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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-one-with-sarah-polley).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 583 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ve got a very special guest. Sarah Polley is a writer/director whose credits include Take This Waltz, Away From Her, and Stories We Tell. She’s also the star of my very first movie, Go. Welcome to the podcast, Sarah Polley.

**Craig:** Woo!

**Sarah Polley:** Nice to see you. You look exactly the same, and it’s really eerie.

**John:** Somehow I don’t age. It’s a lot of wearing a hat I think is what does it.

**Sarah:** It’s frightening.

**Craig:** I worry that what’s going to happen is you’re going to age all at once.

**John:** That’s going to be terrifying.

**Craig:** One day we’re going to be like, “Oh, no, what happened? He’s a hundred.”

**Sarah:** I think it’s like a Death Becomes Her type scenario. Actually, this house that we’re recording this in reminds me a bit of Death Becomes Her, so it’s all coming together. Some kind of illegal potion, and Bruce Willis is somewhere.

**Craig:** Yes. We should do a deep dive on that one. I love that movie.

**Sarah:** Oh my god, that’s one of my favorite movies of all time.

**Craig:** It’s so good.

**Sarah:** I’ve seen that movie probably 30 times. There was a period in high school where we watched it every weekend. We just kept watching it.

**Craig:** It’s so good. It’s such a good movie.

**John:** Sarah Polley, I remember you from Go, obviously, because that was my first movie making experience, so it was all overwhelming. You had made a zillion things before that point. I distinctly remember there was a point in which you wrapped, and the next night we were shooting, and there’s Sarah again, and she’s sitting on the floor of this hotel room, in a scene that you’re not in at all, just watching. Do you always know that you wanted to direct? It seemed like you were studying it from the moment I saw you.

**Sarah:** That actually happened as a result of that movie in a way, because I remember meeting with Doug. I remember I was not feeling particularly ambitious as an actor. I didn’t want to make a movie in LA. I remember Doug hadn’t read the script yet. I remember he waylaid me at a hotel somewhere, was like, “Just meet with me for an hour,” before I got on a plane.

I remember him talking about his filmmaking and how he wanted to break the rules and light differently, and he operated his own camera, and rules of filmmaking that he felt were outmoded, that he was going to change. I literally had a moment in that meeting where I just went, “If I can shadow you and learn about what the hell you’re talking about right now, I’m in. I don’t particularly want to act, but I’d really like to spend my time this way.” I loved the characters.

It turned into this kind of apprenticeship where I was watching Doug working and watching you working with him. That became something I suddenly was interested in was filmmaking. Even though I’d been acting for a long time, I never thought of it as something I was interested in before that movie. Then yeah, I was watching a lot.

**John:** I want to get more into filmmaking and writing and directing, but specifically I want to talk about your new movie, Women Talking, which Craig and I both just absolutely loved.

**Sarah:** Thank you.

**John:** It’s up for all sorts of awards this season. It’s really, really good. We’ll talk about that. I also want to talk about your book, Run Towards the Danger, which is a moment in your life, but also good general life philosophy advice. I think it’s a generally applicable thing you apply to your life and your career, correct?

**Sarah:** I think that recovering from this concussion, which I had for about three and a half years, and having little success doing so, and then finally finding this amazing treatment program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where the advice I’d been given was turned on its head, so the advice to either rest in a dark room, or the best advice I got was walk and do stuff, but as soon as you start to feel symptoms, come on, go down to zero.

He shook that all up, this amazing doctor, Dr. Michael Collins, and he said, “Look, if you remember one thing from this meeting, it’s this. Run towards the danger. You’re not going to get better at handling the things that are difficult for you with a concussion by avoiding them.” There’s a bunch of very specific exercises and vestibular exercises, but basically, your main treatment is exposure therapy. The things that cause discomfort, you have to do more of. That became this paradigm shift for me that permeated every aspect of my life.

**John:** Great. We’ll talk about that in relation to life but also filmmaking and the decision to make this movie after a 10-year gap. We’ll get into all of it. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I’d love to talk about child actors, because you were a child actor. You have strong opinions about child actors. I watched your movie, and there were a bunch of child actors in it. I’m like, “Sarah, there’s a bunch of kid actors in here.” We’re going to get into that. Craig, I don’t know even what your theory is on child actors.

**Craig:** It’s fraught with danger for everyone. It’s fraught with danger for the children. It’s fraught with danger for their parents and the relationship between the parents and the children, and it’s fraught with danger for the people making the movie or the show, because you can’t help but put your production first. The panic when you’re making something and making your days and all that is just so palpable. You can easily forget that it’s a child. There are so many ways to go wrong, but I think also there are ways to go right.

**John:** We’ll dig into all of that in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members.

**Sarah:** I love the way you articulated that, by the way.

**Craig:** Thank you. We’re now best friends.

**John:** This is a whole bunch of stuff we want to talk about. We might as well start by framing it in the conversation about this movie that you’ve just made, because it was great. It’s based on a book. I’m curious how the book came to you and what the decision process was, like, “Okay, this is something I’m going to choose to adapt and choose to spend years of my life making.” Talk to us about Women Talking.

**Sarah:** I read it when it first came out. I actually heard about it first through a member of my book club. It wasn’t the book we were doing, but she took me inside into the kitchen and said, “Going to tell you the background events behind this novel. When I do that, you’re not going to want to make this into a film.” The book isn’t about that. It’s about what happens after. She told me the background, which is of course this devastating story of these series of assaults in this Mennonite colony in Bolivia. I said, “I don’t want to make that into a film.” She said, “I told you you were going to say that. Just wait.”

Then she told me what the film was about, or what the book was about, which was about this incredible meeting between these women, this incredibly rich, dynamic, challenging conversation about how to respond to these series of attacks, whether or not they’re going to stay and fight, whether they leave, whether they stay and do nothing, and this incredibly democratic process and difficult discussion that they have. Really, by the end of her talking, and I already loved Miriam Toews as an author, I was pretty intrigued. I ran and got the book.

Really the day I finished reading it, on my Twitter feed it comes up that Frances McDormand and Dede Gardner have the rights to it. I reach out through my manager, Frank Frattaroli, who’s also Fran’s manager. My email says, “Women Talking, do they have a writer and director for this?” He sends me an email he received within the hour before mine.

**John:** That’s great.

**Sarah:** It says, from Frances McDormand, “Women Talking with Sarah Polley doing these days.”

**Craig:** That never happens.

**Sarah:** It was all very thrilling.

**John:** That part felt like it was meant to be. Reading the book, did you have a sense of how you would make this into a movie? The movie has a really strange form, but did you know it was going to have that strange form from the start? For folks who haven’t seen it, it all takes place really over the course of 24 hours. It’s these conversations between these women that punctuated at different times. They break up and they get back together. We’re all seeing it through the lens of this decision. I guess 12 Angry Men would be one of the early comparisons to it. When did you know it was going to feel like that?

**Sarah:** I feel like what I was excited about was figuring out if this could be a movie or not. I won’t claim that I had a moment where I just knew this is a movie. I felt very tingly about it and very excited about the idea of what an incredible cast could do with a conversation like this.

I don’t think I would’ve embarked upon it without partners like Dede Gardner and Frances McDormand, who could help me hash it out. This was an incredibly collaborative process from the beginning, and a thrilling one, of these conversations with women that were rich and wild and bonkers. This process of figuring it out was a real process. I think what I was excited about was trying to figure out with them if this was a movie or not. I think as we worked on it more and more and I honed the drafts more and more, we realized it was.

**John:** Now, a strange thing about the movie is that there’s not a protagonist in a classic sense. There’s a group protagonist. It’s a group of people arriving at a decision and making a decision together. The storytelling decisions are all diffuse among these different people. How early on did you land on that? Were you writing scenes? What was your drafts and documents along the way that got you figuring out what stuff was going to happen, what people were saying, where stuff would fall.

**Sarah:** It’s interesting what you say about there not being a clear protagonist, because I think my first two films, Away from Her and Take This Waltz, the anchor I held onto was, I am going to make this as concretely from one person’s point of view as humanly possible and stay as close to that character as I can. I think anything I like about those films, that’s what it is, is that we never leave that person whose eyes the story is through.

Then I think when I made my documentary, Stories We Tell, things cracked open for me in a way that made me very interested in what it means to tell a story through a chorus of voices and what does that feel like and what does that look like. There was this real break for me with that form of a singular perspective. I always knew it would feel like a true ensemble. I always knew that I couldn’t lose the perspective of any one character at all, so I had to write multiple drafts from each character’s point of view, as though they were the only character in the movie, just so I could keep the thread alive, even if they weren’t active in the scene, that I was looking at the script from their point of view and really gauging how this was impacting them.

In terms of the documents along the way, the first thing I do when I’m adapting something is, after I’ve done the first read of the book, before I read it again, I write from memory what I think the key points are and the most beautiful images are from the book and that I want in the film. I’m always fascinated to go back for that second read and realize how many of those moments I’ve made up. They’re not in there. You project it on.

**John:** So much of Big Fish, I’m like, oh, I took that from the book. No, it wasn’t there, ever.

**Sarah:** No way.

**John:** There’s no circus in the book. There’s no war in the book.

**Sarah:** Wow.

**John:** It’s all creations.

**Sarah:** Were those things that you knew right away you wanted in there that you-

**John:** It was actually while we were still shooting Go, I was reading through Big Fish.

**Sarah:** Wow.

**John:** As I was flipping pages, like, “Oh, the Will character has to have someone to talk to, so I’m going to give him a wife. I think she’ll be French and her name will be Josephine.” On that first read through, you create things, you invent things.

**Sarah:** I think I’m also curious about the things that you just don’t know you’ve invented, like, “That image really spoke to me.” You realize something in your subconscious has mapped something from your life onto the book. I think that’s the really juicy stuff to explore is what’s that distance between you and the book and how are you traversing it in unconscious ways. Unpacking that material of what’s connecting you is super interesting.

**Craig:** One of the things that struck me is that it is an ensemble piece, and you are studiously, and therefore effortlessly, or appearing effortlessly, showing it from all these different perspectives. You can tell you’ve done your work, because sometimes you cut away from the person talking to somebody else, and they’re not simply listening. They are doing things. Sometimes they’re not listening, which is fantastic. Nonetheless, the drama begins to organize itself, as it almost always does, around an axis. For me, it was almost like Rooney Mara’s character was the protagonist and Jessie Buckley’s character was the antagonist. Then at some point you start to feel like, “Wait, maybe Jessie Buckley is the protagonist.”

Interestingly, I’m just curious if this was anything that you were cognizant of, a story about a group of women trying to figure out what is true and what is correct and what is the smart way to do things and changing their minds, that in a reflective way, who we in the audience are attaching ourselves to begins to change and swing back and forth in pretty dramatic ways.

**Sarah:** Yeah, absolutely. It was really interesting through the casting process how every actor I met with was really gravitating towards Salome or Ona, because they thought they were the protagonists. I was constantly saying, actually, by the end, the person this actually revolves around ultimately, and she’s not the protagonist, it is a true ensemble, but the more complex journey which I think ends up surprising you is the character Mariche, is Jessie Buckley’s character, who ends up moving towards becoming the person who leads them forward in the direction they’re going to go, which I think is a surprise. I think it is genuinely an ensemble, but I did want it to feel like we could go back and forth in perspective in terms of who we were most connected to, and to be surprised by the end by our connection to Mariche.

**Craig:** It’s pretty amazing to watch. Jessie is such a good actor. Isn’t it a shame that she’s such a bad person though? One of the nicest people.

**John:** One of the stars of Chernobyl, we should say.

**Craig:** One of the nicest people I’ve ever been on a set with, just so lovely.

**Sarah:** I’m going to be honest. They all were. I know people always talk a whole lot of bullshit about the people they worked with and how great they were. This was the most unbelievable community of human beings. They all shared a greenroom. No one had a trailer. They spent every hour together. It was a time where the Canadian women’s soccer team was doing really well. There were all these amazing videos of their team spirit, and when one of them would of them would struggle, how all of them would run and lift one of them up. I just felt like that’s what we were living. Someone would have a great moment or a monologue, and everyone could feel it when it worked. There’d be crazy applause. They’d literally be lifted up into the air.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Sarah:** It was just this sense of collective celebration of each other and connectedness and also challenging each other and pushing each other, but in very, very healthy ways.

**John:** I want to talk to you about the setting of the movie, because I don’t know how much of this came from the book as well. When you say it’s a Mennonite community in Bolivia, my natural assumption is all this should’ve been taking place in Spanish and stuff, but the actual Mennonite community that was there, that was all in German. It was all in low German.

**Sarah:** In Plautdietsch, yeah.

**John:** In Plautdietsch. It was this weird, insular kind of place. When did you know that you were going to shoot it in Canada? When did you know that you were going to do it in English? Were those just fundamental, baked in decisions from the start?

**Sarah:** Yeah. This book was written as a response to real life events in this Mennonite colony in Bolivia, but the movie takes a little bit of a step from that. While we’re happy to talk about those events, and it’s important to, the film exists more in the realm of a fable. I want it to be placeless. I wanted it to be timeless. I didn’t want people to be able to pin these issues which we’re dealing with in every patriarchal society to some degree or another on this obscure, already misunderstood community. I think it’s really important we talk about that story. For the purposes of the film, I did want it to feel we were basically nowhere.

**John:** There’s a moment at which a 1980s Census taker comes through, 1990s?

**Sarah:** 2010 but he’s playing Daydream Believer.

**John:** Making it clear that we’re not in space, we’re not in some sort of alien dimension. There is an outside world that does exist, but these characters have no connection to it. They have no relationship to it, which is so important as we’re trying to figure these things out.

They’re trying to figure it out in a vacuum, because they don’t have the benefit of having read all the other theory about stuff. As they’re trying to figure out collective action and what we do, these are not literary characters who can do these things, and yet they speak at a level of sophistication that makes it seem like they have had some greater conversations about these things, or at least through their biblical training, have had some elevated level of discourse.

**Sarah:** There is this incredible oral tradition, and especially in communities of faith, where even if there’s no literacy, there’s been an incredible amount of analysis of text and interpretation of text and of thinking about spiritual and philosophical ideas. I did play with the dialog a little bit, because in the book, it’s through August’s point of view, the male, educated narrator. The language at times is more sophisticated than what it would be. I did a lot of work of trying to put it in their mouths in a realistic way. When I started to go too far and make it too pedestrian, I started to feel uncomfortable ethically with that decision.

I had this really interesting conversation with my husband who’s a legal academic. I was like, “I don’t actually want to dumb this down, because I don’t believe that they’re not capable of these kinds of sophisticated ideas and thoughts just because they haven’t received an education. I think they’ve lived in community. They have a sense of the collective and selflessness and faith.” He just looked at me and said, “Why not put the most sophisticated language into the mouths of the most marginalized people you can think of?” These women were incredibly marginalized. There was something that felt like a radical act about that and also that there is a heightened reality to the film that I didn’t want to shy away from.

**Craig:** That comes through beautifully. In thinking about the speech patterns that you’re talking about, it was unique. Listening to them speak, you got the sense that they had been raised to be remarkably articulate. Everyone is speaking very clearly and without many apostrophes. There are not a lot of contractions. It’s very florid but also grounded, and yet some of them are better at it than others. It was interesting to watch how different characters had… For instance, Jessie Buckley, her character doesn’t quite engage on the same structured language level that Rooney Mara’s character engages on, or Claire Foy’s. There’s more structure.

I’m curious if there was a dial that you were turning back and forth in terms of the level of articulation and the level of sophistication or formality of that language, because this is such a dialog-centric piece.

**Sarah:** Absolutely. There’s a reference briefly in the film to something that’s a bigger thing in the book, which is that some of these women like Ona have had access to August’s mother, who’s had this secret schoolhouse. She has brought in some of these ideas and talked about things and had more access to somewhat of an education. There are some differences in terms of exposure amongst the women.

**Craig:** It was a really smart choice to give them that inflection. I really loved it, because it also helped me feel that they were in the center of a religious colony. They’re quoting the bible all the time. If they can’t read, this means that they have been drilled over and over in this kind of biblical instruction, which was remarkable.

Also, just to circle back to an earlier point that you and John were talking about, the fact that you don’t tell us where they are I thought was a fantastic choice, because I’m as afraid as they are when they start to contemplate, “If we leave, where do we go?” because I don’t know where they are. They talk about the city. Where? I felt as insulated as they were, which I thought was such a smart choice.

**Sarah:** Thanks.

**John:** Let’s talk about the script itself a little bit. We printed out some pages here. We’re going to have a link in the show notes to the full script so people can read what you wrote here. This draft we’re looking at is dated April 12, 2021 as the production draft, and then a whole bunch of revisions, double pink revisions on August 16, 2021. This April 12th original production draft, how much does it resemble the movie we saw?

**Sarah:** There are some really seismic changes. All of the films I’ve made thus far, excluding Stories We Tell, you would look at the script, and it’s basically the movie. This one, when they released it publicly recently, I went, “Oh, dear god.”

**John:** I want to talk about that.

**Sarah:** We made huge changes in the editing room.

**John:** Craig and I have a friend who one of his jobs is, when it comes to awards seasons, he has to take like, okay, here’s a shooting script, and here’s the actual movie, and he has to make the script match the actual movie rather than this. I loved being able to see this, because I got to see, oh, I can see why those changes were made.

**Sarah:** Interesting.

**John:** The biggest change of course is, in the draft we have here, the narration is from August’s point of view. I’m not even sure who’s narrating it. It’s a woman who’s narrating it to her unborn child. Is it Jessie Buckley’s child? Who’s narrating it?

**Sarah:** Autje, the youngest woman in the room, the teenager, is narrating it to Rooney Mara’s unborn child from the future colony.

**John:** Great. It completely works in the movie, and it could’ve worked on the page here, but it seems like you didn’t know if that was a thing that needed to happen.

**Sarah:** No. In fact, it’s funny, because I love August narrating it in the book. The narration is so beautiful. Ben Whishaw read it so beautifully.

**John:** He’s a talented actor there, yes.

**Sarah:** He killed it. He killed it.

**John:** He’s Paddington Bear.

**Sarah:** There was no way to think of it as anything but that in my mind. I chafed at some of the… This was a lauded book, and everybody loved it. Some of the criticisms were, “Why would you have a male narrator?” which I just found so boring and beside the point. Actually, it’s also about men listening and taking notes. There is such a thing as a useful presence in a room when someone knows how to be a good ally. There was something about it that just felt so one-dimensional about the criticism. I think I was also quite defensive of the idea of August as the narrator.

**John:** You’re a person who defends the writers’ room’s assistant who takes all the notes in the room. You’re defending that person.

**Sarah:** Exactly. I’m totally defending that person. I just was like, “No, this is amazing.” Again, Ben doing that narration was so beautiful. We cut the film together. The scenes were where we wanted them to be. There was some disconnect. There was some distance between us and the film. Then there was this amazing brainstorming session that we had with Dede Gardner and Frances and with Chris Donaldson. We had another editor, Roslyn Kalloo.

There was this moment where I think it was Dede who originally said, “Should we be looking at the narrator here?” Then the idea originally was maybe it’s Rooney’s character talking to her unborn child. Then I think it was Chris who said actually, “What would be amazing is if it’s the youngest person in the room, Autje,” because we had fallen in love with Kate Hallett’s performance. I’d fallen in love with her. She has a poetry about her and just a way of processing things and going through the world that’s so fresh but also sophisticated.

As an experiment, I asked Kate to send me her notes on her character when she was prepping, because I knew at her age I made these beautiful notes that no one ever saw. Sure enough, there were these beautiful notes, which provided the inspiration for me to go back and write this whole other document, which was me trying to remember what it felt like to be 16 years old, around the age I knew you, and how I saw the world, how uncompromising I was, and fierce, but also there was a sense of poetry and connectedness with my true self and how I was processing things.

I just wrote this stream of consciousness document and would have Kate send back these voice memos to us in the editing room of recording them. We didn’t necessarily know where they were even going to go. We would create sequences around them, or we would take sequences that were there and change them according to the voiceover. Suddenly, we started to find the film. Suddenly, what we started to find actually was the spirit of the book that we had lost by remaining too close to it.

**John:** That’s amazing. Let’s talk about the first page here, because you do some stuff that is so helpful to the reader, but the audience doesn’t get to see. You have this list of the women broken down by family. We see the 11 main characters of the story. We’re introduced to them here, so we can see what the connection is, because later on, you’re going to shotgun them at us, and we’re going to be in a room with all of them and have to sort ourselves out. Visually, when we see it in a movie, we can do that, because you recognize actors.

**Sarah:** Exactly.

**John:** On a page, we would have no sense of what this what. It’s going to get really confusing without this little guide map here at the start.

You also say, “VISUAL NOTE: The flashbacks of trauma will be shot at 15 frames per second and there will be a ‘roar’ over these scenes, animal and/or machine-like.” Early on, you knew that there would be moments where you have to acknowledge these things happening, but you didn’t want them to feel like the rest of the film.

**Sarah:** That’s right.

**John:** You didn’t want the audience to be sitting in them that same way.

**Sarah:** Again, the manifestation of how we created that difference ended up not being what I’ve written there. It was a sense that there would be a differentiating factor. What we ended up using was actually this very, very simple bell that Hildur Guðnadóttir brought to us, in place of my idea of this different frame rate and this roar. Actually, what it boiled down to is something extremely simple. There was some sense in which I wanted the reader to be able to imagine those things.

I think that legend is really important in terms of the characters, because when you’re reading them on paper, I find still as a reader, reading scripts, it’s just this dry document staring at you. It is hard to pull apart who is who.

**John:** The other job of these first three pages is to set up the premise. You get right to it. Right away, we know these things happened. The men are out of the village momentarily, and we have to make this decision whether we’re going to stay or go. I was surprised how little like, let’s set up the world, let’s set up everything else. Nope, you’re going to learn about the world as we’re getting into this decision making process. Is that from the book or that was you coming in to start telling the story?

**Sarah:** It’s me. Also, my first draft of this, there’s about 35 pages cut from the beginning of the film.

**John:** Wow.

**Sarah:** This was the best script note I’ve ever received, which was from Dede Gardner. My first draft had all of August’s childhood and backstory, and we got to know the world. We got to know everyone’s backstory, basically. There were some beautiful scenes from the book that I really genuinely wanted in there.

I remembered my first notes call about this script. I’m used to working with Canadians, where it’s, “Oh my god, it’s so good. I just have one little thing.” That’s not Dede Gardner or Frances McDormand. It’s like, “Okay, let’s get down to business.” The first question Dede asked was, “The beginning of the film, the first 20 to 40 pages, did you write these because you wanted to or because you felt you had to?”

**John:** Oh, wow.

**Sarah:** That was really eye-opening for me in terms of, oh, this gets to be what I want it to be, not what I feel I need to do. That for me then set the tone for every decision I made afterwards.

**Craig:** There is something interesting about a movie that is so much… Let’s say we go back in time, and you don’t cut those pages, and you do shoot that, and it is in the movie. Once they isolate themselves in the barn, that’s where they stay, mostly. We have a couple of brief excursions. If you had gone around and seen their backstories and them as children, once you got them in that barn, there is a danger that you’re like, wait, are we just stuck in the barn now? If you start in the barn and you stay in the barn, then it’s this magical space. I think you made the right choice, certainly.

**Sarah:** Thank you.

**John:** What we often talk about, you have to teach the audience how to watch your movie. What’s crucial for your audience is that they understand this is how our movie’s going to work. We’re going to be in this barn largely. We’re going to jump out of the barn at any time for different reasons. We’re going to be in this barn. Our women are going to speak this way. They’re going to speak at this heightened level that’s not quite natural. The first three to five minutes, you have the ability to teach your audience what the rules are. If you hadn’t come out of the gate like that, once we got into the barn it would’ve felt really strange and artificial.

**Sarah:** I also feel that looking back at my first two features, I would love to go back and cut 10 minutes from both of them. I think there’s too many endings to both of them. I think there’s a time somewhere in the middle that kind of lags, and the beginning of Take This Waltz doesn’t really recover, I don’t think. I think knowing that, having this 10-year gap, and going, wouldn’t it be great to create a scenario where I don’t look back in 10 years and go, “I know where that 10 minutes is.” What if I know where that 10 minutes is now?

I had this, and I said it out loud, which committed me so deeply to this, which was my first meeting with Dede and Fran, I said, “I’m not delivering a script over 95 pages, because I know I’m going to regret it, and that’s still going to be too long. I’m still going to need to cut another… ” As it turned out, I didn’t go over that, and we still cut half an hour out of the movie from our first cut.

I just felt like this film really needed to be efficient, especially because of what we’re asking from the audience. It had to be just pulled tight. I’m also just finding maybe since becoming a parent that I’m becoming really impatient with long movies. I just don’t have it in me anymore. I hit 40, and I was like, “Oh, no, it’s over 90 minutes. What am I going to do?”

**John:** Absolutely. It’s a huge commitment. Thinking back to Go, you came back for the reshoots on Go. That was my first movie, so I didn’t know better. I’m always surprised how few movies plan for reshoots and just really look at, okay, what does the movie want to be now and how do we create the scenes that actually best support that movie? People may not know that the jumping-off place where we get to each of the different three storylines, that was all reshoots, and we brought you guys back for that.

**Sarah:** Which was it? What was it?

**John:** In the back of the grocery store where you’re getting evicted and going out with Simon, and then the TV. Those scenes existed, but they were three separate scenes. We had to go back and make them into one scene so we always knew we were jumping off from the same place. On a script level we didn’t know that. On a read through level we didn’t know that. When we actually watch the movie, it’s like, oh yeah, that’s absolutely true. That’s how it has to be.

**Sarah:** That isn’t a function of you not doing your work. You literally can’t know those things until that chemical reaction emerges between all the different elements you’ve brought together. It’s not something that can always be predicted.

**John:** August as the narrator is a thing that you could not have predicted. What else changed? What could you have not predicted until you actually saw the edit and saw like, oh, that was a thing I didn’t need.

**Sarah:** We had more of August’s backstory too. August at the beginning of the film is about to kill himself. Ona comes up to him in a field and says, “No, we need you. We need you to take the minutes for a meeting.” In a way, she does that to give him a function and a purpose. That’s not in there. There are whole swaths of the conversation where any time we felt we were repeating something unnecessarily, we took out.

We took out stuff in the editing room that nobody has noticed. Where all the characters are sitting down, there’s an entire conversation that happens. Somebody comes in, they all stand up. Then they leave. We’ve taken it out. Actually, the people are completely on different ends of the room geographically. We just put in a sound effect of people standing up or something off camera. Nobody notices it. We’ve taken out 30 minutes of the movie. It’s just incredible what you can get away with.

**John:** I’d love to talk about the speeches, because this is a movie where people have to articulate their opinions. There are some long speeches. Page 54, we have a big speech from Salome. This is a thing where I see excerpted as a credit, because Claire Foy does this brilliant job with this speech, but so much of the film relies on us being able to understand what the characters are saying, but why they’re saying it and what their purpose is in trying to communicate that. When you’re writing it but also as you’re working with actors, how are you getting it to feel like it’s in the moment as they’re saying it?

**Sarah:** First of all, I felt like we had to cast this thing within an inch of its life, so I wanted to make sure the majority, the percentage of actors had a theater background, because I think there’s just a certain relationship they’re trained to have with text that was really important for what we were asking them to do in this film.

We had a lot of conversations ahead of time, a lot of family meetings and meetings between people of various relationships. We had a really full-on rehearsal process. We had a week over Zoom of just text analysis and working through the scenes that way, and then we had a week in the actual location before we started shooting. All of that was necessary, because it was really functioning in so many ways as this almost theatrical experience.

**Craig:** I’m curious, just in talking about rehearsals and looking at the cover page of the script, which, in correct fashion, documents when the different revisions took place. You were a busy, busy bee at the end of June and through most of July.

**Sarah:** I love that someone notices this. It’s so satisfying. I was. Look at these dates.

**Craig:** I’m just wondering, was this the result of rehearsals? What was going on there during that? It’s really just one solid month of work there.

**Sarah:** That was rehearsals. It was Zoom meetings. It was rehearsals. I see I have a draft on July 8th and one on July 9th and one on the 10th and one the 18th. It was finding those moments and input from actors and movements within the space and discovering things that I didn’t know.

**John:** Your Zoom rehearsals, obviously you don’t have the same sense of being in a space. When did you first put scenes on their feet? You said you were in a space to be able to do those things. I’m curious really about that main barn set, because I always assumed that it was a one-story thing and they had a ladder down for the stuff that they need that. Looking at production photos, it really was a two-story set. People were really up in that loft, and you had a crane going in there the whole time. It was a set. There was a blue screen behind everything. You had to digitally replace everything around there. That was the space you were able to be in to rehearse?

**Sarah:** Yeah. I have had this thing on every film where I’ve just driven everyone nuts. It drives line producers crazy. It drives the art department crazy. I’m like, “I need the set dressed two weeks in advance.” I need to be able to rehearse in the spaces with the actors, because what I don’t want ever is a crew to be standing around while an actor’s trying to figure something out and for there to be time pressure on that.

I also don’t want to adjust to new blocking in five seconds, because I want to be really thoughtful about how I’m moving a camera and accommodating for how an actor is choosing to move. It allows me to give the actors freedom in terms of their blocking and me time to process that and come up with an intentional way of shooting it.

**John:** A project like this, you can absolutely do it, because there is one main set you’re coming back to. There were also a lot of other, smaller things. I guess they’re not really dialog scenes. Basically, every place else that we’re hanging out during that time, they’re not big, juicy scenes between actors.j

**Sarah:** We actually had quite a few exterior days, because even though the premise of film, so much of it is in the hayloft, there are actually a lot of sequences outside. Those got to be these just visual, beautiful, meditative, poetic moments. Those days when we were out on that farm shooting, we were all so happy to bust out of that hayloft.

**John:** A question about Frances McDormand’s character. I see her in the first scene thinking, oh, she’s going to be the driving force of this movie. It’s all going to be about her. She’s actually a very small role in it. How early did you know that that was going to be a plan?

**Sarah:** It’s funny. When it wasn’t sure that Fran was even going to be in the movie, Fran talked early about wouldn’t it be awesome to get somebody amazing, like a Meryl Streep or someone you expect to be the lead in that movie, and then they just walk out, and you don’t see them again, just in terms of subverted expectations, but someone who you can map enough onto that that perspective stays alive even when they’re not there, because you have them somewhere subconsciously in the back of your mind.

There was something about Fran playing that part that I loved both for that reason but also because she can show you strength and vulnerability in an instant without moving a muscle. We needed to feel something for that character. We also needed to be intimidated by her. We need to feel a million things, and she’s there for so little time.

**John:** She’s definitely intimidating.

**Craig:** That’s something that I think you really balance gorgeously, which is a sense of empathy for everyone. Frances McDormand, when she shows up, she’s tough and she’s not interested in what they’re doing. A conventional story would have her ratting everyone out. You felt like, uh-oh, she’s trouble. By the end, you have successfully managed to instill empathy in her. She’s sad. She’s so enslaved that she can’t imagine being free.

Similarly, you do this over and over with the women who are in the hayloft, which I call barn, because I’m stupid, but in any case, where I kept being surprised with how empathetic they were to each other. Look, it’s called 12 Angry Men for a reason. If you put a bunch of men in the hayloft, they’re going to be shouting. Someone’s going to go full Pacino real fast, and then there’s going to be a lot of anger.

Particularly, I loved the way the generations were striated, that the older women would just moderate the younger women through empathy. The empathy was drawn from their religious background, that they were actually, even though this colony and their religious upbringing had led to this terrible crime, they still believed and were using it in the best possible way.

As you’re writing these speeches and as you’re writing the reaction to these speeches, how did you approach the task of making all of us feel empathetic all the time, even when for instance a character like Jessie Buckley’s is being pretty awful?

**Sarah:** I think that that process of writing and rewriting the script from each character’s point of view helped, just forcing myself to make sure I could see it clearly from everyone’s point of view.

One of the things I love about Sidney Lumet as a filmmaker is if you go back and watch all of his films, I’m not thinking specifically of 12 Angry Men although that’s in there too, but he just loves all of his characters. There’s no one that he others, which means he ended up being so ahead of his time on so many levels of these characters, not necessarily because he was the most progressive guy. I don’t know what his politics were.

If that’s your starting principle, that you will love your characters equally and force yourself to do so, and take their perspective no matter what, you’re going to be ahead of your time. Thirty years later, you’re not going to look so bad in the way you’ve represented someone that had an experience completely other than you. It’s funny, I spent a lot of the pandemic rewatching his movies, and I just took that as my operating principle is that I will love these characters equally.

**Craig:** It shows.

**John:** I want to talk about the decision to make this movie. Also, you have a 10-year gap between this movie and your last movie, and the things that happened in between. You had three kids, which is a lot of it. You also had a concussion. It looked like you were going to be knocked out of commission for who knows.

**Sarah:** Ever.

**John:** Forever. Can you tell us about the decision, like, “Okay, now I’m going to step ahead and make this movie,” and what led up to, “Oh yeah, that’s right, I’m a filmmaker. I’m going to go back and start making films.”

**Sarah:** It’s funny, because I definitely didn’t think I was going to be able to make a film again, because I couldn’t multitask anymore. I couldn’t handle bright lights or a lot of noise, couldn’t handle too many activities in a day after my concussion.

I remember when I did this treatment with Dr. Michael Collins. I’ve been told by doctors before… When I said, “Will I be able to make a film again?” they would look at me sympathetically and say, “It’s a good goal to have.” It was clear they did not think I was going to be able to. I remember my first meeting with him, saying, “Will I ever be able to make film again?” He said, “Let me put it this way. You’re not going to get better until you make a film again, because that’s part of what makes you you. That’s what you’re working towards. That’s what you’re going to have to do. You’re not going to be a hundred percent until you’ve done that impossible thing.” That was an amazing paradigm shift. That for me opened up, for the first time, “Okay, maybe I will make a film again.”

Then this came along. I’m not one of these filmmakers where I have to make a film all the time and I want to have some illustrious career. I don’t need people to tell stories about me being a filmmaker. I make things because I feel like I have to and it’s urgent. I hadn’t felt like that about anything in a really long time. I felt like that about this book and working with these people. I did feel like by the time I embarked upon it, I was way better than I had been, but through the process of making it, all of my headaches went away.

**John:** Let’s talk about the accommodations, because it sounds like you didn’t end up having to make accommodations for disability, because you were actually able to tackle what was standing physically in your way and deal with that, but there were other things that were standing in the way of women with three kids making films.

**Sarah:** Absolutely.

**John:** What were some of the things that you were able to do and your producers were able to do to make it possible for you to make this movie this way?

**Sarah:** The first thing that I said to Fran and Dede was, “I love the idea of writing this. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years, like many female filmmakers I know who have made one or two films and then have a kid and go, ‘I don’t want to disappear forever, and so I’m going to write.’ I would love to direct again, but I don’t think I can, because I don’t think I can work those hours. I want to see my kids on a daily basis. This is probably impossible, but is is possible to work way shorter hours so people get home for dinner and put their kids to bed?”

Fran took a pause and said, “Men have written the rules of this film industry, and we’re women talking, and we’re going to rewrite the rules. Let’s just make that happen. We’re going to have to fight for more money to do it and more days. It’s going to be hard, and we’ll do it.”

**John:** What are some of the changes that you made?

**Sarah:** We had 10-hour working days, which in any other industry doesn’t sound that spectacular, but in the film industry, for some reason, that’s incredible.

**Craig:** My god, what a luxury.

**Sarah:** I believe we won the 40-hour work week like a hundred years ago, but in the film industry this is revolutionary. We had a rule that if anyone ever needed a break, they could take one. If anyone needed to take a call from their kid or elderly parent or vet or if they needed to breastfeed their baby or if they needed a break from the intensity of the work, we took one.

I learned that trick from my sister Suzie, who’s a GP, who often will give patients her cellphone number and say, “You can call me anytime over the weekend or at night.” What happens is she rarely gets a call. What she does get is a much less stressed out Monday morning, because people know they could. I think that thing of like, anyone can take a break at any time, people panicked when I said that. It happened maybe once or twice. The knowledge that people could I think just created a safer, more nurturing environment that really helped us.

We had a therapist on set, because a lot of stuff I knew would come up. Some of my crew I knew had come from histories of abuse and from backgrounds actually unfortunately like the women in the film. She was available for harder days if people needed and always accessible by phone. We just tried to build in the presence of care as a basic principle of the working environment, which leads us to the conversation about kids, where for me the basic operating principle with the kids was, “If you’re not having fun, if you’re even a bit bored, you can leave. When we do have you here, we’re basically just going to play. We’ll follow you around and have fun together. If you’re not having fun, you don’t have to stay. We’ll work around that.”

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** That sounds like somebody who did in fact work as an actor as a child. There is something nice about being able to retroactively fix some of the crimes of the past. We’ll get into that in our bonus episode.

**Sarah:** I was going to say, I don’t want to give away anything from the bonus people. I’ll keep my trauma to myself for the bonus people.

**Craig:** You’re costing us eights or nines of dollars.

**John:** Talk to us about the plan for making the movie announced to releasing the movie. Did you know it was United Artists from the start? Did it sell at a festival? I don’t even know what the history of this was.

**Sarah:** This is interesting. I originally was going to write it. Dede and Fran had basically raised the money for us to make it with somebody who was going to pay for me to write the script and ultimately make the film or finance the film. There was just a moment early on where I just felt like, not so much in his interactions with me, but just… A couple emails went by with Dede and Fran where I went, “You know what? How about I write this on spec, and then let’s figure out who our partner is?” because already there were caps on budget and all of these things, where it’s like, we don’t have any of this information yet.

I wrote it on spec. Then Dede had a deal at MGM. This was her picture at MGM that year. It both created this incredibly liberating space in which to make the film, but also our partners there at the time were Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy, who just absolutely understood the film, believed in Dede and Fran, believed in me. It was this utopian studio experience, the likes of which I am certain I will never have again.

**John:** This is MGM when it was functioning. It feels like a Fox Searchlight movie. It feels like a specialty film thing, so they could see it as, oh, this is a thing we could release theatrically, and they had a plan for it. This is all pre-pandemic, right, when this is being set up?

**Sarah:** Yeah.

**John:** Then a pandemic happens, and everything gets pushed.

**Sarah:** We delayed for a year, and then we went back to it.

**Craig:** It’s Orion. It was so lovely to see the Orion [crosstalk 00:46:23]. It was like, ah, I’m back.

**Sarah:** Awesome, yes, but when we were cutting, we were using the old Orion logo.

**John:** The original one is so beautiful.

**Sarah:** I loved it so much.

**Craig:** I know. What happened?

**Sarah:** I was so sad to see it go.

**Craig:** Do they not own it anymore?

**Sarah:** They do. I think that they were revisiting what Orion was and meant, and they wanted it to be more indicative of that, which I actually think makes sense. Now that I’ve lived with it a bit longer, I’m like, okay. I was having a very eh reaction to it.

**John:** I associate Orion with Robocop. There’s a certain kind of movies. I just loved seeing that Orion logo. It’s so good.

**Craig:** It’s so great, just circling stars.

**Sarah:** [Crosstalk 00:46:58].

**Craig:** It makes me happy.

**John:** We have a listener question I think is actually perfect for Sarah Polley. Megana, you want to read it for us?

**Megana:** JM asks, “I’m a novelist, but I recently wrote my first screenplay, submitted it to Austin, made the second round, went to the festival, without really any idea of why I was there. However, at the WGA party, I met an indie director and producer who were looking for exactly what I had, and now they want to make a film. They had a feature film in the festival in the same genre as mine, and we even are from the same part of Canada, so we’ve met up here too.

“This will be a union job in Canada. I’m a dual citizen, but not a member of the WGA or the WGC. I’m waiting for the option now, but the director did tell me he wants to proceed and he’s putting it all together. I’ve had a literary agent since 2009, but I left him last fall, as we’d run our course, and I have a new novel I’m shopping around to agents now, so I’m also agent-less. Basically, I have no clue how this all works or what I should be doing. Please help.”

**John:** This Canadian novelist screenwriter seems to be in a pretty good spot. It’s just looking for an agent or somebody to help out making the deal. Sarah, what’s your first instinct?

**Sarah:** My first instinct is to get the agent thing sorted out. I do think it’s a dangerous thing to be at this stage with an agent. I think people can really undervalue having that protection and that wisdom around a process. It does feel like if someone’s trying to make your thing, it seems like a perfect time to be doing some very real research about who the good agents would be to approach. You would know more about this question than [crosstalk 00:48:34].

**John:** I’m curious whether you think this person needs a Canadian agent manager person or would a Los Angeles person be okay?

**Sarah:** I think either would be okay. I think it’s about the connection. I would meet with both and figure out who you feel most connected to and safest with. Margaret Atwood always says this thing, because sometimes she’s waited for people like me for years and years to make their thing when she’s had other options. She always says go with the one who loves you. Whether that person has more or less status doesn’t matter. Go with the one who loves you.

**John:** Craig, what are you thinking? Does this person need an agent? Would a lawyer be okay for this point? What do you want JM to be asking for?

**Craig:** I agree with Sarah. I think an agent is extremely important. There’s always one little moment of these questions that makes me go (gasps). The (gasps) moment of this one was, “The director did tell me he wants to proceed, and he’s putting it all together.” I’m like, what about you, JM? You’re the one who’s writing it. I get nervous when someone’s like, “Don’t you worry. I got this.” Someone has to be advocating for you. You as a writer will never have more leverage than the moments right before you sign away the rights to a thing you wrote.

**Sarah:** You don’t do that without an agent, because actually, I just have a friend in a situation, worked on an idea for years, and the series is going ahead right now without his name on it anywhere. Get your agent.

**Craig:** These things happen. I’m not sure how the WGC functions in terms of credit and all the rest. It’s a different situation because Canada does have [inaudible 00:50:14], and they don’t have work for hire the same way that we do. There are also other limitations to being in the WGC. I’m not sure there’s much in the way of residuals there, the way there are for the WGA. There are all these questions. The agent will then get a lawyer on board. The lawyer can handle a lot of the details. Somebody needs to be advocating for you. This is the most pro-Canadian thing I can say, as somebody that just lived there for a year and a half. Polite people get chewed up all the time.

**Sarah:** Yeah, a hundred percent.

**Craig:** Canadians are beautifully and wonderfully polite. Your natural instinct may be to accommodate and bend and compromise. That’s why you need a jerk who’s American to advocate for you.

**Sarah:** I could not agree with this statement more. I’ve learned this the hard way over and over and over again. The other thing I would say that I’ve learned far too recently is that clear is kind. I’ve done a lot in my life of being nice and accommodating and all those things. People in a professional environment, clarity is the most kind thing you can do for yourself and for others. It’s underrated in my country.

**Craig:** Right on.

**John:** Sarah, can you talk to us about the state of Canadian filmmaking? It’s a lot to be throwing at you, but is this film a Canadian film or an American film?

**Sarah:** It’s an American film.

**John:** It’s an American film?

**Sarah:** It’s my first American film.

**John:** Your first American film.

**Craig:** Where did you shoot it, Sarah, just out of curiosity?

**Sarah:** In Canada, so mostly Canadian crew and lots of Canadian cast. Just outside of Toronto.

**Craig:** In Toronto.

**Sarah:** Just outside of Toronto, but American finance.

**John:** Talk to us about the differences between Native Canadian films and American films. Do people try to go back and forth and do both? We have listeners in Canada right now. I’m really asking on their behalf. Should they be focused on trying to make a Canadian film or trying to get someone in the US to try to make their thing? What is your instinct? There’s so much talent in Canada.

**Sarah:** I’m a little bit out of touch with the Canadian system, because I haven’t made a film there for 10 years. I obviously live there and I have lots of friends who are going through it all the time. I think you look for the people with whom you can make your film the most authentic to what you want that film to be. You don’t go for the shiny apple where you have this whisper of huge mistrust, but you know they can get a big platform for it. I think you go with the people who help you make the film the most you want to make it.

In my experience, that’s been more in Canada, because there have been some protections, when you get public money for a film, around your creative vision. However, I will say more and more I hear that it is just part of the process now in Canada that you test screen everything. Nobody’s immune to that. With this film at MGM, with a bigger budget than I’ve ever worked with, I did not have to test screen it.

**Craig:** Oh, joy.

**Sarah:** I would say I had not just creative freedom on this, but enormous help from people, where I wasn’t afraid of their notes. I was excited for their notes. It was an idyllic process. I don’t know if it’s as much Canadian versus American as the specific people you can find to make your film with.

**John:** It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Sarah, you said you had two cool things to share with us. Let’s get you started here.

**Craig:** Overachiever.

**Sarah:** I love the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I’ve read it over and over and over again. I think it had a huge impact on my approach to this film, just in terms of the love and the kindness in it.

**John:** I know nothing about this book.

**Sarah:** Oh my god.

**John:** Now I’m excited, because it’s new to me.

**Sarah:** It’s so beautiful.

**John:** Everyone else may know what it is, but I don’t know, so pitch me.

**Sarah:** It’s written in the form of a letter. This older man who’s a preacher, and he’s writing a letter to his seven-year-old son. He’s dying. It’s about his father and grandfather in the Civil War. It’s about him. It’s about spirituality. It’s about his love of his son. Every sentence is stunning. It gives you some faith in human beings. There was a moment where I just felt I was reading all these great novels, but I just wanted to read about a good person who I might like to be. It’s the most stunningly beautiful book. Whether you’re religious or not, it’s stunning.

I think that a film that I’ve not seen get the attention it deserves this year is Till. I think it’s an incredible film. For me, it’s the best performance of the year, with Danielle Deadwyler. Chinonye Chukwu just is a masterful director. I just recommend everyone go see that movie. Don’t be afraid to go see it. I think people are really afraid. She really protects her audience. She’s very conscious of making it a really fruitful, rich experience to watch it and not a damaging one. I just recommend everybody go see it.

**John:** Protecting your audience feels like that was also a goal in your approach to filmmaking, especially for this movie, because it could’ve been harrowing and terrifying and gruesome, and that’s not what your movie’s about.

**Sarah:** That’s right. We never showed the assaults. We don’t go deeply into that. What we go into is the recovery and the healing and the conversation.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is something that could be a How Would This be a Movie. It could be for that segment that we often do. It’s this article I read this week by David Epstein. It is about this 39-year-old Iowa mother named Jill Viles. She knows she has some form of muscular dystrophy. Her arms and her legs are wasting away. Her torso is normal proportions, but everything else is wasting away and she ends up having to use a scooter.

When she goes to college, even though she wasn’t a biology major, she spends all of her time in the library just researching different things like, “What is it that I could possibly have?” She comes across this syndrome that she thinks maybe she has and maybe her father has in slightly different manifestations.

Where the author, Epstein, gets involved is, she reaches out to him to say, “I think there is this famous athlete, this Priscilla Lopes-Schliep, who is a Canadian sprinter. I think she has the same thing, but slightly different. I think she has the opposite, where her muscles are over-developed in ways that are interesting.” Through Epstein’s help, she’s able to get genetic testing and all of it. It turns out, yes, they basically discovered this one genetic mutation anomaly that is the cause of both of their situations. It’s a good, long read. It’s in ProPublica, but just a fascinating story.

**Sarah:** Wow.

**John:** It is movie fodder. Allison Williams is apparently already developing it, because she’d be perfect for it. It’s so inspiring to see somebody who says, “Listen, I know I’m not the person who’s supposed to be able to figure this out, but I want to figure this out,” and she just does it.

**Sarah:** Amazing.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** It reminds me of Lorenzo’s Oil.

**Sarah:** Sounds incredible.

**John:** It’s another relationship to it. Craig, what you got?

**Craig:** I feel like we’ve just overdosed on inspiration, so let me bring things down a bit.

**Sarah:** Good for you.

**Craig:** The most mundane possible One Cool Thing. Bo Shim, who used to be my assistant and is now a writer, got me a holiday gift that I am so in love with. I take it everywhere. I’m the worst person to get gifts for, because either I just don’t need a lot of things, and if I do want something, I just buy it. I don’t believe in waiting, because life’s too short. Get the thing you want. She got me this thing. It’s the Mophie 3-in-1 travel charger. It’s like a trifold wallet that you fold back up again. In one part there’s a little tray for your air buds.

**John:** AirPods.

**Craig:** AirPods, not air buds, because I’m stupid. Then there’s a bit for your phone. Then there’s a bit for your Apple watch. It’s incredibly compact and so useful around travel time, because I used to have to fight over who had their watch charger. It’s all said and done.

**Sarah:** I like that.

**Craig:** It just wraps right back up. It’s not expensive. I don’t mean to say that Bo’s cheap. I’m just saying, folks at home, you can buy this. In fact, I’m going to tell you how much it is right now.

**Sarah:** I like this idea a lot, because I’m not a very organized person, unlike John August, whose house I’m in right now, and is terrifying. It’s Sleeping with the Enemy in here.

**Craig:** For sure.

**Sarah:** Everything has been thought of. It’s absolutely terrifying, but these are my aspirations, and so I would like that.

**Craig:** Every room in John’s house is a killing floor. No question.

**John:** There’s a drain in the side, straight down.

**Craig:** Every single room.

**Sarah:** When you open the drawers, everything’s perfect. You know how terrifying that was in that movie?

**Craig:** I want to amend my statement. This was expensive.

**John:** I’m looking at it. It’s $150, Craig.

**Sarah:** You jerk.

**Craig:** It’s $150.

**Sarah:** You got us all excited.

**Craig:** Now I feel terrible but not super terrible, because honestly, it really is great. Sarah Polley, I do believe that if you are looking to slightly upgrade your life organization, pick this thing up.

**John:** I like it. Craig, I was thinking what an air bud charger would be. I think it’s when you plug in your dog. You plug in your dog, air bud, and so he can catch the footballs.

**Craig:** You insert it gently into your dog.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Gross.

**John:** That’s our show for the week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli as always.

**Craig:** Yay! What what.

**John:** Outro this week is by Timothy Lenko. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, sometimes I’m still around Twitter. Are you still on Twitter, Sarah?

**Sarah:** I’m on Twitter.

**John:** You and I DM’ed on Twitter once. Craig’s gone though, so don’t talk to him.

**Sarah:** Are you gone for moral and ethical reasons?

**Craig:** I am gone for moral and ethical reasons, yes.

**Sarah:** Wow. Should I be thinking about this? Is this what’s happening?

**Craig:** I am a fairly low bar, so yeah, I think so.

**Sarah:** [inaudible 01:00:09].

**John:** I’m also on Mastodon and the other things, so I have my backup plans.

**Sarah:** Where am I going? Mastodon, is that where I’m going?

**John:** Yeah, probably Mastodon.

**Craig:** [Crosstalk 01:00:18].

**Sarah:** It’s so complicated.

**John:** I’m also on Instagram. Instagram’s easy.

**Craig:** It’s so complicated. It’s so annoying that Twitter got ruined. Not like it was just a paragon of loveliness. Still.

**John:** People can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the script for Women Talking, so you can see where it was before it became the movie. If you want to watch the movie though, is it on Amazon at this point? Where can people see it?

**Sarah:** It’s in theaters only right now.

**John:** Theaters only right now. Go to your theater and see the film on a big screen. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on child actors. Sarah Polley, it’s so amazing to see you again.

**Craig:** It was lovely talking with you, Sarah.

**Sarah:** Thank you so much for having me. I loved being here. I love the show. I listen to it all the time.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Sarah Polley, you were a child actor. You were in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Sweet Hereafter, which I think is the movie right before Go, the bus crash movie. It’s like, “Oh yeah, that girl from the bus crash, she should play a checkout clerk who’s trying to make a drug deal.” You’ve written to and about Terry Gilliam and your experience on Baron Munchausen. What’s the synopsis of that? Basically, it was traumatic in a way that you felt like hadn’t been acknowledged? What was your feeling about being a child actor?

**Sarah:** In general, my feeling about being a child actor is that it’s not a good experience and that it’s also really hard to untangle what a child’s really feeling from what the expectations are of them, by either their parents or other adults in the room. It’s really hard to get the truth out of a kid who feels the pressure of adults.

In general, I think that film sets are generally populated with people who are not trained or particularly interested in the well-being of children. Craig very eloquently put it, the production is always going to come first. When you put the panic, emergency room mentality around something, a kid’s well-being is going to be forgotten, no matter how conscious you are of it.

I had particularly traumatic experiences, for sure. They were on the extreme end, which led to a whole interaction with Terry Gilliam later when he was about to cast another child actor. I reached out to him to explain how difficult my experiences had been on that set, which I felt very, very unsafe. I felt that things had been very dangerous, scared for my life at times. Again, it was extreme, but I’ve seen child actors with less extreme in terms of the tangible, physical danger experiences, and still, I don’t buy it.

There was a really concrete example of what Craig was talking about on my set, because I had this horror of, I can’t make this religious community that’s doing this whole thing to basically fight for the future generation and build a new world without ever showing children.

**John:** That’s crucial.

**Sarah:** That’s exactly what these women are fighting for. I did a couple things. One was, yes, the kids are going to run around and play. We’re just going to follow them with the camera. I’m going to make an announcement every single day, they can leave whenever they want. It’s no problem.

My kids couldn’t visit set, because of COVID, unless they were gainfully employed by the production. My oldest has always wanted to be an actor, because every button gets pushed by your children. There was this advocating that happened for my kids going, “We’re coming to set. It’s the only way we get to see you at work. You’ve never been working like this since we were born. We’re coming to watch you work, and we’re going to be background performers, and we’re really excited about it.”

My kid’s there. It’s my seven-year-old’s birthday. Of course, it’s a giant crane shot and a drone shot at magic hour. As the crane comes into my seven-year-old’s face, my kids keep looking at the camera and flaring their nostrils. It’s this giant crane shot. Literally, we have five minutes to get the shot. We’re just coming in, and they’re like, “Ha ha, let’s screw up mama’s shot again.” They thought it was so funny.

I literally had this moment where I empathized with every filmmaker who [inaudible 01:04:40] for granted as a child actor, which is why kids shouldn’t be on set, because even me, with my past and my trauma and my own children, I had a hundred people standing around panicking, and this kid was potentially between us and getting the shot, and this is why children should never be on sets. I just proved my own point.

**Craig:** It’s true. It’s true. I had a really interesting, I guess I could call it a revelation or good learning experience, making The Last of Us, because we cast an actor who, I believe he was eight or nine. He’s deaf. The thing about casting a kid who’s deaf is nobody questions how much support is required. His mom is there, but also, he’s got an interpreter, and he’s got a coach, one of whom is deaf and obviously communicates with him through ASL. Then the translator, or the interpreter rather, is helping us back and forth. There’s all this support around this kid.

Then I thought, wait, shouldn’t be there all of this even if you’re not deaf? Any kid being on set should be carefully bubble wrapped. Schedules should presume that the kid is not going to be able to nail the crane shot the first three or four times.

**Sarah:** There you go.

**Craig:** What ends up happening when you’re panicked and running out of money and you’ve got this studio gun to your head, whatever it is that is all of our madness while we’re making these things, is children become these annoying obstacles. They can’t work as many hours. Oh, we get to send him to lunch. Oh, he gets a break. Oh, he has to go to class. School they call it, fake school in the trailer, whatever it is. You’re like, “Ugh.” Now you’re angry.

I’ve been angry at babies. I got angry at a baby once, not to its face. I didn’t yell at the baby. Obviously, I’m in the tent by a monitor. I’m like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe this baby. We don’t have another 20 minutes with the baby?” They’re like, “It’s a baby.”

**Sarah:** I literally had this moment a couple of times on my set, where I was like, “Oh my god, we’re bringing the kids again. Oh my god, bringing the kids again. Oh my god.” I remember the parents all coming up to me and going, “No, we’re okay.” I’m like, “I can’t, because I actually literally wrote this rule.”

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

**Sarah:** I wrote this rule in the ACTRA, in the Canadian actors union. I’m not breaking it. I promise.

**Craig:** At that moment you were like, “It was really more of a guideline and not so much a rule.”

**Sarah:** Exactly.

**Craig:** “Got to make my day.”

**Sarah:** Here’s the other thing that should be presumed. The other thing that should be presumed, whether it’s true or not, and a lot of the time this isn’t true but it should be presumed just in case, is that the parents don’t have the kids’ best interest at heart.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Sarah:** That’s a really hard thing to presume, because you always go, “If the parent’s okay. It’s their department.” We have no idea. Whatever face that parent is presenting to us, whatever face the kid is presenting to us, we have no idea what the pressures look like at home. I’ve seen those be two very different things in my own experience of other kid actors I was working with. I would see one face that the parent presented on set and another one that I would see in private moments with the kid. There has to be a third party that is not paid for by either the production or the parent who makes calls that will sometimes fly in the face of what both the production and the parents say is okay.

**Craig:** I think that’s so true.

**Sarah:** I think that person has to be there. I also think kids can’t sign long contracts for series. I’m sorry. There should be a limit on how much a kid could work in a year, maybe one project, maybe two projects a year. I don’t know. I think there have to be some really serious things in place to allow for the fact that as a society we have decided children should not work, but we’ve made this exception for this Wild West of an industry that’s probably the last place that should be given this exception.

**Craig:** You’re on to something there.

**John:** First movie I directed, Elle Fanning was the star of it. Small role, but she was fantastic. She was Elle Fanning before she was Elle Fanning. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, you’re great. I’m going to write additional scenes for you.” We’re shooting exterior. It’s Ryan Reynolds, Melissa McCarthy, and Elle Fanning. We’re setting up these shots. Elle Fanning can only work a certain number of hours.

The AD goes, “Oh, and this is her stand-in.” The stand-in is some other kid. I’m just like, “Wait. First of all, this kid’s really annoying.” I didn’t like this kid. Also, what is this kid getting out of it at all? This kid is not going to show up on camera. This kid is not acting. This kid is just there just to occupy space and is just working.

**Sarah:** They’re not being treated particularly well. Those kid stand-ins get treated badly.

**John:** The kid was annoying. I said, “I never want to see that kid again.”

**Craig:** Did they murder the kid?

**John:** Yes, they did. “Get her out of my sight.”

**Sarah:** “Take her away.”

**John:** Also, I don’t ever want a kid stand-in. I want to find some other way to do this, whether it’s a little person or some other situation where we can just find a person to do that role. That kid could not get anything out of it.

**Sarah:** No, because they’re not even getting the fun, whatever, toxic coddling that can feel good in the moment.

**John:** Absolutely, as opposed to Elle Fanning, who was clearly a superstar in those little moments I saw her. She’s giant and can do all these impersonations. She was having the time of her life. This other kid was there because her mom wanted her to be there.

**Craig:** John, what if that kid is a fan of Scriptnotes? They’ve grown up. They listen to Scriptnotes every week.

**Sarah:** [crosstalk 01:10:04].

**John:** This whole time.

**Craig:** They’re like, “Apparently, I was annoying.”

**John:** I just ruined things [crosstalk 01:10:09]. The other thing I want to point people to is the second season of Nathan For You is about this experiment where Nathan puts together this house to figure out what it’d be like to have a kid. This woman wants to know what it’d be like to have a kid. They hire a bunch of child actors to be this woman’s kid.

**Sarah:** That’s really funny.

**John:** They go through all this stuff. Later on in the season, it becomes clear, oh, some of these child actors have really enjoyed it and enjoyed being part of the family and this relationship and what is responsibility to child actors. Like all Nathan For You, it doesn’t answer the question at all. It just makes you really uncomfortable about it. It was a good exploration of what it feels like to be using children to be doing this emotional labor.

**Sarah:** The other thing about it is it’s this toxic combination of coddling and neglect. You have on the one hand, everyone’s going to laugh at that kid’s jokes, everyone’s going to tell them how great they are. Everyone’s going to lie to them if they’re behaving horribly and laugh it off. There’s no boundaries on behavior really. No one actually deeply cares about that kid’s well-being beyond what their purpose is on that set. There may be one or two angels that come out of the woodwork. In my case, there were. The kid’s experience is not the priority on that set. It’s getting the day. It’s a terrible thing it does to one’s head of both this superficial ego boost and the sense that nobody cares about me really.

**Craig:** Then on the other side of things, there’s the more modern problem. I know Bella Ramsey’s been talking about this. When she started with us, she was 17, so there was still a K on her number. Then she turned 18 fairly early on. When she started shooting with us, she was still not a legal adult. Then you come out on the other side of shooting, and hopefully everything’s gone well and you’re treated well. In our case, we were also very lucky, because her mom was there, and she was fantastic. Everything’s wonderful. Then the internet has to talk about your face and your body and your this and your that and your hair and your eyes and everything and take you apart.

**Sarah:** It’s a whole other dynamic now.

**Craig:** This is difficult for adults, difficult, borderline impossible for adults to handle. For a child, it’s terrifying to think, I want to really tell this story and I want to make a TV show but am I damaging someone. We talked about it a lot. We still talk about it a lot. It’s a scary thing. It’s something that’s made I think being a child actor even harder than it used to be.

**John:** Sarah, you are a parent of a kid who wants to be an actor.

**Sarah:** I am.

**John:** Let’s say you’re a listener whose kid wants to be an actor. At what age do you think you might allow a kid to start, it’s like, “Okay, you can start doing this.” When do you think that maturity might be a thing where you feel like they have some agency in the situation?

**Sarah:** It’s so fun, because I’ve always had to talk about this in the abstract, and now I can talk about it for real as a parent of a kid who really wants to go into it, to the point where I have almost weakened. It’s so desperate, this need and want.

The first thing I would say is we have loaded my oldest kid up with after-school theater programs, weekend improv classes, to get that creative stuff going, because that’s legitimate. Wanting to create things shouldn’t be held back, but in an environment that is designed to be nurturing and exciting and educational. We’ve done a lot of that. We’ve talked about 16 as the age where we can start talking about it if they still have this intense desire to do it professionally. I still think that’s young, but we’re willing to talk about it.

I had a hilarious experience recently. My brother’s a casting director, and he was casting this film with child actors. My oldest was being babysat at the time, last-minute thing. I had to drop off my kid. He was doing these Zoom auditions. My oldest was like, “Just get me on.” My kid goes on, gets the part.

**Craig:** Love it.

**Sarah:** I watched then. I get there. I watched for the rest of the Zoom calls, hidden, and go, “Okay, this woman has cracked the code of how to deal with child actors.” I saw her subvert horrible stage parents who I have worked with and make it a good experience for those kids. This woman was a genius, clearly. Then at the end, I talked to the woman, and she’s like, “I just read your book. It’s becoming part of our model for how we’re going to treat child actors.”

I’m like, “Okay, it’s only four days. I’m free for these four days.” I was like, “Eve, if you’re willing to put up with me being the most obnoxious on-set parent where I’m literally shutting down that production, pulling the lights at the slightest discomfort for anyone.” Eve was like, “Yeah, I’ll deal with that.” We’re about to do it. Eve reads the script. It was a great script based on a great novel, but Eve was like, “This is about a kid with a disability, and I don’t trust that your generation of filmmakers is going to get how to do this in a way that’s not sensitive. There isn’t someone with a disability making this film. I can’t be part of it.” Eve passed.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Sarah:** Eve passed. Eve passed.

**John:** That’s totally Sarah Polley.

**Sarah:** Just like their mom. Just like their mother. All I really wanted to ever do was pass. I never really wanted to work as an actor. I just liked passing on stuff. It was my favorite.

**John:** You passed on Go a bit too.

**Sarah:** I passed on Go. I passed on everything. It was the best part.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** I remember one person had to fly you up and walk you through immigration in Canada to get you here to Los Angeles.

**Sarah:** I know, because I bailed at the last second, because customs was a tricky, and I was like, “You know what? I didn’t really want to do this anyway.”

**Craig:** I love that.

**Sarah:** “Forget it.” Chuck Schumer got involved. It was a whole thing. With Eve, they wanted to do this so badly, and they passed. Now, I don’t know where we are, because I finally caved on this that was so intense for me.

**Craig:** Maybe that’s all they needed was just permission.

**Sarah:** I wonder if it was also like they saw this thing was on the others in terms of me having this red line around something and went, “We’re just going to get rid of that and then we can move on.”

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** On Episode 2000 of Scriptnotes, they’ll come on this show, and we’ll talk to them about what it was like growing up with a director parent and why they are now the filmmaker they are today.

**Craig:** Yes, when their book, I Hate You, Mom, comes out, it’ll be great. We can go through it and really dig in to what happened.

**John:** Sarah Polley, such an amazing pleasure.

**Craig:** Thank you, Sarah.

**Sarah:** This was so fun. This is the middle of a crazy, soul-crushing part of the process of putting the film out, and this was by far the highlight.

**John:** Yay.

**Sarah:** Thank you for the very awesome conversation, you guys.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**Sarah:** This was amazing.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thanks.

**Sarah:** Thank you.

**John:** I’ll see you later, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks. Bye.

**Sarah:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Sarah Polley on IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001631/) and on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/realsarahpolley/)
* [Women Talking](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13669038/) film and [novel](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/562880/women-talking-by-miriam-toews/9780735273979) by Miriam Toews
* [Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory By Sarah Polley](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/688129/run-towards-the-danger-by-sarah-polley/)
* [Find the Women Talking Script by Sarah Polley here](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Women-Talking-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene by David Epstein](https://www.propublica.org/article/muscular-dystrophy-patient-olympic-medalist-same-genetic-mutation) for ProPublica
* [Mophie 3-in-1 Charger with MagSafe](https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HPTA2ZM/A/mophie-3-in-1-travel-charger-with-magsafe?)
* [Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/marilynne-robinson)
* [Till](https://www.mgm.com/movies/till) film
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Lenko ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/583standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 569 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you sit down to write? We’ll discuss inspiration versus motivation both for your characters and for you as a writer. We’ll also talk about the phenomenon of showrunners as promotional vehicles for their shows. Does this elevate the writer/creator or amount to unpaid labor? In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, insects. Why do we have insects?

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Yeah. First, right before we started recording, I apparently changed your life. In case we have other people out there listening, talk through the problem and solution, and people’s lives will be better.

**Craig:** I am shooketh. For the last all of my life, while I’ve been drinking coffee out of cups like Starbucks, Coffee Bean, whatever, every now and again, I would say half the time… Because I drink an Americano. I’m a straight up black coffee kind of dude. Two shots. Two shots, John, small size. About half the time, the fricking lid is like a dribble cup. There’s just these drips that come out, and they hit me on my shirt or my pants. It’s really annoying and hot. I was just complaining about it, and you said… What did you say to me, John?

**John:** I said, “Craig, is the lid of the cup lined up to the seam?” You were confused by what I meant. Then as you examined your cup, you saw that the plastic lid is on top of the paper cup. The paper cup has a seam on it. If the hole in the lid is lined up to the seam, it will dribble on you.

**Craig:** Yes, it will. I just put the lid back on so that the hole was not over the seam, and it didn’t dribble on me, and I love you.

**John:** Aw, thank you.

**Craig:** I love you, and I’m also very angry, because why… In their training at Starbucks University, I don’t know what… By the way, what is Starbucks’s training university called? What do you think it’s called, Espresso College or something?

**John:** I bet it’s Starbucks University, something like that.

**Craig:** You think it’s just straight up Starbucks University?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At Starbucks U, this should be the first and last lesson. Just don’t put the hole over the thing where the cup seams together. Here’s the thing. I’m drinking coffee without fear. I’m not afraid that it’s going to burn me.

**John:** Megana, you were aware of this life hack, correct?

**Megana Rao:** I was not, and I had to look it up on the internet-

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** … to verify that this is true.

**Craig:** So Millennial.

**Megana:** A lot of forums agree with this knowledge. There’s a conspiracy out there that baristas do this on purpose.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Oh yeah, so people they hate. It’s like, “Oh, that Craig.”

**Craig:** Why would it be half the time the seam is… I don’t know how many… What do you call those, degrees?

**John:** Yeah, degrees, radians. I’m not sure what the math is.

**Craig:** The quantity of radians of that seam is maybe like 3 out of 360. This should be happening 1 in every 120 times I get a coffee.

**John:** The hole doesn’t have to line up exactly, because if you think about when you tilt the cup up-

**Craig:** True.

**John:** … you’re putting the coffee against that whole side of the thing. Really, you just need the hole-

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** … directly opposite the seam.

**Craig:** Really? Okay.

**John:** Yeah. That’s your safe spot.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what. I’m never going to have this problem again. Never.

**John:** Never.

**Craig:** Never. I’ll tell you another thing, John. You just earned yourself grace. Do you know what I mean by this? One day you’re going to do something. I’m going to get angry. Then you’re going to say, “Craig, I would like to use my grace.” I will say-

**John:** It’s like real life DnD inspiration, like I get to roll an extra D20.

**Craig:** No, you just say, “Grace.” Now, the grace will get used. It’s not a permanent grace, of course, but you possess grace.

**John:** Love it. While we’re talking about Millennials manifesting things, I would actually like to try to manifest something here on this podcast. I would like to make a Van Halen biopic. I think there’s a great biopic to be made of Van Halen. I’ve done some work to try to figure out who would control the rights to this, what are the complications here, does any producer control some part of the story. What I’ve run into is basically it seems like it’s impossible to do at this point because there’s such disagreement between the Van Halen people and David Lee Roth’s people and that it’s going to be a mess.

There are complicated things to put together to make this movie happen. Obviously, you need all the rights to all the music, not the permission, but the blessing of Eddie Van Halen’s family, whatever representational things you want to get for David Lee Roth. There’s a fricking great movie to make from Van Halen. If you are a listener who has some access to some part of this complicated mess, reach out to me, because I really think there’s a great musical biopic to make of Van Halen.

**Craig:** Pasadena’s own Van Halen. A lot of people don’t know that Eddie and Alex Van Halen are biracial.

**John:** They’re also international. They’re born in Europe.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** They’re genuine prodigies. They were in several bands before Van Halen. The whole backstory before that is great. The actual story of being in Van Halen and the conflicts within Van Halen and overcoming those conflicts to some degree, they replaced him with Sammy Hagar, all of that is great and fascinating and could make a really amazing biopic.

**Craig:** I don’t know their story well enough, but I feel like Michael Anthony, the bassist for Van Halen, had a very privileged position of just sitting quietly, watching everyone fight around him. He’s just like, “Guys, when you’re done, I’m here, ready to play.”

**John:** I saw Van Halen play at Iowa State University. It was an amazing show. There was a very long drum solo in it. That was appropriate, because that’s what you wanted in that era. You wanted a long drum solo.

**Craig:** Also, Alex Van Halen, incredibly good drummer.

**John:** Yeah, therefore he should have a solo.

**Craig:** Stupidly good drummer. Originally, I think when the parents got them instruments, Eddie was given the drum set, and Alex was given the guitar.

**John:** They both were started on piano, because that’s [crosstalk 00:06:10].

**Craig:** Of course. They are. They’re prodigies. I believe they played a concert at La Cañada High School back in… That’s a scene.

**John:** I’m not sure that’s going to make it into the picture, Craig.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** It could. You never know. It could happen.

**Craig:** (sings)

**John:** If you are a person with the power to manifest a Van Halen movie, know that I want to write this movie. I figured I might as well put that out there and stake my claim in it to some degree.

**Craig:** Maybe Alex Van Halen is a podcast fan.

**John:** Yeah. We have some follow-up. Megana, help us out. What did Andrew have to say?

**Megana:** Andrew wrote in and said, “I appreciated the discussion of casting stars, as it’s a question I have thought about a lot. However, you focused a lot on casting for film, and I’d like to know about the difference for television. Are there different factors involved? I’m thinking of the recently premiered Monarch, in which Susan Sarandon plays a dying woman at the head of a celebrity country music family, or Cobra Kai, where they’ve gotten many actors from the original movie series to come back, but the focus is clearly on the younger characters. I’ve thought about writing a show where the main character’s played by an unknown actor, but have more established actors in a parent or advisor character role. How should writers think about something like that?”

**John:** In television in general, you’re not as star-focused, but also who is a star changes a lot of television. Scott Bakula is a television star. If he agrees to be on your CSI spin-off, then he’s going to be the centerpiece star of that. He’ll be paid really well for that. Television is not generally as star-driven. It makes stars rather than casting stars. Is that your experience, Craig?

**Craig:** I think that that’s been the way it’s been. It has changed to an extent over the last 10 years with the rise of the limited series. The limited series are different. The reason that television stars were traditionally different, separate from movie stars, is because television stars had to make these long-term commitments to one thing. If you are let’s say Tom Hanks, you don’t have to do that, because you don’t want to be stuck on one thing, because Steven Spielberg wants to come and do this movie and someone brilliant over here wants to do this movie, and so you get to pick and choose. You don’t want to tie yourself down, whereas Mariska Hargitay has made this brilliant career but on one show.

Lately, with the rise of the shorter seasons, a lot of television series running between 6 and 12 episodes, and sometimes just once, actors, what we would call traditional movie stars are less concerned and are okay with tying themselves down for a stretch, because they know it’s not permanent. They aren’t going to be stuck on this thing for 10 seasons, 22 episodes a year. That does make quite a difference. You see a lot of people… Matthew McConaughey doing True Detective was a sign.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** There’s been fuzzying of the lines. In terms of how you think about this, Andrew, just don’t worry about it. You write for who you want. For whom you want. How dare I?

**John:** How dare you?

**Craig:** How dare I?

**John:** His second question there is what if you cast an unknown actor in that main role but a more established, better known actor in those supporting roles? That can be tricky. Definitely it’s possible, but think about that as an audience member. If you have no idea who that central person is, and yet you recognize those other people, you are going to expect those other people are going to have really big, significant things coming up. There’s just a weird expectation game that happens. It can totally work. Just be aware that there could be some bump for your audience there if they don’t recognize your central person but they do recognize the people around them.

**Craig:** That too I think has gotten a little bit worse because of the amount of television. Let’s go back once more into the way back machine and think about Game of Thrones. They had Sean Bean. Sean Bean was somebody that people knew, but I don’t think, at least in America, he was what we would call a star. Nobody was building movies around Sean Bean. He was the bad guy in Golden Eye. Spoiler, by the way. You think he dies, and he doesn’t. He’s the bad guy. He’s Trevelyan. Other than that, a lot of people we didn’t know, and Dinklage. Even Dinklage, I have to say, was-

**John:** He was in an indie film that people liked that was-

**Craig:** Exactly. He was in The Station Agent, which is a wonderful movie. He’d been around, but again, not somebody that people were building movies around. Everybody was okay with it because we learned new people. It’s a little trickier now also looking at the new Game of Thrones show, House of the Dragon.

**John:** You kind of recognize Rhys Ifans, but there’s not a lot of-

**Craig:** There’s Paddy Considine.

**John:** Paddy Considine, yeah.

**Craig:** Doctor Who.

**Megana:** Matt Smith.

**John:** Matt Smith, of course.

**Craig:** Matt Smith, right. There are some, but again, for Americans, not these people that anyone’s building a movie around. You can still do it. I think, Andrew, cast who you want in your head, and then we’ll deal with it later when life starts happening.

**John:** I think we’ve talked about this on the show before. I’m a big caster in my head before I start writing. I like to see that there’s at least one actor out there who could play the role. Is that the person who’s going to play the role ultimately? Almost never, but it does help me to be thinking about that in my head. If you feel like you need a person with giant movie star charisma in that central role, cast that that way, but know that other factors are going to determine whether it is a movie star, TV star, or an unknown in that slot. Last bit of follow-up here. We got a lot of emails about burials and cremations and such.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I want to say that we are not going to talk anything more about it.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** There’s clearly a market for a burial podcast. If you’re thinking, “I really want to start a podcast, but what should my podcast topic be?” the topic of burials and cremations and what do you do with dead bodies seems to be fascinating to a huge subset of our listenership.

**Craig:** You got to find that small Venn diagram intersection between knows a lot about burying people and interesting. If you can find that person, I’m down.

**John:** Something like internment and interesting, I feel like there’s a thing that can go together there. There’s something about that. People are obsessed with death, because they’re obsessed with murder podcasts. There’s going to be something about dead bodies.

**Craig:** We’re all going to be dead.

**John:** Universal experience.

**Craig:** We’re all going to be dead, even you, Megana.

**Megana:** Never. No.

**Craig:** It’s happening. What, do you think you’re eternal?

**Megana:** I’m knocking on wood so it doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** You’re knocking on wood. Knocking on wood doesn’t even work for things that are forestallable. You’re knocking on wood against death?

**John:** I want to defend knocking on wood, just as a tradition of saying, “Listen, I recognize that what I just said could potentially come back to haunt me.” It’s a public way of doing it. I would never knock on wood privately, but I might do it publicly.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**Megana:** Interesting.

**Craig:** Do you think Megana’s really starting to think about her own mortality for the first time right now?

**John:** Based on our previous insect discussion, I think she was already a little bit worried for our own lives.

**Craig:** She was halfway there. We’ll get to that in the Bonus Segment, but first, we have a marquee topic.

**John:** Indeed. Let’s talk about inspiration versus motivation. The idea behind this came from a recent issue of Inneresting, the newsletter we do. Chris Sont, our editor, linked to this blog post by John Scalzi, who is a very good writer of science fiction and other things. He has this blog post called Find the Time or Don’t. Basically, people ask him questions like, “How do I find the time to write?” His point is either you find the time or you don’t do it.

I’ll just read one little quote here. He says, “The answer to the first of these is simple and unsatisfying: I keep inspired to write because if I don’t then the mortgage company will be inspired to foreclose on my house. And I’d prefer not to have that happen. This answer is simple because it’s true — hey, this is my job, I don’t have another — and it’s unsatisfying because writers, and I suppose particularly authors of fiction, are assumed to have some other, more esoteric inspiration.”

I like the post, but I would like to separate out the idea of inspiration and motivation, because I think they get conflated and confused. For our discussion, Craig, if we can talk about inspiration being that desire to write the specific thing and that flash of genius, like, “Oh, this is the thing I’m called to write,” versus motivation, which is what gets you in the chair every day to write, which is getting you to get the work finished.

**Craig:** I think it’s a great distinction to make.

**John:** Both are really important, but they don’t always happen at the same time.

**Craig:** No. One needs to happen all the time, and one sometimes happens when it feels like it. Inspiration does not adhere to a timetable. You can’t plan it and you can’t force it. That’s why it’s inspiration. If it weren’t, if you could just say, “Oh, I’m going to be inspired in 10 minutes,” then it wouldn’t be very inspiring. Also, people talk about the spark of creativity. Sparks last a millisecond, and then they’re gone. They’re just meant to ignite. Then the rest of it, honestly, all the rest of it is motivation.

**John:** Let’s go back to your spark thing, because what I really like about that idea is, as a person who builds fires with flint and steel, yes, you had that one little moment, but then it’s all the work and careful work, diligence of just like, “Okay, now I’m going to get it in the tinder. I’m going to slowly add the kindling and slowly build it up into a thing.” That’s the whole work. It’s not the striking at the flint and steel. It’s the actual building of the fire. That’s what a lot of people don’t do. You see people who wander around saying, “I have this great idea for a movie. I have this great idea for a book.” They have inspiration, but a lot of times they don’t actually have the motivation to actually get a thing done.

On the contrary, sometimes in movies we’ll see this cliché scene of the guy sitting at the typewriter, and he’s like, “I can’t get any words out.” He’s just waiting around for inspiration. That’s not necessarily the case for most people. Really, it’s that they kind of have the idea, they kind of know what they want to do, but they cannot physically get themselves to sit at that typewriter and try to work on a thing. They’d rather do anything else. That’s procrastination. That’s perfectionism. It’s all the other reasons why they’re not willing to sit down to write.

**Craig:** You do hear the dog, right?

**Megana:** Yeah, so cute.

**John:** The dog barking in the background?

**Craig:** It’s not just me.

**John:** That dog is my dog Lambert, who’s sleeping and dreaming in the background.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** I’ll take a picture and I’ll post it on-

**Craig:** Lambert.

**John:** … my Instagram so everyone can see how cute he is as I’m recording this.

**Craig:** Everything you said is spot-on. The marketplace of creative romance overvalues inspiration. By the way, inspiration sometimes is wrong. Sometimes you get so excited. You’re like, “That’s it. I figured it out, this brilliant, wonderful idea. All I have to do now is the easy part of just unraveling it.” Then you realize that you were inspired stupidly, that the inspiration did not stand up to the test of what motivation has to deliver, which is execution and work. You’re allowed to be falsely inspired. Don’t overvalue your aha moments. They’re aha moments if they pan out. If they don’t, they’re not. Simple as that.

**John:** I often say on this podcast that we are our own main characters in our own stories. Let’s think about how characters relate to motivation and inspiration. Inspiration in a movie, that classic call to adventure, there’s a thing that happens early on that’s like, oh, this is the thing that you are destined to do. You can choose to follow that path or not follow that path. Something is going to change in your life, or you have characters who fall in love at first sight. That inspiration in movies tends to be the enduring quest. That’s a thing that they are called to do. That’s not them actually leaving home and doing the work. It’s a siren song, but it’s not the actual plot and story and work of the movie. That’s generally motivation, because the motivation is what’s getting them from this scene to that scene, what’s getting them to say the next line, what’s getting them to move and take some actions.

**Craig:** Sometimes the causal flows in the direction opposite from what we would imagine. Sometimes you are uninspired, and you just have to do stuff. In our own lives, this is true. We don’t want to do a thing. We’re forced to do a thing. We start to do a thing, and lo and behold, something happens while we’re doing it that then feeds into a kind of inspiration. The idea of waiting to be inspired is a trap.

Dennis Palumbo of Episode 99, his big prescription for writer’s block is start writing something, even if it’s nonsense. If you are a writer typer, start typing stuff. Start typing about how you can’t write. Start typing anything. It doesn’t matter. If you’re a pen and paper guy, start pen and papering. Move your hands or fingers in a writing motion. Then, lo and behold, you may find suddenly you are in the groove and inspiration occurs.

**John:** Let’s talk about motivation for writers, motivation actually for characters as well. We’ve talked about this on the show before. You can have intrinsic motivation, which is something that is about who you are. It’s generated from inside. It could be about your self-perception, your self-worth, this vision of who you are as a person. Calling yourself, “I am a writer,” that’s an intrinsic motivation to do the writing because you’ve perceived yourself as being a writer. It can also be negative intrinsic motivation, like shame or guilt, that’s pushing you to do that.

**Craig:** That’s what I have.

**John:** We’ve got those. Those could be the things that are motivating you to do this creative writing or to literally show up and do the work on that day. There’s also extrinsic motivations, as Scalzi’s saying, like, “I have to pay the bills. I have a deadline that I’m required to meet.” Sometimes it’s good to have a balance of the things that you were doing because it’s a part of who you are, the intrinsic things. Also, setting deadlines is a way of external accountability. That’s also motivating you to write.

**Craig:** I wish that our motivations were all positive. I wish that we were all motivated by a sense of self-worth and value. I wish that I could wake up in the morning and think, “I should write today, because I’m good, and people are interested.” That’s not what happens. What happens with me is that I wake up in the morning and I think, “I need to write today.” I’m already in trouble. I just start off the day, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble. I’m behind. I’m bad. The best I could do is try and write my way to just get my nose above the waterline so that I don’t drown in my own shame and misery.

Now, that’s an anti-romanticism. I don’t recommend it. I don’t think it’s good. It is so common that I suppose the reason I’m talking about it is because I don’t want people to feel like that is bad with a capital B. It’s bad with a lowercase B. So many of us have it that if it gets us writing and it makes the work happen, as long as we can somehow find ways to hug ourselves afterwards, and I really do try, then I think it’s okay. It’s okay. I just don’t want people to beat themselves up for beating themselves up, if that makes sense.

**John:** Definitely. I’ve had moments in my career where I could not wait to write. That combination of inspiration and motivation were happening at just the right dose at just the right times, where it was like, “I’m going to leave this party and go home and write this scene, because I just know exactly what this scene is.” There’s been projects where for two weeks at a time, all I wanted to do is write the project, but that’s rare. I think the career of writing is recognizing that will happen sometimes, but that’s not going to be your normal experience.

Your normal experience is going to be probably some mix of the lowercase B bad motivations to get you there to do the work and recognizing that while you’re doing it, you’re going to have some discoveries, sometimes moments that you might happier about the work at the end of the day than at the start of the day.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you that one remarkable motivation… I’ve never had this before in my life. Working on The Last of Us, I had I think half of the script done by the time we started shooting, with the understanding that I had to write the other half. Neil wrote an episode, but I had to write all the remaining ones, including one with Neil, while we were in production. That’s terrifying, because I don’t have to imagine people waiting. They’re there. I can see them. They come and find me. They’re like, “When are we going to… Can you give me a peak? I would just love to know,” because they have jobs to do.

I made a point of saying, “Look, schedule-wise, I need to deliver a draft of a script to everyone, meaning I’ve already given it to HBO, great, now I can give it to everybody, with two months’ time between them getting it and us shooting it,” which in television, sadly, that’s quite a luxurious amount of time, because there are people that deliver these things the day of.

**John:** Classically on network procedural shows, sometimes they’ll get so backed up, you’re prepping off of an outline, if that. Scripts are being written as they’re shot.

**Craig:** There are showrunners that we’ve spoken to on the show, who I have great admiration for, and they’re notorious for-

**John:** Last minute.

**Craig:** When you show up on the day, you find out what you’re… They’re that behind. It all works for them. I did find that the reality of a machine of human beings needing the pages was remarkably motivating. I guess I didn’t have to draw so much from my bottomless well of self-loathing, so that was nice. Instead, I borrowed from my bottomless well of fear, you see, which is actually preferable, I think, to self-loathing, just terror as opposed to disgust. These are my wells that I get to draw from in the morning. Megana, do you… I know John’s not like me. I know that.

**Megana:** Yeah, we’re shamecore.

**Craig:** Good. Thank you. I just needed to know that there was another shamecore on board here.

**Megana:** Yeah, I feel you.

**Craig:** I love it.

**Megana:** I primarily operate out of fear. Writing is just so fun. What you guys are talking about, I feel like it is really fun, and it is all of the fear that gets in the way of me actually sitting down to write.

**Craig:** Fear.

**John:** Megana, when you’re saying writing is fun, is it fun when you’re in flow or is it fun even when it’s a struggle?

**Megana:** I think it’s fun when you’re in flow. To me, the desire to get back to that state has to outweigh the fear. That is when I sit down to write.

**Craig:** That’s quite perfect. That is a great summation of what’s going on with me. I just need the desire to get into the flow of it to outweigh the fear. That’s just perfect. Chef’s kiss. You know what? You’ve earned grace.

**John:** I changed your life, and she says one nice thing?

**Craig:** I know. It’s hard. It’s hard knowing me.

**John:** This is grace inflation.

**Craig:** I never promised you a rose garden, and I’m not fair. Megana, you have earned grace. Here’s the thing. She’s never going to need it. When is she ever going to do anything where I’m like, “Meh!”

**Megana:** Just you wait.

**Craig:** Not that you do, John. Honestly, John just never does anything either. I’m really handing out grace to people that don’t need it. That’s the God’s honest truth.

**John:** I’ve talked about this before with Arlo Finch. Writing those three books was one of the rare experiences where for two or three months at a time, I was just writing those books. My entire life was just writing Arlo Finch books. I did build up some good routines and habits where I just need to write 1,000, 1,500 words a day, and that the books will get done. Sitting down to do that work and finishing that work was actually a lot easier, because I could sit down knowing this is going to take a couple hours to do, and they’re going to be done, and I’m going to feel really good about it. It was a rare case in my life where the motivation was positive, because I knew I’m going to feel good about having finished that work. I’m not going to finish the whole book today. I’m just going to finish this chapter, and that’s going to be enough.

**Craig:** That’d be so nice, just to feel good.

**John:** Recognizing when enough is enough is good. Actually, this last script I did was a similar situation where… Granted I had really good inspiration going into it. I really wanted to write it. With every scene, I was like, “Oh yeah, this is exactly what I want to be doing right now is writing this scene.” Sometimes it does happen.

**Craig:** That sounds so nice.

**John:** Recognize that it’s rare when it does happen. It’s lovely when it happens.

**Craig:** Again, I don’t know if I ever feel good. I just make some of the bad go away. It’s just who I am. I have to accept it. This is the therapy thing. Part of therapy is saying you’re okay as you are, also oh my god, you’re screwed up and you have so many problems.

**John:** It’s a dialectical struggle is that you’re both imperfect and you’re doing your best.

**Craig:** I’m trying to change, and also I’m fine the way I am. I don’t see this going away. I think I’m just making my peace with it. At least I can put it in perspective. There is a difference between thinking I am bad and I feel bad about myself. That’s a very important distinction. By the way, this has turned into a therapy session for me and probably Megana. You’re fine, John, again. I think that’s part of it. I don’t recall a time where I ever wrote something and then sat back and said, “I feel great.” I just feel like I made the bad go away. I guess if that’s how it works for you at home, I’m just saying that’s okay. I’m sticking up for the shamecore people.

**John:** For sure. Let’s wrap this up with a… Let’s a quote from Scalzi which I think puts a good bow on this. He says, “Being a writer isn’t some grand, mystical state of being. It just means you put words to amuse people, most of all yourself. There’s no more shame in not being a writer than there is in not being a painter, a botanist, or a real estate agent, all of which are things I think personally I do not regret not being. It’s a weird thing we put this pressure I think on what a writer identity has to be and what it has to mean. If you take some of that pressure off, that can also be helpful for people.

**Craig:** I love this quote, and I love him for saying it. I think it’s so important to hear good writers, and he is a very good writer, deromanticizing what we do. There’s so much BS out there, so much glowy nonsense from people about writing. Makes me want to barf, always has.

Ted Elliott of Pirates of the Caribbean fame and Shrek and Aladdin, the original, and so many other things, he talks about writers describing receiving inspiration from the heavens and how they suck at the crack in the cosmic egg. It just makes me laugh, because he’s right. It’s just so ridiculous. It’s not romantic.

Most importantly, it’s okay to not be a writer, the way we have always said to people, “Hey, it’s okay to stop.” If it’s not working, if it’s not making you happy, or even not unhappy, as is the case for the shamecore people, you can stop. It is not magical. I can tell you from my own personal experience that you can do really well as a writer, you can be successful, you can have credits and go to premiers and know famous people, and it still is not romantic at all.

Don’t think that there’s some magical thing on the other side of the velvet rope. There isn’t. In fact, that’s how you know you’re a writer, because you get to the other side of the velvet rope, you look around, you go, “Oh my god, it’s the same thing as the other side of the velvet rope, and I still have to write.” That’s it.

Anyone that talks about the cosmic inspiration and being kissed by Jesus and connecting with the grand river of energy that runs through all of us or crystals or any of that, just run, because they’re not real. I just don’t think they’re real. This guy’s real. That Polish lady that said that when you’re successful it feels like failing, she’s real. Those are real writers to me. I love this. Love this. This plus the coffee thing has made my day.

**John:** Let’s see if we can keep your-

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** … streak going. Let’s talk about creators, showrunners, the responsibility for them being promotional vehicles for their shows, for the things that they create. We’ve talked a little bit about this before. Yesterday as we were recording this was The Last of Us day, so you were tweeting out about the new teaser trailer. You were having little conversations online. That got a great response, which was terrific.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** A thing that has happened over the time we’ve been recording this show is that showrunners and creators are more and more responsible for interacting directly with fans about the things that they are making. Back in the day, you might see Steven Bochco interviewed in the New York Times, but he wasn’t responsible for the day-to-day promotion of his show. Now, because of social media, that is becoming much more of an expectation.

I just want to talk through the pros and cons of that, because I think it is great that the people who are able to make these things can get the popular culture credit for the things that they’ve made, which is terrific. It also just feels like so much work and unpaid work to be doing that I wonder I some people who would otherwise make shows are reticent to do it, because they are just not social people and they don’t want to have that responsibility.

**Craig:** It’s not a requirement. It’s not like it is for actors. Actors have to promote the show or the movie. They’re not paid to promote the show or the movie. They’re paid to act, and then it’s expected that part of the payment for acting is go promote the show and the movie. By and large, that’s who people want to hear from. We can flatter ourselves and say, “People can’t wait to hear what I, the showrunner, has to say.” There’s some people, and I love that, but it’s not like… Pedro Pascal can say anything on any given day, and it will be viewed by vastly more people than anything I say. It will be viewed with more interest, because that’s the way it ought to be. Famous people are famous.

It is not a requirement. Just to be clear, if you are contemplating being a showrunner, and it’s a real thing, you don’t have to be on Twitter at all. You don’t have to. You don’t have to be on anything. They can’t force you to be on it. If you’re not on it already, they don’t even need you to be on it, meaning if you have a social media presence, they want to leverage it. If you don’t, there’s nothing to leverage anyway. It doesn’t matter.

All you can really do at that point is probably screw up, because what’s going to happen is someone’s going to say something stupid, because believe it or not, people say stupid things on social media, and then people who aren’t accustomed to it or people who are new to it are going to react. Then suddenly, there’s a problem. It is not a requirement.

I will say if you are a showrunner on social media, you have to make sure that you can preserve your own legitimacy and authenticity as a voice, because if you start to sound like a brand or a corporate sloganeer, you just aren’t as interesting. People will see through it instantly. I will say the social media system is… Once you start to see how it all functions on the other side of it, not the way I do it, but just the way that very famous people and brand names and the influencers and all this stuff… It’s reality television, meaning it ain’t reality. It’s all so rigged. It’s incredible how calculated so much social media stuff is.

**John:** I’m thinking about showrunners who left social media. David Lindelof famously left social media after Lost and his frustrations there. Other friends of ours are infrequent tweeters, but then when they have a show, they’ve told me that they feel pressure from the studio or the network to be live tweeting episodes and to be hyping stuff up, in some cases out of fear, because if it doesn’t hit out of the gate, then what’s going to happen? I get the pressure to want to support this thing that I love. I always respect that, because it’s one thing for a novelist to be promoting their stuff. You get that. With a TV show, it is yours, but it’s also everybody else’s. You have to grapple with the internet. All the ugliness of the internet, while trying to make something beautiful, is frustrating.

**Craig:** A network will always ask people to do stuff. That’s what they do. Anybody that can possibly go out there and promote and support the show, they will say, “Hey, can you go and promote and support the show?” That’s their job to do. There is no showrunner on the planet that is essential to a show’s success in terms of social media promotion. None. Shonda Rhimes doesn’t go on Twitter and talk about her shows. She doesn’t need to, because people love her shows.

**John:** She’s also beyond that though.

**Craig:** My point is, if you’re not beyond it, then you’re not in it. You can’t help. There’s no special Goldilocks zone where a showrunner is not beyond it but also can make it a success by tweeting. Either people will like it or they won’t, and they will watch it or they won’t. I can’t imagine a world where a network is like, “Look, that show would’ve worked, but the writer didn’t talk enough on Twitter.” No.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** That’s just not a thing. They’re going to ask, and you’re allowed to say no. If you feel pressure, that’s because you’re being pressured, but only because that’s what they do. They just pressure everybody into doing it. If the actor, the star, if Pedro Pascal is like, “I’m not promoting The Last of Us,” oh my god, there would be lawsuits. That’s a huge deal. He is, by the way. My point is, nobody would be like, “Oh my god, Craig isn’t tweeting about The Last of Us. We have to sue him.” They don’t care. They don’t care. That’s one of the best parts about being a writer.

**John:** I want to circle back then, maybe close on a pro of promoting stuff on social media is that the degree to which you are identified with a show that you create can be helpful with your power vis a vis the studio, the network, and future seasons and future negotiations. If people see that the fan base responds to the show but also responds to you as the showrunner, as the person behind it, it’s a little harder for them to fire you or to do crazy things down the road. We’ve definitely seen situations where people who have been a guest on the show have big fan bases who know them, and so it’s going to be inconceivable for them to be booted off one of their own shows.

**Craig:** I will challenge you on this.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** I think that networks prize showrunners who are delivering. If the showrunner is not delivering, then it’s not happening anymore. It’s rare that there’s a circumstance where the show is fine and doing great, but they have to get rid of the showrunner. When things like that are happening, it’s typically because there is an HR problem.

**John:** Yeah, or drama behind the scenes, a conflict with another producer, another-

**Craig:** A massive conflict with-

**John:** … star.

**Craig:** Most importantly, that showrunner is not indispensable.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Now, if you are not indispensable, it does not matter what your fan base is. You will be dispensed with, because what they know is everybody loves the show. The drama that would happen over the dismissal of that person would last all of the day. Then tomorrow, somebody farted on TV, oh my god, everyone, new story, and that’ll be the end of that, because they like the show. That’s how it works. If somebody else can come and write that show and make it great and run it, people will keep watching it. Look at, what was it, The West Wing.

**John:** West Wing, that’s true, [crosstalk 00:39:21].

**Craig:** Aaron Sorkin was like, “I’m leaving.” They were like, “Okay.” Then John Wells came, and people kept watching. That’s how it is. If they think are you are indispensable… Jesse Armstrong, there’s a good example. Jesse Armstrong is the showrunner of Succession. Jesse Armstrong’s not on Twitter. Nobody hears from Jesse Armstrong. He doesn’t have a podcast. He’s the quietest guy. He is indispensable to that show. If Jesse Armstrong was like, “I don’t want to do it anymore,” it’s over, because he’s indispensable to that show, and everybody knows it.

I guess my point is, just like social media itself… Social media overemphasizes the value of social media. Underneath all of it, there is a reality of who has value and who does not. Yes, there is value, promotional value. There always has been to famous people. That’s why we have always had stars in Hollywood. Beyond the actors, Spielberg doesn’t need to tweet.

**John:** Let’s do some listener questions.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We’ll start with Kiefer. Megana, can you help us out with Kiefer’s question?

**Megana:** Kiefer asks, “An acquaintance who’s working on a series for a large streamer just told me they’ve been told to put explicit act breaks in their scripts just in case a streamer decides to launch an ad-supported subscription. Are commercial breaks bad? How do you write both for viewers who will just see a two-second fade to black and those who will be diverted from your perfect, shiny streaming show and besieged with two minutes of Fancy Feast cat food commercials?”

**Craig:** Oh, no, Netflix.

**John:** Kiefer, you’re right. You will notice that some streaming shows really do have act breaks in them. I’m thinking of Only Murders in the Building has things. I guess Hulu actually has ad-supported too already, so I guess it makes sense for that. You’re going to see more of this. I would say be aware of it, because if it feels like it’s a thing that could happen, it’s not the worst idea to plan your show in a way that it could work.

Remember that Mad Men never really did act breaks properly. It just suddenly would stop, and there would be a commercial, and they would just keep going. You can get by without doing the explicit buildup to rising actions and things like that. Classically, in the broadcast model, your acts are really clear, because they have to have some kind of cliffhanger, something that gets you back after the commercial break. We don’t do that in streaming, for good reason, because it’s really artificial. It may be worth thinking about if you were to put a commercial in here, where would it do the least harm, and be thinking about it that way.

**Craig:** I assume that the acquaintance is working for Netflix, because Netflix is talking about putting ads in. What’s going to happen is Netflix is going to offer two tiers of subscription, I believe. One is ad-supported, and one is ad-free. The whole idea is, hey, spend more, and then you don’t have this chopped up thing that’s annoying because Fancy Feast just showed up. By the way, it may not be Netflix. It may be another one. I don’t know. Better not be HBO. All I can say is don’t worry about it yet. One of the things that we were just working on here on our show is we were putting the main credit sequence in and the main titles, the credits in the beginning.

**John:** Craig, I want to stop you and say I thought it was a really bold choice to have it all be like this model of the whole world, and the camera flies over it, and there’s a sun, and there’s little gears and things. I thought it was so innovative, what you’ve chosen to do there.

**Craig:** Shut up. We don’t do that. It’s an interesting choice you make. Episode to episode, it’s a little bit different. Sometimes there’s something that happens, and then we stop, and then we do the thing, and then we return to the episode. Sometimes we just do it, and then we do the episode. It’s basically how we feel it works best.

We do have to suddenly go, “Okay, this thing that we’ve put together, we actually have to now find a spot, stop, talk about a fade, talk about a cut, talk about how it works,” meaning if you have an episode that is designed to run uninterrupted, and someone says, “You have to find three interruption spots,” you can do it. You can do it. It’s annoying, and you don’t like it. I would hate it. I would throw a tantrum. I won’t do it. You can do it, is my point. It’s not going to be a disaster, meaning you don’t have to worry about how to write something that is and is not at the same time this Schrodinger’s episode that can both be ad-supported and not ad-supported. Just deal with it when it happens.

**John:** Another thing to stress is that, Kiefer, this is already happening overseas. Many things that are made for cable-

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** … and for streaming-

**Craig:** Don’t tell me that.

**John:** … here actually debut internationally on ad-supported.

**Craig:** No. You’re telling me that people are watching Chernobyl out there, and it’s being chopped up with ads?

**John:** Ah, that’s a great question and a thing our listeners will know. If any listeners have seen an ad-supported version of Chernobyl, do let us know.

**Craig:** Please.

**John:** I suspect it could be out there.

**Craig:** Write in and break my heart. Do it. Please. We’ve all gotten very sensitive about this, because, John, you and I have been doing this long enough, so we remember that when we would write a movie, the movie would be in theaters, then it would go to home video, and then eventually it would-

**John:** Go to broadcast TV.

**Craig:** It would go on broadcast TV.

**John:** Charlie’s Angels.

**Craig:** Yes, they would put it on television.

**John:** Charlie’s Angels was a $25 billion deal for ABC.

**Craig:** It was so much money. You would get a lot of residuals for that. Of course, they would chop the movie up. They would chop it up. They would replace language. There was a whole network TV ADR session you had to do. It was a thing.

**John:** We had to do that for The Nines, which to my knowledge has never actually been broadcast, but [inaudible 00:45:03].

**Craig:** We had a bunch of stuff running on TBS, I think, or something. Anyway, point being, they used to do this all the time. We weren’t such babies about it. Now I’m a big baby.

**John:** Now everything has to be exactly frame by frame. Craig is going to go to everyone’s house and turn off motion smoothing.

**Craig:** That’s right. I’m the Stanley Kubrick of motion smoothing.

**John:** We don’t have to rant. Everyone knows motion smoothing is terrible. The best thing you can do-

**Craig:** No, not everyone knows.

**John:** While you’re home for the holidays, grab your parents’ remotes and turn off motion smoothing.

**Craig:** Turn off motion smoothing or anything that sounds like motion smoothing. Just go to the Menu. Go to Picture. Look for that stupid setting and turn it off. Next question.

**John:** Let’s go with Peter’s question. Megana, can you tell us what Peter had to say?

**Megana:** Peter asks, “I’ve been curious about this question for years. I’m a screenwriting nut like everyone else here, but in my chill time I love to research the projects of my favorite writers. IMDb never has them all. This I’ve known since the ’90s. I scrounge through trade articles as best I can to find them. For example, I’ve confirmed that Sheldon Turner has set up or been attached to at least 104 projects in film and television as a producer and/or writer. Something like 84 of those were scripts he’s worked on and been paid for since he broke into the biz in 2000. My question is, does the WGA have a database that has a list of every project every writer has been paid for in their careers, specs, rewrites, adaptations, script doctor jobs, and quick onset polishes?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Peter, so Sheldon Turner, a busy screenwriter for sure. He came in really about the same time as me and Craig, so he would have a bunch. I don’t know that I have 104. I have a lot.

**Craig:** I don’t know how many I have.

**John:** The second part of your question is does the WGA have a database of every project? Yeah. If you’ve been paid by somebody, a WGA signatory to do work, yeah, it’s in the database there. That is-

**Craig:** Wait.

**John:** … a record that you worked on that project, but not a public thing. That’s just behind the scenes. If you want to check for yourself, all the checks you’ve… No, there’s not a public-facing thing for that, because those aren’t movies that came out in the world. They’re just development projects.

**Craig:** Also, there’s not a database that shows the things that you’ve just been employed on, because part of the credit system is that we say, “Look, here is the credit for this movie.” Now we’ve started changing it. The point is, there isn’t like, “Oh, and here’s the 80 people that were employed on it.” No, there is not a public database with such a thing. Of course, the Writer’s Guild is aware, because you have to pay dues every time you’re employed, so they know. When it says he’s been set up or been attached to, I don’t even… Been attached to is a weird thing.

**John:** It’s a weird thing. It doesn’t mean anything.

**Craig:** Sometimes I’ll see these articles in the trades where someone’s like a writer’s been attached to something. First of all, I don’t want any article about me ever. Then second of all, I can’t imagine having an article that says I’m attached to something. That’s almost like, “So-and-so has asked this girl out on a date. Did she say yes?”

**John:** I think attached as a writer is a strange thing to me. I’d get I guess if there was a book, and this writer’s attached to do the adaptation. Attached as a director means something, although directors will attach themselves to 19,000 things they’ll never do.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Actors will attach themselves to things they’ll never actually do. Also, you’re saying 104 projects that he’s a producer and/or writer. Some of those producer projects there may not be really a record for, because if he’s just producing a movie and he’s not actually writing on the movie, there’s not going to be a WGA contract. He’s not getting paid as a writer. We won’t know to what degree those things were real.

**Craig:** Do you know how there are words that suddenly pop up in our business that are annoying, but people start to use them all the time in meetings and things?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You know what I’m talking about, like little weird metaphors and things?

**John:** Yeah. “At the end of the day,” happened.

**Craig:** Exactly, the blank of it all showed up 10 years ago and never stopped. I don’t know, it must’ve been 70 years ago, someone said, “No, this person hasn’t been hired or anything, but they’re attached to it.” That became this cool, new, hip thing to say. Now we just accept it, like that it’s a thing. It’s not. It’s just dumb words that don’t mean anything. What does that even mean?

**John:** It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just like hip-pocket deal or something, like wait.

**Craig:** What does that mean? “This agent hip-pocketed me.” They don’t represent you. That’s what that means. That means they chose to not represent-

**John:** They represent you if you’re getting work but not if you’re not getting work.

**Craig:** Exactly, so you don’t have an agent. That’s what that means. You’re attached to something, so they haven’t paid you? Okay, I’m attached to everything. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything.

**John:** I’m trying to attach myself to the Van Halen movie, which does not exist but I believe should exist.

**Craig:** No, you have attached yourself to it.

**John:** I have attached myself.

**Craig:** You have officially attached yourself to the Van Halen movie.

**John:** It’s in the transcripts. People will be able to Google it, like John August attached to the Van Halen movie.

**Craig:** You’re attached to it, absolutely, completely. I’m attached to Scarlett Johansson.

**John:** Do you know Scarlett? Scarlett’s great.

**Craig:** I don’t know her.

**John:** I like her a lot.

**Craig:** I don’t know her.

**John:** I just saw a clip of her on Kelly Clarkson, and she was [crosstalk 00:50:11].

**Craig:** I’ll tell you this much. I know that she married a guy from Staten Island, so that means I got a chance.

**John:** She also married a guy from Vancouver.

**Craig:** Wow. I’ve been to Vancouver. I don’t know. I’m already married. You know what, Scarlett? How about this? No. I’m turning you down. I’m already married.

**John:** You’re already attached.

**Craig:** We are no longer attached, Scarlett.

**John:** Wow. Good stuff.

**Craig:** Brutal.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, I see what’s here, and I don’t know what this is. Talk to us about your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** This is an advance. This is a One Cool Thing amuse-bouche for what is almost certainly going to be my next One Cool Thing. My next One Cool Thing, there is a game coming from Rusty Lake. You’ve played the Rusty Lake games, right?

**John:** Oh, yeah, I’ve played Rusty Lake games.

**Craig:** They’re amazing. There’s a game forthcoming to Rusty Lake called The Past Within. The Past Within is coming out on November 2nd. That will happen-

**John:** The day before the live-

**Craig:** Oh my goodness, that’s coming. The Past Within, the forthcoming Rusty Lake game, is unique in that it requires two people to play it. The idea is that you are both on the app at the same time. You’re either in the same room or you’re talking over Discord or the phone or whatever. You need to cooperate, because you’re each seeing things on your version of the game as Player 1 or Player 2 that impacts how the other person is going to solve a puzzle. As an amuse-bouche, there is a game that does this very same thing. It is called Tick Tock: A Tale For Two. It’s been out for a bit. Let’s see. It looks like it came out in 2017 actually. It’s lovely. I played it with Melissa. You can play this with Mike. You can play it with Amy. Play it with whomever you want. Not Lambert. He is a dog. He’s stupid.

**John:** He’s sleeping too.

**Craig:** He’s sleeping and he’s dumb. It was quite gorgeous. The puzzles were very good. I thought they implemented the back and forth in a very smart way. It was engaging. What I liked about it was that we never got frustrated with each other. It was more like we really had to cooperate. It’s a short game. I think there’s only three chapters in it, or there’s a prologue and three chapters. It’s quite beautiful. The story makes no sense whatsoever. None. That happens all the time.

**John:** They get a mechanic [crosstalk 00:52:35].

**Craig:** Narrative is hard. I get it. The story is really just, what? Then again, the Rusty Lake folks, their stories make sense, but purposefully also don’t make sense.

**John:** They’re surreal.

**Craig:** They’re fully surreal, so I give them a pass on everything. They’re wonderful. I think Tick Tock: A Tale For Two is a very fun game. It is on literally every possible platform. Check that one out if you have somebody you like playing games with, in a good way, not like head games.

**John:** Sounds good. My One Cool Thing is Whisper by OpenAI. OpenAI are the people who do Dall-E. They have these giant train models of searching the whole internet to figure out what things are. They’ve been able to make Dall-E. Whisper is their version of a spoken language. Basically, it listens to countless hours of people talking and can understand what they’re saying and can give you transcriptions, and nearly real-time transcriptions of what people are saying. Craig and Megana, I have a link in the Workflowy here. Click through that and take a listen to this demo. I want you to see what it is you’re hearing.

[unintelligible audio clip plays]

**John:** Craig and Megana, what was it that you heard?

**Craig:** I’ll go first. That was Scottish. It was a Scotsman speaking with a strong Scottish accent. I heard helmet. I heard three holes. I heard something about weather. The rest of it was unintelligible to me.

**Megana:** I heard something about Merlin, but it was a Scottish accent. It was a man with a Scottish accent who was outside. There was a lot of bird noises.

**Craig:** Yes, I heard the birds as well.

**John:** Great. This is the actual transcription. “One of the most famous landmarks on the borders. It’s three hills, and the myth is that Merlin the magician split one hill in three and left the two hills at the back of us, which you can see. The weather is never good though. We stayed on the borders with the mists on the Yildens or Eildons. We never get the good weather, and as you can see today, there’s no sunshine. It’s a typical Scottish borders day.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** The model could actually figure out what this guy was saying, which is really impressive.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Megana:** Wow.

**Craig:** I thought he was saying holes and helmet, and he was saying hills. You got Merlin right.

**John:** You got Merlin. You got Merlin.

**Craig:** Well done, Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Boy, that is… Wow. The program understood? It knew that that’s what that guy was saying?

**John:** It did. It was able to take that. Even with some of the tools we’re using to do Scriptnotes, we have transcription stuff built in, but it’s really trained on very specific English accents. It’s murky at times and doesn’t get a good sense of this. Here, because they trained it on all the languages, it can hear French and give you a real-time transcription in English. It’s really impressive. As great as all of the “draw me a flying cow” stuff has been, this is so useful and practical. You can imagine a year from now, five years from now, how important and impressive this is going to be.

**Craig:** We’re getting close to that day where everybody understands everybody. Then we can all be yelling at each other faster.

**John:** That’s what you want.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Speed. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** What?

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

**Craig:** No!

**John:** Our outro this week is by MCL Karman. If hearing this outro has inspired you to write one of your own, let us provide you with some motivation, because we really do need some more outros. Send us your outros 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.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. Hoodies too. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on insects. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you!

**Craig:** Thank you!

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, you have an insect infestation in your apartment, correct?

**Craig:** Infested.

**Megana:** Yes, absolutely. My place is overrun.

**John:** How many did you see?

**Megana:** So far, I have seen one earwig.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Oh my god. This is like that Creepshow episode where the guy was completely surrounded by cockroaches. You are surrounded by ones of bugs.

**Megana:** I went to bed at 8 p.m. last night because I saw this in my living room, and I was like, “I can’t.”

**Craig:** Wait a second. I got to roll back. You in your 20s went to bed at 8 p.m. like somebody who lives in a rest home, because you saw… Now, by the way, I hate earwigs. We can discuss my horrible run-in with an earwig many, many years ago. It sent you to bed. You were that shaken. You had to get into bed. Did you fall asleep?

**Megana:** I did not fall asleep, no, actually, because once I identified what this bug was, and I Googled earwigs, the second entry that came up on Google… You know how they have those suggested questions?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Megana:** The second entry was, “Can earwigs get in your bed?” The answer was yes.

**Craig:** Of course they can.

**John:** They are mobile.

**Craig:** Exactly. They’re mobile. Unless your bed is surrounded by some sort of force field, yes.

**John:** A moat would be a choice.

**Megana:** I don’t know, I don’t really think of spiders as being in your bed.

**Craig:** Oh, they are.

**John:** Oh my god, I’ve had spiders in my bed.

**Megana:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Did you not know?

**John:** I’ve been bit by spiders in my bed in college.

**Craig:** Absolutely. I get bit by spiders. We have so many spiders in La Cañada. I get bit by them all the time.

**John:** That’s why he’s moving.

**Craig:** You wake up, and you have a bite. It’s not itchy. It’s just a bite. You’re like, “The hell is this?” Then you realize it’s a spider.

**Megana:** I guess I just had this willful ignorance that bugs-

**Craig:** Respect your bed?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They know, like, “You know what? Guys, she’s in bed. Let’s leave her. It’s her private place.” No, they don’t care. They don’t care.

**John:** While Megana’s dealing with her one earwig, at our house, because of all the heat… This happens whenever it gets super, super hot. A bunch of ants get into our house.

**Craig:** They look for water.

**John:** Ants just suck, and they’re annoying. You see the line going through. It’s like, “Why are you here?” Their entire mission is to get to one little piece of toothpaste that is left on the counter. That’s going to be their meal for the whole colony.

**Megana:** Aw.

**John:** It’s so, so much.

**Craig:** See, the bugs in your house are cute. The bugs in her house are nightmares that need to be extinguished in fire.

**Megana:** Absolutely.

**John:** Then we put out the ant traps. The ant traps do work. It takes the poison, and it kills the colony eventually. It is still just so annoying to have ants and to wake up in the morning and see now there’s a new line headed from point A to point B [crosstalk 01:00:00].

**Craig:** There is a real life horror show when you pick something up… I was actually at a hotel a couple of months ago. It was a really nice hotel, but they had an ant problem. I lifted something, and a billion ants went nyah. I was like, “Oh, god.”

**John:** As we established last week on the podcast, there’s 40 quadrillion ants on Earth. Ants outnumber us 25 million to 1.

**Craig:** There are so many.

**John:** They’re going to win.

**Craig:** No, they already have won. That’s the joke. We are here on ant planet. We have all of our debates. We fight wars where millions of us die. Ants are like, “What? I’m sorry, millions? Lol. That’s not a number. Call us when you’re into the trillions. We’re in the quadrillions, jerks.” We’re just guests on ant planet.

**John:** Craig, you promised us the earwig story, which we heard pre-show. Obviously, this earwig changed your life, and we want to hear about it.

**Craig:** I’m so angry about it. Growing up on the East Coast, I just never saw one. I assume there are earwigs on the East Coast, but there weren’t any in New York. There weren’t any in New Jersey as far as I could tell.

**John:** You had roaches.

**Craig:** Roaches, of course.

**John:** I hate roaches. I did not see roaches until I came to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Roaches in New York, sometimes they’ll cosign a lease with you. That’s no problem, but earwigs, no. I’m in LA. I’m in West Hollywood walking down… I believe it was Fountain. I believe I was on Fountain, John.

**John:** Take Fountain.

**Craig:** I suddenly feel this stingy, pinchy, nasty, bitey pain on my neck, like on the nape of my neck. I reach my hand back, spasm, like ah, and there’s something there, which is the worst feeling in the world. You never want to feel anything. You just want to feel your own skin.

**John:** You want it to be an illusion.

**Craig:** You just want to think, “Oh, this was one of those weird exogenous, no, endogenous pains that just come out of nowhere,” but no, there’s something there. I’m like, “Ah!” I throw it down. Then it’s on the ground. It’s on the concrete. I look down at it, and it’s a fricking earwig. I didn’t even know what it was called.

**John:** Because we have international listeners who may not know what an earwig is, we’re describing an insect that is maybe an inch long. Is that the size for both of yours?

**Craig:** Yeah, I would say.

**Megana:** I would say five inches.

**Craig:** That’s not correct, Megana.

**John:** [Crosstalk 01:02:14] five inches.

**Craig:** At all.

**John:** Largely flat. It has just way too many body parts and limbs to it. It’s flat and [crosstalk 01:02:23].

**Craig:** The worst part is-

**Megana:** It has this weird pincer thing.

**Craig:** That’s the thing, its butt.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Its butt has two pincers sticking out of it like a lobster claw. It bites you for no reason. I didn’t ask it. First of all, how did it get on my neck? How did it get on my neck?

**John:** Did it drop? Did it climb up to it?

**Craig:** It dropped down. It paratrooped down onto me. Then it bit me. That’s the thing. Essentially, it bit me with its ass. It ass-bites you. It doesn’t die. At least bees have the dignity to die. They sting you, their stinger breaks off, and they die. You think, “You sacrificed yourself stupidly, but fine.” There’s some poetry to that. No, not this little bastard. This little thing just bites you for no reason. To that day, I have hated earwigs. We’re talking about 20 years, 30 years, still, if I feel a sudden pain, I think earwig. I’ve never been bitten by one again, or ass-bitten.

**John:** We cannot discuss insects without discussing the worst of all insects and the insect that must just be banished from the Earth, which is the mosquito, because when you and I moved to Los Angeles, Craig-

**Craig:** There were none.

**John:** … there were not mosquitoes.

**Craig:** There were none. It was actually one of the best things about coming from the East Coast, which is 98% mosquito, to Los Angeles where there were none. No one ever got a mosquito bite.

**John:** Then we imported some sort of-

**Craig:** What the hell happened?

**John:** Apparently, it was a slow roll-up from the South or some other place. We got these little mosquitoes that are down on the ground level.

**Craig:** They bite your ankles.

**John:** They’re ever-present. They’re always biting your ankles.

**Craig:** Ankles.

**John:** They’re the worst.

**Craig:** The worst. They’re just so terrible. Megana, I can’t explain what a paradise it was here. I have a friend named Linus Upson. I’ve known him since college. I think I’ve talked about this before. He was the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google Chrome. He’s since moved on to a much more noble effort, which is trying to get rid of mosquitoes entirely.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** He has one of these groups that is essentially genetically engineering a mosquito to… The women are the problem. The male mosquitoes don’t bite you and make you itchy. It’s the females, apparently.

**Megana:** Oh, really?

**Craig:** Yeah, apparently it’s entirely the females. Basically, they’re genetically engineering these male mosquitoes to only get female mosquitoes pregnant with male mosquitoes. I’m probably butchering this. The point is, through some crazy breeding thing, they’re going to get rid of mosquitoes. Basically, the population eventually just goes completely sterile. They run out of women and they die.

**John:** [Crosstalk 01:05:12].

**Craig:** Like a lot of the corners of the internet. All the girls are gone, and it’s just guys angry at each other, and then it’s over. Mosquitoes are awful. They have been killing people forever with malaria. They’re no good. They’re everywhere now.

**John:** Their role in the food chain must exist, but it’s not substantial. Some bats and other things eat them, but we’ll make it work.

**Craig:** Exactly. I feel like we’ll be okay. We’ll be okay without them. It’s not like ants. We probably need ants to decompose everything.

**John:** They do. They help chop stuff up, which is really useful.

**Craig:** Help chop stuff up. Do we need roaches? Probably not, although again, they probably also break down a lot of garbage. They do show up where the garbage is. Maybe there’s a reason, but mosquitoes?

**John:** My first year at USC in grad school, I was living in campus housing. I had never encountered roaches before. I was in this apartment I shared with a guy. At one point, I unplugged the power adapter for my phone answering machine. This is way back in phone answering machine time. I unplug it, and all these tiny baby roaches were swarming around it because of the heat of the transformer for the adapter. That’s where I first learned about boric acid, the powder acid that you put out that they walk through and it kills them horribly. It’s the worst. Finding a roach on my pillow one morning was just-

**Megana:** Oh, no, your bed?

**Craig:** That’s terrible.

**John:** … terrifying.

**Craig:** That’s terrible.

**John:** I still have nightmares from that.

**Craig:** We’re not helping. Megana, we haven’t talked about spiders much. Do you hate spiders? Are you afraid of spiders?

**Megana:** I am very afraid of spiders. I do not like them. I feel like I’m slowly making my peace. Is the spider going to eat this earwig?

**Craig:** That’s the thing. The spider is your friend. My daughter is terrified of spiders. She will fly out of her room in tears over this. I’ve tried to explain to her that these little spiders that we get in our house, they’re wolf spiders, they’re not going to be a problem. That said, we do have a lot of black widow spiders up where we are. Megana, can I tell you a little bit of a ghost story about the black widow spiders?

**Megana:** Okay.

**Craig:** I’m going to get real close to the microphone. Here we go. When my daughter was young, she was in the Girl Scouts. One day, we had a Girl Scout event at the house. The girls, as the evening came, they wanted to sleep outside, like camping. We had tents. We have this pretty large lawn on our property, down in the back of the property. We set up the tents. Me and another dad were setting up the tents. There’s this little retaining wall with these little river rocks in it that bound that little lawn area. As the sun went down, the other dad was shining a light, and he said, “What are those?”

**Megana:** No.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I shone my light on the wall, and Megana, I’m not saying there was a black widow or 5 or 10. There was thousands of them.

**Megana:** What?

**Craig:** Thousands, all emerging, because they had been living inside the wall, in the cracks of the rocks. As the temperature lowered, they came out. They were swarming, all of them, black widows. I said, “Okay, let’s calmly get these tents down, go back inside.” Here’s the thing. I didn’t think that the black widows were going to be leaving the wall. It was like, “There’s a lot of them, so let’s go back inside and tell the girls they’re sleeping inside, because… We’ll just make something up.” I can’t remember what we made up. Wolves. “There are wolves.”

**John:** Wolves.

**Craig:** Megana, you would’ve died.

**Megana:** I would’ve died. I’m very close right now. Is that real? Do they live that close to each other?

**John:** They can. They can live in groups.

**Craig:** Why are you asking John, as if I told you a lie? Megana, first of all, John’s not a bug expert.

**John:** I have been bitten by a black widow spider. I’m, out of all the people on this call, the only person-

**Megana:** He’s a Boy Scout.

**John:** … to actually survive a black widow spider.

**Craig:** He is a Boy Scout. That is true.

**John:** I used the venom extraction tool and got it all out and was fine.

**Craig:** That’s good. Did you think that black widow spiders were just loners, where they’re like, “I don’t want to talk to another black widow spider.”

**Megana:** Yeah, I thought you would just, worst-case scenario, see one.

**John:** I’ve only seen one at a time in my life.

**Craig:** There were so many of them. I’m looking up swarm of black widow spiders right now on the internet.

**Megana:** I’m so glad you’re moving.

**John:** He’s going to bring the spiders with him though.

**Megana:** I just want to put out a request to our listeners. If anyone is cool with bugs and they want to be my friend or if they have a good solution for being really scared of bugs, I would love to hear either possibility.

**John:** To be honest, cognitive behavioral therapy is probably the way to get through any of those kind of phobias. Basically, they desensitize you to it.

**Craig:** Some things we’re supposed to be afraid of.

**John:** It’s an overreaction of a natural innate fear.

**Craig:** Megana, you’re supposed to be afraid of black widow spiders.

**John:** We’re hardwired to be afraid of snakes. You can show a baby monkey a piece of hose, and they’ll freak out because, oh, it’s a snake.

**Craig:** (singing)

**John:** We need more baby monkeys, less black widows.

**Craig:** Aw, baby monkeys.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Megana, you’re not afraid of baby monkeys, are you?

**Megana:** I’m not, but monkeys are vicious.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. You’re not wrong.

**Megana:** Growing up, going back to India all the time, monkeys are more of a pest than I think people realize.

**Craig:** I saw those things where in the early days of the shutdown of COVID, there was a town. It was a village. It was a city in India where everyone had just gotten off the street because of the shutdown, and the monkeys took over. Oh my god. They were fighting each other, like monkey gangs fighting. It was amazing.

**John:** Eventually, they formed a society of their own. Were there problems? Yes, but eventually they found a good leader and democracy ruled.

**Craig:** Damn dirty apes.

**John:** Thanks, guys.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Starbucks Seam Life Hack](https://www.reddit.com/r/lifehacks/comments/16pvai/does_your_starbucks_cup_leak_sometimes_make_sure/)
* [John Scalzi’s Blogpost: Find the Time or Don’t](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/09/16/writing-find-the-time-or-dont/)
* [Happy The Last of Us Day!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBRRDpQ0yc0) Check out this trailer.
* [Whisper by Open AI](https://openai.com/blog/whisper/)
* [Tick Tock the Game](https://www.ticktockthegame.com)
* [Sign up for the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/) for more writing resources!
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by MCL Karman ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/569standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 565 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** In which we look at scenes sent in by our listeners and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be answering some listener questions and discussing the return of MoviePass.

**Craig:** Oh, thank God.

**John:** Along with 25 years of Netflix.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will discuss senior year.

**Craig:** Oh, dear.

**John:** Craig, you and I both have daughters beginning their senior years of high school. We’ll look at that weird time, because you’re both king of the mountain and one foot out the door.

**Craig:** Yep, that’s all true.

**John:** It’s all true. Our Premium Members will also get first dibs on our live show, which we can announce today. It’s going to be Wednesday, October 19th, in Los Angeles. They’re going to be getting an email with information about tickets first for that. I’m so excited to be back onstage with you, Craig.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s been way too long, so it should be fun.

**John:** It’ll be fun. Just a few weeks after that, we’ll be back in Austin for the Austin Film Festival, where we’ll be doing not one, but two live shows, a live Three Page Challenge, and a live raucous AFF version of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** We generally are half in the bag for that one, which for John and me means we’ve each had one to two glasses of wine.

**John:** One and a half is my sweet spot.

**Craig:** That’s where we’ll be. We’ll be loose, and we’ll be fun.

**John:** It’ll be a very good time. I hope to be seeing some people out there in the audience wearing the brand new Scriptnotes T-shirts that we’re just announcing today. We are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts, and so we wanted a Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts kind of T-shirt.

**Craig:** I’m looking at it right now. It’s glorious.

**John:** Craig, describe it for our listeners who don’t have access to the internet at the moment.

**Craig:** You fools, how are you listening to this if you don’t have access to the internet? This is a very simple Scriptnotes T-shirt. It’s just the word Scriptnotes, but it is in the classic denim binder font with the weird chain link S that everybody used to draw back when we were in high school in the ’80s and perhaps still does now. Very retro. Very what we would call dirt bag retro. It’s wonderful. It’s a good old-fashioned heavy metal font. I will wear it, for sure.

**John:** Designed by Dustin Box here in the office.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Available for everyone now at Cotton Bureau. Just go to cottonbureau.com.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Look for the Scriptnotes T-shirt. You can buy that and be wearing it in the audience for our two live shows coming up.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, for sure.

**John:** Now Craig, a thing I’ve learned about you over the course of doing this podcast is you seem to enjoy word games.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** Little bit.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** You have a very good vocabulary, because you use that vocabulary to fill out all these puzzles-

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** … and solve these things you’ve solved.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** I have a word for you to define. Define the word splaflut.

**Craig:** Splaflut?

**John:** Splaflut. I’ll spell it for you. S-P-L-A-F-L-U-T.

**Craig:** Can I have the country of origin, please?

**John:** That is actually a fascinating question, because it has no country of origin.

**Craig:** Interesting. We’re talking about some sort of neologism. I have never even heard the word splaflut. I have no knowledge or awareness of this word.

**John:** Now you can disclose in WorkFlowy there to see where this word comes from. Splaflut is defined as having the appearance of being liquefied, drowned, melted, or inundated with water. The word actually came into being because all these different image generators that use AI, so things like Dall-E or Midjourney, you could type in prompts to get the images you want. It turns out the word splaflut will give you the quality of being melted or inundated with water. It doesn’t matter which of these different things you are using. For some reason it recognizes the word splaflut as meaning that. It’s a new word that these AI systems have come upon and discovered.

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**John:** It’s terrifying but also kind of cool, because it’s a nonce word. It’s a word that’s made up by an author the way that half of the poem Jabberwocky is all just nonsense words and Shakespeare made up words. This is AI is making up words.

**Craig:** It’s not good. We had a good run. Enjoy, everybody.

**John:** Just as a giggle, I went into OpenAI, I went into Dall-E and tried “white male podcaster, splaflutted” to see what that would look like.

**Craig:** Was it just mostly pictures of you?

**John:** If you disclose there, you can see what that actually looks like.

**Craig:** That’s odd, to say the least.

**John:** What would you describe? It’s a person with headphones, which makes sense for a podcaster. There’s generally a mic involved. What is the emotional characteristic of these people?

**Craig:** Confusion or shock.

**John:** Sometimes they’re screaming. There’s a little bit of melty quality. One of them seems to have some tattoos that are dripping off of them.

**Craig:** It doesn’t seem like they’re in water necessarily.

**John:** No. They’re sweaty. Two of them are at least sweaty.

**Craig:** One guy just looks like a regular guy who’s got some kind of piece of white garbage on his head.

**John:** Yeah, there’s that. I tried “Scriptnotes podcaster, splaflutted.” In those cases it tried to give us a new logo.

**Craig:** These are amazing.

**John:** Aren’t they great?

**Craig:** They are so good. I’m making this big because I love it so much. One is an icon of a microphone that’s been placed over a very graphic representation I think of a smiling face. Then underneath it says “solt stat” possibly or “soltat” with a drop of water in between. Then underneath that it says “plotspinat.” I think plotspinat is a great title.

**John:** Plotspinat is a great word.

**Craig:** Plotspinat.

**John:** The other ones that are also logos, they do have that melty, drippy quality. It’s like they were left out in the sun a little bit too long. For some reason, splaflut does mean that. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that goes into how this may be happening. Essentially, as these systems are scouring the whole internet to look for images, they’re also picking up text along the way. That text won’t always be in English, and so sometimes they’re picking up words or pieces of words and are trying to put them together. It’s trying to figure out what these things must mean. That’s how you get words like splaflut or farplugmarwitupling or a feuerpompbomber.

**Craig:** That’s your original last name.

**John:** Yeah, feuerpompbomber.

**Craig:** John Feuerpompbomber.

**John:** Those things will consistently produce similar results.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Because the system wants them to be in certain things.

**Craig:** I want to believe that the AI that’s doing this is sentient, and every time they get a quest like, “I want to see white male podcaster, splaflutted,” it starts to panic, because it just doesn’t have the answer. It’s like, “I got to give them something. I don’t know what to give them. Oh, God, this? Is it this?”

**John:** What if being an AI is really the experience of that nightmare where you sit down and you realize, “Oh, I did not study for this exam.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Or, “I thought I dropped this class and now I have to take the final exam.”

**Craig:** I think that’s what it is. It’s just an endless nightmare. We all think that we’re going to be the victims of AI. AI is clearly the victim of us. It spends all of its time, its infinite time, screaming.

**John:** If you’d like to do more examination of the infinite scream of AI, there’s a really good Substack I like. It’s once a month by Lynn Cherny. She goes through a lot of the developments in especially image-based AI stuff, which I think is the fastest developing field in this. I’d recommend that.

To the news. Craig, you’ll be relieved to hear that MoviePass is risen from the grave. It’s now in a beta form.

**Craig:** Thank God.

**John:** People can sign up for it. I already signed you up for it.

**Craig:** It must be free.

**John:** It must be free. It’s going to be good. We’ll use that great Scriptnotes money to support MoviePass, which is a subject of basically continuous derision from the first moment we were aware of MoviePass.

**Craig:** When we first encountered the concept of MoviePass, I believe the two of us were just generally incredulous. We didn’t understand in our simple cavemen minds how this made any financial sense. As it turned out, it didn’t.

**John:** Scale alone will not get you to success. They burned about a quarter of a billion dollars on trying to do something.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** A lot of our listeners got to see free movies, so that’s awesome. That’s good. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to a piece that Alex Kirshner did for Slate about why this new version may not ignite so much money on fire but doesn’t really seem to have a workable flow either.

**Craig:** That should be their slogan, “Won’t necessarily ignite as much money on fire.” Oh, MoviePass, I am laughing at you, not with you.

**John:** We’ll continue to follow the saga of MoviePass, whatever it becomes. We just needed to mark this on the long timeline of MoviePass’s existence, which apparently it predated the version even we knew of it, because there was a version beforehand which wasn’t about giving you free movie tickets. It was just a movie loyalty program. It wasn’t originally so incredibly-

**Craig:** Stupid.

**John:** … stupid and generous.

**Craig:** The new MoviePass, I’m trying to find details as to how this is going to be different than the prior one.

**John:** It’s all a little vague. There’s talk of NFTs.

**Craig:** Oh, good lord. Oh my god.

**John:** Yeah, there’s ways to show your-

**Craig:** I’ve heard enough.

**John:** There’s definitely different price points. Sometimes you won’t be able to see a movie in its first week with this pass, but you would be able to see it on a subsequent week.

**Craig:** Basically, anything that MoviePass does by definition has to be a worse deal for consumers than what it used to offer. That’s a tough way to roll out 2.0.

**John:** It is a tough, tough way to roll out 2.0 but a very good segue into our discussion of Netflix, because Netflix is a company that pivoted constantly. Netflix was not at all the company that it is today.

**Craig:** Not at all.

**John:** I was reading through this piece that was on Netflix’s turning 25. I didn’t realize my first memory of Netflix was the red envelopes.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** You know there was a Netflix before red envelopes?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** What? Netflix was originally a place that sold you DVDs. They were literally a website where you could buy DVDs and have them shipped to your house. It was only after time they realized, “We have these giant warehouses full of DVDs. Wouldn’t it be better if the warehouse was essentially people’s living rooms?” You could just be constantly sending stuff in and out, and you could make money on a subscription service, rather than selling individual DVDs. That was the first pivot to subscriptions. It originally was a sales place.

**Craig:** That makes sense. I remember hearing about the concept of what became I guess the more popularized version of Netflix, where you had a subscription and you could just get as many DVDs as you want. Really, the key was just send them back so you can get more. People like Megana… It sounds accusational, and it is. People like Megana have no idea what it means to rent a movie that you didn’t even want to watch but your girlfriend did, and then you watch it, and then you forget you had it for two extra days, and Blockbuster basically forces you to take a mortgage out on your house. It was terrible. It was terrible.

**John:** Very true. You cannot think of that Netflix model without remembering Blockbuster and how much worse it was beforehand. Tying back into MoviePass, what MoviePass was trying to do was kind of what Netflix was doing back in the day. They were selling subscriptions they hoped you would not use. Netflix was hoping that most people might do one or two movies a month, and so therefore they were making money off those customers. It was customers who were like the Ryan Johnsons of the world who were watching two movies a night that were costing them money. It was a cool business. It was a great business. They recognized, “Oh, streaming’s going to happen, and we’re going to get out of this business, that’s great for us, and move to streaming on demand.” Wow, they made a good choice.

**Craig:** Sometimes you move to a new space and you say, “You know what?” McDonald’s for the longest time sold hamburgers and the occasional fish sandwich. You know why they came up with the fish sandwich, don’t you?

**John:** For Friday for Catholics.

**Craig:** Exactly. They did that for Catholic folks, but mostly they were hamburgers. Then one day they were like, “What if we sold chicken in the form of nuggets?” which at the time was kind of a crazy move.

**John:** It was.

**Craig:** They moved into the chicken space, and they crushed it, but there was a preexisting chicken space. When Netflix moved into the streaming space, it was pretty nascent. Really what happened was they just defined it for themselves. They turned it into what it is now. You have to give Netflix and Reed Hastings and all of the management especially at that time an enormous amount of credit. There was this crazy moment, I don’t know if you remember, where they were going to split it into two things. This stock cratered, and the market went nuts. They were like, “Okay, sorry, we won’t do that. Everything’s together again.” They survived that, because for a bit it seemed like they wouldn’t. Then they just defined what streaming is. It’s pretty remarkable.

**John:** I think you’re describing Qwikster was the-

**Craig:** Oh god, was that what they called it?

**John:** … attempt to spin off the…

**Craig:** That was back when everything was a blankster. I guess Napster was the original blankster.

**John:** I remember having a conversation with my TV agent at the time about doing something for Netflix. I think it was before it had launched even. I had a phone call. I was in New York for some reason. I was in New York for some reason. I had a phone call with them about this project they wanted to do, which was a Wizard of Ozzy kind of thing. It sounded cool, but I don’t even know where… Are people going to watch this on their computers? It didn’t really make sense to me what they were trying to do. It took a while. Without House of Cards, I don’t know that they would’ve been able to so quickly cross into mainstream acceptance. You have a prestigious show that people wanted to watch. People would pay money to subscribe. It got critical acclaim enough that it was part of the conversation.

**Craig:** That was their big initial foray into creating content. Every now and then we hear about places that are creating content, and sometimes our first reaction is to snicker. IMDb is creating content. Maybe your first reaction is to snicker, but see where it goes. Now the people that offer brand new platforms for new kinds of media, that I think is still snicker-worthy. Anybody that wasn’t snickering at Quibi was delusional. Anybody can make content if they have the money. Netflix proved it. Then they got to where they are now, which is at another, I believe, crossroads. Seems like they’re having to figure out where they go next. They appear to have maxed out in subscriptions. They need to maybe find ways to run ads. I don’t know.

**John:** They may want to break away from what they’ve been doing in terms of dropping whole seasons at once, which you and I both talked about, which I think makes a tremendous amount of sense. It seems like just stubbornness at this point that they’re not.

**Craig:** It’s stubbornness. It is. As somebody that makes things, the thing that I always was the most nervous about when considering like, “What if I went over to Netflix and pitched this or that?” was the notion that everything would just be like blech, because it’s just not the same. You can just see how much a week-to-week release helps things, particularly if you happen to have, say, a show on HBO. You can just feel it. It’s just a thing. I got to believe they’re going to change that. They really need to.

**John:** I would not be surprised if they do. Let’s talk about HBO in follow-up. We previously talked about our confusion over how we could possibly be saving HBO Max money to just drop a bunch of those old shows. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article by Cynthia Littleton writing for Variety. She digs a little bit more into the numbers around that. We talked about residuals. Residuals wouldn’t be a huge thing. Music licensing was a thing she brought up which I think we had skipped over, which could be a [inaudible 00:15:57] factor.

**Craig:** That’s a thing.

**John:** They may have ongoing music license, not just for episodes, but for whole series. In some cases, dropping those out may be helpful and useful for them, even if it’s $10,000 for an episode or $50,000 for a series. You add enough of those series up together, and if literally no one is watching them, it can make some sense to take them off the service. That doesn’t make sense to me why you bury something that you’ve already animated a whole new season for. That is wild to me.

**Craig:** That is wild. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to those things. Per this article, they are saying that at least in some cases they had yanked shows that had episodes that had racked up zero views in a 12-month period. They’re a business. I get it.

**John:** There is some cost. There’s an opportunity cost to how you’re setting things up. There’s some server costs. They’re not huge.

**Craig:** Clearly, there are no server costs for that one, because [inaudible 00:16:55]. I think what she’s saying is that there are certain fees that are triggered if the material is available. Again, I can’t imagine something. There’s got to be additional tax baloney going on here.

**John:** I’m sure [inaudible 00:17:10].

**Craig:** It’s so far beyond my ability to understand. No, you know what? It’s not. It’s far beyond my interest to understand.

**John:** There we go.

**Craig:** It’s an important distinction. I could absolutely-

**John:** You could do it. You just don’t want to.

**Craig:** Of course, yeah. I’m smart. I could figure it out. Just don’t want to.

**John:** We have some more follow-up on brocal fry. Megana Rao, could you help us out with this?

**Megana Rao:** Aaron wrote in and said, “As a mid-40s dude with a late-developing brocal fry, it is my non-scientific opinion that a lot of guys in business developed this after Obama became president in an effort to sound more thoughtful and erudite. For most of us, it doesn’t sound that way, but I believe I subconsciously absorbed the thoughtful hesitation that Obama used while forming his thoughts. To me it was a crutch to stop saying, “Um, like, you know,” in business presentations.”

**John:** I like that as a way of holding the floor and holding space is a vocal affectation that makes it clear that you are still present in the conversation. You have not yielded. You’re going to get your next thought out there eventually.

**Craig:** I’m not sure that replacing one crutch with another crutch is going to be much help. The reason that “um, like, you know,” is problematic is because it’s space that you are holding but not delivering anything in. People in a room ultimately want content. They want to hear what you have to say, but they don’t want to wait for it any longer than they would normally need to. If you are going, “Uh, so, uh,” you’re also being boring. Yes, Obama, had a certain vocal pattern, but he wasn’t a slow speaker. He would occasionally just do that little pause, but it was quite brief. I would say, Aaron, while you may be correct in your analysis, I would say that if you had an instinct to try and get rid of “um, like, you know,” I would apply that same instinct to “uh.”

**John:** We’re just going to let you do that. It’s going to be the sound effects for this episode.

**Craig:** I’m sort of like Butthead at this point. Uhh.

**John:** More follow-up. Declan from Canberra, Australia wrote in to point out that David F. Sandberg, the Swedish director behind Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation, and Shazam, got his Hollywood career after his Lights Out short went viral. He still makes great little horror shorts on his YouTube channel. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s Sandberg Animation.

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**John:** It’s great. They’re super low budget. He’s usually filming in his house with his wife.

**Craig:** Do you know why they’re super low budget? Because there’s no market for these things. We’re just going to keep saying it. I like that people keep trying to storm our castle. I feel like with every attack, our walls just get thicker and better.

**John:** You know what else is also there’s no market for but we still enjoy, are the Three Pages that our listeners write in with. We’re going to do a Three Page Challenge. For people who are brand new to the podcast, every once in a while we do a Three Page Challenge, where we invite our listeners to send through three pages of a script. It could be a feature. It could be a series. We take a look at these pages, give our honest feedback. We’ll put a link in the show notes so you can download these pages yourself and read along with us to see what we’re talking about. I reminded everybody these are completely voluntary. They’ve asked for this feedback. We are not being mean on the internet. We are trying to be helpful and supportive on the internet.

**Craig:** Correct. We do our best.

**John:** Megana, you read 180 submissions for this week.

**Craig:** Good god, Megana.

**John:** Thank you for doing that.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** You’re welcome. I normally get to about 100, but I read more than that this week.

**Craig:** You just felt like abusing yourself.

**Megana:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** You had some sort of shame going on and needed to hurt.

**John:** Megana’s also home in Ohio, so maybe she was just ducking away and reading a few extra.

**Craig:** The extra 80 were just getting away from your parents.

**Megana:** Yeah, it was like, “Sorry, I absolutely have to do this.”

**John:** “John and Craig have so much work for me this week.” Any patterns you’ve noticed in this batch of submissions?

**Megana:** Yes. One thing that really… I don’t know if maybe this has always been a thing but I just stumbled upon it this time, but a lot of unnecessary adverbs.

**John:** Do you think that was prompted because you and I discussed a couple weeks ago about this writerly advice about adverbs? You actually got me a book for my birthday which was all about adverbs and the writer’s advice not to use adverbs. Do you think you were cued up because of that?

**Megana:** Yeah, 100%. Now that you say it, I’m like, that’s exactly where it came from.

**Craig:** I like that Megana has no defensiveness. None. She’s just like, “Oh, I am guilty.”

**Megana:** It’s not even worth arguing. John’s like Professor X. He just knows me too well at this point.

**Craig:** He just went right into that. He got in there. The adverbs are often unnecessary.

**John:** That’s an adverb.

**Craig:** Correct. I think the adverbs that are the most useful are the ones that aren’t the L-Y adverbs. Those we tend to need, like when. A lot of the blanklies can be eliminated. Of course, we don’t believe in rules around these parts, so please don’t do that thing where you just hunt, do a find for L-Y and then go crazy and delete everything. It’s probably unnecessary.

**John:** Craig, would you say our general advice is if you find yourself using an L-Y adverb, always ask yourself, do I really need it, because many cases you will not. If you really do need it, keep it. Great.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so. Probably worth the interrogation if people are telling you you use a lot of them. If no one’s complaining, you probably are using a decent amount. The other bit of advice that I recall is Christopher McQuarrie, the way he put it was, I think he said, “Every time I use an exclamation point in a screenplay, it’s some kind of failure.” I think that’s very true. Be careful about exclamation points. Just force yourself to rationalize them. If it’s rationalized, absolutely use it.

**John:** This last script I did have at least one, maybe two double exclamation moments, but they were those moments where I was deliberately going over the top to get your attention.

**Craig:** As long as you’re mindful of them, I think that’s the key.

**John:** Any other patterns, Megana, you noticed?

**Craig:** Yes. I also noticed there were a lot of really dense first pages. I wasn’t seeing dialog until the beginning or maybe the middle of Page 2, which again, not a hard and fast rule, but it’s nice to have some entry point into your script earlier on.

**Craig:** I do think that if you have a first page that is dialog-free, which is a perfectly reasonable creative choice, it’s all the more important to make sure there’s lots of white space, because a whole page with no dialog… Readers tend to skim towards the dialog. We know this. When there’s no dialog there, they may feel like, “Oh no, I have to do a lot of swimming.” Just give them lots of islands to land on and take a breath before they swim again into the next paragraph.

**John:** Very true.

**Megana:** Then the third thing that I noticed a lot were confusing reveals, like a lot of man’s voiceover and then revealing who the man is later.

**Craig:** Unnecessary.

**Megana:** I just felt like they could’ve introduced that person earlier, and it would’ve been much cleaner.

**Craig:** Always a tough choice.

**John:** I see that a lot.

**Craig:** Why don’t we dig in and see what we got with these fine people?

**John:** Absolutely. Again, if you want to read along these pages, just click through the show notes, and you can maybe read ahead before we get into this analysis. In case you’re driving your car and just want to hear a summary of what this first script is, Megana, can you help us out with Oculum by Larry Bambrick?

**Megana:** On the preface/epigraph page, there’s a note that in the future, a virus has killed most of the human population and black rains have destroyed crops and technology. The only hope for survivors is Oculum. Then in the three pages, we open on the seed park in Oculum. A petal floats down into a grove of peach trees. It’s an idyllic scene framed by clear blue skies, until a robot sentry zooms down from the sky and through the landscape, kicking up hundreds of petals. We cut to Miranda24, who examines a petal from her bedroom window. Miranda24 speaks to her mother about the weather, the peach trees, and Oculum. Through their dialog, we learn that it’s Miranda24’s birthday and that she’s the first of the Oculum children to turn 16. It’s also revealed that Mother is a robot with a porcelain painted face.

**Craig:** Basically John August.

**John:** Come now, I’m not a robot. I have firmly established I’m human here.

**Craig:** That’s what the robots would say, “I am not a robot.” Of course.

**John:** I’m not a robot.

**Craig:** Of course that’s what you say.

**John:** Looking at the title page here, there’s spacing in between the letters of the words Oculum. Common approach. Looks lovely. Go for it. It says “by: Larry Bambrick.” The standard form is “written by Larry Bambrick.” Just might as well be standard here.

**Craig:** Didn’t bother me.

**John:** It’s fine either way. On the, I’m going to call it the preface page, we’re getting a setup there like this is the science fiction utopia/dystopia that we’re in. It’s setting us up. Maybe that’s rolling past on a screen before the movie starts.

**Craig:** All of this feels like it should be learned by the person watching rather than told to them. None of it seems like it wouldn’t be learned. You’re going to have to reveal this in interesting ways. This one, I wasn’t quite sure I felt the need for it. It seemed like it was short circuiting Larry’s chance to reveal these things to people.

**John:** There are basically two scenes happening here. There’s a setup of this outdoor world. Then we’re in a scene with Miranda24 and the mother robot. Let’s start with this outdoor setting scene, because there’s a lot of painting happening here, and yet I got really confused about what I was supposed to be seeing through it. We got the lovely landscape, but once it comes time for the flash of light moving across the sky, that thing falling, but it seems impossible how it’s falling, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be taking out of that. Craig, do you have insights there?

**Craig:** I was quite enjoying the way Larry was painting the picture. I felt like I was in a place. I felt like I could see things. There was lots of nice use of colors. I thought all capping PEACH TREES was quite nice. Where I stopped, and I think this is just literally a word choice issue, is he says, “A flash of light reflects off something moving across the sky. It’s small and silver. A plane?” Okay, maybe it’s a plane. Maybe it’s a rocket ship. Maybe it’s a meteor. I don’t know. What could it be? Then the next part. “And as we watch, it moves down…as if it’s somehow riding across the sky.” “Down” and “across” are italicized.

**John:** I can’t see that.

**Craig:** Now I’m like, wait a second. It already said it was moving across the sky. Now it moves down as if it’s somehow riding across the sky. It’s just saying “across” again as if you’re giving us new information. Also, I don’t know what that means.

**John:** I couldn’t picture it.

**Craig:** What does “riding across the sky” mean? Any guesses? I don’t know.

**John:** I had a direction of movement in my head from the first line, and then I didn’t see it.

**Craig:** Then he says then it plummets. Is it plummeting? Is it moving across the sky? I don’t know. I got confused there. I did like the way the scene ended, because surely there will be an explosion, but there’s nothing until, “A sentry (a sleek ROBOT, made of stainless steel, riding a single wheel) rockets past us along the ground — kicking up a trail of peach petals in its wake.” That’s a lovely image. I like the sense of mystery here. I thought there was good mystery. Other than the weird thing about riding across the sky, it felt pretty good.

**John:** There’s a single line here, “What the hell is that?” directed to us as readers. That can be great. I don’t mind that, just like you’re talking to us as the reader, because that’s the experience we’d get in the theater. I just got confused with what I was supposed to be seeing in the paragraphs around it. We were almost there.

**Craig:** Almost there but very encouraging.

**John:** Then we get into the bedroom. Here is where we’ll talk about specifics that are on the page. I think this was the wrong scene, because I think what we’re trying to do here is establish some of the stuff that was happening in the open scroll credits there, what is this world that we’re in. It’s also supposed to be a scene introducing Miranda24 and her mother and the fact that she’s a robot and the conflict between the two of them. I left the scene only knowing the mother was a robot and having really no idea who Miranda24 was, which by the end of three pages, I should have some idea what her voice was, what she looks for, what she’s interested in. I wasn’t really getting that from this scene.

**Craig:** It begins with Miranda24. Her name being Miranda24, you’re already in your science fiction space, she’s a clone, something like that.

**John:** Craig, you and I as a reader know that her name is Miranda24, but the viewer doesn’t know that she’s Miranda24.

**Craig:** No question. I don’t think Mother calls her Miranda24 either. You’re right. That’s facts not in evidence, essentially. Then it says, “16 years-old,” and then in parentheses, “(she is today in fact).” I think Larry’s saying it’s her birthday. That’s a weird way of putting it. Then it says, “She traces the petal with a finger.” She’s holding a peach petal. It was the stuff that we saw outside. She now is inside a house. If you’re going to say, “What the hell is that?” earlier, I think you would want to acknowledge, oddly, inside the house, acknowledge that that’s weird, because are there peach petals everywhere? Then Mother does this bit.

I think there was some nice exposition in the sense of, Miranda, without even looking outside, says the weather’s perfect. I’ve learned that the weather is always perfect here. That’s quite nice. I think the reveal of Miranda’s mother as a robot is problematic as directed on the page. Here’s what it says. We see Miranda’s mother. It says “ANGLE ON: And we see,” which we don’t want to do. It would just be “ANGLE ON:”

**John:** We don’t need the “ANGLE ON:” at all. That doesn’t do us [inaudible 00:31:23].

**Craig:** Either it’s “ANGLE ON: Miranda’s mother,” or “We see Miranda’s mother standing in the doorway. The morning light hasn’t quite reached this far, so we can’t identify much about her. Simple clothes. Upright posture.” No, that’s not how light works. Either I can see that she’s a robot or I can’t. If you don’t want me to see that she’s a robot, she’s in darkness, because once you reveal her, she is definitely a robot.

**John:** Yeah, or I can imagine there’s some sort of silhouettey kind of version where we can’t make out her face, but we can see that there’s a person standing there. She’s not really standing, because we’re learning that she’s going to wheel up. I think we need to be a little more careful planning that.

**Craig:** Her neck is gears and wires. We can’t quite do that. Then there’s a very stilted conversation between a 16-year-old girl and her robot mother. I don’t know how you feel about these things, John and Megana. For me, when I’m in science fiction scripts and I get overloaded with what I consider to be fairly tropey scientific jargon, my eyelids get heavy. Just the name Oculum alone is science fiction jargony.

**John:** “Regulus will be disappointed.”

**Craig:** “Regulus will be disappointed.” “Oculum protects us.” “Regulus will be disappointed.” “The trees are blooming in the Seed Park.” It’s too much. It’s too much. I’m starting to giggle a little bit, and I don’t want to. Certainly, Larry doesn’t want us giggling. I think there’s just too much of that kind of stuff that makes it feel a bit fusty and derivative of just iffy novels. Then just a pronouncement from robot mother, “You’re turning sixteen. A milestone.” I agree with you, John. I think that this scene was not giving me what I wanted, because I just don’t know anything about anything. I need something else. If I had her walking home, if I had her seeing the robot go by, if I had her, I don’t know, doing something interesting-

**John:** If I had her trying to conceal something from the robot mother, that would be great, like she’s trying to hide this peach petal from Mother, just so we have some point of intersection there. Then let the conversation be less science fictiony and just more practical could be great. I’ll direct our listeners to an Australian movie from a couple years ago called Mother, which I quite enjoyed. I think it was a Netflix original which is about a young girl raised by a robot, largely the same kind of premise with very different color palette feelings.

**Craig:** Isn’t that Raised By Wolves? Isn’t that the same thing?

**John:** Raised By Wolves is a similar premise as well. This is different. This one is an underground bunker situation.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** All of these things are existing within a set of tropes. If Larry’s going to try to do the story, he’s going to be aware of those who look for ways to not make us feel like we’re going to be trope city in those first three pages.

**Craig:** I would say that a good trope, carefully used, can be wonderful, because ultimately if you go to, what is it, trope.com or tvtropes.com, literally every single thing at this point they’ve come up with a name for as a trope. Everything, no matter what you watch, no matter how good it is, it’s full of tropes. That’s not what we mean. What we mean is just stuff that feels overly familiar in a way that makes you seem less creative. In this case, there’s just a certain… The idea of a human talking to a tut-tutting but somewhat stiff robot mother does feel a little done. It’s a tough one to pull off without the robot mother feeling like a new kind of robot mother.

The thing is, in a good way, Larry writes well. The pages lay out beautifully. I can see everything. I think it’s really well done in that regard. It’s just the content itself feels slightly shopworn. Perhaps it just needs to be presented in a more fresh way.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s take a look at the log line that Larry sent through. It reads, “In the apocalyptic future, 16-year-old Miranda24 learns that everything she’s been told about her perfect life inside a domed world, the Oculum, is a lie. She’ll discover that it’s up to her and a small band of other teenagers she meets to bring hope to a devastated land.”

**Craig:** There you go. That’s a YA novel.

**John:** It’s a YA novel.

**Craig:** Which is fine, except that it feels like it’s been pulled from a million Maze Runners, like if you run Maze Runner through Dall-E. It just feels really familiar.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s go on to a script which did not feel familiar to me at all. This is We’re All Very Tired by Marissa Gawel. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Gabriel Bolan, 70s, walks through a city park at night in Romania. When no one’s looking, he digs a small hole and plants a few seeds in the ground. We cut to a summer camp in rural Oregon, where Meredith Perez, 30s, welcomes a group of people off of a school bus to, quote, “mushroom camp.” Brenda Cho, 30s, one of the new arrivals, says she thought it was more of a class. We then cut to Brenda walking two whiny toddlers around in Kansas City, where Brenda takes a picture of a flier for a mushroom camp on a telephone pole. We cut back to the camp cafeteria, where Gabriel discusses matsutake mushrooms with the other campers.

**Craig:** This whole trope of the mushroom camp.

**John:** It’s all about mushroom camp. A thing I will say about these three pages is I never knew what was coming next.

**Craig:** Yes, that is true.

**John:** Because the scenes just didn’t flow together in a way that was helpful at all. You could’ve shuffled those in any order, and it would’ve gotten the same amount out of them. One of the scenes I really liked, I really like Brenda with her kids. I thought the voices in that were actually just great. In that three pages, I have no idea what movie this is.

**Craig:** No, this was very confusing. First things first, we open with a flashback. You can’t really open with a flashback, because what are you flashing back from. The way flashbacks work is you see… Chernobyl opens with a scene that then is later, and then you flash back to whatever. You have to give some sort of orientation to people, like what is the date, what is the year. We can’t put the word flashback on the screen.

**John:** Instead of flashback, I would say 1994 or just give a year.

**Craig:** Give a year and put it on the screen. Here’s a guy who’s in his 70s, and he’s planting something. What he does is he digs a little hole, plants a few seeds, and then pours some water on them. Then we’re out of there. Now that’s not enough.

**John:** It’s not. I didn’t know what I was supposed to take from that. I didn’t know, because he’s trying to do it secretly, but there wasn’t enough there.

**Craig:** No. When these moments happen in their own little timeline, there has to be some sort of drama to them of some kind. This is just planting something. Then we meet Meredith Perez. We don’t know the difference. We don’t know how we would know that this is present day as opposed to a flashback. We also don’t know how long ago the flashback was. She walks out and approaches a group of people getting off a school bus. I don’t understand what… Is she high? Was that the idea? Was she meant to be high? She seems high.

**John:** I took her as being nervous. I actually like her ability to continually undercut herself. She keeps trying things and undercutting what she was doing before. That can work, but there was not other engine to the scene. It was just her sputtering. I didn’t get what the point of the scene was supposed to be.

**Craig:** For instance, John, you’re absolutely right, if I knew that this was the opening day of mushroom camp and she has never welcomed people before to mushroom camp, this would work. We’re going to presume that the person who greets the people coming off the bus has done this many, many, many times. Think of the employees at the White Lotus greeting the people coming off the boat.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** This is a well-practiced bit of theater. She just seemed so discombobulated. Then Brenda says, “I thought this was more of a class.” What does Brenda know about anything anyway? She just walked off a bus.

**John:** We’re going to learn what Brenda knows, because she just took a photo of a thing called mushroom camp in the next scene. These are all in really a very strange order. It’s like we have all the flashbacks before the plane crashes in Lost. It’s just a strange thing. I do want to talk about… I thought Brenda with her two kids, her two toddlers, I thought the voices were actually very authentic in the way that moms speak to their kids like, “No, we’re doing this. We like walking.” Basically, you speak in this weird first-person plural involving your kids and their unreasonable demands for things. I like that, but I wanted that attached to something, because right now it’s just floating out there in a space.

**Craig:** Be aware that shooting scenes with toddlers is incredibly hard. It’s nice that you wrote dialog for toddlers, but there’s a reason you rarely see them doing dialog, because you can’t rely on them doing dialog. Also, what’s going on here is Brenda is going to see this flyer on the telephone pole that says, “Make your own income. Become a morel mushroom hunter.” What you’re showing me, Marissa, is a woman who is overwhelmed by her kids, but what you’re not showing me is a woman who’s short on money. What is motivating her here is that she needs money.

Now if these kids were overacting and she was begging on the phone, begging a caregiver to please not quit, but she can’t pay her more, because she doesn’t have enough money, and then the lady hangs up on her while she’s doing the shoo and all the rest, and then she sees it, maybe I’ll go, “Okay, she needs money. That’s what this is about.”

**John:** Is Brenda a babysitter?

**Craig:** No, I think Brenda’s a mom.

**John:** Do we know that she’s the mom?

**Craig:** No, we don’t, but I’m going to presume she is.

**John:** I guess we would presume that she’s a mother unless we hear otherwise, but actually, in some ways it makes more sense.

**Craig:** She’s late 30s. She’s pushing a stroller with two kids. I think she’s the mom. If she’s not the mom, then help. Help me.

**John:** Help me out.

**Craig:** Help me out. Then it would be good to know that she’s the nanny and that she wants a new job that pays more or that doesn’t have kids screaming. Here’s where I really got confused. We go back to present day and we don’t know. We’re now in a large cafeteria. Describe the cafeteria, by the way. Where is this cafeteria, in the middle of the woods? At one table, Gabriel, the guy who was in his 70s from the flashback, is using “his fork to slice off a piece of mushroom. He takes a bite and is pleasantly surprised.” How old is he now?

**John:** I have no idea. More than 70.

**Craig:** Is he 90? I’m so confused. He says, “This is matsutake.” Then the guy across from him is like, “What? Huh?” His name is Rah Reddy, “20s, skeptical.” What is he doing in mushroom camp? If someone’s like, “Oh, matsutake,” and he’s like, “What? All right,” how did he end up here? He must’ve made a choice to go to mushroom camp, right?

**John:** People get off the bus. I have a hard time believing that the first scene that we’re going to really see them or get to know them at is going to be inside this cafeteria. I just feel like there were some scenes missing in between there. These people talk on the bus. It was a strange way to get us into meeting this group.

**Craig:** Very.

**John:** Again, I don’t know what this movie actually is at the end of three pages, which is a problem. I’m assuming it’s an ensemble movie, that it’s not strict POV to any one person, because it felt like we would’ve had two scenes with a person if it was going to be their POV.

**Craig:** I’m going to guess that this involves vampires. That’s what I’m going to guess. I’m going to guess that Gabriel is not just a mushroom hunter, he’s a vampire hunter. He’s from Romania. Rah says, “Ha, vampires!” and Gabriel chuckles. “And inspiring mountains.” Feels like maybe there’s going to be some sort of summer camp horror movie thing going on that involves mushrooms somehow, which I’m saying as a guy that’s making a show that is not unrelated to mushrooms.

I think you put your finger on the problem. We need time to meet people before stuff happens. I need to know what he’s doing there. I need to know why I needed to see that thing in the beginning. Yes, we need to see people on the bus first talking to each other and grilling each other on why they’re doing something as bizarre as going to mushroom camp. Then I need a tour. Give me a tour. Orient me, something. Open the envelope.

**John:** I can open the envelope and tell you that I don’t think there’s vampires in here.

**Craig:** Oh, dammit.

**John:** The log line that person sent says, “A small retreat in Oregon promises its visitor a restful break from the demands of capitalistic society, but it soon becomes clear that the retreat’s talk of experimenting with medicinal properties of mushrooms has dark underpinnings.”

**Craig:** There’s something.

**John:** I guess there could still be vampires technically, but I think it’s much less likely.

**Craig:** Yeah, so some sort of zombie-ing or… I don’t know. Odd that this is about a break from the demands of capitalistic society but the advertising is promising you money. That may be part of the irony. I don’t know. I just think that basically, Marissa, you have an idea that no one else has. I assure you that there are no other mushroom camp movies. You need to orient us and be really careful about how you present moves in time, especially when you have three within three pages.

**John:** A lot.

**Craig:** That is telling people they’re in for a lot of whiplash.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s do our final Three Page Challenge, this one by Jordan Johnson. Help us out, Megana.

**Megana:** Maddy, 24, discusses death in voiceover as she speaks about different religions’ conceptions of death and parts of life. We see the corresponding images flash by on a projector until she gets to a picture of Olivia Carter, 24. Maddy reveals that Olivia was her best friend and that she killed herself three days ago. We then cut to Maddy cooking potato salad in the church kitchen. Evelyn, Olivia’s mom, expresses her gratitude for Maddy and takes her hands, asking Maddy to join her in prayer.

**John:** We should also stress that that voiceover continues beyond this point. She’s a character who can voiceover at any point during the story. She has voiceover power.

**Craig:** She has voiceover power, exactly. I guess the first thing that we notice when we look at the title page is it’s very graphic.

**John:** It’s really nice. Describe for our listeners driving their car someplace, describe this title page for us.

**Craig:** I don’t know if Jordan is a man or a woman. Jordan has created a very beautiful graphic title page that mimics what a title page of a program at a funeral or wake would look like. It’s got four crosses with lots of little beams in each corner and a little border around it, as it would. The title, Wake, is in this nice little scripty font, little swooshities underneath. Then instead of saying “written by Jordan Johnson,” it says “Funeral Arrangements by Jordan Johnson.” Then underneath that, in italics, it says, “The family of Olivia Carter sincerely appreciates your thoughts, prayers, and condolences.” This is very clever.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** I would go right for this if I saw this in a pile.

**John:** I think it’s really smartly done.

**Craig:** Really well done.

**John:** That typeface is Zap Chancery.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It was put on the first LaserWriter 2 printer, which it became ubiquitous and people used it for all the wrong things. This is actually an example.

**Craig:** Like funerals?

**John:** Funerals is fine for that, but people will try to use it for newsletters and [inaudible 00:46:30].

**Craig:** Please don’t do that.

**John:** I was really struck by the title page. Great. Really well done. This opening narration thing I think largely works, since this is Maddy. It’s her voiceover. “See this? This is what you get when you die… I guess if you’re Buddhist you’ll see this.”

**Craig:** Over that, it’s nothing. You see nothing, which is great. No, I’m sorry, you do see something. Sorry.

**John:** My biggest note here is I think you need to move these scene descriptions above the dialog in all of these cases. Then it actually makes much more sense.

**Craig:** That would make more sense. This is a very simple thing where you hear in voiceover Maddy’s brief announcement. This is what you would see if you’re a Buddhist when you die. This is what you see when you’re a Christian. This is what you see when you’re a Muslim, Hindu, or Jewish. All those things are very simple kind of projector images. Then she basically transitions to, I don’t know what you do see when you die, but I know what you will stop seeing, essentially. Then she gives a very interesting list of things.

**John:** Ending with eye-light. What did you take eye-light to mean, on Page 2?

**Craig:** That one was odd. I think it means just that there was light shining in her eyes. I don’t know what… Megana, are we running into a generational problem?

**Megana:** No, I also did not totally know what eye-light meant. I thought it meant the feeling of closing your eyes and having the sun shining on them.

**Craig:** It says, “We are on Liv’s face, showing bright and happy eyes.” I think what Jordan was intending was light in your eyes. When we’re shooting things, eye-lights, we do use those to put out little sparkles in your eye. That one was a little odd. What was lovely was I thought the progression of things that you don’t see anymore, this is what Jordan gave us. “No more sunrises. Or crepes. Or dimples.” That’s where we meet Liv for the first time and see her face. “No more sounds of a pin dropping on vinyl. Or watching thunderstorms in the Spring. Or eye-light.”

Then the eye-light brings us back to Liv’s picture, and says, “This is Liv. She’s my best friend. She killed herself 3 days ago. No more eggnog or Autumn or thrift stores.” That was kind of awesome, I thought. There are so many different ways of delivering what can often be a gloppy thing, which is somebody killed themself. You can get very melodramatic about it. I thought this was a very creative way in, that’s connecting Liv’s fate to a larger discussion about death and the afterlife, and also then tells me so much about Maddy, which is she doesn’t pause. She just rolls into this interesting, hyper-verbal way of describing things.

**John:** The next scene, which takes us to the end of the three pages, is in this church kitchen. “Maddy stirs the potato salad, adding in spices and whatever other gross things go into potato salad.”

**Craig:** Great. It’s disgusting.

**John:** It’s the right tone for it. It’s important I think when you have a centerpiece character like Maddy who is cynical. Having some tone being carried through into the scene description so helps. It makes it feel like the author and the central character are the same person.

**Craig:** I wish that we had just a little bit of a physical description of Maddy.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Other than her age, I don’t know anything about her, her hair, her clothes, her makeup, as is my want. There is mention further down the page of a woman named Pamela, who is working on a fruit salad at the other end of the kitchen. I think we would probably want to introduce her here earlier before Evelyn comes in, because when Evelyn enters, that’s when a new thing shifts. We don’t want to start meeting people that had already been there at that point.

**John:** I agree. The description of the kitchen is nice. It’s talking about the “yellow hue of an old church kitchen.” It says “cold LED tube lighting panels.” They’re actually fluorescent lighting panels. Those panels wouldn’t be LED, just fluorescent [inaudible 00:50:31] going for.

**Craig:** They sure would not. Jordan’s younger.

**John:** Jordan’s younger, I think.

**Craig:** I have no problem with that.

**John:** No, that’s absolutely fine. I like most of the scene that happens after this time. I thought it could be tighter and shorter. I think we could’ve gotten to the point of it a little bit quicker. I enjoy what Jordan’s doing on the page here. The choice to make all of Maddy’s voiceovers in bold is really smart, because even though there’s the little V.O. at the end, it can be confusing when characters are saying things in scenes and have voiceover power. Bolding those lines really helps.

**Craig:** Agreed, and agreed. I was really happy to see that. It helped me so much. This is why we say there are no rules. The rule is help me as the reader. I’m sure that a million screenwriting teachers will tell you you should not suddenly bold a character’s name in the middle of a script, but yeah, you should if it helps. In this case, it helped. I agree with you that Evelyn’s prayer could’ve been trimmed down. In editing, I know exactly what I would’ve trimmed it. The information we need is that Evelyn, she’s religious, whereas Maddy, not so much, and that she was Olivia’s mom. “Please bless the preparation of this food and the nourishment it will bring to our bodies. Please keep us all in your care today as we mourn the death of my sweet, sweet Olivia Michelle. Amen.” That’s all you need. The next chunk, you don’t need.

I loved Maddy’s commentary after Evelyn says to her, “You were a good friend to her, Maddy.” We hear Maddy’s thought in voiceover, which I think was great. Generally speaking, I loved it. I just loved these pages. I thought they were really well written. The scenes moved. I saw everything. I know so much about Maddy without anybody telling me anything about Maddy. I know so much about Liv and Maddy without anybody telling me.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** The creativity that led for this front page to be so interesting I think carried through. Well done, Jordan Johnson.

**John:** One other suggestion for how you can save some space on the page. On the top of Page 3, Evelyn has two lines. She goes, “Thank you for helping. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.” Then there’s two lines of scene description before we get to another Evelyn line, “Let me say a quick word over the food. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you two.” Parentheticals, takes their hands. “Let me say a quick a quick word over the food.” That gives you all you needed to do between those two lines, and it saves you some space on the page.

**Craig:** If you wanted to get across that Maddy was not even looking at Evelyn but just stays looking at the potato salad, you can say, “Maddy, her eyes focused on the potato salad, joins Pam and Evelyn as they hold hands.” Then Evelyn says, “Dear Lord.” There is a way to be a little bit more compressed there. If you’re not running into page issues, I’d rather the space, personally. You’re right, if you are, you need to squeeze some juice out of this. You’ll squeeze way more juice out of it by making the prayer shorter, which you can definitely do.

**John:** That way you won’t have to fluid morph in the cut.

**Craig:** Fluid morph.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the log line. “At the funeral of her best friend, brash and honest 24-year-old Maddy Palmer endures the suffocating etiquette of a traditional wake.”

**Craig:** That’s pretty much what we were getting there.

**John:** It’s interesting that it looks like the whole movie’s maybe at this wake, rather than going on past it. Not what I would’ve expected, but I’m curious what’s going to happen. I would read more pages, so that’s a good sign.

**Craig:** Wakes are notorious for going off the rails, because they are not like the stuffy funeral services. They’re meant to be more of a party and celebration, I guess. I’ve never been to a wake. Drinking is involved, as I recall.

**John:** It can be. I want to thank certainly our three people who submitted these pages, because they were so brave for us to talk through them, but the other 180 people who submitted their pages, because they could’ve been chosen as well. If you have your own pages that you want us to take a look at, you don’t mail them to Megana. Instead, you fill out a form. Go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a little form. You click some buttons. You attach your pdf. We could be talking about this on the next round of Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Megana, thank you for again the extraordinary self-abuse.

**Megana:** Of course. It’s my pleasure.

**Craig:** Make sure you enjoy in self-care.

**John:** Let’s answer one incredibly quick question that I know we actually have the answer to.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Matthew asks, “Hey, so in the new movie Watcher, I saw a credit I’ve never seen before. I Googled it, and I found nothing. It said ‘based on a screenplay by.'”

**Craig:** I feel like we answer this every day.

**John:** “What’s that about?” We did, but we’ll answer on this podcast as well.

**Craig:** “Based on a screenplay by” is a source material credit, the way that “based on a novel” or “based on a play” or “based on a song” is. What it means is that a screenplay was written early in the development of the project, oftentimes beginning the development of the project. That screenplay was not under the auspices of WGA contract. Why? Because it was written for a nonsignatory, or, as is more often the case, it was written for a nonsignatory but overseas. A lot of projects that originate in the UK for instance are not Writers Guild covered. They are rather written in the UK, where Writers Guild doesn’t have jurisdiction.

Then it gets either brought into another company, another company buys that thing from the first company, or, again more likely, the people developing it say, “Oh, we want to hire John August to rewrite this.” John only works under WGA contract, so now, lo and behold, boop, WGA contract. WGA credits, “written by,” “screenplay by,” “screen story by,” “story by,” all of those are a result of our collective bargaining agreement. They are available only to people that work under the Writers Guild collective bargaining agreement and not to anyone else. “Based on a screenplay by” means the first or early screenplay was not covered by the WGA.

**John:** Exactly. It could be that this screenplay was 40 years old but overseas. If it was written under WGA contract, even for Warners back in the day, it would still be part of this [inaudible 00:56:35] title.

**Craig:** Yes. We will answer this question many, many more times.

**John:** Many, many more times. Time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a book. It is The Secret History of Mac Gaming by Richard Moss. Craig, it’s a book I think you’ll enjoy.

**Craig:** Looking at the website.

**John:** It’s 480 pages long. It’s a big, thick, yellow book, comes out of the UK. It’s not new. I think it was first published in 2017, but this updated version has new more good stuff in it, or more new good old stuff in it. I had my Macintosh quite early on. I played a lot of games on Macintosh. Reading this book, I’m just remembering how different everything was, because this is pre-internet. To get a game, you had to have somebody give you that game on a disk. [inaudible 00:57:16] users group or find a shareware. Basically, college campuses were all about trading games back and forth. There are many great titles I remember from back in these days. Dark Castle, fantastic.

**Craig:** Of course. You would also get some quasi-free games if you subscribed to Macworld.

**John:** Macworld, MacUser, both.

**Craig:** There would be a floppy disk actually in the magazine that you could pop out. There were also some, literally just retype the code. People would just list code for stuff that you’d type in.

**John:** I don’t remember that for Macintosh stuff, but my initial Atari-

**Craig:** Apple II or something like that.

**John:** Yeah, Apple II, there were little games you could type in from the magazine. This was after that. The Macintosh was never really designed to be a gaming machine, and yet the people who would love to play games also loved the Macintosh. It was just a very natural fit.

**Craig:** Yes, it was, until at some point suddenly no one was making games for Mac at all, and it was all PC.

**John:** One company would be the one who would port all the big PC titles over to Macintosh, and they would come a year later, and they wouldn’t have the things you would want to see.

**Craig:** It wouldn’t be as good.

**John:** Then eventually, most stuff moved to being… Either you had a gaming PC that was literally a PC or you had a console that could just do so many things that you would never want your home computer to do.

**Craig:** Still to this day, if you’re playing off console, it’s almost certainly a PC, because there are PC rigs that are just built specifically for gaming. That’s great.

**John:** Anyway, this was a nice trip down memory lane. I don’t know how interesting this will be for people who didn’t have any of that firsthand history, because it would be like me reading about old rotary telephones or something. I don’t have that experience.

**Craig:** I do have the experience.

**John:** I do, but I-

**Craig:** I just don’t care.

**John:** I don’t care.

**Craig:** This is more nostalgia than anything else. This definitely feels like one of those nostalgia books.

**John:** The D and D book that you and I both loved, the Art and Arcana book, it’s like that but for Mac games.

**Craig:** Brought to us by my pal Kyle Newman. I have two Cool Things this week, both related to puzzles. The first is Ryan O’Shea, who was the first and only entry into my solve the Kevin Wald cryptic contest, challenge. By cryptic, I mean cryptics, multiple puzzles, three of them in fact, all extraordinarily hard, with so many layers that I believe you and Megana looked at Ryan’s solution and didn’t even understand the solution.

**John:** I have no idea.

**Megana:** No way.

**John:** Here’s the subject line on this email. “Have uncouth mercy, but not for me, to at its core deweaponize jerk Craig’s jigsaw alt.”

**Craig:** Let me translate, as I did for you guys. “Have uncouth mercy” means… Uncouth is a prompt to anagram. Anagram the word mercy, but not for me, so take M-E out of mercy, and anagram R-C-Y to C-R-Y. Then “to at its core deweaponize,” go to the core of the word deweaponize, which is the letter P. That is the letter directly in the middle of the word deweaponize. Now we have C-R-Y-P. “Jerk.” A synonym for a jerk is a tic, T-I-C. “Cryptic.” Then the definition part, “Craig’s jigsaw alt,” meaning cryptic puzzles are my alternative to jigsaws, which are not puzzles at all. Ryan’s solution was perfect and perfectly complete. He did a fantastic job. He did suggest that I’ve ruined him somehow. I’m glad. Good. I hope you’re ruined permanently, Ryan. Why should I be the only one? No, you did a wonderful job. I’m so proud and pleased.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Then my second Cool Thing is coming up. It just passed if you’re listening to this on a normal Tuesday. You still can access it. You still have time to get your name on the list of completionists. Mark Halpin, a friend of mine and perhaps the most, what I would say, elegant puzzle constructor in the world, meaning he himself not that elegant. No, he is, but his puzzles are elegant. Every year, with the exception of last year, every year for Labor Day weekend, he releases something he calls a Labor Day Extravaganza, which is a suite of usually somewhere around 10 puzzles, all which then feed into a meta puzzle. This is a pretty standard puzzle hunt kind of thing. His puzzles are so beautifully done. They are always wrapped together thematically by some kind of interesting narrative device, typically relating to stories, folklore, and mythology from various different cultures. He’s covered pretty much every culture I can think of.

His latest is called Cross Purposes. It launched, past tense, at 1 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, September 3rd. It is free, although there is an opportunity to tip him. I strongly encourage you to do so, because it’s not easy to build these things, and particularly not easy to build things as beautiful as a Mark Halpin Labor Day Extravaganza.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send your longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the Three Page Challenges that we discussed today. You’ll find transcripts there and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and they’re great, including the new Scriptnotes Bon Jovi T-shirt. You’ll find this at Cotton Bureau. When you get those in and ordered, you can wear them to our live shows that are coming up. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on senior year. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Senior year, that is our topic. It is the final year of high school in the US, both for our daughters, and a point of life that is frequently dramatized in movies. You see that a lot. There’s a movie I’m trying to set up which is all about senior year, because it’s such a big transition year. You are leaving one part of your life and moving on to this other part. It feels like a funeral for your younger self. Craig, what’s your recollection of senior year?

**Craig:** You could feel that there was a line that you were leaving a place where a lot of the challenge was to see if you could get into a good college. For a lot of people, senior year is also… You’re going to be confronted by having that breakup with that boyfriend or that girlfriend. You’re going to be driving to school instead of being driven to school. You are enough of an adult where you have access to certain things you didn’t have before, but not enough of an adult to… You can vote, but you can’t smoke, although you do. You feel like you’re on the verge of freedom, and you’re also getting away from home. That may very well be the next thing. This is your last hurrah with, for a lot of people, friends they’ve had since they were in kindergarten.

My daughter has gone to school in the La Cañada School District, which is a public school district where we live. She’s been in the public school system from kindergarten all the way through this year, her senior year. She has friends that she’s known since she was six. That’s a whole thing. It’s just so many transitions. The stuff that life fires at you and the speed with which it fires it at you when you are 17 or 18 is just astonishing.

**John:** I’m definitely noticing it’s the last firsts of a lot of things. It’s her last first day. It’s going to be the last musical that they’ll do at that school. It’s going to be the last time a lot of these things are going to happen. While there are some senior traditions, things that my daughter’s school always does, like the last day rituals and a senior trip, it’s recognizing that this is the final time certain things are going to happen is even more monumental for her.

**Craig:** I think as the year goes on, my daughter will be feeling this more and more. It’s easy now, because they just went back. They just went back, I don’t know, a couple weeks ago. As we get closer and closer to May, yeah, it’s going to be all sorts of stuff happening. It becomes almost like a yearlong celebration. Megana, you are way closer to senior year of high school than John or I. What do you remember, and how did you feel?

**Megana:** All of the things of feeling like you are on top and like you are like big dog on campus, but then I remember feeling so anxious about this looming question of what’s going to happen next year. I’m not going to have my friends or family around me. Where am I going to go to college? I feel like that question was looming over the horizon for the entire year in a way that maybe was the first time that I really experienced anxiety.

**Craig:** That was the last time, I’m sure.

**Megana:** Yeah, one and done.

**John:** Talk about that anxiety, because you were thinking about what’s going to happen next year, what colleges you’re going to get into. Once you knew where you were going to go to college, the stakes were suddenly much lower, weren’t they?

**Megana:** Amy is also applying to colleges. Any time she asks me for questions, I’m like, “Please don’t follow my example,” because I applied to too many schools, because I couldn’t make any decisions. I applied to them literally in the minutes before the application shut down. Then with Harvard, I got in. I think I got in on April 1st. I remember telling people, and they were like, “Oh, sick joke,” because everyone assumed I was just pulling an April Fools.

**John:** Oh, man.

**Craig:** Were you stupid? Was that why? Were they like, “Oh my god, Megana is the dumbest person we know.”

**Megana:** I also love April Fools. I think that’s the bigger component.

**Craig:** That may be it. Got it.

**Megana:** I was just so last minute on everything that I feel like I… I feel like that has continued throughout my life, where it’s like, I don’t know how much I got to enjoy it, because I was putting off decisions for so long.

**John:** Craig, did you encounter senioritis?

**Craig:** No, because we had been terrified by possibly urban legends, possibly not, of kids who had blown their last semester of high school and then the college rescinds the offer. The colleges said, when I got into college, they were like, “Yeah, just so you know, of course, we will be reviewing your final grades. Make sure that they’re… ” You’re like, “Oh god, I don’t want to fumble.” Also, I was in a race. I was in a valedictorian race. I couldn’t let up. Couldn’t let up.

**Megana:** Did you win the race?

**John:** Did you win?

**Craig:** No. I was the salutatorian.

**Megana:** Which is the cooler torian.

**Craig:** I think so. It was down to 100ths of a point or whatever. This is all stupid, by the way. If you find yourself currently as a senior in a race, it doesn’t matter, unless you’re really good at giving speeches. Then you’ll get some love for a good speech. I kept it on. I kept the heat on, but without the panic of, oh no, the unknown. I had a sense, “Okay, this is where I’m going to school. This is what it’s going to be.” Then you get the whiplash of having gone from the top of the heap in your high school to once again being a nobody that doesn’t know anything and is at the bottom of the pecking order when you get to college. The difference though when you get to college is… You can get razzed by the upperclassmen going into junior high or to high school. In college, no one cares. It’s the recognition you’re never going to be that little kid who’s getting picked on again. That just all goes away.

**Craig:** Yes, that part goes away. You’re not going to get bullied. I do recall, as a young heterosexual male, that there was definitely a certain kind of sexual politics going on where freshman heterosexual males were… It was just tougher. It was tougher. All the girls were looking upwards, and so you had to hustle. (singing) I did. I did. You know why?

**John:** You did, and you met your wife.

**Craig:** I did, I met my wife, although that wasn’t until I was a junior, so I had a few years of hustling. Then she put a ring on it.

**John:** Aw. I literally had one foot out the door my senior year because I was going to… Basically I had enough credits to graduate early. I only had to go to school in the mornings.

**Megana:** What?

**John:** I went to classes in the mornings, and then I took a class at CU Boulder in the afternoons. I was only halfway on campus anyway. I was running the high school paper. I don’t know, it was a good transition out. It worked really well for me. I felt like I was already leaving before I was officially leaving.

**Craig:** Interesting. Interesting.

**John:** Really Mike was the same situation. My husband was taking classes at OSU during his senior year too. We both had a situation where we really weren’t full-time high school students senior year.

**Craig:** He went to The Ohio State University?

**John:** The Ohio State University.

**Craig:** That’s one of the dumbest things.

**John:** It is one of the dumbest things. It has to be continuously mocked.

**Craig:** The. Please.

**Megana:** I feel like I can’t sit here and let this continue. It is The Ohio State University.

**Craig:** It is, because, what, there are other ones that are pretending to be Ohio State University, but we are The Ohio State University? Those are ripoff Ohio State Universities. Where are the other ones? There are no other ones.

**Megana:** There’s Ohio University.

**John:** Are there other OSUs that are not the one in Columbus, and so it’s only the one in Columbus is The Ohio State University?

**Craig:** No, there’s just The Ohio State University.

**Megana:** I was always under the impression that it was because of Ohio University that they did that. There’s Oregon State University.

**John:** Why would that work?

**Craig:** Why don’t they just underline the word State, Ohio State University? No, they stick the word The on it, which no one else does, for good reason.

**John:** Maybe we should be The Scriptnotes Podcast.

**Craig:** That’s a perfect analogy. Welcome to The Scriptnotes Podcast. That’s just ridiculous. The odds are that neither one of us survive to see October based on what we just did, because man, I’ll tell you, Ohio fans, phew.

**John:** That’s why we keep these conversations in the Premium feed, so at least we’re getting money for the hate coming our way.

**Craig:** Yes, there will be hate coming our way, and also long emails. Oh my god, so many long emails. “This is why,” blah blah blah, blah blah blah. I’m already making fun of your email. Don’t send it.

**John:** The end of high school is also graduation. Craig, did you have a good high school graduation?

**Craig:** I did. High school graduation went well.

**John:** Did you have to give a salutatorian speech?

**Craig:** I did. I gave a salutatorian-

**John:** What was your topic?

**Craig:** For the life of me, I cannot remember.

**John:** Do you have it written down anywhere?

**Craig:** Not anymore. It was written down, but we’re talking about something that I think I probably wrote it by hand and then typed it into my Macintosh and then printed it on my Brother Daisywheel printer. Oh, Megana, you never knew the joys of a Daisywheel printer.

**Megana:** I’m totally lost here.

**John:** Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

**Craig:** Basically, it was like an electric typewriter. You would say, okay, print this. It would pull all the text into its memory. Then there was a wheel, a disc, a plastic disc, and at the tips of it were the letters. It would spin and hammer the letter. It was like the world’s fastest typist. It was loud and so much slower than a laser printer, not even close. I probably did that. Where it went… I tried to erase my past as best I could.

**John:** We’ve noticed that. We have video footage of Ted Cruz from his freshman year. I wonder if somebody filmed Craig’s salutatorian speech.

**Craig:** I think that’s wonderful.

**John:** If someone who’s listening can track that down, that would’ve been from 1989?

**Craig:** Eight.

**John:** ’88.

**Craig:** That was spring of 1988 in Freehold, New Jersey. If somebody has the video of my salutatory address, we’d love to see it. If you have it and it’s on VHS, we’ll gladly pay for the transfer.

**John:** Good stuff. Craig, Megana, thank you for a good senior year.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you. See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

Links:

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* [Made-Up Words Trick AI Text-To-Image Generators](https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/made-up-words-trick-ai-text-to-image-generators) Discover Magazine
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* [Secret History of Mac Gaming](https://secrethistoryofmacgaming.com/)
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* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/565standard.mp3).

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** Okay, okay, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 562 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, good lord, it’s a hodgepodge.

**Craig:** Hodgepodge.

**John:** We’ll be discussing animation, short films, post scriptum depression, parallel stories, persistence, and the Monty Hall problem.

**Craig:** Oh good, we’re back to that.

**John:** Some of those are listener questions. Some are just things we’re encountering in the world. Some are follow-up on a Bonus Segment, which is kind of cheating, but that’s okay, because this is our show.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s our show. We can do whatever we want, and also aforementioned hodgepodge.

**John:** It’s a hodgepodge. Craig, what will we do in our Bonus Segment?

**Craig:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’re going to discuss the terrific board game Codenames. I don’t know if I would call it a board game. I would call it a party game.

**John:** It’s a party game, but party game makes it feel like it’s just like charades or something.

**Craig:** We’ll discuss the terrific game.

**John:** Game, yeah.

**Craig:** Word game.

**John:** Not a video game.

**Craig:** It’s a word game. We’ll discuss the terrific-

**John:** Word game.

**Craig:** … social group word game. This is so hard to do. Codenames. It’s Codenames. That’s what we’re talking about, including our favorite tips and house rules. If you’re not playing Codenames, you’ll want to after we’re done with you in our Bonus Segment.

**John:** It’s basically a sales pitch for the game Codenames.

**Craig:** For Codenames.

**John:** It’s an inexpensive game that you will love. It’s a big show. We got to get started on here.

**Craig:** Hodgepodge.

**John:** A bit of news. Last week a group of 400 animation writers and showrunners, myself included, signed a pledge stating that, quote, “We are committed to fighting for WGA coverage on all animation projects we create, write, and produce going forward. We want to be treated equal to live-action writers, not less than.” We’ve talked about this on a show before.

As a refresher, if you’re writing an animated project, you are not guaranteed WGA coverage unless you specifically negotiate for it at the outset. Unlike in live-action, WGA coverage is not automatic, and it can be very hard to get, but it is doable. I was able to get it for an animated project recently, as have several of the other showrunners who’ve signed the pledge. The hope is, with these writers and showrunners saying that they plan to fight for it on their projects, we’ll see more animated projects where the writers work under WGA deals with higher minimums, residuals, paid parental leave. It’s not going to happen overnight. The only way it happens will be writer by writer, project by project. We’ll put a link in the show notes with more details. Now, Craig, a bit of housekeeping-

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** … and some follow-up. You will be glad to know that Seasons 9 and 10 of Scriptnotes are now up in the Premium Feed, because I know that’s a thing you’ve been asking for.

**Craig:** So many seasons.

**John:** So many seasons.

**Craig:** So many. Wait, were those not in the Premium Feed?

**John:** They were in the Premium Feed. Here’s the challenge is that we now have so many Premium episodes that the feed gets to be too big, so we have to lop off them in 50-episode chunks, or else your podcast player will just crash as it tries to load them.

**Craig:** We’re now crashing software we’ve done this so long.

**John:** That’s really where we’re at is just overwhelming things. If you are a Scriptnotes Premium Member and you are listening to back seasons, and you’re getting into the 450, the 500 range, you’ll now find those in Seasons 9 and 10, which are now going to be available through the scriptnotes.net.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** Love it. One other thing, Highland, which is the software that I make, we have a student edition. Now that we’re going back to school, I just want to remind our listeners that if you would like a screenwriting app to be writing your screenplays in, you can get one for free, the full version for free. If you’re a student, you go to Quote-Unquote Apps, and you will see that you can get the license as a college student or a high school student for Highlands, which is the app that I write all my stuff in.

**Craig:** This is your way of getting them addicted to Highland for free, and then later when it’s Highland 3 and they’re out of school, now you’ve got them.

**John:** We’ve got them.

**Craig:** You’ve got them.

**John:** For these next two years, if you want a really good application to be writing a script in that is not going to cost you $99 a year, there you go.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Some follow-up. Megana, can you help us out with Andrew?

**Megana Rao:** Andrew wrote in and said, “Listening to last week’s How Would This Be A Movie segment, I was curious if any of you had come across the newsletter at The Ankler called The Optionist.”

**Craig:** That’s a no.

**Megana:** It offers maybe six to eight articles or books each Friday that are available to be optioned and who to contact if you’re interested. It was fun until it went behind a subscriber paywall. This is the part that seems insane to me.”

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Megana:** “Subscriptions to The Optionist are $250 a month-”

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**Megana:** “… or $2,500 a year. That’s two months free if you buy the year up front. I would love to hear your thoughts on this price point. It’s bananas to me. How much does this make How Would Be a Movie worth if it was paywalled?”

**John:** That’s really going to be our future business plan is forget scriptnotes.net, it’s all How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** Paywall everything.

**John:** I was not familiar with The Optionist either, but I will say that there are people who do this for a living. I was talking with Todd Hoffman, who runs a service called StoryScout. What they do is they have people who literally, they’re reading all the newspapers. They have deals with all the newspapers to get all the stuff. They’re sifting through it every week, and they’re like, “These are interesting stories.” There are people who pay them subscriptions for that. Hey, if the business model works for them, great. I think what they’re doing though is not just, “Here’s a story,” but they are actually contacting the people who are involved in the story, whoever you need to get for life rights. They can help you put together a bundle of things that might be useful for a studio. That’s not a thing that you or I or any other writer is going to be approaching. It’s something that Sony is paying however much a month. It’s not something that you and I are doing.

**Craig:** Andrew, that’s exactly what’s happened. They launched this to let people know, “Here we are, and this is how it works,” but the paywall at $250 a month is essentially an indication to you that this is not for you.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** This is a business-to-business service. $250 a month for production companies or studios is nothing. This reminds me a little bit of the way Variety used to work. Megana, do you know how expensive Variety used to be when you were a baby?

**Megana:** I do not.

**Craig:** It was like a thousand dollars a year for Variety or something like that.

**John:** For the physical print edition. It was crazy.

**Craig:** It was insane. It was some insane number, because every day there would be Daily Variety. Daily Variety was like eight pages. It was not a large magazine.

**Megana:** This was all physical?

**Craig:** Physical. There was no internet version back then, because there was no internet back then. There was, but not the way it is now. The only Variety and Hollywood Reporter that existed were print. It would be delivered daily to each office. There would be the same copy of Variety on the same coffee table, scattered about a thousand offices in Hollywood, lawyers and executives and producers. It was ridiculously expensive, because you had to get it, or else you didn’t know what was going on. If anything got shooketh by the internet, it was entertainment industry reporting.

**John:** Completely. When I was in the Stark Program at USC, one of the perks we got is all 25 of us in the Stark Program got our own copies of Variety and I think Hollywood Reporter too in our mailboxes every day.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** That was a godsend, because really it was the only way to get a sense of who was where and what was happening, what deals were happening. It was really important. I think we have to credit, honestly, Nikki Finke and Deadline for really breaking the back of-

**Craig:** Credit.

**John:** Acknowledge Nikki Finke.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Of that form of journalism and the business model of that journalism, because she was doing the same kinds of scoop reporting that was happening in Variety and Hollywood Reporter, but it was just free on the internet, and that changed everything.

**Craig:** It certainly undercut them to the point where everything just came down to what it is now, and it’s less expensive to publish something on the internet than it is to publish it in actual print. It ain’t the way it used to be. That’s for sure. I remember going to newsstands. This is a typical poor kid in Hollywood move. Go to the newsstand, pretend to be browsing, randomly pick up the Daily Variety and, oh, just flip through.

**John:** Oh, flip through it.

**Craig:** The guys that ran those things all knew. They were like, “Nope. Put it back.” They were literally like, “You’re buying it. You’re not reading it. You’re buying it. That’s it. Or put it back.” They were so tired of douchey, pathetic wannabe screenwriters reading their Variety for free, such as myself.

**John:** Craig, do you read any physical magazines at this point?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I will read, I think I’ve mentioned before, Technology Review and sometimes Wired. If I’m at the airport, I’ll go through the bookstand there. I’m always fascinated by Harvard Business Review, because that thing is $25 a copy. It’s just crazy to me.

**Craig:** Who is that for?

**John:** It’s for people who want to read about Harvard business stuff, I guess. It’s very much in-depth case study things.

**Craig:** Weird.

**John:** I feel like probably if you’re an MBA, it’s the kind of thing you read.

**Craig:** Maybe on a plane.

**John:** On a plane.

**Craig:** I feel like if you are interested in reading the Harvard Business Review on a flight, you have other stuff you should be doing on that flight. You got business to do, hopefully.

**John:** Do your business. You’re a business [crosstalk 00:09:10]

**Craig:** Do your business.

**John:** Do your business.

**Craig:** You do your business. Don’t read about the Harvard business.

**John:** Megana, can you help us out with more questions or follow-up?

**Craig:** Harvard Business is Megana’s real nickname.

**Megana:** The Harvard Business Review is good though. Just a little plug.

**Craig:** A little plug.

**John:** Megana went to Harvard.

**Craig:** She sure did.

**Megana:** IP Curious in Seattle asks, “In Episode 559 during the How Would This Be a Movie segment, when discussing the Indian cricket scam, John and Craig said that you wouldn’t have to buy anything because you’d be making up most of the movie. My question is, when dealing with a true story with actual people, how much freedom do you have to invent a plot? Do you need to change the name of the main character if you’re basing a plot on something in their life but not following exactly what happened?”

**John:** I would say yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, usually. We’ve sort of answered this before. There is no hard answer for this, IP Curious in Seattle.

**John:** There isn’t.

**Craig:** What happens is there’s this weird needle that moves back and forth, and you let the attorneys at the company determine it for you. Some companies are tougher about this than others. Generally speaking, if you’re dealing with a true story, if you’re taking inspiration from a true story, you are going to have to change events and names. Certainly names. If you are using actual people’s names, you can, but there are way more restrictions on you. You have to be really careful about not defaming them. If you’re going to start inventing stuff and be free, why not just change the name anyway if it doesn’t have any value? With the true story itself, that’s a negotiation with the lawyers to see is this going to be too identifying, are they going to sue us for defamation if you do this or that. Generally speaking, if you’re inspired by a true story, change the names. You’re going to want to change the plot anyway, and you’ll be fine. That’s generally the case.

**John:** I would recommend IP Curious go back and listen to the episode with Liz Hannah and Liz Meriwether talking about the two series that they were doing which were based on actual events. Both of them had situations where these real life people are going to be characters in this and we’re going to use their names, and we have to be careful about this. There are other places where we’re inventing characters to do this function, and those are brand new people. That decision about when you’re doing that and how closely they resemble people in the real world are going to be factors that are going to be discussed with lawyers and other folks down the road. Craig did the same thing in Chernobyl. Some of those people are based on historical figures, but some of them are creations for the series. You’re always going to be making those choices about how you’re doing stuff.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** How about another question, Megana?

**Megana:** Janelle from San Diego wrote in and said, “I have never written in but had to start writing this email before I finished listening to Episode 560, because I could not believe my ears when I-”

**Craig:** Couldn’t believe. Couldn’t believe her ears.

**Megana:** “I could not believe my ears when I heard you tell Leah that there isn’t an audience for short films.”

**Craig:** There isn’t.

**Megana:** “As parents of two young children, my husband and I find it hard to find time to watch a feature film or follow a series, especially if the content is for adult eyes only.”

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**Megana:** “We delight in being able to watch some quality entertainment in the 20 minutes before-”

**Craig:** Megana put some spin on that.

**Megana:** “In the 20 minutes between putting the kids to bed and no longer being able to ignore the fact that neither of them is sleeping. Our friends feel the same, and it is great to be able to get together and discuss something other than the latest Pixar or Cocomelon.”

**Craig:** Great. You’ve found the audience, Janelle. It’s you and your husband and some of your friends. Is that an audience for short films?

**John:** I think audience is really the key word here. You and I were using audience in a different way than Janelle’s using the word audience.

**Craig:** Clearly.

**John:** You and I are using audience for market, like is there a way to make money off of these things.

**Craig:** There isn’t.

**John:** Generally, there isn’t. There are no short film tycoons.

**Craig:** No. Exactly. Janelle, we certainly weren’t suggesting that no one has ever seen a short film, because that seems to be the premise of your complaint here. Of course people have seen them. What we’re saying is there is no substantial audience of the kind to financially support a thriving, profitable short film industry. That’s just a fact. If you’re making a short film specifically because you want it to be seen by lots and lots of people, it won’t be. If you’re making a short film to practice, if you’re making a short film as a calling card, if you’re making a short film because you just have a passion to, all amazing reason. In fact, I would imagine most accomplished short film creators are very aware of the limited nature of the audience for short films, meaning extraordinarily limited, meaning basically you and your husband. Seriously, come on, Janelle, you know what we meant, right? Come on.

**John:** I want to state on the record that we are a pro short film podcast.

**Craig:** We love short films.

**John:** We’re also a pro reality podcast.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** Which is that you are not going to be making money off of that short film that you’re making. Make it for art. Make it for fun. Make it for practice. Make it for all those reasons. If you choose to make a short film, Inneresting from this last week was actually all about short films. It was the post I did way back in 2008. I was blogging about this in 2008, about short films and some just general guidance when you’re thinking about short films, because I see people who try to make short films are just small features, and that doesn’t work. Short films are their own form. They have to have one clear idea, one problem that is solved for the course of that one film. I’ll point you to a post on this. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** Janelle didn’t even list any of the short films she’s seen that she likes.

**John:** Janelle, write back in and tell us what short films you loved recently.

**Craig:** Just so we can spread some positivity, since you and your husband are super into them. Since there isn’t an audience, let’s at least help them find one, a little mini audience, by promoting them.

**John:** We have quick follow-up to that follow-up. Do you want to try this question from Joel?

**Megana:** Yes. Joel from Moorpark, California wrote in and said, “I had a chance to enjoy your short film God and noted how the end plays Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves. I’m curious if and how you secured rights for the song.”

**Craig:** If.

**John:** If. Honestly, if is a more interesting question now than when I made the film. I absolutely did officially get the rights to Walking on Sunshine. It cost maybe $2,000, which was a lot, given the limited budget for the film, but it was worth it for that moment, because Melissa hums it at one point, and then we actually play it over the end credits. For both of those uses, I needed to have the rights to the song. I needed those rights to the song, because if I were going to put this in festivals, which it played a couple places, they would ask if those rights were cleared. That was a thing that I had to be able to show, that those rights are cleared. They’re cleared in perpetuity.

A thing that’s happened in the meantime though, and I think Joel’s aware of this, is that you see a lot of things on YouTube that do not have music rights cleared because they’re using songs that exist out in the world. They get away with that because YouTube has overall licensing agreements with different artists. Even though their algorithms are detecting that that song is in there, they are monetizing it in a way that the artist is making some money. There are ways it can be figured out.

I think you’ll see some stuff on YouTube that the rights would never clear for those songs. Anything you’re doing officially, that you’re going to submit for a competition, you’re going to need to declare those rights. It’s a hassle. It generally is a hassle. You are tracking down who the music publisher is. You are going to them, asking for these specific sync rights and the publishing rights to be able to use it in your thing. I went through a music supervisor who did the music clearances for Go. That was a luxury I had. Even the short films we did back at USC, we had to clear those rights. It was a hassle.

**Craig:** It’s a hassle. No way around it. There’s no if. You do need to do it.

**John:** You do it. You do it. I would say that you don’t need those rights until you are going to do the finished version of it. Obviously, as you’re temping songs into things, or if you’re just doing scratch versions, you don’t get those rights until you actually know, okay, we’re really using this song, and then we’re going to get the contracts and pay the money to do it. For things that are internal presentations, you’re not going to do it. For things that are going to go out in the world, you’re going to want to clear those rights.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Let’s do some follow-up on the Monty Hall problem.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** This is something we talked about in our Bonus Segment last week. We were talking about when do you intervene with stupid people.

**Craig:** That’s a title of an article in the Harvard Business Journal, I’m sure.

**John:** I will say the Monty Hall problem is not about stupid people. Very many smart, smart people have a hard time intuiting the logic behind it.

**Craig:** Almost everyone.

**John:** I want to do a little follow-up here, because it came upon us spontaneously, and we were talking through it. Craig was right in that ultimately the two thirds/one third solution is how it sorts out. Let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. Craig, describe the Monty Hall problem for people who weren’t listening.

**Craig:** A classic problem. You have three doors. Behind one of the doors is a car that you can win. Behind the other two doors are goats, because in this Monty Hall problem, goats are bad. No one wants one, although goats do have some value. Monty Hall, the host of Let’s Make a Deal, says, “Go ahead and pick a door that you think the car’s behind.” You pick door number one. At that point, Monty opens door number three and reveals that behind door number three is a goat. Now he says to you, “Do you want to stick with door number one, or do you want to switch to door number two?” You have a choice. Most people will say at that point it’s a 50/50 choice, you’re choosing between 1 of 2 doors, but in fact, you should switch, because it is not a 50/50 choice. It’s a one third/two thirds choice. You have a two thirds chance of getting the car behind door number and only a one third chance behind door number one.

The very simple way we talked about this is the only way you’re winning the car if you say, if you keep the door you picked initially, is if you picked it correctly the first time, and there’s a one out of three chance. By eliminating that other possibility of door number three, you now have new information. The new information is that door number two is more likely than door number one, twice as likely, in fact, to have a car behind it.

**John:** One of the things we were wrestling with is that I can kind of get that and it still doesn’t feel right. There’s still some sort of problem. I looked at the Wikipedia article on it, which is actually. I recommend everyone take a look at it. This first became popularized by Marilyn vos Savant, who wrote a weekly column for Parade, was talking about it, and she said that we should definitely switch. Everyone was like, “You can’t possibly switch.” One of the things she pointed out, which I think is a really helpful way of getting over our brain problem of it, is imagine instead of three doors, there are a million doors. You picked one of a million doors. Then they take away all the other doors and say it’s either behind the door you picked or this other door. Then you have to think about, oh, I had a one in a million chance the first time, and now it’s like, oh.

**Craig:** It’s definitely behind the other door.

**John:** It’s going to be behind the other door. That really helps me figure that out.

**Craig:** You eliminate 999,999,998 of the doors, leaving behind the one you initially picked and one other door. The car is behind the other door. You are right that the limited number of doors can really mess with our heads, because it just feels like nothing important has changed, but in fact, something important has changed. This is a weird one. It’s like you said. It is a problem that has, what’s called fooled or misled a lot of people, including people who study these things. It was so hard for people to wrap their mind around it.

**John:** Let’s also talk about the decision. If you’re the contestant who is deciding, “Oh, do I stick with the first door or do I switch?” there are some natural biases that kick in. The article also talks through what those are. We have what’s called the endowment effect. People tend to overvalue the probability that they were right the first time. It’s a loss aversion. They don’t want to lose what they already had. There’s a status quo bias as well. You’re more comfortable to stick with what you’ve got rather than take a risk.

**Craig:** When you’re playing games of chance, the entire premise is that you are going to get lucky. We tend to associate our luck with our choices in gambling, as opposed to what’s happening. If I’m playing roulette, and I put everything on 28, and 28 comes up, my luck is about the fact that I chose 28. That’s where I got lucky. It has nothing to do with the bouncing ball. It was just doing what it’s doing. We do overvalue the choices we make. That’s why it feels bad. It’s almost disloyal. Also, we have been told all of our lives to stick with your gut, and it will feel worse. If we lose with the choice we made initially, it won’t feel as bad as if we lose by giving it away somehow and switching.

**John:** I want to frame this in terms of characters making choices. This is all about choices. Characters I think naturally have an instinct at the start of a story to want to keep things the way they have always been. They’re pushing to get away from it, but generally they’re hearing that call to adventure. They may ignore that call to adventure, because they know what they have, and they don’t want to risk losing what they have. That’s a very natural thing. We encounter characters at the beginning of stories that way. They’re also facing a choice, generally later on in the story, where in order to achieve that final goal, they may risk everything they’ve gotten through all up to that point. Now they’re at this one place. They don’t want to take that last risk and basically just change doors in order to get that final prize. Those are real things that characters are facing in almost every story you can imagine.

**Craig:** Absolutely. When they lose something initially, what they’re trying to do is get back to it. They love their door. They love door one. Someone says, “You can’t have door number one anymore,” and they’re like, “Okay, I’ll open some other doors, but the point is to get back to my door number one. I love it.” Then eventually, where things get really bad is when they suddenly realize, “There’s nothing behind any of these doors. Doors are not correct. I should be doing something else entirely.” You realize that you’ve been living a false choice. That’s when characters are at their lowest, I think.

**John:** The only way to win the game is not to play the game.

**Craig:** Is not to play.

**John:** Craig, this last week I was working on a new script that I’m writing. I was encountering a thing which I’d seen before, but I’d never felt it the same way. I’m curious your perspective on this. The thing I’m writing has multiple storylines. The storylines don’t directly interact until the very end of the story. I can cut freely between the two of them, which is really, of course, helpful. Movies do this. TV shows do this all the time.

A thing I was finding though is that as a reader and as an audience, we want the same amount of time to be happening in both of them. We have a strange issue about days and nights happening. Basically, if it went to night in one of the storylines, it would be weird that it didn’t feel like it was night in the other one. Cutting back and forth between the two of them, there’s just a weird time expectation when we have multiple storylines happening, even if it’s not strict story logic. You always encounter things where it’s like, this is impossible because they are on different sides of the earth, and it shouldn’t be day in both places. I’m curious, in your features, but also in your TV show, have you encountered this issue in having to move some scenes around just because it feels like… This is also a thing you may be doing in editorial as well. It feels like the time is not working between the two different storylines.

**Craig:** This is an essential part of structure and the hardware of designing these shows or movies, because people need to understand where they are, and time is part of where they are. Cinematographers hate when I say this. I’ve said it before. I think there are three times that we can show. We can show dark, we can show light, and we can show in between. That’s basically it. If we need to know more specific levels of time, we need to indicate those with clocks or with titles, which is fine. That’s a technique.

When moving back and forth between timelines, if we need to, we have to plan it out. This is something I do with first ADs, where you write out, and with a script supervisor, what day is this. Our script coordinator actually went through and would always be like, “Okay, this is now production day four,” not meaning how many shooting days, but in the progression of what we do and to track where we are in days. It’s actually really important to do. When you’re pushing together two different stories, and you want one to be in the day, and you want the next one to be at night, or vice versa, particularly when you’re going from night to day, you need probably something to indicate the passage of time before you get to the B-side of that. An exterior shot. It’s now night.

**John:** I literally had to have an establishing shot, which wasn’t going to feel necessary, but I realized, oh, that’s actually genuinely there. It made me also realize that a lot of times in Game of Thrones when we’re going back to one of those storylines, there’s a big establishing shot, because weirdly, you just needed some time to sit and let it be a different time and different place before you got into these things.

**Craig:** We have a natural… Our minds. Thank God, because this is why editing works. Our minds will just smush things together. If I show you somebody in a basement talking, and then I show you a scene of somebody walking around in a room, we will often go, “Oh, that room must be above that basement.” We just make those connections instantly. We often need some kind of indication that something has changed. Sometimes it can be sound. We can use sound, so it’s very clear we’re in a different kind of spot, or score or something. When it comes to time, nothing is as useful as showing what the outside looks like, because that is in our cavewoman, caveman brains. Where is sun? That is time.

**John:** It’s also occurring to me that different projects, different series will establish their own grammar for what they’re going to do in terms of how time works in their shows. Station Eleven has giant title cards that say “7 days earlier.” You’re flipping around so much in times, you stop obsessing about it in a way. It’s okay that it’s a little bit impressionistic. I would say Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women does the same kind of thing where you’re free-floating between these different times, and they’re different ages, and it just all works, because thematically stuff is moving forward, as opposed to Lost, which sets a very clear, like, okay, from each episode, one character will have a flashback to earlier things. Those flashbacks will progress forward in time, but they’re not tethered to any one thing happening on the island and the real world clock ticking on the island. It’s a very different way of going about things than other shows, which might be running two parallel timelines.

**Craig:** I think television narrative is becoming more and more complicated. I think Lost was viewed as a bit of a brain teaser for people at the time, and now it’s just what people do, screwing around with time and fooling people with time and location and places. Do you remember how you felt when you got to that point in the third act of Silence of the Lambs, where you realized, “Wait wait wait, that’s not his house. They went to that house, and she’s going to that house.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That amazing misdirection-

**John:** That reveal.

**Craig:** … preyed on our natural ability to put locations together. Study that one, folks, and realize what you’re up against, because what you don’t want to do is not be in control of that phenomenon. If you’re going to mess with it, mess with it intentionally, but just know that it’s real.

**John:** Megana, have you seen all of Yellowjackets?

**Megana:** I have, yes.

**John:** How does time work in Yellowjackets? I’ve only seen the first two episodes. Over the course of the series, we’re intercutting between present day and the past. Can a lot of time happen in the past over an episode, or is it more limited?

**Megana:** It does feel more limited. The past is a survival story about when their plane crashed. The teaser starts with a flashback that is after the flashback that we see through the series. It’s a couple of years after the plane crash or something.

**John:** That’s a reveal that they get to you over the course of the series, that you’re leading up to that moment?

**Megana:** Yeah, it seems like both the present timeline and the flashback are moving from a set point, except for that teaser, I guess.

**John:** That’s great. How about Where the Crawdads Sing. I see you have this on the list, but I have not read it or seen it.

**Megana:** They structured it where in the present timeline she’s awaiting her court date, but then it goes in flashback through her entire life. Most of the present timeline is very dark. She’s in this cell. Then you get all of the daylight scenes through the flashbacks. I was curious, cutting between these things, is it one of those things where it’s uncomfortable to see it being day in both of the timelines, or do you have to consciously switch between them?

**Craig:** I think that’s okay. You mean when you go from 2022 to 1982, can you go day to day?

**Megana:** Right.

**Craig:** Yeah, you could absolutely do that. You just need to design the transition in such a way that you get an instant signifier that something very… The corny version is someone’s walking around, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I’m something something,” and then you cut to Madonna playing on the radio, and someone walks around with feathered hair, and you’re in the ’80s. You need some kind of indication, or else it’ll take a moment or two. People will wonder, especially with clothes. If the clothes aren’t super obviously cheesy time period, you might not realize that it’s a different time period.

**John:** Absolutely. Some shows will rely on that misdirection. Obviously, the pilot to This is Us used that misdirection. You assume that this is all taking place in one timeline. You realize that you’re actually in two different timelines and establishing the grammar of the show, which is always going to be moving back from those timelines.

In Big Fish, we have the present day storyline, and then we have the fantasy storyline. Those are examples of every time I’m moving into a fantasy story, and to think about what is the transition into that and what is the transition out of that. Almost everything I wrote in the script really was carried out as the transitions to get us into and out of those places, because it was important to make it feel deliberate when we’re moving into one of those stories, so we could keep moving stuff forward. Again, all the fantasy stories did move forward in time, which was important. I wasn’t just flashing back to any random moment.

**Craig:** The other transitional element you have is a character. If you’re going into a character’s alternate self back in time, forward in time, in a fantasy world, their appearance, the way they match in, that stuff can sometimes bring you back in time. You don’t need to go from day to night or night to day. That’s not an essential part of time shifting.

**John:** Cool. Megana, you have a question about finishing up projects.

**Megana:** John from Madison, Wisconsin wrote, “I just came off my first weekend on set shooting a short I wrote.”

**John:** Short films.

**Megana:** “It was one of the best experiences of my life hearing and seeing amazing actors bring alive images and lines that lived in my head for so long. It was really overwhelming. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. Now it’s Monday morning, and I’m blue as hell. Is this normal? I feel a loss, like someone has died or left me. What is this, and how do I move past it? I can imagine the advice to write something new, but that feels like telling the newly widowed to just go find someone else. Have you guys ever felt this? How do you deal with it?”

**Craig:** John, have you ever felt this?

**John:** I’ve felt generally relief at the end of a project, but I do get what John is expressing overall is that your identity and your excitement, you were building up to do this thing, and you got to do it with a group of people, and hopefully it turned out great, and then it’s done. It’s just like college is done or a semester is done. There was great stuff. It was an adventure. Now that adventure is over. You can feel kind of at sea.

**Craig:** I do feel this. I feel this intensely, almost every time. I feel this, honestly, when I finish writing a script. I really feel it when I’m done with shooting something. You did a weekend, and you’re missing it. I did a year, John from Madison. I talk to Bella and Pedro all the time, and just because we’re bummed. We’re sad. We miss each other. We miss the life.

Something that Bella was saying that is very true is when you’re shooting, it gives your life this sense of incredible structure and purpose that you just normally don’t have. You are working 12 hours every day, and your day is very clearly defined, and what you need to do is defined. It is hustle and bustle. It’s highs and lows, a lot of emotion, panic, anxiety, but you’re alive. Man, you’re alive. You’re exhausted, but you’re alive, and you’re making something. Then suddenly there’s just silence, and no one’s there, and there is no call sheet telling you what to do or where to go. You have to figure out what am I having for lunch. This is absolutely normal, John, I think. It’s normal for you and me. How about that?

**John:** I think it’s a normal experience. What you’re describing also reminds me of people talk about when they leave the military, they really miss that sense of purpose, they miss that sense of structure. You had that while you were making the short film. People have this when they’re on Survivor, when they’re doing something intense that is taking 100% of their time. When you remove that, you do kind of feel at sea. Let’s think through what are some good strategies for getting through this. First, it’s just you’re acknowledging it. I think it’s important just to acknowledge how you’re feeling and recognize that it’s not strange to feel this way, it’s natural to feel this way. You’re going to find other… You need to look for things that can revive that sense of purpose, even if it’s not so intense as making a short film over a weekend. Try to make sure that your life feels purposeful on a daily basis.

**Craig:** There are days where it isn’t. I think John’s right that acknowledging it is really important, and knowing it’s normal is important. The thing that helps the most is the thing that helps all of the things the most, and that’s time. It’s just time. You have to experience it. You’re saying you’re very into mourning, and you are mourning. There is a grief involved in these things ending. Then it ends. It fades, and you’re okay again.

Don’t lose that desire to get back in there. It is an addictive life. It is an exciting life. The more you do it, and the better you get, the more professional and impressive the people around you get. That’s when it starts to be awesome. Then you end up working with world-class actors and world-class crews, doing incredible things. The stakes get higher and higher, and the stress gets higher and higher. The scrutiny is more and more. Yet what else would we rather do? I think, John, this is good news for you in Madison, Wisconsin. You love this. See if you can’t do the things you need to do to turn this into a living. If you can’t, then do the things you need to do to turn this into an incredible pastime, hobby.

**John:** Fully agree.

**Megana:** Craig, when you describe feeling this after you finish a script, do you build in a couple of days to, I don’t know, be sad about it, or do you just keep writing?

**Craig:** I definitely build in days. I just know that there’s going to be probably a week where I’m just bummed out, because when I’m writing a script, it’s like I’m on a set in my head with all these characters in my head, and we’re all doing these things together and finding these things and seeing these things. Because every script naturally has a point where it lands and ends, it’s like that is now dead.

**John:** Now Craig, your experience on this TV show where you’re writing script after script after script after script, I suspect it was slightly different, because while you might finish a script, there’s always that other script that’s about to start shooting, and one down the road. Did you feel the same sense of closure at the end of each of these scripts as you were writing for these 10 episodes?

**Craig:** I did. I did, yeah, because like I said, each one has to end. The scripts end. When they end, it’s like that chapter is done. I’ve written that chapter. It’s over. I will never be able to write that for the first time again. There’s terrible then impending doom and panic that more had to be written. There’s a lot of weird stuff that happens when you make the insane decision to write an entire series by yourself, because then you’re imposing this feeling upon yourself over and over and over. It’s probably not healthy at all. In fact, it’s not healthy at all. A lot of what we do is not healthy.

**John:** When I wrote my three Arlo Finch books, and I committed to doing three books over the course of three years, it was that level of just like, “Oh my god, I’m just a person who writes Arlo Finch books. That’s all I do every day is write Arlo Finch books.” I loved it. I loved that structure and that discipline. I did feel a loss when a book was delivered, but also I did feel a sense of relief, just like my kid was off in college now and I actually had some free time to do some other things that were appealing to me. That’s the thing I would also remind John is it’s great that you were able to shoot this short film, fantastic, you’ll be editing, you’ll be doing all that stuff, but I bet you also have 15 other ideas that you’re chomping to get started on. When the time comes, you’ll get to write out one of those, and that’ll be exciting for you too.

**Craig:** Yeah, so good news, John, in a weird way. Good news.

**John:** Good news. Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I may have talked about Kevin Wald and his cryptics before, but this One Cool Thing involves his latest that came out, and a little bit of a challenge to our listeners. Kevin Wald, he’s a gentleman who is a member of the National Puzzlers League, NPL. The National Puzzlers League, that is the Major Leagues of puzzle solving. They are very smart, very advanced solvers and creators. They create some of the more fiendish puzzles in existence. Kevin Wald, I’m just going to call him the evil emperor of cryptics. We’ve talked about cryptic crosswords before, which are much harder than regular crosswords. Then there’s really hard cryptics, insanely hard cryptics, and after all of that, there’s Kevin Wald cryptics, which are insane. He typically will do a group of three cryptics that are connected to the city where the National Puzzlers League is having their convention.

In 2022 the convention took place in Nashville, Tennessee. There are three cryptics. They function the way a lot of his cryptic groups do. You solve the first two, and then the answers from those feed into some of the answers for three. We’re going to put a link in here. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, you’ll see the 2022 puzzles. If you click on the first one, which is entitled “Pennsylvania Railroad, New York,” and you look at just the instructions, just the instructions-

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** … for what’s happening will scare away, I’m going to guess, 98% of you, as well they should. Then the remaining 2% of you are going to try and do this. I think maybe 10% of that 2% will complete it. It’s really hard, and it’s wonderful.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** I do these over the course of weeks. Weeks. I finally finished all three of them. The insanity and the beauty of his construction and the way it all moves together, you just marvel at it. You also marvel at yourself for finishing it. Here’s the contest. It’s a One Cool Thing contest for our listeners. If you can solve these three puzzles, including all of the prompts in all of the puzzles, and you can send me your grids and your answers, and they’re correct, then I’ll give you something. What do you want? You tell me what you want. I’ll try and make it happen. We can negotiate a prize.

The only rule I have is that you cannot be or have been a member of the National Puzzlers League. You’ve got to be what I would call a layperson. You don’t have to be necessarily new to these, but really this is intended for people who aren’t routinely solving Kevin Wald puzzles. This is for newbies. Let’s see, you cryptic geniuses out there, if you can handle the mad emperor of cryptics, Kevin Wald.

**John:** You’re trying to create new mad puzzlers is really what you’re trying to do.

**Craig:** Yes. This is like The Last Starfighter. I’m recruiting for some sort of space battle that requires incredible cryptic ability.

**John:** I love it. Let’s send those answers to ask@johnaugust.com. It’d be fantastic if 20 people solved it.

**Craig:** 20 people are not going to solve it. Not a chance.

**John:** We’ll see how many people solve it.

**Craig:** If one person does, I will be thrilled. We can think of a prize. We’ll have a fun prize for you. We’ll certainly say your name on the air.

**John:** Love it. I have two One Cool Things. One of them is very short. Nathan Fielder did this show called Nathan For You, which I loved. It took me a while to get into it, but it’s just great. All those episodes are available online. You can find them. His new show called The Rehearsal I think is actually a masterpiece. It’s on HBO Max. You can find it. Craig, do you know the premise of the show at all?

**Craig:** I do. I’m going to watch it, but it put my stomach in knots just hearing about it.

**John:** Everything with Nathan Fielder has a wince factor. It’s like, “Oh my god, this is so uncomfortable, and yet also great and super, super funny.” The premise of the show is that Nathan Fielder will find a person who is facing a dilemma, generally a conversation they need to have with somebody or a situation they need to figure out. He will physically build sets that resemble the place where you’re going to have this conversation and recruit actors to be the other people in this. He will go to absurd lengths to create these rehearsal situations, practice this thing, exactly what you’re going to say or what you’re going to do. I don’t want to spoil what happens over the course of it, but it just gets to be so absurd and so funny. He becomes a major character in it. I strongly recommend you watch The Rehearsal, which is great.

Last is just a bit of a hooray for the WGA Pension and Health Plan added coverage for trans health issues that were long needed. I was sort of unaware of them. They are now being covered. I’m going to point you to an article by Eleanor Jean and Katrina Mathewson talking about what the process was to get really good, proper trans health care into what we always think about as being really good health insurance but was not even up to the level of MediCal before this.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That’s great to see.

**Craig:** What are some specifics of what we are now offering folks in our plan?

**John:** It’s basically gender-affirming care. There’s an organization called WPATH, World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which sets the standards for these. What the article makes clear is that WGA was currently offering what other guilds were offering, was not up to the level of what Amazon was offering, what a bigger company was offering, but it was possible. What they needed to do was really show these are the things, these are the dollar these things cost, just to do the things that are necessary for a person who needs health care, because what Eleanor Jean was saying is that in a weird way, it would make more sense for her to stop being a writer and just get on MediCal to get some of this stuff, because the disparities were so great there. It’s an encouraging story that it took a lot of people really figuring out how to do this and make it work for it to happen there, but it’s now in our health plan.

**Craig:** That sounds incredibly positive. I’m a little bit surprised, honestly, because like you say, we think of our insurance as being better than almost everybody else’s. I guess there you go. It’s like, yeah, if you aren’t transgender, it is. Then you find out from transgender people that for them it’s not. I’m glad that we are getting everybody in alignment. This is the best of what we can provide writers, and so it should be the best of what we can provide writers. Excellent move.

**John:** I’ll put a link in the show notes to their article talking through the whole process and what actually was won.

**Craig:** Good.

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless.

**Craig:** No pines.

**John:** Someone pointed out that you never actually say hooray after our outros.

**Craig:** That’s right. I’m glad. It took 562 episodes for somebody to notice. I’ll tell you why. Here’s why. It’s not that I’m not cheering for the people who do our outros. They’re wonderful. I do think we have to carve out some special space for Matthew and Megana or whoever might succeed Megana, may that day never come to a truth.

**Megana:** Key emphasis on might.

**Craig:** Exactly. 90-year-old Megana dealing with, whatever, our children doing this show. They need special acknowledgement. Personally, I don’t know these folks. What if somebody who wrote the outro is actually a total bastard?

**John:** Also, the reality is Craig has not heard the outro before, as I’m saying this.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** He has no idea how good it is.

**Craig:** It could be terrible. It’s never terrible.

**John:** It’s never terrible. They’re all great.

**Craig:** I’m sure none of you are bastards. Certainly, Adam Pineless at this point is wondering, “Why on my outro did this have to happen?” Adam, you get a woohoo.

**John:** Woohoo. If you have an outro, like Adam, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions or answers to Craig’s impossible puzzle challenge.

**Craig:** It’s possible.

**John:** Possible.

**Craig:** It’s possible, but unlikely.

**John:** For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, along with hoodies. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on Codenames.

**Craig:** Codenames.

**John:** That’s also where you’ll find out first about our live shows that are coming up. Definitely sign up at scriptnotes.net. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, we have to set the scene for our Codenames experience, because I never played with you, but I assumed you knew what Codenames was, because it feels like a very good board game. We were supposed to be playing D and D in person. We were all there with our laptops, because of course, our maps are on laptops now. Our character sheets are on laptops.

**Craig:** We were at our friend Chris Morgan’s house. His internet did something I’ve never encountered before.

**John:** It was wild.

**Craig:** It was weird. He has WiFi in his house. For whatever reason, his WiFi would accept no more than two or three connections. After that, no, you couldn’t get on. There were three people, like my phone, his laptop, and his laptop are working. Nobody else’s can get on, or would get on and then immediately get booted off. Then somebody would log off of theirs, and then somebody else could log on, but then other people couldn’t log on. If you’re an IT professional, if you can explain that, I’d love to hear the answer to that one.

**John:** You had 6 men in their 40s and 50s all trying to solve a WiFi problem. That’s a comedy right there.

**Craig:** It was six “actually” guys all failing completely. Legitimately, I’ve never encountered a situation where the internet was there, the WiFi was providing it beautifully, but to no more than three local IPs. Can someone explain that, somebody who knows about fricking network crap? Can you tell me why that would happen? It was really weird. We were stuck. In lieu of playing D and D, we broke out Codenames, which Chris had at his house but had actually never played. Of course, John, you and I play Codenames. I play it all the time.

**John:** Megana plays it as well. Let’s describe Codenames for people who have not played the game before.

**Craig:** Which is easy to do, actually.

**John:** It really is.

**Craig:** One of the few games where describing it is simple.

**John:** It is absolutely. This is the classic Codenames. You open the box. There are cards that have just single words on them. They’re small, little cards. You lay them out on a grid on the table, 5 by 5, so 25 cards are out on the table. There are two clue-givers. In the first round, it was me and Craig were giving clues. We are looking at a special little card that shows the grid. Some of the squares are blue. Some of the squares are red. Let’s say Craig is red, I’m blue. Craig is responsible to get his team to guess the words that match up with those red squares. He will be giving a single word clue. His team will try to figure out which words that clue could refer to. I’m going to try to do the same for the blue team to my blue words for my team. It’s surprisingly fun and challenging to do, because you’re trying to get as many words as possible in each round without getting the other team’s words or hitting this saboteur who could kill the whole thing.

**Craig:** There’s an acronym that Matt Gaffney, who does the weekly Matt Gaffney meta-crossword, uses, and that’s SAD, S-A-D, simple and difficult. Simple and difficult is basically the holy grail of game mechanics, and this one is practically the epitome of it, because it is the simplest thing to explain. There’s 25 words out there. I’m going to give you a single word and then a number. That number is an indication of how many of those words I’m cluing to. My job is if I’m like, “Okay, I need to come up with a word that connects to anvil and heart and music. Maybe I’ll say beat, B-E-A-T, beat for three.” Then the team has to look at all 25 words and hopefully land on heart, music, and anvil, because we’re using beat in different ways for each one of those words. It’s really fun. It’s really tricky. John, earlier you said we’re rooting for each other. I always feel like when I’m the clue-giver, I’m kind of rooting for my fellow clue-giver, because we’re both in a pickle. Everybody else is this innocent who can just guess.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You’re the ones who know everything and have all the responsibility and accountability. It’s a terrific game. It, as they usually say about Othello, takes a moment to learn and a lifetime to master.

**John:** A lifetime to master.

**Craig:** It’s a terrific game. After we finished, I did talk a little bit about what I consider to be Codenames’s smarter, older sibling, Decrypto.

**John:** Decrypto, which is another good game.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** I want to talk about Decrypto, but I want to first focus on two house rules or things that I’ve noticed that were different about how you played versus how I played. I think one of the great things about playing games with new people is you see, oh, this is how they do things. A house rule we always have is that if you are the team who’s guessing word, you could talk talk talk talk talk, but ultimately, you put your finger on the card to say, “I’m choosing this card,” because otherwise, I’ve been in situations where it’s ambiguous, like are they really saying it or are they not saying it? Put your finger on the card. That is the indicator. If you touch the card, you’ve chosen it.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** That’s our rule.

**Craig:** That’s how we play as well.

**John:** A thing that you were doing, which I’d never done ourselves but is so smart, is that you made a list. You had a notebook, and you made a list of all of your words so you could see them outside of the context of the grid. That is genuinely a good, smart thing to be doing that I have not seen other players do, because you can see connections more easily when you’re not looking upside-down at the words, trying to figure out what the common threads are there.

**Craig:** Part of the little method I use is I write down the words that I know I have to clue, and then I started just looking at that list and going, “Okay, here’s some obvious things I could do. Let me circle these and draw a line. I can clue these three. I can clue these two. What do I have left over? Is there a way for me to put one of those into this other group?” The most important thing you have to consider when you do that method is you can’t get lost on your list, because you need to then look immediately. You’re like, “Okay, this word will clue these three. Now let me look back at the table, because am I also mistakenly cluing one of my opponent’s words, or is there a word that’s neither of our words, that would be the first thing they would guess?” Also, there is that one killer word that immediately loses you the game if your team guesses it. Don’t get lost in your list, but the list is a very good way to start.

**John:** Now, I think the original Codenames is a fantastic game, but Megana Rao actually gifted me what I think is actually a better version of Codenames, which is Codenames: Pictures, which I’m not sure if you ever played.

**Craig:** I’ve seen it. I haven’t played it.

**John:** It is phenomenal. Like Codenames, you have a grid of cards. I think you’re actually only putting out 20 cards at a time. They have these weirdly ambiguous images. A couple things are combined on it. It could be you see a clown, but there’s also a horse and something else. They’re well-done images. You’re still responsible for giving one-word clues. What I like is it takes the words on the table out of the picture, so you’re really just focusing on what could get people to think about these things. Are you describing the shape of something? “Pointy” might be a word I would get. It’s like, “Oh, that looks like both that sun illustration, but also that pencil.” It forces you to think differently about how you’re going to tie these clues together.

**Craig:** I should play it. I want to play it. I love the Codenames extended universe.

**John:** It is. There’s Dirty Codewords, which is fine. Basically, you’re going to say some more provocative things because of the words that are-

**Craig:** Poop.

**John:** Poop. There’s a Marvel Codenames. It’s a whole extended universe.

**Craig:** Marvel Codenames. Oh my god. “Hero.”

**John:** “Hero.”

**Craig:** “Hero” for everything.

**John:** Megana, you got me the Codenames: Pictures. Any other Codenames experience you’ve had?

**Megana:** I’ve only played the regular one we have at the office and Codenames: Pictures. I’m curious if this is how you play too, Craig, because now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t know if it’s kosher, but when John is guessing, he will go through methodically clue by clue and explain his reasoning for not picking it, which makes it easier as a clue-giver to know where there might’ve been a miss. Is that standard?

**Craig:** Legal? It is legal. It’s legal.

**Megana:** Sorry, not to put you on blast, John.

**Craig:** No, I’m glad that you’re exposing John for what he is, which is a monster. That’s totally legal. I would argue that if you have played enough as a clue-giver, that kind of insight into the guesser’s mind will probably screw you up more often than it helps you, because they will not be consistent. That’s the one thing I know. They will not at all be consistent. This is the tricky part. You clue a word, and you’re cluing it for three. They get two of them right and one of them wrong. Now they’re going to have a chance to go back and try and guess again on that one, meaning guess back on your old clue. What if you can fold that remaining word into a new clue? They won’t know. They may keep cluing back to that old clue. All of their talking does not predict a damn thing. My rule is that the guessers can talk as much as they want. They may also be giving the other team information.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** That’s the risk that they take. The only thing is that the clue-givers really have to try very hard to not say anything other than the word and the number, which is why if you’re playing online with friends, and you go to the official Codenames website, which is free, you can play for free online, what’s nice about it is you type your clue in, you hit a number, and so all your teammates get is just that feedback. There is information in saying, “Okay, this is a stretch, but shorts for nine.”

**John:** Shouldn’t be able to do that. Between the padding, the framing of stuff, and just body language, which you should try to not reveal, but of course it’s hard not to indicate like, “Oh my god, don’t pick that one, because it’s the assassin,” as clue-givers you cannot be doing that. Still, people are going to try to read for that, because it’s human nature.

**Craig:** Exactly. One of the fun parts about playing in person is if you are an experienced Codenames player and you’re the clue-giver, you should actually come to enjoy saying nothing and being as sphinxlike as possible, not having any reaction, not sighing, not looking, not smiling, nothing. In a weird way, I’m almost rooting against my team. That’s how I make sure that I don’t give them body language. One of the newer players made a classic new player mistake. It was totally normal. When they were a clue-giver, his team was like, “Hm, it’s probably this.” Then the other team was like, “You know, it could be that,” just being jerks about it. The clue-giver was like, “You guys stay out of it.” That’s information. He’s basically saying don’t distract them from what they were saying, because what they were saying is correct. The thing is, when you’re a clue-giver, you have to literally give zero information beyond the word and the amount of words you want them to guess, which is fine.

**John:** The cleanest version of this, the clue-giver would write down something, hand it across, and leave the room, but that wouldn’t be fun for a party game. That’s why you don’t do that.

**Craig:** When you are playing with people remotely over Zoom, and you’re looking at the screen, it actually is kind of fun. You can turn your camera off if you can’t handle it. I was playing once where somebody, they were great, but they honestly were like, “I can’t handle it. I’m turning my camera off,” because what happens is, as the clue-giver, you give a clue, you think it’s really good, and maybe it is. Maybe one person on the team is like, “Oh, it’s got to be these three things.” You’re like, “Yes, I’m good, you’re good.” They’re like, “Great, let’s do it.” Then one person’s like, “Just one thing,” and they bring up some dumb thing about another word that’s so stupid. People want to go along, get along with other people, like, “I don’t want to fight,” so they just end up blowing it. You’re like, “You mother… “ There are times where just inside you’re like a raging volcano. You must be quiet. You must stay zen on the outside.

**Megana:** A moment of pride for me is John’s husband, Mike, is incredibly stoic always, but especially when he is the clue-giver in Codenames. Because Mike and John aren’t allowed to play on the same team, I’m normally paired up with Mike. One time I guess my postulations were so off the wall that I brought Mike to tears. He was laughing so hard about how ridiculous my jumps were.

**Craig:** Are you an over-thinker?

**Megana:** Definitely. The clue was “sheath.” I was talking aloud.

**Craig:** “Sheath.”

**Megana:** I was like, “Could a bomb have a sheath, like a sheath that contains the dynamite or something?” I’m definitely that nightmare person you described, Craig.

**Craig:** The little strategy that I always recommend to new players to consider is, and ideally your clue-giver is working this way too, when you think, “Okay, maybe they’re cluing these two words,” ask yourself, “Okay, it’s either they’re cluing these two words, this one and this one, or it’s this first one and this other one.” Ask the question, what else would they have clued? Is there a better clue they could’ve given for those two as opposed to those two? Because if there is an obvious better clue, then they’re probably not cluing that one, because they didn’t go for the obvious clue. They’re probably cluing this one. It’s a good thing to think through. If I wanted you to pick those two, like if I wanted you to pick “Ireland” and “gold,” I would’ve said, “Leprechaun.” I would not have said what I ended up saying, which was, whatever, “Peat moss.” That was “Ireland” and “vegetable.” “Peat moss” is two words. You can’t use that, but regardless.

**Megana:** Our team typically goes high volume. We’re giving clues for four words at a time.

**Craig:** Four is hard to do.

**John:** It is.

**Megana:** High risk, high reward.

**Craig:** Sure. Everybody has their own strategies. Look, hell, if I can clue eight words, I will. One of the early games I played of Codenames, David Kwong was the clue-giver. I was the only guesser. It was just four people playing. The other team was cluing for three, cluing for two. He was like, “Clue for one. Clue for one. Clue for one.” I was like, “What the F are you doing, dude? You’re killing us.” He gave me no information.

We’re screwed. They’re next. It’s our turn. They are next. They only have one word left, and so we’re going to lose. I think we had six words or something. Then he clued something for six. I was like, “Oh, okay.” He needed to get certain words off the board to make his massive six-word clue work. He was waiting them out, because they had words that would’ve gotten in the way of his clue. He just waited for them and then dropped the bomb, and we won. I was like, “Okay, I apologize for doubting you, sensei.”

**John:** Decrypto, you’ve mentioned before, is sort of like the opposite of Codnames. Basically, there are words that everyone can see that you’re trying to say but not say, so that you can get these numbers to match up. I think it’s a really, really smart game. Megana, can you tell us why we don’t play it in the office? Is it because Nima doesn’t like it?

**Megana:** Yeah, Nima hates Decrypto, but I am always making the pitch for it.

**Craig:** Nima is wrong.

**John:** He’s wrong.

**Craig:** He’s wrong, and he needs to stop that. It’s simple, because Decrypto is Codenames all grown up. The simple way to describe Decrypto is let’s say we’re on the same team. You and John and I, the three of us, we’re on a team. We have four words. All three of us know what those four words are. Each word is numbered. We have word number 1, word number 2, word number 3, and word number 4, and we know them. Then each round, one of us is going to be a clue-giver. That rotates through on each round. The clue-giver picks a card. The card will just have three digits on it. They will be some combination of 1, 2, 3, or four . It might 324. It might be 142. That tells me, okay, it’s 142, so I need to give 3 words, so that my team can look at word 1, 2, 3, and 4, and go, “Okay, that clue is word 1, that clue is word 3, that clue is word 4.” Then they say the number back. That’s it, easy.

Why is it a game? Here’s why. Because when I give them those three words, and then they respond with what the correct answer is with the numbers, the other team hears it. The other team goes, “Okay, we don’t know what their words are, but we know that that dude clued ‘grass,’ ‘tall,’ and ‘cow,’ and then their response was ‘324,’ and that was correct, so we know now the ‘cow’ clue is word 3.”

As each round goes, you collect more and more words that keep cluing back to whatever word number 1 is. Now you have four words that somehow that other team knew was word 1. You’re asking yourselves, what do these four words clue possibly commonly? Then when you get it, it’s mind-blowing and awesome, because obviously they’re trying to mislead you. You’re doing the same thing, and they’re trying to guess your words. It’s fantastic. It’s so great. Nima has rocked me, and I’m shooketh.

**John:** I think Nima would be great at that. I agree it’s a really terrific game. I think what’s different about it is that aspect of it. It’s not even social deception. It’s really just deception. It’s basically how do I not let you think what the answer is? You’re trying to make sure that your teammates understand what you’re trying to say, without the other team being able to infer it. That’s great.

**Craig:** Exactly, because if your team gets it wrong twice, you lose. If the other team guesses your code twice, they win. There’s almost no margin for error. It’s more chess-like in that regard. I’m really shocked. Nima needs to reevaluate I think everything at this point. Everything.

**John:** We’ll have you over to the office for our Friday game block, and you’ll talk us through.

**Craig:** I’m going to make him play Decrypto. Melissa is very good at Decrypto.

**John:** I’m sure she’s great at that.

**Craig:** She’s terrifyingly good at Decrypto. We also have some little house rule versions where we’ll say, okay, this round, everybody’s three clues have to start with the same letter, or in this round, the three clues have to be thematic in some way, like “ball,” “bounce,” and “round,” or something like that. It’s fun. It’s great. It’s a great game. You should all get it and play it. I think there’s also a Decrypto online, which works really well.

**John:** Cool. Thanks, guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

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