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The original post for this episode can be found [here.](https://johnaugust.com/2020/three-page-zoom)

**Craig Mazin:** Hi folks. This episode does contain some strong language so put in those ear buds, put on those headphones. Keep those children safe.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 447 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge where we take a look at the first three pages of listener’s scripts and look at what’s working and what could be improved. And because we are live on Zoom we will be talking to those writers in person. To help us out we have a very special guest. Dana Fox is a screenwriter and TV writer-producer whose credits include – Dana, I did not preapprove these with you, so let’s see.

**Dana Fox:** You know what? Let’s not.

**John:** Her credits include Ben and Kate, Couples Retreat, What Happens in Vegas, and the brand new show on Apple TV+, Home Before Dark, which was co-created with another Scriptnotes producer, Dara Resnik. Dana Fox, welcome to the show.

**Dana:** Hi! I’m so happy to be here, mostly because I miss your faces.

**Craig:** Ooh. We were talking about your beautiful shade of lipstick and the fact that you put lipstick on because you read that people need to have lipstick on or else you can’t see your mouth moving on Zoom.

**Dana:** The fact that I somehow fell for this ad – I’m sure it was an ad.

**Craig:** It was an ad. It was the lipstick industry that put that rumor out. No question. Because otherwise if you’re not wearing lipstick it’s just like where is their voice coming from. Their ear?

**Dana:** I see their face moving, but what?

**John:** Yeah. The beauty industry must really be suffering in this time of staying in home, because people are not using as much makeup as they would otherwise be using.

**Dana:** You would think that. But I have so much more time. It used to be that I did not wear makeup at all because I had no time and now I’m just in my house, opening drawers, trying things on. I’m not buying new things, so yes you’re right. The beauty industry is not benefiting from it. Oh boy, guys.

**John:** Oh boy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Boy.

**John:** Dana, you were the first person we’ve talked to who has actually had to launch a show in the middle of a stay at home pandemic.

**Dana:** Super fun.

**John:** So talk to us about your show Home Before Dark. I was recalling this morning that I had a long conversation with you about this almost two years ago. It was summer. I was in New York. I was unpacking a bag and we had like a 45-minute conversation about the difficult deal-making you were going through on your show. So, it’s now finally here, but it’s been a very long road.

**Dana:** It’s been like 2.5 years or so, or three years. I can’t remember when I first started talking to Joy Gorman about it. She’s our amazing producer. But it was a very long time ago. Feels like 500 years at this point.

The show is a labor of love by a lot of awesome people, Joy Gorman, Dara Resnik as you said, John Chu, amazing. We wanted to try to do something that we had never seen before which is like a very sophisticated show that felt like a four-quadrant movie but that starred a young girl that took her really seriously, that gave her a stage as big as any Amblin movie would have given a young male character. And that was something that we had never seen before.

And it sounds like sort of obvious, but along the way it was very, very hard to convince people that it was going to work. Because everybody was like, “But who is it for?” And we just didn’t say–

**Craig:** What is that? Who is it for…?

**Dana:** We just kept saying it’s for everybody.

**Craig:** It’s for human beings. I don’t understand.

**Dana:** It’s for humans. Yeah. “But why will men care?” And I’m like, well, because it’s good. We’re hoping.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also do you need to have 50-year-old guys watching this show for it to be successful? I don’t understand.

**Dana:** I mean, you know that they’re the only ones whose attention I truly crave. [laughs] Dad?

**Craig:** Daddy.

**Dana:** Daddy, tell me I did it.

**Craig:** Daddy, I’m here. [Unintelligible] I’m here.

**John:** Now Dana when you were pitching the show did you say Amblin a lot because having watched the show like Amblin is a really good vibe for it. Because even though it’s present day it does feel like early Spielberg. It just has that kind of spirit. Was that a word you said a lot in pitching it?

**Dana:** It was. We said it a lot in pitching it. John Chu and I put together this crazy, incredibly visual presentation that had so much information in it and a lot of specific visual imagery because we wanted it to feel like an Amblin movie but we wanted it to be through the lens of today and who we are today so that it felt fresh, while at the same time feeling kind of timeless. I’m sort of obsessed in movies or TV not having people dressed or like have weird hair or things that are going to make things feel very dated. So, you know, on our show you’re like when is this? And, you know, that’s purposeful. It’s partly because I just want – god-willing we’re lucky enough to have people still like this show and want to watch it in five years you don’t want them to go, oh, that feels old. I mean, like for example I was just rewatching The West Wing and it’s like it could be today. Everybody is just wearing suits. It kind of looks like today.

And so it feels like it’s relevant still. So that was one of the things we really cared about. And I just wanted to get that feeling back honestly. I think TV is very much about a feeling. It’s what you want to feel. I don’t choose things based on who is in them. I don’t choose things to watch the way that I think executives think people choose things to watch. I just go what do I want to feel tonight and what is going to make me feel that?

**Craig:** Does anyone do anything the way that executives think they’re going to do it? I mean, does anyone behave that way?

**Dana:** It would be funny to get a camera in an executive’s house.

**Craig:** Right. Like they get home and they pull their human suit off and underneath is this “we are studying humanity.”

**Dana:** And they put three kinds of cereal in front of their children and investigate how their kids choose which cereal.

**John:** They turn the little knob. How much are you enjoying this cereal? Now, Dana, before the show even launched you got an order for a second season. So you were writing scripts, you were starting to shoot things, and then you all had to stop production because of everything that’s going on right now. So how far were you into your second season when you had to pull the plug?

**Dana:** We were so lucky to get the second season before anyone had even laid eyes on the show. So it’s so exciting that people actually like the show. I was like phew. And I’m sure Apple was feeling that was well. They were amazing to even give it to us. But we had written about eight of our episodes. We had a ninth one that I was sort of working on and hadn’t handed in yet. And we had just finished shooting our third episode. We were two days into our second episode. And I remember when it became very clear what was going to happen and we were sort of trying to figure out the exact moment. I didn’t really know that far in advance because we were on the pandemic’s timeline, as well we should be.

So nobody had information and wasn’t telling you. It was just kind of like when are these cities going to shut down. Sort of a city by city thing. And I remember finding out about an hour before we ended up telling people. And we were trying to figure out exactly when to say stuff because it’s like obviously no one was going to get coronavirus from an extra four minutes of shooting, so we were just trying to figure out when to do it.

**Craig:** Well, but they could.

**Dana:** There was a scene we were shooting and they finished the scene and they were going to start rehearsing the next scene but they were going to go to lunch and then start the other scene after lunch. And I was like maybe don’t make them rehearse the other scene. Because it’s going to be 42 years until they get to do that scene. So, we’ll rehearse it in 42 years. So we just said, “We’re done.”

**John:** You also have a young star who is probably growing every day.

**Dana:** She’s 142. I FaceTime with her all the time and I’m like she’s a full-blown adult. We’re going to have some really weird continuity issues in that one episode where we have the two days shot. It’s going to be like, oh, look at Brooklynn Prince, this extraordinary nine-year-old, and then it’s going to be in another scene she’s going to be 42, and then nine, and then 42, with the martini.

**John:** Yeah. Little CG action. Little Benjamin Button happening.

**Dana:** Haggard, gray-haired lady. I know. Ugh, she’s so incredible though. I’m really just–

**Craig:** She’s nine?

**Dana:** She was eight years old the whole first season that we shot. And, Craig, you know, and John I was talking to you about it, and I’m sure Dara was talking to you about it as well, John. Like while we were shooting I was just going I have to tell people about this girl. Like Craig I called you and I was like I’ve met the best actress on planet earth.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, The Florida Project was incredible. But you never know if somebody can replicate that or was that just a very specific thing. But I’ve just seen interviews with her where I just think – it’s that same thing with Millie Bobby Brown or Emily Watson had it where you’re like you seem like you were finished by eight.

**Dana:** When you came out. Yeah, when you came out of your mom’s vag. It was just done.

**Craig:** Can we say that? Are we allowed to say that? Yeah, we can say that.

**Dana:** Are we allowed to say that? I don’t know.

**John:** Sure, yeah.

**Dana:** Am I allowed to swear on YouTube? What’s that?

**John:** Yeah, you can.

**Craig:** We decided last time that you could.

**Dana:** OK. Because that would have been hard for me, because you know I swear like—

**Craig:** Vag is not a swear. That’s a perfectly good part of the body.

**Dana:** It’s a beautiful anatomical thing.

**Craig:** Delivery system.

**Dana:** [laughs] Both intake and output.

**Craig:** You have 12 kids we just want to remind everybody.

**Dana:** Yeah, Brooklynn, she has this incredibly empathetic soul. She’s so deeply feeling that when you talk to her about what her character would be going through or you sort of try and describe what you think she’s feeling in that moment you don’t even have to talk to her about what she’s feeling. I just say to her I don’t want you to cry on purpose. I don’t want you to do anything. I want you to just think about who Hilde is to you – to you, Brooklynn – and do the scene.

And she is so good that whatever the thing is that comes out of her it’s her real feelings. She’s feeling them on camera. And so you’re not watching, you know, an actress try to show you what a feeling would look like. You’re watching an actress feel a feeling in front of you. It’s a miracle to me that she can even memorize her lines. And her mom is so amazing.

**Craig:** I know. Memorizing is hard.

**Dana:** I think it’s so hard. It’s what I talk to you about, Craig, because you’re like a famous actor now.

**Craig:** Right.

**Dana:** And so I have to talk to you about how do you memorize the stuff. I think I’d be like—

**Craig:** It’s hard.

**Dana:** I’d be out there. I’d be trying to Tina Fey myself if I could memorize more than three things. I’d try. But I can’t.

**Craig:** No, but you could. You know you could.

**Dana:** No, I cannot. Thank you so much.

**Craig:** You know what? Jason Bateman has a great system.

**Dana:** What does he do?

**Craig:** It’s something like the first word, the last word. He’s got some system. I didn’t really study it that much.

**Dana:** You’re such a good listener, Craig.

**Craig:** I use my own system. He said something literally and then I fell asleep and when I woke up I remembered that he said something.

**Dana:** Is it weird to like plug another podcast on your podcast?

**Craig:** No, do it.

**Dana:** Because I started listening to the Oh Hello podcast. And if anybody needs to learn how to laugh again, like this pandemic made it very challenging for me to laugh. And I found the podcast. And they’re very short. And it’s Nick Kroll and John What’s-his-face?

**John:** Mulaney.

**Dana:** Oh, I love them so much. And please–

**Craig:** Not enough to know his name, but OK.

**Dana:** Not enough to learn how to say – this is what I’m saying, Craig. This is why I couldn’t be an actor.

**Craig:** You got a point. You know what? I take it back. You can’t be.

**Dana:** I’ve seen the name so many times written and I’m like that’s a read-only for me. I can’t say that.

**Craig:** Right. That’s different. Remembering is different than memorizing. You can’t do either of those which is sad.

**Dana:** I want to be out of my own skin right now. Yes. Can you tell that I haven’t been around humans much lately?

**Craig:** This is exciting.

**John:** You are the parent of three small children as well, so that’s got to be a factor in your mental state at this moment as well.

**Dana:** I have too many kids. Mistakes were made. I love them so much. They’re all so young. I have 7, 5, and 4. And as it turns out you would think – I’m so dorky, I went to college, I went to another college, I got all the degrees. You would think I’d be good at home schooling because I like school so much and I’m such a nerd and such a dork. I’m so bad at it. Because day one I was like, oh, this is the day I figure out my kids are a little dumb, or have no attention span. I can’t figure out how to get them to focus.

I’m like, you guys, back to the thing. We’ve got to do the thing. But then I remember they’re small children. So teachers are angels.

**Craig:** Well, it doesn’t help that you’ve got your three kids and you can’t get them to do anything and then you know this other nine-year-old who can do everything.

**Dana:** Literally.

**Craig:** Everything.

**Dana:** I’m like you guys can’t sit at the dinner table. This girl just memorized four pages of dialogue for me. Like you can’t sit?

**Craig:** Good dialogue.

**Dana:** And by the way hit her marks and crushed it. [laughs] Yeah, but these idiots, they can’t remember to watch their hands after they go to the bathroom.

**Craig:** Why can’t you be more like that television star that mommy loves more than you.

**Dana:** But by the way they love her so much. And that’s the other thing about Brooklynn is like during the pandemic she just FaceTime’s our children and tries to make them happy, because she’s such a good person. I love this human child.

**John:** Now Dana you are a good person as well because this last week you were helping to promote the It Takes Our Village campaign which is to raise money for crews that are out of work because of this pandemic. Can you briefly hype what It Takes Our Village is about?

**Dana:** Thank you so much, John. You’re an angel. Yes. So part of the way that I’m trying to deal with this weird time is to spend a lot of time trying to help other people because it takes me out of my own skin. So, if you can get on let’s say GoFundMe and look up It Takes Our Village. There is an amazing fundraising effort that we put together with a bunch of cool people. Bruno Papandrea is who – and yet that last name I can say. Not John Mulaney. Bruno Papandrea, no problem. So obviously I’m choosing to not say John’s last name.

So we put it together. We’re trying to raise money for crews. Crews are the people that are there the earliest. They’re out the latest. It’s like I show up. I’m a disaster because in my mind it’s early. I have coffee. I have been rolling out of bed. And I’m showing up and I look around me and there’s people who have been there for like two hours before the incredibly early time that I got there.

And then at the end of the day when I’m completely exhausted and I think I can’t stand up anymore, I can’t talk to anyone anymore, my back is killing me, I’m dying, I say good night to everybody. And then they pack up all of the stuff and they’re still there for more hours. So these are really the people that need to feel our love and support right now because they’re the ones that crush everything that anybody is watching right now on television to keep them from going completely insane. These are the people that actually make it possible and make it happen. And they will not have a job until we get back into production again.

There are people in the business who can make money during this time period. These people cannot. So, for me it’s sort of a moral imperative that we help them. And any amount that you can give would be amazing. Some people have given some really big donations which is really exciting. And we’re trying to get to $2.5 million so that we can give individual crew members $1,000 to help support them with their bills. And we’re going to try to keep it going as long as we can.

**John:** Cool.
**Dana:** So please help. That would be amazing.

**John:** It Takes Our Village is the GoFundMe and we’ll have a link to that in our show notes.

**Dana:** Ah, love you.

**Craig:** Good cause.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our Three Page Challenge. So for folks who are new listeners we occasionally do this segment called Three Page Challenge where we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their script. It could be a pilot. It could be a screenplay. We look through of all of them. Megana and I went through 160 entries this week to pick four that we thought were really interesting that we could talk about.

This isn’t the four best things we read but probably the scripts that had the most interesting things for us to discuss and we can actually have these people join us here and we can talk to them about what they wrote and why they wrote it and it’s exciting. So we’re going to start off with one of these. Let’s begin with Hampton by Ali Imran Zaidi.

I’m going to give you a quick summary here. But if you want to read these things they’re already up at johnaugust.com. It’s the first post that you will see there. So you can download the PDF and read through them with us.

So we’re going to start with Hampton. Here’s a quick summary. We start with a phone call to 911. There’s been a major accident on the highway. We see scenes of the first responders mobilizing. We then cut to Kamal Shah. He’s sorting oxy in a dimly lit bedroom. He answers his radio and it’s clear that he works in emergency services. He’s talking with a woman named Mina who tells him there’s been this accident and he confirms his post.

We see that Nat is this woman lying next to Kamal. She runs his hand down his chest. Kamal says he’s going off to work. And he gives Nat a last bit of drugs.

We cut to the alleged accident but it turns out there really wasn’t an accident. It was all a hoax. And the firefighters and paramedics are packing up. We cut back to Kamal as he finds his way to his police car. But before Kamal can get the engine started a shadowy figure appears and shoots him through the dashboard. And then the car backs up into a mailbox and that’s where we’re at at the bottom of three pages.

Craig, could you start us off with your first take on Hampton by Ali Imran Zaidi?

**Craig:** It’s garbage! No. I thought this was really good. I had a good time reading it. And I thought it did a ton of stuff in three pages. So I’m a big fan of using the real estate of the first three pages, the first ten pages I think are the most precious real estate you have. And a lot of times we get these things and I just feel like people are squandering it. Like they don’t realize they’re wasting the most precious opportunity.

So in the first three pages you need to establish tone and you need to establish a certain kind of visual setting and a pace. And so the good news is that Ali does all of that. The dispatcher – there’s a bit of confusion in the beginning that I think is an easy confusion to solve. The very first person who speaks is Mina/Dispatcher. Our eyes will probably go past that. So what we’ll see is just Dispatcher and we’ll see, “911, what’s your emergency?” Because we’re not used to noticing or caring about what a dispatcher’s name is. But as it turns out the dispatcher is actually going to come back and be important.

So, one suggestion is to just have that be Mina (VO), “911, what’s your emergency.” Or say dispatcher and then when Mina calls in down the page say it’s the same voice as the dispatcher, or she was the dispatcher. Just make a point of that. But what I think is really good is when we meet – this is the way you meet somebody, right? It’s like introductions are important. And a lot of times we’ll meet people and they’re just sitting there, or they’re walking somewhere. This guy is crushing and snorting oxy. He’s high. Love these descriptions.

“Sexy hands glide down his chest, leading to a not-as-sexy face and dirty blonde hair.” There’s your hair. “He NUDGES her off to GRAB THE RADIO from a hanging, dark green POLICE SHIRT. She snags the leftover Oxy, spilling some on her Hulk Hogan Tee.” There’s your wardrobe. Love the Hulk Hogan tee. Says a lot about what’s going on there. Their relationship is interesting. And just a nice way to kind of introduce that Kamal is, A, a bad police officer, B, a drug addict, C, cheating on his girlfriend/wife who happens to be the dispatcher. All of this is happening without him making a point of telling us any of it. We’re just learning it as we go. He has this really interesting – Nat, who I hope stays in the picture as this drug-addicted girlfriend of his. Could just be a drug-addicted girlfriend number two. And, in fact, she’s really interesting.

She quotes Babe which is the weirdest thing to do.

**Dana:** The best thing ever. I love it.

**Craig:** So cool. And then there’s the surprise that it was a fake 911 call which I wasn’t expecting. And what a great contrast to go from fake 911 call to very real murder. I have nothing to complain about here. I thought these were really tight, really good pages. I liked the way they looked on the page. There was space between things. The way the gunshot happened was exciting and read viscerally.

I think it was really good. I’m disappointed in how happy I am with this.

**John:** I agree with Craig. I really did enjoy this and I felt like Imran did a lot of great stuff in these three pages. The three pages open with On Black and we hear this voiceover before we get to the first image. You see On Black in screenplays a lot. I think you don’t actually see it that often in movies and TV shows because I think we realize that like, wow, looking at nothing is actually not that interesting. And so I think you’re going to want to find some sort of image to open this, rather than just being on black. That’s my guess.

You know, obviously we don’t want to portray the caller because we don’t want to set up that this is a fake thing, but On Black is sometimes a problem.

I love how Imran’s scene description is short and punchy. “Sirens burst to life. An ambulance roars through a stop sign.” Everything is quick and there. There’s no extra adjectives that you don’t need there.

Where I did think we had an opportunity here was between the hospital and the bedroom. We have all this like quick-paced stuff. We have vehicles moving and stuff like that. And then we’re cutting to “a scarf over a lamp bathes the room in red.” There’s nothing active there. It’s just scene description. I felt like if you were to start with crushing pills and lines and snorting, to have some action to start that thing could keep the momentum going. Keep this feel.

Move the scarf back a few lines so that then you’re setting up what the space is. But if we’re in action keep that action happening in parallel.

I got a little confused about Kamal, who he was talking to at the start. I just needed to have a parenthetical to say like “on radio” basically to tell us that he is not talking to the woman in the room, but that he’s talking on the radio. What I loved most about these three pages is I got a sense of what this world was like. I got a sense of who the characters I was supposed to be following. And then at the end of three pages I was really surprised that the guy I thought was going to be the protagonist is apparently dead. And so that’s exciting for me.

Dana, talk us through what you saw in these three pages.

**Dana:** So I thought all of your comments were great. I had similar ones. I think maybe one of the ways to solve the On Black, I would say Over Black, but then I don’t usually use it so I might be wrong. But I think maybe the way to solve it is to just have “911, what’s your emergency” be the only thing over black. Because that’s basically how much black time you’re going to want. And then I would get into this other bit and hearing this over this other bit.

I think that the introduction to Nat, you know, the fact that the “sexy hands glide down his chest leading to a not-as-sexy face” and that reveals Nat, that’s like the good version of giving camera direction, not the bad version. That showed me what I was going to be seeing in a way that I thought was filmic but not sort of hitting you over the head. So I really loved that about it. He nudges her off and grabs the radio from a hanging dark green police shirt. Full disclosure, I think I might be a little dyslexic and have like a little bit of a learning disability, so take this with a grain of salt. But I don’t like anything in scripts that stops my brain for one second, because it takes me a long time to restart my brain. So I would just say CB radio or police radio. Because I didn’t understand the word radio until I got to police shirt. And then I had to go back.

**John:** Yeah. And I got confused what I was actually seeing there. I’m just seeing the handset piece of that or the actual bulk of it. Because the handset piece I can see being attached to the shirt, but I got confused what I was looking at.

**Dana:** Then I’m like where is the bottom part? Where the thing or what’s it connected to? He took off his shirt. Where’s the radio? So, yeah, I think just a skosh more detail there. And then what I loved about this whole piece, you know, the oxy and the police shirt being the reveal and the girl and what not, I thought this told a much bigger story with really small details. I loved that about it. There’s like a Hemingway quote or something about showing the thing. You don’t have to show the whole shark. I forget what the thing is. But this is the perfect example of showing just enough that I felt like—

**Craig:** That was it. It was just you don’t have to show the whole shark. You don’t have to.

**Dana:** Yeah. [gives impression] If you just show the tip of the fin we know the shark is down there. You know, that famous quote.

**Craig:** Right. Hemingway is now an old Jew.

**Dana:** Somebody please look that up online.

**John:** Dana, can you do more Hemingway impersonations because I really think your Hemingway impression is ideal. I can really see him sitting in that café in Pamplona—

**Dana:** Welcome to my show about writing books in Havana.

No, that was really not an impression. It was a very bad impression. But if one of you guys could look up that quote just to–

**Craig:** I’ll do it right now.

**Dana:** Just to save me from myself. That would be great.

Yeah, so I loved that it told such an evocative longer story. I felt like I got both backstory and story out of just your lines of description there which I loved. I also really loved the line when he’s talking to her on the dispatch thing. He says, “I’m sorry Mina.” And then he says, “Code red.” And she replies, “I love you, too.” I also thought that was weirdly evocative. I didn’t totally understand it but I liked it. I thought maybe it implied that he was undercover so that kind of piqued my interest that he can’t say I love you maybe meant he was undercover. Maybe it didn’t. But I just liked that about it. And also I thought “That’ll do, pig” was amazing.

A vibrator kicks on behind him. I just wanted it to be like “clicks on” or something. Because again that was one of those moments my brain stopped and was like, wait, what is this saying? And I was like, oh, she’s turning on the vibrator. And I loved it but my brain went “kicks on?” What? And then I went back. So maybe clicks on, or just a different way of describing that.

And I got to the end and I was like, oh, end of page three and I would completely keep reading. I want to know what happened next. I don’t understand some of the stuff, but I’m totally intrigued by it. This feels like a very lean in and yet there’s a lot of momentum to it and yet I’m leaning in which is sometimes hard to do when things are kind of fast paced. You don’t lean in quite as much.

But this does both, so I loved it.

**Craig:** Yeah. This was really well orchestrated. It was well balanced. There was harmony between things. Things were feeding into each other.

I do have a quote from Hemingway.

**Dana:** Oh, OK.

**Craig:** It says show the readers everything, tell them nothing.

**Dana:** Yeah, fuck. That’s not it. Somebody else said the thing.

**Craig:** Show the readers everything. Tell them nothing.

**Dana:** And he talked with the cigar.

**Craig:** [makes cartoon noises]

**John:** I do want to show one thing on page three here. “Kamal walks out under flickering amber lamp light.” I think that lamplight should probably be a streetlight. But the amber gets used again about six lines later. So, amber is such a specific word. If amber light is being used twice – just you don’t need it the second time.

**Dana:** I think that’s important because it makes people feel – I always say I don’t want to feel the writing. You don’t want to be feeling somebody going like click-clack-click-clack. And so the repetitions of words you sometimes notice and go, oh, someone wrote this. Blech.

**Craig:** I mean, you can connect these things together if you want. You just have to be a little bit more purposeful about it so you can say Kamal walks out under the flickering street lamp, or the flickering amber streetlight. And then a shiny pistol and glove hand twinkles under the amber light of the street lamp, or under the street lamps. If you wanted to make a point of it. Because I don’t know if that’s important or not.

**John:** Yeah. I can’t imagine it’s – it doesn’t feel like it’s especially important or you’d underline it. You’d highlight in some other way if it really were important. I just feel like in both cases probably you’re feeling like, oh, this light should be this color and you forgot that you actually just a few lines above used that same color.

**Craig:** That may very well be the case.

**John:** Here’s an example of a recognition that’s so important is “Blood splatters on that CANVAS ZIP BAG now sitting shotgun.” Just using that rather than the canvas zip bag just reminded like, oh yeah, I did call that out a page before and this is a reward for having noticed that I called it out. So really nicely done.

Let’s invite Imran on to talk about this. Imran, if you could please join us here on stage.

**Ali Imran Zaidi:** Hello.

**John:** Hello.

**Craig:** Hey man, sorry about the way we just beat you up there. I mean, geez, did you enjoy that? God.

**Imran:** Man, I was sweating, but thank you so much.

**John:** So talk to us about who you are and how you came to write this.

**Craig:** Who are you?

**Imran:** So I used to – this is set in a real town called Hampton, Florida in North Florida. The pilot’s name is Got to Go North to Go South because that’s kind of the thing about Florida. You go north to go to the south. And I used to travel to a lot of these kinds of towns. And then at one point I read about this town and all the kind of underpinnings of the crime going on are real. They’re true. I read the state’s forensics report analysis about everything that this town was up to.

You know, it’s a story that in a weird way appealed to me as like a brown immigrant in Florida, the experiences I had I kind of in a way I’ve translated into what Kamal is going to go through in this place where he’s somewhere he really shouldn’t be. A South Asian guy in North Florida is not a common sight. And so it just personally really appealed to me.

And I love genre storytelling. You know, honestly when I take generals and stuff a lot of times I feel like I get the meeting where, you know, what’s the brown family story you can tell, which those are fine but I’m not really interested in family stories really. I’m interested in sci-fi and crime and things like that. So, I try to un-gentrify genre storytelling with what I do. So that’s basically why I wrote Hampton.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Talk to us about what happens in the rest of this pilot and sort of what is the franchise you’re sort of setting up out of here.

**Imran:** Essentially this town, Hampton, in a weird sort of way it’s sort of like that idea of Fargo, but it’s one specific town and one specific story. There’s a lot of people who are not very bright in this town. This is the kind of town, and we see it later, where the police department, the water, and like city hall are all like one small office building which is like a converted house. And so there’s a lot of this kind of – essentially Hampton created a speed trap that started out the money coming in, an illegal speed trap. They annexed a piece of land on a passing highway which is shown at the beginning. And they basically started taking in that money.

And then of course you need to funnel money which means you need to launder it somehow and you need to find other ways to bring in money into this system. And so they took control and they required cash payments from water because the city was providing water. So anyway it goes kind of deep.

So the idea of this is Kamal and his wife are basically helping them launder, because they themselves are not necessarily that good at this whole, you know, the numbers game of this whole thing. And so I follow Kamal and then also his wife gradually through the series who is really – his wife who is a dispatcher, because everybody has multiple jobs in this town. She’s actually helping launder this money. And, of course, they’re trying to get out of it and they’re also at the same time because of the racial implications of the town they’re essentially being scapegoated. And so what I’m trying to do in the version of this story is I’m kind of putting fiction in the dark corners of this story that don’t exist to tell the story of the people that – because a lot of money went missing. And I’m trying to show with my version of this story, this fictional aspect, of what happened to the million some dollars that kind of somehow disappeared out of the town.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool.

**Dana:** For you, what are the touchstones? What are the shows that you loved watching as just an audience member?

**Imran:** I mean lately, obviously, I love Ozark. I’m tearing through the new season that just dropped. I love the rural town kind of story. Like I just love that. I watch a lot of crime – I mean, whether it’s something like Fargo which I thought was amazing, like beyond amazing. As far as crime goes those are like my – whether it’s the old feature Fargo, the original Coen Fargo, or the new one.

What the Coen brothers do where they kind of somehow balance something that makes dramatic sense while at the same time you find yourself laughing at some of these idiot characters that kind of go along the way. And that’s the kind of thing that I really love. Because we’re all kind of geniuses and idiots depending on the day. And so that’s kind of what I like exploring. Like when are we at our best and when are we at our worst.

**Craig:** Great. Well thank you.

**John:** And Imran, where are you at in your career? So you say you’re taking generals and I also saw on IMDb that you’ve worked as a cinematographer. Where are you at right now?

**Imran:** I mean, essentially I’m at the place where I am taking staffing meetings now and then to try to get stuff, because I have not been staffed. I was writing features more before, but obviously because the way the world has turned, you know, it became more about television. So I’ve been working on more television pilots and I haven’t been staffed. That’s basically my next step. I’m trying to get there. Of course, there’s the Catch-22 of if you haven’t been in a room sometimes you can’t get in a room. So, I’m trying to work that as best I can.

**John:** Great. I think people will read your script. I think you’re going to get more of those meetings. So good luck.

**Imran:** Thank you.

**John:** Great. Thank you very much for sending in your pages.

**Craig:** Good work. Thanks Imran.

**Imran:** Thank you so much.

**Dana:** Thank you.

**John:** Thanks.

**Imran:** Bye.

**John:** All right. Let us go next to Sunbeam by Heidi Lewis. I’ll give you a quick summary for people who don’t have it in front of them. We hear a deep breath as we open on 12-year-old Mabel in Normanhurst House, Victorian England. She’s standing on a landing and Mabel watches as a horse-drawn carriage arrives with two doctors. The butler greets the doctors. As a child cries for air, the doctors rush up the stairs past the butler and Mabel. We watch the scene from Mabel’s point of view as she looks into a bedroom and watches an elegantly dressed couple, apparently her parents. Lady Anna and Lord Thomas tend to a feverish girl. The couple and the doctors debate whether Lady Anna should stay in the room and what is the best course of treatment for the girl. Cupping? Or arsenic and bleeding?

Meanwhile the little girl struggles for air until she’s finally propped up, just in time for the child to draw her last breath and for the audience to see the girl, Sunbeam, for the first time. That’s where we’re at at the bottom of three pages.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Dana, can you tell us your first impressions on this?

**Dana:** So, I really liked this. I’m big fan of sort of period pieces, especially in the world that we’re living in. I kind of want to think about other time periods.

**John:** Where people could touch each other?

**Dana:** Where everyone can touch each other and cough on each other. And open doors, you know, just with the handles. Just open them. Just go right for it.

**John:** No elbows required, yeah.

**Dana:** So I long for that. So I really love a period piece. I love a costume thing. This was just a fun kind of world to feel like I was in for – especially I loved the detail of the feeling of the snow falling and then you realize that that’s the feathers in the pillow. I thought that was really beautiful. Really evocative. I can imagine a filmmaker really wanting to make a meal out of that, which is good. And, you know, my only question was is there a way to a little earlier, you know, we started with the 12-year-old girl in a night dress. And I think this is a good lesson. I’m a really good reader and I skipped the first slug line somehow. Like I just didn’t read it.

So, I was like on the 12-year-old girl in the nightdress holding her breath. I’m like I’m in, I love this. And then there wasn’t a period detail in that first section. So I didn’t realize it was a period piece until the four black horses came and the coach came. So I was wondering if – in a way there’s an opportunity there to reveal the period in an interesting way.

You know, period pieces and costume dramas, they’ve been done so many times before that you sort of have to ask yourself what do you want to do that’s either different or if it’s the same as what’s been done before maybe that feels like something that won’t get you as much notice if you’re starting out your career. So I might sort of look at this and say, OK, what makes this different? Are the people talking in a way that I wasn’t expecting? Does it surprise me in that way that Hamilton did because it was a mashup of genres that I wasn’t expecting?

This feels a little bit more straightforward and so if it’s going to be straightforward I think it has to make itself known a little bit more clearly what it’s doing in these first three pages. Because I was just not quite sure what I was reading. But I liked it and I was like I’m on board. This person can clearly write. I’m excited. I want to read more. I feel like if there is a way to think more meta. I like to kind of step back from it a second and sort of go you know how to write, you’re a good writer, that’s great. Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to do this particularly? And let’s dig in maybe when we get to the talking directly to you part of it about what do you love about period pieces, why do you feel that you’re the person that has to tell the period piece story.

Just for me personally, you know, I am obsessed with World War II stuff. It’s like 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell psychotic reading of stories about that. But for me it’s very specific. I want a story about a woman who is a spy in like a very specific time period. I’m like, ooh, let me get my hands on that 1946. Oh yeah.

So, I have some stories that I’ve been toying around with doing and for me it’s not like, oh, I want to talk about World War II because it’s like, yeah, but why, everybody has talked about World War II. It’s like I want to talk about a time period when women were allowed to work and then could fall in love with something and fall in love and get passionate about their work. And then the minute the war is over everybody says, great, we fought for you to be able to go back to the kitchen and take your shoes off and be pregnant again. And I’m like but what about my work? I’m in love with my work. And they’re like, yeah, well you can’t do that anymore.

So, for me that’s why I’m interested in that particular story and that’s why I want to tell that particular story. And so I’m interested in talking to you about why you want to tell that particular story and then trying to help you kind of bring more of that into these pages.

**John:** Craig, what was your read on these three pages?

**Craig:** Well, I quite liked them.

**Dana:** Oh, oh, you quite like them?

**Craig:** I quite liked them.

**Dana:** Shall I light you a candle?

**Craig:** It’s 1946.

**Dana:** I quite like this Victorian story.

**Craig:** I got to go back into the kitchen and take my shoes off.

**Dana:** Where they can’t even just turn on the light switches. They got to light a candle.

**Craig:** I quite like – but it’s funny that you mention turn on light switches and light a candle, because that’s exactly what I want to talk about. It’s the very first thing. I had the same moment that you did where I was a little bit confused about period because like you I kind of sort of glided past Victorian England. But it’s night. Now it’s night in a mansion in Victorian England. I suspect that we’re dealing with candlelight here. The butler later is going to have a candle in hand.

A 12-year-old girl in a night dress stands in a shadowy landing holding her breath. How do I see her? Is she holding a candle? Is there a lit candle? Do we start on the candle?

**John:** Is there moonlight?

**Craig:** Is there moonlight? Do we see a match light a candle? I mean, somehow or another I think that’s a great way to kind of bring us in. Look, it’s a preference thing with me that I’m not a big fan of “right now she’s wondering what it’s like to have no more air in her lungs like a sailboat has gone flat.” It’s a little bit of a purple prose thing. And I can’t shoot it. And no one can act it. So, I’m not sure what the great value is of that kind of thing.

But I’m just kind of wondering what is she doing there. Is she just standing randomly on a balcony? She is thoughtful and curious and she is wondering about air, but why is she there? Is she waiting? That’s a different thing. If she’s waiting then–

**John:** I think she’s at the window. Because when she exhales her hot breath fogs the frosty pain. But I didn’t know she was at a window. So if she’s at a window waiting for the doctors to arrive and that actually tracks and makes sense. But I didn’t get that from the initial image.

**Craig:** Well, because she’s not doing what waiting people do. Because waiting people aren’t thinking about what it’s like to have no more air in their lungs. What waiting people are doing is looking and waiting and hoping. So that’s a different kind of anticipation. That’s the kind of thing where if you breathe you wipe it away because you need to see. They’re not there. You breathe again. You wipe it away again. These are things that you can do.

We get these doctors coming out. They come on in. Pearson, now, OK, just a general dialogue note. A lot of this fell into the category of this is how TV or movies make us think these people spoke. But then there are other examples. I’m thinking of Taboo for instance, the Tom Hardy series, where you go they didn’t talk like this. This all feels a little too Downton Abby. A little too precious and formal for these things.

“She seems so discomforted! Is there nothing you can do for her?” doesn’t seem like panic to me. It seems very rigid and formal. I love the down pillow snow thing, but I don’t know why the pillow has been exploded. Did the girl rip it apart in a feverish fit? I just didn’t understand why that was that way.

Similarly the doctors do this thing that I call bad man speech. So bad man speech is, “My dear woman, you are merely a woman. I am a man. Step aside for in this year women have no rights.” And there is a more interesting way to get across the kind of endemic sexism of a time. And it’s particularly important because you have Anna doing what I think is the “no, no, no, I am a woman and I will not take that crap, sir” speech. And similarly “yet I shall not set one foot from this chamber until I’ve seen her through the worst of it.” It’s like, ma’am, stop giving speeches. Grab somebody. Your child is literally a breath away from dying. Everybody is talking so much.

And I love, I am such a sucker for old medicine. Old failure medicine I call it. It’s wonderful. I love failure medicine. But that’s all anyone ever knew. So, she would be like where are the leeches? Or do the thing? Or do you have arsenic? And everyone is like scrambling and trying to do something because she’s literally dying in front of them.

A child dying in front of you is what I call an overwhelmer. When you have an overwhelmer in a scene everyone has to shut up and no one can talk about anything else. There’s no time to talk about what you want to do, how you feel about your rights as a woman. Your disagreement with another doctor. A child is dying. So there’s just panic. And when she does die, Thomas – who is Thomas? Oh, is the husband. I forgot the husband was there. And here’s why. Because the husband, by the way, he’s in a formal white tie which is spectacular because his child is dying.

Again, I don’t quite get that. But he says, “Dr. North, Hughes,” his daughter is dying. And then he doesn’t say anything? Or do anything ever again. Which is crazy, to me.

So, overwhelmers have to really be respected. However, where we end is really beautiful I think. Because it’s hard to make a kid die and make me go, ooh, because they died. And I went, ooh, because I saw this and I liked that Mabel was there. I think there’s a point of view problem here because the point of view doesn’t really feel like it’s Mabel’s point of view. It feels like it’s more Anna’s point of view. But this dawn comes in and we have our first clear view of the child. And she has golden curls, dimple chin, cherubic. Her name is Sunbeam. She’s dead, or is she? Ooh.

So, anyway, I loved where it ended up. I think there’s really good visuals involved. I think you have an overwhelmer problem that you have to deal with and I think you’ve got to dial down the sort of written period of it all and just get more into humans, because we actually only care about the human part, not so much the stilted stuff.

**John:** I agree with especially the emphasis on the images, because the images are what really worked for me. So as I went through the script I found myself scratching out lines that I felt we didn’t need. And in those omissions I thought we actually could make some progress. So, like you I cut “right now she’s wondering what it’s like to have no more air in her lungs.” I cut out the door chimes. I cut out Dr. North’s dialogue in a lot of places. Basically just getting to the next thing, because in these moments of crisis people don’t stop to say those lines. They just actually rush through to the next thing.

There’s even moments for when you’re taking out blocks of dialogue very naturally you got to the next thing and people just said the thing that has to happen. A bigger thing that we haven’t discussed really is that this is all from Mabel’s point of view but I don’t know anything about Mabel in the course of this. And I feel like at the end of three pages if she is our character I want to know something specific about her. Why we’re entering this story from her point of view.

And so giving us some image or some connection between her parents, between apparently that’s her sister, what it is that she’s here rather than just being a camera through which we’re watching all this. And so by the end of three pages I wanted to have a little bit better sense of why we’re experiencing this through Mabel.

Luckily because we’re doing this with Heidi here she can come on and answer these questions because generally we couldn’t do this. Heidi, step out on stage here and talk to us about what you’ve written here.

**Heidi Lewis:** Hi.

**John:** Heidi, hi.

**Craig:** Hey. Hey.

**Heidi:** Thank you so much.

**Craig:** All right. No problem. You took a couple of shots there. You took a couple of shots, so hopefully you’re not feeling too rattled.

**Dana:** By the way, that’s like all of trying to do this job. [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s literally all we experience all day.

**Dana:** It’s 100% that all day long. No matter whether it works out or not, you’re just like, oh, everyone is saying horrible shit to me all the time.

**Heidi:** You’re generous. I mean, this is generosity because your knowledge is so helpful. So, what I love about this story is that this is a true story. It’s a little – do you want me to go into the background?

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, just tell us what it is.

**John:** Please, please.

**Heidi:** So, I was at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England a few years ago and I saw this massive golden figurehead. And it was the image of a child. It was just haunting. It was so beautiful. And I went over and looked at the little plaque and all it said was this belonged to the ship the Sunbeam. The first family to sail around the world in 1856 went on this ship and I went down this whole rabbit hole studying all of the journals that they wrote. And Anna Brassey, the mom, was this like – she was this strong explorer naturalist adventurer.

And then her daughter dies. And so they decided to build this ship and sail around the world. And the thing that interested me about it was that grief is just something that’s universal, first of all, and that this family went to such great lengths to escape their grief. And they actually brought the daughter with them who died in the form of this figurehead in the name of the ship.

And so it is a ghost story.

**Craig:** Ah, good.

**Heidi:** Yeah, so it’s a ghost story where, I don’t know, I was just kind of looking at how all of us in a family might approach grief. Maybe the mother is distracted and Mabel, the surviving daughter, just when she needs her mom the most has her mom completely just separate from her. So that’s what the story is. It’s a ghost adventure story, true story. And a female story, because it’s the mom and the daughter. So, yeah.

**Dana:** Can I jump in and you can take any of this for what it’s worth. But I love what you’re saying there and I think that you have the potential for a really, really cool story. Maybe think about, sometimes what I do with my stuff is like I write the kind of linear version of it and I look at it and I go there’s something not quite working here. This is the sort of like this is what happened version of it. And I realize like, oh, there’s this thing that in my mind is backstory and it has to become story. So I end up moving around pieces.

I think maybe this isn’t the right way to start your story. I think maybe if you started the story on the ship with the family and you’re with these people and they’re out there and you’re like what the fuck are they doing out there. That’s crazy. And you see the thing on the figurehead, the masthead. And then you basically use the daughter’s death as a mystery that you’re solving to kind of explain why the behavior of them present day is what it is. That could be an interesting way of thinking about it. And, again, you can throw all this away if you don’t like it. But that’s something that’s sort of appealing to me because I know somebody whose child did die and it gave me a window into that profound deep grief of like a mother over their child. And like Craig said, it’s all encompassing. It smashes everything in the room. Like there’s no version of people being like, “We’re talking about stuff.”

But what I found so fascinating about it was as she started to go through it like it was a mystery – it was like a mystery she had to solve. Because her brain could not process it and get over it until she understood every single piece that led up to it. How it happened. Why it happened. Who was there? When the thing? How they got the thing?

So, maybe it’s an interesting way of looking at it as more of like the death is more of a mystery because right now we’re experiencing and we don’t care about the characters yet, so we of course care about a child dying because everybody does. You intuitively sort of know that. But it just might be a slightly more interesting way into it so that if I meet them and I know them and then you bring me back to this and I get to see for example Mabel in happier times. Like I’d go even further back, you know. And Mabel in happier times being a completely different person than the Mabel I’m watching in present day. Then I sort of care about both time periods in a way that could be kind of interesting.

I don’t know. John and Craig, is that terrible advice or is that–?

**John:** I think it’s actually really good advice. Because what you’re doing is you’re trying to find a way to make sure that the franchise of the show, which is really sort of what we’re emotionally invested in, is set up very early on. We’re sort of establishing what kind of show it is that we’re watching which is not going to be a haunted house. It’s not going to be a Victorian house show. It’s going to be a cool ship show. And the mystery of like we won’t know at the start of the show that she’s actually died. And that could be really compelling.

And if this were kind of the last scene of the first episode that would be really cool. Like we didn’t know that this girl who we’ve been following over the course of the story is actually already dead. That’s kind of neat.

**Dana:** Yeah, then I’d be like, ooh, I’m hooked, I’ve got to watch the second episode.

**Craig:** Yeah. These are great ideas. I think that Heidi what Dana and John are suggesting is a kind of advice that helps you take a little bit of the I’ve seen it before kind of feeling off of this. Because while grief is a profound emotion and human condition that we do empathize with and feel and need to discuss and understand through art, when you serve it up straight ahead it’s just – it feels a little kind of like, oh, right. She’s going to have to go through the stages of grief.

And then they will be over. So I guess I’ll be watching that thing. Do you know what I mean?

**Heidi:** Yeah.

**Craig:** and how you begin things really does frame how this can evolve. I mean, you’ve probably seen the Nicole Kidman film The Others?

**Heidi:** Yes. Definitely.

**Craig:** So that’s a fascinating exploration of grief and it does so in a way that does not say, right, first a kid dies, then [unintelligible] dies, then you get sad, then you – do you know what I mean? So you don’t have to do any of the things that Dana and John are suggesting. And, in fact, you could even start in the house if you wanted. But what you do need to do is say how can I surprise people who are going to think, oh, OK, so this is going to be a this – how do I surprise them? How do I keep them off-balance so that when the emotion comes it comes in an unexpected way, in an unexpected direction because that’s what grabs us.

The audience, see, people are protective of their hearts. They will try and protect their heart from you. As somebody who is trying to break it, so you have to surprise them.

**Heidi:** Yeah. I love that. I think it’s great advice. It gives me a lot to think about. I love it.

**Craig:** Awesome. Well thank you.

**John:** Heidi, thank you so much for sending these pages in and for joining us.

**Craig:** Thank you, Heidi.

**Heidi:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. Next let’s look at Find Him by Dylan Guerra. This is episode one, Atlas Didn’t Shrug He Actually Had a Pretty Strong Opinion.

We start in a rundown apartment building in Harlem in the middle of a thunderstorm. Dylan, our main character narrator, desperately bangs on a door. Dylan calls for David, begging him to open up. They open up the door. Then through voiceover Dylan steps back and lets us know that the scene didn’t actually happen this way at all. Instead Dylan takes us to his apartment where he sits in his underwear and types David a series of increasingly passive-aggressive texts. Dylan takes us back and forth between the scene in the hallway and to his bedroom.

Until we arrive at a happy medium with Dylan wearing clothes and texting David from his bed. Dylan admits to the audience that he struggles with being clear. Dylan realizes that he hasn’t yet given us enough context on the scene so he shows us David’s dating profile and describes David through the description on the profile. Dylan steps through the scene and addresses the audience directly telling us that this is the story of David, a guy he met and sort of dated who then went missing and this is Dylan’s search for him.

Let me start off with this because I really dug a lot of what I read in Dylan’s script for Find Him. This script as we look at it has the most formatting issues. It feels like the least screenplay ready of all of these. I liked the control over the writing that Dylan really showed and his ability to inhabit the space and really have a clear point of view and tone that came through from the very start.

So, we had Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the show last week and so she is a character who is turning to the character and addressing us directly. That’s a thing that Dylan is doing. Mostly it’s working really, really well.

On the bottom of page one when we switch to more of what really happened there’s a lot of texting. We’ve talked about texting on the show before and it can be a tricky thing to show. This is just a big block of text which is not going to really work. I think you’re going to want to break it up into some different ways so that we can really sense like this is what we’re actually seeing on screen. This is the flow of how we’re getting to this stuff.

As we’re going back and forth between the various incarnations of this it felt – I can picture it. I can imagine what this is going to feel like as we’re seeing these shifting realities of sort of what actually happened here. If I could change a few things, I might sort of move the tenses a little bit. Right now on page three it says, “And David is important because he went missing.” Well, we’ll talk to Dylan about this, but David is missing. I feel like when you say “went missing” it felt like well this was a thing that all happened in the past.

I want a sense that this is a thing that is still ongoing as we’re setting up the story. If it’s at all possible I would love for David to have a different name because Dylan and David gets so confusing to have two D-words. So if we could rename that character. But I would say I’m very curious to see what happens next at the end of three pages.

Craig or Dana, what did you take out of these pages?

**Craig:** I enjoyed them as well. These are all about Dylan and about his tone. So either you’re going to enjoy the Dylan ride, or you’re not. By the way, I agree with you on the David thing. We do need to change one of their names. And since Dylan has written this I’m going to say Dylan keep your name and change David’s name.

It’s exciting to read things like this when you think, OK, I’m never going to quite know where I stand with my unreliable narrator. They’re going to keep pulling the rug out from under me. For a bit. And then it’s going to become an issue.

So talking to the audience and side comments and contradicting yourself, all of that I think is interesting and fine. I’m a little nervous about what happens on page three. When you actually now start talking about the techniques of the film that you’re in, or the show that you’re in. “That was cool right? The screen blacked out and I then I stepped into it. You thought you were staring at an image and then the image went out and I stepped into the darkness.”

So that is clever, but it’s annoying. It’s annoying because it’s unfair. You’re kind of cheating. In a sense that like I like it – I don’t mind being fooled as an audience member, I just mind being fooled and then having you say, “Ha, I fooled. Did you notice that I fooled you? Wasn’t that interesting how I fooled you?” That can get a little annoying because you are going to start to disconnect a little bit. So that’s always the danger of the fourth wall.

We talked about it on our last live show with Phoebe and with Ryan. That’s the area where you’ve got to be careful. One of the things that Phoebe did so brilliantly was use her moments to the camera – sometimes they were just a quick glance without a single word. But they never said, OK, actually what you just saw, wasn’t that an interesting camera angle? Because then I start to get a little too deconstructed.

It’s OK to do – I’m not saying you can’t do it. Just be aware that a little bit of that in particular goes a massively long way.

And I’m kind of fascinated to see, OK, will I want to keep watching Dylan? Especially if Dylan is narrating his own story. It’s hard for me to say, but I definitely enjoyed the shit out of him for three pages. So, I mean, I’m on board. Given that you can do anything, the only other challenge is you’re going to have to keep that up. Right? You can’t do all these fun tricks in three minutes and then just get bored with them and just start doing your regular linear story. So lots of challenges here.

But, I mean, it was funny. And he was so specific. And I think it might be, so that helps. The voice was consistent. So well done.

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

**Dana:** I really liked it a lot. I had a lot of little check marks, which that just means I’m happy, on a little different lines. And there wasn’t a thunderstorm. And I don’t remember what I was wearing. And he changes outfits and the thing. I was down with it.

I’m always intrigued by things where people are missing, because I think it drives you. It feels like it has a cool, forward momentum to it.

My thing is very much your same thing that you guys were talking about which is kind of like I definitely want to know more. I wanted to be a little more sure of what the tone was of this, in the sense of like are you going for streaming or are you going for broadcast? Because right now I kind of can’t tell and I think it’s important that you make it very clear in the first three pages who you’re for at this particular time.

**Craig:** Isn’t everybody going for streaming? Does anybody go network at this point?

**John:** There’s no such thing as network anymore.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. Like, unless you’re a procedural. I just don’t think so.

**Dana:** On the TV, where they watch the TV? I don’t know how the people do it on the TV.

**Craig:** The TV.

**John:** Derek Haas has all the remaining broadcast shows and everything else is streaming.

**Craig:** Everything else is streaming. Exactly.

**Dana:** But I guess to that end, if this is definitely streaming, which you know I think it’s super fun and you should lean a little bit more into that in the sense that like, you know, Phoebe, you guys were talking about her. I can’t even believe we’re just using her first name like that, like all cas [casual] like. She made a pretty R-rated version of the direct-to-camera address stuff and the stuff that she’s saying is pretty hardcore. Like there’s a lot of sexual stuff in it. And it was super funny because it sort of leaned into tone a little bit more.

This felt like kind of in between like a thing I would expect to see on NBC and a thing I would expect to see on streaming. So I would kind of go a little bit more heavily into that direction if streaming is what you’re thinking of.

You know, the line on page one where it says, “Is Dylan the real Dylan? The Dylan who wrote this script?” That kind of stuff I usually absolutely hate, like with every fiber of my being. And the reason I usually hate it, and I didn’t actually hate it here, so yay, but what it did make me think is number one do you want to star in this, which is going to be in my head the whole time. Does this guy want to star in this? What are we talking about? Who is this guy?

So I don’t know that you want to do that. It gave me pause in sort of not a good way. I might take that line out. I don’t know. Those kinds of like cocky lines that we sometimes want to write in these lines of description, your script better be an A++ or else I’m annoyed that I’ve seen it in the script. So, when I get stuff from writers that has like a cheeky like, “Yeah, because we’re going to get a season three for sure,” I’m like [groans] take it out. It just really bugs me.

Again, because it makes me go like this better be A+ in order for that cheeky tone to pay off. So I’d be a little careful with that. And then I also have a thing on page two, “Why I was banging on this door, which again I didn’t do. Let me explain.” I have a weird rule which is like don’t say anything the audience might actually be thinking. So if a character of yours is saying something like, “Ugh, I’m getting really bored by talking to you right now.” No. Don’t say that. Because the audience might be like, yeah, I’m getting really bored watching you talk to him right now.

So if you’re saying that you have a problem. This was one of those moments where I was like that started to get into what Craig is talking about in terms of like don’t remind me so much that I’m watching a thing that is made by people because I’m trying to get into the thing that is made by people that you’re doing really well. So, let me get into it. Stop reminding me that there are people making it.

Yeah. But I really liked it. And I’m pushing hard on it because I really liked it and because I think you’re close. And I’d love to hear from you where the rest of it goes and if this kind of conceit is going on like Craig said for the whole thing. And how you’re going to do your storytelling in terms of how we’re going to understand the mystery of where this guy went. But I was in. I liked it a lot. I thought it was great.

**John:** Dylan, come up on stage and let’s answer these questions.

**Dana:** Dylan! Dylan!

**John:** Dylan.

**Dylan Guerra:** Hi.

**Dana:** Woohoo. Hi.

**John:** Hi Dylan.

**Dana:** Yay Dylan.

**Dylan:** Thank you.

**Dana:** Great Job.

**John:** So I’m going to disagree with Craig here a bit in terms of some of the tone and the talking to the audience. What I enjoyed about this is that I thought you were kind of deconstructing in some ways the actual talking to the audience of it all. It reminded me a little bit of the pilot for Mr. Robot which sets up this weird relationship between the central character and the audience. And so it’s like your character that seems very eager to please, but also a little cocky. And that combination is actually fascinating.

So, tell us about the origin of this. Because from what I was quickly able to Google it sounded like this was a play before this was something you were writing here. Tell us about this.

**Dylan:** So Find Him, it’s all a true story, which also a big I have with the show in general is to sort of also deconstruct what it means for something to be a true story. Is the reality we construct for ourselves more real than the reality that we actually experienced? And that’s sort of the ongoing theme and sort of why the camera interruptions happened.

So it started because it was a true story. And then I turned it into a one-person show and I’ve been doing it periodically at Ars Nova and some other theaters in New York City. And then I wanted to continue to sort of push the boundary of the narrative that the story was able to tell. And so I crafted it into a pilot. And so the deconstructing aspect or the hyper-awareness is sort of like the thing that will maintain throughout the show.

**John:** Now, the pilot that we’re reading, the first three pages we’re reading of this, is it a 30-minute pilot? A 60-minute?

**Dylan:** It’s a 30-minute.

**John:** So in some ways this reminded me of Search Party—

**Dana:** So great.

**John:** Which was a show I love which is about a bunch of 20-somethings who are ostensibly looking for this missing girl but really it’s just an excuse to have anything interesting happening in their lives. And it does feel like there’s an aspect of that to this story, too. Which is that you’re trying to figure out what this whole story means to yourself as you’re trying to do this investigation.

**Dylan:** Yeah. Totally. And I think throughout the pilot what starts to happen is you sort of – the end of the pilot episode you find out that I don’t actually have as much control of the situation as I thought I did. So the screen blacking out, like what begins to happen towards the end is scenes start to be shown that I don’t intend to show.

**Dana:** I really like that.

**Dylan:** Thank you. I do hear and it is always a concern is that I don’t want it to come across – it is written for me be the main person in because it’s a true story and I’m trying deconstruct true narratives. And so the most heightened that I feel like I can get that is if I was playing myself. And I do come from a wholly theatrical background. So I feel like I’m still trying to figure out the formatting in the way – it’s my nightmare for someone to read this and to be like, “Oh, this guy sucks.”

**Craig:** No, no, nobody would – it’s really good. I’m actually glad to know that it came from a stage background. It’s starting to explain a lot. But all the more reason then – I’m even more concerned in a little bit of a way because there is an experience that you can have as an artist on stage with an audience that is very different from being on a television screen. Because when you are there performing it you are there. It is happening. So the moments where you’re like, “Oh did you see that, the lights just went off, or did you see this, you thought it was this but it’s this,” they’re with you in it. They’re experiencing it with you.

When we watch television we understand somebody sat down, thought of it, contrived it, shot it, did five takes, edited it, and put it on there. It’s sort of the difference between watching a magician do magic in front of you and watching one of those things like a magic special where it’s so rigged. It’s harder when it’s rigged.

So, that’s number one to just think about. And number two, I love the idea that you’re going to start to lose control over this thing that you think you’re in control over. It’s very Pirandello. I love this. All the more reason to be sparing about how much you do in the beginning because if you don’t establish a certain kind of rules in the beginning, like OK, I can tell, OK, I liked about this, I lied about this. But the more you break down in the beginning the less shocking it will be when we find out later that you’re not completely in control of it. It’s like you showed too many tricks early.

So, I think Six Characters in Search of an Author do not understand they’re in a play in the beginning of the play. They come to understand they’re in a play. So, it’s different obviously here. But just think about that dial because that’s such a fascinating concept. And I want you to blow people’s minds with it as opposed to them going, oh, geez, another trick. Do you know what I mean? That’s the difference, right? So that’s the thing to keep in mind as you go because the medium – it’s different. It’s different. And I like the fact that you’re transporting it, but as you transport it you are going to have to do some things.

**Dana:** One of the things that’s great about you when I get to like see your face and talk to you is this – I can tell you that you can bring a sense of intimacy to this. And so I would also hope that there would be a moment where you are actually real in the pilot. So that all of the sort of the sort of artifice means something to me. Like that’s one of the things that I think I loved so much about Fleabag is it’s like taking on this ride and it’s funny and fun and cool and cocky, and then all of a sudden you’re like I have the feelings. I hurt – my heart and also my stomach. Oh god. And I’m sobbing.

And then I’m so onboard for any of the other stuff because I know that this character is actually feeling real feelings and is capable of feeling pain or being hurt. To me, you know, all comedy comes from pain, personally just to me that’s how it’s always been. So I always want to know that there’s some pain underlying the comedy or the breeziness or the fun or the crazy, because then I’m like 100% onboard for the other stuff.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Dylan, thank you so much for sending these pages in.

**Craig:** Good job.

**Dylan:** Thank you so much.

**John:** You’re going to see what happens next. Cool. All right, our last script is by a familiar name. James Llonch has written many of the outros for Scriptnotes, but we’ve never actually met him. And so he sent through these pages and they were a delight. So let me give you a quick synopsis of Nights Never Over. We met Lett, a European woman in her late 20s, as she leafs through her sketch book on a flight to New York. While everyone else on the flight watches breaking news about an event in Times Square, Lett reviews a mug shot of a nun and an old map of New York City. The map is overlaid with symbols and sigils.

A Frenchman unsuccessfully tries to flirt with her. Then as the New York skyline comes into view outside the flight we see a nine-foot-tall shadow demon sitting a few rows behind Lett. As we watch Lett walk through customs and get a taxi we hear snippets from talking heads on the news. They debate Article Eight. Through conversations on the news we learn that the country has been divided into domains and murder rituals are acceptable. The shadow demon follows Lett until she gets into her taxi. And that’s where we’re at at the bottom of three pages.

Craig, do you want to start us off?

**Craig:** Sure. Well, I’m a sucker for this genre. One of the world’s great fans of Constantine. I love the movie Constantine. I assume that this is Constantine-ish in that it appears that–

**John:** Is it Constantinople?

**Craig:** It’s Constantinoples in that the demon world seems to meshing with our world. I’m not quite sure who knows it and who doesn’t know it. This was my big confusion because – so she is clearly looking at something and she has some sort of magical access to something. The mug shot that she’s looking at with the skull and gate seal seems very arcane and occult-ish.

The guy next to her can’t see what she sees. All he sees is sketches of flowers. So there’s some sort of glamoring or magic going on there. There is also a demon sitting ten rows behind them which no one seems to notice or care about. And I’m not sure if it’s notice or care about. I don’t know if she knows that he’s back there. I don’t know, but that’s fine.

There is a lot of talking head debate as we’re moving through an airport and I think the talking head debate is basically referring to – it seems like it’s referring to some sort of law that governed the meshing of the demon domain with ours. That’s my guess. Otherwise I don’t understand what it is. But on the other hand I still don’t know if anybody else notices this other demon moving around, so I’m confused. Can they or can they not see the demons? Are the demons here or are they not here? I am so onboard for a show where it’s District 9 but it’s demons instead of aliens. I’m so onboard with that.

I am so confused by who knows what based on the presentation here. And I am generally concerned about using the talking heads in the background format to deliver exposition. It just never feels good. And I’m not sure it’s super necessary anyway.

**John:** Yeah. As I went through page two and page three I found myself scratching out a lot of lines in the talking heads and you just didn’t need them. Giving us less gave us a better sense of what was going on. James has really good branded ads we’re seeing in the background for In-Mind Retreats, Inter-generational séances, 5th Domain luxury living. I sense that this world is heightened in a way that feels really great. I think the District 9 comparison is really apt here in terms of the demon world stuff.

I mostly picked this one because of the world building and sort of just like establishing the rules for a new world and a new universe. And I think it’s done really, really well in these first three pages. I’m very much intrigued.

One of the consequences though, there’s so much world-building happening here I really didn’t know anything about Lett, this main character we’re following, except that she’s in this cool, strange world. And so that is one of the real challenges of these kind of situations is that you’re doing so much work to establish what this universe is like that we’re not spending time understanding what is special about our central character that we’re meeting here. Because really all we’ve seen her do is look through a notebook, go through customs, and get in a taxi by the end of these three pages.

Dana, what was your instinct on what we just—

**Dana:** I agree with a lot of what you guys were saying. I mean, because I don’t read a lot of stuff like this. You guys probably read a lot more stuff like this. I was just overall kind of confused about the rules of the world as Craig was saying. Like if the demon can pass through people at the airport why is he going above customs and down, like just walk through customs because nobody could see you.

On the airplane when we see the demon, I loved that reveal. I was like, ooh, fun. And yet I didn’t cut to a stewardess walking by and then we see there’s nothing there, so that we know that nobody else can see. And then I think even if you reveal that there you definitely have to also reveal somewhere whether Lett can see that person, the demon or not.

I actually didn’t understand the magical thing Craig that you were talking about. I literally thought it was just that from his perspective the only thing he had a view of was drawings – that he saw something from his perspective that was different than what she was seeing. So I would just say, normally I’m not a fan of, as Craig calls it, like writing something you can’t shoot. But I think in these situations it’s helpful to kind of like ground me a little bit. You know, at some point when we land in the terminal I wouldn’t mind hearing it’s clear we’re in a dystopian…just say maybe one line about what it is that I’m in, this world that I’m in.

Even if it’s like a world that’s 20 degrees off from our own where we see demons and blah-blah-blah living in the blah-blah-blah. Like that would have helped me a little bit.

**John:** Dana, back to that moment. I misread the French guy looking at her notebook the same way, too. And what I really needed was just some underlining or some sort of bolding to sort of say like he sees something different than what we just saw. And that’s what – I just needed some clarity right there.

**Craig:** Unless I’m wrong. I mean, I could be wrong.

**Dana:** Or a description. And we’re going to get it.

**John:** Oh, I think you’re right.

**Dana:** I think you might be right.

**John:** We’ll ask him.

**Dana:** Or even just a description of what the actual visual effect is going to look like. Like what am I going to see when I’m watching it? That would have helped me.

I agreed with John and Craig. I’d cut out all of the righteous anger talking point talking head stuff. I basically took out all of it except for maybe the very last sentence about “make all the morality arguments you want, the founding fathers never intended murder rituals to be welcomed within our border” because that was like, oh, now I sort of understand what this world is that I’m in.

The thing about the demon going over the ceiling and looking down was – it was a very cool idea, but the way it was written was kind of confusing. I think you have to think about if you’re going to be shifting perspectives, if I’m in Lett and I’m a normal world customs agent, then you’re going to take me to the ceiling and I’m looking down from the POV of the demon, you have to make it a little more clear that I’m in demon POV. Because I had to read that a couple times to kind of go, oh, I’m up there looking down. OK, that’s cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a weird phrasing here. Shadow Black eyes Lett. So eyes is a really tough verb generally to throw in there like that as a transitive verb, because we look at it as a noun usually, especially with Shadow Black eyes. But Shadow Black watches Lett from above as its face skims across the terminal ceiling. If its face is skimming across the ceiling then–

**Dana:** And I’m looking at it, not—

**Craig:** Correct. Exactly. It’s looking up at the ceiling, not looking down. As it skims across – skims is also a strange verb there, too. It’s tricky. These things seem so tiny and dinky compared to the larger things, except that when people are confused, especially in something like this where a lot of it you know is going to be sort of novel and world-building you have to be so careful about how people are taking it in and how much they’re capable of taking in. The talking points, the problem with the talking points thing is that it’s a setup. It’s obviously a setup.

Oh, so we happen to be watching this in the background? If you started the show with just these two guys talking, then I would go, OK, fine. The point is we’re watching a show and these two guys are talking and this is what they’re debating. But when you throw it all in the background while Lett is walking by and you’re like, oh, how convenient that in the background of this other scene there’s the world’s most expository discussion happening on TV. That’s the problem.

**Dana:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s welcome James on stage and we can talk about what he’s written and where it came from.

James Llonch: Hey everybody, hey.

**Craig:** Hello.

**Dana:** Hi.

**Craig:** How much of that is going to become an outro, by the way? [laughs]

**James:** Quite a bit. Quite a bit.

**John:** James, tell us about the origin of this story.

**James:** Well, I always wanted to place a high fantasy show in New York City. I mean, through the three pages, I mean, you can’t pick up on it through the three pages, but the domains are relegated strictly to Manhattan Island. So there’s 13 domains within Manhattan Island.

**John:** So like boroughs but like—?

**James:** Right. Much smaller. And various supernatural groups kind of have control of these domains and they act as sovereign entities within the state and the country.

**Craig:** Got it. So like reservations for demons, vampires, werewolves, whatever it may be?

**James:** Yes. And there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on in the domains.

**Craig:** Clearly. Clearly. Some questions that we had, I’m curious if you could clear up for us. Is Lett aware of the demon on the plane?

**James:** Yes. That’s actually a sort of coworker.

**Craig:** Oh.

**James:** An antagonistic coworker that she is not very fond of. That’s why she’s not sitting with it.

**Craig:** OK. Well there’s a huge opportunity there.

**Dana:** That’s a super fun idea. It’s not coming through, but I love it.

**Craig:** Right. So a demon is stalking a woman and then finally she turns to him and says, “I just spent three days with you in meetings. I’m going home now. Why don’t you go that way? I’m going that way. No, we’re not sharing a cab, how about that?” And then she goes away. And then I go, wow, I was not expecting that that was the relationship going on here.

So, because the way it’s set up he’s stalking her in such a manner that we think she cannot see him. Can everybody else see him?

**James:** No. Lett is a witch, so only witches can see him.

**Craig:** Got it. OK.

**James:** Everybody in the terminals, they can’t see him.

**John:** That clarifies then the French guy, he couldn’t see the stuff in the notebook because it was a charm. It was like a magic thing that happens, right?

**James:** Exactly. But I will say, Dana, I know – the paint is a little wet on this draft. I knew that I cheated at that reveal and that’s like on my list of things to change. But thank you for pointing that out again.

**Dana:** Oh, please, don’t worry. This is all just fun. So the thing I was going to say is what it feels like it wants to be in this first chunk, so the Air France flight, what I loved was starting off and having everybody be watching something on their TVs that seems sort of awful. So I would get rid of all the language and I would show what it is that you want people to see. Because this is a visual medium. So you have the opportunity for there.

And by the way there’s no sound because everyone just has their fucking TVs on. So that’s cool, too. That works for you. And that means you can have a map of Manhattan. You can see the districts. You can see how it’s illustrated and what’s going on.

**Craig:** That’s a great idea. That’s a great idea.

**Dana:** And watch some of the chaos and the madness. What I loved about this was I’ve been on planes where I’m like, you know, something bad is happening on earth and you’re on a plane and it’s a really fucking disconcerting feeling. That’s like a cool, fun energy. And so what I think you want to do is I think you want to start out in a few lines here. We meet Lett. She’s doing this thing. We think she’s just in like normal human world, on a plane, and then we’re like, oh, something is going on down on earth. That’s disconcerting. Everybody else seems to be stressed out about it except for her. That makes her different from everybody else and I’m going like, ooh, now I know why I’m watching this specific lady.

And then you kind of want to have a normal human moment, which is like more drink, more drink. I need more vodka, let’s go. And then vodka comes and then it’s like reveal demon and I’m like what am I watching? I love this show. And, you know, do the Craig thing where she turns to him and is like, “Bob, I’m not fucking talking to you anymore. We went through meetings. It’s like you’re always talking over me. You demon-splained me through that whole meeting.” Or whatever that thing is that’s within your tone. And then I’m like 100% onboard. And just make it very clear that this moment is magic. She is a witch and that what she’s writing and doing nobody else can see. And so the guy looks and we watch it change before our very eyes. It turns into a…

I think all of this can be really great.

**Craig:** James, think of a trailer for this thing and think of the little tiny moments that have no words to them that tell you so much. So like you’re on a plane and all of these people are staring at their screens. They’re all watching the same thing. There’s no audio. But we can tell it’s a tragedy. Someone is even like getting teary. And then there’s one woman who just glances over and rolls her eyes and then just goes back to what she’s doing. Rolls her eyes.

If everybody was watching 9/11 on their screens and someone was like, ugh, idiots, you’d be like who are you and what is your deal and what do you know, and where are you from?

**James:** Right.

**Craig:** So little things that draw character out and put us – so that rather than facts coming through we get humanity/character coming through that helps juxtapose how things are.

The demon is stalking her because as it turns out he does not want to spend money on his own Uber. He wants to share the Uber. He always does. He’s cheap. She doesn’t want to have it. If you’re saving the reveal for later of what their relationship is, the problem is that you’ve cheated here because you’re getting fake suspense out of us. And then later saying, “Oh, that wasn’t really suspense.” You have to undermine it in the same movement or it’s cheating.

**James:** Right. OK, I mean, I reveal their relationship maybe ten pages later, 12 pages later.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it’s cheating here because he was stalking her and then it turns out he wasn’t stalking her. So you get the freebie of him stalking her. What will happen later is people are going to be like, well, why did you make me think that? That doesn’t even – why was he even doing that? You know what I mean?

**James:** I actually do the same exact thing again 12 pages later. But then I like reveal–

**Craig:** Stop cheating.

**Dana:** Well I think that’s one of the things that I think is good to say to yourself for all of the people that we’ve talked to today. One of the things I always try to say to myself is what would really happen. It doesn’t matter what you’re actually showing or what world you’re in, or even if you’re in demon world. Because if you’re in demon world what would really happen given your rules and your world? What would really actually happen?

And what would actually happen is that she would turn to him and say something to him at some point. Or she would see him or acknowledge him or whatever. And so you’ve got to do that, because that’s the world you’ve set up.

**James:** OK.

**Craig:** Awesome work, man. Thank you.

**John:** James, thank you so much for sending this in and thank you for all of the outros.

**Craig:** Yeah, seriously. And honestly I’ll watch this because – I’m serious – I love the genre.

**James:** Yeah, I have some crazy shit in this.

**Craig:** Good. I love crazy shit.

**John:** Thanks. This is normally the time on the show when we would do our One Cool Things but the show has been going on for about 19 years. And so I propose we cut One Cool Things, unless you had something you especially wanted to share?

**Craig:** No.

**Dana:** No, last time I did my breast pump. So, I really don’t feel like I can top that.

**Craig:** Oh, and that was mine for this time was breast pump.

**Dana:** OK, perfect.

**Craig:** We’re covered.

**John:** It’s crucial. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks this week to Nima Yousefi and Dustin Box and especially Quinn Emmitt for helping us out.

**Dana:** My baby.

**John:** Our outro this week is by James Llonch.

**Craig:** How about that?

**John:** 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. Dana, you are @inthehenhouse.

**Dana:** Oh my god, you’re amazing. Yes. And please give to the support our crews fund.

**John:** Absolutely. So the support our crews fund, just search GoFundMe. It is It Takes Our Village. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’re find the three pages that our four wonderful people sent in. If you want to send in your own three pages you can do it. Go to johnaugust.com/threepage. It’s all spelled out.

You’ll find the transcripts up about four days after we get the episode up on the air.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes, bonus segments, and if you’re in this situation you had to be a Premium member to send in your three pages, so thank you to all 160 who sent in for that.

Craig, Dana, thank you so very much.

**Dana:** I love you guys so much.

**Craig:** Thanks guy. We love you, too.

**John:** And thank you to our entrants. Thank you so much. Bye.

**Dana:** Bye.

Links:

* [Home Before Dark](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/home-before-dark/umc.cmc.5yqy2wv4w7l0v4x5mn3le8l1y)
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**Craig Mazin:** Hi folks. This episode does contain some strong language so put in those ear buds, put in those headphones. Keep those children safe.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 445 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today it’s our very first ever live video Scriptnotes. We have some number of people watching us live on YouTube, each of them wondering, wait, is that what Craig and John actually look like?

**Craig:** No. This is not what we look like.

**John:** No. So we do live shows fairly often, a couple times a year. We do one in Austin generally. We do a holiday show. This is a special occasion so we’re doing one live streaming on the Internet. People aren’t really here to see us. They’re here to see our two very special guests who we’re going to bring out in a moment. We’re also today going to have a game segment. We’re going to have audience questions. So it will be like our normal live show, except I won’t have had 1.5 glasses of wine which is the amount of wine I need basically to do a live show.

**Craig:** And that’s a bummer because you will be 1.5 times less entertaining. I’m just going to be honest.

**John:** Yes. So, this is 10am. We’re recording this on a Saturday in Los Angeles. But people around the world are watching this which is so exciting. So, as we’re talking right now I now see that there are, let’s see, how many people are watching this? 654 people–

**Craig:** We’re on our way to 14,000 which is my – that’s my target, 14,000. Yeah. Seems reasonable. A small arena. That’s how I work.

**John:** So this is free for the world. This is not a fundraiser for anything. This is just a morale raiser. But for Premium subscribers, Craig you don’t know that we’re going to do this. We’re going to do a postmortem after the show, maybe tomorrow we’ll record this, to figure out what we learned and what went well and what went wrong in the process.

**Craig:** Great. I’m sure that under what went wrong I will feature heavily.

**John:** [laughs] It is a weird moment in which we’re all now just broadcasters. Somehow we’re supposed to be doing television, just everyone.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it turns out that broadcasting is not the rare talent that we were all told it was.

**John:** Mm-mm. Anybody can do it in their basement.

**Craig:** Yeah. People would say you’re no brain surgeon or radio broadcaster. Well, we’re all–

**John:** We’re all broadcasters now.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re all broadcasters now. It’s not hard. It’s not hard.

**John:** All right. Let us welcome our two very, very special guests. First off can I welcome Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She is an Emmy, Golden Globe-winning writer, and actor, whose credits include Killing Eve and Fleabag. She’s joining us from London. Phoebe Bridge, please turn on your camera and join us on Scriptnotes.

**Phoebe Waller-Bridge:** Hey.

**John:** Phoebe!

**Craig:** There she is.

**Phoebe:** We did it!

**John:** We did it.

**Craig:** She looks just like she does on TV. It’s amazing.

**John:** It’s incredible. Actors are wonderful, beautiful people.

**Phoebe:** I know.

**John:** Phoebe it is so wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much. It’s a fantasy to have you on the show at all, but to have you all the way from London is a special, special treat.

**Phoebe:** Thanks for having me.

**John:** Our second guest, Ryan Reynolds is an actor, writer, producer, gin magnate, and somehow a wireless provider. He’s known for such films as Deadpool and The Nines. Ryan Reynolds—

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Ryan Reynolds:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** Ryan Reynolds!

**Ryan:** You forgot some of my awards like MTV Movie Award Best Kiss nominee 1998.

**Craig:** Good year.

**Ryan:** Very good year.

**Craig:** Who won? Who could have possibly beaten you?

**Ryan:** I think Tobey Maguire. Pretty sure it was Tobey Maguire. Hi everybody.

**John:** Ooh.

**Ryan:** This is very exciting.

**John:** It’s nice to have everyone here together, around the world, to talk and do things. And we’re all looking directly at our camera lenses which is something which is a question I want to start off asking the two of you about, because last week on the show we were talking about Clueless. We did a deep dive on Clueless which is one of my favorite movies of all time. And we were talking about how important Cher’s narration was in Clueless because she is talking directly to us as an audience about her experiences and we would not understand the movie without that.

But the two of you are known for looking directly at the lens and talking to the audience and having a relationship with the audience as characters which is so different from most movies. So let’s start with you, Phoebe. As a writer and as a performer how do you make that decision to suddenly start talking directly to the people watching and what’s the decision process in terms of when is the right time to break that seal?

**Phoebe:** Well Fleabag started as a play and it was a one-woman play. So that was all directed to the audience anyway. And I always felt like I wanted the audiences’ experience to be that they feel like they know someone really intimately and then they get sort of betrayed by her halfway through. So it starts off as a sort of mini sort of standup act. And then you realize halfway through that actually there’s sort of more going on. And that by the time you like her and she’s made you laugh she then divulges things to you that you feel uncomfortable about but you feel complicit in that moment. And so bringing that into the TV show sort of felt like a no-brainer.

But then what was hard was that when I was doing the play I was the only person there. It was a lonely experience. And also I was in total – the character in that was completely in control of the narrative. Whereas suddenly in the TV show there’s actual real life things happening around that are also truthful. So I had to kind of shift it so she wasn’t just the only person describing the world. You could see the world. So then it had to become about her – about having fun with it a bit more. So she would tell you someone was going to behave in a certain way and then they don’t. And then she’s actually a bit knocked by that. So lots of little sort of games and stuff that we were playing throughout it.

But overall for me in the TV show it was to create a relationship between Fleabag and the camera that actually changed and evolved itself. So, at the beginning she’s sort of like, “Come in. This is going to be fun, and sexy, and cool, and I’m in total control.” And then by the end of the first season the camera won’t leave when she wants it to. So she’s like, “Oh, fuck, I should never have done that. I should never have let you in.” So sort of made it a central relationship.

**Craig:** Is there any parallel to your actual life now that the camera will not leave you alone? Oh, fuck, why did I do that?

**Phoebe:** I mean, yeah. It cuts quite close to the bone there, Craig.

**Craig:** Good. That’s my job here is to upset. Ryan, say something that I can then make you feel bad about.

**Ryan:** Oh, please, there’s ideas, a whole list alphabetical and chronological that you could probably make me feel bad about.

**John:** But Ryan I was going to say as long as I’ve known you you’ve been trying to make the Deadpool movie. So you were always obsessed with this character and this character in the comic books did break that fourth wall and seemed to be aware that he was in a comic book. But at what stage did it become clear that, oh, in playing this role I will be directly addressing the audience? There’s going to be a relationship between me and the audience that’s different than sort of a normal hero.

**Ryan:** On Deadpool in particular he has a very intimate relationship with the audience. I mean, even by virtue of the fact that Deadpool exists is exclusively because of the Internet and the audience that made it happen after the test footage leaked that we’d made years before. They were the ones that sort of generated the energy that convinced the studio to say, yes, we’ll make this film.

So, it sort of started off that way and I love it. I love how intimate – there’s an intimate relationship there. Deadpool is constantly acknowledging and playing with the cultural landscape. And I think in doing that there’s a bit of a nod-nod-wink-wink with the audience. So, it’s always been – it’s just something to be judicious about with us. I find that less is more with it. I mean, by the second movie I think we’d done it about half as much as the first one. But I do love it. I do love a good fourth-wall break.

**Craig:** There’s something about that connection that both of you guys do that I find fascinating in its relationship to comedy particular. Because I do love comedy, you’re both hysterical. Fleabag is wonderfully funny. Deadpool is wonderfully funny. But you are also talking to the man that was crying on a plane at the end of Deadpool 2. Crying. Like a lot. [laughs] And I was crying a lot because I cared.

**Ryan:** The efficacy of alcohol is much more severe on an airplane.

**Craig:** I wasn’t even drinking. I was not drinking. It was just that because you loved her and you got to say goodbye. Anyway, the point is when you are having these conversations with people it seems to me that you are also getting at something that is true underneath comedy in general which is that funny characters at their best are funny because we understand also that they are sad. That in some way there is something profoundly sad about everyone that is being really, really funny.

And I’m curious what you think about that in terms of how you create your particular characters that you’re so well known for and why people connect to them so well, especially when they’re kind of one-on-one.

**Ryan:** Hopefully this will be pithy, but I do think that the key difference is one is obnoxious and then funny to me is usually steeped or filtered through some kind of prism of pain or you’ve earned it in some way, otherwise you’re just spouting obnoxious jokes. So, that’s always the trick. I know certainly for Deadpool it was always a trick to weight the B side of everything or the A side depending on how it’s constructed but with some pathos or some kind of pain. And it’s also what I find most challenging about writing on Deadpool is that we really have to take everything away from this guy in order for him to exist, otherwise he would just be too much. So you have to – for both of those movies – we have to strip everything that he holds dear away in order to create this real estate in which we can sort of create a bit of a playground. So making that guy the underdog by virtue of his face, he’s all sort of scarred up. He looks sort of hideous under the mask. All those kinds of things. Those are all, I think, those are all the key ingredients to allowing this guy to sort of spread his wings and fly and be as funny as possible.

So, that’s the sort of unsexy work that goes into it. But I do think, I just don’t want to forget this, I think the most beautiful use of a fourth wall breakup I’ve ever seen is Phoebe’s in the last season of Fleabag. That goodbye was, uh, it just – it pulled every vital source of oxygen out of my body. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

**Craig:** It’s also, I mean, let’s just buff her up a little bit more here. The moment where Andrew Scott notices the camera was one of the first acts of actual cinematic invention I think I’ve seen ever. Because I think by the time like I came along in 1971 they’d invented everything. We had flashbacks and montages. People had broken the fourth. But that was astonishing. It was so astonishing – it was a brand new way to tell people in an audience she’s in love with him and he’s special and he deserves it because he’s on that – what a brilliant…what a brilliant thing to do.

Why are you so smart? There’s your question.

**Phoebe:** Um…well. I’m going to put it down to, do you ever – I don’t know if you guys have this, but you know sometimes when you slightly dissociate yourself from ideas that you have? Because that one I do – I remember having that idea really early on before I’d even come up with the character of the priest. Thinking, fuck, that is smart. And it happens but it’s like outside of you, so like all the painful stuff happens like when you’re actually trying to make something work or fit together, but there are moments – and literally I was thinking – it was less of “fuck this is smart,” more like “that will be cool.” And it just affected me in a way.

And I thought but what would that mean for her? Because I think like Ryan was saying you’re constantly trying to find a way to throw rocks at your characters and like especially if they’re funny. Because being funny takes a confidence. And also to be able to be relentlessly funny takes an awful lot of effort. And I think if you meet people in real life who are just like constantly on, you know, you think the [unintelligible] so hard underneath and you think why are you working so hard?

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**Phoebe:** And what are you hiding?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Phoebe:** What happens when you stop? And in some ways that was what the idea when Fleabag began anyway was that she was just the first five minutes of this, like when I first started writing the play was just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. And I was getting exhausted. And I was like she is clearly miserable. And then it was finding out what that was.

But I also think there’s g really heroic about people who try and be funny. Because you can die multiple times in a moment and there’s a real risk in it. And so people being really funny in a really heartbreaking situation can feel both heroic or can feel kind of cowardly at the same time. And I think that’s a really fun thing to be able to play with in a moment. And also the moments that the character isn’t funny, or doesn’t crack a joke and actually lets you in a little bit, is a really powerful tool to have.

**Craig:** Right.

**Phoebe:** But I think, yeah, I have to believe that the funniest people in the world are in deep, deep pain. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yes.

**Phoebe:** Like you say, otherwise it is just endlessly – they just get boring after a while.

**John:** So a question for both Phoebe and Ryan, as you’re doing asides to the camera, as you’re having this direct relationship with the audience, as the writer and as the actor who are you seeing there as the audience? Are you really playing it to the camera operator right behind that? Or are you trying to picture the viewer at home? Who is the person you’re having a relationship with when you’re doing these asides?

**Ryan:** I mean, I typically just right down the barrel. I’m also not, you know, I don’t come from any particular – as you may or not know – school of acting. So I don’t have – person, tennis ball, whatever. [laughs] You know, I can do it. So I don’t need to have that extra feedback in order to kind of pull off the two camera look. It dos help if I enjoy the A-camera operator in the moment because, you know, I feel like you’re sort of delivering it right to him, or her. But that’s, yeah, no, it’s just right down the barrel.

If the camera is too close, though, you can get a little cross-eyed. And I’m naturally cross-eyed, so it’s already an uphill battle.

**John:** Phoebe who is the audience as you’re doing your things?

**Phoebe:** Just the audience. I think I’m the same. I didn’t think of anything too romantic to think about because I don’t know how I’d act that actually, how I’m going to act continuously that there’s another mysterious person that I’m thinking of and trying to communicate that to the audience would feel like a complicated message to get over which is why I think.

So, yeah, I just imagined an audience. And also I felt like the part of it that Fleabag was just desperately trying to keep their attention. So every time looking at the camera was stay with me, I’m here. And then when it changed it would be like, oh, don’t look at me. So sometimes it was a happy welcoming thing, and sometimes it would feel like, you know, an evil eye.

But, yeah, the relationship with my DP who was the camera operator as well was really important, especially when he was like, “Put your face down. You look gross.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Phoebe:** It’s like, “Head up. Head up.” But I really loved in Deadpool 1 as well that really little moment when you just pushed the camera aside and you just give us that little break. And you go, “I don’t think you guys want to see that.” And the fact that he has care for us in it really – because there’s so much bravado and then he’s actually like, “Oh, actually give yourself a break.” I really loved that bit.

**Craig:** Fleabag and the Deadpool movies both have this meta awareness which does not undermine the reality of what they’re doing at all. It kind of oddly enhances it. It’s a common thing I think for people to think when they’re writing something that if you start to break the fourth wall what you’re doing is blowing apart the reality of the situation therefore people will not care about the characters.

So, I’m kind of curious as you guys went through this process, and Ryan I know you were writing on Deadpool 2, as you were writing was this a concern that maybe by doing this too much or in the wrong places that you would undermine what was real and what people would care about, or did you have an innate sense that if it was done in certain ways and certain times it would actually make us connect more to the fake reality of the world you were building?

**Ryan:** I think it’s both. I think it’s a cheat, for me at least. I’m not going to speak for Phoebe or anyone else. But for me it’s a bit of a cheat, you know. I think you want to be very judicious with it and you want to make sure that you’re not overdoing it obviously. But there’s a whole sequence. I remember, I don’t know about you guys, but I find I can spend two days – first off, let me just say this is the perfect [unintelligible] – I hate writing. I just hate it. It’s the worst thing ever.

**Craig:** No, that’s accurate.

**Ryan:** I find that I can get fixated on two lines for like four straight days. I can just be hammering away, fixated on these two when I should just be moving on. And then other days I can put out 20, 30 pages. But I remember there was this one scene in Deadpool which is like a 15-page scene which is already a bit of a no-no in a film—

**Craig:** Slightly.

**Ryan:** Yeah. But it’s a scene where Deadpool has lost the lower half of his body and he has these little child legs growing back. And I loved writing it because as long as you can go in the scene without revealing these child legs to me was very funny. And then we get into some kind of weird cinematic trope where I break the fourth wall and I – oh, we’re talking about time travel that was it, which is also another just horrendous thing to write.

And I remember breaking the fourth wall and saying, “That’s just lazy writing.” So, you know, really that’s a complete cheat because that was lazy writing and we’re forgiven for it to a certain degree by acknowledging that it’s lazy writing. And then kind of carrying on.

But I tend to use it initially as a crutch a lot. And it’s rarely written into the screenplays. I mean, Deadpool we almost never wrote it in. And then Deadpool 2 I think it was written in at one point during an extraordinarily belabored death sequence at the end of the movie. I just did a couple in the script. I wrote, you know, “straight to camera.” But other than that we didn’t, you know.

**Phoebe:** You had decided to do it before filming though? But it wasn’t in the script?

**Ryan:** Oh yes. Oh, 100%. Yes. Breaking the fourth wall. That’s actually not an invention of ours. That’s from the comic books. He’s constantly talking to the reader in the comics. But we did this elaborate death sequence at the end of Deadpool 2 and I was just doing everything – at one point I even did somebody’s award speech from the Golden Globes straight to camera. It was another person’s. Absolutely kitchen sink type stuff.

**Phoebe:** Oh, I can see just that moment right now.

**Ryan:** Right. Just on and on and on and on. But it was, yeah, I do love it. I mean, I do really love that sort of after a while it creates a bit of a trust I think there. And just as long as you don’t overdo it.

**Craig:** You planned for it to happen but you did not plan ahead in terms of actually writing what it was that you were going to say or even when it was going to happen.

**Ryan:** No.

**Craig:** Whereas Phoebe, I’m just going to go out on a limb here and think that you planned it all pretty carefully because you were coming from the stage where obviously you had to perform every night in the same way.

**Phoebe:** Yeah, yeah. And I crumble under the pressure to be able to be spontaneous with the straight to camera. I would lean on the script. In terms of how many times I spoke to the camera that was really scripted. But there were looks that weren’t scripted. I went with abandon with that when we were shooting. And then we just took them all out.

**Craig:** Not all.

**Phoebe:** I was like being all creative. And there’s a cut of the first episode of the second series when I just wanted to see what it looked like when there was just no looks to camera or no talking to camera at all. And my poor editor Gary was sort of like, “Are we really going to do this?” And just to see how it sits without it so you can feel the impact of it again. And we just scripted so far back, because I think it can get irritating because there’s a self-awareness about it and somebody being consistently self-aware all the time is a bit like the same thing as someone making jokes the whole time. But it’s almost like commenting on what’s happening. And so I did put it back quite a lot.

But, god, I really went for it in a few scenes and it’s a shame. It’s a shame.

**Ryan:** You would side eye the camera, though, which was just one of my favorite things that you would do. In an emotional moment there would just be this little side eye glance to the camera. Oh, it was such a great use of it.

**Craig:** I do them sometimes. I try and do them. Like in my house sometimes if something happens—

**Ryan:** Always.

**Craig:** And I screw up. There’s one thing that I always do from the Howard Stern movie Private Parts where he’s gotten his first job at a radio station and he pours Dr. Pepper on a record and he goes [laughs like Howard] and I’ll do that any time I drop something. And now if I screw something up or somebody says something ridiculous I’ll just sometimes look over. I’ll look over to a Fleabag camera and just go…

**Phoebe:** Oh good. Good.

**Craig:** You’ve ruined me.

**John:** Nice. Well, let’s talk about self-awareness because both of you are writing things in which you are going to star. And you’re going to be the principal person we’re going to see on screen. And it must change your relationship to the material and to all your collaborators. So you are the person, you’re the face of this thing, but you have directors, you have producers, you have other actors in the thing. How do you balance, and especially both in production, but when you get to post, how do you balance your relationship as the person who created this thing with the person who is the centerpiece star of it? How do you take in outside feedback to make sure you’re doing the right things? You are the center of this whole project. How do you make sure that it actually makes sense? Who do you turn to and how do you have those conversations?

Ryan, I’ll start with you. Who do you enlist in your circle of trust because the camera is aimed at you and you’re talking directly to the camera, how do you know when you’ve gone too far? How do you know when to rein it back in?

**Ryan:** First off, fuck everyone else’s opinion.

**Craig:** There we go. There it is. I knew it. I knew it.

**Ryan:** Secondly, no. I am so self-loathing. You know, look, this panel of people right here have forgotten more about screenwriting on this call than I’ll ever know.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Ryan:** I’ll start with that. But I’ll say this, though. I am so self-loathing that there is no part of me that is really precious about more me in anything. I do struggle, you know, this film I did this year called Free Guy, which is one of my favorite things that I’ve ever been a part of, I struggled writing other people in it. Not myself so much, but I did struggle making sure that their voices felt three-dimensional and important. It’s easy to give other people jokes. But, yeah, in the post-production process sitting in there I had no problem. My biggest problem is pulling out too much stuff. You know, I’ll start to – I’ll pull stuff out and the editor or in this case Shawn Levy who I was working with, the director and producer, he would say that you’re taking out exposition at this point. You’re taking out important information that we need to know. Just because you don’t want yourself…

So, yeah, that’s never been a huge problem of mine. But then there’s also – the flip side is I can get a little crazy about certain jokes or beats or things that are for whatever reason super important to me. But, you know, I take feedback in a test audience the same way anyone else takes feedback in a test audience. I can walk away and if there’s a resounding no to something then it’s got to go.

**Craig:** Phoebe, self-loathing also?

**Phoebe:** Yeah, huge amounts of self-loathing. All the way through every part of the process. I lean really heavily on my director, Harry Bradbeer, and my producer, Tony Robbins. Because they are really brutally honest. No matter how much that hurts it’s so valuable. But also there’s sometimes when I, from a performance point of view, I feel there’s so much going on. Sometimes I just wouldn’t know. And feeling like you’re in it when you’re also running it and that kind of stuff is a luxury. I don’t feel very in it all the time as an actor. I don’t actually know if I’ve felt like that to be honest. It’s so bad.

But so I would – I’d just be like is it funny, is it sad? Basically is like the question that would be thrown across the set. Sad enough? And Harry would be like, “Sadder.”

So, I really rely on them. And then I suppose, I can’t remember what the other thing I was going to say. What was the other thing that Ryan said?

**Ryan:** I don’t know. No idea.

**Craig:** He’s not good at writing. And…

**Ryan:** And now, yeah.

**Phoebe:** Oh yeah, he’s a terrible actor. He’s terrible at writing. Really bad at producing.

**Ryan:** I’m OK at some stuff. I’m OK – I can drink like a fish. Yeah.

**John:** Ryan, I think we can help you out because from the very start of Scriptnotes we’ve been trying to offer sort of useful advice. And to steer people away from bad advice that they often get as screenwriters. Because new screenwriters are sort of inundated – they read the books. They go online. They look through all these guides to teaching you how to be a better screenwriter, how to even get started as a screenwriter. So I thought we might play a game the four of us together to figure out sort of like how to sort through the good advice and the bad advice.

So what I did last night is I went online and I Googled “screenwriting mistakes” and I pulled some of the advice I found online about screenwriting mistakes. And I’m going to invite on a contestant to play this game with us.

**Craig:** Hey Paige.

**Paige Feldman:** Hi.

**Phoebe:** Hi Paige!

**John:** Paige, can you introduce yourself?

**Paige:** Hi, I am Paige Feldman. I’m a writer and director. I’m living in Los Angeles. I just signed my first feature deal like on Monday.

**Phoebe:** Yay.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** How about that? We have really – I mean, our listeners are quality.

**John:** Yes.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, Paige, this is going to be a game segment. So what I’ve done is I’ve pulled this advice from the Internet but it also introduced some things I just made up myself. And so your job is going to be to figure out what was real bad advice and what is fake bad advice. And so as a new screenwriter this is important stuff for you to figure out.

Now, I should ask you have you ever played on a game show before?

**Paige:** Yes. I was a contestant on Jeopardy! in the teen tournament when I was 16.

**Craig:** Wait, hold on. Hold on.

**Phoebe:** What?

**Craig:** Where have you been all my life?

**Ryan:** Yeah buddy. Let’s walk that back a second.

**John:** Paige, you have to tell us about this teen tournament. So, how did you do? What were the questions that got you? Tell us.

**Paige:** So, I lost in the first round. Lost on Final Jeopardy!

**John:** What was the answer, what was the question? Let’s see if we can get it. Craig will probably get it. We’ll see.

**Craig:** I’ll try. I’ll try.

**Paige:** In 1859 this man said to Horace Greeley, “I have 15 wives. I know no one who has more.”

**Craig:** Ooh, that was 18-what?

**Paige:** I think it was ’59. I mean, it was in 2001 that I was on the show so this is—

**Phoebe:** Have you got people in your head for the other years, Craig?

**John:** I was going to guess Brigham Young, but I’m not sure.

**Craig:** I was going to guess Joseph Smith, but I don’t think we’re right.

**Ryan:** I was gonna go Joseph Smith.

**Craig:** [laughs] That was the fakest – I was Brigham Smitherson.

**John:** Paige, what is the answer?

**Paige:** It was Brigham Young.

**Craig:** Oh, you got it. Great. You picked the right Mormon.

**Phoebe:** Oh my god.

**Ryan:** John August!

**Paige:** You could have won the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament, John.

**Ryan:** Wow.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Who did you pick out of curiosity, Paige?

**Paige:** I had absolutely no idea because I didn’t know who Horace Greeley was when I was 16. So, I just—

**Ryan:** For shame!

**Paige:** I just chose the only person I knew who had a lot of wives which was Henry VIII, even though I knew he only had six. And I enjoyed myself on the show until I got eliminated and then I got to watch all of my friends do fantastically. So.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I hope that they all paid for it somehow.

**John:** Let’s hope you can do better on this one. I think you probably will do better on this one.

**Craig:** High stakes.

**John:** All right. So let’s start with some really basics. We’ll have Craig start with a first bit of advice. So this will be A, B, and C. Craig, you start.

**Craig:** Basics of formatting. Is it, A, only use Fade in and Fade out at the beginning and of your script?

**John:** Or is it B?

**Phoebe:** Dissolve to is the proper transition to use within the script if needed.

**John:** Or is it C?

**Ryan:** Make sure to underline jokes in your script so that even idiot actors can understand them. Save italics for dramatic moments like when Deadpool remembers his hot dead wife.

**Craig:** I love that moment.

**John:** So, Paige, which is the fake answer there?

**Paige:** I am going to guess it’s C unless Ryan was adlibbing the idiot actors part.

**John:** C is the correct one.

**Phoebe:** She’s good, guys. She’s good.

**John:** She’s good. She’s good.

**Craig:** She’s on it.

**John:** A pro.

**Craig:** She’s on it. We’re going to have to step this up.

**John:** Question two, let’s talk about technique on the page. Phoebe, why don’t you start us off? Is it A…

**Phoebe:** When you’re writing scene description it’s OK to use “we see” as a way to communicate an image or action every now and then.

**John:** Ah, the controversial “we see.” All right, Ryan, B?

**Ryan:** Slug lines should not contain dates or times.

**John:** No dates or times in slug lines. Or is it C, Craig?

**Craig:** Every screenwriter worth his or her salt uses Final Draft.

**John:** Paige, what do you say, A, B, or C?

**Paige:** This one is a little bit tougher but I’m going to guess it’s A because there’s so much like “no one should ever use we see” happening which is silly.

**John:** The correct answer was C. I made it up just so Craig would have to say to use Final Draft.

**Craig:** I’m so angry. I’m so angry for so many reasons. One, Paige, I thought you knew me. You don’t.

**Ryan:** Craig, are you like John where you just charcoal sketch your scripts?

**Craig:** No, no, John goes from legal pads to his own proprietary software. And then at some point I think he ultimately does the formatting within one of his many multiprocessors. Whereas I use a lovely program called Fade In Pro. But I do not like Final Draft. I’m on record.

**Paige:** I just switched to Fade In.

**Craig:** Oh, good for you. Well done. And John has Highland.

**John:** Mostly Craig I wanted you saying that on the air so that they can snip that out and use it.

**Craig:** I know exactly why and I’m not upset, but a little bit.

**John:** Question three. Talk about nuance and detail. Ryan, can you start us off?

**Ryan:** In screenplays detail is poison. Film is a collaborative art form. The director, cinematographer, set designer, makeup artist supervisor, special effects supervisor and so many others will decide the details. Now, your job is to convey the broad stroke image as quickly as possible so the reader can visualize it quickly and move on to the next image they’re supposed to be seeing.

**John:** Or is it B?

**Phoebe:** Whatever you do don’t have your protagonist look to the camera and deliver a devastating line. [laughs]

**John:** Or is it C?

**Craig:** If you character isn’t listening to music and you simply included the song as something to be played over the scene that is not your job.

**John:** Paige, tell us. A, B, or C?

**Paige:** While I would assume that B would be given as advice of someone who wanted to, I’m thinking that it’s probably a little too specific to Phoebe, so I’m going to guess B.

**John:** You are correct. Correct.

**Craig:** So just to be clear, the other ones they’re real things that you’ve read?

**John:** They’re real things. So in the show notes I’ll provide the links to where I took these all from. These are actual articles online. So things about “detail is poison,” that came from an online thing.

**Craig:** Well, we’re going to ruin that person’s day, month, year, life.

**John:** All right. Question four. Structure. Oh, structure is a big bugaboo. People have a hard time with structure. Whole books are written about structure. Phoebe, can you start us off with answer A?

**Phoebe:** A, in a properly structured movie the story consists of six basic stages which are defined by five key turning points in the plot. Not only are these turning points always the same, they always occupy the same positions in the story.

**John:** Ooh, or is it B?

**Ryan:** At the exact midpoint of your screenplay your hero must fully commit to her goal.

**John:** Or is it C?

**Craig:** Do not indicate where to place the title of the film or where to roll the credits. These notations are superfluous in a speculative script. Such matters are usually decided by the director.

**John:** Paige, tough one here. A, B, or C?

**Paige:** I feel like I’ve heard all of these. I am going to guess – I’m going to go with B.

**John:** It’s a trick question. They were all actual things I pulled out.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** So-called experts said all of these things.

**Phoebe:** So my first instinct was correct.

**John:** Your first instinct was correct. We’re going to give you the chime. All right, final question. These are takeaway lessons we can sort of get out of what we’ve learned. Craig, start us off. A?

**Craig:** For a character to be engaging, even likeable, they have to be deeply flawed.

**John:** All right. Or is it B?

**Ryan:** Physical descriptions including race, height, clothing, etc. matter far less than most writers think. Leave the costuming up to the costume designer.

**John:** Or is it C?

**Phoebe:** You may think that there are rules for how a screenplay is supposed to work, but in fact there are merely conventions. And while it’s important you understand the conventions you should use them as a foundation upon which to build your own work, rather than a straightjacket to constrain you because after all isn’t that the point of art?

**John:** Paige, what’s the answer?

**Paige:** I mean, this is about the bad screenwriting advice and C was very good screenwriting advice, so let’s go with C.

**John:** C is correct. Paige, you have won the game. I’m not sure what you won. You got a chance to hang out with us on the Zoom.

**Paige:** That is winning.

**John:** Thank you so much. Good luck with your screenplay. Sorry about Teen Jeopardy! but I hope this made up for it.

**Paige:** Absolutely. It’s better than Teen Jeopardy! Thank you guys so much.

**Ryan:** Well done, Paige.

**Phoebe:** Nice to meet you, Paige.

**John:** Thanks Paige.

**Paige:** Nice to meet you.

**Phoebe:** Killed it.

**John:** Bye.

**Ryan:** Bye-bye.

**Craig:** You know, better than Teen Jeopardy! was all I ever wanted.

**John:** Yeah. It is.

**Ryan:** John, Brigham Young, like just pulling that out.

**John:** That’s Colorado. Growing up in Colorado. So Horace Greeley, there’s Greeley, Colorado is named for Horace Greeley, so I had a sense of the time and place of it all. It’s just sometimes you’re born lucky.

**Phoebe:** Very good.

**John:** I have a specific question for Phoebe and Ryan, because you are the two people who actually have done this. Hosting Saturday Night Live, you both hosted. When you get to the end credit things how do you know which person to hug first? I always stay for the end credits because I want to see the hugs. How do you know which person to hug first? And does one of the cast members come up to your first? Usually it’s the musical guest you sort of huge first. But tell us what is the decision process on who to hug first at the end of Saturday Night Live?

**Ryan:** I aim for hierarchy. I just go for the most powerful person on the stage first. And then work my way down to the audience.

**Craig:** Right. And then through the audience in hierarchy as well?

Ryan. Yes. 100. And then to my family. Through that hierarchy as well. By the end I’m just hugging sperm.

**Phoebe:** I actually got stuck in a non-hug world of pain at the end of mine. Because I was sandwiched between Taylor Swift and Matthew Broderick. And I’d already hugged Taylor earlier. And I’d never even met Matthew. So suddenly when they were like now is the time to fucking touch them I was like, well I turned to Taylor and was like well we’ve done this so I should probably go and do it. It all happened in like split seconds. I should probably go to Matthew and I gave her a look, as she was coming in. So I like—

**John:** Oh no.

**Phoebe:** [Unintelligible] Taylor, turned to Matthew who was already on his way back, had to like claw him back. And then he kind of already gone. Then I turned around and Taylor said to me, “I’ll hug you.” And then we hugged. And then someone actually sent me a gif of the whole thing.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s wonderful. None of us will be watching that right after this. In fact I may–

**John:** We’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** I may leave for a moment to watch it. I mean, I need to see it now.

**John:** All right, we have 1,277 people watching the show right now live.

**Craig:** 13,000 fewer than I thought, but OK, go.

**John:** Some of those people have written in with questions already. Megana Rao our producer she’s going to read some of the questions that people have joined us with. Megana, welcome.

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

**John:** Megana start us off with a question from our listeners/viewers.

**Megana:** OK. We’ve gotten in so many questions. So the first one is from Brady. And he says, “Aside from Beyoncé who inspires us all what’s the most obscure place you’ve pulled creative inspiration from for your projects?” Brady also says, “PS, I love you all.”

**John:** Aw, Brady. We love you, too. Obscure place of inspiration, where you get stuff from?

**Phoebe:** I accidentally, I was a little bit stuck and I just try and pick up like random things when I’m a bit stuck and just have a read, sometimes like three sentences can just get your head out of something. And I picked up a book called Vagina by Wolf that was on the side, it was my friend’s book, and I’d seen it hanging around and I wanted to read it for ages. But I literally opened it at one chapter and I read like five sentences of it and it gave me the idea of the godmother orgasming when she paints, which then rolled into [unintelligible]. This beautiful chapter about how orgasms can connect to your creativity. And so it really helped. So I just dove straight into a vagina.

**Ryan:** Wow.

**Craig:** I’ve done that, but it hasn’t – I mean, I haven’t gotten any great work out of it. Got to be honest with you. It’s distracting frankly.

**Phoebe:** Uh…

**Ryan:** I usually – I’ll dip into music. I find anthemic synth rock, Phil Collins. I don’t know why. That will just pull me right out of whatever kind of funk I’m in. Yeah, Enya. Stuff you wouldn’t expect. Weird sort of not – unexpected kind of stuff that’s melodic and synthy and, I don’t know. For some reason it shakes me out.

**John:** Cool. Megana, another question.

**Megana:** OK, this one is for Ryan but I guess you can all speak to it. It came in from another Ryan and he says, “After being in a one-room film like Buried how did that change your relationship with locations in any given–?”

**John:** Yeah. Buried. I enjoyed your film Buried. So in the film Buried you are in a coffin for basically the entire film. How did it change your feeling about sets?

**Ryan:** Well, the funny thing about Buried was it was shot in Barcelona. It takes place in a coffin. And I was like can’t we just shoot this in my fucking living room? Why are we going to Barcelona?

I don’t know if it changed my relationship to sets but it certainly was a lesson in that, because you do think, OK, this thing is a single location, it’s a claustrophobic movie, isolationist kind of film. But actually there were 17 coffins that we shot in. Each one had a different sort of purpose. So it really did require a tremendous amount of engineering and crew and space and that sort of thing.

But, yeah, locations are – my mentality they’re kind of irrelevant. I don’t really think about it like that necessarily. But, yeah, I do remember that. That was a lot of travel for one coffin.

**John:** Phoebe for Fleabag did you write to specific locations? Do you know like this is the coffee shop I want to be using? Do you have places in mind as you’re writing or is that just normal location scouting after you had scripts?

**Phoebe:** Well, a mixture of both I think. There were one or two places I felt I would write to and I felt really connected to. Like there’s a scene in a Quaker Hall in season two and actually Andrew Scott who plays the priest in it and taken – when I was first pitching the idea to him for the show we met up in Soho and we were talking about religion and all sorts of stuff for hours. And then he at the end of it said I want to show you something. And he took me into that Quaker Hall.

And we sat and spoke in there. There was no one else in there. We weren’t breaking the rules. But then I really desperately wanted that location for the real thing, because it was gorgeous, but also it was in the center of London. This felt really good. And also it had that history between us. And we couldn’t get it. And so we got another place somewhere else. And at the last minute that one fell through and the one we loved became available. And so we got to film in there in the end. And it is really joyful I think when you find yourself in locations that you’ve written to. But it’s rare I think that everything falls into place that you can.

**John:** Megana, another question.

**Megana:** OK, awesome. So Eleanor asks, “As a writer are you ever insecure about using autobiographical elements in your work?” With a follow up from Andy who says, “When you incorporate something that’s vulnerable are you ever surprised when people praise you for that instead of judging you?”

**John:** Great. So incorporating autobiographical elements and sort of the vulnerability that happens with that. I mean, Ryan, you and I can speak to the movie we did, The Nines. That middle character that you play, you play three characters, the middle character is sort of me. And so one of the initial conversations we had to have was sort of like you’re free to take anything you want to take from me. My mannerisms. My whatever. And it was really great and weird to sort of see it being mirrored back. But it worked well together. So, you’re incorporating stuff from the real world.

If it’s a moment that I’m sharing with another writer I will sometimes ask like are you going to use that thing that just happened between us because I want to – I don’t want to take it if you’re going to take it. Phoebe or Ryan, do you encounter that, stuff in your real life that’s maybe becoming part of stuff you’re writing where you have to feel some protective bubble around certain things?

**Phoebe:** Ryan? [laughs]

**Ryan:** I was so excited to hear what you were going to say.

**Craig:** I mean, I was on the edge of my seat.

**Ryan:** Well, I mean, I don’t know about protective. Sometimes something – if something completely wild happens and you have some sort of expectation that we come 90 degrees to and we’re all sort of freaking out about this funny thing that just happened. And I’m amongst a group of people that may or may not be writing screenplays, I might sort of do the same thing John is doing where I might say can I use this because it’s fantastic. I think I could do it justice.

And certainly I don’t write anything autobiographical other than it’s about myself. And I did enjoy playing John with John five feet away from me every scrutinizing moment in his home lo those many years ago. But, no, I look at it more like influence. When I was younger I was in a writer’s circle online. This is about 15 years ago and there was heavyweight writers on this thing. I mean, all over the place. But you could sort of lurk as well. And I was always too nervous to jump in this circle and, you know, write stuff. But I certainly learned so much from the voices. There were so many distinctive voices in these writer’s room. And while trying never to steal from any of them, I did sort of learn about sensibilities and how they can just so be so completely polarized. So, yeah.

**Craig:** Phoebe, do you ever wrestle with the fact that a lot of people think you are Fleabag and Fleabag is you?

**Phoebe:** Yes. But it’s not so much of a wrestle. I just sort of realize that – because it’s not autobiographical but it’s really, really personal. So I think – and I think that question is beautiful about do you feel like people actually reach out a bit, they don’t judge you. They actually are so relieved when they feel that something is honest and truthful. And I think when I was writing stuff before – Fleabag was the moment where I just thought oh fuck it, I’m just going to write this. And I think when you have that feeling sometimes that’s when you kind of – I don’t know if you guys have had that – but when you just go off.

And when I first started writing the series I was writing what I thought a TV show version of Fleabag should be. And I was writing that and I was getting really angry. No one told me to write it like that. No one said it. It was just a part of my brain that said this is what people are going to want. And then I was angrily writing that and I got so angry writing it that I started writing what turned out to be the TV series as like rebelling against myself for writing the sitcom version. And I was like I hate that they’re making me do this. And I’m like this is what I’m really going to do. And then I sent that one off with a real like Fuck You to my producers. And they read it and they were like OK. And then I was like and this is what I really want to make. And they were like, “Well good, because that is so much better. Why are you wasting your time doing that?”

And so it was quite confusing at the beginning trying to write something that sounds and feels like something people would like. But then there’s always an emptiness about that. And then the moment you start writing something that feels really personal and you get a little bit nervous writing it. Or I remember in season two of Fleabag when I was writing the speech. She does the speech like two-thirds of the way through when she’s saying “I just want someone to tell me what to do.” And she just does this whole list of “I just want someone to tell me what to wear, what to eat” and it felt a little bit dangerous writing that as a central female character just going like, “Just tell me what to do.”

And I was writing it going like, oh god, I’m going to get bashed for this. How dare I say that that’s what a woman or anybody secretly wants underneath it all, let alone a kind of heroine of the story? And that was one of the speeches that people have been so responsive to. And that’s a really comforting feeling.

**Craig:** I think the audience is very good at detecting something that is true, as opposed to something that is designed to seem true.

**Phoebe:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And so their willingness to forgive things, because we are complicated people. There’s a subtlety there that they just got. I got it when I saw it. I just thought that, oh, this actually – I understood why it was a dangerous thing for her to be saying AKA you to be saying. And I also understood therefore that it was a different thing than you are weak and I do want to be dominated or told what to do. It was really more of this – it was an instinct we all have that is different from our – it’s complicated. I got the complexity. It worked. It worked beautifully. Well done. Good job, Phoebe.

**Phoebe:** Thank you. But it’s funny because when you do something like that you just don’t care how you get judged because you feel like it’s truthful. And then I was just like that is true. And I’m going to stand by that character in that moment.

**Craig:** It usually works.

**Phoebe:** Whereas when you’re being false it’s far more scary. They’re going to find out. They’re going to find out. And they always do. They always do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Craig, do you want to start us off with a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Yes I do. And, look, we’ve done a great job I think of keeping this a light, lovely podcast. We’re not getting all down. But even in the best of times I have some anxiety problems. Just vague medicated anxiety problems. And so I’ve tried all sorts of the cool mediation apps and the things like that. But the thing that generally works the best for me is just good old breathing. Just simple deep breathing does miracles.

But then I start getting in my own Jewie way, I start freaking out that I’m breathing wrong which is the most Jewish thing I can think of. Like am I breathing right? Did I count enough? So I’m trying to remember this. And a couple of years ago and this just got recirculated around a guy named Nathan Pyle made some little animation, some little web animations to help you breathe rhythmically in a nice deep breathing way. And they work so beautifully. And they’re very simple. It’s just like a ball rolls down a little hill. And up the hill. And you can sort of breathe along with them. And they’re wonderful.

And for whatever reason these days I’ve felt the need to do quite a bit more of that. So, if you’re prone to anxiety and you’re prone to those moments where you’re feeling a bit jelly-legged or butterflies in the stomach or just afraid and you feel like a nice little deep breathing session would help will include a link to those because I find it a wonderful tool.

**John:** Excellent. Now, Craig, on a previous show you had talked about Horse Paste which is a version of Codenames that’s online. Megana and the rest of the office we were trying to play that yesterday and it was down. So instead we went – maybe it’s back up now, but instead we played Drawful 2 which is on Jackbox.tv which was actually tremendously fun.

So, it’s a thing that’s probably most designed for playing on AppleTV with people in a room together and you’re drawing on your phone. But it actually works really well over Zoom. And so you can share one person’s screen and then everybody else is drawing on their phones. And so it’s a way to have a party game when you cannot physically be together. So, Jackbox.tv. It’s a game called Drawful 2 if you’re looking for something to play with your family, no matter where your family is, or your friends.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Something out there in the world. Ryan Reynolds, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Ryan:** I have one particular podcast that I’ve been going back to since Christmas. John, I think I sent it to you. It’s Anthropocene Reviewed. It’s John Green, novelist/screenwriter. He has this great podcast. It’s once a month. It’s called The Anthropocene Reviewed. I think it’s the last Thursday of every month. But there’s one particular episode that I revisited right now in these times that we’re living in, like you guys, we’re all needing to take some deep breaths. But it’s basically about Auld Lang Syne, the history of Auld Lang Syne, the song. Auld Lang Syne and where it comes from and its use, because it does actually have a use. And it’s heartbreaking. And it’s so beautiful and it’s one of the most beautiful 22 minutes of podcast I think I’ve ever heard in my life. And I think it’s really resonant for right now. So I keep going back to that.

It’s the podcast from I think this last December. John Green. The Anthropocene Reviewed. I highly, highly recommend it.

**John:** Yeah. I listened to that in a train in Japan on your recommendation. It really is a terrific episode.

**Ryan:** Yeah. Beautiful.

**John:** Phoebe, do you have something to recommend for us?

**Phoebe:** I do. It’s a TV show. So it’s not quirky, but I feel so passionate about this TV show that I just have to say. And I don’t know if it’s actually out there. I think it’s being remade. It’s a BBC show called This Country. Do you guys know of it?

**Craig:** This Country?

**Phoebe:** This Country. And it’s a brother and sister, Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper wrote it together. And it’s based on their experiences growing up in the Cotswolds.

**Craig:** Oh, I’ve seen much of this. It’s excellent.

**Phoebe:** It is so good. And it gets right under your skin. And it is so funny and so witty. And it’s a kind of documentary style but their performances are so, so detailed and so extraordinary. And I was grief-stricken when it ended. And they’re not going to make another one. They’ve made three series. But I think Paul Feig is remaking it in America. But catch theirs before because it has so much heart. It is so funny. And it is a really accurate depiction I think of the Cotswolds life for teenagers.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if it’s watchable here unless you’re—

**Phoebe:** Well find a way.

**Ryan:** In that case just go with CSI: Miami.

**Craig:** It’s a similar show.

**John:** One or the other.

**Craig:** If you use a VPN and you can fake where then I think you can probably watch the BBC.

**Phoebe:** Maybe you can buy it on iTunes? I don’t know. Maybe there’s–

**Craig:** It’s possibly purchased. Obviously you’d want to ideally purchase it if you can. It’s extraordinary. And it’s one of those shows where I started to feel like I was starting to learn a little bit about Britain. I was starting to learn a little bit about people.

**Phoebe:** Yeah. And it’s not a side of it you see very often.

**Craig:** No. No it’s not. And it was fantastic.

**Phoebe:** What do you feel like you learned from it?

**Craig:** Well there is actually this fascinating connection, because now I’ve spent a bunch of time in the UK, and I’ve started to become closer to this fascinating connection between people in Britain and people in the United States. I mean, growing up I used to think that British people were, you know, quite British and quite posh and everything was wonderful. And then we were just a bunch of rooting, tooting Yosemite Sams just shooting in the air.

And as it turns out I guess there’s a huge swath of rural America that matches up quite nicely in a weird way with Northern England and some parts of Southern England. And it’s just the accents are wildly different. Wildly. But the general deal is not wildly different. And I was shocked at why I was shocked. Because it’s where everybody came from.

**Phoebe:** Of course. Of course. It’s the same everywhere.

**Craig:** It’s literally the same. And we did spend, you know, for Chernobyl we had, I don’t know, probably of our cast I think 90% was UK and of that 90% probably 50% were Northern England. And, I mean, and this isn’t to say that I didn’t love everybody from London, but the folks from Northern England are awesome, and Scotland are awesome. I mean, it was just – I had the best time. They just felt like home in a weird way. They felt American and so I love that show because there was a weird camaraderie in the clumsiness and the brokenness but beauty of our people together. I thought it was great.

**Phoebe:** Aw, that’s lovely.

**John:** That is our show. So, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, who I get to see. Hi, thanks Megana.

**Phoebe:** Thanks Megana.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Special thanks this week to Nima Yousefi and Dustin Box for helping us out. Our outro is by John Spurney. 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. But for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Phoebe, you’re not on Twitter. You’re so smart.

**Craig:** So smart.

**Phoebe:** So scared. So scared.

**Craig:** And then tell us what dummies thing is. What is it? @Vancity?

**Ryan:** @VancityReynolds.

**John:** Excellent.

**Ryan:** Ryan Reynolds was taken.

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

**Ryan:** True story.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** You can find the show notes for this 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 bonus segments including the postmortem on this episode.

**Craig:** All that money. Oh, so much money coming into John.

**Phoebe:** Still on air. Still on air.

**John:** Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Ryan Reynolds. Thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**John:** Thank you so much for being our very first ever video guests. This was remarkable. Thank you so, so much. Thank you to everybody who watched. I’m supposed to tell you because we’re on YouTube that you have to push that like button and subscribe.

**Craig:** Smash that like button. Smash it.

**John:** I don’t care.

**Ryan:** Smash button. Yeah.

**John:** I don’t care. Don’t subscribe if you don’t want to subscribe. But thank you both very, very much for being on the show. It really means a lot that you came on board.

**Ryan Reynolds:** Thank you guys.

**Craig:** Thanks guys. You’re the best.

**Phoebe:** Thanks so much.

**Craig:** Have a great one.

**Ryan:** Lovely. It was a pleasure.

**John:** Bye guys.

**Phoebe:** Bye.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. It is 25 hours later. Craig how was that live show for you?

**Craig:** Well, I mean I thought it was deeply enjoyable. First of all, it worked, so thank you because you did everything. You and Megana and your crew put the whole thing together. I thought it worked kind of flawlessly, from my point of view at least, because we could see them. There were a couple of moments where there was a little bit of video lag, but honestly in today’s day and age for there to be not a ton of that is lovely. And we were able to have a great conversation. It seemed like a lot of people watched it.

**John:** So we had a bunch of viewers. We had simultaneously like while we were recording it the peak number of viewers was 1,315. Overall, so we’re recording this on Sunday, there were 10,559 views to the video so far.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So a normal episode of Scriptnotes gets about 40,000 or more people listening to it over the course of the week. So it was good to have for our first ever video thing it felt really good that we got that many people watching. And the report back from the folks who I had moderating the comments was that everyone was lovely and positive and they didn’t need to ban anybody or put anybody on time out. Everyone was great in the comments section.

**Craig:** [laughs] What a weird thing. That our expectation is that adults will behave like little nursery school kids and need time outs. But unfortunately that’s kind of the way the world works.

**John:** So I want to talk a little bit about the technical side of this for folks who might want to try to do something like this at home. The four of us and our guests were speaking in Zoom. And so Zoom is a privacy and security for nightmare for a lot of reasons, but it also works really well. And so the fact that Phoebe was all the way in London and our latency was not bad at all that’s credit to Zoom. So despite all the scary things you read about Zoom are probably true, but they actually do work really well.

So we were all talking in Zoom and then if you use the Zoom webinar feature which is about $40 a month you can pipe that through to YouTube Live. And so that was my choice to not have our normal viewers watching us in Zoom which was possible. I pushed it all to YouTube Live just because that way no one can Zoom bomb us because we were safely behind a wall. That was the instinct behind that.

It went OK. I would say that Megana and I and you actually at one point were in little test screens where we were seeing to make sure that it all worked right and every time we did that it started a new YouTube Live session. And so people would join us and then finally when we actually got the real thing going it could happen.

But I wanted there to be an ability to sort of pause the YouTube streaming so that we could actually talk to Ryan and Phoebe before we went on camera and there really wasn’t a good way to do that.

**Craig:** Well, it still worked.

**John:** It worked.

**Craig:** And I thought you did a great job.

**John:** Aw, thank you. Thank you. And I thought it was a good conversation and they were just lovely, smart people. They had never met before and they felt like, you know, they should have met.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I can’t be the only who was just watching them and listening to them talk and thinking, yeah, I could see these two guys in a movie doing something together.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Yeah. It feels like a decent team up.

**John:** I don’t remember if Ryan was texting me this or tweeting me, but back when he had watched Fleabag he was like, “Oh my god, I hope she will put me into a movie or a TV show at some point.” He was so impressed by her way back when in the day. And she’s just great. It was lovely to have them together.

I don’t think Scriptnotes is overall going to pivot to video. I don’t think we’re going to be a regular television show.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** But how are you feeling about doing more of these?

**Craig:** I’m fine with it. I mean, I don’t get nervous about any of this stuff. I don’t mind it. As long as there’s no expectation of people getting all dressed up and things. But there seems to be a fairly robust environment of podcasts that are now also video casts where it’s like there’s a camera stuck in a recording booth so you’re looking at a guy talking into a microphone.

Personally, look, I find the whole thing bizarre in the sense that any – I’m excited that people listen to our podcast. As you know, I’m endlessly amused and shocked that anyone listens at all. And then the thought that people would watch something also seems kind of crazy. If they want to, I guess. Yeah.

Look, I’m a bigger fan of our actual live shows because there are people there and you can feel a room and warmth and an audience. It’s a very experience. So I’m on the ends of the spectrum. I like a nice quiet just you and me. We’re out on our couples date alone. No one can bother us. Or, we’re at a big party.

**John:** Yeah. I will say that when you and I are just recording the show by ourselves there will be times where we’ll get into tangents or we’ll get on a thing. It’s like, you know what, let’s cut all of that out and pretend we never had that conversation. And in a live show or live stream we really can’t do that. I was mindful that I had to watch myself a little bit more because everyone was listening to us live as it was happening. So there’s something comforting about when it’s just us on tape because you and I both have the ability to cut anything out.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. I mean, I’m so generally oblivious. I mean, it’s a rare thing for me to go, oh god, why did I? Oh no, I shouldn’t have said that. And I do every now and again and I say, “Hey John, can we cut that out?” But every now and then it would occur to me that we were live, but you know the nice thing is when you’re doing this with two very accomplished actors they’re so calm, even if they tell you later that they were not calm at all, but at least in the moment they appear so calm that you can’t help but mirror their general demeanor.

**John:** Now we may want to talk about this in the real episode that we’ll record for this next week, but we’re recording this on Sunday where all of Twitter is abuzz about the New York Times Maldives story. So we should maybe have a quick moment because this was actually part of my morning was this conversation about like, oh, is this going to be a movie? And of course it’s going to be a movie.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I mean, writes itself basically. Actually the problem is it’s so obviously a movie that you almost don’t even want to see it because you’ve seen it. Like I’ve seen it in my head. But then again, if somebody does a really good version of a great formula picture then it can be wonderful. I mean, I’ve already put my own little spin on it which is that a couple gets married. It’s not like an arranged marriage or anything, but there was pressure from everybody because they were perfect for each other and they kind of bought into it and they got married. And they both realized individually and separately like minutes after they said “I do” that this was a huge mistake. But the honeymoon is already booked and so they decide I’m going to tell my partner on the honeymoon that this was a mistake and it has to end. And they’re both thinking it. And then they get there and then they both say it to each other and they’re both hurt. And then seconds later they’re told they cannot leave.

**John:** Absolutely. So that’s easy good approach. I’m not dying to see that movie honestly.

**Craig:** I don’t want to see any of them. [laughs]

**John:** I was texting with Ryan this morning about this saying like, hey, this could be a movie. And he was like, yeah, my executive assistant just sent this to me. And he’s like do you want to do it, we could do it together. And I’m like give me a second for my morning coffee to wear off and then I’ll get back to you. And I ultimately – I “passed” on it, not that it was ever offered to me, but to me it was like there are – I can think of 20 writers who could do a great version of this story, or at least could do this movie. And if 20 other writers could do this and do a bang up job on it like there’s no reason for me to be chasing this movie.

What I do think is interesting about a possibility for this is in some ways it feels like a play. Because it is contained.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** It’s within a single space. Except that it’s the Maldives so you don’t want it on a stage. You actually want it beautiful shot everywhere. You want it to feel like you’re on location or some sort of Lucas Film Mandalorian where you create the Maldives through the magic of video screens. So, it wants to be a movie just because it’s going to be gorgeous and beautiful, but it is essentially a chamber drama or chamber comedy between these people.

Something that people have been bringing up on Twitter which I think is a good point is that it can feel like Beauty and the Beast where everyone else who works at that resort are kind of like–

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** These animated things. And that is potentially really problematic.

**Craig:** Hugely.

**John:** To not have their perspective on what’s actually going on there.

**Craig:** Hugely.

**John:** I think the opportunity would be to do sort of a Wes Anderson kind of thing. They’re trying to keep this couple here because they actually – as long as this couple is here they don’t have to go through quarantine. There’s like a whole process. So they’ll do whatever they can to sort of keep this couple together.

**Craig:** I like that. That’s fun. So, then it’s really like the company said, OK, well, we’re going to fire you as soon as the last guest is removed. But if there is a single guest there, of course, you have to stay because that’s our policy. And so they cannot let those – and those people really want to leave but they can’t let them leave. The problem is then the quarantine aspect gets a little mushy.

**John:** It does. So, there’s problems. I think the other opportunity in terms of that central couple is that the way you can chart an entire marriage in this very hot box environment is potentially great. All the progress when you can’t actually leave this person sort of what happens. It can be a microcosm of a marriage within this small period of time.

But someone else can write it. I’m not going to write it.

**Craig:** I agree. And sometimes I think when everybody looks at something and goes, oh my god, that is so a movie. What they’re really saying is oh my god that reminds me of a lot of movies I’ve seen.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** What was the movie that Dana Fox worked on? Couples Retreat.

**John:** Couples Retreat. Yeah. The one where she’s in a resort in the Maldives and she’s just crying and trying to figure out a way to print pages.

**Craig:** It was actually Bora Bora in French Polynesia. And that’s a movie is Dana Fox writing that movie in Bora Bora. But that movie is very much couples in paradise except that it’s contrasted with the trouble inside their relationship and all that. So, you know, makes sense. Yeah, I can see – there’s all sorts of–

**John:** Couples Retreat meets Contagion is basically the pitch on that.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And this is almost now we’re starting to put our finger on what the problem with Hollywood is is that that requires zero effort. So there’s an entire merchant class of producers who do nothing but sort of just go, neh, heh, and then someone else goes, meh, and then they have to go find writers. It’s like it’s not necessarily a thing. It’s just because it sounds like stuff you’ve already seen. But that’s kind of a blemish isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, isn’t that partly why you just don’t want to do it? Because it just feels like what new thing can you say with that kind of high concept? Yeah.

**John:** There’s a couple projects that I’m writing right now and what I will say about them is that they are things for which I am incredibly passionate about doing and I feel like, yeah, I’m the right person to do it. So that’s why ultimately I was like you know what let one of the other 20 writers who would be great at this pursue this project and I’m going to try to chase less in this next decade.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know what I’m perfect for.

**John:** You’re perfect for The Last of Us.

**Craig:** You know what? I do love it. I love it. God, I love it. And weirdly also a pandemic just happened.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is the strangest of things. Yeah.

**John:** Craig, one last question for you. What is happening in Russia and are they just completely concealing the actual numbers? Is it actually just horrible there and we’re just not hearing about it?

**Craig:** Well, you won’t until you will. But certainly in the initial days of sort of Russian reporting on COVID if you looked at the maps of the world and you start to see where the cases were every now and then on the map there would be this little white spot on their color chart. And that indicated there was no COVID there whatsoever. And Russia was this enormous white spot. See, there was no COVID there according to them. In fact, there was. Of course there was.

What was happening was they were simply failing to classify it. Not failing, deciding, determining under pressure to not classify pneumonia cases as COVID. That is akin to just sort of saying, oh yeah, there’s been a lot of pneumonia, like weird cystic pneumonia and it’s not because of AIDS. It’s just pneumonia. But it is because of AIDS. Because we know that. So, that’s what they were doing.

And then they’ve stopped because it got out of control. So there is sort of – suddenly Putin starts doing things. I think because he started to realize how bad this could be.

It is remarkable that the same delusion has landed on the doorstep of very similarly minded political people. And it’s not about – I wouldn’t say that it’s about being strong men per se. But there is this group of political leaders that are men who feel like they don’t need to take no guff from the experts. And that it’s the damned expert elites who are ruining everything and just good old fashioned common sense like back in the old days, John Wayne types, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So Trump, Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, and of course the uber Vlad Putin, all of them have the same responses which is, oh, boloney. I’m not crying over some flu. That’s what the French do. Well, the French didn’t really do it well enough either. Well, now they’re crying. So he’s finally now, or at least over the last two days, he started to shut down Russian businesses and places where people can gather and so on and so forth.

They are not in good shape. They’re in bad shape. This is not an economically healthy country. Their “democracy” is incredibly fragile. They have had a number of political convulsions that Putin has successfully knocked back. But it’s things like these that cause real problems.

I don’t know how bad it’s going to get over there. Obviously I never wish ill will on anyone. Certainly no one wants to see a bad leader suffer by his citizens dying. But I do suspect that it’s going to be quite bad over there.

**John:** Well, it strikes me that looking back to the Chernobyl age, you know, at least then there was a central planning sort of authority. It felt like they bungled, they lied, they did bad stuff, but they actually could sort of muster their forces and do massive things. I don’t know that Russia today can do that. So, that is the challenge. You have all the problems with none of the actual solutions.

**Craig:** Well, there was a strange kind of spirit in the Soviet Union. They were obviously more than happy to deny reality and to make decisions that cost lives and to lie to the rest of the world. But once they understood the enormity of something they were capable of reaching back into this interesting collective Soviet spirit of fighting. So World War II the Soviets I think something like 40 million–

**John:** The meat grinder of, yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, 40 million casualties, military and civilian combined from World War II. That’s a five-year, six-year stretch. That’s insane. We don’t understand what that means here. We have no sense of it. They do. And that was after World War I and the Revolution. So, they have a certain kind of spirit.

Over here what we’ve done is fragmented ourselves into 50 fiefdoms. We have a central leader that doesn’t lead. And our John Wayne go-it-on-your-own spirit is currently being tested in the sorest way by a little clump of RNA surrounded by a lipid layer.

**John:** Yeah. It is not a great time.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. But to bring us back to a happier note, thinking back, the postmortem on our show, and the possibility of a Maldives movie, I do think Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge writing and starring in that couples movie could be ideal. I could picture them together. They are beautiful. They are funny. That is the movie we need right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I’ll watch anything with those two. I think that would be awesome.

**John:** Craig will watch a livestream of a podcast with them in it. That’s how much he enjoys the two of them.

**Craig:** I watched it as we were doing it. First of all, you’ve been friends with Ryan forever. And that was my first time meeting him. And he really, like I said on the show, his reputation is just sterling. I mean, it’s a rare thing when you hear somebody just say, oh yeah. And it’s not that every Canadian has that reputation, by the way. Don’t get fooled. There are some bad Canadians out there. Not many. There are some.

But he’s just terrific.

**John:** So I’ll put this in the real follow up show notes, but for folks who might be curious about it Ryan texted me afterwards to say that he kept meaning to talk about the original fourth wall-breaking movie. It was Mary MacLane’s 1918 silent film Men Who Have Made Love to Me. And so if you look up the Wikipedia entry it’s actually fascinating. So it’s a lost film. There’s no prints of it left. So there’s only reports about what actually happens in the film. But it is a silent film where the writer-director star, this woman who actually kind of looks a lot like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, does turn to camera and speak directly to camera and acknowledge sort of what’s happening.

So that was sort of the first – apparently the first time in cinematic history where that fourth wall was broken.

**Craig:** Men Who Have Made Love to Me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So she would turn to the camera and then–

**John:** And then title card.

**Craig:** Title card.

**John:** So, I mean, she’s a pioneer.

**Craig:** I love it. I love it. Well, I mean, first of all like what a cool proto feminist thing that in 1918–

**John:** What a great title.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s like I’ve had sex. [laughs] I like it.

**John:** All right. Craig, thank you for a fun show and we’ll do one of these again sometime.

**Craig:** Awesome John. Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

 

Links:

* [Watch the episode here – Scriptnotes Live: Episode 445](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRV5O0ZSNc0)
* [Deadpool](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1431045/) and [Deadpool 2](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5463162/)
* [Fleabag](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B01KW5IIJM/ref=atv_dp_season_select_s1) and the [play](https://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/news/phoebe-waller-bridges-fleabag-play-to-stream-_90860.html) to release soon!
* Huge thank you to [Phoebe Waller Bridge](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3564817/) and [Ryan Reynolds](https://twitter.com/VancityReynolds)!
* [Breathing Cartoons](https://twitter.com/nathanwpyle/status/1139676955316559872) by Nathan Pyle
* [Anthropocene Reviewed: Auld Lang Syne](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anthropocene-reviewed/episodes/anthropocene-reviewed-auld-lang-syne)
* [This Country](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6583806/), now on [Hulu in the US](https://www.hulu.com/series/f3e3f7ed-134f-411d-9dc8-e8048b2d6b7e)
* [Free Guy](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6264654/)
* [Drawful on Jackbox Games](https://www.jackboxgames.com/drawful/)
* Bonus How Would This Be A Movie, [Couple Stranded in Maldives](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/style/coronavirus-honeymoon-stranded.html)
* [Men Who Have Made Love to Me](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Who_Have_Made_Love_to_Me)
* Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium [here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jon Spurney ([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/445standardv3.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/stop-counting-pages-and-touching-your-face).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 442 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we get statistic. First, for decades the film and television industry has used a rule of thumb that one page of screenplay equals one minute of movie. But does it really? New research shows the correlation is not particularly strong. We’ll discuss what that means for screenwriters and look forward to a future that moves beyond pages.

**Craig:** And then we’re going to look at how the coronavirus, have you heard of that, John? Coronavirus?

**John:** I have. Yes.

**Craig:** We’re going to look at how that has impacted Los Angeles and the industry and we’re going to talk a little bit about what we’re doing and what you might want to do.

**John:** Yes. And for Premium members we’ll have a bonus segment in which Craig and I will debate which first level D&D spell we would choose to be able to cast in real life.

**Craig:** Throw down.

**John:** I put some real serious thought into this last night and I have my choices.

**Craig:** Same.

**John:** Now as we get started on this episode let’s do a little table setting here because we are recording this on a Thursday. You’re hearing this on Monday or Tuesday. So whether you’re in the US or somewhere overseas things are probably kind of weird and scary in regards to coronavirus and they’re probably different than how they are as we’re recording this.

So, we were talking before we started airing is that we’re not going to be a definitive podcast about all things coronavirus and there’s a hundred other podcasts out there you could be listening to. So, I’d like this to be kind of a safe place to not be freaked out about everything, if that makes sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re already freaking people out about how hard it is to become a screenwriter. So, I mean, why pile on?

**John:** This will be our little nest of self-care. So it’s not going to be a doom and gloomy kind of podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ll give you some information. We’ll tell you how things are going here. But, yeah, you’re going to want to get your doom and gloom or hopefully your scientifically accurate information from places like the CDC or Johns Hopkins has a really good specific COVID-19 newsletter that you can subscribe to. So, good stuff out there.

**John:** All right. Let’s start with some follow up. Last week on the episode we talked about professional readers and how little they’re paid. We talked about the union. We talked about freelance readers. And we asked for listeners to write in with their experiences and a whole bunch of them did. So Megana went through a bunch of them and here is a sampling of some of what we got. Craig, do you want to start us off with Taylor?

**Craig:** Sure. Taylor from Burbank writes, “My fulltime position is as a development assistant for a production company but as the salary is barely enough to cover my monthly rent I also have a few jobs on the side. One of those is as a freelance script reader for Alibaba Pictures, or rather was as a freelance script reader because after about three years and no decline in the quality of my work I’ve been essentially ghosted. No more assignments. No more email responses. While I’m not exactly happy I have to find another side gig, after listening to this episode I was a bit horrified to realize how little I’ve been making. Two years in I was met with a congratulatory email I was now getting a raise from $45 a script to $55 and would now be paid $75 for a book, $85 if it were over 300 pages.

“Wow, almost a half a day’s salary for reading a script. And then John mentioned the rate he was receiving at the beginning of his career. I’m still not quite sure why Alibaba dropped me without warning, but as I was freelance and often wasn’t assigned enough scripts to even qualify for taxes at the end of the year it doesn’t seem like any big loss.”

**John:** Oh, Taylor from Burbank. So the fact that you were receiving the same money that I was getting 20 years ago, that’s a problem. I mean, reading scripts and writing coverage is hours of work. And to be making that little is crazy. I mean, you’re barely making minimum wage at that point.

**Craig:** And I assume that Alibaba Pictures is associated with Alibaba the large Chinese company?

**John:** I don’t think it actually is. I think it may be a different company. We left it in because he said we could leave it in, because he wasn’t working there anymore. I’m not sure which company that is, but they’re not paying a lot.

**Craig:** Well, I’m happy to say since he let us say it that Alibaba Pictures sucks. Yeah, you suck.

**John:** They should pay their people more.

**Craig:** They should pay their people something even approaching fair. That’s terrible. Shame on you, Alibaba Pictures. You suck.

**John:** Leslie would agree with you. She writes, “It is unconscionable that many agencies and production companies get away with paying readers the same rates that were paid to readers in the 90s, or barely a little bit more. #PayUpHollywood shows us that shame can work in getting Hollywood to live up to its so-called progressive values espoused by many in Hollywood. Granted, not all smaller companies can afford union rates, but there are plenty of higher-tiered companies that are getting away with paying too little.

“Not everybody wants to be a fulltime reader, but there should be more union reading positions for those that do. Considering how important reading is to this industry there should be more companies that provide union positions.”

**Craig:** Couldn’t agree more. And we’re going to try and exercise a little shame here.

**John:** Yeah. And I think Leslie does bring up a good point. There are people who read fulltime as their main job. Like our friend Kevin is a fulltime reader, which is great. But it’s more common that it is a little bit of piecemeal work. That people are doing a little extra on the side. And I think we’re trying to address both situations. If this is your side gig reading it’s got to be a side gig that’s actually worth doing. And if you are a fulltime reader you need to be paid like a fulltime employee and that’s why these people who have union benefits are getting union benefits.

**Craig:** No question. We can’t afford to have the reading of these things and the coverage of screenplays be reduced down to the lowest quality of gig economy as possible. It’s just not going to work for anybody at that point. That would be the definition of penny-wise, pound foolish.

Should we keep reading some more? Because we got a lot here.

**John:** Go to Colin.

**Craig:** Colin writes, “I’m a reader for an established entertainment company that will go unnamed because I love my job.” You got it, Colin. “They pay me $30 for a feature-length script. Less if it’s an hour-long or a comedy half-hour. Considering it takes around four hours to read a feature script thoroughly and produce the coverage, even $50 a script wouldn’t cover minimum wage. When I was first offered the position I quoted my employer $50 for script and was negotiated down to $30 because they make the very good point that they can find an intern to do it for free. Won’t be as good, but it’s not about being a good analyst, just one who can get the job done efficiently and quickly. I’m sharing this story because I feel lucky to have this opportunity and would never give it up to an intern.

“I’m proud to put it on my resume, but my resume also contains three other jobs that I need to have to support keeping the one I love. Fair warning to aspiring script analysts.”

John, I feel like Colin is being way too easy on this terrible established entertainment company.

**John:** I feel like Colin is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s just, come on. They’re not paying you well. It’s the job you love. The reason why you love the job is because you like reading scripts and writing coverage on it and because it’s giving you some creative satisfaction. That’s fine. That’s good. But you are not being paid properly for what you are doing. And the fact that you have to do outside work to cover your reading work just to make a living, that is a problem. You are not being paid nearly enough and so maybe they’re super nice where you work but they need to pay you better.

**Craig:** They don’t sound super nice.

**John:** No they don’t.

**Craig:** He says, “When I was first offered the position I quoted my employer $50 per script,” which was already low as far I’m concerned, and then was negotiated down to $30 because they make the very good point they can find an intern to do it for free. No they can’t. Colin, if they could find an intern to do it satisfactorily for free they would. You see what I’m saying? They’re just ripping you off.

So, “established entertainment company” that currently pays anyone, including Colin, $30 to cover a feature-length script, you suck. And you should be ashamed of yourself. And you have to stop and treat people humanely. The work that you’re going to get back from these people will not justify the cost savings. And even if it did, don’t you just want to be a human individual that treats people nicely?

**John:** Yeah. Well, there’s other people who are not treating people nicely. Let’s wrap up this segment with Ken who writes in, “I attended a graduate film program and in one of my classes we had a guest who is a big manager for writers and directors.” Craig, do you think this guy is going to turn out to be a good guy or a bad guy?

**Craig:** I’m going to go with terrible human being.

**John:** “He was a graduate of this university and offered the entire lecture hall of aspiring writers the opportunity to come to his office to meet with him one-on-one to discuss our scripts and careers. He seemed so sincere and eager to help.”

**Craig:** [laughs] I bet he did.

**John:** “When I went to the office he gave me about five minutes of his time to ask questions while he responded to emails. Fine, he’s a manager with successful clients. He’s busy. But then as I was leaving he told me the best way to stay in touch and build a relationship was to become a reader for his company. And unpaid reader. He had his assistant email me a few scripts and a coverage template and sent me on my way.

“I talked to my friends who also had meetings with this guy and they all had the same story. He spent a perfunctory couple of minutes with us hopeful aspiring writers in order to get free coverage. I found the whole situation pretty gross. I never heard of a single student receiving any meaningful career advice or help, even after covering many scripts.”

**Craig:** I mean, first of all, the graduate film program needs to never have this person back. Let’s start with that. Because they’re just letting the fox into the henhouse. Second of all, I’m not saying that this person is a horrendous pile of flaming garbage. I’m saying that they have behaved in a way that is consistent with being an enormous flaming pile of garbage. What an outrageous and disgusting thing to do.

**John:** So this is making me reflect back on the time after I graduated from film school and I was working as an assistant. My last assistant job. And so I was working as an assistant to these two producers. And they said, “Hey, get some film school people in to be interns and they can do coverage and such.” And so I posted it at USC and I actually had a couple people come in who were my interns. And I would give them scripts and they would come in with the coverage and we’d talk through their stuff. And I don’t think they got anything meaningful out of it except for the one who was ultimately hired to replace me when my bosses fired me.

But I will say there is some logic to if you were doing this for two or three weeks, if you’re going through a couple of times of coverage, and I think I actually did help them write better coverage because I would sit with them, read their coverage, and sort of be able to help them write better coverage. So I think I did help them to some degree. So I don’t want to say that an unpaid – well, unpaid internships are problematic for many reasons. I do think there is some value to learning how to write coverage. And if you’re not being paid to learn how to write coverage I get that for a small period of time.

But to try to bring through wave after wave of these people to do free work for you is ridiculous and needs to be stopped.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s exploitative. They asked this person to come in because he’s a big manager for writers and directors. They’re hoping that this individual can provide value to the students in a graduate film program. Again, to put in perspective, Ken and all of his fellow classmates paid money to be in that room. An enormous amount of money. I assume that a number of them took on significant debt. But the whole point was that they would have access to interesting people who would benefit them, like a manager who has no interest in benefiting them. He just wants to beat them up even more by getting free work out of them like they’re, I don’t know, Dickensian orphans that he can gather up, Fagin style, to go pick pockets.

It’s sick. It’s absolutely sick. I’m so angry. I want to know who it is. Oh, god, I want to know who it is.

**John:** We’ll email off the chain and sort of see if Ken will tell us who that person is.

**Craig:** If people read about a prominent big manager for writers and directors turning up dead in a week or two, I didn’t do it. I’m just going – not at all.

**John:** Not at all.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** You’re saying in advance if it were to happen it wasn’t Craig who did it.

**Craig:** I’m saying I didn’t do it. [laughs] I didn’t do the thing that hasn’t happened yet.

**John:** So, as we wrap up this little discussion about professional reading and people who are reading for their careers, we made no great progress here. But I think the way forward is to chart out sort of what’s acceptable and start applying shame for doing things that are unacceptable. And some of that shame should be vastly underpaying or not paying for this kind of work. And recognizing that there may be a place to learn how to do coverage, where you’re not being paid for it, but when you are doing the kind of work that a person is normally paid to do that means you should be paid to be doing that work.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s just sort of a definitional circular logic thing. So the quality of paid work should be for pay.

**Craig:** I completely agree. I hope that what we can do is something similar to what we did alongside all the assistants who were struggling and continue to struggle for fair treatment in the Hollywood workplace come up with a vague guideline of what seems right. And then say, invite I guess, major employers to sign on and say, yes, that’s the way we’re going to do this. We are going to pay that amount. And it’s important because the clients of awful people like this manager have no clue that their scripts and other scripts that are being submitted to them have been covered by unpaid interns. Unreal.

**John:** Yep. Now, in the setup for the segment last week I said that we would talk about both professional readers and like reading your friends’ scripts and we sort of never got to the reading your friends’ scripts and some guidance on that. So Jerry wrote in saying he really wished we would talk a little bit about that.

And so I want to spend a few moments to talk about the difference of reading someone whose script you know and sort of someone comes to you with a script and says, “Hey, would you read this and tell me what you think?” Because that’s a very different experience and it’s important to sort of distinguish those two things.

So, if someone comes to me with a script that they want me to read, I will start with a question and this is a question that Kelly Marcel actually sort of first asked me. I’ll ask do you want me to tell you that you’re brilliant, or do you want me to tell you what’s broken and needs to be fixed.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And when she said that to me it’s like a lightbulb just went off. It’s like, oh, yeah, you know what, those are very different things and sometimes I need one and not the other. And so just being clear what it is the person actually needs.

So, if it is a situation they are looking for things that need to get fixed it’s important to structure your feedback to them in terms of the movie that they’re actually trying to make. When you are giving them your honest feedback don’t try to change it into a thing it’s not, or at least not the movie that they want to make. So you are going to need to ask some questions probably at the start like I see two different ways this could go. It seems more like you’re headed in this direction. If that is the direction you want to go in let me structure my comments towards that movie rather than the movie I sort of wish you would make. That always feels really important to me.

And finally I would say one of the most important kinds of notes I get from a friendly read is when they tell me where they fell off the ride. Because hopefully they were with you for a lot of the script, a lot of the story, but at some points they dropped off or they got a little bit bored, or they might have stopped reading if they didn’t feel a social obligation to keep reading. It’s so important to tell people where you got confused, where you got bored, where it just wasn’t clicking for you. Where you lost faith in the movie. Because those are the things that are so hard for the writer sometimes to recognize in their own work.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re describing somebody who is serving a friend in an advisory capacity. So you’re not saying, “Well, I read your script. I don’t think anybody is going to make this.” That’s not useful. Or “I don’t this idea.” That’s also not useful. “I don’t really go for these sorts of movies.” Not useful. “Wasn’t very funny.” Not useful. None of those things are useful. You’re there to be advisory.

The scale that I offer is regular, spicy, or extra spicy. And many times people will say, “Oh yeah, no, extra spicy.” And I’m like just take a moment. Think about it. Extra spicy means I’m going to talk to you the way I talk to myself. And it’s not pretty. OK? So, take a moment. There’s no shame in regular or spicy. And a number of times people are like, “Oh, OK, let me back off to spicy or regular.”

The idea is to try and suss out from them what they were trying to do. And then say, listen, I think given that you’re trying to do that maybe consider doing this. So it’s all very advisory. As opposed to professional reading which is entirely a kind of marketplace analysis. It’s evaluatory rather than advisory. Is this what we want? Is it to our standard? No, yes, the end.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, literally coverage on the title page it says pass, consider, or maybe. And you’re scoring things into a grid. It’s not the same function as trying to help something. And so it’s also important to note that if you ever see coverage on your own project first sit down and be ready to just shudder a bit. Because you will see that it’s only pointing out problems and not pointing out solutions. It’s literally just looking for threads to pull. And so it’s not a constructive thing to read your own coverage. I’ve done it a couple of times. I would not recommend it to anybody.

**Craig:** It would be extra spicy almost always.

**John:** Yeah. So a thing to avoid.

Always imagine yourself getting the notes that you’re about to give and be thinking what would be constructive to you as a writer to hear and that can include some tough love about things that aren’t working, but it can be tough love delivered really genuinely with love.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** All right. Let us move on to one of our main topics. So back in 2006 I answered a question from a reader on my blog. And I should stipulate it’s just so weird that I can Google questions and I find answers to things I answered in 2006.

**Craig:** You mean you’re providing your own Google hit back is what you’re saying?

**John:** I feel like past me is offering a gift to present me.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw. And it’s weird reading my old posts because I still sound like myself. I’m very consistent sort of year to year. But here was the question I answered–

**Craig:** Robots don’t age. [laughs]

**John:** We just don’t age at all. “Every screenwriting book I’ve read, class I took, and basically the first rule I learned says one page of a properly formatted script equals approximately a minute of screen time. I know one page of say a battle can last five minutes whereas one page of quick dialogue may last ten seconds if the actors talk fast. So my question is is this rule true?”

And so back in the day I said the rule is not really a rule. It’s true-ish, but it’s true-ish mostly because most scripts are about 120 pages. Most movies are about two hours. It kind of works out that way. So, I guess you can say it’s a very crude rule of thumb, but it’s no more than that. And we can obviously think of exceptions and I listed the movies I’d made at that point and sort of what my script page count was and what the actual running time of the movies were. And there wasn’t a strong correlation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But then a couple weeks ago I got thinking, you know what, I wonder how strong the correlation really is. And so I asked Stephen Follows, so he was the guy – remember, god, a year ago, two years ago I was talking about missing movies, like the movies you can’t find on DVD or on streaming? Like movies that just sort of disappeared.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He’s the guy who did a systematic study of like which movies are not available for streaming anywhere. So I went to Stephen Follows and said like, hey, would you be interested in tackling this question and going through a bunch of scripts, going through a bunch of running times and really charting this out how strong is the correlation between how many pages a script is and how long a movie is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, Craig, can you guess the answer?

**Craig:** Not in any real significant way.

**John:** No. It’s not a very strong correlation at all. There’s some clustering around one would be a perfect correlation, so a 111-page script is 111 minute movie. But only 22% of scripts had a ratio between 0.95 and 1.05. And two-thirds were within 0.8 and 1.2. So a lot of them were even sort of beyond those borders. You can have scripts that were 100 pages long, it could be anywhere between 80 and 120 minutes, which is not surprising to you or to me because we’ve all encountered that.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, if you’re supposed to have a 100 and your range is between 80 and 120, this is not good. The concept we’re dealing with here is standard deviation which is to say how average is your average? If you add it all up and, yeah, there’s like a lot of scripts turn out where they’re really close to 1:1 ratio, in this case 0.95:1.05, then OK, it’s good enough. But the problem is standard deviation. A lot of scripts are not even close to that. And so you average because there are a bunch of outliers, if you want to call them that, to the left, and a bunch of outliers to the right. And in our case there’s so much variation it would seem in the actual timing of anyone’s particular page length that the measurement is not useful at all.

**John:** So we should say as an industry we have a person whose job is to do script timing. That is generally the script supervisor. He or she sits with the screenplay before production and in consultation with the director goes through scene by scene, does an estimated running time per scene, adds it all up and comes up with a crude estimate of like this is how long this movie will probably last if we were to put all of these scenes into the finished film. That is useful. That is useful to see if something is going to be really short or really long, or if things are feeling long that we might want to take something out. But that is a completely different skill than just counting the number of pages on it.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are two reasons that a studio needs to know from a screenplay how long of a movie are we looking at. Reason number one, as you mention, is what’s the running time of the movie going to be because they don’t want say a family comedy to be 2.5 hours. Kids are not going to make it. And the other one is how expensive is this going to be because the budget of movies is defined in no small way by how many days you have to shoot.

It turns out that the one-page per minute rule satisfies neither of those needs. You’ve got a script supervisor who can do a much better job of telling you roughly how long the movie would be. And you have a first AD who can tell you a much better job of roughly how many days you’re going to need to shoot it. So, we should get rid of it entirely. Warner Bros I think still contractually requires that your screenplay be 120 pages or fewer.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve signed contracts that require that. I was just looking at the contract I did for this next thing. And I got up to 130 pages, so I could just go nuts.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** But literally they don’t have to accept the script if it’s longer than that which is just ridiculous. So, let’s talk about sort of why it matters overall. The industry is obsessed with page count. And because it’s a number that they can look at and try to quantify and so that pressure pushes down on screenwriters in that we sort of have screenplay dysmorphia disorder where we will do crazy things to try to cut page count down. And so it’s the reason why the decision to double space scene headers or single space them. Why we’ll take out words on page 14, just like small little words, or like cheat margins on a dialogue block just to sort of pull up later pages.

And we waste hours–

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Hours. Collectively we waste thousands of hours probably a year doing these little tweaks on things just to bring it from 121 pages to 117 pages because it matters, even though it doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** Yeah. It matters even though it doesn’t matter. I mean, I’m really bad because I also hate dialogue being split across pages, so I fiddle around and try and avoid that as well. But, yeah, we waste a lot of time doing this and it speaks to the stupidity of it. If I can not change the meaning in any way, shape, or form and reduce my screenplay by six or seven pages which I could easily do. Easily. All those little widows, those huge blocks of white space–

**John:** Widows and orphans, yeah.

**Craig:** Gone, right? So you just eliminate those and, boom, you can do it. And so then what does this one-page-per-minute thing mean at all? People should just start talking about it. It’s stupid.

**John:** Yeah. Another reason why it matters is because movies don’t have pages. Pages only exist in the screenplay format. But the pages don’t match up to the movie at all. And so movies have scenes, they have sequences, but they fundamentally don’t have pages. And so working in animation one of the things I actually really enjoy about it is at a certain point you stop caring about pages because it’s just become sequences. They number things really early on in the process because they move from the pages to boards to actually animating things. And so you stop caring about what page something was on.

That is good and that is probably how we need to move overall as an industry is to stop thinking about pages and start thinking about scenes. And stop thinking about the screenplay being this paper document that has now become digitalized as a PDF but is still essentially the paper document that everything is sort of focused around. If it’s actually the text that matters, it’s the scenes that matter, the sequences that matter. We should really be focusing on a format that is about those scenes and not about what could be printed on a piece of paper.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are riding in a jalopy just cause. There’s no reason for it.

**John:** Yeah. Now, if we were to move beyond pages, if we were to move beyond the PDF, some things that could be vastly improved. First off is security. So, right now Craig you’ve probably had to deal with these when you get a screenplay that’s locked down that you have to go through the special app to use? Have you dealt with that?

**Craig:** I’ve done that. I’ve also had to physically – so when I read Rian Johnson’s script I had to drive to Disney, go in a room, give them my phone, and then get like AE Ink reader kind of thing, not an iPad, but some sort of reader like that. Read it. Hand it back to them. Get my stuff back and go, after signing 400 NDAs. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve had that kind of situation or things that are printed on red or other situations. Or like they would send me an iPad that had been locked down that I could only read that script on. But more often I get this terrible app and it’s the equivalent of [Pix], but it’s just for like PDFs. But it’s essentially like a Flash app that shows you one page at a time and they can digitally cancel you from it. So like if they decided they wanted to hire a different writer instead of you, like you could be on page 67 and it would just disappear.

And so if you’re going to do that, I guess you’re going to do that. But the problem is it’s all still based on a PDF and so they’re still sending you an image of a page rather than actually sending you the text. And there’s so many better digital ways to handle that kind of security to keep that stuff locked down. And if we were to be willing to get rid of the PDF we could do that stuff a lot better.

**Craig:** Well, eventually we will. I mean, it is disturbing to think of any kind of – I mean, maybe that application isn’t Flash-based, but when I hear the word Flash I definitely don’t think security.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really backwards. I mean, one of these days I’m going to go off on CastIt.Biz. Have we ever talked about CastIt?

**John:** I don’t think we have. It’s worth a small discussion of what CastIt is, because everyone just loathes it.

**Craig:** CastIt is a web-based “solution” for casting where you log in, you access your project file, so let’s say it’s for Chernobyl. And then it keeps all of the little video clips of the taped auditions of everybody, along with their names.

**John:** In theory it is so much better than the days of tapes you’d get from casting.

**Craig:** Sure. But what I just said does not sound like it would be hard to do. It seems like most of the web has mastered the art of video archiving and database management. CastIt.Biz is literally unchanged since, I don’t know, 1998? I’m not kidding. I mean, I remember using it in 1999. It looks exactly the same. It is horrendous. The navigation is dismal. It’s ugly. For the life of me I have no idea why people are still using it. It sucks.

**John:** A friend of mine was working on a rival situation, a rival platform for it, and wasn’t able to make it work. It’s the Final Draft problem. It’s just they are established and people are familiar with it and so people are scared of change and they’re not changing but they should change.

**Craig:** Well, CastIt.Biz is a weird – I actually feel bad for them. Whereas Final Draft makes me angry. Because they have all this money and they keep “innovating” which is worse than actual innovating. It’s like fake innovation. Like, look, now we can do dual dialogue better. It’s like, dummies, that should have been there from the beginning, but whatever. CastIt.Biz, it’s almost like one day someone is going to be like, oh yeah, there’s a weird smell coming from their apartment.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Like you open the door and there’s going to be a coder slumped over and his cats have mostly eaten him. I mean, I can’t imagine that someone is actually over there going – anyway, poor CastIt.Biz. I do think that we do need a much better solution for this. The screenplay, first of all the screenplay format is ancient and creaky. And the idea of PDFs is ancient and creaky. The page-per-minute is ridiculous. It literally makes no sense.

Yeah, technology has not – well, we lag behind terribly.

**John:** Yeah. And so two last things. Collaboration could be much better if we’re not so obsessed with the physical representation of the page. So I both mean in terms of real time collaboration, the way that you can share Google Docs and update stuff in real time. The way that you and I are updating our workflow in real time as we change stuff. That is much simpler if you’re not trying to match a PDF page.

Also, the ability to sort of put notes on things makes much more sense if you don’t have a physical page that you’re sort of trying to represent.

And then version control. So really when we talk about script revisions and colored pages and all that stuff, it’s a really archaic old way of doing version control.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Where everyone says like, OK, well, we’ll now add page A36, which is going to be a cherry page, which will go into the script. And you know what? It’s charming that we had that system. That system needs to go away.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** No other system would ever have sheets of colored paper to represent sort of how stuff needs to fit together. We can do version control so much better and push it out to everybody and everyone can be looking at the most recent version of the script at all times because we’re not so paper obsessed.

**Craig:** 100%. The current revision system with revision marks and all the rest of it is based on Xeroxing. That’s just based on a large copy machine cranking stuff out. And we don’t have the ability to do very simple things. Everybody reading it for instance with a certain level of permissions should be able to just cycle through the revisions of a single line of dialogue. Just cycle through if you want.

And setting permissions, by the way, is another huge aspect of this.

**John:** Totally. That’s both security and collaboration. That’s what you need to do.

**Craig:** What are we going to do? Are you going to fix this?

**John:** I am not going to fix this myself. But I will say that as I think about this the two main products that my company makes, Highland 2 which its first claim to fame is that it could melt PDFs down so you could get the actual screenplay text out of it. That was its first trick was its ability to do that. And then Weekend Read which is to reformat PDFs so that you can read them on your phone. In both cases they’re trying to deal with the huge limitations that the current system is putting on things.

I would love to not have to solve these problems because we just agree as an industry – it doesn’t have to be one other solution. It can be multiple other solutions. It can be different ways to handle stuff. I kind of don’t care how we decide to do it. I don’t care if it’s one industry standard. I just think we need to be willing to move beyond our current situation that’s set up. And I think the page-per-minute is a part of this. We have this illusion that this rule of thumb is actually a rule. And it was never a rule.

The world is not going to fall apart if we stop worrying about screenplay pages and just focus on the actual text.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s not why the world is going to fall apart. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] There’s lots of other challenges facing the industry.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. There is. All right, so that’s my little rant there. This is one of those rants without an actual call to action other than just as screenwriters, as people in the industry, hey, what if we were to stop just obsessing so much about pages and page count. And recognize that there could be different ways to do this that would make so much more sense. And we have lots of showrunners listening to us, lots of writer-directors out there. Maybe on your next project think about how you might go to a workflow that was not so PDF/page obsessed.

**Craig:** Maybe I can get Neil Druckmann to figure this out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, the videogame business is so version controlled and collaborative and permission based and all that.

**John:** Craig, maybe I’m just speaking to an audience of you. You have this opportunity with your new show. Think about ways that don’t have to use the normal screenplay way of doing stuff.

**Craig:** Oh, I like where this is going.

**John:** And report back to us what you decide.

**Craig:** Fine. Done.

**John:** Cool. All right. Now it’s come time for us to talk about the coronavirus or COVID-19. And really we want to focus on the unique impact it has had on film and television in Los Angeles because that’s sort of what we know.

So, I wanted to start by talking about film because movies, theatrical films, are designed to shown in big theaters with a bunch of people. And you talk about opening weekends and buying tickets and popcorn and a bunch of people in a place. And that is not conducive to keeping this disease under control. So, right now as we’re recording this it’s not clear what’s going to happen with movie theaters, which ones are going to stay open, but clearly we’re looking at dramatic declines. Already Broadway is closed. Disneyland is closed. Sporting events and concerts are canceled.

Movies are shifting their release dates. And the film industry as a whole I think some of the greenlights have started to become kind of flashing yellow lights because we just don’t know what is going to happen to the future of theatrical releases.

**Craig:** It’s not good. The thing that haunts me a little bit is how much time these businesses can withstand while being closed down. Because it seems that a lot of businesses run the way a lot of homes run financially, which is hand to mouth. No pun intended. If we’re not open today we’re going to be out of business. And that’s frightening.

So, yeah, I’m very concerned. The movie theater experience was already being severely impacted right now. It’s going to be hammered. And also I just think studios are not releasing their movies. They’re just delaying them until such time as theoretically everything is OK. But we know that Broadway as of today, our recording, has shut down. Disneyland is shutting down. The NBA suspended their entire season. I have no doubt that Major League Baseball will – I think Major League Baseball, my guess is continue but not with people in the stands. They’ll be playing to empty stands.

**John:** They’ll be playing to television. So sporting events I could see the ability for them to carry on in some way because they do have a tremendous home audience there. They’re not making all their money by selling tickets to that venue, that event. Versus theatrical features it is about butts in seats. And I’ve talked about on the show before that my husband Mike used to run all the movie theaters in Burbank. So he had 30 screens that he needed to run every weekend. And a ton of teenagers are working for them. And just imagine how stressful it must be for the person who is in his job right now to be thinking about safety of his own employees but also thinking about how do we keep this business running.

**Craig:** I mean, in some ways it becomes a very simple thing. There’s not a lot to do except shut down. The obligation that we have to our employees as employers becomes an enormous thing. As a nation we’re not particularly good at it. And so we’re about to find out what we’re really made of.

**John:** Now, Craig, if you were a studio boss and we often cast you as the studio boss on these podcasts–

**Craig:** Yes, of course.

**John:** And you have something like the Bond movie, some sort of giant event, at what point might you decide to put that on Pay-per-view or some sort of like launch that movie somewhere other than in the theaters? What would go into your decision making process?

**Craig:** It depends on the film. So, a movie like Bond is essentially an evergreen. You can theoretically release a Bond movie whenever you want. Is there an enormous cost to delaying a Bond movie? Probably not an enormous cost. There are other movies that feel somewhat timely. A sequel for instance, like a proper sequel. You want to capitalize on a hit. Well, if you delay it for a year it’s not going to seem so timely.

Or, if you’re in competition with another movie. Things like that. But again you don’t really have much of a choice. If you put something on Pay-per-view you’re going to be losing an enormous amount of money. Because when they decide to release something theatrically they have already done the numbers. They modeled it. It makes sense to do it. It doesn’t mean that their models always turn out correctly. Obviously there are huge bombs. But by and large something as blue chip as a James Bond movie they kind of have to release it theatrically. Because the amount of money they’re going to make on “Pay-per-view,” they’re going to make that anyway after the theatrical release.

**John:** Yeah. I do worry that if you were to release a movie like Bond on Pay-per-view it immediately drops the value for – it becomes pirated on day one. And so if you’re trying to maintain some window between the Pay-per-view event and sort of it normally being on iTunes, that’s difficult because everyone can pirate it immediately. It is a real challenge. I don’t think there’s a great solution to it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I will say that I’m working under the assumption that movie theaters probably will close. Who knows where we’re at on Tuesday when this drops? I will commit at this moment that once the government says that movie theaters can reopen I’m going to go that weekend. I really want the theatrical experience to remain. I want to make sure our theaters don’t close. That our theater chains can keep going because big screens are great. And I love to be able to watch a movie with an audience. And I would hate for this to kill our theatrical experience.

**Craig:** Yeah. Me too. It’s disconcerting.

**John:** Now let’s talk about both film and television, the challenges facing there. The challenge of a group of people working together. So in some ways it’s like any office or any sort of workplace. There are people working together to make our movies and to make our TV shows. In the case of TV you have writers’ rooms. And so I just saw Ryan Knighton was headed back to Vancouver because the TV show he’s on is now a virtual writers’ room rather than an actual writers’ room with people in a room together.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s a choice that showrunners are making or studios are making for showrunners about we’re not supposed to have a big group of people together to do stuff. So for writers’ rooms you can make that virtual. It’s not ideal but you can make that virtual.

For actual production, for gaffers and grips and props and everyone else, there’s no working at home for that. And production is already being hugely impacted.

**Craig:** Without question. Across the board everything. I mean, I heard that NBC/Universal had shut down all production of all television shows. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But I’m hearing stuff. I mean, it does seem like that’s what’s going on.

**John:** The other challenge is if you are a show that’s traveling someplace, so like the Mission: Impossible movie was supposed to go to Venice. Not only can you not film where you’re supposed to be filming, but there’s the real risk of being stuck someplace. Like I was supposed to be going to France and Switzerland in two weeks for my vacation. Even before this got especially bad my real worry was like, oh, we could just be stuck there and not be able to come back to the US. And that is the concern for anybody working on a production overseas is that you cannot get back to where you’re supposed to be getting to. So it’s tough.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was supposed to – we’re recording this on March 12. I was supposed to be on a plane yesterday to London for a couple of award ceremonies. And we obviously canceled that trip like two weeks ago. But I think the ceremonies themselves are canceled. If I had been there, well, it’s the weirdest. I can’t understand. So apparently we have stopped accepting people from Europe except from the United Kingdom. So if you’re in Europe just get to the United Kingdom. What?

**John:** It makes no sense.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Take the train and get to–

**Craig:** Oh geez.

**John:** As we’re recording this I’m supposed to be at the Tucson Festival of Books. And so they kept sending updates like, you know, oh, here’s the precautions we’re going to take. I’m like they’re going to cancel the Tucson Festival of Books. I’m just waiting and waiting and like, yep, they pulled the plug. That’s why I’m here recording on a very rainy Thursday afternoon rather than from Tucson.

**Craig:** I guess if there’s a silver lining here it’s that it’s never been easier to communicate with each other and see each other without being physically with each other.

**John:** Absolutely. So a lot of my meetings for this week and next week have become phone calls or Skype sessions. That’s fine. A lot of that stuff does make sense. There are advantages to being together in a room. There’s a reason why writers’ rooms are rooms and there’s things you can do in a room that you can’t do virtually. But given the choices, yeah, virtual makes a lot of sense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now let’s talk about sort of if there’s any upside is that this is a great opportunity to catch up on a bunch of stuff you’ve been meaning to watch. If you’re a streamer this feels like a time to really showcase the things that you’ve got. And so some of the features that would have normally been going to theatrical will probably end up on streaming. They’ll get an audience. And it will be interesting to see over these next few months what that feels like.

I know our family, we started making a shared Apple note listing out all the movies we planned to watch as a family. And so it is an opportunity for your own film festival.

**Craig:** Well that is true. Just as it is the best time to communicate without being near each other physically, it is also the best time to be stuck in a house with a want for entertainment. Because there are thousands. Thousands.

**John:** Yes. There’s far too much TV to watch and now you have a little more time to watch all the TV you have not watched.

So let’s talk about in addition to safety precautions and sort of all the standard advice which people should follow. You should watch your hands. You should stop touching your face. You should listen to the advice of actual medical professionals. But what are some creative precautions or preparations that a writer could take? Let’s take a few minutes to talk through those. Because if you’re listening to this podcast and you are a writer, how do you best take advantage of this time? And to me I think it starts with making some sort of writing plan. List the projects you’re considering. Pick one of your projects. And then schedule time each day to write it. And make a plan for how you’re going to do it. Set some goals of effort. Not necessarily that you’re going to finish by a certain time but that you’re going to get a certain amount of work done each day. It could be pages. It could be words. Whatever. And find some system for holding yourself accountable.

If you have some friend who can be your accountability on this. That you are going to spend some time over these next challenging couple of weeks and months with your Internet turned off, with your Twitter shut down, actually focusing on doing something productive and good creatively and not just be a despair machine.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want to be a despair machine. I mean, look, I’ve got my work to do. I’m doing my work. It’s hard. I find myself very distracted. Very worried. Very concerned. And I have to allow for that as well. I think it is perfectly reasonable for us to say as writers, “Maybe I don’t get as much done over the next few weeks as I would normally, because there’s stuff going on in the world.” And if we’re any good at our job we are kind of spongey when it comes to emotions and feelings. And we’re going to feel stuff. And it’s not going to feel great.

If you’re sitting there writing something sunny or happy it may be harder for you. If you’re sitting there writing something brutal, it may be hard for you. So, you know, just take it easy on yourselves. I don’t know how else to advise here because, of course, the most important thing is that you try as best you can to stay healthy and keep your loved ones healthy, and that includes your noggin. Writing second, health first.

**John:** Yeah. I got offered a project this week that I think in a different week would have been like oh yeah absolutely I’ll do that. That feels like a dream. And literally just like what that project was about and this week is just not a good combination. This period that we’re in is just not a good combination. So I passed on it. Not because it wasn’t a great and worthy project, but because I just knew that I did not have the emotional bandwidth to be putting it into that script and be living my actual life.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s weird. With me sometimes the subject matter, you think like, OK, writing Chernobyl or Last of Us, which is a global pandemic, you know, I mean, you think well geez. Actually weirdly for me individually the subject matter isn’t what does it. It’s just the concentration. It’s when the world is demanding my attention and I have to leave it and go to the world in my head it’s hard. It’s just hard.

**John:** The one thing I want to make sure listeners keep in mind though is you have permission to turn it off. It is important to sort of keep informed, but you can keep informed like once a day. And that’s OK. If you’re not up to every hour’s new drama that’s all right.

When I was living in France in the lead up to the 2016 election I got so stressed out that at a certain point I took Twitter off my phone and took all the news sites off my phone. And I just made a deal with Mike where once per day he could just give me the recap of what’s going on because I just couldn’t actually process it anymore. And I think it’s all right to give yourself permission to look away and to focus on some other things. And indeed it’s probably healthier to just draw some boundaries between when I’m going to be aware of the stuff and when I’m going to let myself cocoon within myself and work on my own stuff.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. You just have to take care of yourself, as best you can. Yeah. Maybe it will become a nice escape. It’s hard to say.

**John:** Yeah. It could. I mean, I will say that a lot of our listeners are probably younger than 9/11 or other sort of big dramatic – the Northridge earthquake.

**Craig:** I was here.

**John:** Yeah. I was here. Those were big, scary times. But there were also good moments during it where there were moments where you saw everyone coming together and rising up and being better. So, I don’t get concerned about everything falling apart as much when I realize that there are good people out there who are trying to put stuff together. And I can imagine myself as one of those people.

I often talk on the podcast about sort of seeing yourself as the protagonist of the story of your life. And so if I imagine John August as the hero in this saga right now, I think about what that person would do and what are some choices that he could make that would – as difficult as things are – would lead to a better outcome. And that’s sometimes helpful.

**Craig:** In your story though you’re just laughing as all organic matter perishes.

**John:** [laughs] That is true. Finally the robots will–

**Craig:** Finally.

**John:** Will rise up. All right. It has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is actually a bit of a law rule here. It’s actually a Scriptnotes episode. Episode 99, which was our Psychotherapy for Screenwriters. So, I posted it on YouTube and one of the cool things about having all of our transcripts is you can now post videos and then upload the transcripts and it will automatically sync up the transcript to our talking. And it turned out really, really well.

And so Episode 99 is when we talked with Dennis Palumbo who is a therapist who mostly deals with screenwriters and talks through their issues. It’s one of our most popular episodes and I just thought it was a good time to put that up for everyone who wants to listen to it can listen to it.

The idea to put the transcripts as closed captions came in conversation with Shoshannah Stern and Josh Feldman. Shoshannah Stern was on our Christmas episode. And as we were working through the logistics of getting her on the show it really became clear that for folks who are deaf podcasts aren’t like such a great thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Weird.

**John:** Weird, huh? I mean, as an audio-only format they’re kind of inaccessible. And so in the interest of accessibility we’ve always done transcripts. The YouTube video is another way to make some of what we do a little bit more accessible. So check that out if you want. There’s a link in the show notes to Episode 99.

**Craig:** Great. I like that. Even if there’s nothing to watch per se, if you are deaf and you’re able to watch the captions go by in the cadence of the discussion–

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** You get, I think, a better sense of the way the discussion flows as opposed to just reading it, which is, you know, reading.

**John:** Cool. Craig, what do you got?

**Craig:** Well, sticking on this whole COVID-19 thing, there is a very helpful, I think, newsletter the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is putting out. You can subscribe to it online. We’ll provide the link. But, well yeah, no reason for me to read it out loud. By the time you hear this you will have that link.

It’s good. It’s good because it does not bombard you every two seconds as far as I can tell. I’ve only received one so far in the one day I’ve had the subscription. But it’s very measured and thoughtful and scientific, fact-based. It keeps you updated. It has running totals. It is not a freak-out alarm, but it is really informative. So, probably worth taking a look at that.

They are, because of the demand, sometimes when you sign up some people may get a timeout error. Just try it again.

**John:** Great. That is our show for this week. So reminder, if you’re a Premium member stick around and we will be talking about our first level spells. But otherwise Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by James Launch and Jim Bond. We’re using one featuring Aline Brosh McKenna. It’s a repeat, but it’s a worthy repeat because it’s happy and bouncy and sometimes you need a happy, bouncy, dancey song.

**Craig:** True that.

**John:** If you have an outro send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We’re running a little bit low on outros, so maybe you could take some of this time to write us some outros.

Ask@johnaugust.com is also the place to send longer questions, but for short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

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 like the one we’re just about to record.

Craig, have you a good week.

**Craig:** Thanks, you too, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, magic. Let’s talk some magic. So this was a random idea. I’m not sure where it came from. And we should say that the idea behind this, so this is Dungeons & Dragons Spells, Fifth Edition. First level spells can be from any class, but you suggested and I think it’s a good suggestion that no healing spells will be included in this pack.

**Craig:** Yeah. So obviously because it’s a gaming simulation of reality the HP hit point system of defining how healthy somebody is just has no connection whatsoever to reality. Also, in the world of D&D when you sleep for eight hours and wake up you’re totally healthy. Wouldn’t that be nice?

**John:** Oh, it would be so nice.

**Craig:** So spells that are like “restore half your health points,” it just doesn’t have any possible relation to our existence. So I figured let’s just skip those. Yeah, it would be nice if I was like, oh, I have good berries so I can make a berry that makes me feel a little bit better.

**John:** No good berries.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** All right. My choice, I was debating between three. And so I’m going to pick this one, but I’m also going to argue for the other two because I think they’re really good. Looking through this list I was struck by how many of the spells I would pick in real life are not the spells I ever pick when actually in the game.

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**John:** Because I’m always worried about like attack or defend. I’m not worried about sort of utility spells. But they’re all utility spells the ones I picked. So I picked Comprehend Languages. It has a verbal, semantic material component. It lasts for an hour. I need a pinch of soot and salt. But for the duration you understand the literal meaning of any spoken language that you hear. You also understand any written language that you see. But you must be touching the surface on which the words are written. It takes about one minute to read one page of text.

**Craig:** [laughs] Apparently they do have the one-minute-per-page rule. I like Comprehend Languages. Here’s my argument against.

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Argument against is, A, it lasts one hour which is kind of frustrating in the sense that you can hear and understand some things and I suppose have the memory of it, but then if you are at a party and you run into hour two, I guess you just cast it again. Is it unlimited casting?

Two, bigger issue, you can’t speak it. You can only understand it, which is kind of limiting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then argument number three is we sort of have this magic in our phones.

**John:** Yeah. I would say that Google Translate does a really pretty good job of this in a lot of situations. So, I totally hear you, but the ability to understand languages does feel very useful. And so I guess I did miss the fact that it doesn’t give me the ability to talk back.

**Craig:** Well, you’re dealing with a DM over here.

**John:** You are.

**Craig:** I’m always looking or the loop holes.

**John:** And also just the literal meaning. So, if it is – oh crap, the Jean-Luc Picard, something when the walls fell. What was the one, the civilization that only speaks in metaphors?

**Craig:** Oh, right. Yeah.

**John:** Is it Shaka, When the Walls Fell?

**Craig:** Yeah, I can’t remember.

**John:** I’m looking it up now. I will get the answer while you tell me about what spell you want to do.

**Craig:** So, I took at your other, you had a couple of backup choices which I’m happy to discuss, and one of which I looked at very carefully. Your two backup choices were Sleep and Disguise Self. Now Sleep, you know, has a little bit of a hit point in there because the amount of people you can put to sleep. But let’s just limit it to one person. Let’s just say Sleep is one person. The thing about–

**John:** How often would I want to cast Sleep on my kid when she was little? So often.

**Craig:** I mean, over and over. You’d spam that. But these days I’d mostly just want to cast it on myself.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Because my theory is that if you cast Sleep on yourself you will fall asleep. Now the sleep only lasts for a minute, but my feeling is like if it’s midnight and I’m having a little bit of insomnia and I cast Sleep to myself, all I need is that starter.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And my brain will take over from there

**John:** Gets it going.

**Craig:** So I thought about that one. You also have Disguise Self. That’s a very interesting one. So for Disguise Self which also lasts an hour you can make yourself, including your clothing and other belongings, look different. You can seem one foot shorter, or taller. You can appear thin, fat, or in between. You can’t change your body type meaning you can’t have 12 limbs or turn into an octopus. But it’s pretty good.

The downside, and what use would that be? A lot of shenanigans, right? That’s a heavy shenanigans spell.

**John:** Well, it’s shenanigans but also like Instagram. I mean, the fact that it could make you look like anything else could also make you look much better. So in a culture where we are constantly putting filters on our stuff to make things more attractive Disguise Self is your friend. It’s just an ability to present yourself as you wish you could look rather than how you actually look.

**Craig:** Or as we also call it, Photoshop. But, I mean, the bummer is it only lasts for an hour. So you run into that thing where you show up at a party and then like Cinderella you’re suddenly running to re-disguise yourself or else people are like oh my god.

Here’s what I went for. A spell I would never, and I mean never–

**John:** I’ve never seen anyone take this spell.

**Craig:** Ever pick this spell as a caster. But in real life, super freaking useful. Unseen Servant. Unseen Servant. Duration one hour. This spell creates an invisible mindless, shapeless force that performs simple tasks at your command until the spell ends. It springs into existence and then you can ask it to perform simple tasks that any human servant could do, such as fetching things, cleaning, mending, folding clothes, lighting fires, serving food, and pouring wine.

Once you give the command the servant performs the task to the best of its ability until it completes the task. And then it waits for your next command. Uh, yeah.

So basically this is the most ethical way to have the most abuse-able, unpaid intern ever. Right? I mean, so cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, lifting, carrying, schlepping. This is incredibly useful day after day after day after day. If I had an Unseen Servant right now I wouldn’t have to touch the doorknobs anywhere.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It would be so useful.

**John:** It’s like [unintelligible] but actually a little bit more flexible.

**Craig:** So much more flexible. Like, OK, you know what? It’s pouring rain and I need to get the mail. Hey, Unseen Servant, go get the mail. Brilliant. Love it.

**John:** All right. So circling back, it is Shaka, When the Walls Fell. That’s the Jean-Luc Picard reference. Here is my argument for Comprehend Languages which I just now thought about is that while we have Google Translate to do languages that people actually speak right now, Comprehend Languages would work on all the old stuff that we see that we can’t actually translate. So we’re talking about not hieroglyphics but other lost languages where we have things written in clay tablets and we have no idea what they actually are.

So the ability to actually understand what was written there would be a game changer for historical research.

**Craig:** Unseen Servant, do my laundry. I rebut it thus.

**John:** I find it interesting. Unseen Servant does not cook apparently.

**Craig:** It could. I don’t see why it won’t. Lighting fire. Serving food. I think cooking is too creative of a task. What you could say is Unseen Servant boil this chicken and put it on this plate. I think really simple – well, it says, actually the servant can perform simple tasks that a human servant could do. Simple dishes.

**John:** A boiled egg it could do, but not chicken cordon bleu.

**Craig:** No. Exactly. So, but this is very useful.

**John:** I agree it’s useful. It’s also – the D&D we play has very little to do with daily tasks.

**Craig:** Utterly useless in D&D. It is literally only useful as far as I – by the way, a billion nerds are like, “Hold on.”

**John:** “Hold on. Here’s a way I used it once to do stuff.”

**Craig:** To the keyboard. I apologize to you as a fellow nerd. I’m sure you have found a brilliant use for Unseen Servant, but honestly, er, meh, you can only have so many spells. Why pick that one?

**John:** Absolutely. Craig, I wish you and your Unseen Servant a very good week and stay safe out there.

**Craig:** Thank you sir, you too. Bye-bye.

**John:** Bye.

 

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 441 – Readers](https://johnaugust.com/2020/readers)
* [How Accurate is the One Page per Minute Rule?](https://johnaugust.com/2020/how-accurate-is-the-page-per-minute-rule-2)
* Stephen Follows’s analysis on [Is the One Page Per Minute Rule Correct?](https://stephenfollows.com/is-the-page-per-minute-rule-correct/)
* Try [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/) for free!
* Download [Weekend Read](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weekend-read/id502725173) to access your own or read our library of scripts today!
* [Hollywood and Coronavirus](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-could-take-20-billion-hit-coronavirus-impact-1284582)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 99: Psychotherapy for Screenwriters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIBboG1ddhs) with captions on Youtube!
* [Center for Health Security Updates](http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/newsroom/newsletters/e-newsletter-sign-up.html)
* Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium [here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jim Bond and 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/442.mp3).