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

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin. How can I help?

**John:** This is Episode 552 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we talk narrative geography, professional development, and when it’s okay to take that pitch out somewhere else. Then it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at entries from our listeners and give our honest opinions on what’s working and what’s not. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll teach you the one secret to social media everyone is too afraid to show you.

**Craig:** Oh god, it’s not the top 10 secrets?

**John:** No, there’s just one secret, it turns out. It’s a secret you already know, Craig. The secret was in you the whole time.

**Craig:** I can’t wait.

**John:** It’s going to be good.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** I should say there’s not a general language warning for the whole episode, but I will probably swear when we get to that part. If you’re a Premium Member and your kids are in the car, John’s going to probably be saying some bad words.

**Craig:** Now you’ve unleashed me.

**John:** Craig, we’re going to start with some Follow-Up. This is so much in our pocket. It’s one of those questions that comes in that you and I are so well qualified to answer. Megana, start us off.

**Megana:** @ryanbeardmusic from Twitter asked about the credits for the upcoming Elvis movie. He said, “Hi all, can you explain Baz’s multiple writing credits for Elvis, please? I presume it’s a WGA thing, but I can’t wrap my head around it.”

**John:** This tweet shows the credit block for Elvis. This is what it reads. It reads, “Story by Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner. Screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell and Baz Lurhmann & Craig Pearce and Baz Lurhmann & Jeremy Doner.” Baz Luhrmann’s name appears four times in just the writing credits for this movie. That’s a lot, but it happens. Craig, talk to me about why this happens.

**Craig:** We do answer this pretty frequently, but this is a particularly good one. I really like this one. The way to understand all this stuff is to understand that every writing team that works on a movie is considered an individual writer for the purposes of credit. Let’s say there’s a writing team of Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell. We know they’re a writing team because of an A-N-D between them, there’s an ampersand. The ampersand tells you they’re a team. They count as one writer for the purposes of credit arbitration.

Now, when we do credit arbitration, and in this case there was an automatic arbitration, because Baz Luhrmann is also the director of the film, we don’t know who the writers are. We’re given scripts, and the scripts say Writer A, Writer B, Writer C, Writer D. I’ve done a couple that hit Writer H, which was exciting. What happens is we say, okay, we’ve gone through all the scripts, and here’s what I think it is. I think that the writing credit should be story by Writer A and Writer B.

**John:** With an A-N-D between those two.

**Craig:** That’s right. Writer A and Writer B, they’re two different writers. Then I think it should be screenplay by Writer C and Writer D and Writer B. Now, here’s where it gets fun. What if Screenwriter C is Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell? As it turns out in this case, that’s what happened. Baz Luhrmann wrote on this own for the purposes of story. Then he clearly did a draft in tandem as a team with a writer named Sam Bromell. He also did another draft as a team with a writer named Craig Pearce. This is an interesting one. Basically, the arbiters gave out as much credit as they could on this. They gave credit to the team of Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell. They gave credit to the team of Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce. They gave credit to Jeremy Doner. Then when it came to story, they gave it to Baz Lurhmann and they also gave it to Jeremy Doner. Wow.

**John:** It’s a lot. Here’s a thing that will help people understand this is, if you added some parentheses it would make a little bit more sense. If you put some parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell, if you put parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner, you’d understand those are three separate writing teams, and they were probably Writers B, C, and D, but they could’ve been writers B, F, and J. We don’t know how many writers were involved in this project.

**Craig:** Sure don’t.

**John:** That’s how it happened. By the distributive property, you want to be able to put Baz Luhrmann out and then put everyone else in parentheses, but you’re just not allowed to do these credits. As a person who’s been an arbiter on these things, I can tell you that Craig’s exactly right. We have no idea whether these people are writing teams or individual writers when we’re reading through these scripts. We’re giving credits to Writer A, Writer B, and then C, D, and E. We have no idea. That’s why you get credit blocks like this which look kind of strange. Same thing happened with Chloe Zhao on Eternals. It’s just a thing that happens.

**Craig:** It’s just a thing that happens. There is only one weird circumstance where we can collapse the credit down a bit. That is if there’s a writing team and then another writer, and the writer is one of the writing team, and there’s nobody else getting credit. If I worked on a script with John, it would be Craig & John. Then John goes off to do something else and I write another draft just by myself, and the arbiters say, oh, A and B both share credit. Written by Craig Mazin & John August and Craig Mazin looks bizarro. In that case they can smush it down to just written by Craig Mazin and John August. The apportionment of residuals would still be accurate to the technical credits.

**John:** All this was done by the books and is all good. I think a person could reasonably argue that there should be some way that these writers could agree to have the credits not have his name there so many different times, that there’d be some way the actual monies could be apportioned properly, but the credit block could look less screwy. Craig, under our existing rules, could these four writers decide that?

**Craig:** No. They can’t. There is an almost never used rule that says that writers can determine their own credits if they want to get together and do that, but not in the case of an automatic arbitration. Furthermore, the apportionment of screenplay credit among three writers can only be granted by arbitration.

**John:** Yes, in this case the screenplay is apportioned between three writers, in this case three writing teams, so only arbitration can do that. Megana, did that answer your questions?

**Megana:** I guess my question is can you talk about the development process of this, the process of Baz Luhrmann working with these three different writers? Are they hiring these people on to work as a part of a writing team to work with Baz Luhrmann?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Megana:** My question was whether the writing team is also under contention, like who did what to the draft?

**John:** We know people who’ve worked on… None of these writers. We don’t know these writers personally, but we know other folks who were involved at some point in this process. I think the call was, hey, do you want to go to Australia and work with Baz on this script. A writer would go and work with Baz for a couple weeks on this thing. It was a collaborative team writing thing where you were doing stuff together. There’s no real transparency into that process from the arbitration point of view. How much were they really a team? I don’t know. These writers were hired on to work on drafts with Baz Luhrmann.

**Megana:** Got it. That does clarify things.

**Craig:** That’s correct. There is really no… Other than a writer protesting to the guild and saying, “Listen, I was strong-armed into being part of the team. I didn’t want to be part of the team,” or somebody stuck their name on as if we were a team, but they really weren’t, unless that kind of protest happens, no, it’s just presumed that the writers who share the credit on the title page there for that draft are a bona fide team. It does seem like Baz Luhrmann probably wrote some kind of treatment at some point, some sort of story material by himself. Whether that came before or after Jeremy Doner, I do not know. Then it seems like he did indeed have at a minimum two writers that he did extensive work with as part of two different teams.

**John:** That’s my guess as well.

**Megana:** Got it. Thank you guys.

**John:** Megana, what else do we have?

**Megana:** Chris asks us, “What do you call the page before a script begins, where the writer puts either a quote or an explanatory message? I’m trying to figure out why writers do this, because my gut reaction is that it feels like cheating, but perhaps I’m missing a valuable tool I could use to better elucidate or thematically prep the reader for some of my writing. I don’t mean a character list like in The Nines script. I’m referring to something that is much more directly explanatory for the reader.”

**John:** Craig, what do you call that page between the title page and the first page of a script?

**Craig:** I don’t. It’s just the stupid page with the stupid quote on it.

**John:** It feels like a dedication page. I’ve also called it an intermediary page. If there were a standardized name for it, I think it would be helpful, because it’s weird we don’t have a good standardized name for it.

**Craig:** You could call it quote page. It’s not something that you need to worry about, Chris, honestly. I don’t think it’s cheating. If somebody wants to do it, God bless them. Is it a valuable tool? No. There has never been a single screenplay that went toward the path of success as opposed toward the path of failure, simply because of the strength of its quote. It’s not a thing. It doesn’t matter. You’ll be fine. You use it, you’re fine. If you don’t, you’re fine. It is not a valuable tool. It sounds like it’s not the kind of thing that you feel a great desire to do. The vast majority of screenplays do not do this.

**John:** The majority of the screenplays I’ve written do not have one of these pages. He mentions The Nines, which has a character explanatory page, which was really crucial for that, because otherwise you might not realize that the same actor’s playing these characters in different parts of the movie. Big Fish has one. It says, “This is a Southern story full of lies and fabrications, but truer for their inclusion,” just a single sentence on that page. It was helpful for Big Fish, because it just set up the right tone for what is the story you’re about to read. For that, I thought it was great. It ties in very nicely to the next question from Corey here. Megana, if you want to ask.

**Megana:** Corey asks, “In Episode 550 you discussed a screenwriter placing a trigger warning page between the cover and Page 1, whether it was warranted. I’ve written a screenplay that has several characters with disabilities. I don’t outwardly identify as a person with a physical disability, and I’m concerned that it could deter producers into thinking my writing is ableist. My question is, should I be putting a disability inclusion/information page at the top of my screenplay? Since my script is a comedy, it involves both abled to disabled bullying and disabled to disabled bullying. Can an information page alleviate potential producer concerns or scare them off more quickly?”

**Craig:** That was a really good question. Wow, it’s funny, we’ve been doing this so long, John, that now we actually can get new questions, because the world changed. That’s how long we’ve been doing this.

**John:** It did change.

**Craig:** The world changed.

**John:** Craig, before your answer, what would your answer have been 10 years ago?

**Craig:** My answer 10 years ago would’ve been nobody cares. That is not the answer that I would give today. This is a good question to ask. It’s relevant, because I think that a lot of producers, particularly in mainstream Hollywood, have become very concerned about this issue. Depending on what the story is, they may feel a burning desire to know if the writer is part of the class they are portraying. There’s lots of ways they can find out. The easiest way is your agent. Your agent says, “By the way, I represent this disabled writer, and he or she has written this script.” If you don’t have representation, nobody’s doing that for you, then I think it actually is helpful to put some kind of thing in there to let them know that you are coming at this from the inside as opposed to from the outside.

**John:** I agree with you in principle. I’m trying to imagine what would actually be said on that page that would both set the reader up for a good experience reading the script and not feel weirdly pre-defensive. I think it’s a really challenging thing to phrase there for that one page, that one sentence you’re going to put there, that’s going to set the person up right.

**Craig:** It’s not an easy… You could simply say something… Let’s say Corey’s last name is Jones. “Corey Jones is a disabled writer from Virginia.” You could do something as simple as that that is the most barebones biographical thing. Then I think the readers would say, “I understand why you were saying this.” I don’t think anybody would go, “Who cares about your bio, Corey?” They would get it, I think.

**John:** I think another alternative would be to find some quote, a thing a real person said out there, who is a disabled writer, a disability activist, who said the most important thing is that we push hard and then take it back. There might be some quote from a disabled person who says you also have to be able to have fun. You can’t put people up on a pedestal. There might be something like that that can actually help frame the comedy that you’re about to get into, because otherwise the person might be uncomfortable with some of the bullying that’s happening there.

**Craig:** Every comedy, you risk that, regardless. You could. You just don’t want to start your comedy by saying, “Lighten up. It’s a comedy.”

**John:** Don’t do that. Not a thing to do. I can imagine other kind of comedies that are talking about marginalized communities where a similar kind of advanced statement could be really helpful in framing who you are and why it’s appropriate for you to be telling this story or the kind of story that you’re hoping to tell.

**Craig:** Megana, what would you do in a situation like this? Should there be something? What do you think? Also, how would you phrase it?

**Megana:** I think it’s becoming a lot more common just in my experience. I feel like I’m seeing whatever we want to call that interstitial page a lot more. I think that people are more open to reading that. I think the quote is nice. I think what John was saying about finding a quote that frames it, without being too explicit, sounds nice and warming you up to the story.

**John:** I’m curious what our listeners think about this issue, but also what to call that page, because Megana just said interstitial page, which is the term I was reaching for rather than intermediary page. What do we want to call this page? I feel like if we just picked a title to this page, within five years we could actually name this page, and it would no longer be a question out there in the world. Write in to Megana or just tweet at us and let us know what we should call this page between the title page and the first page of the script. Those are follow-up-y questions, but Megana, we have some new things in the inbox. What do you got for us?

**Megana:** Great. Fred asks, “What do established screenwriters do for professional development? I’m in a field where there are continuing education requirements to keep up on the latest developments and hone my skills, but I’m curious what you do.”

**John:** Craig, are you caught up on all your classes or your coursework? Is your documentation up to date?

**Craig:** Yes, I have been proceeding up the ladder of professional development, and I should have access to the executive bathroom shortly.

**John:** That’s good, because you got to keep your credentials going there, because you never know when you’re going to be called up on it.

**Craig:** I’m so un-credentialed.

**John:** We tease, and yet there are some things I think we are doing consciously or subconsciously that are the equivalent of professional development. There’s certain things like WGA Showrunner Training Program, well-known, well-respected. Hey, you are going to be running a show. Here’s a boot camp in how you run a show. That is important. It’s been going on for a decade. It’s been really helpful in people figuring out how to do that job, the management function at that job. Things do change and evolve over the course of our careers. What Craig was just saying about 10 years ago, he would’ve had different advice for this writer, than now when we recognize that the world around us has changed to some degree, and we have to adapt what we’re doing. Yet there’s not a systematized way of doing that, because we’re not continually employed by the same employer. Just know we have to do HR training and sexual harassment training if we are staff on a show sometimes. For feature writers, that’s not really a thing.

**Craig:** I did have to do that when we started our production here. I don’t really consider that professional development, per se. It’s a creative job. We really don’t have professional development beyond watching TV, seeing movies, reading books, talking to people that are different than we are, the things that creative people and writers have always had to do. Professional development, I think in a lot of fields, is essential. Then in other fields it seems like it’s just a bunch of busy work designed to make people jump through hoops so they can get paid more, when they should have just been paid more already. It’s a way for some people to say, “Oh, I took these seven classes, so I should get paid more than that person, who is way better at this job than I am, but I took the seven classes.” We don’t have these problems. We don’t have the benefits or the drawbacks of professional development. We just try and stay plugged into culture and hold on to some relevance, I think is probably a good way of putting it.

**John:** I would say, just to be perfectly honest, most of my professional development has come through Scriptnotes, because you and I having a structured weekly conversation about the profession that we’re in, between each other, but also with all the guests that we bring in, I learn a lot, especially when we bring in folks who are doing something different than what I’ve ever done. We bring on showrunners or folks who are working in late-night or other fields I’m not directly involved in. That’s professional development, because I’m learning how they’re doing their jobs, the questions they are asking themselves, the struggles that they are facing. If I were to run a TV show, I’d be much better prepped, just because I’ve been doing all of the work and listening to these very smart people talk about their jobs.

**Craig:** There’s your answer. All you have to do, Fred, is start a podcast and do it for 10 years. Then you too will be professionally developed.

**John:** Love it. Megana, what else do you have for us?

**Megana:** Rachel asks, “I’m working on a spec script that’s based in a city I know well. I know where each of my characters live and work, and when I have them meet, I’m automatically thinking in terms of where they would genuinely meet if they were real, like which character would selfishly pick a place that’s close to their home but inconvenient for everyone else. At the same time, I’m aware that this isn’t generally how real-world locations are treated in actual movies. Any Before Sunset fan who’s visited Paris knows the disappointment of trying to trace Celine and Jesse’s walking route, only to discover that it dissipates after 10 paces because they teleported to some entirely different part of Paris mid-scene. Is my current approach misconceived? Am I sweating a set of considerations that don’t matter at all?”

**Craig:** A good question.

**John:** That’s a good question. I’m not saying you are totally misconceived, but I think you’re also, in your question, you’re answering your question. In the real world, people don’t think about that as much. In the actual making of films, we are going to cheat things to get from place to place. All that said, it does drive me crazy when people can do impossible things in LA in a movie. In movies that I’ve set in LA, things like Go, I am mindful of what part of town I’m sticking in and being sure it all tracks and makes sense within that part of town, both logistically but also just culturally and visually that it feels like you’re in the same part of the city that whole time. It’s not wrong for you to be thinking about where these people live, but you can get too anchored into some of your choices in the script that aren’t going to be relevant to the reader or to the viewer.

**Craig:** There was this note that used to get handed out a lot in the ’90s. Let’s say you were writing a movie that was set in Miami. The studio executives say, “I feel like you need to make Miami more of a character in the movie.” You would always think, oh, yes, yes, but what does that mean? Do you mean show places in Miami or have things that are… That’s what setting a movie in Miami is supposed to be. What do you mean? I think maybe all they meant is to provide some bits of authenticity and specificity. I think it’s probably a good thing that you’re thinking this way because it’s helping you think about your characters. If you think in terms of where they would genuinely meet if they were real, that gets you closer to where that scene is going to take place.

Now, if you’re doing a movie that is very much about a city, then sure, you’re going to want to make sure that Fenway Park is where it actually is in Boston, because people will just point at you and say that you’re terrible. It’s okay to lay everything out as truly as you can, and then when production happens, you figure it out. If they say, “We can’t shoot there. We’ll have to shoot here,” you can either rewrite it or you can cheat it. If it’s helping you write and it’s helping you achieve a certain amount of verisimilitude, specificity, and authenticity, then yeah, as long as it’s not holding you up, march on.

**John:** The other thing I would ask you to do is keep in mind what your reader needs to know versus what you want to know, because you as the writer/creator have this vision in your head for how people got from this point to this point and the shoe leather that would take them from this moment to this moment. That may not be important to your reader at all. Always just try to go back through your script and think, okay, do they actually need to know this detail? Do they need to know this connecting bit, or are they just looking like, “We’re in this location and we’re in this location. We don’t need to know how we got there or how realistic it is.” Is it not informing the characters and their dialog and the choices within those scenes, it probably doesn’t belong in your script.

**Craig:** I want to answer another question, desperately.

**Megana:** Do you want to answer this one from Jack from Sydney, Australia?

**Craig:** I haven’t read it, but yes. I don’t know what you’re going to say. I haven’t opened the thing. I’m committing to answering this question no matter what it is.

**Megana:** Jack says, “I recently completed a feature, and after receiving some extremely warm notes from a coverage service, I decided to share details and the log line of the project online. It’s very high concept, and judging by the responses and feedback, it’s clear the idea alone has a great deal of appeal. Off the back of this, I’ve been contacted directly by development executives asking to read it, which all sounds very positive but also has me a little nervous. I know ideas on their own are a dime a dozen, so I’m very keen to get the entire script into people’s hands to digest and enjoy. As this is my first time with any sort of industry attention, I’m just not sure how to navigate this and whether to share it freely with whomever asks. I’m unrepped and still very early in my writing journey, so any advice on what to expect and how to manage this would be appreciated. Before sending, should I watermark my script somehow? Will I be expected to sign release forms? Are these for my protection or theirs? Is this all just the ramblings of a paranoid newbie?”

**Craig:** I’ve committed to answering this question, Jack.

**John:** Craig, do it.

**Craig:** I’m going to answer this question. Don’t worry. You are from Australia, Jack. I do not know how copyright functions in Australia, but I can assure you it offers you more protection than copyright does in the United States, because copyright protection in the United States is the worst, unless you’re a business. You have Droit Moral. You have moral rights of authors and so on and so forth. The point is, when you write something, you have established authorship. There is likely a copyright office in Australia. You should contact them, register your screenplay with them so that there is a legal paper trail. Then you should go ahead and give it to people. You can absolutely watermark it. I think most of the major screenwriting programs do it. John has a separate program called Bronson Watermarker that does it.

**John:** Oh my gosh, this is Craig Mazin hyping one of my products. Please make a note of this in the transcript. This is the first time this has happened.

**Craig:** I don’t know if I hyped it, but I’ve acknowledged it.

**John:** Acknowledgement is hype from Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** If your sales spike, I want money. Yes, you may be expected to sign release forms, but they have requested this, so it is now, instead of an unsolicited screenplay, it is a solicited screenplay. If it’s an unsolicited screenplay, it’s fairly common for them to ask you to sign something, because they really didn’t want to read it at all, and they don’t want to get sued over something they didn’t want to read. If they’re soliciting it, then in general you should be able to send it to them, watermark it with their name. They won’t be offended. It is for everyone’s protection. Live and love, man. Go for it. That’s what you wrote this stuff for is to show it to these people, right? Show it to them.

**John:** The moment has come which you’ve been hoping for which is that people like your stuff and want to read it. This is very exciting. Yes, so you can watermark it. It doesn’t have to be a big, obnoxious watermark either. Just a little reminder like, hey, this is for you and only for you. You have a trail because they’ve asked for it, and then you were emailing the thing. Down the road, if you do need to sue somebody, you could prove that they had access to it, that they read the thing. It’s fine. Don’t catastrophize this yet. The best possibility is that you’re going to make some connections. You’re going to hopefully find somebody who makes this movie or at least wants to meet you as a writer. These are only good things. I’d say take the excitement, work with the excitement, and keep pressing on. Also, in stressing out over this script, don’t stop writing your next one, because that’s even more exciting than this current one.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Megana, give us one last question before we get to these Three Page Challenges.

**Megana:** JJ from Pasadena says, “A couple of months ago, I had a general meeting with an exec from a company that controls a lot of magazine IP. After the meeting, the exec sent me a couple of articles they thought I might be interested in. One of the articles clicked with me, and I came up with a pitch for a show. I didn’t use any characters from the article or any other material except for the idea for a setting. Even then, my setting became completely fictional. I pitched my idea, and they passed. My question is, am I free to take this pitch to other places, without the article attached, of course? The characters I created, their relationships and backstories are wholly original works and have nothing to do with the article. My managers are saying it’s tricky, but my take is what’s the difference between what I did here and me reading the article on my own and using it for inspiration to create something original, which happens every day?”

**Craig:** Managers. I swear to God.

**John:** I’ll take the first crack at this, because I may have a different approach than Craig. We just talked through Jack’s situation where people have solicited his script, and so he doesn’t have to worry about this. In this case, the reciprocal is true, because this magazine can show like, oh we came out to you for this thing, and we didn’t want it. We didn’t want it, but you took this article that we’ve used, and it became a basis for your project. Is that likely? Not likely at all. The way to make it even less likely or ever become a thing is to really change whatever other details were from that article and just make it your own thing. If this thing was set at a bowling alley, could it be set at a roller rink instead? Is there a different place you could set it, it just gets rid of all traces of that article? Yes, what you did, JJ, was create a whole new story that was vaguely inspired by that thing. You can get rid of that thing that was underlying it and use what you’ve got there as its own pitch. Craig, what’s your take?

**Craig:** The tricky part is only the diplomacy between yourself and these other people, but they passed.

**John:** They passed.

**Craig:** Which to me, that’s the end of diplomatic negotiations. The fact is, I’m presuming this article is nonfiction. It may not be. If it’s fiction, that’s a different story. To me, I don’t think of articles as fiction. If you had said essay, that might be different. Fiction is copyrighted, and it is a unique expression and fixed form. You can’t infringe upon somebody’s copyright on that any more than they could infringe on something you wrote.

If it’s a nonfiction article about facts, and the facts have been published in a magazine or newspaper, those facts are free to everybody in the world. You cannot own facts, particularly after you have reported them. You have gone even further than you would need to go, because you’re not using any of the characters from the article, or if it’s nonfiction I would call those people people. Then you said your setting became completely fictional. I think you’re perfectly fine if it’s nonfiction. If it’s fiction, no. That’s dangerous. You would have to make it very, very different so that when the executive from the IP magazine company hears about what you’re doing and reads it, that he or she can say, “Oh my god, I’m suing you.”

**John:** Let’s talk for a moment about fiction versus nonfiction, because we’re not lawyers obviously, but let’s talk about it just in a general sense of why they feel different and why they work differently in terms of what we consider literary material. If something is a work of fiction that has characters in it, something that has story developments, you can see, okay, this is the movie within this space. These are characters that were created to tell this one story. It’s hard to get rid of all those things and create a whole separate story. It’s unlikely you’re going to do this. As opposed to most nonfiction works, which are like, okay, this is about underwater mining, and there’s just a general sense of how this all works and the people involved in this, but there’s nothing there that you couldn’t go out and just do your own research and come up with the same details and facts. You’re going to be able to do that with nonfiction. You’re not going to be able to do that in fiction. That’s part of the reason why they feel different and why you don’t see the same kind of problems happening with the nonfiction articles.

**Craig:** The nonfiction work is research. You’ve read it. It counts as research. It’s facts. Certainly you can write about real people. You can’t defame people. The reason that we are so obsessed, we meaning Hollywood, with buying the rights to nonfiction articles, is because it helps the company stake a claim to an area, so everybody else knows they’re making a movie about let’s just say-

**John:** FIFA Soccer scandal.

**Craig:** The FIFA Soccer scandal. So-and-so has bought the rights to this big article in Rolling Stone about the FIFA Soccer scandal. They’re going for it. Also, now, when they buy that article, they have access to the journalists’ notes and all the stuff that was behind the article, including the contact information for all the people they talked to so that you can keep going further. You can also use things that they didn’t publish in the article. Beyond that, facts are facts. It’s just research.

**John:** Facts are facts.

**Craig:** That’s why anyone can write a movie about the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. You can take any fact you want from any nonfiction book or article, any of them.

**John:** Let’s discuss a practical matter though. Let’s do your Reagan assassination attempt thing. Let’s say there was a really good article and JJ was brought in to maybe pitch on this really good article about this Ronald Reagan assassination. It’s a very specific moment and beat. They say, no, actually, we’re not interested in that. If JJ then went out and started pitching this Ronald Reagan assassination movie to other places, those producers would be pissed. The ones who passed would be pissed. Would they legally have a claim to stop it? No, not really, they wouldn’t, because he could do his own research. That doesn’t mean it’d be a good idea for JJ to do, because it’s very clearly they brought him in, they passed, and he’s going off and doing that. Doesn’t mean he shouldn’t do it. It just means he should be aware of that. I can understand some hesitation there. It doesn’t sound like JJ’s situation is anywhere near that specific.

**Craig:** No. It’s a bad idea unless somebody buys it, in which case it was a great idea.

**John:** Then it’s a great idea.

**Craig:** This is an area where having great representation helps a lot, because representation can launder these kinds of interactions. No, you wouldn’t want to be known for going around town shopping an idea like this. If you had a general meeting and you mentioned your awesome take on the attempt on Reagan’s life, and they got excited, when the other people call to complain, your agent’s going to say, “They wanted to make one too. They mentioned it to him. What do you want? You don’t own the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life.” Then they just have to eat it. This is the danger of developing stuff that’s nonfiction. While I was developing Chernobyl, there was a competing Chernobyl project at Discovery, I think, which now amusingly is HBO, so that’s weird. You’re aware that it’s there. Let’s all see what happens. Nothing you can do.

**John:** Let’s get on to our Three Page Challenges. These are, as far as we know, not based on any fiction or nonfiction works. Instead, these are pages that our listeners have sent in. If you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, you can see the entry form, which you can send us a pdf of your three pages, generally the first three pages of a script. It can be a teleplay. It can be a screenplay. Every once in a while, Craig and I will read through these and give you our honest opinions. I say we read through these, but of course it’s really Megana Rao, and in this case Drew Marquardt, our intern, who is reading through all the entries in this last batch. If you want to read along with us, you can go to the show notes for this episode and click there. It will have the links to the pdfs of what was sent in to us, so you see. You could pause this episode and read through the pdf first, or just go back through it after you’ve listened to us describe them. We have three of them here. Megana, could you help us out with a summary of this first script?

**Megana:** The first one is Tag, You’re It by Suw Charman-Anderson. In the dead of night, World War One trench fighter William leads a small group of soldiers to silently plant barbed wire in No Man’s Land. Caught by a German patrol, William is riddled by machine gun fire and bleeds out. We cut to present day, where Nia Jenkins, 50s, goes to take a sip of water but notices a drowned spider in her cup and flings it across the room. At the same time, a man in filthy clothes mutters to himself as he walks through the town center. He lunges at a group of students who fight back, and in the scuffle, pull off his hoodie to reveal he’s William, and he hasn’t aged a day.

**John:** Craig, one thing I want to say about these pages before we get into anything else is a lot happens in them. There’s actually a fair amount of story beats that happen in just the course of these three pages, which I just want to commend, because so often we’ll get through three pages and it’s like, okay, that set up some scenery, but not a bunch happened here. A bunch happened here, so good job on that. Before we get to these three pages though, the title page here reads Tag, Season 1, Episode 1, You’re It, but doesn’t have Suw’s name or contact information on it, nothing else. A cover page doesn’t do any good unless you actually have the cover page stuff on it. Just make sure you’re always putting that stuff on for a Three Page Challenge or for any script you’re sending out there into the world.

**Craig:** Particularly if your script is entitled Tag, because there is a thing in television that is the tag, and so they may think, wait, is this just the end of Episode 1. You might want to put that in all caps or something, just because… It’s a little interesting. Often, you will see pilot episodes. Season 1, Episode 1 is a bit… It’s very optimistic.

**John:** Say pilot.

**Craig:** I think pilot seems a little bit more true to what it is, unless Suw knows something that we don’t.

**John:** Craig, when we got into… We’re opening up in these trenches of World War One. What did you think of this first page? Let’s go through the World War One sequence.

**Craig:** There was a lot of really good stuff here. World War One trenches are pretty evocative things. I think that Suw did a pretty good job of placing us in that world. I needed a little bit of effort, which I didn’t want to expend, I generally don’t want to expend any effort early on, to get through a little bit of lack of information. It begins with, “Exterior, World War One trenches, night,” although it is WWI. I think if it’s World War One, you can go ahead and write it out at that point.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** You can come back to the abbreviation later, but give us the first bit. Then it says “super: the Western front, 1916.” Other than my late father and men his age and history professors, a lot of people are not going to know what the Western front was. They’re not going to know where it was. I think we need to hear where we are, whether we’re in Germany or France. We need to know a town, an area, just so we can place ourselves.

I loved that William Fernsby, I liked he had “ferrety eyes and a shaven head.” He’s “up to his ankles in filthy water.” He’s got lice. He’s waiting for the soldier in front of him to move forward. It’s a nice way to move us into establishing that there are six men. It says “in the wiring party.” We don’t know what that is. Probably not a good idea to use that lingo when you just need to show me what you show me next, which is they’re gathering “supplies of six-foot pickets and rolls of barbed wire.” We proceeded through the No Man’s Land. Again, probably a good idea to give people a little bit of a concept of what No Man’s Land is, which was essentially this dead space in between opposing trenches.

This puzzled me. I’m curious, John, what you made of it. In the second scene, “William treads carefully, quietly, his nerves humming. The German trenches are only 150 meters away. There’s a noise.” Noise is in all caps. “The entire party freezes, nervously searching for its source. Communication is by hand signal and low whispers. Slowly, as they realize there’s no one there, they begin to move again.” Now, I know what happens next, but what-

**John:** Yeah, but at the time, what-

**Craig:** What is this noise? What is it? Do you know? I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know what that noise is. You have to be more specific here, because a noise could be anything. What do they think they hear? Do they hear movements? Do they hear someone approaching? What do they think are hearing?

**Craig:** Describe the ruckus. We need to know what they think it might be. Now, it seems to me that what Suw’s going for here is in the next scene, “William has moved away from the others.” That’s pretty vague. Why? What’s he doing? Why is he away from the others? “Out of nowhere appears a German soldier,” which is ironic, because that is how a German would say that. It’s backwards. A German soldier appears out of nowhere is better syntax, I think. “Part of a patrol.” You wouldn’t know that, because we don’t see them, because he’s alone.

**John:** Scratch that.

**Craig:** Don’t need it. Also, how out of nowhere? Do you mean apparated? Do you mean from the shadows?

**John:** From the darkness?

**Craig:** Yeah, because there’s clearly something supernatural going on. We need a little bit more clarity there. Also, it says, “The German soldier is on him immediately, but neither fire their weapons. Instead, they grapple hand-to-hand, silent except for huffs and puffs,” until the German soldier puts his wrist against William’s and then, “William screams in pain.” Why were they quiet earlier? Maybe that gets answered later. I don’t know. I like what happened next. Everybody died.

**John:** Everybody died. I was assuming they were quiet just because everyone has to be so super, super quiet. I think that could’ve been a little better set up. I think my only real frustration with this trench sequence is that throughout this whole thing I have got no sense of who William is individually. I wanted just one line. Just give one piece of business to William that is his alone, because otherwise it’s just the camera is favoring this one guy. I don’t know that’s going to be enough, because it is important that it is him, that we’re really going to see his face.

**Craig:** I agree. I did like that on the top of Page 2, the German soldier, which is spelled solider, a word that any spell check would capture, so please, for the love of God… “The German soldier leaps almost gleefully into the line of fire, his body jerking grotesquely.”

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Whoa, okay, that’s interesting. Then we find out that William is dead by, “William lies amongst the mess of bodies, eyes barely open, blood flowing freely from bullet wounds in his chest. Dawn breaks on the dead.” That’s great.

**John:** Dawn doesn’t break on the dead though, Craig. The sun suddenly comes up?

**Craig:** I still don’t know the difference between dawn and sunrise, to be honest with you. Every cinematographer laughs at me. Meaning there’s light on the horizon and there’s a lot of dead people. It was evocative.

**John:** It was evocative.

**Craig:** Then we ran into some trouble.

**John:** Last thing I’ll say is we want to get William off by himself. I think the wringing of the wire could be a good reason for him to be off by himself. Either he’s pulling ahead or he has to stay back with the reel as the others are pulling it forward. Just show us how he gets to be put by himself.

**Craig:** Agreed. No question, we need to explain that, because otherwise what’s happened is your screenplay has moved him somewhere he shouldn’t be so that something can happen. Audiences just don’t like that.

**John:** They don’t like that. That’s not all of our scenes. Next, we’re moving into Nia’s house, the bedroom. The room is “stylishly decorated, tidy but sparse … curtains drawn, dawn light seeping in around the edges.” I don’t know what tidy but sparse means.

**Craig:** Tidy and sparse. Sparse does not contradict tidy. It says “super: present day.” I’m not sure we would need that if you could just give us some details in the room that would tell us we’re no longer in 1916.

**John:** Now, we see this spider crawling around. I don’t need the spider crawling around at all. I basically just need… I love that she’s hot in bed and she’s the sort of person who sleeps hot and she grabs for the water and there’s a spider in it. That’s great. I think we spent too much time on this spider business.

**Craig:** Unless it becomes really important later, which is possible.

**John:** It could be.

**Craig:** We have some reverse syntax again. “Alone in the double bed lies a sleeping woman.” I’m starting to wonder if maybe Suw is a German speaker.

**John:** Could be.

**Craig:** “The menopause has reached Nia at last.” The menopause?

**John:** The menopause.

**Craig:** The menopause.

**John:** You got it.

**Craig:** I think it’s just menopause.

**John:** Menopause has reached-

**Craig:** She’s menopausal. Here’s my biggest issue. She wakes up. There’s a spider. She freaks out about the spider. She calls up for somebody named Tomos. There’s no one there. She’s upset. She then picks up the spider with some barbecue tongs and flushes it down the toilet. It says finally she can breathe again, except it says, “She can breath again. She sags.” Then that’s it. Then we’re off to a different scene. I’m like, why did I watch any of that?

**John:** I don’t know why we watched it.

**Craig:** I learned nothing. It didn’t drive me forward. Why? Here’s the deal. Suw, you get this big, exciting first sequence. Then you go somewhere else. I need something at the end of that sequence, doesn’t have to be crazy, to make me go, “Oh, what’s going on here?” I don’t get anything. I just get a lady flushing a spider.

**John:** I like the details. I like her with the tongs and all that stuff. I see it. It’s all great. I didn’t get any new information that’s making me extra intrigued. It just feels like a different movie, like okay, that movie happened, now we’re in this movie, and now we’re going to this third sequence, which is the college students. This fortunately does tie back into our opening. We see that William is part of this world. He seems to be the stereotype of the insane person rambling around that everyone’s trying to not look at, but mostly this worked for me. Then he’s on top of a student there. I would say my frustration at the end of this was, “With surprising speed and agility, the man lunges at the nearest student. There’s a scuffle as the others pull him off. His hoodie falls backwards, and we see his face.” The other student, who is that student? Is it a man? Is it a woman? Give us some detail here. Even if this character’s not going to survive this moment, we’ve got to know something.

**Craig:** Also, again, describe the ruckus. “There’s a scuffle as the other pull him off.” What does that mean, scuffle? Are people throwing punches? Do they grab him? Unless you were different, John, I had zero doubt that this was going to be William.

**John:** No. Of course it was going to be William.

**Craig:** His face is covered by a hoodie. I wonder who it is? You might, Suw, get away with not doing this ornate reveal and just a simpler reveal. We see a man from behind, stumbling “through the pedestrian precinct.” That’s an interesting choice of words. A car almost hits him. He turns, and now we see his face. It’s William, and he’s muttering to himself or whatever. This feels pretty involved. Generally speaking, “One notices the man but studiously ignores him,” I don’t know. The students, they’re nothing. They’re like props. Then we end with a reference to a character. We learn their name. We learn how the name is pronounced. We learn what their skin color is, what their eye color is, what their hair color is. We really probably don’t need all of that there. We’re going to learn it later. I would rather learn it when other people would learn it, because the audience isn’t going to learn it here. They’re not going to know his name here. I would probably dose that out a little bit later perhaps, because he’s supposed to be mysterious.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s give a little more detail on William at the start. Let’s consider whether we need to have this scene with the spider and Nia where it is, because I think it’s meant to be just a filler scene so that we don’t have these two things back-to-back. It’s not doing a job here. Let’s get to our William quicker. Even though I started this conversation by saying I was happy with how much happened in these three pages, and I still am, I think we could spend our time better in these three pages still.

**Craig:** If you do have what I think is a pretty interesting narrative conceit, which is Highlander but World War One, there’s other, more imaginative ways to show somebody being launched through time and still being alive and being as disturbed as the man who put this curse on him. I think this feels familiar. The executive feels familiar. I would really take a look at Page 3, and I would just ask myself… Let’s presume people get it, that there is actually… It’s not the most earth-shattering concept. Maybe put a little less pressure on the concept and think a little bit more about a more contemporary or challenging execution of it.

**John:** A thing we started doing recently with Three Page Challenges is that we asked them to submit a log line as well. Craig and I don’t know the log line until this very moment. I’m going to open up the triangle here. Here’s the log line for this thing which Suw sent through. “A curse transforms a single mum into an immortal heroine who must protect Earth from aliens, but is her 1,000-year-old champion really on her side or should she be protecting her enemies from him?” I did not see aliens coming.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** An involuntary immortal quality there, I get that.

**Craig:** You knew that Nia Jenkins was important because we saw the scene, so yes, but aliens, that’s the part I was like… That caught me by surprise.

**John:** I’m excited to see what Suw does with the rest of this script. I thought there was some promising stuff here.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Now let’s move on to our next thing. Megana, can you give us a summary of Halloween Party?

**Megana:** Great. Halloween Party by Lucas Abreu and Zachary Arthur and Kyle Copier. In a local newscast, a reporter delivers breaking news that three people have died and hundreds more were injured at a Halloween Party at Arizona State. They showed the mugshots of the two students identified as suspects, Carmichael and Allie. We then go back to two days earlier as Carmichael and Allie walk to class. Allie bemoans that they’ve yet to attend a single college party, but Carmichael defends this decision, saying he needs a spotless record in order to sit on the Supreme Court one day. Allie pushes back, insisting one party won’t destroy his life, but Carmichael asks her to wait until after his longtime crush, Maddie, leaves.

**John:** That’s where we’re at after three pages. Craig, first impressions of Halloween Party?

**Craig:** Lucas and Zachary and Kyle, this is going to sting just a touch. There’s a lot going wrong here. There’s a lot going wrong in a way that is very typical for screenplays. In that regard, this is, I think, useful and fixable. I want to go through them, because there are just a lot of screenwriting sins that pile up really fast and really consistently.

**John:** Agreed. There’s also some good things we can point out as well, but the sins are very obvious.

**Craig:** The sins are pretty obvious. Let’s start with sin number one. The reporter is not reporting the way any reporter reports. This is what the reporter tells us: Breaking news. Three people died and hundreds of people were injured “in a Halloween party gone wrong” near a college campus. Two people were taken into custody. They are the key suspects. What? How did the people die? It said investigation “into last night’s horrific events are ongoing.” What events? No one ever gets on the news and said, “Three people died.” How? Were they shot, chopped up, melted?

**John:** Poisoned?

**Craig:** We need something. Right off the bat, there’s just a clumsiness here. Reporter dialog is just something you need to get right.

**John:** Let’s talk about reporter dialog. This whole setup essentially is a Stuart Special, where it’s just like we’re seeing the aftereffects of this and the news footage of this thing, and then it jumps forward to three days earlier, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with a Stuart Special. This could be a good setup because it is surprising that these two people did this horrible thing, apparently. They want to see them in the time before. That can absolutely work, but we’re relying on this newscast to do a little too much. I also wonder about starting over black. There’s a limited amount of time which an audience is willing to just stare at a black screen and have someone talking. I think this was pushing beyond that. Think about what are you actually showing on screen. Are there multiple reports happening simultaneously in an I Am Legend kind of way? That could be a way to get into it. This is not going to work here. All that said, I love the character descriptions of both Carmichael and Allie. “Carmichael, 21, short Black chubby kid with a smile wide enough that it probably hurts his face, has a cul-de-sac haircut and lipstick all over his face.” I don’t know what a cul-de-sac haircut is, but I love that his smile “probably hurts his face.” I love it. Craig, Megana, what is a cul-de-sac haircut?

**Craig:** In the shape of a horseshoe?

**Megana:** I took it to mean just suburban and nerdy.

**Craig:** We’ll have to look that one up. While we’re doing research on this, I didn’t mind this description, but I did not like the description of Allie. The description of Allie was, “Allie, 22, tall skinny woman who’s far cooler than she has idea about.” To me, that’s just cool but doesn’t know it.

**John:** I like “glossy eyed and faded, she’s still on top of the world and doesn’t give a fuck about her black eye.” Great.

**Craig:** Hard to get across in a still photo. Also, who’s watching this? It’s on TV. We won’t know she’s a tall skinny woman because you’re showing us mugshots. How do we know she’s tall and skinny? Is there a specific height on the mugshot? They don’t really do that. That’s from the bad movies from the ’50s. There’s so many issues here. I thought, okay, let’s see where we end up two days earlier. We’re at campus. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with the Stuart Special. We’ve seen this particular kind of Stuart Special a lot.

**John:** I do not believe that two days before Halloween, people are already wearing their Halloween costumes around campus. I just don’t believe it.

**Craig:** They’re not.

**John:** I did not believe the campus at that moment. They’re not. Here’s my frustration is, there’s no such place as “exterior, Arizona State University campus.”

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** That’s not a place.

**Craig:** Not a place.

**John:** It’s not actually a location. You can be like, the main quad moving between the dorms and this place, but describe, give us a place, because I don’t know what the ASU campus looks like. I need to know something, and especially because you’re going to do a walk and talk, attempt to do a walk and talk for a very long time between two characters in a space. I have no idea where we are. By picking a more specific place, you could break it up. Give us some things to do and see and change up the scene. Right now, we are just trapped in this conversation that just keeps going. Aaron Sorkin could not make a good walk and talk that could carry us through these two pages of some void that we’re in.

**Craig:** Well-observed that we are in a place that doesn’t exist. Many, many years ago, all the way back when I had my blog, I wrote an article called You Can’t Just Walk into a Building. I think that’s what it was called. It’s common for screenwriters to say walks into a building and looks around. It’s like, what building? Building isn’t a thing. Someone has to go find the building. What is inside of the building? Is it just a building? Campus is not a place. Absolutely true that nowhere on the planet Earth are people in costumes two days before Halloween. There is no reason for Carmichael to be dressed in a Harry Potter outfit. Why?

**John:** I think it’s trying to ironically comment on JK Rowling’s trans controversy. I have no idea why he’s in a Harry Potter outfit. No idea.

**Craig:** It’s a brave attempt, but no. Then what proceeds is two pages of what I called ticker tape writing, just dialog, no interruption, no action lines, no one else shows up. I simply have these two people having a conversation that doesn’t appear to have a moment before. The conversation begins like this, “This weekend we’re doing it. I think we should try drugs.” Okay, but what were they saying before that?

**John:** They were together. They were already walking.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** This could be a first line if she runs up behind him and grabs him, startles him, and pins him down and says this is what we’re going to do. That is the beginning of a scene, that that moment started. It can’t start with them already walking and she says this.

**Craig:** If you just added the word no, then I would understand that she was responding to something, and so that we were inside of a…

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** You can’t just start as if these people were walking silently and then suddenly, scene. Then what happens is two people that know each other very well start telling each other things that they should already know. They just start announcing things that they should know. “We’re seniors at the number one party school in the nation and have literally never been to a single party.” Yeah, they know that. “I want to be on the Supreme Court.” Yes, I know. Then, “You act weird around Halloween,” which is bizarre, but also something that you would know. Then, “Imagine how many more copies of my book I’d sell.” Okay, so you’re a writer. You need to tell him that, even though he already knows. Then he has to tell her that there is a woman that he is in love with, that she already knows about. None of this would happen.

**John:** It would not happen.

**Craig:** None of it.

**John:** We often talk about how late could you come into a scene and still get the purpose of the scene. It’s a fun exercise with this, because you would come in so much later to this and actually get the information out that you want to get out, and give yourself space to do more interesting things in here. We won’t keep beating on this, but it’s like a jokoid. It has the quality of dialog, and dialog that people say in movies, but it’s just there’s too much, and it’s not actually moving us anywhere, not going to any place. There’s one sentence I actually have to talk about, because I think it would be actually an impossible sentence to diagram. I’m going to read Carmichael’s sentence from the top of Page 3. This is what Carmichael says. I’ll try to give a fair performance of it. Here it is. “I’m simply saying I have to go in there with a resume solid enough for Lindsey Graham to be comfortable nominating somebody with a skin color that’s darker than his mother’s.” Wow.

**Craig:** What I wrote next to that was awkward and written. By written, I mean instead of somebody talking, which is what dialog in a screenplay is for, it appears that somebody has taken some time to write some prose out. He does it again. Then his next dialog brick is, “This just kind of feels like one of those moments I bring up in my bestselling autobiography 50 years from now where I talk about how your decision to try drugs in this moment led you to a life hunting for Sasquatch and multiple felony-level prostitution charges.” No.

**John:** How many words was that?

**Craig:** So many words. The sentences are coming out in absurdly complete packages. I have a challenge for Lucas and Zachary and Kyle. The challenge is I want you to rewrite this scene. I want you to not worry about being funny. I don’t want you to write a single joke. I want you to write it in the most realistic way possible, as if these were actual human beings walking across an actual campus, going somewhere, coming from somewhere, and having a discussion that two people that have known each other for years would actually have, in the way that they would have it. Just go as low concept as you can. Go mumblecore on this. You can always then pull it up. I think you guys need to get down to the really realistic ground on the ground before you can start getting into the comedic stuff, because it’s just not connected to reality right now.

**John:** I very much want to see that. I was going to propose the same thing. I want to see a cleaned-up version of this. I think it’s also challenging to have a team of three writing scenes. It can happen, but you don’t see it very much. It’s not common.

**Craig:** That’s true. Maybe that’s part of it is that it becomes committee-ized or something. All I can say, guys, is I think that I’m sure that you have a movie that all three of you love, that is in this genre. See if you can get that screenplay and just really dig into how it’s constructed. I think you will move forward by leaps and bounds. I really do believe so.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** I am rooting for you guys.

**John:** Here’s the log line that they sent through. “When two best friends decide to impress their friend group from out of state, they mistakenly throw the greatest Halloween party of all time.”

**Craig:** That’s what I think probably you thought it would be about, certainly what I thought it would be about. There are lots of great movies about young adult parties going bad but good. Time-tested genre often works. I think you guys, just give yourself this little exercise, and then I think write back into it. It’s okay. Like I said, you didn’t invent any new mistakes, so don’t worry about that. I made these mistakes. John, you made these. Maybe you didn’t, but I did.

**John:** A hundred percent, I did. Also, I do wonder if some aspect of what happened to dialog at a certain point, and what we took to be as good dialog, like of the Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s very convoluted, and yet it all fits together, people heard that and internalized that and think that’s what dialog should sound like. It’s just not working in some of these situations.

**Craig:** Also, there’s a certain kind of person that can do it. If your characters are highly educated, articulate press secretaries for the president or future Mark Zuckerbergs who are on the spectrum and at Harvard, yeah, then they can talk like that, because some of those people talk like that. This is not to insult anybody at Arizona State University, but this is not the typical cadence of anybody. Neither Carmichael nor Allie are talking like actually people there. All of their lines are too formed. When Allie said, “Never fucked a woman,” she knows he hasn’t. What is that even about? Then you fuck him then. It was just so weirdly mean, and then he just kept going through it. That’s an example, guys, where I think you’re going for a laugh but you’re actually hurting the characters. That’s the other thing is never, never sacrifice character on the pyre of the laugh, because you probably won’t get the laugh, because people will be upset at the character, and you’ll hurt the character.

**John:** For sure.

**Megana:** Wait, also, do you want to know what a cul-de-sac haircut is?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to know. Please.

**Megana:** I think that what they are saying here is it’s a fade. There’s a little bit of hair on top, and then you have the cul-de-sac effect because it’s really trimmed down on the sides.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Megana:** The thing that comes up when you first search for this on Google is just male balding patterns. That makes more sense to me as a cul-de-sac.

**John:** A horseshoe, yeah. I doubt he has shaved his head to resemble male pattern baldness, although I’d want to know that character. I’d really want to know that character who would choose to do that.

**Craig:** I would respect that.

**John:** A hundred percent.

**Craig:** I would respect that.

**John:** Megana, can you talk us through our final Three Page Challenge?

**Megana:** Ronnie, an American at college in Scotland, comes home from a one-night stand to a voice mail from her dad, Ed. As she listens to the voice mail on speakerphone, she notices her pet goldfish floating in its tank. As she tries to resuscitate the fish, Ed informs her that her mother has died. Back home in Santa Barbara, Ronnie and her siblings stand on the beach as Ed pushes their mother’s urn out to sea, which the tide quickly brings back to shore. Her sister Elle swims the urn out and submerges it. When she returns to shore, their sister Sophia accuses Elle of stealing her earrings.

**John:** That’s where we’re at at the end of three pages.

**Craig:** What’d you think, John?

**John:** I liked quite a lot about these. I really liked quite a lot about these pages. There’s some interesting stuff here. Again, we’re on a college campus, and yet it feels a more specific college campus. I wasn’t trapped in nowhere for this as much. I have specific things about getting to voice mail. This is essentially the convention of someone listening to their voice mail when they get home or the answering machine that we used to have in the ’90s. I want to propose that maybe her phone is dead and she’s plugging it in when she gets into a room and that’s why she’s now getting this message from her father about her mother being dead. Yet I dug the tone. We were in a dramedy space. I was curious to see what was going to happen on Page 4, which is always my question for these kinds of samples is do I want to keep reading. What did you think?

**Craig:** I loved it. Do you think it’s Emme or is it Emme?

**John:** I think it’s Emme. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** If it’s E-M-M-E?

**John:** We’ll say Emme for this podcast. We’ll apologize if that’s not quite right.

**Craig:** Miss Harris. The start, here’s a description that does work for me, “Ronnie Thomas, 20, American, the kind of girl you ask to watch your laptop at a café, ties her sex-wrecked hair back and throws on sneakers.” Now I must admit, I’m not sure what the kind of girl you ask to watch your laptop at a café is, but sex-wrecked hair gets a check mark for me. I can see her. This was a very efficient way to show me something that I’ve seen a million times. Here’s the thing. It’s okay to do things that people have done a million times. Just don’t dwell on it like you’re the first person to do it. What I liked here about Miss Harris is that she writes this very efficiently, like you get it, you know the deal. As you point out, she’s running across the university campus. I would like to know where, but at least at the end, it’s super short and she’s heading for another dormitory building. At least I get a sense roughly of where she is. I like the stone spiral staircase.

I thought this was such an interesting way to convey information. We’ve talked about exposition a lot and how you get across ideas and how exposition is sometimes a wonderful opportunity to be creative. This is creative. He’s just yammering on her voiceover. She’s very upset about a goldfish. She starts doing little… I saw her doing little finger compressions, which I thought was really hysterical. Then her dad says, “Oh, and your mum is dead.” Then she starts screaming. Then her roommate says, “Well, that seems a bit dramatic, doesn’t it?” It was very good. It was a good way to… I’m so leaning forward and excited. I kept feeling that way when we got to the beach in Santa Barbara. How did you feel about that scene?

**John:** I think the beach mostly worked. We are there. The idea is that we’re going to put these ashes. We’ve seen the ashes at the beach thing a hundred times. Again, you weren’t scared of the stock scene. You’re doing the thing. You’re putting the urn in, and it just won’t sink. That comedy, it just keeps washing back up, feels great that the sister swims out with it and finally submerges it and dunks it. It feels right. Do I know quite what’s happening on the page after that? Nope, but in these three pages we’ve met our hero, we’ve taken her from Edinburgh where she’s going to school to Santa Barbara. It feels like that’s where we’re mostly going to stay. We don’t know. We’re curious. We want to know more about her. We basically like her so far. These are promising things.

**Craig:** They’re smart. This is a very funny bit. I thought this was really funny. I liked the idea that Ed is like, “This is ridiculous. This urn full of her ashes, it’s biodegradable, it’s supposed to just sink and release the ashes into the water.” Everyone starts laughing. Then Elle takes it and brings it out into the water and she dumps it in, and then there’s this bit about earrings. It had that kind of intelligence that you see in Fleabag, for instance, to me. You know in Fleabag, in the second season, when they’re at the funeral, and everyone’s just like, “Oh my god, you look really great.” It’s this incredibly awkward thing that happened. Her hair just was perfect that day. It’s so weird and specific. I could see her sister. I could see her other sister. I like that Elle was wearing a slightly too extravagant gown. It’s all just really well done. I loved how much white space there was on the page. I salute you, Emme or Emme or Emme Harris. Well done.

**John:** Here’s a suggestion for Page 1. As Ronnie’s speeding across campus, her friend in upper case “carrying books, stops as she passes.” Friend asks, “Are you coming to Lit?” Ronnie says, “Yes, just going to my room to grab my stuff. I’ll see you in a sec.” “They part ways. Ronnie heads for another dormitory building.” Who’s that friend? That friend male, female? That friend could be somebody specific. Just give us a gender. Give us something about that. Also, it’s a wasted opportunity. It’s like a nothing conversation. There’s a moment to either acknowledge that this was a walk of shame coming back from this thing. I wanted something funny there and for them to just tell us that, okay, we’re in a comedy and get us primed for the next scene, which could land even better if we had some joke before that.

**Craig:** I agree with that.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** That’s an excellent point.

**John:** As we wrap up here, let’s talk about the log line. “After the death of her estranged mother, a college student returns home to her sisters and dad in California for a memorial service that reveals more than one complicated relationship.” It’s a half-hour pilot, apparently.

**Craig:** Great. Great. I want to read it. Send it. I’ll read it. I’m excited. This is good. It was funny. I enjoyed it.

**John:** I want to thank all the people who sent in Three Page Challenges, especially these three that we talked about today. If you want to send in a Three Page Challenge, go to johnaugust.com/threepage and fill out the form there and attach your pdf. We do this probably every two or three months. If you’re a Premium Member, we’ll send out an email in the week before we’re going to do one so we can get that last call of entries for this. I want to thank Megana and Drew for going through all of these entries…

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** …and remind people that this is a voluntary thing, so we really applaud you for sending in scripts that we can all talk about. All right, Craig, it has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing comes from, on Saturday night, we did a thing we had not done for a long time since the pandemic, which was having a game night. We were over at a friend’s house. We all played games together and gathered around a table. It was tremendously fun. I played a new game I never played before, which was the Blockbuster Party Game. I’ll link in the show notes to it.

This game comes in a case that looks like a Blockbuster tape, which is just such a wonderful bit of nostalgia. The game itself, you have movie titles on your cards. You’re trying to get your team to guess them. It has a Charades-y kind of quality, but it actually has some really smart game mechanics in terms of things you can do to compete against the other teams. There’s timers. It’s all smart, and just the right version of this kind of game. If you’re a person who loves movies, which you probably are, if you listen to this podcast, and want a party game for six people or more, I recommend you check out the Blockbuster home game. It was like eight bucks on Amazon, so not a big commitment, but a really surprisingly fun game.

**Craig:** This was a game from the ’90s, right?

**John:** No, this is a brand new game.

**Craig:** No, it’s not.

**John:** This is a brand new game that just-

**Craig:** You’re kidding.

**John:** It’s a brand new game that just happens to have the packaging and the feel of Blockbuster. They must’ve just found out whoever has the logo for Blockbuster. They got the rights to have the logo for Blockbuster. It’s a brand new game.

**Craig:** Oh my god, so this isn’t when Blockbuster’s at the height of their power. They had a little associated game. Maybe they’re like, “Who’s going to sue us? There’s no Blockbuster.”

**John:** I think Blockbuster’s one of those brands, it’s like Ataris. You don’t need the real company. You want the nostalgia for the thing.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** I quite enjoyed it. When you’re back in town, Craig, I’m going to have you and Melissa over for game night with a bunch of folks, and we’ll play this, and I think you’ll enjoy it as well. It’s a smart choice they made in deciding this.

**Craig:** Deal.

**John:** I also insist that at some point you host Mafia again, because Craig may be a good screenwriter, he’s one of the best Mafia hosts you could possibly ever imagine.

**Craig:** I’m thinking about just doing that professionally from now on.

**John:** I think it’s a good choice. Craig, it’s less stressful. People would pay you good money. You could have billionaires pay you to be a host for Mafia parties.

**Craig:** I worry that for billionaires, when people die, they actually die, because they can murder, because laws don’t matter. My One Cool Thing this week is something that wandered my way via Twitter but I guess from TikTok. This is not a new thing, although it’s new to TikTok. It’s called the hanger reflex. Have you been following along with this one, John?

**John:** I have. We tested the hanger reflex around in our house after watching an episode of TV. We tried it. Craig, does it work for you? Does it work if you do it to yourself, or only if someone else does it to you?

**Craig:** I only tried it putting it on my… Let me tell you what it is. If you haven’t heard of the hanger reflex, you take a wire coat hanger and you spread it slightly and put it on your head and then let it go so it squeezes on your head. For many, many people, including myself, your head will naturally turn to either the right or the left. What I found was if I rotated it, it would turn one way or the other. It always turned towards the way the coat hanger was hooked.

**John:** The hook.

**Craig:** This is not one of these mass suggestion things. This in fact is an established reflex discussed in journals, medical journals, research journals. No one really knows why, although they think it has to do with shearing force, which is basically when one force is pushing one way and the other one is pushing the other way, but not directly at each other. It creates a natural desire to twist along with the shearing force. It’s really weird. I was not expecting it to work. It absolutely worked on me. Have you tried it, Megana? Have you hangered yourself?

**Megana:** I have not yet, because you have to have a wire hanger, right?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. Apparently, it will work with a thicker plastic hanger, as long as there’s actually space, as long as it will squeeze properly, but wire is the preferred one.

**Craig:** I think I’ll find a wire hanger and I’ll put it on your head. We’ll get this done. Don’t you worry. Don’t you worry. Anyway, check it out. If you just Google the hanger reflex, very easy to try at home. Fun for the whole family. You start to feel very, very stupid as you’re doing it. Some people are like, “Wait, this is a setup, right? You all just agreed to say that this does something, and then I’m going to be the idiot that puts this on my head, and you’re going to laugh at me.” No, it’s a thing. It’s actually real.

**Megana:** Have you tried to resist it when you’re doing it?

**Craig:** Yeah. You can.

**John:** It’s not overwhelming. It’s not like some ghost is turning your head.

**Craig:** No, it’s really more that if you don’t try and resist, you don’t try and help it, your head will just naturally want to turn. It’s really weird. You’ll see when I put it on your head.

**Megana:** Cool, I can’t wait.

**John:** That is our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with help this week from Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Nice.

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

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Our outro’s 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. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You 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. 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 secrets of social media. Craig and Megana, thanks so much for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The secret to social media was actually revealed this past week by Sara Schaefer, a writer and comedian who has actually been a guest on this podcast before. Let’s take a listen to Sara Schaefer’s secret to social media.

**Sara Schaefer:** I used to always share my opinion online. No matter the topic, I was ready to dive into the discourse, even when it had nothing to do with me. The result, me posting a lot of dumb shit. Before I knew it, I was posting dumb shit online every single day, until all that changed. Now I don’t post dumb shit at all. What’s my secret? Silence. Surprised? I was too. Turns out you don’t have to post anything at all. It’s not required. Sometimes you can just be quiet. My girl friends ask me, “But Cheryl, wouldn’t that be censoring yourself? Is this the end of a free society as we know it?” No, it’s actually something else. It’s called maturity. I wondered what would happen when I stopped blasting out every half-formed thought from my head like a diarrhea cannon, but now, thanks to silence, I’m posting half the amount I used to, and guess what, I still exist. Silence, I never knew. Did you?

**John:** Craig, do you think Sara has hit upon the formula for social media success?

**Craig:** She has, although I have to give credit to fellow screenwriter Katie Dippold for saying this exact thing a number of years ago. Somebody had tweeted something, and she showed it to me and then just wrote, “You don’t have to say anything.” It’s just an interesting thing. Sometimes you get fooled by social media into thinking that it must be used. It doesn’t have to be used at all.

You know what? The other day I was thinking about this very issue. We’ve been living with alcohol for thousands of years. They find residue of beer in prehistoric bowls. What if we hadn’t? What if no one had ever had alcohol until 10 years ago? Then the first alcohol was very rudimentary. It was pretty watered down. Now after 10 years, there’s beer, there’s wine, there’s vodka, there’s gin. Someone just invented tequila. People are going crazy. No one knows what to do. They’re puking. They’re arguing if it’s a disease, is it not a disease, is this a good thing, is it a bad thing. We’re so ill equipped to handle something as powerful as alcohol, because it’s only been around for 10 years. That’s social media. We don’t know what we’re doing. It’s alcohol. Sara Schaefer, what you’re really saying is you don’t have to drink it. You don’t have to drink it. You can watch other people drinking, and it’s fun.

**John:** One thing I think Sara hits on which is really important is that, “I didn’t say anything, and yet I still continued to exist,” because one of the things about social media, if you’re not posting it’s like you’re not really there. No one’s retweeting you. No one’s acknowledging you. If you don’t put out your opinion, do you even exist? You do continue to exist. You actually are a person who has opinions, even if you’re not sharing those opinions. More importantly, you don’t have to have an opinion on everything. You can just stay out of whole conversations. That’s a crucial skill which I wish people could pick up earlier.

**Craig:** I love staying out of conversations. It’s like crack cocaine for me now. I read something. In my mind I’m like, “I’ve got something to say.” Then I don’t say it, and I feel great. It’s such a joy.

**John:** What put us on the bonus topic today was the Amber Heard, Johnny Depp trial, which I’ve never commented on. Obviously, I know Johnny Depp from work projects before. I don’t know Amber Heard at all. It angers me so much that this is a public trial that’s being shown to the world and also discussed by the world, when it’s none of our fucking business whatsoever. I just get so incredibly frustrated by that it’s just a moment of entertainment and enjoyment for the world to participate in and comment upon, when who the fuck cares? We shouldn’t be allowed to watch this thing.

**Craig:** I haven’t been following along with the trial of the century. You’re right. It’s none of my business. I can’t possibly learn anything or grow as a human being by following the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard trial. There was this other thing that happened to me over the last couple of months. That was, and I think I shared this with you, getting a number of interview requests by real places like TV news outlets here and abroad to comment on the war in Ukraine, because I had written a television series about a nuclear disaster in Ukraine. They’re always very flattering when they come for you. I politely declined. The reason I politely declined is because I am not qualified to discuss the war in Ukraine. That’s not what I do. It seems like nobody out there cares. They’re just trying to throw more people at microphones. Everybody can shout their unearned opinion at each other. That’s why I like that we do this, because we actually have earned our opinions about screenwriting, so it’s nice. You see what I mean? Why would anyone ask a screenwriter to talk about a war in Ukraine? That’s crazy.

**John:** On the podcast we are sharing our expertise and our opinions on a topic that we know very well because it’s actually the thing that we do every day. Had they gone to an expert in Ukrainian military history or the tactical issues involved with Russian military or nuclear safety, fantastic. Those are great places to go to. The guy who wrote Chernobyl is not a valid news source for this thing.

**Craig:** No. I think everybody has been trained to believe that everyone is an expert on everything, and God knows they’ll tell you about it. The problem is, what do we do? I don’t know how to get out of this.

**John:** A choice is silence, as Sara Schaefer lays out. We don’t have to weigh in on things. We don’t have to weigh in on things that we are experts on or not experts on, that we do know of some information. We can stay out of it. There have been times where I’ve jumped in on something because it’s a funny moment. Great, but I’m trying to stay out of things that are just like, this is an enraging thing that’s happening in the world. If I’m not showing my rage, it sounds like I’m sitting on my hands. No, it’s just that I’m better off donating to abortion rights charities than screaming about it on Twitter, or I’ll go to a protest where actually my physical presence is important for me to be there, than just putting it out on the timeline, where everyone else is also venting. Megana, you are not as big of a social media user as I am. What is your decision process about what to amplify, what to keep back from? What’s your metric for doing that?

**Megana:** Sorry, this is something that I could talk about forever. I think I prefer to hold most of my opinions to myself and reserve the right to feel differently about things.

**John:** Wait, I want to stop you there. Reserve the right to feel differently, reserve the right to change your mind?

**Megana:** Yes, I reserve the right to change my mind, which social media and the internet does not respect or it’s not a thing that is really possible on the internet.

**Craig:** You monster.

**John:** You monstrous hypocrite. How could you possibly change your mind?

**Craig:** How dare you?

**Megana:** I agree. I also grew up with social media. Me and my friends all got MySpaces and Xangas when we were 12 years old. No 12-year-old has anything interesting to say. I think that around 2014 I was grossed out by the way it felt like everyone around me was behaving in a way that they could then curate to social media instead of just living. After that, I just stopped posting stuff. I’m still on social media. I’m still on Facebook because there are certain groups that I get information from and message boards. I wish that I didn’t have to be on Facebook, but I am, because of that. I’m on Twitter because of writing and work stuff. Then I’m on Instagram. I’m actually not really on Instagram that much. I wish that I didn’t have to be on any of these things, because I think that there is some value in them, but for me in my life it’s mostly a negative.

**John:** You’re distinguishing between you’re a consumer of these things but you’re not a producer of content for these things. That’s an absolutely valid choice. Basically, it is helpful for you sometimes to get this stuff coming in. There obviously can be toxic effects of that too. I guess back to Sara Schaefer’s point, you don’t feel the need to comment on everything that’s happening, passing by. You’re very judicious about what you put out there in the world. You got to go up and see Craig in Calgary, and Bo, and hang out with them. I got to see pictures of beautiful stuff up in Calgary, which is great. I was so happy to see you posting that kind of stuff. You could share that with people who would be interested in seeing those things, but you didn’t have to weigh in on bigger issues.

**Megana:** I think another thing with social media is that especially with the new Facebook algorithm and the metaverse overhaul or whatever, it favors extreme opinions. Most people don’t have extreme opinions. Most people think pretty similarly about things. When I’m on social media, I’m like, “Oh my god, this world is so polarized.” When you go outside and talk to people, you realize that’s not actually the case at all.

**John:** I will stand up for the fact that Oreo Thin cookies are the best version of Oreos, and the dark chocolate Oreo Thins are the best version of Oreo Thins. That’s the hot take that I will stand by.

**Craig:** Guess what? You’re a garbage person.

**John:** Tell me why I’m wrong. Tell me what is the actual correct answer for what is the best store-bought cookie.

**Craig:** You may absolutely be right, but I feel that my job is to express outrage. Where is the outrage? I love when people on Twitter are like, “Where is the outrage?” I’m like, are you kidding me? What else is there here? “Where is the salt?” says man drowning in ocean. It just doesn’t make any sense.

**Megana:** One thing that was nice is John and I went to the Bans Off Our Body March in LA, what was it, two weeks ago?

**John:** Yeah.

**Megana:** The Supreme Court leak and the stuff about Roe v Wade is something that is incredibly frustrating and painful. I see so many hot takes on social media. First of all, found out about the march through social media. Being able to be in a physical space with people was so affirming. That’s all I wanted to say.

**John:** You just don’t know how many people there are on Twitter. You can see all these things scroll by in your timeline, but when you’re actually physically in a space with a bunch of people, you’re like, oh, these are all as upset and angry and scared as I am, and they’re all coming together to stand up for something, is meaningful. Shouting there was meaningful because we were all shouting together. Shouting at each other on Twitter is not doing any good.

**Megana:** There’s no room for anyone to “well, actually” you at that march.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Exactly, because you were experiencing real community. These places call themselves virtual communities, but that’s an oxymoron. You need to see people. You need to be with people. It’s why sporting events are still popular. Everyone has the best seat in the house to see any baseball game they want, any football game they want, and still, tens of thousands of people go every day in each individual city to see a team play because it’s community. It’s physical community. Fuck you, Meta. It’s not going to work. It’s just not.

**John:** Craig, what I hear you saying is that while you love Scriptnotes as this podcast, we need to go back to doing our live shows and we need to get all 40,000 of our listeners together in a stadium to listen together to a Scriptnotes recording.

**Craig:** That would be good if they would all agree to show up on the same day. It’s true, the pandemic, we worked around the lack of physical communion, but it’s just not the same. We were designed to live in space, in reality and space, and not in this disconnected fucking void. It is of course a system that is built on shouting, will encourage shouting. Sometimes people say, “Twitter just makes everybody mean.” I don’t think it’s Twitter that’s making people mean. I think it’s people being assholes make people mean. It’s the “well, actually” people. They have no control over themselves. They don’t know how to use this. They don’t know how to drink the alcohol, and so they’re ruining the party for everybody. All my metaphors collided, smashed together. I don’t care. It’s awful. Talk about a really hot, hot, hot take. Is there anything more Twitter than complaining about Twitter?

**John:** Nope. The circle is now complete.

**Craig:** The circle is complete.

**John:** Thank you guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Ryan’s Elvis Question on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ryanbeardmusic/status/1527078914304053249?s=20&t=mxVqjmJlJB_h7npBbI0w8Q)
* Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: [Tag – You’re It](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F05%2FTag-3-pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=8f19a8a60a86d95ebd750d8d808c7e0f41086178fa494e7a66c4dbe1303ca6d8) by Suw Charman-Anderson, [Halloween Party](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F05%2FHalloween-Party-first-three.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=1e53d05e5ac4750e18d1cce9b4ec22f64a7ed94e761e27be5ad312169555a61e) by Lucas Abreu & Zachary Arthur & Kyle Copier, [Belly Up](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F05%2FBELLY-UP-three-page-challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=196cabefbb46451a9202a4b18c5fa5693fe28c48046c0a556434856eceb54b11) by Emme Harris
* [Blockbuster, the Party Game](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WMWNYNN?ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_FAJ764ZAMGTXGQZ1V9AB)
* [The Hanger Reflex](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7788272/#:~:text=The%20hanger%20reflex%20is%20a,the%20cause%20of%20this%20phenomenon)
* [Sara Schaefer Silence Video](https://twitter.com/saraschaefer1/status/1527385667583365133?s=20&t=Xs601W2CeWgx8WrXLbPCXQ)
* [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 Nico Mansy ([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/552standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/telling-real-world-stories).

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

**Craig Mazin:** No, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 580 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s a How Would This Be a Movie case study. I’ll be talking with screenwriter William Nicholson about his script for Thirteen Lives, following the attempted rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a cave. We’ll get into issues of life rights, competing projects, narrative point of view, cultural sensitivity, and what happens when you and the director don’t agree about what kind of movie you’re trying to make. Craig, it’s a really good conversation. I was sorry to not have you there, but sometimes the one-on-one things are better when it’s just one on one.

**Craig:** What I’m hearing is that it was a really good conversation because I wasn’t there.

**John:** It was a good conversation. Also, I saw the movie. I think I was vaguely aware of the actual real-life rescue. You remember that one when it was happening, right?

**Craig:** Of course. I remember when it was happening. I remember Elon Musk doing what he seems to do on a daily basis now, which is say something incredibly stupid, so there was that.

**John:** There was that.

**Craig:** They got the kids out, which was great.

**John:** Yeah, which is great. I knew that the kids got out. We did talk a little bit about knowing the ending of the movie. Before we sit down and watch it, you know the kids get out. The specifics were actually a lot different than I realized or than I heard reported in the moment. It was really a question of point of view. Do you talk about it from the family’s point of view, from the kids inside the cave’s point of view? At what point do you reveal the kids inside the cave are alive? How do you reflect the balance of worldwide attention versus the actual very small, local story on the ground? It was a good conversation about the choices he made but the other choices that could’ve been made.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Nice. Also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about our non-work goals and aspirations for 2023. We are canonically not a resolution show. We’re not going to promise to do a thing. I always like to think about stuff we’d like to do more of or less of.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Let’s be thinking about that for a Bonus. We’re going to ask Megana too.

**Craig:** As long as we’re asking Megana, then we’ll be fine.

**Megana Rao:** I have to think of something.

**Craig:** Get going, Megana.

**John:** Some follow-up from last week. We had Rian Johnson on the show. We were answering a question about variable frame rates. I said that I was going to watch Avatar right after we record it, and I would be able to tell you what I thought of the variable frame rates. They mostly worked for me. The times that you go into really high frame rate stuff, it tends to be underwater. There’s a lot of underwater. The underwater stuff is amazing and beautiful in the movie. There are other moments where I did notice things were shifting, but it’s also hard to tell, because it’s a 3D movie, so everything’s a little bit weird anyway. I don’t know, if I was watching a 2D movie, I might not have had the same experience with the high frame rate stuff.

**Craig:** How are the glasses these days? Feeling good?

**John:** So much better.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** The glasses are pretty lightweight. This is my first time wearing them with a mask as well. A little trick for people is that if your glasses start to fog up, just pull your glasses a little bit further away, further down the bridge of your nose, and they won’t fog up so much.

**Craig:** That’s a good tip, or get Lasik.

**John:** I’m talking about the 3D glasses.

**Craig:** Oh, the 3D glasses. You have to wear the 3D glasses. I guess that makes sense. It would fog up. Maybe in a movie like Avatar, the fog might add a little something.

**John:** No, the fog will not add. James Cameron does not want you to have fog on your glasses.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** He will come by and he will wipe off the fog on your glasses.

**Craig:** He does seem like somebody that would more likely just smack the mask off your face.

**John:** Interestingly, he was supposed to come to the Q and A after this, and all the chairs were filled and-

**Craig:** He got COVID.

**John:** He got COVID. He got COVID 20 minutes before. [inaudible 00:03:33] positive test 20 minutes before.

**Craig:** That’s very convenient COVID to get, by the way. There have been times where I’m like, “Come on, COVID.”

**John:** Craig is scratching a little line with a little thin Sharpie there like, “Oh, sorry, can’t go.”

**Craig:** Yeah, “I don’t want to do this thing. Oh, dammit.”

**John:** I really enjoyed the story in Avatar 2. It didn’t feel like three hours. I think what impressed me most is it’d been a long time since I’d seen a 3D movie, because I just didn’t really care about 3D. This was the first 3D movie I’ve seen that didn’t make me go blind at a certain point. There’s something that happens to me in 3D movies where my brain just stops being able to process what I’m seeing. In this, it didn’t happen. I felt like I could see everything [inaudible 00:04:14].

**Craig:** That’s good. There is a diminishing return. Watching 2D stuff, you begin to forget pretty quickly that it’s just a flat thing on a screen. Your mind turns it into 3D basically. Similarly, your mind turns 3D into whatever the 2D version of 3D is. It all just in my mind turns into the same experience, unless they’re doing the tricks, like something flying at your face. Otherwise, meh.

**John:** I think Cameron obviously couldn’t do whatever he wants to do, because it’s all virtually filmed and stuff, so that he could build shots after the fact to work properly to brain in 3D, which is helpful, because so much of the 3D we see these days was really shot to be 2D and then they do it in post.

**Craig:** They do a conversion.

**John:** It’s not the same. Let’s talk to smaller screens. The big news this past couple weeks has been how many shows got chopped off of HBO Max, and things that were already shot, things that were already on the system.

**Craig:** Gulp.

**John:** Old things, they’re gone.

**Craig:** My show’s still there. Yes!

**John:** Craig, are you checking Chernobyl every moment to see whether-

**Craig:** I am not checking Chernobyl every moment, but listen, who knows? I don’t understand it. I legitimately don’t understand it. We’ve talked about this before. It seems like there was some sort of tax benefit to merging companies and then offloading some assets or something like that.

**John:** That one was an example of that, where you could take a big write-off on it and just bury it. It doesn’t seem like they’re necessarily going to bury all these things. Patrick Somerville, who came on to talk about Station Eleven, he said he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. He keeps checking to see if Station Eleven is there. He promises that he will project it on a rock in the Mojave Desert if he has to. These other shows, they’re off HBO Max for right now, but it looks like they’re going to try to put them on some sort of ad-supported system that’s maybe not HBO Max. That could be someplace else. I want to talk a little bit about that, because that’s something we haven’t really gotten into a lot on the show. Megana, I think there’s a question we could frame this with.

**Megana:** Andy from Seattle asked, “Once a show gets sold from HBO Max to a free, ad-supported streaming television service, will writers and actors start getting residuals as the property starts making active money?”

**Craig:** They sure will.

**John:** They will. They’ll get some residuals. It’ll just be a different system for it.

**Craig:** Yes, but it will be a better system. We will make more money this way.

**John:** We’ll make more money depending on how it’s set up, because I can imagine two scenarios, which we’ll just set up. First off, HBO could sell it to a place like Pluto or one of the other existing services, in which case there’d be a license fee. That might be good.

**Craig:** There’s always that. That’s the only way we make money off of residuals. HBO made Chernobyl. Let’s say they put Chernobyl on CBS. The only money HBO gets is the licensing money. The ad money goes to CBS. We don’t get any of that. We just get the licensing money that goes to HBO. That’s the gross. Then the producer’s gross is 20% of that, because we lost many, many years ago. Then we get a percentage of the 20%.

What’s interesting is right now if you make something for a streamer, there is no licensing fee ancillary market. The residuals we get are these weird, imputed things that are not necessarily connected to anything real. You and I are old enough where we wrote movies, and then those movies ended up on TBS with ads in them. We would get pretty decent residual checks from the licensing of those movies to TBS. For writers and directors and actors, this could revitalize the dwindling residuals stream. Creatively, as we’ve discussed, it’s a little disconcerting that you can make a show and it just disappears from something like that. I think it’s gotten everybody a little wigged out, and for good reason. I’m curious. Is Station Eleven available on DVD?

**John:** Station Eleven does not have DVDs right now.

**Craig:** How does he have it?

**John:** I think he’s talking about whatever cut he has off of the non-linear editor. His actual tweet was, “If Station Eleven ever disappears, I promise to purchase one acre of land somewhere in the Mojave Desert and just play it on a loop projected on a rock forever.”

**Craig:** We’re going to have to download some of these things.

**John:** I’ll check into it. It’s entirely possible that DVDs were cut for that show. So many of these HBO Max shows have no DVDs. There’s no other physical way to see it. That creative fear is huge. Circling back to the issue of residuals, Chernobyl that’s on HBO Max, you’re still getting residuals, but those residuals right now are based on a declining fee per every year that it’s on the service and based on a certain fixed price. It doesn’t have anything to do with the actual success of the show. It’s just basically from the time it was made it just declines in value after that time. Chernobyl could in theory make more money being licensed someplace else and therefore create more residuals for you.

**Craig:** It would. It would. I don’t want people to watch it with ads in it, but yeah, it would. It’s really interesting, because what’s happening, this is again financially not necessarily bad news for artists, creatively potentially bad news, is that streamers are suddenly asking the question that all of the rest of us have been asking for a long time, which is, so wait, how do you make money? I know you sell a subscription, but okay, if they’re subscribing, why do you need to make anything more, or do you need to make this much more, or how much stuff do you need to have there, because where does money come from, because in the old days, if you could convert stuff to ad-supported or home video of any format, there was your reason to make more stuff. There’d be additional revenue streams. If all it is is streaming, that’s it. You’ve basically curtailed your own revenue stream as far as I can tell.

**John:** Your revenue stream is based on the monthly subscribers and the idea that having these vast libraries was going to keep them returning as monthly subscribers.

**Craig:** Sure, but that is the only revenue stream you’ll ever have, whereas in the old days studios would have ticket sales, airplane rentals, home video, and then eventually pay TV, licensing it to HBO and Showtime, and then eventually ad-supported television on TBS. Let’s just presume everything goes to TBS if it still exists.

**John:** A thing I’m always confused about when these announcements are first coming out is… Free ad-supported streaming television, or FAST is the abbreviation you’re going to see for that, it’s the same thing as AVOD, so advertising-based video on demand. The difference is that we usually talk about AVOD for things like The Office. If The Office was showing on NBC, and so you’re watching it there, but then a few weeks later it was showing on nbc.com, that was AVOD, and so where studios would show their own things on their own websites.

What’s different now is of course there are streamers that are doing that [inaudible 00:11:18] TV. There’s existing things like Pluto. There’s probably going to be new things presumably coming out of Warner’s that are going to be a service like that. I think figuring out what the appropriate licensing fee is for HBO Max to be selling it to their own service will be an issue.

**Craig:** That kind of self-dealing has been litigated many, many times before and will continue to be litigated now that it seems to be coming back. Making sweetheart deals with yourself is tricky. You need to sell it for what would be a legally supportable market price. You can’t completely jam people. It will be interesting. I feel like the wheel is turning back in time. We’re heading backwards in time. It’s funny.

Silicon Valley was so behind the explosion of streaming, if you consider Netflix. I consider Netflix to be Silicon Valley-esque. I guess the idea of just the new way of doing things, new media we called it. Meanwhile, what were those companies in Silicon Valley doing? Selling ads on everything. Google is an advertising company. YouTube, which Google owns, is an advertising company. Facebook is an advertising company and so on and so forth. Currently, the aforementioned Elon Musk is flipping out, trying to get more people to advertise on Twitter, because it’s an advertising company. They’ve always been ad-supported, and then somehow we got hoodwinked over here into being like, “No ads. No, we don’t need that. That’s old-school stuff.” I guess if you want to make money, ads.

**John:** Ads.

**Craig:** Ads.

**John:** The answer to the question is, what’s going to happen, hopefully this will be more residuals for the writers involved, but of course, those things actually have to be distributed someplace. I think it’s potentially good news assuming that they actually are putting those things someplace and not just burying them in a hole, which is I think the worry we had originally.

**Craig:** I could be wrong, but it seems like the things that are getting buried in holes are things that had very low viewership numbers. They’re pulling Westworld off of HBO Max. That’s going to land somewhere. That is be on another platform.

**John:** That was the marquee property of HBO two or three years ago.

**Craig:** There’s no question about that. It will be figured out one way or another. I think some of the things that got completely removed were probably… They had said in some article some of the… They mentioned one show. I can’t remember what it was. I think it was animated. Something like only 400 people watched it in a year or something. It was like, okay, I guess-

**John:** There were back-episodes. They had the whole catalog of Sesame Street. There were some episodes of that show that just no one had watched in-

**Craig:** No one had watched.

**John:** Yeah, because who wants to watch a 20-year-old random episode?

**Craig:** It makes me feel good sometimes to watch Sesame Street.

**John:** Nice. Let’s get to our main centerpiece of this episode, which is the conversation I had with Bill Nicholson. This is part of a Writers Guild Foundation event. We’ve done a lot of events for the Writers Guild Foundation over the years. There’s going to be a link in the show notes to the video of this whole Zoom interview we did. William Nicholson, Bill Nicholson, is great. I’ve never had a chance to talk to him before. Credits include Everest, Unbroken, Mandela, Les Mis, Elizabeth, Gladiator, going back many, many, many years, starting out as a playwright. We really got to talk about the whole process of figuring out from someone coming to him with like, “Hey, would you want to do a movie about this cave rescue?” to all the changes and drama along the way, shooting this during the pandemic, and then shooting it for Amazon, which couldn’t release it the way they wanted to release it. A really good conversation and just a really great writer. Enjoy this. Craig and I will be back afterwards for our One Cool Things.

It is my absolute pleasure to be talking to you today, Bill, about Thirteen Lives but also I’d love to talk about screenwriting in general and your career and many other things. Where are we talking to you today from? I see it’s dark there.

**Bill Nicholson:** I’m in South England, in Sussex, in the converted garage where I do all my work in the lovely English countryside.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s start with Thirteen Lives, because I just watched it last night. I’m really curious how you came into the project, because I remember the story as it was happening in real time. It felt like, okay, obviously there’s going to be a movie coming out of this, but what was your entrance into this as a movie?

**Bill:** Like you, I remember it from when it actually happened. I wouldn’t say I followed every deet, but obviously, I did follow it. It was very moving, and then I forgot about it. Sometime later, as is the way of these things, a producer got in touch with me and said would I be interested in writing the screenplay. I was initially a little reluctant, because I thought maybe it was an oversimple story. Guys go down in a cave, get stuck. It’s all terrible. Then they get out and it’s okay. Of course, they sent me some research. They’d had a lot of research done on it. That amazed me and I realized what a rich tale it was. It moved me in a whole different way actually. I really like writing very emotionally valid and powerful pieces, so I said yes. The simple answer is I got asked.

**John:** That’s great to be asked. I’m not surprised you were asked. If you look at your credits and look at the movies you’ve written and going back to Gladiator and Shadowlands and those things, but more recently, Everest, Unbroken, other true stories, and finding the ways to tell these historical true stories in ways that are compelling. You seem like a very great fit for it. I guess my question is, when they came to approach you to write this, how much did they have? Off and on Scriptnotes podcasts, we get these questions about like, “Oh, what rights do I need to do to tell a true story?” People will see producers jockeying for rights, locking up this person’s life rights or this person’s life rights. As they came to you, what were they coming to you with? They had some original research, but what else?

**Bill:** You’re completely right. It was a writer’s nightmare. Lots of other projects were in the mix. There was another team that had the rights to the Australian doctor, Harry Harris. We did not have the rights to the Thai kids at all. The Thai government controlled that. The key rights, which are the British divers, those were the ones that my producer had obtained. That was the core of the project. The rest we had to… You know the process. We had to use material that was in the public domain. It’s worrying when you’re [inaudible 00:18:06]. It’s worrying on all sorts of levels. It’s worrying also because I’m dealing with real people’s real lives who are still there, especially the Thai people. I think we had a superb level of research, which fed me absolutely as much as possible. I just did my best to give a fair crack to all of those individuals.

**John:** You say you had research. How much of that was coming to you in written form versus your ability to talk to these divers? What was your ability to reach out and ask specific questions, or did you have to go through levels to get there? What was your connection to these characters?

**Bill:** With the two main divers, I went and visited them and talked to them and subsequently made very good relations with them, was able to check a lot of things with them as I went along. All the rest was [inaudible 00:18:58]. This was in COVID times. A superb researcher had amassed an enormous amount of material, mostly remotely, particularly on all the Thai details. I was supplied with that when I began, because the producer had also produced the documentary, which is called The Rescue. They’d done all the research for that. I was given all of that, and I was able to ask the researcher to ask the researcher to follow up whenever I wanted. I was very well supported.

**John:** One of the fundamental decisions you have to make as a writer is how you’re going to tell the story and when you’re going to start the story and what details are going to be at what point. How early in the process of the conversations with the producers about coming on to do this did you have an approach? Did you have a take for how you were going to tell the story?

**Bill:** Not immediately, but you’re completely right. People think if you have a true story, because you take down what happened. Of course, you sort of do, because you have an obligation to the truth. My job is finding the emotional through line and also the mini emotional stories within the overall one, because nobody is going to watch just to hear another fact. They watch because of what you make them feel about the characters, what the characters want, what the characters fear, and what then happens to them. It really is a kind of crafting of real events to create emotional drama. Of course, there is emotional drama once you’ve got kids threatening with death.

You’ve really got to do a lot more than that. I looked to the material. I drew up a timeline of my own, the peaks and the troughs. I looked at that very early on, because obviously, the producers, when they asked me to do it, they didn’t just say, “Go ahead and do it.” They say, “Tell us what you will do before any contract gets signed.” That’s fair enough.

I give them I suppose my pitch really. I said very early on the obvious thing which anybody tackling this story would say, which is, “We cannot afford to make this be a white savior story, so how are we going to deal with that? We’re going to look at all of the Thai stories. We’re going to look at what they did and the complexities of that and how much we can weave that in.”

I made the decision very early on that this was in a way not the story of the boys. This was partly because I did not have their rights, but it was also partly because they’re stuck. They’re in a cave. You have a choice. Are you going to keep cutting back to them inside the cave getting hungrier and hungrier or not? I said, “My way of doing this is we’re going to see them go in, and then we’re not going to see them again until they’re found.”

**John:** It’s 45 minutes into the film before we see them again. We see, oh, they are actually alive. This is a real open question. Obviously, as an audience who has some knowledge coming into it, we know that they’re alive in there, but everyone on the outside doesn’t. You set up a good expectation that maybe they are going in to find bodies ultimately. They don’t know where they are, how far.

**Bill:** It’s very interesting the way you can tell a story by being able to know the ending and still make it tense. I think it’s because as people watch, they accept that they’re within that moment. One of the reasons that I took the project on actually was because one of the things that really struck me, after the divers found the bodies, there was this ecstasy throughout this enormous camp, real cheers. The boys are there. The boys are alive. That was simultaneously experienced with the divers knowing that the boys are going to die, that there is no way to come out.

I find that sort of crunch very powerful. When I saw that, I go, “Actually, we have got a story here.” Of course, if you can communicate to the viewers sufficiently, this really is an insoluble problem, and then you proceed to find a crazy solution, which against all the odds works, and you have a story.

**John:** Now, let’s talk about decisions of classic characters and themes going through stuff. You have actors we recognize who are doing certain things. Also, what I was really impressed by with the movie, and you talk about making sure that the Thai people in their efforts are centered in this, for a lot of the start of the film and really throughout the film, we’re seeing the rest of the efforts from the Thai perspective. These are competent people who are doing their very best. It feels very documentary in a good way. It feels very matter of fact. You don’t see a lot of speechify. You don’t see people stopping to explain something about Thai culture and history and stuff. It’s very much focused on the moment.

Did you know from the start that you were going to have so many characters and that we as an audience might not even really know their names? I’m thinking about the engineer on top of the mountain who’s trying to divert the water. We recognize him, but we know very little about him. Do you know that from the start, that you’d have this wide array of characters?

**Bill:** Yes, in the sense that I had to place my heroic British divers in this much bigger context. I think the first thing that I thought when I looked into all this story was an enormous number of people volunteered. There was this great mass, like 5,000 people just gave their time or their equipment for nothing. I love that. It runs counter to the kind of story that we’re being told all the time, which is that we live in a competitive world where people will only get off their bottoms for money. I’ve wanted to celebrate that very much, which meant locating as many of these stories as possible.

There are very many stories. You simply don’t have the space. In that sense, you color code the characters so that people recognize them visually rather than knowing their names. You also give them each a little kind of trick so that you can spot how they’re likely to… You can only do that to a very small degree, because you’re juggling so many characters. You talk about it being documentary. Yes, it’s documentary in the sense that it did happen. We’re not grandstanding with it. We’re not trying to make out some sort of opportunity for people to make their own speeches.

I actually think the grand sentiments come over much more powerfully if you throw them away, if they’re not asserted, you ask the audience to find that for themselves. That’s a conscious decision, particularly with the main divers who really led me into this by their own characters. I was picking up from what they told me about themselves, which is, “We don’t do this for money. We’re amateurs. We’re not interested in publicity.” They’ve got a rather delightful… There were so many that got cut out.

When they were first asked to come, Rick, the Viggo Mortensen one, said, “How are we getting there?” John says to him, “They’re giving us business class flights.” Business class, I’ll fly anywhere. I love that. It’s very British, very undercutting heroism and grandiosity. I was working from the characters.

I also think it means that you can feed your actors with a role where they have very few words but a lot of emotional moments. Those emotional moments, they are going to act on. They’re going to be on their face. If you’ve correctly structured the emotional trajectory, the audience knows what they’re thinking and feeling, looking at their face. They don’t need words. That is what screenwriters do. It drives me nuts when people say… Somebody said to me, “Oh, you didn’t have much to do for the first 20 minutes, did you?” I say, “I wrote the damn thing. Every feat is written.”

**John:** Absolutely. What is the camera pointing at, what are we seeing, what are we living.

**Bill:** Exactly. Not just that. Ron and I talked a lot about structuring the dives, because too many dives are boring. Each dive has to have its own character, its own emotional little story. I literally listed them all with the emotions that accompanied them.

**John:** Let’s talk about the emotional trajectory of the Viggo Mortensen character, because he’s the one who I think… I would say your characters don’t protagonate a lot. They’re not going through this classic giant character’s arc where they come in as one thing and leave fully transformed. It’s small and it’s subtle but it’s there. Viggo Mortensen’s character’s probably the easiest one to see that. He’s initially reluctant to necessarily go on this dive, to even join on his trip. Then when he’s there, he’s skeptical a lot along the way. What were the beats you mapped out for yourself? Were they literally in an outlined form? How much were you thinking about how his character progressed over the course of the story? How did you chart that for yourself?

**Bill:** That’s kind of fairly simple really, because he starts out not wanting to go, doesn’t like kids, as he says. He gets there. He’s pissed off, because we then have all the beats about the local Thai divers don’t rate them, which is fun to have that. They’re old guys [inaudible 00:28:12] which gives him something to resent. Eventually, they do get allowed to dive, and it goes wrong. They pull out the pumping guy, and it all goes wrong. Then they’re stuck, and he wants to go home. I got that beat.

All the time, you’ve got John beside him, acting as the antagonist, his protagonist in a way, saying, “Yeah, but we’ve got to stay.” John, who knows, and I like this, John knows that Rick really wants to save the boys even though Rick says he doesn’t. That helps me a lot. I can write those little moments.

Of course, the big beat with Rick is that they find the kids, and he’s depressed. He goes down instead of out. Then you’ve got the interesting question of… This I had to argue out with both John and Rick, who had the idea to use anesthetics. I got it wrong the first time round, because it worked in my structure to have John suggest it. The real Rick said to me, because we’d shown them the script. This is no secret to them, of course. I always do that, by the way.

When I’m dealing with real, live people, I will say, “You can see anything I’m writing at any time.” Of course. It’s their life. I said to them originally, “You’re going to find this really peculiar, because I’m going to invent two characters, Rick and John. I have to.” They were really good about that. They got it. Then lots of stuff I just made it. They said, “That’s fine.” He did say, “That was my idea.” I restructured that beat.

Then you bring in the next group of divers. In the cut version, they come very abruptly. I wrote several scenes that introduced them, but it’s a long movie. Something has to go. You have the relationship with the incoming divers, which again reflects on Rick, because Jason is the one who thinks Rick’s a little bit [inaudible 00:30:19]. You then realize Rick is the leader. He has gone along with this idea. The failure will be his failure. We’re now emotionally engaged on his behalf, not just the boys’. That then takes you through the various beats of finding semi-failure along the way, until the moment when they’re sitting in a group and they’re just laughing. You can feel the release of the nervous tension and at the moments when he’s resisted contact with the families. I had so many moments I could track. There he is hugging families or being hugged I should say, because he doesn’t know how to do it.

It’s a gift really to just track all this. I did give him a little speech, which is not in the film, right at the end when they’re in their minibus and they’re going back to the airport. He’s saying, “You know what? This is something that should not have worked. This is like a one in a thousand chance that it worked, but it did work. You know what [inaudible 00:31:18] make a movie out of it, and everybody else think it’s easy.” I rather like that, but no, it didn’t come to pass.

**John:** The movie probably wanted to be over before they would’ve had a chance for that moment. Let’s talk about the dialog that’s in the movie and the dialog that’s not in the movie, because they both help in form. Let’s talk about the dialog that’s not in the movie, because there’s not a lot of talking. We have our characters mostly doing the work that they’re there to do.

There’s this misconception obviously that the screenwriter just writes the dialog and the director does everything else, but it sounds like if I’m reading the script, I get a very good sense of what those characters are, what’s going through those characters’ heads, even as they are silently observing, moving their way through the cave, stopping to get abreast.
I’m thinking back to Colin Farrell’s character half freaking out because his kid has woken up. There’s all those moments. Those were all scripted. I think it’s crucial that we remind people that those moments are in the script from the start.

**Bill:** That’s right. You’re right. If you were to see one of the drafts towards the end, you’d get a lot more dialog. It’s not so much more dialog, because there are several scenes, basically dialog scenes. This always happens to me. I guess I overwrite. I’m always writing dialog scenes which I think really help to get us sympathetic with the characters. They’re too long, and in the end the whole thing goes. The people along the way read them. Your point is correct. That feeds into their understanding. The director reads them.

I have no complaints about what is cut out. In fact, throughout my career, I’ve had the embarrassing experience of writing scenes that seem to me to be vital, having them cut out, and realizing they weren’t necessary. Each time, I think, “When am I going to learn? When am I going to write the 90-page script that they shoot instead of the 120-page script?” I don’t know why I don’t learn, but that’s the process. I’ve worked with some actors.

A million years ago, I wrote a film called First Knight with Sean Connery and Richard Gere. Sean Connery sat me down in his hotel room in London with a scene, and he said, “Look, I want to go through the scene with you. I’ll do my lines. You do the other person’s lines.” I did the other person’s lines. I would do the line, and Sean went, “Ah.” Then I did the next line, “Mm.” Then I did the next line, “Mm.” He never spoke a word. It all made perfectly good sense. He said, “Would you mind if we just [inaudible 00:34:01].” Maybe you have to start with more and hone it down.

You are dependent on the actors, because once you start dispensing with the words, you’ve structured it so that the audience knows what the actor is likely to be feeling, but the actor has got to deliver that without the acting. In my opinion, acting has become so sophisticated now. Actors are so extraordinary, film actors. You can see what they’re thinking. I can think of moments like the little scene where Harry Harris is being asked to use his skills [inaudible 00:34:46]. He’s saying no, and the other two, Rick and John, are disagreeing on how to deal with him. There aren’t many words, but that little trio, you can see what each one is thinking right the way through. There’s a couple of shots at the end that are just faces saying nothing. That’s also very skilled directing, of course.

**John:** It is. There’s a moment in Worst Person in the World, a film from last year, where a woman makes a fundamental life decision, and we see it completely on her face. It was the screenwriting that got us from her leaving a party to standing at that place and being able to think. The natural instinct would be for her to say something to someone to make sure we understood that, and yet the power of a camera and a really talented face, we can see all that information. It’s a great lesson to learn.

Let’s circle back to you say you overwrite and you need to learn how to write the 90-page version of a thing. Also, it’s just recognizing that the process of making stories is always going to be too much. There’s going to be a process of discovery there, so giving yourself permission to overwrite there a bit and recognizing and hopefully having good collaborators who will see, “Yes, there may be too much here, but we need all this too-much-ness in order to find the movie that we’re also going to want to make.”

**Bill:** I would definitely agree with that, yeah.

**John:** Let’s talk about your relationship with Ron Howard. At what point did he come into the process? Was he there from the start or only after you had a draft? What was his involvement in the film?

**Bill:** He was not there from the start. It was pretty much completely written. What happened was the producer, PJ, hired me. At that point, he had an arrangement with another director, a very good director. I worked on it with that director. I did I guess speed drafts. We kind of ran into a problem of how we saw the movie between me and the director. I have huge respect for the directors that I work with. I tried very hard to deliver the kind of tone that he was looking for, but it ran counter to my instincts. I argued it very strongly with him, but he was very clear what he wanted. There came a point when I said to PJ, “I have to leave the project. You must get another writer who’s in sync with your director.” They had a big think about it. The director had a big think about it. To his enormous credit, he said, “Look,” because PJ and Gabi Tana, the other producer kind of liked my take.

He said, “Look, I’ll withdraw. It’s not a problem.” He withdrew. I then proceeded with my version, which was, to put it very, very simply, more emotional. He was much more action and repression, which is a great way to go. I’m a very warmhearted person. We proceeded in my version. I did several drafts until both the producers were thinking, “This is good. We will shop it.” They then took it to their agents in LA. That is when it went to an agent, and that’s when Ron picked it up. Ron then came in, and I then worked with Ron for several more drafts.

**John:** We both had the experience of an existing draft and a director comes on board. It’s both a conversation with the director about what movie they see versus the movie that you wrote and what they need. You’re trying to explain what your intentions were with things. They’re trying to explain what they think they actually need from a movie. What guidance can you give to a writer listening to those conversations with the director? How do you approach that in a way that both sides benefit?

**Bill:** The first thing is you have to not be defensive as a writer. We writers have a very tough time, because we are not in control. That is the reality. If you want to be in control, be a writer-director, which I have also done. You are not in control. The director is going to have to make this damn movie. It’s no good, you demanding the director executes your vision. He’s going to execute his or her vision. Don’t be defensive. What you do is when the director says, “I think they need more of this or less of this,” what you’ve got to think is, why is he saying that? What’s happening here? Is there a valid point here? If there is, how can I enact it in a way that fits my vision? I’ve had some bad ones, but mostly they’ve been good. My experience has been that it improves when you do this.

I always tell people, and this applies to development as well, if you get notes, don’t obey the note. If the note says, “We think the dog should jump over the cliff,” don’t say, “Okay, I will write it.” Say to yourself, “Why did they say that? Haven’t I got a better way of giving them what they want?” because you will have, because you’ll understand the whole thing. They’re probably looking just at that beat. That’s the problem you have with some directors. Some directors aren’t good at overall structure. I’m talking now about really emotional storytelling. They’re good at a scene. They know that they can make a scene work. They can make that scene work when the guy comes in and we don’t even know what he’s seeing and he’s incredibly scared.

[inaudible 00:40:23] how that impacts down the road. What you have to do is say, “Okay, they want an emotional high point, which I have not delivered. I’ve got to find a way to deliver it, and then they’ll be happy at that point.” If you have a problem, I have had this with some extremely famous directors who have said, “I think there should be a scene like this here.” I’ve said to the team, “That will make no sense. That will wreck the whole flow.” They’ve said, “The boss has asked for it. You’ve got to do it.” I then do it. In my experience, always those the projects that don’t get made, because the director hasn’t understood what the story is, but the director is too powerful. There are too many directors, unfortunately, who never get anybody telling them boo. It’s just extraordinary to me.

I’ve said to the team, “Just tell him it doesn’t work.” They said, “You don’t do that. He’s our boss, literally our boss in every way.” [inaudible 00:41:25]. Mostly, you should be able to collaborate with the director in such a way that the director feels really safe with you as a writer, that the director can say, “I want more here and less here,” and you go, “Yes, fantastic, let’s do this. We’ll find the way together.” That is really exciting.

I have to say, with Ron, he was extremely respectful. I think he had taken on a highly developed script. It had been through many processes. His attack, it was a combination. It was very process-driven. He really wanted to understand how he was going to film the process and what impact that would have. A lot of his changes related to that. Other changes were he wanted more of a particular element. For example, he wanted more of the guy called the water guy, Thanet, who is up on the mountain diverting the water. Let me think. What else was there?

We did talk quite a lot. We played around quite a lot with changing some of my structure. We talked, and I was willing to, but in the end, we stuck with it. He will say that the last time we were on a giant Zoom together to talk about this at this stage, he said that the thing about the screenplay he received was that the structure was there already. He didn’t have to really mess with that too much. He’s a very nice guy.

**John:** He’s a nice guy. I’ve worked with him on a couple projects. He’s lovely.

**Bill:** He’s just amazing. I just wanted him to be able to do what he needed to do. Then the other thing that happened was he started shooting it, and I was not present on the shoot. I was in Australia. He was on the phone to me or on the email to me quite a lot, saying basically for budget reasons, we can no longer do this scene or that scene, “Find a way to write the beat that happens there somewhere else in another way,” or, “Could you please add it in to the existing scene?” There was quite a lot of that, which I was of course completely willing to do. I think you need to be in that sense a kind of craftsman who is there. “We’re now sailing the ship and it’s leaking. Please could you plug that gap?”

**John:** Absolutely circling back to this, in the first time you’re talking with the director or really anyone else in the project, a friend always reminds me that as the screenwriter, you’re the only person who’s already seen the movie. You see the whole thing there. You have everything that’s on the page, but you also have a whole movie in your head. Sometimes those initial conversations are really just aligning what movies is the director seeing in their head and trying to find the overlaps there and fix the things that aren’t overlapping quite right.

In those conversations, it varies director to director for me, but sometimes you are spending three days talking about the color of the paint on the walls, but that’s really the process for just trying to align your visions for what things really look like and what’s important to them or what’s important to you. You never know what it’s going to be as you start the process.

**Bill:** I don’t get into those sorts of conversations. I’m happy for him to paint the walls whatever color he wants really. What I want to know… I say I want to know. I don’t have any power over this person. It doesn’t get me anywhere. I would like to know that the director sees the same movie as me, but to be honest, I never know until it’s done, until it’s actually being shot, because people do the oddest things.

**John:** bill, you’ve made your living as a playwright and as a film writer and director. Do you have any experience running television shows or doing any of the series where the writer would be more in control, the writer would be telling the director what to do? Have you had that experience?

**Bill:** Not in the modern form. I’m doing a Netflix TV series right now, writing it. You’re right, it is very, very different in power terms. Back in the day, when I was working with BBC, I did I think four TV movies. The interesting thing about the BBC and television then is my name was the name that was in the newspapers, to the rage of the directors. It was William Nicholson’s latest. I really of course liked that.

I really disliked the filmed by thing, where directors act as if they’re created the whole thing. I’ve softened over the years. I used to be quite militant about this. I’ve done two movies myself as a director/writer. That has taught me to respect directors very, very highly. I do realize I need them. I just wish that the world out there understood what screenwriters do. I don’t know why this hasn’t got through. We need a movement like Cahiers du Cinema, which elevated the directors. We need a movement.

Maybe you’re right. Actually, it’s happening. It’s happening in TV. The people who create the great TV series are the writers. Our day is coming. That’s fantastic. You get astonishing things like Succession, which I don’t know who’s the hero of that, whether it’s Jesse Armstrong, Lucy Prebble, or whoever, I don’t quite know what’s going on, but somebody is doing something completely brilliant there. They’re also superbly directed, I have to say. Again, let’s all try not to quarrel over who gets the credit and be grateful if we can together do something good, because most things don’t quite work.

**John:** Circling back to Thirteen Lives, so much of the film is in Thai. It’s in a very specific Northern Thai dialect. I’m guessing you don’t speak it. At what point in the process did you need to think about how much of the film was going to be in Thai versus how much was going to be in English and what the balance was going to be. Did you need to interact with any of those language experts or did that process come later down?

**Bill:** It came much later. I knew all along that a large part would be in Thai. That was all part of respect for the people we were filming and not turning it into an outsider attack. I write it all in English, and it goes on the page in bold italics, meaning translate this please. The team making it under Ron then bring in Thai translators, but not just Thai translators, Thai filmmakers who are also Thai, who tell me about the culture. Back comes the message. You have this scene where this Thai Navy Seal speaks to his boss, his captain, in a quite strong way. They would never do that. That does not happen. We have total respect for authority people. You’ve just [inaudible 00:48:20] I change it. I just simply rewrote. That happened quite a bit.

I had a whole lot to do with the governor here, who had actually a very interesting story. I originally made him a rather ironic, wry guy, who was constantly saying, “They’ve set me up for the fall here.” There’s a little bit of it in the movie, but I had quite a lot more. I was told he would not speak of his superiors in this way. Even though he thinks it, even though it’s true, he just wouldn’t, so out it went.

**John:** Probably both choices about how that character would respond but also what the movie wants to do. The movie is so focused on the question of will we be able to get the boys out, anything that feels like it’s not to that point is going to be on the chopping block. It’s hard for it to last in the film. You made choices about how much we’re seeing or are aware of these characters’ personal lives before they get involved. Basically, the moment anybody shows up Thailand, we’re never seeing their homelands again.

Basically, we’re only going to stay near the caves here in Thailand. Talk to us about decisions to show Colin Ferrell’s home life and what you were trying to do there, the few glimpses we had outside of Thailand. Were there more scenes? What were your decisions about showing their life before they get to Thailand?

**Bill:** No, there were not more scenes. I knew that I wanted to just tell you enough about them to give you some anchor for how they were going to make their emotional journey and then just show you enough at the end to remind you where they’re come from and what it means. They’re two different stories, obviously. With Rick, Viggo Mortensen, he lives alone in this chaotic, machine-filled space. You would kind of sense that the guy’s asocial just from the images of him. Also, there was quite a bit of dialog there when he’s talking on the phone to John.

With John, with Colin Ferrell, all I needed to do was show that he’s divorced and he’s got a kid. Obviously, he’s going to identify the kids in the cave with his cave. I don’t need to say that. You just plant that, and that’s there.

In the early versions, there was another thread. They had a kind of office, the British Cave Rescue Council. There was a woman there who fed information back all the time. We did think whether to have her in England, but I really decided no, this is one of those stories where you need to maintain the pressure cooker, get them into the pressure cooker and keep them there. That was a very conscious decision, which is why I didn’t want to go into the home life of any of any of the Thai characters once the pressure had begun. I think it’s sort of like Aristotelian unities. It’s a unity of time and place, and they’re up against the clock, and just hold it there. Don’t play games. Don’t do cutting around with time. Give us a sense of the passage of time.

**John:** [inaudible 00:51:29] your theater background, it did feel like once you created the space of the camp outside the cave, that was your main set. That’s where everything has to happen within the space and within this place and time, which I guess helps answer the question of your decisions about which of the Thai parents we were going to follow, which ones we were going to identify and have some ongoing relationship with. You pick one mother, one father who we come back to more often and we [inaudible 00:51:55] which kid is —

**Bill:** And a boy. The boy, I made him up. That didn’t happen [crosstalk 00:52:00].

**John:** The smallest boy, yeah.

**Bill:** The smallest boy did happen.

**John:** That’s right, the boy [crosstalk 00:52:05].

**Bill:** The one who doesn’t go into the cave and who was out there. I wanted one boy who represented [inaudible 00:52:11]. That didn’t actually happen. They all went into the cave. The smallest boy, that was a real thing, because I had that in the research. Obviously, the mother is a competent mother, the father is a competent father, etc. All their names are changed.

**John:** Let’s talk about structure overall, because you have a time structure, which is very natural for day one, day two, and seeing the progression. With each day, there’s a change that has happened. Sometimes it’s the weather. The way that the weather is a huge villain in the course of the stories is really interesting. You also have the decision to overlay the map and show where things were and how far deep we are into things. Was that a decision that was made on a script level or does that come later on in the filmmaking process, the literal, how deep we are into the cave system structure.

**Bill:** That was not me. That was in the cutting room, in the final stages. That was Ron and his team doing that in the final stages, looking at it and saying, “It is really important that people know how far in we are.” In the longer version of the script, I’d incorporated that information in the dialog and things like that. That didn’t survive. I thought it was really good.

**John:** I think it’s a really smart choice.

**Bill:** It was really smart. In a kind of clever way, there was more information you could take in, but it didn’t matter. You got a visual sense. That was not me.

**John:** I think it’s another thing taken probably from some of the great documentaries of the last 10 years in that sense of as you see somebody climbing a peak in Yellowstone or a peak in Yosemite, seeing how far up they are, and it was just the right choice to give us that sense of-

**Bill:** It’s a very interesting challenge. How much does the audience realize? How much have they picked up? How much do they know? What do they need turning? On the whole, you’ve got to be ahead of your audience. If they’re left saying, “We’re underwater. I have no clue where I am,” which of course is the case. How could they? What we did was, and this was in the script, I characterize stages along the journey. I said, “This will be the stalactite one. This will be Chamber 3. This will be the T-Junction.” The T-Junction was what they called it and Pattaya Beach was what they called it. I gave a description of each stage so that when they built the sets, they would look a little bit different and would give us a bit of a sense that we’re not just always in a bath. We did think about that ahead of time.

**John:** You said you’ve written the script. You’re heading into production. Obviously, casting has happened. Was there a table reading? Was there any chance for everyone to get around tables to read this together? It doesn’t seem like it would have been necessary for this, but was there some sort of [inaudible 00:55:01]?

**Bill:** I simply don’t know, because it all happened in Australia, and I wasn’t there. They all had to fly out and go into quarantine for two weeks, and then they were in their bubble. I would say about this table read, which I’ve had on every film, I absolutely hate them.

**John:** Tell me why.

**John:** There’s a couple of reasons. For some reason, the person who reads the directions is the third AD, and he can’t read. That sounds like an illiterate monotone, which is awful, and I’m dying. I learned after a bit to say, “Let me read the directions, and I’ll put some [inaudible 00:55:37].” The second reason is the actors find it very, very difficult to know whether they’re performing or not. On the whole, they don’t want to perform. They don’t want to perform, because why would they? It’s a weird set of circumstances. The confident ones don’t want to perform because, “Why should I?” The un-confident ones think that they’ll perform and be found wanting. People will say, “Why did you cast him?” The whole thing is awful for everybody. I’ve come out of every reading thinking it is a disaster.

I wasn’t present at the readthrough of Gladiator. I was involved in the project. It was such a disaster that they practically pulled the whole thing. That’s when I came on board. I think they’re terrible, these readings. They do have a function, because I almost think you should get a whole team of completely different people to do the reading. The tech people, they need to know a little bit what this thing feels like. The actors, it’s hard.

**John:** I will make a mild case for the opposing view. I’ve had table readings that have gone as badly as Gladiator’s table read, where it’s just like, wow. Everything you’re saying about an actor choosing not to perform, the risk of performing, definitely been there, seen it. My argument for them is that it makes it clear that all the actors that have at least read the whole script once, because so often, actors, they’re reading, they’re focused on their part. It’s a chance to say, “Oh, you know what? This scene actually pertains to the scene before this scene.” It’s the whole thing feeling together chronologically for once, because movies are going to be shot out of sequence and it’s going to be hard to tell what things are where. For one moment, everyone was together.

The other thing, if anyone’s listening and this is helpful, I will tend to do, if there is going to be a table reading, I will make a special version of the script that is just for the reading, that greatly cuts down the scene description so it’s just getting you right into the dialog there, and it’s all clear. If we’re going to summarize things, everyone’s looking at the same page. I hear you there.

**Bill:** That is very smart. I think you’re quite right. The table reading should be treated as a kind of performance in its own right and thought about and almost directed. Each of the actors could be told, “Don’t worry about it. Just do it clearly. That’s all. You don’t need to emote if you don’t want to.” I have been at readings. When Shadowlands was done as a reading, it was amazingly successful, and it made everybody feel this is going to work. I just wish that happened every time.

**John:** My movie Go had a great table reading, and some other ones haven’t. Of course, in theater, the idea of a reading is actually super common, and those are ways you get financing and get to the next level. Everyone understands that it is a form of a performance there, but with movies it’s a special thing. Really, you have to ask yourself, who should be in the room for that? Is it just for the filmmakers and the actors? Do producers need to be in there? Do financiers need to be in there?

**Bill:** I really like your idea of having a special text for the reading, because that’s great, because you want to maintain the pace. I’ve sat there while somebody reads through a whole page of directions in a [crosstalk 00:58:53] tone where it needs to be tightened, performed, and move on so that we can get the feeling of it. I hadn’t thought of that. If it ever happens to me again… It’s quite a lot of work though, isn’t it, doing your own-

**John:** For you or for me, maybe it’s two hours of time to take and cut it down. If it saves a lot of drama down the road, I’ll do it.

**Bill:** Do you read directions yourself?

**John:** No. We’ll find somebody who’s actually a talented actor who’s not in the production to do it.

**Bill:** Good. Good.

**John:** My friend Dan Ethridge is fantastic at that, so I will draft him whenever possible.

**Bill:** You’ve thought about this much more than me. You’re smart.

**John:** During production, obviously this is happen in Australia. At most, you’re having a phone call or Zoom with Ron, so you’re not super involved in that. At any point doing post, do you come back in? Do you take a look?

**Bill:** Yes.

**John:** Was there anything for you to do?

**Bill:** Yeah. This is entirely at Ron’s discretion. He’s a nice guy, and he’s also a smart guy. It was cut in London. He said would I please come in, see the first assembly, talk about it. We talked together. I came in and saw the shorter version, and we talked about that a lot. I wouldn’t say that I did anything tremendously significant, but I was certainly there watching it and talking about it with him.

**John:** Great.

**Bill:** I was incredibly grateful for that. A lot of directors are frightened of writers, because they know the writer knows more than them what’s supposed to be there. They don’t want the writer on set. They don’t want the writer in the cutting room. They didn’t want the writer getting too much credit. Ron is not like that.

**John:** That’s terrific. This movie came out theatrically limited but then also on streaming. Did you have a chance to see this with an audience?

**Bill:** Not really. As you know, MGM, who financed it, got bought by Amazon after we finished the movie. It didn’t get the screen life that we would’ve liked. I’m old-fashioned. I like cinemas. I like theaters. They did put on a… This was in London. There was a premier in LA, which I didn’t go to. I was obviously invited, but I chose not to make the journey. There was a good screening in London. We were in France. We got the train back for that evening, and the train was delayed three hours in the Channel Tunnel, to my fury, so I actually missed about half.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Bill:** We got into the theater. I haven’t seen it much with an audience. Now it’s seen as a streaming event, and people see it separately. I’ve got this odd feeling. I don’t really know how people have responded to it.

**John:** I watched it again. I watched it last night at home, streaming it. My instinct though is that there’s going to be some big cheers when the first kid is brought on the stretcher up through the pulley system. That was a really emotional moment for me is seeing that the kids are getting out but also that everyone is there pushing the sled out together. I feel like that’s the moment where you’re going to get some cheers in the audience. I’m frustrated that you didn’t get a chance to hear those cheers, because I feel like it’s going to be a great sound. Bill, can you talk to us about what’s next? Are there any things that you’re working on that we can discuss?

**Bill:** I’m always a little bit shy, for the simple reason that I never know they’re actually going to get made.

**John:** Same.

**Bill:** That’s the life we lead. I’m doing a cinema movie. It’s with a very good director right now. It seems to be going a bit slowly. I’m not quite sure what’s going on. I’m waiting for my next instructions on that. I mentioned I’m doing a TV series for Netflix, which is about the crypto scam. It was a podcast actually called The Missing Crypto Queen-

**John:** Great.

**Bill:** … about a Bulgarian woman who created a crypto coin. It’s a wonderful story.

**John:** I think we actually maybe discussed that on our podcast in terms of How Would This Be a Movie. I’m excited that you’re doing that, because she’s a really flamboyant character if I remember correctly.

**Bill:** Exactly. It’s wonderful. It’s all about why do people believe what they believe, which is central to our current experience everywhere, politics everywhere. I’m just doing the first two episodes of that. That doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed. I’m also doing a small British movie about a guy, which is a true story again. You see, these are all true stories. I don’t like adapting novels. I don’t do it, because somebody else has [inaudible 01:03:41] the characters and invented the story.

Real life is a complete mess, so it needs people like me to come in and turn it into craft, something out of that. That’s what I like doing. I’m doing a small movie about a person who goes mad. The fun of it is, it’s kind of implying that madness is a choice, which actually serves a purpose. He thinks he’s a secret agent saving the planet. He ends up being sent to hospital and given heavy drugs and so on. You realize that being a secret agent saving the planet beats his real life. You kind of get why a guy would do that. Essentially, it’s dealing with the fact that all of us are prone to picking up clues around us and creating a narrative of our life that enables us to feel good about ourselves.

**John:** Absolutely. You are the story you’re telling about yourself.

**Bill:** Yeah. I’m doing that. There’s a couple of other longer-term projects. Those are three that are actually on my desk right now.

**John:** That’s amazing. Bill, an absolute pleasure talking with you and meeting you here. Congratulations on the film. I’m really excited to see these next projects as well. A delight. Thank you so much.

**Bill:** It’s a great pleasure for me as well, talking to somebody who gets these things, a fellow. I love it. Thank you so much.

**John:** Thank you.

**Bill:** Bye-bye.

**John:** Have a great night. Bye.

**Bill:** Bye-bye.

**John:** Craig, we are back in this moment. It is time for our One Cool Things. I have two TV shows to recommend to you and to our listenership. First is Andor, which everyone says it’s by far the best Star Wars series. It’s just phenomenal. It’s just really, really good. Craig, I was thinking about you as I was watching it, because there was this scene, I think in the maybe second or third episode, where the Empire, or what will become the Empire, is having this board meeting, just planning meeting. It’s in this big white room. It’s just so smartly done. It’s everything you always talk about how you admire the Empire for its efficiency and for its organization. I thought of you. If I could find the clip snippet of it, I want to send it to you, because you will just love that when you get a chance to watch it.

**Craig:** Obviously, I always root for the Empire. I’m just so confused after all these movies. How do they keep losing? It just doesn’t make sense. Why is everyone so scared of them? All they do is lose.

**John:** I’ll say that the whole premise of Andor is basically how does the revolution start, how does the rebellion start. It’s really smartly done. It’s no surprise. It’s coming from Tony Gilroy, who’s a great writer and is running this show. Just so, so smart. Everyone tells you to watch Andor. I’m just the 19,000th person to tell you to watch Andor, because really, it’s worth it.

The other thing is Fleishman is in Trouble, which I don’t hear people talking as much about. So good. As I recognize the names going past, Susannah Grant, who is of course fantastic, but Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote the book and she wrote almost all the episodes of the series. It’s so smartly done. The POV storytelling on it is really, really great. Fleishman is in Trouble, another great thing to watch. That is on Hulu in the United States.

**Craig:** Excellent. My One Cool Thing is an article. It is in Wired. I don’t know if you’re going to need a subscription or not. Maybe Wired does a couple of free articles a month. This one is called Welcome to Digital Nomadland by Susana Ferreira. It’s a really interesting story about this class of workers called digital nomads, who work entirely virtually, and so can work anywhere, but they’re alone. These are a lot of people who don’t have families, etc, so they’re stuck alone in their homes. They want to go places. They can go anywhere.

This Portuguese island basically on the southern coast of Madeira created what they call a digital nomad land. It’s basically like we built some homes and some work areas for you, communal work areas. You can come here, live here, and you’ll have a community, instead of being alone. Theoretically, this would also be great for the actual island itself and the people who live there, because it would help the economy. It doesn’t work exactly the way they were thinking, but it’s really interesting, because I never considered this is a new way of building a community. All of our legacy communities are built around decisions that were made god knows when, based on there’s a lake nearby or there’s a river or whatever.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** This is like, “Ah, it seems like a good spot to put a bunch of people with laptops,” so a new way of creating communities. Check out Welcome to Digital Nomadland by Susana Ferreira in Wired.

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

**Craig:** Again.

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

**Craig:** Still.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Michael Lane. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. 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 hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segment. Reminder to use the promo code. What is the promo code, Craig?

**Craig:** Onion.

**John:** Promo code onion to save $10 on your annual subscription, but only through January 15th, so do that.

**Craig:** Onion. Onion. Onion.

**John:** Onion. Onion. Onion. Stick around after the credits, because we’ll be discussing our non-writing aspirations for 2023. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun year.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, I sprung this on you. We didn’t have time to prepare any sort of plans for 2023, but not work, because obviously you’re going to have a very busy work 2023. Maybe I’ll start with some of mine, and you can think of what some of yours are going to be for 2023. I’m excited to be DM’ing again. It looks like we’re going to finish up the campaign that you’ve been so generously hosting for the last three years.

**Craig:** It’s a long one.

**John:** It’s a long one.

**Megana:** Wow.

**John:** When you finish up, we’ve discussed in the group, I’m going to try to run a much, much shorter, not going to go three years, kind of campaign. I’m excited to get back into that and look at who our group is. We have a large group, but not everyone can come every time, so trying to plan for things that will work will if people are just gone, so their tokens aren’t just sitting there idly, that we can actually do things every week with the people that we have on hand.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That’s probably the thing I’m most excited about in 2023.

**Craig:** I’m excited about that. I can’t wait to just play again. I guess that’s not really an aspiration. It’s going to happen. It’s an inevitability.

**John:** It’s going to happen. We’re going to finish. We’re going to finish the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and then we’ll do something new.

**Craig:** Yes, we will. When it comes to non-writing aspirations, I don’t really have specific ones, or at least none that are tied to a new year. I have an ongoing project, which is to catastrophize less, take deep breaths, put anxiety in its proper perspective, and remind myself… Am I allowed to curse in this Bonus Segment?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Everything will be fucking okay. That’s great.

**John:** [crosstalk 01:11:27].

**Craig:** That’s what I’m working on. Megana, I feel like you and I are very similar in this regard.

**Megana:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** Tell me, what do you do, or first of all, is that part of your non-writing aspiration for 2023? If it is, how do you go about it?

**Megana:** I think it is. I am also trying to stretch more in 2023 because I’m getting older.

**Craig:** That’s nice. Yeah, you are.

**Megana:** I am. I think that getting myself to a place where it’s like, “Oh, I’m stressed out,” and moving my body in some way is always incredibly helpful. That is a new tactic I’m taking for 2023.

**Craig:** I like it, stretching.

**Megana:** Instead of just panicking alone in my room.

**Craig:** Right, and tightening up in a little stress ball.

**John:** Stretching also one of the things that you can do while you’re doing something else. You can stretch while you’re watching TV. Increasingly, I will just not sit on the couch. I will sit on the floor and try to stretch while watching Andor or Fleishman is in Trouble, because I can still fully enjoy the show, but I’m also hopefully getting my hamstrings a little less messed up.

**Megana:** I have a standing desk, but if we’re being honest, I don’t stand at it very often.

**Craig:** You mean your sitting desk? That’s your sitting desk, Megana.

**Megana:** Now it’s going to be my stretching desk. It’s going to be my stretching and less panic desk.

**Craig:** I like that.

**Megana:** Do you have a standing desk?

**Craig:** I do. Like you, it’s really… Look. Here’s the deal. I know what I can do. I know what I can’t do. I know what I might do. Part of everything is also just giving myself a break.

**Megana:** You deserve it.

**Craig:** I do a lot. You know what? I don’t want to use the standing desk. Screw it. I don’t want to.

**John:** If listeners are looking for things to help them think about their year and they want to try a book, a book that actually was genuinely useful for me was James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which really talks about how the best way to change your habits and get rid of some bad habits and start some good habits is just make them unavoidable. It’s literally like putting your running shoes by the door so you’re going to be tripping over them if you don’t do it. It’s making sure you’re setting yourself up for success. If people are looking for a book or something to read over the holidays, to make them think better about what they want to do in the new year, how to get that achieved, that’d be a good bet, Atomic Habits.

**Craig:** If your New Year’s resolutions or aspirations are to read less and sit more, I just want you to know I’m your patron saint.

**John:** We’re going to support that. Craig, a thing I’m going to try to not do in 2023 is recreate Twitter. I’m not going to try to, because obviously, Twitter is going to… It’s not dead, but it’s not going to be the same thing it was. If it’s around six months from now, six years from now, it’s still not going to be as useful to me as it used to be. I’m not going to try to find the new Twitter. I just don’t think that’s going to be a goal. I’m going to find other ways to encounter the ideas in people that I used to encounter and stumble across on Twitter. I’m not quite sure what that’s going to be. I can still miss the things that were great about it. I’m not going to try to look for the next version of it.

**Craig:** Which is totally fine. I think you probably won’t have to try too hard. I think that there are people right now salivating and rubbing their hands together, going, “We sense a vacuum.” That said, Twitter never really made money. I don’t know if anybody necessarily… They’re not going to want to recreate Twitter either, but they’re going to make something. Something’s coming. You remember the fantastic opening credit sequence for Silicon Valley?

**John:** Oh yeah. Great. The constantly churning, 3D, top-down view of all these companies building up and exploding.

**Craig:** Exactly. They would change it over the seasons to reflect other implosions and new risings. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We just know change is afoot. It just doesn’t stop. The churn doesn’t stop. Something new is going to come along that’s going to take over our lives soon enough.

**John:** What it has started doing more of as Twitter’s been declining is just going back to my RSS readers, the blogs I follow and stuff like that. That was actually really good technology. RSS is what’s actually powering podcasts like Scriptnotes to let new episodes come out there. People can use that for posts as well. I’m going to try to do a little bit more blogging on johnaugust.com. The thoughts that I used to try to cut down to 280 characters to fit on Twitter, I will expend a few minutes to make a longer blog post.

**Megana:** Nice.

**Craig:** Been a lot of that going on.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a very good 2022. I’m so excited to be doing more Scriptnotes with you in 2023.

**Craig:** Oh wait, we’re still doing this? Oh my god.

**Megana:** Wait, Craig, was that your answer for your resolution?

**John:** Catastrophize less?

**Megana:** Catastrophize less?

**Craig:** Yeah. What did you think it should be?

**Megana:** No, I think that that’s great. I also think that you deserve more vacation in 2023.

**Craig:** Aw, that’s very sweet. I don’t love vacations. I know I’m supposed to.

**John:** Maybe a different definition of vacation. It doesn’t have to be sitting on a beach someplace. It could just be like, Craig, for the next week you just get to play all of the video games.

**Craig:** I do love that.

**John:** I think we both wish a little more of that for you.

**Craig:** Thank you. You guys are very sweet. I wish you guys to have a wonderful and happy new year, no matter what it brings for us, which will be fascinating, no doubt.

**John:** It will be a fascinating year, I’m sure.

**Craig:** We will, as always, look back on this and go, “Aw, you guys didn’t know. You didn’t that the space weasels were coming.”

**John:** So naïve we were.

**Craig:** From the Planet Weasel. Yeah, they’re coming. We didn’t know. Until they do come, let’s have some fun.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [William Nicholson](https://www.williamnicholson.com/) on [IMdB](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0629933/)
* [Watch the conversation between John and William here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ22OXQEyos)
* [Thank you to the Writers Guild Foundation for organizing the event!](https://www.wgfoundation.org/blog/category/FYC)
* [Use Promo Code ONION for two months free in our annual Scriptnotes premium membership](https://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Welcome to Digital Nomadland](https://www.wired.com/story/digital-nomad-village-madeira-portugal/) by Kyle Jeffers for Wired
* [Fleischman Is In Trouble](https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/fleishman-is-in-trouble) on Hulu
* [Andor](https://www.disneyplus.com/series/star-wars-andor/3xsQKWG00GL5)
* [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 Michael Lane ([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/580standard.mp3).

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/)
* [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 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).

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
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* [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).

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