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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 436 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast it’s a new installment of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at stories in the news and figure out how they can become entertainment, because real life is deeply unsettling, and even in circumstances where someone’s guilt is incontrovertibly established traditional rules of not just storytelling but actual democracy are shattered one after the other making you wonder whether anything actually matters. And if there’s even going to be an election in November, which is why we retreat to what-if scenarios and imagine a world in which choices have consequences, and the bad guys sometimes lose.

To do so we have a special guest this week. Liz Hannah—

**Liz Hannah:** No pressure.

**John:** She is a writer whose credits include The Post, Long Shot, and the upcoming All the Bright Places. Welcome back, Liz.

**Liz:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Welcome back, Liz. Third time?

**Liz:** Third time. Need the jacket.

**Craig:** You got the jacket. We have a burgundy jacket for you.

**Liz:** Oh, that’s nice.

**Craig:** At five. It’s gold-stripe.

**Liz:** Oh wow.

**John:** Later on we give scarves. There’s a whole sort of Scriptnotes wardrobe.

**Liz:** I was like do you start with like a jean jacket, then you get to a leather jacket?

**Craig:** All of it from Goodwill.

**Liz:** Great.

**Craig:** Rest assured, someone died in that jacket.

**Liz:** If it’s XXXL, that’s exactly the way I want it.

**Craig:** At minimum.

**Liz:** Yes, obviously. Either that or like petite.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** That’s how it works.

**Liz:** Those are the ranges.

**Craig:** From a child.

**Liz:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** And if you’re a Premium member stick around because at the end of the show there will be a bonus segment, and Liz hopefully you’ll stick around for this, too. I would like to talk about books and what it’s OK to do in or with a book. So, are you allowed to dog your pages? Are you allowed to markup books? What is permissible to do with an actual physical book?

**Craig:** That will be our bonus topic?

**John:** Bonus topic.

**Craig:** Great.

**Liz:** Great.

**John:** All right. Craig Mazin, you just won a WGA award.

**Craig:** I sure did. I can only imagine how frustrating that must have been for some of the people from the guild that were there. I realized when I walked in, because I ran into Sally Burmester who is the kind of second in command of the credits department who I’ve had a lot of years working with, and then just some other people that I know from the guild that I’ve always been very friendly with. And I had such a nice hugs and all the rest of it. And then I realized like there’s only really two kinds of people that work at the guild. People that are like, yay, but then most of them who are like you son of a bitch. So, I was like–

**Liz:** Do you feel like it’s just the guild that feels that way about you?

**Craig:** No, no, obviously the rest of the world. I’m aware of my polarizing nature.

**John:** Well congratulations on another award for Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So there’s very few awards left, but it’s been a good run.

**Craig:** It’s been a great run. And honestly because we all love each other – I feel like there are probably shows that do, or movies that do really well where there’s a lot of enmity between people. I think there was like something in the air when was it 12 Years a Slave, when that movie won? There was like the writer and the director didn’t like each other. There was something in the air. We all love each other. All of us. Like everybody. So when all these things, like Johan Renck won the DGA award last weekend. So, we were loving on him. And our production designers won. And our sound people won. And so everybody sends each other these lovey-dovey emails. And I’m, you know, that part is wonderful. We all actually like each other so we’re happy.

**Liz:** Such a rarity.

**Craig:** I think it is.

**Liz:** It is.

**Craig:** I think it legitimately is. Ah, if people could see the misery that goes on. But, yeah, it’s been great. And I’m very grateful. And the Writers Guild, you know, my relationship with the Writers Guild is complicated in that I’m always kind of just a fuse-budgety policy questioner, but obviously a loyal member of the guild for a quarter of a century. And, you know, that award last night actually was emotional. It was nice.

**Liz:** It’s really nice to be in a room with other writers. And it’s nice to be recognized by your peers who you respect and who you are either internally or externally competing with. You know, you’re all trying to make each other better, or be better than somebody else. And so to be recognized like that I think is really wonderful.

**John:** Yeah. Some news and some follow up before we get to our main topics. My third book, Arlo Finch, comes out Tuesday, the day this episode drops.

**Craig:** I’m looking at it.

**John:** So Arlo Finch in the Kingdom of Shadows is the third book in the installment.

**Craig:** OK. I just want to describe for people–

**John:** Describe it.

**Craig:** So Arlo Finch and his friends are staring into what appears to be two centurions, but statues with wings, but the wings are it looks like stone. And it’s like but the centurion statue stone goliaths are facing each other and in between them is a crevice of light.

**John:** Fair.

**Craig:** And something good or bad is coming out of it. And you know what I feel? I feel like they’re about to leave something and enter something new.

**John:** That is absolutely true and accurate. They are headed into the world beyond the woods. The realm.

**Craig:** Yes. The Kingdom of Shadows.

**John:** Yes. That is in fact the Kingdom of Shadows. All three books have an “in the” thing. It’s all geographically based.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So “in the Valley of Fire,” “in the Lake of the Moon,” and now “in the Kingdom of Shadows.” It is actually truly a trilogy. This last week I put out a long medium post which you can read about the experience of writing a trilogy, because as screenwriters we always write like one movie. And it was really cool to actually get the chance to write the whole trilogy and do the whole thing. But unlike your Chernobyl experience where you could plan out the whole series in advance, I really kind of couldn’t do that. And so one of the things I wanted to get into in this post is the degree to which you can make a plan but there’s just a lot of discovery along the way. And the villain of this series was not the villain who I thought was going to be the real villain as I started writing the first book.

**Craig:** The real villain I presume is capitalism.

**John:** It is capitalism. [laughs] It’s funny how it all comes back to that.

**Craig:** I’m in a Bernie State of Mind.

**John:** If you want to come see me and get your book signed I’m doing an event at Chevaliers on Larchmont this Sunday at 2pm.

**Liz:** Love that bookstore.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** I do want to read this blurb on the back of the book. It’s pretty amazing. This is Ransom Riggs who is a number one New York Times bestselling author of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a book that my children both read, and thus I read and loved. And he writes, god I hope Ransom Riggs is a man, because I just said he writes.

**John:** He does. He is a man and he does write.

**Craig:** It could be – Ransom is a gender-neutral name.

**Liz:** That’s true. It’s sort of a human-neutral name.

**Craig:** It’s human-neutral. It’s actually a word. It’s a noun. Ransom Riggs says, “John August is a master storyteller.” That’s pretty impressive.

**John:** It’s nice. Yeah.

**Craig:** Master.

**John:** Yeah. I got some good reviews on this.

**Craig:** Yeah man. That’s awesome. Congratulations.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Are you going to do another one by the way? Not another one of these, but another thing?

**John:** At some point.

**Liz:** A book series.

**John:** Well, at least a book. I don’t think I would do another series right away. It was a lot to undertake right at the start and it was kind of foolish in a way, just because to do a book a year is just a huge commitment.

**Craig:** Derek Haas does a book a minute.

**John:** He does a book a minute.

**Liz:** That’s right. He does.

**John:** And his books are ultimately a series, but they’re not a trilogy in that way. Like it’s another installment. This was a lot.

**Craig:** I wish I had – so our friend, Derek Haas, who does all the Chicago shows, Chicago Fire, all the rest of it, has more confidence as a writer than anybody I know. And because of that he’s free, like he doesn’t do that thing that I’m always doing which is just going, “You know what? I suck. And actually today would be best spent playing a videogame.” He doesn’t do that.

**Liz:** Oh, that’s every day.

**Craig:** Yeah. Right.

**Liz:** Every day opening the computer, and particularly when it’s a blank page you’re like, no, not good enough for that. Just no.

**Craig:** No, I can’t. Derek is like, “Awesome, blank page. Let’s fill it. Woo!”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** God, I wish I had that.

**John:** He gets up at five in the morning and just does it.

**Craig:** He gets up at five in the morning. I go to bed at five in the morning because my mind won’t shut up. Ugh.

**Liz:** I had to open a blank page on Thursday. I was writing an outline for something and it was luckily like the 15th draft of it that I had been doing, or 15th break of it, and so had kind of an idea of where I was going. But man opening that blank page, even knowing like I’ve got the notes, I know where I’m supposed to head, I was just like there’s so much more interesting things happening on Twitter right now. Or Instagram. Or The New York Times. Or quite literally anything else possible.

**Craig:** Anything. Can I tell you also as I get older there’s this new thing that’s been happening – I don’t’ know if you experience this, John, because we’re older than you, Liz. I’ll start a new project. It’s the beginning. I look at it and I go, “My god, am I still doing this?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Have I gotten nowhere? [laughs] You just realize that you’ve been driving a car in a circle forever.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you’re like I have to do this again? Here we go.

**Liz:** My favorite thing is to revise my title page.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a classic.

**Liz:** I’m really into that.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Liz:** I’m like, um, is this where you put – is it centered? Is this the font that I want to use for the title? What are the other title pages I’ve used for other movies I’ve written? And then you go down that wormhole. Maybe I’ll just read this. We’ll see–

**Craig:** I’ve got a new thing for you if you want. This is my new jam. So I’m adapting this thing that’s based on another existing work. And that existing work has a very specific font it uses. So I’m like, oh, I’ll use that font for the title page. Well, that font was specifically for that thing. But then other people have made similar. So now I’m on a font hunt.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, font hunt. That was so much fun. And then you get to download the font and install the font. But that’s a day. You’re exhausted.

**Liz:** I was doing a look book for something recently and really got into the font world. And I was like, you know, I really think I want this to look like a neon sign. Guess how many neon sign fonts there are?

**John:** 700.

**Craig:** 4,000.

**Liz:** A million. Just a million.

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

**Liz:** And so then you’re like what color is it if I’m doing this in neon sign?

**Craig:** Right.

**Liz:** It was a great day. It was a great day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a good day.

**John:** And really when you’re being paid a daily rate to do this, well, my pages aren’t done yet but I did fit the font for the–

**Craig:** What we’re saying is their nightmare come true.

**Liz:** Actually every producer listening to this right now is like, “Ugh, that was why it was on Tuesday and not Wednesday.”

**Craig:** Exactly. “Because of the font? You piece of shit.” [laughs] What can we do? We’re humans. We can only do what we can do, unless we’re Derek Haas.

**John:** A script from this past year which did use a custom font on its title page–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Was Knives Out. And we talked about Knives Out in Episode 436. I got a bit of follow up here. It says, “John and Craig, you guys were talking about the specificity in scripts and referenced the Knives Out script. I was excited to read it but I noticed there was very little if any description given to the characters. Starting on page one with Fran and then within the first three pages Marta, Mom, and Alice are also introduced, but Marta was the only character with any description whatsoever. And this description was only given as 20s. I’d have to believe that if this was a three-pager sent in by an unknown you would have mentioned that and Craig would have had some umbrage.”

**Craig:** Yes. I would have.

**John:** “So is this because the script is written by an established writer, or it’s a style that some writers can either do or not do as long as it’s consistent?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Tell us what you think, Craig?

**Craig:** Rian Johnson was writing a script for himself to direct.

**Liz:** That’s what I was going to say.

**Craig:** So there’s no question that when it was time to cast, I mean, well first of all that movie is cast almost exclusively with stars. Well-known actors. Meaning there wasn’t going to be an audition process as much as we think this kind of person – I imagine this sort of person, this sort of person. For those actors when the script was sent without question Rian must have included – I mean, I’ll ask him – but he must have included, or just called them and said, “This is who you are. This is what you look like. This is how I see it.” But there was no reason for him to put all that in there because all it would do would be to limit the description for the actors that would be reading it. So he could tailor that to them.

Yes, if he were not directing it, or if there were any chance that anybody else would be working on it, or that there would be a lot of open auditions then, yeah, no, he would have to do something.

**John:** He’d write, “Ruggedly handsome, but doesn’t know it.” Or any of those classic things.

**Craig:** Papa doesn’t know it. Ruggedly handsome but doesn’t know it.

**Liz:** She’s the girl next door, but…”

**Craig:** But.

**Liz:** But.

**Craig:** But. Yeah. Exactly. Because the girl next door sucks.

**Liz:** Yeah, exactly. She looks great without her glasses on.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, the glasses.

**Liz:** That’s my favorite. I’m also wearing glasses right now ironically. So there you go.

**Craig:** Wait, take them off. Let’s see what happens.

**Liz:** Well, it’s like Clark Kent. I can’t.

**Craig:** Of course. Wait, oh my god. Liz Hannah is–

**John:** Superman.

**Craig:** Superman. She’s Superman.

**Liz:** Obviously.

**John:** That’s a good disguise. I was talking with a friend of the show, I had lunch with her a week ago, and she was talking about the process of going out to a major star and so the character is written a certain way in the script but you also write a top page letter that sort of says this is why this is the role for you. And that’s a whole process we should talk about in a future episode, because it’s a very specific thing that happens.

**Craig:** Yes. I did those. I did those. They’re nerve-wracking. I don’t like doing them.

**Liz:** It’s horrifying. You do it for directors, too. You know, like if you’re trying to attach somebody and why is it you and why is it that person and blah-blah-blah. And then when they pass 12 times then you really just get to the letter and you’re like this letter isn’t good. This is why they’re passing.

**Craig:** Also I feel like, oh my god, I’m just – if they say yes I feel like I just sold somebody—

**Liz:** A really bad [crosstalk]–

**Craig:** Like a defective product. Yeah. But that’s me and that’s my sad brain.

**John:** Craig, some shocking and sad news this past week. MoviePass fell to zero. The stock fell to zero. So it had ceased operations in September. We had talked about MoviePass over the past two or three years.

**Craig:** MoviePassed.

**John:** MoviePassed. Craig, any surprises? Any last words for MoviePass?

**Craig:** The surprise was that it took this long. It’s actually amazing how long a venture with no logical prospect for success can actually last. Neither you nor I are business geniuses, but we saw fairly clearly what I think a lot of business geniuses just did not want to see. Which is that that was just not a functioning workable concept. And hopefully people will learn their lesson. But they won’t. Because capitalism is the villain, man.

**John:** Since this is probably the last time we’ll ever talk about MoviePass–

**Liz:** Fingers crossed.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to say that I think there is something underlying the idea in terms of like encouraging people to go see movies at theaters which was a good thing that happened for a short period of time. And so I was talking with Megana, our producer, and she was saying like it was kind of great for a while because it made going to movies with your friends so cheap that they went to more movies.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** And that’s a good thing. So, if the movie theater chains themselves, or other people who actually have a financial interest and an understanding of how movies work could bolster that kind of frequent movie-going I think that’s only to the betterment of everybody.

**Liz:** I agree. I had friends who had it and the thing was that they wouldn’t just go see like Star Wars or whatever the big movie was. They were like well because we can go to the movies we’re going to go see anything that’s in the theater. So they would see small independent movies that like I didn’t even know were in theaters. And so I think that encouragement was really great. Because it’s not really the Star Wars of the world that need the butts in seats.

**John:** Exactly.

**Liz:** We’re all there.

**Craig:** We’re all there.

**Liz:** It’s the other movies that are getting the theatrical release that are really looking for the butts in seats. And so I agree. I think encouraging people to go to theaters is great. I think it just has to be sustainable in any form.

**Craig:** It was great for us. It was great for people that like movies to see as many movies as they wanted for the price of one movie. If restaurants did that more people would definitely eat out. And experience new foods. Unfortunately never could quite – I mean, remember there was that one point where they were like, “No, we’re playing three-dimensional chess. You don’t understand. We’re in the data business.” And for a moment I was like, oh, well, OK. Maybe I’m dumb and that’s a thing?

**John:** I don’t really get how Facebook works either, so maybe.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. But then I was like Facebook has ads. I can understand that. But what is MoviePass going to do with their data of people that go to movies? Really the only data they had was that people that were smart enough to take advantage of this insane thing. RIP MoviePass.

**John:** Yeah. The point you made, Liz, about sustainability I think is really crucial. Whenever you look at a bunch of money spilling into something it can stir stuff up. But like can it really build a sustainable business model out of things? And that’s always the question whenever I see venture capital coming into something I’m like, oh, are they going to ruin something and try to change it?

**Craig:** Yeah. The probably will.

**John:** They probably will. All right. Liz, you have just made a new movie, All the Bright Places. It is coming out on Netflix. What was the process of you getting this movie put together and making this movie? Because this is one of the – you were hands-on in actually making this movie. So talk to us about it.

**Liz:** Yeah. It started a while ago. Actually I think I started the first draft of it right after I sold The Post. So it was before we started shooting The Post. So this would have been 2016/2017. And it’s based on a book by Jennifer Niven called All the Bright Places. I got sent the book by my manager who is a producer on it. And Elle Fanning had been attached for a long time. I’ve known Elle for a long time. We wanted to work together. And I read this book and found it emotionally very moving, but also it dealt with things that we don’t always talk about really openly. I think we don’t always talk about mental health as openly as we can. And we don’t talk about tragedy and sort of trauma and how we recover from that, or don’t recover from that.

And it was also a story about teenagers, but it wasn’t a story just about teenagers. It was sort of when we talked about making the movie we were like let’s make a movie where the two leads happen to be 17, not a movie about them being 17.

**Craig:** Right.

**Liz:** And so I started a draft in 2016/2017. And then everybody was busy, couldn’t really find time. Couldn’t find the right director. And then I was doing rehearsals for Mindhunter in Pittsburgh in 2018 I guess, what year is it? No, yeah, 2018. And I got a call that this guy Brett Haley wanted to direct it. Brett had directed a movie Hearts Beat Loud, which was really wonderful and sweet. And he had read the script and everybody somehow was available. Like it’s one of those crazy things, like everybody had sort of six weeks to shoot this movie in two months. And so we all went to Cleveland and made this movie. And got really the wonderful weather of both steaming hot and icy cold winter.

**John:** That’s why Cleveland is such an in-demand filming spot is because of the climate and its accessibility to everyplace else you want to be.

**Liz:** Yeah. It was beautiful for us to shoot there. It gave us everything. The movie takes place in Indiana originally and so we were shooting Cleveland for Indiana.

**Craig:** That’s good enough. That’s close enough.

**Liz:** It was pretty close. But it was great. And Justice Smith is the co-lead. And he’s phenomenal. I had not seen him do work outside of Jurassic World and Pikachu and stuff like that. And what he did in this movie and what he and Elle did together was really phenomenal.

**John:** So as I was putting together the outline for this I was looking for the trailer for it. And so I find this trailer that’s Elle Fanning and some other dude and it was like a fan cut trailer from 2015.

**Liz:** Oh boy. Yeah.

**John:** And so it was crazy to me that like apparently right from when the book sold people were like, oh, this should be a movie and Elle Fanning should star in it. And it’s like the universe wanted this movie to exist.

**Liz:** The fans of the book are ravenous. They love this book. Jennifer Niven, again who is the author of the book, my cowriter on the screenplay, she just has this amazing fan base. I think because it’s real. And it’s also not talking down to teenagers. I think that was really, you know, when I grew up the movies I watched were like Say Anything and John Hughes movies that were not saying that your feelings that you’re having because you’re 17 are any dumber because you’re 17 when you’re having them. And I thought that was an important sort of thing to put out in the world.

I have two teenager half-siblings. I have a brother who is 18 and a sister who is 14. Making things for them I think is now something that I think about. And I don’t want them to watch something and be like, “You totally got it wrong because you’re old.” And I was like well that’s fair.

So, anyways, yeah, honestly Netflix came in and helped us make the movie. And they’ve been amazing partners. But it was a really interesting experience to just sort of have – actually what you were talking about with Chernobyl. It’s like we all kind of lived in Cleveland for eight weeks and became super close. And kind of making a movie with your friends about something you all feel so passionate about is really – I’ve never had something that was that kind of communal in a way.

**Craig:** And now how do you go back to the other way? Where you’re making a movie which is already a war and then you have more wars?

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is brutal on you.

**Liz:** And if you don’t like the people you’re doing it with and you don’t – it’s funny, at the time that I was doing Bright Places I was talking to an actress-producer about doing another movie, about doing a movie together. And we were kind of just having big talks about what do we want to do, where are we at in our careers, and things like that. And both of us sort of right before, she made a little movie and I made Bright Places, and right before that we were both just so burned out and we were like, “I don’t know, man. Like I don’t know if we can do this. This just feels really hard. Maybe we should just take breaks.” Both of us were just kind of totally burned out.

And then she went and made this little movie with an ensemble cast where they all basically lived in a house together for six weeks. And I went and made this movie with a bunch of people and we basically all lived in a hotel together for eight weeks. And I called her when I got off and I was like, OK, I think I know how to do a movie again, because it’s like this is actually how you should do it, which is with people you love who are going to push you.

Brett and I, the director, got super close during filming. That does not mean that we didn’t fight and argue and disagree. But I think in good ways. You know, I think the writer/director relationship on set is super unique and super different from every project. It sometimes doesn’t exist. Sometimes the writer isn’t there. And I believe that’s very unfortunate because I think that relationship can really push the material and push the movie to be so much better.

**Craig:** It’s the best thing. When it works it’s the best. I mean, Johan and I would – we would have our disagreements, but even as we were having them we had this absolute confidence and faith that we would agree. At the end of the discussion agreement would happen. There was never this like paranoia that OK I’m just going to get rolled over.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On his part or on my part. We were just like we’ll figure it out. It’s cool. We figure things out. That’s what we do. And we’re going to be fine. And I’ve been in so many situations where that’s not even a question. There’s no availability for any kind of consensus because consensus is considered insulting to the director that they would have to even have consensus with the writer.

**Liz:** Yeah. Well, and I think you’re talking about the respect of it, too. Like the mutual respect. I have been super fortunate about the directors I’ve worked with. There’s been that mutual respect. But I’ve also been around and it hasn’t.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Liz:** And obviously we all know those stories, or unfortunately been a part of those stories, but when you have the mutual respect where it’s like I’m not disagreeing with you because I just want to be right, I’m disagreeing with you because I think this might be a right way to go. And then you talk about it. And then you make a decision together about what the right way to go is. And I think there’s no – people I think get really afraid of stepping on other people’s toes or that as the writer you’re trying to encroach on the director and things like that. It’s like, no, I don’t really give a shit. I just want it to be good. And I don’t care who is right. It just has to be good.

**Craig:** They have no problem encroaching on the script.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I just see a whole like encroaching thing, I just laugh at.

**Liz:** It’s crazy. I mean, I’ve worked with producers who have never worked with onset writers before. And I’m like what do you think – I’m here to help. That’s what my job is on set as a writer. I’m just here to help. And with Bright Places we were really lucky. And Justice and Elle and Brett and I would just kind of like go over the script every morning. And we were rewriting every day to be better.

You know, I’ve been in situations, I’m sure we all have, where you’re rewriting it because you’re like we just have to have words. There’s no words. So we just need them. This was like we had the words, but we were just like let’s take a couple hours and make them better.

**Craig:** Lovely.

**Liz:** And it was a really lovely experience.

**Craig:** That is great. And correct me if I’m wrong, you now make a movie every 14 days. Is that right? You’ve got one in the theater every 14 days.

**Liz:** Yes.

**Craig:** You’re becoming very prolific. I have to say. You are.

**Liz:** Oh, no. That’s silly.

**Craig:** No, you are. This is exciting.

**Liz:** I appreciate it. Yeah, actually this year I’ll have two things out.

**Craig:** How about that? And last year how many did you have?

**Liz:** Two.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Liz:** Yeah. I do a movie and a TV show a year it sounds like.

**Craig:** I like that you were like I wrote this thing all the way back in like 2018. And like it’s taken almost a year for it be like…

There’s a movie that I’m hoping to get made at Universal that I wrote in 2014. And that was after it took Lindsay Doran and I, I think, seven years to get the rights to this book. I mean, so that’s fast.

**Liz:** Oh, no. It’s very fast.

**Craig:** You fast. You fast.

**Liz:** It’s very fast. I’m very lucky. I’ve had really great partners in this, too. I mean, I think that’s the other thing. Because I’ve written scripts that haven’t been made. And I’ve tried to get things made that haven’t gotten made, be in TV or in features. But I think the thing about the ones that get made, or sometimes they just don’t work. Sometimes it’s just not the right time. So it’s not anyone’s fault. But the ones that do work is because I have great partners on it who are willing to just do it. And I think that’s – there’s so much overthinking. There’s so much questioning. There’s so much doubt in all of it. I mean, just talking about the blank page. And when you’re kind of just like let’s go make a movie, or let’s go do this because it’s something we really care about—

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Liz:** You know, that’s what I’ve been really fortunate to do. And I’ve also – talking about this other conversation I was having about what I was going to do, you know, a movie to do next and stuff like that. I’ve also just like, you know, I’ve gotten to a place where I just don’t like making things with people I don’t like.

**John:** Oh yeah. It’s the luxury of some choice about who you’re working with. And we all have those choices, but we don’t sort of recognize we have those choices early on, especially in our careers.

**Craig:** We do not.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I did not.

**Liz:** But I also think it’s how – what are you willing to give up? Like I think one of the things that I was really lucky about of The Post happening not when I was 22 years old is that I had a life. I was married. I knew what was important. I had really close friends, really close family who didn’t care really about – they were excited for me, but that didn’t change their perspective of me. Well, hopefully. I guess I’ll find out.

So I was like I’ll go work in a coffee shop. You know, I’ll go be a librarian. My priorities are not based really on the success of my career. They’re based on the happiness of the people in my life and that I hope my job helps that, doesn’t hinder it. And so I try and make choices that it’s like, you know, would I rather go work in a library in the Pacific Northwest than make this movie? Then maybe I shouldn’t make this movie.

**Craig:** Ooh, I don’t know if I should be applying that test because I think I might pick the library every time at this point.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**John:** But you don’t want to make fear-based choices about the things you’re doing. Like I better take this project or else I won’t get another project. So, I think as you get through your career you can recognize like am I making this choice to do this project because it is something that I actually want to do, or is it something I fear if I don’t do that there will be a consequence?

**Craig:** I mean, tell me I’m wrong, but I always felt like you were actually really good about that. That you weren’t somebody that made choices out of fear. Whereas I only made choices out of fear for so long.

**John:** Well, sometimes I wouldn’t make choices out of fear, but make choices out of envy. Like I knew somebody else was going to make that movie. I know that movie is going to get made. And I want to make that movie.

**Craig:** I’ll be walking by the theater going why did I not?

**John:** There was a major book series that I passed on just on concept and then it became like one of the biggest book series of all time.

**Liz:** 50 Shades of Grey?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** 50 Shades.

**John:** And it’s like, no, I wouldn’t want to do that.

**Craig:** I would love to see your 50 Shades by the way. Now I really want to see your 50 Shades of Grey. It would be amazing.

**John:** It was not 50 Shades of Grey.

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

**John:** Liz, when do we get to see your movie?

**Liz:** All the Bright Places comes out on Netflix February 28th. I think there is a trailer dropping the first week of February, so you can actually watch a trailer that has–

**John:** That’s not fan-made but actually made by professionals.

**Liz:** Not fan made. A real trailer. And super excited. And then I guess you watch it forever because it’s on Netflix. So–

**Craig:** Forever.

**Liz:** Would love for people to watch it the opening weekend. Opening I guess is so–

**Craig:** Opening minute. Opening second.

**Liz:** Opening minute. Yeah. And also if you’re in LA I’m going to host a screening at the Alamo Draft House the Sunday after the release.

**John:** Oh great.

**Craig:** Love that. That’s great.

**John:** That will be nice. All right. Before we get into our How Would This Be a Movies, I wanted to take a look at an article by James Pogue in The Baffler which was called They Made a Movie Out of it, which is sort of the other side of this whole story. And so this article takes a look at how nonfiction journalism, especially long-form nonfiction journalism, has become such a pipeline for movies to get made. And that source of IP has become incredibly important. And Pogue really rails against it. And to kind of comedic effect also in a way. I found it kind of hilarious at a certain point.

But he talks about war time romance, unlikely savants, deranged detectives, gentlemen thieves, love-struck killers. Stories that tap into the thrill of being alive as being the mandate behind these companies that are sort of essentially packaging together, not literally packaging in the way that agencies do, but they are creating these stories with the intention that they will become movies down the road.

So, it was the first time I saw someone actually writing up about this phenomenon which I think we’ve all kind of seen. And it’s really there. So, Craig, what was your first take on this article?

**Craig:** I was very glad that he wrote it. I am currently subsumed by people who are like here’s a podcast, here’s a book, here’s an article about some horrible thing that happened, because obviously that’s what you do. And every single time I think to myself why would I need this? It’s facts. So, what I think is going on is that there is this world of producers, and I don’t mean to tar them with an evil brush. They’re doing their jobs. But what they’re doing is they’re trying to present to Hollywood ownership of something, an exclusivity. I got a book out of galleys that is about this event. Now I own the rights to it. And we can now make something of it and no one else can. And I’m just like, oh yes we can. Oh yes we can.

And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, like my lawyer will call and will say, “OK, I got this submission. This producer has this thing.” And I’m like, OK, but what are they for? So they just planted a flag on a thing that is community property, like they went to a fire hydrant and said my fire hydrant. It’s not your fire hydrant.

And the worst part of this, and he really does such a good job of pointing this out, is that it’s distorting the way journalists do their work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they know how this works. They can see what sells. And the money they get from selling the rights is vastly more than the money they get to do their actual jobs, which is a shame.

**Liz:** Yeah. We should definitely pay journalists better.

**Craig:** Yes. So it’s distorting the way we are now receiving information. And that part is the scariest of them all. I always say like, hey, the reason you’re sending me – I never say this to them – but I’m like the reason you’re sending me this book that is a bunch of facts that nobody owns is because you saw a show I did and you think I will do good with this. But there was no producers with books and properties back then. You know, in fact we were in “competition” with a project that Scott Rudin had because he bought a book out of galleys. Which, by the way, was an excellent book. But that book came out when our show came out. So they’re waiting around for a book to be published. Do you know what I mean?

Anyway, so I thought this was a great article. And I would just say to people like to writers if you love some bit of history don’t be afraid to talk to those people, but you don’t get boxed out of anything just because somebody has the rights to nonfiction.

**John:** So let’s talk about the money for a second because what Pogue says is that a long-form piece in something like The New Yorker is about $9,000 is what a top tier writer could expect to make out of this. Versus like options could be $300,000. It could be more than that. And so they’re definitely looking at a paycheck. And so even while on a screenwriter level, like a top tier screenwriter, that’s not a ton of money, for a journalist that is a ton of money.

Mark Harris had a tweet this last week where he was saying, “I talked to a writer today who told me her goal is to establish a Twitter persona—“

**Liz:** Oh right. I saw this.

**John:** “—that she can leverage into a deal for a book of identity-driven essays that she can sell as a streaming series that she will consult on and kick off her TV creator-producer career.” And so it is that sense of like if I’m going to be a journalist I have to be thinking about what stories I’m going to tell that can actually carry on to the next thing. And that’s not what journalism was supposed to be about.

**Liz:** Well, it’s also complicated because we’re living in a world of IP. We live in this world where everything has to be based on IP. Everything. You can’t, you know, do this – I mean, genuinely one of the reasons everybody freaked out about Knives Out, I mean, I think it’s a really great movie, but it’s also because it was original. It felt different. It felt like there wasn’t some underlying anything for it.

And so I think it’s really hard as – by the way, any version of writers, journalists, screenwriters, anybody – is going into a study and selling something and just being like, no, I made it up. Or, no, it’s about this time in history. And by the way it’s real. And I don’t need to back it up with a novel or a book or a nonfiction book. So I think that’s really hard.

Whereas when you say like here’s the book that this is based on everybody’s eyes sort of light up and they’re more excited. And they see the Time cover.

**Craig:** They shouldn’t be.

**Liz:** By the way, there is a tie-in book cover for All the Bright Places that has just been released for the fifth anniversary of the book.

**Craig:** But that’s fiction. Like I get that. But for nonfiction, everybody is just staring at this book, thinking that the book is going to get them through. It’s not. Especially if it’s nonfiction.

**Liz:** Well, by the way, The Post.

**John:** I was going to say The Post is based on real stories but it’s not based on any specific book, correct?

**Liz:** No, it’s not. It was never based on one specific book.

**Craig:** There you go.

**Liz:** It’s based on about a dozen different people’s stories. And actively Katharine Graham never wanted her memoir optioned, which was one of the issues everybody felt of adapting it. But in reality you don’t need that specific book to write a story about her life.

**Craig:** You don’t need it. Right.

**Liz:** And in fact that book is – by the way, personal history. Everybody should read it. But it’s specific to her perspective. And it’s her story.

**Craig:** That’s the other problem with this is that when you get these books you’re getting a point of view that you’re now locked into. If I had to pick one book about Chernobyl that show would not be what the show is because everybody has their focus. In fact, that’s how they end up selling the book. There is no event. Pick anything in – let’s just pick something. Vietnam War. There’s been 4,000 books about the Vietnam War. If you’re going to sell one now that somebody is going to option it has to be from a point of view that no one is like – this is a Vietnam War from the view of Viet Cong. He’s 16 years old. And he’s got to get from here to here. It’s his real story.

I get books like this now all the time. And I’m like that’s great. But, again, I’m only writing about that? That’s what I’m doing? Really?

**Liz:** Well, I mean, I think this is also 1917 which was a movie that I frankly was like dreading watching because I was like it’s another war movie.

**John:** And it was very specific.

**Liz:** I’ve seen this before. But, then I sat down and within five minutes I was like, oh, this is completely different because this is so specific. And it’s so personal.

**Craig:** It’s personal. It’s not a book.

**Liz:** First of all, I think it’s genius. But it’s so personal. And so that – I think there’s this dread of watching historical movies because you’re like it’s just going to be the same thing, or I’ve done all these, blah-blah-blah. If you’re encompassing one big story, you kind of have to do it either way. You’re either encompassing a huge story from multiple perspectives, or you’re doing the one. And I think that’s how you can do it now.

**Craig:** And you get to choose.

**Liz:** And you get to choose.

**Craig:** Whereas the book is choosing for you. And then when you show up as a writer, this is the other problem with these books, and these articles, and these podcasts, which I hate, is that you show up as a writer as an employee from the jump. Right? If you go and you say I have an idea, I want to write a history of the Washington Post and Katharine Graham and Ben Bradley and all these things that happened.

**John:** Or if you just go and do it yourself as a spec.

**Craig:** Or you do it yourself, exactly. I am the property. The writer is the thing that matters. As opposed to would you like to rent a room in my book house for a while, employee? And I just think we lose power from the jump with this stuff.

**Liz:** It’s interesting. Because I just adapted a podcast as a limited and I had never done that before. It’s a true story. And what I found interesting was actually–

**John:** It wasn’t Scriptnotes, was it?

**Liz:** It…

**John:** Oh yeah. Who is playing me is what I want to know.

**Craig:** I am.

**Liz:** Yeah, sorry.

**Craig:** It’s the weirdest thing.

**John:** That’s such a bold choice.

**Craig:** It’s so weird. Well she said that I knew you well enough and that I could do it.

**Liz:** I wrote him a cover letter and I was describing his character. And that’s how he agreed to do it.

But so I adapted this podcast and it was really interesting because it was kind of the best version of what we’re talking about because it actually was multitudes of perspectives. It was a podcast that was done by journalists and so there were dozens of people that they interviewed. And so what it was, they had done all the research for me.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Liz:** And so it was in one way for me the most freeing way to do that because I had all these different perspectives. Not just me, obviously. The team that I was working with. And that I think is really freeing. If that had been one person and that had been one person’s perspective on this story I don’t think there was any way to do it. And that’s very limiting. But because it’s IP everybody is really excited.

**Craig:** I’m with you on that. There was a podcast that I was considering adapting and it was very much like the one you’re saying. It was very broad in its scope and it was so brilliantly researched and done. And so I felt like, OK, this is the most amazing research partner of a general world of stuff. But these things where they’ll come to you, “We have a podcast about one family and their war against another family in this little town. And it’s crazy the things that happen.” I’m like, great, but that’s like, ugh. So it’s all real and it’s very narrow. And can I just listen to the podcast and then do my version?

Why do I actually need? You know? Anyway.

**Liz:** Why does every episode have to follow the episode of that? Yeah.

**John:** So Pogue’s article I think very smartly points to Argo as being really a key point in the progression of this. Because Argo is based on this Wire piece by the guy who founded this journalism company, Joshuah Bearman. And that became sort of the platonic ideal of sort of like what the true life story turned into good Hollywood entertainment. It had all of the pieces and beats that you sort of want to see. And I think we’ve referenced Argo a lot as we’ve done these How Would This Be a Movie segments. It’s like you’re taking a real life story and how you’re transforming it. But I really wasn’t thinking about the underlying piece of IP. I was just thinking about the actual events and assuming that a great script was written because it was a great script.

**Craig:** Well we will watch these things and appreciate them when they’re done really, really well. But the business layer in our industry looks at process. And they’re trying to duplicate a process. So a writer sent me an email this morning and he said, “I want you to know that I was meeting at a place,” he wouldn’t tell me where, “and they have asked their executives to just start compiling lists of industrial disasters.”

**John:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** And I just was like you dumb–

**John:** Taking the wrong lesson.

**Craig:** Dumb, dumb dodos. Like you dopes. But this is what they do. So Argo is a remarkable story that, you know, as we do ours and we’ll do some today, some of these resist and some of these as you know just blossom in front of you. Argo is one that just like any one of us I think could have looked at that and said we know what to do. It was one of those. And not to take anything away from the brilliance of what they did do, but you could see how it could be something. And they don’t understand that.

They just see a process. Buy article. Sell article. Make money. Because so many of them make money from just things being made. Not from them being made correctly or interestingly or, yeah.

**Liz:** Well, I think it’s also what you’re talking about is the specificity of a writer’s voice, too. Because I think there’s also the version where the three of us see all of the events of what takes place in Argo and there are three different movies and none of them are actually Argo that Chris Terrio wrote.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Liz:** And so I think that, you know, The Post was a movie that wasn’t a remarkable and a unique idea to be like I want to make a movie about the Pentagon Papers and Katharine Graham. People have been sort of talking about it. When I was writing it I heard there were two other scripts going on at the same time that were, by the way, very different, that were much more focused on – I haven’t obviously read any of them but I was told much more focused on the Pentagon Papers.

So my unique vision on what to do was to follow Kay. And so that’s really specific. A dozen other movies could have been made about Ben Bradley. About The New York Times. About any other version of those stories, of those events. So I think like to people listening who are wondering like well I want to make a movie about the Vietnam War. I want to make a movie about this, but like every movie has been made about this, everything has ever been said. Well what are you saying that’s different? What are you bringing to it that’s going to be unique?

**John:** Yep. So, I asked on Twitter saying what stories should we talk about for a How Would This Be a Movie. And so here’s what I did not pick, but I want to single them out because they were some really, really great stories that I didn’t pick for this one. People asked like, oh, an adaptation of the book She Said, the Harvey Weinstein story. Sure. Great.

The History of the Vibrator. The Secret History of the Vibrator. It’s different than you expect. It was not actually done by a medical professionals for hysterical women. It was actually a very different origin.

A stripper named [Tanka Ray] who had a great backstory.

**Craig:** [Tanka Ray].

**Liz:** Love it.

**John:** What actually is happening in the Chevy/JD Power commercials, the ones where they keep revealing all these real life people.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** And JD Power. Like what the hell is JD Power?

**Craig:** And Associates.

**John:** The demon ZoZo who often shows up with Ouija Boards.

**Craig:** Oh, OK.

**Liz:** Wow, that was not a twist I saw coming.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** ZoZo.

**John:** Outsourcing of hitmen, so hitmen who keep hiring a subcontractor and a subcontractor.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Liz:** Is that like Barry season four?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It will be.

**John:** It is. This woman who falls in love thanks to being catfished. She actually falls in love with the guy whose photos were being used by the cat-fisher. And they actually–

**Liz:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** She fell in love with the stock photo guy.

**John:** Yeah. Stock photo.

**Craig:** I love that. That’s amazing.

**Liz:** That’s great.

**John:** Ronald Reagan’s October surprise. Bic vs. Gillette. Could be the new Ford vs. Ferrari.

**Liz:** That’s the one we’ve been waiting for.

**John:** Yes. Firefighters who are saving the dinosaur trees of Australia. Tuna price-fixing. Ships frozen in ice at the North Pole. Soldiers battling wolves in WWI.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** There’s some good stuff here. But for today I picked political stories. Things that have a good political angle because I feel like we’re in a political moment. Liz, you’re a person who writes movies with politics involved.

**Liz:** Unfortunately. Sorry everybody.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The first one I want to talk about is Jeff Bezos and his phone getting hacked. Because this was a really complicated saga also with some iconic characters. It’s still kind of happening in real-time in front of us. Very short version of this. Everyone knows Jeff Bezos. This is a summary that John Gruber did. And so John Gruber has a site called Daring Fireball. And I really liked his pitch for what this saga was. I’m going to summarize it a bit here.

The richest man in the world, a billionaire a hundred times over, meets and exchanges phone numbers with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, the most powerful dictator in the Middle East. The richest man in the world happens to own as a mere side business The Washington Post, a newspaper whose news coverage and opinion columns have been highly critical of the Saudi Arabian royal family’s brutal and aggressive regime. The crown prince uses this superficial personal relationship with the richest man in the world to hack his phone by an infected attachment sent by WhatsApp using military grade technology seemingly crafted by a secretive firm from Israel that supposedly only offers its services to trusted governments.

With the information they extract they end up revealing an affair that he’s been having. His marriage falls apart. He brings in Gavin de Becker, a world-famous sort of researcher and protector to figure out what’s happening. The president of the United States is involved in the saga. The president’s son-in-law is involved in the saga. A team of Saudi agents brutally murder and dismember Jamal Khashoggi, who was a reporter for The Washington Post.

There’s just a lot of pieces here. So, the Jeff Bezos MBS saga, how do we start this movie?

**Liz:** Well, if it’s Craig there is a natural disaster or a manmade disaster probably.

**John:** Well let’s take a look at this on—

**Liz:** This is the article. This is the one you’ve been looking for.

**Craig:** This is it.

**John:** Let’s take a look at this on two fronts. First off, the actual story. And then I think we should also talk realistically about how challenging it will be to make this movie given the people involved.

**Craig:** Well, so weirdly I don’t think it would be hugely challenging depending on the company. There are some companies that are tied up with money from the Middle East, but generally not from Saudi Arabia. Look, I think one of the competitors to Amazon, whether it be Netflix or Hulu would be thrilled to maybe poke Bezos. It’s not like he’s going to kick their stuff off of Amazon here and there. But when I read through this story the challenge I see it as is that other than the Khashoggi story which was just terrible and shocking, I’m not sure I care that much.

In other words, it’s a billionaire who is getting poked back by another billionaire and his marriage falls apart. But he’s OK. And he continues to own that business and The Washington Post. It is concerning that Saudi Arabia is in possession of technology that can do this. But that’s it. It’s sort of like so it happens and then it’s like and how what. And did it change the world? Did it crack the earth open in any significant way? I don’t really think so.

So, weirdly my problem with dramatizing this is I’m not sure that it’s dramatic in any significant way. That’s kind of – yeah.

**John:** All right. Liz, you made another movie about The Washington Post.

**Liz:** I did do that.

**Craig:** Which was dramatic.

**John:** So I’m wondering where do you see – what characters would you focus on if you were doing this movie?

**Liz:** That I think was my initial reaction reading it was like who is the POV character in this? Because I agree. I didn’t have, again, I think aside from Khashoggi which that I think in this story and the way this article is laid out is almost an afterthought to what happened. And that for me is the emotional crux and the tragedy of this whole story. And so I wonder if there’s something there of that you’re telling the story when billionaires fight there are consequences. And it’s not just done over text message. There are actual legitimate fatal consequences to this power play and to whomever is in the White House currently.

And I think – so that for me was like I don’t know that this article is the story, but if this is the backdrop there’s probably a deeper emotional conversation to be had about the side effects of billionaires trying to play each other.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll link to a couple different articles. And this to me of all – we were talking about sort of like whether things need to be based on IP or based on articles – I don’t think there has to be anything based on an article here at all.

**Craig:** No way. Yeah.

**John:** That question of POV, I would have generally said like I don’t care about rich people’s problems, and then I watched Succession. And I guess it turns out I really do care about rich people’s problems.

**Liz:** I love rich people’s problems on Succession.

**Craig:** Although, are they rich people’s problems? Because my obsession with Succession is that the richness exacerbates family problems. And that they’re everyone’s family problems.

**Liz:** Well it’s basically King Lear.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s King Lear.

**John:** But the degree to which Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, that it is a classic affair but taken to such a weirdly Titanic level. And so I think what might be possibly interesting about doing this story is that you have these characters who are almost like Olympian gods at this sort of Titanic level up here. And then you have the contrast of that with sort of ordinary people. And so I don’t know there’s ways you get down to the Amazon fulfillment worker and the researcher, or the hacker who is doing this one little bit of code, but there may be some way of just looking at how disparate these people’s lives are. The scale at which they’re playing. Because it’s true that also I think national/international policies is happening partly because of this affair. And this weird text message being sent back and forth has triggered something huge in the world over what should be something kind of inconsequential. I think that might be the way you get over the scale problem.

**Liz:** Yeah. It’s also a little bit like The Laundromat. It’s kind of the story of the little guys that are affected. You know, it’s the people who are not involved in the power plays and not involved in those conversations and not involved in the affair and they’re getting totally screwed.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about some of the dangers about trying to tackle this story at all. Because you said that you felt like a Netflix or an HBO might be willing to some of this. I come back to thinking of Sony and North Korea. And I do wonder if you’re the company that’s trying to this thing you may be looking at not just legal challenges from Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, but also a government who is trying to destroy things.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they’ve proven that they have some technologies there. So, that is an issue. And it’s going to become more of an issue because we know for instance that it’s not possible to tell certain stories about China. This has been coming up a lot because I’ve been getting a lot of tweets and things about Wuhan and coronavirus and what the Chinese government is doing, which sounds very, very familiar to anybody that’s looked at the way other certain communist governments have handled these kinds of things. And the fact remains that I just don’t see how you could make a movie that is critical of the Chinese government in Hollywood today because of the intertwining of finances. It’s just not possible. I just don’t think it’s possible.

And that’s obviously of great concern. It’s going to become of more concern. This is not the first time Hollywood has had this problem. Curiously they did in the 30s. The Nazi government started basically pressuring Hollywood to not make certain kinds of things or they wouldn’t show the movies in Germany. And Hollywood in its typical way said, “OK.” Because Hollywood is cowardly and loves money.

So, despite all of the wonderful speeches that people in Hollywood seem to make about progress and freedom and liberty and so forth, it’s going to become harder and harder to do this because of globalization and the globalization of the marketplace. And more importantly the globalization of financing turns everything into a tricky mess. And sooner or later you just end up with whatever the safest villain is when we start making these movies.

So, famously the Red Dawn remake, right? It’s like, yeah, North Korea, what are they going to do, right? So I think in 20 years the only villains that we’ll have in movies will be the North Koreans. We’re telling some story about what happened when the United States invaded Grenada, it will still be North Korea. We’ll just change it to North Korea.

**John:** We’ll just have to invent some random country. Some island nation.

**Liz:** Yeah. I mean, I think it’s interesting talking about globalization and things like that because look at what happened with the NBA when Daryl Morey tweeted about Hong Kong.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. And the cowardliness was just kneejerk, right?

**Liz:** And I think there’s also the problem of people being undereducated to actually the things that are happening. I think people will just say kind of a blanket statement of like, oh, well this is what’s happening. But not knowing and not understanding. Frankly, I think the fact that the Houston Rockets didn’t fire Daryl Morey is a big statement and I think is good that they did not take it to that level and they didn’t fine him and things like that.

**Craig:** Right.

**Liz:** But it is really this conversation of fear and it is a conversation of, you know, look, I’ve not done a project because I was genuinely afraid that the people that I was writing about would take over my car and make me crash into the side of the building. There are those things.

**Craig:** Those thoughts have crossed my mind as well.

**Liz:** Yeah. There are those stories that there is a legitimate fear. And do I really want to write that one or am I OK just turning my car on and leaving that one on the side? So, Saudi Arabia is a little scary. That’s a little, you know.

**Craig:** It is.

**Liz:** I would prefer not to have them hack my phone.

**John:** All right. Also looking at globalization and probably the single person who most embodies globalization at this moment would be Carlos Ghosn. So this all happened while I was in Japan. I was there for the holidays. And so I was there as all this stuff happened. So, if you don’t know who Carlos Ghosn is he was born in Brazil to Lebanese parents, raised in Lebanon. He attended some of France’s best schools. He was working for the tire-maker Michelin. He worked on his English and became head of the North American company, for Nissan, Renault, Mitsubishi, that alliance.

He was arrested in Tokyo for basically hiding money, not declaring money that he’d gotten in. On December 29th he escaped and made his way all the way back to Lebanon, which should have been impossible, and he somehow did it. So, this feels like – what I love about this story is I can completely imagine a version of this where he is the hero and this remarkable, daring escape he’s made, or that he is a great villain who has fled from Japan.

**Craig:** Or a MacGuffin.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like he’s like the light in the briefcase. First of all, Carlos Ghosn’s last name for a word puzzle nerd is such a gift.

**Liz:** Phenomenal. It’s great.

**Craig:** Like I’m looking at Carlos Ghosn. I’m like, OK, is there a puzzle where other names I can just remove. I can change one letter in the first name and one letter in the last name, both to T, and make a phrase like car lot ghost. So now I have a whole Carlos Ghosn puzzle I’m going to try and work on.

But, my take on this would be like you get hired by a company that’s like here’s the deal, we got to figure out how to get this dude out of this country over there.

**John:** Logistics.

**Liz:** 100%.

**Craig:** It’s logistics. And it’s a comedy.

**John:** A heist in a way.

**Craig:** It’s a heist where you’re moving a human through. And it’s really hard. And you have to make money. And maybe you kind of get to know him while he’s talking through the box or whatever. But I love the idea of kind of a logistics-based black comedy.

**Liz:** I think we should get the Ocean’s crew back for this one.

**John:** Totally. So, at one point in order to get into a plane he’s basically smuggled inside a box, because it was just too big to go through the normal scanner. So they don’t detect that a human being is inside that.

**Craig:** I don’t know. When you read it, because the thing is when you look at him it’s just kind of funny. Like I’m not scared of this guy.

**John:** No.

**Liz:** No.

**Craig:** He seems kind of like a goof.

**Liz:** He threw a Marie Antoinette-themed birthday party for his wife.

**Craig:** He’s a goof, right?

**Liz:** Like it sounds amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it smells like a comedy to me also because his crime is financial. And while we know that financial crimes have impacts on real people, he’s not a murderer. He wasn’t like polluting the air with some evil chemical. He just, you know. And, look, he also kind of has a point. I mean, his point was I got arrested in Japan for this crime and their conviction rate is 99%. That’s a huge problem. Like that is legitimately a problem.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** It doesn’t appear that there’s such a thing as a fair trial in Japan if everyone is guilty. So I kind of got like a little bit of sympathy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know? Look, he’s probably a total criminal. But, I don’t know, I just thought it was fun.

**Liz:** Do you think the Japanese government was like, “We got to lose that one case so it’s not 100%.” Do you think they have that conversation?

**John:** A ringer.

**Liz:** We’ve got to keep it just at 99% guys. Because otherwise we’ve got issues.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think they need to adjust that number. I’ve got to be honest with you. 99 is not–

**Liz:** I have questions.

**Craig:** Like I think the federal government has like a 90% conviction rate here in the US.

**John:** Which you could argue like–

**Craig:** They pick the winners.

**John:** They only try the cases that they know they can win.

**Craig:** But even there like, you know, like one out of ten. That feels like we’re normal. If you win every game as a pitcher you’re probably juicing, you know? So lose one.

**John:** I will put a link in the show notes to an article that talks about the Hollywood connection behind all this because – actually both of these stories have Hollywood connections.

**Craig:** That was the craziest.

**John:** Yeah. So Ghosn was talking with a producer about sort of like that his life felt like a movie in this way. And so this was before he had actually done this great escape. So I think that’s funny.

Going back to the previous story, there’s a Hollywood connection there, too, because the way the party at which Jeff Bezos and MBS met was here in Hollywood. Brian Grazer was throwing this party and Iger was there and other folks were there. So it’s so–

**Craig:** Never go to a Brian Grazer party. Never go.

**John:** That’s what tends to happen.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve never been invited.

**John:** Nope.

**Liz:** Yeah, I was like how many of those invitations have you shot down, Craig?

**Craig:** Zero.

**Liz:** There you go.

**Craig:** Zero. But I’m just saying prospectively I’m not doing it.

**Liz:** You have a 99% of not going to a Brian Grazer party.

**Craig:** Of not going to a Brian Grazer party.

**John:** All right. Our third and final story is also political. This is about Holly Cairns—

**Liz:** Love this one.

**John:** Standing against partner Christopher O’Sullivan. This is in rural Cork. She is a candidate for the Social Democrats. He is a candidate for some other political party whose name I can’t pronounce.

**Craig:** But they’re like a moderate, moderate-left versus left-left.

**John:** Yes. But they’re both running for the same spot. It feels like a classic setup, but I was trying to remember what other movies had the male and female—

**Liz:** Competing.

**John:** Competing.

**Craig:** The Competition.

**John:** What other rom-com has the couple against each other?

**Craig:** The Competition is a great movie, Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving are both competitive pianists. And they’re falling in love while they’re at a competition. They’re not like already together. That’s a new one. Hmm?

**Liz:** I can’t pull any.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think so.

**Liz:** I mean, I really – reading this I was like – can we just do the sequel to Long Shot with this? Because it’s such a great story. I also liked that there’s also three seats available. So the two of them could–

**Craig:** Which kind of takes away the—

**Liz:** Takes a little bit.

**John:** The stakes.

**Craig:** The reality has lowered the stakes.

**Liz:** And also the article left that to be like the last line of the article.

**Craig:** Which I was like oh you people.

**Liz:** Yeah. You just got me.

**Craig:** And also but like the danger is the article, or at least one of the articles starts off with, “It sounds like a bad romantic comedy.” And you’re like that’s the problem. It kind of sounds like a bad romantic comedy. So how do you make the good romantic comedy version out of it? Because the two of them seem actually lovely. And they’re married and they’re staying married, which means there’s actually not a ton of conflict there it seems.

**Liz:** No. And you can tell they’re not Americans because they’re so just casual and like, well, we agree about everything except politics. So it’s fine. And I was like I’ve never – I don’t understand that. That’s not a sentence that’s ever been said in the United States.

**Craig:** And also like they’re both super good-looking. It’s actually really annoying. I hate them.

**John:** All right. So let’s talk about the challenges. If you get hired to do this story what are the things you’re going to be looking for in order to create the conflict, the challenge that you need? And so we’ve had other writers come on talking about the romantic comedy engine. What are we looking for in a comedy and in here that’s going to make this possible so it doesn’t just stall out?

**Liz:** I mean, for me I think comedy is always best when it’s organic and relatable. Like I think when you – character flaws are inherently comedic. Particularly if you see a reflection of yourself in them. So, I think this feels like a relationship comedy to me. This feels like two people who like the only reason they’re not together is because they disagree about everything. You know, so, it feels a little like a comedy version of like War of the Roses. And you get two really dynamic people who – and passionate people.

My only thing is I don’t know if the conflict of the movie can be sustained about two people arguing about politics.

**Craig:** No.

**Liz:** That feels like a–

**Craig:** Death.

**John:** But here’s where I think the upcoming election gives you a real benefit in this story that you don’t normally get in a romantic comedy. It’s like there is a deadline. There is going to be a decision reached. And normally when a couple has conflict about when do we have kids, are we staying here or are we moving, there’s never a decision. And actually it can feel like the population is getting to vote on some of these things.

**Craig:** Right. My gut is that there’s no way to do this story if they’re happily married in the beginning.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s not a good marriage. It’s falling apart. And the fact that one of them chooses to run against the other is the ultimate shot across the bow. And then what they find, and this is a very romantic comedy sort of way of looking at it, is as they compete with each other they just start getting hotter and hotter to each other.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Again.

**Liz:** It’s a little Mr. and Mrs. Smith meets like The American President.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. There you go.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so what happens is they are back together again and then one of them discovers that the other one has kind of screwed them over campaign wise. It’s that phrase all’s fair in love and war. No. There is an interesting movie where you say that’s nonsense. All is not fair in love at the very least. Right? And so it was like it started bad, it got good, it went terrible, and then there’s the election and obviously something good happens at the end you would hope.

The problem with these movies, and when I say these movies – movies where the climax is leading up to a competition. Sports movies have this all the time. Election movies have this. Someone has to win and someone has to lose. And there’s only so many permutations. The least interesting one is like the person that we thought would win would win. So you see in like, sports movies got smart. They used to be like “we win” and then they were like “we win the semi-final, who knows what will happen next.”

**Liz:** We got the emotional win. We got the character win.

**Craig:** And then they were like “we lose but we lose with honor.” So they’ve done so many permutations. And when you’re dealing with a man and a woman it’s like, well, if the man wins it just feels like, ugh, men win, cliché. But if the woman wins it also feels quite like, ugh, they had to let the woman win. You know?

All the nonsense gears-turning of people misinterpreting. So then what do you do at the end? Do they both lose? But then you feel like, ugh, they both lost. Screw this movie. What do you do?

**Liz:** Or do you do the version – and this is not the romantic comedy version – but this is like the romantic drama version where somebody wins and they breakup.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s so sad.

**Liz:** I know. Sorry guys. I brought you down.

**Craig:** Oh, and then there’s also the whole like Gift of the Magi version where it’s a tie and they each voted for each other. You know, like there could be something sweet. I’m such a sentimentalist.

**Liz:** Yeah, that doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** I know. I know.

**Liz:** That’s not happening. That’s not a thing that happens. Sorry. I think them breaking up actually is probably like the more interesting version if you’re going to do this. You basically do kind of like a high concept updated War of the Roses. And that like maybe the fighting has like pushed one of them to realize something they didn’t, but also realize we’re not supposed to be together.

**Craig:** I’m so old-fashioned. I want them to be together.

**Liz:** But maybe one of them is like, “I’m president, you’re vice-president, but we’re not going to be together. We’re the best functional as partners, but not romantically.” I don’t know.

**Craig:** Maybe there’s a way that they have to like – you know, like sometimes you can run for an office while you have an office. So let’s say she’s running for this office and he already has an office that he can keep. She wins. But she has to now work with him like as a coalition thing? Like I want them to be in love at the end.

**John:** Yeah. I do, too. A coalition government. That’s what we want.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Coalition is a good title, by the way.

**John:** Every relationship is a coalition government.

**Liz:** It’s true.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Liz:** That is accurate.

**John:** Every marriage is a coalition government.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Yes, I’ve been in the minority coalition my entire marriage.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Trick Mirror. It’s a book by Jia Tolentino. The subtitle is Reflections on Self-Delusion. I thought it was great. Megana, our producer, had recommended it. And I read the first essay, The I in Internet, and thought it was so good I just reread the whole essay again. It was terrific.

She talks about growing up in a Houston megachurch. The sororities of UVA. The Peace Corps. Being on an early reality television show. She’s just a really good writer. You know there’s some writers who you’re like I’ll read whatever essay you write. I don’t care what it’s about. I’ll read that essay. And it was just great. So Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino.

**Craig:** Awesome. What about you, Liz?

**Liz:** Me? I’m going to do a health thing, which is really—

**Craig:** Ooh, health.

**Liz:** I know. So I’ve spent the last eight months in a room, which basically means I’ve stopped taking care of myself. And a friend of mine recently was like you need to drink more water because it’s going to make you healthier.

**Craig:** Oh, the water people.

**Liz:** I know, those water people.

**John:** They come. They come at you.

**Liz:** But she upped the stakes for it. Superior electrolytes. They are electrolytes you put into your water. It changed my life, genuinely.

**Craig:** Salt. So she sold you salt.

**Liz:** She sold me watermelon flavored salt.

**Craig:** OK. [laughs]

**Liz:** But here’s the thing. Genuinely I’ve been, again, this goes back to what we sort of always talk about which is taking care of yourself, and none of us do that. And particularly writers. It’s just so much easier not to. To stay sitting rather than get up. It’s a lot nice than having to walk around or exercise. But I’ve decided that I’m supposed to take care of myself now. And so superior electrolytes. They’re fantastic. I’ve actually genuinely in the ten days of doing it I found out I feel better when I’m hydrated.

**Craig:** Hydration is important.

**John:** That I totally believe.

**Craig:** Yeah, it turns out we do actually need – we are mostly water and we need the thing that we are.

**Liz:** Well, and if you work out you end up sweating, which is also horrible because that’s another reason we don’t work out.

**Craig:** It’s gross.

**Liz:** Yeah, it’s gross.

**Craig:** You’re peeing out of your skin. It’s disgusting.

**Liz:** It’s just a horrible thing.

**Craig:** It’s terrible.

**Liz:** But I highly recommend. This is a broader spectrum of things to say which is like take care of yourself. It is an important thing to do.

**Craig:** Always. Always, always, always. We’re big fans of that.

My One Cool Thing is a kind of a puzzle that I knew about for a couple of years because I’m a puzzle dork. I learned these little niche puzzles. Usually because I’ll get a puzzle and I’ll look at it and I’ll go what the hell is this. And then Dave Shukan who is my puzzle mentor will go, “Oh, that’s a this kind of puzzle.” I didn’t hear – what’s a that kind of puzzle?

So, a couple of years ago I was doing this puzzle and I’m like I don’t understand what I’m even looking at. And he goes, “Oh, oh, oh. Yeah. That’s called a star battle. It’s a certain kind of puzzle.” In the New York Times they do these big puzzle inserts at the end of the year and they included star battles. And they explained what they are. And people are very, very excited.

It’s such a fun puzzle to do. Very simple. It’s basically a grid. It’s like 10×10. And your job is to put two stars in every row and every column. But there can only be two stars in every row and every column. To make things a little trickier, but also a little easier, they also have these squiggly lines inside of the grid that are regions. In every region there must be exactly two stars.

So it’s this very elegant, very simple logic puzzle. And you’re like, OK, well I guess that shouldn’t be, and then it just absolutely possesses your mind. You can play them on the Internet for free if you just Google star battle puzzle. Like the very first hit should be one of those little online. And you can generate different sized grids and amounts of stars.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** Puzzles.

**Liz:** Have you ever played Wit’s End?

**John:** I have played Wit’s End.

**Craig:** What’s Wit’s End?

**John:** That’s the one where you have the little wooden walls that you put up?

**Liz:** No, no, no.

**John:** A different one. Tell us.

**Liz:** OK. So I’ll do one more quick thing. I’m a huge Trivial Pursuit nerd. We play Trivial Pursuit a lot in my house. The problem is we’ve run out of questions.

**John:** Oh! We call Wit’s End “smart people game.”

**Liz:** Well, Wit’s End is like an updated version of Trivial Pursuit. You can play with two more people. But the questions are very different. They’re not just trivia questions. There’s like word puzzle questions.

**Craig:** Oh I love this.

**Liz:** And there’s like ranking things. So you have to rank like the five countries that start with L from largest to smallest. And so—

**Craig:** I’m buying this thing right now.

**Liz:** It’s excellent. You can buy it on Amazon. It’s called Wit’s, like I’m witty, although I’m not, Wit’s End. Highly recommend. Really fun. Also goes very fast. Like we played two rounds in an hour. It’s great.

**John:** Great. Very nice. That is our show for this week. A reminder for our Premium members that we are going to do a bonus segment about books. If you are not a Premium member you can sign up at Scriptnotes.net. You can also give a gift membership if you want to give a gift membership to somebody. There’s a little button that says “send a gift.” So you can do that.

Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. With production assistance this week by Stuart Friedel and Dustin Vox.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Lachlan Marks. 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.

Liz, you are?

**Liz:** @itslizhannah.

**John:** Excellent. You can find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. And reminder, Scriptnotes.net is where you sign up to get the Premium goodness. Liz Hannah, thank you so much for joining us here.

**Liz:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thank you, Liz.

**Liz:** I want the jacket next time.

**Craig:** Done.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. It’s time for our bonus segment. I want to talk about books and specifically what you’re allowed to do to a physical printed book.

**Craig:** Burn them!

**Liz:** I was going to say there’s one thing you’re really not allowed to do.

**John:** On Twitter this past someone showed a picture of like I find a way to make Ulysses more portable, basically they ripped it down the spine so you just take half of it with you at any point.

**Craig:** But people lost their shit. I mean, they went bananas.

**Liz:** That’s a tough one.

**John:** That’s a tough one.

**Craig:** I think book people think books are alive. [laughs]

**John:** And I grew up, I remember watching—

**Liz:** They have feelings.

**John:** They have feelings. I don’t know if it was a film or probably a film strip with like a [doop] that advanced to the next thing, we were talking about like when you get a library book or a new book you have to open it carefully and bend all the pages and how you don’t mark anything in it. And I’ve increasingly just started just writing in books or dog-earing pages.

Craig and Liz, what do you think is OK to do with a printed book?

**Liz:** I think anything except burning it. I really feel like that’s the one that you don’t do. I mean, I adapt a lot of books, so even in my professional career I have to highlight things. And have to underline things and stuff like that. So, I don’t know how I would begin to do my job without being able to do that.

I don’t think I’ve ever used a bookmark in my entire life.

**Craig:** Same.

**Liz:** So dog ear. Or if like it’s a hardcover sometimes I’ll try and do like the book cover–

**John:** Oh, the jacket.

**Liz:** The jacket into the page. But that inevitably, then the book jacket is gone.

**Craig:** It falls out.

**Liz:** And so inevitably it doesn’t happen. So, yeah, I think there’s just like one really big thing you don’t do with books, and then everything else feels OK.

**Craig:** And there’s one really big thing you do do with them, which is read them. So as long as you’re reading them, read them the way you want to read them. That’s what they’re there for.

**John:** Here’s a question for you. If I lend you a book, should I have any expectation that you’re going to give me the book back? That printed book?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, the word lend implies yes.

**Liz:** Yes. If I’m giving you a book then, no. But, what’s funny is I did recently give a friend of mine a book because I was like this book is great. And then he brought it back and I was like I really didn’t want it back. Like I don’t have enough space for this.

**John:** It’s not a boomerang.

**Craig:** Did you use the word gift?

**Liz:** No, this was yours. I gave it to you.

**Craig:** I’m giving you this book.

**Liz:** Yes. This is for you.

**Craig:** If someone says lend I immediately feel guilty and I’m in a panic and I want to send it back.

**Liz:** I also take care of it. I don’t mark it. I would say that’s something you don’t do. When somebody lends you a book do not highlight it. Do not dog ear it. That kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Well at that point what I usually say is because of the way I sometimes physically handle my books I’ll just buy it. Or, you know, get the e-book version which then I can do whatever I want.

**Liz:** Right. Who is reading Ulysses and needs to carry – we live with e-books and iPads in our world. By the way, you don’t have to tear anything off. And it’s lighter.

**Craig:** By the way, you don’t have to buy Ulysses. Isn’t it in public domain anyway?

**Liz:** I’m sure. I’m confused.

**John:** I’m confused, too. Well, I will say let’s talk about e-books versus printed books. Because like a previous recommendation was Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers, which is an 800-page book. And so I bought the book at Chevaliers where they’re doing the Arlo Finch book reading. Everyone should come to that. And you should go and support local bookstores and buy physical books, which is fantastic. So I bought this book at Chevaliers and I was like, oh my god, this book is so big and so heavy. It’s like uncomfortable to read. It’s just too big of a book. So I also bought the Kindle version. So, Chuck Wendig got paid twice.

**Liz:** There you go.

**John:** Which is good. But it was much easier to read that book. And Jia Tolentino’s book I just recommended, I did read the e-book version, although I had the printed version here at the office.

**Liz:** I do that a lot. I do the double purchase a lot.

**Craig:** I’ll do the double purchase.

**Liz:** Because I love having – I am a tactile person, so like actual reading of a book I enjoy. And like, you know, I keep a book in my bag whenever I’m traveling around waiting for meetings and stuff like that. You just have kind of a book.

But, you know, if I’m going on vacation I bring my iPad.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** I hate reading off the iPad. You’ll read a book on the iPad?

**Craig:** I do. But you read better from a book I think.

**Liz:** Yes, I do, too.

**Craig:** A proper book.

**John:** I read better from a Kindle.

**Liz:** I process it better.

**Craig:** I’ll get both versions for research purposes. Because you can search–

**Liz:** It’s so great.

**Craig:** Which is amazing, right? You can search, which is brilliant. And of course you can highlight if you wish, which is a little clunky, although the new pencil makes it a lot easier. But I still, a physical book I just find easier to deal with and easier – because that’s how I was raised. My daughter I don’t think ever reads a physical book unless it’s required for school or something. Everything is online. I mean, that’s how they’ve learned. It’s over, John.

**John:** It’s over.

**Craig:** It’s over. It’s over.

**Liz:** Well, we all knew that. Yeah, the only thing that I really actively read on my iPad are screenplays. Like I don’t read screenplays printed out anymore. I don’t do notes on printed out screenplays anymore. I do it on the iPad. And I just bought the big iPad.

**Craig:** Oh, the big-big.

**Liz:** The big-big one, which felt like an aggressive move until my husband was like, “No, it’s the size of a piece of paper.” And I was like, oh, well that changes everything.

**Craig:** Is that right?

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh wow.

**Liz:** So one screenplay page is one–

**Craig:** That’s the one my daughter has. Oh, that’s actually kind of – is it heavy or?

**Liz:** Nope. It’s wonderful. Because you can do notes. And it’s not cramming them.

**John:** Is it the size of this one? Or is it bigger than this?

**Liz:** No, it’s bigger than that.

**Craig:** It’s the big-big.

**John:** Oh, I find that too big. But it works for you.

**Liz:** I thought it was going to be too big. And now I’m obsessed with it.

**Craig:** This is the one I have. I have the one that you have which is the standard size.

**John:** Which works well. But Craig, you and I used to – we grew up in D&D with physical books. And you’ve really transitioned to e-books for that.

**Craig:** OK, so like D&D wise, just having gone through the – so I’ve switched over pretty recently to just using the source books, because you can search. But the new revelation was I just built this new character with their character builder. It’s spectacular. It’s so good. And the best part is you never want to print it out. You always want to have it on your iPad because now you tap on something and it tells you exactly what it is. Like you never have to wonder or flip through. It is freaking great.

Obviously hugely relevant to your life, Liz. Hugely relevant to your life.

**Liz:** I just fell asleep for a couple minutes. No. No.

**Craig:** Once again, the light went out in her eyes.

**Liz:** There is just a little clicking off. No, you know, I tried. I tried.

**Craig:** Listen, that’s all anyone could ever ask. You don’t have to like things. You know, sometimes – I know I’m supposed to like kale. Right? It’s bad.

**Liz:** I feel the same way about kale as you do. Or you feel the same way about kale as I do about D&D. How about that?

**Craig:** I hear you.

**Liz:** That sounds good.

**Craig:** I hear you.

**John:** Consensus.

**Craig:** Consensus.

Links:

* [Liz Hannah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Hannah) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/itslizhannah) and [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2176283/), and Scriptnotes episodes [242](https://johnaugust.com/2019/austin-film-festival-2019) and [359](https://johnaugust.com/2018/where-movies-come-from)
* The [2020 WGA Award nominees and winners](https://awards.wga.org/awards/nominees-winners)
* [Arlo Finch in the Kingdom of Shadows](https://johnaugust.com/arlo-finch#kos-preorder) will be having a [Launch Event: February 9, 2pm at Chevalier’s on Larchmont](https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/john-august-020920)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 434](https://johnaugust.com/2020/ambition-and-anxiety) in which we discuss Knives Out
* [MoviePass parent Helios and Matheson files for Chapter 7 and stock falls to zero](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/moviepass-parent-helios-and-matheson-files-for-chapter-7-and-stock-falls-to-zero-2020-01-29), on MarketWatch
* [All the Bright Places](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Bright_Places_(film)) comes to Netflix on February 28
* [They Made a Movie Out of It](https://thebaffler.com/salvos/they-made-a-movie-out-of-it-pogue) by James Pogue
* John Gruber on [the Jeff Bezos phone hack](https://daringfireball.net/2020/01/hacked_to_bits)
* The New York Times on [Carlos Ghosn’s escape](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/business/carlos-ghosn-escape.html) and [the Hollywood connection](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/business/carlos-ghosn-movie.html)
* [‘Like a bad romcom’: couple run against each other in Irish election](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/27/couple-run-against-each-other-in-irish-election-holly-cairns-cork) from The Guardian
* [Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L2JGLZ9/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1&linkCode=sl1&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkId=b6ea2f4ef065e37692c379f26e11577a&language=en_US) by Jia Tolentino
* [Superieur Electrolytes](https://superieurelectrolytes.com/)
* [Star Battle puzzles](https://www.wired.com/2010/12/dr-sudoku-prescribes-star-battle/)
* [Wit’s End](https://www.amazon.com/Game-Development-Group-11104-Board/dp/B00004W60G) on Amazon
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Lachlan Marks ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/436standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/mushroom-powder).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 414 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast it’s How Would This Be a Movie with four terrific stories in the news that maybe, just maybe, could become feature films. Plus we’ll be answering some listener questions about narrators, personal crises, and song titles.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** And Craig I thought we would do the questions up front because I always feel like we push the questions to the end and we may rush a bit. So we’re going to lead with the questions with the questions this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. We can really milk the answers. I love it.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do. But, I have news and a favor to ask of all our listenership. So, I’ll post a link here in the show notes, but I am trying to direct a feature film. I think I said this on the podcast before. Part of the reason why I’m not running for the WGA board again is I’m hoping to direct a feature film in these next two years. That film is called The Shadows. The central character in it is Abby. She is 15 years old. She’s smart, resourceful, anxious, and blind. That means I need to find a blind actress who is 15 years old-ish to play this role.

That’s not going to be easy. There’s not just a list of teenage blind actors who are ready to make feature films. So, if you follow through the link you’ll see I have a casting notice up that describes what I’m looking for. It has audition scenes. My hope is that we’re going to find someone who has probably never had the opportunity to act in a feature film before or television who will self-tape and present herself as the possible actress for this role.

But if I cannot find this actress I cannot make a movie. So, if you know an Abby or you think you might know an Abby the place to check out the information is johnaugust.com/casting. That’s where you go to see all the information and the audition scenes and stuff about self-taping of yourself to possibly be cast in this movie.

**Craig:** Good URL. Appropriate. So traditionally the way this would work is casting directors would be sent out into the world and they would cast a wide net and show up in malls and things, trying to just pluck out some diamond from the rough. But now we have these things. We have podcasts and Twitter and social media. So this is a great way to get the word out that you’re looking for somebody like this and I have to presume that there are tons of kids across the United States who are acting, or acting in school productions, or community theater who are blind who will hear this and say, yeah, what about me, John August.

**John:** Yeah, what about you?

**Craig:** What about me?

**John:** So classically the casting director would send out this notice and you might do searches in malls and such, but that’s not going to work for this very specific part. So ultimately there will be a casting director to help do all the other things, but if I cannot find this person it is sort of pointless to do anything more about trying to make this movie. So, this is not the first step. The first step was writing the script. But the second step is trying to find this actress, so that’s what I’m trying to do right now.

Ryan Knighton who was on the show once or twice, a fantastic writer, actually the reason why I met him was because I was writing this script. So that’s how long I’ve been working on this. This predates the Arlo Finch books. But now is the time where I can actually make this movie. So, if you can help me find this actress I’d be much obliged.

**Craig:** Now, here’s a question for you. Let’s say you don’t. Do you scrap the movie?

**John:** We scrap the movie.

**Craig:** You scrap the movie.

**John:** I don’t think you can make the movie kind of any other way. I’ll say that as I started writing this movie it was a real concern. Like is this an idea worth pursuing knowing how hard it will be to find the right person for this part. And I decided to go for it because it’s something I’d never seen before on screen and that’s really interesting to me. I want to make the movie I want to see most, and this is kind of the movie I want to see.

So, that’s why I wrote it and that’s why I’m hoping to be able to direct it.

**Craig:** Well, I think you will find someone. I can’t imagine that you won’t. That doesn’t seem possible. Sight is not required for acting talent. It’s just not. You know, I think of all the things that we do in our business and acting is so interestingly internal. In many ways I would imagine that there’s probably a lot of acting exercises where if you are sighted you close your eyes anyway and try and relate to somebody without the extra cues. So, I would be shocked if you don’t find not just one person but a lot of people. I think you will.

**John:** I hope so, too. And I do think it will be a process of working with this person to figure out a language for how we’re going to do the things we need to do and how to sort of best make this movie happen. If this were a supporting character we might not have the time and resources to make this all possible, but this is the central character and so it’s all going to be about figuring out the best way to make this movie. So, it’s going to be a very collaborative process.

**Craig:** No question. I mean, I’m just thinking ahead to the day you’re there and you’re shooting. I mean, other than figuring out how to assist the actor with hitting a mark. By the way, people probably don’t even know – a lot of people don’t know why this whole thing of the actor has to hit their mark even exists. It’s because film cameras and even the video cameras that we use now like the Alexa and so on and so forth, they don’t have automatic focus the way your iPhone does or an old school video camera because those auto focuses are actually very slow. I mean, you’ve probably noticed that when you’re shooting things that sometimes they’re blurry and then they get – well you’re not allowed to have any blurry ever when you’re making a movie.

So there is a focus puller whose job is to constantly adjust focus depending on how far away from the lens the actor who is being filmed is. So they measure where they are and if there’s a scene where they’re moving then during rehearsal we’ll watch them and then there is an assistant camera person, the camera assistant, who watches them and where they stop that person comes over and puts a little piece of tape down or a little bean bag. And the actor now has to reliably stop there each time because that’s a distance that the focus puller is relying on.

So I could see where if somebody was not sighted you would need to have a little extra assistance there to make sure that they didn’t fall short or go too far depending on their motion. But beyond that I think it’s probably the same as everything else, right?

**John:** Yes. So focus is one small issue. I’m sure they’ll be other things that come up. But I’m mostly just excited to meet this actor and see what she can bring to the part.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Now, Craig, you actually had an unexpected bonus episode of the Chernobyl podcast that just came out today as we’re recording this. Tell us about this episode. And I especially liked your little prologue to it.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you. Surprise episode. So this is my Lemonade. It’s a surprise. Well, we were talking and so the podcast was surprisingly popular. We didn’t necessarily imagine that Chernobyl itself was going to be quite as viewed as it was. And I really didn’t think that the podcast would be quite as listened to as it was. But it was. And that’s very gratifying. And Jared and I were talking and he suggested kind of a little bit of a bonus, OK now that the show has come and aired and has been viewed and occupied a space could we/should we discuss it.

And so we got Peter Sagal back and Jared joined us. And I think maybe a day after or two days after we recorded it all of a sudden there was this news story and, huh, a nuclear explosion in Russia that they weren’t telling us about. Well that’s familiar. So I did a quickie solo prologue and, yes, that is available this morning. So if you subscribed to the Chernobyl podcast you got a little ding on your phone this morning. But if you don’t it’s available on all podcast platforms in the known universe, including YouTube and Stitcher and all the other ones that John knows I don’t know.

**John:** And we’ll also put a link to it in the show notes so people can follow through there. Because sometimes people are meticulous and they delete subscriptions just so they don’t have old things sitting around.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you can follow through there. One final bit of news. There’s been an issue with the app, the Scriptnotes app for the premium listeners. Folks both on the Android side and on the iOS side have written in with some problems. So, if you are having problems with the app the general advice I can give you is make sure you’re using the most recent version of it. If you’re still having a problem write into the ask@johnaugust.com account and Megana can help steer you towards some resources or at least get reported to the actual folks who manufacture those apps to make sure that we get those bugs fixed. Sorry for anybody who is having problems.

**Craig:** Was the bug that somehow some of the money was going to me?

**John:** No. It was not a money flow issue. It was simply an authorization token.

**Craig:** So that bug remains is what you’re saying? The bug of money not going to me.

**John:** That bug – that is a feature not a bug.

**Craig:** [laughs] I am a feature not a bug.

**John:** You are a feature not a bug. Some follow up. Why writes in, “As a longtime fan of the show I believe you guys have made me a better writer. But that sadly cannot be empirically proven. My body weight however is easy to accurately measure. A few months ago I listened back to Episode 50, How to not be Fat. And John’s diet, slow carb, sounded really simple and easy. Having never attempted a diet before I went in with no expectations but the change was instantaneous. Now some four months later I’ve already lost over 30 pounds. So this is a thank you for helping me to not be fat at the very least.”

Craig, can you even remember back to Episode 50?

**Craig:** No, I thought we started at Episode 51. I don’t know if we even did this. What are these first episodes? They might be other guys.

**John:** I think this was like a random advice episode. I think this was maybe not a traditional craft and character arcs. But we did talk about it. I remember discussing it and back at that time I was doing this slow carb diet which is like the Atkins diet. It’s like all these things where essentially you eat fats and proteins and not a lot of carbohydrates. And it works. And at that point I was eating a lot of black beans and eggs. And you will lose weight if you do that.

I’m not doing that right now, but I’m sort of mindful of those things and I try not to eat a lot of carbs that I don’t need to eat. So, if you want to go back and do that, great. But we’re not really a good diet and health advice podcast.

**Craig:** No. Not at all. There are four billion of those. Listen to one of those waste of times. Because we would like to waste your time in different ways.

**John:** Yeah. But Why I’m happy for you that you‘ve lost this weight. I would encourage you to find other ways other than just a diet to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Because just eating alone is not enough.

**Craig:** Yes. Meth is not recommended. You will lose a lot of weight. A lot of weight with meth.

**John:** A tremendous amount. Because teeth – teeth are heavy, too.

**Craig:** Just the teeth alone.

**John:** Those last ounces, just pop them out one by one.

**Craig:** Yeah, man.

**John:** Tic-Tacs.

**Craig:** Meth. I mean, who doesn’t know not to do meth still?

**John:** My hunch is that some people who do meth – this is me talking with absolutely no expertise.

**Craig:** I like this. Go for it.

**John:** My hunch is that people who find themselves doing meth often don’t know they’re doing meth when they start doing meth or they’re coming from some other drug and when that drug is no longer available that’s how they’re ending up at meth. That’s just a guess. I’ve done no research or Googling before saying that.

**Craig:** Your theory is that no one is really sitting down and going, right, so I don’t have drug problems and I’m aware that this is meth. Let’s go. You’re saying that’s probably not happening.

**John:** I think that’s probably not the default pathway into meth abuse.

**Craig:** Well, meth. How about some questions. Should I start with Alison from Atlanta?

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Alison from Atlanta asks, “I’m in the planning phases of my screenplay and I’ve come to fork in the road about whether or not to use a narrator. I’ve heard the argument that it’s lazy writing as you’re telling instead of showing, which I understand, but some of my favorite movies or TV shows use narration really successfully. I feel like it could be especially useful when there is significant dissonance with how a character feels inside versus how they are behaving. Do you have any advice for when the narration is useful or when it detracts from the story?”

John, what’s your advice for Alison?

**John:** The only project I’ve had that I think has a narrator – I take that back. Two projects I’ve used narrators for. The first is Big Fish. The second is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In both cases they were really, really helpful. But let’s take a look at why. In Big Fish that narrator is sort of the voice of Edward Bloom, the storyteller who is bridging between the real world and the fantasy world. It starts kind of in the real world and drifts into the fantasy world. Helpful for that. Could you do the movie without the narrator? Yes. But it is useful.

Second movie is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which is very much a fairy tale, a storybook telling of this boy’s quest and Willy Wonka. In those cases, useful.

Those are situations where I think the narrator is helpful. Unfortunately we encounter so many movies and scripts where voiceover or narration has been applied in post. It was not part of the initial conception of the storytelling. And, wow, you can tell.

**Craig:** Yeah. Narration sometimes is a Band-Aid. But I want to say, Alison, when you say some of my favorite movies or TV shows use narration really successfully, that’s the answer to your question. Anybody who makes the argument that narration is inherently lazy writing, as you “telling instead of showing” is wrong. And you should tell them to their faces that they’re wrong. And that probably everything else that they say after that should be considered invalid. Because it’s the most ridiculous thing to say. Narration is a perfectly good tool if it’s used properly.

Like you, John, I have not written a lot of things that have narration in them, but I remember the first thing I wrote with narration was a movie based on a Philip Dick short story. This is many, many years ago. And it’s one of my favorite things that I’ve written, so of course it didn’t get made. But the hero was an immigrant who did not speak English. He was an Italian immigrant. He didn’t speak English. And the story itself had a kind of romantic fairy tale quality to it so a narrator felt appropriate. He was able to kind of fill in some things when the character was alone and wouldn’t necessarily be speaking in his own language. And if he did why would we subtitle. There’s a lot of weirdness in there. But it was mostly the fairy tale-ness of it that seemed to call for a narrator.

Similarly when you talk about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it is kind of a modern fairy tale. It is clearly taking place in a world that is a pushed version of our own. So the storybook aspect of it feels worth honoring and acknowledging. So, go for it Alison. If it feels right then do it. And if you’re doing it because it’s just convenient, or solving some problems, maybe not.

**John:** I would encourage people to think about the movie Clueless without Cher’s narration. It would be unwatchable. You would not like Cher in that movie if you did not have the ability to see inside of her head. And that’s really what it is. It’s honestly kind of like giving that protagonist a song in a musical. It’s allowing you to expose what they’re not saying to everybody else in the scene. So that may be another situation where you need to use it.

**Craig:** Correct. And if you think about Fleabag which is spectacular, all of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s little discourse to camera to us, that’s narration. That’s what that is. The fact that she’s filmed doing it but talking to us doesn’t change the fact that it’s narration. And we don’t mind it, we love it. Because it fits. It makes sense.

Goodfellas needs narration. Narration – probably the same exercise worth doing. Watch Goodfellas and every time the narration starts hit mute. It just won’t work. Or it won’t work as well.

**John:** All right. Nicole asks, “I live in one of the cities that was recently devastated by a mass shooting. As I’m sure you can imagine you the depth and breadth of emotion in the aftermath is sometimes overwhelming. I have an appointment with my therapist and we’ll work through it with her, but in the meantime I’ve got a draft due to a producer I’ve never worked with before. Normally I’m super responsible about hitting deadlines, but it’s really hard to get my head into writing comedy right now so I’m struggling to get pages out and I am falling behind. How do you overcome your personal life crises when you have to get your work done? Should I let the producer know that the draft might be delayed or wait and see if I can get back on track soon? The draft is due in about two weeks.”

Craig, what advice would you have for Nicole?

**Craig:** Well, first of all fantastic question. And I’ve been there. Happily I haven’t been there a lot. But when it happens it happens. And I think Nicole your sense that this is not mentally doable for you needs to be listened to and respected. Yeah, you could soldier through it but would it be good? And is it good for you?

When this has happened to me, when there have been incidents in my own life – I just went through one myself again with my family – where either someone is ill or there is a crisis or trauma that befalls you or around you or you just on your own without any cause slip into a clinical depression or an unmanageable state of anxiety it is absolutely fair to call people up and say I need two weeks, because I need two weeks. This is where I am. This the page I’m on. This is why I need the two weeks, without getting into super-duper detail. I will be back after those two weeks and then I will finish.

There are not many things that will work as well as a break. And what you don’t want to do is turn your work, your writing, the thing that you love and that you rely on into a burden or more fuel for dysfunction and misery. John, what do you think?

**John:** Your advice is absolutely correct. And what I would caution Nicole to do is not to wait until the actual due date to lob in that email or that phone call, because then it just looks like, oh, you just ran out of time and now you’re telling us.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, this is the time to reach out to that producer, even if it is a person you’ve not worked with before, and explain the situation. In this case you have – I don’t want to say the advantage – but because it’s a public event that everyone can see it’s pretty clear that there’s a basis behind this. That you’re not just making an excuse.

It can be tougher when it’s just your own thing. When it’s something in your own family that you don’t want to discuss. When it’s clinical depression coming up. When you’re having problems that can’t be sort of externally verified I know it’s scarier to reach out and make that call, but you got to reach out and make that call. And you need to do it before the time is up.

If you have an agent, manager, lawyer, someone else who is also on your side, a different producer if it’s about the studio, it’s worth clueing them in to just so that they have a sense of what you’re going through so that they can back you up a bit.

**Craig:** And you are working in a business that’s full of people that have all sorts of emotional issues and mental health issues. And after all you’re also working in a business that pedals emotion. That is our product. So the fact that you are a feeling person, that you have a sensitivity – that isn’t a bug, that’s a feature right?

You don’t have that thing that actors have where they can use their crisis to pump out tears on film or if they’re having a terrible, tragic day it theoretically could be turned to their advantage. Writing requires a lot of mental energy. It requires focus and attention. It’s spinning 12 plates at once. There’s a lot of logic going on. And then also all of that emotion. I think in general you will be met well by people. They will not say to you, “No, I want you to finish it anyway. You can’t take two weeks off.” Because at that point they’re kind of shooting themselves in the foot. What are they going to do, complain to you then when they get the script and don’t like it? You told them. You warned them.

Also, there’s really nothing they can do about it. You can just get sick for two weeks. If you feel, by the way, this is for anyone, that you’re working for people who truly will not get it, then lie. If somebody is so miserable as to not understand the validity of an emotional crisis then just tell them or having your agent or representative or manager tell them that you have a physical illness that is going to last two weeks. Because they can’t argue with that.

It’s a shame that sometimes you have to do that. But if somebody is going to be a total jerk about it then they forfeit their right for you to be completely honest and forthcoming.

**John:** I think that’s all true. The last thing I want to say is that just making that phone call or that email and telling them that this thing could come in late in my own experience has relieved so much anxiety on my side about the fact that I’m worried that I’m going to be late that it made the writing a lot easier. So some of what you’re actually feeling is the panic over a what if I can’t actually deliver this on time. And so by tipping them off that you may not be able to deliver this on time you’ve lowered the stress on yourself and you may actually be able to do the work that you need to do and be happy about the draft you’re turning in.

**Craig:** No question. Sometimes you say I need two weeks and they say sure. And then two days later you’re like I’m good. What you really needed was two days. And that’s the thing. You’re right. The worst feeling for writers is feeling that they have to write and yet they can’t do their best work. That’s a terrible feeling.

So, whatever you need to do to not have that feeling, do it.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** OK. So we’ve got one more question. This is from Seth who asks, “My question is about using a song as the basis for a movie. For example, if I decide to write a quirky rom-com about a grungy mechanic from the Lower East Side who meets a beautiful society girl from Central Park West and I call it Uptown Girl, do I owe Billy Joel a credit or money? I know that if the song is licensed that will cost. But what about the concept?” Well that’s an interesting question. Hmm, John, any thoughts on that one? We’ll be pretend lawyers for the moment.

**John:** We’ll be pretend lawyers. I think you’re in real jeopardy if you call that movie Uptown Girl. Uptown Girl is a title that everybody knows. It’s very clear that it’s inspired by that song. No, Seth, no. Don’t do it.

So, if a song inspires you, so if you wanted to do a movie about a mechanic and a society girl, you could do that probably pretty safely because it’s going to be generic enough that like there’s nothing in the song that you’re actually taking from that. But you call that movie Uptown Girl and you just put a giant crosshair on your back.

Honestly, if your movie has nothing to do with the song but you call it Uptown Girl you’re probably going to be getting some heated emails from some people who are not too happy about that. I don’t think that’s a safe choice. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree with you. I’m not sure where the legal line is per se, but you actually don’t want to find out. They’re going to make a problem for you. The point is that usually speaking the stories of songs in and of themselves aren’t really copyright – I mean, they’re copyrightable. Of course, lyrics are copyrighted. But the story inherent to those can be duplicated without fear of infringement.

For instance, I’m thinking of a good old story song like the Pina Colada song. Escape (The Pina Colada Song). So most people know the story of that ridiculous song. A guy gets tired of his marriage to his wife, so he is looking for singles ads, or I guess he writes a singles ad. Yeah, that’s what he does. He puts an ad looking for somebody who likes the following things, including Pina Coladas in the rain, and then somebody responds back and says, “I love all those things. Let’s meet.” And so he goes to a bar to meet up with this new woman that he’s going to cheat on his wife with and lo and behold it’s his wife. And then they laugh weirdly, which would not actually happen. In real life it would be a rocket ship to divorce.

But regardless, because it’s just bizarre, but the story of somebody looking to cheat on his wife and swiping right and ending up with his wife, anybody could do that. That idea is not intellectual property. If you call it The Pina Colada movie and he’s talking about Pina Coladas in the rain then oh yeah you’ve got a problem.

So I agree with you. I don’t see the point. I don’t really think the title Uptown Girl is so important to that concept anyway. If it’s the only attractive thing about that idea, well then you kind of are leaning on the Billy Joel-ness of it all and I would think he’d have a reasonable argument to make.

**John:** So titles we talked about before are – the whole process of getting titles cleared is complicated and there’s a whole division that sort of approves which movies can have which title. But it is complicated by songs. And I’ve been through several situations on movies and other projects where a title we would have wanted is a famous song. It becomes arguable like are we using it in reference to that song or not. It becomes complicated. Don’t call your movie Uptown Girl unless you’re making a Billy Joel related movie I would say.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. All right. Let’s talk about movies we do want to make. This is a segment we do every once in a while called How Would This Be a Movie where people send us stories that are in the news and we talk about them the only way we know how to talk about them is how do we turn these into narrative feature films or perhaps TV series. This time we have four of them because there were four really good ones and I just couldn’t winnow it down.

Different people sent in different things. I’m not going to credit who sent stuff through because in some cases it was multiple people. But they’re all compelling in different ways.

So let’s start with a podcast I listened to this past week. It is by Willa Paskin for Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast. She is a terrific writer and these are really well-produced episodes. I really loved listening to the whole podcast series. The one this week was about the soft serve wars. So the Mr. Frosty trucks both in Midtown, Manhattan but also in China and sort of the war of turf, of different companies competing, and break off groups, and the history of soft serve ice cream. I thought there was a lot of compelling stuff here. Craig, how did you feel about this as story material?

**Craig:** Well, it’s an interesting world. And it occurred to me you probably didn’t have this, right? I mean, where you were growing up in Colorado?

**John:** No, we didn’t have soft serve trucks.

**Craig:** Yeah. We had them everywhere. So on Staten Island, and this extends throughout New York in every part of New York, you would have these trucks. And there were two trucks that would come by. One was the Good Humor man. So he had the Good Humor brand of ice cream.

**John:** And Good Humor was hard ice cream?

**Craig:** It was. It was incredibly hard. It was the hardest of ice creams. It was so hard. And then there was the Mister Softee truck who would come by, and that was the soft serve. And frankly I did prefer the Mister Softee. It just didn’t come by as often. And they would play their songs. They had their little jingles. And we would get very excited and run after the truck.

So, right off the bat I think one of the issues with this is that it’s not necessarily a universal experience. The notion of this kind of turf war over this particular kind of product. It does feel a little niche to me. Obviously when people are trying to do it China studios get very excited when something may appeal to a Chinese audience, because they’re greedy. But I’m a little concerned about that.

The story though that this brought to mind, when you were a kid, John, did you ever read a book called The Push Cart War?

**John:** Called The Push Cart War. Yes!

**Craig:** Do you remember that one?

**John:** We said it at the same time. I do absolutely. And they had little pea shooters and they were shooting out the truck tires I believe.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I do remember The Push Cart War. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. It reminded me a lot of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, The Push Cart War is basically a classic story of the little guy versus the big guy. And the little vendors versus the big trucks. And in this case I could certainly see a kind of comedy – I think it would have to be a comedy – of competing ice cream vendors who are at each other’s throats scrapping over the last nickel and dime. And then they have to face a common enemy which is, I don’t know, suddenly a Starbucks or some massive corporation is taking over by sending their new things in which is better and bigger supposedly. So it becomes mom and pop, little guy versus the big guy, and maybe there’s a little bit of an allegory of the way that capitalism gets people on the lower rungs to beat each other up and leave a space for the big guy to just waltz in.

But I’m not sure – I’m a little worried about the whole ice cream aspect of it because I just don’t know if people in like you say Boulder or Denver are going to say, oh yeah, ice cream trucks. I think they might go, “Ice cream trucks?” That’s a problem.

**John:** Well let’s talk about that universality. Because even in the intro here I said Mr. Frosty rather than Mister Softee because I didn’t know that as a thing.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** That’s how little I knew about that. But I don’t know that this lack of universality really is necessarily a problem because I think, you know, I could imagine the start of this story very quickly setting up important it is for this community and really establishing the worlds. Because so many movies we see, like I don’t know anything about sort of how baseball mathematics works, but the movie is going to teach me how to care about that.

You know, there’s so many movies involve characters who are experts in things I don’t know anything about and that’s part of the experience of watching the movie. So I’m not so worried about the lack of universality in the sense of like places that don’t have ice cream trucks as long as I can establish why it’s important for these people who are selling ice cream and these people who are buying ice cream.

There were three kind of main threads and I think you’d have to pick one of them to make a movie. There’s the guys who are trying to start a Mister Softee business in China. And so that’s – you can picture that one. You’re trying to build something within a bureaucracy which is really complicated and you’re trying to explain to people what it is that you’re doing.

It was fascinating in the podcast talking about how McDonalds and I think KFC were the only places that were serving soft serve at that point and they had separate walk up drive-thru windows for just soft serve ice cream because it was so new and unusual there at the time they were launching. So China is one possibility and the rise and fall of that company.

Then the tension between the Mister Softee trucks and the competing brands within Midtown Manhattan. It’s probably a comedy. It’s probably like Adam Sandler is the godfather. Sort of a turf war kind of thing and it seems silly but these people are taking it really seriously. That section of the movie, I don’t know about you, but I got sort of PTSD trying to think about the logistics of shooting in Midtown Manhattan and how you’re getting all these trucks in Midtown Manhattan. The filming of it freaked me out.

**Craig:** By shooting in Toronto, of course. [laughs]

**John:** That’s naturally how you would do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But they’ll get the New York City tax credit. And finally the single character who is probably the most compelling and interesting is a woman they interview. She’s the ice cream woman who took over her dad’s route. He was a Good Humor man who then had a soft serve truck. And so she’s the – actually she doesn’t have a soft serve truck. She’s still selling traditional ice cream in Brooklyn.

She had a fantastic voice. She just felt like a really compelling character. For a single protagonist this woman trying to defend her father’s route feels like a through line. But I don’t know if any of these are compelling enough movies that I’m rushing out on a Friday night to see them.

**Craig:** No. I think it would require – I think you probably got closest with the idea of Sandler. Of a comedic star taking something that’s small like the Water Boy and making it into something epic. I mean, Tim Herlihy is a genius at doing stuff like that and I could easily see Tim writing a really funny movie that’s centered around Mister Softee versus Good Humor, which is just already I’m kind of giggling at it. It sounds like a funny idea.

So that’s probably the closest I would think to actually getting it made. I mean, this other last little component of this is that there is – for those of us who grew up in New York – there’s a lot of nostalgia to it. There’s a strange kind of connection to the past with those trucks when I see them walking around, even as an adult, and I would see the Mister Softee. The logo is like a cone that’s got soft serve but he’s got a face like in the cone. And just his face warms my heart. It just does. His dumb, stupid cone face makes me happy.

**John:** Yeah. I also got thinking about sort of what’s the color scheme, what’s the world, like what’s happening in the day. It got me thinking back to Do the Right Thing which is an incredibly hot day and sort of what it feels like to have an ice cream truck on that hot day and sort of like passing through these neighborhoods. What would it feel like and what does it feel like to be the guy on the truck? And it’s a cash business and so you’re always vulnerable that way. The staking out of corners. Even if it’s not done as heavy drama, it felt like there were dramatic moments in there. There were reversals. That felt interesting and I think doing it – probably knocking it back a few years and setting it period is helpful for that way, just because you get the benefit of nostalgia and a simpler time when we didn’t have Uber and Postmates and all the other things that got you your ice cream. You might be waiting for that truck to come.

**Craig:** All right. So we’ve decided. This is going to be set in the ‘70s or ‘80s. Tim Herlihy is writing it. Sandler is in it. It feels like it’s going to Netflix. Sandler has got that huge deal at Netflix. I’m in. I’m watching that movie. What do we get for – do we get money for this? Do you we get money when they? Yeah, you know what? They’ll have to send us money. Yeah. Money.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve made a lot off this.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** All right. So our next story is about Zimbabwe’s female rangers. It’s a story in the National Geographic by Lindsay M. Smith, photos by Brent Stirton. So this talks about an all-female wildlife ranger team, the Akashinga. And so they are the defenders of the animals within this region. It’s a non-profit international anti-poaching foundation. The Phundundu Wildlife Area is 115-square-mile former trophy hunting tract in the Zambezi Valley ecosystem.

We’ll summarize some stuff in here, but it’s worth clicking through for the photos because I thought the photos were actually one of the most fascinating parts of this. Craig, what did you take from the female ranger’s article?

**Craig:** Well, I thought that this was a chance to do something more than what it was. I actually – the value here to me is that it can be allegorical. And I do like these stories where it seems like, OK, this is pretty straight up. It’s about women who are fighting off poachers to protect animals. That’s a very nice thing. Who cannot like that? That’s very sweet. But in and of itself there’s the problem. It feels a little just saccharine. Right? Like, ah, cool, women are doing that. And they’re beating poachers. And everyone hates poachers. And they’re saving animals. Hooray.

But I think there’s probably an interesting story to be told underneath where these characters who are doing this are in their own way reclaiming something about their lives that was taken from them. This is not easy. Living in Zimbabwe isn’t always easy. That country has been under the thumb of Robert Mugabe, a dictator and a thug, for decades. And that part of Africa is a tough area to live. And being a woman in any part of Africa seems like it’s an additional challenge.

And so there is a chance to tell the story where it’s not just well-minded women go, you know what, we’re defending these elephants, but rather it’s women who have lost a certain kind of power or have been traumatized or who have been marginalized finding a way to reclaim some power and defend something of great value. And ideally – ideally – have a really positive portrayal of Africa, because we don’t get it a lot. We get a lot of Blood Diamonds. We get a lot of Ghosts in the Darkness or whatever that movie was with the lions. We don’t get a lot of this. And I think that’s really – that’s what you’d hope for.

And they do hint at this in the article. They point out that a number of these women have suffered trauma. They either were orphaned by parents who died of AIDS. Or they were victims of sexual assault or domestic abuse or abandonment. And so I think that’s where I would kind of come at it. And I do think actually this could be pretty cool. I could see this being a movie.

**John:** I could see this being a movie, too. And I agree with you that focusing on the women is clearly the way to tell this story. You want to see why they are doing this and why they are better suited for this task than men would be. And so the article does talk some about that in the sense of when they’re trained to do this they just do a better job, because they’re better able to work with the community. They have these automatic weapons but they don’t turn to those automatic weapons as sort of the first way to get a problem solved. And they work well together as a community, so that is crucial. I think that’s really the center of the storytelling.

In this short story we meet Sgt. Vimbai Kumire. So she’s one of the main women we follow in this story. But Enterprise World also meet Damien Mander. So he’s described as a “tattoo-covered Australian and former special forces soldier who has trained game rangers in Zimbabwe for more than a decade.” And he’s one of those characters who seems kind of interesting and compelling at the start, and yet I kind of don’t want him in the movie. My concern is that no matter what you try to do with this character he’s going to feel like the white savior guy. And that’s the thing I want to see least in this movie is the outsider who tells people how to do something.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So in focusing on this I’d want to find a way to tell the story honesty but that focuses on the women themselves and feels like it’s them solving this issue and not some outsider telling them how to solve this issue.

**Craig:** An alternative way to approach that is to accept the truth of it and then use that to address the white savior-ness of it. Meaning in reality this guy I assume was very useful and he helped trained them. But he’s not the one out there doing it. He’s not the one putting himself on the line. He’s not the one who is going to stay. This isn’t his country. And pointing that out I think is reasonable.

There is a limitation to the value of those people. But there is also real value to them. And that’s interesting. I think even a relationship – and I wouldn’t have it be a romantic relationship in any way, shape, or form – but a relationship between one of the leaders or a leading character of the women and him which is a relationship of mistrust and concern specifically for that reason. Because remember Zimbabwe was not always Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe was Rhodesia not so long ago. And the idea of addressing certain aspects of colonialism and asking how do we move forward and how do we live or work together with this behind us is an interesting one.

So there’s an alternative point of view to embrace it and face it head on. But I agree the one thing you can’t do is this old school thing of white guy shows up, teaches black people how to be better Africans, and then leaves. That’s – we don’t do that no more.

**John:** That’s not going to work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So I think what we’re both saying is neither of us want this guy to be protagonist or antagonist in the story. He can be a character in the story. He can serve a function, but he should not serve one of those primary functions because that is something we’ve seen a lot and it becomes – I just get the bad kind of goosebumps when I see that.

**Craig:** Bad bumps. Nobody wants bad bumps.

**John:** Nobody wants bad bumps.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Where does this movie go? Where do we see this kind of movie happening?

**Craig:** Well, this is a movie that if done at a certain level and a certain way could earn a theatrical release because it theoretically could be quite prestigious. I could see it being an award-y kind of movie depending on how it’s done. It could also just be a very down the middle obvious treatment of this material. With all of these movies it’s always more likely that they’re going to be done on a streaming platform because that’s the world we live in. There’s no superheroes in it. Nothing blows up.

But, there is still a space for independent film and even for major studios releasing independently made films that address issues like this, have really interesting casts. I think you can cast this really well. Now more than ever there are some awesome actors of African descent, both American and Caribbean and British. And, of course, African. So there’s a lot of really cool opportunities. I think it could actually be a theatrical movie, but it would need independent love I would think.

**John:** I think you’re right. I could see a Participant or sort of an outside financier being a key player in this to make it happen at a budget level where you can sort of get the production values you really want to see there.

I would say of all the movies we’ve done on a How Would This Be a Movie before it reminded me somewhat of the California firefighter story we read.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** About the female inmates who were California firefighters. In which you a have a setting and a world but you need to pick very specific characters within that story to follow. And we don’t have them quite yet. We have sort of a sense of placeholders for people who could be there, but we don’t have actual characters with journeys. And so any writer who is approaching this is going say like, OK, here is the backdrop, here’s the world. I need to create an entire story. I need to import a story into this or do the firsthand research to figure out what are the stories I can tell that actually have beginnings, middles, and ends and characters who go through transformations. Because we’re not seeing that in this story so far.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this may just be a matter of personal preference but I think I would rather see this movie than the firefighter movie, just because I find the subject matter more interesting and I get to see somewhere I don’t know and learn things I don’t know and be with people that I don’t know. And it’s not that I know those women, but I know California, I know brush fires, I know firefighters. A lot of this we have experience with it. It’s not foreign to us. And I’m attracted by things that are foreign because you learn more. I just do. I mean, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to do Chernobyl. It was not American. It seemed like an opportunity.

**John:** Here’s what’s also great about this story is that as you’re watching this you are aware that the danger to these women could come from any direction. So it could come from other humans in the world. It could come from animals. It could come from gunshots. It could come from poachers. There’s a lot of things that could happen and stand in the way or endanger any of the characters we care about in the story.

In the firefighter movie we’re afraid of the fire mostly.

**Craig:** Fire. Yeah.

**John:** And so we can see that coming. Where we can’t always see bullets coming. Or we can’t see that dangerous panther or tiger or anything else that’s potentially out there. So that’s an interesting difference with this movie. Our last How Would This Be a Movie comes from an advice column in The Cut as well. It’s the Ask Polly advice column written by Heather Havrilesky. This one is about a woman with severe mushroom allergies who becomes convinced that her in-laws are maybe trying to kill her. So it’s not just that they are insensitive to her food sensitivity. They seem to be finding ways to introduce mushrooms into things that have no business having mushrooms in them.

I loved the letter writer’s description, but I especially loved Heather’s response to how nuts this situation was. And she actually says that this feels like the pitch for a dark comedy on premium cable. And, yeah, it kind of does. It’s that idea of like are my in-laws trying to kill me. Maybe they are.

**Craig:** Yeah. Heather went ham, which I love. And she was right to do so. And the letter writer was so weirdly sweet about it and kind of underplayed the insanity of what’s going on here.

Now, look, we live in a world where people will say, “Look, I have this allergy to this thing,” and maybe there’s a little pushback kind of in the air, like a little silent pushback which is, ugh, everyone is allergic to something now. You can see people kind of groaning and rolling their eyes sometimes. Or if someone says, oh yeah, if you’re in a restaurant, “I want the surf and turf but instead of the lobster can I have this because lobster makes me slightly itchy.” You know, I understand there’s a certain kind of, I don’t know, self-indulgent griping you could do about people with allergies.

But the truth is that when somebody has a legitimately troublesome allergy it is life-threatening. It is terrible. As a parent it’s got to be absolutely nightmarish to be policing your own child and just every day wondering is this the day that somebody slips freaking mushrooms in. And the crazy part, the craziest thing, is when after it’s been made clear to her in-laws that she has been hospitalized over this and convulsed in an ambulance because of mushrooms they added mushroom powder to mashed potatoes at a holiday dinner.

What is mushroom powder? I’ve never even heard of mushroom powder. That’s literally poisoning. You are poisoning – you’re trying to poison her. And everybody knows it. And they say things like, you know, “Well, everyone except your wife likes mushrooms and we’re not changing what we eat for one person.” Oh my god. It’s not that she doesn’t like them. It’s that they’ll kill her. So, I think the deal is they want to kill this lady. They’re literally trying to kill her.

**John:** The fact that it seems like they want to kill her is what makes this so compelling. And I think it’s easy to feel sympathy for this woman and I find the husband character really fascinating. Like how much of a doormat is he that he’s not willing to stand up to his family for trying to kill his wife? That isn’t good. But it’s easy to imagine who that family is and how messed up that family must be and how tight that family must be to want to do this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I mean, this woman is an outsider marrying into a thing. It feels kind of great.

Now, this allergy by itself is not a movie. So, I think it’s suggesting a jumping off point for a movie, but there would have to be a lot of other things and this mushroom allergy is just like one sign, like a really clear sign of not just the undermining but the dangerous dislike that they seem to have for her. And that, you know, I think what’s relatable is we all kind of imagine that our in-laws don’t really like us, but to have it taken to the extremes is I think what makes it a movie.

**Craig:** Mushroom powder. So, one thing that I always try and remind myself when I read these things is we’re getting one person’s version. Now, it may be that this woman who is writing this letter and who is describing how her in-laws are trying to kill her with mushrooms, she could be awful. She could be an awful person. I’m not saying she is. But there’s a world in which she’s just a racist, nasty, abusive human being. And everyone reasonably loathes her.

Even then you can’t put mushroom powder in the mashed potatoes. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t mushroom somebody. You’re not allowed to mushroom people. There’s other ways to deal with them. You can’t mushroom them to death. That’s just wrong.

Is this a movie? No. It’s not at all a movie to me. I don’t think of it as a movie. I don’t think of it as a series. I think it could be an episode of something that’s kind of interesting. It could be a B-plot that you find out that somebody you hate is allergic to something and somehow mushrooms get – I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t think it’s a movie by itself. But I think the notion of are my in-laws trying to kill me – I think that is enough of a comedy idea that you could build something around it. I think there’s a tremendous amount more story you need to do there, but I think the mushroom aspect of it as am I crazy could work.

And a movie like Game Night comes to mind, where it’s just like it is funny but there is a real darkness underneath it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could do a movie where a woman marries a man and it’s one of those interesting paranoid things. And Game Night has a similar aspect to it even though it’s a comedy. There’s a certain paranoia to it. Where she discovers that her husband actually has been married three times before that she didn’t know about and all three of those women died. And so now she’s thinking – and we’re all thinking – oh, he’s a serial wife killer. But he’s not. He insists that he’s innocent and she keeps finding clues. And eventually the big twist is it’s not him. It’s his mom. She keeps killing his wives. That could be cool.

I mean, I’ve just given away the ending.

**John:** To me the pitch is more like right from the start you’re worried about the mother-in-law, but of course she’s talked down, well everyone sort of feels that way about their future mother-in-law. And there’s ups and downs, but when it becomes clear like, wait, something really nuts is happening then there has to be a further step there. There has to be something more than just like, you know, oh, she’s trying to kill me. There has to really go to sort of why they’re trying to kill her, or what it is about that.

So, figuring out what that is – figuring out what’s really behind the family – that’s probably the key to what makes this a movie versus an advice column.

**Craig:** I want you to know there is mushroom seasoning. And there’s some mushroom powder. It’s really rare. I mean it’s just not – it’s not really a thing. You’ve got to go way out of your way – way out of your way – to find like dried porcini mushroom powder or something. They’re trying to kill her.

**John:** They are trying to kill her.

**Craig:** Sorry, based on what I read. I am not accusing anyone of anything. But based on what I read it would seem–

**John:** We don’t know the real family’s name, so they can’t libel us.

**Craig:** Correct. It would SEEM that they are trying to kill her with mushrooms.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, of these four things we’ve talked through which do you think will become a movie and which are you most excited to see if it’s not the same answer?

**Craig:** The Zimbabwe female rangers.

**John:** I would agree with you. I would say that’s probably the most compelling story area. I can imagine some version of the comedy soft serve wars thing happening. That feels like the nostalgic space for that. But I’m probably most excited to see the Zimbabwe anti-poaching rangers.

**Craig:** If Tim Herlihy does agree to come onboard and do the soft serve thing, then that one. But only if.

**John:** Herlihy or bust.

**Craig:** Herlihy or bust. That’s my motto.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Game to Grow. So it’s this Seattle-based company and they use specially designed D&D experiences, modules and rulebooks, to help kids with anxiety and/or spectrum disorders relate to each other better and work through skills that they can use in real life. It seems great. So I have not met these people, the Adams, but I’ll put links in the show notes to an article about them, what they do. Also a Kickstarter for a thing called Critical Core which are sort of the slimmed down rulebooks that they use to talk through what they’re doing. But you look through this Craig and you’ll obviously recognize so many D&D things you love, but you’ll also recognize some things that are developmentally useful.

So there’s this one to nine scale of developmental capacities which is so true and accurate to sort of how kids process things which is basically how to think critically, how to cooperate going through stuff, how to plan ahead. All the things that you and I do all the time when we play D&D, which I think I probably got a lot out of playing D&D as a teenager, which is so useful and transfers so well to real life decision-making.

So it just seems like a great program, so I’ll tip people towards this and it’s something I’d love to see replicated in other places.

**Craig:** This is brilliant. And I love that the age range is so wide. So they’re looking at kids from ages eight to 20. So, this would certainly be relevant for one of my kids. And, yeah, I’m going to look a little deeper into this. For sure. This looks great.

My One Cool Thing this week is the National Puzzler’s League, otherwise known as MPL. The National Puzzler’s League is, like one hand there’s a magazine, The Enigma, that comes out with lots of puzzles in it. And they also have a national convention. This is not for your casual puzzler. I’m just going to tell you.

So I have friend Dave Shucan who is a brilliant puzzler and puzzle constructor and solver and he goes to the convention and he’s kind enough to say, hey, take a look at this puzzle that I did there. And they are awesome. They are really layered. When I say really layered I mean I tried explaining one to Melissa last night and she stopped me after about 12 words and said, “Please no more. I don’t want to hear anymore.” [laughs]

It’s layers and layers and layers. They’re beautifully done. They’re beautifully constructed. So I’m going to be joining the National Puzzler’s League and the membership for a year is a big whopping $23. I think I can do that. Online-only membership is just $15. So, yeah, I’m totally into that.

So National Puzzler’s League. If you want you can check it out at puzzlers.org and we’ll have a link in the show notes.

**John:** Fantastic. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Med Dyer. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today.

Short questions on Twitter are great. So I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the casting notice. So, again, if you think you might know an Abby, a blind actress who is around 15 years old, I’m looking for her. So you can go to johnaugust.com/casting to find out more information about that.

You can find transcripts there as well on the site.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, thank you for helping me figure out whether these things would be movies.

**Craig:** My pleasure, John. Let’s do it again.

**John:** Cool. Bye.

Links:

* [The Shadows Casting Call](https://johnaugust.com/casting) John is looking for a 15 year old blind actress for the lead role — please help by sharing this link with anyone who might be a good fit!
* [Bonus Episode, Chernobyl Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bonus-episode-with-jared-harris/id1459712981?i=1000446954276)
* [Scriptnotes Ep 50, How to Not Be Fat](https://johnaugust.com/2012/how-to-not-be-fat)
* [Decoder Ring: Ice-Cream Truck Wars](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2019/08/decoder-ring-explores-the-world-of-ice-cream-trucks) by Willa Paskin
* [Akashinga Women Rangers Fight Poaching in Zimbabwe Phundundu Wildlife Area](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/06/akashinga-women-rangers-fight-poaching-in-zimbabwe-phundundu-wildlife-area/) by Lindsay M. Smith
* [My In-Laws Are Careless About My Deadly Food Allergy](https://www.thecut.com/amp/2019/08/ask-polly-my-in-laws-are-careless-about-my-food-allergy.html) by Heather Havrilesky
* [Game to Grow](https://www.cnet.com/news/game-to-grow-the-dungeons-dragons-game-rescuing-kids-from-their-social-anxieties/?__twitter_impression=true), support on [Kickstarter here](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gametogrow/critical-core/description)!
* [National Puzzler’s League](http://www.puzzlers.org/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Med Dyer ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_414_mushroom_powder.mp3)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/how-do-you-like-your-stakes)

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 402 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program we’re going to be talking about the idea of stakes, what it means for a writer, and what it means for a character. We’ll also talk a little bit about Aladdin, fandom, and of course some agency stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But first we got to hype up our live show again. That’s coming up really soon, June 13, at the Ace Hotel. It’s a Thursday night.

It is a benefit for the amazing charity called Hollywood Heart. Our guests include Alec Berg of Silicon Valley and Barry, Rob McElhenney of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and his new Apple show, but also we’ve added Kourtney Kang of Fresh off the Boat and a new show coming up. She is fantastic. I got to work with her on a project. So we’re so excited to have these TV moguls up on stage with us.

And there will be more stuff to do too. We have some prizes. We have giveaways. We have special shirts we’re making just for that night so people buy your tickets if you have not bought your tickets yet.

**Craig:** Yeah. And correct me if I’m wrong, and I’m not wrong so you can’t correct me.

**John:** You’re never wrong.

**Craig:** I’m never wrong. Not about these things. And we have McQuarrie on a loop saying, “I hate to say it but Craig is right.” Hollywood Heart, which is the charity that this benefits, is a legal charity. Meaning if you buy tickets you can deduct them from your taxes.

**John:** I suspect that’s true. Because – and the actual value you’ll receive is just knowledge and joy.

**Craig:** And power.

**John:** Power. Yes.

**Craig:** And love.

**John:** We’re giving away power. Yeah. Love.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I mean why wouldn’t you come to this? It’s a great cause. And you know what? We’re in a bigger place. We got ambitious here. We need to fill a bigger venue so we need you listeners. If you are in the Los Angeles area–

**John:** We need your physical bodies in that space.

**Craig:** Yeah, we need you.

**John:** So that we will feel together.

**Craig:** I mean, look, in all seriousness, you know me. I’m perfectly happy talking to an empty room. In fact, I’m happier talking to an empty room. In fact, no one come. But really here’s the thing: it’s for charity. We’re trying to help kids. So, that’s why you need to show up. It’s not so much for me. Show up for John and the kids.

**John:** Yep. And our guests because our guests are phenomenal.

**Craig:** And our guests.

**John:** And there could be one or two more coming, but we can’t say that yet.

**Craig:** We’re always full of surprises.

**John:** Great. So hyping is done. I had my showing up at a place experience this week. This was the premiere for Aladdin. So Aladdin came out this past weekend in the US and most of the world. So I went to the premiere on Tuesday and it was weird. So I don’t think we’ve really talked about movie premieres so I thought we could spend a few minutes talking about what it’s like to go to a premiere as a writer.

So I guess, let me start how the day begin, because obviously I don’t need hair and makeup because I look just the same no matter what.

**Craig:** Well, makeup. [laughs] You could use a little makeup.

**John:** I get a little blush – no, I do nothing. So basically I get in a car, the studio sends a car, so me, Mike, and my friend Dan, we all went to the premiere together. We hop in a car. We got to Hollywood. This is at the El Capitan. They block off streets around it because they actually have blocked off all of Hollywood Boulevard for this premiere. So it’s actually difficult to get there.

They try – the publicists try to get you there so early. So the premiere started at 6:30. They wanted the car to leave my house at 4:30.

**Craig:** Oh god. Come on.

**John:** I’m like 10 minutes away. And so I said, no, 5:30 at the earliest. So we get in the car there. We get to the place where they’re dropping us off. There’s a greeter there who was fantastic. She took us around and did everything. And I specifically said that I wanted to skip the red carpet, so we’ll get into why I wanted to skip the red carpet, but Craig what’s been your experience when you do a premiere and doing the red carpet? Do you actually answer questions along that red carpet?

**Craig:** I have. It’s only been for certain movies, but I have. It’s weird. Definitely – it was less weird for Chernobyl because they seem to want to ask a writer questions in television. [laughs] When you’re in the movie business, so you walk down this red carpet and all these – you know, people have seen this I suppose in movies. The red carpet and all those people have their cameras and they’re like, “Look over here. Look over here.” And then the writer walks down and it gets real quiet all of a sudden.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s usually a handler beside you saying like, “This is Craig Mazin, the writer of the film.” Or they point to specific people who are already going to be asking you questions. Sometimes there’s little video crews.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Sometimes it’s just a person with a microphone there to talk with you. And, hey, can you tell everyone at Cat Fancy Magazine about Frankenweenie? And it’s like, are there any cats in Frankenweenie? I’m like, yes, there is. Let me tell you about Mr. Whiskers.

**Craig:** Yeah. And sometimes you speak to people who are from other countries. And, look, it’s all part of the machine. I mean, the thing to remember about these premieres, which I think a lot of writers don’t quite get early on, is that the purpose of the premiere is not to celebrate you, or the director, or the cast, or the movie. The purpose of the premiere is to sell tickets. It is designed to create stuffing for magazines and websites.

And so the parts that get the most stuffing generated that’s where they care. Meaning typically actors.

**John:** Yeah. Because those are the ones who are going to actually move copies of magazines if there were still magazines, but like clicks on websites.

**Craig:** Correct. Like if Will Smith for some reason was not able to go that day, because he had something else going on, they would move the premiere. [laughs] You know, it’s like he’s the thing that’s going to get all of the attention, right? I mean, he is the biggest name. So, it becomes that.

I mean, I watched it first hand at The Hangover 2 premiere. It was extraordinary. And it was right across the street. So Disney runs its family premieres at El Capitan and across the street you have Mann’s Chinese where a lot of big premieres take place. And they close off the street and it’s madness and people are there to see – they’re there to see Bradley Cooper.

**John:** Yeah. They’re not there to see Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** No! No. No one even in my house is there to see Craig Mazin.

**John:** So, approaching this premiere, this is a movie that I had worked on, very hard. I had stopped working on the movie. I had seen it several times. I had given notes on it. But it was not fundamentally my movie. And I knew I did not want to be answering a lot of press questions along the way because I can smile and sort of like, “I’m so excited to be here,” give those generic answers. But it was just going to be awkward and weird.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And I didn’t sort of want to give some honest answers on certain things. And so I said like, OK, I will go but we’re going to skip the whole red carpet thing. And my handler was fantastic. She whisked me through this little back way so I didn’t have to do any of the red carpet stuff.

And then you get into the theater, which the El Capitan Theater is beautiful inside.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Intimate but beautiful. And there’s like two other people inside the theater. And so even after delaying going there so early we had about an hour to kill.

**Craig:** I know. I know.

**John:** For everyone who was on the red carpet to start it.

**Craig:** I know. The timing of it all is so weird. At some point they start yelling at everybody to go into the theater, but no one is going in. I’ve got to be honest with you. I do not like these events at all. And if I can avoid them I do. If I don’t have credit on a movie but I’ve worked on the movie and I get an invitation to go–

**John:** I don’t go.

**Craig:** I can’t remember the last time I went. I do not like premieres because they’re actually not fun ways to see a movie. It’s so much of a hassle. And I just care about the movie.

**John:** I’ll take that back. The one time I did go was the first Iron Man. And it was a fun premiere and I was happy for everyone involved. And so I was there to celebrate them, but I just loved that it was not about me at all.

**Craig:** And, you know what? I’ll take it back, too. There was one. I went to Hail Caesar, because I was just really excited. I wanted to see it early. And you know what? I was not disappointed at all. I love that movie.

**John:** That feels like a good movie to see with a big crowd and with a group around you. And that is actually genuinely the fun of seeing these movies is because in the previous incarnations where I’d seen Aladdin I’d seen it in a screening room by myself, or nearly by myself, and so I’m watching this thing that is supposed to be a comedy and it is not funny to me because I’m sitting here scribbling into a notebook about things that I would encourage them to work on.

And then to see it with a crowd it’s like, oh, yeah, those are jokes that I wrote. And those jokes are getting laughs. And you actually get spontaneous applause at moments. Yes, the crowd is sort of extra hyped up because they know the folks involved and they’re applauding people’s credits as they show up. But it’s also a joyous moment because also it’s new for people because none of them have been spoiled by reviews or other bits of spoilers that have come out about what actually happens in the movie. So it was genuinely fun to see it with that group.

I met one of the composers who did the great new song for it, so that was cool. So, I’m glad I went to the premiere of Aladdin is the short summary.

**Craig:** I’m glad you went, too. It’s good. I’m glad. You know what? We’ve got to stay positive.

**John:** We got to stay positive. And it looks like, you know, we’re recording this on a Friday but it looks like the movie is going to do pretty well for the weekend and that’s a good thing, too.

**Craig:** It’s Aladdin from Disney.

**John:** It is Aladdin from Disney. That was kind of built in to the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean not to take anything away from the accomplishment, but we’re talking about degrees of success at that point. There’s no chance that people aren’t going to show up. It’s Aladdin. It’s A Whole New World. For You and Me.

**John:** Basically thank you everyone who went out to see it over the weekend. I hope you enjoy it. I’m happy it actually turned out in sort of the right kind of PG. It’s truly a PG that you can take younger kids to. And I’m happy with a lot of how stuff went in the movie.

**Craig:** How many murders, onscreen murders, do you get before you get bumped into PG-13?

**John:** I don’t know. There is one onscreen murder that I really, really argued to cut. Sidebar here for a moment. It’s a thing that you encountered in so many different cuts of movies you’ve seen before where there’s a scene that is wedged in there to establish a character and it breaks the flow of everything else around it. Just like, oh no, this guy is a bad guy. See how bad he is? And I really, really wanted that scene to go and they didn’t listen to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, this is – it’s what happens. You see, I mean–

**John:** It’s a collaborative medium. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a collaborative medium and maybe – I think what you should do is maneuver yourself into a position where you don’t have to collaborate that much. [laughs] And I’ve said this on the show many times. There is a way of doing something where you are going to do it mostly by yourself. You are going to make mistakes but the mistakes will be consistent with everything else because it all came from one brain.

It’s the mix and match of it all. Somebody may have a great idea. You know what the problem is? That character we’re supposed to be scared of him, but we haven’t seen him do anything bad. We should establish how evil he is. Great idea. Execution-ally there’s no chance of success because that came from somewhere else. It’s like throwing some weird instrument into the middle of another song.

**John:** And that’s a thing that happens in the writing stage all the time, too. Even what I’m writing right now, there’s a scene that I would kind of love to establish a little bit earlier in the script but like there’s no place to put that without breaking everything else around it. So, you know what? I have to do the hard work of figuring out, OK, if it is coming in at this later moment how can I make it work as this later moment beat. Because it’s not the same scene that would be happening earlier in the movie.

**Craig:** This is the life of the writer.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Writing and editing. They’re closely tied together.

We need to talk about the WGA and the ATA. But I would propose Craig, because last week it went on a long time, maybe could I set a three-minute timer and when the timer goes off we’re just done talking about it?

**Craig:** I need ten seconds.

**John:** All right. I’m starting three minutes, but if it goes less than that that’s great. And go.

**Craig:** Well, last week I was praying to the skies that everybody get back to the table. And they’re getting back to the table. Can’t claim causality there. I’m just happy that it happened. I’m optimistic and I’m very hopeful that you guys in leadership and the agency people can find a deal together.

**John:** Craig, you said you prayed to the skies and heaven, so this is a religious conversion for you is what I’m hearing. That you now understand that there is an all-powerful creator behind these things?

**Craig:** Sort of. By the skies and the heavens I’m referring to myself. So I’m the member of a new religion. The religion of–

**John:** Craigism?

**Craig:** It’s Craigism. And our lord’s prayer, “I hate to say it, but Craig is right.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, wouldn’t it be so funny if your first disciple was Chris McQuarrie?

**Craig:** My only disciple.

**John:** We should also briefly mention, because we have two minutes left on this time, which we didn’t even need. So another thing that happened this week was – I saw you single this out on Twitter – a writer who had been represented at Gersh shows up for a meeting at Fox. They say like, “Oh, no, your meeting was canceled.” And Gersh confirmed that they had canceled the meeting after he had fired them. That was not a god look for that agency.

**Craig:** No. That’s just dishonorable behavior. And even worse it is ignorant. This is not – in theory this will have an end. And we will want to return to agencies. And new writers are going to want to go to agencies. And Gersh will be one of those agencies, except now if anybody were to ask me about Gersh I would say they’re not great because as an institution they thought that would be a good idea. That’s a terrible idea.

That implies a poor sense of judgment. And that’s shameful. Shameful and stupid.

**John:** I knew almost nothing about Gersh, but this is the only thing I’m associating with Gersh right now is this incident. And so that ain’t great.

**Craig:** Just a huge error on their part and petty. And revealing. This is the problem. You reveal something about yourselves. Why in god’s name would they have done – what did they think they were going to accomplish? It’s the judgment thing that makes me – so it’s not a question of like, boo, you’re anti-writer. If they want to be anti-writer and somehow manage to be successful at the same time I guess OK. But there’s no successful strategy encased in that move. None.

**John:** Nope. None. And also it speaks to the question of who owns a meeting. And so if a meeting is set up between a writer and the studio, to my thinking is a social contract between the two of them that is not a thing that the agency owns in any meaningful way. I don’t think you can own an intangible thing. That’s the frustration to me, too, is that they felt that they controlled that meeting rather than the writer.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. It’s so arrogant. And you’re Gersh. No offense—

**[Alarm timer sounds off]**

Whoa.

**John:** I literally set a timer. That’s three minutes. We’re done. We can’t talk anything more about it.

**Craig:** That’s good. The people at Gersh are so happy. They literally got saved by the bell. [laughs]

**John:** Literally saved by the iPhone bell. Let’s get to some questions from listeners. We have not answered listener questions for a bit.

**Craig:** Somebody at Gersh was like shorten that timer. All right, listener questions. Are we doing listener questions or we doing stakes? What would you like to do first?

**John:** Well, our first listener question is about stakes so I thought we might start with this. Why don’t you take Vera’s question here?

**Craig:** Sure. Vera from Germany, welcome Vera, asks, “How do I raise the stakes in a true story? I’m involved in writing a feature film based on real events. Our producers are worried there may not be enough personal jeopardy in the story and I worry there may not be enough potential for it. The story is about young researchers who learn something of global consequence. They are ridiculed once published and their lives changed drastically after, but they didn’t know that beforehand.

“Almost all our main characters are alive today and still relatively well-known. We’re even in touch with them and they’re supportive of our project. So we can’t make their past selves look worse than they are and wouldn’t want to. They were good. How can I raise the stakes for the characters beginning early in this story?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** Well, first off, Vera, this is a fantastic question because it’s the kind of thing you’re going to face all the time. You have the extra difficulty of having real life people in there so you can’t manipulate backstories in ways that sort of get to reverse engineer what you want them to have.

But let’s talk about stakes overall, because we’ve talked about stakes in previous episodes but it’s good to have a refresher about what we mean by stakes, what development executives mean by stakes, why you hear this term used so much, particularly in features. You hear it some in TV, but you really hear it in features.

I think there’s two main questions you’re asking when you talk about stakes. First is what is the character risking by taking this action? By making a choice to do a thing what are they putting at risk? The second question is what are the consequences if this character or these characters don’t succeed? So it’s both the action that they’re taking and also the consequences of failure. How bad is the failure if they don’t succeed?

Chernobyl, of course, has remarkable stakes throughout the three episodes I’ve seen so far. Characters are faced with these kind of stakes questions all the time. Craig, anything else about the definition of stakes we want to tackle before we get into it?

**Craig:** No, it’s a very simple concept. What are you risking and what happens if we don’t succeed? It’s as simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. So you’re trying to pick the answers to those questions and to me what’s so crucial and so often missing is proportionality. You have to pick stakes that feel right for these characters, this world, this situation. Not everything can literally be life or death. Not everything is the end of the world. And so often I think especially in our blockbusters we try to make everything be the end of the world. Superhero movies especially have to sort of be saving the whole world and they probably shouldn’t be so often.

If you think about the world of the characters, it could be the end of the world to those characters. And so then you have to carefully define, you know, what is their world consisting of. Is it their social grouping? Their standing? Is it their family? Is it their dreams, their hopes, their wishes, their goals? What is at risk for them that isn’t necessarily of global consequence?

**Craig:** Yeah. We are currently in a state of stakesflation in Hollywood where everything gets upped. It’s not enough to destroy a planet, now you must destroy the galaxy. No, now you have to destroy multiple galaxies. Now you have to destroy half of everything that is alive which I assume at some point someone is going to say, “Well, we have to move that up to next time Thanos snaps his fingers it needs to be three-quarters.”

But when you think back to the first blockbuster, generally Jaws is considered to be the first blockbuster film, and the stakes in Jaws are there people on an island that are being eaten by a shark. And our heroes have to stop the shark before it eats another person. That’s it. That’s it. And it captivates to this very day because the stakes there are really not so much about random people getting chewed up, it’s about a man who has a certain sense of self and purpose and that self and purpose is being challenged to the extreme by a creature that seemingly is beyond his ability to handle. That’s stakes. It’s personal. I love it.

**John:** That’s stakes. So obviously when we talk about stakes our key focus has to be our hero, our protagonist, and what are the stakes for that character. But it’s important to remember that there should be stakes for most of these characters and they don’t have to be the same stakes. In the case of Jaws there’s the stakes of if we do this then we could hurt tourism. If we acknowledge this problem there could be issues.

I’m thinking to Chernobyl. So, we have your scientists explaining, no, if we don’t do this thing the next thing is going to blow up and it’s going to be worse. And we have another scientist who is saying if we don’t figure out exactly what happened these other reactors could blow up. But we also have government officials who are saying we can’t let this get out because if we do let this get out then there will be a panic.

Everyone has a different sense of what the stakes are and they’re taking actions that match their own understanding of what are the most important stakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. For some characters in the show the stakes are love. I want to be with the person that I love. I don’t want to abandon them, even though it puts my own life at risk. For other people the stakes are I have to keep this government together. And if I fail to then there’s going to be chaos. Right. Everybody had their different competing interests. And in those moments, for instance in Chernobyl there’s a moment in Episode 2 where Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgård’s characters are on a helicopter and they’re approaching the power plant. And they both have stakes.

One guy is I have an order from the supreme leader of the Soviet Union. That is somebody with nearly absolute power. And I have to fulfill that because if I don’t I understand that my life and my position and my authority and everything I have is under severe threat. And the other character’s stakes are that’s going to kill us. Don’t go there. We’ll all die.

Competing stakes. Always a good thing to have.

**John:** And ultimately the helicopter pilot has to decide.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Who does he need to listen to in this moment? And he actually reverts to sort of a lower [unintelligible] hierarchy of needs to sort of get to, OK, I don’t want to die in the next two minutes and so therefore I’m not going to fly over this thing. I’m going to listen to the other person.

But I think that actually points to really the root of stakes which is needs and wants. I mean, wants are generally sort of the better way of thinking about it. But what is the character going after? And is the thing they’re going after a really primal survival kind of thing? In some movies it absolutely will be. In some movies it is life or death. It’s cliffhanger. It’s those movies where at any given moment you could die.

But for most characters in most movies it’s a little bit higher up the chain. So it’s about comfort, family, stability, self-realization, self-actualization. Their sense of identity is at stake if they don’t succeed in this venture and that’s the risk that they’re taking.

**Craig:** All these levels of things, what it comes down to is what can you make me believe. And when it comes to stakes I don’t really as a writer have to do much to make you believe at home that saving the planet from a space alien is high enough stakes. It’s just sort of baked into the scenario. Strangely, and this is something I wish our friends in the executive suites had a stronger grasp of, that reduces our interest because there isn’t much of a challenge to that question.

John, a space alien, is threatening to blow up the world, and we need you to solve it. OK. I mean, I’m on the world. What am I supposed to do otherwise? I don’t really have a huge choice there. But if I say to you, John, you have a dream of something that means a lot to you but to pursue it will put your relationship with your own family at risk. That is stakes that now I’m leaning forward in my seat and thinking, ooh.

**John:** So Craig let’s talk about another recent movie that did a great job with stakes and obviously this is a movie that had huge end of the universe kind of stakes but also had very personal stakes which was Avengers: Endgame, which I thought did a really brilliant job of blending the two. Because obviously it’s going to have these big superhero stakes. Half of civilization, half of all living things have been eliminated with a snap. And yet there were very clear personal stories that they focused on. The choices of – we see Hawkeye losing his family and sort of wanted to get his family back and so that was so important. But I thought what they did with Tony Stark and Tony Stark being reluctant to even pursue going after this solution because he didn’t want to risk this family that he’d been able to have in this intervening time. It was really smartly done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Markus and McFeely are experts at working what I would call understandable, empathizable, if that’s a term, stakes into movies where the apparent stakes are ka-boom and blech and pow, right. What they say is even something as dramatic and huge circumstantially as half of every living person dying in the universe they narrow it in. It’s like they kind of force you to tunnel into a relationship to that event through individuals.

What does this mean for me and the man I love? What does this mean for me and my brother? What does this mean for me and the sacrifices I’ve made in my own life to get to this point? All of it is – they just tunnel you into that so that the two things are enmeshed. And that is super important. I just think these broader stakes of something is going to blow up is ultimately irrelevant. There’s no Die Hard unless there is a man trying to win his wife back. It just doesn’t matter. I don’t care.

**John:** It doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** I don’t care about who is in the Nakatomi Building. I want John McClane to kind of earn some redemption and get his life back. That’s, you know, what I’m hoping for.

**John:** Yeah. And even movies that have similar kinds of plot devices the nature of the stakes is so key in why they work differently. So think about comparing the first Charlie’s Angels to a Mission: Impossible movie. They both have some of the same beats and sort of plot mechanics and sort of set pieces, but the Charlie’s Angels fundamentally like will this family be torn apart. Will they be able to save their father figure character? That’s a very different dynamic than what you see in a Mission: Impossible movie.

It gets down to those really granular details about what is the relationship between these characters. What do they really want beyond just the plot wants?

**Craig:** Yeah. And this kind of fine-tuning and understanding, this is where unfortunately we do drift out of the area of craft and into the area of instinct which isn’t really teachable. But what I would say to Vera is, in just garnering what I can from your question, Vera, it seems to me that you’re wondering if you have to make them look bad to create stakes and I’m not sure that that’s ever necessary. Those two things aren’t really connected. I think if they were good people but you understood watching it, and you may have to adjust, that they were risking something really important to them to put their research out into the world. And really important it can’t just be my job. Nobody cares. You can get another job.

It has to be how someone they love or admire looks at them. Or how it might disrupt their pursuit of somebody that they love. Or how it might affect who they think they are as a human being and what their value is. It’s got to be something I can feel in my stomach, you know? Then there are stakes. And, by the way, perfectly fine to create a movie with stakes and have a character “bet it all” and lose. That sometimes is the most interesting story at all.

**John:** Yeah. I think back to Erin Brockovich which this is based on a true life story. This character intervenes in these water poisoning situations. But it was the specificity of like what was in turmoil in her life that made it such a compelling story. And Susannah Grant had to look at all the possible stories to tell and pick the one that had real stakes for that central Erin Brockovich character. And her stakes were not the stakes of the people who were drinking the contaminated water. Her stakes are personal. They’re about her relationships. They involve her kid, her boyfriend, sort of the dynamics of her life.

So I would say look at the characters, the real life people you have in this situation. Try to mine for some interesting ways that they either fit together or that in taking the actions they are doing they’re not just disrupting their own lives or risking their own – I say lives, not their physical lives but their own status or place – but is going to have repercussions on those around them. And the degree to which they understand that, those are stakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. 100%. I think that that’s kind of what we’re dancing around here as we talk through all this. We’re really talking about character. I think sometimes this notion of stakes gets separated out by people who are analytic or – and by analytic I mean producers and executives who are trying to come up with something easy for us like, “Well what are the stakes?” And the truth is if the character is working, you’ll know what the stakes are. The character and the stakes should be embedded with each other. It should just be one in the same.

In the same way that the character and the story should be embedded with each other and be one in the same. And the dialogue and the character should be – character is the hub. Character is the hub of the wheel my friends. And stakes is just one more spoke emanating out of it. It’s all baked into character.

In the case of adapting real life, Vera, it’s OK to make changes in order to create some stakes. Sometimes you have to alter that but do it within the spirit of what you know really happened. And if in the spirit of what really happened there are no stakes at all, maybe it’s not a thing. But I suspect that there are some there.

**John:** I think there are. The last little bit I want to add on stakes is there’s a second kind of stakes which is not this overall story/character arch-y kind of stakes, but is very specific to a scene or sequence. And so an action sequence is the easiest way to think about that where if the character doesn’t succeed in this moment these are the consequences or the possible consequences. In those cases it is a little bit more craft, where you actually have to understand that the audience needs to be able to see what could go wrong or what the downfalls are of a mistake or a less than perfect performance in that moment.

When we had Chris McQuarrie on to talk about – on Episode 300 – to talk about the Mission: Impossible movies, he gets a lot into that. Which is basically how can this possibly end well. And to get the audience asking that question you have to make it clear what the jeopardy is. And sometimes as I’ve rewritten my own stuff or rewritten other people’s stuff it’s because it wasn’t clear in that moment, in that scene, what was the thing that could tip one way or the other.

So making sure that in those moments that is really clear to an audience.

**Craig:** Every scene is its own movie. And that means every scene has its own stakes. And all of that is connected back to a simple question: what is it you want? What do you want? Even if the scene is if that fiery gasoline trail hits that fuel tank then all those people are going to die, well, I want to stop that. It still has to come back to somebody wanting something. And ideally there’s somebody else saying, “No, I want it to explode.” And now we’ve got ourselves a scene. But even if the scene is I’m sitting down to tell someone that the nature of our relationship is changing there are stakes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s always there.

**John:** All right. Let’s move onto another question. This is from Daniel in Israel who writes, “I’ve been offered to write a TV pilot episode for a local production company. The thing I’m supposed to write the pilot around is essentially only a main plot point. Something someone might call an inciting incident. What I am lacking is the protagonist. Not his identity, but what he wants and what he needs in his life. What I’m trying to figure out is how to create this protagonist in light of this ‘inciting incident.” How would you construct a screenplay and its protagonist when all that you have to work with is this main plot point?”

So, a related question here really. Here Daniel is facing a situation where the plot of it, or at least the start of the plot is really clear. He’s trying to figure out who is the character to drive through this doorway into a story.

**Craig:** Great question, Daniel. And first of all, if we’re in a situation where somebody was just sitting around the house and thinking, “Oh my gosh, I have a great idea for a plot, but how do I come up with a character?” I would say you don’t have a great idea for a plot. Start with character.

But this kind of thing where somebody comes to you and here are your own stakes – there’s money. You’re trying to earn money as a writer.

**John:** There’s money, yes.

**Craig:** And they’re giving you an assignment. You have to figure it out. This happens all the time. I cannot tell you how many times I get a call where someone says, “We’ve got a script. It needs a little bit of work. Story works great. We just need characters. We need character work.” And I just think the story can’t be that great. If the characters aren’t good how is the story good?

So, Daniel, here is I guess the only practical advice I have for you is take your main plot point and ask this question: to whom would it be most interesting for this to apply? Because any random person can go into a situation and be confronted by a problem. But there are certain people who the nature of their lives and the position that they’re in and their past and what they want – they’re the best people to do this to. And typically it’s because this is the thing that will torture them the most. So, think of who that is and you may be off and running.

**John:** I agree. I think back to the How Would This Be a Movie segments we’ve done and they fall into two camps. There’s ones that have a really fascinating character and then you have to figure out like how would you actually build a story around that character. The other ones are the sort of plot machines. Oh, that is a really crazy thing that happened in the real world and you have to then approach it with like, OK, who is the character that should really be driving that story. So, it might be a real life event and there’s myriad characters around it, but you have to figure out whose point of view is actually the interesting point of view.

And I think Craig nailed it. It’s the character for whom the story is especially suited. Either because they are perfect for it, like they are the one person who could be the expert in the situation, or more often and more interestingly the person who is the least well-equipped to be doing this and is out of their element. And that is going to give you more conflict, more comedy if you’re going for comedy. It’s going to be the person who is relatable to the audience because they’re probably a good proxy for the audience in that they don’t have the information or the expertise to be grappling with this situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s call it the A side of things. In movies we talk about the A side and the B side. It’s sort of like an editorial term. Like the stuff that happens before, the stuff that happens after. So that’s the A side of it. And then the B side of it is for whom would the resolution of this plot point be the most interesting and satisfying? Think about it from forward and backward and you just might have yourself a solution there.

All right, let’s move along to Alex from New York, shall we?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** All right. Alice writes, “I’m in a script writing class and I’m trying to pitch a story where there is no three-act structure. My professor responded by saying that for this class we can only make something that follows the structure. She then pulled out a book with the title How to Write a Great Screenplay.” [laughs]

“And said our script had to contain the six key moments. Of course there are many great movies that follow the three-act structure, but I also know that many of my favorite movies don’t – Boyhood, Nashville, A Serious Man come to mind. I guess my question is do you need a three-act structure to write a great movie or is this a sign that I should drop out of this overpriced school?” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] I love people who answer their own questions. Obviously the answer Alice is you’re not in a very good screenwriting program. But I want to sort of move past that moment to talk about this idea of how you teach writing. Because it occurred to me this last week, my daughter for her English class has to write these five-paragraph essays. And Craig you remember these five-paragraph essays.

**Craig:** I sure do.

**John:** They have to have–

**Craig:** Thesis.

**John:** The thesis and then you have to–

**Craig:** The examples.

**John:** Exactly. Each paragraph has to be about a different thing of those things and has to summarize and have the evidence within them and then a conclusion. And I find it just a torturous form. And I want to push back against it, and yet I do feel like it’s important that she learn how to write this ridiculous form now so that she understands what it is and will hopefully never have to write it quite the same way again.

A thesis is important. A thesis, you know, a central idea behind which all of your essay hangs together – that’s important. And for screenplays an understanding of a three-act structure I think is important. That sense that movies do have beginnings, middles, and ends. And there is a natural flow through which you move through story.

But I don’t want to be as an adult be forced to pay money to take a class where someone holds up a terrible screenwriting book and says that you have to follow this template.

**Craig:** Someone has written a book How to Write a Great Screenplay. I’m going to go out on a limb here. Because I have not heard of this book. Therefore my conclusion, this is just supposition, is that the individual who has written the book How to Write a Great Screenplay has not written a great screenplay. What else do you need to know?

Now, when it comes to surviving classes and things like that, you can take any movie and slap a three-act structure on it. If you put a gun in my mouth and say, A Serious Man, divvy that up into three acts. I’ll do it for you. No problem.

**John:** Totally. Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s also a sign that it’s useless. It is a very fundamental thing. It’s a little bit like in math class when you were moving ahead and your teacher said, “No, sorry. You need to show all your work. You need to show me the 15 plus 24 equals, carry, the whole thing.” Can’t I just do it in my head? “No.” OK, fine. So that’s what it is. It’s a little remedial.

Our script had to contain the six key moments. Hey, Alice from New York, I don’t know what those are. John, do you know what those are?

**John:** I don’t know what they are.

**Craig:** Well, we’re doing all right. [laughs] You got Aladdin out. I got Chernobyl running. Things are going OK. Somehow we made it without not only reading How to Write a Great Screenplay. We’ve never even heard of it.

**John:** So, here’s what I will try to defend about this idea about teaching people this template-y thing. if the teacher were requiring you to just do an outline, like a one or two-page outline that talked about your story in those beats or like come up with a new story and make it fit those beats, that I could see being a valuable exercise because it might get you to think about whatever these elements are I suspect they are, you know, what is that transition between the first act and second act, which real life screenwriters do talk about. Where you’re really – you’re not in Kansas anymore moment. Where a character has crossed a threshold into a new part of the story. That does tend to happen in most places.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** One of these other elements could be kind of a reversal where the thing that looks like it was close is now actually much further away. That things have gotten much worse. That is probably a meaningful beat. And so if it was an outline thing, but to make you write and entire 100-page screenplay following this template I don’t think is a fair thing to ask.

**Craig:** No. Perfectly fine to suggest that this is how beginners can learn. This is an intro to screenwriting. But if somebody like you says, “Listen, as a paying customer of this institution I would like to attempt to do it this way.” Why in god’s name would they tell you no? Listen, do it that way. And if it stinks, and by the way, higher probability it will stink, because you’re trying something – you’re doing like a degree of difficulty dive here that’s different than the other dives – then people will tell you it stunk and you’ll learn something and you’ll move on. It doesn’t mean that three acts are going to save you from stinking, nor does it mean that not three acts condemns you to stinking. It’s just part of the learning process.

But I would say to your professor stop that. Just cut it out. That’s just bizarrely pedantic.

**John:** I agree. Chris writes, “I recently swapped scripts with a writer friend. Instead of offering me story notes he called out formatting ‘errors’ in my first couple pages such as how I bold slug lines, reference a song, italicize dialogue for emphasis instead of underlining, etc. I explained how I was under the impression that all these things were stylistic choices rather than hard and fast rules. That a writer should use anything to better paint a movie in the reader’s mind.

“As an underwriter he argued that script formatting must be much tighter so as not to give anyone reading it a reason to throw it away. Is this true or is my friend simply being overly nitpicky on things that are really a writer’s choice? I’ve read dozens of screenplays at this point and feel no two really format exactly the same way.”

Craig, where are you at?

**Craig:** This is guy is swapping with his friend. You know who likes that?

**John:** That guy, yes. That guy.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig. So we’re talking about swapping, huh Chris? You going to swap?

**John:** Apparently they’re talking.

**Craig:** Get out of here, Sexy Craig. You can’t answer this question. Angry Craig can answer this question. Umbrage Craig is here. How many times do we have to kill this? This zombie won’t – we shoot it in the brain. We cut off its head. We light its heart on fire. What do we need to do to stop this from happening, John? I’m at my wit’s end. What do we do?

**John:** I don’t know. So I feel like a lot of people do listen to the show, but I’m also aware when people like Chris writes in that not everyone listens to the show.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** There are a few people who don’t listen to the show, although I’ll say that I had some meetings this past week and I was just surprised like folks who aren’t writers who listen to the show. So shout out to those folks who are not writers who listen to the show.

But, yeah, I don’t know how we’re going to win them over. I think all we can hope to do is to our listeners remind them that, listen, the standard screenplay formatting is helpful. It’s helpful because it creates an expectation about how stuff is supposed to look and if you go wildly off of it we are going to wonder does this person really know what they’re doing. Even as we do the Three Page Challenges when we see things that are like that’s not how it’s done we will comment on that because it is useful because it can slow a reader. It gives a reader an excuse for putting it aside.

I don’t think that’s what you were doing, Chris. The things you were singling out are reasonable choices. Some bold slug lines. I like to bold slug lines. I didn’t always, but now I do. So I use italics fairly liberally. It’s OK.

I think we just need to always remind folks that the standards are there because they’re helpful and they’re sort of standard but they’re not hard fast rules. And anyone who tells you otherwise probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just stop giving your friends scripts. They’re useless. Sorry. Your friend is useless. I don’t know how else to put it. I mean–

**John:** Also, your friend is useless because your friend did not give you constructive notes about the actual story.

**Craig:** Exactly. Correct. All they did was demand that you conform to a system that they insist is real but I can assure you is utter nonsense. Nonsense. That’s what they did. You were looking for advice on the story, the characters, the theme, the dialogue, and they came back and said here are a bunch of things you’re doing that are incorrect factually.

And the only person that was doing something factually incorrect is your friend, who maybe shouldn’t be your friend anymore. Because, I’m sorry, I bold slug lines. And like you, John, used to not bold slug lines. I reference songs all the time. I italicize dialogue for emphasis all the time. I also underline. I use We See. I do all these stupid things.

And your friend, I guarantee you, is going to say, “By the way I heard on Scriptnotes that they were bagging on me, but you know what? They only say that because they’re successful. But if you’re not them then…” this is how he sounds by the way. “And then you’re going to send your script to readers. They’re going to throw it out. If they see that you italicize dialogue they’re going to throw it out.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this. And all I can say is no. No, I’ve been doing it this way since I began when I was nobody. Nobody cared. You know what they cared about? Oh my god, I like a script finally. This month of just sifting through one desperate, soul-crushing failure of a screenplay after another and finally something showed up that was, I don’t know, at least mediocre. It made their day. [laughs] That’s all they care about it. That’s it. They don’t care about the rest of this. For the love of god.

**John:** So I’ll say if people don’t trust my authority as a screenwriter on this, let me go back to 20 years to when I was a professional reader. My job was to read screenplays. And I would read two a day and I would write up coverage on them. So I read 200 screenplays. And it was my job to be that reader who passed things up or said no to things. And not once – not once in 200 scripts – did I ever single out for formatting. Oh, it’s a really good story but warning executives it’s not formatted exactly the way you’d want.

No one cares about that. If you’ve never seen coverage – it’s only pedants who say this.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh, you know what? John, that – the guy that I was just listening to there, I’m going to call that, that’s Victory John.

**John:** Victory John.

**Craig:** Victory John. He knows when he walks into a room victory is assured. Victory John was great there. Nice work Victory John.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Chris, get rid of your friend.

**John:** Craig, let’s take one last question. Can you read Garrett for us?

**Craig:** Absolutely. Garrett asks, oh god, do we have to do this one?

**John:** I think we can – it actually goes into an interesting place.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Fine. Garrett asks, “So many fans are furious about the conclusion of Game of Thrones. I am nowhere near dealing with this problem personally, but how do writers surprise insatiate rabid fans who spend all their time figuring out where a series or movie will go? It seems as though super fans will be disappointed whether the ending is too predictable or completely out of left field.”

All right, John, dig in.

**John:** Garrett, I think you are correct. Again, I like people who ask a question and then answer the question within their question. There was no way to land that plane that would keep everybody happy. Some people were really upset by how it ended. Some people signed a petition to redo the whole season. That ain’t helpful. That’s not going to happen.

We’re in this weird time where a fan’s ownership of a piece of material and sort of their sense that the culture belongs to them is really challenging and somewhat problematic. As a person who loves the show I was excited to see the show do what the show wanted to do. And I was excited that the creators got to do what they wanted to do. But that’s not going to be to everyone’s taste.

Craig, how do you resolve Garrett’s question?

**Craig:** I think that the shocking part of it all is that it is impossible to get that angry about an episode of television unless you love that episode or that series. You love it. And the only way you can love it is if the people who made that episode made what you love.

This isn’t a case where some other showrunner came along and took it over and everybody goes, nah, they don’t have the magic. That’s fine. I get that. But in this case Dan and Dave who made this thing you loved, not for one episode or one season, but for years, and who gave up years, a decade of their life, while their children were being born and raised, moving back and forth between Los Angeles and Ireland over and over and over. Doing all of these things and throwing their heart and soul into all of this and keeping a massive cast together and a storyline that involved god knows how many characters. I wish I could impress upon people how many decisions are required to make one episode of television. It is insane.

And they did it into the 70s of episodes of television and they did it in the highest level. And the very same creative ambition and bravery that led them to this material in the first place and allowed them to do it in such a remarkable way in the first place is the very same creative bravery and ambition that led them to deliver an ending that they thought was right.

And if you don’t like it, that’s OK.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But why – the part that blows my mind, and this is where I agree with you Garrett, it’s a huge problem – is why people would suddenly say things like they’re bad writers. How dare you. How dare you. Not on the level of being insulting to Dan to Dave. They’re geniuses and they’re doing just fine. How dare you insult logic in such a crass and outrageous manner. To say that they are bad writers because they didn’t write a good episode of a show we love because they’re good writers.

I mean, get help. Listen, I get it. You can be super angry in an episode. I’ve seen episodes of things of shows that I love where I watch the episode and said I don’t like this. I don’t like the choices they made. But what I would never do is say because they’re bad writers.

I’m sorry, no one is going to bat 1,000. How about be happy for the good times and the joy they brought you, which is a decade of joy. Can’t we celebrate that? It just bums me out.

**John:** I don’t know who proposed this, but someone was pitching that HBO should film a reality show, sort of like a Project Greenlight, where they bring together eight of the biggest petition signers about wanting to do a new season and get them all together to write a new final season. And just film the whole thing.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** And what that process is like. Because that would be–

**Craig:** What a cruel, cruel joke to play.

**John:** That would be pretty amazing.

**Craig:** And I do. I see things where people say, “I figured it out. Here’s what they should have done.” And they’ll stick it somewhere and then people go like, “Yeah, amazing.” And I’m reading and I’m like that would have been the stupidest, lamest, who cares episode of nonsense in history.

Remember, again, they are somewhat victims of their own success. This is a show where people would spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince each other that Bran was really the Night King. And that level of engagement is amazing. You don’t get to it if the people making the show haven’t done an incredible job. And they did for so long. And to turn your back on them because you didn’t like the last – well, they betrayed us. No. No, you betrayed them. You betrayed them. You bought into that show. You loved it. You cared about it. You told them how great they were. Because they were. And then the minute they do something that’s slightly a – I mean, oh my god, people lost their minds because Jon Snow didn’t hug his dog, sorry, direwolf. Well, guess what? He does later.

And then I hope people go, oh, oh, if he had hugged him there then this hug wouldn’t have meant as much. Yes. Have a little faith.

**John:** That’s probably true.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I’d probably [cut] myself – I’m going to get petitions now to have my head chopped off. I don’t care.

**John:** Back in Episode 296 I sat down with Damon Lindelof. So we talked through Lost.

**Craig:** Lost. Sure.

**John:** We also talked through The Leftovers. And interesting to compare the response to those two endings because they’re both kind of big puzzle box shows and people were incredibly frustrated by the ending of Lost. People seemed to generally love the ending of The Leftovers. And I do wonder if some of it was expectation management. I felt like on The Leftovers Damon did a very good job from season one saying do not expect that you are going to have one answer that will completely resolve everything about what happened and why it happened. That will not come. And I think that softened the – conditioned things a little bit better. And so that may be one of the things that showrunners unfortunately now have to think about is not only how do I get this plane up in the air but how do I land this plane in a way that is going to – basically how do I tell everybody right while the plane is going up where I expect to land the plane and condition them for what they’re going to be getting into.

**Craig:** It’s hard to stop, especially when the joy of something is in the process of it. I mean, I’m a Game of Thrones fan. I’ve seen every minute of every episode of Game of Thrones. Including every minute of an episode that no one else has ever seen. And I’ve loved the journey. And to me the joy was the process. It was the unfolding of this story over time and the collision of characters and things.

Ending is essentially counter to the purpose of the entire venture. So, of course people are going to be a bit confused or put off by some aspects of it because it goes against the DNA of what that show is. That show, the joy of it, is in that it doesn’t end. The world gets bigger and crazier and wilder as things smash together and the stakes grow higher. That’s the joy.

So, I mean, guys, it’s almost as if you would have preferred that, I don’t know, a piano had fallen on them and there was no final season. Is that what you really want? I shouldn’t have asked that question. Now there’s going to be a petition to drop a piano on them.

**John:** So, I would say if you are considering writing into me and Craig and telling us why we’re wrong, I would urge you to first listen to Episode 235. That is the one where Benioff and Weiss came on our show at our benefit for Hollywood Heart. They were gracious to fill in for Lawrence Kasdan when he could not make it. And they talked about the making of Game of Thrones and Craig’s involvement in that early pilot process. And how this is mostly Craig’s fault.

**Craig:** Like most things.

**John:** Actually, you’re somewhat to blame, Craig. Because if you had not intervened when you had intervened maybe Game of Thrones wouldn’t have become a thing and then we wouldn’t have been frustrated by the events of the end of the last season.

**Craig:** That’s such a – you know what, John? There you go. You want to save yourself disappointment folks, stop watching things. Stop falling in love with things. Stop opening your heart to things because it’s much better to have never loved than to have loved and lost. Is that what you are saying? I’m sorry. No one can deliver it perfectly. And if you point me to something and say, “Well they did it perfectly,” I’m going to say to you no they didn’t. Because they didn’t. There’s no way to do it perfectly. You just do it.

And years later people will come – I swear to you people will come back to this years later and say, “Well actually, here’s a think piece about why it’s brilliant.” That’s just how our culture works. Inevitably.

**John:** Yep. Those are the stakes of making a high stakes show.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Segue Man, that’s beautiful.

**John:** Got to bring it all back around. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book I read this last week which I really enjoyed. It’s by Ryan North. It’s called How to Invent Everything. And the premise of the book is that you are a time traveler, whose rental time travel machine, has broken and this is the manual that comes in the little machine. And so, OK, you’re stranded in the past. Here’s how you have to invent all the things that get you back up to modern civilization.

So it goes down from basics of agriculture to metalsmithing to inventing logic. It’s just a very comprehensive guide to how you would get back up to as close as you can do modern day civilization if you were to be stranded in prehistoric times.

**Craig:** Before being eaten.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That is a very smart idea for a book. I like that. My One Cool Thing is also some reading material, but as you know big puzzle buy over here. So there’s a magazine. It’s an online magazine called PANDA Magazine which is short for P and A which is short for Puzzles and Answers. It is published by a gentleman named Foggy Brume. That is his real name.

**John:** I would not buy that as a character’s name. No–

**Craig:** It’s his real name.

**John:** I reject the premise of Foggy Brume.

**Craig:** Foggy Brume. Very nice guy. I’ve had the joy of puzzling with him myself a few times. And he puts out a monthly edition. And I think this is true frequently he does these big puzzle boats once a year where it’s like a big mega puzzle to do. And then each issue has a little sort of mini mega puzzle where you solve, in this case in this month’s issue there are 12 puzzles that are difficult and each one gives you an answer that you plug into one big puzzle to get a big answer. PANDAMagazine.com is where you can find this if you’re big into that sort of thing. It’s a good challenge.

Each magazine comes with a whole bunch of puzzles where he provides the answers so you’re not miserable. And then there are some that are more of like a contest where he will eventually publish the answers once the submission date comes and goes. So, PANDA Magazine. Foggy Brume. A good subscription for the puzzler in your life.

**John:** I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Edited by Matthew Chilelli who also wrote our outro this week in the style of Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Who did your Chernobyl music? It’s a woman with a hard to pronounce name.

**Craig:** So her name is Hildur, well I’m going to pronounce it like an American. She is Icelandic. So the cheap pronunciation is Hildur Gudnadottir. In fact it is like Gudnadottir. I can’t do it because I’m not Icelandic and I think Icelandic is the hardest language in the world to learn and speak or something. It’s hard.

She is brilliant. You’re also going to be able to hear her work in Todd Phillips upcoming movie Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So she’s amazing. And, good news, I believe that – so HBO has confirmed they are releasing her original soundtrack for Chernobyl for download and other versions of it. And I think it’s coming May 31. I think that’s when it will be available. I believe given the quality of the work she did on Chernobyl that that original soundtrack, that original score, is going to become a staple in editing bays.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s going to be one of those temp scores that’s going to confound other composers for years to come I hope. Because it’s unique.

**John:** Nice. If you have an outro you’d like us to play you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. They go up about a week after the episode has aired.

Some folks have started to do recaps and discussion on Reddit so you can head over there and see what people are talking about for this episode.

You can find the back episodes of this show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons in the store at johnaugust.com.

You may also want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide at johnaugust.com/guide to see which episodes listeners recommend most.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next time.

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