her agent what happened because of all the implications. However, I’m scared that he will have access to her if she stays at that agency. What if he terrorizes and sexually harasses her this way? Or destroys her career?

“My friend knows how hard it is to get represented in Hollywood. Although she has a manager, she doesn’t want to let go of her rep. But I think this baby agent has very little power anyways. He’s never even sent her on a general. My friend is also afraid to take on her powerful ex-boss/sexual harasser and certainly doesn’t want to be branded by this before anyone has even seen her work.

“What can I do to help her and what can she do to help herself?”

**John:** Ugh. All right. So much here. First off, we’re going to talk about Shocked. We think Shocked is a man. We’re guessing Shocked is a man, so we’re going to refer to this friend – the person who is writing this letter as Shocked. And the woman as the person who is going through this horrible situation.

This sucks. And so my first instinct was I don’t know what to do this, and so what I do in this case is I ask really smart friends. So I reached out to six of my smart female writer friends to get their take on what the right steps were. But before we get into that, Craig, what’s your first read on the situation?

**Craig:** Oh man. Well, so this is an interesting situation where I think while I want to tell Shocked’s friend to draw her flaming sword and slay the dragon, it’s so easy for me to say that. And it’s not so easy to do it. I do believe that in today’s day and age everybody has quite a bit more power than they used to. I mean, they used to have zero and now they have quite a bit in the sense that all she has to do is pick up the phone and call Deadline and this guy is in massive trouble.

But, she’s right to understand that that comes at some sort of cost. Given that the agent she has at this agency is not a bigshot. So Shocked describes this agent as a baby agent who has very little power and has never set this woman up on a general meeting, I don’t think there would too much lost if she walked from that agency and went maybe to try at a different agency, clean break, and see if she could find somebody else. That is I would call it the path of least resistance, because it doesn’t seem like you’d be losing much.

The path of greater resistance is to bring this incident to the attention of the board of directors at that agency.

**John:** So in talking with the six women yesterday one of the points that came up again and again is that the big moves are great in theory, but they don’t necessarily help the woman. So going out with a flaming sword or going to Deadline or one of those things, that’s not necessarily going to help her.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so what we really want to do is help her. What is the thing that helps her in this moment? The thing that was universal across this was to write it down. And both Shocked needs to write down everything that he remembers about this conversation he had with her. He needs to encourage her to write this all down, so she has it on paper. So if she decides to do something she has it down on paper that this is what happened. And that she has evidence if she decides to use it at some point about what happened.

Almost everybody I spoke with said she should leave this agency, and that included an agent I spoke with saying that this agent is not getting you work, this agent is not powerful, this junior agent you’re dealing with. You should leave because if you don’t trust going to this agent necessarily with this issue, like how can you trust this rep? How can this person actually represent you if you can’t even tell them that their boss is doing this?

You have to leave that agency. And you already have a manager. Just leave. There’s no reason to stick around.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think so. And if there is a desire in a very pro-social way to prevent this man from doing this to other people by calling him out, that is something that Shocked’s friend should only do through a lawyer. This is also a moment where I think you want to lawyer up.

**John:** We have some resources on that as well. So you may want to lawyer up, but people I spoke with recommended Time’s Up is not the right place to go to. Women in Film may be the right hotline for your call. Because this is actually kind of what they do is people who had these situations to talk through, OK, let’s deal with the trauma that you’re actually encountering right now and let’s see if there’s other women who have had similar reports. Let’s see if there’s some grouping of action that could make sense here, so it’s not just you against this 60-year-old man.

You are at the start of your career, he’s at the end of his career, and just remember that through all of this is that he’s almost out the door and you’re just coming in.

**Craig:** Right. I think that even if Shocked’s friend doesn’t have an intention to launch missiles, it’s still good to talk to a lawyer, even if all you get out of that is an understanding of what you’re supposed to write down. What are the details that matter? What are you supposed to write down? What are you supposed to save? And what do you do if you turn a corner and here’s there? What do you do if he leaves a message or he texts you?

Having a lawyer advise you at least on some best principles there would be a good thing. But that is a good point. As a 60-plus-year-old man not only is he going to be out of the business while you’re still in the business, assuming that your career flourishes, you’ll be working and he’ll be dead.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So if you want revenge there is that one revenge which is you dance on their grave. But this really sad and infuriating. And it’s sad and infuriating that this guy still feels protected enough by the world that he’s pulling this crap.

**John:** That – I want to spend a moment here. Because this is a man, a 60-year-old man in 2021 who somehow has been able to – this person obviously opens Deadline. This person can see in the world like what has happened to a person like him again, and again, and again, and still thinks like, oh, I’m special, I’m different, this is not going to happen to me. The hubris. The arrogance of this guy.

I mean, in addition to the shitty behavior he’s doing to this woman, just that he believes the rules that have taken down all these other people do not apply to him drives me mad.

**Craig:** Not only that, but he believes that the rule that 20-year-old women generally aren’t attracted to 60-year-old men also doesn’t apply.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So like he’s in a deep deluded state. I’m 50. I can’t believe that my 51-year-old wife still finds me attractive. [laughs] So I don’t know what this dude is smoking. I guess he’s just smoking his own ego, and his own arrogance. And, also, let’s face it. This business has entitled him. He doesn’t pull this crap if it hasn’t worked before.

**John:** Yeah. And so obviously it’s important to acknowledge that you are not the first person he has done this to, obviously. And so it’s not your responsibility to take up the sword for all the other people, but remember that you are not the only person. So there’s nothing special about you. This is his pattern of doing this that has gotten us into this situation.

Some other advice I got from the women I spoke to is for Shocked make sure you don’t infantilize this woman. She is a grown woman who can make her own decisions. And she actually has more agency in this situation than she may realize. So you can encourage her, but don’t box her into a situation. Don’t tell her she has to do something, because she doesn’t have to do anything. She can choose what is the appropriate step for her to take.

This person also said useful advice might be you don’t want to be a side character in someone else’s story. And so if she thinks of herself as the protagonist in this story, like screw this guy. This guy did a bad thing. And it’s up to her to decide what she wants to do about this next step. But the important part is it’s up to her and she doesn’t have to let him drive the narrative from this point forward.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think Shocked is being a good friend. I think good friends want to help and they want to find out what they can do to help. And maybe this is help. I don’t know. Maybe this is hurt. You know? Because the other issue is if this woman is like, wait, you put my shit on Scriptnotes? That would be bad. So hopefully this was something that they discussed. Obviously we’ve anonymized everything quite extensively here.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I think at a minimum let’s get to super practical stuff. Super practical stuff makes absolute sense that she would leave the agency. And that when you leave the agency also, Shocked’s friend, lawyer. Don’t leave the agency by you calling and going through a weird, awkward conversation with your agent.

**John:** No. The manager can do this as well.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Many of the women said your manager just tells the agency, “You know what? She doesn’t want to be repped there anymore.” And that’s it. It’s done.

**Craig:** I would actually still advise lawyer. And here’s why.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** Managers cannot be trusted completely in this regard. They have a deep conflict of interest.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Lawyers are governed by a higher authority. The State Bar. And their attorney/client privilege. And ethics. And all that stuff. And a lawyer, you can tell your lawyer anything. Anything. And it’s confidential.

You can’t say that about a manager. They can blab your crap anywhere they want. So, I would say lawyer. Clean break. Have the lawyer communicate that. Make it nice and simple and final. And then, yeah, moving on.

**John:** So, the Women in Film hotline 855-WIF-LINE. Or it’s womeninfilm.org is the organization. So we’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

Obviously, Shocked, if you want to keep us apprised to sort of what this person decides to do in the future we’d love to hear about it, and of course I’m sure we’ll get plenty of emails in from folks with their opinions what to do.

Megana, I’m curious to hear your opinion on this as a writer in her 20s. What was your first instinct on this and where do you see this shaking out?

**Megana:** Yeah, I mean, it was really upsetting to read. And I think last month when things started opening up after the pandemic we saw all of those horrible mass shootings. And this past week, or past couple of weeks I think as LA has opened up and people are returning to their offices I’ve just been reading so many horrible, and hearing these stories about women and assistants who are continuing to have these #MeToo type stories.

You know, it’s just like a very sad sobering reminder that these issues were not solved and they have not gone away. But we’re all just forced to be away from each other for a year. But now that the world is opening back up we have to figure out a way to fix them. The problems haven’t gone away and it’s just really disheartening to be reminded of these things that we were dealing with pre-pandemic and where we are now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s such a good point. It pushed them aside because we were literally not in offices for them to happen. But now they’re back.

**Craig:** You kind of want to hope that it’s also not a case where there’s this weird pent up aggression that’s going to emerge and that we’re going to go through a period where it’s even worse. I hope that’s not the case. But one thing that we always have to keep in mind is we cannot applaud ourselves constantly for the progress that’s been made because the progress will never be perfection. And there is always going to be this stuff going on. Because we can’t pre-crime these things. We can’t get ahead of them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re going to happen. And dealing with all of that and how we handle those situations, it is going to continue to put young women in particular in very difficult positions, put women of all ages in very difficult positions. That’s going to keep happening. We hope less and less. But no one should be surprised that this is continuing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** One last point I want to make, and someone brought up as I spoke to them yesterday, is that I think we still have this vision of agencies being super powerful and sort of like the Mike Ovitz model. And I think agents can help you. I really don’t think they can hurt you that much. And so I think her rejecting this guy is not going to hurt her. I don’t think agents actually have that power in 2021 the way we might have mythologized them before.

I don’t think her leaving the agency is going to hurt her career because it hasn’t helped her career.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, from a practical point of view the agent that just got promoted from off a desk, yeah, that’s not necessarily the best person in the world. I mean—

**John:** Megana, I cut you off. What were you going to say?

**Megana:** Oh, I think I was just going to say to answer your earlier question, the thing that also makes me so sad about this is like this woman has had something really horrible and discouraging happen to her, and following up on our conversation about patterns of success, like she now has all this self-doubt and anxiety about the value of her actual work. And then she has to be the one to advocate for herself. Oh my god. It’s such a difficult standard for us to keep and for us to expect people who have been abused to be able to do that. It just breaks my heart.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is one of the more insidious aspects of this that we don’t talk about enough. And that is that people start to question whether or not they’re good at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s something that Megan Ganz spoke about, well, with her typical clarity and intelligence when she had her experience being harassed and abused by Dan Harmon. One of the things that hurt that most was being unsure of whether or not her position on that writing staff was because of her skill. And that is crushing. That is a stomach-churning thing to think. The face I have? I’ve never had to wonder. If somebody was going to give me something it was because of the work. It certainly wasn’t because of my appearance, or how they felt about me romantically.

And I’ve never had to ask myself that question. I’ve never had to contemplate whether or not I was being hoodwinked and gas lit.

**John:** Yeah. Two of the women I spoke with yesterday they related so strongly to this story because they had had very similar things happen and their response from 20 years ago was just like, OK, well I’ll just move on and I’ll just suppress it and I’ll move on. And I do think there’s an opportunity now to – if this woman chooses to – to address this and stop it if she wants to rather than just having to say like suppress it and pretend it didn’t happen.

**Craig:** Well, we are certainly hoping the best. And if you can, therapy, and talking to a professional about these things now I think is always advisable.

**John:** Agreed. All right. It is time for One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things this week. The first is an HGTV series called Home Town Takeover which sends a big HGTV crew to Wetumpka, Alabama to do a bunch of makeovers around the town. Wetumpka, Alabama is where we shot Big Fish. It’s where the house in Big Fish is. And one of the houses they remodel is the Big Fish house. And so it was so surreal and wonderful to see – our first day of shooting was at the Big Fish house. And to see them refurbishing and remodeling this house.

What they kind of say on the show, but they don’t make entirely clear, is that house is really kind of just one story and we stuck a fake second story on the top of it. But it was never really meant to stay. And we were supposed to take it all down and the owner said, “No, no, just leave it up.” But it was never meant to be livable.

And so the crew had to go through and jerry rig to sort of make it actually livable space. But it was so cool to see both that house but also that town and to realize if I hadn’t written the movie Big Fish that wouldn’t have happened. It was just a weird connection to like, oh, this series exists because I decided to adapt this book into this movie. So it was a really weird thing to see. But actually a really well done HGTV series. So I recommend you check that out if you like those kind of shows, or if you like Big Fish and you can see that.

My second One Cool Thing is Standard Ebooks. And so Project Gutenberg has the text of a zillion books that you can download for free which is great, but it’s not lovely formatted text. It’s not as good to read as a Kindle book might be or a printed book might be. What Standard Ebooks does is they produce a collection of these high quality really well-formatted, accessible, open source, free public domain ebooks. And they’re really good.

So, just go to their site, standardbooks.org/ebooks and you can download basically all the great classics, but really good versions of them. So if you’re looking for those try Standard Ebooks.

**Craig:** You know what? I don’t need a One Cool Thing. You had two.

**John:** I gave you two.

**Craig:** We’re good.

**John:** But, here’s a One Cool Thing you can do is on Episode 500 we said that we desperately need to go back to a segment called Change Craig’s Mind. But we need to figure out how we’re going to change – what’s a topic we can change Craig’s mind about? So if you have suggestions of things you’ve heard him say that you think, no, that’s wrong and we can get him to change his mind, we’ll see. And we can try over the course of this next season to change his mind about anything.

**Craig:** It’s possible. It’s possible.

**John:** Well, Craig, I know you hate mayonnaise. Could we change your mind about mayonnaise?

**Craig:** Oh my god, no. That would be just an utter waste of time. It would be a waste of a segment. That is disgusting.

**John:** Aversion therapy. But we need to find another mayonnaise, something Craig doesn’t really like–

**Craig:** It’s the word.

**John:** Maybe the sense that you don’t like it because you don’t kind of like get it. And then you get it and you’re like, oh yeah, it turns out I do like that.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s possible. Lately I have been watching more ventriloquism.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. Late at night he fires up the iPad by the side of the bed.

**Craig:** I make myself a mayonnaise sandwich and sit down and enjoy a fun evening of ventriloquism. Absolutely not.

**John:** My brother grew up on mayonnaise sandwiches. That was his go-to sandwich.

**Craig:** Oh god. Geez.

**John:** Wonder Bread and mayonnaise.

**Craig:** Ugh. Man, that is white.

**John:** Nothing else.

**Craig:** Good lord, that’s white.

**John:** So white.

**Craig:** White.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** White. That’s so white it’s white.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Brian Ramos. 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 I’m @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for the weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lot 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. That’s also where you can sign up to get updates on the Scriptnotes book. And we’ll be sending out an update this week about where we’re at with the book. Craig, Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**Megana:** Thank you guys.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, so the Scriptnotes book, we think it’s going to be actually a pretty hefty book because there’s just a lot of material in there. And I’m curious what you look for in a physical printed book. What are things that excite you about books? What are printed books that you’ve especially liked over the course of your career?

**Craig:** Well, for most fiction I don’t care because I’m just reading. I just want to turn pages. So the quality of a paperback, or even a hard cover book is not particularly important to me. But when it’s a book about a topic, something real, or a book that’s meant to be educational, a few things stick out.

I like size. I like the book to be larger. Because I think it gives you more detail. I really like mixed media. I like the idea of images. There was a book I had as a kid that was more than just images of course. I think it might have been published by World Book. And it was about the universe. And there were plastic overlays and there were sort of grown up versions of popup book style stuff, where you’re moving tabs and turning wheels and things to actually accentuate whatever the value of the imagery was. And then photographs of real things.

I like to engage, feel like I’m kind of involved with the book. You know, play with it a little bit.

**John:** Yeah. I also really love books that I can sort of pick up and flip to any page. Like for nonfiction books, that I can just flip to any page and find something interesting. I think the reason why I loved my D&D books so much growing up is you could just flip to any page in there and it was interesting. And you didn’t have to read them from the start to the end at all. It’s just join at any point.

I also really loved – Peanuts had these great sort of encyclopedia things. They were these colorful things about space and the world. And I loved those too growing up because you just flipped to anything and you’d just find interesting articles. So you could join them at any point in the middle of the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s a kind of a book fetishization where people are really into the binding and the edges. You know, there’s like the ruffled edges.

**John:** Oh yeah. I hate them.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t like the ruffled edges. It looks like your book got stuck in something.

**John:** I hate gilded edges as well. Because they were sharp on my fingers.

**Craig:** Ah, yeah, nothing says luxury like gold-tipped pages. Uh-huh. I just want the book to not fall apart. That’s really all I’ve ever asked for. I don’t really care about that other stuff. I’m not a book fetishist.

A similar problem with NFTs where I’m really struggling just to understand why people are doing it. And like similarly when people – I have a first edition of this thing and I’m like, yeah, but the value of that thing is not the object.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’s like saying I have first edition CD of this – who cares? It’s plastic. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the content that matters. So I don’t get too wrapped up in the whole booked-y thing.

**John:** Do you like book jackets or the ones where it is printed directly on the cover?

**Craig:** Interesting. Ever since I was a kid, first thing that I do is take that off.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t like book jackets either. I don’t take the jacket off, because I don’t want to lose it, but I also don’t like it. I like them for being able to use them as a bookmark. I will use those to sort of mark what page I’m at.

**Craig:** I was a dog-earer. Still am a dog-earer. I know I’m not supposed to. It’s like wrong.

**John:** It’s a crime.

**Craig:** Crime, whatever, against this inanimate object. But ever since I was a kid I would – my fingers would be the color of whatever the cover was because the cover was often some sort of red or blue.

**John:** Yeah, cloth.

**Craig:** Right. And so when you take the dust jacket off your fingers – Megana, cover on/cover off?

**Megana:** No, no, no. I always do cover off. Because I always tear it.

**Craig:** Oh that’s interesting. So you’re reading violently.

**John:** She’s a violent reader.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** There’s an increasing trend towards the jacketless books where the artwork is printed directly on the book itself. And I just like that. Sometimes it doesn’t look as neat on the shelf, but who cares what’s on the shelf? What actually looks good in your hands and sitting on a table is more useful to me. And it’s one less thing to lose. I don’t want to lose a thing. I don’t want to rip it. I don’t Megana ripping my book covers.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Megana housesits for me. I don’t want to come back and all the book covers are ripped.

**Megana:** I also borrow a lot of your books, with your permission.

**Craig:** Oh. I thought you were just admitting grand theft bookery.

**John:** So Craig two recent books – and the Scriptnotes book will not be anywhere near this size, or epicness, but the Art & Arcana book, we talked about it in the opening, was really sort of a remarkable feat of history and all the artwork throughout the ages. That was a book that you want to keep and you want to sort of, you know, again, you can flip through it. I think I did read it straight through, but you could also just go to any point in the middle of the story.

**Craig:** Those are wonderful books, especially for people who are already into a thing. And there are areas like that where, you know, sports in particular. And I should have mentioned Michael Witwer who also worked on – it wasn’t just Kyle. But if you are into something then – and you know that other people are into it you have an opportunity to do something different.

I’m a baseball fan and every Christmas – I say Christmas even though it was boring Chanukah – I would get oh we got you a book about the Yankees. And there’s like 4,000 books about the Yankees. And most of them are just bad. Because they’re just the same old crap. And they’re literally made for stupid Christmas presents. They weren’t actually made to be loved.

So, try and make something that – if you’re a bookmaker–

**John:** Yeah. We’re bookmakers now. So we’re going to try to make something that people will love. Hey, what is your opinion of the ribbon inside books? The bookmark ribbon?

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** You don’t like it?

**Craig:** I hate it.

**John:** You do? All right. Because I’m a big fan. In our sample artwork we have the ribbon, so I guess you’ll have to rip that out.

**Craig:** Megana, if you say that your problem with the ribbon is that it tears then we know you are reading these books in far too aggressive fashion. Are you a ribboner or a non-ribboner?

**Megana:** I like the ribbon, but I’ve been reading books on my Kindle through the pandemic and I recently got a book in paper, or like a physical book, and I have so many papercuts on my hands. I’m like what is wrong with me?

**Craig:** Yeah. What is wrong with you? [laughs]

**John:** She’s both too strong and too fragile.

**Craig:** Normally I’m really supportive of your position, but I’m concerned that you’re reading books incorrectly.

**Megana:** Yeah, I don’t know.

**Craig:** What’s happening?

**John:** What is happening? I will say that I love a big book, but sometimes the book is just so big it’s uncomfortable to read. And so I just got the Ultimate Sandman, because I’d never read Sandman. And I was like I’ve got to read Sandman. So I read Ultimate Sandman which collects the first run of Sandman. And it’s great and it’s oversized so it’s actually much easier to read and you can see the artwork better. It’s just terrifically well done. But man it is heavy. So it’s a thing you cannot read – you can kind of read it on your lap, but you certainly could not read it laying down. It’s awkward–

**Craig:** That’s the thing. I don’t know if you’ve seen these, as we get older I see more–

**John:** Large print books.

**Craig:** –ads targeted to me that I’m like, oh boy. And they have these contraptions where it’s like suspend the book over your face in bed. And you’re like oh boy. But it’s true. If I have a heavier book that I’m reading after about 15 or 20 minutes if I’m in bed my elbows start to ache.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because, god, can you believe that, Megana? I mean, how old are we? Do any of your friends ever say, “Ow, my elbows ache?”

**Megana:** Wait, because you’re holding the book up?

**Craig:** See, she literally doesn’t understand. She’s trying to comprehend how that could happen. Just you wait.

**John:** Just you wait. A thing I won’t put up with anymore that I used to not have a problem with is cheap paperbacks. I find it just really hard to read cheap paperbacks at this point.

**Craig:** The print is too small. I can’t read it.

**John:** The print is too small and you can sort of read through the next line. So I’m going to read my Kindle. I’ll buy a hardcover, but if I can’t get the hardcover I’ll probably read the Kindle.

**Craig:** I mean, I must admit that if there is a Kindle version to purchase I’m purchasing it. It’s just – or an Apple iBook version. The one thing that I miss and I wish they could solve is page numbers. If they could solve that.

**John:** It’s nice to be able to refer to a page number.

**Craig:** Yeah, if they could just solve page numbers.

**John:** They get better at it.

**Craig:** That would be nice.

**John:** So, Craig, now that you’re moving to my neighborhood you will have Chevaliers as your neighborhood bookstore. It is terrific, so hopefully you’ll get back in the habit of buying some books.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** In print.

**Craig:** Yes. I do love a bookstore. I love to browse a bookstore. And inevitably if I browse a bookstore I’m going to buy a book. And the place that we have near you per square foot I think has more bookshelf space than any place I’ve ever been other than a library. There’s bookshelves – so many opportunities for books.

**John:** Excellent. We love it.

**Craig:** So we will purchase those.

**John:** And one of those books will be the Scriptnotes book that you won’t read.

**Craig:** Complete with ribbon.

**John:** Love it. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**John:** Thanks Megana.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Megana:** Bye.

Links:

* [Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana Book](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562708/dungeons-and-dragons-art-and-arcana-by-michael-witwer-kyle-newman-jon-peterson-and-sam-witwer-foreword-by-joe-manganiello-official-dungeons-and-dragons-licensed/)
* [Heartbreaker](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1465487/) and [The Breaker Upperers](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6728096/)
* [Noah Evslin’s pitch for Guild Awards](https://twitter.com/nevslin/status/1391143482010390529)
* [Ira Glass on Taste](https://jamesclear.com/ira-glass-failure)
* Women in Film helpline for sexual harassment and misconduct in the entertainment industry:(855)WIF-LINE (855-943-5463) or reach out [online here](https://womeninfilm.org/)
* [Hometown Takeover](https://www.hgtv.com/shows/home-town-takeover)
* [Standard Ebooks](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks)
* [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/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Brian Ramos ([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/501standard.mp3).