The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/brocal-fry).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** This is Episode 564 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll be answering questions from listeners who seem to be on the cusp of a career breakthrough, or are they? We’ll try to sort out what’s real from what’s fantasy. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk about iterating and failing fast. Is there a way to apply this classic startup guidance to writing?
**Craig:** I didn’t even know that that was classic startup guidance.
**John:** The idea of these startup companies, you want to get a product out there really quickly to see if it works, and then you can iterate on it. Rather than spending a year developing a thing, get something out in two months and see is there even a market for this.
**Craig:** Got it. We’ll dig into that, but only for the people that pay through the nose.
**John:** Paying through the nose at $5 a month.
**Craig:** $5 a month.
**John:** For Premium Members.
**Craig:** $5 a month.
**John:** Before we get to any of that, we have to talk about some stuff happening on HBO Max, or not happening on HBO Max now.
**Craig:** What is going on?
**John:** It’s a lot.
**Craig:** I can’t keep up.
**John:** This past week, HBO Max removed a bunch of TV shows they had there. It wasn’t just they were canceling things that they had in development. They actually just pulled stuff off the service, so things like the series Camping, Vinyl, and Mrs. Fletcher.
**Craig:** A lot of animation.
**John:** A lot of animation, King of Atlantis. There’s a whole big list of animated projects that were there [crosstalk 00:01:28].
**Craig:** Can I ask a question?
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** Maybe you can explain this to me.
**John:** Please.
**Craig:** What is the point of pulling something off of a streaming platform? Don’t they own these things?
**John:** They do own these things. That’s what we need to figure out. Let’s back up. We talked about Batwoman a couple weeks ago. In the case of Batwoman, that was a very expensive movie that they had made and decided to shelve. With that, they were going to have ongoing marketing costs. They still had to finish the movie. There’s an argument to be made they wanted to change direction on how the DC films were going to go. They might not want to have this movie out there. They wanted to pivot. That was really surprising, but also kind of understandable. Those shows are done. They don’t have a lot of ongoing costs except for residuals.
**Craig:** How much residuals could there possibly be there?
**John:** That I don’t really get, because there’s the writing residuals, there’s going to be acting residuals for the voice cast, presumably.
**Craig:** There’s not going to be writing residuals of any significant kind for a lot of the animated shows, because those are generally covered by Animation Guild, where there aren’t residuals. I’ve not watched Summer Camp Island, but if you have Summer Camp Island, why not just leave it there? What does it cost to leave it there? I’m confused.
**John:** Here’s I think the best explanation I’ve seen, that it’s not just the ongoing costs. Animated series do have residuals, but it’s paid to the Guild rather than paid to the individual. There’s a little bit of cost there. They may have other licensing costs or things.
**Craig:** It’s got to be de minimis. I can’t imagine.
**John:** The best explanation I’m seeing is that it’s actually worth more as a tax write-off basically to say by scrapping this, we’re able to take it off our books and call it a loss. They’re just looking for things that can take a loss off.
**Craig:** This is like an accounting game.
**John:** I believe it’s mostly an accounting situation.
**Craig:** Ugh.
**John:** Ugh. Let’s talk about what happens next and if there are any remedies. I would like to say that there are not going to be remedies from a legal lawsuit standpoint or from a Guild action, because this is not a case of self-dealing. If it was a situation where they were cutting themselves a sweetheart rate, then you could see some sort of arbitration happening or some sort of lawsuit happening, which we’ve seen before. These people whose shows are not available now, they got paid for their initial work. You can’t force the company to release something. There could potentially be a kill fee in some of these deals.
**Craig:** I can’t imagine.
**John:** In many ways it’s analogous to the classic pilot process, because back when we used to make TV shows for a regular season, you would go and shoot 50 pilots. The network might have 50 pilots, and they pick up 10 of them. Those other 40 pilots, it sucked. You felt like that work was wasted, but also, you were going into it expecting that things might just never be seen. You were prepared for it. Emotionally it’s just so different for these people who have had a show that was on the air that’s no longer available, or they made a season that no one will ever see.
**Craig:** The company owns the stuff, so they can do with it as they wish. I have to wonder, isn’t there some sort of implied contract between the company and the consumer if they say, look, you can give us this subscription and you get all this stuff? Then they take a whole bunch of that stuff away. Now, people can cancel. I hope they don’t, as somebody that has a show coming out on HBO.
Look, to be honest, I think a lot of these shows are getting a ton of attention on social media, because they have very passionate fan bases, but those passionate fan bases were not broad. They were narrow but deep. It’s going to be hard to make the argument, for instance, that whatever, The Runaway Bunny was bringing in millions and millions of viewers. It wasn’t, I’m sure, because they wouldn’t have put it in this bucket otherwise. That said, again, if the only value is some sort of accountancy dance, that’s such a bummer. Why?
**John:** The only thing I will say is going forward, I could see this attracting attention of some federal agencies, because back in the day, when you and I were starting this business, this couldn’t have happened, because there was what’s called fin-sin [ph], which basically the people who make the shows and the people who release the shows could not be the same company. If this were the case here, and Summer Camp Island was taken down, a different company made Summer Camp Island, so they would find a different distributor for it, or they would put it on DVD. There’d be some other way for it to make its money back. Because so much of what is created in streaming models is Netflix makes it for Netflix, HBO Max makes it for HBO Max, and it has no other life, I could see some agencies stepping in and saying hey, this is restrained trade. It’s an unfair business practice to the people who are making these things for you to be doing this, or you’re restricting the ability of access to material. There’s probably some federal way to look at this.
**Craig:** I don’t think restricting access to material that you own and create is ever going to be a thing. This is more of just a general cultural and moral question. I’m not sure that there is any kind of federal enforcement that could happen, unless the government said hey, you know what, the whole reason we had fin-sin was specifically because we felt morally this was the right way to go and it would be better for culture. I don’t think you’re going to find the will to do that in today’s political climate where the corporate money is flowing like wine. I think it’s a black eye for HBO Max. They’ve had a bad couple of weeks here.
It also is sometimes when companies smash together, this stuff happens. I hope that this is just when the Earth was formed, the Moon broke off. Maybe that’s it. Maybe we’re done. I hope we are. It sounded like it was going to be worse initially than it turned out to be, because initially people were like, oh my god, HBO Max is disappearing tomorrow, and everything is getting fired into the atmosphere.
**John:** What are some remedies going forward, if you were a creator who had a show, who didn’t want this to happen to their show? I reach all the way back to something like United Artists or something, where I could envision some creators banding together, saying, “You know what? We are not going to directly write stuff for this company or make stuff for this company. We are going to only have an independent studio that’s making this, and then we’ll license it to that.” It’s challenging, but possible, foreseeable.
**Craig:** It’s possible. I think you could probably, if you are a show that is desirable enough to this company, that you could probably work in some closets for as long as there is a streaming service owned by this company or its successor company, this has to be on the streaming service. It has to be available. You don’t have to promote it. You just can’t make it go away. You can’t send it down the rabbit hole.
**John:** You can’t disappear it.
**Craig:** What are the shows that people are likely to grant that allowance to? The ones that they wouldn’t be taking off anyway. The little ones, they’re not going to give that to. I think we have been confronted with a new reality that was always there for this short but exciting time that streamers have taken over everything. It has always been a possibility that they would just make things disappear. Now they have started to do so. Be warned, this is not just something that HBO Max can do. It is something that Apple or Amazon or Netflix or any of them can do.
**John:** Last thing I’ll say is that, this is not a solution, but a thing I’ve noticed when stuff gets crazy is that sometimes commiseration is actually a little bit helpful, and gathering together and talking about the things, because a lot of these shows came out during the pandemic. These people have never gotten a chance to hang out with each other. I would not be surprised if the people of Summer Camp Island or someone else, or especially these animated shows, or even people who made Camping or whatever, if you want to get together and talk about that stuff and just rejoice that you made something cool, that’s great, or if you end up doing screenings of the stuff that you have, do that, because I think emotionally that can be really helpful. Maybe you can talk and figure out what you want to do next and meet the people you would’ve met if the show had been out there in the world. It sucks.
**Craig:** It does. I would imagine at some point, given how cheap digital storage has become, someone somewhere is going to start just archiving everything, which is not their legal right to do, but they will, so that if something like this happens, then… The danger is that this just encourages piracy if they are archived. I don’t know. This is a weird one. Have you read somewhere that this is about a tax write-off thing? I wish I understood how taxes work. I don’t understand.
**John:** I wish I understood. Here’s what we’ll do. The same way we did a VFX deep dive last week, maybe we should get some tax experts on.
**Craig:** Oh god, no. No no no no no. I won’t make it. I won’t make it. I won’t last five minutes.
**John:** Honestly, it’s speculation at this point that it’s a tax thing. I know that for that woman it really genuinely was a chance to write that down.
**Craig:** That I understood. I understood that completely. I’m just like, what is the write-down value of something that exists that you’ve already paid for and it’s done and it’s been on the air already? I don’t understand. You know what? I don’t have to, because guess what. John, my job is to write screenplays, make television shows, and answer questions.
**John:** Craig, I have been thinking about you this past week. Obviously, the first little mini trailer came out for The Last of Us, and it looked great. Congratulations.
**Craig:** Thank you.
**John:** I was also thinking, oh, what if they never aired your show? How devastated would you be? You gave 18 months of your life to this show.
**Craig:** Here’s the thing. There is, I think, a strong part of me, and other people I’ve spoken to have this. Lindsay Doran is this way, where we wish once we finish something that we wouldn’t have to show it to anybody, that we made something and we love it exactly as it is, and we don’t have to have it sullied by observation. That obviously is not really what we feel, but there’s a part of us that just thinks, on the positive side, no one’s going to be saying mean things to me. Of course, it would be crazy. It would just be crazy. I wouldn’t even know what to say. I’m a weird one, because I actually do love the making of things more than the other stuff. The making of it is 90% of the joy that I get out of it, and then people appreciating it is 10%. I’m a weirdo like that. I just like the making part.
**John:** That’s great. It’s great that you do like the making. There’s moments I like the making, but to not be able to show that thing you made would be just devastating to me.
**Craig:** Yeah. It’s funny, I think I would be able to move on. I would definitely question, in a serious way, what the hell I was doing now.
**John:** Then you would want the financial accounting to explain why burying your show made more sense.
**Craig:** I’m not sure I would do anything like it again if I didn’t have some sort of guarantee that it was actually, when they said that they were going to put it on the air, that they’re going to put it on the air. That said, they are putting The Last of Us on television.
**John:** It does appear to be that way.
**Craig:** It is happening.
**John:** Let’s do some follow-up. We’ve been talking about short films on this podcast. We’ve got some listeners who wrote in with some additional thoughts. Don wrote in to say that the problem isn’t with the quality, format, or audience, the problem is with accessibility. He’s pointing out that he logged into Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, HBO Max, all these different streamers, and it’s very hard to find a short section anywhere on them. I remember a while back on Amazon, I did find where their shorts were. There were actually some really good shorts in there, but they’re buried. They can be there.
**Craig:** Don, you may be right. This also may be an instance where somebody makes a product that people just aren’t that into, and so they don’t make the product that accessible. They don’t put weird food that people generally don’t like right there at the end of the aisle. They put the stuff that people do like. If more people wanted to watch short films, trust me, Don, these corporate nightmares would not be burying them. They would be putting them front and center for you to enjoy. That’s my belief.
**John:** Absolutely. Gabriela wrote in to say that there are places that do put these shorts front and center. She points to nobudge.com and Short of the Week, which has links to a lot of short films and things categorized by filmmakers. She says that she often finds herself going down rabbit holes, following all this director’s short films, or that actor was in this short film. We’ll put a link in the show notes to nobudge.com but also some of the ones that Gabriela really liked, some of the short films [crosstalk 00:14:59].
**Craig:** She’s curated a nice list for us. This is kind of the deal, like aha. You can wrap your mind around the idea that this thing that you are making or this particular thing that you are enjoying isn’t necessarily a mass audience thing. That is not a judgment. I think people are getting a little feather ruffly about it. We’re not saying the short films are lesser than or bad. We’re just saying that they don’t have a mass audience the way other formats do. Where they do exist, people that like them can enjoy them. It’s a little niche. Your niche. Enjoy your niche. I like saying niche.
**John:** Niche is a good word.
**Craig:** Niche.
**John:** One of the things she points out is that it’s a great chance to see actors before they became famous. It’s the same way first people’s exposure to Melissa McCarthy was in my short film, God. One of these films has Sarah Sherman, who’s now on SNL, Kirby Howell-Baptiste. The same way that shorts could be calling cards for directors, a lot of times it’s the first time we get to see a really interesting actor.
**Craig:** That may be.
**John:** Another reason why shorts are important.
**Craig:** Indeed.
**John:** Finally, Anamin [ph] Games in Long Beach wrote in to say that one of the biggest uses of short films is really if you think about video games. The short films that are used to introduce video games or just form mythology around video games is really important. I hadn’t considered that, but yes. We would not have the TV series Arcane if we didn’t have all the short films that went into the League of Legends universe.
**Craig:** Yeah, but those are kind of commercials, right?
**John:** They’re commercials, yeah.
**Craig:** I think we can call them commercials, unless you want to say that commercials are short films, which I think a lot of commercial directors would love to hear. That’s its own thing.
**John:** Yeah, or they’re the endgame connecting pieces behind stuff. It’s explaining how you’re moving from this plane to that plane.
**Craig:** Supplemental material and so forth.
**John:** Many of them do function like short films in the sense that they will have a character experiencing one small problem and overcoming that one small problem rather than being a full three-act situation.
**Craig:** Good.
**John:** Important update here about Chris Morgan’s terrible WiFi. Our listeners will know that the whole reason why we had to play Codenames that one night is because we were over at Chris Morgan’s house, and his WiFi was disastrous. Megana can tell us Sandrine’s theory on why his WiFi was so buggy.
**Megana Rao:** Sandrine wrote in and she said, “It’s hard to say for certain without seeing the network setup, but likely it’s because consumer routers try really hard to be smart and often don’t succeed. The router divides the amount of available bandwidth by all the devices, and once it reaches the maximum number of devices it can accommodate, it stops splitting the bandwidth. Most homes have three to five devices per person, between your phone, laptop, tablet, gaming console, Alexa-like device, etc. That quickly adds up before you even add any guests. If you get a new device, the router still reserves a connection for your old device, because it doesn’t know. It’s trying to be nice.”
**John:** When we were over there, one of the things I did notice is that Chris’s Nest thermostats, they all had individual IP addresses. At one point when we restarted everything, they all had the missing WiFi signal. I think there could’ve just been a lot of devices that were trying to do it. It was just basically saying, “Okay, I’m full up. I cannot take any new devices.”
**Craig:** I appreciate the theory. I am suspicious. Almost every modern router can handle internet of things plus phones and things and all the rest of it. When we looked at his system, I think he had some Ubiquiti stuff. It was pretty decent. What he said after was that there was some kind of throttle problem that was happening in the neighborhood. I’m pretty sure his internet is coming in through Charter or whatever they’re called now, when they each each other, Spectrum, I don’t know. Anyway, point is there was a provider issue, which makes more sense to me.
**John:** Also, it could be both being true. Basically, the pipe coming into his house was very, very narrow, and this very smart router that he had, which was a good router, was trying to protect the limited resources it had. It might’ve been doing that by, when it hit a limit, saying okay now we’re going to stop allowing new things on it, so that everything wouldn’t degrade.
**Craig:** It’s possible.
**John:** I think what we all agree on is that Chris needs a new person to come in there and fix his whole internet situation, because that was a mess.
**Craig:** Maybe not, because once the service came back, he said everything was fine. I don’t know, I think he might be okay.
**John:** He didn’t have six other people trying to access the internet.
**Craig:** I think he did a test.
**John:** He recruited six volunteers to come to his house.
**Craig:** I think he started up as many devices as he could, and everything was fine. I’ve been there before with multiple people, and there’s never been a problem.
**John:** [inaudible 00:19:48].
**Craig:** I think his system is all right. Look, I think the important thing is he doesn’t really understand the system. It’s good to understand your own system.
**John:** I think it’s important.
**Craig:** Thank you, Sandrine. You may be right.
**John:** Let’s close out our follow-up with something going back all the way to Episode 44. Megana, help us out.
**Megana:** Ryan wrote in and said, “I was recently listening to Episode 44: Endings for Beginners and wanted to revisit a discussion you were having at the outset of that long-ago episode. It’s about vocal fry. Back then, you didn’t seem to care for it much.”
**Craig:** Yeah, back then.
**Megana:** “I’m curious if you both have maybe changed your minds about linguistic tics like this and of the linguistic tics of teenage girls in particular. It seems to me that annoying as these might initially sound, they just give us a bigger canvas to work with, that without teenagers generally and teenage girls in particular, to say nothing of all sorts of other communities who come at language differently than what we think of as the default, white, English-speaking, mostly male, without all of these groups trying out and inventing new forms of speaking, that yes, make us feel older and increasingly out of touch, but also keep language a living, evolving thing, we’d be stuck with fewer voices and tics and whatnot to try and get down on the page. Anyway, I would love your thoughts on this as language-lovers and voice-capturers and recent fathers of teenage daughters.”
**Craig:** This feels very setup-ish.
**John:** It does feel very set up. Ryan, I agree with your thesis in that I think we were too dismissive too quickly of vocal fry as being just a little trend, and we’re not mindful of the fact that all language change tends to happen with young women. Young women change their language most quickly. The changes they make end up spilling over into other people. Vocal fry, which was largely a teen girl phenomenon when we first probably talked about it, is now ubiquitous. It’s crossed to all sections of things. The new thing which you’re hearing, which Craig, I’m curious whether you’re hearing this too, is, “Stop-uh! Stop-uh!” The extra “uh” on the end.
**Craig:** I love that thing.
**John:** Love that thing. I think that starts in teen girls and then probably goes to gay men and goes to other places too. Our language is richer for the weird quirks that come up.
**Craig:** The “uh,” it’s not new. It’s not even mildly old. It’s very old, because I used to call my sister No-uh, because when she was a teenager she would like, “No-uh.” It’s always been there. Maybe I’m wildly off on this, but I feel like there’s less vocal fry than there was. I feel like vocal fry had this moment, and then it passed. My daughter does not have it. Her friends don’t have it. I listen to them. When they talk, let’s say I happen to be near them for 3 minutes, I will hear about 90 hours of regular people talk in that 3 minutes, because there are so many words, and I don’t hear it. I don’t think it’s as common. I think it might have just sort of crested. It’s not as prevalent I think as it was. The up-talking is out of control. It’s completely out of control.
**John:** I’m thinking back to, Lake Bell had a movie called In A World, which was about these dueling movie announcers.
**Craig:** In A World.
**John:** I really liked the movie. I think I had a concern about your takeaway from the end of it. It’s because in the end she does training for young women to get them to stop up-talking and vocal frying. I wonder if really the solution is not to try to change women’s voices, but to have a broader acceptance of what is a professional voice.
**Craig:** I have no problem with women trying to change women’s voices. I’m fine with that. I definitely see that it’s problematic for men to say, “Women, stop it.” If I say, “Look, people who up-talk are going to be viewed as less intelligent than people who aren’t,” I don’t have to like that, and I don’t have to agree with it, and I can actually say affirmatively that that’s bad. If it’s real, what do we do? We make these decisions as we go. Obviously, things change as generations grow up and take over. I don’t get in the way of women teaching women how to do stuff. I stay over here. I stay over here and watch. Megana, what do you think?
**Megana:** Recently, an actress tweeted that she likes women but their voices on podcasts are irritating because they’re a little higher, and that they should work on lowering them. Basically to say, I don’t always agree with women telling other women what to do. I think we need to examine why we find women’s voices annoying at all.
**Craig:** I think that part of this is generational. I think it’s tempting to look at this solely through the lens of gender, but a lot of times we are looking at old versus young. I think that as people get older, I find that men and women of a certain generation start to see more in common with each other than they do with their gender cohorts of younger generations, that boys are annoying and girls are annoying to men and women who are older. It is an interesting phenomenon. You begin to see this exasperation. I try and not be exasperated by young people, because they’re going to be taking care of us. Vocal fry and up-talking, there’s no crime there. It’s something that I giggle about, to be honest with you. Anybody that’s actually like, “Damn this vocal fry,” has definitely got a problem.
**John:** To wrap this up, I want to point people to a performance I thought was remarkable. This is in the series Search Party. I think it was the third season. There is a character named Cassidy who’s a lawyer played by Shalita Grant. Her vocal fry and her performance is so remarkable. She’s a really good lawyer who’s defending Dory. She has completely the most extreme version of a 20-something vocal fry. It’s just an absolute delight to hear. Going back to the question of to what degree can a vocal tic inform a character or do you use a generational vocal tic as a character, I thought it was a great, great choice. Maybe in the tradition of Legally Blonde is a great character who’s really marked by not just her personality but really her vocal performance that lets you know that she is young and she’s challenging established authority.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** Megana, are you still hearing vocal fry? I’m still hearing vocal fry.
**Megana:** I’m still hearing vocal fry. Also, John, we were talking about this months ago. We were talking about how I notice it a lot in men my age. John coined the term brocal fry.
**Craig:** Brocal fry. That’s guys who are doing this sort of thing.
**Megana:** Yes, exactly.
**Craig:** I can talk about those guys. I can be part of that. I can be part of men telling boys to effing stop it. I can be that grouch. I have no problem with that. Cut it out.
**John:** I think Brocal Fry will be the title of the episode.
**Craig:** Cut it out, brocal fry. I have no problem policing men.
**John:** Hey Megana, it’s time for (singing) Megana Has a Question.
**Megana:** My question is, what is the strategy behind announcing a project in the trades?
**John:** Some context behind that, so you’re asking why do certain things get announced and other things don’t get announced. I think you’re asking, why is this thing even in the trades? I don’t know who these people are or who this director is.
**Megana:** This isn’t me subtweeting anyone or any article, but sometimes when I’m reading through Deadline, it’ll be like, “So-and-so is attached to this.” Then I read the article and I’m like, “Attached to what? What is this? What is there?”
**Craig:** Derek Haas, friend of our podcast and Chicago Firer, sometimes will send me a link to a Deadline article and just be like, “Dude, huge news.” The Deadline article is something like, “John Finkleberg is the sound mixer for the pilot of a show on the Serial Channel.” You’re like, “What the hell is this?”
What is the strategy behind announcing a project in the trades? I think the strategy is that it costs nothing. They’re fire-hosing stuff out there. The online trades cost them nothing to put another article out and call it an exclusive or whatever. It’s just one more opportunity for people to click on something and see an ad. For the people that are putting it out there, they’re trying to confidence something into existence. It doesn’t work that way. They can show people, “Look, it’s legitimate. We’re in the trades. If it’s in Variety, it must be real.”
**John:** I think another reason why some stuff gets announced and other stuff doesn’t get announced is that the producer or the studio wants basically to make a claim to something, basically let everyone know, okay, clear this territory, clear this space, because we have this big writer on this project or this director has come onto this thing, so don’t do something else that’s like it, or this director who’s actually attached to nine different things, now they’re attached to this thing, and we think this is the next thing that’s going to happen. There can be some jockeying in that. The audience really is not for the rest of the world but for that actor’s reps or for… There can be certain very specific audiences, the same way that people in Trump world will say something to the press just so Donald Trump will hear it.
**Craig:** It’s a little bit like it’s hot wind for a hot wind farm. It’s bloviators talking to each other, because I don’t like announcing anything personally. What’s the point? I am announcing that I’m going to do a thing. No one cares. Do the thing. Then we’ll tell you if it’s good or not. That’s basically how this works. All this announcing, it’s really for… There is a class of people in our business, and it is probably actually the largest class by number, of people who don’t write or act or direct or edit or even produce in the classic way like Lindsay Dorant produces, but more middlemen and middlemen between the middlemen and sub-middlemen and representatives of middlemen and the derivatives of the representatives of the middlemen, and all of them are talking to each other. I’m out of that.
**John:** Let’s say you were a development executive at some small company that’s at Disney or something like that. It may behoove you to have that project announced in the trades to just remind people like, oh, they’re actually a place that makes things or could make a thing or we should re-up the deal at Disney. It reminds people that you exist. I think it’s proof of life.
**Craig:** It can be proof of life. I suppose that is true.
**Megana:** It’s sort of like the way boomers use Facebook updates?
**Craig:** Yes.
**John:** Once again, Megana has really summarized it down and provided the best answer.
**Craig:** (singing) Megana has an answer!
**John:** (singing) Answer!
**Craig:** Wait, were we just set up there by Megana?
**Megana:** No.
**Craig:** I think we were. I think she set us up so that she could just dunk on us.
**Megana:** When you said the thing about reminding people that they exist, I’m like, I recognize that as a phenomenon.
**Craig:** The olds do that. They do that all the time. We have another question coming about money. Is that right?
**John:** Money.
**Craig:** Money.
**John:** Megana, can you read us through DB’s question here?
**Megana:** DB says, “Let’s talk about money.”
**Craig:** I hope this isn’t David Benioff, because I can’t.
**John:** [Crosstalk 00:32:00].
**Craig:** That’s just too much money to discuss.
**Megana:** “After some small but meaningful successes, established producers in a studio took a chance on me and I booked my first rewrite job. After two months, many late nights, and several listens of back Scriptnotes episodes, I submitted the script. The studio loved it, and they offered me other rewrite jobs. I’m now writing, rewriting, or developing a few features in addition to my own show. My question, while perhaps tacky, is this. What future path might eventually lead to bigger paydays, partnering with producers or studios to write and sell originals or gunning for that sweet, sweet rewrite money? Is there sweet, sweet rewrite money? I come from a lower middle class background. I’ve struggled financially without safety nets my entire life. In fact, after I graduated college with a mountain of student loan debt, I was a safety net for my immigrant family, not the other way around. My manager and agent have been great, helpful, and protective of my choices creatively. I’m of course pursuing my dream projects. From a purely financial long-term point of view, I’m just curious.”
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** Great. This is the happy struggle. I’m glad things are going well for DB. Let’s talk about this, because you and I have both done big work on features that we’ve initiated, but we’ve also done a lot of rewrite work. Maybe, probably, the rewrite work has paid more on the whole.
**Craig:** The way I always like to think of it is that the work that you do, that you generate, whether it’s an original, or more likely these days, being the first writer to write something based on something, that is the stuff that gets you all the rewrite work. You can’t just rewrite forever. At some point you’ve got to do your own thing. You just will eventually fall off that list, unless your rewrite work is attached to more than a few big feature directors who ask for you by name. You’re going to have to feed both beasts. The best money in features is the weekly production rewrite money. That’s the best money there is in terms of just day for day.
**John:** We should clarify that that’s a situation where you are probably not the original writer. You are coming on to a project that is in some sort of crisis moment, and they’re paying you on a week-to-week basis, they can stop you at any point, a good amount of money to be there to rewrite the stuff that’s about to shoot. That’s when they stick me on a plane and fly me to Hawaii to help out on a thing. That is one of those weekly jobs. It’s not a thing I started. I’m the emergency fixer of a problem.
**Craig:** Sometimes you’re brought into one of those things because the movie’s fine, but one of the actors is not happy. One of those I was brought on, my job was you have one week to convince that woman to get on that plane and go to that production. You have to sit with her and write stuff and make her happy without screwing up her movie. There are all sorts of reasons why you may get that assignment. Those are financially incredible. You don’t get there unless you’ve written a bunch of other stuff that people like and you’ve had some successes on your own. That’s part of it. You have to feed both.
It sounds like you came from a similar background that I came from. My family was an immigrant family, but same deal, lower middle class, mountain of student loan debt, taking care of them. Don’t over-calculate here. There’s temptation to try and game the system. You can’t. Do the best work you can do. I guarantee that if all you do is write well, you can’t fail. Just keep writing well. That’s all you got to do.
**John:** DB has one very different situation than you or I did is that he’s coming just because he sold a show. He’s going to have a show that he’s going to be theoretically running. That is a big complication, because running a show is taking up your entire life in theory. It may be hard for you to go out and pitch all those other feature projects or to be the weekly person, because if you are running a show, by definition you are not going to be available for a weekly to do for that other thing.
**Craig:** It sounds like he sold a show, but I don’t know if that show is on, because the way he’s talking, it says, “After some small but meaningful successes, I sold a show to a streamer.” I think maybe that show is not running.
**John:** Maybe it’s not running yet. At a certain point, it could be running. At a certain point, there’ll be an expectation that you’ll be going into-
**Craig:** In that case, yeah. Look, if you’re running a show, you’re going to be saying… DB, the best thing of all, then you start saying no. Nothing makes you sexier than no.
**John:** The ability to say no is a crucial thing. I’m flashing back to my early years as a writer. Go was produced. I was writing Charlie’s Angels. I sold the TV show DC, which I was then running. There were other projects happening simultaneously. Big Fish was also happening. The show does end up eating your life. Craig can testify, actually running a show eats your life and makes it impossible for you to do other things during it. Just also be aware, DB, that you may not even have the opportunity to say no to some things, because it just may be impossible for you to do some of the things at a certain point.
I’ve talked with other feature writers who have gone off to do a TV show. They’ve said, “I don’t know if I can afford to do this TV show, because this is taking away the time that it would be able to do the feature work I was going to be able to do.” Those are really high-class problems to have, but there are problems that you may encounter at a certain point.
**Craig:** It is a nice thing to go chase your dream gig when you know that you’re financially settled. It’s a much better feeling. Fear is the enemy of creativity. If you’re writing afraid, you’re going to be in trouble. It sounds like things are going well for you. I would say just keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t think about just being a rewriter or a not rewriter. Do it both. Remember that you have no idea what phone call is going to happen tomorrow. I think all the time about how I can plan for things. Every kooky, crazy, exciting thing that ever happened to me came out of the blue. It wasn’t out of the blue. It’s just that I didn’t know that people were talking. People had meetings, and then eventually I get a phone call. I didn’t know. I had no idea.
**Megana:** Can I ask a follow-up question on rewrites?
**Craig:** No.
**John:** Please ask your question, Megana.
**Craig:** Oh my god, that was the most sad rollover ever. “Okay.”
**Megana:** I already had the whole song and dance of my segment, so that’s fine.
**Craig:** (singing) Megana asks another question!
**Megana:** Just for DB, if he’s going into these rewrites, and this is more of a question of how you guys approach rewrites, because if you’re working on original stuff, you can do the note behind the no and make the changes you want to make. When you guys are going in to do a rewrite on a big studio tent pole project, are you taking the notes more literally because you’re trying to endear yourself to the producers?
**John:** Yes and no. There’s a little less kabuki in terms of if there’s a production problem that you need to write around, then you’re writing around that. If it’s an actor problem, then you are having to do that tap dance where you’re both trying to make that actor feel heard and supported and confident in what they’re about to do and yet not derail the whole movie or what the director needs to do or what the studio is telling you to do. I think we said this before, that so much of what they’re hiring you for as a writer on those production rewrites is really to be the therapist to the negotiator. You’re a hostage negotiator getting them through this situation.
**Craig:** The one thing that they really don’t have to worry about with you is you being emotionally invested in such a way that you’re going to be defensive. I’m a neutral party when I show up. I say what I see. They tell me what they want. I have discussions with them. Very often, the discussions go like this. “Okay, I’ve read everything. I hear what you’re saying. I hear what you’re saying. I think the problem is actually different. I think this is the problem. You may or may not agree, and that’s your choice. If you don’t agree, let us part ways. If you do, this is what I would do.” More often than not, they agree, because what they’re not concerned about is that my solution is the product of emotional defensiveness or desire to preserve something that mattered to me, because I wasn’t there when this whole thing was done. I can be clinical.
This is a really good question, Megana, because if you at home find yourself in the enviable position of doing these kinds of rewrites, don’t just do what they tell you to do. That’s how you will yes your way out of that business. What they want is somebody coming in to be an expert. When corporations hire consultants, which is basically the closest analogy I can think, they’re hoping for the consultant to tell them stuff they didn’t want to know or didn’t know. That’s why they’re paying the consultant, even to the extent that employees are like, “Oh god, here comes a consultant that’s basically going to crap on everything,” because that’s their job. I don’t do that, but I don’t just give them what they want. I give them what I think they need.
**John:** A writer friend was talking about this one job she was brought in on. She realized at a certain point that, “Oh, they don’t actually even want me to rewrite this thing. They basically want me as a woman with these credits to do exactly what they wanted to do anyway.” She ended up quitting out of the job. They were basically giving her the pages that they wanted to put her name on for this rewrite, which was just absurd. I was offended on her behalf.
**Craig:** That is a thing right now. Hiring writers to rewrite, but really they don’t want to rewrite. They just want to sprinkle whatever diversity need they decided they have on it without actually treating that person like an artist and needing them. That’s debasing. Everybody has to have their antenna up for that. That is a problem. We can’t do anything about that. That is something that the employers just have to understand is awful and will backfire, by the way, almost every time. It’ll just backfire. That’s a thing that didn’t used to exist that now exists. That’s creepy. Everybody, good news, more creepiness in Hollywood.
**John:** I think we have time for one more short question.
**Craig:** Woo.
**John:** Let’s try this one from Pat.
**Megana:** Pat says, “Well, it’s happened. First optioned script, a pilot, has died on the vine. Creative differences. I’m disappointed but also could see it coming, as the producer kept pushing further away from the original idea/script towards something I had less and less interest in writing or believed would be successful. Now what do I do? What advice do you have for that day/week/month after a project you’ve been working on has failed to launch? Reformulate and send it around again? Start the next project you’ve been itching to work on? Eat a bag of Dove chocolates and watch The Sandman? Any wisdom from the trenches would be much appreciated.”
**John:** Oh, Pat. I’m sorry this has happened.
**Craig:** Sorry, Pat.
**John:** This has happened to every writer who’s ever been on this podcast, where something was like, “Is this going to happen? It’s not going to happen. It’s done.” What you’re describing where you could feel this is drifting further and further away from what you had intended, yes, and so you had some warning that this was going to happen. It wasn’t just a sudden shock. It’s just now it’s clear that this thing is gone. Craig, what’s your instinct? Do you go back and look at this exact project again? Do you focus on something else first? What would you do first?
**Craig:** I think it’s important to focus on something else first, because you’re just so close in it right now. What you might do would be motivated more by proving somebody wrong, as opposed to what you should be doing or would really want to do artistically. You need a little perspective, and perspective is a function of time. Personally, I would say let’s put that in the drawer for a bit, but it’s still yours. It’s an optioned script. You own it. You’re going to come back to it. Work on something else. Work on something else. As you say, start the next project you’ve been itching to work on. You can definitely eat a bag of Dove chocolates and watch The Sandman. While you’re doing that, start looking at that next project. Eventually, you can and should come back to the pilot in the drawer and take a look at it and think about it and wonder what you would want out of it, because here’s what I know, that if another producer comes across that script, perhaps it’s improved, because time helps us improve things, another producer comes across that script, they might cotton to it, and where they want to push it is in a completely different direction than the other producer.
The one thing I know about producers is they don’t lack confidence. They all think they’re right. What you need is a producer whose right is aligned with your right. There may be a much better match. I can’t imagine a worse match. Give it some time, and then come back to it.
**John:** The underlying message behind all this is make sure you don’t treat this project not going forward as a failure, because it wasn’t. It was a series of successes that didn’t end up in a final glorious TV show, but you accomplished some things. You were able to get this script in the hands of somebody who wanted to make it, who saw the quality here. You were able to learn about how to work on this thing. You made it to a certain stage. It didn’t go any further, but you did learn something from it. There was a bunch of successes. Don’t take this last collapse as the overall failure, that this was a waste of your time. Instead, go forward. Pick that next thing that you really wanted to write, that you probably would’ve preferred to write, that you’re doing all this work on this other pilot, and move forward. Cool. Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. You said you had a great one.
**Craig:** I do.
**John:** Let’s see if it’s actually all that great.
**Craig:** It is all that great. John, every now and again, something happens in the world of technology that really does change the way that we approach making television and film. I was out to dinner the other night with John Lee Hancock. He has just finished post on his next movie. I’m in post-production on my show. We started talking about this thing that we were so excited about. It’s relatively new. It’s I would say two or three years old at this point, commonly used. It’s called fluid morph. Now every editor out there is like, “Yeah, we know.” For the folks who are listening along, let me explain why fluid morph is the greatest goddamn thing of all time. Editing is a big puzzle. I love the puzzle of editing. You’re trying to figure out how to achieve what you want to achieve with the footage you have. Sometimes that requires a little bit of trickery. The one thing that’s so frustrating is when you have this great moment. Let’s say there’s a line. John, give me a line from a movie that you love that I can do.
**John:** “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
**Craig:** We’re going to need a bigger boat. The “going to need a bigger boat” was so good, but there was a pause between “we’re” and that. We could start the “we’re” over another person, cut the pause, and then come back to “going to need a bigger boat,” but that’s not as good as just somebody looking and going, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.” There was nothing you could do back then, because if you cut within a take, that’s a jump cut. Everybody would see. Enter fluid morph, where now you can just cut out some space inside of a take, stick the A and the B side together, and then fluid morph just goes and makes the jump cut go away. It doesn’t work in every situation. It needs certain circumstances. It generally works best when there’s lots of light and when most things aren’t moving. It can handle little jump cuts. It’s wonderful and just a great tool to have in the editing quiver, tool belt. It’s a great tool arrow to have in your editing quiver tool belt.
**John:** What you’re describing is… I knew of it in general, but hadn’t seen it, this thorough breakdown. We’ll put a link in the show notes to how this is being done. In audio editing, like what Matthew is doing all the time on our podcast, is cutting out this weird stuff. It’s always been really easy to do an audio. The challenge is, oh, we have these people’s stupid faces here. We can’t do this because we’re seeing the line. It’s been very easy to make that kind of cut when we’re over someone’s shoulders, but when we’re not seeing their actual mouth. This is just moving mouths to actually fit and get rid of that jump, which is great.
**Craig:** In audio, typically when you cut a pause in between, you’ll put the two things together. Sometimes you don’t have to do anything, but sometimes you need a little two-frame dissolve or two-frame cross-fade in terms of audio, where it’ll blend over that cut and then it just disappears. We can’t do cross-fades and visuals until now. Essentially, that’s what a fluid morph is. It’s a cross-fade over a cut inside of a take. Man, I’ll tell you, sometimes when you’re stuck in a corner and then you’re like, “Wait a second, what if I want to cut this line out between these two lines but I want to stay with him on those two lines?”
**John:** That’s a great example, because it wasn’t just the actor’s performance. It’s literally like, okay, that doesn’t actually make sense anymore because of a change.
**Craig:** Exactly. I like the first sentence. I like the third sentence. I don’t like the second. I love the way they’re staring. I want the camera to stay on them. Fluid morph.
**John:** Exciting to see. My One Cool Thing is a treat yourself. We talked about when you finish a project, how do you treat yourself. I of course go to Panda Express.
**Craig:** Of course. So weird.
**John:** My treat myself this last project was an OXO coffee grinder. I made my own coffee. I use an AeroPress, which has worked out great for me. I always have to use decaf.
**Craig:** Why do you use decaf?
**John:** Because I can’t actually have caffeine anymore, Craig.
**Craig:** What?
**John:** Literally it was causing this heartburn problem that felt like I was having a heart attack all the time. I stopped caffeine, and it all got better. I miss caffeine sometimes. I really, truly do.
**Craig:** Did you try Prilosec and so forth?
**John:** None of that stuff was doing the job.
**Craig:** Wow. Serious. I’m sad. I’m sorry.
**John:** It was acid reflux really, basically. The little flap wasn’t doing its job right, and Prilosec and all the other stuff wouldn’t take care of it.
**Craig:** Caffeine will absolutely exacerbate that, no question.
**John:** Dr. Craig with the advice.
**Craig:** Dr. Craig is here.
**John:** I was using my little Mr. Coffee stand-up grinder thing that has a little whirring blade. It’s just not as good as a brewer grinder. I got this OXO coffee grinder. It is delightful. You fill it, put your beans it. You push a little button. It gives you exactly the amount of coffee you need to make one cup of coffee. I’m just so much happier. I wish I had gotten this 10 years ago.
**Craig:** Sometimes we forget that we can change something. We just live with this slightly annoying thing for years. Then one day… The OXO, this is great. I like that we do commercials and we don’t get paid. I guess that’s how you know we actually like things. I don’t listen to podcasts, as you know. I have a new car that has Apple CarPlay, and [crosstalk 00:52:17].
**John:** So much better than anything else.
**Craig:** It’s wonderful. I was just poking around. Then they have podcasts. I’m like, “Okay, let me just see what… “ It was some small list of curated podcasts. I just picked one. I picked Pod Save…
**John:** Pod Save America?
**Craig:** Pod Save America. Thank you. I was going to say Pod Save the World. That’s so terrible of me.
**John:** There’s Pod Save the World too.
**Craig:** Pod Save America. I’ve been on Pod Save America. Some idiot.
**John:** You were on Love It Or Leave It.
**Craig:** Isn’t that the same thing?
**John:** It’s the same network.
**Craig:** It’s the same guys.
**John:** It’s some of the same people.
**Craig:** This is how bad I am. I was on one of those things. I’m listening to one of those things with one of those guys. They start doing a commercial for… I honestly can’t remember what it was for.
**John:** Probably Beam or Casper Mattresses.
**Craig:** No. I don’t know what it was for. Oh, no, I do. It was for SimpliSafe.
**John:** SimpliSafe is a common sponsor there, yeah.
**Craig:** The alarm system. I was like, “What is this? Why are they doing this?” Obviously, in real time, it took .01 seconds, but in brain time, it was a year of me going, “Why are they talking about SimpliSafe like this?” and then like, “Oh, that’s right, podcasts have ads.”
**John:** We don’t have ads.
**Craig:** No, although now at this point we’ve done an ad for SimpliSafe and the OXO Burr grinder.
**John:** We didn’t talk about how great SimpliSafe was and how it can provide confidence that your home and your possessions are protected while you’re away, that it’s easy to set up.
**Craig:** It’s so easy to install.
**John:** Here’s what I’ll say about switching to my OXO coffee grinder. Literally, because I now don’t have to open the bag of beans, scoop the beans, put them in the thing, it saves 30 seconds every morning, which is great.
**Craig:** Here we go. Here we go. Here comes the calculation.
**John:** 30 seconds every morning, and it also tastes better. Literally, my coffee does taste better.
**Craig:** I have added five minutes to my lifespan.
**John:** More will be accomplished.
**Craig:** More will be accomplished in this time. OXO coffee grinder has increased John’s overall CPU efficiency.
**John:** Even without the caffeine. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, and I am @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find 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, and hoodies too. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, and news about our upcoming live shows first. Craig, Megana, thank you for a fun show.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
**Megana:** Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** This segment is about failing fast. We have two questions here that can help set this up. Megana, do you want to start us off with Joe from Kokomo?
**Megana:** Joe from Kokomo wrote in and said, “Like many, I’m a big fan of Pixar and their creative process, which has been tried and tested. Fail fast, be collaborative, and many other strategies seem to give them quality. It’s usually over years and years that they attain this high standard. It’s not uncommon for them to toss out a bunch of work and start afresh. Safe to say this is labor and time-intense. When working on a pitch for an open writing assignment, how is it possible to come up with real quality so quickly? I find cracking a narrative painfully time-consuming, and really the majority of the work involved in, quote unquote, writing. How do you strike the balance of not pitching crap and not doing a Pixar and not spending every waking second working for free on a pitch an exec will just flippantly consider?”
**John:** Great. The second question we had was from Raja, who basically asked, “I want to fail fast so I can iterate faster. How do we get to that point?” Basically, there is this theory [inaudible 00:56:50] the startup world, of just you want to come out with a minimum viable product, so you can see is there a market for this, what are the things, so we are not wasting a year trying to build something that nobody actually wants. This is I think tough for the kinds of stuff that Craig and I are usually writing. It reminds me that Mike Birbiglia and all stand-up people, they do this all the time, because they could just try stuff out really easily. They can just go on a stage and see what jokes work.
**Craig:** They can workshop things. Maybe not so much for Mike, just because of the way that he does more this long-form storytelling piece, but for a very traditional comic like let’s say Patton Oswalt, who’s one of my favorites, Patton’s sets are very traditional. They’re jokes. They are connected into chunks, and they’re organized, but they’re jokes. If one of the jokes isn’t working, he’s going to know after a few sets, I would imagine. Then he’ll just cut that one out, or if one is working really well, maybe he expands on that. What we do is not in pieces. We’re not delivering pieces. No one’s going to watch a movie and talk about, “Oh my god, there were so many great scenes, but then five scenes that bombed.” That’s not the way it works.
While I appreciate the questioning here, I think it’s slightly misguided, meaning what I’m detecting underneath this is a desire for efficiency. You’re not going to have it. This is not an efficient process. Being artistic is not efficient. Being creative is not efficient. Sometimes you’re going to put in a lot of time to get something that’s so-so. Sometimes in two minutes you’re going to come up with something awesome.
**John:** I think what you’re pointing to, the difference between Patton Oswalt or even Mike Birbiglia is that they have a built-in feedback mechanism. They have laughter. They have an audience. They have a set planned for going ahead and doing this. As writers, we generally don’t have that quick feedback mechanism, so we’re asking someone to read our script or listen to our pitch. Unless we have a system for doing that the way that Megana has her writers group, we’re not going to have regular people always being able to provide feedback and giving us a real sense of whether this thing we’re working on is working or not working.
Sara Schaefer, who’s been a guest on the show before, she has a new show called Going Up. I went to the first run-through of it, her first trial version of it. It was like this to some degree. It was a full one-hour show set concept. I will say, smartly, she was at an inexpensive theater that she could rent for not a lot of money. There wasn’t the pressure of expectation that everything had to be perfect. She could play around with it some. Rachel Bloom has been doing the same thing with her show. She’s finding ways to get feedback before a thing is finished and yet it’s still not nearly the failing fast the way that I think Joe and Rahad are looking for.
**Craig:** When comedians go in front of an audience, let’s say there’s 200 people in the room. I don’t know if that’s typical, large-ish comedy club.
**John:** That’s a pretty big [crosstalk 00:59:59].
**Craig:** Let’s say 100 people. Do 3 shows a week, 300 people. Do 2 weeks, 600 people. That’s a lot of people. We’re not getting 600 people to read a script. More importantly, you don’t want it. Telling jokes and getting laughs is a democratic process. You’re looking for the thick middle where you’re going to get most people on board for some comedians. Some comedians really enjoy just making their people laugh and everybody else confused. That’s fine too. Some of them are amazing. For what we’re doing, that’s not the point. You can’t fail faster. You’re going to fail as you fail. I want to fail faster is a little bit like saying I want to come up with ideas faster and I want to write faster and I want to think faster. You can’t.
When Joe asked how do you strike the balance of not pitching crap and not doing a Pixar and spending every waking second… You just try your best. You’re not going to pitch something you don’t believe in, obviously. If you find cracking a narrative painfully time-consuming, I got news for you, Joe. You might not be the guy that gets open writing assignments, because that’s maybe a gear that’s just not really compatible with your machinery. Your machinery works a different way.
**John:** Craig, I loved pitching open writing assignments. I just loved, hey, we want to do a Highlander movie, and so I could spend two days thinking, how would I do a Highlander movie. That to me is the joy. I love that.
**Craig:** Some people love it, and some people hate it. Personally, my story, I would go fast. I could do it, because it would go somewhat quickly. Also, I think I had a decent internal barometer about what mattered and what didn’t for that stage, so that I didn’t get bogged down into the little minutiae, because ultimately they didn’t matter for that stage.
**John:** Megana, I want to ask you about your writers group and the degree to which they can provide that quick feedback. Are you able to pitch them an idea or give them a brief glimpse of the thing and hear whether it’s a thing worth pursuing?
**Megana:** Yeah, definitely, but the project that I’m working on now, we actually just met last night. It’s pretty close to finished. Even with pretty consistent feedback from them, and them watching the evolution of this feature that I’m writing, it still took the time that it took for me to get to this stage. I don’t know that it could’ve gone any faster. Ultimately, whatever feedback they gave me, I’m the one who had to figure it out and take the time to change how certain characters are interacting with each other, whatever. Maybe that’s my limitation. I can’t think of a way I would’ve gotten here sooner.
**John:** The minimum viable product for a script is a script. You got to write the script. There’s just not a lot to it. Maybe for a pitch. I definitely remember when I switched agencies, I did the water bottle tour of Los Angeles and met with a bunch of people. I had a couple things in my back pocket that I was pitching, like, “Oh, this is a kind of movie I’d love to write.” I was able to get the quick feedback on, oh, a lot of people are interested in that, and no one bit on that other thing. If you’re thinking of a full script, I don’t think there’s a quick way to get there or a quick way to fail on that. On a pitch, sure, no one’s biting, you know that’s probably not the thing you want to pursue.
**Megana:** That makes sense. I guess when I have a new project, I’m talking to my writers group about it based off of the questions that they’re asking. It helps me realize whether there’s actually story there or not.
**John:** Craig, as you’re working through, you’re now in the editing room, there is a version of this argument where you’re not trying to make the absolute final, most perfected version of a thing. You’re just looking at on this screen does it look like this is the right way to do a scene, and then you’re working on perfection later on?
**Craig:** You definitely funnel in. There’s no question about that. The ending process is different, I think because you are dealing with specific pieces. Actually, it is a little bit like a broken picture jigsaw not-puzzle, because there is a finished show that looks like a finished jigsaw not-puzzle, and you’re just figuring out how to move the pieces around to get there. They are the pieces. When you’re writing, you can make your own pieces. You can eliminate pieces, change the pieces entirely. It’s just a very different process. For me, I tend to find that I want to dive into the details as quickly as I can with editing. To me that’s where it all happens, all in the details, all in the little moments. If a scene is just a total mess, then I may give a general guidance for it.
There’s two kinds of ways that I work with our editors. The first way is to say, “Okay, here’s my general notes, because I think that this is not on the green. I can’t tap it in the hole. Here’s what I think. Da da da da da.” Then they’ll work on that. Then I’ll come back, “Okay, it’s on the green. Now let’s get into everything. The line reading is where we cut from there to there. Do we have them move slightly before we cut away?” All these little tiny, tiny, tiny things that we can get into. I love that part. I’m only working with that’s there. There’s nothing else.
**Megana:** I also just want to make a plug for the segment called How Would This Be a Movie, where I feel like you guys go through open writing assignments.
**Craig:** I guess that is true.
**John:** That is true, because we’re really looking through all the possibilities of how you would approach a thing, and then it’s like, is there a movie there? I guess you find out.
**Craig:** I legitimately thought Megana was going to say, “I want to make a plug for,” and then announce some competing coffee grinder, just because she had been stewing over this this whole time, just like, “The OXO is not very good.”
**John:** Any time that coffee aficionados hear about a thing, everyone will tell me about why OXO is greatly inferior to this other thing which costs five times as much. That’s how it goes.
**Megana:** I look forward to those emails.
**Craig:** That’s going to be fun. You know what? Just put a little filter.
**John:** Absolutely.
**Craig:** The word coffee. If anyone emails you about coffee, just delete it. Spam.
**John:** Thanks, guys.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
**Megana:** Thank you.
**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.
**John:** Bye.
**Craig:** Bye.
Links:
* [HBO Max to Remove 36 Titles, Including 20 Originals, From Streaming](https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/hbo-max-originals-removed-1235344286/)
* Gabriella’s short film recommendations: [Squirrel](https://vimeo.com/349748860), [Bev](https://vimeo.com/189287773), [Savasana](https://vimeo.com/152139989), [Learning to Walk](https://vimeo.com/225793466), [Lavender](https://vimeo.com/user50707716), [Home](https://vimeo.com/400449901)
* [OXO Coffee Grinder](https://amzn.to/3c0t61r)
* [Fluid Morph](https://www.provideocoalition.com/the-literal-invisible-cut-mastering-the-fluid-morph/)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([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/564standard.mp3).