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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/adapting-with-justin-simien).

**John August:** Hey, it’s John. Craig uses the F-word a couple of times in this episode, so just a warning in case you’re in the car with your kids.

**Craig Mazin:** Sorry about that. It just happened. It slipped out.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 460 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we look at adapting features into TV series and adapting to changing norms of portraying people of color and historical figures. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we’ll talk about Hamilton on Disney+ and what it means for musicals on screen. To help us with all of this we will be welcoming writer-director Justin Simien.

But first we have some industry news. Craig, what happened this last week?

**Craig:** So on July 1st the Writers Guild announced, that’s the Writers Guild West, in conjunction with the Writers Guild East, announced that conjointly they had reached a tentative agreement with the studios on a new three-year contract. You were on the negotiating committee. This was kind of a strange one because of the pandemic and all the rest. And I think this may have been the first in my memory, this may have been the first deal that we negotiated after both of the other two major creative unions.

**John:** That’s right. So in our backstory here, so as we’ve talked through the lead up to this, generally the three big guilds, the Directors Guild, Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild, each of them is negotiating a three-year contract. I forget exact expiration dates but generally the DGA goes first, SAG generally follows after the WGA. Sometimes it goes before the WGA. But our contract had actually run out and we’d extended two months because of the pandemic basically.

We started all the process of gearing up for this negotiation. So we did the survey to members. We did the pattern of demands. There was a vote on the pattern of demands. We had member meetings. And then suddenly we could not have member meetings anymore because there was a pandemic. We could not gather together.

**Craig:** Yeah. And a lot of people had asked me at the time when we were running up against the expiration what would happen if there wasn’t some sort of official extension. And the truth is there kind of is an implied official extension. If your collective bargaining agreement expires and there is no strike and there is no lockout, essentially the contract remains in place and is largely enforceable. There are a few things that go away like grievances and things, but mostly it extends itself.

So people were a little concerned, like wait, do residuals stop on that day? No. Everything just keeps on sort of motoring along. But what you don’t get are, for instance, increases, or any of the things that you’re hoping to get, or probably know you can get. So it’s a little bit of a game of chicken. You don’t want to extend forever. You want to get a new deal done. So, I was not particularly freaked out by that.

**John:** No, I wasn’t either. Things to keep in mind though is that so the pandemic, of course, meant that we could not meet in person, but also meant that all production had shutdown. So suddenly the entire town was not working, except for weirdly the writers. We were still employed. And we were still employable. And we had virtual rooms. So it was a weird situation that we were going through. And then in the middle of these negotiations, which were all happening on Zoom, we had the George Floyd protests, Black Lives Matter. We had a lot of other stuff sort of happening in society. And that was impossible to ignore that these other things were happening while we were trying to negotiate a three-year contract with the studio.

So there was a lot going on is basically what I meant to say.

**Craig:** There was. Look, you and I know that for, I don’t know, a while now there had been a lot of talk that the writers would be going on strike. I would hear it all the time. And I just didn’t ever think we would. It just didn’t seem – this was before COVID, before the world started to turn upside a little bit. It just didn’t seem likely to me. I didn’t quite understand why everyone was freaking out. Maybe I’m just naïve. But it didn’t seem like it was going to be a strike situation. It really didn’t seem like it was going to be a strike situation once the DGA and SAG had already cemented the pattern in place.

So, I was not surprised by this. I think some people were. Nor was I surprised particularly by how it all worked out. It kind of seemed to me like it worked out the way I expected it would.

**John:** I would say it didn’t work out quite the way I expected it would. So, and again, perspectives in terms of like who we’ve been talking with and sort of which rooms we’ve been in, but let’s go back and talk about sort of the strike idea, or the strike threat. Because in our last negotiation, the 2017 negotiations, there was a strike authorization vote that happened. And that’s one of the things that unions do when they are in a negotiation to show like, hey, we actually will – we would step out. We would stop working if this were to happen. Much harder I think to play that card when the entire town is shut down.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s true. Although I’m happy that we couldn’t play that card because I don’t really think we should be playing that card the way we do. First of all, I don’t think it comports with our constitution. But also I’m just – we had gone through this last time and I was like on record I am not doing this whole – even if I don’t want to strike I have to vote yes for a strike. I’m not doing it anymore. It’s just crazy. We shouldn’t be in that business of just constantly asking our members to vote for something they don’t want just so that it won’t happen, and then it happens. I’m glad.

We do have to figure out how to have a reasonable strike threat without taking that vote. I think we did in 2001. We did a really good job of pushing it right up to the brink. We didn’t have a strike authorization vote, but it sure seemed like it was inevitable. And then at the last minute a deal was worked out.

**John:** So let’s recap what the issues were going into this, pre-pandemic, sort of what was on the table. So, for a change it wasn’t about the health plan. The health plan is actually funded and fine. We knew that the DGA had taken a rollback on residuals for TV syndication, so that was a thing that was going to be pushed at us. We talked a lot about pension and keeping our pension funded, so that we actually can pay what’s being owed to writers.

We talked a lot about streaming and SVOD, specifically residuals for streaming and SVOD. The idea that if your show is a massive hit for Netflix or for Amazon your residuals should reflect that. And right now they don’t. We talked about getting rid of the reduced rates that studios can pay for writers, newer writers, so there’s a new writer discount. There are trainee rates, which mostly go to underrepresented class of writers, minority writers, Black writers.

We talked about teams and the way that – writers are the only group in this industry where two people are sharing one salary and in sharing one salary there’s some real inequities that happen there, in their rates and also how things are calculated for pension and for health.

Comedy and variety, so when we had Ashley Nicole Black on the show talking about how if you’re writing on one of these talk shows, like late night talk show that’s for a steamer, there aren’t even minimums. There’s not residuals. It’s all sort of a wild free for all.

In feature land, because Craig and I focus on this, there was a proposal for a theatrical residual for foreign distribution. So essentially the same way that when an American TV show is shown overseas we get residuals for that. Shouldn’t we get residuals for an American movie that is showing overseas?

We talked about a second step for screenwriters. This has been a thing that Craig and I have been hammering on for years and years. The idea that especially writers who are being paid less than a certain percentage of minimum, or certain double of minimums, that you need to guarantee them a second step. They are the most vulnerable feature writers and they are being exploited in one-step deals.

**Craig:** Yeah. Generally speaking I think all these things are important. The guild has to figure out what their priorities are and what is more getable than others. I just want to mention that pension was a real issue. I mean, you all saw that. Somebody should be apologizing to Nick Kazan who went out on a limb and made a very strong statement during the last election that our pension was in trouble. And I believe he got just a ton of anger about that and denial. There was just like official Writers Guild denial that the pension was in trouble. And he was right. The pension was in trouble. And somebody should apologize to him for that.

And I’m glad that we were able to address it because the guild essentially has two major moral obligations as far as I can tell. One is to the emerging writers and one is to writers who are in the sunset of their life, because that’s when we need the care the most – when we’re coming up and when we’re on our way out, not to be too grim about what it means to be a retiree. I’ll be there soon enough.

The feature thing is obviously – it just hurts. And we are either going to be in a situation where we keep kicking that football down the field and punting forever, or we make it a point of saying that that is now the priority and it’s more important than other things like the every three years improving the payments and rates and terms for television writers. We’re just going to have to do it or not. Right? But right now we are on a pretty much a 25-year streak of nothing for screenwriters specifically.

And so I don’t know what to say. Certainly I’m going to be voting yes on this contract. I think most reasonable people would. But I just don’t know what else we can do internally, other than to continue to encourage screenwriters to run for the board. I know Michele Mulroney is a big advocate for screenwriters. I’m glad she’s there in the room.

**John:** She was co-chair of the negotiating committee.

**Craig:** And I hope she keeps pushing this. I know she wants it. I know that.

**John:** So you were saying the guild has a specific focus on writers at the beginnings of their careers, emerging writers, writers at the end of their careers. Another area which was on our pattern of demands was paid parental leave which is a real crux point there because for many writers it’s the moment at which they have to decide am I going to continue a writing career or am I going to have a family.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so one of the sort of real breakthroughs I think of this negotiation was for the first time, for the first guild ever, we have a paid parental leave which is entirely funded by studio contributions. It’s 0.5% of writer’s earnings go into a fund that pays for paid parental leave. It’s worth $30 million over three years. No one else has it. I genuinely believe DGA and SAG have to get it for their next round. I think it could be groundbreaking for writers, especially women, who feel like they have to choose between a family and a writing career.

**Craig:** Yeah. No question. This is definitely of greatest value to us because it supports women continuing in the workplace. We know that just because of the nature of the way birth works that parental leave accrues to the benefit of women in the more immediate and important way. And because – I’m not sure if it ever will carry over quite the way it has for us to the DGA and SAG, because the nature particularly in television is that it is a Monday through Friday gig. You show up, if you’re in a room and you work and you go home. Directing, there is no ability to take leave in the middle of a movie as a director. It just doesn’t work financially. And the same goes for actors. It’s going to be much more difficult for them.

I’m not saying that they deserve it any less. It will just be much more difficult for them to get.

**John:** Craig, I think you’re misunderstanding it though. This is actually – it’s fully portable. So I think a feature writer is in much the same situation as a director. And a feature writer will be able to use this because the money that has been socked aside from this is going to go to them. So, you know, while you may not be leaving your exact job the way that someone who is working as an executive at Disney would leave to go on parental leave, when the time comes and you are not taking work because your job is now to raise a newborn you will be able to use it.

So the fact that it applies not just to TV writers but to all writers, to comedy/variety writers, is crucial.

**Craig:** Of course. Absolutely. I think, no question. I wasn’t questioning whether or not it applied to all writers. And I’m glad it does. I’m just suggesting that it’s going to be harder for the DGA and SAG to get it. But I hope they do.

But, no, I’m thrilled that we got this. I think it’s incredibly important. And it is going to make it easier for us to improve our parity, well, we don’t have parity statistics, but will improve our statistics and help push them toward parity, particularly in gender. So this was a big win for us and I’m thrilled that we have it.

**John:** Cool. Let’s wrap this up by saying the things we did not get, which I think are still really important. That sense of tiered residuals or some way of recognizing that if something is a giant hit for Disney+, like Hamilton, it should be paying out more in residuals than something that is not a hit. And there needs to be some way to recognize that and to pay that.

**Craig:** You’re talking about like elevations of the formula itself?

**John:** I’m saying elevations of formula or an actual true formula. How often something is streamed impacts how much a writer gets in residuals?

**Craig:** Well, there’s not connection whatsoever to the amount of showings? It’s just a flat number?

**John:** It’s essentially a flat number?

**Craig:** Isn’t there a formula with [imputions] and [unintelligible].

**John:** No. So right now the way in which you figure out how valuable something is is kind of an internal calculation based on the market value of the thing. But it doesn’t actually make sense when Netflix is making something for Netflix. They’re not selling it to anybody else.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** And so there’s no transparency.

**Craig:** They’re self-made stuff. And there is no transparency. We know that. And this is – this is a really tough nut to crack. Because even if you come up with a tiered plan you have to rely on their numbers. Because there is no Nielsen. There’s no ticket sales. There’s no box office. I mean, Netflix repeatedly says that people watch their shows. It’s some number that’s absurd. It’s just like, “Yeah, 400 billion watched our latest—“

No they didn’t. No they didn’t. They have their whole like, oh, they watched it for two seconds. But then in reality they’ll come back to you and say, “Oh yeah, no one is watching it.” I don’t know how they – how do you get that without transparency from them?

**John:** But the reason why this is so crucial just to wrap this up is that as more and more stuff goes streaming first, as what we consider theatrical features are made streaming first, this matters. Because the future of residuals is going to be on streaming. And so we need to make sure that residuals actually make sense on streaming.

**Craig:** Look, this battle is hugely important. And this is a battle that will cover both feature writers and television writers.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Because right now I’m looking around, I’m not seeing theaters even open. And when this ends I don’t know what that looks like. And I also don’t know – I don’t think any of us really truly understand the economics that the studios are currently contemplating. The cost of putting Hamilton on Disney+ is vastly lower than the cost of putting it in theaters. Vastly lower.

Now, are they losing out on ticket sales? No question. Do they make it up in subscriptions and subscription retention?

**John:** Maybe?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t know. But what I do know is if things continue to go the way they are, I mean, even prior to COVID Netflix had no problem making movies for Netflix that just stream. So, yes, we need to figure out that formula. And that will be a strike issue. And that’s something that we’re going to have to – I would love if we could somehow talk to DGA and SAG about that, too.

Foreign theatrical is probably not as big of a deal. I don’t that that’s – for me, personally is much of a – that feels a little bit like arguing over a somewhat sun-setting thing.

**John:** Just to help the Deadline Hollywood headline writers who are going to say, “Craig Mazin: We must strike.” All right.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, I’ve always said [Wannsee] and we have to strike over something. They really need to look carefully at that. But I also do think at some point we are going to have to as a union collectively, and I’m talking to television writers now, do for feature writers what feature writers have done over and over for television writers.

**John:** I would also want to include comedy and variety folks in there as well. We think we get the short end of the stick. They get no stick at all.

**Craig:** They get no stick at all. So I think we should concentrate on the no sticks and short sticks people in our next go around. But for this go around I think that you, your committee, the guild pretty much did the best they could. I don’t see, I mean, just because I’m disappointed that certain things aren’t there, well, duh. I mean, I guess if we’re not disappointed then we really under-asked, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this seems like a pretty solid deal. And pretty much what I imagined it would be. And we should all vote yes and get back to – well, keep working I guess.

**John:** We’ll keep working. All right. Now for the marquee attraction of this podcast. Justin Simien is a writer-director whose credits include Dear White People, which won the US Dramatic Special Jury Award for breakthrough talent at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. In 2017 his television series based on the film debuted on Netflix. Now two seasons in it’s received a notable spike in attention given the protests and national conversation about race and racism in America.

His follow up feature, Bad Hair, debuted at Sundance in January, which feels like a century ago. Justin, welcome to the show.

**Justin Simien:** Hey, thanks. Good to be here.

**Craig:** Great to have you on, man.

**John:** It is a pleasure. So, where do we find you today? Describe your surroundings as we’re recording this.

**Justin:** I am Skyping from lovely Los Angeles where coronavirus is everywhere. And, yeah, where I’ve been just sort of working out of my house, you know, since February like everybody else.

**Craig:** You’re nesting. You’re nesting. We’re all nesting.

**Justin:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Which I like. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a good instinct. So, let’s talk a little bit about your background. So you are a film school person, is that correct? We get so many questions on the show about like, “Hey, should I go to film school?” People who are in high school or people who finished college and thinking like, oh, should I go to film school. You are a film school person. I am a film school person. Tell me about your film school experience.

**Justin:** Wow, I’m a film school person, guys. You know, it was interesting. I have to say I figured out what kind of storyteller I needed to be/wanted to be in high school because I had the fortune of going to a performing arts high school. I studied theater. What was I called? I was a theater major with a musical theater emphasis. And truly if it wasn’t for that experience I don’t know what I would be, where I would be, how I would be. And so for me college was actually a little bit more like a high school in that there was certainly a film school component to Chapman University, but there were also other schools there. And there were other kinds of folks there. And there were quite a few people who had grown up and spent their whole lives in Orange County and had never met Black people before.

So it was a little more I would cliqued than my actual high school experience. But, the thing that I really loved about the Chapman film school is that, you know, there’s really this emphasis on making things from day one. You’re not sort of learning theory. I was making short films right away. And they were probably really terrible and I haven’t watched them in a long time. But it felt so great to be able to, you know, apply what I was learning kind of immediately.

And I think there’s a lot of stuff that I learned. There’s a lot of stuff that I’m realizing I didn’t learn in film school that has become essential to me.

**Craig:** Oh, well, let me stop you there. Because I’m not a film school guy like you two fancy lads. So I’m kind of curious what are the things, and I would imagine people who run film schools should be curious about this – what are the things you didn’t learn that you maybe think you should have, or at least film schools could do better?

**Justin:** Well I think film schools, well, I don’t know if this is true for all film schools, but it feels like it’s all about preparing folks for a certain kind of job. You know, you’re taught single protagonist storytelling. The things that I learned were very focused on like how to fit within Hollywood’s existing framework, which I think is valuable and interesting and helpful, but is incredibly limiting, too.

Specifically when we talk about cinema history, specifically Black people and African-American sort of contributions to not just Hollywood but cinema history in general are almost completely ignored. You maybe get like a conversation about Blaxploitation but like, you know, when everyone learns about Birth of a Nation we all watch the movie or we all watch clips on that. We discussed in great detail how D.W. Griffith invented cinema language and editing and cross-cutting and all of these things. And everyone is very careful to parse out the egregious racism in that film from its cinema techniques.

But then no discussion is ever given to the fact that that actually begins the independent film movement in America because, you know, Black Americans were so outraged by that film that you have the rise of someone like Oscar Micheaux who actually creates an entire Black Hollywood system, with its own stars and its own theater chains and all this stuff.

And this is stuff you just kind of have to find out in life if ever. And it’s actually like essential knowledge. This is actually the framework, the groundwork, for independent cinema as we know it. And of course independent cinema is what I’ve been operating in since I got my break.

**Craig:** It’s fascinating I think the general perception in let’s just call it the hegemonic culture in the United States is that universities and higher education is a hotbed of Marxist hyper-progressive thinking. And in fact the more I talk to people the more it seems that at least in a lot of these institutions things are fairly regressive. I don’t really understand. I mean, I’ve got to be honest with you, just as a side note about film school. A lot of people bring up Birth of a Nation. It’s been brought up a lot lately. John, have you ever seen Birth of a Nation?

**John:** I’ve never seen Birth of a Nation. So it only adds a thing that people talk about rather than an actual thing to watch.

**Craig:** Let me go on record here for a second. Birth of a Nation sucks. And I understand that people, like why they study it, because it was the first one. But it sucks. It’s sort of like let’s all study the first sandwich that was ever made. It was one stale piece of break that was folded over a shitty piece of meat, but look, a sandwich was born. Well who gives a shit?

Yes, OK, so he created these things. But it doesn’t matter. We all know what those things are. It seems like such a pointless exercise. And it’s a boring, overlong film. And the heroes are the Klan. It’s just stupid. I don’t know why anyone is bothering with it. Here, you want to summarize the value of Birth of a Nation? Let me teach you what cross-cutting is. There, that’s what it looks like, in 4,000 other movies since Birth of a Nation. Who gives a damn?

So, anyway, that’s just my rant on Birth of a Nation. I don’t understand why film schools are so obsessed with this boring, crappy thing. It just sucks. Come at me Birth of a Nation stans.

**Justin:** I know.

**John:** Send your emails to ask@johnaugust.com

**Justin:** A very controversial statement.

**Craig:** Yup. I’m out there.

**John:** But before you got into that rant I think you were asking why film schools and the Hollywood studio system are so regressive or so traditional and they are institutions. It’s basically they have a gatekeeper function. They classically have had that. And for people who were excluded from that system you have alternative systems that rise up. Just like we have alternative press and alternative newspapers, you had alternative films and independent films. And that’s what I think Justin is signaling that we have not been paying nearly enough attention to the history of independent film. We’ve only been paying attention to the history, the line that goes from Birth of a Nation through Casablanca up through, you know, Jaws.

**Craig:** Or when we do look at independent film we’re looking at our single, typically white male hero directors. That’s kind of the ‘70s worship of the guys that came in from USC and all that.

**Justin:** And those guys are great, you know. But the truth is that that kind of – these pockets of filmmakers exist all over the place and exist all over the globe. They exist in every race and every gender. But it’s only a certain grouping of them that we talk about.

And this is something that I deal with in the show Dear White People because the Ivy League that the kids attend in Dear White People is meant to sort of be an analogy for America or for imperialism or whatever. But the thing is all colleges are kind of based around this Ivy League system, at least in America. And the Ivy League system really came out of specifically preparing white, I believe Protestant men to be a part of the American workforce.

And so even though we’re moved from those days, college is really just about preparing a person to become a product. You are–

**Craig:** This is so good.

**Justin:** You are preparing to establish your market value. This is what I deserve to earn as a filmmaker. And so things that college is particularly concerned with is what the market is already looking for, what it already demands. You’re looking really to figure out how to fit yourself in a can of soup so that it can appear on the proper shelf. And I think that that knowledge is important and is interesting, but it isn’t like sort of the same as like, you know, knowledge in general. It isn’t the same as art and conversation and dialogue. These are things that happen in a culture and a society actually all over the place and in ways that might surprise people and are unexpected and don’t sort of fit neatly into a curriculum.

So, I really enjoyed film school. It was kind of like an escape. It was a way for me to get out of Texas and just sort of make movies every day and have that be normalized. But, a lot of what I needed to learn to sort of become the filmmaker that I am I had to figure that out on my own. I had to go find that stuff.

**Craig:** I fell into your discussion of higher education like a cold man going into a nice warm bath. That is so – I cannot tell you what a breath of fresh air it is to hear somebody talk about the higher education industry the way you just did, because it’s so spot on. I mean, the Ivy League tradition was originally meant to educate the wealthy sons of wealthy captains of industry so that when they took over the business they had some, I don’t know, general understanding of just well-rounded liberal arts and weren’t just kind of narrow dumb-dumbs.

And what we’ve ended up with, you’re exactly right, is a system where we actually before you get to college you are already a product that is being analyzed and tested and tested and tested. And the purpose of the testing is to get into a school. The school does nothing more than prepare you ultimately, I mean, what do Ivy League schools really prepare you for? I went to one. So I can tell you. To go work on Wall Street. That’s what they prepare you for.

I had no interest in that. So, I don’t know why I went there. This is a great – we should have a whole other discussion, like a very radical discussion about higher education on another time, because I’d love to dig into that. But obviously we have many other things to talk to you about.

**Justin:** We do. But just really quickly I have to insert like a really—

**Craig:** Go for it. I love it.

**Justin:** Something that just came up, because we research a lot every single for Dear White People and I was researching the admission standards and how that works. And not only was the goal of the initial Ivies to prepare white Protestant men to lead what they felt was going to be a new empire, the American empire. But specifically it was designed to weed out in this country at that time Italians, Jews, Black people, women, you know, everyone else so that they couldn’t sort of take the reins of this new empire. It was a way to make sure that only a certain sect of people would get to lead it.

**Craig:** It’s a weird thing. It is a weird thing. When you start to look back at how recent this was not just like an implied bias or a secret bias but just an open policy. Open.

**Justin:** In fact, it was created to enforce the bias.

**Craig:** Correct. I mean, we have a world where Einstein is teaching at Princeton and is generally considered the smartest man in the world and the father of the nuclear bomb that helped us win WWII, blah-blah-blah. And there is still a strict quota on Jewish students at that time at Princeton. Anyway. And by the way, no women. And Black people…what?

**Justin:** Oh please. No, Black people – you know, this idea of systemically taking Black people out of the history of various things, that really begins in WWII because they felt like the general public couldn’t take the idea that there were Black people fighting in the war, but what we were fighting was white supremacy. Like wasn’t that what we were fighting? Weren’t we trying to end fascism?

**John:** Who is the white supremacist actually?

**Craig:** Their white supremacy has a crazy costume, so that’s bad. But ours…

**Justin:** And so instead of going into it let’s just remove them from it. So that’s why you don’t see any Black people in WWII. That’s why you don’t see any Black people in the history of cinema ever talked about before the ‘70s.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** All right. Let’s get back to your university setting. So can you talk us through the decision to do Dear White People as a feature, the original feature you made, and then the decision, let’s transition into making it into a TV series? So the initial idea for Dear White People as a feature. Where did that come from?

**Justin:** I was sitting in college after one of many very funny conversations between the few Black people that went to Chapman. I was in the Black Student Union. And I was just having a conversation with a friend about how funny is it that like for certain Black folks, you know, we will tolerate all kinds of personalities because we like need each other in a way that’s different. And we just had this conversation about friendship and race that was like why isn’t this kind of conversation in a movie. I of course adored Spike Lee and Robert Townsend and John Singleton and Charles Burnett and sort of the Black filmmakers that came out of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. And I loved that, it’s probably problematic to say it now, but I guess it was then so I can say it. I was super into Woody Allen. Dun-dun-dun.

And like–

**Craig:** That’s all right. That’s OK. They’re movies.

**Justin:** Sort of like dialogue-laden, talky, articulate comedic satires. And I felt like I wanted to do that, but I wanted it to be new and fresh and speak to something that wasn’t being talked about. And what I felt at the time was that there really wasn’t anything in popular culture that was reflecting specifically my Black experience of being a Black person among mostly, vastly white people. Yes, I had my sort of community of Black people and Black friends, but most of time was navigating a very white world and having to cross in between those two things. I felt like that was an experience that I was having that all of my Black friends are having but yet none of us had a movie or a TV show that reflected that.

And so that’s really where it came out of. And at that time I just really knew that I loved multi-protagonist movies. It was like the one thing that no one at film school seemed interested in teaching me how to write or make. But I knew that I loved them and I loved Altman and I loved Do the Right Thing. And I loved Election. And Fame. These movies that nobody is right. And it’s not about consolidating around one particular point of view. It was about challenging the status quo from a bunch of different points of views.

And even though I didn’t really have language for all of that at that time I knew that my first movie had to be in that kind of world. And so ever since I had the idea to do that I really, you know, I spent years and years just sort of really self-educating myself how to write something like that. And in doing that it just became obvious to me that like within an hour and 40 minutes I could tell this story. But if this were ongoing somehow, if this were a series, and again in 2005 when I first started the idea of something like Dear White People being on television was laughable.

**Craig:** Right.

**Justin:** I mean literally it was unheard of. Nobody thought that that would ever happen. But in my imagination I thought, boy, this would really make for a great show. And I was inspired specifically by the M*A*S*H becomes a show. You know, Altman who is sort of a master of multi-protagonist cinema. It was already in my head. So by the time it started to come up it really wasn’t a decision. It was like do I want to pay rent and follow this opportunity to make Dear White People a show, or do I want to spend another eight years trying to get another movie made. So I picked the one that paid my rent and allowed me to keep going.

**John:** Justin, I want to stop you there on your decision to write the script while you were in film school. The idea that like, OK, this is a movie that I want to see that doesn’t exist but I want to see. And I think a message we keep trying to get out is that, you know, people ask us what you should write and we always say like write the movie you wish you could see. And it sounds like it’s exactly, Dear White People was exactly the movie you wish you could see because it did not exist out there. And you would have bought tickets for the very first showing, the very first day if it did exist. And so you had to make that movie. Is that fair?

**Justin:** I think that’s fair. And I think that’s a really important thing to stress because I think what we’re all taught, not only in film school but in film books and just by popular culture in general that like the most important question to ask is who is your audience. Who are the strangers that you’re sort of pouring your guts out for? And let’s make all of our creative decisions based on that hypothetical.

Whereas I always bought that, because I was like well I actually want to make things for me because I fucking love cinema. Like I will drink cinema’s dirty bathwater. I love it so much. And so what I want to see is a valid thing to bring into the equation because I’m not getting, you know, me as a gay, Black lover of cinema I’m getting hardly anything that’s geared specifically to me. It’s always an adventure from the outside in, you know, when I watch movies. And specifically when I watched the movies that people say are the great ones and the ones to watch. Like I’m having to look from outside a window into usually a very white life that Black people hardly ever show up in.

**Craig:** Well it’s described as this empathy gap where people who are in marginalized communities, in your case Black, gay, you are forced by culture to witness straight and white over and over and over to the point where if you’re going to appreciate what are an enormous amount of brilliant cultural works, you have to find a way to empathize with that culture. That culture doesn’t necessarily have to find a way to empathize with you. Right? Because they don’t have it. And, in fact, when you ask them to empathize with the other they really seem to struggle.

And what I find so interesting about the way you’re describing your relationship to the audience is that you have combined what you have taken in and who you are and then you say I want to make something that I’m passionate about that has a purpose. There’s sort of a purposeful self-expression. And I will argue over and over again until I expire that if you have a personal expression that is unique to you, meaning you’re not copying other people, right, so you’re not cynical, and you are not concerned with hitting a target. You’re simply expressing a concept that you believe hasn’t been expressed in this way and could not be expressed by anybody else like you can do it. If you have that, plus talent, then the audience will show up. Right?

So that’s like the old joke of like how do you avoid paying taxes on a million dollars. Step one. Get a million dollars. Right? So you definitely need talent. But there are a lot of talented people who don’t really get – look, for whether or not, people can argue about what my talent level is, but coming out of this very middle class kind of workday ethic background that I did my attitude was you work the jobs they give you. And that was where I was. And that’s where I was for a long time.

You were clearly and are clearly a braver person than I was. And it’s for the better. If you have talent – I mean, that’s obviously the key, then you trust it. You will essentially create the audience for the work that you do.

**Justin:** Yeah. I mean, I think that that that’s true. But I also think that for somebody like me, specifically Black, gay, it isn’t a given that an audience will show up. You know, there are so many brilliant storytellers who are braver than I am frankly and who are really out there, you know, doing something that popular culture is not ready for. But because they are a woman or because they’re gay or because they’re something other than straight white men audiences don’t find it. And people don’t champion it.

And I think my bravery, if you could call it that, really comes from a sense of urgency. A sense that like if I don’t do this and if I don’t take this chance and if I don’t sort of make the loudest version of this thing I will be completely ignored. You know? It’s sort of like there’s a pressure there.

You know, Dear White People is not the only thing I came up with. Dear White People is not the only thing I was thinking of in 2005 when I started writing it. But I knew that it was the one that had to come first because it was loudest. It doesn’t feel courageous in the moment. It actually feels quite terrifying. But I appreciate that it reads as brave. [laughs]

**Craig:** Well, you know, you can’t be brave if you’re not scared. Right?

**Justin:** That’s very true.

**Craig:** Bravery is action in the face of fear, I think.

**Justin:** That’s absolutely true.

**John:** Well, Justin let’s talk about the actions you took in that face of fear. What were the steps from I have this idea, I’ve written this script, to actually we’re rolling cameras and we’re finishing a film? What was the process of getting from idea to there’s a movie that can debut at Sundance?

**Justin:** Well, for me the process was really about motivating myself to do the work. There was a tremendous amount of work to do for Dear White People. One, I had to learn how to write it. I had to learn how a multi-protagonist film works. Because they don’t work in the same way that a single protagonist film works. And the kind of obvious thing of like, oh, it’s just like a single protagonist film but with many protagonists. It actually doesn’t answer a lot of questions. And it’s a really easy thing to get lost in.

And so part of my process was to watch everything that was multi-protagonist first and foremost. And then watch everything that felt like issue-driven. And whether or not it felt like Dear White People tonally, whether or not it was a comedy, I needed to get into my DNA the way these movies operate because, you know, something like Do the Right Thing for instance, you know, Mookie is technically the protagonist but he actually isn’t the one that breaks us into act two. It’s actually Buggin Out that breaks us into act two by bringing up the brothers on the wall.

But then it’s Mookie who breaks us into act three, but [unintelligible]. So just like little things like that, having to sort of – you know, what are the rules here? And so that was actually a really wonderful process. And then the other part I’ll be honest is I watched the Star Wars documentary Empire Dreams countless times because what George Lucas was trying to do with that film was also to make something he wanted to see but that did not yet exist and in fact really nobody, even the studio up until the day before release, nobody believed in that project.

**Craig:** They let him have the rights to the merchandise. [laughs]

**Justin:** Oh yeah. And I think they put it in two theaters or something. It’s like no wonder it’s a blockbuster because it’s only playing on two blocks. I needed those stories and I read a lot of biographies just to know that I belonged in the room. Because the self-doubt is crippling, I think for anybody trying to break into this industry or be an artist.

But especially for me because I was trying to say and do things that frankly I had no indications that I would be allowed to do.

**Craig:** Love it.

**Justin:** So there was a lot of that. And there was a lot of table reads. There was a lot of self-prodding. Self-given deadlines. Forcing myself to, OK, I’m going to figure out this plot problem this week. I’m going to table read with this group of friends by this month. You know, that kind of thing just went on for years and years.

**John:** But at what point did you have – there’s a budget, there’s a schedule, we’re actually going to make the movie? What was the transition point from this is a script that I’ve written to this is a movie I’m making?

**Justin:** So around 2011 we had a table read and I felt like people got it. I felt like people were picking up what I was putting down. And there was a conversation after that table read that was exactly – that’s how I knew that the script was in a place where I felt it was ready to be produced because people were having the exact conversation that I wanted people to have in the lobby after seeing the movie.

And so I made a concept trailer, because I mean there was just absolutely no – there was no market for what I was doing at that time.

**John:** Let me push back against that. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a market, because we actually know there was a market because the movie did really well. But there wasn’t an obvious prior to say like, oh, an audience will show up for this movie. You had no evidence of that.

**Justin:** The movie did OK. But it was, you know, I remember sitting with my agents and these people who were very passionate about me and my career and the movie were like, “So just so you know, 90% of all independent financiers we actually won’t even be able to go out to because they won’t even look at the package because it’s a Black ensemble”

So, yeah, it was like really I didn’t have any clue how to get the movie made. So, I just took whatever next step was available. And I felt like, wow, we should make a concept trailer so that people can get what this is. Because on the page it’s multi-protagonist. It doesn’t read like a script that a reader would expect to receive. You know, some readers, particularly white male readers were incredibly offended by aspects of the script. And so I made this concept trailer so that people could see it and get a feel for it. And that went viral online. And instead of at the end of that trailer “coming soon” it would say, you know, “Don’t you wish there were movies like this? Me too. Give us some money and maybe we can make that happen.”

And we raised about $45,000 and we were able to hire a casting director. And essentially we made YouTube videos about the making of this movie until a bigger financier eventually maybe a year and a half later came onboard to properly finance the film at about a million dollars. And, you know, because of the virality of that original clip we were, you know, there was a studio that was interested for a while and then they dropped us. And then spread a story that I had dropped them. It was all of this BS like political stuff going on.

But the net result was the movie wasn’t getting made. And then a year and a half in, because we had built this fan base online, and then we were continuing to water it and foster it, you know, this financier, Julie Lebedev, who also financed my second film, Bad Hair, I mean, she was just like, “You guys have an audience before there’s even a movie. Like let’s do it. And can you do it for $1 million?” And I said I don’t know, but I know that I’d rather try than not. And that’s exactly what happened.

We went to Minneapolis because they had a rebate program called Snow Bate that had just come back. We landed and looked at the University of Minnesota and we were told, well, you know, if you want to shoot here, and at that point in time it was the only college in the nation that we conceivably had a timeframe that we could shoot at. They said, “Well then you need to start in two weeks.” And that’s what we did. We hunkered down. I started casting. And all of a sudden we were making a movie.

**Craig:** I just love this so much. I love stories like this because it just shows a certain kind of indomitability and an impossible persistence is required.

**Justin:** Yes.

**Craig:** It also – I think it also goes to the heart of this very strange paradox. I think people think that studio productions are all about minimizing risk and independent film financing is the riskiest proposal of all. It’s actually backwards. Most independent film financing is the most cowardly kind of financing. They only way they’ll give you that financing is if they can do foreign pre-sales which make them make money before you even start shooting.

**Justin:** Absolutely. Absolutely. And foreign pre-sales work on specifically white star talent.

**Craig:** Yes. White and generally male star talent. And that system is, I mean, we have a certain kind of wonderful racism here in America. There’s a very old classic racism overseas. It’s a different kind. It’s a different vintage.

**Justin:** Nostalgic racism.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. And it is very much their theory is that “Black movies do not travel.” I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this. And we know for a fact that it’s not true. We know that.

**Justin:** We know it – it is proven untrue constantly.

**Craig:** Constantly.

**Justin:** And yet it’s still the paradigm. And so when people talk about how does racism persist, it’s like it’s not necessarily even an attitude. It’s not like – there maybe, but I don’t envision this hidden meeting of all the independent financiers and they’re like, “How do we keep the Blacks out?” Like it’s not like that. But when there’s these informal rules in place that’s essentially what we’re doing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a received wisdom. And then every time a movie with a – let’s just say a significantly Black cast or a predominantly Black cast, or a movie about issues pertaining to Black people or race does well overseas they just say, “That’s the—“

**Justin:** “The exception.” Yeah.

**John:** The exception that proves the rule.

**Craig:** The exception. It’s an exception that proves the rule. Well, if every single exception is an exception then they’re not exceptions. It just happens so often.

**Justin:** It does.

**Craig:** First of all, hat’s off to the financier who was bold enough to say, “You have an audience. That’s all I need. I don’t need to be repaid by Spain, France, Germany, Italy before you can roll film.” I mean, to me that’s what independent film financing should be. So that’s good for her.

**Justin:** Well I think that’s great about Julie is that she would like that, but she recognizes that it’s wrong that that isn’t happening for certain kinds of stories and I think Julie is in the business of making – of proving markets that haven’t been proven by other people. And certainly with Dear White People and then again with Bad Hair, I think we’ve been able to do that.

**John:** Now, so you made this feature. It gets a great reception. The decision to go and make this as a TV series, in some ways it seems kind of obvious because when you have a multi-protagonist story, well, TV is multi-protagonist. You’re always going to be following multiple characters. So it seems like a pretty straightforward transition. And yet it’s so much more time and space and storytelling and a crew that is not just to make one feature but to make a whole series. You have potentially other writers. What was your process like figuring out how to move from I’ve made a feature to now I’m making a TV series?

**Justin:** Well, at that time I was certainly inspired by what was happening in streaming. I was inspired by things like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black because I felt like there was this new paradigm. There was this new space for cinema on TV. We were sort of moving beyond the idea that a show had to be very tightly formatted so that a kind of rotating set of creatives would come in and essentially make the same thing each time.

We were moving past that. And we were now moving into this world where you could stream an entire season of something as if it were just a really long movie. And that was really exciting to me. And I remember one of the early screenings of Dear White People there was an executive, her name was Tara Duncan, she’s president of Freeform now, but at the time was a creative exec at Netflix. And she said, “Have you thought about making this as a show?” And I said I absolutely have. And she said, “OK, well when you guys sell this,” at the time Netflix wasn’t really buying movies at that time, “so when you guys finally sell this I want you to think about it.”

And as I toured with the movie doing Q&As across the country a lot of which were at colleges, mostly white colleges where the BSU was throwing an event to show the film, or even in other countries like in Paris in particular, in London, Scandinavia, I was having these moments where I was realizing like, wow, the Black experience is actually a global one. And there’s so many things that we didn’t even begin to get into with this movie. So I started preparing just in my mind what would a TV show be like for this. And I started thinking about what could we do that would be new and fresh and exciting. And I came up with this idea of why don’t we give each character at least at the beginning their own episodes. So it’s a multi-protagonist show but it’s not a multi-protagonist show about this one light-skinned girl Sam and her friends. It literally is like when we’re in a Lionel episode we’re meeting everyone else from his point of view.

Wouldn’t that be interesting if we did something like I’ve seen Robert Altman do and I’ve seen other directors do with feature films, but we did that on TV? And that’s really where it grew out of. And there was a lot of material that didn’t get to be filmed that eventually became episodes. One thing that I recognized is that there were a lot of different kind of people showing up for the movie, but reliably Black women, young Black women were showing up. And were identifying with Sam and Coco. And I felt it was a priority to get Black women both in the writer’s room but also behind the lens to direct these episodes.

I never felt like this should just be coming from my point of view. I felt like my point of view should maybe set the parameters, but then I want a bunch of artists that are like me and I want to give them what I never get, which is room to do them and to say something that is specific to them. And that’s really the technique that I went into that with and I was able to do that. I was able to build a writer’s room where people felt empowered. Where people felt like they could bring their real stuff to the table.

We did the same thing with our creative departments, and particularly with the directors. And it’s been like going to graduate film school. I get to sit there and learn and mold and shape these world class directors.

**John:** Now, you have two seasons that are done and they’re out on Netflix.

**Justin:** Three.

**John:** I’m sorry, three seasons. But are there plans for – like what would you do next essentially? If there’s another season how does this current cultural moment we’re living in, how do you see that shaping the future of this show? What does it feel like to you?

**Justin:** We were actually writing season four when the lockdown happened earlier this year. And so we finished writing season four over Zoom. And then about the time that we were done writing it, and it was very emotional and of course it was like nobody knows that this is even happening, but we’re like oh my god this is the end of the show. Because it’s also our fourth and final season, I forgot to add.

And so the lockdown happens. And then the scripts are just sort of in a vault somewhere for a while. And then, you know, all of the protests around George Floyd begin to happen. And when the video of George Floyd went out, you know, as a Black person you don’t know if this is going to start a movement because frankly videos like this have become just part of the everyday fabric of life. And especially as a Black person it’s like every other week there’s something like this that happens. And when it starts to become a movement, you know, that was really mind-boggling and inspiring.

But then you realize that all of the same complications and all of the ways in which racism persists even among really well-intentioned people, well-intentioned white liberal people especially, all that stuff is still there. It actually felt like we had written a season especially crafted for this moment, but we of course had no idea that that’s what we were doing. The sort of method of attacking each season always involves deep, deep research. And a constant trying to tune in to what is in the Zeitgeist. Like what is just below the pop culture that’s happening.

And we end up making these wild predictions. And I can’t say much without spoiling it, but we end making these predictions that tend to come true. And you’re going to see the season and think that we wrote it in response to what’s happening, but we didn’t.

**Craig:** I have had my own weird dance with that very thing. And it turns out if you just look at the world and talk about it honestly that things that happen after are going to see like you predict them. You’re not predicting anything. You’re just accurately reporting what other people may not have been looking at.

**Justin:** I think that’s absolutely right. I think that’s absolutely right.

**John:** Cool. We have one listener question that I felt was especially relevant for this. Craig, would you mind reading us what Ryan in Brooklyn wrote?

**Craig:** Yeah. Ryan in Brooklyn, where I was born, writes, “My writing partner and I spent the first half of 2020 researching and writing a script based on a very well-known character from 18th Century American history. He is by no means the most heinous of culprits as far as racism, sexism, colonialism and the like go. But, he owned slaves and benefited from systems of white supremacy none the less.

“As our current culture reevaluates how we see these figures who in our case have for the most part been known as heroes and pioneers, we have taken a pause to ask ourselves for reasons both moral and creative if the project is worth even continuing with. How does one strike a balance between giving history its due but also taking into consideration modern sentiments?

“For instance the only people of color in the script are either servants or slaves who would have been paid very little mind within the limited scope of our narrative. But I feel like leaving them out altogether is white-washing. Artificially propping them is white-savior-ing. And leaving them as they are is lazy.”

Well, that is I suspect a dilemma that a lot of people are wrestling with right now.

**John:** Absolutely. And Justin it feels like the kind of dilemma that your characters on your show might be arguing. So talk us through what you’re thinking as you hear Ryan’s question.

**Justin:** Well, one, I applaud Ryan for having the dilemma, because there are examples of many people in this particular situation who don’t see a dilemma at all and just sort of well we’re just going to not talk about the slave people. Or that’s a very easy decision. Or we’re going to hang a hat on it. So kudos to you for recognizing the difficulty of the moment. I think for me and this is not really going to sound like advice, but for me it’s not just about how I’m telling a story or why I’m telling a story, but timing is a very important factor in storytelling in my opinion.

There are certain – there’s a time for certain stories. Because we’re trying to speak to a certain moment. There’s a reason why out of all the things people could be thinking about or talking about or experiencing we want them to experience this little slice of life right now. And for me – for instance I got a script the other day, it’s a wonderful script. Wonderful story. But it’s about a white boy sort of among a bunch of Black and Brown people where he is the outcast. And we’re sort of getting something of the experience of prejudice from his point of view. And I was like this is a good story, but I can’t tell this right now because this isn’t – this is a point of view that everyone is already pretty saturated in. And actually the story about the Black and Brown people who sort of just kind of accompany his world, those are the stories that have been left out. So actually I would like to tell those stories right now.

So, it doesn’t mean like abandon your story, but I would say, you know, I think you’re right to maybe give it a think and give it a pause. And if the Black people, the sort of subjugated people in that story are not the focus of it, you know, maybe they could be. Maybe we don’t really need a historical heroic example of a white person from a backwards time right now. Or maybe there’s something else to say about that person that is pertinent to the moment.

I think stories do exist in the times that they’re born out of and they should speak to those times. At least that’s how I feel as an artist. And everyone can do and make what they want. I may not go see it. [laughs]

**Craig:** I love that answer. I think that’s great.

**John:** Our friend Aline tipped me off to a podcast that charts all the presidents in order going up through modern day. And just because I know so little about the presidents, and my daughter is starting AP US History. And so I’m listening to the first episode and they talk about young George Washington who I only have the one image of George Washington which is sort of what’s on the dollar bill. But if you actually go back and look at he was pretty hot when he was a teenager. He had a reputation. He would have been a social media star essentially. He was known around the community and he was sort of heroic and dashing and sort of a wild adventurer. And there’s a story to be told about young George Washington, and yet I have exactly Ryan’s qualms about it because I don’t know that I need to see a young George Washington story and try to fit it into a context that is at all meaningful in 2020. It doesn’t feel like, what you said, it doesn’t feel like the time to tell a young George Washington story.

**Justin:** Especially because don’t we all have – I mean, you can’t live your life as an American without being confronted with George Washington’s story.

**Craig:** Thank you. We know it.

**Justin:** The one story that I just learned about is that it wasn’t wooden teeth, it was slave teeth. Did you guys know that? That he had slave teeth towards the end of his life.

**Craig:** Ew.

**Justin:** And it became wooden teeth over the course of the centuries of that story spreading, but it was actually the teeth of his slaves. It’s things like that that to me would be much more interesting to see a perspective or a movie about.

A movie I fucking love and I talk about this all the time that did not – I feel like this is another topic – but I feel like film criticism failed this movie. And it is Lemon by Janicza Bravo. And what I think is so brilliant about that movie is that essentially she’s telling a tried and true story that we accept all over the place about an actual sociopathic white man but nobody can see it because he’s a white man. And so the movie is very uncomfortable. And if you don’t quite know what she’s doing maybe you feel a little left out.

But what she’s doing is she’s telling the story that we always go to the movies to see, especially in independent cinema. It’s the thing that we always fall for, but she’s doing it without the white male gaze. She’s doing it from a Black female gaze. And that makes people very uncomfortable. But I was like that is so brilliant. That’s the movie about George Washington I could see right now.

**Craig:** It does seem, Ryan, like one of the things you’re hearing here is not only, OK, well done you’re considering this and timing matters, but also there have been a lot of books and movies and television shows that have examined very well-known characters from 18th Century American history. Do you know why they’re very well-known? Because they’re very well-known.

So if they’re very well-known, I don’t know, do we need another one?

**John:** Well, but Craig it is an opportunity to look at one of these people and fill out the context. So I guess the question is is it worth spending the time to take a look at one of these characters and paint out the context when you know that painting out that context is going to be really not just challenging but may not be the right time to be doing that.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. It just feels like – also, I feel we’re about to get – you know, I am always on the lookout for the trend. Because the trend is what, so people are behind things always. That’s what they want, the people that are paying for things. And the trend is going to be, well, let’s keep telling stories about famous white people but now let’s also focus on the Black people around them. Or, or, crazy idea, tell stories about not those white people. Because we’ve already had those stories. I actually don’t need another story about Thomas Jefferson as it relates to Sally Hemings or his slave-owning or the south. Because I’ve gotten my fill of Thomas Jefferson in Paris. I had 1776. I have John Adams. There’s a lot of Thomas – there’s Hamilton which we’ll be talking about. There’s a lot of Jefferson. Jefferson, Jefferson, Jefferson. I’m good. Let’s move on. Let’s find other people to talk about.

That’s my general feeling.

**Justin:** But I will bring this up, too. The dilemma that’s being described to me feels like – I always feel that way as a writer. And it’s not about racism. Like I always get to a point in the story where I’m like, oh, I don’t know if this works anymore. I don’t know if this fits. And so it might be a necessary machination of the process. Maybe this movie, you know, this is going to say woo-woo, but I do feel like stories kind of have their own souls sometimes. And they tell you when they’re not ready. They tell you when they need something else. They tell you when they’re not working.

And this might be your journey to making a more interesting project. You know, this pause that you’re being given by this moment might actually be an opportunity to explore a different area of this very same person or this very same moment in time or, you know, or something deeper, more challenging, more interesting perhaps.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. Craig, kick us off.

**Craig:** Well, I didn’t have one myself so I turned to my intrepid assistant Bo. And I said, Bo, do you have a One Cool Thing? And that is why I’m going to talk about long hair, which I don’t have.

**John:** Nor do I.

**Craig:** I don’t really hair. I mean, I have a little bit. So, Bo does have very long, straight hair. And apparently when you have long straight hair, so I’ve been told, it does get very dry at the ends. And, you know, you hear about split ends.

**John:** Yeah. I kind of know that as a theory, but I don’t really know what it is.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I guess the ends of your hair just start to split because they’re dry. So she is recommending something called Olaplex. And we’ll put a link in the show notes. If you have long hair that is getting dry at the end do what Bo does. Check out Olaplex. I cannot vouch for it myself because I don’t really have much hair.

**John:** The amount of money I save on hair care products is staggering.

**Craig:** I use like this much shampoo. Boink.

**John:** No shampoo for me. My One Cool Thing is a website I’ve gone to for years, and years, and years. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about it on the show. It’s called Electoral Vote. If you go to this website, it’s electoral-vote.com, it looks like it’s from 1995. It’s like a really basic website. But every day they just update it and it’s these two smart guys who sort of summarize the political news and sort of what’s happening in the world for you.

And if you just read this every morning you feel like, oh, I kind of get what’s happening.

**Craig:** This is an encouraging map I’m looking at.

**John:** Yeah. So it was originally set up about sort of literally the Electoral College and that. But it’s morphed over the years into just a general political discussion of what’s going on in the world. Good summaries. Really good Q&As over the weekends. So, I’d recommend you take a look at this.

What I had to do during the 2016 election was really deliberately limit myself to how much news I would take in, because my anxiety just went off the charts. And so this would be the kind of thing which I would allow myself to look at in the mornings and then look at nothing else for the rest of the day.

So, if you were to go on that kind of diet this might be the thing you would leave in so you can get some information.

**Justin:** What is it again?

**John:** Electoral-vote.com.

**Justin:** Oh, OK, Cool. I missed the dash. Cool.

**Craig:** John, your description is perfect. This website does look like it was made back in the Angel Cities area.

**Justin:** Absolutely. Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s a nice map to look at. I mean, I’m kind of grooving on the map. Because I don’t – I’m one of those people when everyone is like, well, we’ve put out a new poll. Biden leads Trump by this many points in the general election, I’m like, oh, you mean the national poll that I don’t care about at all?

**Justin:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Give me the states. Give me the states.

**Justin:** This is giving me so much agita.

**Craig:** It’s coming.

**Justin:** Louisiana, why? OK, go. Sorry.

**Craig:** I think you know why.

**John:** Know yourself. Know yourself. And if this is not the right thing you’ll know it and you’ll clip it away and you won’t put it in your bookmarks.

**Craig:** I like this.

**John:** Hey, Justin, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Justin:** You know, this one made me feel so old. Have you guys heard of Animal Crossing? But I’m just going to say the thing that I think is fucking cool. I am so enjoying I May Destroy You. I know this is not a hot take. But Michaela Coel’s show on HBO or the BBC depending on where you are is just a cool – if you’re a writing nerd, you’re seeing the things that they’re doing on that show and the things that they’re getting away with in a TV show is so inspiring and liberating.

So, I don’t know if that’s cool enough or edgy enough.

**John:** Oh, it’s absolutely cool enough. We’ve been trying to get Michaela Coel on the show and Megana has been working really hard on it. So, people in Michaela Coel’s universe, if you are hearing this now we really are trying to get you on the show. So, we would love to have her.

**Justin:** I also just want to meet you and worship at your feet. So, if you can just reach out to Justin Simien. That would be great. If you just need some worship.

**Craig:** I feel like, yeah, she’s the new Phoebe, right? I mean, I’m not taking anything away from Phoebe. Phoebe remains Phoebe. But there’s this meteor that has arrived and everyone is like, oh my god, how do I get to talk to Michaela.

**John:** But you know what? We got to speak to Phoebe.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So hopefully we’ll be able to get to speak to Michaela as well.

**Craig:** And just to reiterate, Phoebe, still a meteor. Still a Phoebe-like meteor.

**Justin:** Well I want the Zoom code or the Skype code. I just want to listen in. Because, you know, I think she’s incredible.

**Craig:** Honestly, after your discussion of higher education, Justin, I’m considering having you be a permanent third host on this show.

**Justin:** [laughs] I’m down. I’m down.

**Craig:** When you meet a kindred spirit you’re like don’t leave me. Stay.

**Justin:** I love nerding out about this stuff.

**Craig:** So great.

**Justin:** It’s my pleasure.

**Craig:** Well, you know what, we’ll nerd out about Hamilton in our bonus segment.

**Justin:** All right.

**John:** Absolutely. So until then Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Justin, what are you on Twitter?

**Justin:** Oh god, I’m barely on Twitter. But @jsim07. I may not @ you back just because it’s not on my phone right now.

**John:** Which is so smart. We have t-shirts. They’re great. You can get them at Cotton Bureau. There’s a link in the show notes.

You can find those show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com or on the podcast that you are playing this from. 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 just about to record on Hamilton.

Justin, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.

**Craig:** Thanks Justin.

**Justin:** My pleasure. Thanks guys.

**Craig:** That was great.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, you are a big Hamilton fan. Did you see Hamilton on Disney+?

**Craig:** Yeah, of course I saw it on Disney+. Are you crazy?

**John:** Justin Simien, did you see it on Disney+?

**Justin:** I did.

**John:** And had you also seen it in the theater?

**Justin:** I had.

**Craig:** And I have twice.

**John:** I have twice. And I’ve seen it with this original cast in the theater.

**Justin:** Oh wow.

**Craig:** Yup. I saw it with the original cast and then I saw it out here at The Pantages with another spectacular cast with I think – Renee Elise Goldsberry was the one kind of carryover, but everybody else was knew I think.

**Justin:** You guys are hardcore fans.

**John:** We’re pretty hardcore fans. I loved the staged production. I will say I loved the film production as well. But I need to provide some context. I was staying at an Airbnb when this debuted and so we hooked up our AppleTV, watched it, and it was only after I watched it that I realized that motion smoothing had been turned on.

**Craig:** Oh no.

**John:** And you know what? It was good.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** My theory is, and I can’t of course reengineer it to know, but I think the weirdness of live theater and motion smoothing which makes things look too present, kind of worked for it.

**Justin:** I could see that.

**Craig:** Outraged.

**John:** It was weird. So I think it made the one case, other than professional sports, in which motion smoothing is not an absolute horrible–

**Craig:** I hate it on sports. I hate it.

**John:** But let us not talk about the motion smoothing. Let us talk about Hamilton on Disney+ and our reactions to it. Justin as the guest you get to start. What was your reaction to it on Disney+?

**Justin:** Oh god. This is very putting me on the spot.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Justin:** I’m not, OK, I am probably not the biggest Hamilton fan in the world. I wasn’t before I saw it on Disney+ and I’m still not. But, I thought, you know, one, seeing theater on TV in this form is something that like deserved this quality of production for a really long time. Like when I went to performing arts high school like – every theater geek knows about that one tape of Into the Woods with Bernadette Peters in it, or Pippin with Ben Vereen.

**Craig:** Yup.

**Justin:** And I love that stuff. So to see it normalized on TV is great without the gimmick of like doing it live in front of an audience that I think some Broadway shows are being adapted for TV in that way. So to see it just like in its native Broadway environment, well-filmed, with beautiful lighting, clear audio, I think was kind of a revelation for me that like, god, I wish I could see more shows like this.

**John:** Craig, what was your take?

**Craig:** The same. Look, I do love the show. And I appreciate the – it’s five years old now. And because we’re older five years seems like the blink of an eye to us. My daughter who is a huge Hamilton fan, she’s grown up, like she’s changed dramatically from a 10-year-old to a 15-year-old as Hamilton has aged one-third of her life with her.

So, it is interesting to see how the world changes and we do start to look back and reexamine. I still think that Hamilton is an incredibly important show. I think it has opened a ton of doors. I think it has changed Broadway permanently. I think Lin-Manuel Miranda is a genius.

I think that if you now want to look at the show and start asking questions about – he does sort of wave his hand kind of these aren’t the droids you’re looking for in that kind of manner over slavery. He’s very smart about how he – there’s a line right up front, “While slaves were being carted away across the waves.” He is smart to mention it. And it comes in various points. Does the show address slavery the way I think he would if he were doing it right now? No. Is that kind of the curse and blessing of art? Yes.

The art stays the same. The world changes. We do go back and look at it, but it is so good that it is – you can still dig into it and chew on it. From a musical point of view and from a storytelling point of view it is mind-blowingly good to me. And I really appreciated the fact that I could just see the show.

There are a ton of shows where they just don’t do it. I think they don’t do it because they’re scared that you won’t show up to see the show maybe. Hamilton obviously does not have that concern. They have sold out every performance they’ve ever had. But I would love to see other shows done this way because it is wonderful to watch. And it is a very different experience than a film adaption, like say Chicago, or the live versions which are live versions and not the show.

I thought Tommy Kail did a really great job of somehow being there and inside of things, but not in a way that made me feel like I wasn’t watching the show. More than anything what I really appreciated was the one thing that I couldn’t get in a theater and that was the faces. To see faces like that. Leslie Odom, Jr. in particular, who is just like, yeah. So that’s the MVP of the show, right? All respect to Lin who is, again, a genius, and who created the whole thing, wrote every one of those insane words, and managed to wrestle the whole thing. For a performance point of view, Daveed Diggs is a scene-stealer. But Leslie Odom is a show-maker.

And being able to see his face and the way he moves his mouth is very specific was fascinating to me. I got more of his inner turmoil and the terror of a man that’s constantly pretending all came out in the close, which I loved.

So I thought it was wonderful and I will absolutely watch it again. I remain a huge Hamilton fan. A huge Lin-Manuel Miranda fan. And just as much – more of a Leslie Odom fan. More of a Daveed Diggs fan. All of them. Christopher Jackson. All of them. Just remarkable.

**John:** So, I had a Broadway show, Big Fish, that you do a filming of it. So, pretty much every show that’s on Broadway there is at least one performance that is sort of properly filmed. There are multiple cameras in the audience filming it. But it wasn’t anywhere near this level of sophistication where – and it’s not edited in a meaningful way. So there’s not that kind of sophisticated approach to when we’re going to be in a close-up, when we’re going to be over here, when we’re going to be actually on stage and following a character as they’re making their exit. We have none of that.

And so there’s not a filmed version of the show I can look at and say, oh, here is the show. This is the thing that I made. And some of that is what theater is supposed to be. You have to actually be there to see it live and in person. And Craig you were asking sort of why more of them aren’t done it’s because – large part of it – is because the union contracts that govern how the performances are made basically bar the filming or make it impossible to have that be out there any other place.

And you’re always worried about cannibalizing future sales of the show by people just watching the video of it, which makes sense.

**Craig:** I get that.

**John:** But watching Hamilton, I think the thing that was most surprising to me is when it was done I did not have any desire for a typical adaptation of Hamilton. I didn’t want to see the movie version of Hamilton.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Justin:** I agree with that so much because I think that Hamilton works in a very theatrical way. And I actually – this is going to sound like shade but it’s not – it is sort of, you see it with the adaptation of Cats into a film, is that some things they aren’t – it’s not a direct translation. I think a fantastic movie could be made of Hamilton. Don’t get me wrong. But you can’t just film it in real life and have it just be what it is. It just wouldn’t work. Like it works because it’s a concert experience almost. You are overwhelmed by these amazing performances and you feel like you’re there and there’s an audience participating. And you need all of that, I think, for Hamilton as it is conceived right now to work.

I felt the same way about The Lion King actually. And that I really enjoyed because I think too few people really appreciate the power of theater and musical theater in particular to be both musical and whimsical but also profound. And Hamilton is both dramatic, profound, and a musical. And that’s something that like only a few people understand because only a few people will have access. For that I think it’s very meaningful to have it out.

And I could not agree more. This to me is the version of Hamilton to see.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, there are certain shows that are easier to adapt than others. I mean, I’m in the middle of adapting one right now and I consider it to be one of the easier ones in the sense that the show is trying to be cinematic and so you can now be totally cinematic as you do the film adaptation.

Whereas Hamilton is not trying to be cinematic. Hamilton is interpretive and it is stylized. For instance, it does remind me of Pippin in a little way.

**Justin:** Absolutely.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So when Pippin sings about war they’re dancing. It’s Fosse. It’s not war. And here when they’re fighting the Battle of Yorktown it’s dancing. And take the bullets out your gun, take the bullets out your gun. How the hell would you shoot that with real soldiers and bullets? It just would be ridiculous.

**Justin:** They would try. [laughs]

**John:** They would.

**Justin:** Which to me is so depressing.

**Craig:** They would, yeah.

**Justin:** In Broadway stuff in particular that gets translated to movies I’m just always – not always – but I’m mostly very disappointed because no one has taken the time to figure out how to adapt the theatricality of the show to cinema. They just sort of film it. And that’s not the same as adapting it. And some of these shows, and Hamilton is one of them, like I don’t think anyone should have a first blush idea as to how to do that. It should be recognized as an incredibly difficult problem to figure out how to adapt something like Hamilton to the screen.

**Craig:** Lin, I think, could. I suppose if there’s anyone who could do it Lin could. I still remain very impressed by the adaptation of Chicago. I think that was—

**Justin:** Oh, I think it’s great.

**Craig:** Incredibly successful. In part because Rob Marshall understood that he was making both a movie and also shooting the show. So he kind of runs in two lines. There’s reality, which feels cinematic, and feels real, and in the world with cars and outside. Because theater is inside. Movies are outside. But then also there are these moments where, you know, He Had it Coming is – it’s not the official name of the song, but–

**John:** Staged.

**Craig:** It’s staged. It’s a dream. Even when Latifah is doing When You’re Good to Mama there’s two versions. There’s the real one where she’s just in her regular – and it’s a regular prison – and then there’s the one where she’s in a burlesque on stage. So, he manages to do the theater and the real at the same time, which is brilliant.

I think Chicago is an excellent sort of map.

**Justin:** I love Chicago. And I love that Chicago consolidates really for popular culture some things that Fosse was doing in his films that I don’t think quite made it to the mainstream yet. Like if you look at Cabaret you’re starting to understand – Cabaret to me really is one of the first American musicals that begins to sort of have a dialogue between the real world and sort of like stage reality. And then with All that Jazz when the character starts hallucinating on his deathbed and he starts seeing in his mind what it would be like if this were made as a musical number you’re starting to see the language for that form. But it really isn’t until Chicago that it’s sort of like put into a kind of thesis that I felt like my mom could understand, or a general movie-going public could understand. And I don’t know, I do not include Chicago in the list of Broadway adaptations that I’m disappointed at. I quite like Chicago.

**Craig:** And interesting that you point out Cabaret because now we’re talking – there’s something about Kander and Ebb, I’m just going to say. Those guys are – when I think of the shows that they’ve done and written they do seem somehow slightly more adaptable. I don’t know how. There’s just something about them where I can see it working. I think part of it also is just the nature of the songs. They feel like I want to watch them being sung on screen. Or do I need them to be in a theater or else they’re boring? You know?

Like Sondheim to me, you got to be there. I don’t know. I just believe that. You got to be there. It just doesn’t work the same way if you’re not there. That’s my feeling.

**Justin:** Well I’m going to say it. I would have made a great Into the Woods. [laughs]

**Craig:** I love it.

**Justin:** And by the way I think it is possible to make a great Hamilton film. It’s just a lot harder than I feel like–

**Craig:** People might think.

**Justin:** People might realize, yeah.

**John:** So let’s also acknowledge that the Hamilton that we saw on Disney+ was not the version – well, it was a version – but we weren’t supposed to see it on Disney+. We were supposed to see it on the big screen. This was going to be a theatrical release. And I think it would have been a giant theatrical release. I think it would have been a big event.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And that would have been a very different experience to see it on a big screen with a big audience to be able to cheer together. I can imagine people singing along in a theater.

**Craig:** That’s the part I hate. [laughs] I’m so angry at that part, in my head.

**John:** Maybe some screenings they would allow singing, some screenings they wouldn’t.

**Justin:** Eliza!

**Craig:** Shut up!

**John:** I remember seeing Evita at a singalong Evita and it was great that everyone could sing along to the songs. But, it’s important to remember that Broadway Theater is incredibly expensive so very few people get to see it. And so people have much better experience, or their experience of Hamilton is probably largely through the cast album rather than seeing the show because so few people could afford to see the show.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Movie tickets are much, much cheaper, so it’s how most people would have seen it. But now that it’s debuting on Disney+, which is an inexpensive subscription service, just the amount of people who saw Hamilton in one night when it debuted on Disney+ has got to exceed probably everyone who saw it, at least the original cast, in the theater.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** And so it’s important to remember sort of how transformative a cultural thing can be when everyone can see it is the thing, when it’s taken away.

**Craig:** This would have been – I mean, years ago if they had had to do this it would have been on ABC and they would have had commercial breaks. A lot of them. That’s how we watched stuff when we were kids, right? Commercial breaks. Oh my god, can you imagine? Oh my god.

**John:** Yeah. I may be working on one of those things with commercial breaks.

**Craig:** “Forgiveness.” And then, “We’ll be back after these messages.” Ah, yeah, commercial breaks.

**John:** All right. Thank you gentlemen very much for talking about Hamilton with me.

**Craig:** A joy.

**Justin:** My pleasure.

**Craig:** A joy. One more reason that I want to spend all my time with Justin.

**John:** Thanks.

 

Links:

* [WGA AMPTP](https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/wga-amptp-negotiations-deal-contract-1234695529/)
* [Dear White People](https://www.netflix.com/title/80095698)
* [Lemon Movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5973364/)
* [Olaplex](https://olaplex.com/)
* [Electoral Vote](https://www.electoral-vote.com/)
* [I May Destroy You](https://www.hbo.com/i-may-destroy-you)
* [Hamilton on Disney+](https://disneyplusoriginals.disney.com/movie/hamilton)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Justin Simien](https://twitter.com/jsim07?lang=en) on Twitter
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/460standard.mp3).

The original post for this website can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/police-on-screen).

 

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode contains some strong language. It’s also reflecting kind of how we’re feeling at the start of June 2020, which is a little bit raw and painful and uncomfortable. So, I just wanted you to know that before you started listening. Thanks.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 455 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we are going to take a look at how police and policing are portrayed onscreen and writer’s responsibilities in doing so. We’ll also answer listener questions about freaking about in meetings and whether to write books or movies.

And in our bonus segment for Premium members we’ll discuss the possibility that Craig does not exist.

**Craig:** Oh god. I hope that’s true.

**John:** That would be wonderful.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Before we get to any of that we do need to acknowledge this moment that we’re in. So, we postponed this last week’s episode a day to sort of give some space. But if you’re listening to this years later we should explain what this moment is. The last two weeks we’ve had protests over the killing of George Floyd. The issue of police violence against Black Americans is at the top of the list. We’ve had looting. We’ve had curfews. We’ve had the National Guard. We’ve had more police violence. And this is all against the backdrop of a pandemic which still has no cure. It’s been a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this moment that we’re in, it’s one of those moments where we just noticed that we’re in it. That’s all that’s happened is that we’ve noticed the moment that we’ve always been in. And we means all of us, but specifically people of color in this country. I guess we hit a point where we just – everyone. Everyone. And that’s been part of the kind of nice thing that’s come out of this is that everybody is standing up and saying, “Nope, no more. No more.”

**John:** Yeah. So a lot of our listeners are in LA. So some of what we’re going to say in the next few minutes is probably like “well, obviously, I have eyes and I have ears.” But we also have a lot of international listeners who wouldn’t be familiar with what is actually happening right here in Los Angeles. And you and I might be the only people they know who live in America or live in Los Angeles. So, I thought we might give some recap of what it feels like to be here right now, just a sense of you’re in this place.

For me the last two weeks has been kind of the situation where I thought I was in one genre of movie and suddenly I find myself in another genre of movie and I can’t kind of figure out where I’m at. Like I felt I was in a pandemic movie and now I’m in a dystopian movie, or a different kind of dystopian movie. An authoritarian kind of dystopian movie. A protest-y kind of movie. And I’ve been trying to get my bearings. And I keep cycling through these feelings of confusion, of grief, anger, fear, moments of hope, despair, and then it just sort of circles back around.

And as we’re recording this it’s a cloudy afternoon. I feel less despair than maybe I did six hours ago. But you just don’t know what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just feel like this country just hit a saturation point. We have taken it on the chin from ourselves and from our terrible federal government and from local law enforcement and the scientific response – the politicized scientific response and the way that our scientists have been shackled. The entire last five months has been awful. And all of it was built on top of something that has just systemically been awful. And we just hit it. We just hit the point where we just said, nope, that’s it.

And if people are wondering why the death of George Floyd was what did it, as opposed to the death of Breonna Taylor or anybody else that was murdered by the police, I don’t know. Other than to say that there’s just sometimes it’s time. And it just hit the time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Boom. And I’m glad. I’m glad. And I hope it keeps going. And I’ve never felt like this before. That’s part of the happy circumstance of my easy life. But I feel like it now. And I’m just – I’m angry. I’ve got to be – like I’m angry every day right now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s where I’m at.

**John:** Adam Lisagor, friend and writer, made a point that the feeling that fascism is happening, it’s the awareness that to the Black community in America they sort of always were living in a fascist state. There always was a fear of things. So we’ll get into this in our discussion of policing. But the other change of feeling was that after the 2016 election we did that little special episode where we talked about like not that everything is going to be OK but this will end. And I would say that a thing I’ve felt over the last two weeks is that notion that right after the election people could tell me, “Oh, you’re overreacting. You’re being crazy.” And now someone can’t say like, “Oh, you’re being crazy.”

Because when you see video, when you see these things happening in front of you, when you hear helicopters overhead and you see military vehicles moving down the streets, OK, you’re not being crazy. You’re actually seeing not just figurative institutions like the rule of law and justice eroding, but you’re seeing the things that you know in your daily life being destroyed. Literally restaurants I would eat at don’t exist anymore. That Starbucks where I met Melissa McCarthy, oh, that’s on fire right now.

And so to see those things be literally destroyed in front of you like you’re in a Roland Emmerich movie just makes it more present. Makes it more immediate. And you can’t – it’s just harder to deny what’s actually happening in front of you.

**Craig:** The stuff that’s been haunting me is weirdly watching the police abusing old white men. And here’s why. Because I see this – there’s a video out of Utah and video out of Buffalo which is just awful to watch. And the police just push these two different elderly men backwards and they fall. And one of them starts bleeding and is in serious trouble. And you watch that and you think, OK, if that’s how they’re treating old white men then how do you think they’re treating everybody else? Going all the way down their list. And I presume at the bottom of their list of who should be treated well are young Black men. And this is how they’re treating old white men. And I’m watching this and I’m just thinking this doesn’t happen randomly.

Because the police chief and will come out each time and say, “Well, we are shocked. That is not who we are.” It is who they are. It’s who they are. That doesn’t happen just randomly over and over and over in every city. There is a culture that has permeated law enforcement. It’s evident.

I mean, I watch LAPD beating people with sticks who were just peacefully protesting. They may be obnoxious, by the way. Protestors may be obnoxious. They may say things. They may get in your face. Too bad. You’re not allowed to hit them with sticks for that. Because, see, we’re in this place now where only certain people get to have the protections of being Americans. Like, I don’t know, white supremacists who show up in government buildings with semiautomatic guns.

**John:** Protesting that we need to open up the economy because of COVID-19. Yes. All that.

**Craig:** Right. Because they want to be able to go to Wing Stop. That’s OK. But somebody walking down the street saying, “You’re murdering people that look like me for no reason,” they have to get hit with sticks. The whole thing is outrageous. The entire thing. When you look at the entire thing it sucks. Our country right now sucks.

And I’ve said this before. I’m a Yankee fan. Through and through. That’s my team. I love the Yankees. In the 1980s the Yankees sucked and I would get so angry at how bad they sucked. I would yell at the screen “you suck” because I was upset. Because I wanted them to be good. Because I loved them. I can’t not love them. And I can’t not love this country. But I am so angry right now and it sucks so bad right now. Oh, god. We suck.

As a team our country right now is the worst. And its manager is the worst ever. And a lot of the people in charge of the organization are the worst ever. And people are dying. Because we suck. Those are the stakes. We’re not losing games. We’re losing lives. We suck right now.

And I am angry. Again, I’m sure this is evident to everybody listening to this, but I’m disgusted and I’m angry and I’m proud of our kids, you know, like my daughter who gets out there and makes signs and marches. Because I do feel like their generation understands so much more and so much better than ours does. So there’s a little bit of hope. But it doesn’t matter if they get hit with sticks. Then it doesn’t matter. So the whole fucking thing has to change. All of it. It has to change. And, I mean, if we cannot figure this out fast, as in like November, I don’t know. Then, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the team that it used to be. Maybe I’ve got to find a different team to root for. Because it is dispiriting and breaks my heart.

Did you see this video of George Floyd’s daughter? Did you see that?

**John:** I have not seen the George Floyd daughter video.

**Craig:** Fucking heartbreaking. Because she says that her daddy changed the world. And I’m like, you know, that’s not what a little girl should be saying is that her daddy changed the world because he got murdered. Anyway.

**John:** So, as I watch – I never watch live TV, but I needed to watch live TV because I live near the mayor’s house and there are helicopters over my house as protestors are marching on this house. And to watch it in real time and not knowing like, OK, this is totally a peaceful protest. Will this stay a peaceful protest? What is going to happen next? And to find myself being both an audience member and a potential actor in this situation where like I don’t know whether this thing I’m seeing on TV is going to spill over the fences and become a situation in my life.

Or to watch live TV and to see Trump do that crazy press conference and then the chaotic walk to that church. And to be watching and like, wait, am I watching a Zapruder film happening in real time? At every moment it felt so dangerous. And you could tell like, OK, this is some sort of horrible anti moon landing. You could tell that some big moment was happening in live TV.

**Craig:** Anti moon landing. That’s exactly right. It’s a moment where we can all share and vomit.

**John:** Yes. So as I’ve been watching myself watching this thing I always come back to the sense of you are a protagonist in your own life and that one of the challenges is to both observe and recognize that in the drama of your life you are the central character and you are the hero in this moment. And you’re having to make tough choices the way that heroes in these stories have to make those tough choices.

And so the choices of like, OK, do I go out and protest knowing that there is an incurable virus out there that would put me at risk. It would put my family at risk. Do I let my daughter go out to these things not knowing whether this is a thing that could end up with police and batons and tear gas? These are the tough choices that protagonists in stories have to make.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we do the best we can. Because we’re not heroes in a movie. Heroes in movies get to walk away from explosions. We don’t. Heroes in movies can be beaten in the face hundreds of times. Watch any Rocky film, he would have been literally dead after three or four of those straight punches to the face. But that doesn’t happen in movies. In movies you can get shot and you just keep going. You just wrap a thing around your arm. That’s not how it works at all.

You have to make these choices. I’m happy to say that people are being brave, which is exactly what we need. It’s funny. It’s also exactly the thing that the worst of us keep insisting the best of us are. The worst of us keep saying that everybody else is this scared, easily triggered snowflake. No. No. No, quite the opposite. These people are out there facing down batons. They are not afraid.

And, yeah, look, did I like the idea of my wife and daughter in a crowd of people on the one hand? No. So, you know, you make sure – my wife is incredibly responsible. We’re wearing masks and you be really careful and you try and keep yourself socially distanced as you can. But, then I am not going to – I’m not going to deprive, especially my daughter who is very emotional about this. And I’m not going to deprive her of this. So I have to make that choice. And I hope it works out, you know? But I have to be brave, too.

Just, I am proud of the people. I am.

**John:** Yeah. A moment I’m proud of is that I saw white Americans actively seek out information about what Black Americans are facing on a daily basis and try to understand it. And try to actually not only to listen to it but to speak up and act out in protection of Americans who did not have the same experience. That gave me some hope. And I don’t want to make it sound like it was all storm clouds and dystopia for the last two weeks because that wasn’t my experience either. It was a lot. And I think we have to just acknowledge that it’s a lot. And that in not knowing what happens next that uncertainty is also draining.

**Craig:** This is an experience that you and I, I don’t think, have ever really had. This kind of America. We were not alive for the late ‘60s where this was going on quite a bit. And I guess it’s our turn.

There was a war, I think it was after World Wars, during the Hoover administration. This may sound familiar. A stingy Republican administration was stinting on benefits for veterans of WWI. And veterans of WWI marched on the government. And there was like a little war. And the government basically shot a bunch of its own veterans. This is kind of who we are.

If we have a moment now to change it somehow for good that would be great. I don’t know if we can. But we can’t not do it. We can’t not change things profoundly. When I look at not just in ’92 everybody could point at Daryl Gates and say your traditional here in the LAPD is no good. And you could say that from time to time about individual police departments. I’m watching police departments in Portland and Minnesota and Los Angeles and New York and Buffalo and in Utah and in Kansas. And it’s all of them. We have a cultural disaster.

**John:** Well, then let’s talk about that. Because there are many other podcasts and many smarter people who can talk about systemic changes that need to happen to improve policing and police and we will link to some of those resources because I think that’s another good thing that’s come out of here is some people actually have very specific plans for this is what we want to do. But let’s talk about that cultural expectation about policing because that’s a thing you and I can speak to because I feel like so much of my experience as a white American with police has been the police that I’ve seen on screens. It has been – because I have never been arrested.

**Craig:** Same.

**John:** I can count on one hand the number of interactions I’ve had with a member of law enforcement. There’s nothing more privileged than that to have to deal with with this. Either as a suspect or someone who has been a victim of crime. I just have not had to deal with police. And so my experience of police comes from watching police on television. I think that’s a truism for many white Americans is that we think of police as those people who solve crimes on television. So let’s talk about how police are portrayed right now and think through what are some possibilities for how we change how they’re portrayed on screens so that we get to some better understanding and better approaches to policing onscreen.

**Craig:** Sure. I’ve never written any kind of police stuff, but I’ve certainly watched it. I have a friend, Ken White, who goes by the name Popehat on Twitter. He is a former federal prosecutor turned defense attorney and he has his own podcasts and he appears on news programs from time to time as I guess a pundit. And for as long as I’ve known Ken, which is, god, about 17 years, he has always been a very staunch proponent of the notion that law enforcement is over authorized and law enforcement essentially has its thumb on the scales of justice in ways most of us do not appreciate or understand.

And it’s easy to sort of, you know, in times of what we think of as peace because we are privileged to be in situations where we’re not on the frontline of this, we think, oh come on, they’re doing a good job, they’re out there. And, look, it’s just like on the shows. And I suspect that if Ken White were to create a police show it would not be like that at all.

**John:** No. When I hosted this panel on criminal justice a few months ago, which feels like a lifetime ago, we were largely talking about from arrest to incarceration. But so much of what police do is well before that. It’s the policing. It’s the being out there in the world. It is solving the crimes. And so I wanted to talk through some of what we see police do on TV and then we can talk about sort of how that doesn’t match up to reality.

So, cops on TV, they are problem solvers. The problem is a crime and they solve the crime within 60 minutes. And now obviously I’m talking about sort of the police procedural show and we’ll talk about sort of the exceptions to those shows. But like in most of especially the CBS kind of crime shows, but also the NBC crime shows, there’s a problem, the problem is introduced at the start of the episode. And then by the end of the episode there’s a solution to the problem. And the solution is putting a bad person behind bars. Or killing the bad person.

The cops on TV, they are heroes but they’re not necessarily protagonists in the sense that they don’t change. They don’t experience ups and downs and huge growth over things. They start the episode super competent and they end the episode super competent and they did the job and they solved the problem. There’s not a sense that they are undergoing a metamorphosis over the course of the show.

**Craig:** Right. They specifically can’t because they have to be back next week to solve another problem. So, there is a presumption there just built in structurally to the police procedural that the police officer is doing a good job. Now, there are some shows like The Shield where part of it is about a police officer being corrupt. But for the most part in the procedural they’re often given a glossy paint of problems. Maybe they’re an alcoholic. Maybe they are divorced. Maybe they’re cheating on their spouse. Maybe they did something in their past. It’s very common that when we meet police in movies or television they have done something wrong in the past. And they are in the midst of atoning for it while they usually violate any number of reasonable police regulations to bring the bad person to justice.

This is very common. In reality the bad things that police do are being done all the time by police. And at this point I can hear somebody saying, “Not all police.” Correct. Not all police. Just like not all men. Just like – yes, yes, yes, we know.

**John:** But we’re talking about the overall system. And also we’re specifically talking about the police that we see on TV which is what we’re talking about right now. So, to this point of like the police we see on TV they can use or ignore the system as merits and there’s no consequences for ignoring the system. So I think back to one of my favorite shows of youth was Hunter which was a cop detective show with Fred Dryer. And he’s a maverick. Hand in your badge. Here’s your badge back. You solved the case.

Basically as long they got the results it didn’t matter if they broke the rules. And that is a thing we see in these systems again and again is that they have all the resources and they have the whole team but if they need to move away from the team and they need to go on their own as a lone wolf well that’s what they should do.

**Craig:** Right. So the frustration that these shows create dramatically in us is a cop is handcuffed. I know who the bad guy is. I know how to catch this person. But you and your stupid hippie liberal regulations are preventing me from delivering justice vigilante style. So, you suck. You, the police chief, the politicians, the DA, anybody that – god help you if you’re a defense lawyer. You’re all scum. And I need to be out there doing the job that needs doing.

**John:** Yep. Now, in doing that job they are fundamentally conservative in the sense that they are protecting institutions. They are protecting the status quo. And so anything that is a disruption to the status quo is something that needs to be knocked down within the course of those 60 minutes. And so it doesn’t matter whether the disruption was a murder or a plot. Whatever happens they’re going to bring us back to normal at the end of 60 minutes because that’s what you do in an ongoing series. It’s like there has to be a big thing that happens but by the end you need to be able to recycle back to where you started the whole show.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, you fix the world. That’s what you’re doing. As a cop in a procedural you are fixing the world. Now, in the actual world as it turns out it appears that police are one of the things that are breaking the world. Now, if you are someone whose child has been smashed in the head by a police baton or shot in their own apartment because they were in their own apartment, and you watch one of these shows it must seem like it’s beaming in from another planet.

**John:** Because that’s not been your experience with the police. That’s not who police are. Like what is that? I mean, come one, police are there to protect and serve. That’s what it says and that’s what we’ve seen on TV again and again is that that’s what they should be doing, right?

And so then you see these aberrations and like well that gets back to the “oh it’s one bad apple.” And Seth Meyers this last week made the point, “Listen, if the cops were bad apples like people die, then you’d say, no, you have a bad orchard. You have an orchard problem, not an apple problem.”

**Craig:** Uh-huh. Yeah, Chris Rock has a great bit from years ago because, see, it’s not like this is news, right? Where he said, “Uh, yeah, OK, well police officer is one of those jobs where you actually can’t afford to have a bad apple. Like pilots. You can’t – American Airlines can’t say after a crash, ‘Well, you know, that pilot was one bad apple.’” [laughs] We cannot have any bad apples walking around with the ability to shoot somebody in the head, or smash them in the face with a stick, or push them on the ground and put their knee on their neck, or take their life and liberty away. We can’t.

They can’t have bad apples.

**John:** And that’s one of the ways in which I would say reality does mirror the TV perversely is that the stakes are incredibly high. The stakes of these dramas are always like, oh my god, it’s going to get away. The bad guy is going to escape. In real life it’s the worry that like the ability to inflict deadly harm on somebody at any given moment, so the stakes are profound at a moment because of how we have armed our police.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, that’s exactly right.

**John:** Now, in these shows the world is a fundamentally dangerous place. And I think this is a thing that we don’t talk enough about is sort of the Jessica Fletcher problem is that in Murder She Wrote all these people are dying in her tiny, small town. What is up with her small town?

**Craig:** She’s obviously a murderer.

**John:** She’s obviously the murderer. But if you watch crime shows you believe like, oh, it must be very common for these kind of crimes to happen. And they’re not. The kinds of crimes you see on TV are not the kinds of things that a police officer is dealing with on a daily basis. And so it gives this really warped perception of how dangerous the world is versus what you’re seeing onscreen. And statistically we can show over the last 30 years the US has gotten just so much safer in terms of like the odds that a violent crime are going to happen to you, unless it is a violent crime happening on a person of color by a member of law enforcement.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. Because those aren’t crimes. See? They’re not listed as crimes. They obviously are crimes. But probably the number of assaults, physical assaults, that police inflict upon people is incredibly significant. And you can sense this kind of thin-skinned entitlement when I watch these videos of we deserve your respect, you can’t talk back to us, you can’t sass us. No. Actually, I’m sorry, but for all these people that profess to be defenders of the constitution and who declare that the 2nd Amendment and the right to own 12 guns is necessary to protect ourselves from a tyrannical government, how do you not then see that that’s exactly what the problem is right there? There.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I should be able to express my mind in front of a police officer at any point, including saying, “I don’t like what you’re doing. I detest it.” And, no, they can’t get all grouchy with me about that. Sorry. Because you’re not allowed to be a bad apple when you’re a police officer or a pilot. If I walk on a plane and I say to a pilot, “You know what? I don’t love the way you’ve been flying,” is he allowed to beat me up? I’m stuck on the plane with him. He’s stuck on the plane with me. No bad apples.

**John:** But, I mean, really we have to acknowledge though that in any place where there’s a position of authority, even like an airline pilot, your objection to the way he’s performing his job does depend on your race. And so you raising the same objection in a situation is all going to be influenced by their perception of you and your race. And so-

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** You, Craig Mazin, could raise objections to a pilot or police officer or a city official and have a different outcome than a black person would.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And that’s a thing which is so uncomfortable to admit. And I do feel like we’ve made some chipping away progress over the last two weeks to get more people to recognize this and how pervasive the difference is there.

**Craig:** Why is it that it’s hard to admit? What is that? I mean, I don’t feel am I responsible for racism and white privilege? No. So, why should I feel this need to deny that it exists?

**John:** Because you don’t want to admit that you’ve benefitted from it.

**Craig:** OK. But we have.

**John:** Oh, we absolutely have. I’m saying–

**Craig:** I know you know that. And I know I know that. But I’m just saying who doesn’t know this? Who is looking around and not getting it at this point? At this point.

**John:** I think we also want to believe in the American ideal that everyone can raise up through the ranks and it doesn’t matter where you started. It has no [unintelligible]. Yes.

**Craig:** It’s childish. This is what children do. When children are afraid of something they shut their eyes and they say it’s not there. It’s just denial. That’s it. Just straight up denial because to acknowledge it somehow is frightening to you. If you are invested in the notion that this is the greatest country on earth and the American dream is alive and well, and everyone here is treated equally and all the opportunities are the same, well, I’m not going to tell you to open your eyes. You already know that that’s bullshit.

You know it. In your heart. Now, it may be uncomfortable for people who are not doing well in this system to also admit that. It is hard at one time to say I’m struggling, I don’t have enough money, I don’t have enough work, I can’t afford healthcare, my children are sick. And also I’m white and I benefit from a system. And I can appreciate that to an extent. But then also this is part of empathy. You have to start putting yourself in other people’s shoes. You have to.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, it’s a fundamental ability to shift this is my own experience, this is your experience, to the degree I can look at it from your perspective I can understand we have different outcomes because of where we started, because of how society is treating us. It does not help that we have a president who has just a noticeable vacuum where empathy should be. A spectacular gap there.

**Craig:** Does not know what it is.

**John:** So two other points about TV cops. There’s a well-documented CSI effect which is that prosecutors and defenders when they bring evidence into trials they’ll say that juries expect that there’s technologies there and sort of precision that just does not exist in the real world. Because they’ve seen things on CSI to make them believe like, oh, you should easily be able to do these things. Well that’s fiction. And they don’t understand what the reality is.

A general case you can make for we have this idea of competence and professionalism from what we see in TV police procedurals that is not reality. And I think for people who don’t have interactions with police outside of what they see on TV they would believe that the police function the way they see on TV and that they are competent and professional at every moment. And that’s dangerous.

**Craig:** It is. Actual police work is, well, it’s work. And most law enforcement, most police work, and then on the other side of it the prosecution and defense of people is far more bureaucratic paperwork-y than people want to admit. And also the stakes of the police drama necessarily put forth that there’s a risk that justice will not be done. That someone is going to get off the hook. This is the always the problem. If we don’t have this evidence they’re going to get off.

No one gets off. How about that? How about in this country first of all almost no one goes to trial at all.

**John:** Yeah. It’s all plead out.

**Craig:** It’s all plead out. The whole deal is we make a deal and it’s plead out and you’re going to suffer. And if you want to go to court just know that everything is stacked against you. Your temerity to demand a trial is going to stack it against you. Everyone is pissed off that there’s a trial. The judge is pissed off. The prosecutors are pissed off. The public defender is pissed off. Everyone is pissed off. They don’t want to do it. They just want to bargain you down to something that everyone can agree on. The one factor that is always true in most things is that you are Guilty with a G. And that’s how it works.

So the stakes are not that high. You will say, OK, well you know what this is what we’ve got. Well, you know, you don’t have everything. True. You know what? I’m not going to spend an hour in police show time trying to find that thing. Let me just pop two years off this recommendation. What do you think? How about instead of 15 we go to 12. And the defense guy will say, “Eh, I could do 9.” You’re like, 11? “Great.” Done. That’s how years of human beings lives are decided.

That’s not conjecture. If you listen to the third season of the Serial podcast, which is brilliant, you’ll hear it. You will literally hear the discussion. And it is chilling to listen to. That’s the reality. So they’re creating sort of false stakes on a lot of these shows. And, by the way, I don’t know how you continue on as one of these shows without changing at this point. I don’t get it. I think you have to, right? How do you continue?

**John:** I want to get that. Because I do think we’re going to have to have a reckoning with the kinds of shows we’re making and how we sort of do that. So the last point I want to make about police shows right now is – and I don’t have data to back this up, so this is just conjecture – but my perception is that the people who are arrested or prevented from doing terrible things on these shows generally aren’t people of color. And you’d say like, well that’s good, because you’re not portraying those people negatively. But I think then you also risk that you’re actually not painting an accurate picture of what is really happening here and sort of who is being affected by the system.

So if it’s always just white blond guy who is the villain here, well OK, you may be demonizing blond white guys to some degree but you’re not actually showing who is being impacted by the criminal justice system.

**Craig:** Right. And it is incredibly purposeful. I mean, when we were making the superhero parody movie, way back when, David Zucker and I watched as many superhero movies as we could. This was back in 2008. So we hadn’t quite gotten into the big Marvel cycle. But there were plenty of Spider Mans and Batmans to watch.

And the character of white mugger – I think we called him White Mugger #3, was our favorite. So the white mugger is usually a 40-year-old, clearly a stunt guy. He likes to wear that knit wool hat. You know, that ridiculous mugger hat.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And he’s unshaven. And he’s angry. And he’s like, “Gimme the purse.” And he’s got the gun. And we would just laugh at this because the whole point of white mugger was like, um, we’re uncomfortable showing the nature of how these things work, right? We’re uncomfortable showing the nature of poverty and we’re uncomfortable showing the nature of who the police are actually involved in. And, by the way, if superheroes were real who they would be beating up. So, we’re going to create this fantasy world and pretend that race doesn’t even exist. Isn’t that nice. There’s no race. Guys, we don’t have to address this problem because in our movie all the muggers are white.

Well, that’s bullshit. Right? It’s bullshit. Criminals are of all colors, but more importantly the interaction between people that commit crimes and the people who are there to enforce the law is completely screwed up. It’s screwed up. And here’s why. Let’s say you’re a mugger. And you come up to somebody and you threaten them and you want – you are a criminal. You are committing a crime. You do deserve to go to jail.

What we cannot do as a society is empower any individual person to beat the shit out of that guy on the spot, break bones, right, and possibly kill. Because sometimes you think someone is a mugger and they’re not. In fact, a lot of times it would appear the people that we think committed a crime are matching a description of somebody that merely vaguely looks like them. As in Black.

So even the superhero fantasy of punishing the mugger is nonsense. And so on police shows, yes, you see that stuff and it’s their way of just sidestepping the whole thing and not showing ever what is often common. A white guy with a stick hitting a black guy. That’s what’s common.

**John:** That is what’s common. So, we’re going to link to two other pieces that came out this last week. Kathryn Van Arendonk for Vulture and Sam Adams for Slate. And they talk through some of the issues of police on TV and there are of course counter examples. There’s The Shield. The Wire. Bosch. Justified. Fargo. True Detective.

A counter example from my own childhood I thought about yesterday was The Dukes of Hazzard. When you think back to The Dukes of Hazard, like Boss Hogg is the mayor. He’s the villain. The police officers are corrupt and incompetent. There’s Rosco P. Coltrane. There’s Amos who is sort of good-natured but still has to work for the police. That was sort of what my first impression of the police was, was weirdly this kind of strange southern fantasia of these good-old boys and the terrible sheriff who is trying to do them in. There’s a connection between that and Smoky and the Bandit in the sense of like, you know, literally a bandit or a Robin Hood kind of character who is up against this law enforcement.

But that was really the exception. So, let’s close out the segment by talking about what we think might–

**Craig:** Let me just point out that those heroes were always white. So, like, at the same time in the ‘70s you had like the one fantasy is white guys fighting back against corrupt police. My other favorite one was there’s a James Garner movie called Tank where he literally rides a tank, a military tank, to avoid a corrupt police officer. That’s what white people can do.

And at the same time Dirty Harry is just shooting Black people. Just shooting them because thank god he’s taking care of justice.

**John:** Yup. That’s justice.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those two paranoid fantasies right there can explain the two kinds of demonstrations in our country. It’s Dukes of Hazzard when the Ku Klux Klan dudes show up in a government building with long guns and it’s Dirty Harry when people of color are in the street protesting against innocent men and women being murdered.

**John:** Weirdly true. So you’re either Dirty Harry or you’re the Duke boys.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s what it is.

**Craig:** Depending on what color you are.

**John:** So let’s think through the future of police on TV. And let’s not be naïve. It’s not going to magically change. But I do wonder where we can get to in the next five-year period. Some of these shows I feel like as they restart production you’re going to have to – weirdly even in a bigger way than the pandemic impact and how we’re going to portray people interacting with each other on screen, just acknowledging that this moment has happened feels like it’s going to be fascinating.

I think there’s a real question of like should these shows continue to exist? Can these shows be changed in a way that’s meaningful? Or is it inherently the problem of the formula of a 60-minute crime procedural doesn’t really lend itself to anything other than this kind of thing?

**Craig:** Yup. I believe the latter. I think that we know that medical shows are essentially medical fantasies. Because when you actually do have someone in your family or if you yourself are seriously ill or injured you understand that the process is not at all like an hour of medical procedure television. But we’re OK with that because we’re too busy being healed or being cured or praying for – if you pray – for your family member who is sick.

But we don’t have the luxury of – if we are being hit with a stick or being shot in our own apartment, it’s not like we have the luxury of pretending that cop shows don’t cause trouble. They do. The reductive nature of the police procedural is either going to falsely glamorize or reductively criticize the problems with law enforcement in this country.

I don’t know how to fix it.

**John:** Yeah. This is not saying that we cannot do other things that are about police, but the sense of a weekly show that is about – I mean, procedure, they’re called procedurals because there’s a procedure. There’s a process that it goes through every week. It feels unlikely that we’re going to get to a place.

And I’ve seen some well-intentioned shows that try to take different approaches to them and they were not successful either critically or commercially. Someone may crack that code, but I don’t think it’s going to be by tweaking some of the ingredients within the basic nature of a police procedural. That’s why I think it’s important to have representation of various voices inside the writer’s room. But I don’t think it’s going to be a writer’s room problem to solve these existing shows. I think you have to make different shows that can work differently.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is going to have to be thought of in a different way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because – and what we don’t ever do with procedurals is show the long dragon’s tail of suffering. You have a police procedural where someone gets a little too crazy and beats someone up. And all the white cops get to be virtuous and say that cop is bad. Let’s get rid of him. And then they do. But what you don’t see for every single episode following that one for years is the person who is beaten up going through some sort of physical rehabilitation and living with brain trauma.

You don’t see that. That’s gone. In fact, you don’t remember their name.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they don’t matter. Because the entire thing is from a perspective of the police. And at this point I’m sorry I am only concerned with the perspective of citizens who are being policed. Because we’ve had enough of the police’s perspective. And I’ve had enough of being manipulated by the police perspective when I’m – when we are told that the old man in Buffalo fell. He tripped and fell. And then we see the video. And then they go, “Oh yeah, oof, those cops. Mm.” Well I think everybody all at once said at the same time, “Now if there hadn’t been a video…”

**John:** Oh yeah. That’s been the lesson of really the last few years, but especially this recent period. There’s video. You cannot tell me this didn’t happen because I’m seeing this.

**Craig:** Because I’m seeing this. And now you entertain the horror of knowing that prior to 1990 there was no video ever of anyone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that is centuries of police doing whatever the hell they wanted to.

**John:** In case we’ve not said this clearly enough in this podcast, it’s not that this is a new phenomenon. We’re acknowledging that this is not new. It’s that the arrival of video has surfaced an ancient evil which a huge chunk of the population already knew about, but a huge chunk of the population could look away from because we didn’t have it there on video to see.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s just a – it’s exaggerated, it’s not that bad, I don’t have that problem. When I’m stopped by the police they’re incredibly cool to me. What’s the problem? Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, Craig, you and I did not solve the issues of police violence against–

**Craig:** Shocking.

**John:** Against Black Americans. Hopefully we had a helpful discussion for other writers thinking about what we are portraying police like on screens and the choices that decision-makers are going to be faced with as they decide what portrayals they want to put on screens.

**Craig:** And when they’re making those decisions. Don’t find yourself in a room full of white people all trying to figure out what the right thing to do is. If you are in the room with all white people trying to figure out how to make your show different, or better, or more responsibly you’ve already fucked up. You need to have people of color in the room. We need to employ writers of color for not just window dressing purposes, or to signal how wonderful we are, but for the actual stated reason behind the whole diversity thing. Which is that individual different perspectives matter and influence things in a positive way.

**John:** One addendum I want to put on that is the notion that it cannot fall on the responsibility of the one or two or four Black writers in the room to have to speak up and stand in the way of horrible choices and inconsiderate things being described. Like, they cannot take that burden all on themselves. And we cannot ask them to do only that. That’s why one of the things I’ve been somewhat hopeful about the last two weeks is I feel like people have actually been reading up and trying to understand a bit themselves what that is so it doesn’t fall entirely on the Black people in the room to explain why something is wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s a particular problem when a staff has one person of color. And then everybody sort of turns to that person and says, “Well you’re here really as an ambassador from person of color stand. And so tell us what it’s like on your planet.” That’s not correct.

**John:** Particularly if that one Black person in the room is the lowest level staff writer, or is the PA. I mean, to ask that person to step up and do all that work when they don’t have any authority is crazy. So, we have to just acknowledge relative power in that room as well.

**Craig:** 100%. And most of these potential disasters can be averted if you simply look at it from their point of view, as best you can. And ask how would this seem to me if I were in their shoes? And do that as much as you can, all the time, with all the people that work with and for you. Just try.

**John:** Which shouldn’t be that hard considering we are writers and our whole job is to be able to understand–

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** What things look like from other people’s perspective.

**Craig:** But you know, and now I’m going to be critical of writers for a moment, that – for as long as I’ve been doing this I have been shocked over and over, which is surprising, because really I should stop being shocked, that writers whose job is to empathize and imagine themselves in other people’s shoes, writers who are supposed to be enlightened oftentimes are blinded by their own thin-skinned insecurity and ego. It blows my mind how frequently the blinders go on because they have their own set of shame issues and neediness and fragility.

**John:** I absolutely have those myself. I see them and I recognize them and I despise them when I see them in myself. But they are there. Another thing I see in myself that I see in other writers, too, is laziness. Is that it is a lot of work to have to be doing that and to be thinking that way. And it’s just easier not to do it. And so laziness is another contributing factor there.

**Craig:** Well let us affirm ourselves to working harder and let us affirm ourselves to doing what we need to do to kind of improve ourselves whether it is through therapy for our own issues, or just listening better. And see if we can’t make things better for human beings at least in our small circle. Because we can’t fix the world. We can’t. But if we fix little pockets. If we make little pockets better over and over and over, just like that, things get better.

**John:** We’ll hope. Let’s try to make the world better in two small ways with these two questions we’re going to answer.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Jason asks, “Have either of you ever lost control of your emotions in a meeting or on a call—“

**Craig:** No!

**John:** “With professional collaborators and needed to apologize or restore the climate back to a safe place to collaborate again? If so would you mind sharing how you did this? Is this common in creative collaborations? And how to best handle it when people find themselves in a situation where emotions get the best of them.”

Oh yes I have. Oh yes I have. I’ve lost it.

**Craig:** Oh. Oh? Go on.

**John:** In one case I was brought in for notes and I thought it was going to be one notes meeting and it ended up being just like a pile-on on me. And I was like I cannot handle this. This is not at all. No. This is not it. And I left.

And was it the right choice to leave? Probably, because I would have said even worse things had I stayed. And then in the follow up phone calls I could explain like this is what my expectation was. This is what the actual thing was. This is not cool. And I think I ended up basically getting out of that project.

In other cases, I described this on the Charlie’s Angels movies. There’s a thing we describe as like fighting the monster in that on any given day someone was going to be the monster and everyone had to sort of come together to fight the monster. And some days I was the monster. And it was the recognition that it was a tense situation and we were going to do it. And there would be some yelling. And afterwards we would talk it through and be fine because it kind of had to be fine because somebody else was the monster at that point.

So, I feel like anger and frustration in the pursuit of creative goals isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s when you stop treating people with respect that you have to really ask why are you letting your emotions get to that place.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have gotten emotional. I tend to not vent it outward, but to keep in inward. Although there was a moment, it was during Chernobyl. It was during post-production of Chernobyl. And it doesn’t matter what the specific thing was. I experienced the work of something and it upset me. It upset me. Because it was not at all what I wanted and I could feel myself being flooded with waves of negative emotions. And so I stood up. I said, “I’m going to get some air.” And then I walked like three miles. And I was aware that even that in its own way is kind of hostile to just stand up and walk out and then disappear and not answer your phone. But it was kind of what I needed to do to avoid something I didn’t want to do.

I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I didn’t want to make people feel bad. And I also understood what ever little part of rationality was left that wasn’t going to solve the problem. So the problem was going to be solved by kind of careful explanation of where what I wanted had not occurred and where I what I didn’t want had occurred. And by the time I was done walking and came back I had calmed down sufficiently to be rational. And to kind of help relay what I wanted.

It happens. But I try as best as I can to not – I’m not a big yeller. You know. I have been in situations where, I mean, the Weinsteins made me absolutely crazy. Crazy. I mean truly nuts. It’s quite likely that in the past I – especially when I was younger I probably did raise my voice. It just doesn’t get you where you want to go. But it’s been a long time for me. It’s mostly for me when that happens I do – my mode is to walk away, calmly. Walk away and then return when I’m OK.

This is an emotional job. And one of the reasons why is something that you and I have gotten into with our how to give notes thing. The thing we made we identify with. It is entwined with us. And so when someone is doing something that we perceive as injurious to it it’s like they are being injurious to us.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it is always – I was on a notes call for something a few weeks ago and I said you know what just, sorry, holding up my hand. We’ve been at it for a while. I think I’m at the moment where I’m not quite absorbing things efficiently anymore. Why don’t we take a break? And we’ll pick this up again tomorrow or a day later. And everybody was like, OK, yeah. Great. Because I didn’t say it after five minutes. And if you can do that that’s always preferable.

**John:** Agreed. All right, Randy asks, “As someone who is interested in becoming both a novelist and a screenwriter which craft should I pursue first? And how do I effectively manage my time to learn both of them?”

So, I’ve written books and I’ve written movies. I’ve written many more movies than I’ve written books. Craig, you’ve done some prose writing as well. If I were to give advice to Randy about which thing to pursue first, I would always come back to kind of what do you want to exist in the world. What is the thing you wish you could see your name on most? Is it a movie? Is it a book? If it is a movie then you should be writing a screenplay. If it is a book you should definitely be writing a book. There are more books printed every year than there are movies made. So your odds of getting that creative work out there in the world to some degree are much higher with a book, because you can always self-publish in ways you can’t self-make a movie.

But it really comes down to sort of what you wish had your name on it in the world most to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not sure how to answer this. I feel like as writers or an artist of any kind the work that you’re going to attempt to want to do is the work where you feel love back. There’s a relationship between the artist and the audience. If people say, “Look, I love reading your prose, I just don’t care as much about the screenplay stuff,” then maybe follow that. And if people are excited when they read your screenplays but the novels feel a bit jejune then maybe stick with the screenplays.

What is the world telling you that they want? And maybe then, you know, that’ll kind of help you figure out what to do.

**John:** Yeah. There are definitely a class of screenwriters who would never, ever write a novel. And who fundamentally see themselves as people who can see movies well and they’ll put up with the having to write it part of it so that they can make that movie happen. That’s kind of valid. Novels are all you’ve got is the words and you’ve got to be able to hold someone’s attention over hundreds of pages with just those words. And it’s a lot longer of a slog than screenplays tend to be. But nothing is stopping you from doing both.

I will say that the sunk cost of a novel is a lot. And so definitely be – if you’re new to writing prose start on some smaller things rather than tackling a whole novel at once and just see how the form fits your brain and your fingers. Because it doesn’t fit everyone.

**Craig:** Yup. That’s absolutely true. But sort of an unanswerable question. Feel your way and see how it goes.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing feels like it should be a Craig One Cool Thing. It is a game. It’s on Steam. It’s also on Switch. It’s called Baba is You.

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** So Baba is You is one of those kind of puzzle games where you’re pushing blocks around in order to achieve the goal of the game which is generally to hit the flag at the end of it. And what is so ingenious about Baba is You is that the rules for that level of the game are also blocks. And so you can move the blocks around in order to change the rules of the game. So no longer do you need to hit the flag to win. You can change it so you now need to hit the rock. Or you can become the rock. Or you can become the walls. It’s very clever in how it does it.

It’s also really tough. I’ve been embarrassed how often I’ve needed to look up solutions to certain puzzles. But I really did enjoy it quite a lot.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** For you, Craig, or anybody else who is looking for a puzzle kind of game, Baba is You would be my recommendation.

**Craig:** That sounds great. I do love a game as you know. My One Cool Thing is, and this is merely one of many options that people have. If you’re trying to support change in our country, especially in regard to law enforcement and policing, and you’re not quite sure where to go there’s a billion people who – there’s not a billion people. There are a number of nonprofit organizations that are working to fix things. The one that I was really impressed by the work they’ve done and so I did make a donation myself is called Campaign Zero.

And Campaign Zero is interesting because their entire focus is on reforming the way the police function and interact with communities. And they have 10 kind of points that they’re working on. All of which seem, well, very reasonable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And very needed.

**John:** It’s hard to say like, oh, that’s a radical idea. No, that’s not a radical idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. Pretty much all of them.

**John:** And it looks like their activism is really about convincing local governments to insist upon these changes. And so there’s national stuff that can be done, but it’s also pushing on local levels will affect people’s experience on the ground.

**Craig:** Yeah. And one thing that strikes me about the campaign that they’re running, and real fast I’ll rattle off their 10 areas of focus. End broken windows. Policing. Community oversight. Limit the use of force. Independently investigate and prosecute when there is police malfeasance. Community representation. Body cams filming the police. Training. End for-profit policing. Demilitarization. And fair police union contracts.

So, if I were a police officer who believed in the rule of law and fair policing and the equal treatment of all Americans regardless of race, color, creed, I would want all of these things. I would be in favor of all of these things. And I know that there are police like that. I know that. I think it’s important to say that there are good apples as we say. It’s just that again, like pilots, can’t afford any bad ones.

So, if I were a good apple and a good police officer of which there are a number I would be desperate for all 10 of these things. And I would be desperate for a different kind of relationship with the community I police. And I hope that this is something that carries through. And this isn’t nonsense liberal fantasy. And weirdly the people who decry government tyranny and the tree of liberty must be watered with blood and don’t tread on me, they should be in favor of this, too.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’d think that they’d be able to make that connection there. So hopefully people find some way. And if you don’t have the means, and this is a brutally difficult economic environment, so if you don’t have the means it’s totally understandable. And maybe there’s a way to volunteer a little bit of time if you have. But if you do have the means I think this is at least one reasonable way to donate. But, of course, feel free to research. There are a number of others.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Jason Azziz. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. They are great. They’re on Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments, including the one we’re about to record really where we’re looking at whether Craig actually exists or is just a figment in all of our imagination.

**Craig:** Oh god. Rooting for figment.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, so this occurred to me that the last time I saw you in person, that we saw each other in person, was February 28, 2020.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It was at a fundraiser for Mark Kelly who is running for senator in Arizona. And you and I were in a room. We shook hands. There were other screenwriter friends there as well. And at that moment it was like – maybe we didn’t shake hands – it was at the moment where like, wait, are we supposed to be in a room together? Are we supposed to shake hands? What’s going on? Is this safe? It was very early in the pandemic.

And then I have not seen you since.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I started to wonder, I’ve seen you on video, but we have the ability to sort of fake video. Right now you and I are talking on Skype. You could be an elaborate computer simulation. Naturally you’d assume that I am the computer simulation, but you could be the computer simulation. Like someone could take all of the transcripts of Scriptnotes like I’ve done and put them into a computer system and generate with Markov chains things that sound like Craig Mazin there. So how do I know that you really still exist?

**Craig:** Right. We don’t. Neither of us exist. So, neither of us are real. This is a simulation. But, you know, inside of the simulation it feels real. And reality is only subjectively defined because it’s experience. We experience reality. So it’s from our point of view. This is why empathy is so interesting. You are attempting to experience somebody else’s simulation.

So, the important thing to make clear is I’m not real and also I wasn’t real that night either.

**John:** Mm.

**Craig:** When you saw me there–

**John:** Pass the joint back. Now has your unreality changed though in this situation? Because it feels like, you know, when I see a person in front of me in a physical space they feel more real, and yet all of my interactions these days are basically on these Zoom rooms.

I was struck by a friend was talking about this writer’s room that she’s in. it’s been entirely a virtual room. And six weeks into this room one of the writers stood up and said, “Oh, I have to stretch. I’m really, really tall.” And everyone in the room was like, wait, you’re tall? That’s a thing, it was weird for them that this person that they’ve known virtually for six weeks. Wait, you’re like freakishly tall? It was a thing that would have been the first thing they noticed about them in real life, but not because of this virtual situation.

**Craig:** Well, what I would say to you is you are overestimating the value of your own eyeballs. If you are in a room and you look in a mirror and you see me in the mirror I’m right behind you. You see yourself and me in the mirror. That seems pretty real. But that is no different than seeing me on a Zoom. Your eyeballs are just seeing light that is being passed along. So instead of light going right into your tiny little organic cameras it’s just taking a little detour and then getting into your organic cameras.

And so I’m not arguing that Zooms are just as real as real life. I’m arguing that real life is just as not real as Zooms.

**John:** Yeah. So, where this goes to is the idea of sort of where we’re headed in the next few years where there’s going to be an increasing number of people who we interact with who we will never meet. And so traditionally if I was hired to write a film I would at some point sit down with the producers and with the head of the studio and we’d have this thing. Basically just a reality check that everyone exists and we’re actually going to do this thing. There would be some face-to-face meeting. And those are going to be less common. I think even after there’s a vaccine and things get back to a little bit more normal I feel like people are going to become more comfortable hiring people they’ve never met to do things.

I’ve hired somebody for my company who I’ve never met in person who is now working for us every day. So, that’s a strange thing I think this pandemic has brought us to.

**Craig:** Well, let’s say that, I think it’s reasonable to expect that we will have technology soon enough – we kind of do – where instead of just vanilla Zoom we can create a situation where the room that we normally, like a shared room, a conference room is scanned in perfectly down to the tiniest pixel, retina level.

**John:** A holodeck-ish kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. So we can look around in 360. We have our little headsets on. Our oculi. And we can look around the room. And then eventually our avatars are res’d up to the point where they are essentially as detailed as our actual selves. At that point what’s the difference? I mean, at that point haven’t we created a simulation of reality that we’re in?

**John:** But thinking back to even the episode of Mythic Quest that you were in where you’re talking with the other quality assurance testers and there’s the passing of chips back and forth. There are physical things in the real world that we are all sharing the same physical reality that is different.

I mean, this episode we were talking about the importance of going out and protesting and marching. Nothing is more real and physical and sort of being in your body than going out and protesting. And protesting feels like a thing that is important to do with your body versus online.

**Craig:** But would it blow your mind if someone said to you you have actually already – it’s just that you’ve been living your entire life in a very elaborate, really res’d up Zoom.

**John:** A brain in a jar.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s the Matrix. And the truth is I do believe the people who say it’s incredibly unlikely that we’re not. It doesn’t make any of this less real. That’s sort of the point. I mean, pain is pain. Joy is joy. You touch something, you’re not really – when you touch something or when you taste something you’re not–

**John:** It’s fields of stuff interacting, yes.

**Craig:** It’s your brain telling you that you’ve touched something. It’s your brain telling you that you felt something or you tasted something. None of it is real. It’s not real, but it matters.

**John:** So that sense of it’s not real but it matters does get us back to the notion of empathy and the sense of even in the unknowability of things one’s choices have consequences. This is not nihilism. This is not the denial of an outside reality, at least in a moral sense.

**Craig:** Right. What we’re saying that what we think of “real” is a vastly overestimated concept because experiences are real whether or not the thing is real. I mean, you and I literally for a living create fake experiences that have real emotional impact. So the experience of watching a movie or a show or a musical creates real feelings.

If we can’t see the value of that then, you know. So, that’s why I’m all in favor of it. You know, to conclude, I do not exist.

**John:** Never has.

**Craig:** But I am important and I matter.

**John:** Aw. That’s nice to think. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Black Lives Matter](https://blacklivesmatter.com/)
* [Campaign Zero](https://www.joincampaignzero.org/#vision)
* [Baba is You](https://hempuli.com/baba/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [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 Jason Azziz ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scriptnotes/455standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/there-are-no-slow-claps).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 451 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show Craig will offer some guidance on how to flip the script on tropes without landing on your face. We’ll also answer listener questions about phone numbers, slug lines, and short films. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will discuss personal videogame histories and the possibility that I was raised in a cult.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Craig has no idea what the Premium topic is until I read it aloud, so he’s excited.

**Craig:** I mean, both of those sound amazing.

**John:** Amazing. What else is amazing is if you are listening to this episode when it comes out on Tuesday then you are only two days away from our next live show.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Thursday, May 14, we will be having a live conversation with Empire Strikes Back writer Lawrence Kasdan to celebrate the 40th anniversary of that film.

**Craig:** Wow. 40 years. 40 years and I don’t know, can we do spoilers? 40 years of Darth Vader is Luke’s dad. We not only will only be talking to Lawrence Kasdan but I believe we will be able to share either visually or through some sort of method of relaying his handwritten screenplay. And I’ve been looking through it and it’s kind of amazing because sometimes there will be things he’s written and you’re like that wasn’t in Empire Strikes Back. And then sometimes it says, “Yoda, you will be, you will be,” and you’re like oh my god. It’s written down on paper. So, it’s pretty awesome. I mean, it’s kind of a cultural document.

I’m excited. And always fun to talk to Mr. Kasdan. He is a good friend of the show and the greatest living screenwriter.

**John:** Yeah. We like all of these things about him. So, we will be doing this on video, but we’ll also have audio for it. So, you can anticipate this being a future episode, but if you want to join us live at the time you can join us on Zoom. There will be a link in the show notes and more information as we have it for how you can participate in it. We probably won’t be inviting guests to actually come on and ask questions. But Megana will be monitoring the feed and if there’s questions that come up we will try to get those answered while he is there with us.

**Craig:** OK. That’s a good plan.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see. We’re winging it. So again this is done with the Writers Guild Foundation who we often do live shows for. So it’s exciting that even in this time we can continue to support their great mission.

**Craig:** You know, you and I, I think, are charitable people.

**John:** We try to be. We do.

**Craig:** We’re charitable. We like the charities. Now more than ever.

**John:** Let’s get to some follow up. Now, a few shows back I asked previous Three Page Challengers to write in with updates and so we have a first update from a previous Three Page Challenge entrant. Do you want to talk us through what Patrick wrote?

**Craig:** Sure. Patrick McGinley writes, “I sent in the first three pages of my science fiction script, Destination Earth, back in 2014. And you were kind enough to discuss them on Episode 159. I was never under the illusion that someone was going to make an expensive sci-fi spec without an underlying IP so I spent the last five years turning it into a feature length audio drama.”

That’s fascinating.

“It launched in March. All ten episodes are out now and you can listen to them at destinationearthaudio.com. In a recent episode you talked about how difficult it is to get a spec sci-fi or fantasy script made. I think audio dramas are a viable path. You can produce them for almost nothing and you can get your story out in a way that can be enjoyed as entertainment and not just read as a document. Thanks to your great advice over the years I made the jump to fulltime writer in 2018. I’m writing on a show that’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime.”

That sounds like it should be a planet, by the way, in a science fiction thing.

“I always draw inspiration from your podcast and it makes it easier to sit down in front of the blank page every day and do the work.”

Well that’s great, Patrick.

**John:** Yeah. I’m happy for Patrick. So that’s one success story. People continue to write in with your experiences after this Three Page Challenge. Even if it’s not great news. I’m curious what’s happened to people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now on this idea of the audio drama, I’m struck by a previous One Cool Thing of mine was the show Bubble which was a fiction podcast by Jordan Morris which I really enjoyed. And just last week it was announced that they are developing that as a series now. I think it’s over at Sony. So that seems like a viable way to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know that basically every podcast that is vaguely adaptable into something is being sold. Remember when there was the graphic novel gold rush?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s podcast gold rush now. I mean, that’s what’s going on. So I get pitched a lot of podcasts. But what I like about what Patrick did was he just got super creative and flexible. Flexibility is not necessarily something that comes easily or like second naturally to writers. Sometimes we can be a bit rigid. We get fixated on our creative expression as a way of being artistic and it can’t not be that. And what I like is that Patrick was like well what if I do get flexible and turn away from film to this other entirely different format and thus bring it to life. And it’s a really smart thing to do. I think that’s really clever. And I wonder if this is going to be something that’s more popular. That instead of trying to bomb people with your spec scripts via cold queries and so forth you just start reading them out loud.

**John:** Yeah. I will say that just reading them out loud is unlikely to really engage people. Like if you look at the audio dramas that work, if you look at things like Homecoming which obviously became a big series, they were really good as audio things. And the people who created them had very smart instincts about how it could work in an audio format. So it’s not going to simply be I’m going to sit at the microphone and read this thing aloud. You’re going to have to shape it to fit the medium. But that is work that a writer can do.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, definitely if you just read it that would be bad. That would be sort of “oh I need to sleep, put on that boring man reading a screenplay.” But hiring some folks or just bringing some folks together who feel like just doing, you know, having some fun and reading something and adding some sound effects. I mean, production for something like a little audio drama is easier now to do in a professional manner than ever before in the history of mankind. And that’s not the case necessarily with making films and television, although they are somewhat easier.

But, yeah, go for it. It’s fun.

**John:** Now, on the topic of reading scripts aloud, last week we spoke about table reads. And Craig you had a strong opinion that you thought table reads for production in features was generally not a helpful process for you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Aline Brosh McKenna, our friend and the Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes, she writes in, “I was really interested to hear your conversation about table reads. I had a couple perspectives. I agree they can sometimes be detrimental in movies. Also sometimes on pilots where cast members don’t know each other and there are tons of execs. But for a TV comedy and series they can be super important. And on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend they were incredibly helpful. Not only to find where the laughs are, or aren’t, although that is useful, but to check the sturdiness of stories when you hear them out loud. We really relied on them.

“Also when I started writing I did multiple readings of all my scripts in my apartment with friends and that was probably the most useful thing I did and it’s something I always tell first time writers to try.”

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a great distinction being made here. If you are working on a show, a repeating ongoing show with a stable cast, and definitely this is the case with comedy because of the aforementioned joke issue, but you can actually get a much more reliable sense of how the script is going to be when you shoot it from that reading. That’s a helpful reading because everybody knows their character. They have the benefit of god knows how many episodes behind them.

When you’re dealing with features, they haven’t done it before, and they don’t want to do it for the first time in front of you. They want to do it, you know, for the first time when it’s safe and they have takes and there aren’t executives around. Great distinction there. I can’t imagine any sitcom, whether it’s something that’s kind of quasi-experimental like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or not, not having read-throughs. You just need them for those. And also for your features if you want to have friends then that’s for you. And no one is judging you. There’s no professional fallout if it’s a bad read. So it totally makes sense. But yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Your distinction about safety I think is really crucial. It’s not a safe environment in features generally and people do get cut and no one feels secure in doing it. Which if you’re coming back and this is episode seven of this series and you are a regular on it, you feel like you can be free and experiment in a table read and other people wouldn’t be able to do that.

**Craig:** Precisely. It looks like we’ve got another comment here that sort of jibes with that if you want me to take that one.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** Anonymous writes, “In Episode 450 Craig commented that table reads are useless. Most actors couldn’t agree more. In television they’re often used as an escape hatch to fire an actor prior to shooting a pilot. An actor friend of mine went through three screen tests for one show. Yes, three definitely screen tests before being hired. The executive producer of the show, whose name I won’t use, even called my friend personally after hiring them to say how excited he was to work with them. The director echoed the sentiment and even execs at the network approached my friend prior to the table read and said they were excited to have him on, or her, on board. It’s this person.

“Then came the table read when apparently one exec who’d likely never even had read the script decided they ‘wanted to go in a different direction with the character.’ This happens all the time to actors. It’s almost a badge of honor to make it through a table read with a job when you’re a working actor but not a name actor. So the studio pays a handsome sum to the actor under contract to walk away, but they at least didn’t drop $4 million on shooting the pilot.”

**John:** Yeah. So what he’s describing here is it is expensive to fire an actor after the table read, but it’s much, much, much more expensive to have to reshoot a pilot because you don’t like that actor in that role. And so execs are sometimes taking this as an opportunity to go like, “I’m not sure this is really the right person,” and get rid of them.

**Craig:** And if I were a network executive, like a broadcast network, I would want to go ahead and commission a scientific study to find out how often we have done a good job making that decision. Because I suspect that perhaps a Pop-O-Matic would be just as useful. Do remember Pop-O-Matic?

**John:** I don’t. But as we get into the bonus segment you’ll understand why I don’t know what a Pop-O-Matic is.

**Craig:** Oh right. Because you were possibly in a cult. So there was a board game called Trouble when we were kids.

**John:** Oh I do remember Trouble. We had Trouble back in the cult.

**Craig:** And so the Pop-O-Matic was that little plastic dome with the die inside of it and you would push it down and it would go click-click and then the die would go boing because it was in this little flexible diaphragm thing. So, Pop-O-Matic is a great way to revolutionize dice rolling which as we all know was just excruciatingly difficult without it.

**John:** It is. The worst. I think it’s because you can’t lose the die because it’s inside the little bubble. That’s why it is. Because Trouble is exactly the same game as Sorry really, but it’s just the Pop-O-Matic makes it so you cannot lose the actual thing that tells you how far to move your little pegs.

**Craig:** That is a very practical explanation of why they put Pop-O-Matic in the world. I think the not practical and more commercial reason is they were like look at this gimmick. Look!

**John:** Makes a noise. Kids like making noise.

**Craig:** Sugar-fed lunatics watching this commercial at six in the morning on a Saturday will go bother their parents immediately.

**John:** Good stuff. Last week we also talked about virtual writer’s rooms which is where you are gathering together a group of writers and they’re meeting on Zoom or some other sort of video sharing service rather than being in a room physically together. And I wanted to make a decision between entirely virtual rooms, which is what people are encountering right now, and semi virtual rooms.

So Annie writes, “I work in a virtual room now and for all the reasons you mentioned on the podcast that’s not so much an alternative to a traditional room as a necessary evil to get us through this weird situation. But two years ago I was an assistant in a room where one writer had to Skype in for a few weeks while his visa was being figured out. It was pretty terrible. He had such a hard time being completely involved in the conversation, even with his writing partner in the room trying to help facilitate his participation. When he finally did come to LA his personality and presence were so much more than we’d experienced through the computer screen.

“I can’t imagine having a room with multiple writers in this situation. Plus, they’d be missing out on all the bonding that happens in the kitchen around lamenting snack options and comparing caffeine consumption, all of which actually becomes very important to the room dynamic.”

So what Annie is trying to draw a distinction between is if everyone is in the same boat, OK, you’re in the same boat and you sort of muddle through. But this idea that, oh, maybe I don’t have to move to Los Angeles from Milwaukee and I can just Skype into the room is probably not a realistic option for those writers who don’t want to come to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I mean, if you’ve ever had the experience of being in like a minivan type of vehicle and you have a bunch of friends who are in the second and third row and you’re all the way up in the front, you’re left out. They can’t hear you. You’re talking forward. You’re not part of the thing. And you’re in the van with them. Separation does have an impact. It just does. There’s nothing you can do about it. And the more you try and include yourself the more kind of frustrating it is for everybody. So I completely agree. This is a great indication to people that, yeah, while everyone has to do it, sure. But if not everyone has to do it, you want to be in the room.

**John:** Yep. Do you want to take this comment from Greg?

**Craig:** Yeah. Greg writes, “I’m working in a room for a big streamer right now and there’s one topic that keeps coming up that I wanted to add to your list – video lag. One day my connection was spotty and the effects of lagging in the room felt almost like I was having a stroke. I couldn’t control my voice or image and others were looking at me as though I needed some sort of professional help. Then my connection dropped the chat and it felt like a digital bouncer had forcibly removed me from the room. For the next ten minutes I worked in sheer panic to get back in and when I finally did I sat there sweating, wide-eyed, trying to pretend I was as calm and good-humored as everyone else for the rest of the day.

“I thought I was alone in this until it happened to one of the head writers. Her image froze. Then she logged back in on her iPhone, appearing next to her own frozen face.” That’s awesome. “We all laughed at this even as she looked confused and afraid and as we tried to explain to her what we were looking at she froze again. When her second video resumed it was of her rushing down a hall with sheer panic in her eyes. It was the look of someone trying to find a life raft off a burning island.” Greg is very dramatic, by the way.

**John:** Yeah, I was going to say.

**Craig:** “The worst part was that if any of us attempted to call out her terror in any way other by cracking a light joke it would have been like saying the emperor has no clothes. We would have imperiled the room, the comfort of the other writers and our productivity because Zoom chats are founded on the fundamental lie that we’re actually together when in fact we are alone and one second away from digital annihilation.” Again, I have to repeat, Greg is a very dramatic person. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. But I wanted to include Greg’s full description there because it is a thing I have experienced and feared is that like when you can’t get into a group, when a discussion is happening without you and you feel like you’re pushed to the outside of it it is really panic-inducing. And you always feel like, wait, will I be able to rejoin this thing? You might have flow that is now broken. Particularly if you’re trying to run the show and then you’re not able to actually get into the conversation. It is, you know, it’s scary.

**Craig:** Yeah, so I don’t know what’s wrong with me but when I’m on one of these things and suddenly my video glitches up and I get booted from the room I feel a slight sense of relief. [laughs] Like, oh good.

**John:** You have an excuse for why you’re not there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like I can just go now and do whatever I want. And later just be like, yeah, Zoom right? Geesh.

**John:** I heard about this on Twitter but – not this last session but the session before – the six of us were playing Dungeons & Dragons and it’s like midnight and I felt an earthquake. I’m like, oh my god, there’s an earthquake. And the other five people on the chat were like, including you, were like, “There’s no earthquake.” And then the next nearest person felt the earthquake. And the next nearest person felt the earthquake. And it was such a wild moment because I was closer to the epicenter of the earthquake I felt it first and then there was a lag before it got to Phil and then to you. It was just such a wild experience that even though we were all there virtually we were physically in the same city and so therefore we were feeling the same effects.

**Craig:** Yes. And that’s something that you don’t normally have access to, right? It’s a weird thing. Because normally when you’re experiencing something together you’re together. And in that sense you could actually kind of chart the movement of the shockwave, which dissipated dramatically by the time it made it to me and to Chris Morgan.

**John:** It was a long way to get there. The other thing I’ve noticed with video lag that can be so frustrating is obviously the big networks have gotten much better at all the live from home stuff and they’re generally faking the live-ness of it all. They’re not really live from home.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But one thing I do watch which is more live is Drag Race has this Werq the World Tour where they’re raising money for drag queens. My daughter is obsessed with it. And so we watch it and it’s two very funny drag queens. One is in Los Angeles and one is in New York. And they have great patter, but just that one or two seconds lag really makes it awkward.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** And you just cannot do it. It’s tough.

**Craig:** It’s brutal. Timing is everything. And when you have a forced lag it’s over. There is no – it’s why sometimes they’ll bring a comedian on to one of the news shows, like the kind of talking head news shows. And their stuff always dies because of the time delay. It just kills it. The expiration date on a joke is precisely 0.0001 seconds after it is said. I mean, if you wait any longer than that it’s just like stale air, stale air. “Oh, OK. Yeah. That was funny, the thing you said a little bit ago.” It’s the weirdest thing. Yeah. Timing.

**John:** Timing.

**Craig:** Timing.

**John:** All timing.

**Craig:** Timing.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic. Craig, talk us through what you want to tell us about tropes.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I’ve been working on some new things lately and especially now that I’m in television – television, there’s so much more material you have to shovel into the engine of creation because there are episodes. Everything in television is longer than it is in film. And so you’re thinking about a lot of scenes, a lot of moments, a lot of scenes, a lot of ideas. And over and over it’s inevitable that you’re going to start to bump into places where tropes could go.

**John:** We should probably talk about what do we even mean by tropes? Because it’s a term that you and I throw around, but other people might not know what we’re talking about.

**Craig:** Cliché is a word that people use. So these are the moments, dialogue lines, scene, sequences, things that we have seen over and over and over in movies and television. It’s the guy walking away slowly from the explosion that he caused behind him. It’s the person saying something mean about somebody and then saying, “She’s right behind me isn’t she?” It’s that stuff. It’s crawling through the air duct to get to a place.

**John:** Absolutely. So they’re moments of narrative that are almost like stock photos that we’re so used to seeing them that we can kind of anticipate what they’re going to be like. And you could just string them together in forms that look like popular entertainment, but as a viewer we recognize that they are clichéd moments or they are sort of stock moments. And cliché would be too hard of a thing to bang them on because they’re natural bits of storytelling device in some cases, but we’ve seen them so often that they no longer feel fresh.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Jane Espenson often refers to clams. They’re old dead jokes for example.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there are also things that maybe in and of themselves aren’t considered tropes, but when you think of them naturally in the course of writing a scene you get a whiff of familiarity about them anyway. I mean, it’s not necessarily a trope that when there’s a horse racing scene and a character loses they rip up their little bet slips, but I’ve seen it so many times. So it’s like a little thing is like is there another way to do it?

And so I just kept thinking like, OK, what I’m really trying to do is every time I run into something like that I’m asking myself, OK, don’t do that. But then there is a question. Well then what do we do? Because that trope emerged in your mind for a reason. It’s accomplishing something. So we’re going to talk a little bit about how to handle that.

And I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is that tropes are not inherently bad. In fact, weirdly they’re inherently good. That’s how they became tropes. So, I looked this up. Everyone has heard somebody at some wedding say, “Throw your hands up in the air and wave them around like you just don’t care.” This has happened four billion times. But about 41 years ago Sugar Hill Gang wrote “Just throw your hands up in the air and party hardy like you just don’t care” and that may have been the first popularized use of that and it was awesome. Because no one had heard it before and so it was cool.

That’s why it became a trope. Tropes become tropes because they’re surprising and they’re fresh and they entertain and they solve problems. They solve problems. It’s like the first time you taste Hamburger Helper. You don’t know it’s garbage. It helped the hamburger. It worked.

**John:** Or first time someone said like, “Well let’s never do that again,” when something disastrous happened. It was actually a novel response to that thing that had just happened. But if we say that now it is still and is a trope. It’s shining a light on this thing which just went wrong. It doesn’t work anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does not work anymore. The problem with saying, OK, well then I’m not going to do that is that we are disallowing ourselves from using something that at the very minimum accomplishes a thing. Hamburger Helper does accomplish something. It just doesn’t accomplish anything original. So our job here is to replace the trope with something that actually also accomplishes something. Different and good is original.

Different and bad just sucks. And so we have to be careful when we say, all right, no tropes please. We also have to caution that when you zig where everybody else would zag there is the potential that you might do something that’s just boring or self-indulgent or confusing or unimpactful or not believable. So, the challenge today is to figure out how to not do the tropy thing but still get all the tropy goodness from the heart of it while being fresh and surprising and entertaining.

**John:** That sounds great. And I think part of the reason why we’re emphasizing that tropes are there in the first place is that people approach anything we write or anything that they see with a set of expectations. They have expectations about the genre, about the kind of thing that they’re watching. So, they’re aware of what they expect to kind of happen in this. And if you’re so trying to avoid every possible trope then it’s not even going to resemble the genre it’s supposed to be in.

If you’re trying to write a vampire thing and all the vampires aren’t hurt by sunlight, or wooden stakes, or any of that stuff then at a certain point you’re not writing a vampire thing anymore. So you have to be aware of what the overall scope of tropes is for this and how you’re making your choice about what you’re doing and what you’re not doing and how you’re hopefully aware of the tropes and remixing them in a way that makes it feel fresh.

**Craig:** That’s a great example. The vampires. Because vampires are just like drowning in tropes. But you want the vampire to bit someone in the neck. That’s a thing, right? OK, or at least bite somebody in a vein. So, that’s something you need to do. And as you’re creating your vampire story you may come to that place where suddenly the vampire has to bit somebody and drink their blood. So that’s a trope. And I think the first thing you should do is not just deny it. Not say, “Well in my movie vampires don’t do that.” Just first say to yourself, OK, I’m going to allow myself to play out the tropiest version possible in my mind. What am I getting out of it? What are the things that matter?

Is this character particularly scared? Are they excited to be bitten by the vampire? Is the vampire reluctant, guilty? Is the vampire ravenous? What are the things that at least I want out of my characters in the middle of this tropy thing? Learn from that. That’s the stuff that actually you can keep and use. Because tropes are just expressions of intention. They’re just often clever or once brilliant expressions of intention that now become stale from overuse. But keep the intentions.

So, first off, listen to the trope as it happens and learn from it. So you’ve listened to the trope in your head. You’ve heard what the intention is. And now it’s really important for you to say to yourself I’m not going to actually do it. I think sometimes we get into a self-delusional state where we think, well, I mean, you know, we can get away with it. We can do just one. Or, it’s not like it’s that tropy, because instead of the usual vampire biting somebody in the next in a castle he’s biting somebody on a neck in a rooftop bar in modern day New York. No, look, if you blindly walk into a trope, that is to say you didn’t realize it was a trope in the moment, which happens, and then someone points out and says, “Oh, yeah, you know, I’ve seen that,” then you go, OK, OK, got it. Let me change that.

But if you know, don’t do it. Just resist the siren song.

**John:** Absolutely. So I think what your call to action here is like just don’t be lazy. Don’t use the trope without examining what the trope does and why you would be using it. So don’t go for the trope without thinking about what the trope actually does. In the vampire example why is a vampire biting someone’s neck? Well, it’s biting the neck to feed. Is that the most interesting way to show feeding? Is it worth spending the shoe leather to change that vampire behavior and go at it a different way? Is there something about the biting of the neck that you’re going to do differently that is important to your story? For instance maybe the vampire doesn’t have these pop-out fangs and so biting the neck is actually really difficult because they just have normal teeth.

Like that’s a change that you’re making which could be worthwhile. But basically your challenge is to always ask yourself why am I doing this thing that is sort of a stock photo in this kind of story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because ultimately the audience will be sitting there going, oh, OK, well you know, see you borrowed that. You’ve started to bring up techniques like, OK, so what do we do.

So let’s go through, I’ve got seven suggestions. But I’m sure there are many, many more. But we’ll start with the easiest one which is just reverse it. So if the trope says boy meets girl when they bump into each other and you want them to have a meet-cute and you want it to be in the middle of the street because that’s kind of where they are maybe you just reverse it and they each bump – or they amazingly avoid bumping into each other. Like they’re heading towards each other with all of the attributes of a bumping together scene and they miss each other. And in missing each other they kind of turn back and realize that they had a near miss. And that’s the way it works.

Any trope there is you can just simply try, at least in your mind, to just do the reverse. If we know that vampires feed on people by drinking their blood then is there a way that vampires as it turns out need you to bite them so that they drink your blood. Whatever it is, reversal is always at least a simple strategy. If it works, great. A lot of times it doesn’t. But a decent first shot.

**John:** Absolutely. So you’re taking a look at, again, this is all going back to what does the reader, what does the audience expect. If the audience comes into it with a certain set of expectations and you’re able to kind of acknowledge those expectations and flip them then the audience is going to be hopefully even more engaged because they know that you know what they are expecting and that you’re taking an action to subvert that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. With that in mind, one of the kind of more comedic ways to handle tropes is by being meta. So the idea is that the characters or the filmmakers are kind of silently acknowledging that they watch TV and movies, too. They know the trope. They are either – when they engage in a trope they’re commenting on it, or the movie is commenting on it, or it doesn’t go the way it’s normally supposed to go.

So parodies kind of truck in this steadily. We did something in one of the Scary Movies where it was the trope of somebody in a moment of kind of anxiety and the camera is moving around them in a 360. We’ve seen this so many times. And we were doing this and then the character kind of puts their hands out and goes, “Stop,” and the camera stops and they vomit. And so it’s like you just acknowledge that the trope is happening.

Lord and Miller are by far the masters of this. So if you want to study this kind of meta trope behavior look at 21 Jump Street or The Lego Movie or any of the work that they do. They’re brilliant at it.

One of the simplest methods of being meta about tropes is doing the trope exactly as it is except taken to its absurd extreme. So, classic trope. You remove the cover of a bomb and there are four different color wires and which one should I snip. We’ve seen it a billion times. But in MacGruber you take the cover off the bomb and there’s a thousand wires. A thousand wires. And that’s great. I mean, it’s essentially like you said, it’s playing off of the audience’s expectation.

**John:** Yeah. And again the movie MacGruber it’s a joke they keep playing again and again is that it’s about diffusing this bomb and then they don’t actually do any of the work to diffuse the bomb. They’re having a completely unrelated conversation when you know you are supposed to be focusing on the bomb.

**Craig:** Right. For drama, sometimes all you need to do to kind of subvert and untropify a trope is to just change the dynamics. So I’ll call it loud to quiet in this instance. So we’ve all seen a prison riot. There have been four hundred zillion prison riots on movies and TV shows and they all look the same. In the prison riot there is a bell ringing somewhere. There are prisoners running around in a violent scrum. There’s always two levels to the prison and on the top level they are throwing burning mattresses to the bottom level. Every. Single. Time. Burning paper, burning mattresses, and people are getting stabbed randomly. And everyone is screaming.

That is what a prison riot looks like in everything. OK. Well, if you’re writing something and it’s time for a prison riot is there a quiet prison riot? Is there a way to do a prison riot where basically the prisoners are methodic and strategic and careful, which is actually kind of terrifying to consider?

So just deciding I’m going to do the same thing but just way quieter, or way louder, may be enough to kind of detropify your tropy intent.

**John:** Absolutely. And that shift of dynamics could also, it doesn’t have to be the entire universe, but whoever the central character is in that we have an expectation of who that person is generally in that story and to put a different kind of person in that slot is incredibly helpful.

And so if you have the charismatic cult leader and we have an expectation of what a charismatic cult leader is, and instead you have somebody who seems just the opposite of that, or just dialed in a very different direction, that is fascinating because we understand the general dynamics of how this is supposed to work but that’s not the person we expect to be doing that. And that gives you opportunity.

**Craig:** Precisely. Again we are playing with their expectations. I mean, last week we were talking about comedy as a magician’s trick. It’s just subverting expectations. It’s misdirection. That’s what we’re talking about here.

Another method is just analogizing. You take the same kind of thing but if there is something that has been done to death and yet useful, find something else that has the same kernel of psychological payload but is just different in circumstance in a way we haven’t seen. Typical thing in a lot of movies, particularly sports films, is the wise old coach who used to be something but isn’t something anymore because something tragic happened to them like they lost the big game and now they’re a drunk. And they’ve got to pull it together to help the young hero. That’s pretty much a stock trope.

If you want that character, if you need that character, maybe just look at the drinking part and say is there some other kind of self-destructive addiction that I can put here that isn’t that. Because we’ve seen it. It’s been done a billion times. So what else? I mean, weirdly enough one of my suggestions was are they in a cult? Are they obsessed with following something? Are they and end-of-the-world prepper? Are they running from a crime they committed? Are they trying to win back an ex-lover who has clearly moved on? What are they doing with their lives that has consumed them and pulled them away from what they maybe should be doing?

So you don’t have to turn your back on the useful aspect of self-destructive mentor, but you just have to change the nature of it I think or you end up being tropy.

**John:** Absolutely. And so in this case we’re probably talking about that sounds like he’s either a protagonist or an antagonist. We’ve seen stories in which that coach figure is the central character, so The Way Back, the Ben Affleck movie recently, he’s sort of that central character. We’ve also seen that as the antagonist, the one who is helping but also challenging our protagonist along the way.

What we’re pushing for is to look at sort of what the outside frame is of that character and are there things about that stock version that you can strip away and subvert so that we can actually see something really interesting and find ways to sort of do the same effect but without the usual details that we’re used to in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. You just get different lines, you know, different expressions. It frees you in a lot of ways. It really does. It frees you.

OK, we’re getting closer to the end of our list here. We’ve got three more. Mourn the loss of the trope. So tropes make things easy. And sometimes would benefit from the inclusion of a trope. If your 16-year-old protagonist is struggling with her physical identity or her sexuality, I think it’s OK for a moment where she acknowledges that there is a world where tropes exist which is fantasy world, where ditching your glasses or getting a haircut makes you a new human being to everyone. That doesn’t work that way in real life. And it’s OK to acknowledge the trope as almost like you the writer and the character are mourning the loss of it. If only the trope would world. But it won’t.

**John:** So let’s take Booksmart as an example. So in that script you have so many opportunities for these two young characters to engage in tropes, and instead we don’t engage in tropes, or we actually push against those tropes. So you have two young women who want to have the perfect night of high school, of partying, and in some ways they are longing for that trope. They are longing for this idealized version of what a high school party night is supposed to be like. And again and again they are not able to achieve it.

They’re also aware that they’re sort of going for this impossible thing at the same time. So the script is very smart about not letting them do the things that they kind of want to do. And sort of the sadness that it’s never as simple as you sort of wish it could be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’ve said an interesting word there which is smart or intelligent. That there is an implied intelligence when you fight back against tropes. Whether we like it or not, and whether we intend it or not, the use of tropes implies a certain kind of lack of intelligent or intelligence horsepower, because it’s a borrowing. So you will seem smarter, which is good.

OK, two more. This is an easy one. Eliminate the lines. Because tropy dialogue is what we consider to be written dialogue. It’s never going to be heard as authentic because it’s been said by a billion other characters before. And now one talks like that.

**John:** It’s hack.

**Craig:** It’s hack. Nobody in real life talks in trope lines. So, don’t have your characters say them. But those trope lines became trope lines because they did express something authentic at one time. So, whatever that authentic feeling is, it’s OK to have your actors express it. It’s OK to have your characters feel it, just not out loud.

**John:** Just don’t say those words.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just sometimes all you’ve got to do is if the trope comes to mind just delete it. But change nothing else and it just might work.

**John:** Absolutely. And if you are able to find that line that so perfectly encapsulates what that moment is like, congratulations you have now created a new trope.

**Craig:** A new trope.

**John:** A new trope line.

**Craig:** A new trope line. And finally, and this is really I think the best advice, and it’s the one I try and use the most. Be real. Tropes or at least are psychological processing of them is such that they feel connected to a glossy or melodramatic representation of life. They feel movie-ish. They feel TV show-ish. So the lines are kind of fake witty. I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character wasn’t really witty but he would always have these snappy little one-liners, you know, because it’s fake. The behavior is fake macho. Nobody walks away slowly from an explosion. That’s fake. The choices are fake brave. The emotions are fake sentiment. There is never a slow clap in real life ever. There are no slow claps. [laughs]

So the question you have to ask yourself is in the moment that you have created what would really happen. Think about that carefully and then do that. Because there are mechanical ways as we’ve described to change tropes, subvert them, hide them, acknowledge them, but nothing is as interesting, I think, ultimately, than letting a trope happen in your mind naturally, you arrive at a point. Your brain says, oh, the trope would fit right here. And then you say that’s great. But what would really happen? And then you might get something.

**John:** So we have many listeners who are film historians and so I challenge them, can you tell us where the slow clap came from? What was the first cinematic depiction of the slow clap? Because as Craig points out–

**Craig:** The first slow clap.

**John:** It’s a thing I only associate with movies and I think I’ve seen people try to do it in real life and it feels incredibly weird because it doesn’t actually make sense. It doesn’t work. And so if someone can tell me the history of the slow clap I’d be delighted to hear it.

But Craig’s underlying point here about being real, like what is the actual real behavior that people in real life situations would do is the cornerstone advice here. Is that the way you get to making your characters feel grounded within the universe of the story you’re telling is to be consistent within that world. And so we’re not saying nothing can be heightened. Obviously things are heightened. And so Veep is heightened. That’s not how real people would speak. Never Have I Ever, a show I just watched and really loved, is heightened. And that’s fine.

Social Network is heightened. People are speaking at a clip that they couldn’t speak at in real life. But within that heightened universe there is an underlying reality that you’re never reaching for sort of stock ways to get through things. In any of those things if they reached for a clunky line like “Let’s never do that again” it would thud. It wouldn’t work.

**Craig:** Yeah. It just wouldn’t. And so, yeah, you are allowed to be not realistic in your tone, but in moments where tropes would fit the best way to untropify the trope is to say what would actually happen here. Let’s not gloss this over with some tropy paint. Let’s embrace the realness of it.

I thought that, you know, the movie that we were looking at the other week, Bad Education, did a really good job. I mean, there’s so many opportunities for tropes in that movie.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And it seemed like, you know, they dodged most of them. I really do think so. I mean, you could feel like everybody was working hard, including the actors. Because, I mean, remember, some tropes aren’t just written. Some tropes are also acting tropes. Here’s one that I see all the time. In the place of somebody allowing themselves to experience something they just do a heavy breath out. No one does that. Normally in real life no one is like, [deep breath], well, but they do this sometimes. So everybody worked really hard to not do the tropy tropes and it’s appreciated. It really is.

**John:** It is. Here’s my actor tropy trope. I’m frustrated so I’m going to take off my reading glasses and throw them down on the desk and then rub my temples with my hands. That is my tropy trope.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I mean, I think there’s a pretty great – there’s a few great Denzel gifs. A lot of times I feel like tropes begin with Denzel. Like Denzel does something amazing and then everybody else is like, ooh–

**John:** Oh, I’ll Denzel that.

**Craig:** I want to Denzel it. And then it’s like, mmm, but Denzel Denzeled it. So you can’t Denzel it, because he Denzeled it. So, anyway.

**John:** Craig, I think you Denzeled this topic and for that I want to offer you a—

[Clapping]

**Craig:** Da-dum.

**John:** I don’t know what it means. But it’s a thing that happens.

**Craig:** Just sometimes, yeah, it’s a thing that happens. It’s just so funny. The whole psychology of the slow clap is that everyone is stunned. And no one is quite sure if they’re the only person who thinks what they saw was great. And then one brave soul is like not only am I going to express that this is great, but I’m going to do it so deliberately–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then everyone is like, yes, I will too. One by one. And then the applause. And then it has to turn into like the full applause.

**John:** Yeah. But it would be better if it didn’t turn into full applause and instead it was like they were keeping time, where everyone just starts clapping the same way, like are we supposed to start singing?

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**John:** That’s a way to subvert that slow clap trope.

**Craig:** That is absolutely terrifying. Yeah. And there’s always that moment where the person like when the slow clapping is happening the person on stage is like “what’s going on?”

**John:** Wait, what?

**Craig:** They’ve never experienced the slow clap phenomenon. [laughs]

**John:** Well, the challenge of the slow clap though is it’s also a mocking thing. You can make somebody by the slow clap. So it’s impossible to read what it actually is. And it’s a thing that just happened in movies.

**Craig:** In real life the only time you hear a slow clap is in a mocking reference to slow clapping. So, yes, in a movie if someone gets the slow clap their response should be like, “You know what, screw you man. I know what you’re doing.” Oh, slow clapping.

All right. Well, we’ve got some questions we can shuffle onto here if you’d like.

**John:** Let’s go for it. I’ll start with Paul in Wales. He writes, “I have a question about slug lines. I’ve seen them be bold, underlined, and with scene numbers if it’s a spec, but how about different colors? I’ve written a half-hour TV pilot that uses parallel realities, showing how different characters deal with the same problem. Because scenes from both realties are intercut I’ve given each reality a different colored slug line, pink and blue, and the rest of the scenes are in black. As someone with dyslexia I find this easy for myself to keep track of where I am in the story. Are there easier ways of showing a jump between realities on the page? I have written Reality A and Reality B in parenthesis at the end of each slug line. Should I instead put this before the INT or EXT?”

Craig, what’s your thinking on this kind of slug line questions and color overall in scripts?

**Craig:** The risk is just being distracting with the colors. That said, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. If you have something where you’re moving back and forth between various realities and you want to color code those slug lines, that to me is not a killer. If I were reading the script and enjoying it I think I would find that to be kind of a delightful help. If I were reading the script and thought it was boring then I would think of it as – honestly, I would just think I wish the writer had spent as much time on the writing as they did on the color coding.

So it always gets filtered through the quality of the writing itself. I am tempted to say that if the script is done properly and well you won’t need those. But, I don’t think it’s a huge problem. And if readers do say, “Listen, I really appreciate it,” go for it. It’s not like we’re dealing with the 1990s where everything was being Xeroxed on black and white machines. So, why not?

**John:** So when we had Greta Gerwig on the show her script for Little Women had pages in red, so the text was in red, for when we were in the past. And it was helpful because that was constantly playing with which timeline we’re in. And so she did not just the slug lines but the whole scenes would be in red when they’re in the past.

And that worked for her script and I thought it was a good choice for it. What Paul is suggesting I think could work, but I don’t know that going in color is really going to be more helpful than putting the past or present over it, or putting some little symbol, or maybe just bolding the ones that are in the present versus the past, or the different realities. The pink and the blue feels like a lot to me. And I do wonder and worry for Paul’s sake that someone who is picking it up is just going to go, “Huh,” and might toss it a little bit earlier than they should because they’re so thrown off by the color.

So I think a simpler choice that works is going to be better than a color choice which might work a little bit better honestly, but will just throw people off.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, I think it’s also – you could also say, look, as a little note beforehand, “I have dyslexia. This is how I am able to write and navigate through the script. So apologies if you find it distracting.” I think sometimes just being honest about those things and people will go, well, I’m not going to be a dick and just be like, well, I don’t care about your dyslexia. Throw. You know? And fling it virtually across the room.

I mean, I would probably give somebody a bit more of a break because I understand the intention. As opposed to I am self-indulgent and I think that I’m going to make things pink and blue. Do you know what I mean? So, yeah, you know, I think in general he should be – I would be – let’s put it this way. That’s not going to be the problem. Do you know what I mean? In the end ultimately if there’s a problem it’s going to be because of the writing.

Alexandra from West LA writes, “Could you do an overview of all the ways a screenwriter could make money screenwriting?” Such a good question actually, Alexandra. Thank you. “How is the screenplay market structured? Where is most of the money? I know as screenwriters we aren’t here for the money, but current insight on this could help funnel my overrunning cup of creative desires, especially as so many different storytelling formats open up. Thanks. Thank you.”

I like that she said thank you twice. Alexandra in West LA. So, John, let’s do a quick rundown on how you can make some scratch doing this gig.

**John:** All right. So, the classic ways screenwriters, we’ll talk about film and TV as one big pile of writing, the classic ways they make money is I write a script all by myself, a spec script, and I sell that to somebody for a sizeable chunk of money and they say, “Fantastic, we love this script. We will make this into a movie. We will pay you this amount of money for the script you’ve written. We will hopefully pay you some more money to do the rewrites on it.” And that goes out into the world. I will get some sort of residuals and profit participation on that movie when it gets made. That is a classic way that people get paid as screenwriters, but it’s actually not the way that most screenwriters make money.

Most screenwriters instead make money by being hired to write a specific project. And so it could be their original project that they have an idea for, they pitch it to a producer, to a studio. That financier says, “Great. I will pay you X dollars to write that script for me.” Or it could be based on a piece of property that the studio or the producer owns and they are looking for a writer to adapt this into a movie. They come to you and say, “Do you have an idea for how to do this?” And you pitch them your idea for how to do this and they pay you money to do it.

Those are classically the ways that screenwriters make money is by creating material themselves and selling it, or by being hired to write screenplay material for somebody else.

**Craig:** Yeah. So there is open writing assignments where you’re hired to rewrite things. There is roundtables where they bring screenwriters together to have a kind of group effort to punch up a comedy script for instance. Or talk about how a dramatic script might be improved, sort of development style. And in television there are similar entrepreneurial avenues. You write a spec script, you set up a show. You can also be hired as a high level executive producer or story producer for a show that somebody else started. And of course you could be hired as a staff writer where you are helping break stories in the room and then you are assigned a script.

**John:** Yeah. So in our earlier conversation today about like writers in virtual rooms, those writers are being paid for their time in that room. And based on how their contracts work that time that they’re in the room may also be applied towards the script that they’re writing, or that script that they’re writing may not be part of that time that they’re spending, that weekly money they’re getting for being in the room. But that is probably the bulk of overall writer income in the WGA is TV writers who are in the room writing on a show.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then there are sort of nontraditional areas. I mean, well screenwriters also can work on variety shows. So they’re working on jokes and sketches. You can write on game shows, which do need writing. And then there are things that you can do sort of independent. I mean, you can write for commercials. Is it screenwriting? Well, it’s writing for the screen. It’s not necessarily unionized, but there is that.

But basically that’s kind of the run of it. I’m sure we’re missing a few things. But by and large 95% of the money that we make as screenwriters is through open writing assignments, through rewrites, through original material, through working in a room, or collaborating with other people on a television show. That’s kind of the run of it.

**John:** I would also say that a not insignificant part of income that comes into writers is stuff that’s not really writing, but it’s teaching writing, or it’s doing other stuff that’s sort of adjacent to that process. And so Peter Gould who is a fantastic writer and a director on Better Call Saul was my screenwriting, actually my film basics professor at USC. And so there’s a long tradition of also teaching or doing other things. We talked about assistants and readers, there’s other ways that these writers make their living while they are writing.

**Craig:** Yeah. So there are kind of screenwriting-adjacent gigs that you can do like teaching for sure.

**John:** Great. Jason asks a question. “On his blog recommended changing your phone number to have a 323 or an 818 area code. Is this still necessary in 2020?” So he’s referring back to a 2007 post I had done about moving to LA. And back then I had recommended that, yes, you should change your number to an LA number just so that people think of you as being an LA person.

That is just dead advice. That is not relevant anymore. Because people keep their cell numbers from wherever they were.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So don’t change your number.

**Craig:** No. Nobody has a number anymore. You’re a name. So, the numbers are gone. There’s a comedian did some joke about getting arrested – it was Kathleen Madigan I think. She gets arrested and they give her one call, but they take all of her possessions. It’s like I don’t know anyone’s number. You took my phone. I literally have no – I can’t call my own parents. I don’t know their number. [laughs] And that’s kind of where we are right now.

**John:** Mm-hmm. I still dial my mom’s number as numbers. I think part of it is just so I don’t ever forget it, just because it otherwise – that’s the number I grew up with. I can’t ever let that go.

I feel like I would be losing a part of myself if I didn’t dial that number.

**Craig:** Every day I wake up thinking I would like to lose a part of myself.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** I’m all into Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

**John:** So while your phone number does not matter anymore, the area code for that, I will say that don’t use a goofy email address. So, I think proper email addresses are – Gmail is fine. Everyone has Gmail. AOL is still fine. Some people still use their AOLs. It’s fine. But never use Roadrunner. Never use like the free email that came with your Internet service when you first set it up. That always feels kind of weirdly unprofessional to me. So, pick something that is – if you’re putting your email address on the title page of your script, which is fair and genuine, you can do that, just make it an email address that you’re not embarrassed by.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, AOL is kind of a red flag. If you’re an older person and you’re using AOL and you want to make it some sort of a virtue of loyalty then that’s fine. Yeah, Roadrunner, Hotmail.

**John:** Yeah, if I see a Hotmail I’m like I’m a little dubious of this.

**Craig:** EarthLink.

**John:** Yeah. All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things that are sort of related. The first is a book. It is my friend Jordan Mechner who created Karateka and Prince of Persia and is an amazing videogame designer and screenwriter, he has a book out now called The Making of Prince of Persia, 1985-1993. It is a collection of all his old journals. And so he was a person who actually just kept a journal about what was going on day by day as he’s building what became an incredibly seminal game and helped change the videogame industry. And you’re just seeing this college kid working out sort of how to make this game and largely do it himself. Everything from how to sort of figure out the bit maps to some of the programming stuff, but really more the business and the logistics of how it should all fit and work together.

So, I really enjoyed it and I think the closest comparison I would have for it would be I remember reading Sex, Lies, and Videotape, the book, that Soderbergh wrote which is both his production journal and the script for Sex, Lies, and Videotape. It was like the first real screenplay I had read. But the actual production log, his sort of notes about what he was doing day by day were so helpful in seeing like, oh, you know what, it’s just a lot of hard work and he didn’t know what he was doing through a lot of it. And so if you are a person who aspires to make things I think you might really enjoy Jordan Mechner’s The Making of Prince of Persia, 1985-1993.

We’ll put an Amazon link there. We put Amazon links for most stuff. But we’re also going to start putting Bookshop links to things we can. Bookshop.org is a website you go to and it’s like Amazon but it actually feeds through local book stores. And supporting local bookstores in this time is incredibly important. It’s a really well setup system and so we’re going to try to be providing Bookshop links to anything we talk about on the show that we can find on Bookshop.

**Craig:** Yeah. It sounds good. It is a really cool read. And like Sex, Lies, and Videotape part of the fun of reading about Jordan’s process is that you’re looking at somebody who is dealing with enormous limitations. And so so much of the story of The Making of Prince of Persia is how do I deal with the fact that I have no resources. I don’t have a lot of money. I don’t have a lot of time. And I also have very little memory to work with to actually make a game that functions.

So, the way that a kind of deprivation can sometimes lead to creative epiphany is fascinating to me and so the story of how for instance the main antagonist of Prince of Persia is a direct result of a memory limitation and how that comes to be is really fascinating. So, it’s an interesting – it’s a really interesting journey. And Jordan is a great guy. So, well-chosen there, John.

My One Cool Thing this week is I think I’ve mentioned Maria Bamford as a One Cool Thing in the past before. She’s a standup comedian out of Minnesota. She is brilliant. She’s also odd. She’s like one of the great odd comedians. She has no problem being weird. Her eccentricity is sort of front forward. And she also has absolutely no shame about talking about her struggles with mental illness which were quite serious. And she did have to take a lot of time off because she does suffer from pretty significant mental illness.

And she talks about mental illness all the time. In this latest comedy special Weakness is the Brand she doesn’t talk about it a ton, but when she does it’s still pretty impactful and pretty – there’s funny and then there’s funny because, my god, that’s really, really true and you said it and it’s funny, which is different. I think she’s terrific. And so if you’re looking for some laughs and slightly challenging laughs, which is great, check out Maria Bamford: Weakness is the Brand.

**John:** Is it Netflix? HBO?

**Craig:** I believe it is on Amazon Prime.

**John:** Fantastic. Which is of course the–

**Craig:** Distant planet.

**John:** Distant planet where the Amazons actually came from.

**Craig:** Yes. Amazon Prime.

**John:** Amazon Prime. In our bonus segment we will talk about my cult history and our early experience with videogames. But until then that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks to Dustin Box and Chris [Sont] for their help.

Our outro is by James Llonch. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

Craig, thanks for talking us through the tropes.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And remember there’s no slow clap.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. So, our bonus topic. A couple of things made me think of this. First off is Jordan’s book. Craig, you are adapting The Last of Us. And I’ve been playing a lot of Animal Crossing.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So videogames are having a big cultural moment, but they’ve kind of always been a cultural touchstone. They’ve always been reflecting and sort of making the popular culture. And so I wanted to talk about our videogame histories. And I guess we’ll start with the distinction between videogames and arcades and videogames at home. Because I did go to the arcade with my brother some and I would play stuff, but I wasn’t a big arcade person. Were you an arcade person?

**Craig:** I wanted to be a big arcade person. My parents generally if they saw me deriving pleasure from something would put a stop to it. [laughs] So the arcade in the Staten Island Mall which I think was called something like Space Port. I think it was called Space Port. It was all I wanted to be in. I just wanted to be in Space Port. And they were like, no, that’s full of teenagers and trouble.

**John:** I just completely picture you on the most recent season of Stranger Things being one of those kids.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** In the Star Port Mall.

**Craig:** So Star Port – god, I really want to check. So the Staten Island Mall, which is still there. I lived about, I don’t know, like a ten minute walk from it, and it was just classic. It’s like a classic mall. And Space Port as I recall it was just poorly made up to look like you were entering some sort of space station.

**John:** Were there some black lights?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think there were. I think there were. I think there were some black lights. There was that carpet that had planets and crap on it.

**John:** Oh yeah. Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know that carpet.

**John:** Yeah. It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** And then a lot of delinquents. But I really wanted to. But mostly my early gaming was limited to the Atari 2600 and then games that I could play on the Apple II.

**John:** Yeah. So this is where we sort of get into the John was raised in a cult thing because so much of what people will talk about in terms of their videogame history but also their popular cultural history I don’t have the references for somebody who is my actual age. It’s like I did not live through the same timeline. And so I don’t seriously believe I was actually raised in a cult or I have missing years, but things like H.R. Pufnstuf or Fraggle Rock, people will bring up these things. Like, “Oh my god, I loved that,” and I have no idea what it is you’re talking about. It just didn’t exist for me.

And part of it was growing up in Colorado, you know, in a pre-cable universe you only have what the local stations would carry. And sometimes they wouldn’t carry those things. But it is just strange that there’s stuff I don’t know about that everyone else my same age seems to know about.

**Craig:** Well, Fraggle Rock was HBO, right?

**John:** So that’s cable again. So I didn’t have cable TV.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so I think that that’s fair. I mean, if you couldn’t afford HBO – I mean, first of all in New York we didn’t even have cable. I think New York was like the last place to get cable for some weird reason. We had these odd forerunners to cable like scrambled broadcast networks like WHT and weird stuff like that.

But if you didn’t have cable then you did miss out on things like Fraggle Rock. Honestly, I think I’ve only seen one or two episodes of Fraggle Rock. That wasn’t a thing for me.

So H.R. Pufnstuf was slightly before us.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** A little bit older. Or at least the bulk of it was I think. It was like early ‘70s. Super early ‘70s.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I mean, I remember seeing some of it but I wasn’t super into it either.

**John:** Obviously there’s stuff which is just based on geography, but clearly I think a bigger factor for me was that my father was inherently a contrarian and so if there was a thing that everyone else was getting he would do the research and get the other thing which he thought was better.

**Craig:** Ah. Yes.

**John:** So I never had an Atari 2600. Instead we had the Sears Pong game.

**Craig:** Oh dear.

**John:** Which I had to Google to make sure that it actually was a thing and it really was a thing. But Sears came out with their own version of Pong and that’s what we had on our little black and white TV. We never had an Apple II. Instead we were an Atari family, so we had the Atari 800, then the 400, then 600XL.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So I would get whatever videogames would also be made for the Atari computer systems. But instead of Pac-Man we had Jaw Breaker.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** We didn’t have Chop Lifter. We had something that was kind of like it. So we would always have these things that were approximations. Or games that my brother and I would have to type out of the magazine. So they’d have these games written in Basic and you would type them out of the magazine.

**Craig:** Oh yes. I remember those. I remember typing those.

**John:** Yeah. And then you’d save them. Once we had a cassette drive you would save them to a cassette drive and keep them there.

**Craig:** Yes. I remember. God, that brings me back. Typing them in. And that goes to show you how poor those games were in terms of their visual appeal because you could literally type them from a magazine into your computer. And save them on a cassette tape which was always fun to watch.

Yeah, I went down this memory lane about a month ago when we announced that we were doing The Last of Us because someone asked me what are your favorite videogames of all time. And so I had to go all the way back to kind of the beginning and ask like, OK, in the early days – because it’s easy for me to say like now I love, for instance, Fall Out and Bio Shock and GTA. That’s easy, right?

But in the beginning the first game that I remember falling in love with that pushed into my brain something was Adventure.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** On Atari. It was magical.

**John:** So, again, Adventure is a thing I never actually played myself. But I can picture it. I can just picture swinging across that little pit. But I could only play it at friend’s houses.

**Craig:** No, that was Pit Fall.

**John:** Oh, Pit Fall. Then I don’t what Adventure is. Oh, Adventure is the dot where you’re moving through the castle?

**Craig:** Yes. So Adventure is the dot.

**John:** Yeah, I never had it.

**Craig:** So it’s the dot. You have three castles depending on the difficulty level. There’s a white castle, a black castle, a gold castle. There’s a white dragon, a black dragon, and a gold dragon. The dragons looked like ducks. I don’t know how else to put it. They looked like ducks and they made this sound. [Groaning sound] And you had a sword which was a dash and a less than sign. I’m pretty sure. And you were a dot. And there was a bridge. The bridge is why the game was magical.

Never let anyone tell you that Adventure was magical because of the sword or the dragons. It was the bridge. And the reason why is the bridge allowed you to move through things you otherwise couldn’t get to. So there was like a little maze section that was sort of invisible. But as you moved through it would reveal itself. And you had to get from one part of the maze to the other, but there was no way to get there unless you had the bridge. The bridge allowed you to travel through an area you couldn’t. And that bridge was part of how you could start to screw with the game and go places you weren’t supposed to go and get your dot stuck in a corner. Or, get to the first real Easter egg of all time. So much fun.

So, Adventure was the first one that kind of lit me up. And never looked back. But I am concerned that you were not raised in a cult but rather you were manufactured and certain things were just left out. [laughs]

**John:** That’s entirely possible. And so I would say that during the time when I should have been playing some of these early videogames we had the proto Internet very early. My dad was an engineer for AT&T. And we had a terminal in our home where you could dial in and dial in to BBSs, Bulletin Board Systems. And so I was on that really early before most people were on that. And so the time in the afternoon when I would have normally been doing videogame stuff I was doing this.

And so message boards and chat boards and sort of chatting with people online. That’s probably how I got to be kidnapped into the cult. I do remember because unlike modern Internet where you just connect anytime you want, there were only a certain number of lines going into a bulletin board system and so you would get the busy signal a lot. And if I couldn’t get to the main bulletin board I wanted to get to I would try other bulletin boards. And so did join some bulletin board that I recognized along the way was some sort of religious kind of cult bulletin board. But I could always get into it. So I would log in there and check my email messages within that culty bulletin board.

**Craig:** That does sound like cult stuff. Yep. Yep.

**John:** But early videogames I did love from the Atari system we had, Karateka which is Jordan Mechner, and then ultimately we made a new version of Karateka with Jordan 20 or 30 years later. Castle Wolfenstein I loved.

**Craig:** [Speaks in German].

**John:** A sense of story was great there. It was the first videogame I really played where I was a character in a story, which I loved. And they’re making a Wolfenstein now again. They will always make Wolfenstein.

**Craig:** Oh, they’ve made so – there’s been tons of them. And they’re quite elaborate now. But back in the day it was a flat green monitored scroller with levels walking upstairs. It was very similar to Aztec, another early game I played. And you had the key and you had to open the locker and it had a three-code digit. And they would occasionally say Kommen Sie. And you would have to shoot them with your little gun and it was, you know, it was – weirdly I got more enjoyment out of that then some of the new Wolfensteins which are rather elaborate and pretty impressive, like especially the one on the moon.

**John:** Now, Craig, have you gone back and tried to play any nostalgic games and what has been your experience going back to play those nostalgic games?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Like the simulations or the–?

**Craig:** Sure. Like the mime simulator and all that stuff. It’s pleasant. It’s pleasant because it’s nostalgia. But rather than play it now what you can do it is instead of going through all that rigmarole – I don’t actually want to play it. I want to watch it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I was able – so the other game that I said early on was – there were a few. There was Adventure. There was Star Raiders. And there was Aztec. And so I went on YouTube and sure enough somebody had kind of a whole play through of Aztec which is – well when did Raiders come out? ’81? So somewhere in that zone of 1982ish this kind of copycat game called Aztec came out. And it was so much fun to watch it again and remember the enormous amount of time I spent playing it. But I don’t need to play it myself.

**John:** Yeah. Dark Castle, once I finally had a Macintosh.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, of course.

**John:** Was of course important and classic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the Atari game which was like – it was called Star Raiders – was the classic thing where like you warped to the next place and you have to defend your star bases. Loved it. It was all good. And that was actually a game that came on a cartridge.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Which made me feel like I was actually part of a videogame universe at that time when it was cartridge rather than having to load something up off a tape.

**Craig:** Star Raiders was a great game. So Star Raiders, like so many videogames, was inspired by a popular movie. It was clearly designed to look like you were in an [X-Wing] Fighter fighting [Thai fighters]. But it looked good. I mean, it was first person. There was like a reticule. And kind of the whole system was really brilliant. And it was just a great, great game. It’s funny how over time things have sort of flipped around.

For a long time they were trying to make Halo into a movie. And I always thought how do you make Halo into a movie when it’s a rip-off of a movie? I mean, it’s a great game. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s Aliens. It’s space marines fighting Xenomorphs and it’s Aliens. And there are a lot of games like that. Then you’re like, well, if I adapt it into a thing…

So, now that’s starting to change because videogames are getting more and more creative I think. And certainly more and more ambitious. And they’re taking you to places you wouldn’t otherwise go to and they’re also going to different time periods and historical periods. It’s fascinating. So, I mean, look, I think one of the reasons why videogame adaptations have struggled for so long is that people have been trying to adapt things that were already adaptations so there was a familiarity and tropiness to all of it. That could start to change. I hope it does.

**John:** This last week we rewatched Starship Troopers which I had not seen since it came out in theaters. And it was fascinating watching it because I had forgotten how Aliens Xenomorphy kind of it was. And so a lot of things I think as being, oh, that’s a thing that was established by Alien or Aliens, Starship Troopers also did quite a number on as well. It was a better movie than I certainly remembered it being.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. It’s this weird tongue and cheek quasi – it’s hard to tell if it knows it’s being funny. I think it does.

**John:** My take on it was that the filmmakers knew that they were funny and none of the actors knew that they were being funny. And that’s actually probably what makes it work is that the actors are so earnest in this absurd thing that they’re doing.

**Craig:** Yeah. “It’s afraid!” Yeah.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Pretty cool.

**John:** Craig, so thank you for helping me deprogram my cult.

**Craig:** You will never be deprogrammed. You are the function of a program.

**John:** I am the program.

**Craig:** You are the program.

**John:** Thanks Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** See you next time.

 

Links:

* Join us Thursday, May 14th for a live talk with Lawrence Kasdan 4pm PT on Zoom here: [Online Conversation: Revisiting The Empire Strikes Back with Lawrence Kasdan](https://www.wgfoundation.org/events/all/2020/5/5/online-conversation-revisiting-the-empire-strikes-back-with-lawrence-kasdan)
* Submit to the [Three Page Challenge](https://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Jordan Mechner’s: The Making of Prince of Persia, 1985-1993](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005WUE6Q2/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0) and Bookshop.org
* [Maria Bamford: Weakness is the Brand](https://comedydynamics.com/catalog/maria-bamford-weakness-is-the-brand/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/451standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can 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 448 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. One of our favorite recurring segments on the show is How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at stories in the news and discuss how to turn them into features. Today we’re going to take a look at the outcome of that process with a new HBO movie Bad Education which is based on actual events and written by our guest, Mike Makowsky.

And in our bonus segment for Premium members Craig and I will talk about our own first Three Page Challenges and why those early pages are so important.

But first we have some follow up. Craig, do you want to start us off?

Craig: Yeah. We got some feedback here from a different Craig, because there are others.

John: There’s one or two more.

Craig: I’m sort of the premier Craig. A different Craig writes, “Last week Craig,” that’s me, “said that the brain is very plastic. He is incredibly correct.” John, I kind of want to just stop there. I feel like that’s the best bit of follow up we could imagine. But I will continue.

John: Not only is Craig correct, he is incredibly correct.

Craig: Incredibly correct. But, you know what? I’ll continue.

John: Although if you think about incredibly, incredible comes from like it’s not believable.

Craig: Like he’s correct in a way that is not credible.

John: Is not believable. Yeah.

Craig: Correct. The different Craig continues. He says, “I suffered a brain injury when I was three and this prevented me from learning how to read and left me with dyslexia. I got through school with a good memory and a basic handle of English. The ability for a PC, meaning a computer, to read text changed the world for me. I spend most of my working day with headphones on. My team knows that’s just me. As you can imagine movies were my life as books weren’t an option. At 50 I decided to give writing screenplays a go. I wasn’t after a career, but I knew how films worked as I had spent years watching them.

“I have sold two specs in the last year. Small indies. Mostly because of the assistance of you both. If people doubt that they can do it, well, they should only see themselves as a barrier. There has never been a time in human history that has allowed for the leveling of so many playing fields. I am not saying that every hurdle can be removed, but effort can be recognized and rewarded. There are mechanisms that can be used. Thank you both again.”

Well that’s lovely.

John: That’s great. So congratulations to other Craig for all the hard work he’s been doing and the ability to use the tools that are out there to sort of move past some barriers that are being put in your way. So that’s very encouraging.

Craig: Yeah. And it’s also good for people who are later on in years. Sounds like the other Craig is about the same age as you and me. You know, if you want to start something there is no time limit on starting. And if you’re not ready right now that’s OK, too, because there’s more time later.

In general, very encouraging note from Craig. So thank you other Craig.

John: Excellent. So another bit of follow up. Last week we spoke about what screenwriting actually is. And after stipulating that you and I are not film historians we said that early screenplays don’t closely resemble what we now think of as screenplays. Elizabeth on Twitter wrote to steer my attention to the book When Women Wrote Hollywood, Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. And I just started reading it and it is a good overview of sort of those early days of the film industry and early days of screenwriting.

And one of the realities is that a lot of people who were writing the initial screenplays were women. And that history has sort of been erased. Kara Green-Epstein also wrote in. She said, “The idea that screenwriting was just short lists until Casablanca is really a narrative that was created originally to discredit the work that female screenwriters were doing and pushed them out of the business once men realized that filmmaking had legs and that it was a money-making industry.”

Craig: Not sure about that one.

John: I’m not entirely sure about every part of that, but what I do think is that as we were very quickly describing the initial things that became screenwriting I think it is important to acknowledge that there were people who were writing those early screenplays and those early screenwriters were often women. And it’s a thing that you see discussed in sort of the history of Hollywood but I don’t think it sort of makes it out into the broader industry awareness too often. So I think it’s good for us to focus on this for a moment.

Craig: Yeah. I think that’s absolutely true. It’s a great point. I’m glad that Elizabeth brought that up. What I would say to Kara Green-Epstein is that she is right that there are a number of things that film historians do to overlook the contributions of women. And for our lapse in not bringing that up in our last conversation I do feel regret. I don’t think you or I really meant to imply that screenwriting was just short lists until Casablanca. That’s clearly not the case.

Casablanca comes out after World War II. There are god knows how many brilliant movies that are written in the ‘20s, but really the ‘30s. I mean, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. These obviously had full featured screenplays. They weren’t merely lists. So, I don’t want anyone to think that we think that until Casablanca there weren’t fully featured screenplays. There were tons of them.

John: Yeah. So a thing I want to throw in the show notes is a link to the History of the Screenplay Format by Andrew Gay which really talks through the various kind of formats that were built along the way. The reason why Casablanca is often put down as a dividing line is not because there’s something remarkable about the Casablanca script, although I will put a link to the Casablanca script in there was well. It’s that from that point forward screenplays tended to look very, very similar in terms of what they were describing and they were much less about the continuity. They were much less about the like “this shot and then this shot and then this shot.” They were much more of a literary document.

So it wasn’t that Casablanca was the one that made it a literary document. It’s that pretty much all the scripts you see moving forward after that point were really much more written to be read than to be a shot plan for these are the exact shots that are going to be in the film.

Craig: Yeah. And I just – because now I’m all like, I’m sitting here rather sensitive about the things that I’m saying. I don’t want anyone to think that I think that Casablanca came out in the 1950s. It came out after World War II commenced. Now I’m getting worried that we’re going to get more letters.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Those film historians will come after us. All right, let’s get to our feature topic here which is about features themselves. About how we take things that exist in the real world and turn them into features. It’s a thing we talk about a lot on the show. And our guest today has done just that. His new movie, Bad Education, opens very soon on HBO. And he’s here to talk about the process of getting from true story to movie, to a movie that is now streaming everywhere. Mike Makowsky, welcome to Scriptnotes.

Mike Makowsky: Thank you guys so much for having me. This is so cool.

Craig: It is so cool. I agree. I agree. It’s so cool.

John: Mike, are you actually a Scriptnotes listener?

Mike: I am. Yes.

Craig: Spectacular.

John: So you have listened to us talk through the How Would This Be a Movie segment before. For people who haven’t seen the movie yet talk us through the very generalities of what happened in the real world – what is the true life event that inspired this movie?

Mike: So basically in 2004 at a public school district on Long Island in New York called Roslyn there was an $11.2 million embezzlement scandal perpetrated by the superintendent and a couple of other administrators and was thought to be at the time the largest public school embezzlement scandal in history. And it happened at my school while I was a student there.

John: Great. So you had a very personal connection to it because this was literally the school district that you were going through. But if someone didn’t have that sort of special flash of insight what was the media coverage of this event that a person could have latched onto? What were the stories that were out there that a person could have found out about this event?

Mike: Yeah. So the New York Times was covering it week-to-week as the case went into trial. And the different administrators were arrested and ultimately five people went to prison. It was covered pretty perennially for probably two or three years by media outlets across the country.

John: And when did you first have the decision to like, OK, I’m going to try to make a movie out of this? What was your way into this?

Mike: That came much later. In 2004 I was in 7th grade and was far more concerned about my impending Bar Mitzvah. So, it was not the first thing on my mind. But it was very clear to me even as a 13-year-old who couldn’t kind of fully process the ramifications of what was happening as it was happening that this was a really, really big thing. It’s the biggest thing that had ever happened in my town. And after graduating from college and moving out to LA and making a couple of smaller independent films I had always wanted to try to write a true story. I always wanted to write something that took place on Long Island because it’s a very specific kind of region and upbringing.

Craig: Yeah.

Mike: I was thinking about stories that were close to me or were stories that I knew that other people might not necessarily be aware of. And this came back into my consciousness. And I went back to my hometown to do all the research in 2016. And I spoke with a bunch of my old teachers and parents of friends who were on the PTA and went through all of our local news archives and yearbooks and essentially outlined the whole script out of my high school cafeteria. So it was a really, really insane, cool, surreal experience.

Craig: I mean, that’s amazing that first of all you have the benefit of having lived in the milieu of this movie. So you know the people. You know the places. You’re soaking in all of that. So that’s research you don’t even have to do. It’s also a gift to be able to write something inside of a place, sort of be in a place when you’re referring to it in your own little fictional sub-world of it. But one of the things that we talk about all the time when we do these How Would This Be a Movie segments is, OK, so here are the facts. And, yes, it’s the biggest thing that ever happened in Roslyn, Long Island, but in the end it’s a thing about crime. Right? This lady and this guy stole a bunch of money.

So, at some point you as a writer go, OK, but what’s this really about. And where were you in the process when you kind of landed on what it is about? And if you can articulate for folks listening what you think this is really about?

Mike: Sure. So I think that one of the things that was really, really interesting to me going through the research process and specifically talking about kind of like the primary subject who was this superintendent, a man named Frank Tassone, who had built our school up to this point of national prominence. The year that he was arrested we were ranked the number four public school district in the country by the Wall Street Journal. Because he was such a really, really passionate educator who made a lot of inroads in our community and a lot of kids were getting into Ivy League schools and doing really, really well on their SATs because he was placing this real premium on their higher education and learning.

And the parents were really happy. And the health of the public school district, especially on Long Island, is directly tethered to the property values in the community. So there was a lot actually at stake in our town. A real, real direct relationship between the schools and the continued prosperity of our little suburb on Long Island.

John: Let me jump in here for a sec to explain, because international listeners may be puzzled by why there would be that connection. But in US public schools it’s very often the schools are funded by property taxes, taxes paid by land owners in that area. So it’s a very local kind of thing. And so the more the land is worth the more that school district has. And therefore it becomes this weird cycle where the richer school districts also attract wealthier families which brings up property values and becomes a sort of strange cycle.

So, if you’re listening to this in France you’re like that doesn’t make any sense. But this is a really common way things are structured here in the US.

Mike: Yeah. What the film at least tries to interrogate is this dichotomy between our superintendent who seemingly cared so deeply about the community and the town and the students. And really had a one-to-one relationship with so many – I mean, he ran a Dickens book club on weekends for parents. He was the Roslyn Rotary Club Man of the Year. Like the idea that then he could just sort of turn around and victimize that entire community and steal from the students’ pockets was something that struck a lot of my community as very, very upsetting and maddening. It was a huge betrayal that still has really, really deep-seeded tension to it, even today.

So I was just fundamentally curious about how can good intentions pave the way for something I think a lot more insidious. When I wrote the script in 2016 the college admission scandal had not happened yet.

Craig: Right.

Mike: But I think that this is something that we saw at least a year ago play out on a much broader scale. Just what would bring these parents to compromise their integrity so thoroughly for their children’s benefits. I mean, it just seems to perpetuate itself over and over again. You see these stories every couple of years.

Craig: As a culture we clearly struggle with the notion of assigning value to children based on outcome. And the ultimate outcome for so many people in the United States is where does your child go to college. And it was certainly that way with my parents and me. It’s not that way with me and my kids. But it is with a lot of people.

So, this theme keeps burbling forth throughout this kind of pressure. The idea of education as a function rather than something of value in and of itself. But it does seem to me that you took a surprising angle on this that I don’t think I would have thought of and I’m glad you did, because I appreciated it. And it comes out most clearly in the end really when Hugh Jackman, who does a wonderful job playing Tassone, is sitting there with Ray Romano who plays the head of the school board, and what comes out is a question of class. That there is a wealthy community that expects this man and all of the staff and teachers below him to provide a service that increases the value of their children and the value of their homes, but he’s not one of them. He works for them.

And he is I think in an interesting way as a character who seems fueled by some small amount of resentment or a large amount of resentment. He’s starting to feel like he is underappreciated and underpaid and maybe just nothing more than a glorified janitor to them. And I thought that examination, as the child of public school teachers in the New York City Board of Education system, this is not a foreign thing to me. I’ve heard this kind of resentment over and over and over as a kid at the dinner table. And I thought that was a really interesting angle. The notion that we expect this service class to benefit us but they’re not allowed to actually live well. And that’s seemingly what’s behind his crimes more than anything else.

Mike: It was something that I found very much by accident, and I’m so glad that you remarked on it. I think that the title Bad Education is a bit of a misnomer. I received such a great education at my middle school and high school. Teachers who believed in me and were the first people to really foster my interest in writing. I mean, I remember I had a teacher in 7th grade which was the year that Tassone was arrested. Every day during recess I would just go to his classroom because he was an aspiring novelist and we would just write together and give each other notes. And I think he was just humoring me at the time. But it just meant the world to me that a real adult believed in me and encouraged me.

And it was then sort of cool to be able to go back in the research process and reconnect with a lot of these old teachers that I hadn’t seen in years. And see them more as people and not just these functionaries. Some of them were even my first readers on the script. So you have your English teacher in high school, you know, you’re used to him scrawling notes in the margins of your essays, but it’s a whole other thing when he’s doing it in like a Final Draft document. So it was just a really unexpected outcome of this in that I was able to both reestablish those relationships but also kind of see Tassone more through that lens.

These people saw me through the most formative years of my life and years where I was kind of the worst. And they saw me through it. And it was nice to sort of just be able to go back and in some small way be able to thank them.

Craig: Well, and I think you did. I mean, there’s that moment again near the end where Tassone is talking to an unreasonably complaining mom who is trying to get her child into an accelerated program when it is quite clear that the child does not belong in the accelerated program because the child cannot even read the word accelerated. And what he says in his kind of final breakdown moment is essentially, “You all just use us, get what you want, and then you’re gone. We give you things. We care about things. You expect us to care about all of your kids individually, and we do, and then you leave when you’re done with us. You just toss us aside like a husk and you’re gone forever. And you never come back.”

And, again, it’s that feeling of class, you know.

Mike: These teachers not only remembered like surprising small details about me, but remembered the names and the seating charts of every student that they had. It was something that I felt like it would be irresponsible not to put in the script at least in some form. And it was a way for me to find some sort of window of empathy with Tassone himself, the superintendent, who really, really did care I believe ultimately about the students despite what he did and didn’t do.

John: So Mike let’s get back to the How Would This Be a Movie. So you have your setting, which you know the setting, you grew up in that setting. You have the basic plot. You know that it’s ultimately going to lead to his being found out and being arrested and the consequences of that. How early on in the process and how did come upon the decisions about which characters to feature, which real life people are making it into your story, and which characters you may need to create or do composites? What was the process in terms of figuring out which characters would be in the story and which ones would have storytelling power?

Tassone is a real person. Pam Gluckin is a real person. Is the Ray Romano character an actual person or is that a composite?

Mike: Mostly a composite. I mean, Ray Romano plays the head of the school board. And the school board are basically just parents in the community that have taken a leadership role within the management of the school as well. And ultimately what had happened in real life and in the film was that the school board caught wind of the embezzlement scandal about a year and a half before it was reported and they agreed to sweep it under the rug rather than to report it to the authorities or to the community, partially because they were compromised by not wanting to invite any sort of blight or scandal on the school district that they were directly benefiting from, that their children were benefiting from.

John: Now in the film you establish stakes that there’s going to be an upcoming vote and they don’t want to jeopardize things before the vote. Is that an invention of your story or is that a thing that would have happened in that same timeline?

Mike: It would have happened. Yes, it did. What we do in the film itself is we consolidated to kind of fit one school year just for, you know, simplicity sake. And I don’t think that it compromises the chronology to a [unintelligible]. Every year, every May, the school budget vote is the thing that administrators prepare for and steal the community for. And at the time of the scandal because the school district was doing so well and the students were doing so well the tax payers, the parents in our community, were all too happy to basically give Tassone and his cohorts whatever they asked for every year. So we had one of the highest operating budgets in the country.

We had, in 2004 I believe an $82 or $83 million a year operating budget.

Craig: Wow.

Mike: That was being inflated year by year with very, very little oversight.

Craig: As you’re writing you need to assume I think who a hero is. Who is the protagonist of this movie?

Mike: I like characters that exist in moral gray areas. And I think that there are, you know, some people that are going to watch the movie and root for characters like Tassone and Pam Gluckin who is Allison Janney’s character, two of the let’s call them conspirators in the embezzlement scheme, if only partly because it’s fun and you almost identify I think as a viewer with characters who are trying desperately to bail water out of a leaking boat. One of my big comps was Shattered Glass, which I think that Billy Ray does that so well with Hayden Christensen’s character in that film.

Craig: I mean, just as a side note, the end of your movie feels like a direct homage to Shattered Glass.

Mike: Thank you for calling it an homage and not an outright steal. I appreciate that.

Craig: We’re nothing if not kind.

Mike: But there is also a clear-cut protagonist and audience surrogate in the student reporter character. Her name is Rachel in the script. And in real life another really, really crazy facet of the story is that our high school newspaper was the first to break it. It was then picked up by Newsday and the New York Times but only because the newspaper reporter’s son was a Roslyn student who brought home his copy of the school paper and his dad read it and then reported on it the next day.

With Rachel we really tried to unpack the entire breadth of the crime through her eyes and kind of see each of the different cards fall really through her and kind of have her carry us through the different machinations in the story as best as possible.

John: All right. So you have your central characters here. You have Frank Tassone is arguably a protagonist. He’s the character who we actually see sort of change the most over the course of the story because he’s trying to bail water of this sinking ship. But an interesting thing that you decided to do is to conceal information from us as an audience about this character. And so we’re discovering over the course of the story things that he’s doing and lies that he’s been telling that go beyond the surface scandal of the embezzlement.

Talk about your decision process for that and sort of I suspect in your different drafts you probably made some different choices about when to reveal certain things about this central character.

Mike: Yeah, for sure. Even in the first draft I think I definitely tipped my hand a lot quicker to this guy might not be what he seems and that he is somehow complicit. And it was something to the credit of my director, Cory, that I think we needed to kind of find going through the drafts and how to disseminate information in a way that constantly felt surprising, but also organic. Ultimately the sense of structure that we landed on very much mirrored really the process by which our community in 2004 found out information about both Tassone and the scandal at large through media reportage.

It seemed like almost every week there was some new tidbit or some new salacious detail either about the extent of the grift itself or frankly about Tassone’s own personal life which got kind of really unfortunately ensnared in the reportage in a way that I don’t think was wholly positive or beneficial to anyone.

John: I want to play a clip here. So this is a clip that happens a little past the midpoint of the film. Something that has already been in the trailer so it’s not a huge spoiler here. But this is a group of the school board and Tassone coming in to talk with the Allison Janney character. They decide to label what she’s going through is that she’s a sociopath. And I thought it was such a fascinating term to apply to her. So, let’s take a listen to this clip.

[Clip plays]

Hugh Jackman: You stole from the schools and from the taxpayers, from the kids we’re supposed to serve. I think this kind of behavior goes beyond the bounds of immoral. It’s cruel. It’s heinous. It’s sociopathic even.

Allison Janney: Sociopathic? What?

Hugh: Shameless self-interest. The unstable personality. The parade of rotten marriages.

Allison: Frank—

Hugh: You need help, Pam. Real medical help. You’re a sick woman.

Female Voice: We’re concerned about you, Pam.

[Clip ends]

John: So, Mike, what I love about this scene is that it’s really funny but it also gets to again that thematic question you’re trying to wrestle with. What is their actual motivation? And these characters are performing the script, you can kind of see them as sociopaths. You can read them as they actually have no sort of moral underpinning underneath this. They are just doing whatever they can do to make that money.

Where do you as the writer of the story come down on Tassone being a sociopath, on Pam being a sociopath? What’s your judgment on these characters?

Mike: I don’t think that they’re sociopaths at all. And obviously I think that was what happened in real life, too. It was easy enough to just sort of chalk it up to “oh these people are just mentally disturbed.” I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that these kinds of situations are very complicated. I think as we also saw in the college admissions scandal, right? I don’t think that these are just a matter of good versus evil. I think that that really doesn’t do the complexity of it justice.

There’s another scene in the film, Tassone sort of expounds to Ray Romano’s character on how all of this really began. And I think it was something that I really identified with. He basically says that it started – he went out to a pizza place and ordered a slice of pizza and a coke and he used the wrong expense card by mistake. He used the district credit card instead of his personal card. And he said to himself, OK, Monday morning I’m going to go back into the office, I’m going to reconcile everything. I feel so guilty about it. And then Monday comes and goes, nobody calls him on it, and then on Tuesday he buys a $0.60 bagel. And then before you know it you’re at this $11.2 million price tag in the blink of an eye.

It’s like this frog in boiling water kind of dynamic.

Craig: But he’s saying this to a guy that he also points out lives in this beautiful house. He’s saying in so many words like you all look at this school as a machine to get your kids into the right college so they can be rich. It’s all about being rich. And so why am I not allowed to be rich when I’m doing the best job making everyone rich? It’s just that resentment underneath it. I mean, that’s what I found fascinating about the character and the way you portrayed him was that it wasn’t like he mistakenly became, you know, there was a choice he made on that Monday to not pay back the slice of pizza. And then to go further and further and further.

And obviously his cohort, Pam Gluckin, felt precisely the same. It’s amazing to me that he – I mean, look, it’s always amazing to me that these people think they can get away with stuff. The level of self-delusion there is remarkable. It was the same thing in Shattered Glass. They always remind me of Wile E. Coyote after he runs off the edge of a cliff. For a moment there if you just keep running you’ll be fine. But the moment you stop and look down, that’s it.

Mike: Yeah.

John: Now, so generally in this segment we talk about How Would This Be a Movie and we’re thinking about just the creative decisions. But in this case it’s like how do we get from you’ve written this script to this becoming a movie. So talk us through, you’ve written this script, what are the steps that happen that got us to this movie debuting on HBO?

Mike: So I wrote the script on spec sort of without a net. I thought if I had to ask someone for permission that the person just wouldn’t give me permission, or they would be like, you know, if I brought it up to my agent or manager they’d be like, “Well, it feels like kind of a tiny story.” And fortunately I went ahead and I wrote the story. Sent it first to a producer that I had previously partnered with on one of my independent films, a guy named Fred Berger who is great. And he really believed in it. And together we just sort of started going out and submitting it around.

And I was very fortunate in that the script was received well initially and was on the Black List that year.

John: So this is Black List 20–?

Mike: 2016. Yeah.

John: 2016, great.

Mike: But really what ended up making the difference was finding Cory Finley, our director. The script has a very, very specific tone that I think ultimately on the screen is very execution dependent. So pairing it with a director who could really navigate that darkly comedic tone was really, really important. And in 2017, soon after I wrote the script, you know, Cory’s film Thoroughbreds premiered at Sundance and just had a very, very unique view of the world and depiction of its characters and questionable morality. It felt like a real kind of one-to-one match for him to come onboard.

And suddenly I think people saw it a lot more clearly. And this is crazy, this never happens, but within like a month or two Hugh Jackman had come aboard and we were suddenly in the throes of preproduction.

Craig: That worked nicely.

John: That’s great. And so at this point the film is kind of a classic indie. So there’s money being raised from outside. You have a star, you have a director, you have a script. You’re bringing in Allison Janney. You’re bringing in this cast and you’re making this movie. But you don’t have a place that’s going to – you don’t have a buyer yet. So this is the kind of thing that is made for price and then you’re going to go to a festival and sell it. That’s the plan at this point?

Mike: That was the plan. And, yeah, so we premiered the film at Toronto last year in 2019 but nobody really knew if there was going to be a market. And we were, of course, incredibly nervous. I mean, I was just crawling out of my skin. I also just wanted people to like the movie. And I also felt this tremendous debt to my hometown where I wanted to make sure that I got everything right because if I didn’t and I made this sort of turd then my town would be like, oh, and then he made this bad movie about us.

Ultimately, I mean, HBO has been this incredible partner. And it wasn’t necessarily the way that I thought that all of this was going to go down. But ultimately what you really want is a distributor that cares very, very deeply about your film, that’s passionate about it, and that’s willing to get as many eyeballs on it as possible.

And we found just really like the ideal partner in them. There is a version of the movie that gets perceived as this very small, tiny, secular story about bureaucratic nonsense on Long Island. And frankly, I mean, who knows if people go out to see movies in the movie theater unless they have that sort of four-quadrant appeal anymore. There’s been a lot of skepticism about it. And there certainly was. I think even within the market in Toronto. HBO believed from the outset that this had a bigger appeal. And I’m so, so thankful for them.

John: That’s great. So like an I, Tonya which sold at Toronto this could have been a thing that went that route and it’s billboards and award season campaign and it’s all that. Going to HBO you miss all that, but also you get to miss all that, which is a lovely thing, too. Craig can talk you through the award season stuff for HBO. He’s been through all of that. But it is a different scale of crazy than trying to get Oscar nominations for your two lead actors there would certainly be in the conversation for those things and they will still be in the conversation for Emmys down the road.

So, Mike, what are you working on right now? What’s your next project?

Mike: I am moving definitely more and more into TV, kind of like this darkly comic true stories that can benefit from eight episodes of runway to really develop the subjects and paint a very sort of broad picture. So I’m writing – I’m adapting this series of Texas Monthly articles from the 1970s for Hulu right now. This crazy, crazy murder trial in Texas lore that is both like disturbing and disturbingly funny. It very much kind of I think builds on the tone of something like Bad Education. And I’m really, really excited about it.

Craig: Great.

John: Cool. Do you want to stick around with us while we answer some listener questions, because you may have some good answers yourself?

Mike: Sure. Yes.

John: Craig do you want to start us off with Stacy?

Craig: Yeah, sure. Stacy writes, “I recently began work on adapting a book I loved into a film. I didn’t have the rights nor ever expected someone to try and make my script. But I loved the book and wanted to try my hand at adapting. However, very soon after starting I found out that not only have the rights already been purchased but a very well-known writer-director is attached to make it. While this did validate my initial inclination to adapt this slightly plotless, absurdist book into a movie, I’m now wondering whether it makes sense for me to try and write it in the first place. Should I continue working at it or move on to another project?”

John?

John: My advice to Stacy is to move on. So, yeah.

Craig: This is pretty much an easy one, right? A layup to begin with.

John: Here’s what I’ll say though, Stacy. Yes, it should validate your feeling that there is something to be made there. Think back to what is it about that project that would appeal to you, about that book that appealed to you? What is it you have in your own life, in your own brain, that can sort of scratch that same itch? Get to work writing that thing because that will be a thing that you can take out on the town and sell and show as your own work. This thing that you’re doing as a labor of love, it’s going to have a hard time showing up as your work just because it’s based on that book and people know the other version of it. So stop and work on something else.

Mike, anything more to add to Stacy?

Mike; I think you said it beautifully. I think you really, really try to hone in and diagnose just what appealed about it to you in the first place and what feels really, really personal to you. And if you can distill that, build on that foundation but build something wholly original from it, or find a story that has some similarities but is also different enough you should do that. Of course.

John: Yeah. All right, Demi asks, “The thing I struggle with most in writing is theme. Specifically when am I being too explicit with it? Like is it ever OK for a character to directly state/discuss the theme in dialogue, or must it be demonstrated through what happens? If you can put it in dialogue how explicitly can you address it? Do you have any examples or suggestions?”

That feels right to our conversation here because in your film we are talking about these themes of class and who gets to do what. And so Mike what’s your first instinct for Demi here? Do you think stating the theme is OK?

Mike: Yeah. I do. As long as you’re not putting too much of a hat on it and kind of obliquely reference something without making it feel blunt, I guess, if that makes sense.

Craig: I think it depends a little bit on the genre, the kind of movie you’re doing. I mean, The Matrix didn’t need to beat around the bush about its theme. Believe in yourself and you can do anything. So, yeah, some movies you just want to hear it be said. Batman, the Nolan Batman movies were never shy about stating their themes completely. And those were morally complicated films, but still he was just like here it is. This is what it’s about.

And that’s fine. In other movies I think where maybe reality is not pushed in any way, shape, or form you do have to pull back a little bit on that because in movies where people have superpowers or the world is slightly technicolor it’s OK for people to say things like that. No one really talks like that in regular life. So if you’re movie is parroting regular life you probably want to ease off on the theme announcements.

John: I worry that we are mislearning a lesson about not speaking your subtext and trying to bring that over to not speaking the theme, because I think it’s probably a good instinct to actually try to have the character say the theme at some point. I’d say use it and then you can always pull it back, you can always move away from it if it feels like oh my god that’s a giant flashing light there.

Craig is right. Comic book movies, with great power comes great responsibility. They can just announce it there. And you can’t do that in most other movies. But if a character has a moment of discovery and realizes something and articulates that discovery that they’re having. That feels genuine. That feels earned. If they’re whispering it rather than shouting it that feels like the kind of thing that you want to see in movies.

And we’re talking about literary themes, but think about sort of musical themes. Like sometimes you are just actually literally playing the theme music of the film that we’re going to hear at these crucial moments. So think of your theme that way. It is the emotional music that’s underlying all these stuff and sometimes it needs to be in the foreground so don’t be afraid to foreground it at times.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, honestly I pretty said what the theme was of Chernobyl in the first line of dialogue. I wasn’t shy about it. I mean, sometimes it’s just about where it happens. You know, if you say your theme in a big climactic moment where someone turns to the camera and says, “Ahhh,” then you go oh my god it’s the theme moment. But sometimes you can just sort of like slide it on in there and people will kind of get it as they go.

John: Yep.

Craig: All right. We’ve got one more question here.

John: Go for it.

Craig: From Matthew. He writes, “I have a pending option agreement from a two-time Academy-Award winning actress-producer for a screenplay I wrote. And she wants to turn it into a TV series.” Yes please. “This will be my first option ever. Should I have her draw up the option agreement between me as an individual or under my S-corp?”

John: I love the easy questions. It’s your S-corp.

Mike: Oh yeah.

Craig: Yeah. Always. Always.

John: It’s your S-Corp. So we’ll explain very quickly for folks, and I think we’ve probably talked about loan-out corporations.

Craig: We have, yeah.

John: In previous episodes. But either S-corps or C-corps are common in this industry. They’re a way of sort of insulating yourself as the artist so that the studios or other people can hire your company rather than hiring you directly. It makes sense for tax reasons and also for liability reasons. This is an example where you would use that S-corp so that she would be hiring your loan-out corporation rather than hiring you directly. That’s totally appropriate.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t see why you wouldn’t. My guess is that you would realize that when you looked at the option agreement and noticed that she was also using her S-corp. So that’s probably a good sign.

John: Yes. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Craig, what is your One Cool Thing this week?

Craig: Well, you know, I have been struggling John at home with this printer. I’m not going to say which large corporation made it – it’s Hewlett-Packard. What I will say is this laser printer, it was like living with a very unstable girlfriend. There were times where she loved me and there were times where she wouldn’t pay any attention to me at all. There were times where she told me she would do something but didn’t. You’d hit print and just, well, who knows. You wouldn’t know.

And I just gave up. I was so tired of it. So I was looking for a new printer and I came across this Epson brand called EcoTank and honestly they had me at EcoTank. The brilliance of this thing is it doesn’t use the freaking toner cartridges. Oh, what a joy. You just – they give you ink like it’s a bottle of ink. And you just go glug-glug-glug into the little ink holder and that’s it. That alone is so – because the cost of those toner cartridges, it’s like they’re made of plutonium or something. And they’re terribly wasteful to the environment. And lo and behold I said, hey Epson, print. And it went, OK, no problem man. Here you go. That’s what I’m here for.

So, so far so good. Very pleased with the Epson EcoTank ET-4760.

John: All right. We’ll flag that for follow up two years from now and see if you still like that printer. Like, oh, curse this printer.

Craig: Turns out she was also an unstable girlfriend. Argh!

John: Oh, printers. My One Cool Thing is a program #StitchUsBackTogether. It is being run by my friend Jamarah Hayner. What Jamarah has done, she’s an organizer of people and things, she recognized that there is a shortage of gowns for hospitals. So basically – especially in the pandemic when you have healthcare workers interacting with patients they should in theory be changing out their gown between each of those visits so that they’re not spreading stuff around. There’s a shortage of gowns in Los Angeles and in New York and other places across the country.

She’s focusing right now on Los Angeles and she’s basically worked with a bunch of vendors. If you are a person who sews and has a sewing machine and would like to help make these gowns, basically people will show up at your house with the fabric. The patterns are already set. You sew them and other people come and pick up these gowns you’ve sewn and take them off to hospitals who need them.

So, it’s a thing that I’m doing. I’ve been sewing a bunch of masks here at the house for the past couple weeks. I’m going to try my hands sewing these gowns. I’m not great at sewing but I’m OK at sewing.

Craig: You know what? I bet you are great at it.

John: All right, I’m being a little modest. I’m pretty good at sewing.

Craig: I bet. I mean, can you imagine what my gowns would look like?

John: They would not be good. Craig has seen me duct tape a picket sign and he knows I have some pretty good craft skills there.

Craig: It was just these beautiful parallel/diagonal lines. Like he was making a candy cane. And then I was over here, you know, with just tape on a thing. I’ve always struggled with that. If I tried to sew a gown it would have either only one hole or six holes.

John: It would be really good for the three-armed doctors there.

Craig: Correct. Side note, seamster is a word.

John: Yeah. So as I was trying to set this up I was looking whether seamster was the matching word for seamstress and apparently it is.

Craig: It is.

John: So if you are a person who does sew, obviously if you work in this industry in the costume department you may have the ability to do this and actually have a sewing machine that’s sitting idle. There will be a link in the show notes. The hashtag is #StitchUsBackTogether. You may also just have parents or other people in your life are looking for a thing to do that can help. This is a thing that people can do that can help.

So right now in Los Angeles. They’re going to try to expand to New York if they have the capability.

Mike, do you have a One Cool Thing?

Mike: I do. When I wrote Bad Education I optioned the rights to a New York Magazine article that I felt at the time was the most sort of comprehensive and literary portrayal of the scandal. And it was written by a guy named Robert Kolker who released a book about two weeks ago called Hidden Valley Road that I’m in the middle of reading right now. And it is really, really amazing. So amazing in fact that it is now Oprah’s Book Club pick for the month.

John: Oh wow.

Mike: And I can’t recommend it more highly. It’s a nonfiction book about a family of 12 children in Colorado in the 1960s. Six of the 12 were diagnosed schizophrenics. Apparently I guess contributed in large part to how we understand from a medical perspective schizophrenia and mental illness today. I guess that their genes were mapped and studied.

But the book itself is harrowing. It’s probably not the most uplifting content to be recommending in the middle of a global pandemic, but it is just a very, very beautifully written, well researched, and human book. It’s like very, very emotional and cathartic in a way that I hadn’t necessarily expected when I first picked it up. He’s just a brilliant, brilliant writer. The book is awesome.

John: Cool. Excellent. That is our show for this week. So, if you’re a Premium member stick around after the credits because Craig and will be talking about our own three pages. But otherwise that’s the show.

It is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by James Llonch. 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 like the ones we answered on the show today. But for short questions on Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Mike, are you on Twitter?

Mike: I am. I’m @mike_makowsky I believe.

John: Fantastic. So you can tweet at him to tell him how much you enjoyed Bad Education which debuts I think the week that this episode drops, so check that out on HBO.

You can find the show notes for the episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and some bonus segments as well.

Mike, thank you so much for coming on the show and congratulations on your movie.

Craig: Thanks Mike.

Mike: Thank you guys so much for having me. This is so cool.

Craig: You got it.

[Bonus segment]

John: All right. So, we got a question in that I thought might be a good Premium topic. Aaron writes, “From watching your latest Scriptnotes Episode 447, the live Three Page Challenge, a question occurred to me that might also be of interest to your listeners. What’s your personal favorite first three pages of any screenplay you’ve written or worked on, produced or not?” Which was interesting for me to think about.

So I have a couple of choices, but I also want to spend some time thinking about why we talk about the three pages, the first three pages being so important, and why they’re important to me as a writer.

So, first three pages of stuff I’ve written that has been really meaningful to me. Big Fish, the opening of Big Fish was probably of anything I’ve written in my entire career was the most classically sort of like rip the page out of the typewriter, crumple it into a ball, and start over. It was just very hard to set up all the things I needed to set up in Big Fish about sort of that they’re moving between a fantasy world, a real world, who the characters are, who had voiceover power. All the stuff that had to happen. Once I got that working in those first three pages in really setting up the movie the whole movie became possible. So that was a case where those first three pages were not just to sort of get the audience on board, but they were kind of the key to unlocking here is how I’m going to actually make this movie work.

So, as I looked back on things I’ve written the Big Fish first three pages are probably the most important ones of my career. Craig, do you have anything in your work that you feel like those first three pages are so crucial? I mean, Chernobyl feels like it’s partly – we just talked about in this episode about how sort of speaking the theme of Chernobyl at the start was so important for you there.

Craig: Yeah. Although I’m struggling a little bit Aaron because here’s the funny thing, every first three pages of every script I write is something that I torture myself over repeatedly because I want to get them right. And there are so many things that can go wrong. And there’s also so many opportunities to do good work in those three pages, to establish tone and place and character. To establish a feeling, a kind of emotional truth, and to also create the beginning point of something that will ultimately be revealed to be a circle. It’s degree zero of a 360 degree circle, so therefore it’s degree zero. And it is degree 360.

And so all of them I feel this way about. I can’t look at any particular script and say, oh, this is my favorite first three pages. They’re all my least favorite. I feel like they are all – I failed every time to be perfect in those first three pages, but I do try. I try my best. And I think as time goes on I get a little bit better and a little bit better. And I suppose when I get to that place where I’m no longer getting a little bit better than I realize that the plateau has occurred, followed by the inevitable decline. But, if you’re listening to this and thinking, oh, this may explain why he gets so fussy sometimes when we are reading these three pages, because I beat myself up so furiously over the first three pages. So when we get somebody’s first three pages and there are typos or things that just don’t make much sense or the worst sin of all – wasteful writing.

It’s like being a starving person and looking at somebody throwing food out. I don’t know how else to describe it. The real estate is so precious. I’ve said it so many times. So, mostly my sense memory of writing the first three pages of screenplays is pain and self-recrimination.

John: So, a project I’ve been writing more recently, I’m looking through my Dropbox at more recent stuff, The Shadows which is this movie that has a blind central protagonist, which at some point I hope to go off and direct, but the first three pages of that I think about in two different ways. Because it’s a thriller that has scripted opening title moments that do not involve the central character. So, it basically just sets up the universe and the world. And so the first two pages are really just getting us through those opening titles and sort of setting up the universe a bit. And I think that it’s really good writing, but I don’t consider that really the start of the movie.

Obviously you’re reading those pages to get a sense of the feel, but it’s really I’m so happy with the first three pages in the actual story part of it because I think I do a nice job establishing who this character is and sort of why she is a uniquely interesting character to be following through this story.

So, those are pages that I spent a lot of time on trying to figure out the right way into it. That said, I could completely imagine six months from now recognizing the movie really wants to start a different way and those three pages would not be part of it at all. So those pages were key to me to be able to understand how to write the movie, but they don’t necessarily need to stay the first three pages of the movie that we’re shooting.

Craig: Yeah. There is a certain amount of flexibility that you always have to have. But in movies those first three pages, they’re such a load-bearing wall. That if you are going to change them you almost assuredly are going to have to change other things.

If you can just replace the first three pages without doing any other work like the way a magician pulls the tablecloth away and leaves all the stuff on it, then something is wrong. You have not essentially built this opening in an integral way. Ideally you can’t really pull that Jenga piece it. It is crucial to everything. So when I do look back at those first three pages and make changes I know that the second I’m done with that work I need to go ahead in the script and find the things that this has affected and impacted.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know, to kind of make sure that, again, it feels like a circle and not just like a line.

John: That’s fair. And I think back to sort of the idea of scripting opening titles versus just the movie starting. I remember Laura Ziskin, remarkable producer, she made the movie Hero with Dustin Hoffman. And when she showed it to us, we’d read the script and then she showed us the movie, and the script was better than the movie. It just was. And one of the things she pointed out was that they had built this opening title sequence that was not part of the actual script where they do all the opening titles and Dustin Hoffman’s name and basically all the opening credits. And then that first scene afterwards is really boring and slow because it was really intended to have those titles over it. It was intended to be sort of that placeholder thing that sort of got you introduced to the world. And the opening title sequence had really stepped over it in ways that you couldn’t have anticipated.

So even though the script document probably had a great first three pages, as a film they stuck something in front of it that actually hurt those first three pages.

Craig: Well that’s a great point. And this is why I find that television openings are so frequently more interesting and compelling than movie openings. Meaning the opening scenes. Because no one can mess with it. I mean, the writer pours an enormous amount of intention, hopefully, into what that opening scene means and is. And then someone comes along and goes [barfing noise] and they don’t always know that they’re stepping on something important but they do. They just trod on the grass and they step on the flowers and suddenly something is wrong. Because they think, oh my god, we got to open with something exciting and flashy, or whatever it is that they think. It doesn’t matter.

Whereas when you look at the beginnings of – I mean, look at the way Vince Gilligan routinely does his openings. They are little short film masterclasses. And they are above all else so carefully crafted and intentional. And that’s something that’s very rewarding about television that you know that your intention and the craft that you put into this. I mean, this is why with features it’s so – like I say, I beat myself up, I grind myself to a nub to try and make sure that the opening is just gorgeous and perfect and tight and then, you know, who knows. Someone goes, meh, or maybe not. Maybe we’ll do this instead. So anyway I work in TV now.

John: That is the clear explanation. There’s a project I’m working on which I may be able to talk about soon and it would be for TV. And I am very excited honestly about the first three pages and the first three minutes, anticipating, you know, what that is going to feel like and sort of the rocket sled of being able to launch people into the world.

So I do get very excited about those and I recognize from – I’m about to pitch it now, you really are pitching those initial first three pages to sort of get people hooked into the idea and excited to see where the story is going to take them. So, when I see – like you when I see the first three pages people are sending through and they don’t seem to have a clear intention, they just weren’t put together with care and real passion, I can feel it and it makes me less enthusiastic to read the stuff that’s going to happen afterwards.

Craig: No question. No question. And you’re right. If you have conceived of your first three pages correctly then they are exactly mimicking the feeling you want to impart when you’re pitching the beginning of something to somebody. You’re setting a stage. You’re creating a mood. You’re baiting a hook. All of those wonderful things to make people lean forward and you’re also doing a lot of hidden work that they don’t even see. Because we are magicians. So while we’re wowing them with what’s going on in our left hand, our right hand is casually in our pocket, setting something else up. So that’s the fun part of it. But it does require care and effort. So, as you do consider, you at home, sending in your first three pages, listen to what we’re saying here because if you’re not working as hard at them as we are, well, you know, it’s not going to go well.

John: In the cases where we have just really gone crazy over those first three pages it’s because they did show such real attention to what they were trying to do and made us so excited to keep reading that movie. So that’s what you’re always looking for.

Craig: Correct.

John: Craig, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Bad Education on HBO April 25th, 2020
• Elizabeth on Twitter wrote to steer my attention to the book When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry
• Casablance script
• History of the Screenplay Format by Andrew Gay
• Bad Education True Story
• #StitchUsBackTogether organized by Jamarah Hayner
• Epson EcoTank ET-4760
• Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
• Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium here.
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• Mike Makowsky on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by James Llonch (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.