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

**John August:** Bonjour et bienvenue. Je m’appelle John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Je m’appelle Craig Mazin.

**John:** [French language]. Craig, we’re back. You’re back from Calgary. I’m back from France. We are back in our native home city of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Correct. We were both in countries where things on wrappers are printed in French.

**John:** That’s true, yes, and French rappers rap in French.

**Craig:** French rappers are the best. I assume you were there for fun.

**John:** For fun, yes.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Spent some time touring the UK, looking at some schools for our daughter. Then we were just back in France for the first time since the pandemic. Longtime listeners will know that I used to live there. It was nice to be back and seeing my old haunts. The boulangerie which was our favorite place to get pastries every day was still there, but slightly less good than it was before.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Something happened.

**Craig:** Life happens, John. Life happens. It must’ve been nice to return there. It must’ve been nice to be overseas and not working. I can’t say I was overseas. I was over-border. I was over over-border.

**John:** You were over-border, yeah. I did no Scriptnotes work at all.

**Craig:** That’s wonderful. That’s great. Look, wasn’t it nice?

**John:** It was so nice.

**Craig:** Let’s just say, without freaking anyone out, I will simply say sometimes it’s nice to not do Scriptnotes.

**John:** It really is.

**Craig:** It really is.

**John:** [inaudible 00:01:23] not be thinking about it.

**Craig:** If you don’t realize that you’ve got… Oh, it’s not a big deal. It’s just that there’s this splinter. It doesn’t hurt. Then one day 10 years later they take the splinter out and you’re like, “Oh, wow. It’s actually way better without that splinter.” Nobody should get nervous or anxious.

**John:** Don’t worry.

**Craig:** Don’t get anxious.

**John:** Everything’s fine.

**Megana Rao:** I am really anxious.

**Craig:** No no no. Megana, sleep.

**Megana:** I don’t like where this conversation is going.

**Craig:** Sleep.

**John:** Let’s get to today’s episode so that Megana gets less nervous. Today on the show, effing magnets, how do they work? More specifically, how do you create characters who both pull in the viewer and pull themselves through the story? We’ll look at techniques for adjusting the magnetic fields. We’ll also catch up on a lot of news on animation writing, the CW, and more. There’ll be no Bonus Segment at the end for Premium Members, because instead, they just get a whole Bonus Episode we just created, where we talk with the creator of Wordle and the author of 50 Years of Text Games about ways to use words for fun and profit. It was a good conversation, yes, Craig?

**Craig:** It was fantastic. I think everybody will enjoy it. Naturally, the two of us make sure that it is of interest to everyone, including people that don’t play word games, because there’s universal things that need to be examined, and they were.

**John:** Craig, I think we had one text exchange during my entire vacation, which was Craig writing, “Hell froze over.” I had no idea what the context was. We can now say that hell froze over because Craig Mazin was invited to join the Motion Picture Academy.

**Craig:** If you’re a longtime listener, you know that was something that was never going to happen, and it happened. I was invited to join the Motion Picture Academy. I am now in the Motion Picture Academy. I’m a part of a very exciting and interesting freshman class.

**John:** Craig, you are now an Academy member. I’m so excited to be attending Academy events with you and such and making fun of speakers and-

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** …doing all the Academy business.

**Craig:** I will say that the number of emails that I receive per day has shot up dramatically. I guess I’ll have to figure out how to manage the email influx from the Academy. It’s nice. I am excited to vote for the Oscars. That sounds like it would be a fun thing to do.

**John:** It’s fun to do. It’s actually a really well-designed voting system. Of course, you’ll be a part of the Academy app, which is where you’ll see all the screeners, which is actually really well-designed.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** I think it’s wonderful. I think it was our own Aline Brosh McKenna, the living Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes, who may have put my name forward. I should thank her for that. It was also gratifying because you can become a member of the Academy simply by being nominated for something or you can become a member because people think you ought to be. In my case, it was the latter. That was nice. It’s always nice to be wanted. Yay, Academy.

**John:** Hooray. A bunch of news happened, Craig, while you were getting your Academy membership and I was overseas. The Animation Guild ratified their new three-year contract. We’ve talked about animation writing many times on the show. Animation Guild represents all folks who work in animation in different fields, a lot of artists, a lot of different people. They also represent some writers who work in animation.

There was a long and vocal campaign to try to improve the conditions of writers working under Animation Guild contracts. This contract did some things better. It established new job tiers for promotion. There’s a Level 1, Level 2, a supervising animation writer, all who got some pay bumps. There’s a new more junior level called associate animation writer, which is lower paid. It looks like some progress. It also looks like not very close to what an equivalent writer would be getting under a live-action WGA deal. It can both be significant progress and not what these writers should be receiving.

**Craig:** That’s right, nor will it ever be. Because of the circumstances surrounding the Animation Guild, specifically that it is part of IATSE and not a writer’s guild, they will not ever have the kind of bargaining power we do. They don’t have as many members by far. Also, their strike threat is essentially de minimis, because IATSE’s not striking so that animation writers do better. They will always struggle to do the best they can. They do, I honestly think, do the best they can. The people who work there care a lot. They are not defensive about the fact that their collective bargaining agreement is not as good as ours. They are aware of it. They don’t deny it. They do the best they can. That’s the most important thing. They did get a pretty decent turnout, which I think is really important. Member turnout apparently tripled compared to the last vote.

If there’s one thing that I guess we could look at as a decent thing, it’s just additional codification of what IATSE got, which was an enshrined 3% minimum wage increases annually over the course of the contract. That used to be the standard across the industry, and then suddenly it went down to two and a half. Hopefully, we can all return to the 3%. Anyway, I think all in all a successful negotiation for Animation Guild. Well done to the folks who run it and all the folks who voted.

**John:** I also just want to commend the animation writers who kept speaking up very vocally about how important it was and how their jobs are different than other folks who are working in the Animation Guild. They’re the first people on board in a project. They have very specific needs that are different from other folks. I think it’s great that they spoke up and were so insistent throughout this. This is not the last we’ve heard about animation writing and making sure that animation writers are paid what they should be paid.

**Craig:** I expect that we’ll be hearing about this every three years, as well we should.

**John:** Other news, so Craig, you and I have not talked very much about the CW, but we should probably explain for international listeners, because the CW is just a weird situation. Way back in the day, we had two different networks called the WB and UPN. Shows on the WB that were so famous were Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel.

**Craig:** The Buffyverse.

**John:** All the Buffyverse, but also Dawson’s Creek was a WB show. My own show, which lasted seven episodes, only four of which aired, called DC, was a WB show.

**Craig:** Great four episodes though.

**John:** It was really just a phenomenal four episodes. UPN, which was another Paramount-based network-

**Craig:** United Paramount Network.

**John:** Yeah, which had a bunch of shows. Those two merged, and they became the CW. The CW is the home to things like Supernatural, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It’s owned jointly by Warner Bros and CBS. It’s always been a strange partnership. They are trying to sell the CW now. It looks like it’s going to be bought out by a group called Nexstar, which represents a bunch of the stations that actually broadcast CW shows.

**Craig:** This is the I guess natural fallout of the move to streaming, because basically Warner Bros is all in on HBO Max, and CBS is all in on Paramount Plus. Then the question is what exactly will the… By the way, what is with the the?

**John:** The CW?

**Craig:** Yeah. We don’t say the NBC, the CBS, the ABC, the HBO Max.

**John:** We don’t say the CBS.

**Craig:** It’s just there for whatever reason, the CW. I guess they started with the WB, because it wasn’t WB. It was the WB.

**John:** I guess, yeah.

**Craig:** The weirdly named the CW will try and fit into this forgotten, perhaps neglected spot, which is the independent network. It’s possible that it could work. I just don’t know what their programming exactly will be, because all the programming they had is owned by these other entities. They’re not buying the programs. They’re just buying the name.

**John:** They’re buying the name. They’re buying the network and the ability of the network to brand shows. Warner Bros and Paramount will still own a part of it. I think the reason why I want to talk about this on Scriptnotes is that the CW shows were an important birthplace for a lot of writers. They were shows that ran 20 episodes a season or 22 episodes a season. There was a lot of work there. The CW canceled a bunch of their shows. That’s a bunch of writers who don’t have jobs suddenly.

I think we forget about the nature of seasonal employment. These were shows that would start early fall and go through into the spring. In this streaming era, we see much less of that. Those were really good jobs for a bunch of people. I’m concerned that whatever this new network becomes, it’s not going to have scripted shows to the same degree. We’re going to lose out on a great training ground for a lot of writers.

**Craig:** It won’t be. Don’t be concerned. Just deal with it as reality, because they will not be making scripted television the way that the CW or the WB or UPN even did, because it’s too expensive and because you can make a lot of money with unscripted programming at lower margins. That’s how you compete. Look, ultimately, all of the networks are going to go away. They’ve been around forever or what we imagine forever to be. They’re going away. We’re not going to have NBC, CBS, and ABC at some point. They’re just going.

**John:** I agree with it.

**Craig:** Then it’s just going to be Disney Plus and Paramount Plus and Peacock and then all the other streamers we know, HBO Max and Apple TV and Amazon and so on and so forth, Hulu and etc. There’s not going to be network television anymore. There’s a redundancy there that everybody can see. Everybody. We all know it. At some point, I think NBC… Honestly, Derek Haas is keeping NBC on, as far as I can tell.

**John:** The Chicago shows?

**Craig:** Yes. When the Chicago shows run their run, which probably will be 40 years from now, then and only then will NBC finally be like, “Okay, we’ll just be Peacock.”

**John:** Some follow-up. On our bonus topic a couple weeks ago, we talked about adulting, basically what are the things that made you realize that you are now an adult and what those felt like. I proposed on Twitter, “Hey, what are some useful markers you found of adulthood?” Our listeners sent through some really good suggestions. I thought we would read through some of the listener suggestions for things that mark you as possibly an adult. “Getting excited about water filter speed.”

**Craig:** What? Water filter speed.

**John:** Yeah, like getting a home water filter or how fast your Brita pitcher filters.

**Craig:** I see. Yeah.

**John:** “Throwing out plastic cups and replacing them with glass.” Yeah, so getting permanent things rather than temporary things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “Hiring professional movers.” That is a real mark of it, when you’re not relying on your friends to drag you through. My friend Andrew Lippa said, “A mark of adulthood is initiating conversations that will likely invite conflict.” Recognizing I’m going to say this thing, I know this is going to make you mad, but I’m not going to actually avoid saying it because I know it’s going to make you mad.

**Craig:** I’d consider that also part of my adolescenting, to be honest, but that was me.

**John:** That was being provocative though.

**Craig:** I think that’s what “initiating conversations that likely invite conflict” is.

**John:** I think it’s recognizing that it’s not being afraid of conflict.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. You’re not starting something, but you’re not avoiding it either.

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** That’s how I took Andrew Lippa’s-

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** Knowing Andrew the way I do, that’s how I read that. Chuck Wendig, who’s a very smart writer, he said, “Being excited about things like showers and bedtime.”

**Craig:** Bedtime in particular has really become… I used to really dread it, and now lately I’m like, “Can I just get into bed? Can I get into bed now? Oh my god, no, it’s 8:15. I can’t.”

**John:** Along those lines, “Being excited when you have no plans for the weekend.” So good. “Wanting a low-key birthday.” “Seeking empty beaches.”

**Craig:** Empty beaches. I never wanted full beaches.

**John:** I never want to go to the beach. I hate the sun.

**Craig:** You really should not ever-

**John:** I should not be in the sun.

**Craig:** No. When you were an Eagle Scout, were you just in a full beekeeper costume?

**John:** For a variety of reason, I’ve pretty much always worn hats, which has helped a lot. I would say my one advice to people is just put on a hat, because it’ll help you out so much. I do remember on a horseback trip wearing a ball cap and having my ears get incredibly badly sunburned. That’s not a fun thing when you’re just peeling dead skin off your ears.

**Craig:** You need a brimmed hat.

**John:** I need a brimmed hat. That’s what I need.

**Craig:** For sure. That’s why I’m saying beekeeper. If you look into beekeeper costumes, I think you will-

**John:** I think I’ll be happy. We have some follow-up on our discussion about gun violence. Megana, do you want to help us out with this?

**Megana:** Nikolai brought up, “In Donald Glover’s brilliant show Atlanta, LaKeith Stanfield’s character Darius is at a shooting range. Around him, Second Amendment enthusiasts are shooting at human targets, which Darius shoots at a target of a dog. He’s approached, and the men tell him, ‘You can’t shoot dogs,’ to which Darius replies, ‘Why would I shoot a human target?’ I’m certainly not doing the scene justice, but I think the point still holds.”

**John:** I haven’t seen Atlanta, so I haven’t seen this beat. I think that’s a really clever idea for a moment. It’s also an interesting way to bring up the ideas of why are we using guns and what’s okay about guns and what’s not okay about guns.

**Craig:** It’s pretty setuppish. That’s my favorite word. I got that word from Hannibal Buress, setuppish.

**John:** Setuppish.

**Craig:** Isn’t that a great word?

**John:** It is. It’s pejorative but not dismissive completely.

**Craig:** It’s just saying you’re luring me into something. It’s setuppish. It is clever.

**John:** It is clever. I like it. Follow-up on remote writers’ rooms. Help us out.

**Megana:** Allison wrote in and said, “A follow-up to that great question about remote writers’ rooms. Why must writers’ rooms be in LA when so much production is remote? Wouldn’t it make sense for Disney to have writers’ rooms in Atlanta, for instance? I live and work in Portland, Oregon, where we have a thriving TV and film scene. The productions may hire local camera operators, directors, actors, etc, but the writers’ rooms are always based in LA. This above the line/below the line divide never made sense to me. Making writers’ rooms local to the locations could go a long way to bridging this divide.”

**Craig:** Interesting point.

**John:** I think I remember some anecdotes of a show that did actually put its writing staff in the place where it was shooting. It’s so unusual that I think it just stuck out because I’d never heard of that before.

**Craig:** There’s a really simple reason for this, Allison. Money. When you take people from where they live and ask them to live somewhere else, it costs money. You have to pay them a per diem. There’s a weekly fee that they get just for living expenses. You have to put them up somewhere. You have to feed them. You have to take care of their travel back and forth and all of that stuff. It’s just money. Now if it were me and I had a writers’ room, which I don’t, but if I did, yeah, I probably would’ve wanted them with me. Then I’m sure HBO would’ve said, “No, we’re not spending all this money for people to be up there and be there when you need them during production, but when they’re not needed during production, then… ”

Ideally, a lot of this stuff is written before you get into production. We do hire below-the-line folks and then bring them places and put them up and pay for them, because sometimes we need specific people. Cinematographers, camera operators are a good example, and obviously actors. Basically, bottom line, Allison, dough.

**John:** Yeah, dough. Also, I think it’s understanding the timeline of when you’re shooting these things. Craig’s right to say ideally you’ve written all the episodes before you start shooting, or you’re getting close to that. The exception would be if you were doing a traditional network show like one of the Baltimore shows like Homicide. I think Homicide may have actually had its writers’ room there in Baltimore, because they were right there on set doing all the stuff. You basically needed to have those writers be right there on set to do the things. It was great. That is a possibility there for a network show where you’re not writing so far ahead of what production is. For most shows, it’s not going to work. I think Allison also may be thinking that they’ll hire local writers to do that thing. No, they won’t. No showrunner’s going to find the six writers they want for that show in Portland. They’re just not going to find that. It’s not going to be a thing that works out.

**Craig:** Even if they were there, it doesn’t matter, because you need writers where you are before you get to Portland. You can’t get to Portland unless you’ve written a lot.

**John:** When we had Liz Meriwether and Liz Hannah on the show talking about their productions, they did have writers on set, but they had to bring in one writer at a time, because that’s what they can afford to bring. That was great and helpful for them. That’s what they could actually do.

**Craig:** That is industry standard.

**John:** We have some follow-up on disclaimers. Megana.

**Megana:** Frank from LA wrote in and said, “I wrote a pilot that’s a Real Housewives style reality show spoof about plus-size male models. When I was first taking it out, execs who read it blind without meeting me or without seeing the web series it was based on thought I was making fun of fat people. It was so frustrating, because I was doing the exact opposite. The feedback was largely tepid and/or cautionary, until I added a second page that said, ‘The author is loud, queer, and overweight. In their head they could be Naomi Campbell if only the world would let them.'”

**John:** Here’s an example of a preface page or an epigraph, still debating what those are going to be, that was helpful for Frank in getting his script read because people did not understand the context of who their writer was and how they should be reading the script without some sort of introduction there. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** It’s everything, so well done, Frank. The fact that maybe you didn’t think about doing that initially is not your fault. What I love is that you then thought of doing it. There’s nothing questionable about this. To me, context in the course of humor is incredibly important. We’re all grown up enough, especially now, to understand that some things are funny when certain people say them, and some things are not funny when certain people say them. You could boil it all down to the punch up/punch down thing, but I tend to think of it more as self-criticism versus outward criticism, self-awareness versus otherness.

If I write a comedy, and I suspect this is going to come up later when we get to our One Cool Things, and I am criticizing American Jewish culture, I’m doing it from inside my group, and that is different than if somebody else does it from outside. It just is. We don’t have to even get into why. We all know and understand this inherently. I think it’s actually brilliant and puts people at ease. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to like the script. What they can’t do is say, “Oh, I don’t feel comfortable here, because I think somebody’s just teeing off on other people.”

**John:** Well done. I agree. I think it’s a good use of that preface page or epigraph. You can use either term.

**Craig:** Prologue, whatever.

**John:** Prologue.

**Craig:** Epigraph, I think that’s what we’ve settled on.

**John:** I think we settled on preface page. Let’s get to our marquee-

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** …topic here. It’s been a while since we’ve had a marquee topic. Craig, while I was on this vacation, I read a book. I read Jason Kander’s new book, Invisible Storm. If you don’t remember Jason Kander, he was a candidate for Senate in Missouri who lost but came really, really close and was just a phenomenon in Missouri. He was also then going to be running for president. He decided not to run for president, ran for mayor of Kansas City, pulled out of that to announce that he basically needed to stop because he had tremendous PTSD and basically could not function as a candidate. The book does a really good job of talking about those decisions and what he was trying to suppress but ultimately couldn’t suppress.

It got me thinking about, so often on Scriptnotes we’re talking about what characters want, what they’re driving towards, what they’re aspiring to become. That always feels like a pull. We’re being pulled in one direction. In the case of Jason Kander, he was really being pushed away from something. He was basically trying to escape from this PTSD. So much of his success was actually a fear-avoidance mechanism, trying to get away from this thing. Basically, as long as he was running really fast, it couldn’t catch up. He believed it couldn’t catch up. I like that push-pull dynamic that a magnet both can be drawing towards something but also repelling away from something else. I thought we might talk about what characters are trying to do looking at both what they’re being pulled towards but what they’re pushing against.

**Craig:** The pushing against part is probably a universal thing. I think everybody is afraid of something. Fear is a huge part of what it means to be human and therefore a huge part of writing human characters. What we find is if we simply write somebody as being afraid of something and moving away from something, the story isn’t very interesting, because they’re just hiding, and they’re hiding overtly, and we just are waiting for them to stop. It’s more interesting when we think what we’re seeing is the story of somebody driven toward something positive. It’s only then that we realize that their positive motion forward is really in lieu of what they’re afraid of doing.

**John:** As we look back to some of our deep dive discussions on Clueless or on Little Mermaid, these characters will express their wish, the thing that they’re trying to go towards. They’re also leaving home. Sometimes that leaving home is being pushed away from that too. Sometimes they are pushing off against the wall as they’re swimming away. Figuring out what that wall is can be really, really important. Figuring out what it is that they don’t want themselves to become, what it is that they are afraid of becoming, what it is that they are loathe to face again, can be what’s driving them. In really successful stories, and I think Kander’s real life story is successful in its way, it’s finally having to confront that monster, confront that thing that you were trying to escape, is part of the journey that gets you through to the end. It gets you into your third act. It’s finally facing this thing that you’ve been trying to avoid the whole time.

**Craig:** Exactly. This is very simpatico with the whole how do you write a movie podcast that we did. The revelation of what it is that terrifies you is something that should happen. It’s almost like a little horror movie inside of every movie, whether it’s a comedy or an adventure. There’s this daunting realization that the problem, the thing that you were not looking at is the following. You weren’t even aware of it necessarily. What a lot of first acts do well is give you all the clues as to what might be the problem. We notice early on in our stories that our characters are not merely pulling towards something, but they’re good at it. They’re often competent at it. It’s much more interesting if the thing you’re pulling towards is something that you’re good at, because then theoretically you can just keep going.

**John:** That’s a thing that we see with Jason Kander, who’s very good at being a politician and raising the money and doing the things and being on the phone constantly and doing all the things it took to be successful as that and was using those things to have this vision of where he was going to end up. Really, he was distracting himself from the work he needed to do. It reminds me of when we had Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the show. We talked about Fleabag. Fleabag is a character who is… Her forward momentum really comes from constantly pushing people away and basically building a distance between herself and other people. You don’t see her going after a thing as much as pushing people away and using the conventions of talking to the audience and other things to create a space around her. It’s only when she’s finally confronted about this that she can make the progress and growth she goes through at the end of the series.

**Craig:** It’s one of the ways that we connect with the quote unquote unlikable character, which is why this character isn’t likable is the worst note that anyone can get. Shame on everybody who gives it. Their unlikability is often about how they are pushing things away, and doing so in a way that allows them to get through life. It’s often very funny. Pushing people away is probably better presented through comedy than through drama. It gets very heavy very quickly when you’re just like, “Screw off,” constantly. The notion of, it was just misanthropy, I guess, it’s funny. They’re funny people, because we’re like, “Yeah, everybody does stink. That is stupid.” Then you realize, wait, that’s the part of me that is a bit afraid of things. I think it’s really important that we get to see people being repellent.

**John:** I think back to Melissa McCarthy’s character in Can You Ever Forgive Me. We had Marielle Heller on the show talking about that. That is a miscreant character. She does not like the outside world. She does not trust the outside world. We see her doing specific things to protect herself from exposing any vulnerability. Of course, for the movie to succeed, it has to introduce characters who can break through that armor and give her things that she actually wants to see and make her step outside of her comfort zone to let some people in. Of course, her whole scheme falls apart in the process. That’s an example of a movie that’s not a comedy and yet does do that job of I have a strong magnetic field that is pushing everyone away from me and succeeds.

**Craig:** There are obviously comic moments in that movie. Melissa McCarthy is a fascinating example, because I think basically every character she plays, with rare exception, is somebody that is pushing people away. Zach Galifianakis, also very, very famous for this. What makes them so good at it is more than just their talent, which is exceptional. They also just have this interesting humanity in their eyes. I’ve always said among comic character actors, or just comic actors I guess you’d call them, that some of them are a little scary, and some of them you want to just take home and hug. Jim Carrey, I think his characters always have this mania that’s a bit terrifying, and so it’s exciting.

**John:** You would not want to give him a sharp knife. I would not be comfortable.

**Craig:** Exactly. You don’t want to give him a sharp knife. There’s a danger about his… Sacha Baron Cohen, there’s a danger there. Then when you look at Steve Carrell or Zach or Melissa, it’s like… For whatever reason, there’s just something about Steve Carrell where I just want to take him home and hug him. Those characters tend to do really well when they’re pushing people away, because you know inherently they’re not being mean or cruel. They’re just hurt.

**John:** When you get the note about likability, I think the corollary note to that is relatability. Sometimes those characters who might seem unlikable, as long as they’re relatable, as long as we can see aspects of things we would ourselves do and protective mechanisms and defense shields they’re putting up in our own lives, we can relate to them, even if they’re not classically likable human beings, they’re not picking up and hugging puppies. We can see ourselves in them. I think that’s an example of something Melissa does so well is that in the characters she’s playing, you can see why she’s doing what she’s doing. You can understand she’s trying to push you away and she’s still letting you in.

**Craig:** I think that relatability is ultimately essential for every single character that is ever… The only characters that you can get away with being not relatable are I guess dispensable ones and very broad ones, so James Bond. The classic template for James Bond movies is that there’s a main villain who usually is somewhat relatable, but then that main villain has an interesting sidekick, so Oddjob or Jaws, Nick Nack. They are always very thin characters. By and large, everybody, villains, second bananas, leads, everyone at some point or another must be relatable, even in ways that are seemingly incompatible with their circumstances. For instance, Thor is a god, and yet really all those movies are asking us to relate to him on a very not godlike level.

**John:** I would say the most successful Thor movies are the ones that pierce the Thor character the most and reveal his inner flaws and his humor and his dissatisfaction with himself and his own situation. It’s not the ones where he’s awesome, it’s the ones where he’s flawed are the ones where you’re going to be most curious to follow along.

**Craig:** If you were Chris Hemsworth, do you think you would ever wake up in the morning being like, “Pretty flawed here.”

**John:** I think the success of one of these films though is showing beautiful people who are still flawed in relatable ways. That’s obviously one of the great challenges we face as writers is to have characters who are compelling and driven and feel like a movie can center around them, and yet we’re still seeing through to some of their vulnerability. I think the Iron Man character that Robert Downey Jr plays is a very good example of this, because he is an asshole. He’s fundamentally not a sympathetic character, and yet he is written with a specificity and with a vulnerability that lets you see behind the surface. He could be both. He could be pushing you away, literally pushing you away with his little magnetic jet hands, and at the same time letting you in to see what’s there.

**Craig:** We’re going to get so many angry emails. “Those are not jet hands. Those are Propulsors.”

**John:** Repulsors, yes, I’m sorry.

**Craig:** I don’t know what the hell they are. It’s really interesting. Separate topic we should talk about one day is the unfortunate phenomenon that no matter how much representation we talk about and the improvement of representation on film, the one area where human beings just seem to really struggle with is we want good-looking people on screen. We want them. Black, white, disabled, doesn’t matter, but all we ask is that their faces have symmetry. We are fascinated with the lives of people who have symmetrical faces. It is so weird to think of. When you really boil it down, it’s like, what is happening there? There’s not a chance that people’s facial symmetry is a statistical reflection of their actual interest value as humans. What are we doing? What is happening? Anyway, I just find that fascinating.

**John:** Yet facial symmetry doesn’t make you a movie star. Tom Cruise is a good-looking person and was a good-looking person growing up, but it was his actual charisma, which is not his physical body, that made him the star.

**Craig:** Yes. Really, what it comes down to is if you have this much talent and your face is this symmetrical, you can be a movie star. If you have even more talent than that, but your face is terribly not symmetrical-

**John:** You can be a voice actor.

**Craig:** You’re not going to be a movie star, because people just don’t… They don’t care. That’s what so strange. It’s so strange, because there are some incredible actors out there who don’t have whatever that is that’s the facial symmetry that we all demand. Then we miss them somehow. Then there are actors who we all know are famous because they’re very good-looking. A lot of the people who are now famous for being famous, I think a lot of that is just… Anyway, side topic. We’ll come back around to that on Episode 730.

**John:** The last little point I will make here, which we’ll reference again when we come back to this topic, is it reminds me of… There’s this phenomenon of hockey players who are born in a certain month are much more successful. I think it’s probably because of that. It’s because this actor was so beautiful and was so handsome and was cast in these roles, they learned how to become a much better film actor, and they kept getting the work. They improved as an actor because they kept getting more chances to play and more chances in front of the screen.

**Craig:** There is no question that… I can’t remember the comedian who said the secret to happiness is be good-looking. You laugh, and then he starts talking about it, and you realize, oh my god, yes. Yes, apparently, that is the secret. Everything gets a lot easier. Everything. Everything. All of your successes are over-praised. Your failures are ignored. Everybody is interested in you and wants to be around you and are attracted to you. It’s this interesting magnetic thing we’re talking about.

**John:** Last bit on magnetism I would just say is a lesson I learned as I’ve been thinking about this over the last few weeks is that obviously, always be looking for what a character wants, because what a character wants is going to be driving them in a lot of cases. Just never forget the corollary question is what are they trying to get away from. What are they pushing against? What are they trying to push away from themselves? You’ll find some really interesting details and maybe some interesting characters and situations by looking about what it is that they are repelled by and see whether that can be additional driving force for you in figuring out your story and basically your protagonist’s journey.

Cool. Let’s go into our One Cool Things. I have two recommendations for you, both things you can see on streaming. First off is Fire Island, written by Joel Kim Booster, which is a delightful retelling of Pride and Prejudice but all told on Fire Island. Really, really nicely done. Delightful. You can find it on Hulu. It matches very well with our Clueless episode, which we just aired last week, which is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma. This is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, all set on Fire Island. Very much recommend you see that.

Also, if you’ve not seen Heartstopper, which is a really well-reviewed and popular show on Netflix, I would recommend it. It is a small gay British high school show that is just really smartly done. It’s weirdly chaste and based on these great graphic novels by Alice Oseman. If you are in the mood for something just light and delightful, I would recommend Heartstopper for you.

**Craig:** I have to watch the show. Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie in The Last of Us, and a guy named Steve Oben, who is one of our costume department geniuses, they were obsessed with this and would talk about it all the time. I have to watch Heartstopper. In a lovely way. They just said it puts a smile on your face.

**John:** I was describing it to Megana as being like M and M’s, where you eat an M and M and suddenly you’ve ate the whole bag. You’re like, “Wait, where’d the show go?” They’re very short episodes. It’s just delightfully done.

**Craig:** I’m in. How could my One Cool Thing this week not be the James Webb Space Telescope?

**John:** Pretty amazing images.

**Craig:** You and I are old enough to remember when Hubble blew our minds. By the way, I feel bad for Hubble. Hubble’s been out there killing it for decades, and then James Webb shows up. It’s not enough that James Webb is so much better than Hubble. Now it’s supposed to be like, “Look at this shit from Hubble. Look at this shit photo from Hubble. Now look how much better it is from James Webb.” It’s so mean.

Anyway, it is kind of incredible. The images that we’re seeing are startling. They are not of stars, but of galaxies. They are closeups of galaxies. They are sections of sky that show dozens or hundreds of galaxies, each of which, of course, contain countless stars and planets. All of this is just mind-blowing. Interestingly, most of them do look a little bit like… Remember when we were kids, John, you would go to the store and there were those little vending machines where you’d put a quarter in and you’d turn the dial and you’d get a little plastic egg?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Inside the egg was candy or a toy. One of the toys was this clear, super bouncy… The Super Ball. A super bouncy ball.

**John:** Super bouncy ball, yeah.

**Craig:** Inside a lot of them was a billion sparkly things.

**John:** It’s glitter. It’s glitter inside a rubber ball.

**Craig:** That’s what the universe is. It’s a glittery Super Ball. It’s mind-blowing, portrays a kind of vastness that our brains are simply incapable of processing fully. My One Cool Thing this week, James Webb Space Telescope, and you know what, also the Hubble. Hey, Hubble.

**John:** Hubble’s doing great.

**Craig:** You are the OG, Hubble.

**John:** 100%. I got to see the James Webb Space Telescope before it launched. We went down to Northrop Grumman and got to do a tour. I’ll talk through how you get to see it. You are going up three stories, up to this glass observation bay, and looking down at a bunch of people in beekeeper suits basically, that Craig would be happy with, just completely vacuum-sealed, because this whole thing, which has this giant gold mirror, a speck of dust on it could ruin everything. Years of years of construction for this. It felt impressive. I could not even imagine launching it into space. To see the results that they’re able to get off of it is just incredible.

**Craig:** NASA has been, I won’t say quietly, but not noisily, being amazing for a really long time, and particularly I think for the last 10 years or so, in terms of what they’ve been able to do with Mars and now with this telescope. I have to say the reorientation away from man space travel towards investigative space engineering is great.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** It’s great. I don’t need a guy on Mars. What’s he going to do? He’s going to walk around. Who cares? Show me more of it and analyze it.

**John:** Put some more robots there. Let them dig around and pull stuff up.

**Craig:** How about this? HD cameras are preferable to putting a person there, so that that person can be like, “Oh my god, I did it.” We’re like, “You did it.”

**John:** You look at this telescope or even the rovers we have on Mars, they can work for 10 years-

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** …and keep doing stuff, versus a guy who can be there for a week and you got to fly him back.

**Craig:** We get excited because we can watch it, and he’s walking on Mars. We’re like, “Oh my god, it happened.” Now what? The cost and the danger is extraordinary, and for not a great amount of information, not as much as you can get from diagnostic and investigative equipment like this. Hooray, NASA is what I’m saying.

**John:** There’s things that we’re able to do on the space station with humans there which seem great. We’re able to run experiments and really do stuff on the fly. Fantastic. I don’t feel a pressing need to send people back to the moon or back onto Mars. We’re good. We’re good.

**Craig:** We’re good.

**John:** We can focus on some things on Earth here that can be much more useful.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. Like making Scriptnotes, which is a-

**Craig:** Podcast.

**John:** … podcast produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Yay.

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

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. Thank you to everyone who sent in outros. I put out a call for them, and now we have a whole bunch of new ones in, and they’re so, so good. We’re stocked, but we’re always looking for new outros. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you’ll get all the back-episodes, Bonus Segments, and Bonus Episodes, like the one we’re putting out this week on word games. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

Links:

* [Animation Guild Members Ratify New Three-Year Contract](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/animation-guild-ratifies-three-year-contract-1235174906/)
* [As Nexstar Deal For Control Of The CW Nears Finish, Ownership Structure Comes Into Focus](https://deadline.com/2022/06/nexstar-deal-to-acquire-control-of-the-cw-nears-finish-line-1235054433/)
* [John’s Adulting Twitter Thread](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1544347536366108673?s=21&t=gkZVGb4zyQhdj41RFy-4Cg)
* [Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/invisible-storm-jason-kander?variant=39935556911138) by Jason Kander
* [Fire Island](https://www.hulu.com/movie/fire-island-c2abb64a-bf06-48fa-8465-c0958e2b8ecd) by Joel Kim Booster on Hulu
* [Heartstopper Series on Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/title/81059939) and [Graphic Novel](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heartstopper-alice-oseman/1133594836) by Alice Osman
* [James Webb Space Telescope](https://webb.nasa.gov/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Pineless ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/558standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/20-questions-with-john).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 543 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

While it may sound like a normal John and Craig episode, it’s actually not. Craig and I couldn’t find a time to record together this week, so instead we’re recording two separate episodes in which we attempt to answer 40 listener questions.

I am going to tackle the first 20. Of course, all this wouldn’t be possible without our intrepid producer, Megana Rao. Megana, welcome to the show.

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

**John:** I say welcome to the show, but you’re actually always on the show. We can hear your laughter sometimes in the background, even when you’re not asking questions. Today you’ll be asking so many questions.

**Megana:** I’m ready. I’ve done all my vocal exercises.

**John:** Sounds good. Now next week you’ll be doing the same exercise with Craig, who will answer 20 more questions. I’m curious who’s going to have the better answers. I will be listening to this without having any exposure to it. It’ll all be a surprise to me when the next week’s episode comes out.

**Megana:** Yes, but it’s not a competition, because they’re different questions. I couldn’t bear to pit you guys against each other.

**John:** Also, we’ll have a Bonus Segment, as always. This week, Megana and I will discuss murder architecture, specifically how it relates to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Fresh. Basically, who are these architects and contractors who are hired to build these houses in which all you can really do is kill somebody? I really want to get into the backstory behind how these houses exist, because they’re really cool and cinematic, but they’re also not practical for things other than murder. It’ll be fun.

You and Craig, I suspect you’re going to discuss millennial stuff, because Craig is obsessed with you as a millennial.

**Megana:** I hope to represent us well.

**John:** Represent us, but not me, because I’m Generation X. You’re representing your people.

**Megana:** Correct.

**John:** Your millennial identity. Last week’s episode, we were talking about keyboards. Craig mentioned that he was incredibly fast typist, he was over 100 words per minute. I was joking that you were a slow typist. We actually took a typing test and found out that you are a faster typist than I am. What number did you get?

**Megana:** I had 81 words per minute and 100% accuracy.

**John:** I had 62 words per minute and 100% accuracy. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the test that we used, so if you want to compare yourself to the Scriptnotes folks to see how well you did. The 100% accuracy, I did make some mistakes and then back up and fix some things.

**Megana:** It counts against your total time, so I think that’s fair.

**John:** I think it’s fair too. That’s with my current weird keyboard. I do feel like the typing test, obviously you’re looking at stuff and you’re trying to type what they’re having you type, but that’s not necessarily reflective of how I really type in real life, which is basically dumping my brain out onto a page, which I think could be a little bit faster than that.

**Megana:** Because this typing test was you had to accurately notate what words they were giving you, it wasn’t–

**John:** Yeah. If I wanted to write their words, I wouldn’t be a screenwriter. In our discussion of ergonomic keyboards, several listeners also pointed me towards the ZSA Moonlander, which is a very cool looking keyboard. I always wanted to try it out, because it does look neat. It’s one of these very split keyboards where your left half and right half are completely separate units that you can position however you want to position them. They look neat. I’m eager to try something. An advantage to it may be that it’s much more portable, because one of the challenges I have with my weird vertical keyboard is it’s a bitch to pack. It’d be great to have something I could travel with if I need to travel. I’m going to be traveling this next week, so we’ll see.

**Megana:** Do you normally travel with that keyboard?

**John:** I don’t. Normally if I’m just traveling, I’m just using my MacBook, which is fine for short times, but it’s harder for longer periods of time. The year I was living in Paris, I did have to travel with my big keyboard, and so I had to find a whole setup there for how I was going to make this work with the keyboard. It’s a fragile thing to be packing and traveling with this stuff.

**Megana:** It’s massive.

**John:** It’s massive. It’s big.

**Megana:** This thing’s gorgeous though. I hope you get it.

**John:** You’ll see it. It’s coming in about two weeks. By the time I’m back from my trip, it’ll be here and we’ll try it out.

**Megana:** Cool.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for all these questions. Usually on the show, the questions get pushed to the end of the episode. Now we’re going to start with the questions and go through it. You and I were both looking at the 72 Questions with Phoebe Waller-Bridge from–

**Megana:** Vogue.

**John:** Vogue, yeah. This will not be nearly as scripted, but hopefully we’ll have some good answers to questions that our listeners actually really truly have.

**Megana:** Cool. Are you ready?

**John:** I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m stretched. I’m limber. Let’s go for it.

**Megana:** We’re going to start with a short one. Steve asked, “Are Stuart Specials a bad thing?”

**John:** Stuart Specials are what we call when we get a Three Page Challenge that starts in a way where a situation, a scene has happened, and then at the end of the three pages, then we flash back to the real time. Essentially, it’s opened in a flash forward. I don’t think Stuart Specials are always a bad thing. They become a cliché in the Three Page Challenge.

Here’s an argument for the Stuart Special is that you’re giving the reader and viewer a taste of where your movie is headed to and what it’s going to evolve into, which may not be indicative of what the normal start of the movie would be. It’s attention-grabbing in that way. Go opens with a Stuart Special. That’s fine. It is a little bit of a cliché. Megana, as you’re reading through Three Page Challenges, do you find yourself avoiding any of them because they are cliché within our little domain?

**Megana:** I think that’s exactly it. I like Stuart Specials when I see them on screen, but when I’m reading through so many Three Page Challenges, I think I get frustrated because I feel tricked by the end. I’m like, “Where is this going?” because I only have the three pages.

**John:** When I see them in real movies, they can be really effective and it gives you a sense like, oh, this is where it’s headed. You’re also waiting for that scene to happen. Sometimes you can become impatient for that moment to happen, because you know it’s supposed to be there.

**Megana:** I also realized this as I was reading this question. I forget about the beginnings of movies a lot.

**John:** That’s fair too. A movie that’s doing well, a movie that’s setting us up well and going well scene by scene by scene, you forget what you saw before, and you’re really just in it in the moment, so therefore you’ll forget about the Stuart Special. Hopefully, it caught your attention, but it’s not making you think back to it. If you’re thinking back to the opening halfway through the movie, something’s not working halfway in the movie. Cool.

**Megana:** Sam asks, “I’ve encountered a lot of advice over the years about dealing with scripts that are too long, but I rarely see people talk about what to do when a script comes up short in length, like when a feature draft is 75 pages. I realize I might just write 75-page features, but I have a hunch that I rush through things. I’m a video/podcast editor as my day job, and I think my instincts to cut things down take over during outlining and writing. I have a hard time not going as quickly as I can from wherever I’m starting a script to the ending I have in mind. Do you have any advice for how to allow scripts to breathe or for how to take a short script and look for what might be missing from it?”

**John:** Sam, I think the real problem here is you probably don’t have a second act. I’m guessing that what you’re really writing is a first act and a third act, and you’re not really allowing a second act to breathe and develop and grow and change. By that, I mean you’re creating a situation and then you’re resolving that situation, without building and conflicts and other developments in between. I suspect it’s not that your scenes are too short, that you’re running too efficiently. It’s just that you’re not actually creating enough obstacles along the way for your story to finish. There’s nothing inherently wrong about a short script. I think we all love things that can clock in at under two hours. You are probably just not actually creating enough moments of conflict and development and suspense. You’re just not doing enough there. It really is probably an outlining phase problem.

Before you start your next project, really look at where are you starting, where do you think you want to end up, but where are the surprising things along the way that can happen? What are the detours that will be rewarding? Remember, you as the writer know where it’s all headed, but the audience shouldn’t know where it’s all headed. Really, what does the character want in the moment? How can you send that character down a road that makes sense for the character, that point, but is going to lead to new obstacles and new complications? I think you’re just probably missing beats. You’re just not letting yourself explore and enjoy the story the way that you want to in a feature film.

**Megana:** Great. No Context asks, “What tools do you use to keep track of notes and ideas that happen when you’re not at your desk, digital or analog?”

**John:** A couple things. I’ve talked on this show a lot about how I have a stack of index cards scattered throughout the house. If I need to write something down, like a note, an idea, a thought, I’ll just grab an index card and write it down and put it some place where I can find it again. If it’s in the middle of the night, I will take that and stick it by the bedroom door so that it’s there and I can take it downstairs in the morning and process it and put it in my notes of things to do.

I will also use the Notes app on my phone for things like casting lists or like, that’s a good idea for this person in this role. The Notes app is really helpful for that. We certainly share notes between me and my husband for things like the grocery list and stuff like that, stuff we want to be able to easily access and add to and share at any moment.

For things that I want to hold on to and I don’t have a thing to do with them right now, but I need to not forget them, I started using Roam, R-O-A-M. It’s called Roam Research, which is like a personal Wiki where you can just dump information. I’ll have broad categories of places where I’ll put stuff. It wants to enter everything into a daily view, so you can track what day you entered some stuff. Then it’ll have little category labels for things. If this is related to a project, I’ll just use that project category and dump in my notes for that. That’s how I’ve processed those individual index cards full of information, make sure I don’t forget those things. I don’t do a great job of going back through that, honestly, and remembering it, but I know it’s always there. It keeps it from being a loop in my brain.

I think one of the best things about taking notes is it just frees your brain from having to remember stuff yourself. The only way you can remember things is by looping it and keeping an active memory. Put it in that long-term memory, and then you don’t have to stress out about it.

**Megana:** Super helpful.

**John:** Megana, what do you use for your notes? I see you doing different things. What are you using right now for your notes?

**Megana:** I mostly use the Notes app on my phone, but it’s an absolute mess. I found a note on there the other day that just said “animals” and I have no idea what that means or why I wrote that. I will write things in the middle of the night or whatever, I have an idea, I’ll create a new note for it, but it’s not organized and it’s not functional in any way.

**John:** We don’t have phones in our bedroom, and so I don’t ever turn on my phone in my room. Having just physical paper is good, because it lets me get it out of my head, but it doesn’t invite me to do anything more with it. I can’t look something up in the middle of the night, which is really helpful for me.

**Megana:** That’s very cool. I’m going to try the index card thing.

**John:** If you’re reading a book and you need to take a note about something in a book, how do you do that?

**Megana:** I guess I take a picture of it on my phone.

**John:** Then do you do something with that picture or it just sits in your photo roll?

**Megana:** It just sits in my photo album.

**John:** I think using the camera as a memory tool, it’s so helpful and it’s just so handy, but it’s hard to doing anything with that after the fact. Now with the iPhone, you can select the text in a photo and copy it out. It’s a thing to do, but you have to actually remember to do that.

**Megana:** You can search by text now, which is cool, because I’m always quoting things that I read, but have no sense of where they came from, so that’s helpful.

**John:** It’s nice. If I’m reading a book and there’s something I do need to remember, I will grab an index card and just write it down, because the actual process of having to actually write it makes me think about it more and makes me think of the context of it. I will, again, try to just use paper when I can.

**Megana:** Do you ever annotate your books?

**John:** I’m not a person who marks them up a lot. I don’t underline or mark stuff up. You’ll see some books around the house where I’ve done that, but it’s really the exception. Are you a marker-up of books?

**Megana:** If it’s something I’m using towards my writing, then yes, but otherwise, not really.

**John:** Makes sense.

**Megana:** It’s a lot of effort.

**John:** I feel like I’m never going to see that again. I have that shame about not marking up books, because what I was taught in grade school and libraries is you just don’t mark up books. I always feel bad for the next person who’s going to get that book.

**Megana:** Exactly, or embarrassed that they’re going to think the things that I marked up were lame.

**John:** It’s always fun when I read a book on Kindle. You can see that a bunch of people have marked, have highlighted a passage. It’s like, oh yeah, I can see why everyone has highlighted that one passage.

**Megana:** I know, but I judge them for that. I’m like, oh really?

**John:** So basic.

**Megana:** Clint asks, “Since shorts move so quickly, I’d like your opinion on ways to do character development. It feels like there isn’t much time to develop a character. Should we strive for longer shorts of characters more the focus rather than plot?”

**John:** Clint, I wonder if you’re not thinking about shorts in the right way, because I think we talk so much on this podcast about character development and characters having wants and needs and going through a journey, and there’s this whole sense of leaving home and emerging transformed, and it’s all about a onetime journey that transforms a character. Shorts aren’t necessarily that. Shorts are often just a situation. Shorts are like short stories. They’re really describing what a character is experiencing. They’re like a snapshot in many ways, more than a full journey at times.

I think maybe you can ease off on your pressure to have this massive character development, because there’s not really a time or space for that. It’s not really what a short film is designed to do. A short film is more like a joke. It has a setup, development, and then a punchline, a delivery. That’s great. You don’t have to think about, oh, I need to make a longer short in order to have better character development. No. I think as long as you’re really exploring the question that the short film is asking and delivering a good answer, that’s really the goal.

What you may also be thinking about is how many characters you’re trying to introduce into your short film. I think some of the best short films are really constrained in the number of characters they’re giving us, so it can really follow one person’s short journey in it. You may not have time or space to have meaningful characters set up who are having real conflict with each other. Really, it’s about one character encountering a situation and getting through a situation.

**Megana:** I agree with you. I think maybe the expectation for a short is different. Even as an audience member, I’m not expecting to see character development. I just want to see something, a little slice-of-life sort of thing.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s a postcard rather than a full book.

**Megana:** Adrian asks, “In what part of writing the script do you think about music? Not like the movie Yesterday where the plot revolves around the music. I’m particularly curious about music rights that you don’t own.”

**John:** I tend to think about music pretty early on in the process, because I’m really trying to figure out what does this movie feel like, what does this show feel like, what does it sound like. I will try to build playlists for myself in Apple Music pretty early on, just like, this is what reminds me of this movie that I’m writing. Those songs won’t necessarily make it into the soundtrack. They may not be part of the script, but they’re just giving me a sense of what this all feels like.

There’s a new project that I may be doing. I’ve already started pulling some songs that make me feel like, oh, I would love to see this in context of the show, or it just reminds me of what I want this to feel like. This is a composer that I think would be fantastic for it. This is a vibe that I think is fantastic for it. Pretty early on, I do think about the music.

Yes, there are practical concerns about what songs you’re going to actually be able to get or not get. That’s going to come down the road. I don’t try to stress out about that too much at the start. For my movie The Nines, I wanted some musical kind of numbers. There would be two songs that would be sung in the course of the movie. Quite early on, I knew those would be important story scenes and that we needed to actually license the rights and prerecord them and do all that stuff. That was great and that was exciting. That’s not the norm for most scripts you’re going to be writing for someone else to read.

I would say just use thinking about music as a way to help you build the world in your head, but also don’t let it become a time suck where you’re curating the perfect playlist for this movie that you’re never actually writing. All these kind of things can be distractions from the actual real hard work of sitting down and putting words after each other to actually build your movie.

**Megana:** I get to listen to that music sometimes when you and I are driving around or something, but are you sharing that with anyone else?

**John:** Generally not. There’s one project which I had a collaborator on, so he and I have a shared playlist for that. No, I’m not usually sending in a bunch of tracks along with the script to the studio. If it is generally musical, then of course we’re all listening to the same things or making sure we’re talking about the same songs. At this stage, I wouldn’t be sharing this with anybody else. For one project I’m working on, there’s a very specific vibe of music that I’m trying to do. I think it may make sense for me to put in links in the script to some examples of what this is going to sound like, because otherwise people may not really have a sense of what it is I’m describing. You’ve actually talked about one of your projects, you just put links in the pdfs to the songs, and that was helpful. I’ve done that with another project, on your suggestion.

**Megana:** Cool. I’ve never seen you reference a particular song if it wasn’t a musical in your script before, but I definitely feel that the vibe that you’ve created in your playlist translates.

**John:** In my script for Dark Shadows, Let the Sunshine In was an incredibly important song for one sequence. That’s a thing where I did script into the movie, like, this is going to happen here, but that’s really an exception for me.

**Megana:** Cool. Nick asks, “What are some of the ways seeing your work produced has influenced your writing style, particularly seeing actors perform your characters and their dialog, and possibly the questions they ask you about it?”

**John:** It is a big difference when you first see something actually happening in front of you. The first thing I had produced was Go. I remember sitting on set. We were shooting this scene which is no longer in the movie. We’re in this apartment building. I’m sitting on the floor outside of camera view and watching this first scene get shot. I was just so excited. I’m seeing these things happening. These words I wrote are actually now… Actors are saying them and it’s all happening in front of me.

Then you realize it all becomes small technical questions on the day. You approach the scene with this perfect idealized version of how it’s all going to be. Then when you actually get there, you realize there are a thousand compromises and some wonderful discoveries you make along the way, like, “Oh, I didn’t see that as a possibility. This is really great. I love that line reading they’re giving. I love how the director’s staging this thing.”

More importantly and more present are the compromises that are being made based on the reality of the locations you have, the time you have, who you have, the number of setups you can get into. I think a thing you learn over time is what’s easy and what’s difficult in production. The things that are going to be obstacles along the way could be the number of night scenes you have, the number of kids you have, the number of really complicated setups, the number of characters you have in a scene.

A thing I don’t think I realized was when I was just pushing words around on paper is that if you have a character who is not doing anything in a scene, it’s really tough for that actor to be present in a scene but not actually have lines or have a specific thing they’re trying to do. They just become dead weight there. When we’re reading a script, we don’t really notice it in there, but then you actually shoot a scene, you realize, oh wow, that character’s standing there and has nothing to do. That becomes a problem. That’s a conversation you end up having with directors and actors and finding business for them on the set.

A thing you also recognize once you’ve actually had things produced is recognizing that scenes that aren’t absolutely necessary will probably get cut, because there’s just this ruthless pressure to have everything build to the next thing and build to the next scene. If you have a scene that you really need to keep in there for tone reasons, for comedy reasons, make sure there’s a plot reason why it also needs to be in there, because otherwise, it’s in real jeopardy.

When you talk with actors about what they’re doing in the scene or what their motivation is, it’s important, as a writer, to remember that they are there to be the character, they are not there to be the movie. Always frame your answers in terms of what it is they’re trying to do right now and what is right in front of them and not what the scene is supposed to do or what’s happening in the movie, because they don’t know, they don’t care, that’s not their responsibility. Their responsibility is to their performance in this moment. That can be a thing that’s hard to remember, because you are the person who has this God’s-eye view on the whole thing. You remember why that character’s saying that line, because it’s setting up something down the road that doesn’t matter. What matters is why they are saying in that moment.

One of the things I think is really useful about being the screenwriter though who does have a God’s-eye view is sometimes there can be an instinct in a scene to make a little change. It doesn’t matter. It flows a little bit more naturally, but you know it sets up something very important later on. It echoes something later on. You may need to stop and say, “I get why you’re trying to do that. This becomes important later on for these reasons,” and you can have that conversation. That’s another good reason to have a writer on set, because you can sometimes point to things that they wouldn’t otherwise see.

The last thing I would say is that you’ll see in director Q and A’s about a movie that came out, it’s like, “Oh, I had this long scene, and then we decided that actor can just do it in a look. They don’t need all this dialog. They don’t need all this stuff.” Sure, that happens some. Often, you do need the dialog, or at least without that dialog you wouldn’t have gotten to that look. It’s recognizing that you are giving them things to say and stage directions to help create that mood. Sometimes they can cut things out, because we got it with a look. That doesn’t mean it was a failure on your part as a writer. It means it was a success that you were able to create a situation in which they could give a performance that didn’t need to have all the words you originally could’ve put there.

**Megana:** That’s super helpful. You and I both watched a movie recently where you could say all of the actors are in their own different movie. That’s a really helpful thing to keep in mind. Your point about having actors who are necessary to the scene reminded me of that Patton Oswalt clip in, I think it’s the King of Queens, where he’s in the scene but doesn’t have any dialog, and he just stands perfectly still in the background. Have you seen it?

**John:** I haven’t. That sounds great.

**Megana:** It’s amazing. I’ll include it in the show notes and Slack it to you. It’s so good.

**John:** That surprises me with something like King of Queens, because I feel like an ongoing show would have a really good sense of like, okay, we have to service all these characters and all these actors. They probably wouldn’t put somebody in the scene who didn’t absolutely need to be there. Sometimes they needed him for one line, which was coming at the very end. There are these wide shots that you can just see him there in the acts. It’s tough.

A thing you don’t appreciate when you’re writing scenes is how they’re going to be shot and how coverage is going to work, which is basically when the camera is focused on one actor versus another actor and when you’re in wider shots, when you’re in medium shots, and how differently it’ll play than the master shot that you’re probably thinking about as you’re writing the scene. Generally, we’re writing scenes to reflect reality, like what is actually really happening in this space. We’re not hopefully thinking too much shot by shot by shot by shot, but ultimately it is going to be shot by shot by shot by shot, and understanding that some things are going to change and feel different because of that. The rhythms and the tempos will change. That’s just the compromise we’re making for the media that we’re chosen to write in.

**Megana:** I’d love to hear you guys talk more about just the mechanics of characters entering and leaving scenes.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s put that on the board for a future episode, because entrances and exits are so crucial. We try to cut them as much as possible, because they can be shoe leather, but they can also be really essential when they need to happen. On stage, they have to happen, because bodies have to move on and move off. There’s a whole art to that. There’s a very different art to how we do it on film and television.

**Megana:** Great. Next question, Katie in LA asks, “I’ve been wanting your perspective on the intersection of parenting and art, specifically in regards to Euphoria. Do you watch it? Do your children? As a parent of a five-year-old, it gives me panic attacks, but as you are further along in your parenting journey, I’d love to know if it’s a thing for you and/or how you’re talking to your kids about it.”

**John:** As a parent of a teen, Euphoria also gives me panic attacks. Listen, it’s a show about high schoolers, which means that junior high schoolers really want to watch it. They want to watch it most. Yet it’s a show that’s really made for adults.

I want to both support the show in terms of it has its vision of showing high school life through a very different lens, and I want to support that vision, and yet as a parent I really wish the show didn’t exist. I can say that. I wish the show didn’t exist as a parent, not as a writer, because I think it is so dangerously attractive to exactly the teens who shouldn’t be watching it. It’s not trying to glamorize that life, and yet it is glamorizing that life, because these are ridiculously attractive people doing really dangerous things in this perpetual Southern California fog somehow. For all the reasons it is so attractive to teenagers, I think it’s also not a great thing for certain teenagers to watch. I think it can be really triggering for some kids who should not be seeing it.

Katie’s talking about she has a five-year-old. You can control access to media for a five-year-old. It’s much harder to control access to media for a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old who has the internet and who can find stuff, even if you were to put a password on your HBO Max account. That’s a real question. I think the issues of responsibility kick in there too. Yet I don’t want to take away their specific vision of somebody who wants to make this show about this experience. It’s just tough.

I have to hold both things, that I want the show to be able to exist, because it’s a show with an artistic vision and really great performances and all the things that are noble about it, and as a parent I don’t want it to be out there for teens who shouldn’t see it. It’s really hard to keep your teens from seeing it. I do feel like sometimes people who create things like this aren’t aware of how challenging it is to keep things from teens who want to see it. Megana, what’s your take on Euphoria? You’ve watched it.

**Megana:** I’ve watched it. I watched the first season. I haven’t seen the second season yet. I also don’t know if I’m ready for it. They are impossibly cool and hot. I could totally see how if I was in junior high school it would set up this expectation. I think kids are able to parse things out and know that that’s not reality, but it is a little bit harder to discern when you’re that age and you’re that close to it. I totally hear what you’re saying. That makes a lot of sense.

Jerry asks, “I’m intercutting between two scenes that happen at the same place, but at different times. This will be sustained for three and a half pages. Is it best to use slug lines in transitions or offer an action line detailing the nature of the transitions early on in the scene?”

**John:** The word Jerry wants is intercutting or intercut. What he can do, and this is common, you’ll see it in a lot of scripts, is let’s say there’s two basic scenes happening. There is a bank robbery happening and there is a scene in a diner happening. They’re happening at the same time. You’re intercutting between the two of them. They have some sort of play between the two of them, but they’re not the same scene. They’re two different spaces. Generally, you’ll set up one moment. The bank heist is happening, and we’re seeing what’s happening in the vault. That’ll be its own scene header. New scene header for INT diner day, and these two characters are having this meal.

Then at a certain point you say intercut. Intercut means both scenes are going to be happening. From that point forward, you can just use the scene description to talk about what’s happening in those moments. You don’t have to keep going back to scene header, scene header, scene header. For most situations, this will get you through it and it’ll feel nice and natural, because you’re not stopping the flow constantly the way you would be if you were throwing in scene headers all the time. It makes it really feel more like the sequence would be in the movie then just a bunch of scene headers on a page. Intercut or intercutting is your friend there.

At a certain point when you’re done with that, you say, END INTERCUTTING. That’s all uppercase, generally with a period, basically like, hey, we’re done with that sequence and now it’s time to move on. Then either you stay in one of your moments, in one of your situations, or you go to a whole new scene header for a new place that you’re going to end up.

**Megana:** I see. Would you also delineate when you are going to see a certain scene by using voiceover from the other scene? Does that make sense?

**John:** If it’s important that we’re not seeing the character on screen doing it, but that it’s a voiceover, sure, you put the VO after them. I think you would probably want to indicate, from Max side, Molly VO, they’re coming right towards you, or something like that. That’s a situation where you might want to try to make that more clear. In most cases it will just make sense. You can find ways just with scene description to have it make sense. We know who the characters are. We know where they are. You don’t need to hold our hand through it all.

**Megana:** That’s super helpful.

**John:** That was a good palette cleanser there. We can go back to something a little bit more challenging.

**Megana:** Enthusiastic But Not Ignorant asks, “I’m a mid-career mid-list novelist. I’ve written several books which have been published by commercial houses and well-reviewed in major outlets, but I’m not a bestseller. Now an established production company with a solid track record has made an option offer on my latest book, with the aim of making a limited series. My question is this. If I wanted to use this opportunity to get some TV writing experience, what is the best way to go about it? Should I ask to take a crack at the pilot on spec? Should I wait to see if something goes into production and try to get in the writers’ room? I want to be involved, but I also want to give this the best chance of success, which probably means allowing people who have actually done this before to take the reins.”

**John:** I love Enthusiastic, because Enthusiastic sees what they want, but also recognizes why going after what they want too aggressively may hurt the thing down the road. You’re coming at this from the right perspective. Congratulations on writing the books, and this book in particular which may go to limited series. Take that victory for what it is.

I think your goal now should be, how do I help this series be as awesome as it could possibly be? That is by being supportive and enthusiastic about the project, supportive and enthusiastic about who are they bringing to be the showrunner on this project, who hopefully you will meet with. Try to be that resource for them, so that they always feel like you’re on their side, you are that person who can help them achieve greatness with this.

I would not try to write this pilot yourself, because you don’t know how to do it. All the natural problems that are going to come up with writing this pilot are going to be amplified, because they’re going to be worried about you as a new screenwriter trying to adapt this thing. You could turn the same script that somebody else could turn in, but they’re going to judge it weirdly because you don’t have experience actually making the show. I think you should not try to write it.

I think you should offer to read absolutely anything, give enthusiastic, positive notes, really try to help the process, but not intervene very much in it, because I do worry that you’re going to probably derail it more than you’re going to help it. In success, then you have the opportunity to be more involved on the next project, and you’ll also read a bunch of these things, you’ll have seen how this all happened and how the sausage was made.

**Megana:** Would you recommend that Enthusiastic try to get into the writers’ room down the line? I hear what you’re saying about the pilot, but should they, I don’t know, try to position themself for any sort of writing credit on this project?

**John:** I don’t think that’s a great idea, because I think if you were going to be in the writers’ room on a project, there’s going to be this weird power dynamic between you and the showrunner, because you are the person who created the original material, and this is the showrunner, and if they’re changing things, people look, like, “Oh, is it okay that they’re changing this thing? I don’t think that’s a great idea.”

If people can write with other experiences where it’s worked out great, fantastic. I know on The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof and the guy who wrote the book The Leftovers, they did collaborate on stuff, and that sounded great. If the person who wants to adapt your book wants to adapt it with you, that’s great. That’s a fantastic dream scenario, but that’s not likely. It’s going to probably be a very special situation if that’s the case. I think Tom Perrotta is the man I was trying to think about for The Leftovers. Maybe that’ll happen, but I don’t think it’s going to probably happen in this case.

**Megana:** Got it. Francesco asks, “I’ve been watching the Dirty Harry series on HBO Max recently, as well as Bullet, and found myself wondering why we don’t get a lot of movies set in San Francisco anymore. In the ’60s and ’70s it seemed like a reasonable place to set movies, but in the last couple of decades, everything seems to be set in either New York or LA. The exceptions are biopics about people from SF, like Milk. Even a movie that was written and set in San Francisco like 500 Days of Summer ended up being switched to LA. Is there some financial or logistical reason for this, like San Francisco not offering good tax credits, or are cities other than Los Angeles and New York not considered relatable or interesting anymore? I ask about the lack of San Francisco-based movies because it’s my nearest big city, but I suspect if they were making Rocky now, it wouldn’t be set in Philadelphia. Thoughts?”

**John:** I think Rocky would still be set in Philadelphia. I think San Francisco is a weird special case that’s worth looking at. San Francisco, from what I understand from producers who try to shoot there, it’s just ridiculously hard to shoot there. It makes you recognize how much LA and New York City bend over backwards to make it comparably easy to shoot there. When it comes to permits, policing, neighbors, parking, basically the infrastructure within a town to make it simple to shoot a film there are just much robust in cities that shoot a lot. There’s a virtuous cycle where because things shoot here, it’s easy to shoot things here. Because things aren’t shooting in San Francisco, it’s harder to shoot things there. You don’t have the crew and equipment infrastructure, because there aren’t crews ready to go in San Francisco of a size for a big studio feature, because there aren’t people living up there who have been doing that all the time.

There are some logistical problems in San Francisco apparently also just because of it’s so hilly. Where you park the trucks is a real challenge. If you don’t have good cooperation from police and traffic and everybody else to move cars off the road, so you can actually park places where you need to put those big trucks, that can be a challenge.

That said, there are movies that are shot there. I’m thinking back to Diary of a Teenage Girl. Marielle Heller came on to talk about that. That was shot in San Francisco. Again, it’s a smaller movie. It has a smaller footprint, which makes a lot more sense for that. The HBO show Looking that I loved was also set in San Francisco, shot in San Francisco. They made it work, but I bet it was more challenging in San Francisco than it would’ve been here in Los Angeles. They made the choice to really do it in San Francisco, which is great for that.

I do think Rocky would shoot in Philadelphia. That was iconic for that movie, that place. You’re also close enough to New York City that you can pull in a crew from New York if you need to. It’s not that challenging.

When we made Big Fish, we were in Montgomery, Alabama and Wetumpka, Alabama. There was no crew, and so we had to pull people in from every place else. The city was really accommodating for us because we were the first big feature to come in there, but they didn’t have the kind of infrastructure that other places would have. We had to wing it. We had to spend money that we wouldn’t have otherwise had to spend, just because of the challenges of shooting in a place that was not used to filming.

**Megana:** Interesting. Cool. Paul asks, “Will Zoom pitches still play a big role in post-pandemic life or will this all go back to, quote, in the room?”

**John:** I think Zoom pitches are here to stay. Right now in Los Angeles as we’re recording this, it’s safe enough that people could go back in the room to do things in person. I actually think they’re going to go back to doing stuff in person. All the meetings and the pitches I’ve had recently have been on Zoom, and producers and other folks who aren’t even in Los Angeles. It would be really impossible or very unlikely to get them to fly to Los Angeles to do this one pitch. I think Zoom pitching is here to stay. I think 70, 80% of pitches coming up will be Zoom pitches, at least for the next few years. It’s not just the pandemic. It really is an easier, better way to do some of this work.

Megana, you’ve been helping me out so much on pitching recently. I have these slide decks I need to use. We discovered it’s much easier for you to join the Zoom call as well and be the person driving the slides while I’m just talking. I’m not responsible for clicking forward and switching stuff from one input to another input. I think it does just make sense for pitching really. When you’re on Zoom, everyone can look at the same set of slides or everyone’s looking forward. You’re not having to pay attention to one person in the room or other people in the room. I just think it’s better, and I think Zoom pitching is here to stay.

**Megana:** All the things about, I don’t know, your bodily awareness you don’t have to worry about in a Zoom pitch, like, oh, this outfit I’m wearing is scratchy or I’m too hot in this room. You can control it, because it’s your house.

**John:** Megana, you’ve been pitching a ton, but you’ve only done Zoom pitches. You don’t really have the experience of pitching a project in a room, correct?

**Megana:** Correct, but I love Zoom pitches. They’re fun. I guess I’ve adapted to the Zoom of it all. I’m sure I would love in-person pitches too, because I like meeting people and chatting. I think the Zoom, and now that we’ve all gotten a little bit better at the logistics of sharing kino and the tech behind it, it’s become really seamless and everyone knows what to expect.

**John:** What I do miss about in-person pitching and in-person meetings, general meetings too, is I think you get a sense of whether you vibe with somebody better in person than you do on Zoom. That’s just a reality check. I remember very early meetings with Andrea Giannetti, who’s at Sony now, but back when she was at TriStar, she calls me into her office and she’s like [unclear 00:37:46] going through stuff and just get a sense of, oh, I get who you are. I don’t think I would have that same experience with her now on Zoom, just because a Zoom meeting is just much more functional. It’s not hang out and vibe and chitchat a bit. It’s different on that level. I will miss a little of that, but on the whole, we’ve had the chance to pitch to, as you saw, 12 places that would’ve been impossible to pitch if we were trying to do this in person.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh. That’s a great point. I’ve had a couple of generals that have been in person. From the logistics of meeting someone and figuring out who they are at the coffee shop or where to go in the office, all of that in-between stuff, I do think you get a good sense of your dynamic and who the other person is that you don’t via Zoom.

**John:** There’s going to be some function of in-person stuff for certain kinds of things, but if we’re actually going out to pitch a project and trying to pitch to 10 places in a week, Zoom is just so much better. I remember when we were trying to set up Prince of Persia, and Jordan Mechner and I were literally driving studio to studio to studio, and it was all like, could we get from this place to that place, or suddenly we’d have to go from Sony to Warner Bros.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** It’s tough. The folks who don’t live in Los Angeles are like, what’s the difference between Sony and Warner Bros? It’s an hour in bad traffic.

**Megana:** What else is nice is I feel like it frees up your day, because there are certain times of day in Los Angeles where no one should be driving. Now you can pitch at 4 o’clock and it’s no big deal.

**John:** There was a company who wanted to do Arlo Finch, and so I remember going out to have a meeting with them in Santa Monica. I liked them, but the fact that they were in Santa Monica made me really a little bit down on them as a place. Now, much less of a deal, because I recognize I would never be driving out to Santa Monica.

**Megana:** Moving on to Ben, Ben asked, “I finally got a job at a major film studio. I’m a receptionist/office coordinator. On my break, my boss’s boss’s boss saw me working on my script. We talked about story for a while, and as she was leaving, she invited me to send her a, quote, solid script, and that she would forward it to the head of the studio. I told her that I had just started on this script and I wanted to take my time. She said, ‘No worries. This is an open invitation. Take a year if you need. We aren’t going anywhere.’ My question is, can I really take a year? I’m worried that she’ll forget about her offer or she might move on to another studio or something like that.”

**John:** Ben, you can take a year. Don’t burn this offer too quickly on something that’s not great. Whatever you do decide to give to her, have some other people read it first and tell you, oh, this is good, because don’t give her something that’s not good, because it’s not going to help anybody. She says she’ll forward it to the head of the studio. We’ll see. She’ll forward it to the head of the studio if she really, really, really likes it. More importantly, she’s a person who could be a fan on your side, so that’s great.

It seems like Ben is back in person where he’s working, because someone’s walking by and seeing him do something. That’s exciting for Ben. That is one of the real advantages to being in person is that casual notice somebody’s doing something and have it work there. It reminds me of when I was an intern at Universal. I was responsible for really menial filing of paperwork and stuff. Doing my lunch breaks, I would type up my script. I had handwritten pages, and over the lunch break I would type them up on my little laptop in the commissary.

**Megana:** Aw.

**John:** Some people would ask to see stuff, and I just knew that I wasn’t ready to show this to anybody. It was nice that they asked. They could see that my goal wasn’t to be a clerk filist, my goal was to be a screenwriter, and they were rooting for me in some way, which was nice. You had more experience though with this probably recently with folks in your writing group and when they show it to superiors or folks they’re working with. What is the consensus you’re hearing out there on the street?

**Megana:** I agree with you. I think a year is totally fine. I think in LA there’s just a weird sense of time because we don’t have seasons. To me I wouldn’t even notice if someone sent something to me a year later. The other point that I was going to make is I think definitely have your friends or your writing group or writers you respect read it. A piece of advice that my friend Joey Siara from my writers group gives is, at a certain point though, if your friends have been reading multiple drafts, they’re no longer objective readers, and they’re your friends, so they can’t always give you harsh feedback. I think at a point like that, using something like the blacklist or having a third-party reader who’s not been invested in your project since the genesis of the idea is really helpful to get some more measured and neutral feedback before you send it to a professional like your boss’s boss.

**John:** For sure. [Unclear 00:42:37] next.

**Megana:** Mark from Tennessee asks, “Can you give examples of scenes that you wrote that you realized would be difficult to shoot and how you rewrote them to be more shootable and/or production-friendly without compromising the quality or purpose of the scene?”

**John:** Great, I can think of a lot of examples of those kind of rewrites. In the original script for Big Fish, there is a sequence about how Edward Bloom was born. It came from the book. It was this big mythological birth moment that happened. We got to Alabama, and Tim Burton said, “I just don’t have a place to shoot this. It just doesn’t actually work here. Can we do something simpler like he’s really slippery?” I’m like, great, he can be a slippery baby. It became a much shorter, simpler scene. Also, it got a laugh and it was the right kind of change. It was really a production change. It was a money, budget, couldn’t actually shoot it change, but it was a better change for the movie, so I was happy to make that alteration.

In Go, the original script, there is an additional character who appears in the third section. I always called her the Linda Hunt character. She’s a supervisor to Burke. She got written out because she had nothing else to do. It was logistical in the sense of we just couldn’t really afford the scenes, but also it just didn’t need to be there. It was a good cut. Then when we went back and did the reshoots for Go, originally the three sections of that movie branched off from different scenes. It was at the supermarket, but they were different scenes. That’s what kicked them off. It was recognized, oh no, we should go back to the exact same scene each time that jumps us off to the new place. It was this simplification there that really helped.

For The Nines, I think one of the things that was really helpful is we found a way to shoot LA for New York City. When we did the actual real New York City stuff, our footprint was super, super small. It was just me, a camera operator, and a local sound person. We didn’t have any trucks. We didn’t have anything. We could just shoot the New York exteriors we needed and sell that. We didn’t need to bring anybody else there to New York. A lot of the stuff that takes place in the New York section of the movie is all LA, including the New York jewelry district, just because our downtown LA can look like New York if you frame it right.

The other thing which was so crucial for The Nines was recognizing that usually when you’re trying to schedule a movie, you’re trying to schedule around locations. You’re trying to shoot out a location and move on to the next location so you don’t have to go back to a location. In this case, we had to optimize for what part of the movie we were in, and really it came down to the state of Ryan Reynolds’s hair and beard, because we were cutting his hair, we were coloring his hair, he had a beard, he had no beard, and so we had to optimize for that. Because we were shooting the main set as my house, we could shoot at my house, go do something else, come back to my house, go do something else, and so we could dress the house and do the house, just be really flexible in that location. That made all the difference, because the movie would cost so much more if we had to do wigs and other things to make all the rest of the things work so we could shoot out a location. That was a big factor.

The general things you’re looking for when you’re trying to figure out for production concerns are, does it have to be night. If it can day, it’s going to be just simpler. Can we not have children? Can we not have animals? Those are things that add complexity. If you can avoid those, you’re going to save some time and some frustration.

**Megana:** Can I ask you a question about this simplifying out the Linda Hunt character? I know that you worked on movies that are shooting as you are rewriting things. What is your methodology for that? I feel like my brain would explode.

**John:** That got dropped out before we had really even budgeted. We knew that that was going to go away. If you’re in production and you’re recognizing, okay, all these things are shifting… The Charlie’s Angels movies are examples of everything was shifting every day, and you had to figure out what we shot, what’s coming up next, what was public. You really just try and optimize for what is the movie we’re trying to make right now and not be too beholden on what the original plan was behind things. If there’s a simplification to be had, do it. If it’s not going to materially affect the story you’re trying to tell or the production value you’re trying to achieve, you do it. Things like if you have to move the crew from one place to another place, that’s a huge drag, unless it’s not.

An example in Big Fish is we were shooting in Montgomery, Alabama, and we would shoot exteriors at the river, but then if the weather turned or the light was not good, they could just pull up the trucks at lunch and move back to our stages, which was just this warehouse, and shoot stuff in the afternoon at the stages. Being flexible and recognizing what is the priority. In the case of Big Fish, sometimes the priority was let’s get really good light for these exteriors, and you could optimize for that.

**Megana:** Very cool. Moving on, Ryan asks, “Screenplay examples for instruction comes in waves. Tootsie, Star Wars, Casablanca. Which scripts from the last 20 years do you think should get, quote, taught in film programs?”

**John:** My first instinct was to say Aliens, but then I realized Aliens is more than 20 years old, which makes me feel so, so, so old. Listen, I think there’s so many great scripts to be picking there. A lot of indie films should also be higher up there. I think Booksmart is a great movie and does a really good job of its storytelling and character wants being explored and expressed, and it has a sense of fun and a sense of style, which is great. All Lord and Miller’s work is creative and fun and does really interesting things with audience expectation, so I’d move those up higher there. Wow, other great, recent movie examples…

I think the reason I was reaching back to Aliens is that was such a seminal script for how we’re writing action on the page, and I feel like it’s been duplicated so thoroughly and modeled so much in movies after that point that you could probably read any action film over the last 10 years and it’s still going to have some of that quality to it. Megana, I’ll throw this back to you. You’re newer to the screenplay format. Of the stuff that you’ve read that’s more recent, what do you think is going to be very teachable?

**Megana:** I guess a couple of other examples that I think seem fresher to me are The Wolf of Wall Street or Adam McKay movies where there’s just so much breaking the fourth wall and exposition done in a different way that feels new. Is that true?

**John:** I think that is also true. I think it’s playful with the format. You look at The Big Short and it’s how it’s getting that information out there. We’ve talked about The Social Network as being a really good movie to watch in terms of how it is telling a story, how it is using real life just as a springboard to make a very specific point about this environment. I think those movies will be on the short list.

It’s also worth noting that so many of the classic movies we’re pointing to, say like Tootsie, Star Wars, Casablanca, white guys wrote them, and so I think making sure that the canon that we’re teaching from isn’t just like, these are the white male screenwriters of that era. There’s really amazing films being made by filmmakers of all different backgrounds, and making sure that we’re not just teaching one kind of thing.

**Megana:** Totally. Eliza asks, “I’m an aspiring writer, and I’ve recently learned about the TV fellowship programs and decided to apply. Fast-forward to a month later and I’m bleeding out of my eyeballs and pulling out my hair.”

**John:** Oh no, Eliza.

**Megana:** That was so graphic. “The truth is I find TV spec scriptwriting to be incredibly hard. The number one tip that I’ve encountered is, spec what you love, but I love highly serialized shows. When I sit down and try to find some tiny crevice where I can maybe explore something further, say on a season of Killing Eve or The Morning Show, I run out of steam by the end of Act One. I just can’t for the life of me come up with a spec story that has legs long enough to travel for 60 pages, which lines up perfectly with what occurred in the preceding episode and what will occur in the succeeding episode.

“Writing a TV spec has been so shatteringly difficult that it’s making me question if I have potential as a writer at all. It’s supposed to be a straightforward exercise that amateur writers can use as a steppingstone to become professionals. In other words, it’s child’s play, right? Is this an indication that I should just pack up my stuff and head to the exit?”

**John:** Yes, Eliza, you should give up now. You should completely give up. No, Eliza, you have, I think, some wrong expectations. Let’s disabuse you of your wrong expectations. First let’s talk about what spec writing is for TV. When someone says a spec script when it comes to TV, they’re probably referring to this is an existing show, I’m going to write an episode of this existing show, not because they’re paying me to do it, but to show that I know how to write and that I could write a show like this. You write one of these things not because you’re trying to get hired for that specific show, but as a sample for you to get staffed on a show that could be kind of like it. If you’re writing The Morning Show and you’re hoping to get staffed on Bridgerton or something, you have the ability to do an existing thing.

These kind of spec scripts have fallen a bit out of favor. They were much more common when I was starting. Some showrunners really like them. I remember Mindy Kaling tweeting about how much she loves reading specs, because you get a sense of can this person write this voice, can this person really understand how this TV show works.

Useful exercise, but just understand that it has its limitations. One of the limitations that you’re encountering is that you really can’t try to fit your episode into the existing narrative and existing plot lines of a serialized drama that same way. You can’t make this be an alternate Episode 3 of Season 4. It’s just not going to work. Take that pressure off yourself. Instead ask, what is something you would love to see the show do at a certain point. Don’t try to be so serialized.

Find a way to take these characters and have them do something interesting that feels like it could be an episode of the show, it just wasn’t an episode of the show. The characters feel consistent with the universe of that original TV show, and yet they’re not trying to directly slot into something else that has happened in there. I’m going to reach back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You don’t have to make it fit into one season mythology or one big bad mythology. Just have it be something that feels like a classic, good episode of that show. Maybe if you’re going to do something interesting, take those characters somewhat out of their normal environment, put two characters together who don’t generally have opportunities to interact.

Do something that is both the voice of the show, but also stands out and is unique, so that a writer who may want to hire you, a showrunner who may want to hire you, says, “This person not only understands the show, but understands how to do something interesting with those characters and the elements that they’re given.

**Megana:** Totally. I think some of the expectations that Eliza has are a little too high. I don’t think anyone who is reading these fellowship applications is going to be tracking at one point in the season or the plot line this goes. They probably don’t even watch that show. They just have a sense of who the characters are or maybe they’ve seen an episode. I think that you’re absolutely right, and taking some of that pressure off will really help.

**John:** Don’t bleed out your eyeballs and don’t give up on this, because you’re trying to do something that’s really difficult, and it’s not a normal job at all. It’s not a normal thing to have to write an episode of a show you’re not getting paid to write, that you don’t have the writers’ room as a resource. You’re trying to do a weird thing, so just try the best job at it you can. I think honestly these kind of spec pilots make more sense for comedy. They show your comedy chops and your ability to write characters’ voices in a way that make more sense, which may be why I think so much of staffing has moved to reading original stuff rather than specs of existing shows.

**Megana:** I think specking what you love makes a lot of sense because you know the world of the show, but I’ve never specked something that’s a highly serialized drama. I wonder if that’s also making it harder for her. I wonder if there’s a procedural she likes enough that she could write a spec for.

**John:** That’s such a great point. It reminds me of that Ira Glass quote about, at a certain point you recognize you have taste, but you don’t have talent. She probably has really good taste when it comes to The Morning Show, so she knows exactly how it’ll all work and she knows what a great episode this is, and she’s comparing what she’s writing to the very best episode of The Morning Show ever, and not being able to see the process to get there. I do think picking something that she loves so much may be part of the problem.

**Megana:** Totally. Moody asks, “What’s the deal with streamers and residuals? For example, do the writers of a Netflix Original or another subscription-based streamer make close to what a writer for a studio is going to make with purchase and rental fees? Are residuals even relevant the way they used to be?”

**John:** Oh yes. The question of streamers and residuals is an ongoing one. It’s going to be inevitably a focus of negotiation for the next MBA negotiations. Let’s talk through the current state of, if you write something for a streamer, how residuals work.
The important thing to understand is right now it is a fixed residual. Let’s say you got story and teleplay on a credit for a one-hour that you write for Netflix. This is an example here. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the WGA document that talks you through how you actually calculate what these things are, based on the current deal. For this one hour written for Netflix, the residual base would be $29,657. That’s not money you’re getting right now, but that’s what’s called the base of it. That’s how much the residual pot is worth for that.

Then it depends on how big the streamer is. There’s this thing called subscriber tiers, which is by how many people, I think only in North America, are subscribers to that service. In the case of Netflix, it’s the highest tier because they have the most at more than 45 million subscribers. It’s called a subscriber factor. You multiply that original 29,000 by 150%, so it increases that. Working off that, there’s what’s called an exhibition gear percentage. Basically, each year, a percentage of that total money, you’re getting paid out as a residual. It starts at 45% in the first year. It drops to 1.5% in years 13 and beyond.
For this hypothetical show that you’ve written that you got written by credit on, you would be getting a first-year residual of $20,000, and then it would drop dramatically year after year after year until 13 years where you get 1.5% of that, or one 40th of that really is the best way to think about that.

It’s really hard to compare this residual to what you would be getting in cable or in broadcast, because cable and broadcast, they are generally not fixed residuals. There’s a fixed residual for the first rerun in broadcast, but really your residual in normal TV is based on a percentage of the licensing deal. When Friends sells, for licensing, there’s a certain amount per episode, and you as a writer get a percentage of that. An incredibly successful show like Friends, that licensing fee is huge and your residuals can be huge. A show that is not a big hit could be a lot less.

Right now the deal with the streamers is, probably for some shows you’re getting a little bit more residuals on it, because it doesn’t matter whether it’s a success or not, but for the big hits you’re getting really screwed. You’re not getting any piece of that pie on a giant hit. If you write Stranger Things, you’re still getting the same crappy fixed residual. It’s not great right now. It could be a lot better. It’s a reason why I think there’s going to be so much focus on trying to improve how we’re doing this and to really make the success of a given show be reflected in the residuals that a writer gets for having written that show. Did that make sense? I’m trying to talk through a lot of numbers.

**Megana:** It does. We’ll link to this WGA article, because it’s really helpful, these graphs, and then the calculations and the examples that they walk through make it easier to follow. It is surprisingly complicated. I didn’t realize how much these percentages dropped off year over year.

**John:** Yeah, I think it falls off a cliff. Some caveats here, we’re talking about high-budget subscription video on demand, which is what you call the expensive stuff made for something like a Netflix. There’s a lower-budget thing, which obviously the results aren’t going to be as good, and the calculations work differently. If you’re making a movie that is originally intended for a theatrical market, but then it’s released on Netflix instead of being released theatrically, in that case they have to calculate what’s called an [unclear 00:59:01] license fee, which is basically how much they think the movie would be licensed for if it were out on the open market. That becomes harder and harder to do as there are fewer movies out there who then are showing up on streaming later on. There’s ways to calculate it when it’s not clear that it was made for this market, but it’s complicated.

When you’re in one of those situations, you get the Guild involved to check on it, and the Guild is constantly arguing about how certain things should be counted, so it’s tough. Let’s say you have an existing show that is then licensed through a streamer. That goes through a more normal residual process, which is basically there’s a license fee, Netflix is paying a certain amount per episode, you as a writer get a percentage of that amount in your residuals.

**Megana:** I have a lot of follow-up questions. Is that why day-and-date release stuff that came out during the pandemic was more complicated? Did that affect drastically how writers were being paid for movies that were simultaneously being theatrically released and put on streamers?

**John:** The fact of the residuals to some degree had a bigger impact though on box office bonuses, which is one of the ways we get around the problem of not having backend participation or having a meaningful backend gross is that we say in our contracts, okay, when this film reaches $50 million in the US box office, I get a bonus check of this. When it hits $100 million, I get a bonus check of this. It’s a way of giving us a backend. If something’s released day-and-date, your box office is going to be greatly lowered because of that. The Scarlett Johansson lawsuit over Black Widow was really about that, which is basically she had bonuses in her contract that she was not going to be able to hit because they released the movie day-and-date theatrically and in theaters.

**Megana:** Got it. Cool. We have four more questions left.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Megana:** They’re pretty quick. Mattias asks, “Other than writing, what’s something aspiring writers who live in LA should be doing?”

**John:** A quick checklist of things you should do other than write while you’re in Los Angeles. You should see movies. You see a bunch of movies. See the new releases, but also go to things like the Academy screening series. Go to any sort of retrospective stuff. Those are great to see. Anything where there’s a Q and A afterwards, especially with the filmmakers, with the writers, those are terrific. Whenever the ArcLight reopens, they do those. Directors series at Film Independent is really good. I host some of those events. Go to festivals. Go to festivals like Outfest or the indie festivals. Volunteer to crew at one of these things. You’ll meet some people. You’ll see a bunch of movies.

Go to plays. Go to comedy shows like Groundlings. You’ll see stars before they become stars and see how all that works. Take a class if you feel like taking a class. Again, you’ll meet other people who are trying to do what you’re trying to do, and writers, which is always good. If you’re in LA, you should hike, because you can, because there’s just a ton of hiking around Los Angeles.

Make sure you’re exploring different parts of the city. It’s really easy to get stuck in your one little bubble in Los Angeles, but LA’s giant and there’s so much to do. If you’re in Silver Lake, make sure you make it out to the ocean every once in a while. Vice versa, if you’re on the West Side, make sure you’re hitting downtown and other parts of the city.

Crew on your friends’ films. Find films that need PAs and be a PA. Just get some experience on a set while you’re here, because there’s always so much shooting. Learn how to shoot something. Get a camera. It doesn’t have to be an amazing camera. You can do it on your phone as well. Write a short thing and learn how to shoot it, because that’s a skill you’re going to need to learn to have. Understanding how shot by shot by shot you put something together is crucial. LA is where film was born, so do that while you’re here.

Finally, there’s a bunch of events that are always happening in Los Angeles. It’s one of the biggest cities in the world. Go to concerts, go to museums, make an art date with yourself to get out of your apartment and see things and do things, because there’s no reason to stay trapped indoors in Los Angeles. Go out and do stuff. What other advice would you have for Mattias here?

**Megana:** I think all that’s great. It’s made me more excited to live in LA. I think also specifically do things that are not related to the industry or not going to help you in any way. I think working in the industry and living in an industry town is really overwhelming and sometimes just suffocating, and so having things that are completely separate from that is helpful, like hobbies like swimming or pottery or things where there’s no way for you to network or be thinking about anything professional.

**John:** Agreed.

**Megana:** Great. We have a question from Flustered. Flustered asks, “Later this year we’re shooting my first US studio feature. I’m not a total newbie. I have experience in my home country, but this film is definitely my biggest moment to date. I pride myself on being a pretty chill person. I’m used to working with actors. I’m someone who’s never really been into celebrity culture. People are people. That is, until they attached our lead.”

**John:** Oh, no.

**Megana:** “They booked someone who would have made my 16-year-old self fall out of my chair. What I want to know is how do we as screenwriters be chill? I’ve had a couple of meetings with him to discuss the character pass I’m about to do, and he’s been bloody lovely, of course, so I’m off to an okay start, but come production, I’d love to get a photo with him. Ugh, just typing that feels so cringe. I just need tips on professionalism, and if asking for things like a photo is crossing some invisible line. This is a total nonissue in the scheme of things, but I literally didn’t know who else to ask.”

**John:** Don’t ask for the photo, Flustered. Celebrate the fact that you are interacting with this actor in a way that they see you as a professional and that they are excited to have you on board as the writer of the project. Don’t be a fan. Don’t ask for the photo.
It can be hard to be chill around people who are really famous and who are rich and successful and just gorgeous and all these things that overwhelm you. I find it helpful to be specific and really focus on what is your job, what do they need, how do you help them get the best performance, what are they interested and into.

My first meeting with Drew Barrymore was about Charlie’s Angels, and we really could talk, really vibe on what is the movie that we are trying to make, what does it feel like. We could arrive at a shared vision for how the movie should feel. That was a really good experience. Yeah, she was very famous at that moment, but she was also focused on the work. It sounds like this actor is focused on the work too. Don’t make it a fan situation by asking for a photo.

Here’s when you’ll get your photo. You’ll get your photo at the premier, which will be fantastic, because you’ll be on the Red Carpet and get a photo together, or on set, or the stills photographer on set. There can be some fun way for you to get that shot that you really want, but really focus on the movie rather than the photo.

**Megana:** This is the perfect time for fake it ’til you make it.

**John:** 100%.

**Megana:** Rena asks, “Do you have any tricks for not falling into patterns and dialog? For example, I find myself using the word honestly a lot, and honestly, it’s getting old.”

**John:** Oh Rena, I hit the same situation, and I find myself doing things like that where I’m just like, “Oh my god, I used the word actually three times on a page.” The only thing you can do is just be aware of it, and when you see it, stop it. Having someone else read through it, having, honestly, Megana read through stuff and say, “You used this word twice,” is how you’re going to notice it. Then when you do notice it, you will find a way to stop yourself from using it so often.
Now, in terms of dialog, yes, you’re trying to make characters sound like themselves. I think what you may be noticing is that if one character says “honestly,” another character shouldn’t say “honestly” that much. If one character says “honestly” a lot, that can feel authentic, because individual characters should fall into loops where they do say things the same way and have the same structure to things. That’s why Jim Halpert sounds different than Michael Scott. People have the natural things they go to, the patterns that they go to. I think Rena’s going to be okay.

**Megana:** Yeah. Also, with a tool like Highland, you can Find and Replace and just search for those things once you notice them.

**John:** Absolutely. If you notice “honestly,” just do a find for “honestly” and see all the times you’re using it and see when you don’t need that word. “Honestly” is one of those things where it generally can just be cut, and it’s a stronger sentence without “honestly” in front of it. If you need a softener, just find another softener to get you into it.

**Megana:** I have a problem with my action lines where I’ll say “starts to” instead of just whatever the action is. I do a pass where I edit all those sentences.

**John:** Good plan.

**Megana:** Last question, Shewani [ph] asks, “How do you handle balancing writing your own passion projects versus pitching on assignments?”

**John:** That’s a good question. I don’t always balance it great, but I think I’m always aware of these are things that I want to write. I have a short list of projects that I do want to hit at some point, or either start writing or come back to. These are things that are just things that I own and control that I want to be my own stuff. Whenever I turn in an assignment for someone else, I will try to prioritize going to one of those passion projects for at least the time I have, while I’m waiting on notes back or whatever, just so I do get some time to spend with those projects.

In terms of pitching versus writing your own stuff, if I am pitching something out there, I still have a lot of free writing time. I’ll try to use that free writing time on my passion projects. Am I trying to pitch these passion projects? Sometimes. Sometimes it feels like this is the time to get that thing out the door and get people reading it, but more often, the stuff I’m pitching on is stuff that exists that I’m trying to get to the next point or I’m trying to either get the job or get this project, this book or other property, set up some place. I still have the time to go and write the new stuff that is for myself.

Basically, I would say recognize that your writing time is crucial and important, and if you’re not doing work for somebody else writing, make sure you’re doing that work for yourself writing. Megana, we got through 20 questions. Was it only 20 questions? It felt like 9,000.

**Megana:** I’m sorry. I hope that wasn’t me asking the questions, but yes, that was 20.

**John:** 20 questions. 20 questions done. Let’s see Craig Mazin beat that. Should we go on to our One Cool Things?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is this video by Paul Stamets, who is a mycologist. He studies fungi and mushrooms. He as a scientist developed this fungi that attracts ants and termites, and they eat this thing and they bring it back to their nest where it kills them. It’s a pesticide, but it’s a very specific, clever pesticide where they bring it back into their nest and it kills them, but also makes everyone else stay away from it. It’s very site-specific, which I think is a really good idea. His patent is expired. He got his patent 17 years ago. Patents expire.

What I liked about this video is he was describing how excited he was that this is now open for anyone else to use, that this is now in the commons and people can build products off of it. Also, he was never able to actually bring it to market. He could never actually find a way to do it. I liked his honesty about like, “I really thought this would be a great thing and revolutionary, and I couldn’t do it. Maybe somebody else can. Also, here are the challenges you’re going to have, because it doesn’t have this patent protection anymore.” I just really liked his approach to this thing he developed which was really cool, which was not successful commercially, but is still good for the world. It’s just a good mix of the open sourcing and public goods and the real challenges of capitalism all wrapped up into one little video.

**Megana:** That really fits with the ethos behind your work.

**John:** Fountain is an example. It’s a public good. It’s screenwriting syntax, which is good for a lot of people. It’s had some success, but it hasn’t revolutionized the world in ways I would’ve liked. It hasn’t been the ever-attracting mushroom that has destroyed other entities, but it’s had its own little, small successes.

**Megana:** Very cool. I guess thematically related, my One Cool Thing is Under White Sky: The Nature of the Future. It’s this book by Elizabeth Kolbert. She won the Pulitzer Prize for this book The Sixth Extinction. I haven’t finished it yet, but I think there’s nine different examples of ways in which humans have tried to fix certain problems that have happened in ecosystems or the environment, and now she looks at things 30, 50 years down the line, and how we are now trying to remedy the ways that we have interfered and caused greater problems in the environment. She looks at the Mississippi River and carp. I was just telling you this example about these pupfish that are in Devils Hole in the Mojave Desert. While that land has been protected, 100 miles away in Nevada they were doing nuclear testing, and how that has influenced this very specific species’ survival rates is so fascinating.

**John:** On the inspiring-depressing scale, where would you put this?

**Megana:** I was thinking about that before I recommended it, because I was like, it does depress me, but you know I love some dry nonfiction to get me to bed.

**John:** Oh yeah, me too.

**Megana:** It’s pretty bleak, because so far it doesn’t feel like we as humans can do anything right. If we do something that seems to temporarily help the environment or help the world in some way, this takes the long view look at it, and it’s like, nope, you actually messed things up far more than you realized. It is pretty bleak. It’s depressing.

**John:** I’ll add it to the list, but I think I have a few more cheery things to get through before I get to a mass bleak book.

**Megana:** Fair enough.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Thank you again, Megana Rao, our producer, for all those questions, and for everybody who sent in their questions. That’s so, so helpful. Our show’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Out outro is by Ben Gerrior. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can also sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on murder houses. Megana Rao, thank you again.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, let’s talk murder and architecture, because you had encouraged me to watch this movie Fresh. It’s only a very mild spoiler to say there is a killer in this movie who has a really stylish house, a house like, oh, I would love to have this house. It’s a little bit remote. It’s not a creepy cabin. It has good, natural wood finishes and details. It feels nice. It also has a basement that is set up for murder, but not a grungy, grimy murder. It’s much more sophisticated. It feels like a spa. It’s like a spa where you get dismembered.

**Megana:** Like one of those places where you can get plastic surgery but you’re still at this retreat.

**John:** Oh yeah, completely. Like where she goes in Hacks.

**Megana:** Yes, exactly.

**John:** Like that. It’s all tasteful, all well-done. You might be chained to the floor, but it’s got good aesthetics to it. You got your stainless steel toilet. You got a little drinking fountain. You’ve got some things you need. Even the bars closing off your cell, they’re wood. It looks like teak.

**Megana:** It’s like Scandinavian.

**John:** It’s very Scandinavian, which is also a good tie-in to Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a Scandinavian thriller in which ultimately we discover this murderer who has this house. It’s like, okay, part of your house is just designed as an abattoir. It’s clearly set up to just slaughter people.

**Megana:** I re-watched that scene from Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He also has this whole setup in the basement where instead of a sprinkler system, it fills the room with gas and he has his own personal gas mask that he just attaches, I guess, when he climbs down the stairs. It’s just all part of the process. I feel like he must have rigged that, because how do you get a contractor to do something like that?

**John:** Are they just really good do-it-yourself-ers who just have really good skills for this, because I was thinking the main character in Fresh is an accomplished surgeon himself. I don’t understand how he’s doing all the work he’s doing as a surgeon and as a dismemberer of bodies and as really an entrepreneur. Also, he has clearly some facility with how to build concrete structures and these things. Assuming he does have a contractor and an architect, what is the cover story for why these rooms are being built this way?

**Megana:** It’s like, yeah, I need you to build these guest bedrooms with metal chains that are bolted into the ground.

**John:** Maybe the chains are something he could do himself, or he could have just one lackey in on it with him. The bigger construction things, you got to have a crew there. There’s stuff that has to happen. Even with the pretense of, oh, maybe he has this private surgery center, yeah, I guess, but I find it suspicious, or maybe I find it as an opportunity for a movie or a docuseries about the people who build murder houses, like a home-flipping thing, but it’s really about murder houses.

**Megana:** You’re someone who owns a house and has remodeled your house. My understanding is that any time you want to make a change, you do have to get a permit from the city. Is that true? Is that true for everywhere or just LA?

**John:** I think that’s why murderers are moving out of Los Angeles, because it’s the bureaucracy really. It’s all the permitting that’s really getting in the way of innovation and murder houses. You have other things listed here in terms of the aesthetic. Parasite, of course, a great example. There’s the whole basement in Parasite. Essentially it’s a bomb shelter, I get that, but also it feels like a murder hole.

**Megana:** Totally.

**John:** Invisible Man. Look at this house that he built, that also seems set up for devious deeds. In that case, I can’t remember any specific room in there that feels like, okay, this is just a room that could only be used for evil, but maybe.

**Megana:** He has that room where he keeps the suits. I don’t know what about these really ultra contemporary homes is so frightening. I think maybe it’s all of the glass and then the concrete.

**John:** That sense of it’s all transparent so you can see everything, and yet…

**Megana:** It’s so disorienting.

**John:** Yeah, disorienting. Everything’s being hidden. It’s hiding in plain sight in some way. Concrete does feel fairly industrial and brutalist and confining and soundproof. They’re always a little bit remote so no one can hear you screaming as they’re cutting you apart. I see here in the Workflowy you have other examples of things that are tied into murder architecture or really questionable, like why would you build this this way.

**Megana:** Correct. One TikTok sensation that our whole office was obsessed with was Samantha Hartsoe, this woman in New York who discovered a secret… I guess she was getting a breeze through her bathroom and so she discovered that through her bathroom mirror, her apartment connected to an entirely different apartment.

**John:** Basically she could take out her medicine cabinet and climb into this accessory hallway that went into a completely different apartment which was empty. Why would you build that accessory hallway? It was all just unsettling.

**Megana:** So unsettling. Then I have this other story in here. I remember when I was in college, I was reading this story, the headline was Ohio State Students Discover Stranger Living in Basement. In the article, it actually really warmed by heart, because I was like, this is so Ohio. These boys were living in this house on campus. There were 10 of them. Strange things were happening in the house, but because there were 10 of them, they just always attributed it to a different roommate. Halfway through the school year they discovered that there was a squatter living in their basement. In the most Midwestern turn of events, all of the quotes are, “He seems like a really great guy. We wish we could help him out. Would’ve loved to be his friend or get to know him, but it’s actually not okay for him to live here.” It’s so apologetic and accommodating. It was so sweet.

I texted one of my friends from high school, my friend Sean, and I was like, “This is so funny and this is so Ohio.” He was like, “Yeah, man, that’s my house. Yeah, I was living there. He’s a great guy. He’s a philosophy major just trying to get by.” I was like, “This is so funny and heartbreaking.”

**John:** It reminds me of the people who are squatters in the Hamptons. Off-season in the Hamptons, they’ll just pretend that they should be living in these houses, and live in places where they don’t actually have any right to be there.

**Megana:** If Craig was here, he would talk about the nature of higher education and how cost-prohibitive it is, but yes, it is very similar to that.

**John:** College is the problem. Which would probably end up on Room, because you think about it, Room, it’s not within the house, but this guy has a structure in his backyard that it’s just designed to hold these people in. It’s apparently soundproof. I’m trying to remember. It’s underground? Basically, you can’t easily get out of it. A similar thing happened in one of the seasons of Search Party, where there was a secret underground bunker room that was all soft and padded and where she couldn’t hurt herself. Again, I ask, who are the contractors who are building these things, and what do they think is actually happening? I just think there’s a, I think if not actually a docuseries, then at least a good Onion article about the contractors brought in to do this project and what they believed that they were doing.

**Megana:** I think that there’s maybe too much overlap, and we need to be more suspicious of doomsday preppers and murderers. I don’t want to miscast doomsday preppers, because it’s like, do your thing, but I think maybe we should just be a little bit more skeptical or ask a few more questions around some of those precautions.

**John:** 10 Cloverfield Lane is a great example. It’s both a survivalist prepper bunker situation, but also a creepy murder shaft. The two things do seem like they fit together. If you have gratings in your floor and the ability to spray down blood into the floor, I don’t think that’s normal doomsday prep. It’s just me. I think those should be some things that if it’s on the spec sheet for the construction project, I think you’d intervene there.

**Megana:** Not only are these people committing crimes or murder, but they’re also probably violating some zoning laws.

**John:** 100%. Got to be strict here. Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Patton Oswalt in King of Queens Scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2QE3JpWfTo)
* [ZSA Moonlander](https://www.zsa.io/moonlander/)
* [Compare Your Typing Speed Against ours here!](https://www.typingtest.com/test.html?minutes=2&textfile=benchmark.txt)
* [Phoebe Waller Bridge – 73 Questions with Vogue](https://www.vogue.com/video/watch/phoebe-waller-bridge-on-fleabag-british-humor-and-her-creative-process)
* [Residuals for High-Budget Subscription Video on Demand (HBSVOD) Programs](https://www.wga.org/members/finances/residuals/hbsvod-programs) from the WGA
* [Paul Stamets on Seven Mycoattractant and Mycopesticide Patents released to Commons!](https://paulstamets.com/news/paul-stamets-on-seven-mycoattractant-and-mycopesticide-patents-released-to-commons?mc_cid=5d4ff8f8e6&mc_eid=8952ca1075)
* [Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert](https://bookshop.org/books/under-a-white-sky-the-nature-of-the-future-9780593136270/9780593136270)
* [Murder House Architecture](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1506362648887136256)
* [Samantha Hartsoe’s TikTok NYC Apartment](https://www.tiktok.com/@samanthartsoe?lang=en)
* [Ohio State Students Discover Students Living in Basement](https://www.thelantern.com/2013/09/ohio-state-students-discover-stranger-living-basement/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Ben Gerrior ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/543standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/preproduction).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 507 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show what is preproduction? Or what the hell is Craig doing right now?

**Craig:** That’s a great question.

**John:** Then it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie where we take a look at stories we found in the news or just online somewhere and discuss how they could be filmed entertainment for the world to enjoy. We’ll also look at a related question: why do certain movies get made? What is it about some projects that make them more or less likely to actually go into production?

And then in our bonus segment for premium members, if you were a time traveler Craig what would you want on your cheat sheet? If you had like a one-page back and front of stuff you wanted to carry with you back into the past what stuff would you want to put on that sheet?

**Craig:** OK, well mostly prescription medications. But let’s get into it.

**John:** Let’s do it. All right. Let’s start with preproduction. So, Craig, you were gone last week because you were in the throes of preproduction. We described you as being buried under an avalanche of preproduction.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Talk to us about – I don’t think we’ve really talked about what preproduction is.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think so.

**John:** So let’s really go through it both for a writer’s perspective but also a showrunner’s perspective which is different. So talk to us about the kinds of things that are involved in preproduction and really what are the boundaries of preproduction versus production and when does preproduction really start for you?

**Craig:** Well, the easiest question to answer is what the boundary is. The boundary is once the cameras start rolling you’re in production. Every day prior to that you’re in preproduction. On a television show where there are multiple episodes individual episodes will have prep going on while you’re producing other episodes.

The time you spend in advance of shooting in prep varies from project to project. The rule of thumb for feature films, for an average feature film, let’s say we’re talking about a $40 million movie, typically you’re looking at three or four months of prep. For a show like the one we’re doing we have been prepping for many, many, many months. And we will continue to prep throughout as new episodes come up. The basic gist of it is if you think about all the things that have to be in place when you’re shooting, all of those have to be planned. And that’s what’s happening in preproduction.

So every department is planning the locations you’re going to be shooting, the sets you’re going to be building, the clothing that the actors are going to be wearing, the casting of the actors, the stunt work that’s going to be required, the picture cars, meaning the cars that show up on the screen when you’re driving, what’s all that look like. What cameras do we need? How many cameras do we need? Do we need cranes? Do we need other special arms for the cameras? Who is going to be handling the video playback? Who is going to be recording the sound? Makeup. Hair. Visual effects.

Every single tiny little thing has to be figured out, including a bunch of things that I don’t necessarily concentrate on, but also have to be figured out like who is doing the catering and what are the trailers going to be. And, oh, props. All the fabrication of things. You know, everything actually happens in prep. And if it doesn’t, well, that’s going to be a sad day of shooting.

**John:** Well perhaps our listeners have watched a heist film. And so you’ve seen the preparation that goes into a heist. It really is kind of analogous because you are trying to plan for this event which is the start of production and you have to think about what are all the things we need and what are the things that could go wrong and how are we going to be ready for this. So you’re assembling a team. You’re getting the resources together. You’re figuring out how you’re going to do these things.

And what’s different about prep for a movie or prep for a pilot is that in this case of the series you have to be thinking about not just how you’re going to make this first episode, but what are the decisions you’re making right now that are going to carry through the whole show and especially this first season? You’re planning not just for one hour of entertainment. It’s multiple hours and a huge schedule to go through. So the decisions you’re making with this first director are going to ripple through to all of the other directors on future episodes. And these are fundamental decisions you’re making right now.

**Craig:** They are. And it’s really dangerous. You have the ability to mess things up before you even start and to mess them up permanently. So you have to be really careful and you have to think twice. There is a tendency, I think a natural human tendency, to want to just arrive to yes. Get to certainty as quickly as you can. But I find that it’s really important to listen to the nagging little voice at the back of your head going, “Well, wait a second though.” Maybe this is a problem for people who have stronger egos than I do because I think sometimes I hear stories about showrunners just like, “I’ve decided this,” and everyone is like, “But we’re the experts in this little area and we’re saying this.” “No, I’m saying…”

Anytime anyone, I don’t care who it is, it could be the guy delivering lunch, if that guy is like, “Hmm, that looks a little too red, don’t you think?” I’d be like, what, oh I mean, hold on. Does it? Let me consider that carefully because it might. Because if you don’t measure a thousand times to cut once you’re in trouble.

Example, hair. Very simple thing you’d think, hair. It’s not simple. That’s going to be the hair. So, we’re going to be shooting for quite some time. Once we figure out what Pedro Pascal’s hair looks like that’s the hair. Every day. Every day. If you blow it then every day you’re going to walk in in the morning, you’re going to look at him, he’s going to look at you, and you’re both going to go, “Great.” And he and I will both think the same thing, “Craig is an idiot.”

So, got to get it right.

**John:** Yeah. Now, let’s talk about what the start of prep really is because there’s this sort of murky period that I’ve found when a project is like we’re going to do this thing but it’s not quite clear when we’re going to actually shoot it, so the initial onramp into prep is really strange. And so talk to us about for something like this or for something like Chernobyl what were those first hires and when do you get sort of permission to actually make those first hires who are going to help you to put the rest of the team together?

**Craig:** Well, so sometimes we’ll call it pre-prep, which is kind of an amusing idea, but I mean, pre-pre-prep. So, the first thing that happens typically is in order to get a green light for your movie or your television show there needs to be a budget. And the only way to have any reasonably useful budget is to do some work. Typically that means figuring out roughly where you’re going to shoot and looking at some key locations and determining what you might need to build and not build.

To do that you have to start with this first key component and that is a producer. The producer in movies that I’m talking about is typically a unit production manager, sometimes they are elevated to executive producer or something like that. And in television they might be called producer or also executive producer. So for us, Rose Lam is our executive producer along with myself and Carolyn and Neil. And she was the first real key hire because she was the person who was going to start to work on schedule, like let me look at the scripts, let me look at this bible, let me use my experience to break it down, get a sense of how long this thing is going to be, come up with some basic numbers and some plans for where we should shoot.

And to do that you get a little bit of a float. They call it a float. You get floated some money from the studio. Not too much, but enough to get that done and done accurately. At which point then there’s a decision made about budget and all the rest. And then you begin hiring people. You need your casting director very early, because you’ve got to cast way ahead of time. You need to hire your production designer very early because what their vision is is going to impact how you are going to be spending your money. And you certainly need to make sure you have a director in place as well.

**John:** Yeah. And what can be confusing is based on different kinds of projects and media when you go from like, OK, we can put together a budget versus OK we are giving you a green light to start shooting can be a very different experience. For something like your show, maybe they said like OK we’re going to make this thing based on this budget, this script, and this director and other key talent involved. But other projects I’ve been through you’re going through quite a lot of preproduction and they have stop points sort of along the way. Like you can spend up to this point but they could decide like, no, we’re actually stopping this right now. We’re not moving forward. We’re not giving you the green light. And that can be one of those tricky things, too.

It’s not like full speed ahead, we’re making this thing, we’re starting this day. You’re continuing to like sort of hopefully build momentum, but you’re still waiting for key decisions from the powers that be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And for television that’s sort of what a pilot is. There’s a built in break point where everybody can agree to produce to one hour of television and no more. And then decide what to do from there. For us we were ordered to series, so that’s not an issue. We’re doing it.

Look, it’s risk and reward. Bet hedging versus commitment. They each have plusses and minuses. Pretty obvious what the plusses are of hedging your bet. The minuses are that when you don’t have a full commitment it can sometimes be harder to access and lock down great talent, not just in terms of actors, but in terms of directors, cinematographers, production designers, and all the craftspeople that create the product with you, create the show, the movie, the series.

And if you don’t actually have a full commitment there a lot of them are like or I could just go over here where there is a commitment and now I have a job. And I don’t have to worry about not having a job. So there are costs to that.

**John:** Yeah. A thing you find in sort of traditional television is you shoot a pilot and then all of your actors are placed on holds so that the studio can decide, OK, yes, we are going to make this into a series and therefore we can pull all of those actors and keep them on the show. And obviously there’s the choice to replace any of those actors you want to and reshoot that stuff which does happen.

It’s tough. And I think as more and more stuff has been written as mini rooms and we’re sort of shooting the whole thing at once that can be great, but it also puts a lot more showrunners in situations like you are where you have to plan for like – you may only get one crack at it. If you were shooting a pilot you could make some changes between the two things. Just like Game of Thrones made changes after that pilot that didn’t work.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** You’re not going to have that opportunity.

**Craig:** No. And we didn’t have it on Chernobyl either. And so part of that is making sure that you feel really, really confident in your team and in the scripts. But I think there are probably also on the other side of the pilot process some negatives to consider as well.

So positives are you can stop and you can retool and move ahead successfully like they did with Game of Thrones. The potential negative is everybody gets a chance to just sort of pick at it and water it down and smooth off the edges and make it stink. Nothing survives too much scrutiny. Nothing. From people who can comment without accountability.

So when I’m making something and I’m commenting on it in the editing room I have accountability for it. All of my comments are leading towards me coming out to the rest of the world and saying I stand by this. Other people it’s sort of like, well, if it’s one of the shows that a network puts out in the year, or Netflix, one of the 15 shows they put out every ten seconds, they’re not really accountable to it. So, it’s like they’re not getting blamed for it specifically. And so everybody can sort of focus too much and pick at it and then walk away. And it can just, you know, the soufflé can collapse.

So, plusses and minuses in all circumstances to these things. When there were only three networks and there was one season it made sense. Everybody had a pilot. Nobody could avoid the pilot situation because there was nowhere else to go, because those were the three networks, this is how they do it. We all do it at the same time. Not so anymore.

**John:** Yeah. But also the musical chairs problem of it was really tough because essentially there’s only a certain number of actors. There’s only a certain number of cinematographers, directors. You’re all fighting for very limited resources here.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I got my third choice of an actor and I got this–

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s bad.

**John:** It’s bad. And so this is probably a better way to make things, but it is still really difficult.

**Craig:** It’s difficult. Yeah.

**John:** So, a question for you. As you were buried under work last week, how much of your daily firefighting problem-solving is really about money and budgets?

**Craig:** Very little. We certainly have budget challenges. There’s no such thing as a show without a budget challenge. It doesn’t matter what your budget is. My feeling is that by and large no matter what you do as an artist you will always have at best 90% of the money you need. That’s just the way it goes. Because, you know, your imagination always exceeds your grasp to some extent. And they have to draw the line somewhere. We do have a very healthy budget and we have a budget to make an excellent show, and so we shall do our best to do.

But, no, most of the issues that I deal with really are just the issues of 400 things need to be determined and here’s what someone just sent over as a possibility. And it’s not quite right, but it’s making us reconsider this or that. Someone says I need to sit with you for ten minutes and just ask you three questions. And that ten minutes turns into two hours because the questions are actually complicated. And then all of the other things that were supposed to happen after that have just been pushed down the line and then things spill over into the weekend.

And as you get closer to shooting this is very common.

**John:** Yeah. Now, how much more complicated is it shooting something that’s distant and remote? Like Calgary is not the end of the world but it’s not in a production hub. And obviously Chernobyl was not shot in a production hub. It does strike me as a very different experience because when I make a movie here in Los Angeles, we’re making Charlie’s Angels, we have all the resources of Los Angeles here. And we can pretty easily swap people in or out if we need to.

You are more isolated up there and is that a thing you have to think through in production right now?

**Craig:** No. It’s something that we consider early on. But one of the selling points of shooting here in Alberta is that there’s a pretty good layer of crew here in Alberta. And when we need to fill in we pull people in from Vancouver or Toronto where those are production hubs. Vancouver is more of a production hub at this point than Los Angeles is. So there’s actually quite a good depth and folks don’t mind relocating from Vancouver to Alberta for a while, or Calgary for a while, the way that our friend Derek lives in Chicago for a big chunk of the year because they do Chicago Fire there. So, that hasn’t been too bad.

And of course Calgary is a city of a million-plus people. So this experience has been much easier than the prep experience in Lithuania. There’s no language barrier. And there’s just more people to pull from. However, this production is way larger. So everything kind of scales together.

You get 90% of what you want all the time. That’s the way it goes. At best.

**John:** Let’s talk about you as a writer in this prep preproduction situation. Also it’s weird, as I was working on the outline here. We say prep and preproduction and prep is sort of a shortened version of preproduction, but it’s also preparation. It’s weird that they are describing the same things and they’re similar words but they’re not quite the same word.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** As a writer what are you doing right now on that first script that’s shooting? How much are you still tweaking things? Is there a script coordinator who is helping get stuff put together? What is the writing that happens for you during this period?

**Craig:** The writing for the first three episodes and to some extent the first four episodes is kind of done. There are little tweaks. I kind of blew it. I forgot that we had changed, like literally a word from one thing to another, and I was like oh, D’oh. And that actually matters because the people doing some prosthetic stuff need to know where it’s going to go. So we issued – the green pages were literally I think one word changed.

We do have a script coordinator and so I work with her closely. I’m very good about maintaining revision levels and scene numbers and things like that. But with any production at this point you do need a script coordinator to be the central distribution point. And that all goes through Synchronize. Synchronize is the software that everybody uses. God, I hope it’s better than – it’s not owned by Final Draft is it? Because that would bum me out.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t think it is.

**John:** It’s probably Entertainment Partners or something else.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anyway, so it’s basically the software that does all the distribution of schedules, calendars, scripts, all those things to cast.

**John:** And are you distributing physical scripts? Or is it all online now? Basically are people seeing printed pages or are they only scenes on tablets?

**Craig:** I believe that they are able to print them. They arrive as watermarked PDFs so they print them for themselves for reference if they need to. But, no, this is not like the old days where when it was time to release new pages 12 Xerox machines begin cranking up to 800 kelvin as pages got shot out. We just don’t do that anymore. It’s wasteful and it’s slow and expensive and unnecessary.

But it is a weird situation because I am writing the other episodes. So, you know, there are episodes that are going to be shooting many, many months from now that I’m writing now while we’re prepping and then while we’re shooting. And that’s, you know, that’s a tingly feeling of anxiety.

**John:** And something we should make clear is that the preproduction phase stops at a certain thing. Once you start production like preproduction stops. But there’s still prep on each individual episode.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that is the director. And are you marrying a director and DP together? Who travels together on an episode?

**Craig:** Yes. So each one of our episodes. Without getting into it, because I don’t think they’ve all been announced. But we have five directors across ten episodes. So we have the pairings all figured out in terms of DPs and such.

**John:** And does each director have his own first?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So one AD is running the whole?

**Craig:** Well, no, I believe there’s going to be a second first AD that comes in. So, they alternate because what’s going to happen, of course, is the first AD does need to start prepping episodes with the director. So once it’s time for that our first AD who is working with our first director to kind of step back and start planning ahead then the new one comes in. So, yeah, we do have this kind of side-by-side first AD thing going on.

**John:** And so that episode prep is also crucial because you made general decisions about the look of the show, how stuff is basically going to work, overall camera styles, but this director with this DP and this AD is figuring out like, OK, we’re going to need a crane on this day. This is how many extras we need for this thing. So it’s really taking what you’ve written in the script and figuring out like, OK, let’s really break it down in how we’re going to do this and what is our plan for getting this episode shot in the number of days that we have. What is our schedule going to be? When do we go to nights? How do our weeks work? Those are crucial things.

**Craig:** We’re going to nights real fast.

**John:** Oh, Craig, you wrote a shot that probably mostly takes place at night.

**Craig:** No it doesn’t. Thank god it doesn’t mostly take place at night. But there’s a bunch of night stuff early on and, of course, we don’t shoot in order, so I’m not giving anything away about what happens when. But I’ve been pretty smart about not plunging us into too much night. But there’s night early on. And you know what? Better to do it early.

**John:** Yeah. Rip the Band-Aid off.

**Craig:** Rather than when you’re week – sorry, week – month seven and you’re like oh my god.

**John:** But you are in Calgary facing a unique challenge. There’s limited daylight.

**Craig:** Ah-ha.

**John:** As you get into the winter.

**Craig:** And this is an interesting challenge. Very limited night right now. So, a couple of weeks or so, or however, I haven’t looked at the schedule exactly to see exactly how many days, but the number of days we have that we’re shooting nights we have to be really careful about. They are very well orchestrated, prepared, and choreographed because right now in Calgary you get about 4.5 hours of proper dark.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** That’s what you get. So in production when you shoot a little bit of a day and a little bit of night it’s called a split. We will likely be kind of in a semi-split situation where we shoot a little bit of stuff that’s sort of day-ish and then we start prepping and we use that kind of twilight, that 19-hour long twilight that they have here to set up. And then once the sun is gone-gone, boom, pedal to the metal.

**John:** Yeah. I remember on Go, of course it has a lot of night shooting, and it mostly takes place over the course of one long night, and there would be times where you’re just trying to get this one last shot and the sun is coming up and you’re trying to hold up flags to make it a little bit darker. And you just curse the rising of the sun. And then to have to drive home after a full night of shooting with the sun coming up is just the worst experience.

**Craig:** Particularly if you’re driving east. It’s just blaring in your eyes.

**John:** Oh yeah. That was me. Me coming from Santa Monica Airport back to my house in Hollywood.

**Craig:** It’s depressing. The shooting schedules can definitely screw your head up. They certainly screw my head up. There is this awful feeling of chasing the light or chasing the dark, which is why I think some of the older, more well established directors from the ‘70s and ‘80s starting promoting this whole we’re going to shoot everything on a green screen stage and I’ll be MoCap because you don’t have to go outside, it’s always air-conditioned. There’s no light. There’s no dark. You’re wherever you want.

**John:** Yeah. Season two of your show is going to be like The Mandalorian. It’s going to be all virtual sets. Pedro will be back in his environment.

**Craig:** It will not. Look, I do – I’m not impressed – The Mandalorian, the volume. I love that they call it the volume. It’s a remarkable technology. It seems very well suited for something that does take place in a kind of fantastic other world. We’re a very naturalistic philosophy over here.

**John:** You’re a naturalistic zombie show.

**Craig:** Yeah. Not zombies. Not zombies.

**John:** Sorry, fungal creatures.

**Craig:** Thank you. Humans, just fungal-infected humans.

**John:** Yeah. Infected humans. All right. Let’s think about movies that are not in preproduction. They’re not even in development. They are just potential movies. It’s our segment How Would This Be a Movie. And as set up I’m seeing Zola this afternoon. I’m very excited. Because it’s the first of the movies that we’ve pitched, way back at the Austin Film Festival. I remember our great discussion about the Zola tweets, so I’m excited to see that movie. People love it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just this past week I got approached to adapt – to do one of my first How Would This Be a Movie. One of the properties we talked about on the show, producers came to me and offered me–

**Craig:** Did they know when they were offering it to you that–?

**John:** They did not. Because if they had known they would have seen like why I did not think it was a good idea for a movie.

**Craig:** They would have seen the big no flag being waved real early. You can’t say which one it is I assume?

**John:** Unfair for me to say which one it was. Because someone will get that job, and that will be great, because I love when writers get hired to adapt things. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for a movie. All right. We have three or four projects here to look at. We’re going to start with the big one which I think probably actually is a movie. We’re going to link to the New York Times story on this, but there’s actually a lot of other sources for it.

This was about these criminals who were using these secured devices, these encrypted devices, for phones and texting that they thought were legit, but of course the FBI was actually behind it. And so they bought these cell phones on the black market. They believed that they were super securely encrypted. It was like cell phones just for criminals.

**Craig:** Right. [laughs]

**John:** And of course the FBI was involved in this. And they were able to sort of really round up a whole network. On one day they had arrested 800 people in more than a dozen countries. They intercepted 20 million messages in 45 languages.

**Craig:** They seized tons of drugs. 250 firearms. 55 luxury vehicles. And $48 million in several currencies and crypto currencies.

**John:** And interestingly none of the people arrested were in the US. Because you actually can’t use basically what they were doing, like you can’t use in the US. But it was like Australia, and Asia, and all sorts of other places.

**Craig:** Yes. Europol was sort of a big part of it. So something like this has happened before. There was I think it was either the FBI, CIA maybe, had figured out – there was a company that was hosting servers for the dark web. I’m not sure what aspect of it. But they got them. They came to those people and were like we got you. We got you on X, Y, or Z, whatever they had done wrong. And the deal is we’re going to go easy on you if you just let us run this. And they were like you got it.

And so for months all these people who were using this secure server specifically to avoid the prying eyes of the government were literally sending stuff through a government server. And all of it was just being logged as mountains of evidence.

**John:** Yeah. And it was a very similar case here. So this is Operation Trojan Shield. Ugh.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Really?

**John:** That was the name of the operation.

**Craig:** Condom brand.

**John:** There was a service called Anom. And basically they busted the guy who was making these secure cell phones. And said like could you just keep making these secure cell phones but let us see everything that’s happening there. And he was like OK.

And so they sold these really expensive cell phones. I think it’s also so smart that they kept these phones really crazy expensive and sort of underpowered.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And so everyone felt like, oh, it’s got to be legit. It’s got to be real.

**Craig:** Genius.

**John:** And it’s a classic honeypot. You make somebody sort of feel like oh I’m getting something for free, or I’m getting something that no one else could have. And that’s how it works.

**Craig:** And they got them. So the question is how do you make this a movie beyond the simple mechanism of the kind of man in the middle hacking trick that they pulled here, because in and of itself once you get the point of that, well, then that’s that. So what do you do to kind of jazz this thing up to be a movie?

**John:** Well, I think there’s a couple good choices here. So I kept thinking back to the 2006 film The Lives of Others, the German film where–

**Craig:** Great movie.

**John:** Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, I just love saying his name.

**Craig:** I know. It’s great.

**John:** Which is about eavesdropping in East Germany and a guy who is listening in on a family and sort of like becomes involved in their lives. So that’s a clear way in. But I also think we always talk about sort of ethical choices and characters being forced to make tough things. You’re going to hear about so many crimes and you have to make decisions of like when are you going to intercede or not intercede and sort of what is worth sort of blowing the whole thing up for or not.

And I think those tensions can be great. I’m assuming that the movie is more from the law enforcement side than from the other side, but maybe we’re splitting it sort of back and forth the way Sicario does. I think there’s lots of ways. What’s tough about the story as it is right now with the situation is like there’s so many characters you could pick, there’s so many ways in, and it’s a completely different movie based on where you start.

**Craig:** Well, and that’s why in the end when these companies purchase these stories, so whoever wrote this article, in this case I’m looking at the New York Times article. It was by Yan Zhuang, Elian Peltier, and Alan Feurer. So let’s say that Yan, Elian, and Alan sell the rights to this story as they’ve written it to Warner Bros. At that point Warner Bros what they have is a big question mark. And then they start talking to writers. And this is how it gets figured out.

Somebody is going to come in and throw one of those darts in the right path. For me, when I think of this, I do think of The Lives of Others, and I also think of Donnie Brasco. And the idea that you can create a relationship with somebody while this is happening. That part of your job is now you are monitoring the communications between two criminals and it’s quite clear to you at some point that one of them is just simply being used by the other.

Because you can see everybody’s communication. So what you’re watching is the normal flow of social activity where someone is being bullied or ostracized or lied to or manipulated. And you begin to feel for them. And I think that’s really interesting. So there’s all sorts of possibilities here.

But it would have to be whipped up quite a bit beyond just the concept. The concept alone isn’t going to get you more than 15 or 20 interesting minutes I think.

**John:** I agree. So, you and I are both thinking about this as a drama, but let’s think about this as a comedy or some other genre of film. Because there’s something kind of funny about this. The central conceit can be funny where these people think they’re being secure and they’re not being secure. And that’s relatable. We’ve all sort of messed up and done something that we thought was private and was actually public and it sort of got out. So there’s an opportunity to tell the same kinds of stories or the set the same kind of characters but play it in a funny way. And I think that’s another very interesting take to this is to approach it as a comedy, or even a romantic comedy.

Because what is it like if you can see inside what a person is really doing? Or you can see that this guy’s girlfriend is absolutely just a nightmare and you want to sort of intercede there. There’s something fun about having that information feels like a comedic premise.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in the ‘90s, I mean, this is how I got my career started. You would imagine a drama and then you would say, OK, do the drama except the person that would be the hero what if they’re just an idiot. Now go. Literally, don’t change anything else except that they’re stupid. And let’s have fun.

**John:** Steven Soderbergh, Matt Damon movie. I think it was The Informant! with an exclamation point feels – that’s a similar kind of premise there.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** You talked about sort of buying the New York Times article. I don’t think you buy this article. I don’t think there’s an enough there.

**Craig:** I don’t think anybody should buy any article. I don’t understand that whole business to be honest.

**John:** But I can imagine that there’s a longer article that really goes into the characters and gets some firsthand reporting that is unique and different that could be an article worth buying.

**Craig:** Then it’s just facts. They’re reported. Everything in the article as it is published is available for everyone to use. The reason you would buy the article is to have access to the iceberg under the water line amount of notes that perhaps the reporters had aggregated. And that can be interesting stuff.

**John:** That could be interesting, too. In this case you’re unlikely to get firsthand – none of the people involved in this story are going to talk to you. None of those people are going to be real characters that you can – real life people that you can buy life rights to. That’s not a thing here. So it’s not important.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Cool. All right, next How Would This Be a Movie is Wanted: A Household Manager/Cook/Nanny. This is a thousand-word job listing that requests applications from somebody with a good degree, great executive functioning, very good Excel skills, and also river swimming. So I remember when this – so this was a viral post that went out. Basically this woman, a single mom, who was a CEO was trying to hire on someone to be a nanny, but the requirements for this person were just absurd. Basically crazy. And then I remember also reading Ruth Graham and Slate did a follow up where she actually talked to the woman who did the post. And it was much more reasonable and also interesting.

Because basically this woman kind of needed a wife. This woman needed to do sort of the other stuff and it became sort of an interesting question of feminism and gender roles. I thought there was an interesting thing underneath that as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I read through that, too. Although I wonder sometimes if we look at these things and the first filter we’re going to consider is gender and the way sexism functions in a patriarchal society. And then the second filter we might want to consider is tech people versus not tech people, because it’s like they’re their own species of human.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** When I listen to the tech people talking, I mean, so I was really interested in the woman sort of explaining through things, because I thought like OK this is where I’m going to actually see the truth under this and go I get it lady. But here’s the first thing. OK, so Ruth Graham asks this question: how did you set about writing this ad? And the woman said, “I had a great nanny for 5.5 years with our family. When the kids started school I placed her with a Google family that had baby boy twins. She’s now been with them for 5.5 years and they love her deeply. This is important because,” and now here’s why we go into Techville. “This is important because I’m one of the most loving, kind people around. And I build wonderful long-term relationships.” Who talks like that?

**John:** No one.

**Craig:** No one.

**John:** A tech person talks like that. Yeah.

**Craig:** A tech person is like and now here’s–

**John:** And now value.

**Craig:** Yes. Let me give you the PowerPoint of why you should invest into my human status. That was like whoa. And, look, also some of the stuff, I understand like your desire – it would be great if she was really good at mountain driving. I guess. But also she’s like my kids and I love to swim in rivers. We’re really into river swimming. You know, it’s OK if you found a wonderful person, a nurturing, caring person who could do all this other stuff, including mountain driving, but when she’s like these people aren’t physically fit enough I’m like well kind of also how dare you. So an amazing, wonderful, loving, caring person who your children would love and who would teach them things and take care of them and drive them places, do all these other things, you’re not going to include because she can’t river swim? How about just leave her there on the shore and then swim on back?

Anyway, I started getting annoyed when I was reading. Because just like, ugh, tech people. It’s tech people. Tech people.

**John:** And I think what she really wants is Maria von Trapp from the Sound of Music.

**Craig:** Maria von Trapp couldn’t swim the–

**John:** No, but those kids did river swim. Like we saw them swim in the river.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they also climbed a mountain, literally.

**John:** They did.

**Craig:** Every mountain.

**John:** Uh-huh. They did some mountain driving as they were getting out of there. So, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s true. That’s true.

**John:** So who are the characters in whatever story this is? I think it’s a comedy, but I think it’s a relationship comedy probably between these two women and what happens here and sort of what that dynamic is which I think is potentially really fascinating.

**Craig:** OK. I have an idea for a movie for this that I actually think is pretty good.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So don’t steal it everybody, but here’s my idea. My idea is you’ve got this kind of back-breaking tech humanoid. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman. Literally doesn’t matter. Who is a single parent and puts this crazy viral job listing out there that is essentially demanding a super human. There is a mess. Somebody is a mess, manny, nanny, doesn’t matter. And they’re like I need money. So they basically lie to get this job, but then are required by dint of the job, and also by starting to really care for those kids, to become the nanny that they were supposed to be. And the better they get at stuff the more it becomes apparent to everybody else around in the tech world that is meeting this manny/nanny that the manny/nanny is a super human because they have risen to this task. And that person becomes CEO.

Because if you can do all the things that this person is asking you don’t need to be a nanny. Guess what? You are a mega human. So anyway that was my idea for a movie.

**John:** I really do like that idea and I like the sense of – what you’re pitching is sort of a School of Rock to some degree. The person who takes the job just to kind of take the job because I happened to answer the phone and I sort of passed myself off as this thing I’m really not, and then I actually learned how to do it and I actually had skills that were above and beyond because I was actually myself.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Sort of underneath this.

**Craig:** And the same thing happens in the third act. By having that success, because you did this you then are in a position where you’re going to leave those kids and then the kids are like why and then you’re like, oh, I love you. And it’s nice. I mean, look, it’s formula and everything but I do think that you’ve got to lampoon the tech culture here. They are nuts. And by the way they’re nuts and they’re also running everything.

**John:** They are. Well, the other thing you’re pitching is essentially Mrs. Doubtfire.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is a person coming in under false pretenses to do this. So to the degree that I think you could go in tomorrow and say like it’s Mrs. Doubtfire for the 2020s. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s like Mrs. Doubtfire becomes the perfect human being who becomes both an allergist and a river swimmer and a stunt car driver. And one of the things she was like “determine how to purchase travel via points or miles and comparisons.” And I’m like, oh, so they’re also a travel agent. They’re a booking agent.

**John:** But that is a spouse to a large degree, too. That’s what’s fascinating about this is that they really – she wants someone to watch her kids but also to help run her life. And that’s–

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t know how it goes over there with you and Mike, but for me and Melissa there are a whole lot of things on this list neither one of us does, including let me just start with river swimming. And mountain driving. Mountain driving?

**John:** Yeah, you’ve got to mountain drive.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t, yeah.

**John:** Chauffeur.

**Craig:** Megana, when you read this, just out of curiosity, what did you think about this?

**Megana Rao:** I felt so bad about myself.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s terrible.

**John:** Now, Megana, you come from a tech background, so you worked at Google. So for all you know you know the Google family that took the previous nanny here.

**Megana:** Yeah, the Google baby boys. I mean, that part of it wasn’t surprising for me and I had a real visceral reaction to reading this. And I was like a lot of the things she’s talking about is adulting and the worst parts of being an adult.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Megana:** And I was just thinking about like I think the reason that people have such a reaction to this is because the emotional labor required for these things is so taxing and tiresome. And thinking about doing a job of just looking at kids’ summer camps is so hard to like fathom. Because it’s horrible, but then it also made me think of all the work that you guys and all parents are doing but we just prefer to look at because we don’t pay for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is quite a bit of that. I believe that people need help and I believe if you can afford help then it can be a win-win for everybody. Some people are getting employment and people are getting help.

**John:** And she’s paying $35 to $40 an hour which is not bad.

**Craig:** No, no, it’s quite a lot. That said, the job that she’s describing is intense and there is a whiff of, well, when the revolution comes they’ll be the first against the wall, you know? It’s starting to get a little weird when you’re like having people pit themselves against each other to get your job to do this list of impossible things that honestly you will be OK if you don’t have somebody swimming in the river with your children. That’s not necessary.

**Megana:** Well, the weirdest thing to me also is when she talks about – she’s, you know, the most loving, wonderful person around.

**Craig:** Oh my god. What the fudge?

**Megana:** And how she loves her employees. It was just this weird thing of like outsourcing family and community but having – I don’t know. It was just so blurry around the boundaries and that made me feel really weird.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She did I think at some point describe her friends as – what was it?

**Megana:** Building alliances with other parents.

**Craig:** Building alliances. How dare you? Also, the nanny needed to be able to do sit-ups, lunges, squats, and pushups.

**John:** Yeah, physically fit.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Yeah. I mean, like you do. Megana knows this. It’s part of the office culture here.

**Megana:** Yeah. Every day when I walk in.

**Craig:** John is like–

**John:** I blow the little whistle and then we do our lunges and our squats.

**Craig:** Megana, it’s Thursday and that’s squat day, so here we go. I, wow, experienced snow-driving.

**John:** Next How Would This Be a Movie. So this is a couple who breaks up after being handcuffed together for 122 days. This is Ukrainian lovers, Alexandr Kudlay and Viktoria–

**Craig:** Pustovitova.

**John:** Pustovitova. Have taken off their shackles and are moving on from one another. So this is a couple who agreed to be handcuffed together because they were having relationship troubles and they decided that the way to solve these would be to be the most cliché version of a ‘70s odd couple who have to sort of live together by being handcuffed together. So they could have divided their house in half and put a tape line down the middle, but instead they chose to be handcuffed to each other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And as I looked through the photos related to this article I see them wearing different clothes including clothes with sleeves. And I don’t understand how they’re putting on these clothes with sleeves while they are handcuffed together.

**Craig:** This is so much bullshit. This is Instagram nonsense bullshit.

**John:** That’s why I kept it on this thing. This is just annoying Instagram couple decides to be annoying Instagram couple.

**Craig:** Screw you guys. Where they lost me completely was when it said that Pustovitova ultimately had to quit her job as a beautician because clients weren’t comfortable with her husband standing over them as she manicured their eyelashes. So, first of all, you can’t manicure an eyelash. You manicure fingers, not eyes. But you cannot do that job while handcuffed anyway. Geez Louise.

**John:** So Craig there is not a movie to be made about this particular handcuffed couple?

**Craig:** No. It’s nonsense and I would like to never hear of them again.

**John:** All right. Our final How Would This Be a Movie contender, this comes from a Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax. It is her column. And here is the issue. Megana, would you read this question for us?

**Megana:** My husband’s sister “Beth” fancies herself a psychic of sorts who can communicate with the beyond. A few months ago, we were eating dinner when she began talking about a spirit with me. I honestly had no idea who she was talking about and told her that, because I had no deceased relatives or friends who fit her description. Beth became very upset, claiming that she was overwhelmed with what the spirit was trying to tell her. She was so upset she ran from the room to lie in a dark room and compose herself.

My in-laws asked me to be gentler with her, since this “gift” is a major part of her identity.

I see two paths. I can either lie to Beth and feed her belief that she has this “gift.” Or I can tell her she is dead wrong. Which makes me feel like I’m kicking a puppy. My husband and I would ideally like to handle Beth’s “gift” in a thoughtful way, but it’s hard to see what middle ground we have, especially when she puts you on the spot. How can I thoughtfully respond to Beth in a way that preserves her self-worth but also doesn’t give in to a delusion?

**John:** Now, Craig I think has a strong opinion on sort of the reality of Beth and what the sister should tell Beth. But I would urge him to think about as a movie or as characters in a movie is this a situation that can be fun and fraught? And how might you develop this as a movie?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a fun odd couple situation when you are marrying somebody and their sibling – you inherit these other people. And if you are very much a skeptic about things and that’s part of who you are, that’s part of your identity, no one ever seems to acknowledge that being a skeptic should be a major part of anyone else’s identity. And then you get stuck with somebody who believes this nonsense. It’s really frustrating.

It’s particularly frustrating if they keep being right and you start to feel like you’re being gas lit and what’s going on. Look, I refuse to be a part of any movie that actually says – other than Ghostbusters – that suggests that there is any of this stuff. But that seems like that’s what it would be, ish.

**John:** To me Beth feels like a minor supporting character, like you’re marrying into a wacky family.

**Craig:** She’s one of them.

**John:** It’s Meet the Parents, but she’s one of them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the natural choice for it. But if you want to elevate her up from a supporting character to the other sort of co-lead, that is potentially interesting. I mean, obviously Ghost is a great example of this situation where like this person has a “gift” that seems impossible. Whoopi Goldberg’s character has a gift that is impossible. Seems impossible. And yet it is important for the plot to move on. And there can be some good comedy there.

But I think it’s important to marry the skeptic with the true believer. That’s comedy.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you’re right. But I also feel like I’ve seen this character before a little bit. You know, like the wacky and then no one has to take them seriously. Everybody agrees that they’re nuts. So it’s not really, I don’t…

**John:** But I think what’s potentially more fun is that everyone says like oh no but she’s right. Like if you come into a family where everybody is like, oh no, Beth has the gift and she sees these things. How are you supposed to deal with that? As the rational person. And so we’re coming in as the audience as the rational person. We’re relating to that character as our way in and then we have to see like, oh my god, and the frustration.

**Craig:** Every family I ever talk to I think I’m the weirdo. Because somebody there believes in god. And that to me is right up there with contacting the dead. I just don’t understand it.

**John:** Let’s do a recap of our four things we talked about today. So the first off is the criminals and their cell phones that were actually done by – there was a whole FBI sting behind that. Is that a movie? Is it a limited series? What do you think that is?

**Craig:** I don’t think it’s a limited series. That would be a very boring limited series. I think it’s a movie maybe if you really make it about relationships.

**John:** Yup. Nanny plus.

**Craig:** Yeah, it could absolutely be an interesting comedy that lampoons tech culture.

**John:** The handcuffed couple is not a movie. We’re striking it out. And I wanted to leave it on this list because I felt like these are people who perceive themselves as characters in a movie and they’re not. They have main character syndrome and it’s annoying and they need to just stop.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Defiant Ones is a great movie about two people handcuffed together or chained together. And it was all about the relationship between white people and black people during the Jim Crow era. That’s not this. This is just dumb. [laughs] This is just stupid.

**John:** The original Charlie’s Angels “Angels in Chains” episode is a classic and you’re not going to top that. So, just stop.

**Craig:** Can’t top it.

**John:** Can’t. And psychic sister-in-law is a maybe and I would say it’s possibly a movie but also I think that’s an interesting character in an ongoing TV comedy because it’s not a problem you’re going to solve. You’re not going to resolve this problem.

**Craig:** No. It feels like a wacky neighbor.

**John:** Yup. Let’s segue to something that Aline actually brought up. She texted to say why don’t you guys talk about why certain movies get made, so not just how would this get made but why certain movies get made. And my first instinct is that movies get put into development by development executives who are one type of person. And so they’re seeing story from a specific way. And they are interested in like oh the story, the characters, this writer is really great. And movies go into production because of marketing executives. Basically the decision of like what movie do we think we can actually make money on is often a very different team.

And so when I get approached with a hey would you want to adapt this thing for us, when I got approached with this hey do you want to take this How Would This Be a Movie one of my fundamental decisions was like I don’t think you’re actually going to make that movie. And so much of my job as a screenwriter is to really stock pick or thinking like what movies do I think you’re actually going to make versus you’re just going to hire me to write a script.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does seem to me that some movies just cannot be stopped.

**John:** Inevitability is I think a thing.

**Craig:** Inevitability. Generally speaking if there is some underlying property that some PowerPoint presentation proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it can’t miss, they’re making it. Obviously it can miss. In fact, those probably miss more frequently and then the hit, it doesn’t matter. Everybody agrees together, holding hands in a boardroom this is correct. So this is how you do get pitched things where you go you can’t be serious.

And there’s nothing you can do about it. They’re making it. If there is a combination of a very hot star and a very hot director, they’re making it. Even when they shouldn’t. And that doesn’t have to be a very commercially obvious movie. That could be like a completely commercially not-obvious movie. And yet still but we got them. And then it’s like, OK, I guess you’re doing it then. You shouldn’t. But all right.

**John:** But you always have to think in terms of like what is the slot for this. And does the studio see this as their awards contender? Or do they see this as a big blockbuster movie that’s going to actually generate real movie? Because those are the two things that studios tend to make now.

With the rise of streamers there’s latitude to make other kinds of movies that are appealing to specific audiences which is great. But classically people were approaching this as like can I win awards with this or can I make a gazillion dollars off of this. And those are the things. And some of the movies we talked about today it’s not quite clear how that would work out. I mean, the nanny-plus, Aline could write that movie. It reminds me of sort of like I Don’t Know How She Does It or those books – there was an era of books that were adapted that were centering on women and women’s issues. Maybe you make those for streamers now, but you’re not making them very often for theatrical release.

**Craig:** No, I don’t think any of the movies that we contemplated existing today would be for a major studio. They just don’t do them.

**John:** Unless it was Smokehouse, the George Clooney company, doing it for Warners as a big awards kind of thing. That’s possible. Like Argo is an example of that kind of movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is still that niche, but a lot of times I think with those things they have arranged for other co-financiers that limit – when you talk about like, OK, we’re spending a bunch of money, what they’re spending a bunch of money on is, I don’t know, whatever Paw Patrol, live action Paw Patrol.

**John:** That’s what we want. Did you see the trailer for Clifford the Big Red Dog?

**Craig:** I did.

**John:** The trailer for Clifford the Big Red Dog was better than I expected and I think it will actually succeed in its target audience. And I want to wish them well.

**Craig:** I have no idea because I don’t know what it costs. If it costs a whole lot, I don’t know.

**John:** If it costs $100 million then I think that’s money not well spent. But I don’t think it costs $100 million.

**Craig:** That would be unfortunate. And somewhere someone is listening to this going it literally cost $99.5 million, you mother-f-ers.

Yes, listen, I root for all movies.

**John:** I root for all movies as well.

**Craig:** All movies.

**John:** All right. Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, you forgot.

**Craig:** I didn’t forget. You know, what episode is this? 507? There aren’t even 507 cool things in the world total.

**John:** There are so many cool things in the world.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. I think we’re into like moderately interesting things at this point.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is genuinely cool and I think our audience will like it.

**Craig:** I’ll be the judge of this.

**John:** Do you want to hear it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my One Cool Thing is an episode of Decoder Ring. It’s a podcast I listen to. I think it’s been a One Cool Thing several times before. Willa Paskin hosts it. It is terrific. It’s on Slate.

This episode was on the Tootsie shot. And the Tootsie shot – you know in Tootsie when she’s walking towards the camera, it’s a very long lens in a crowded New York street?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** You recognize that shot as an iconic image from Tootsie, but from a zillion other movies.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** It’s about the history of that shot, or that kind of shot, and how that shot became possible because of technological changes, but also sort of cultural changes. And the changes in cities overall. It’s just a really great analysis of both urban structure but also moviemaking and cinematography and what that shot means in terms of like we’re focusing on this one person among a sea of other people. That it’s generally a first act shot that you see.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And establishing who this person is in a crowd of others. I just thought it was great. And it ties into 9 to 5 and lots of other things, too. So I would highly recommend people check out the Tootsie shot episode of Decoder Ring.

**Craig:** Pretty cool.

**John:** That’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Pretty cool.

**John:** And that’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Michael Karman. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter I’m @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re lovely. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can also find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you find transcripts and sign up for the weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting where we talk about things that are interesting to writers.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where get all the back episodes and bonus segments including the one we’re about to record on your cheat sheet for time travel. Craig, thank you for coming back and for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. So Craig this is the conceit here I want to get to. So let’s say you are traveling back through time and you may get stuck someplace. If you had one sheet of paper back and forth what kind of information would you want to have that you could share with the people of that time, that era, so that you could jumpstart them but also sort of like prove that you actually know things? What would you have on there that would make you seem so, so smart?

**Craig:** OK. And I don’t know what time I’m going to?

**John:** You don’t. You don’t know what it’s going to be.

**Craig:** Because what a bummer you jump in that thing and you end up just yesterday. You’re like, ugh.

**John:** I’ve got the Pythagorean Theorem for nothing.

**Craig:** God. Yeah.

**John:** And I want to stipulate that there’s prior art here. So Ryan Norse has a great book on how to invent everything. A previous One Cool Thing of mine was The Information by Lewis Dartnell. There’s The Thrifty Time Traveler’s Guide by Jonathan Stokes. So people have thought about this. But the sense of one sheet of paper is sort of my conceit for this.

**Craig:** I would probably emphasize medicine and in particular germ theory.

**John:** Yeah. Oh god.

**Craig:** And some simple antibiotic methods. But most importantly just basic germ theory. If I could back into certain periods and just prove to people that they should just wash their hands, and like specifically the doctor.

You know, when Lincoln was shot, so this is not that long ago. What was it, 1865?

**John:** Sounds right.

**Craig:** So not that long ago. That wasn’t thousands of years ago. The doctors who they took him across the street and they brought doctors in. He was clearly in grave straits and on his way to dying. There’s a bullet hole in his head and they just put their fingers in it to try and feel if they could find the bullet. That’s what they did.

They didn’t wash. There was no reason to wash because there’s nothing on your hand that could possibly cause more problems than a bullet. If I could do one thing it would be germ theory.

So notes on germ theory. Plans for how to heal infections. How to prevent viral transmission and bacterial transmission.

**John:** Those all sound great. I think there’s some basic formulas that would be important there. Because this idea of a cheat sheet, I don’t know if you ever had any classes where a physics test you were allowed to sort of like have one sheet of paper that can have–

**Craig:** They never let me have that.

**John:** Oh, I think it’s a godsend. Because it’s stupid not to because you could always look it up.

**Craig:** I know. But they were mean.

**John:** Yeah. So the basic formulas, so Pythagorean Theorem, Quadratic Formula, getting everybody on a base ten system is just so important and so crucial. The knowledge that the world is round, because experiments you could do even in ancient Egypt that show like oh the world is round, you can actually calculate the size of the earth. The sense that the earth is not the center of the universe. That the sun is the center of our solar system. That there are other planets. I think that’s important to understand. It’s not going to have as big of an impact necessarily as washing your hands will be, but I think will move things forward.

Getting people past – you know, if you look at Aristotle and sort of the classic philosophers they were trying to do this theory of mind, but also the physical universe, and they just did not have the tools to actually understand. So they kept inventing things and they systematize this logic but it was based on nothing. So bringing them the scientific method and sense of like this is the hypothesis, this is what I’m testing. This is the results. That feels crucial to me.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Capitalism and just the sense of how money works and how we’re going to exchange stuff, how we’re going to exchange goods and services.

**Craig:** A lot of Bernie fans screaming at their iPods right now. How dare you!

**John:** If you understand capitalism then you can get to other sort of systems as well.

**Craig:** That’s how you get yourself off the hook, huh? All right.

**John:** That’s what it is. But who explained capitalism better than Marx? No one.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not really sure anybody did prior to that. It was just sort of this is our system. It’s a natural bartering system is what we do.

**John:** There was Adam Smith.

**Craig:** From the Invisible Hand.

**John:** Invisible Hand and all that stuff. Those feel like the crucial things to sort of get across. I mean, you don’t need to teach them atomic theory. There’s things that are just not going to be realistic because they have to build so much stuff along the way, but I want to get people started as quickly as we can. And hopefully head off some of the worst things like slavery and thinking about sort of like what does it fundamentally mean for each person to have inalienable rights that are possessed within.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, what do you think? Based on everything we know about science fiction when you go back and you help people then you hurl yourself back to the future, it’s going to be a nightmare scape. Because that’s just we can never help.

**John:** Time travel inevitably involves sort of like sleeping with your mother and it’s bad.

**Craig:** Oh, why would you? Why?

**John:** Back to the Future.

**Craig:** Got to drink heavily now at 11:47 in the morning. Oh man. I’m going to go back in time to a moment before you said that. That’s all I want to do.

**John:** Now if you can go back in time you could actually think of a One Cool Thing that you could have shared here.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** No, not going to do it.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** Craig, thank you very much for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** And listeners if you have suggestions for what you should put on that sheet do write to us because I think you’re going to probably have some really good ideas of what that sheet should be.

**Craig:** Better ones. Oh, you know what I would love? I would roll the dice and hope that I would go back to the time of Jesus. And show him the bible. And have him go, “You can’t be serious?” And I’m going to be like, no dude, this is real. And he’d be like, “You can’t? You cannot be serious.” And I’m like, no, no, no, this is seriously real.

**John:** Listeners if you tweet at me with your one page back-and-forth sheet cheat I will retweet that because I think that’s a great idea. Do it. Craig, good luck with your continued preproduction and when do you start shooting? Or is that public knowledge?

**Craig:** That is not public knowledge, but real, real soon.

**John:** Cool. Enjoy.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Zola Movie](https://a24films.com/films/zola) discussed in our HWTBAM segment on [Episode 222](https://johnaugust.com/2015/live-from-austin-2015).
* [The Criminals Thought the Devices Were Secure. But the Seller Was the F.B.I.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/world/australia/operation-trojan-horse-anom.html?referringSource=articleShare)
* [1,000-Word Job Listing for a “Household Manager/Cook/Nanny](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jan/24/nanny-viral-ad-california-ceo) and follow up [An Interview With the Woman Who Wrote the Viral 1,000-Word Job Listing for a “Household Manager/Cook/Nanny](https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/01/meet-the-silicon-valley-ceo-and-mom-who-wrote-the-viral-extremely-detailed-job-listing-for-a-household-manager-cook-nanny.html) from Ruth Graham on Slate.
* [Couple breaks up after being handcuffed together for 123 days](https://nypost.com/2021/06/18/couple-breaks-up-after-being-handcuffed-together-for-123-days/)
* [Must I really indulge my ‘psychic’ sister-in-law?](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/carolyn-hax-must-i-really-indulge-my-psychic-sister-in-law/2016/08/05/ff5f2f10-5830-11e6-9767-f6c947fd0cb8_story.html)
* [Decoder Ring: The Tootsie Shot](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2021/06/tootsie-shot)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Liz Hannah](https://twitter.com/itslizhannah) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael Karman ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/507standard.mp3).