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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 275 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. We are coming to you one day earlier than usual because Tuesday, I’ve heard, is the Election Day in the U.S. Craig, is that right?

**Craig:** Oh, is it? I don’t — they should probably say something about it on the news.

**John:** I heard a rumor of it. So I thought maybe we’d get this episode out the day before the election. Also in the theory that some people may be a little bit stressed out about the election–

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** And may want to hear about anything other than the election, so we will not talk about the election whatsoever in this podcast.

**Craig:** No, I would honestly would love it if somebody could just knock me out until the day after, just put me under. I can’t take this anymore, I can’t.

**John:** I’m sorry. I can’t either.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So today on the podcast, we are going to be looking at how movies and TV shapes the English language and how writers should think about their role in all of this. And we’ll also examine the uncomfortable overlap between rom-com characters and stalkers.

But first a reminder, t-shirts, today, this Monday that you’re listening to the podcast, is the very final opportunity to buy one of the two Scriptnotes t-shirts. There’s the blue shirt, there’s the gold standard shirt, they are both lovely but this is your last chance to get them. And when I say it’s your last day, I mean, daytime because at 5:00 p.m. today Monday Los Angeles time, they are closed forever. You will not be able to buy a t-shirt after 5:00 p.m. today on Monday.

**Craig:** I better buy some shirts.

**John:** You better buy some shirts. I think, Craig, we will find you a special friend of the show magic cohost discount. I think you’ll get maybe like $0.50 off. So–

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Whoa.

**Craig:** I was not expecting that kind of generosity today.

**John:** Well, I’m feeling very generous today.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** But everybody else, you need to like click the links that are on the show notes and buy your shirts because if you don’t buy your shirts you’re going to feel really sad when you’re wandering around the Austin Film Festival without a Scriptnotes t-shirt.

**Craig:** I mean, it does seem, honestly, like a lot of people have those shirts on. It’s the must have. It’s the must have wear of Austin.

**John:** It proves that you’re part of the inside crowd. So I want to thank everyone who bought a shirt or two shirts, you guys are awesome. I want to thank people for buying enough shirts that we are now on the wall of fame forever at Cotton Bureau as one of the most popular t-shirts ever made at Cotton Bureau.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** You guys are the best.

**Craig:** How many — so they made like, what, four or five different kinds of shirts there?

**John:** [laughs] They did, yeah. They’ve made a whole range of different shirts and our two shirts are both on the wall.

**Craig:** You know, again, I’m reminded of this fact that often slips my mind that people listen to this. There are more than just you or me.

**John:** So last week, we crossed 100,000 listeners–

**Craig:** My God.

**John:** In a week, which is nuts.

**Craig:** That is insane.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so, god, the amount of money you’re making, it just keeps going up, right?

**John:** You know, I feel like I should do a blog host that like lays out exactly what money comes in because there’s this whole idea that this is a money-making venture.

**Craig:** Where do you think that idea comes from? I don’t know where.

**John:** I think it comes from you, Craig.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** What? So anyway, the t-shirts are a lovely thing. They will start to pay for some of Matthew’s time.

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** That’s really what it will do.

**Craig:** It start to pay for some. I assume that we remain a money losing operation, you know, we — is that right, or–

**John:** I think we are. We approach breakeven. It really depends on how much of [unintelligible] salary you want to throw towards this podcast.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**John:** That’s what it comes down to.

**Craig:** Well, that really comes down to, you know, how much nonsense you have been doing throughout the day. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah, there’s plenty of nonsense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s plenty of scaring ducks away from the pool.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s the best job ever. Have you given him a firearm?

**John:** I have not, but Stuart gave him like the best techniques in terms of like tennis balls can be effective, you could just–

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Go out there and wave your arms. Basically, you don’t want the ducks to root in your pool because they will stay in your pool and that is not good for the pool or for the ducks.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t even–

**John:** The podcast becomes extra relatable when we talk about our swimming pools.

**Craig:** Listen, man, I haven’t mentioned a thing about that. I live in a very modest home.

**John:** You really do live in a very modest compound.

**Craig:** [laughs] Rich-guy laugh right there.

**John:** On last week’s episode we were talking about one of our listeners who we believe to be Martin Sheen, and we wanted him to do a voice over for us on a future Three Page Challenge. Literally moments after we recorded the episode, I found out that it wasn’t Martin Sheen, it was Michael Sheen, another incredibly talented actor but not Martin Sheen. This is Michael Sheen who is the star of Frost/Nixon, Masters of Sex, the Twilight series. He’s great on 30 Rock. He’s Welsh. We love him. He’s apparently a listener. So we actually have audio for this.

So Michael Sheen was on a podcast called My Dad Wrote a Porno and this is how he came to find about that show.

Michael Sheen: I think it was one of your guests, one of your previous guests. I think it was Rachel Bloom.

Male Voice: Right.

Michael Sheen: Who I heard on another podcast called Sciptnotes, which is about screenwriting.

Male Voice: Yes.

Michael Sheen: And they do a thing at the end which is One Cool Thing and her One Cool Thing when she was a guest on it was this. That sounds interesting.

Male Voice: That sounds ridiculous.

Michael Sheen: I’m going to have a listen to that.

**Craig:** He was in the Underworld. He was in — he was the head of lycans, he was the head werewolf.

**John:** I have not seen Underworld, but come on.

**Craig:** Oh, you haven’t. Those movies are good.

**John:** So the one movie Craig has seen that I have not seen.

**Craig:** Well, there’s a bunch of them.

**John:** Well, not the one movie.

**Craig:** There’s–

**John:** There’s a bunch of movies but like the–

**Craig:** There’s the–

**John:** Craig, your shtick is that you’ve not seen any movies.

**Craig:** Well, here’s the deal. If you put good-looking people in leather and have vampires fighting werewolves, Bill Nighy as an ancient vampire. Ooh.

**John:** Oh, that’s pretty great.

**Craig:** Yeah. Plus they have guns. Here’s the genius of Underworld. They were like we like vampires and we live werewolves and we like the idea of them fighting but we also like the Matrix. Let’s do all of that.

**John:** Let’s do all of that.

**Craig:** Yeah, just do–

**John:** Let’s do all the scenes.

**Craig:** Do all of it at once.

**John:** Kate Beckinsale. Done.

**Craig:** Yes. Kate Beckinsale–

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Moving around in like super tight leather, it’s great. The whole thing top to bottom, incredibly entertaining movie series, super geeky. If you — I mean, you’re a D&D guy, you would actually probably enjoy the – oh, and then there’s some Interview of the Vampire kind of stuff thrown in there.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** It’s like 12 different movies that they just blended together in a smoothie. And Michael Sheen — so first of all — sorry, Michael Sheen. That’s really embarrassing although it can’t be the first time, right? I mean, he’s had this before.

**John:** I mean, better than Charlie Sheen. If we had confused him with Charlie Sheen.

**Craig:** That would have been a little weird. And also it’s not fair because Michael Sheen’s real last name, I’m assuming, is Sheen and Martin Sheen’s real last name is Estévez. So Martin Sheen, that’s not even he’s real name, right. So we should have known.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We should have known it was Michael Sheen. Michael Sheen is fantastic. He’s one of those actors that’s never bad. You know that kind of actor that’s never bad. Because even like — look, Robert De Niro is an amazing actor. He’s been terrible at times.

**John:** Yeah, he has been.

**Craig:** Miscast, wrong role, didn’t seem to care, whatever it was, just he was bad, you know. Michael Sheen, never bad.

**John:** Do you think Michael Sheen is blushing right now as he hears you extoling his many virtues?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t – is he a blusher. I guess, you know, Welsh people probably — they’re — you know, they’re fair skinned.

**John:** Yeah. So a little blushing could happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But that’s fine. I mean, I think it only shows how great of an actor he is that he lets that emotion come through.

**Craig:** Especially when he’s the werewolf guy.

**John:** Yeah, for sure. Oh, so he’s a werewolf not a vampire. That’s crucial distinction.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. I don’t even know how you could have thought he’d be the vampire. He’s clearly–

**John:** No, but I think he’s a vampire though in the Twilight series.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, he is. Maybe that’s why you thought that, yeah.

**John:** Maybe–

**Craig:** Okay. Now I can understand why you would think he’d be a vampire because he played a vampire in an incredibly popular film series. He was–

**John:** That’s how talented of an actor he is. He could be both a vampire and a werewolf.

**Craig:** He’s so much better as a werewolf, I’m telling you. So much better.

**John:** Well, regardless of, we’re lucky to have him as a listener and we’re lucky to have our 99,000 listeners as well. So thank you everyone who listened and bought a t-shirt.

And now on with today’s show.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So back at Episode 260, we implored listeners to stop using the phrase begs the question. You remember that, Craig?

**Craig:** I do, I do. We begged them.

**John:** So we begged them to stop using begs the question because beg the question and begging the question really means to use circular logic, it doesn’t mean to raise the question or to invite the question. And my theory, which I had no evidence to support actually, was that the misuse of begs the question probably came from film and TV writers who were trying to use legal terms in courtroom dramas and didn’t really know what it meant and then they started using the same terms in places that really had nothing to do with legal situations.

So I — my theory, which I really can’t prove and I’m not going to do like the sophisticated data analysis to figure out like when it happened, but my theory is that we are kind of partly to blame for how begs the question has become misused and how it doesn’t mean what it kind of originally was supposed to mean.

**Craig:** Well, there’s no doubt that we, we meaning Hollywood, right, what is that? Is that a synecdoche when I make we into Hollywood, but I don’t know what it is? But we–

**John:** Charlie Kaufman would know what that meant.

**Craig:** He would know. Hollywood essentially powers the great bulk of American culture, let’s call it nonmusical American culture, and then by extension an enormous amount of global culture. And the way that we present language absolutely matters and it does impact things. Look at, for instance, one of your favorite movies and I love it, too, Clueless.

**John:** Oh, yes.

**Craig:** So Clueless, like Valley Girl before it, it popularized certain little local expressions that suddenly then become everywhere. “As if” became–

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** A thing. What I just said, “Start a thing,” that’s what Mean Girls made a thing a thing. Stop trying to make the blank a thing, right? So–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It is actually kind of remarkable how much influence movies do have on popular language even if movies aren’t inventing that language, in fact, they rarely invent any language but they do gather up bits and pieces of things especially when they’re making movies about young people, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and on and on and on, and then they megaphone it and amplify it. And sometimes in their megaphoning and amplifying they get it wrong.

**John:** Yeah, sometimes they do and sometimes they lock in some weird mistakes and changes that really are not part of the normal way that the language is used. So writers have always been doing this. So going back to Shakespeare, Shakespeare was using the language he heard around him but he was also inventing new language and a lot of things he was inventing and putting on stage for the very first time became parts of our language. Similarly, the language as spoken, the language as written for a long period of English history have been very different things but eventually as the written language started to more resemble the spoken language, the spoken language kind of drifted towards what the written language was doing and vice versa.

And so I think when we look at sort of the changes that movies and television make on our language, you have to be in mind like, yes, people may have been speaking that way but because it’s now on a fixed form and that dialogue is frozen in that movie, we start to think like, “Oh, that’s how people speak,” which in the case of Valley Girl or Clueless, that wasn’t necessarily how a large population was speaking, but now everyone was hearing it and everybody was imitating it, consciously or subconsciously.

**Craig:** Yeah, and this is, of course, the problem that we have when we watch old movies, I mean, movies from the ‘30s or ‘40s or ‘50s and we think, “Oh, that’s how people all spoke back then.” No, no more than the world looked black and white back then. It was a crafted presentation. Movies have always been special amplified presentations of reality. So it’s a mistake to look back at old movies and think, “That’s how people must have spoken.” Not at all.

**John:** So here’s a great example, so let’s listen to a clip from The Philadelphia Story. This is in 1940 and just listen to the language that they’re using.

Cary Grant: I suppose you’ll still be attractive to any man of spirit though. There’s something engaging about it, this goddess business, something more challenging to the male than the more obvious charms.

Katharine Hepburn: Really?

Cary Grant: Really. We’re very vain, you know. This citadel can and shall be taken and I’m the boy to do it.

Katharine Hepburn: You seem quite contemptuous of me all of a sudden.

Cary Grant: Not really. Not of you. Never of you.

**John:** So this Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn talking in The Philadelphia Story and where are they from, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, they’re from a magical land that’s right between the United States and England. It’s called Middle Atlantic Land.

**John:** Exactly. It’s a really peculiar accent that has features of British English and some Briticisms but it also has other weird special characteristics. And so, we’ll put a link in the show notes to an article by Dan Nosowitz for Atlas Obscura which is talking about how people in movies before 1950 spoke so strangely. His article is called How a Fake British Accent Took Hollywood by Storm. And that’s kind of what we’re hearing. It’s like they’re not trying to be British but they’re trying to not sound American and they’re trying to sound kind of fancy. There’s just like there’s no other kind of good word for it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s sort of rich, it’s fancy. It’s a highly cultured way of speaking, but it’s really off.

**Craig:** It is really off. I mean, you have words like, for instance, I think he says challenging in there and it’s challenging, challenging. And I don’t even think the British would say challenging and the Americans certainly wouldn’t say challenging. And then really, really, really. It is a reflection, I think, of Hollywood’s desire to aim high and present a classy product. The people involved were beautiful, classy people that we would aspire to. They weren’t non-Americans because we’re Americans and we need to be American, see, but better. And this was at a time when I think there was a sense that class mobility was more of a thing, that you would aspire to speak that way and wouldn’t you be putting on the Ritz if you did.

**John:** Yeah. So imagine, this is the movies after all, this is the pinnacle of sort of like everyone watching the same bit of culture together. Everyone is watching people speak this accent and, yes, this accent may have existed in pockets before and people may have been trying to speak in a fancy way. But like this was kind of an invention. This was an invention and in 1942, like two years after this movie, there’s actually a very famous book by Edith Skinner who has a book called Speak with Distinction where she defines “good speech” and it has basically these characteristics that we hear these actors speaking, which is non-rhoticity, which basically means dropping your Rs. And so words like here and Charles, you don’t hear the R in there. There’s no scrape to that R. There’re weird things that she wants you to do with the tempo of words and how you’re hitting your accents on things. It’s a very peculiar way of speaking that lasted for quite a long time in movies even though it didn’t like necessarily break out into the larger world. I think people still aspired to that accent.

**Craig:** There was a time before, really before sound came in, where acting was incredibly performative. Nobody was meant to be acting naturalistically. If you look at a movie like, say, Nosferatu. Everyone is what we would call emoting, overacting. It was a kind of act that you might do on stage in a big, big theater house where people all the way in the back needed to see that you were scared. And you had to act things really big because you couldn’t say words, right?

And then when sound came in, Hollywood understood, “Wait a second. There is a more naturalistic way to be. We should start acting the way people actually act.” And so you have this wave coming in and, you know, very famously, James Dean is one of the — and Marlon Brando, this kind of naturalistic acting. And you could see how it wasn’t like a — there was no revolution. It was just a gradual thing that occurred. And just as that happened, when you watched the motion from — in the way people talk, just dialogue and sounds from ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, even ‘60s. And then by the time you get to the late ‘60s, it’s already disappearing. And you have, you know, you’re looking at movies that are heralding the coming ‘70s era, you know, a movie like Easy Rider. There is no interest in putting on airs. If anything it is how can we be the most real and normal that we can be.

**John:** Yeah. And normal is often a code word for authentic. It’s basically, it’s how do you make it feel like these people are actually really in this space and they are the characters that they’re portraying. Which in The Philadelphia Story, that wasn’t — I mean, that wasn’t the urgency. It wasn’t about like getting the perfect voice for like where that person was supposed to come from. Everyone sort of spoke like they were in this magical kind of movie world. And I think a lot of people kind of wanted to be in that magical movie world. I think this woman, Edith Skinner, she was being a prescriptivist. She was talking about good speech was trying to sound like you’re in this kind of movie. So I want to talk about prescriptivism as it relates to sort of language overall and English overall because I think the greater trend, and I think something we all notice as writers is there’s all these rules which are applied to us that we learned from grade school on about how English is supposed to work.

And many of those rules are really arbitrary. They really are just things that have come down over the years from people who want English to be something that it’s not at all. And so, this isn’t quite our gold standard episode where we talk about like the history of gold as an economic tool. But I want to take a little bit of time here to talk about like why English is the way it is and sort of clear up some misconceptions about how English came to be because I don’t think we’ve never done that in our 275 episodes.

**Craig:** Well, I just thought it came to be when Americans invented it.

**John:** Well, we did invent it. We kind of perfected it. I mean, other people had tried but we just — we nailed it.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** We just got it done. Nailed it.

So let’s go through the very short history of English. Because I remember when I was in high school, I watch like this — I think it was Bill Moyers’ PBS series which was like the 10-hour version of the story of English. But here is the sort of a few minute version story of English so you can be a little bit smarter than some of your other friends at a cocktail party.

So a root language that most of the languages that we are familiar with in Europe is called Indo-European, and no one actually speaks Indo-European right now. But they could trace it back and they can figure out that it’s the origin of English, Spanish, Hindi, Portugese, Bengali, Russian, Persian, Punjabi, so a huge chunk of our currently spoken languages trace their way back to this Indo-European language. The branch that we ended up on was Proto-Germanic. And so that’s Dutch, German, Swedish and the original English that was spoken in the Isle of Britain by the Anglos and Saxons was very much like sort of how German works now. It had a lot of those — Craig, did you ever learn German? Did you ever take German?

**Craig:** No. I grew up fearing Germans. I can’t imagine why.

**John:** That’s fair enough. But, you know, German does a lot of things. When you first start learning German, you take a German class, they’re like, wow, you have to — it feels like you have to conjugate everything. It’s because there’s declensions on nouns and nouns come in different cases and they do a lot of special things. English used to do that or at least Old English used to do that, the stuff that was spoken by the Anglos and the Saxons in the Isle of Britain. So if you look at the original poem of Beowulf, it’s Old English but it’s basically unintelligible to us now because it does all that old difficult stuff. It’s written in a language called West Saxon. And so the nouns, the adjectives, the pronouns, verbs, everything has these special endings and forms. And so if you’ve taken other languages, you know, that in Spanish or in French, you have to modify the ends of words to match up with things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I hate that.

**John:** Yeah. Isn’t so rough like it’s — all this extra work. And basically, we used to do all that in English and then we just sort of stopped. The reason we stopped is probably, mostly because of the Vikings.

**Craig:** Thank you, Vikings.

**John:** Thank you, Vikings. So Vikings spoke a language that was sort of Old Norse, which was very much — it was one of the old Germanic languages but they had different endings on their nouns. And so when they came to Britain, as adults, they were trying to speak this language that was being spoken here and they could sort of do it but they couldn’t do it very well.

**Craig:** They were just too dumb. They were literally too stupid to learn the language. They’re like, “We’re not learning your language. We’re changing it. It’s too hard.”

**John:** So as someone who is currently living in Paris, I have so much sympathy for the Vikings because I spoke some French before I got here. But a lot of the parents at my daughter’s school showed up here like not knowing a word of it. And it’s really tough as an adult to sort of get up to mastering things. So you end up sort of just like getting by and I think that’s probably what the Vikings were doing is they would show up as adults and like, “Argh. Okay, we’re getting by.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And what they basically did is they kind of just — they were like ordering at a restaurant where they didn’t quite speak what was there and everyone could understand them but they couldn’t quite make it all work.

**Craig:** I’m not sure that’s what the Vikings were doing but, okay.

**John:** Yeah. There was also raping and pillaging, too. There’s probably a bit of that.

**Craig:** Touch of it.

**John:** Touch of that. They showed up, their nouns had like the same root but they had different endings, so they just sort of stopped using the endings of the nouns. They brought a lot of their words relating to ships and things like that and everyone just sort of got by. Meanwhile, also in the Island of Britain, there were the Celtic peoples who were already there and they had some impact. Probably the biggest impact they had was, you know how in English, we do this really strange thing with the verb, “do.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Really kind of a verb, how we use it. Nobody does that. But the Celts sort of did something like this, which is that we use did and do in order to form questions. Like, “Did you go to the park today?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But we also use it in negatives in ways that’s really strange. So this is a sentence that should make sense in English, “I no go to the park today.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We can’t say that or, “I not go to the park today.” You can’t say that. You have to put the did in there. It’s a useless did but you have to put the did in there, “I did not go to the park today.” And that’s a really weird thing in English and the linguist, John McWhorter, thinks that probably came from the Celtic people who are already there in the England.

**Craig:** Yeah. They might have been drunk when they were coming up with that.

**John:** Yeah. But you know what? It’s part of our language now. It stuck around. So that’s how we do it.

**Craig:** Hey, it’s — you know what? I love it personally because I speak it. I’m really — I’m so good at English. I have all the best words.

**John:** I have all the best words. Well, our best words came from the French. So the Norman invasion of the Island of Britain happened in the 11th century and they brought in all of their words. In a lot of cases, we had the same words already kind of from the same roots but then we ended up using the French words as well. And so we sort of — we didn’t quite double our vocabulary but we got a lot of like duplicate words. And so that’s why in English, we have both the word royal and the word regal which are from the same root but we sort of got both of them, and, hey, bonus words.

So the French was the last sort of big impact of like new words. Then in the 15th century, we start with modern English. We start with printing presses. We start with the King James Bible. There’s the great vowel shift which I barely understand but essentially all of our vowels shifted sort of one notch on the sort of the loop of vowels. And it’s part of the reason why all of our spelling is so strange because we used to pronounce things very differently and we used to pronounce things the way that they were kind of written down and everything just shifted because our vowels shifted and the letters that we pronounce shifted as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. You end up with these bizarre cases like — was it Ogden Nash who famously said you could spell the word fish, G-H-O-T-I.

**John:** Yeah. That’s so great. So let’s see if I can remember, it’s the GH from enough, right?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The O from —

**Craig:** That’s the tricky one.

**John:** I don’t remember what O sounds like in–

**Craig:** Women.

**John:** Oh, you’re absolutely right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then the TI is the TI in like question and a lot of those words.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, that obviously is bananas. And somebody — I was talking to somebody who — I can’t remember who it was or where he was from but English was not his first language. And I said, you know, is it hard to learn English? Because everyone across the world, you see people learning English. It is becoming the most global language. And he said, in his experience, it was actually quite easy because there were so many quirky things. So you understood like, “Oh, that word just sounds like this.” It’s not like I have to —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, continually apply certain things. Like it’s easy for me to learn the word women because it’s just distinct. It’s women. That’s it. Boom. Done.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And no feminine or masculine or things like that.

**John:** Well, yeah. There’s a lot of simplifications that happened. So we lost our genders on all our nouns, great, helpful.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We also basically stopped conjugating at all. So we conjugate the first person plural. And so I speak, you speak, he/she/it speaks.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then we speak. You all speak. They speak. So it’s only that third person is singular that we–

**Craig:** How great is that?

**John:** Yeah. It’s so simple.

**Craig:** That literally — that would turn, like I took French in high school. That would have been — that’s like three-quarters of it is gone because you’re not conjugating.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, oh my god, it’s not enough that you have conjugate everything. And then there are irregular conjugations. And then there are the imperative conjugations. If I want to command somebody to speak, I say, “Speak.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. It’s as simple as that. No wonder people are learning this language. It’s not hard.

**John:** So one of my husband’s friends is an English teacher here in France. And so, it’s so fascinating to hear his explanation of like how things work in English because I don’t think he’s actually right a lot of times because he will say like, “Oh, you don’t have this form but you just do this.” And I was like, “I don’t think that’s actually accurate but I think it actually makes sense most of the time. So, fine, it’s fine for you to say that.” Like we basically don’t —

**Craig:** [laughs] He is a bad teacher.

**John:** We really don’t have the subjunctive in English.

**Craig:** Yes, we do. We have the subjunctive.

**John:** We have subjunctive but we use it so rarely. So it’s not a crucial thing for you to understand.

**Craig:** I use it frequently.

**John:** So give me an example of when you love to use the subjunctive in English.

**Craig:** Well, the most common use is following an if. If I were to go to here, if I were to do this, if I were to do that. I wish — if and I wish are probably the two most common. I wish that I were a little bit taller. I wish I were a baller. I wish I — that would be a bad version of that song. I agree. But accurate subjunctive. I’m a fan.

**John:** I’m a fan of like the hortatory subjunctive. Like, may we all be so lucky.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like that.

**John:** So that’s, we be.

**Craig:** Yes. May we all be, yes, there but for the grace of God go —

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** No, that one doesn’t quite work.

**John:** Yeah. But we don’t have to think about it nearly as much as other languages do, which is kind of great. Other sort of weird advantages to English that have come up is like we’re very phonetically rich so it’s very easy for us to bring in words from other languages and sort of make them fit and work. Other languages tend to have fewer phonemes and so it’s harder for them to sort of get a word — to be able to pronounce a word that’s not a native word for them, but they make it work. Every place can sort of incorporate words. But English seems to be especially greedy at taking in new words.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t think of too many — in French, I think we can cover everything. I mean, there’s the — there’s, you know, the kind of nasal thing or the back of the throat R.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But we’re capable. Those are really just, you know, little sprinkles on top of sounds we already have. In Italian, there is a sound that we do not have.

**John:** All right. What is it?

**Craig:** It’s this particular kind of plural case or sometimes you’ll see in some words they’ll also have a GLI. So GLI, which sounds like glee. In Italian, it’s actually LYE. It’s hard. I can’t quite…LYE. It’s LY-combined together-E. LYE.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a weird sound.

**John:** Yeah. And so it’s — we’re not perfect. We don’t sort of have everything. But we have just like a huge range of things. And so even as I listen to some adults here mispronouncing something in French, I want to tell them like, “No. No. We really do have that sound, you’re just try apply the wrong vowel for that.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like, you know, just like your ghoti-fish example, like we really do have that sound to make that. You’re just thinking of the wrong letter for it. And if you could think of the right letter for it, you’d make it to be able to work.

But English has some significant downsides. And I think it’s worth pointing what’s not so great about English. Because we got rid of all of our endings on words, word order ends up mattering a lot more in English than in many other languages. So you have to put things in a certain order for them to make sense. In some languages like Latin, for example, you can put stuff in kind of whatever order it pleases you because it’s very clear what that noun is doing in the sentence. Here, we have to use helper words and a lot of word order for sentences to make sense.

**Craig:** I like it that way.

**John:** You like it that way?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because we’re used to it. It’s natural to us and it’s a hard thing for some people to learn from other languages.

**Craig:** Tough.

**John:** We have strange ambiguities and we’re sort of missing some things that other languages have. So, an example which I already used when I was trying to lay out the conjugations is we use the same word for you, singular, and you, plural. And it doesn’t trip us up that often, but there are weird cases where you’re talking about more than one person and if we had a different form of you for that would be helpful. We used to have thou, which was that second person singular and it just — it disappeared. You took its place. But it was useful.

**Craig:** Well, you can see how colloquially people fill it in themselves. So where I grew up in New York, there was “you’s.” And obviously, in the South, in huge swaths of the South and even to the mid-South, it’s “ya’ll” which is incredibly common, and then, there’s “you all” which I hear all the time. I hear that out here in California. So, people will add little zippitys on there to kind of get themselves into a second person plural as opposed to second person singular.

But there’s also cases in, for instance, in French, you know, they have the formal and informal which we do not have. So, “vous” could be second person singular if you’re talking to somebody fancy.

**John:** Yeah. And the explanation behind the “vous” being formal in that situation is it’s also like of a royal we. It’s the same kind of idea where like you’re giving somebody extra respect as if they’re kind of two people by using the “vous” form with them.

**Craig:** It’s ridiculous.

**John:** We also lost our version of a sort of — or we sort of use you for. We don’t have the thing to say like a generic person like sort of not anyone specifically, but a general person.

**Craig:** We have one. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. We have one. Yeah.

**Craig:** Which doesn’t quite work, but then, there’s — but we often do use “you” to mean you, a person who’s not here who but like one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. You can’t get there from here. Like, who’s that “you?” It’s not literally you.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Because of how our language evolved, we ended up with a ton of words that are misspells and hard to figure out how to pronounce. And so, one of the great advantages of English, I think, is that we have a huge dictionary and a huge range of words you can choose from. But if you’re trying to learn the language, man, that’s a lot of words.

And so, we have “tree” and we have “arbor” and there’s no apparent connection between the two of them, but they are connected and there’s just a lot more to sort of master if you’re going to try to master English as a language.

**Craig:** Yeah. I love vocabulary. I do.

**John:** You’re a crossword player. So, like, for you, it’s great.

**Craig:** We prefer puzzler or solver, sir.

**John:** I’m so sorry.

**Craig:** Solver, yeah.

**John:** You’re a solver.

**Craig:** I don’t play crosswords.

**John:** I’m a giver-upper on crosswords.

**Craig:** I’m going to get you started. I am. I feel like you would be great.

**John:** I literally tried the New York Times this afternoon. I tried the Thursday Puzzle. Is the Thursday Puzzle hard? Because it was hard for me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, this Thursday had rebus. So, that can be tricky. I don’t know if you – a rebus is when one square holds more than one letter.

**John:** Yeah. And today’s, one was AG, and it just completely stumped me.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. Thursday — start with Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Just work on those.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Get your sea legs, feel good about yourself, and then just know that Thursday will always have a gimmick.

**John:** Ooh.

**Craig:** So, be looking for — always, Thursday, there’s always a gimmick.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Friday and Saturday are tough ones. They are just difficult, usually gimmick-less, but difficult. And then, Sunday is like a Thursday. It’s like a big Thursday.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, now, I know.

**Craig:** But, yeah, go Monday and Wednesday. You should be able to do Monday easy-breezy.

**John:** Cool. I will try a Monday puzzle when Monday comes.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Because I will be looking to do anything other than focus on Tuesday.

**Craig:** I know, seriously. You may not be able to come home.

**John:** Ugh. We won’t talk about that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** All right. So, let’s get back to our discussion of English. And so, just like we had the woman who was talking about the accent that everyone should speak with, we have a lot of people who are talking about like how everyone should write and the words that people should use. And these prescriptivists for the English language, a lot of them are coming from Latin because they were church people. And, church people, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Craig, but church people like rules and they want an orderly universe. So, it comes from–

**Craig:** Like commandants even.

**John:** Yeah, even that. Like, divinely inspired texts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they’re reading the bible or they come from a background where the bible is in Latin and Latin is a very orderly language. It has a lot of special rules. And so, they’re looking at how cool Latin is. When you look at English, it’s like, well, English should be more like Latin or at least we should try to make English a little bit more like Latin.

And so, a lot of the rules that we’ve been taught over the years come from these prescriptivists who are looking at English saying like, “But in Latin, you do it like this. So, therefore, the rule should be that you do it like this.” That comes up a lot in cases with our pronouns because even though we got rid of most of our cases for nouns, we still have them for “he” and “him” or “she” and “her” for “I” and “me.”

A lot of the rules you see people trying to apply to English come from Latin where they’re trying to say like, “Oh, well, this is how you do it in Latin. So, you should do it this way in English.” And when we mess things up in English or when we are chastised for things in English, it’s often because people are looking at how we should be doing things because they were done a certain way in Latin.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a — I mean, I will freely admit that I’m a grammarian. And the joy of grammar for me is not one of any kind of metaphysical superiority. There is no significance in and of itself to grammar. The joy is in — it’s in the fastidiousness itself. It is a joy of joyfulness. I am begging the question here. I like the specificity. I do think that there are a lot of cases where being grammatically correct actually does better express intention and meaning, but not always.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Most of the time, I just like grammar because I like being in control of the algorithms of speech and of writing.

**John:** Absolutely. And so, the kind of grammar you’re describing is how people use language and how to use language effectively to communicate the meaning that you’re trying to communicate which is great and like there’s reasons why, I think, it’s important to understand these rules, as they’re set down as rules, to make sure that what you’re trying to communicate actually is getting through on the other end and to be able to anticipate.

If you break any of these rules or tenets, the person on the other end may perceive you in a way that you don’t want to be perceived or perceive your ability to use the language negatively because of a choice you’ve made not to follow a certain set of rules. And so an example would be, “Craig and I host a podcast.” Great. “Me and Craig host a podcast.” Well, that actually is not wrong, per se. There’s lots of good defense for using “me” as a subject in that case. But most people would say no. And if you’re going to do that, you’re going to have to be aware that people are going to assume that you’ve made a mistake there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a signifier. I mean, what we often look at with grammar is the signifier of education.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And the thing about “Me and Craig host the podcast”, I mean, my sister texted me the other day. She’s a brilliant attorney and she wrote, “Me and this other guy did a blank, blank, blank.” And I understand, when you’re casual and when you’re texting, when you’re chit-chatting, it’s totally fine. But, if you were to write something and publish something, it is essentially saying, “Me hosts a podcast” and now, you sound like Tarzan or Cookie Monster and it’s ridiculous.

So, it really does come down to signification for most, but for me, also, there is a certain beauty to the sound of “Craig and I host a podcast” because it flows and it flows into my understanding of how I host a podcast should sound. There’s an assonance to it as opposed to dissonance. I feel dissonant. Similarly, I’m the person that gets irked when people make the mistake when it’s the — when it’s an object and they’ll say, “She went to the store with John and me,” right? That’s correct.

“She went to the store with John and I.” I hear that all the time. Now, the signification is you’re trying to sound smart, but you actually screwed it up and now you sound dumb. So, it’s about — it’s a weird thing. It’s like music to me and just the notes sound wrong if you’re using “me” when you should be saying “I.”

**John:** Absolutely. So, I would point listeners to a great podcast hosted by John McWhorter who’s a good linguist who talks about specifically the “Billy and me” sort of problem. And it’s a weird thing. He actually makes a very compelling case that “I” is actually the special case and there’s a weird thing with “I” that you basically — “I” has to go right before the verb. And if there’s really anything between “I,” it breaks.

And so, basically in English, it’s evolved to be the case where the “I” has to be right next to the verb, otherwise, you have to use “me” or something else there. Because, think about a sentence, like, “Craig and I, not knowing what we wanted to do decided to blah, blah, blah…” The most space you put between “I” and the verb, the more the whole sentence breaks down. Another example he sort of gives is that “Who’s there?” You don’t say, “I.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I is never the answer to the question. “I” is basically only the pronoun that goes right before the verb when you’re talking about yourself.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s a strange case.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the — and by the way, speaking of crosswords, a common crossword answer is “Is it I?” So, there’s a famous bible quote, “Is it I, my lord?” and that is correct. So, “Who’s there?” “It is I.” That is grammatically correct. Almost no one says that because he’s absolutely right. I is demanding the verb following the — you can do in a positive. That’s when you have a little phrase set apart by commas that work like parenthesis. So, you can say “I, angrily, went to the store” or–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “I, in need of a book, went to the bookstore”. The longer that a positive comes, the more broken down the sentence is, and frankly, almost no one will put in a positive in there because it is ugly-sounding. Again, it’s musical.

**John:** It is absolutely musical. So, that’s where I want to get to the whole point of this discussion of English is that the writing that we are doing for screenwriting is very musical writing. And, so, the same reasons why you would not want to have a character say, “It is I,” are the reasons why you need to think about the grammar choices you’re making when you’re writing screenplays.

So, let’s talk about it. So, first, let’s talk about screenplays as a whole form. They are written in the present tense. I’ve read screenplays that are written in the past tense, more like a book. It feels weird that the standard has become that we write screenplays in the present tense and that every moment is happening sort of right in front of you. They’re a reflection of the experience of watching the movie. The same way the movie is flowing right in front of your eyes, the screenplay is flowing right in front of your eyes in the present tense. Craig, have you read any scripts that are not present tense?

**Craig:** No. I’ve never seen that and I can’t imagine how that would feel because it seemingly clashes with the dialogue. Now, there are books where, you know, most novels are written past tense, third-person past tense. And then, when people are speaking, but then, that’s why when people speak in books where the prose is third-person past tense, the novelist is constantly adding to the dialogue “He said,” “She said,” “He asked,” right? To put the dialogue in the context of the past. Sometimes, there’ll be cases where an author will make dialogue very present feeling and they will often — like, Stephen King is famous for this. He will set some dialogue apart in italics as a kind of stream of consciousness or thought which does feel very present. And, so, it’s set apart from the book by its italicization.

But, with what we’re doing, everyone is speaking in the present and there is no “He said/she said,” because there’s no narrator. So, I can’t imagine how that would feel to say, “John walked outside. He took a look around. John, ‘This is wonderful right now, but so wrong.’”

**John:** Yeah. So, the thing I want to point out though is like we say it’s the present tense, but it’s also not only the present tense. So, in previous podcasts, we’ve talked about the present-progressive which is that like “He is sitting,” “He is doing something.” It’s that interruptible form of the present that English has that a lot of the other languages don’t have, by the way, which is useful and delightful.

And we’ve been strongly encouraging people to use it when appropriate because it’s not passive writing. It’s actually writing that reflects ongoing states in ways that movies are about ongoing states. And so, it’s a very useful form of the present tense to be using.

**Craig:** Completely, completely. We should be able to use all tools in the present tense toolbox.

**John:** Every once in a while in scripts, you will also see the future tense used and they’ll often be in callouts to the reader saying like, “We will come back to this later on,” like they tend to be parentheticals, you know, not parentheticals over dialogue, but parentheticals to the reader in scene description that’s reflecting the sense that like you are in the present tense right now where I am, but trust me. There is a future coming and this will become important.

So, you will occasionally see breaks out to the future, even breaks out to the past where we say like, “We met this character on page such and such,” but those are not the normal flow of screenwriting. They’re very special cases.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. Those tend to indicate some kind of meta awareness where we are now breaking the reality of the movie. You could say in the description something like, “Vanessa is unhappy with her job. One day, she will be a billionaire, but not now, and not for a while.”

So, you know what I mean? And that’s a direct communication to the reader that is floating above the reality of the movie. It’s understood that people in an audience will not have that experience. It’s there so that that reader can get closer to the movie experience because, of course, we are trying to make something audio-visual with text only.

**John:** Absolutely. I think that also ties into why we say that screenplays are written in the third-person, but really they’re often written in a sort of a second-person plural. That’s why you’ll see “we’s” in screenplays and I some people hate “we’s” in screenplays. Craig and I are fans of “we’s” in screenplays because it is a collective experience. We’re going through this process together. So, it feels very strange to see an “I” or a “me.”

**Craig:** Yeah. That would be weird.

**John:** But I think I’ve seen it in a Shane Black script, but in general, you will sometimes see a second-person plural “we” to describe this experience of what’s happening and what we’re doing together.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, we hear, we see.

**Craig:** Again, if you were to say “I” or “me,” you are making a winking comment to the reader. You are not doing something that could possibly be shown on screen because you, the writer, are not there. You don’t exist for the audience nor should you unless there is, again, some kind of special case — so, yeah, no question.

**John:** Right. So, that’s all the stuff that’s not the dialogue, but, really, I think the crucial thing I want to get to here and the part that actually has an influence on culture is the dialogue because that is the writing that the audience is taking with them.

And so, let’s talk about sort of the things you’re doing in the writing of dialogue that are going to impact how people are using their language 30 years from now. So, well, a lot of the mistakes you see listed on websites are spelling mistakes. Guess what? People can’t hear your spelling mistakes. That’s the lovely thing about being a screenwriter. It doesn’t mean spelling is not important. It’s incredibly important. But like a spelling-mistake in dialogue is just a spelling-mistake in dialogue. It’s not a thing that the viewer is going to encounter.

**Craig:** No, it’s not. But it can snag the reader.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Typically does snag the reader. So as the writer — I think it’s — you want to spell things correctly not for the audience but for the readers so that they understand that you are — well here is the illusion that you’re creating for the reader. As opposed to all the — I mean, the mega illusion of a movie for an audience, the mini illusion for a reader is that you the writer are in complete control of the story. Every word, every moment has been carefully designed with intention and purpose and that they’re in good hands. And when something is misspelled, particularly when something is misspelled in a way to indicate that the writer just didn’t know the real word, they stop and think, “Oh, this person is not that smart or didn’t take the time to proofread, or literally doesn’t know what a word means.” And that can get shaky for you. It hurts the read.

**John:** It does hurt the read. So, I sort of deliberately set you up for the like spelling doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. And if you’ve listened to our Three Page Challenges, we will single out on spelling mistakes because that is the first experience the reader is going to have with you and your script.

But let’s take a look at what else is communicated in dialogue. Well, can the listener understand what the character is saying? You’re trying to balance accuracy to, like, how the character would speak, and clarity so the listener would actually understand what’s happening there. And so, you know, if you’re doing an historical drama there’s going to be a balancing act between how that character really would have spoken in that time and what a viewer in 2016 will actually be able to understand that character saying.

**Craig:** Correct. We had a Three Page Challenge where somebody was faithfully reproducing Jim’s dialogue from Huckleberry Finn and the problem was it was unintelligible essentially. And what may have been intelligible to readers in the 1800s no longer so the case here for a reader of the screenplay. I mean, you know, English class you have a teacher working you through it but we don’t want to make a screenplay work. We want it to be something that is absorbed freely, without effort by the reader. So that’s where our effort comes in.

This also becomes tricky when people are writing dialectically for characters in whose skin they do not live. Very frequently — well not as frequently as it used to be and happily so. But I would read scripts where writers who clearly were not black were writing black characters with black dialogue. And it was just hard. It was hard to get through. It felt fake and weird and way too confining and it’s not great. I remember early, early on in my career, I wrote a movie for Shawn — I’m sorry for Marlon Wayans and there’s so many Wayanses I was bound to maybe slip up and say the wrong one.
Shawn was in the movie but smaller part. And I remember before I started writing Marlon said to me, “Oh and by the way, don’t write it black. Don’t do that. Just write it. I’ll make it black, don’t worry.” And I said “You got it buddy”. It was a weight off my shoulders because I’m not black.

What happens is there is this weird circular feedback where white writers will watch movies written by white writers pretending to be black people and they’ll think, “Oh, that’s how black people talk then.” But really what they’re doing is an imitation of white people imitating black people. And at that point it’s just a mess and it becomes a self-serving and self-fulfilling prophecy, and it’s no good. So you have to make these careful judgments about how you’re going to present dialogue when you are trying to alter your grammar or pronunciation to match the style of another person that you are not.

**John:** Yeah, but at the same time, Craig, I want to make sure we’re not giving — we’re not letting writers off the hook for even — I don’t want to say attempting to reflect the voice of a character because there’s a way that a person could misapply what you’re saying there. And say, like, well I should only write — I should only put white people in my movie. Or I shouldn’t try to make the African-American characters in my movie sound like human beings who are living in 2016.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** In the situations where I have encountered this, my focus has always been on writing the dialogue that reflects what the character is saying and then understanding that there will be a discussion about the actual words that the actors are going to be saying no matter what their background. That stuff may change based on what’s going to be comfortable coming out of their mouth. And it’s the same kind of discussion no matter what background of actor you’re talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have to — part of what we do is, because no matter who you are as a writer, you will be writing people that you’re not constantly, almost all of them. And when I say people you’re not, I mean, obviously, you’re not any of the characters that you’re writing but if you are let’s say a Latina woman, you are sooner or later going to be writing characters that are not Latina women.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So part of our jobs is to understand the music and cadence and rhythms and patterns of all different kinds of human speech. But where I think it – you kind of have to draw an interesting line. For instance there’s a colloquialism among African-Americans where they’ll say I’m — where you or I might say, “I’m getting ready to do something” there’s a colloquialism where they’ll say, “I’m fixing to.” Right?

Now, in very colloquialized African-American speech, that will get contracted down to “I’m finna” and you can — and I see like on Twitter, like, on the very famous Black Twitter you’ll see “I’m finna” sometimes people say “I’m F-I-N-N-A” or F-I-T-N-A or — and, you know, so, for me if I’m writing character and I hear that pattern, I might want to say, you know, “I’m fixing to dah, dah, dah” I don’t know if I would write “I’m finna to” because it’s starting to get a little — I don’t know. It’s weird. You have to draw this interesting line you know?

**John:** Yeah. You don’t want to go into pantomime. You don’t want to go into this place–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Where you’re sort of aping a culture that you don’t really understand. You’re using words that you would have no business ever using. So that’s absolutely true. But I think what your example is with finna is a great example of this other thing which we noticed which is — we talked about with Clueless, we talked about with Valley Girl where you like you see speech happening and then you’re reflecting that speech. And if you had a movie that was using that throughout, people would start using that more often, and at a certain point it would become commonly accepted. That same thing happened with like, and the way that modern people use like to mean a bunch of things that have nothing to do with like. Where she was like this, or it takes the place of “said” or it takes the place of any kind of filler word, “like” is there. And same with literally which means not at all what literally is supposed to mean.

**Craig:** It means the opposite now.

**John:** But people say literally. So, the thing that I find myself being careful of but using more often than not is “wanna, oughta, and gotta,” which is basically the shortened versions of “want to, ought to, and got to,” because spelling out got to, in most characters’ dialogue feels really bizarre and it actually is not the right sense and tone for what a character would say.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, there are characters who are educated and fastidious and prickly. And they might say, “I have to,” or “I am going to.” But “gonna” I’m constantly using “gonna” and “gimme” you know. Yeah, and those are perfectly common. And nobody reading a script is going to stop and say, “What, it’s ‘going to’ you cretin”. Like, everything that we discuss on this show, because we are so anti-rule, it’s about having the skill to go far enough and not too far. It is — dialogue and how to manipulate speech, how to break speech and grammar on purpose to match the way people naturally speak as opposed to the way people unnaturally write is the hardest and perhaps impossible thing to teach. You either got it or you don’t.

**John:** So let’s bring this all the way back around to how this all started off which was begging the question, which was my plea for writers to stop using “begging the question” incorrectly. And really ask the question like when is it okay to use the phrase incorrectly, because you know what, that’s what the character would actually say? And so examples are “who” versus “that.” “Which” versus “that.” “Less” versus “fewer, farther, further.” “Between” and “among.” All the examples I just gave, I’m actually kind of fine with a character using the incorrect version of that. Like you’re supposed to use between two things and among several things, whatever, nobody necessarily does that. So I’m fine with the character doing any of those things. It’s when you’re trying to pull a strange esoteric phrase in and use it incorrectly that my hackles go up.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, we’ve said a lot on the show that one of the best ways to think about characters, and create or achieve verisimilitude, is to think of them as liars, because people are liars. People are constantly lying, and people are constantly bending and breaking language. So what it comes down to is what’s going to draw more attention, more unwanted attention, using between incorrectly, or using among correctly.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s really what it comes down to, where do you want attention to fall? I think of grammar all the time, in a way with my characters, to divide them by class and education. And just as to bring it back around to the non-rhoticity, strange Middle-Atlantic accent, that was seen as a sign of erudition, education, class, money. So people who have those things, I try and write in that way, even between — look, I have a movie with talking sheep. The smart sheep’s grammar is perfect. It’s perfect. She actually — she corrects somebody who says, “Who?” asks the question who, and she says, “Whom?” Because of what it refers to.

The other sheep just speak, and some of them have terrible grammar, but she’s the smart one. She has excellent grammar. So that’s how I think of these things. When you’re talking about how to write characters in relation to grammar, the tricky part for writers is you can’t manipulate the rules and break the conventions, and differentiate between characters based on how they speak if you don’t know the rules.

**John:** Absolutely. And what you just said there, you as the form that does not exist in English. That’s English for us.

**Craig:** Right. That’s right. If one does not know the rules.

**John:** Our language is crazy, but it’s good, I love it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our next topic will be shorter. This is an article that you posted in the outline called, how – actually what was the actual real title of the thing?

**Craig:** It’s called “How Rom-Coms Undermine Women” by Megan Garber. This is an article in The Atlantic. And it runs through something that I think has probably occurred to all of us. You know, there’s a convention in romantic comedies that a boy is in love with a girl, and she is in love with somebody else, usually the wrong person, and he is the good guy that only if she could see how wonderful he is, and how truly he loves her, she would be in love with him. And he tries, and he tries, and it’s not working, and somebody at some point says to him something like, “If you want her, you got to go get her.” And so he does some grand romantic gesture like for instance showing up at her house, and holding up a boom box in front of her window, and playing, you know, a wonderful song, or showing up at the airport where she’s about to leave the country, or showing up at her workplace to sing a song, or showing up at her home to show her the cue cards with his devotional written on it.

But the point is, he’s showing up somewhere he’s not supposed to be and doing some big thing and in real life that makes you like a creepy stalker.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so the question is, are we teaching this really bad thing to people as normal? And the hard part is, I think that, well, I’m kind of curious about what you think, but my personal feeling is that these things do happen in life, rarely, but they’re not stalkery if they work and they super are stalkery if they don’t. So, it’s kind of a weird thing. What do you think?

**John:** I think it is absolutely valid to point out the trope of it. And we’ll put a link in the show notes to the TV tropes guide to stalking is love, which is basically all the situations in which someone is calling out like — someone’s love behavior is actually really kind of stalking and a little bit crazy.

Another recent article was about how to talk to a woman who’s wearing headphones, which was such a great example of like this really clueless male behavior, and just like really offensive, and yet, we would sort of get a pass in movies a lot which is not cool either. So I think sort of like the discussion of language, it’s one of the situations where screenwriters are culpable to some degree for perpetuating these ideas, and yet I agree with you that they are out there because they also do sometimes exist.

The thing which I disagreed is, or at least a short coming of this article to me was that I don’t think she recognized that the female characters in romantic comedies also do these kind of things as well.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** You look at Rebecca Bunch in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, you look at Nancy in Tess Morris’s movie, Man Up, they are deceiving the men around them, they’re doing things that are not good or appropriate, and things that would seem like a dangerous person would be doing if they were not in the genre of romantic comedy. So I think it’s troubling.

And maybe it’s just a thing to be aware of the same way we should be aware of the messages we send out with our action movies and with all sorts of other genres of movies, where we portray a world that is not accurate and which if these things happened in the real world would be hugely upsetting.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think actually audiences are very good at understanding that movies aren’t real. I do. If you were to make a list of things to write about, of concern, that audiences were taking seriously, I think far before you got to, you know, Lloyd showing up and holding up a boom box, you would get to people shooting each other in the head. Now we do have a bit of gun violence going on in our world, no question about that, but certainly not to the tune of what you see in movies. Fist fights even. There’s constant fist-fighting movies. I’ve never been in a fist fight in my life. Never. Not once.

**John:** That’s true. People break bottles over heads, which you should never do. It’s a horrible thing. Head injuries are terrible.

**Craig:** You’ll kill someone. You’ll kill someone if you do that. People are breaking chairs over each other’s heads, they’re punching each other in the head all the time. In the head. Car chases. Have you ever been in a car chase, John?

**John:** Not a one, I’m delighted to report.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I’ve never pursued somebody in a vehicle. People are pretty good at understanding the difference between these things. One thing that mitigates all of this stuff is that when we go to see a movie, a romantic comedy, there’s a contract before the movie even begins, between the movie and the audience, and that is that these two people could be wonderful together. That they are not bad people. They’re good people, and fate has torn them apart, a la Romeo and Juliet. The enemy in a weird way is not the woman who’s resisting stupidly this man’s advances, nor is the enemy the man who is perhaps going to somewhat extreme measures to get this woman to see how wonderful and deserving of love he is. The enemy is fate. Fate has gotten in the way.

Now, occasionally, you’ll get a romantic comedy where it’s the anti-romantic comedy, and you know, they don’t end up together and that’s fine, too. But that’s our understanding of these things. That said, the problem with the romantic comedy stalking behavior is similar to the problem that I think people have in real life, anyway, men and women, which is what is the line between being passive and quitter, and being obsessive and stalkery?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a hard thing to navigate. Courting, courtship is difficult.

**John:** Yeah. The lesson we learned on today’s Scriptnotes. I don’t know that I have more to say, other than I think, it’s useful to be aware of it, be aware of it as a trope, and if there’s a way to hang a lantern on it so it’s clear to the audience that you’re in on this, the troubling aspect of this behavior, too, maybe do that. But I agree that like we don’t go to movies necessarily for lessons about how to date and marry. We end up taking them in, just the same way we take in language by accident. And that’s I guess one of the things about our culture. It’s how we get some of our education.

**Craig:** Yes. And another one just came to mind is While You Were Sleeping. Remember that movie?

**John:** Oh yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** She’s just like completely is obsessed with this dude, completely obsessed with him. And then when he is hit by a train and goes into a coma, she like insinuates herself into his family’s life and poses as his girlfriend, as his fiancé.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s definitely, if you did that in real life, you would have to go to the bin.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when Sandra Bullock does it, we’re like, aww.

**John:** Aww. That’s actually one of the reasons why I love the new opening to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend this season, where basically it just explains like she’s just a girl in love, and like you can’t call me crazy because I’m an ingénue. And an ingénue in love is crazy, so therefore, I’m just an ingénue. Just a girl in love.

**Craig:** It’s kind of like, we’re now kind of at the fun part of our culture where we can take these things apart, but keep the little bits inside that are true, get rid of the junk that is like, look, part of this article is like Hitch is really screwed up, and the movie, the premise of Hitch is screwed up. This is a guy who’s basically the pick-up artist who is teaching men how to consciously and insidiously manipulate women into being with them. That’s gross. And you know, they’ve been trying to develop that pick-up artist book for years, as a movie, which I just think is atrocious.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They shouldn’t do that.

**John:** They shouldn’t do that. So if nothing else, maybe we’ll stop that movie from getting made, and it will all have been worth it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think so. We don’t have that power.

**John:** We have none of that power. We have the power to talk about cool things. So my One Cool Thing this week–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Is Time Travel: A History, by James Gleick, is a book that is — I’m reading right now that I think is just delightful. So Craig, how long back ago do you think time travel was invented?

**Craig:** You mean the concept of time travel?

**John:** The concept of time travel.

**Craig:** Or actual time travel?

**John:** The concept of time travel.

**Craig:** Because actual time travel was developed 14,000 years from now.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** The concept of time travel, oh, I would say, I don’t remember anything like that in Shakespeare, like maybe turn of the century like 1800?

**John:** Yeah, 100 years ago, H. G. Wells. So what’s so fascinating–

**Craig:** Oh, 20th Century then.

**John:** 20th Century, so it’s — the time machine, it’s his story, is really where you can start to think about time travel as you and I think about it now, which is that a person develops a way to go forward or backward in time. So there were other stories in which people like with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, they get hit on the head and they show up–

**Craig:** Wait a second. Yeah, what about Dickens and A Christmas Carol? He goes back, the Ghost of Christmas Past. He goes back in time.

**John:** It’s not a conscious choice.

**Craig:** It’s a ghost.

**John:** It was not a conscious choice to go back in those times. So there’s been many situations like a dreaming of previous times, a dreaming of alternate time lines, that – Fantasias have happened, but that sense of like the future is a place that you could travel into is actually a brand new concept. And we didn’t use to have a sort of space to think about like the future as this new area out in front of us.

And so all the paradoxes of like, you know, like what if you can go back and kill Hitler? We’d never thought of that before. There was never like a what if you could go back and kill Caesar? That was not a thing. It’s only because — and Gleick makes a very compelling argument for the only reason why we have our current thought of time travel and Terminator and sort of all the iterations of timelines and stuff like that, is because of the inventions of this last century and the scientific discoveries of Einstein and everything else that sort of put it in the public culture, but also the acceleration of culture so that it’s only when generations started being born where they recognize like, wow, my life is nothing like my parents’ life, and my kids’ lives will be nothing like my life. That’s when we started to have a future, and started to think about the future as something different than the present.

**Craig:** That makes total sense, yeah, because like back in the old days they’d be like, well, why would I want to go into the past? It’s like now, but just a little bit lamer.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The future will be like now, but like a little bit better.

**John:** Maybe, hopefully, who knows?

**Craig:** Yeah. Ish.

**John:** So I’m quite enjoying this book, so I’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** Well, keeping on track with Science, my One Cool Thing is a young woman named Maanasa Mendu. Maanasa Mendu is 13 years old. She lives in Ohio. She’s a middle school student. And as part of a competition, she created something that’s kind of amazing. She was looking at the shaking branches on a tree in her yard and thought, as we often do, you or I, boy that reminds me of the action of Piezo-electrical materials. And it turns out that she created with, I think it was like 10 bucks worth of Styrofoam and plastic, created a device that essentially captures naturally occurring vibrations in the environment along with solar and wind, and creates electricity from it, and was able to power a small light bulb with this little $10 thing she made, hanging off of a tree. It’s incredible.

So she won this prize from 3M, the Post-It company, among other things, and I’m just fascinated by there’s this potential that we have in this country that just blows my mind constantly when I think about somebody like Maanasa Mendu. She’s 13 and she might have actually invented something amazing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just think of what’s going to happen, you know, when she’s 25. It’s just amazing. So Maanasa Mendu, you are my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Very, very cool. So that’s our show for this week. Our final reminder that this is your very last chance to buy one of the two Scriptnotes shirts, so click on the links in the show notes, or just go to johnaugust.com, there’ll be a link on the side bar there for where you can get your shirts. So thank you to everyone who bought shirts. We’re excited to make them, and send them to you.

As always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Woo-hoo.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Eric Pearson. If you have an outro you’d like to send to us, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions for us to answer. I think next week we’ll try to answer some of your questions.

On Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. That’s a great place for short questions. You can find us on iTunes, just search for Scriptnotes and while you’re there you can also download the Scriptnotes app which lets you listen to all the back episodes of the show.

**Craig:** Fancy.

**John:** Fancy. So scriptnotes.net is the place for that. There are also USB drives available at store@johnaugust.com that have all the back episodes.

One of the questions, Craig, we have to figure out is, the new MacBooks do not have USB drives. Or not USB-A drives and so do we still make drives anymore? I don’t know if they are going to continue to exist.

**Craig:** Well, if you connect them through the dongle, it should be fine, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, there’s, like, a — because I ordered the new MacBook Pro, and with it I also ordered just a little USB-C, regular old USB adaptor.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In case, you know.

**John:** Okay. They’re available with Craig’s dongle and if you would like–

**Craig:** You know Sexy Craig has a dongle for you.

**John:** Probably the dongle is as much as the drive so–

**Craig:** You know, like, you like the drive of the dongle?

**John:** Ugh. We almost got through the whole episode–

**Craig:** Ooh, yeah, almost got through it.

**John:** If you listen to the transcripts, you won’t hear Sexy Craig’s voice at all. That’s a thing actually–

**Craig:** Not even a little bit.

**John:** On Twitter last week, people were saying, like, I listened to the show for the first time after only reading the transcripts. I didn’t understand what Sexy Craig was, and now they understand what Sexy Craig is. And they’re horrified.

**Craig:** If you can even wrap your mind around it. I mean, can you ever understand it? I don’t think so.

**John:** Apparently both of our voices are completely wrong for how we sound in print.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I wonder how people think I sound.

**John:** Yeah, probably authoritative, but I don’t know.

**Craig:** Crazy, sexy?

**John:** If you’re a person who mostly experiences the show through the transcripts, and only heard our voices recently, we’d be fascinated to know. So tell us on Twitter what you thought we would sound like before you actually heard us. That would be interesting for me to know.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Cool. Craig, have a wonderful week.

**Craig:** You, too, John, and I’ll see you–

**John:** On the other side.

**Craig:** See you next time on the other side of the wall. [laughs]

**John:** Oy. All right. Take care.

**Craig:** Bye.

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* Megan Garber in [The Atlantic](http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/its-rom-coms-fault-too/505928/)
* [Stalking Is Love](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StalkingIsLove)
* [“How to Talk to a Woman Who is Wearing Headphones”](http://www.themodernman.com/dating/how-to-talk-to-a-woman-who-is-wearing-headphones.html)
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/scriptnotes-holiday-show-2015).

**Malcolm Spellman:** This is Malcolm Spellman. I’m a guest on Scriptnotes this week. I swear a lot, so don’t listen to this podcast in the car with your kids, or the old folks in your family, or they’ll hate you. Craig and John August made me say this. Merry Christmas.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 228 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and…

Audience: Things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Is that right?

**John:** We have some pros. Yeah. Craig, welcome to our third holiday special I believe.

**Craig:** If you say so.

**John:** All right. So, people who are listening at home don’t have a sense of where this is. So, can you do some really great scene description so people reading at home get a sense of what this movie feels like?

**Craig:** Interior.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Generic auditorium. Stadium seating. The crowd is — the theater is packed.

**John:** Which is nice, yeah.

**Craig:** Everyone looks vaguely writerly. Not too attractive, but not horrifying, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** A lot of J.Crew and Gap.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree so.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the two hosts are at the front of the stage welcoming their audience to what’s going to be a really great night. So usually on the podcast we can have like one guest, sometimes two guests. These live shows, we can cram up to four guests into an episode, and that’s what we’re doing tonight.

We should just start with our first guest because —

**Craig:** No banter?

**John:** Well, we can banter.

**Craig:** That was it. Okay, first guest.

**John:** That was our banter. We just started. We didn’t plan this at all. But we should start with our first guest because he’s probably been our most popular single appearance guest —

**Craig:** Disturbing.

**John:** In history.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So this gentleman, he first appeared in Episode 185. He is a producer on the television program called Empire. And he’s the one and only Malcolm Spellman. Malcolm Spellman is right here.

So, Malcolm, you have your name big up on that screen right behind you. How is that? How does that feel?

**Malcolm:** I’m winning.

**John:** You’re winning? How does it feel to have your name in the credits every week on a television program like Empire, like a huge hit?

**Malcolm:** Fifteen years working, three credits, two of them on Empire is good. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It does feel good.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, it took a long time.

**John:** So, welcome to our show here. And part of why I wanted to have you here is because I have so many things I want to ask you about because I have just no sense of what your opinion is going to be. And so I have a list of like random topics. It’s like, “Ask Malcolm about this topic and it’s going to be great, is my hunch.” So this is our last episode we’ll be recording before Star Wars comes out. So I want to know, what does Malcolm Spellman think about Star Wars?

**Malcolm:** Hey, I’m really, really excited about it. And, you know, it’s one of the most important movies for me. it’s a visceral memory, you know what I’m saying? They fucked up the last three, so I’m primed up. [laughs] I’m primed to be there.

**Craig:** They did fuck up the last three. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** They did. They did.

**Craig:** They, by the way, I like that we’re saying they, like it wasn’t one guy.

**Malcolm:** So, no, I’m excited to get in there. I think it’s the most important. And similar to Marvel, it is a mythology for movies. Like it’s super specific. Everyone’s imitating whatever but it’s the most important one out there.

**Craig:** Did you see this thing in WIRED? They said something like, “We will not live to see the last Star Wars sequel. There are going to be so many of them, assuming this works,” that’s kind of incredible. Like it’s never going to stop now.

**Malcolm:** Do they know your relationship to number nine?

**Craig:** My relationship?

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was my idea. That?

**Malcolm:** With Rian, but —

**Craig:** Oh.

**Malcolm:** It was funny like when — he’s friends with Rian Johnson and when that —

**Craig:** Wait, you’re friends with Rian Johnson.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, but he’s better with you all, you know —

**Craig:** Okay.

**Malcolm:** You guys. You know how it is.

**Craig:** He’s Swedish. A little Swede.

**Malcolm:** I’m his black friend. [laughs]

**Craig:** You are. By the way, you literally are like totally —

**Malcolm:** Everybody is. Everybody. [laughs]

**Craig:** Like from top to bottom.

**Malcolm:** But I remember when it came around, I actually was with him before any of you guys. He was taking me to a Godzilla screening and he was blushing and levitating. And then you realize when you’re talking to him — again, that’s why I’m saying about, important to the mythology, there isn’t anything else out there like it, you know what I’m saying? And, yes, so they’re going to keep pimping until it’s done.

**Craig:** Don’t you think like if Star Wars had been, instead of a movie it had been written down as a story 2,000 years ago, we all would be going to Jedi church.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s actually better than the Bible. It’s more exciting, I think.

**Malcolm:** Definitely better than scientology. [laughs]

**Craig:** Scientology makes no sense.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Scientology, they literally make you pay like you want to see a sequel, you have to pay for like extra —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is. It’s mythological.

**John:** They want you to pay for the sequels on Star Wars movies but like you get to experience it for free and like —

**Craig:** Wait, wait, we have to pay for those? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. There’s no Netflix equivalent of scientology, I believe. You can’t just sort of like, you know, buy once and watch it forever.

**Craig:** You can’t get a subscription to jump right to Xenu. You got to really work.

**John:** Yeah, again and again.

**Craig:** Meanwhile, we’re literally in the middle of scientology world — I mean, they could, right?

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] Absolutely. Or like Stuart and his parents, like you can actually like just get their subscription to Netflix and not actually pay for it yourself. [laughs]

Can I have a show of hands here in the audience —

**Craig:** Stuart!

**John:** Who is watching Netflix or another streaming service using their parents’ login?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Wow. See, I had a hunch. We have a connected audience.

**Malcolm:** That’s why we’re broke. [laughs]

**Craig:** Alan, we’ve got a problem.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’ll talk about that when you’re —

**John:** Yeah, indeed.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So it’s great that people are watching these shows but they’re not —

**Craig:** They’re sponging.

**John:** They’re sponging a bit.

**Craig:** Off their parents.

**John:** Off their parents. How dare they.

**Craig:** It would mean I’d have to talk to my parents.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s totally worth the subscription.

**John:** Malcolm, I have another question if you’re ready for another question.

**Malcolm:** I’m ready.

**John:** Okay. So we were talking about the Marvel Universe and so now they’re busy getting ready to do Black Panther and they have a director on board —

**Malcolm:** Ask me the black questions, right? [laughs]

**John:** I’m going to ask you the black questions. I want to know your opinion on —

**Malcolm:** It’s going to define my career. [laughs]

**John:** I want to know your opinion on hiring a sort of targeting, you know —

**Craig:** It’s the black question. It’s happening.

**John:** Targeting minority filmmakers to make the one minority character in a franchise.

**Malcolm:** I think it’s all part of a growing narrative, you know what I’m saying? So obviously, this discussion of diversity and black folks and black filmmakers particularly has become more and more relevant and important. And because of shit like Empire and Black-ish, whatever, and we’re winning, they’re like, “Oh, fuck.” And you look at something like Creed and that’s immediately where you’re like, I hate to say this, no white people were going to think of that story, you know what I’m saying? They just wasn’t because they don’t — none of them was going to imagine what the fuck is Creed’s son doing. And that is why you need —

**Craig:** I’m sorry. That is undeniable. There isn’t one of you white people in here that would have thought of that. It’s a fact.

**Malcolm:** It didn’t happen in how many years.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. It was always like you were closer to probably like Rocky’s — like remember when he had a robot? The robot would have happened first.

**Malcolm:** Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s, I think, a great example of why Marvel doing this, whether they’re following a trend, I’m sure the reason they’re doing it is because they don’t want to get shit because, you know, they didn’t have any black filmmakers involved with the project. But the ancillary benefit of that will be that you get this perspective which is the most potent voice in pop culture.

And we forget that because we haven’t been able to do our thing in this medium. And everything else, we kill it and make it hot for everybody. And now they’re about to discover, like you look at what happened with Creed and there’s a good chance Coogler will do the same thing for Black Panther, like add something new and vital —

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** To the shit. So I was —

**Craig:** I mean, I honestly think that maybe there is a part of them that thinks we better do this to avoid some kind of pity.

**Malcolm:** I agree.

**Craig:** I think though, I mean, don’t they just smell money? I mean, isn’t that — you know.

**Malcolm:** They’re mostly scared.

**Craig:** Really?

**Malcolm:** They were just going out to all the black folks. They were like, “We just don’t want to get yelled at.”

**Craig:** Oh, because if we make Black Panther, we can’t make it with a white guy actually.

**Malcolm:** That’s right. And what they will discover is, “Oh, shit, this dude had some original ideas that no one else was going to have and gave it a freshness, you know what I’m saying, and they’re going to win with it.”

**John:** Right. So you are our TV friend. So John Landgraf who runs FX Network had a famous quote this last year. He said like, “We’ve reached peak TV. There’s too much television.” As a person who makes television, is there too much television out there?

**Malcolm:** It definitely feels like that, but it’s growing. There’s more people getting in with people more — like the real players are just emerging. Like Google wants to get involved, you know what I’m saying? [laughs] And SoundCloud and Spotify.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** I just had this big meeting with the digital folks at the agency and there are ways like you know how we were coming up — the last five years whatever was feeling like how is anybody making money off this shit, right? They now know these people are making money. And they were saying Apple has this really detailed complex layout on how, like they know who’s going to pay this much in the first window. In the second window, who, for free, will let you feed them all kinds of ads and stuff.

I just watched a standup comedy show on YouTube and I spent $1 on it, right? I think once that gets cracked open, there’s going to be a whole — like once you can start billing a show to your cell phone bill for $1 or whatever, there might be so much more money out there than anyone can fucking imagine.

**Craig:** I think there is.

**Malcolm:** That all this shit can be supported.

**Craig:** I think there is. And what I think about sometimes when I look at the landscape now and I see, I don’t know, hundreds of channels just through the wire and then God knows how many if you include just things that are on the Internet, and the fact that people are still making money and then I think back, once there were three. How much money were those — oh, my god.

**Malcolm:** I know.

**Craig:** They must have been making so much money. It’s like the fact that they ever canceled anything is insane.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why would you even cancel it? Don’t show anything. It doesn’t even matter.

**Malcolm:** No. They were making so much money it made them stupid. They were like, “Fuck, let’s don’t keep all this money right here.”

**Craig:** It’s so true. It’s so true. It made them stupid and it also made stupid people think they were smart because they thought it was them. No, anybody, anyone, you could have shot someone and put their dead body in a chair and NBC would have made money in 1963.

**Malcolm:** That’s right. That’s right.

**John:** That’s the new primetime special. It’s called “The Dead Body in the Chair” and it’ll get good ratings.

What is TV though? So you had a meeting with these digital folks of your agency. What are they even talking about with TV? Because like the digital stuff used to be like, “Oh, that’s the extra bonus. Like it’s the webisodes for The Office.” But now, like what’s the difference? I mean, if you’re making money somehow, that’s — if these people who are in the audience who are aspiring writers, what do you tell them? Should they be trying to write for, you know, Fox like you are or should they be trying to write for, you know, YouTube?

**Malcolm:** I think, well, what it feels like is right now, most of these companies are still thinking — like Netflix and Hulu, they’re still called digital companies even though they’re doing traditional formats, right? But that shit is about to change. Like I think it’s about a year or so away. I’m working with some folks on trying to change it. And once that happens, I think it’s going to all happen organically, right? I think the big gap right now in digital that I see, I almost don’t want to say this shit because I’m like, man, fuck, I might get rich off of it but — [laughs]

**Craig:** Well, if you say it in front of me, I will absolutely get rich off of it.

**Malcolm:** I think like what hasn’t happened yet is people like us, right, who are doing well and creating — when I say high-level, whatever, right, I’m saying the shit people pay for. Whether or not you guys like the shit we work on or whatever, that’s what I mean by it, right. The people who are creating high-level content are all like, “Yeah, fuck, digital could be awesome but I’m not passing up.” I know what your quote is, you know what I’m saying, I’m — you’re like —

**Craig:** How?

**Malcolm:** Because you’ve been bragging motherfucker. You be like, “Malc, guess how much money I just made.” [laughs]

**Craig:** I forgot about that. That’s how.

**Malcolm:** So there’s no way they’re going to really get you, right? Not yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** But what’s going to happen is there’s going to be people like me who aren’t quite where you’re at but make more money than the average person going there. And if I go in there and do high-level shit, and when I say high-level I mean the same level what you’re getting on FX and HBO, but it’s whatever format I want and it’s funded, that’s when you’re going to start getting to the shit where it’s like, well, what do you do with a 15-minute pilot, right? You put it on fucking YouTube and if you got hot motherfuckers in it, it gets 30 million fucking views and if you’re charging people $1, you’re like, “Oh, fuck,” you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** We should mention that there may be some language in this podcast.

**John:** There’s a possibility, so —

**Craig:** If you’re in the car with your kids.

**John:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** But I think that’s the new frontier. I think there’s going to be some people like me who are going to be willing to, for creative freedom and the potential for huge upside, pass up — because, you know, I’m in that weird level where it’s like I’m not getting Mazin/John August money, but I’m getting enough money that it might make me feel a little bit scared to go in here and do this shit for free.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** But if I do it — you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Well, but the upside to it, I mean there’s ownership opportunities —

**Malcolm:** That’s right.

**Craig:** That happen at those levels. I mean, I think there are a lot of people that make a lot of money that it’s guaranteed money, it’s employee money, but then who do take these risks. I see it all the time. And then, you know, some people can do both. They can say, “All right, well, I’ll do a job but now I’m going to try something that’s mine.” And I think that’s really exciting. I mean, there’s more opportunities now than ever before.

I mean, for people out here thinking about television, I mean, would it be fair to say from your perspective, as somebody that’s, you know, now at the top of the heap of a network which is still a thing, that it doesn’t make any sense to write for a network or write for a not-network but rather to write something that’s exciting and see who grabs it.

**Malcolm:** By the time you get done, yes, that will be a thing. That’s going to be the big breakthrough. Like if your fucking idea had to come in at 17 minutes to be perfect and awesome, people are going to start reading that shit and there’s going to be people like me out there or whoever who are like, “Oh, I know what to do with this.”

**Craig:** It’s amazing how long the structure has lasted from —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just the fact that there’s a season that’s based on when they used to roll new cars out. That’s why we had the whole, you know, September — and then the 30-minute/hour format is back from old days.

**John:** It’s arbitrary. Malcolm, what you’re describing sounds amazing but it doesn’t sound like a thing that just a writer does. It sounds like you are going to create stuff. And so it’s not just like writing a script. It’s not writing a spec for somebody. You actually have to make the thing that’s going to be — like the reason you have ownership is because you’re going to make the final product.

**Malcolm:** That’s right.

**John:** You’re just not writing the script, so —

**Malcolm:** Yes.

**John:** It’s taking ownership of the whole process. And that’s a lot to ask of somebody. People just want to like throw Courier around on a page and that doesn’t sound like it’s enough to be that new kind of television thing.

**Malcolm:** But I think it’s going to be move so quickly that entities will exist by the time — I mean because you’re looking like how fast does it take to mount this stuff, is entities will exist that know what to do with it. Meaning, if you just write some stuff in Courier and the people I’m working with have now got four or five projects going that are proving to be lucrative or whatever, I can’t write everything, you know what I’m saying. You’re going to look around and be like, “Oh,” you know what I’m saying? I think exactly what we grew up doing is going to happen. And the digital space is just going to be way more free and open.

**John:** We’ll hope. Tonight’s theme is basically all creators who created TV shows. So we’re going to have answers to some of these questions for people who are doing the kind of stuff that you’re talking about doing. And we should get to it, I think.

**Craig:** Yeah. So we have to get rid of Malcolm is what you’re saying?

**John:** We have to get rid of Malcolm.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Malcolm, thank you very — you’re going to come back at the end.

**Craig:** All right, Malcolm.

**John:** Malcolm. Our next guests are the co-creators — well, Malcolm, he’s like family. He’s not a guest. Are the co-creators of Another Period. We’re going to show a clip from this but I want to set it up because it’s even better if you sort of know the setup on this. This is about the Bellacourt sisters. They are trying to enter high society. They have invited Helen Keller over to boost their standings on high society and they’re trying to impress the Marquis de Sainsbury who’s keeper of the social register. And so keep this all in mind as you watch this clip from Another Period.

**Natasha Leggero:** And it takes place in 1902.

**John:** Oh, 1902. You’ll see that by —

[Video Plays]

**Female:** More cocaine wine?

**Male:** Yes.

**Female:** A little bit more won’t hurt.

**Male:** Any lady in Newport society needs to know how to hold her liquor.

**Female:** Well, I can hold my liquor better than anyone.

**Female:** Me, too.

**Male:** Oh, my goodness, that sounds like a challenge. Shall we see who can drink it the fastest?

**Female:** Oh, yes. Yes. Helen, other person. Let’s race.

**Male:** One, two, three go.

**Female:** Wait. I have to tell Helen we’re doing a contest.

**Female:** Ahhh. You are all piles of trash. I am a mountain of gold. I won. I took the egg. Argh.

**Female:** I won, you dumb haybag. You don’t count.

**Female:** Second place. Why am I always second place?

**Female:** You’re not second place. Lillian’s second place. I’m first place. I won.

**Female:** No one asked you to play, whore. You’re fat. Other person? Other person? I’m the one that taught her to communicate. Without me she’d be nothing. You’re nothing without me, Keller. Nothing.

**Female:** I love you, Annie.

**Female:** That’s a Ming vase, you deaf bitch. We only have 17 of those.

**Female:** I wasn’t totally sure what was happening. But I knew I wanted to stab someone.

**Male:** Let go of my sister. You heathens. What is this, Baltimore?

**Female:** Intruder.

[Video Ends]

**John:** Can we welcome up Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome.

**Riki Lindhome:** Hi, guys.

**John:** Good lord, how did you make — this show is — oh, I love your show so, so much.

**Riki:** Thank you.

**John:** And, Craig, have you watched the show?

**John:** He doesn’t watch anything.

**Craig:** Nothing.

**Natasha:** He’s been sending us emails all week with his favorite lines.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** I’m like, “No, this is my favorite line.” So I don’t watch shows, as you guys know, and John said, well —

**Natasha:** That’s a thing? You just don’t watch shows? [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s not like on purpose. I’m just lazy as fuck and —

**John:** He plays Fallout 4. That’s basically —

**Craig:** I do. I play Fallout 4. Look, it started bad where I was talking about crossword puzzles with Natasha and she was like, blech. Now we’re talking about Fallout 4, it’s like —

**Natasha:** No, you were talking about crossword puzzle like chat rooms.

**Craig:** That’s cool. I don’t know why anyone’s laughing. So I started watching this show and I’m obsessed. I mean, honestly, in a fair and just world, they would be talking about the show the way they talk about Mad Men. I’m serious. I’m dead serious.

**Riki:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Because I have this thing having gone through in my life times where I was working on pure comedy. Just comedy that is completely pure. It is the hardest thing to do. In fact, I want to —

**John:** Yeah — !

**Craig:** That’s fucking pathetic. [laughs] So I want to actually start by asking you guys a question about process because — so your show is, I mean, I guess you could say it’s loosely a parody of Downton Abbey but not really. It’s kind of its own thing.

**John:** Can you tell us how you pitched the show? Because I mean, it’s so specific and the voice and the vision is so specific. What was the genesis of your show?

**Riki:** Well, we had a few glasses of wine. [laughs]

**Craig:** Cocaine wine.

**Riki:** No, just regular wine.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Riki:** Natasha and I, we decided we wanted to make something. I mean when —

**Natasha:** Yeah. You know, we had this idea for this like fake reality show about these like dumb idiots and then I had this other idea about this other thing that took place in 1902 and Riki was like, “Well, why don’t we combine them?” And so we did that. [laughs]

**Riki:** But we kind of knew the idea was too weird to pitch. And so we went out and made like a 15-minute short. We spent real money and made a real short. And there was actually a scene from the short in the pilot.

**Natasha:** And I had read a book about Newport at the turn of the century before they introduced income tax. Like 90% of the wealth in America was all in Newport, Rhode Island. So it’s like a really fascinating place. And if you go there, you can still like go to all these house museum tours and see the whole world there. And people were living like it was bananas.

**John:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** And it’s American history because everyone loves — you know, Downton Abbey, it’s not our history, so.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, I think it’s a brilliant choice actually because there’s something inherently funny about wealthy aristocratic Americans because Americans don’t really — it’s not like we deserve it, you know. We’re not nobility.

But I want to ask you guys about the relentless and exhausting nature of writing stuff like this because your show is, I guess it’s what, like 25 minutes, I mean when you take out commercial and stuff?

**Natasha:** No, it’s 20.

**Craig:** It’s 20?

**Natasha:** Yeah, it’s so short.

**Craig:** Twenty minutes is a lot.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s 20 minutes, every page is like five or six jokes a page. But more importantly, you never get a break because nothing can be ever taken seriously in the show, that’s the magic of it. So there’s no point where anyone can just stop and be reflexive or —

**Natasha:** Nope.

**Craig:** I mean, how do you survive the pace of it, of writing it?

**Riki:** You’re making it sound so hard.

**Craig:** Maybe it was just hard for me. [laughs]

**Riki:** No. [laughs] I mean, we work really, really hard at it. I would love to say like, “Oh, it’s just natural and we just come up with this stuff.” But we, like, kill ourselves to make this show. We think about it from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed.

**Craig:** Right.

**Natasha:** But it’s also the rhythm of a show that’s inspiring to us. So we want to be doing something fast-paced and funny and finding the funniest people we can to try to make that happen.

**Craig:** The cast is amazing.

**Riki:** We got so lucky. And that was part of it is we had all the cast, we had their pictures at the end of the writing table and we would be like, “Okay, Brett Gelman is so hilarious. What’s the funniest stuff he does?” And we’d watch clips of Brett and we would write specifically for him and then it just makes it easier and fun.

**Craig:** That’s my part, by the way, if he croaks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Riki:** You’re Hamish?

**Craig:** I’m stepping in. Yeah, for sure.

**Riki:** Hamish, the outwoodsman?

**Craig:** yeah.

**Riki:** Yeah. [laughs] Slash abortionist?

**Craig:** Yeah. Slash Jew hunter. Don’t forget that one.

**Riki:** Yes, yes, yes. [laughs]

**John:** I would love to see the show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you shot this sort of presentation pilot. So it’s 15 minutes and is it sort of like the first episode that we saw? Was it like the pilot or just different scenes from the show? What did it feel like?

**Natasha:** We hadn’t really done any of the downstairs. We were just doing the upstairs. And then I think Comedy Central wanted to see more downstairs. And then we all got very inspired by the downstairs people because —

**Craig:** They are amazing.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Garfield.

**John:** Garfield and Chair.

**Riki:** Yeah, it’s —

**Natasha:** With Michael Ian Black and Armen Weitzman and Christina Hendricks and —

**Riki:** Yeah, Christina Hendricks is hilarious in the show.

**Craig:** She’s really funny. And you never know. Sometimes those people aren’t. Those people like dramatic actors —

**Natasha:** Those people.

**Craig:** The dramatic actors sometimes don’t fit in with that kind of comedy. And she does brilliantly.

**Riki:** She was so game to do anything. She had so much physical comedy. She was just totally fun.

**Natasha:** And I think she used to do comedy before.

**Craig:** Ah-ha.

**Natasha:** You know, or like in theater or whatever in college.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** So David Wain is on your show and is also from Children’s Hospital. He’s been a guest on the podcast before. But Children’s Hospital is a show that it’s like every episode is just completely brand new and there’s no continuity episode to episode. But you guys actually have a lot of continuity. So talk to us about figuring out how to be funny in an episode but also have arcs that sort of cross episodes. What was the plan? Did you know that Chair’s back story would be revealed in episode 6? What was the plan?

**Riki:** Yes. We map out the entire season. We have the luxury, I guess. Some people don’t like it but I think it’s a luxury to write the whole season at once before we start filming. And then we cross-board every episode. So we shoot all 10 episodes kind of at once.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Riki:** Yeah. So if we have an actor in two episodes or five episodes, we can shoot them out in two days or three days or whatever.

**Natasha:** That’s why it has to be kind of fast-paced because you have to be able to jump plot lines, if you have to. [laughs] Like figure out —

**Craig:** But it’s incredibly helpful, I would imagine, that you can — I mean, I guess part of it is you’re forced to by budget and all the rest of it, but that you know the whole season. That means you can go back. And I assume you do a lot of backwards, retrofitting, because it really does feel so well-machined. I mean, there’s so much craft in it. I’m really amazed by the show, I got to tell you.

**Natasha:** Oh, that’s so nice.

**Riki:** Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**Riki:** Thank you. We love it, too, but we’re biased, you know. [laughs]

**Craig:** Like I don’t believe your —

**Natasha:** No, it’s sweet. This is a very sincere, serious podcast. I love it.

**Riki:** But, yeah, we map out the whole season and we really think about every character and their arc and where they’re going to end up in episode 10. And then we have it, you know, just all up on our little board and then —

**Craig:** Sorry, I really love the show. That the character of Garfield is insane. Every character is either insane or so stupid as to be profoundly retarded.

**Riki:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** Or both. Your character particularly —

**Riki:** I’m both.

**Craig:** Is both profoundly retarded and insane.

**Riki:** Yes, and violent.

**Craig:** And violent.

**Riki:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** And yet, I actually managed to care. Like when Garfield comes back, I cared.

**Natasha:** Well, Garfield’s nice.

**Craig:** But he’s also crazy. I mean, he’s insane.

**Natasha:** Right.

**Riki:** I mean he’s best friends with a towel.

**Craig:** He puts the potato — yeah. And then the potato is like the new thing. Like that’s his new towel.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, you don’t have to see the show. You get it now, right?

**Natasha:** He might be the only nice person in the whole show.

**Craig:** Peepers has his moments. He is a man of honor.

**Natasha:** Right. That doesn’t mean he’s nice, though.

**Riki:** Peepers has his principles.

**Craig:** Yeah, he has principles.

**Riki:** I wouldn’t say he’s nice though.

**Craig:** Actually, he’s quite mean.

**Riki:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** So can you talk to us about the music because one of the most striking things and the reason why I love the Comedy Central, the blip at the end is because you have like this sort of heavy, hardcore rap soundtrack underneath it all. So there’s obviously a Downton Abbey influence, the upstairs, the downstairs, the striving for society. But then at what point do you figure out like, oh, we’re going to have cutaways like on the Kardashians, we’re going to drip — nail drops throughout it. When did that come? Was that part of your presentation? Was it always in the script?

**Natasha:** I don’t know. We always kind of like saw it that way somehow and then we asked Snoop Dogg to do the credit.

**Riki:** Natasha did the Roast with him, so —

**Natasha:** And so he did it and so him singing the song, like it kind of made it feel this reality vibe that we wanted and —

**Riki:** It just made us laugh so much when we had the cold open and then it would go into this hardcore rap song. We were like, “That feels right.”

**John:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Riki:** And so we just kept it going. And then when we had little bumpers at the end of each act, it’s like we just — I don’t know, it’s just funny, I think more than anything. You know, there’s no deeper meaning behind it other than that it made us laugh. [laughs]

**John:** All right. It feels like an incredibly challenging show to shoot. So is this shot here in town?

**Riki:** Yeah, in Silver Lake.

**John:** In Silver Lake, great. So —

**Craig:** Oh, I live really close to Silver Lake. So I’m just saying, if the guy dies —

**John:** If you need an extra in the background or a double.

**Craig:** Or if somebody kills him.

**Natasha:** It’s this old mansion in Silver Lake.

**John:** Right. And so, you’re basing out of there and you cross-board and cross-boarding means that you have all the scripts, you figure out what scenes you need and you’re shooting all those scenes with those actors no matter what episode they’re in.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**John:** But do you just go mental? As actresses, do you go crazy with the responsibility of like, “Here’s what I need to do,” versus also, “I’m creating the show and responsible for the writing,” how do you balance all that?

**Riki:** Well, we have to work really hard. On Sundays, I memorize my dialogue for the whole week and I have someone come over and drill it with me so that I don’t feel, you know, like the last minute trying to memorize. So I have it down by the time we start our week. And then usually like two to five minutes before each scene, I’m like, “I need some time.” Like I need to just relax. I need to like be in a free space for a second. I can’t answer any wardrobe questions. I get no fires. Like someone else has to put them out in the next, like right before the scene. And that seems to help.

**Natasha:** That’s interesting because I feel like I use the energy of the stress and maybe just lash out as my character.

**Craig:** That makes absolute sense because your character — I mean, so your character is kind of a monster.

**Natasha:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** And your character is nuts and incredibly stupid. Her character can’t read.

**John:** Yeah.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s like one of the basic —

**Natasha:** But that was common in the turn of the century. They thought if a woman read college level books it would shrink their ovaries.

**Craig:** There’s also the constant referral to weird like late 1800, early 19th Century or 20th Century understandings of medical science. I mean, the scene where the tension — like Chris Parnell plays Dr. Freud releasing their tension with this fucking vibrator, it’s —

**Riki:** That’s from the turn of the century. There’s so much real stuff in our show you wouldn’t believe it. Like cocaine wine was real.

**Craig:** Cocaine wine was real.

**Riki:** Like so many things are real, but yeah, Freud masturbating women to relieve hysteria happened. And so, of course, we’re like, “Oh, let’s all get masturbated together.” I don’t know if he did a group session but —

**Craig:** Like, you know, the mom’s there with her daughters and —

**Riki:** As a family. [laughs]

**Craig:** As a family, right. It wasn’t enough. She needed like a dildo machine. [laughs] This brings to mind a question.

I don’t have to tell you guys that we live in a time where people get in trouble constantly. Not for massive violations of taste but minor violations of taste at times. You guys kick the door down. You light stuff on fire. You don’t care. This show, while it’s lampooning racism and sexism and classism, it’s also like parallel with it. It’s like making fun of it and it’s with it.

Has there been a lot of backlash? Are you getting in trouble or you good?

**Riki:** I can’t believe how little backlash there’s been. We have a rape scene in episode 2 where —

**Craig:** I know.

**Riki:** One of our male characters gets raped and we were like just waiting for the, you know, backlash. We didn’t get it. You know, everyone on Twitter has got an opinion, but like it wasn’t like a mass, you know, hundreds of people. You know, there’s always one or two people who say something but —

**Craig:** A mass, by the way, is not hundreds of people. It’s like 100,000 people.

**Riki:** Sure.

**Craig:** Like if you say smoothing about like, I don’t know, a female superhero character —

**John:** As an example, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, as an example, you might get a thousand people that hate you in the news feed. But —

**Riki:** Yeah. I mean, we had a puppy hanging scene.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. The puppy hanging scene is great.

**Riki:** There’s so many —

**Natasha:** Yeah, like at least they PETA people can come after us. [laughs]

**Craig:** Somebody just —

**Riki:** I know. We have —

**Natasha:** I mean, they’re desperate for something to talk about.

**Riki:** Your character dressed in Mickface which is making fun of Irish people —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Riki:** It’s white makeup with freckles and a red wig. [laughs] And she did an anti-Irish song in her pageant.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**Riki:** And nothing. I don’t know. People don’t seem to get mad at us. I don’t know why.

**Craig:** I also love how the show brings in —

**Natasha:** Oh, because we’re in those fancy costumes.

**Craig:** I know. The customs basically do it, right? Like that covers everything.

A lot of times, though, in the show they’ll bring in characters that are historical of the time, roughly. So her character’s former lover is Ponzi, the guy that invented the Ponzi-scheme. And he’s basically trying to get money. He’s a total cad. He left her at the altar. And he’s back and she talks about how she spent a summer with him making love when she was 11. And there’s a picture of Ben Stiller man with 11-year-old girl and she just like — no letters, nothing. It’s amazing.

**Riki:** Nothing. [laughs]

**Craig:** And you guys are bulletproof. I love it.

**Riki:** I don’t understand it.

**John:** Maybe it’s the period that may help you though because it feels like, “Oh, well, it’s a period show.” It’s like, of course it’s different mores for that time. Yes, you’re making a joke —

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** I be if you tried to do the same joke that was meant to be set in present day times, people would be less comfortable with it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think they’re just magic.

**Natasha:** Like when I started doing standup, I realized if I wore a dress and gloves I could be meaner. And people wouldn’t get as mad. So maybe that’s kind of part of it.

**John:** Can you talk to us about the difference between writing for yourself as standup and writing for a character that you’re playing or for all these other characters? Is the process of coming up with a joke, of coming up with how you would actually get that idea across different based on who’s going to have to say that line.

**Natasha:** Yeah. Well, it’s very collaborative, our show. And we really think about every person and what they would be funniest doing.

**Riki:** Yeah, this is not a show where the leads take the — or the writers take the best lines. Like we make sure everyone is funny. We will do our best to make sure everyone is funny. [laughs]

**John:** Do you have table reads before you shoot? Or is that even possible with the block shooting you’re doing?

**Natasha:** It’s not possible, but we do have them.

**Riki:** Yeah. It really —

**John:** All right. Yes. Yes and yes.

**Riki:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah, yes.

**Riki:** But it’s also not possible, but yeah, we do have them.

**John:** And talk to us about improvisation because it feels like it would be much harder to improvise in a show that’s taking place in this period of times where and it’s also so serialized. Characters can’t go off and just do anything. Do you do those, you know, random last takes to try to get other —

**Natasha:** There are certain actors that we let do that like Tom Lennon and Mike Ian Black and David Wain and Brian Huskey are kind of made to do, you know —

**Riki:** 1902 dialogue.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**Riki:** But most of us are not made to do that because we lose the affect. Or we’ll be like whatever or we’ll say something modern.

**Natasha:** You can’t say that. Like when she called her whore, it’s because her name is Hortense. Like you wouldn’t just call someone whore, right?

**Riki:** But Tom Lennon would be like, hot pudding, it’s a scandal. And you’re like, what does that mean? You know, you’re just like, okay.

**Craig:** Something like it was like butterscotch or scotch bucket.

**Riki:** Scotch frog hat.

**Craig:** Scotch frog, yeah, like what the fuck does that mean?

**Natasha:** He could do that for hours.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** Just act surprised in 1902.

**Riki:** Yeah. We said some line to him and he goes, “What Christmas?” And it just sounded normal. And we’re like okay. But I personally cannot improvise like that, so I don’t.

**John:** Where are you guys at with a second season? What’s going on right now?

**Natasha:** We’re writing it.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** So it’s definitely, it’s going. It’s going to happen?

**Riki:** Oh yeah, we start filming in January.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Just down the street from Craig.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah, so —

**Craig:** And have you settled on all of the cast for the —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Settled? Settled on that?

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No Jews? No, like a Jew character? Like a funny — okay.

**Riki:** I mean I don’t know if we’ve thought of it that way.

**Natasha:** Are you an actor?

**Riki:** We’re not like no Jews. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, I am. I am an actor, of course. I’ve never done any acting, but right now —

**John:** Yeah. Craig Mazin just grew this beard by the way. And he will shave his beard —

**Craig:** Why would I — no, no, this is very —

**John:** It is a period beard.

**Craig:** I just want to be in the show.

**John:** We want you to have 18 seasons of your show.

**Riki:** Thank you.

**John:** So please keep writing your show.

**Natasha:** Thank you.

**Riki:** Yeah, everybody watch it.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. You guys really should watch it.

**Riki:** Maybe we’ll get more people to be mad. It would be nice to have a controversy because then it would get more attention.

**John:** Absolutely. So reference like green female superhero and you’ll get a lot of controversy. That’s our advice to you.

**Craig:** I’ve got in so much trouble. You don’t even want to know because I don’t wear dressing gloves. And boy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** You guys should all access your parents’ cable provider and put in the number and watch it on Comedy Central on their website.

**Craig:** Yes, you guys go home and do this.

**Natasha:** It’s not on Hulu anymore.

**Craig:** Another Period, awesome, awesome show.

**John:** Natasha and Riki, thank you so much for coming here.

**Natasha:** Thank you.

**Riki:** Thank you for having us. Thank you.

**John:** Craig has a mild crush as you can see on —

**Craig:** On the show.

**John:** He has a talent crush. We also have a bit of a crush on this next show as does a lot of America. It is a show on Netflix. It is called —

**Craig:** Oh, you don’t know?

**John:** I know what it’s called but I want to see if —

**Craig:** Master of None.

**John:** All right. And we want to show you a small clip of this program so you can see what it’s about.

[Video Plays]

**Alan:** I got to say, out of the 15 X-Men movies that I’ve seen, that was definitely top nine.

**Aziz:** Yeah, there was, like, 30 heroes and 40 villains. There are just too many people in these movies now. Text from my dad — “Please come and fix my iPad. Now it won’t stop dinging.” Does your dad always text you to fix stuff?

**Alan:** I don’t think my dad knows how to text. He also hates talking in person. He averages, like, three words a week.

**Aziz:** Our dads are so weird. I told my dad I got to call back on The Sickening.

**Alan:** Oh, the black virus movie? That’s great.

**Aziz:** Thank you. I told him. He’s like, “Uh, okay. Can you fix my iPad?” How about, “Hey, son, great work,” or, “Hey, son, I’m proud of you”?

**Alan:** I have — I have never, ever heard my dad say the word ‘proud’. It’s always like, “That’s it? So that’s all you’ve done?” Like, if I went to the moon, he would honestly be like, “When are you going to Mars?”

**Aziz:** Yeah. “Oh, Brian, you went to the moon? That’s like graduating from community college. When are you gonna graduate from Harvard, AKA, go to Pluto?”

**Alan:** I just feel like Asian parents, they don’t have the emotional reach to say they’re proud or whatever. Have you ever hung out with a white person’s parents, though? They are crazy nice.

**Aziz:** Yeah.

**Alan:** I had dinner once with my last girlfriend’s mom, and by the end of that meal, she had hugged me more times than my family has hugged me in my entire life.

**Aziz:** Yeah, dude, most white families, they’d be so psyched to adopt me.

[Video Ends]

**John:** All right. Let’s welcome the co-creator of this wonderful program, Mr. Alan Yang. Sir, congratulations.

**Alan Yang:** Thanks, man.

**John:** I remember talking to you, we were both wearing aprons. We were at this crazy meat-filled event where they were roasting things. And you’re describing the show that you’re going to make with Aziz. I was like, that sounds cool.

**Alan:** Yeah. I wear that apron everywhere, though. Yeah, so it’s been kind of a long time gestating and evolving since we came up with it, but yeah, it got made. [laughs]

**John:** It got made, congratulations. So when you described it, you said it was going to be an eight episode — sorry, 10-episode series for Netflix and it was all going to be in New York and it was going to be Aziz and sort of individualized stories. He said it was Louis-like. And it’s that but it’s also so much more. It feels like it’s such an amazingly 2015 show.

**Alan:** Yeah. You know, we put kind of a large priority on making it hopefully feel different and fresh and hopefully original too, you know. So we kind of have this rubric of, “Hey, if you could see it on another show, maybe push harder and do another topic or do it in a new way or make it stretch over a longer time period.” Just anything we could do to make it feel original. And we had this idea from a long time ago where any characters we wanted for the episode, just the ones that we needed, we would use. So we wouldn’t have the same repertory cast in every episode because you know in real life, you know, if the three of us are buddies, we still don’t spend 24 hours a day together. So like not every story I go through involves you and Craig.

**Craig:** John and I do spend 24 hours.

**John:** Yeah, it basically is that.

**Alan:** Yeah, so you can have an episode with Aziz and alt person or Aziz and his parents or whatever and you might not see Eric Wareheim or Lena or whoever.

**John:** Cool. Give us a sense of your back story because I don’t know sort of how you got — I know you’re from Parks and Rec, but I don’t know you from before then. So how did you get started in this?

**Alan:** Yeah. So I majored in biology in college and that was just a rocket ship to comedy, just like right into — [laughs]

**Craig:** I did that, too. I did that, too. Were you pre-med?

**Alan:** I wasn’t really anything. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I loved writing and I loved comedy growing up, but that didn’t really seem like a real possibility, right?

I grew up in Riverside, California which is like an hour from here. And, oh, someone from Riverside, sorry about that buddy. [laughs] But yeah, so it’s just — I read a study that said it ranked all the cities in America in terms of how Bohemian they were by sort of a metric of how many people worked in creative fields or, you know, did kind of, you know, things that we do I guess. And number one on that list was LA because there’s a lot of entertainment people so they counted that as artistic for some reason. And the last place city on the entire list was Riverside which is crazy, which is like it’s an hour from here but I guess if you wanted to do something creative, you just get the hell out of here.

**John:** So you started at the bottom and worked your way up here.

**Alan:** Yeah. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s like that Drake song. [laughs]

**John:** Your life is a Drake song.

**Alan:** Yeah. So I went to school and, you know, I was doing biology and I kind of hated everyone. And I didn’t really like — like I felt like I didn’t fit in. But I found a couple of things I liked to do. And one of them was I played in a punk rock band which is really fun. And so I got out of the campus and was able to tool around. And I started writing for this comedy magazine. And the comedy magazine was called Harvard Lampoon.

**Craig:** Did you say Haverford Lampoon?

**Alan:** Yeah, it’s called a Howard Lampoon. I went to Howard University.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Alan:** No, it’s a —

**Craig:** That’s the best way to work at Harvard ever. I was working at…Harvard Lampoon.

**John:** I was in Boston and yeah.

**Alan:** Yeah. So it’s an oftentimes horrible magazine that is not funny at all, but there’s a lot of funny people there. And basically, all I wanted to do was hang out with funny people and be funnier. So I grew up, I was watching the Simpsons, and Seinfeld, and SNL, and Mr. Show and I was like, wow — when I started working on The Lampoon I was like this maybe is a job in some way. Like I didn’t know that it was a job.

So after I graduated, I moved out to LA and just started writing scripts and was broke and unemployed and trying to get an agent. So that’s how that started.

**John:** So my perception of The Lampoon folks who move out to LA is they basically like just load in a van and everybody moves out to an apartment and just start working together. Was that the experience?

**Alan:** The van part is not accurate, but what’s great about it is you just don’t feel so alone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** So you move out. And there’s not that many people on the magazine, so my year for instance, there were probably six writers or something, five or six writers. So yeah, a few of us moved out to LA and what you do is you move out here and you just don’t – you’re all broke together, right? So you feel less like a crazy person and, you know, I respect the hell out of everyone who does it and comes out alone because that’s really scary and intense and it’s a huge risk and that’s tough. But it was cool to have like a couple of buddies who could be your roommate or you could go have a beer with or something when you’re all struggling growing up.

**Craig:** I was struck you when you were talking, you were saying you grew up with The Simpsons and Seinfeld, so I’m guessing you’re quite a bit younger than John and I are, but the show has this really interesting ’70s vibe to it. And even like the credits remind me so much of like Woody Allen. So I assume this is intentional?

**Alan:** Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. You know, again, that was another thing where we just wanted the show to feel different. And one of the things we had been doing recently while we were coming up with the show is watching a lot of these ’70s comedies, you know. Hal Ashby, you know, obviously The Graduate, Elaine May, Heartbreak Kid.

And what was really cool when watching those movies was just the realism and how they let scenes breathe and how it wasn’t necessarily, you know, 100 jokes a page, like a lot of these sort of network comedies are.

**Craig:** I like those.

**Alan:** Well, yeah, those are great. Listen, like there’s no better show than 30 Rock, right? It’s an amazing show, but we just didn’t want to necessarily do that show.

**Craig:** Right. But you like that pace?

**Alan:** Yeah. It was like, you know, we have scenes where there are no jokes.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** We have scenes where there are ton of jokes. We have scenes that are a little broader. But for the most part, we were trying to do things that felt a little bit like a conversation that you might have with your friends.

**Craig:** Well, speaking of that conversation, there’s something really interesting. You know, so I’m watching, you know – I watched these episodes of your show and pulled out — like there were a lot of moments like this where I thought, I wonder if you and Aziz ever found yourselves in this weird dilemma where on the one hand, part of what the show is is presenting this perspective of what it means to be Asian-American in Hollywood and you’re sharing a unique perspective. That’s part of the unique voice. On the other hand, you don’t want to feel like, “Oh, now I’m representing four billion Indian and Chinese people and that that’s what I have to do.”

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like do you ever feel like, “Okay, we’re kind of ping-ponging back and forth between these two things. We want do it, we don’t want to do it.”

**Alan:** Yes and no. So that’s actually — that’s a very astute question because you do feel that way, right? You feel like, “Man, there is one show with an Indian guy as a lead like in the world right now?” [laughs]

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** Like this one, right?

**Craig:** So we can probably —

**Alan:** Yeah, so you feel responsibility be like, you know, you don’t want to — but the number one thing is we just want the show to be good, right? So you want the show to be good and this is a thing I actually talked about with my friend last night who’s half Asian and I’ve worked in really, really fun rooms and very, very open, very, very progressive like really, really fun places. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with another Asian writer. [laughs] You know, it’s like I’ve been working for 10 years, you know. So you’re always — so if it ever comes up — and you know on my last show on Parks and Rec, it was a very diverse room, you know, oftentimes majority women or at least half women which I thought was great.

But there were times where, oh, we had one black writer like my old roommate, Aisha Muharrar, was a writer there. And we had an issue where it’s like, “Okay, is this offensive and like, we have to ask Aisha?” Like you don’t want to ever put a person in that position, but you have someone who is black or someone who is Asian and you’re going to ask them. So it’s just a tricky place.

And what we ended up doing was, anytime there was this sort of interesting or controversial or an issue that might be offensive or sticky in that way, we just have the debate. We would all yell at each other in the room. And our room was, you know, some Asian people, some Indian people, some white people, too. [laughs] But oftentimes, we put that conversation in the show. We would just put it in the show.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** So, you know, there’s some literal like transcriptions of arguments we had in the writer’s room —

**Craig:** I love that.

**Alan:** And they just go in. Yeah.

**Craig:** I love that. Because there is a certain fearlessness to your — and that’s kind of what’s required especially for comedy, even when it’s comedy of this — which is very — you know, this tone is a really unique tone. I think the second you start kind of, I don’t know, crafting it and being careful about it, it feels like it’s fake.

**Alan:** Yeah. We weren’t in the business of like, “Well, we don’t want to offend people.” Like we don’t really care about that. [laughs] It was like —

**Craig:** Good for you.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**John:** But I think what’s working about your show and Another Period, even though the tones are just so vastly different, is they’re both incredibly specific. They’re not the same version of the everyone in a kitchen set kind of show. It’s a very specific way of looking at this world and characters who want things that are not the common things we’re expecting to see characters want.

**Alan:** Yeah. I think there’s a fallacy that it’s like, “Well, we have to make this character sort of as generic and relatable as possible like an everyman.” I think Aziz wrote a good piece in the New York Times or something where he was interviewed where he said the everyman isn’t always like the most common person in America. It’s not always a younger white guy or, you know, whatever. When you get relatable is when your specific emotions and motivations and characters, you felt that so strongly yourself that you know how to put it into the script. And when you do that — I think we discovered that while we were writing the show, it’s like, “Well, these characters are us.” So we know how we felt when that happened and a lot of these experiences are ours, you know. A lot of that stuff in the parents episode, that stuff all happened with my dad. You know, he killed this chicken when he was young. And I’m an ungrateful shithead.

But yeah. So that’s real. So that’s real.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alan:** And so I knew how to write that. So when you’re able to do that, the specific becomes universal and it becomes relatable.

**John:** You’re also able to write a version of yourself saying things that are like the kinds of things you would say, but specifically to that scene to what point you’re trying to get across and so it’s not an everyman because it’s you.

**Alan:** Yeah, exactly. So, you know, my white ex-girlfriend or whatever, her mom loved me. [laughs] Like, you know, that’s why that’s in there. But it’s like, you’re right, you know, when things become personal, I think that’s often times when they become really good especially in comedy.

**Craig:** I’m kind of curious. I’ve written with actors before. You’re in a really funky little situation here. I mean I’m sure it’s — I mean these two are both acting, so they can’t really — they can kind of neutralize each other if one is like this scene is about me. But your co-writer, your co-creator is the star of the show.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he is also not just the star of the show, his character, Dev, is basically it’s him. I mean his parents are his parents, right?

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So have you ever looked Aziz in the eye and said, “Nah, Dev wouldn’t say that.”

**Alan:** [laughs] In those words, no.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Alan:** But, you know, in the writer’s room, he needs someone to tell him — he does need someone to tell him no.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** And he respects that. I mean we’ve known each other for so long now. You know, we met first season Parks and Rec so we’ve known each other for seven, eight years or whatever. Yeah, I’m not scared of that guy. [laughs] But, you know, and it’s good because when we have conflicts, that makes the show better generally.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** You know, and it’s like we’re such good friends. You know, we hang out so much outside of work. And we’re going on a trip to Europe tomorrow. [laughs] But that means also like I can yell at him on the set. Like if it’s like, “Hey man, like I don’t think — I think you should do it this way.” And then ultimately, usually we shoot it both ways and we see it in the edit room or whatever.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** Or in the writer’s room, I think it’s good for a person in his position who has such a strong point of view and who generally knows what his character would do. You know, I put 100% faith in that. But at the same time, there’s so many other concerns when making a show like how the story is shaped and the structure of the episode works and what the series arc is.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** All those things need to be taken care of as well. And so, you know, we have conflict but we always resolve it amiably and I think it’s generally worked.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Awesome. Alan Yang, congratulations on your show yet again.

**Alan:** Thanks so much.

**Craig:** Awesome man.

**Alan:** Thanks.

**John:** And stay put. Now, can we have everybody back up here because we’re going to do our One Cool Things. All right. So traditionally on the podcast, we do the thing at the end of the show called One Cool Thing and Craig always forgets his One Cool Thing and we sort of stall for a time and I do mine first. But tonight because it’s a holiday show, I thought we would do sort of a secret Santa kind of One Cool Thing.

So what I asked everybody to do is to put their One Cool Thing on the back of a card and it’s going to have someone else’s name on the front of the card and that’s who’s going to get that gift of the One Cool Thing. So we’re going to pass these out. So hold on one second.

**Craig:** [laughs] Malcolm is so excited for this. That’s a show I would totally watch, by the way.

**Malcolm:** It’s so John August.

**Craig:** Like you and August together is going to be an amazing show.

**Malcolm:** Grand closing.

**Craig:** It would be so great.

**John:** I will read aloud what someone is giving me and then I need to figure out who is giving me this gift. My gift to John is the magical power to give everyone in America at least one Muslim friend or at least a barber or a dentist or something, so people are a little less scared. You’re welcome, John.

**Craig:** Well, you know, that wasn’t me.

**John:** No. I don’t know, Malcolm Spellman. Did you give me a Muslim friend?

**Malcolm:** No.

**Craig:** Are you kidding me? You thought that was Malcolm? Oh my god, never. Malcolm doesn’t want anyone to have anyone —

**Natasha:** That is clearly someone who went to Harvard.

**John:** Was that you, Alan?

**Alan:** Yeah, it was me.

**John:** Oh, I have a Muslim friend. Thank you very much, Alan Yang.

**Alan:** Great hand. Great hand.

**Craig:** She nailed it.

**John:** How do I get a Muslim friend? Is there like a —

**Alan:** Yeah. I don’t know, I didn’t really understand the assignment but, so I just wrote down a bunch of words.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** No. But, you know, that was just a thing that I was thinking about the show a little bit because I knew I was going to talk about it. And one of the things we realized when making it was like, man, like, for all these episodes we did research like when there is an episode about old people and we had — we spent the day with a bunch of older ladies in New York and I had lunch with them and learned stories.

And it’s like, man, the more you meet people and like they become your friends or at least your acquaintances, you’re a little bit more empathetic. You just know them a little better and whatever, not to get political — I don’t really care about politics. But, you know, if they didn’t let Muslim people in America, Aziz’s parents wouldn’t have been able to come to America. And he wouldn’t have been born.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** And I wouldn’t have been able to do the show with him.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** And you guys wouldn’t have gotten to hear me say all this amazing shit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** So that would have been a huge tragedy. [laughs]

**Craig:** It all boils down to you.

**Alan:** Yeah. Like it’s basically about, do they get to listen to me or not.

**John:** Yeah. Well thank you for the gift of understanding.

**Alan:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Thank you very much. Riki, what did you get?

**Riki:** I got a KRUPS F23070 Egg Cooker.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** You got to know who that’s from. It sounds like a robot talking, so who could it be from?

**John:** Yeah, it’s me. [laughs]

**Craig:** That literally sounds like robot talk. KRUPS 01243 Egg Cooker.

**John:** So here is why I’m giving you this specific egg cooker, because it’s the best egg cooker. So over the summer, we were staying at an Airbnb and the person showing us around was like, oh, and there’s an egg cooker. I’m like, “Well, that’s ridiculous. Who needs something to cook hard boiled eggs? You just boil water and you have hard boiled eggs.” But it was like I woke up early one day, I was like, “I’m going to try the egg cooker.” And it’s amazing. So essentially, it cooks seven hard boiled eggs at once and like cooks them perfectly. So you don’t have to like set a timer. You don’t have to do anything. It’s just like you have hard boiled eggs.

**Natasha:** How many hard boiled eggs do you eat a day?

**John:** I eat one a day. So you do a whole bunch at once and just keep them in your fridge.

**Natasha:** I eat like one a year.

**Riki:** It would be the first egg I’ve ever cooked, so —

**Alan:** It’s been a decade.

**Riki:** I don’t cook eggs at all.

**Craig:** I eat one a year.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s egg day.

**Alan:** You celebrate egg day. Yeah. Yeah, June 20, right? June 20th?

**Craig:** It’s egg day! Yay.

**Alan:** You guys don’t celebrate that?

**John:** I think you’d actually genuinely enjoy it.

**Riki:** I think I might. I mean, I think I might. I’ve never cook anything, so it would be a welcome change.

**John:** Yeah. I mean it’s easier than using a hairdryer. Like it’s how simple it is to make.

**Riki:** Wow. But then I would have to buy eggs as well.

**John:** Yeah. Or you can have —

**Riki:** It’s like another step.

**John:** Or you can have someone buy you the eggs.

**Riki:** True. [laughs]

**John:** True. All right. Natasha, what did you get?

**Natasha:** I have a question, though, do you peel it? Like you just eat it with toast or do you just like carry it around with you, the egg?

**John:** I would advise you to peel the egg before you eat it because like the shell is crunchy and —

**Natasha:** But you just bite into it like that and eat the dry yolk and just eat it?

**John:** Yeah, it’s fine. Yeah.

**Craig:** Bite into it, eat its nutrients.

**John:** Or rip it open. Yeah, it’s delicious, it’s healthy.

**Natasha:** Okay, cool.

**John:** Natasha, what did you get for your Secret Santa gift?

**Natasha:** I got Postmates. Well, I think this person probably also like me and Alan didn’t really understand the assignment. So I feel like this is maybe from Malcolm and he just discovered Postmates. And he wants me to know about it, too. But I already know about it. But thank you.

**Malcolm:** No. I’m the king of Postmates. Like —

**Natasha:** You can order from many different restaurants at once.

**Malcolm:** I’m on the level where I order that shit while I’m driving home at the same time.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**John:** But I don’t know what this at all. So talk us through. Sell us on this.

**Malcolm:** It changes everything.

**John:** All right.

**Malcolm:** They are — it’s Uber for everything else particularly food. So any restaurants you want in LA, you just tell them, you know, you do your order, whatever, and they bring it to you and it’s not like — the difference between this and delivery is when you order food from delivery, they’re stopping at other people’s house, your food shows up cold. They order your shit for you, go pick it up, bring it straight to your house. And again, once you get really good with it, that’s when you start ordering in your car at a red light. You try to —

**Craig:** God.

**Natasha:** And also —

**John:** How did Malcolm Spellman die?

**Natasha:** We should also be clear, this is an app for rich people.

**Alan:** Yeah. It’s like $40. [laughs] No, it is good.

**Natasha:** And also, one of the other amazing things about it is you get things delivered that don’t deliver. So it’s not just like your Domino’s Pizzas is hotter. It’s like —

**Craig:** What about like say, egg cartons? Do they do the eggs?

**Natasha:** Your Mr. Chow’s crispy rice sushi.

**Craig:** So it’s like a messenger service for food basically.

**Natasha:** For restaurants.

**Craig:** Or for restaurants.

**Malcolm:** But they’ll go pick up your ink cartridge from Staples, all that shit.

**Natasha:** Oh really?

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Alan:** Any object. It’s great. It’s an object delivery. Yeah. Or you push the limits.

**John:** Alan, will they bring me a Muslim friend?

**Alan:** Oh yeah. [laughs]

**John:** They can do it, because that’s an object —

**Alan:** Here’s your Muslim friend and the egg cooker, John.

**John:** Fantastic, it’s all —

**Alan:** One car.

**John:** Backstage, we were talking about actors who do voiceovers for commercials. I feel Malcolm Spellman might be the right voice for this delivery service.

**Alan:** Yeah, he’s got a great voice.

**John:** You’d buy it from him, wouldn’t you?

**Craig:** Oh yeah, this place will pick up your shit.

**Malcolm:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That was a pretty good impression.

**Malcolm:** Charges on Postmates.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**John:** Alan Yang, what did you get for a Secret Santa gift?

**Alan:** Oh yeah. I got, I would follow him on all social media as a Christmas present.

**Natasha:** I didn’t understand the assignment.

**John:** So do you follow him on any social media?

**Alan:** Do you not follow me, Natasha?

**Natasha:** Well, I thought like if you are were on some deep —

**Alan:** Oh no, no, you think I’m — you think I’m young person, I’m not that young.

**Natasha:** Oh okay, I thought you were on like Snapchat.

**Alan:** I am on Snapchat actually. [laughs] You’re right.

**Craig:** You are that young.

**Natasha:** Okay, so I’ll —

**Alan:** I should make up a bunch that don’t exist.

**Natasha:** Are you on Periscope?

**Alan:** I’m not on Periscope. I don’t do any broadcastings. You’re on like Twitter and like what do you —

**Natasha:** Of course, I follow you on Twitter.

**Alan:** Instagram, of course. Yeah.

**Natasha:** But Instagram, I don’t follow you. But I’d like to.

**Alan:** Follow me, man. Some great pics up there.

**Craig:** Christmas is getting weird.

**Natasha:** I’m going to do that tonight.

**Alan:** I can’t wait. I can’t wait for that follow. This has actually have been a good moment for me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alan:** I get an additional follower. Everyone follow me, AlanMYang. [laughs] No, it doesn’t matter.

**John:** Alan is going to spend half an hour on any person, trying to get each person in this audience to follow him.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** But Alan’s aesthetic, I bet his Instagram is good. I bet it’s kind of anal-retentive.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** But you have some good like, you know, visuals up there.

**Alan:** Yeah, it’s not bad. It’s not bad. It’s not great. It’s not bad, though. [laughs]

**John:** Malcolm Spellman, what did you get from Santa?

**Malcolm:** Kitchen Hacks: How Clever Cooks Get Things Done. I’m going to guess Mazin.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** I’ll tell you why I knew it was Mazin, ‘get things done.’ If you know this dude, the authority in that.

**Craig:** Yeah, you got to get things done. Quite a great book. It’s not appropriate for you because you don’t cook anything, you order your shit from Postmates, but if you were to chop a vegetable for once in your fucking life, it’s amazing, Cook’s Illustrated is my favorite because they’re, you know —

**Riki:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Why? I mean I just feel so degraded.

**Natasha:** No, Cook’s Illustrated. I just never heard of that. Sounds cute.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the best. They’re like the scientists of coking. And they give you all these tips of the best ways to cut things like how do I cut this. Oh, we figured out after a thousand cuts of a pepper, this is the way you do it. And the way you’re nodding —

**Natasha:** No, that’s cool. I have no talent in the kitchen, so I’m just — I’m inspired and intrigued.

**Craig:** Then it could help you if you ever did try because —

**Natasha:** Oh, no interest either, but —

**Craig:** Just making sure.

**Natasha:** But I appreciate it in others.

**Craig:** If you fuck something up, there’s a whole chapter on how to fix your fuck up.

**Natasha:** Oh, that’s cool.

**Craig:** So it’s wasted on Malcolm.

**John:** And I really think that could have been the title of the episode, Wasted on Malcolm.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it should be the title of every episode.

**John:** Yeah. We had fantastic guests and a fantastic venue, but we did not have a fantastic recording. And we lost Craig’s gift. Craig did not get to open his gift and discuss it. And it was a pretty great gift you got.

**Craig:** Yes. So I got my gift from Riki Lindhome and it was something that I’ve already put on the show as my One Cool Thing which is the Hamilton soundtrack. And so Riki and I bonded over our obsession and memorized love for the Hamilton soundtrack and then — you see, this is why people need to come to the live show because the two of us then did an impromptu version of the opening song. We made it through a good like 30 or 40 seconds of the lyrics of the opening song. [laughs] Just together, doing a duet, it was lovely.

**John:** I have a hunch that our technical glitch was actually the Broadway League sneaking it and shutting it down so that it could not be recorded because that’s, you know, Lin-Manuel Miranda is like he’s very adamant that he’s not going to want bootleg recordings. And you guys were so magnificent singing that song.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That he had to stop it.

**Craig:** Well, I get it. I don’t want to — look, I don’t want to mess with Mr. Miranda. It was something to see, man. It was something to see.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And unfortunately then after that, we did have some pretty good questions and answers that got eaten, so —

**John:** Yeah. And often, we tape the questions and answer and put them through as a separate episode in the premium feed, so we won’t have that for this time. But there were some interesting questions asked. So I thought we’d just summarize kind of the things we talked about and do the short version of what those were.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So the questions that came up at the microphones were about writing staffs because we had these great TV people there and they were able to answer questions that Craig or I could not normally answer.

A question about the diversity on writing staffs and sort of spring boarding off what Alan Yang had said about being like the Asian guy on the staff. And so the question was like, well, what if you are the black guy or the Muslim guy, what does it feel like to be the person who has to answer the questions of like, is that offensive?

And so Alan actually had a really interesting answer about how in Master of None, stuff would come up, there was specifically a situation where the women on the writing staff were describing what it felt like to be a woman at a restaurant who wasn’t introduced and they had a big discussion, a big argument kind of in the writer’s room and that made it into the script.

And so he was arguing in favor of diversity on staff just because you got that diversity of opinion and that diversity of opinion was what led to this some really great dialogue and scenes in the show.

**Craig:** Yes. So he was sort of saying that rather than assign or not assign the role of representative of race, gender, sexual identity, whatever category, that rather it was just, let’s have a discussion. If a discussion is a debate, let’s have a debate. Then let’s actually portray the debate which on his show, I think, is very doable. On a lot of shows, it’s not quite like that because the show maybe isn’t about relationships in that sense.

But having the debate, I think he was basically saying having the debate is worth it. It’s actually more important to have a debate than say to isolate individuals and say you are now the arbiter of what is acceptable for this topic or that topic.

**John:** Absolutely. Okay, next up. Riki Lindhome fielded a question about how she assembled her writing staff. And we actually asked all the show creators how they assembled their writing staffs. And Riki Lindhome said, well, I would read the first three pages of the script and if I didn’t like the first three pages, I would toss it aside and start reading the next one.

And to be clear, Riki Lindhome does not listen to the Scriptnotes podcast, so she has no idea about the Three Page Challenge. She was just speaking honestly of like how she put her staff together. And I thought that was actually great because it’s such a testament to this is why your first three pages are so important because if they don’t like three pages, it’s not that — they’re not going to read page four, they’re not going to read page 20. They’re just going to stop reading and they’re going to go on to next one.

So be it a TV spec or spec script you’ve written, you got to hook them so quick.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, there’s a test that you and I apply when we do our Three Page Challenges here on the show and mostly because I assume 99 percent of the people sending them in are not professional working writers yet. The test that we’re applying is basically, “Can you do this? Do you have the fundamentals down? Are you making certain rookie mistakes? Are you making blatant mistakes?” Our test isn’t, “Is this wonderful?” Our test isn’t, “Is this really great?” Our test isn’t, “Would I hire you?”

Now, for Riki and for Natasha, when they’re looking at potential people to work on their show, you’re making a show. These are the people that are your life-support system. So they’re not looking to see if you’re avoiding problems. They’re looking to be inspired.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think specifically, Riki said something like, her test is, “Do I care?” Not just, “Is this good?” but do I care about it? Do I remember it? Do I want to tell other people about what I just read? That’s on a whole other level of existence. That’s about being inspiring.

So just be aware. I want people to be aware that when we do this, don’t think like, oh, if they can get through those guys that they’re, you know, they’ve got it made. We’re kind of only doing a very fundamental first pass look at these things. What’s waiting for you out there is Riki going “Mm-hmm.”

**John:** Mm-hmm. Doesn’t care. So it’s really, we’re setting a pretty low bar, like, “Do they clear this low bar?” Like, this person seems like they can kind of do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And we’re also taking a lot of time to talk through various things on the page that tripped us up. Riki is not. She’s just basically like, “Did I laugh? Did this click with me? Do I want to meet this writer?” And that’s a very different kind of standard than what we’re doing when we’re doing a Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** So it would be fascinating to have somebody who does a lot of staffing come on and be a guest on a Three Page Challenge because I bet it would be brutal.

**Craig:** Oh, well, because they don’t really do anything like what we do. I mean, there is that, you know, the book, Blink. I mean, everyone is using Blink when they’re doing this. There’s too many — I mean, I think Alan said they get 300 scripts, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, so staffing season is like this swarm of piranha in the water all trying, you know, to grab this one tiny little thing to eat. So everyone is getting inundated by these scripts. I think they open them up and, I mean, she says three pages, I guarantee there’s some where you don’t even make it to half a page. Because just, you have that blink moment you’re like, “Nope, not for me.”

**John:** Yeah, I don’t think we’ll ever do this but a fascinating exercise would be to take a big bucket of the scripts that come in. And sit down with somebody who does this for staffing and just all of us spend an hour just like going through and reading those first three pages and at the end of it discuss which of these scripts would we even want to read page four.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, and you could also, while you’re doing that with this person, have them take — give them a red pen and have them make a little mark on the page where they stopped reading.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** Because I think that would actually be fascinating to see.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And sobering.

**John:** Yeah, after we did the Q&A we had a few announcements. And so I need to have those announcements down so that everyone who wasn’t in the audience can hear them. First off is that on Monday of last week, so a week ago, as you’re hearing this podcast, I sat down with Ice Cube and Andrea Berloff and F. Gary Gray and the filmmakers behind Straight Outta Compton. And so that was a special Q&A in Hollywood. And so I got to ask them questions. So it was about a half an hour of Q&A with those folks and it was great and it was — I loved that movie. I loved sitting down and talking with them about it. So if you are a premium subscriber, you can listen to the audio from that. It’s up in the Scriptnotes premium feed. So you can subscribe to that at Scriptnotes.net and listen to that. We should have one or two more writer interviews up there before the end of the year as well.

We also had a very big announcement about our next live show. Craig, tell us.

**Craig:** So this is something that we’re doing for a charity organization called Hollywood HEART and I admit that at the time that we did the show last night, I wasn’t quite sure exactly what the charity did. In my mind I knew it wasn’t about actual cardiac health. But there was a representative there from Hollywood HEART who came up afterward to explain that it’s about helping kids here in Los Angeles. And it’s a terrific organization.

So we have wonderful guests. This is going to be a live show on January 25th. We’re doing it downtown. And who’s coming? Well, we have Jason Bateman, star of screen and also a filmmaker in his own right now. And we also have the screenwriter of the small movie that is coming out. It’s like a prestige movie coming out in December. It’s called —

**John:** Yeah, it’s one of those sort of “remakey” kind of like, you know, some people may have heard of it.

**Craig:** Right. It’s called Star Wars: The Force Awakens?

**John:** Yeah, I think so. I think you got it right.

**Craig:** Or is it “The Force Awakens”.

**John:** Either one I think would work. It’s translated from French.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you could try it either way.

**Craig:** Star Wars, and his name is Larry Kasdan. He also in the past, he has written another Star Wars film called The Empire Strikes Back.

**John:** I saw that one. It was really good.

**Craig:** And then he wrote a side movie called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**John:** Yeah, we discussed that movie. Do you remember that, a zillion years ago, we discussed that?

**Craig:** Oh, that’s right.

**John:** We did a whole episode on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**Craig:** Yeah, yes. And he’s also written Body Heat. And he’s also written Big Chill. And he’s also written The Bodyguard. And, and, and, and — perhaps the greatest living screenwriter. I like to call him that.

So Lawrence Kasdan, co-writer of the — what will undoubtedly be the biggest movie of all time — Star Wars: The Force Awakens, will be with us on January 25th along with the very funny, very brilliant Jason Bateman. That’s a show you definitely want to come to and the proceeds do benefit Hollywood HEART. If you want tickets and you want to learn more about Hollywood HEART, go to HollywoodHEART.org/upcoming.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And that’s how you get tickets and so forth.

**John:** So this ticket apparently includes cocktails as well. So, come on, it’s bargain.

**Craig:** It includes cocktails?

**John:** That’s what it said on the thing. I’m only going with what I saw on the website.

**Craig:** Wow. So, just to be clear because I said it was about kids, I think that’s a little vague. It’s specifically, it’s designed to nurture creativity and community through the arts and it’s targeted at at-risk kids who either have HIV or AIDS or who are homeless or who are in foster care or the judicial systems. These are kids that are definitely in trouble. They are in trouble and they’re using the arts to kind of help get them out of trouble. And I’m a big believer in effective charity. That’s my, you know, like I get very angry when I see ineffective charity because it feels like such a wasted opportunity. I know that this is a great way to get through to kids who are in trouble. It’s a great way because the arts are part of everyone’s life. It is instantly attractive especially to kids. So I think this is a great idea. There is a camp that they run. So you should totally buy tickets for this. I mean, if you don’t buy tickets for this, you’re just a bad person.

**John:** [laughs] So the carrot and a stick, the guilt, the love, all of it together.

**Craig:** Everything.

**John:** The Craig Mazin special holiday gift.

**Craig:** I just hit you with everything I could.

**John:** The last announcement was that on the previous show we talked about how an upcoming episode will have us talking about advice for things that are not screenwriting-related. So advice about anything. So we’ve gotten more than a hundred questions in about that.

**Craig:** Wow, my god.

**John:** But keep sending in those questions. And we will plow through them and we will answer as many of them as we can on a future episode. I’m really looking forward to that. Off air, I’m going to talk to Craig about a potential guest to join us to help answer those questions.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** Ah. But we should wrap up this episode with a lot of thanks. So we need to give thanks to the Writers Guild Foundation. Its wonderful volunteers who helped staff that event and Chris Kartje for putting it all together. Thank you so much. LA Film School for hosting us. Leon who did all our tech stuff. We had clips up there. We had clips on a big screen. It was like we were a real show. So thank you for that.

**Craig:** Like a real show.

**John:** Matthew Chilelli, as always, did our intros and outros and edited this episode. And Stuart Friedel, our producer, our long-serving, long-suffering producer was there along with his parents and his grandparents who got to hear Malcolm Spellman —

**Craig:** Oh, my god, that’s so great.

**John:** Swear so much. Yeah. And so —

**Craig:** Oh, my god, Bubby was there. She must have been like, “Oy”.

**John:** “Oy”. Yeah, so —

**Craig:** Even the way you say “Oy” is Christian.

**John:** I know. I can’t help it. I come from a Christian heritage.

**Craig:** You do.

**John:** I knew where they were sitting in the audience but as I looked up there I thought I still saw like the paper on the seats. So I thought like, “Oh, well, the grandparents didn’t come.” But it just turns out they were so small that the paper on the chair backs behind them was still visible.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s so cute.

**John:** So cute. So it was a cute fun night. We had amazing guests. So in the show notes at johnaugust.com you’ll see the links to their Twitter handles, their other bio information about them. You’ll also see links for most of the things we talked about on the show that we could squeeze into the links. As always, subscribe to us on iTunes if you’ve not already subscribed. That helps us a lot. Leave a comment. We were not one of the top podcasts of 2015 for some reason, so let’s make that a life goal for 2016 to be one of those top-rated podcasts on iTunes.

If you have a question for me or for Craig, write to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can write your question about, you know, non-screenwriting advice for our special episode. On Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. And thank you everyone who came out to our live show and thank you all for listening.

**Craig:** Go buy tickets for January 25th.

**John:** Cool. Thanks, guys. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Malcolm Spellman on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1173259/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/malcolmspellman), and [Scriptnotes, 185](http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat)
* [Natasha Leggero](http://www.natashaleggero.com/) on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1641089/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/natashaleggero)
* [Riki Lindhome](http://www.rikilindhome.com/) on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1641251/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/rikilindhome)
* [Another Period](http://www.cc.com/shows/another-period) on Comedy Central
* Alan Yang on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1520649/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/AlanMYang)
* [Master of None](http://www.netflix.com/title/80049714) on Netflix
* [Harvard Lampoon](http://harvardlampoon.com/), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harvard_Lampoon)
* [KRUPS F23070 Egg Cooker](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00005KIRS/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Postmates](https://postmates.com/) will deliver you stuff
* [AlanMYang on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/alanmyang/)
* [Kitchen Hacks: How Clever Cooks Get Things Done](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1940352002/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Cook’s Illustrated](https://www.cooksillustrated.com/)
* Hamilton, the Original Broadway Cast Recording on [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/hamilton-original-broadway/id1025210938) and on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013JLBPGE/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Scriptnotes, Bonus: Straight Outta Compton](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-straight-outta-compton)
* [Get your tickets now for Scriptnotes, Live on January 25](http://hollywoodheart.org/upcoming/) with [Jason Bateman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Bateman) and [Lawrence Kasdan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kasdan), a benefit for [Hollywood HEART](http://hollywoodheart.org)
* [Scriptnotes, 73: Raiders of the Lost Ark](http://johnaugust.com/2013/raiders-of-the-lost-ark)
* [Email us](mailto:ask@johnaugust.com) or tweet [John](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) or [Craig](https://twitter.com/clmazin) for advice on things that have nothing to do with screenwriting
* Thanks to the [Writers Guild Foundation](https://www.wgfoundation.org/) and the [Los Angeles Film School](http://www.lafilm.edu/) for hosting us
* [Intro/Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. So today’s episode of Scriptnotes was recorded live at the Austin Film Festival. There are enough bad words, you probably don’t want to listen to it in the car with your kids or at work if you work at some place that doesn’t like to have occasional swearing.

Our thanks to the Austin Film Festival for having us there. It was tremendously fun. And we look forward to seeing you next year.

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. This is a real church crowd. Yeah. All right.

John: My name is John August.

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and —

Audience: Things that are interesting to screenwriters.

John: Really well done. So a few of you may have listened to the podcast before. Can I see a show of hands of who’s actually heard of the Scriptnotes podcast? Oh, that’s a lot of you.

Craig: That’s a softball to use. You’re just —

John: Yeah.

Craig: Looking for praise now.

John: Yeah, we are. Basically, we’re looking for t-shirts out there in the crowd. Some of you might not know what the podcast is like. So Craig, what do we do on a weekly basis?

Craig: John carefully prepares a bunch of topics. He talks to his staff about how to produce the show. He lets me know what time the show will happen. I am five minutes late. I don’t know what we’re doing.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And I talk too much.

John: Oh, no. You talk just the right amount, Craig. So what are we doing today? I’m going to put you on the spot.

Craig: Today, I know what we’re doing.

John: All right. Tell us what we’re going to do today.

Craig: Because it’s special.

John: All right.

Craig: Well, we have two great guests today. We have Nicole Perlman who wrote Guardians of the Galaxy. Little movie. And we also have Steve Zissis, star of HBO’s Togetherness and writer and creator thereof. And those of you who are looking in the book, the guest list has changed a bit because of flights and whatever. I think, frankly, it has improved.

John: Tornadoes, yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Floods.

Craig: We’re also going to be —

John: Acts of God in a church.

Craig: Acts of — we should be safe here.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Well, not me.

John: Listeners at home — and I realize that we’re actually in a historic sanctuary at St. David’s Episcopal Church. And so we are looking over a crowd that’s like maybe, I don’t know, 2,000 people.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And they’re all in pews.

Craig: It’s a mega church.

John: We have this little, you know, satellite room, too.

Craig: Yeah, it’s a mega church.

John: Thank you for being here in this church with us.

Craig: Yeah. And we’re also, today, going to be doing this little feature that we started kind of recently where we take three different stories from the news — current stories from the news and ask, and we’ll have our guests who are in, how would we make a movie out of this. So we’ll be doing that with you guys today.

John: Hooray.

Craig: Hooray.

John: So this will be really fun. So this is probably my seventh Austin Film Festival. You’ve been here a bunch of times, Craig.

Craig: I think this is my fourth or fifth.

John: Yeah. So we love the Austin Film Festival. And yesterday as I arrived, I had maybe not the best start. So I wanted to talk through sort of what happened going from the plane — actually, going from the escalator to the baggage claim. I managed to make a series of faux pas that I feel if I would share them it will make me seem human and relatable.

Craig: Let me just point out, he’s not human.

John: No.

Craig: But he will seem human and relatable.

John: Yeah. So I want you to sympathize with my plight here. So I get down off the escalator and there’s a guy there waiting — maybe you’re out here in the crowd right now — with a big blank sheet of paper and said, “Mr. August, would you draw us a sketch from like, from one of your movies?” I’m like, “I didn’t illustrate any of these movies.” And so like, you know, “Sketch us something from like Frankenweenie or something from Corpse Bride.”

I’m eager to please people. I’m a teacher pleaser. And so I was like, “You know what, I’ll try something. I’ll give it a shot. Like, I’ve never drawn anything from these movies, but sure.” Tim Burton won’t mind if I draw one of his creations.

Craig: And did that guy’s face just go, “Uhh?”

John: No, no. He was really pushing me. And so I was trying to decide whether I was being punked or like to see like how badly I could draw Sparky from Frankenweenie. So I ended up drawing the female dog from Frankenweenie. And like the ball being pushed underneath the fence, and it was like a charming little scene, but completely the wrong thing to draw.

So I’m drawing this thing and I signed it, whatever, and I signed another autograph. And then people started to think like, “Oh, that must be a famous person.” So random people started to like try take photos with me as if I was a famous person. And they have no idea who I am in their photos.

That’s by far the better part of what happened.

Craig: This is what he thought would make him sound human and relatable.

John: No. No, no, no. No, wait. Because the whole thing is about to flip.

Craig: Okay.

John: So as I’m waiting for my bag in baggage claim, there’s a guy who I recognized who was on the flight. I was like, “Is that an actor? I can’t picture him.” But he seems familiar, and he’s wearing sunglasses. And there was a limousine driver who was meeting him there. And so I was like, “He’s somebody famous. Who is that person?”

And then I could see the driver’s little card that he would hold up. And it was flipped over and it said “Raimi.” I’m like, “That’s Sam Raimi.” And so I’m like, “Oh, I should say something to Sam Raimi because we have mutual friends. I mean, like Laura Ziskin and other folks.

And so I finally, like, sort of screw up my courage and say, like, “Hey, Sam. Sam, it’s John. It’s John August.” And he just completely stone faces me. Like does not acknowledge me whatsoever, like I’m just a crazy stalker person. So I became that stalkery person who sort of wanted to, like, get his attention.

So this other nice guy who might be in the audience here today said, “That’s not Sam Raimi.” It wasn’t Sam Raimi. It was Sam Raimi’s brother apparently. And so —

Craig: You met Ted Raimi?

John: Ted Raimi is here.

Craig: Ted Raimi I would have thought would have been like, “No. But let’s talk.”

John: No.

Craig: You know —

John: Ted Raimi shut down.

Craig: Wow.

John: And so this is no slam on Ted Raimi. This is no slam on Sam Raimi who wasn’t even here to defend himself. It’s just this is a situation at trying to get my bag, I managed to humiliate myself kind of twice. So the tornadoes in Austin have been, like, really a highlight after that point.

Craig: I’m really sorry that that happened.

John: Oh, thank you, Craig.

Craig: I care about you.

John: Thanks. That’s nice to hear.

We’re going to try something very new and very different that we’ve never done before. So back on our 100th episode of the show, we did this thing where underneath the people’s seats, there was a golden ticket hidden. And if you have that golden —

Craig: Don’t go looking.

John: Or, maybe go looking but you won’t find anything.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Underneath one seat, there was a golden ticket and that person won a very special prize. So today, we’re going to try doing a raffle of a very special prize. So as you guys came in, each of you should have gotten a little raffle ticket, hopefully most of you. And —

Craig: Did you throw your raffle ticket out? You ate it? What did you do?

John: You ate it? Yeah. It wasn’t edible, no. I guess it technically is edible, just not really good.

Craig: Not tasty.

John: Not tasty.

So this is Annie Hayes, everyone. Annie Hayes is our Austin Stuart. Say hi to Annie Hayes. So Annie Hayes is helping us out.

Craig Mazin, will you pick one ticket from there?

Craig: Yes. Oh, so many. Okay, I got it.

John: All right.

Craig: I have it.

John: So let’s read the number and see if it matches up to anybody here.

Craig: Six. Good. So far so good. Two. One. I think everybody started with 621. Zero. One. Zero.

Amanda Murad: Oh, that’s me.

Craig: Yay.

John: Come on up.

Craig: Let’s see. I’m going to hold on, I’m going to figure out what your name is. It’s Amanda.

Amanda: Amanda.

Craig: Amanda Murad.

Amanda: Murad.

Craig: Murad.

Amanda: Close.

Craig: I thought it was Norad for a second.

John: That would be cool.

Craig: Yup.

John: But Murad’s great too.

Amanda: Okay.

Craig: No, no. It’s not that cool.

John: So are you a screenwriter?

Amanda: I am a screenwriter.

John: And do you live in the Austin area or are you just here for this conference?

Amanda: Just here for the conference. I live in LA.

John: Oh, holy cow.

Craig: Great.

Amanda: Yeah.

John: Is this your first time in the Austin Film Festival?

Amanda: It is.

John: And how is it so far?

Amanda: It is really fun.

Craig: It just got awesome.

Amanda: It just got way more awesome.

John: What are you writing right now?

Amanda: I am working on my second pilot.

Craig: Great.

John: And have you only done TV stuff so far? Have you written a feature? What else have you written?

Amanda: I’ve written one feature. But I have two pilots and a play.

John: Cool. That’s awesome. In these envelopes, they’re marked A, B, and C, there are three different items. And I want you to pick which envelope you would like to open.

Amanda: Whose fate am I deciding in this decision?

John: Your own fate.

Craig: I like her sense of nervousness and caution though, I have to say.

John: Yes. She’s not just blindly rushing in.

Craig: Yeah. She’s not like, “Okay.” No. She’s like, “Okay.” So A, B, or C?

Amanda: Okay. The letter A is usually pretty good to me.

John: All right. Great.

Amanda: A.

John: A. So take this envelope but don’t open it yet.

Amanda: Okay.

John: And we are going to open up one other envelope. So I want a vote from the crowd. Which of these other two envelopes should I open up?

Audience: B.

John: Everybody who wants me to open up envelope C, raise your hand.

Craig: C.

John: Yeah. All right. We’re going to open up envelope C. Open up envelope C, Craig.

Craig: Okay. All right.

John: Let’s see what’s inside.

Craig: See, he gives me stuff to do and everything, keeps me involved. Okay. Oh, this was the good one.

John: Yeah, this was the good one.

Craig: This was the best one.

John: All right. Yeah, it’s a really good one.

Craig: Just let her have it. [laughs]

John: Maybe we should.

Craig: No, because she’s so normal. I mean we had like a chance of getting a total freak. Not that — I mean, there’s at least one of you in here who’s —

John: Yeah. So there’s a thing which I was going to do with all this but apparently, you chose so well or the audience chose for you. Maybe it’s the audience who chose for you.

Craig: You know what? The audience chose this for you.

John: That’s really the audience choice.

Amanda: Thank you, guys, so much.

John: So what this card says is, “John and Craig will read your script.” If you would like to.

Amanda: Yes.

John: Great.

Amanda: Yes.

Craig: And we’ll talk about it on the show. And you can come on the show.

Amanda: Yes. Yes.

Craig: Great. Or you can have a t-shirt.

John: Yeah.

Amanda: I’m going to pick C.

John: All right. Well done.

Craig: C.

Amanda: The letter A has failed me.

John: Yeah. Amanda, at whatever point you feel like you have a script that you want to send in, just send it in to Stuart at ask@johnaugust. I’ll remind him that you were the one who won this competition and the audience won it for you, really.

Amanda: I will be sure to thank you all in my email.

John: And we look forward to receiving it.

Amanda: All right. Thank you, guys.

John: Amanda, thanks so much.

Craig: Envelope B was money, by the way.

John: Yeah, exactly.

So the idea behind that was the Monty Hall problem which is essentially we were going to open up one thing and then she would decide whether she wanted to keep or switch and it involved math and statistics and probability.

Craig: These guys messed it up.

John: No. You guys did a nice thing. You did this all for her.

Craig: They did. Yeah, they did.

John: They did.

Let us get to our very first guest of the podcast.

Craig: Great.

John: Nicole Perlman is the writer of Guardians of the Galaxy. And she’s writing a bunch of other stuff right now and we cannot wait to talk with her. She was a guest way back when, right when that movie came out. And let’s welcome Nicole Perlman up to talk to us again.

Craig: Nicole Perlman.

Nicole Perlman: Thank you.

John: Nicole Perlman, you were on the show before. You had just written Guardians of the Galaxy which was a giant, giant hit. What has changed in your life since we’ve talked to you last, in writing?

Nicole: I’ve descended into heroin use and I’ve lost all my friends and family. [laughs]

Craig: God, I know how that goes.

Nicole: Yeah. Totally. No, it’s been good. It’s been really crazy. It’s been so crazy that I sort of fled to San Francisco. I was like, “Oh, too much stuff. Too much good. Must run north.” So no, it’s been very good. Lots of projects. I’m doing Captain Marvel —

John: Great.

Craig: Awesome.

Nicole: With Meg LeFauve. So that has been cool. We’re really in the early stages but we’re having a lot of fun. And I’m doing a project for Fox, an adaptation of Hugh Howey’s Wool Trilogy, and that has been very cool.

That guy, by the way, really knows how to live. He wrote a best-selling novel and he’s like, “I’m going to go build a boat and sail around the world. See you.” And he like checked out. So that’s what he’s doing which is really cool.

John: I mean you’re checking out to some degree.

Nicole: Totally.

John: Like you’re keeping out of the rat race.

Nicole: Yeah.

John: And so what really prompted the decision? Was it just you had enough stuff on your plate that you actually could leave and —

Nicole: Yes. That was it.

John: That’s the response?

Nicole: And also, people just kept asking me to be on their podcasts and it was just —

John: Yeah, it was such a huge drag.

Nicole: It was a huge drag.

Craig: It’s the worst.

John: Yeah, I mean, Craig, I tell you, you got to back off a little bit.

Craig: I mean, I don’t know what those podcasts are because I don’t listen to podcasts. But I know what it’s like.

Nicole: No, it’s good. It’s probably just for like a year. I’m in LA every week for work but I felt like I could just do it. I spend less time commuting by flying in and out than I did when I was in LA in my car, which is kind of crazy.

John: That’s actually scary, yeah.

Nicole: It’s true though, yeah.

John: So talk to us about — obviously, you can’t give us any character details or really plot details about Captain Marvel.

Nicole: Yeah.

John: But what is it like writing with another writer? Is this the first time you’ve had a writing partner on something?

Nicole: It’s not the first time. I’m working with another writing partner on a spec, my first spec in a long time. So that is another experience. It’s been really good.

Meg and I are really, really just starting out. And she comes from a Pixar background so she’s really used to collaborating. So I think we’re still feeling it out a little bit. The being on the phone part, I’m very meek on the phone when other people are talking. I’m very respectful. I’m just, like, “No, no. You go ahead. No, no. You go ahead.” You know, and —

Craig: You got to lean in, girl.

Nicole: You got to be like, [roars], “Listen to me.” So I think that is — because that goes over really well, too.

John: Yeah, it does.

Craig: I don’t think that’s a good idea, actually. I don’t want you to do that.

John: But you need to get a Groot voice is really what you have to do.

Nicole: A Groot voice for sure. For sure.

John: Simple things.

Nicole: But Meg is wonderful and so she’s really good about character. And I think she comes from a non-genre background and so there’s a little bit of me being like, “Oh, you know, so there’s this history of this type of character, you know, we don’t want to do that because it’s been done that way.” And she’s like, “But we want to have this with character and integrity.” I’m like, “What? Integrity? What? What’s that?” So she’s great. And I think that we balance each other out in a good way. But again, it’s early days yet.

John: So one of the challenges would seem to be that you have to come to a consensus between the two of you about what it is you want to do and how you want this movie to work and how you want the character the work. But also then you have to be able to pitch in a unified sense to Marvel. And Craig sort of loves Kevin Feige or sort of really admires Kevin Feige.

Craig: I do.

John: And so that must be a challenge of like how you want to do your work and also fit into this greater picture. Do you have to be mindful of everything else that’s happening in the Marvel Universe to do your one story?

Nicole: Well, you know, without giving away anything that would get me, you know, excommunicated, basically Kevin and his group of brain trust people go and figure out where we fit in and then have let us know where we fit in. And so Meg and I gave them a list of questions, very long and epic questions and then potential answers to those questions. And they, you know, returned from their mountain top retreat which they [laughs] went to and then returned from and said they —

Craig: Handed you tablets.

Nicole: Pretty much. Pretty much. And so that’s what we’re working with now. And we’re also really in the phase of reading through massive packets of information, you know, which is always fun.

John: Cool.

Craig: I love that you’re writing a spec at the same time you’re doing all this other stuff.

Nicole: Yes.

Craig: In the wake of the success that you’ve had and all of the stuff that they’re now asking you to do, how do you manage to carve these spaces out and keep these things separate? Because you’re working on, you said, Captain Marvel and a spec and —

Nicole: The Hugh Howey Wool.

Craig: The Wool.

Nicole: Yeah. And I just sold a sequel to a movie that was my favorite movie from childhood but I can’t talk about it yet, so that’s going on. And then I’m also doing a virtual reality project with Steven Spielberg.

Craig: That’s five.

Nicole: And then I’m also doing a comic book —

Craig: I’m sorry, with who?

Nicole: Nobody. Nobody. Just a real, you know, up and coming —

Craig: So that’s five things.

Nicole: Yeah. And then a comic book series, too.

Craig: Six things.

Nicole: Yeah.

Craig: So I’ll ask my question again. I mean, how do you keep it all — I mean, do you just push a few things off?

Nicole: Well, honestly, it’s just because — and I’m sure you guys have experienced this — that things go into holding patterns. And especially with Marvel, the movie doesn’t come out for three-and-a-half years, so it’s got a lot of long pauses in between submissions of stuff. So with that and with the other projects, too, there’s a long waiting period.

The people who’ve made me wait the longest are the Marvel publishing people. And that’s like a 20-page thing. You send them and like months go by and then they’re like, “Good work.” “Okay.”

Craig: So in a situation like yours, you’re almost kind of hoping that they’ll take time.

Nicole: Right, exactly. So it’s okay. I think the more projects you have to fill the empty spaces, the less fear, that existential dread of like, “What’s happened to my projects?” You know, they just take a while and so that helps.

Craig: Yeah, because all of your eggs aren’t in that basket. But then there is that sense of being overwhelmed.

Nicole: Yes.

Craig: Do you have that?

Nicole: All the time. All the time.

Craig: Right now?

Nicole: I’m just veering between sheer panic and like different kinds of panic. Like panic of like “I have nothing going on. My career is going to crash.” And “Oh my, god. I’m going to be overwhelmed and die and never get anything done.” So, yes.

Craig: Sounds just like me.

Nicole: I’m really happy all the time.

Craig: Right. Of course. So what do you do to deal with that?

Nicole: I moved to San Francisco.

Craig: Of course, yes. Yes, of course.

John: So I want to get back to the idea of writing a spec. And so what was it? It was an idea that was just burning that demanded to be written? What was the —

Nicole: What it was, was that I’m doing a lot of big, fantastical, world-building projects and I wanted to do something that was contained, low-budget, very character-driven, just a cast of three or four people, and possibly something that would be able to, you know, produce or direct.

My writing partner is a writer/director and so we wanted to do something that was manageable. Which of course my representatives were like, “You realize you’re not going to get paid anything for that.” And I’m like, “Yeah. But get excited about it. Like, you know, get so excited about this guys.” And they’re like, “Yeah. Mm-hmm. That’s great.” So it’s basically what we’re doing in spare time to remind me that I am a writer [laughs] and not a cog in the machine.

John: Yeah, it’s the Joss Whedon do a smaller thing in between the two giant projects.

Nicole: Exactly. Exactly, yeah.

John: Cool. So Scott Neustadter was supposed to be joining us here up on the panel. And Scott Neustadter couldn’t be here because the airport is completely shut down. So like one of many panels who’s not going to be here today. Luckily, Steve Zissis has agreed to fill in. This is Steve Zissis —

Craig: Upgrade.

John: Who is the co-creator of Togetherness. Steve Zissis, come up here.

Steve Zissis: So what’s the processional hymn?

Craig: I’m Jewish. And this is not Greek Orthodox at all. At all. Like the two of us — actually, three of us. And he —

John: I’m good. I’m good. The android faith alone —

Craig: Fucking white privileged man.

John: Yeah. It’s so good.

Craig: I’m good.

John: I’m good.

Steve: What are you?

John: I’m sort of, like, random protestant.

Steve: Oh, random protestant.

Nicole: Random protestant.

Craig: Yes. Yes.

John: Culturally. Steve, thank you so much for filling in.

Steve: Of course.

John: But thank you also for you great TV show, Togetherness.

Steve: Thank you.

John: Tell us how that came to be because this is an HBO show. It was an idea that you sparked with a Duplass brother and is now going into its second season.

Steve: It started, I guess, with Jay Duplass and I fooling around in his backhouse trying to do something creative together. And —

John: It sounds terrible.

Steve: Yeah. We just wanted to do something creative. And at first we started recreating ’80s soap opera scenes from like YouTube clips. And then Jay and I would act them out and we would record them. We didn’t really have a goal in mind.

Craig: How high were you guys? [laughs]

Steve: We just stole someone’s lithium. But then that just started snowballing into something, like, “Okay, we need to do something more structured.” And then we really borrowed upon our own lives and created a relationship show that was very autobiographical.

I was waiting tables at the time. And I would get off of work and stay on the phone with Jay because he was on the graveyard shift with his newborn child. So we would work out the story and the season arc for the first season during the graveyard shift, basically, on the phone.

Craig: Amazing.

Steve: And that’s how it started.

John: So by that point, you were thinking about this as probably a half-hour for cable and it’s going to revolve around these central characters, this family, this guy who’s moving in. You had all those dynamics sort of figured out early on.

Steve: Actually, initially, it was just going to center around the Alex character who was my character. But then when we went to HBO, they were like, “We love it. We really want to work with you. But we’re looking for relationship shows that could be a four-hander.” And we were like, “Yeah. Yeah. We could do that.”

We went back to the drawing board and — I mean, it was tough because we had built something centered around one character. So we were panicked for a little bit. But ultimately, HBO was right.

Craig: Well, I love moments like this because you never — we just did this show last week about William Goldman’s Nobody Knows Anything, which is not nobody knows anything but nobody knows anything. You never know.

So these people hand down these edicts sometimes and our first reaction is, “You know, goddamn. I mean, sure go ahead and turn it into whatever you want. It’s not something that we bled over the graveyard shift while he’s up with his kid and I’m slaving away waiting tables. No, no. Your whim is my command.”

But then sometimes they’re right. And I love that you guys did it. Because the truth is, what was the worst that happened? You tried and it didn’t work, right? But it does work. It’s amazing.

Steve: And HBO in general is really — they’re pretty hands off with notes. I mean, once they sort of, you know, tap you, they want you to do your thing. And they’ve been pretty hands off since then, actually.

John: So when did you actually start writing? So had you written anything before you went in to meet with HBO?

Steve: So we wrote the initial pilot called Alexander the Great which was centered around my character. And then they said, “Let’s go back to the drawing board.” And then it took us about four months to come up with the pilot for Togetherness. We went in and shot that. And then, you know, I was still waiting tables and rubbing rabbits’ feet. And we got the green light for this first season.

John: Great. So you turned in this pilot script. They said yes. They blessed you to go shoot a pilot. But then there’s that long waiting process, you know, whether it’s a show that they’re going to actually want to put on the air.

Steve: Yeah. And we had had the first season sort of arced out. We didn’t write the first season until after we got the green light.

Craig: And then the panic of success set in and you realized, “Oh my, god.” I mean, were you overwhelmed by the thought that you had to do the thing that took you four months again and again and again and again?

Steve: All I remember is calling my mom and crying. And I remember the last day at the restaurant, my last shift, I was so happy. There was such a weight lifted off of me. But I was trying to contain my joy because I didn’t want my fellow friends that I’ve been like slaving with in hell to look at me.

Craig: You’re nice.

Steve: Yeah.

Craig: You’re nice.

Steve: You know, I didn’t want to —

Craig: Right.

Steve: So then I got home and, you know, exploded.

Craig: Oh. It’s such —

Steve: Literally.

Craig: And then — [laughs]

Steve: I exploded.

Craig: I exploded.

Steve: Like the blimp that was released from — .

Craig: Well, we’ll be getting to that.

Nicole: Yes, they will.

Craig: I see you’ve done your homework. You were mostly following the career path of an actor. Is that correct?

Steve: Yeah.

Craig: Prior to Togetherness? Had you done a lot of writing before that? This was kind of the first stab at it.

Steve: The only real writing I had been doing is the countless improvisational —

Craig: He’s an improvisational master, by the way.

Steve: Which I know isn’t really writing.

Craig: Master of improvisation.

Steve: But Jay, Mark, and I had been doing really highly improvised independent films since, like, the early 2000s, even in 1999. And then it just sort of evolved out of that style.

Craig: For your show, I get the sense that it’s not quite like the Curb Your Enthusiasm model where you’re scripting it but you’re almost scripting your own improv. That’s kind of the sense I get from it.

Steve: Well, like Curb and I think, like, the show like The League, they go in with just an outline.

Craig: Right.

Steve: But our show is completely scripted, really tight, really structured. But we just find that, like, the golden nuggets in the scenes and oftentimes the funniest jokes are the ones that are found in the moment. Even the emotional scenes, not just the comedic scenes. Like we talk about it like, sort of like setting up like lightning rods, and then just creating the perfect conditions for lighting to strike.

Craig: Right.

Steve: You don’t always get gold and there’s a lot of trial and error. But if you’re patient, you will.

John: Now, on a show like Togetherness, do you have — obviously you don’t have act breaks, but do you have a template in your head of like over the course of an episode these are the kinds of things that need to happen. We need to be able to take a character from this place to this place. We need to like hit certain milestones. Did you and Jay figure out sort of what the show is like, you know, structurally?

Steve: Yeah. We had a good sense of where the first two seasons were going to be in terms of a story arc and character arc. And then now, we’re preparing to write season three. And for the first time, we’re having to really — we sort of have an open map. We can create our own map at this point. So we’re finding new things now with season three, because the first two seasons were sort of already mapped out in our heads. So now, we’re writing a new map.

Craig: It’s such a great cast, too. I mean, everybody —

Steve: Thank you.

Craig: Everybody is spectacular. You know, the first time I saw the show — I tuned because you know I don’t watch anything. You guys know that. But I watched the show because I’m friends with Amanda Peet and she was in a movie I did and her husband and everything. And so I wanted to see it and there was something about it.

I was one of your first Twitter followers. Because you just — well, there was something, like, you know, I don’t know why I’m attracted to sort of schlumpy side stacks. Yes. Something about you. Something about ethnic, sad men — [laughs]

Like that face right there. It’s like, it’s all I want, like that. Like, look at me moving towards it. [laughs]

No, I mean, honestly, you’re the best. I mean it’s a great show. I’m just so glad that you — I love stories like yours but we don’t hear them a lot. Now, what we do, in a way we celebrate them, I think, sometimes more than we should because a lot of people who are waitering, they’re like, “Fuck it, man. Steve did it. I’m next.” Probably not. Probably not. It’s incredibly rare. So it’s so exciting that it happened, that the incredibly rare thing happened to you.

Steve: And I grew up with Mark and Jay back in New Orleans. We’re all from New Orleans. We all went to the same high school. And we all sort of came across this method of filmmaking sort of by accident. Out of necessity, really, because, you know, we were all broke. [laughs] So, you know, this whole John Cassavetes style, we could say that it was our intention from the beginning but it actually wasn’t. Like Jay and Mark’s first attempt to make a feature film was a complete disaster. It was a failure.

Craig: Because they were trying to make a real —

Steve: They were trying to make something big. They were trying to emulate the Coen Brothers. They failed miserably. They borrowed $100,000 from their father who was like a very successful lawyer in New Orleans. And they squandered — like it was a complete failure. [laughs]

Craig: Was he angry?

Steve: No, not at all. Because he’s —

Craig: Cool dad.

Steve: Yeah. He’s a great guy and so supportive.

Craig: I would be pissed off. My kid blows $100,000, I’m pissed.

Steve: But then after those failures and those failed attempts that they started to find their own voice and style just sort of out of necessity, which is cool.

Craig: And you were part of that from the start.

Steve: Yeah. I did their first experimental films. I did shorts with them. And I loved sort of the improv style of their way.

Craig: Right.

Steve: It just fits with me well.

Craig: Yeah, excellent.

Steve: Thank you.

John: So because we have two of you up here, we want to talk through this feature we usually do called, “How would this be a movie?” And I asked on Twitter for people for suggestions. I’m like, “What should we talk about for how to make into a movie?” And the three best suggestions we got were Zola. People who’ve done their homework, Zola is sort of amazing. So I want to talk through sort of what that is.

We’re going to talk about Zola, we’re going to talk about the rogue blimp, and we’re going to talk about George Bell, The Lonely Death of George Bell. And try to figure out how to make these into a movie or a TV series. Or if someone approaches you with this idea, how do you run with it?

So let’s get some back story on Zola. Actually, I took notes because I’m the preparer. So Zola, if you don’t know is —

Craig: I don’t need notes. I could do this just fine.

John: Just —

Craig: No, no.

John: No, it’s fine. I’ll —

Craig: No, no. I’m done.

John: Just for everybody else, Craig. They might need it.

Craig: Yeah.

Steve: We’ll just ‘prov it.

John: What was the white boyfriend’s name?

Craig: Jarrett.

John: Oh, he’s got it. All right, so for people who —

Craig: I don’t drop mics because it’s not good for the microphone.

John: Yeah. So for people who’ve missed out on the story so far, Zola is a Twitter account. And basically, she had like this epic tweet of like 174 tweets that detailed this wild experience she had in March. And you read this and it is amazing and sort of tweet by tweet sort of going through this long saga of what happened.

Her name is Zola. She meets this girl named Jess at a Hooters. They strike up a friendship. They talk about hoeing. And they exchanged phone numbers. And Zola agrees to go on this trip.

Craig: Just to dance.

John: Just to dance.

Craig: She’s not a hoe.

John: She’s not a hoe. She’s a dancer.

Craig: And she doesn’t know that the other girl is a hoe either.

John: True.

Craig: She knows she’s a dancer. That’s it.

John: Yeah, but —

Craig: She’s not out there trapping —

Nicole: She didn’t seem that surprised though. She’s like, “Oh, yeah.”

Craig: Right.

John: She doesn’t seem that surprised because even early on they were talking about hoeing. So like —

Craig: There was some hoe talk.

John: Yeah. Even not if profession, it’s — they’re sex worker adjacent, if nothing else.

Craig: I ain’t touching that one.

John: All right.

Craig: I’ve gotten in trouble before.

John: So the characters we have are Zola. We have Jess. We have the black pimp whose name is eventually revealed to be Z something.

Craig: Z.

John: Z something. We have Jarrett and Jarrett’s fiancée who shows up every once in a while and is a complete character of mystery. But you guys looked through these tweets and someone approaches you with this, you know, Nicole Perlman, what is a movie you spin out of there? What’s interesting to you as a movie out of the Zola story?

Nicole: Nobody would ever give me [laughs] this project to adapt. I was impressed at her excitement and her enthusiasm about this and she was like, “And then, and then, oh no but wait, oh no, but wait,” you know. And that part was great but I actually kind of lost the thread a little bit, I was just like ah — so I’m going to be lame about it. But I kind of loved the idea of them talking about hoeing like they were farmers, you know. They’re just hoeing and —

John: Yeah. [laughs]

Nicole: That was the twist like —

Craig: I think we’re going to pass on you.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I don’t think that that’s —

Nicole: All right, that wasn’t mine —

Craig: But thanks for coming in.

Nicole: That’s okay, that’s okay.

John: Craig, if someone approached you with that story, do you tell the story as just that? Because it felt like a Magic Mike kind of like road trip sort of, like Magic Mike XXL which is —

Craig: Right.

John: Just following a series of events and perspective.

Craig: Well, it’s so crazy that if you try and tell it, it’s just going to seem like you told it again because the story that she lays out is in bananas. The one way to think about it is, like I was thinking about how sad it was. I mean, the woman that is the actual hoe and she’s getting beaten up and snatched and a man gets shot in the face. This is terrible.

And yet, we’re all reading and everyone’s like, “Oh, my god, you got to read what Zola wrote.” Like that’s an interesting movie to me is that somebody types up something like that and it becomes viral. Meanwhile, the people that are in that have no idea and they’re out there somewhere —

John: Yeah.

Craig: And going through something real. That could be kind of interesting because the nature of these viral things, there’s something really creepy about how it separates us from the real. Someone died. That guy murdered someone.

John: Yes, shot them in the face.

Craig: And they beat that woman up.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Plus the hoeing.

Steve: Is the Twitter account verified?

John: Yeah, the Twitter account is not verified, so let’s talk about that possibility.

Steve: Okay. I’m not sure about the movie, you guys would be better for that. But I think at the end, there should be voice over throughout, we should see the little emoticons on the screen, the tweets, and at the end of the film, there should be a 72-year-old grandmother in Ohio —

Craig: [laughs] Right. Catfishing everyone.

Steve: That has catfished the whole thing.

Craig: Right.

Nicole: That would be amazing. That would be so great.

Craig: That’s pretty great. That’s pretty great. And like her grandson is there in the background playing “Grandma, almost done.”

John: So we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, who was the writer who pretended to be much younger than she was and was Felicity. Was that Riley Weston?

Craig: Riley Weston.

John: Riley Weston. So it would be fascinating if it were a Riley Weston situation where somebody is basically spitting a giant yarn for what all this is. It has such a feeling of truth though. I also had the question about whether all those tweets were written in advance or was she writing them one by one.

Nicole: I think she was writing them all in one stream of consciousness.

Craig: I think so too, yeah.

John: But it’s so hard to, I mean I have such a hard time fitting everything I want to say into one tweet. So to be able to stretch that out over —

Craig: She just got to that character limit, hit return and kept going, you know, I can hear the clacking of her nails on the laptop. And she’s like “Bam, ding ding ding ding.”

John: Yeah. And yet it had a structure to it. She just kind of knew where to start and she knew — she was very good about reminding you, this person you saw before, like I didn’t know his name, but now, I know his name was Z, and it was brilliantly done to me.

Steve: Yes. And just when the energy started to wane, she said, “Only four more tweets till the end.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: I know like she actually knew.

Steve: Yeah.

Craig: You think that there’s — you think grandma —

Steve: It’s a 72-year-old grandmother. That just graduated from the Iowa writing program.

Craig: Nothing good comes out of that.

John: Nothing good possibly can.

Craig: All right, all right. That’s pretty solid.

John: Right. Let’s talk about rogue blimp. So for people who are listening to this, way after the fact, there was a giant blimp, actually particularly an aerostat that was designed for East Coast defense. Basically it wasn’t a camera, but it had a like long range radar for detecting incoming missiles that could hit the East Coast. It broke free of its mooring and all hell sort of broke loose. And so it ended up dragging a cable behind it that did not have power and did other things. This is the sort of a little more in your wheelhouse.

Nicole: Yeah.

John: And a producer comes to you and is like, Nicole —

Craig: [laughs] She’s written a ton of blimp movies.

Nicole: Yeah.

John: Yeah, indeed.

Nicole: A whole sub-genre.

Craig: Like another one. I can do more than blimps. [laughs]

Nicole: Dammit, I’m so pigeon-holed.

John: What kind of movie is the blimp movie to you?

Nicole: It seemed like a wacky sort of like two guys think they’re going to get in the Goodyear blimp but they choose the wrong blimp and then they cut it free. And then because of that they end up almost starting World War III because they keep — I don’t know, but I could see it with the whole cruise missiles with blimps, by the way. I was like that’s how we detect incoming cruise missiles, is with a blimp? You know, that just seems really shoddy. [laughs] I was really disappointed in the Department of Defense. I was like, guys, seriously.

And also the whole Google blimps. Somebody has to get something mixed up with the Google blimp. And I thought it would be fun if they — If they took off on the sort of the like cross country trip in this NSA blimp not realizing it wasn’t the Goodyear blimp and causing a whole bunch of problems with the DOD thinking there was some sort of terrorist attack.

John: Steve, what kind of movie do you make out of the blimp?

Steve: Well when I saw NORAD, it made me think of the 80s movie WarGames.

Nicole: Yes, totally.

Steve: So like tonally I think WarGames would be a [laughs] good match. But I think it should be about the guy that was holding on to the blimp, you know, by the line there. And what happened to him the day before.

John: Yeah, so it’s sort of like Up but bigger.

Steve: Why did he — yeah, like Up. Exactly. Why did his grip — why did he lose his grip?

John: I see the campaign for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and she’s — who’s carrying in the balloons and like it’s sort of like that, but it looks — you need to never let go.

Craig: Never let — that’s the tagline.

John: Never let go. Craig Mazin, what movie would you make out of the blimp?

Craig: You know what, I think you could make a really good Pixar kind of movie about a blimp. Because I love the fact that it seems so anachronistic. And I like the idea that this blimp has been there for so long and he’s just blimping along protecting America and we don’t know. And he just follows orders and he just never doesn’t do his job. And then they come in they’re like, “Oh, you know, we’re replacing blimps, we’re replacing it all, you’re done.” And he’s so depressed. And he basically pulls himself away to just go. And then he kind of goes on this journey that may — helps him find his purpose again and he meets other things that float.

I mean there’s, you know, like dandelions and —

John: There’s a cloud.

Craig: A cloud, you know. But the blimp finds his, you know — it’s basically, he’s committing suicide is what he’s doing but, you know — so it’s — I think he could — I don’t know —

Nicole: It’s really heartwarming.

Steve: I think for sure, at the end credits, there should be a Led Zeppelin song.

Nicole: Ah.

Craig: Nah. No, no. Yay. [laughs]

John: It’s improv. Only good ideas — yes and…

Craig: Yes and.

John: The other —

Craig: Yes and no.

John: Yes and. Another possibility is a — the Michael Bay version is essentially it’s stealth because essentially like the death blimp sort of goes out there and you cannot possibly stop it. And so like if it has a sentience, if it has a thing it’s trying to do. There’s something also kind of like slow motion zombie about it because it’s not fast, it just like — it’s a path of destruction, it’s like the tornadoes this morning. It’s just that it’s going to move through in a straight line.

Craig: So even more blimps start coming and they just keep coming.

John: Yeah. Absolutely.

Nicole: It’s kind of like that — what is it, Rubber with the one about the tire?

John: Oh yeah the tire, yeah.

Nicole: It’s just like this rabid tire that’s running over people. It’s just like that. It’s like the cable very slowly dragging and causing devastation. It would be like, “No,” and it just keeps coming.

Craig: [laughs] It’s a little low stakes. It just — shoot the — just takes the —

Nicole: You just step to the side —

Craig: Just shoot the blimp — yeah.

Nicole: One foot.

Craig: It’s a blimp.

John: Yeah. But the fact that it just keeps coming. And they had to shoot it down. That’s actually the funniest thing. It’s like —

Craig: They do. Use a shotgun.

John: They use a shotgun to shoot a blimp.

Craig: But by the way — I’m sorry but if that’s Pixar and they shoot him at the end and he deflates. You’re going to feel, like that will kill you.

John: It’s Old Yeller. It totally is.

Craig: It’s freaking Old Yeller, but then somebody finds him and inflates him again. You see what I’m saying? It’s like, let’s go make that, guys. Somebody just steal it. I mean, it’s gold.

John: All right. Another option, you have the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, one of those gets loose and you have to go after that thing and shoot that thing down and that’s pretty good. So Underdog gets loose, and you have to shoot down Underdog.

Craig: Underdog.

John: Yeah. That’s how I would do it. Or Snoopy. One of them would do it.

Let’s get to our third possibility which is, well maybe there’s a comedy but it’s The Lonely Death of George Bell. This is a New York Times story.

Craig: Hehe. Hahahahaha.

John: Hahahaha. Written by N. R. Kleinfield. And it talks through the death of this man, George Bell, who was found in his apartment, he’d been dead for about a week. He was a giant, obese, he was a hoarder, everything was sort of awful and he had no —

Craig: Otherwise, good.

John: All of it was great —

Craig: Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, good.

John: He had no next of kin and so he talks through this, how does the city and the state have to deal with people who have no next of kin and sort of what that whole process was. It was a fascinating look at sort of the different layers of bureaucracy that sort of happen to settle out the estate and deal with the body.

Craig: And a lot of people do die alone and disconnected and they don’t even — like they were having trouble even just identifying him even though he was — everyone was like, “Oh yeah, that’s George Bell.” They had to find some — it took them forever to even match up an x-ray to know that it was really him.

John: Yeah. And it wasn’t a remarkable case —

Craig: No, just a guy.

John: The journalist picked this one situation, but like it’s a very common situation. So what kind of movie? You do sad well. So what kind of movie do you make out of George Bell?

Steve: I was — It was a great article. I was really — I immediately thought of It’s a Wonderful Life when I was reading this, for a bunch of reasons. The main character’s name was George Bell instead of Bailey. And then also, if you’re reading the article where unclaimed bodies go, is a place called Potter’s Field which is where the evil Mr. Potter, you know, his area became — but I was thinking, you know, It’s a Wonderful Life is about George Bailey learning about the lives he touched while he was alive. But in this article, you could study the lives that this man touched by his death, which I find it really interesting like the workers who were sifting through his apartment and his other relatives that were getting like — they weren’t hardly relatives, but they were getting some of his money through his death. It’d be interesting to examine how the death of someone can bring people’s lives together and unify people in a way that is unexpected.

John: Nicole, what kind of a movie do you make out of Bell?

Nicole: I mean it’s going to be a sad movie no matter what I think, but if it’s one of those movies that makes you feel better about your own life [laughs] or rather it gives you a more insightful look into what makes a life worth living. I thought that the heartbreaking thing was the lost relationship, the woman that he loved, and he left in his will, and she still cared for him and how he had withdrawn it. And I think that there’s something really interesting about how objects reflect choices that we make in our lives sometimes. And the whole investigation into who this man was, trying to piece together who he was based on objects left behind. And that was really interesting because it, you know, was definitely a memento mori, but it was also a — it was like a case study of every object represented — I almost saw it more as like a mini-series, almost like a Serial kind of thing. But, you know, each object represented a choice that he made to either connect or disconnect and leading to the final disconnection with the one person who still loved him, you know. And what else do you have to live for, you know.

Craig: I love that part. So in the story, he’s left money to people and they have to find these people. Some of those people are dead, one of them is this woman who we find out he was engaged to. The woman’s mother told her daughter, you have to get a prenup, and the guy said, “I’m not signing any prenup,” and he left. And they never spoke again except for occasional cards. And the woman always felt like that was the path she should have gone. And then by the time they find her, she’s also dead, and she kind of ended up in a bad way. And you know what I was thinking was, just because — my whole thing about these stories is, at some point, obviously we need to find the uplift and the redemption or else it’s kind of brutal.

And I love the characters of these people that go into your apartment and start investigating from your stuff. And I thought what if a man dies alone in an apartment in New York, and a woman dies alone in an apartment in Florida. And you have a guy in New York — or probably a woman in New York looking through the stuff and a guy in that apartment in Florida looking through the stuff. And they find things that are related to each other, and they have to call each other to help, and they fall in love.

John: Oh, Softie Craig.

Craig: Well, I mean because they’re — it’s like The Notebook except with different people, you know, and just like —

They’re both like — well, the point — I mean — because I love — there was one guy they talked to who was like, “Yeah, I’m probably going to end up like George, like his buddy.” He’s like, “Yeah, I’ll probably die alone, too.” And here are two people that are like, this could be me, you know, and almost have given up, and then through this they — and so their love happen, you know. It was like there was some George and whatever her name was, you know. I’ll give her a name, Evelyn.

John: As I was reading through this, I looked at it more as a world in which you could set a story, rather than looking at George Bell because it felt like the people who were the investigators, that was a fascinating job and that fascinating job could take you into lots of really interesting places. So you could have the comedy version where — or the romantic comedy where people meet this — sort of meet-cute over death. But you also have lots of good thriller options. So you discover like — it looks like it was just a guy who died, there actually is a much more complicated situation. And once you start digging around, you yourself get in danger. So that’s the thriller way to take it.

With all these three scenarios, this one has characters and has a world which is great, but doesn’t really have a story. It doesn’t have a story driver. It doesn’t have like present day story drive, so we have to find a way to make the story drive take place. The blimp one has a lot of sort of like present day stakes, but there’s no characters, whatsoever, so we have to create a whole new characters.

Craig: Except for the blimp.

John: Except for the blimp. If the blimp is anthropomorphic and can talk. If the blimp can sing, well…

Craig: “Well, I guess they don’t want me no more.”

John: Yeah.

Nicole: Plush toy potential.

John: Yeah

Nicole: Inflatables.

Craig: Actually, you know who’d be a great voice for the blimp?

John: Josh Gad. Oh Steve Zissis.

Craig: A great voice for the blimp. He would, because he can bring sadness but then he can bring joy.

John: I like it — I like it so much.

Nicole: He can lift your hearts.

John: How do you feel about — ?

Craig: Look, look, that’s blimp. That’s it. That’s the blimp face. We should totally do this.

John: Zemeckis. Motion Capture. Steve Zissis. Done.

Craig: Wait, hold on.

Steve: Or it could be Andy Serkis being the blimp.

Craig: Yes, yes. Andy Serkis. He does the voice and he does the blimp.

John: That’s nice. I think Andy Serkis would be delighted to have someone else do the voice because it’s going to work out really, really well.

Steve: Sure.

John: And then the first one has characters and plot and there’s so much but it feels like it’s so already made. I mean it’s Spring Breaker 2 or like my first movie, Go. It has that same aspect of like all this stuff just happening.

Craig: It also has that thing that a lot of real life stories have which is that they’re incredibly episodic and then and then and then and then and then and then and you know what happens at the end? This.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And you’re like, okay, but that actually is a great example of a story that if you just took and tried to narrativize without re-contextualizing anything, people would go, “Why did I watch that?”

John: Although I would push back on that. Zola herself has a lot of agency in the story so Zola is the one who’s like taking photos of the girl and putting it on the back page.

Craig: I know. So who are we rooting for?

John: Yeah. It’s a real question.

Craig: There — I mean Zola literally starts — Zola starts out great like, “I’m not — I’m just a dancer and that’s fine.” And then she’s like, “Oh no, this guy is trying to hoe us. That’s no good.” And this girl is scared and says, “Please, you know, we just got to do this.” And Zola is like, “Well, okay, if we’re going to do this, we might as well do it right. I’m now going to make a whole bunch of money. I’m going to pimp you.” Who are we — ?

John: Yeah, it’s Risky Business though. I think what’s fascinating is that —

Craig: Well —

John: If you would — well, if you take — I think Zola is part of the reason why she’s so fascinating is because she is a woman in that situation. She is taking control and ownership of —

Craig: Another human being.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Yes.

Craig: Not good.

John: [Crosstalk] another human being.

Craig: Like she’s sex trafficking a person.

John: I also love that she will just run at the first sign of danger.

Craig: Right.

John: Anything goes, she’s out of there.

Craig: That was the other thing. Yeah. So this poor woman gets snatched up. What does Zola do? Runs. Does she call the police?

John: No.

Craig: No, just runs.

John: Yeah. So people who listened to the show before know that we’ve had a really good track record of the things we discuss on what would — would this be a movie. They always get kind of picked up. At least one of the three things gets picked up and so maybe an audience poll, of these three movies, which one do you think Matt and Ben are going to try to make into a movie first?

Craig: Right.

John: Because it’s usually them. Sometimes it’s DiCaprio, but usually it’s Matt and Ben.

Craig: Usually it’s Matt and Ben.

John: All right. So can I get by applause, who thinks the Zola movie will happen? Okay, by applause, who thinks the blimp movie will happen? And who thinks the George Bell movie will happen?

Craig: People love death. They love death.

John: They love death and uplifts. Yeah.

Craig: And there’s tragedy and it’s good. It’s Greek tragedy.

Steve: Yeah.

John: It’s good Greek tragedy. This is the time in the podcast where we open it up to questions which we can’t normally do because we’re usually recording this on Skype and there’s no one else in the room. But at this point, we would love to hear your questions.

So there’s not a microphone out there, so you’re going to just raise your hand to ask your question. I will repeat back the question and then we’ll answer it. So if anyone has a question, raise your hand. You have a question right there in the first row.

Craig: So the question is that, so this woman knew about the George Bell story, wanted to write the George Bell story. I assume you contacted the author of the story to try and get the rights, and the author said, “No,” and then sold the rights to somebody bigger.

So John Lee Hancock is here. He’s an excellent, excellent director and filmmaker. And John Lee and I tried to get the rights to a story and we failed, we got beaten out by Brad Pitt. It’s hard. The truth is that the people who write these things, they kind of go where they want to go. It’s tough, you know.

John: So let’s talk about what her options are. So I would say if there are things that are so appealing about that movie for you, you might be able to find different real life details or basically a fictional version that can get you to those places because the stuff we talked about with the George Bell movie, it doesn’t necessarily need to be George Bell.

There were things that were interesting about his specific case, but there were also just things that are interesting about that world and that world is —

Craig: I’d even go a step further. There’s actually nothing specific to his story that — I mean, well, the thing about the woman is great, you know. But you can invent a lot using — no, you can’t? Okay.

You know, and the other thing to remember is that the rights are granted on cycles. They are not in perpetuity usually. So they give people 18 months and if nothing happens in 18 months, a lot of times there’s an option to renew and sometimes they don’t and the rights become available, so stay on top of it. You know, that’s the best you can do, but it happens to everyone. And it’s not just, “I’m a little girl and I’m nobody.” Everybody has to deal with this. It’s one of those things.

John: John Lee should direct that movie. Wouldn’t he do a great job?

Craig: He does a great job all the time with all movies. Yeah. Thank you.

John: Thank you, John Lee. Another question from the audience. Anything you want to ask us. Such a quiet group. Right here. So I’m going to repeat the question. Question is, is anything happening with Challenger that someone might see down the line?

Nicole: Yes, this is the project, this is the zombie project that will not die and I’m glad because it’s my favorite but it keeps coming back from the dead and every time I’m sure it’s dead, it keeps coming back.

So yes, it’s been re-optioned, we have financing from E 1 but again this whole, it all really depends on casting. There’s like four people who could play the part and so if we get one of those four people, hooray. If not, it will die again until somebody else wants to option it.

John: I don’t even know what the project is so this is a script that you wrote?

Nicole: This is a script I wrote a million years — I wrote this script in college actually and it was a love letter to Richard Fineman because he was my childhood crush when I was in high school which is why I had no dates until college. But I really, really loved Richard Fineman. And so I wrote a screenplay about his investigation into the Challenger shuttle disaster and it was my golden ticket kind of, you know, my Willy Wonka ticket in a sense that that was what got me meetings and I won a bunch of contests and got my first job off of that as a sample.

And so it was this project that had, one day it’s like a hair raising story of lots of crazy experiences with directors and actors and it hit financing like five times. So it’s funny every time I get a new financier, I’m like, “Great, awesome, yay. We’ll see. That would be so great if it happens.”

But yes, I love that project. I’ve rewritten it a million times. We’ll see what happens.

John: I remember it now because you talked about it on the podcast the very first time.

Nicole: Yeah.

John: Great. Another question from the audience. Right here.

Craig: It’s a big question.

John: I’ll try to recap it. So what is the intellectual property at the heart of a movie and related, sort of what do we really mean when we’re talking about sort of what a movie is or what the fundamental idea of a movie is?

Craig: Well, I guess we’ll limit it first to screenplay, you know.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because once the movie is made, that’s the intellectual property. So intellectual property is unique expression in fixed form movie, fixed form done so that works, right?

Screenplay, that’s the intellectual property. It’s the unique expression in fixed form. Courts interpret this. That’s why judges sometimes go, yeah, no. We know that ideas aren’t intellectual property so the blimp idea is just an idea, right, plus it’s not written down. It’s not in fixed form.

If you write a screenplay, that contains dialogue but it also contains scenes that you’ve written, characters that you’ve described so everything that is evidenced by the text in your screenplay is in large part your intellectual property. It’s just the concept, the basic idea of it that isn’t.

So more is protectable than you think. In fact, that’s why so many of these cases fail because eventually somebody goes, “Well, show me what you have and let me see what you have.”

John: So arbitration which we talked about on the show is the WGA process for figuring out who deserves the writing credit on a script when there were multiple writers. And that’s not copyright. That’s literally looking at sort of the copyright is owned by whoever is making the movie.

The arbiter’s job is to figure out, of the things that constitute this screenplay, who did what and sort of whether that person did enough that it actually should count as being her movie or it should be shared credit. And that is a difficult thing. That’s why it’s a good thing overall that we are having screenwriters look at that stuff because it’s a hard thing to judge.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And when you see those weird copyright cases or those things where like, “Oh, this person stole my movie,” they’ll often be — those cases will often be brought in really weird venues because it won’t be sort of in Los Angeles, it will be in like some weird Texas court because they have a better track record of getting those things to happen there.

Craig: But they never —

John: But they don’t actually work. Yeah.

Craig: Yeah, but you’re protected. I mean — great example. Okay, so the question is, you write an in-depth outline for a movie and then somebody else takes that outline and writes a script. Have they infringed on your copyright? Essentially is what you’re asking. The answer is absolutely, no question.

One of the things that copyright gives you is the right to make derivative works which means other people do not have the right to make derivative works unless you license and grant them that permission. So the screenplay that is taken from an outline is a derivative work of that outline.

So this is why when we sell screenplays to the studios, they buy everything. They never leave anything out. They want to own everything. The last thing they want is for you to then go, “Oh, by the way, I’m writing another screenplay that you don’t own this derivative of my treatment that somehow you didn’t buy stupid, haha,” right? Okay.

So yes, that is a treatment and outline in fixed form is protectable copyright. That is intellectual property for sure.

John: Great. Question right back there. Nicole Perlman is a great person to answer that question.

Nicole: I don’t know if I could answer it particularly because I didn’t write samples of different genres. When I was starting out, I kind of got a lot of work from my Challenger sample, got me a lot of biopic, space, aviation, technology work and then randomly an Argentinean tango movie with Sandra Bullock. [laughs] Which did not get made. I can’t imagine why.

So yeah, I would say that it can help you having a brand. I think that if maybe it’s not your strength, definitely try other things and if you might find that you — and I personally — I’m writing Marvel movies and big fantastical science fiction and fantasy kind of things and I’m also interested in space, technology, aviation as well at the same time so — which drives my representatives crazy, but I think it’s a — I think you write what you want to write and what you love and don’t really — if you have a great idea for romantic comedy, write the romantic comedy and then maybe people who are looking for romantic comedy wouldn’t have thought of you because they thought you only did, you know, thrillers so I’d say whatever is your best idea that’s most on fire at this stage in your career, write that, and don’t worry about it.

Craig: Have you sold a screenplay yet or — ?

Audience Member: No.

Craig: Then think of it this way, you don’t even have a brand yet because the brand thing is really just, “Well, we bought something from him so now we’re going to put him on a list for things like that.” So at this point, you’re free, free, free, and by the way, you’ll be free later too.

I mean the nice thing about writing is you can write yourself in and out of trouble. So yeah, now write that great script. There’s no need to worry about pigeon-holing.

John: We have time for one more question. Which question will be — right here.

Craig: That’s a good Zissis question because I feel like your character is a bit of a reluctant hero in Togetherness. I mean it’s not a movie, it’s — but I look at that season, that first season.

Steve: Yeah, in terms of the first season, Amanda Peet’s character is kind of like the catalyst. She’s the kick in the pants of my character that gets him going on a trajectory. But after that, after she does do that, I am on a mission to, you know, transform and pursue my acting goals and et cetera.

Craig: So there’s this tension that happens with the reluctant protagonist where we’re actually waiting for them. You know, a lot of times reluctant protagonists will take on some job begrudgingly just to go back to what they had. It’s very common. Shrek I think just wants to get his swamp back. He’s a pretty reluctant protagonist, right? But then they are transformed.

I think that’s the key for the reluctant protagonist is that we’re waiting for somebody to light that spark. They don’t really — they’re reluctant because they’re afraid, it’s probably a better word, the fearful — and I think all protagonists are afraid, on some level.

I mean your character, definitely, you can feel it. He’s just scared, you know, and then Amanda comes along and she forces you but then — and I love the dramatic irony of what it also does between the two of you which is great, you know, but that’s — that would be my short answer.

John: So what we’re describing with Steve’s show is a show where you have, you know, multiple characters who are functioning as each other’s protagonist and antagonist. They’re causing each other to change. Classically what we are often talking about with movies is you have one character taking a trip that they’re only going to take once.

And so I can’t think of a lot of movies where I’ve been willing to watch a character just never engage and like finally at the end engaged. That doesn’t tend to be a really successful paradigm. So you as the writer have to find a reason to get them engaged with your story so whether that’s burning down their house, so they can’t go back to their original ways, or taking that one thing that actually means something to them which is what Shrek ultimately does.

You are forcing them into because you’re creating a situation where they have to change. Go back to sort of those Pixar story rules, like every day is the same except one day and that’s usually the day that your movie is taking place.

Steve: I think it happens a lot with the lovable loser archetype actually now that I’m thinking about it. If you think about a lot of Bill Murray type movies, he’s usually in that role like Stripes where he is that reluctant — reluctant guy.

Craig: Groundhog Day, he’s just refusing to change, refusing, refusing, refusing to the point where he just, he would prefer to kill himself than change which is the sort of ultimate reluctant hero but again, there’s Andie MacDowell transforming him.

And so I love that you said that that because that’s the answer to every reluctant hero is a relationship that changes them. That’s why we go to movies. It’s for that. I think all heroes in a weird way are reluctant. I mean I don’t like heroes that wake up in the morning and go, “Time to kick ass, let’s go.” Jerry Bruckheimer loves that.

I wrote a movie for Jerry once and the first note I got back was, “He doesn’t seem like a hero on page one.” I’m like, why would — who wants to beep, that’s the movie, beep, hero, hero, hero, hero, credits.

John: Things blow up.

Craig: Yeah. Boom. That is not me.

John: But think about George Bell. Like George Bell is like a reluctant hero who never actually sort of kicks out of gear but there’s a version of George Bell where like he’s in that situation.

Craig: Right.

John: And something kicks him out of that life.

Craig: Okay, so —

John: And he’s a Shrek.

Craig: So have you seen the movie Marty, classic Paddy Chayefsky screenplay, 1955? Ernest Borgnine won an Oscar for it, beautiful movie, and it’s one of those old movies that honestly is not old.

And it’s a very simple story of a butcher who’s not a particularly good-looking guy and he’s lonely and he lives with his mom who harangues him, and he’s resigned and then he meets this woman. And stuff happens and there’s a transformation but it’s a difficult transformation. There’s a price to pay for leaving your shell, you know. You should come to this, I’m doing this structure talk tomorrow, I don’t know if you’re available, this is all I talk about — okay, good. You’ll hear it again but like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It will be a lot —

John: Okay, very quickly because we’re running out of time. I forgot to do One Cool Things. So One Cool Thing is a tradition in the show. My One Cool Thing is actually a little thing I used for filming this last week. It is called a Glif. It comes right here in Austin, Texas. It was a Kickstarter, so Craig’s favorite thing in the world.

It is a little device for holding your phone, being able to mount it on tripod which is tremendously useful when you want to shoot photos or video with your phone because the iPhone is a really great camera these days and so it’s a little mount for your phone so you can attach it to a tripod. That’s my One Cool Thing, the Glif.

Craig: Fantastic. Nicole, what is your One Cool Thing?

Nicole: I was in London last week and I went to the Cosmonauts Exhibit at the London Science Museum and it was amazing and the Russians had some great stories and I highly recommend you guys all look into Cosmonauts. They are fantastic.

John: Great. Steve, do you have One Cool Thing?

Steve: I was just going to recommend an animated film called The Man Who Planted Trees. That’s old but you can get it on Netflix. It’s one of the greatest pieces of animation ever.

Craig: Is it American, Japanese, or?

Steve: It’s, it was a Canadian animator and it’s narrated by Christopher Plummer.

Craig: Awesome. Well, my One Cool Thing is an update on an old One Cool Thing called Thync. I don’t know if you guys listened to the show. A while ago, I found this product that you stuck on your head and it sent electrical impulses into your head in an attempt to calm you down or perk you up and I thought, “You know, this sounds cool.”

And then every now and then on Twitter, someone will be like, “Have you done it? Have you done it?” I’m like, “No.” So I did it, kind of works. It kind of works. You definitely feel it and it allows you — you have an app that sort of is Bluetooth connected to this ridiculous thing and as you move the dial up and down, you can feel it. And if you move it too high, it hurts and you feel your scalp contracting, it’s bad.

So, but there’s this calm lady on your iPhone going, “Find your sweet spot,” and you’re like, “My head, my head, my head, my head, fuck” but then you get, and it actually did. I felt spacey. I don’t know if that’s calm, but I felt spacey.

Nicole: It’s like electroshock therapy.

Steve: I’m thinking of the last scene of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest right now. Craig, we might need to smother you with a pillow.

Craig: Pillow me. Yes, give me the L’amour treatment, I need it. Yeah, it’s time.

John: Excellent. So glad we actually got to shock you, Craig and actually — and attach you —

Craig: Shocking myself.

John: It’s so good.

Nicole: Can we get access to that? Can we just shock you whenever we want?

John: I think —

Craig: No.

John: We’ll build an app for that and soon everyone will be able to zap Craig.

Craig: Shock Craig.

John: Yeah. Nicole and Steve, thank you so much for being our guests.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

Steve: Thank you.

Nicole: Thank you.

John: We need to thank the Austin Film Festival for having us. It’s a huge pleasure to do this every year. Thank you guys for being an incredibly good audience. We need to thank Annie Haze who’s our assistant this week. So thank you very much. Guys, thank you so very much.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Links:

• The Austin Film Festival
• The Monty Hall problem on Wikipedia
• Nicole Perlman on IMDb and Twitter, and on Scriptnotes, 164
• Steve Zissis on IMDb and Twitter
• Togetherness on HBO and Wikipedia
• Papermag on The Harrowing Twitter Odyssey of @_zolarmoon
• The Baltimore Sun on the rogue JLENS blimp
• The Lonely Death of George Bell, from The New York Times
• Variety on Nicole Perlman and Challenger
• Marty on Wikipedia
• Glif tripod phone mount
• Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age at the London Science Museum
• The Man Who Planted Trees, on Wikipedia and Netflix DVD
• Thync
• Intro/Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/how-would-this-be-a-movie).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 201 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, our communication can open up to a whole new frontier. I can now send you my heartbeat because I have an Apple Watch just like you.

**Craig:** I mean, let’s just run down the things we could do. We can send each other heartbeats. I can draw like a dick on my phone if I want —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And I can draw a boob and send it to you.

**John:** You can send an animated Emoji kind of thing.

**Craig:** Which I actually — that we could do I think to anybody.

**John:** I think it would just come through as a normal Emoji though. I don’t think it comes —

**Craig:** No, it does.

**John:** Through as the cool animation.

**Craig:** It does. It comes through.

**John:** Does it?

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. They can’t send us one but we can send anybody one of those.

**John:** Yeah, so it’s unilateral Emoji power.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. But the little like, “I’m going to draw something and blah, blah, blah,” you know, frankly, there’s no real utility in that. I don’t —

**John:** If I were a high school student, I would love it.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure.

**John:** I’d be drawing dicks and sending them around all the time.

**Craig:** Dicks and boobies everywhere.

**John:** That’s what it would be. So far, I’m enjoying it. You know, once I started treating it like a watch that could do extra things versus a tiny iPhone, I was much happier with it. But I found that that first hour I kept trying to do iPhone kind of things on it, it really is not an iPhone.

**Craig:** No, not at all. And that’s a very good observation. You just treat it like a watch. The truth of the matter is that 90% of the time, I’m just using it like a watch where I check the time. I like the fact that it — I don’t know what face you’re using, but the way I’ve got mine designed, I’ve got just a standard analog face. I’ve got a little digital time as well. I’ve got the date and day. And then at the bottom, a little summary of what the next event is coming up, you know, on my calendar.

**John:** I suspect you and I are both using the utility face.

**Craig:** I think I am using the utility face, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Apparently, it’s the most common face used by Apple Watch users.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But I use the same thing. And in my upper left corner I have little circles that fill in for my activity. And I enjoy that as a concept. I’ve been a little bit frustrated that I have a very hard time getting the move circle to fill in all the way. And I think my humblebrag for this will be that my heart rate is really, really low. My resting heart rate is really, really low. And so things that I think should count as movement, my heart rate doesn’t go up high enough that it doesn’t feel like I’m actually really working at it.

**Craig:** You know, I was wondering —

**John:** So that’s my only frustration.

**Craig:** The heart rate thing is a little, I don’t know. I’m a little suspicious of it. Well, actually, geez, god, my heart rate is ridiculously low, too. 61.

**John:** Yeah, I’m 60.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** But maybe that’s because we’re so calm whenever we’re doing the podcast.

**Craig:** Because we don’t move, man. Let’s just face it. [laughs]

**John:** We don’t.

**Craig:** Just real lazy —

**John:** This podcast, we will not be moving whatsoever but we will be discussing some topics and doing a whole new kind of featuring segment which I thought up this week and I hope will be fun. This week, we’re going to take a look at three stories in the news and look at them from a screenwriter’s perspective saying, how would these be movies?

And so we’re going to look at the FIFA scandal. We will look at the Large Hadron Collider and we’re going to look at the situation with Laura Kipnis and the Title IX Investigations and sort of that whole issue of sexual conduct on campus.

So we’re not actually going to reach any conclusions about them as the actual news stories, but we’ll look at them as how do you make this into a movie, which is most of what screenwriters do is try to think about how something could be a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that, actually, as an exercise, is very much like what we’re doing all the time when we sit down with producers or executives. At some point, someone will say something like, “Hey, you know, we’ve been thinking about making a movie about FIFA.” Or, “Hey, we’ve been thinking — you know, my boss, insert famous person here, is just obsessed with origami. How do we make an origami movie?” And you’re constantly being asked to take something and narrativize it. Well, let’s see how we do with these.

**John:** Yeah. So this will be our first experiment in narrativization with three news stories. And then we’re going to take a look at the advice of “follow your passion” or “do what you love” and to the degree with which that applies to writers and screenwriters but to the degree with which it could be damaging advice overall. So we will get into that. And Professor Craig has a bunch of stuff in the Workflowy for us to talk through about that.

So it should be a fun new kind of episode.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll see. I like to hold my applause.

**John:** You’re setting expectations low.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig Mazin specialty.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it could be a disaster.

**John:** But it could be fun.

**Craig:** But, look, it’s free. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, I mean, come on.

**John:** All right, let’s get into this. So we’re going to talk about each of these issues. We’ll sort of do a quick summary of what actually is happening, in case you’re listening to this six months after the fact and you don’t remember what the story was.

But then I want to take a look at this from — maybe spend the first little bit of it talking about like, well, what kind of movie in general are we talking about making, what’s the genre, what sort of general type of move would this be. Look at the characters, look at what the storyline might be, and also answer the real question like, “Would anybody make that movie?” So let’s start with FIFA.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So FIFA was a big scandal this last week. Do you want to summarize it? Should I summarize it? What do you think?

**Craig:** You know, there’s not that much to say. I mean, FIFA is the international organization that supervises football, you know, what the rest of the world calls football, soccer. And they control the World Cup. They also control what city gets the World Cup. And that’s a bit like the Olympics. Cities bid for it, they compete heavily for it because it’s good for your economy to have, you know. God knows how many people filing into your country to watch the World Cup.

And unfortunately, what that means is that there’s the opportunity and possibility of corruption because you have FIFA officials that are in possession of a decision. And lots of other countries want them to decide for them. So you could see how it’s like, “Oh, hey, take this briefcase of money.” “Oh, hey, why don’t you have a free whatever and give it to us?” And I think frankly, the rest of the world had resigned itself to FIFA’s steady, consistent corruption.

**John:** Until about 10 days ago when it suddenly changed.

**Craig:** It suddenly changed.

**John:** So what happened is this was in Zurich and a bunch of plain-clothed police officers came in and arrested and then later indicted a bunch of FIFA officials and other marketing officials for essentially kickbacks and bribes. This was all at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice. And so, it was suddenly, you know, sort of out in the open. And at the time, Sepp Blatter who runs FIFA, claimed the responsibility. He has the best name.

As we get into like the storytelling of it at all, like Sepp Blatter is just too impossibly great —

**Craig:** [laughs] Sepp Blatter, I mean, they’ve got to just put that into the new Star Wars movies.

**John:** That’s so good.

**Craig:** Darth Blatter? Come on.

**John:** [laughs] So he was initially sort of like not publicly part of the investigation, like he wasn’t sort of indicted in this first round. He won the election as Head of FIFA two days later. And then after another few days, he resigned from it because it was clear that he was going to be ensnared in the investigation. His words though were, “The mandate does not seem to be supported by everybody in the world of football,” in his hastily arranged news conference in Zurich. “FIFA needs a profound restructuring.”

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. FIFA needs a restructuring, all right. I mean, good lord. I mean, we’re not supposed to comment on the news story itself. We just want to make a movie out of this somehow.

**John:** We do. And so as I was thinking about what kind of movie this would be, one of the details that came up which I found so fascinating is the structure of FIFA which tends I think to lend itself to some of this corruption is that each — it’s not even countries, but each sort of locality who has a team gets to have a vote on where the World Cup is being held.

And so you can have these tiny little island countries that have as much of a vote as Germany or France does on where these things are being held. And so because you have these little countries and one official of this little country having so much power in how this is being done, they’re very prone to bribery. And also, I found the possibility for that little guy from Bora Bora being ensnared in this whole thing potentially fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s definitely one way to go is to just say, “Let’s take the villains of FIFA and let’s make an underdog movie here.” So, a little country wants the World Cup and they love soccer, and there’s no chance they’re ever going to get it, but they pick their aging soccer hero. They sort of say, “Hey, leave this charge and give our kids something to think of.” And he gets caught up and swept up. And then there’s probably a woman that he’s falling in love with. And he goes. And he basically gets screwed over by these evil guys. And so, he fights back.

And, you know, they end up playing the World Cup on big floating platforms in the Pacific Ocean because they’re French Polynesia or something.

**John:** So what you’re describing is sort of falling into the sports movie overall genre. So there’s things like there’s aspects of Cool Runnings. That Matt Damon, South African football movie, or rugby movie, which also involved Morgan Freeman as a backdrop for telling the larger story of Nelson Mandela. There’s definitely all of that stuff because you have this cinematic game that you can watch. There’s actually sport. There’s action happening right there.

The other way I was thinking about doing this was sort of the Coen Brothers comedy, which is that you have these larger than life characters doing this sort of absurd thing and taking money for, you know, soda contracts. And there’s some kind of great black comedy to be made about what that life is like.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. So we’re talking about genre here and in a weird way what happens is you start to go right to, well, what’s this about, you know. And in the first instance we have this broad comedy. And what it’s about is, you know, what most things are always about. The underdog wins.

And then a darker comedy or a Coen Brothers style comedy is really about the Byzantine Kafkaesque nature of the world. FIFA and its nonsense becomes a stand-in for, you know, the mythological maze that the hero would find himself in. And those can be fascinating and really funny. The collision of different nationalities you could see lending itself to some fun there as well.

You know, where of course the other way to go is to take it just head-on. And say, “Okay, well, let’s just deal with how can we make a political thriller about this.” There’s probably not any violence, but people have become accustomed to sort of the unwinding of international things if it’s done with some real drama.

There is an interesting theme here that I think could be explored in a movie like that. One thing that came out of this whole thing that I found fascinating was that in a time when most of the world, and particularly Europe where so much of football mania is centered, has lost its love for the United States. There was this remarkable outpouring of appreciation. It was like the old days where people went, “Here come the Yanks. Good for them. Finally, they’re going to come and clean this up. And hurray for them. And you know what, they may not love football the way we do, but they saved us. They’ve saved our beloved sport.” That’s interesting to me.

**John:** The kind of movie you’re describing makes me think of Syriana or Michael Clayton in that they’re taking it straight on. They’re sort of trying to peel back the layers and really looking at what’s happening underneath this thing.

And like they’re also dipping into what we consider the villain’s point of view at times. I think of the scene in Michael Clayton where she’s like hiding in the bathroom stall making a phone call. There’s some really great tension to be found there.

But I would also question whether, you know, there’s not obvious like people being murdered in the streets in this kind of movie. But if you look at the situation in Qatar, which Qatar was awarded the World Cup, and there’s real concerns that, you know, essentially the slave labor that’s going to be building the stadiums in Qatar would result in many, many deaths. So there’s ways you could probably frame this as a real human cost to this kind of corruption and scandal.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in doing so, you find why it matters to people. So the question is, forget who’s going to go see this, who’s going to make it, right? Because the who’s going to make it involves who’s going to go see it.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** And people that are going to be spending $30 million, $40 million or $50 million a movie, what they want to know is, well, what ultimately draws me to this if I don’t care about soccer or even if I do but I’ve read the story and I get it. And what draws people to all these things is some kind of human drama, whether it’s the simple comedy drama of the spirit of the underdog or if it’s something about a repressed underclass in the dark side of a happy sport. Something, we have to find that thing to connect through.
I actually think that you could make a really interesting movie about this. My instinct, if I were running a studio, would not be to make the sunny comedy version because that feels a bit played out. And I think that this is too — frankly, it’s too interesting. The fun version of that is Cool Runnings where it’s about kind of a very minor sport and minor country. And the comedy is the fun part. My instinct here would be to go head on.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would go head on and Syriana with this thing. I guess, ultimately, what I’d be trying to find in it is a path for America to become what it once was. Not the world’s policeman, but the world’s best example. And use that as the sort of joy at the end of this.

**John:** So what you’re describing I think could be a really cool movie. And it reminds me of Zero Dark Thirty. So Zero Dark Thirty, you’re trying to take on the assassination of Osama Bin Laden but, like, what is the actual human story you’re trying to tell within that? And so they decided to focus in on the single woman. We’re seeing this from her perspective as she’s trying to do this mission. So finding who that relatable U.S. person is or whose journey we’re going to follow and whose struggle we’re going to follow trying to make this happen could be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s take a look at who some of these characters are we’re going to encounter. Obviously Sepp Blatter is just, come on, just phenomenal.

**Craig:** Sepp Blatter.

**John:** So we have Loretta Lynch who’s the U.S. Attorney General who is pushing this investigation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** She is certainly a possibility. But I have a hunch that there’s some other man or woman who really led the charge and said, “You know what, I think we can get them on RICO charges,” which is normally how you would bring down the Mafia. I think if you could frame this story in a way like the same kinds like, you know, The Untouchables or the same way you could sort of frame these Mafia stories, you might be able to frame it from — use that as a framework for what kind of a movie this is.

This is like the U.S. taking down the Mafia. That may be a way in to sort of both how we’re going to describe the movie internally, about what kind of movie we’re trying to make. But also you’re thinking about what kind of movie are you ultimately going to need to try to market when you put it out there in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this is where you come up with these little moments that help people understand. And by the way, you’re exactly right. You can’t make Loretta Lynch, our U.S. Attorney General, the hero of the story because she’s simply too big and too public. It’s like making the President the hero. That was kind of my problem with, you know, the White House Down, Olympic Fallen movies because the President doesn’t punch people. He’s too big. He’s not real, you know. He’s not real to me.

**John:** Yeah, exactly. Unless you’re literally making Air Force One which like you so deliberately constrain it down. Like, well, it has to be the President.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But that’s not this movie.

**Craig:** It’s just not this movie. So you do want somebody that we feel accessible to, somebody that we can identify with. But there’s that moment where they’re in a room and the person is saying, “Here’s what I want to do. I want to bring them up on RICO charges.” And someone else says, “Okay, when you say them, let’s just run down who you’re talking about. These 17 countries, these following people, none of whom we have jurisdiction over, all of whom are bribing these people to not give us evidence, we can’t go here and we can’t go here. These people hate us, and these people hate us. And you want to bring them all down on a RICO charge within two months?” And the person says, “That’s right.”

And you start to get a sense of what this movie is about.

**John:** You know, the other movie this is reminding me of is Erin Brockovich because you might have an outsider who’s come in to say like, “This is what’s happening. This is what needs to be done.” So even if he or she doesn’t have the expertise to do exactly the thing that needs to be done, they have to convince someone who does have that power to do it. And the way they do that is the compelling human story of how we are getting to this place.

So then the issue becomes, how do you set up your competing themes of like whatever this individual journey is versus what FIFA is doing overall and what soccer is like. You know, how do you combine the ideas of like that kid playing soccer, your own kid playing soccer on the field and this giant sports machine that is corrupt and is employing slave labor in a faraway place. How do you make that all fit into one movie, that’s your struggle.

**Craig:** That is. And, you know, my instinct would be that the person involved here actually doesn’t understand soccer at all. They don’t play it, their kids don’t play it. They are as American as American gets, in fact, which is a part of their problem.

For instance, I could see a character who had been working in the state department for a while and working in an area where frankly every time they try to do something that “helped,” they hurt, which is kind of the story of the post 9/11 United States. Every time we try and fix things, we seem to make them worse.

And this person is consumed by this. And they seize upon this that the thing that no one is looking at. And they say, “Wait a second. If you pull the lid off of this, you start to see how many people are really being hurt, this is the kind of thing we should be doing. We shouldn’t necessarily be droning every time we have a problem. Maybe this is what we should be doing, going after the rich and corrupt who are, in the name of capitalism and a good show, are hurting a lot of people. That’s the way we used to be.”

And then it becomes about that person redeeming themselves and maybe giving us all a little bit of a glimpse of how we could be better.

**John:** Something you just touched on there is that by having this person be an outsider to the world of soccer and maybe even outside to the world of how FIFA works, by having your hero be that outsider, you give the movie and the audience a chance to learn with the hero how stuff fits together. And you also get the ability to teach the audience what is important and what is not important about this world you’re introducing them to, because you’re not going to need to teach them all the rules of soccer. That’s not going to be important to your movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you’re going to be able to teach them how this bigger game works. And so, as I’m throwing out other examples of movies. You think of Moneyball. And Moneyball, it didn’t just teach you how to like hit the ball, it needed to talk to you through about sort of this is what trading is like. This is how you put a team together. This is the structure of this world. And having your hero be the outsider to this could be really, really useful.

**Craig:** Yeah. And as you mentioned, Moneyball, you were psychically connecting to something I was already thinking when you talked about how the audience goes in on this outsider path with their hero. And that is that you’re creating an opportunity for great relationship. Somebody that’s bought in to help you navigate that world. So you don’t know anything about soccer. And you don’t come from that world. And you have this idealistic view of what you can accomplish.

And they pair you with somebody that isn’t a crusader or government official but knows a whole bunch about soccer and the soccer world. That’s a great odd couple pairing. And watching those two people help each other, the cynic makes it clear to the idealist what they’re really up against. And the idealist reignites a little bit of a candle of hope in the cynic. That’s classic stuff. But you’re always looking to create characters that need other people. Or else, your movie is going to get super lonely.

**John:** Yeah. The thing we need to always remind ourselves is when you put all FIFA overweight there on the shelf and just look at it from whoever we pick as our hero, what is going to be her journey through this movie. And how are we going to find the moments of triumph and failure along the way. How are we going to get to that place where all hope is lost? Where do we get to that darkest night? And how are we going to structure the story so that character could have those moments, because that’s what would let it be a story about a person rather than a story about a scandal that we just sort of fundamentally don’t care about. That’s honestly the challenge with most of these movies that are based on real life events is trying to find a way that you can have — you can really chart a hero through this whole thing.

You look at what Aaron Sorkin did with The Social Network, which is still one of my favorite movies. It was so smart in creating a character in Mark Zuckerberg who wasn’t the real Mark Zuckerberg but allowed a character to have progress in the journey and to have these ups, these downs, and to really articulate the frustrations in really smart ways. That’s what you’re going to be able to find with this story is how do you find a character who it can be about them and not be about soccer?

**Craig:** Every movie ultimately must be about people. We simply don’t watch fictional movies, even dramatizations of real things for the events themselves. That’s why we watch documentaries. And even in documentaries, they make it about people. Otherwise, it’s a textbook. It’s just your history textbook on film. It’s a news reel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You have to make it about people. That’s how we connect to everything. So Sorkin looks at Facebook. And he says, here’s a man that started Facebook. Facebook is so that you can make friends. This man doesn’t seem to have any friends. Good. Let me start there. That’s a good place to start. Really good place to start.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s go on to our next big news topic. This is only sort of halfway news because it’s existed for a while, but this last week they reignited some stuff and upped the energy on the things. We’re going to talk about The Large Hadron Collider. So for people who are not scientifically oriented, The Large Hadron Collider is this giant ring, this particle accelerator built on the border of France and Switzerland. It’s run by CERN, the organization for nuclear research in Europe.

There’s 10,000 scientists, it’s a tunnel 27 kilometers circumference. And what they’re looking for are supper symmetric particles. It’s really trying to understand the fabric of the universe. It’s trying to understand dark matter, trying to understand the very first moments after the Big Bang. It was incredibly expensive. It was incredibly controversial when it was getting made. There’s always been sort of this background worry about like well what if we sort of break something in the universe by trying to build this thing. So let’s just take a look at here’s The Large Hadron Collider. What is the movie there?

**Craig:** Well, you’ve got some possibilities. You could, again, let’s just start with the real easy one. Straight ahead, it’s a drama about whether we’re going to find this or not. I think that would probably be pretty boring.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** When we talk about movies where people are pursuing specific scientific breakthroughs The Imitation Game or Beautiful Mind, it’s really about the individuals and their interesting personal struggles whether it’s with being a homosexual at a time when it’s illegal or whether it’s having schizophrenia. In and of itself, this probably straight ahead will be — no one will care. So then of course, you go let’s fling ourselves the other way into science fiction, right? Okay. Science fiction tends to come in two flavors. It comes in the hopeful flavor or the be careful flavor. My guess is that this would probably fall under the be careful flavor of science fiction.

**John:** Do talk through both versions.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So let’s start with the pessimistic, but let’s also talk the optimistic version.

**Craig:** All right. So optimism, we’ve got this wonderful thing. And if we do it, perhaps, we get — I could see, well, geez, I don’t know how to make it optimistic, because the truth is what happen is you’re guessing about things like what do you, you know, do you find heaven?

**John:** I was going more towards Jodie Foster in Contact where essentially you, you know, by building this thing, you’re able to understand some fundamental mystery. And therefore either travel to a different place, have communication with the new species. I was also thinking back to in Star Trek lore there is the prime directive which is basically non-interference with other cultures. But The Federation will reach out when a civilization has reached a certain point. So in one of the movies, I guess this First Contact, Zefram Cochrane builds the first warp drive. And therefore The Federation reaches out and says, “Oh, hey, Earth. There’s other life out there.” And that’s how Earth joins The Federation.

So I think there’s a possibility for essentially by basically knocking on the door by building this particle accelerator thing, somehow, a higher civilization reaches out to us. The conflict of the movie is do you trust them, do you not trust them? Is it Escape from Witch Mountain? Like what is the — that’s not giving me sort of what the story is, but that might be the background for what it is. Like an optimistic future that’s there. Tomorrowland is a bit of that, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Contact, I love Contact. And one of the things that Contact did was it posed a problem. It imposed a problem. It imposed a question. What do you do if you are contacted by someone else? But in this concept, we are doing the meddling. We are meddling with the ultimate stuff of the universe. And so it feels — my instinct is that when we meddle with things willy-nilly that if the result is something good, it’s less satisfying dramatically.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s as if we push the first domino that went all the way around through a Rube Goldberg device and gave us a nice cookie. When we push that domino, I want stuff to go bad. And then I want us to continue our Star Trek analogy here, it’s like Q. Q shows up in one episode. They say, “Oh, you know, we’ve got things figured out. We’re not scared anymore. We know what we’re doing.” He says, “Oh, really? You have no idea what’s out there?” And they’re like, “Yeah, we can deal with it. We’re cool. We’re the Enterprise.”

So he just flings them into deep, deep, deep space where they encounter the Borg for the first time. And they lose. And then he brings them back and says, “You see, stuff out there, it ain’t any good.” So I could see something here where when it works at first, it seems like they just did a thing. And there’s no problem. But then, some weird things start happening. A little bit like what was the Joel Schumacher movie where they would almost die?

**John:** Flatliners.

**Craig:** Flatliners.

**John:** I love Flatliners.

**Craig:** I love Flatliners. In Flatliners, same thing, they’re meddling with science. They’re trying to see how long they could be “dead” before they can be brought back to life. And as a result of their experiment, weird things start happening to them. They start witnessing people from their past, people that are interacting with them. And ultimately, it turns into kind of a supernatural morality tale about making peace with your past.

But I can see a similar kind of thing happening here where it’s almost as if Neo was a scientist and flipped a thing on and then starts to see The Matrix without anybody explaining to him what The Matrix is. Perhaps also they turned it on and it summons — it essentially draws attention to us. And bad people come.

**John:** Yes. And so, the version of bad people come could be the incredible $100 million, or at this point $400 million movie version. Or it could be something more like Primer, which is you know, again sort of experimenting with scientific things and the danger of sort of unleashing that but done on a very small scale.

I also want to throw out the option of like, well, what if it’s not a science fiction genre at all? So what is this as a romantic comedy? So I was thinking like what, you know, is there a way that we can take thematically the idea of like things coming together and clashing together and build a romantic comedy out of that? Like what is it like if these scientists fall in love? What could we do with this ring idea that this is sort of a giant tunnel and that there might be something really fun to do with using this as a backdrop rather than having it be the actual center of the story? What would that be?

**Craig:** Yeah. For instance, I could see a story where two scientists work on this project. And there’s something wrong between them. And they turn on the switch, they achieve success. And in achieving success, it becomes clear that they’ve caused a problem. And there’s going to be essentially there’s a certain amount of time that’s going to go by and then the universe will collapse.

They’ve got three days. And they’re the only two that know about it. They’re the only two that figured it out. Everybody else thinks it’s great. And so, you have this romantic comedy where everybody in the world is just going about their day, but two people know for sure the world is going to end in 72 hours.

And what do they do with that time? That would be very interesting. Of course, you’d probably not want to destroy the world at the end of the 72 hours. Perhaps they figure out a way. Perhaps one of them has to sacrifice himself or perhaps they can just fall in love. But there’s something really fun about the idea of two people, you know, because they’ve — I’ve seen this movie where there’s apocalyptic movies and the world is going to end and so people fall in love, but everybody is doing it. I kind of like that only two people know about it, and they’re like should we tell people? Why? What for if we can’t stop it?

**John:** Yeah. And there’s also that uncertainty principle maybe like essentially you don’t know what’s going to happen. So they know that there’s like a 50% chance that the world is going to end. So like, you know, there’s a 42.1% chance that the whole universe will implode in 48 hours. Do you tell people? Do you not tell people? That’s an interesting question because you could sort of ruin the world by telling them. But of course, you want people, you know. It’s an interesting ethical question.

What you’re describing is the high concept romantic comedy. I feel like there’s a low concept romantic comedy that could also be fun just because it’s a comedy set in a world I have not seen before. I’ve seen a lot of comedies set in higher education. I’ve seen comedies set in other work places, but it’s such a weirdly specific workplace that it’s locked down, it’s scientific. Everyone there is probably on Craig’s favorite thing, somewhere on the spectrum. And that could be really great.

And so to see the normal kind of bureaucracy happen but in a scientific way, and there’s always sort of weird safety protocols to be able to make those thematic observations about the difference between physics and chemistry, you know, and sort of like what that means for in a romantic sense or in sort of an emotional sense.

There could be some really interesting stuff to do there. So it doesn’t feel like a Nancy Meyers comedy. But I could see Nora Ephron making a great comedy set in this kind of world, or I could have imagined her making a comedy set in this kind of world where you have these characters who have really strongly held beliefs that are going to naturally come into conflict.

**Craig:** That’s also some nice thematic stuff there about people that are working on a project in which the pursuit of truth at any cost is the name of the game. And extending that theme to interpersonal relationships can be pretty interesting too.

**John:** Yeah. So if we get Marc Webb in there, Aline writes the script, sold.

**Craig:** Sold.

**John:** Let’s talk about the reality though of trying to make this movie. So I can completely imagine, I’m sure there are at least a hundred spec scripts out there that involve a science fiction thriller, aliens arriving kind of thing, about the Hadron Collider —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It just has to be out there.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m sure it is. Again, if I were running a studio, I would not make that movie. I don’t think it’s specific or interesting enough. It just feels like we’re taking a phrase from the news that maybe 2% of Americans know about and just trumping up yet another, you know, effects laden aliens getting angry at some people. I wouldn’t make that movie.

**John:** I agree with you. I wouldn’t make it. If I were a studio, I wouldn’t make this smaller, smarter, primer version because I wouldn’t know how to release it. But if I were a filmmaker who made that smaller, smarter Primer version and took it to Sundance, I could see that being a big hit at Sundance. I could see that the indie version thriller of that happening.

I think the romantic comedy version could sell with the right package. And that it would be a really good pitch or it would be a script. It wouldn’t be just like a, “Oh, we have this lark of an idea.” No, you would really need to pitch that whole thing through.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’m not sure there’s enough there to really support it. I don’t love this one, you know, it just feels — you know, what you want to avoid — basically this is the problem is that everything ultimately gets narrowed through this lens of marketing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** While it’s annoying and perhaps creatively odious, it is realistic, because in the end, people are going to go, “Oh, it’s a comedy about two people falling in love and they are like super nerdy scientists. Okay, so it’s like The Big Bang Theory, but a movie.” And it’s going to be hard to make that feel special just on the basis of the fact that they’re working at the thing, you know. I don’t know, it’s a tough one.

**John:** It’s a tough one too. I think in some ways, the sharper version of your high concept like because super collider there’s an additional sort of world effect might help you out there too. And it might lend itself to like, “Oh, I can see what the casting is like on that.” You look at Pixels, the movie coming out, like that’s a really, really, really high concepts comedy pitch, but like if you say like, “Yes, I can see what that is, I can see what the trailer is, go for it,” I have a hunch that if you and/or Todd Phillips had an idea for a comedy set in the Large Hadron Collider and you can go in and pitch that and set that up, and people would be excited to try to make that.

**Craig:** Well, I mean to be honest, I think if Todd, forgive me, if Todd Phillips has a pitch about a blind squirrel and a bucket, they’re going to buy it, too, because everybody just believes in him and they have been richly rewarded for believing in him. But I suspect that if there is a — for instance, if you took the high concept comedy of two people, two rivals, scientific rivals who both arrive at the same conclusion, they’ve never agreed with each other ever. The one time they agree with each other, nobody else agrees with them and that is that they figured out that the world is going to end in three days, that’s interesting.

So in a way, I guess what I’m saying is the Hadron Collider part of it is probably a minor thing. If it’s going to be part of a romantic comedy, it’s a minor thing the way that where the man and the woman work is sort of a minor thing in a romantic comedy. Like what was it, The Wedding Planner?

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** She’s a wedding planner, I get that, haha, wedding planner, but she’s never married, well. But in the end, that’s not really — it’s not even that important. What’s important is the relationship she has with Matthew McConaughey. I think in What Women Want, Mel Gibson was an advertising guy, so there was a little bit of thing of like, ah-ha, he thinks he knows what women want because he’s in advertising, but doesn’t really know. Okay, fine. But once you get that out of the way, it comes down to the relationship.

**John:** Yeah, the upcoming movie with Bill Hader and Amy Schumer, he is like a sports doctors and she has to write a profile on him. That’s just the conceit to get you started. But that’s not going to be what the bulk of the movie is like. I would say, probably most romantic comedies, the essential premise is just there to get the first 30 pages going and does not become a very important part of the rest of the story.

**Craig:** No, because —

**John:** Usually.

**Craig:** Not really an important part of romance. I mean what you do for your job, I mean, it’s just the way romance works. That may be how you meet somebody, maybe what initially attracts you to somebody. But after the first three or four dates and the first five fights, it’s not about any of that anymore. So in that case here, I think to the Hadron Collider would essentially act as a McGuffin for romance.

**John:** Yeah, I agree with you. All right, our third and final possible movie that we’ll talk through, this is all about the two articles and the articles written about the articles by and about Laura Kipnis and her situation, so challenging to talk through this and not getting lost in the weeds of the specific stories and specific allegations. But essentially, Laura Kipnis is a professor. She writes a story for the Chronicle of Higher Education, called Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe. That’s right, I should say academe, right?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s academe.

**John:** Academe. So a little background, just one paragraph from this article so you get a flavor of what it is. “When I was in college, hooking up with professors was more or less part of the curriculum. Admittedly, I went to an art school, and mine was the lucky generation that came of age in that too-brief interregnum after the sexual revolution before AIDS turned sex into a crime scene replete with perpetrators and victims. Back when sex, even when not so great or when people got their feelings hurt, fell under the category of life experience. It’s not that I didn’t have my share of mistakes, or act stupidly and inchoately, but it was embarrassing, not traumatizing.”

And so in this article, she talks about the relationship between professors and students and how that used to be kind of common. And now that’s become criminalized or at least frowned upon, maybe sort of outlawed on campuses. And it has created some really terrible, awkward situations and has changed the nature of academe by its existence. So that was her initial article.

And then in the follow-up to that, she was investigated under Title IX complaints by her university. And so this is what sort of happened here. She writes that, “I wouldn’t be informed about the substance of the complaints until I met with the investigators. Apparently the idea was that they’d tell me the charges, and then, while I was collecting my wits, interrogate me about them. The term ‘kangaroo court’ came to mind. I wrote to ask for the charges in writing. The coordinator wrote back thanking me for my thoughtful questions.”

So essentially, from this initial article, one of the people who had accused a professor and the situation was sort of described vaguely in the original article had brought up charges against her saying that this was retaliation and it was just a giant mess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Craig, this is thrown on your lap saying like, you know, a producer says, Lindsay Doran says, “Hey, you know what, I think there might be a movie about either specifically this Laura Kipnis situation or the nature of sexual politics on campus and professors.” What do we do with this? What is the shape of this kind of movie?

**Craig:** [laughs] Run. Well —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** You’ve got some choices here. And the first choice you have to make is, “Am I taking a position or not?” There are movies that are designed to thought provoke. They are carefully crafted to make you think. And there will be some villains, there will be some heroes. But everybody will be imperfect. And you will not feel good at the end of it, necessarily. And sometimes those movies are brilliant. And you’ve got Rashomon as the granddaddy, but there are just — there’s a long tradition in literature of what you’d call the nobody wins, nobody loses, everybody’s human. That’s certainly one way to go.

The other way to go is to take a position here. And the obvious position I think to take is that a professor who, by the way, seems to have been a longstanding well-established feminist is now somehow getting caught by a mob that perhaps she feels she might even be complicit in having created in the first place.

And so then you get into the human politics of what happens when disempowered people get power as a group, the trampling of individual rights and how we have to weigh individual rights against social justice. And it gets really messy.

Here’s my problem. My problem with this is that I don’t see where the dramatic victory is for anyone to make this into a movie because what makes this interesting is your unique perspective on it as a person. You may have a general tendency towards individual rights and liberties. You may have a general tendency towards social justice. And you may work very hard to try and balance both. I hope that you do like I do.

But it’s too intellectual, frankly. It doesn’t feel like a movie is the proper treatment of this. I feel like, frankly, the proper treatment of this is discussion in public space. Sometimes these things resist drama. I feel it would be a bit leaden and could turn into sort of a lecturey kind of vibe. So, you know, I’m a little worried about this one.

**John:** I’m worried about this one, too. My first instinct is that it feels like a play because it feels like you might want to actually do this with a limited number of characters in sort of an enclosed space with long scenes where you’re really digging and talking through those kind of things.

And as we’re talking — if you heard me typing — I was trying to find the name of this play that it reminds me of, which is a professor and a student who are having this relationship. And it’s unclear, it’s sort of deliberately unclear sort of where the boundaries of this relationship are. Actually, now that I think about there’s probably four plays that are sort of the same territory. There’s a Theresa Rebeck play is one of them, but there’s an older one I was thinking about, too.

A play might be a really good vehicle for talking through this. You talked about Rashomon. You know, in some ways, our TV series tend to be our Rashomon right now where you can revisit certain scenes and sort of see them from different perspectives.

What I also liked about what you should, though, is that mob mentality. And the degree to which this in some way is an intellectual zombie movie, where it’s like once the zombies are after you, there’s essentially nowhere to hide. There’s no safe place.

And I think it’s a really interesting commentary on the universe we live in right now where outrage is enough. And so the sort of presumption not of guilt, but that in her article Kipnis talks about this woman who was identified as a survivor rather than accuser and sort of what the boundary and the differences between, you know, being accused of something and that thing actually having existed.

And so whether a person could call themselves a survivor of a situation that you’re not even sure actually happened. So there’s all sorts of really interesting questions, really challenging to pit them as a movie, though.

**Craig:** I completely agree. I love the idea about a play, by the way. It does feel like a play. The problem with the movie is you’re right, your tendency is to say, “Well, this is a kind of a zombie movie. It’s about an intellectual mob.” But the problem is that when you say any intellectual group is a mob or any philosophical group is a mob, you have demonized them.

And the truth is I’m not sure that anybody wants to see people that are very upset about sexual assaults or abuse on campus be demonized. Because the truth is I think most people who are concerned about this do not move en masse as some sort of unthinking mob ready to burn down anybody that looks at them askance. What we tend to do when we make these movies is pick on ideologies that we have all socially decided are just Wrong with a capital W. So occasionally, somebody will make a movie about, say, McCarthyism. We’ve all decided that’s no good. So that will be a good intellectual zombie movie.

**John:** Or if we’re making a McCarthyism movie, we might make it, though, in a different context. So we might make The Crucible which is about McCarthyism.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it can be about witches.

**Craig:** Right. So we all agree that the Salem witch trials were bad. [laughs] We all agree that McCarthyism is bad. Now, The Crucible was particularly relevant because of when it was written. And it was a clearly a commentary in something that was part of the culture. If you make a movie about the Red Scare now, you’re just being boring because it’s been done too well too many times. It is frankly no longer relevant.

If you made a movie today about how a lot of people in Germany got together and became Nazis and did terrible things, while I’m sure it would have value, but probably it’s too late. We’ve well established how that works. We’ve made those zombie movies already.

In this case, I don’t think that we can yet agree what the nature of this mob is if it even is a mob or if this is just the loud voices of certain people, for instance, in this case what’s happening to Professor Kipnis seems to be the result of one or two people making complaints that must be followed-up by law. Well, if that doesn’t quite qualify, you — I think the real villain is probably academic bureaucracy but it may also just be bureaucracy in general or maybe where the law fails to encompass common sense, but none of it feels like I want to watch a movie of it. I don’t want to see that unfolding cinematically.

**John:** Yeah. So thinking back to The Blind Side, and so you look at John Lee Hancock’s movie. What was interesting is late in the story sort of the NCAA challenge comes out. And so there ends up becoming an investigation. By the time that becomes an important part of the story, we already love all the characters because — and the story wasn’t fundamentally about that thing. So when that stuff comes out, when the investigation comes out, we have a strong rooting interest in one side and we believe what they are saying.

In this movie, and the reason why I still think I wonder if it’s a play rather than a movie which we might be more comfortable with the ambiguity is there’s going to be some central incident about whether this person was rightly or wrongly accused. And our expectation of the movie is like we want to have an answer for that. And we want to feel good about the answer for that. And I don’t know that we’re ever going to come to that place in this movie.

We talked about Erin Brockovich when we were talking about the FIFA scandal. And if Erin Brockovich, if we were ambiguous at the end about sort of whether she was right or whether she was wrong, that would not be a successful movie. That’s not the kind of movie we paid our $8.50 at that time to go see.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want to watch a social crusader crusade against something that at the end the movie says, “Well, maybe that wasn’t so bad.” It’s not satisfying for you hero. The play that I was thinking of, when you said play, I immediately thought of — I don’t know if you ever saw Twilight: Los Angeles by Anna Deavere Smith.

**John:** I never saw it.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s so good. So Anna Deavere Smith is a playwright. But in this particular play, what she did was she interviewed dozens of people about the Los Angeles riots, the 1992 riots. And some of the people were public figures like Daryl Gates who was the Chief of Police at the time and some people were just, you know, people who were there watching on the corner. Reginald Denny, for instance, the guy, the poor guy who got dragged out of his truck and beaten nearly to death.

And what she did was she then performed their monologues, verbatim, as them. One woman. Fascinating. And you got such a remarkable understanding of how an event gets dispersed by all these completely different point of view. Totally dispersed. And you walk away thinking, anybody that tells you that they understand the LA riots is nuts because you can’t. And so I could easily see a play like that where you approach this thing and at the point of it all was, everybody who is sure, sure, sure of their point of view is nuts because you can’t really wrap your mind around something this complicated. It defies you.

**John:** So as you were talking, I was Googling, and I found the name of the play that I was thinking about, which is Oleanna. It’s a David Mamet play.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It became a movie as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that’s the power struggle between a university professor and his female student who accuses him of sexual exploitation. That’s one of the things underlying that. I think what’s potentially different about this as a story is the second level thing where it’s, you know, you aren’t even involved in this initial act, you’re not even trying to determine whether this sexual event happened, but rather even talking about it is creating the situation. And that someone’s hurt feelings is in some ways more important than academic freedom. A really interesting idea, but challenging to do as a movie.

**Craig:** It’s just not cinematic. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthy. It is worthy. Frankly, it’s too worthy. It’s too serious and too complicated to be portrayed cinematically. We use cinema just in a different way than that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would much — I think eventually, you could come to it. But right now, I think smart people need to debate this in good faith and not through fictionalization.

**John:** So I say, book or play for this right now. Movie, when it becomes a giant hit.

**Craig:** Concur.

**John:** Concur. Let’s talk about your topic there, Craig. Do what you love. Do you love doing this podcast, Craig?

**Craig:** I do love doing this podcast. I do.

**John:** Aw, I do too.

**Craig:** I love doing this podcast. And notably, it is not my career.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s this interesting essay, I guess you call it essay, in Slate. I guess we’re sort of friends of Slate now, aren’t we?

**John:** We’re friends of Slate, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s called In The Name of Love. Elites embrace the “do what you love” mantra. But it devalues work and hurts workers. By Miya Tokumitsu. And what Miya says is that this mantra of do what you love disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is a privilege. It’s a sign of socioeconomic class. She says, “Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and co-sign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can bestow Do What You Love as career advice upon those covetous of her success.”

So what’s she’s saying is it’s a little bit of the you are born on third, you didn’t hit a triple. So when you’re born on third, why are you shouting down to the batter, hit a triple?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And there’s this other flipside of it, which is that most people do not do what they “love”. They do a job to support themselves and their family. They may be interested in their job. They may be good at their job. They may show great care and attention to their job. But do they love it? Probably not.

**John:** Are they even doing a job that anyone could love?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** She points out like, you know, is anyone going to love washing diapers? No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No one is going to love washing diapers.

**Craig:** No, no one is going to love washing diapers. So then the question is, well, is this whole do what you love thing devaluing the experience of those people? And the answer I think, frankly, is yes. I think that there is a very useful argument to say to people, not do what love, and love what you do. But whatever you do, also, find some time to do what you love. Don’t expect to be paid for that. Don’t expect that to be your career. It may be. It may very well be. But if you love singing, make sure you take some time in your life to sing. Do not think that if you don’t sing professionally, that you have somehow failed to chase your passion. You have not failed.

**John:** So way back in episode 192, I brought up this book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. And he was talking about the same sort of thing, but he was talking about it from the other perspective.

So Tokumitsu was writing about how this do what you love, follow your passion advice is impossible for a large swath of the population. Newport is looking at even the people who it could theoretically be possible for, it ends up becoming this trap of impossible expectations. So anyone who theoretically was born on third base who is not loving their work will just keep switching careers and switching careers and switching things like, “What am I doing wrong that I don’t love this thing that I’m doing?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Newport’s argument is that you can’t do what you love until you know how to do it. And that’s so much of loving something, loving the work has to be being good at it. And so the initial part of any new career is usually a grind. It’s usually terrible. And I certainly found that with writing, too. Like those first scripts to write were kind of brutal to write. But then I got much better at it and now I love being a screenwriter. But it doesn’t mean I necessarily love the process of writing.

**Craig:** Right. Well —

**John:** And I think we can create really unrealistic expectations by putting up a big banner saying to do what you love.

**Craig:** The problem is right there in the word love, which people simply misunderstand. You and I both have been married a long time. The excitement, the headiness, the intoxication that we felt when we first met our spouses, that’s not sustainable. If you sustain that overtime, you have some kind of mental problem. And [laughs] you won’t be able to live your life because, you know, falling in love really is a version of insanity. Love, proper love, is the result of the commitment. It’s a result of the long time, the agreement that you will be with someone. It becomes its own reward. And it is different, it is more complicated, and less dopaminergic, if I may, than —

**John:** I like you using those words.

**Craig:** Thank you. Than that instant love, right? That passion, that excitement. I don’t have intoxicating love for screenwriting. I have an old guy with his old wife love of screenwriting. And what I know about that is that that’s not about passion. It is about other things. It is about a compulsion to do a thing. It’s about a safety that I find in doing a thing. It’s about a certain kind of control over something, a working towards a mastery of something, even though you cannot attain it.

It’s also about an inherent will to power, which is a very Nietzschean term. It basically means I want to affect the world. I want to do something and change something out there, which is true, by the way, for everyone that does anything, even the diaper washers.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There is a wonderful video online, we’ll link to it in the show notes, of some men that are building a bridge in Switzerland. And this bridge is essentially going across this massive valley between these two communities. It’s a footbridge. It is 270 meters long. So for those of you who don’t know about meters —

**John:** We’ll say yards.

**Craig:** We’ll say yards [laughs], exactly. It’s nearly three football fields long. They had to build this thing — well, imagine, how are you going to build a footbridge over 300 yards of space hanging over thousands of feet into a gorge? Well, they just decided they would do it. Did they love what they did? I don’t know if they loved it, but they were compelled. And the work itself was its own reward. Some of those men did nothing but hammer boards into place. But they were part of it.

So I say to people, forget about doing what you love and loving what you do. Look at work as its own reward. There is an honor to labor and to service. There is an honor to earning a day’s pay and taking care of yourself and supporting other people. And remember this, if you do have creative passions or any passion for which no one is willing to give you money, then look at the work that you are paid for as an opportunity to create some freedom and some space for you to do those other things that you do love. Make your uncompensated passions possible.

**John:** Absolutely. So that means, you know, treating your day job as a day job that lets you have a night life and a chance to create, you know, amazing things that are not part of that work life. Some of the best writing I did early in my career was working a really mindless job at Universal filing papers. And I came home every night and had my brain free to write things. And that was exactly the right job for me at the time.

**Craig:** Look at J.K. Rowling who conceived of and wrote the Harry Potter series or at least the initial book while she was a single mom, unemployed, and trying to make ends meet on the dole, you know. And you don’t necessarily have the circumstances that you want when you’re creating things or when you are following your passion. And if no one had ever liked her book and no one had ever bought her book, she still would have — that would have been an exercising of a passion for her of a kind. And that is its own reward.

**John:** Agreed. Circling back to your, you know, why do we engage in artistic pursuit, quite early on in the podcast, you singled out Jiro Dreams of Sushi which is exactly that kind of sustained artistic pursuit over the course of decades to try to perfect something. And so does he love sushi, does he love fish? I don’t know. But he really values the work he’s doing. And that is his reward. He doesn’t want to call in sick any day. He doesn’t want to have anyone else run his restaurant because he is doing the thing that he does. And that is his life is trying to perfect the making and delivery of sushi.

So that’s another way to look at sort of the why you keep doing something even if it’s not necessarily financially valuable.

**Craig:** It’s hard for us sometimes to think that we’re going to go through life and we’re never going to be rich. We’re going to go through life and we’re never going to be famous. We’re going to go through life and we’ll never be the boss. Well, that is true for almost everyone. So the question is, how do you let go of that and find a different way to define your own happiness and satisfaction?

I would suggest that when you let go of that demand, you are probably that much more likely to achieve that demand. But you may not. And so I think that we have to stop telling each other, “Hey, man, you know what? I know you drive a cab but you really want to be a rock star, so quit.” We got to stop saying stupid crap like that. It’s just dumb. And frankly, it’s —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** It demeans people who do actually value and care for any job that they do. In my mind, if you work and you’re paid, you are an honorable person doing an honorable thing.

**John:** Cool. Craig, what is your One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Oh, so I’m a little late to this. John, have you played or are you familiar with Telltale Games, their Game of Thrones mobile game?

**John:** I’m not familiar with the Game of Thrones game. I see it here in the Workflowy, so tell me about it.

**Craig:** So Telltale Games, I think they may also be the people behind The Walking Dead games. I’m not sure. I should —

**John:** Yeah. I know they do those.

**Craig:** Okay, great. So basically, they are story-based games. They come in episodes. They have released four episodes of a six-episode season. Each one takes about an hour to play through. And basically you’re following an episode of Game of Thrones that they have made with their own characters. And occasionally, you make context-based decisions. So people put you in a tough spot and you have to decide, am I going to punch this guy or am I going to try and create favor with him. So it’s all that sort of thing.

It’s done really well. I have to give them an enormous amount of credit. They pretty much got almost everything right. I love that they made a story-based game for a story-based property. I love that they created new events in the game that integrate into show events occasionally sort of the way that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, you know, like it’s that kind of, “Okay, so we’re going to have a discussion.” Meanwhile, in the background, we see the pigeons flying out of the pie and we know that’s Joffrey’s wedding and he’s about to die.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** But we’re over here in a different place. [laughs] So that part is great. There are some cameos from established characters. You’ll see Tyrion and Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen. But most of the characters are new characters that they’ve created. And they’re really good. They’re really good characters.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** They’ve created a whole new house, House Forrester, that is in a really bad situation. There are shocking deaths, which is appropriate for Game of Thrones. Moral quandaries abound. But I think more than anything, the reason I love playing, and I’ve run out of episodes and I’m waiting for Episode 5 is they did such a good job of emotionally investing you in the heroes. They really beat the crap out of their heroes. And the villains are the worst. I mean, they’re actually worse, frankly, than like Joffrey. [laughs] They’re the worst.

**John:** [laughs] That’s great.

**Craig:** And you just desperately want to see them dead. So it gets so much right. A couple of things it doesn’t quite do great, occasionally, there’s fighting. Not frequently. I think three or four times an episode you’ll have to do a little fight. And the fighting is a QuickTime event-based fighting. You’re familiar with that concept in video games?

**John:** I hate those.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it’s like —

**John:** It’s Tempo-based, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s basically you watch something and then suddenly it tells you “Tap here,” “Swipe Here”. And you do it and then fine, whatever. But frankly, I’m not watching it for the fighting, so I don’t care about that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The facial graphics kind of run the gamut from awesome like Jon Snow really looks like Jon Snow, to “Oh, no.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I got to say Tyrion, poor Peter Dinklage, he honestly looks like Peter Dinklage after a fire and his face was reconstructed by a —

**John:** Yeah, but from memory.

**Craig:** Yeah [laughs].

**John:** Like someone who met him once like trying to put his face back together.

**Craig:** From memory and they didn’t have good tools or an education.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just his face is absolutely horrifying. He looks like Peter Dinklage wearing a Peter Dinklage mask. It’s just terrible. But I did want to cite, because we are screenwriters and we love writers out there, the people that I think are most responsible for the success of this game are the writers. And these are the ones that I found on the Internet, so forgive me if I left any names out.

Andrew Grant, Nicole Martinez, Meghan Thornton, Brad Kane, Dan Martin, John Dombrow, and Joshua Rubin. So, congratulations. You’ve all done an excellent job. I’m very excited to play the next episode. I think it’s 20 bucks to get all six, which is a lot of game play. Or you can get individuals ones I think for five bucks or something like that.

**John:** And do you play it on the computer or on the iPad?

**Craig:** iPad.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** And is this the Brad Kane that we know?

**Craig:** Do we know a Brad Kane?

**John:** Don’t we know the Brad Kane who’s the voice of A Whole New World?

**Craig:** Oh, my god. Is it? Is it that Brad Kane?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know. It just says Brad Kane. But, yeah, you’re right. Bradley Caleb Kane. Well, how about that? I wonder if it is him.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s —

**Craig:** I mean, it’s kind of a common name but it might in fact be him. So if it is, awesome job, dude.

**John:** Yeah, the singing voice of Aladdin.

**Craig:** He was the singing voice of Aladdin and a screenwriter, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. My One Cool Thing is actually a blog post but also a series of discussions and one of those rare times where the comment thread is actually worth reading through. It’s a post by Tyler Cowen who’s looking at the question of, “If you traveled back into the past, what could you trade for present gain?” So essentially, if you were to have a time machine that you could go back in the past, what should you take with you from the past to bring to the present that would be valuable?

And which is sort of the inverse of a lot of these question. Usually it’s like, “Oh, if I could travel back in time with an iPhone, I would be like the richest person alive or I would have stock knowledge.” So what can you take from the past?

And one of the obvious choices like, “Oh, I’ll take a piece of art.” But then of course the problem becomes that piece of art wouldn’t exist in the timeline from the past. It wouldn’t have value, it can be perceived as a forgery.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It wouldn’t carbon date right. So there were a lot of really interesting ideas. Like honestly one of the best suggestions in there is just to go back and find an original edition of a comic book and put it and seal it and so therefore the reason why it’s pristine is because it’s actually new to you. But interesting thought. And as we were talking through all of these ideas about like, how would you make a movie out of that, this feels like one of those like, “Oh, is that a movie idea?” Like people who are traveling back and sort of trying to do arbitrage on things they could take from the past.

**Craig:** Right. So like not time cops but time robbers.

**John:** Yeah. Time bandits.

**Craig:** Time bandits. The thing that pops into my mind probably would be stock certificates, you know, like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like get a whole bunch of stock certificates, just buy a whole bunch of stock certificates in, I don’t know, Johnson & Johnson or something like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, those would have appreciated dramatically by the time I get back. I could certainly see that.

**John:** Yeah. But again, the challenge becomes, if there’s any question of authenticity, any sort of dating on things would be an issue. But that probably is not going to be an issue with stocks.

**Craig:** Well, no, they’re real, that’s the thing. I mean —

**John:** They are real but they wouldn’t be old enough is the issue. It’s like, I guess the artwork is the thing that you could really tell like this Grecian urn —

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** It’s only like five days old rather than, you know, 5,000 years old.

**Craig:** I guess. But I don’t know, that’s an interesting — like they wouldn’t be weathered or something?

**John:** Exactly. I mean, or literally carbon dating would not show them right.

**Craig:** Oh, well, yeah, I doubt anybody would carbon date your stock certificates but —

**John:** Yeah, they wouldn’t. That’s too recent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a good thought.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s something.

**John:** It’s something. It’s always something. That is our show for this week. If you would like to subscribe to this show, you should go to iTunes and click the subscribe button. And you should also leave us a comment. Maybe it’s a little rating, would be lovely because that helps people find our show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** While you’re on iTunes, you could get the Scriptnotes app which gives you access to all 200 and now one episodes of the show, dating all the way back to the very beginning. Scriptnotes.net is where you sign up for this service that gets you all the back episodes.

There will be USB drives with all 200 episodes on them. So if you are debating about where to save your money and spend it later on, next week or the week after, we’ll have details about where you can get those USB drives. Craig signed them.

**Craig:** Ha-ha.

**John:** Craig and I both signed them in a way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You will see our thanks on every drive.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And edited by Matthew Chilelli. I’m not sure who did the outro this week, but I bet it will be swell. You can find out who did the Outro by going to see the show notes which are at johnaugust.com. We have show notes and transcripts for every episode of the podcast.

If you would like to ask a question of Craig Mazin, you should write to him on Twitter. He’s @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com. And that is our show. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right, see you soon.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [A timeline on the FIFA scandal](http://www.latimes.com/sports/soccer/la-sp-fifa-scandal-timeline-20150603-story.html)
* [Large Hadron Collider turns on ‘data tap’](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32976838), and the [Large Hadron Collider on Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider)
* Star Trek’s [Prime Directive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive) and [Zefram Cochrane](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zefram_Cochrane) on Wikipedia
* [Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe](http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia/190351/) by Laura Kipnis
* [Title IX Investigation Opened Against Female Northwestern Professor Over Column, Tweet](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/05/29/laura_kipnis_title_ix_investigation_feminism_political_correctness_controversy.html)
* [In the Name of Love](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html)
* [“Carasc” Tibetan Bridge](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCUw3Fpqyaw)
* [So Good They Can’t Ignore You](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455509124/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Cal Newport
* [Game of Thrones by Telltale Games](https://www.telltalegames.com/gameofthrones/)
* [Traveling back into the past to trade for present gain](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/05/traveling-back-into-the-past-to-trade-for-present-gain.html) by Tyler Cowen
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))