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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** It’s massive.

**John:** It’s massive. It’s big.

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

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

**Megana:** Cool.

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

**Megana:** Vogue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** Super helpful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Makes sense.

**Megana:** It’s a lot of effort.

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

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

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

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

**John:** So basic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** That’s super helpful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** Oh my gosh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** Aw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Oh no, Eliza.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Let’s do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Agreed.

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

**John:** Oh, no.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** 100%.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Good plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** Fair enough.

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

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

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

**Megana:** Yes, exactly.

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

**Megana:** It’s like Scandinavian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** Totally.

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

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

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

**Megana:** It’s so disorienting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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

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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 539 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we ask the eternal question, how would this be a movie? This time focusing on stories and topics related to science. To help us out, we have two special guests joining us. First, Erin Macdonald is an astrophysicist PhD and a tattooed one-woman career panel for the field. She lives in Los Angeles, working as a writer and producer, and is currently the science consultant for the entire Star Trek franchise. Welcome, Erin.

**Erin Macdonald:** Hi. Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

**John:** I have so many questions about the science in the franchise, and specifically space science as it relates to Star Trek, which feels like it’s a long history there. Warp drives, we’ll get into all that stuff with you today hopefully.

**Erin:** Excellent.

**John:** Next up we have Leigh Whannell. He is an Australian screenwriter, actor, producer, and director, known for co-creating the Saw and Insidious franchises with James Wan. He made his directorial debut with Insidious: Chapter 3, and has since directed 2 more films, the widely acclaimed Upgrade, and The Invisible Man, which was the last movie I saw in theaters pre-pandemic. Leigh, welcome back to the show.

**Leigh Whannell:** Thanks for having me again.

**John:** You were on Episode 354, which was an episode that Craig recorded without me. Now we’re recording this episode without Craig. Essentially, we always have to keep one of us off the podcast when you’re there, because you’re just too dangerous.

**Leigh:** It would be too dangerous, like combining the wrong type of chemicals.

**John:** It’s all risky. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, speaking of risk, we are going to talk about Leigh’s proposal for a period shopping mall theme park experience. I’m strongly in favor of this happening, for the record, and so I want to really work through all of the possibilities for Leigh’s proposal to create a theme park experience period mall.

**Leigh:** Excellent.

**John:** We’ll do it. Before we get into sciencey stuff, we have a business question. Actually, it’s here from Megana. Megana, can you ask your question that I see here in the outline?

**Megana Rao:** I saw this tweet from Ed Solomon about the accounting for Men in Black. I spent an embarrassingly long time looking through these documents, and I feel so confused about what I’m looking at. I was hoping you guys could explain some of the movie accounting to me. He says, “Sadly, Men in Black lost over $5 million this period alone. Someone needs to call Sony and tell them to stop building sets. Seriously, does nobody know how to run a business?”

**John:** Ed Solomon is putting up links here to the profit definition, the profit statements from Men in Black, obviously a huge, huge hit, one that spawned many sequels. He’s one of the credited writers on it. He has a net profit participation in the movie. The movie is not into net profits, even having generated gazillion dollars. Leigh Whannell, you are a person who’s written movies that have generated hundreds of millions of dollars. Is this at all familiar to you?

**Leigh:** I did enter the film world through a different door. It wasn’t the front door. Obviously, Men in Black was a film that was made very much within the studio system. Big studio, big money, big movie stars. The first few films especially that I was involved in were definitely independent films. The first Saw film was actually financed by the producers. Two of the producers did what they say you should never do in Hollywood, which is spend your own money. They mortgaged their houses to pay for that movie. It’s a very different financial map. I guess it’s the old saying of betting on yourself. I think with those movies, by betting on ourselves, maybe we saw more backend and more profits.

What I hear about these big studio films, and maybe you can enlighten me, John, is that they always find some creative accounting to show why, “Oh, no no no, you see, the standees that we made in Malaysia mean that you don’t get your profit participation checks.” That’s what I hear from people who have worked more in the big budget studio system.

**John:** I’ve made many movies for Sony and for other places. I made Aladdin. I will guarantee you the movies will never turn a technical profit. The reason behind it is that setting out to make this movie, the studio takes a loan out to make the movie. They’re borrowing $150 million or whatever to make this film. Your film Invisible Man is probably similar sort of [unclear 00:04:20] because it was not that expensive, but it was still expensive enough that it will never turn a technical definition of profits.

These studios are taking out this big lump of money to make this film. They’re spending the money to make the film. They’re charging interest on that loan for the whole time. Even though they are both the bank and the person borrowing the money, they are essentially continuing to generate interest on that original loan, and that original loan will never pay down. They’re also throwing every conceivable expense against the film, including a distribution fee, which is money they’re paying themselves to distribute the film, basically all the other overhead and accounting they’re throwing at it. These films will never achieve technical profit, based on the definitions. Those definitions are laid out in the contracts that you and I have signed as writers when we are doing this. Even the attorneys who we’re paying good money for tell us never to expect to see real money in the backend on these things.

**Leigh:** You say the studios take out a loan, are you saying… This might prove my naivete on these matters. Are they taking out a loan from themselves? Don’t these studios have vaults full of cash that essentially when they finance movies, the money, it doesn’t come from a bank, it comes from those vaults? It comes from the studio coffers, right?

**John:** Yep. You would think that you could not loan yourself money in that way, but that is technically what they are doing. Each of these films, just like your Saw film or Insidious film, it is its own company that is formed and set up to do the thing. They’re loaning money to that production to do this. There’s many ways they could be structured. It could also be structured as an international situation. They are designing things in ways to maximize the amount of money that the studio gets back in without the film itself getting paid money.

**Leigh:** It is interesting to hear about things. I had a friend of mine who was directing a film for Universal, and he wanted to shoot some scenes on the studio back lot, in one of the studios. One of the producers was saying, “It’s too expensive.” My friend said, “This is a Universal film and we’re shooting on the Universal lot.” The producer said, “Yeah, you don’t get a discount for that. They will charge us.” I just found that an insane version of double dipping.

**John:** There might be circumstances where a studio will require a production to use its things, for certain good reasons, but they will still charge that full freight for using their own facilities. That’s just how it goes. This can be frustrating, but it’s also, I think, because it is unlikely that a writer will ever be paid these kind of net profits on things, that’s why you find other ways as a writer to get some backend participation. Obviously, residuals have nothing to do with the profitability of the film, and so we get paid residuals no matter how much it shows on this statement, which is great.

We might also ask for box office bonuses. If we know that our film is going to be theatrically released, which is never a given in 2022, we can say, “When the US theatrical box office on this film hits $50 million or $100 million, you have to write me a check for X.” That’s one way to get around these impossible net profit definitions. Megana, did we answer your question to any degree?

**Megana:** You did. Basically, it’s not supposed to make sense to me, but yeah.

**John:** When you’re back in the office, I can show you Aladdin statements or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory statements that show that they are similarly money-losing propositions on paper, even though they’ve made the studios good money.

**Megana:** Thank you very much.

**John:** We just played the role of business consultant here, explaining to Megana how this weird thing in accounting work. I’m only vaguely qualified to do that. I’m not qualified to talk about space or astrophysics. Luckily, Eric Macdonald is qualified to talk about this. Can you give us, Erin, a sense of your history studying astrophysics and how that segued into your working on the Star Trek franchise?

**Erin:** I’ve always been interested in film and television and the entertainment industry. I made that fork crossroads decision when I went to college, or university, to decide to study physics. As I went through there, I realized I didn’t quite like it as a career. I did research for many years, specifically in gravitational waves. I went through, did my PhD in Scotland, had a great experience, but when it came to the postdoc life of research, that wasn’t really for me.

When I left academia, I was looking for things that would scratch some of the things that I enjoyed doing in academia, one of which was teaching. I started going to sci-fi conventions to teach about the science behind things like Star Trek. I would go and give these science talks, and they were hugely popular. People just really lined out the door to see these talks. I started going to multiple conventions all around the country. I started to meet a lot of writers, creators. Then when I moved out to Los Angeles, a lot of them started to give me a call and start folding me in. I found my way in a very indirect route to now be a part of the entertainment industry, which I’m thrilled about.

**John:** Can you talk about those early calls you’re getting, asking for your advice, your input on a project? What are the kinds of things that, at a writing stage, they want to know from an actual scientist?

**Erin:** Typically, it’ll just depend on when they find out that I exist, whatever the stage the project is in. Typically, it’ll be in that story development period, where they’re coming up with a high concept, especially for some hard sci-fi. They’re going to ask me questions about like, this is the method of faster-than-light travel we use, or this is the energy source that this population’s using, or here’s the inciting incident that is somehow science-based. Can you just give me a pass on it to see how it feels? I always say, all right, if I can read it and it doesn’t make me throw up in my mouth, that’s a good pass.

**Leigh:** Erin, I have to say, this is really strange kismet that you’re on this episode, because I recently in the last six months started writing a sci-fi, horrory type thingy and needed to talk to an astrophysicist because our film was about that. Everything you’re talking about is exactly what I’m basically sitting someone down and saying, okay, how ridiculous is this?

**Erin:** I love that, by the way. I try to take the approach with writers that I’m going to “yes and” your project. I’ve heard a lot of stories of people with very negative experiences with science consultants, where they have a friend or a friend of a friend who has a background in that story, and then they send them the idea, and the response is like, “Nope, that doesn’t work. Science doesn’t work like that.” I really try to take a more positive approach, like, “Okay, if that’s what you want to do, let’s see how we can make this work and let’s see to what extent we need to explain it.” That’s sometimes a lot of what I do too is just say, “Yeah, you can do it. Just don’t try to explain it.”

**John:** Let’s think about the kinds of questions a writer might ask. A lot of times these are bigger conceptual questions. If it’s gravitational wave, faster-than-light travel, this is the means of faster-than-light travel I’m planning to use in my script, so great, and talking them through the options there. In some cases are you also talking about what the lingo is, what an actual astrophysicist would say in these moments? We had Zoanne Clack on the show, who was originally hired as a writer’s consultant on Grey’s Anatomy. She was there as a medical consultant, not just for like, this is the medical procedure, this is the disease, but also like, this is what a doctor would actually do or say in those moments. Do you get involved in this is what an astrophysicist would be like?

**Erin:** Absolutely, yeah. I think that’s where the direction of my career has gone. I still have those early concept conversations like you were talking about, Leigh, but now when I’m folded into a writer’s room or into a specific show, it can be all the way from story development and most of my days reading scripts. I will give little tweaks to the dialog here and there. Then like you talked about, maybe not necessarily getting the technological language right, but more the conceptual drive of what a scientist does. That’s something I’ve done for a number of episodes, where they have a scientific problem, and I’ll help the writer’s think through it as you would a scientist to build that story and to drive that forward.

**John:** We had a conversation two weeks ago with Mike Schur from The Good Place. He was talking about as it came time to do the moral philosophy on his show, he had done a lot of reading on moral philosophy, but he needed an expert who could really talk about this the way that a philosopher would talk about it. He enlisted Todd May and another philosopher on to do that. It sounds like you’re involved in a similar place where the writers may have a good sense of what they’re trying to do in general, and they’re coming to you for specific help and making this actual fit with everything else that’s around it. Is that right?

**Erin:** Yeah. What’s really interesting about my role now is I’m available to the whole Star Trek franchise. That’s five shows right now that are currently in development. They all use me very differently. Some of it is based on the fact that I’ve been with them for multiple seasons, and so that trust and that relationship has grown. I’ll be in from breaking season arcs all the way through to sitting in the writers room to reading scripts, but even be involved with the post-production aspects and help with graphics. Other shows, I’ll just get the script and I’ll just edit little dialog and just do a little wordsmithing here or there.

Any time I’m approached about a science-fiction project, I always like to ask, okay, science fiction is a huge spectrum of science to fiction, and tell me where you want to live, and we’ll tweak the science to fit that appropriately, because there’s a lot of different types of sci-fi out there.

**John:** Speaking of different types of sci-fi, Leigh, your film The Invisible Man involves a scientist who’s developed a means of invisibility, which is very different than in the original film. He’s really using optics to become invisible, and a suit that lets him do this. At what point in the development of the script were you really figuring out, oh, this is what is believable to me for how this invisibility technology works?

**Leigh:** It’s a good question, because Invisible Man and Upgrade were both films incorporating a lot of sci-fi elements. I am definitely not a science major. If you started quizzing me about the Periodic Table, I would draw a blank, but yet I have my imagination. It’s been strange to watch certain things that I’ve invented in my mind somehow create some link to the real world. In the case of The Invisible Man, I thought, what if you had a suit covered with cameras, and each camera was taking thousands of pictures and then simultaneously projecting a hologram, so it’s almost like this hologram suit.

We were well into pre-production in Sydney, Australia, when we went and talked to some scientists at the Sydney Institute of Technology. We were explaining to them that it would work. They were thinking, and they were like, “Yeah, that could work.” They said the technology’s not there yet, but if you had a camera that could render fast enough and take these images and project. It was almost like I was retroactively given the green light on what I was thinking, but by that point the ship had sailed. It is interesting, this meeting ground between your imagination and real science.

**John:** For our topic today on How Would This Be A Movie, it’s interesting, some of them actually are things that started out as science fiction and then crossed more into scientific discussion. There are ideas that were first broken in the pages of sci-fi, yet the underlying concepts were interesting enough that given enough time, real science could catch up to these ideas.

Let’s segue right into some How Would This Be A Movies. For this installment, I asked our listeners on Twitter for suggestions on articles, topics to explore, and as always, they delivered. We picked a mix of some astrophysics, social science, some biology. I want to dig into some of the reality of each topic, but then also, what are the fictional possibilities based on the topic. This first one is an example of something that we first see in science fiction and then explored more. This is the Dyson sphere. Erin, maybe you could help us explain what a Dyson sphere is and why we might be looking for those out in space.

**Erin:** Yeah, totally. I love Dyson spheres. I’m very excited about this. Dyson spheres are a theoretical construct, kind of a thought experiment that people have put together about trying to find advanced life out in other solar systems. Really quickly, we live in our solar system, which is a bunch of planets that orbit a star, and then there’s millions and millions of stars in our own galaxy, and then there’s a bunch of galaxies out there. Typically on this scale we’re just talking about within our galaxy, but outside of our solar system. The idea of a Dyson sphere is that you essentially build a giant sphere, sometimes starts as a ring, then that ring starts to grow, that goes all the way around the star, and it’s essentially solar panels, that you’re able to harvest all of the solar energy off of this star. It’s an insane amount. If your civilization is advanced enough to do that, then the idea is they’ll probably need that much energy anyway.

**John:** A Dyson sphere is a way of harnessing all the power of a star. The reason why we might notice those out there is if you’re actually collecting all this energy, astronomers here on Earth, using our space telescopes, might notice that something is weird about that star, and they might be able to see the effects of this Dyson sphere and that it’s collecting all this energy.

**Erin:** Yep, absolutely correct. When it comes to trying to find a Dyson sphere, the big thing is trying to find ways that astronomers can differentiate between an artificial object like a Dyson sphere versus any sort of naturally occurring objects. This actually happened. There was something called Tabby’s Star, where they discovered it had a weird signal to it, that it could be artificial, but upon further investigation, they think that it’s just a bunch of debris that’s around this star that was making its signal look weird. That’s the tricky part about astrophysics.

What I think makes it a great vessel for storytelling is we just have to take what the universe gives us. We really don’t know anything. We can’t create our universe in a lab. We get these puzzle pieces that we have to put together. Dyson spheres are a really exciting one to explore.

**John:** Let’s think about this in terms of a movie, because building a Dyson sphere would presumably take thousands of years, and so it’s not a thing that’s going to be happening in the course of one of our movies, most likely. It could be a character who is encountering a Dyson sphere that exists in the world, finding proof of an alien civilization, because they have one. Leigh, what’s jumping out to you in terms of a way that a Dyson sphere could appear in a film that you want to make?

**Leigh:** The first thought I had was of those two options. Are we building a Dyson sphere to save our universe or do we come across a Dyson sphere? I feel like you solved the first problem. It would take too long to really make a film about building one. Maybe this is a film about finding a Dyson sphere. It’s so funny, because the film I’m writing right now, I could really incorporate some of these elements. I would say coming across or seeing a Dyson sphere at a distance, and then where do we go from there?

**John:** It feels like it’s a setting, it’s an initial incident, but it’s not the actual thing itself. Erin, you can tell us… Obviously, there’s probably NDAs for future stuff, but have Dyson spheres already appeared in the Star Trek universe?

**Erin:** They have, actually, totally NDA-free. This was in The Next Generation. There was an episode where they discovered a Dyson sphere around a star system. It was a Next Generation episode, but they were able to bring back Scotty from the original series, that his ship has crashed into this Dyson sphere. That’s exactly what it was. It had a huge gravitational pull. That’s why his ship crashed, because it was just so massive. In this case it was a fully closed sphere, which it doesn’t need to be. The gravitational attraction of this is what caused the ship to crash. It’s been seen before.

**John:** We can’t talk about search for extraterrestrial life without maybe bringing up the Fermi Paradox, that sense of, there should be so many civilizations out there, given the time span of the universe, and there should be more things out there. It’s the question of why does it seem like we’re the only people, or at least we don’t see any other civilizations out there.

That paradox could be answered in a couple different ways. One of the possibilities is that no civilization actually gets up to the point where they would build a Dyson sphere that we could see them, they all collapse first, or there may be other reasons that we can’t understand why we’re the only ones who are visible. Maybe people are out there and they’re hiding because it’s a good idea to hide. There’s all sorts of interesting, provocative questions that are raised by the lack of evidence out there.

**Erin:** I love the Fermi Paradox. You touched on a couple good ones. Like you said, it’s this idea that it takes so long to create this advanced capability, whether that is a Dyson sphere or something like warp drive to be able to visit other star systems. A big one for me is not the philosophical aspect, but just the probability that your civilization is going to have an extinction event from space, like a gamma ray burst wiping you out, is much higher than you having enough time to build that. The analogy I use, it’ll take you 200 years to build a house, but you live in a 100-year floodplain. It’s going to wipe you out before you do it.

**John:** It’s all very dispiriting.

**Erin:** It is.

**John:** Leigh, let’s think about characters in this situation, because it feels like if we’re out in space doing things, we have such tropes about what space [unclear 00:21:38] are like, but is there any other way to get into the characters who would be in this story?

**Leigh:** I think if we’re talking about the human characters here, it sounds like a film about humans meeting obviously a much more advanced civilization. What’s interesting to me about a lot of these films is that a lot of sci-fi films that involve creatures from space or other civilizations still couch it in very human terms. A spaceship is a very graspable concept for human beings. It’s a flying car and the aliens look just like us except their skin is green or something. I find the mysteries of space so much more enticing, like the last 15 minutes of 2001, where what’s happening is so far beyond your comprehension. I do think Arrival was a recent film that, it made the aliens very mysterious. I thought their language was very provocative. For me, I see a movie about us primitive humans, the ants on the side of the freeway, meeting this super advanced civilization and learning about them, I guess.

**Erin:** I can throw out one fun science thing that you can maybe play with for the story, which is the fact that it takes light time to reach us from other stars. We might detect a Dyson sphere that’s, let’s say 100 light years away, but we saw them as they were 100 years ago. You can always factor that in in space exploration stories, especially about humanity, that can sometimes talk about the passage of time or the futility of existence, because hoping that they’re still there by the time you’re able to talk to them.

**John:** Or that they might be on their way to us. Can you give us a quick primer on warp drives, both the warp drives that exist in the Star Trek universe and what the other versions of warp drives we see in the Star Wars universe? What are the basic edges of faster-than-light travel in these different environments?

**Erin:** There’s typically about three flavors of faster-than-light travel. Warp drive is the one most people think of. That’s this idea that when you’re on the surface of space time, this bowling ball on the trampoline visual some people are familiar with, you cannot go faster than the speed of light. Once you have no mass, then you just coast in a straight line. Warp drive is saying, what if space time goes faster than the speed of light and you wrap that fabric of the trampoline around your ship and then that moves you faster than the speed of light. That’s essentially how warp drive works.

Other fun examples include things like wormholes, whether they’re artificial or naturally occurring, which is, again, thinking about that fabric, that trampoline, you take two points and you have a tunnel between them that’s actually shorter than the whole distance from traveling along the surface. We’ve seen a lot of those.

**John:** I think it’s Carl Sagan I first saw on Cosmos, who had the piece of paper bench and a pencil sticking through. That’s a very classic image of the hole through the plane.

**Erin:** Bingo. Exactly. That’s it. Again, wormholes are something similar to warp drive that mathematically our understanding of space time, they could exist. It’s just we’ve never seen one or we don’t have enough energy to create that. Then the final way to travel faster than the speed of light are things like we saw in Battlestar Galactica or Dark Matter, which were jump drives or blink drives, which is where you spool up. It’s as if you’re pulling that fabric toward you, using a ton of energy, and then you make a small jump, and then you let go and you get catapulted to where you were wanting to go. Also takes a ton of energy to do that.

You mentioned Star Wars, so I’ll just explain briefly. Star Wars is hybrid between a wormhole and a jump drive. It’s as if you’re building the wormhole as you’re traveling through that. Yes, I’ve tried to science Star Wars.

**John:** Let’s go from these big cosmological problems to really small, inside your DNA problems. We have a tradition of movies that explore science that goes too far. We have these human-animal hybrids, Island of Dr. Moreau. It turns out that hybridism is actually much more common than we would’ve guessed. Specifically chimerism, which is where a human has two different sets of DNA in themselves. We’ll put a link to a couple different articles about this. Oftentimes it’s from in the womb. You’ve absorbed your identical twin, and so both of your sets of DNA are in there. In real life, there are examples of a woman who was suspected of murder for her young children, and it turned out that she actually had a chimerism disease, disorder, that was causing these kids to be dying, or their DNA samples didn’t match who they should be, or they were not the father of their own children, weird situations that come up like this. Let’s think through some movie options, story options for chimerism. Leigh, is anything jumping to mind?

**Leigh:** I feel like my brain, it must be stuck in bad ’90s thriller mode or something, because the first thing that comes to my mind when you’re talking about this hybrid is it’s one bad twin, one good twin. They’re one human being, but it’s almost a Jekyll and Hyde situation with two personalities fighting each other and maybe one personality not remembering what the other person’s doing.

**John:** That’s literally the plot of Stephen King’s The Dark Half, which is that it’s an unborn twin.

**Leigh:** One of my favorite Stephen King books when I was a teenager. Underappreciated. That’s right, in that book he ingested his twin and it became his pen name. That’s where my brain first goes, but maybe that’s just the first piece [unclear 00:27:07] that you get out all the bad ideas before you get to the good one.

**John:** Erin, it seems like part of the issue, why we’re just discovering chimerism right now, is that there’s really no reason to check a person’s DNA unless there is a problem. It’s only in these weird fringe cases like a crime or a paternity thing that we would even notice that someone had two sets of DNA in them.

**Erin:** That seems to be the case. I think when you look up examples of chimerism, a lot that you see are aesthetic duality. You can play a lot with visuals there, where you have one half of the flower is one color, one half is another one, or a cat that’s half one type of cat and half the other type of cat, because it seems like… Again, I’m not a biologist, but it does seem like this DNA almost, it’s like they merge but they exist side by side as opposed to existing throughout the whole body. It’s really interesting.

**John:** It is. Let’s think about the kind of characters we would find in this story. Thrillers are natural, but maybe there’s options for comedies or other kinds of stories. It could be the main character is a chimera, actually has this double set of DNA. It could be like The Dark Half or it could be some other reason why they’re manifesting as two selves. It could be also the investigator who’s trying to find out how it’s possible this crime was committed by somebody who doesn’t match up to this thing or the DNA’s not matching. It could be a scientist exploring this. Leigh, any thoughts about who you’d want to see in this story?

**Leigh:** I like it from the point of view of the person living it, rather than the investigator, which turns it into a twist, like aha.

**John:** It feels like a Law and Order episode.

**Leigh:** Exactly, whereas I think a movie from the perspective of somebody who’s actually sharing their consciousness and their body with some other set of DNA, I think this could be really interesting, like a first-person. Maybe the two sides could be communicating with each other. You have these long blackouts where the other guy’s in charge. Then the two sides of the personality are communicating about what the other one’s doing. I think that’s a more interesting thing.

**John:** Erin, I’m thinking back to Star Trek: The Next Generation, or sorry, it was a later show. There’s the Dax character who has… It was a person who, they have another consciousness inside them. It feels like a trope that Star Trek has played with a bit.

**Erin:** Oh yeah, for sure. I think whether it’s a dual personality or whether it’s something that exists somewhat separately. Like you said, the Trill were these alien species that had a symbiont that would pass from a host to another. Instead of it being a chimerism thing, then you’re thinking it’s almost like two sentient entities. You’re talking a little bit more about a parasite symbiotic relationship, which is really fun. Then when I see chimerism, the first thing I think of is the original series episode, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, where you have the people who are white on one half and Black on the other. Black on the other half and white on the other half. It’s a not so deep metaphor.

**John:** I can’t imagine an analogy for anything.

**Erin:** They hate each other. Again, that’s more visual, whereas what you’re talking about is much more psychological, which I think would be a fun area of this to explore.

**John:** It’s also easier to envision a world in which chimerism was so common that people visually did look interesting. You could tell that they had multiple people in them at all times. We’ll put examples too. These people whose skin tones don’t match from side to side, but you can have more extreme examples than that. That doesn’t go quite to the black and white Star Trek, but it could be an interesting look for a character. If Craig were here, he’s always talking about hair, makeup, and wardrobe and how characters look. It could be an interesting detail for how a character looks. I like that.

When Craig was on the show, a couple weeks ago, we were talking in the Bonus Segment about population and how growing up I was always taught to fear population growth, that basically we’d run out of resources, that the world’s population was going to get too big, and now suddenly we’re facing, like, oh, populations are declining in a way that could be very detrimental, and population loss is a thing.

I want to talk about the scientific concepts behind sudden population loss. Asked on Twitter was, how much of the population do you have to lose where you go from a Leftovers situation, where they lost 3% of the population, it was sad, but life goes on, to Station 11, where they lose almost all of the population and you’re suddenly back in agrarian times. I’d love to talk through the math and science behind how much of the population you can lose before everything changes and everything falls apart.

**Erin:** When you think about population, there’s an interesting aspect, which is the exponential growth. I think I remember those messages sent from the past about how population growth is out of control. There is true to some extent, but when you really think about it, let’s imagine the blip, where half of life gets wiped out.

**John:** In the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

**Erin:** Yes, correct.

**John:** The Thanos snap.

**Erin:** I remember seeing something where people were like, if you just got rid of half the people now, our global population would be down to what it was in 1970.

**John:** Which doesn’t seem so bad at all.

**Erin:** Right, but half seems like a lot. That’s just our understanding of exponential growth, which I think we’ve also seen a lot this past year with how exponentially things can spread from one person to another. It’s hard for us to wrap our heads around sometimes. I’d probably err on going on the more extreme example of that.

**John:** It’s also this question of how quickly you lose all the people. If you lose 50% of your population in the snap of fingers, you’re also going to have a lot of collateral lost, based on the planes that were in the air and the people who are stranded and things falling apart. I think my question, which it’s hard to answer scientifically, but I think is good to grapple with as writers, is what other institutions of our civilization would just completely collapse if we didn’t have enough people to do them, that the human infrastructure behind things would be really challenging? Leigh, as you’re thinking through this space, we always talk about post-apocalyptic and we always think about, oh, there are zombies now or there’s some other problem, but honestly just having not enough people can be its own struggle.

**Leigh:** I was going to say, maybe the most interesting thing for me would be somewhere between the Leftovers and Station 11, whereas Leftovers was a chunk of the population and they were just dealing with the weirdness of it, and then Station 11 is everybody. What if it was like all of a sudden, there’s still a lot of people, but it’s half what was there before, and suddenly it’s like, wait, nobody knows how to make this anymore. We lost most of our scientists. It’d be interesting to suddenly see people having to grapple with minds that have been lost. A lot of people who were maybe working on things that were going to improve the planet are suddenly gone.

**Erin:** That’s so funny you say that, because I really feel… When I worked in engineering, and in academia, we had a lot of people that were like that, that had been in the industry for 30, 40 years, and make the morbid joke, like, man, he better not get hit by a bus. We’re in so much trouble.

**John:** Think back to the Y2K bug and all the problems that could’ve happened if we’d not been able to pull people out of retirement to fix the computer systems that were written in. Was it Coble?

**Erin:** Yeah.

**John:** They were the folks who actually knew how those things were built. If you lose certain people who know certain things, that’s going to be a huge impact, the folks who actually know how to run the nuclear power plants or know how to run our water systems. You look at the zombie shows, you look at The Walking Dead, and the zombies are terrifying, but not being able to use a sink is also terrifying.

**Leigh:** You think about time travel, I remember talking to a friend once and saying, “Yeah, I’d love to go back in time, 200 years. I would just rule the population by holding up my iPhone.” My friend was like, “Yeah, but could you explain to them how it works?” I was like, “No.” He was like, “What happens when it runs out of batteries? What would you do? Could you explain to them how a toaster works?” I was like, “No, but I could tell them what it was.” He was like, “You would very quickly be flayed and hung on the castle and you wouldn’t amount to anything because you can’t actually make anything or explain it.” He was very right about that.

**John:** That’s where I think it’s so interesting about sudden population loss, because it’s like time travel, where you’re having to revert back to an earlier time, even though you’re moving forward in time. It’s like certain things just can’t be done anymore because you don’t have those capabilities. As you think about this as a movie, let’s think about what characters we may want to see in this story, which also I guess depends on what time frame we want to tell our story in. Station 11, it’s both present day and jumping forward 20 years to what happens after that.

**Leigh:** What if it was a scientist character who was building something that maybe was going to some sort of climate technology that was maybe going to improve the world, and then suddenly he was part of the population that disappeared, and his teenage children or adult children are suddenly left with this thing that they don’t understand how it works, that their father was the mastermind of. He’s creating a tension there of we have all this stuff, but we don’t know how it works anymore.

**Erin:** Yeah, or even their colleagues or their people that they were mentoring or that are now having to piece together what they were working on.

**Leigh:** Exactly. There we go. Let’s [unclear 00:36:22].

**John:** In the second South Park movie about COVID, that actually is a plot point, where this one guy has built this thing that no one else can figure out how to do. It’s definitely an idea that’s out there, that sense of the person who’s created the situation is the only person who can solve it, and we can’t find the person who created the situation, which feels great. That person is probably not the central character. That’s the obstacle, the McGuffin we’re looking after. It’s either children of that person or someone else who is searching.

**Leigh:** Perhaps the thing that caused the massive population loss could be what the scientist character was working on. Suddenly he’s one of the people that’s gone, and his children or his colleagues, as Erin said, have to figure out how it works before everybody’s gone. There’s this ticking clock of how do we figure out how this thing works before we all disappear and there’s not 50% of the people here, there’s 0%.

**John:** At least pointing out that we have to have continuous stakes. If it’s a onetime event where we lose half the population, that’s horrible and there’s repercussions, but what are the ongoing stakes? What’s the ongoing narrative tension that’s being built up through the situation? Something like it’s going to keep happening.

**Leigh:** Maybe if there’s a rip in the dimensional fabric. Now we’re getting into Marvel territory. If there’s some sort of cataclysmic event, cosmic event causing the population loss, and this machine or device that the scientist character, she or he has been working on and is suddenly gone, I think as that tear in the cosmic fabric gets bigger and bigger, you’re like, there’s something to work towards.

**Erin:** I really like the idea of it being a continuous event and that ticking bomb of like, all right, we have to make this as accessible and as understandable to anyone, because we don’t know who’s going to go next.

**John:** Let’s talk about accessibility and understandability, because our characters in the movie are trying to understand it, but also we as an audience have to understand it. I think back to, Leigh, your explanation of how the suit works in Invisible Man. It was really clear. You were showing it to us. We were seeing it happen. It’s like, oh, I get what it was, and there wasn’t anything more to it. Anything that’s involving a scientist concept, we have to think about what is the simplest, most logical way to explain what’s happening here without over-explaining it.

**Leigh:** I always love people explaining something to a child. It’s always helpful, because then again, I think it’s a way to dramatize exposition. I feel like one of the gold standards for this is the scene in Jurassic Park when they sit down and they get the kids animation that’s like, hey kids.

**Erin:** 1,000%.

**Leigh:** Here’s how dinosaur DNA works. I remember the 13-year-old watching that movie in theaters. Within 30 seconds, the writers and the filmmakers had completely explained this hugely complicated concept of extracting dinosaur DNA from mummified mosquitoes. All of a sudden I was like, “Great, got it,” and they can just move on with the monsters and the crashing and the bashing. It was beautiful. I feel like if you involve a child, and the child’s like, “I don’t understand,” and you just have a character saying, “Look, this McGuffin over here is going to fix all our problems,” I feel like that’s a good way to explain it to the audience.

**Erin:** It’s a classic trope we use in Star Trek all the time. It started with Spock over-explaining something and then Kirk giving a blank stare and getting a much more simple–

**Leigh:** [unclear 00:39:50].

**John:** Then you have McCoy saying, “No one could possibly understand this.”

**Leigh:** I’ve noticed a tic in screenwriting. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, John. I’ve noticed a tic with screenwriting, like in Marvel movies and stuff, not to keep calling them out, but they’ll have one of their characters… I’m just making this up on the spot. They’ll have one of their characters say something like… It has to sound creative scientific and very complicated. One of the characters will say, “No, listen, what we need to do is take the interlocker and connect it to the vectranon and then when we plug it twofolds back into what we would consider dimensional da da da, then we’ll be okay.” Then one of the other characters will say, “Time travel. You’re talking about time travel.” It’s like, oh my god, they do it every time. I look around the theater, and I’m like, is it only our screenwriters noticing this tic?

**John:** I do want to give a shout-out to Episode 419 of Scriptnotes with David Koepp, where we actually talk about the film strip inside of Jurassic Park that explains all.

**Leigh:** Can I ask you, John, is there an actual industry screenwriters nickname for that thing of saying, “Time travel.”

**John:** In some ways it’s like hanging a lantern on the exposition. Basically someone’s explaining jargony stuff, and they do have some character comment on the fact that you’re explaining jargony stuff. It’s a little bit hanging a lantern, but if a listener has a suggestion for, oh, that’s what we called this, we’re happy to popularize a term for that phenomenon that I’ve definitely noticed.

**Erin:** I have no problem with it, because it’s been my entry into the industry is to write them, is to write those scenes.

**Leigh:** You do the jargony part for the screenwriter, and then the screenwriter comes in and goes, “Flying. You’re talking about humans flying.”

**John:** I love it. This whole thing has been a thought experiment on different story topics. Our next one actually is a thought experiment. It originated on a rationalist message board. It’s called Roko’s Basilisk. Basically the greatly simplified version is that a future artificial intelligence might punish or otherwise take action against anyone who stood in its way, including those in the past. It gets a little hand wavey, but essentially, because for all we know, we’re living in a simulation, AI could torture us, or torture indistinguishable copies of us, and so therefore, we shouldn’t try to stand in the AI’s way.

**Leigh:** John, just in reading the article, I did have one point of confusion, which was just how does this hypothetical AI torture people in the past? Does it have time travel capabilities?

**John:** Basically, because it could create a simulation with us in it, that would be indistinguishable from us, it’s torturing a version of you, even if you, Leigh Whannell–

**Leigh:** Right, but I would not be affected by my simulation being tortured. My simulation wouldn’t be having a good time, but I myself would not be–

**John:** If you stick it in the framework under which all these other discussions are being had, if a version of you is being tortured, it is you being tortured, if that thing is indistinguishable. That’s my best understanding. Help me out, Erin.

**Erin:** As far as I understand it, and this is one of those things that does result in crying in the shower in the middle of the night, but the way I have thought about it is it’s… This is why they talk about it as a doing thought experiment.

**Leigh:** I love when the article says, “Be warned. Just reading this article may send you insane.”

**Erin:** What they’re trying to get across is, once you’ve learned this sentient, all-knowing artificial intelligence could exist in the future, you now have a decision if you’re going to be one to help that or to not help it. Your decisions as you make along the way could influence that one way or the other and it could eventually punish you. Again, as John mentioned, there are versions of this where it’s in a simulation or we’re living already in that simulation. Extrapolating the probabilities of your own behavior, like when we code NPCs in video games, non-player characters in video games, we’re assuming they’re going to make decisions based on what you do. It’s the same idea that this artificial intelligence will make a decision based on what we’re deciding to do. It’s very philosophical.

**Leigh:** Maybe the movie there, so as not to skirt too closely to the Matrix, although maybe it already is, maybe the movie there is that there is an anti-AI scientist, somebody who is a distinguished scientist who believes that AI is the wrong direction to go in, if we give it too much power, suddenly starts to find their life falling apart. Things are happening. Maybe people they know aren’t recognizing them anymore. Starts to work out that the AI that this scientist colleague invents in the future is now inflicting pain on a simulation, but somehow that simulated version of this main character is affecting her own life. Somehow the simulation is bleeding into her own life, and it becomes this almost Jacob’s Ladder version of what’s real, what’s not, how can a supercomputer in the future be tearing apart my current reality.

**Erin:** It brings up good things you can play with with free will. Am I going to choose this? I’ve been predetermined to choose this. Everything I’ve been exposed to in the past says I’m going to choose this, but now I know that it knows I’m going to choose that.

**Leigh:** Maybe the main character’s life starts falling apart so much that the AI in the future sends her a message somehow, be it through somebody else or whatever, but saying, “This can all stop if you get on board and help your colleague to make me what I am today.” She has this moral crossroads of do I stop this tearing apart of my life and help my colleague create this thing that is tearing apart my life, or do I keep on my current track of trying to stop something that I think is bad for humanity.

**Erin:** I got to say, this reminds me of a film, Superintelligence, with Melissa McCarthy. It was really similar to this.

**Leigh:** Oh wow.

**Erin:** Really weirdly similar to this.

**John:** Let’s pull back a little bit and look at the article in context, because the headline is, are there basically ideas that are too dangerous to think. That reminds me of The Ring. Once you’ve seen the videotape in The Ring, you are cursed and you are going to die in seven days. I think there’s some aspect of once you’ve been exposed to a thing, you can’t ever get away from it, feels like an evergreen topic. Everything we’ve been describing feels like a horror film [unclear 00:46:23] in some ways. That knowledge could be a curse that you carry with you.

This also reminds me of, there’s a book that Megan McDonald and I both like a lot, called There is No Antimemetics Division, which has a sense of ideas that you can’t actually see or think, because they are anti-memes. They’re memes that are so powerful that they worm their way into your head. There’s something that feels scary about this, but also not necessarily super cinematic. I’m having a hard time picturing a thing that a camera would be pointed at.

**Erin:** I could picture it being a very heady hard sci-fi, psychological sci-fi horror about how do you forget you learned something, truly forget it.

**Leigh:** Also, if you have an AI in the future that’s torturing you, I almost see it as a science fiction Jacob’s Ladder where the character’s life is falling apart in really eerie and scary ways because this entity in the future is messing with her reality somehow. I can see things to point the camera at.

**John:** You’re quire a director. I’m also thinking early Darren Aronofsky. I’m thinking Aronofsky around Pi and that sense of people who get so obsessed with ideas that it takes over their life. [unclear 00:47:40].

**Leigh:** I want to pitch what I’m working on right now, because every time you guys are talking about seeing things in space that don’t make sense or a character becoming so obsessed with an idea, I’m like, I just want to pitch it, but [unclear 00:47:53] so I can’t.

**John:** Let’s go back out to very, very wide and things we can’t point a camera at, which would be solar storms. I’d love to talk about the reality and dramatic potential of solar storms, which are basically… The surface of our sun sometimes puts off these giant plumes of fire and radiation that can mess up life on Earth. We have records of these things that happened. There have been telegraph lines becoming charged and paper catching fire. That was before we had all the modern technology. If we were to be hit by one of these right now, it would be really, really bad. Erin, can you give us a sense of what a solar flare or solar storm could be like? You’d mentioned gamma ray bursts earlier on. There are things out there that are just really bad if they hit the Earth.

**Erin:** Yeah, space will kill us. I love that you brought this up. The big bad solar storms are called coronal mass ejections or CMEs. Actually, we wrote this into an episode of Season Three of Star Trek: Discovery, where the engineer referred to it as a star burp. We will simplify it to that. Like you said, it unleashes a huge amount of radiation, a huge amount of heat. Now you’ll survive the Earth getting hit by a CME. A gamma ray burst is such high radiation, you’re just going to fry. A solar storm isn’t going to necessarily hurt you, but what it does do, as you said, is it takes down technology. It’s a huge electromagnetic pulse.

You mentioned the telegraphs and the papers catching on fire. That was from an event in 1859 called the Carrington Event. That was when Earth got hit by a CME right at the early stages of this industrial era. It was so powerful, it took down transformers. It blew out all the telegraph lines. People who were using telegraphs, it set their paper on fire. They got shocked by it. It’s crazy. It’s come close to happening these days. I think in 2012 we discovered a couple years later we only missed one by a couple weeks. It can happen, and the implications are numerous and delightful and catastrophic.

**John:** It’s not hard to envision the big catastrophe movie of this, which would be everything gets taken down. Let’s set a moment to think about the period film of this. If we actually were to make a movie about the Carrington Event and what that would be like, in some ways it could be charming. It would be a disruption and things could happen, but it’d be a good parable for losing this technology we counted on and having to do things the old way or something like you can’t send a message out and so you’re isolated. There’s something charming about that image.

**Leigh:** Yeah, that’s actually a great idea. I actually think just that concept, it almost is by the by now when you talk about the solar storms. It’s like a movie based on what would happen to us all if none of our devices worked anymore, if suddenly everyone teenager’s TikTok in the world was not available to them. I think I can see an interesting dramedy about that.

**John:** As we went through this pandemic, it was bad. Everyone agrees, it sucked, but we still had our technology. Without our technology, it would’ve been much, much, much worse. Our ability to get things and communicate with people, if we didn’t have Zoom and FaceTime and phone calls, it’s hard to even imagine how much worse this would’ve been. Scaling back up to the modern day catastrophe movie, it would be horrible. It would be one of those pre-apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic kind of scenarios. We could get our way back, but it would be really, really hard.

**Erin:** I think it’s fun to explore. I’ve tried playing around with different stories with this too. We could be sitting here having this conversation, a CME could hit us, and it’d just all be gone. All the cell towers are gone. None of the electricity works. All the power lines are down. What do you do in that situation?

**John:** A question for you. I’m envisioning the Earth turning in space. Does it only hit half of us or does it hit the whole planet? Do we know what would happen?

**Erin:** Good question. That’s why we’ve dodged them in the past is because it’s just lined up with Earth’s orbit or not. Yes, if a CME hits us, it will affect the whole Earth, because of Earth’s magnetic field. These are all charged particles. If you think about iron filaments in a magnet, they’re all going to align with that. Certainly the side that’s hit direct will be affected by it, but the magnetic field of Earth will carry that throughout. There are some nuances to it, but it would definitely be a global event.

**John:** We talked through these different scenarios and different story ideas. Obviously, we’re overlapping so much with what Leigh’s already writing that he’s really angry at us now.

**Leigh:** No, I’m not angry at all. I’m desperate to almost chat it over with you so you guys can shoot holes in it and talk about it with me, but maybe to do that publicly wouldn’t be wise.

**John:** Maybe we’ll do that offline.

**Erin:** We’ll take it offline.

**John:** Yeah, we’ll do that. Thank you for talking us through the science behind all these things. If a studio were developing one of these ideas, how would they enlist your help in doing this? How early do you come in in a process? Do you come in when there’s a script done and the director’s figuring out some stuff? What is the best way to involve a scientific professional like you on this?

**Erin:** I’m naturally moving into the writer space. Other science consultants have done the same. Naren Shankar and Andre Bormanis both got their starts as science consultants on Star Trek. It’s very easy now for me to see how that transitions into a writing career, but what I’ve found with other writers is the earlier the better, because we can brainstorm fun ideas. We can break story. We can add layers that you might not have thought of, that have this backbone of science. Then we also don’t have to undo anything, just because it doesn’t quite fit. It’s not that I would never not let you do something, but it just means that we can make it stronger by getting ahead of stuff.

**John:** Erin, if somebody were working on a thing like the chimeras in a story, obviously they can do a lot of research themselves, but what would be your recommendation for finding experts or finding people in the field who they could actually bounce ideas off of? Do you have any guidance on that?

**Erin:** Yeah, there’s a few resources. The Science and Entertainment Exchange is one in LA that is available to writers. I know the WGA has some connections as well, that you’re able to reach out to them. I’m hired as a science consultant, and sometimes I do get asked biology questions. My role for that predominantly is to reach out to experts I know and whom I trust, but also that I have that research background to filter through a lot of the BS, to not waste anyone’s time, and that I can translate that in a way that helps your story. There’s lots of resources. Twitter’s also a great way to reach out to science communicators and people who are good at translating stuff for you.

**John:** Fantastic. We have one question here Megana’s put on Workflowy. Do you want to ask that for us?

**Megana:** Greta asks, “I’m writing a sci-fi horror project about an experimental medical procedure. I’ve gotten really caught up researching the science and mechanics of drug trials, etc, but when I watch other movies in the genre, they don’t seem to spend much time explaining or justifying the premise. My question is, how do I get out of the way of my own backstory?”

**John:** That’s a good question. We talked a little bit about that in the great explainer in Jurassic Park, which is such an efficient talking it through, like this is how this is all going to work. As I think through, so many of my favorite movies that are in a scientific space don’t spend a lot of time on the science. It’s just part of the premise itself. Leigh, with both Invisible Man and Upgrade, you have scientists in those movies, but they’re not sciencing that much.

**Leigh:** I feel like I remember reading an interview with a guitarist once who was playing really experimental, seemingly crazy music. He’s like, “Yeah, but you have to know the rules to do this. You got to learn the rules and then forget them.” I feel like one thing for me is just to know what the science is. In the case of The Invisible Man, I had my theory and had written out how I thought the suit worked, but I didn’t feel the need necessarily to have a scene where somebody explains that in detail.

I feel like sometimes you knowing how the science in your film works can filter through your screenplay in more of a drip feed fashion than this exposition dump. I do feel like audiences pick up on a lot. John, you said before, “I saw the suit and I felt like I knew how it worked,” but I didn’t really have anybody explaining it in the movie. I did have a couple of people say, “You didn’t even explain how the suit worked.” I guess you’ll never please everybody. My policy is just to know it yourself, but not necessarily force that knowledge on the audience in a heavy-handed way.

**Megana:** Do you find yourself ever going through in a pass and taking out some of the science if you’ve overwritten it?

**Leigh:** Sometimes, yeah, because I guess when you get into editing you realize that the essential bone marrow of the film is just the story, and anything that’s not pushing it forward is window dressing. What I actually love is one thing that you’ve talked about, Erin, that you do, is giving people technical terminology. There’s this thing that I love where it’s like when you’re watching a film and you feel like you’re in the hand of authority. If I’m watching a scene with neurosurgeons and somebody’s like, “Hand me the excavator,” is like, “Three milliliters of da da da da,” I don’t need to know what that stuff is. What I do need to know is that the people on screen know what it is.

It works very well in spy movies when somebody sits down and is using terminology that I don’t understand. If somebody sits down, some CIA guy, and is like, “This whole thing’s a blackout. I’m going to need a two-day wash-up on this,” I don’t know to know what those nicknames are. I’m like, “Oh, wash-up, that sounds important.” The scene would be bad if the character sat down and said, “Oh, this whole thing’s a blackout,” and the character they were talking to said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I’m pretty new here at the CIA. What’s a blackout again?” and the guy was like, “A blackout is when an operation goes totally south and we have to pretend it didn’t exist.” If I was watching that movie, I’d be like, “Oh my god, you had me at blackout. What are you doing?”

The script I’m working on right now, just to give you guys… I’ve been talking to someone about telescopes, super duper powerful telescopes. This guy from Cal Tech was giving me all these terms that they use that I’ve been dropping in the script, like, “Check the baffles.” I wouldn’t explain to anybody what baffles are or anything. By the way, if I’m remembering correctly, it’s the black sheeting that keeps light away from the telescope.

**Erin:** Very nice.

**Leigh:** What I would do in the script is have someone on screen say, “Check the baffles,” and then somebody else would be like, “Baffles are all good.” I really don’t think the audience would be sitting there going, “Wait a minute, what about baffles? I’m lost.” All they need to know is that these guys are scientists who know their shit. That’s the most important thing.

**Erin:** The counterpoint too is that it gives a lot of good credibility when you do have that one astronomer or that one neurosurgeon who’s watching it, and they’re like, “Yeah, they used the right word.” [Unclear 00:59:15].

**Leigh:** On Upgrade I got a lot of comments, or I saw a lot of comments on Twitter from hacker types who would say, “He used the right terminology for that hack.”

**Erin:** Makes a big difference. It makes a huge difference. I’d still caution people to throw the techno babble in, as I like to call it, but making sure that it is right. You don’t have to explain it, but make sure what you’ve got is at least as close to possible.

**Leigh:** It’s not important for the audience to know how the science works. It’s just important that they believe the people on the screen know how the science works.

**John:** Exactly the point. You have to believe that the characters know what they’re doing and are doing things properly. The case with Star Trek, Erin, I will say that there’s techno jargon, but it’s also very Star Trek-specific techno jargon, because you want to make sure that you’re referring to the same things in the same way, episode to episode, series by series, that it’s consistent.

**Erin:** That’s a lot of the reason they brought me on to be available to the whole franchise was to maintain that consistency, because that’s five shows. Once shows are off and running, they’re operating pretty independently. Having someone double checking how one show’s talking about transporters or talking about warp drives or imposing any numbers or star dates, all that stuff is in my purview to make sure that that all stays consistent, and consistent with the last 55 years of Star Trek. No pressure.

**John:** I bet we have some listeners who are so envious of your job. It does sound remarkable.

**Erin:** Thank you.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Annie Rauwerda for Input. She’s talking about the love story behind… In Wikipedia, if you look up High Five, there are these four photos of this man and this woman doing high five, down low, too slow, showing what those actual things are. They’re the public main photos for those things. It’s tracking down who were those people in those photos and what is their deal, because they look to be like they’re in college. It’s not clear, are they a couple? What’s going on? The spoiler for it is they are actually a couple. They are actually married. They have two kids now. It was lovely to see a thing that’s been on the internet forever and tracking through who those people are now. It’s a lovely story that has nothing to do with science whatsoever, but made me happy as I was reading it.

**Leigh:** Very good.

**John:** Leigh, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Leigh:** My thing would be, I’ve been reading these short story collections by an author named Brian Evenson lately. I’m really loving his short stories. He writes these, I wouldn’t call them horror stories necessarily, but they are somehow infused with existential dread. Literary horror I guess would maybe be the term. He’s written a few collections of short stories. I just read one called A Collapse of Horses. He has another one that I’m just about to start reading called The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell. Actually, each story is related to somehow, going by the back blurb, each story is related to what we are doing to our environment and our planet. I guess he’s building these stories of eerie dread out of the way our planet’s going. His stories, some of them are very short. They’re just amazing little bite-size chunks to read before bed or whenever, just because we don’t have enough existential dread in society right now. Things are going just fine, and you want to feel more uneasy.

**John:** We love it. Erin, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Erin:** Yeah. I’m taking the opposite approach to Leigh in terms of existential dread and confronting it or running away from it. I have gotten really back into comic books and comic book stories and that lighthearted, fun, skirting around sci-fi fantasy world. I’m reading a book right now called We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen. It is a delightfully fun book about two characters. One has woken up with no memory, but he’s able to erase other people’s memories, so now he becomes a super villain. He holds up banks in order to buy coffee and books. Then another character is also looking for her past. She can’t remember, but she can go really fast, and so she deliveries fast food. They meet in a memory loss support group and then they team up. I haven’t finished it, but it is an absolute delight to read. It’s We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen.

**John:** That sounds absolutely great. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Contra Entropy. 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. Leigh, where are you on Twitter?

**Leigh:** @lwhannell.

**John:** Great. Erin, where can people find you on Twitter?

**Erin:** @drerinmac. That’s D-R E-R-I-N M-A-C.

**John:** Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where we’ll have links to articles and topics that we discuss today on the show. You’ll also find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. 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, like the one we’re about to record on Leigh’s fantasy mall. For now, Erin and Leigh, it was an absolute pleasure. Leigh, thank you for coming back on the show. Erin, you’re welcome back on the show any time. This was a delight having you here.

**Erin:** Thank you. I had a great time.

**Leigh:** Thanks, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Leigh, on Twitter one night I saw you pitch this idea of like, would anyone go to a period shopping mall where basically you were in the ‘80s or the ‘90s and everything inside this shopping mall, presumably a dead mall that you’d resurrected for the thing, would be of that time period. Am I explaining your concept properly?

**Leigh:** Yeah, pretty much. It was interesting. This idea of mine lives in the gray area somewhere between an actual business plan and a stoned 2 a.m. thought. It’s somewhere in the middle there. I just sent up this tweet. It got a lot of attention, maybe more so than my usual tweets. Once you get the attention of the internet, that can be a bad thing. The 17 Scandinavian Saw fans that usually respond to my every tweet are nothing but positive. All of a sudden the darkest tentacles of the internet were like… If we had to think of the internet as a creature unto itself and not millions of individual people, I’m always astounded at the anger of it.

In that tweet that you’re referring to, I said, “Would anyone want to come and visit this period ‘80s themed mall with movie theaters, but if you had to give up your phone to keep up the illusion of it being the ‘80s, would you do it?” It was astounding, the number of people who were like, “You can take my phone when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.” I was like, whoa, calm down, random guy, not really posing this. I was also astounded by the number of people who would quote tweet it and write, “So…a mall,” or like, “Hey, what if I took a mall and turned it into a mall?”

No, random people. I will use this podcast as an opportunity to say, basically what it would be is a little nostalgia theme park, that you take a dead mall and you make it all very period, so the cinema just shows ‘80s films. The arcade there just has vintage games that were around in this era of the mid ‘80s, the food, everything about it. Basically it’s essentially a Stranger Things theme park. You’re walking around. I just know that if someone did do this, I would want to be there every day. I would want to drink it in. It is something I’ve thought about a lot over the past year.

**John:** Now Erin, would you visit Leigh’s mall?

**Erin:** I would. Depends how long, but again, I spend a lot of time in malls. I don’t know if I have a ton of nostalgia for it.

**Leigh:** What I think the idea is, it’s not so much a mall, like hey, you’re here in a mall to go shopping. It takes the shape of a mall, but it’s really an adult theme park. I went to this place in Portland, Oregon a few years ago with my friends. It was called the Kennedy School.

**John:** The Kennedy School’s great. Describe it, because it really is a very unique place.

**Leigh:** Incredible, especially for someone who lives in LA, which is a city that I don’t think has great entrepreneurial bar and entertainment options that are happening, new ones. Basically, the Kennedy School, this company has bought this old elementary school, which I think was called something something Kennedy School. They bought it and they’ve converted it into this entertainment complex for adults. It has movie theaters in there, a bowling alley, several different bars. It’s a one-stop shop that you can go to. Instead of doing a bar crawl down a street, you go to the Kennedy School, and you walk in and there’s one little bar here, and then there’s a movie theater, and you can plan a night around it. I just remember being blown away. I don’t know how you felt, John.

**John:** I went there for a lunch. It was cool that it was clearly a public school and everything looked like a public school, but it had just been turned into a bar and restaurant, movie theater. I think there was even a hotel.

**Erin:** That sounds awesome.

**Leigh:** I loved it. Dammit, see, Erin’s loving this Kennedy School idea way more than my mall idea. The great thing about it is you’re walking down the corridor, and it was like an elementary school corridor with the little hooks for the coats and everything. I guess my mall would be like that. It’s not a mall in the sense that you can shop there. It’s restaurants and bars and entertainment options would be the only… There would be a movie theater, a bowling alley, an arcade, three or four different food courts, and different bars. It would all be housed in the shape of a mall. Maybe there would be some performance art. Maybe somebody is doing 80s style robot dancing or something. You could really build this little insular world.

I like this world building thing that’s happening with theme parks. I went to the Stars Wars World at Disneyland recently. I loved the all-encompassing nature of it, that when you walked in, it’s like you’d left this planet and you were now interacting with Storm Troopers.

**Erin:** I love that.

**Leigh:** I guess this would be the ‘80s nostalgia version of that Star Wars theme park. Maybe there’s a video store there or something.

**John:** We need to ask Megana Rao, who’s too young to have ‘80s nostalgia, would you visit Leigh’s ‘80s nostalgia mall.

**Megana:** Yeah. I like arcade games and bowling and things. I miss mall food courts. Would you have that there?

**Leigh:** Absolutely. Absolutely.

**Megana:** Yeah, I’m in.

**Leigh:** It would be good food. You would gussy it up a bit. It would have the look of an ‘80s style mall food court, but the food would be a little bit better.

**John:** Let’s talk about how we manifest this vision of yours, because I would like to visit this mall too. Who builds this? How much control do you want over this? Do you just want it to exist and be able to visit it or do you want to have some role in making it exist?

**Leigh:** It’s one of those things where a lot of people say if nobody’s doing it, you should do it. I’ve read a lot of interviews with people that have opened restaurants or whatever, and they’ve said, “I decided to open this restaurant because it didn’t exist.” If I’m to take that approach, I have no hospitality experience, so I guess I would have to get in touch with someone who is some sort of venture capitalist or had some experience in experiential… I do know there was a guy at Blumhouse who I’ve worked with a few times who was in charge of their maze experiences or anything that was real.

**John:** Escape rooms, that kind of stuff.

**Leigh:** Exactly. Maybe someone in that field who could… Maybe you could tie it in with… For all I know, you could go into Netflix and say, hey, this could be Stranger–

**John:** Stranger Things. If you are a Scriptnotes listener who is probably wealthy, but also has experience in hospitality, that could be great. I think about my friend Ryan Reynolds has a gin company. Ryan Reynolds doesn’t know anything about gin. He didn’t go into this knowing anything about gin. He wasn’t a gin expert. He had an appreciation for it, and he built this company and sold it for a gazillion dollars. I just want this to be your gin, Leigh. I want this to be your Aviation Gin.

**Leigh:** I feel like with your encouragement this might exist one day.

**John:** We’ll hope so. We’ll have you back on the show for that.

**Leigh:** Excellent.

**John:** We’ll do live Scriptnotes from your mall. I promise you that when the mall opens, Craig and I, we’ll commit Craig to doing a live Scriptnotes at your mall.

**Leigh:** Thank you. Excellent. I’ve got two guaranteed customers.

**John:** Leigh, Erin, thank you so much.

**Leigh:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [Ed Solomon’s Tweet on MIB Movie Accounting](https://twitter.com/ed_solomon/status/1495249600428523522)
* [What is a Dyson sphere?](https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-a-dyson-sphere/) and [Dyson spheres on Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere)
* [What is a Human Chimera?](https://www.insider.com/what-is-a-human-chimera-and-how-does-it-happen-2017-11) and [Becoming Two People At Once](https://interestingengineering.com/becoming-two-people-at-once-human-chimerism)
* Stephen King’s [The Dark Half](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Half)
* [The Science Behind the Endgame Snap](https://www.fandom.com/articles/avengers-endgame-science-snap) and [Minimum Viable Population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population)
* [Rokos Basilisk: The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time](https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/rokos-basilisk-the-most-terrifying-thought-experiment-of-all-time.html)
* [There is No Antimemetics Division](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FHHQRM2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by qntm
* [Are Solar Storms Dangerous to Us?](https://earthsky.org/space/are-solar-storms-dangerous-to-us/) and [How We’ll Safeguard Earth From a Solar Storm Catastrophe](https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/space/how-we-ll-safeguard-earth-solar-storm-catastrophe-n760021)
* [The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos](https://www.inputmag.com/culture/wikipedia-high-five-too-slow-photos-mystery-couple-solved) by Annie Rauwerda for Input
* [A Collapse of Horses](https://theamericanreader.com/a-collapse-of-horses/) a short story collection by Bryan Evanston
* [We Could be Heroes](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087JJ5G5K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Mike Chen
* [Leigh Whannell](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1191481/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/lwhannell?lang=en) and Leigh’s [80’s mall tweet](https://twitter.com/LWhannell/status/1490133853607919616)
* [Erin Macdonald](https://www.erinpmacdonald.com/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/drerinmac?lang=en)
* [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 Contra Entropy ([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/539standard.mp3).

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

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

**Craig:**
My name Craig Mazin.

**John:**
And this is episode 528 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show with animation writers fighting to get paid what live action writers get, we’ll look at what minimums and backend really mean, but it’s also a craft episode. We’ll talk about the kind of movie, where the hero is actively trying to find themselves and is the waste paper basket the writer’s most important tool? Plus, in our bonus segment for premium members, is movie dialogue actually harder to understand these days? Craig has opinions.

**Craig:**
Amazing. Absolutely [inaudible 00:00:36].

**John:**
A taste of what’s to come for our premium members. Craig, it’s nice to be back recording with you. It’s been a minute here.

**Craig:**
Yeah. A little bit up and down over here, as we make our way through this insanely large production, still here in Canada, although we’re catching a little bit of a break now, as we head into the holidays. I get to come home for a little bit, looking outside at beautiful Calgary, it is a lovely dusting of snow. Apparently La Nina and El Nino have joined hands to make Il Nino and something enormous is coming apparently. Apparently it’s going to be snowpocalypse up here, which is okay for us. We’ve got an episode, where we need a little bit of snow.

**John:**
Oh, it’ll be great.

**Craig:**
Yeah.

**John:**
Yeah, little bit of snow’s also good for skiing. I would love some more snow for that.

**Craig:**
Yeah. I’m not going to do that.

**John:**
Yeah. I’m going to do that, but while you were gone, we replayed the Die Hard episode. This was a special episode we’d done for premium members. We put it in the main feed and I added in a bonus segment for our premium members, where we talked with Steven E. de Souza about the writing of Die Hard, which is so exciting. We did some follow up on that. Megana, can you help us out with a follow up?

**Megana:**
Great. Jeb writes, “You did a great job in the Die Hard episode, highlighting the various Reagan era elements of the film, bumbling experts, idiotic feds, awful Europeans, et cetera, but one of the key elements in the story, is the fact that Holly works for a Japanese firm. As you of course remember, the 80s featured a fascination with Japanese culture, highlighted perhaps best in Karate Kid, but also fear related to the perceived decline of the US, in relation to Japan. Japanese companies excelling in the auto industry, electronics, and even US real estate. Movies like Gung Ho, highlighted those tensions for comedic gain, but that anxiety was real. Anti-Asian hate crimes were rampant in the era and the fact that Holly is working for a Japanese company, building its own towering foothold on American soil, is just one more thorn in all American John McClane’s side. The fact that he prevails and saves the American employees, is a not too subtle message.”

**John:**
That’s a good point. Let’s talk about that [crosstalk 00:02:45].

**Craig:**
[crosstalk 00:02:45] Jeb.

**John:**
Okay. I would say that a person looking at the movie now, who didn’t grow up in the 80s might not realize the degree to which there was this sense that, “Oh, Japan’s going to take over the world,” because they didn’t. Spoiler and it is interesting, because I do sense that at the start of the movie, the fact that this Japanese company is made a little bit more of a thing, but I like that the movie doesn’t feel racist towards the Japanese owners and the Japanese owners are good people and solid.

**Craig:**
Yeah. That’s where I’ll push back a little bit on Jeb. I do agree that of course his pretext is correct. There was a very famous memo written by the head of Sony, that was circulated around American businesses in the 80s, as a warning that they were going to beat us, but also why aren’t we like this? It wasn’t simply a Japan-a-phobia, it was also Japan-a-phelia. There was an admiration and a desire to raise our standards to theirs. They were doing it better than we were. The Nakatomi building is in a not-80s-way, It’s not played for racism jokes. Nobody makes fun of the Japanese culture. The boss is portrayed as an honorable, decent man, whereas the American employee is the cokehead snake. The fact that John McClane saves the day, that’s not I don’t think, a particularly trenchant point about America versus Japan as just, he’s the movie star, he’s the action hero that came to save the day. If anything to me, the fact that it was a Japanese company, which by the way, disappears in terms of importance almost immediately. It’s just not really a thing, I would say reflects nothing more than what was in vogue at the time, which was, yeah and we should make it a Japanese company, because that feels like an 80s thing right now.

**John:**
I would say that the Japanese company helps set up McClane’s initial fear of losing his wife, because not only has his wife moved to the other side of the country, but she’s really working for a Japanese company and will probably end up moving to Japan at some point. I think I remember that. It said that she may actually need to move to Tokyo at some point and the sense of losing all of the stuff that he’s had, to this company is real and yet that’s not the meat of the film at all. It’s misdirected.

**Craig:**
No. There is a really interesting episode, that I think we could do and we’d want to bring in some friends to discuss I would imagine, about the movie Gung Ho, which Jeb cites here, which is a fascinating 80s attempt, I would call it, an 80s attempt by white people, to make an anti-racism movie and spoiler alert, it doesn’t go great, but it also weirdly wears its goofy heart on its sleeve.

**John:**
I’m trying to remember the premise. Is this Michael Keaton or is this Tom Hanks?

**Craig:**
It’s Michael Keaton, although it could have been Tom Hanks and more importantly, it’s Ron Howard. It’s this kind of very… Ron Howard to me, always represents the sweetest, most innocent American point of view, which doesn’t always mean it’s enlightened, it just means it’s not coming at something out of anger or disgust or contempt, but yeah, Ron Howard directed this movie. Starred Michael Keaton and it was about a Japanese company purchasing an American company and it was a car company, changing the way the auto factory worked and how it suddenly became a culture clash and it was Gedde Watanabe and George Wendt and Michael Keaton and very much white savior stuff, but also weirdly at times, beautifully human. You could see, it was actually a little bit ahead of its time. The problem was the time was really behind where we are now. It was ahead of its time and yet behind where we are now, it’s a fascinating thing to look at and I think maybe one day we can dive in. It won’t necessarily be the most comfortable, deep dive we do, but worth examining.

**John:**
Yeah. Now if we were to make Die Hard today, that Die Hard never existed, but it was just being made today. It would not be a Japanese company. It’d be a Korean company, who inevitably was building that building, which brings us to squid game, not squid games, but we have some follow up on that. Megana can talk to us about what Eliza sent.

**Megana:**
Eliza says, “As an avid Korean-American listener, I want to clarify why the show’s English title is Squid Game singular and not Squid Games, as in the Olympic Games or Hunger Games. The last game in the series of childhood games, is The Squid Game. If the last game had been hopscotch, then perhaps the title would’ve been Hopscotch. If one is unfamiliar with the Squid Game as are most English speakers, there’s a desire to encapsulate the entire experience with an umbrella term. However, you can see it wouldn’t make sense to title it Hopscotches, had the last game been different. Squid Game sounds awkward to a Korean speaker and only sounds right to an English speaker. Furthermore, Korean doesn’t have a plural indicator like the S in English. A single rock is Dol, just as a fist of rocks is Dol. The rest of the sentence communicates the nature of the rock, as it relates to its surroundings and condition.”

**Craig:**
Well, Eliza, thank you for that. We love language here, obviously. I think the thing that I was perhaps primarily ignorant of, wasn’t the fact that plurals work differently in Korean, as much as that, apparently there are more than one game that occurs in Squid Game and Squid Game was the last of those games. I just thought the whole thing was just all Squid Game, because I still haven’t seen it. That said, this interested me. What really grabbed me on this single rock is Dol, a fist full of rocks is Dol and I checked with our intrepid Bo Shim over here, because what I was curious about was the Olympic Games, because Eliza mentions the Olympic Games and Korea has hosted the Olympic Games and I asked her in Korean, what do people call the Olympic Games? And she said, that in Korean people simply call them Olympic like, “We’re hosting the Olympic,” and of course this confirms what Eliza’s saying, but now what I want to do, is not say Squid Games or a Squid Game. I just want to call the show, Squid.

**John:**
Reduce everything down to it’s single elemental route, that the fundamental thing that everything ventures out from. Yes.

**Craig:**
I have not yet seen Squid.

**John:**
Not a bit of it. More follow up on our Thanksgiving movies. Lars from Cologne writes, “I finally got around listening to episode 522 and would like to suggest that another reason Thanksgiving movies are not as common as Christmas movies, could be, that Thanksgiving is an American tradition, which would make it tough overseas. That’s also why they’re often sold as road movies, as John pointed out. The event is really just an excuse to get some people who don’t see each other often, but have a lot of history and unresolved issues, to sit down at a table and fight them out. Yes, I think the universality of Thanksgiving is not in it’s favor for a movie.”

**Craig:**
A little bit of editorializing there from Lars, from Cologne. Sometimes Lars, I know this is hard to believe, people just sit down and have a good time. Typically that’s what we do on Thanksgiving, but yes, it’s true, Thanksgiving is solely American, although Christmas is not particularly universal. I think more people than not, in fact, I know that more people do not celebrate Christmas than do, but also a Thanksgiving movie could be very cheap proposition to make. Yeah. I think honestly we figured it out last time, but thank you Lars for the help. Just there’s no narrative built into it. It’s a meal, that’s it. It’s a meal.

**John:**
Yeah. Now back to Christmas though, two years ago, I celebrated Christmas in Korea. This is going to be the Korean episode. It’s really what I’m getting back to you. It’s all going to be about Korea, this whole entire episode and it was delightful to celebrate Christmas in Korea and they really did a number there. They really celebrated it big.

**Craig:**
Yes. Christianity is very big in Korea. Although, I would imagine it is not at this point, quite as big as Squid.

**John:**
Nothing is as big as Squid.

**Craig:**
I do love there’s a… It’s not Squid, it’s Cuttlefish, but there’s this dried Cuttlefish, Korean snack called Ojingeochae. It’s like-

**John:**
It’s [crosstalk 00:11:04] get that for you and then you actually mark in the bag, how much of the Cuttlefish each of you has eaten?

**Craig:**
No, that would be insane.

**John:**
Yeah. No, nothing like the ketchup doritos?

**Craig:**
No, no, no, no. Here’s the deal. The ketchup Doritos and I’m going to say it again. Something happened and I don’t even want to get into it, but something went wrong there and it’s-

**John:**
And now you don’t like them?

**Craig:**
No, I love them, but it’s driven a wedge between me and Bo. No, I started eating that all the way back in 1992, because I was living with my friend, who’s a Korean American named Chin and he introduced it to me. It’s almost squid jerky, is what it is, but it’s actually, you would think, “Oh squid jerky, this right off the bat didn’t sound great.” It’s delicious. Delicious.

**John:**
Yeah. All right. Another piece. This could be umberage inducing, but let’s see how this goes here. Our podcast that you’re listening to right now, is called Scriptnotes. There’s a feature in final draft called Scriptnotes, which is how you leave little notes for things and several people pointed out this week that they’ve started putting a TM after Scriptnotes. A trademark symbol. I did what a person does and I looked at the trademark registry. They used to have a trademark on it, but they let the trademark lapse in 2018.

**Craig:**
Well, why don’t we trademark it?

**John:**
We could try to trademark it.

**Craig:**
I think we should. Let’s trademark it and then let’s sue them.

**John:**
Here’s what I know about trademarks, because I actually had to get a trademark on this other game that we were doing at one point and trademarks exist in certain spaces. It’s entirely possible they could get their trademark for this feature in a software program, called Scriptnotes and we could get our trademark in the podcast called Scriptnotes, but honestly let’s just stop fighting over a trademark and just not-

**Craig:**
Well, the good news is we haven’t started fighting over the trademark. I think we can just stay right here where we are. Obviously they could have said something about it, prior to the abandonment in 2018, but they didn’t, probably because the thing that you’re worried about when you get a trademark, I have a trademark for instance, for my production company Word Games, is that what I don’t want, is another company that does what I do, calling themselves Word Games and then the question is, “Oh, well who made this?” And without question Final Draft the company, could have said there is a marketplace confusion, if we have Scriptnotes as part of our script running software and these other guys are doing a podcast about screenwriting, people might be confused and think that they represent us, but I have a suspicion that they were happy about that.

**John:**
Yeah. One of the challenges when you have a trademark, is you have to protect and defend your trademarks. You have to look for people who are infringing on it and you have to send them letters saying, “Hey, don’t infringe on our trademark.” I sent actually, a very nice email to Final Draft, reminding them that they don’t actually have the trademark on Scriptnotes. We’ll see if they take the little TMs off their videos and such.

**Craig:**
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Look Final Draft, we keep it on a simmer with you guys. Don’t wake the dragon.

**John:**
All right. Back to Korea news. When the agency campaigned, the WGA agency brujaja was settled, one of the points in that, was that the companies who own production entities had to sell down to a 20% stake, basically were limited to a 20% stake. This past week it was announced that Endeavor is selling its content side to CJ Entertainment, which is a Korean firm. I think I may have even predicted that on the show, that that’d be who would buy out this entity, because it makes a lot of sense, because this is a Korean company who wants to do more American production, who has a lot of experience, has a lot of money. It seems like the right outcome for both sides.

**Craig:**
Yeah and yeah, the company’s worth quite a bit of money there. You never know with these things. It’s a little bit like when they make sports deals and then you find out later, “Oh, well it’s not really that much money and the other team paid for half of the money, that they said that they got,” in any case who knows, but it’s impressive regardless either way and yeah, CJ Entertainment’s a real deal.

**John:**
They did Parasite, they did Big Fish in Korea. They’ve done lots of… There’s just two examples of high quality things they’ve done. They are the equivalent of Sony Entertainment for Korea. They are a big production house.

**Craig:**
This is an interesting development. I’m watching it and yeah listen, every time a new company comes into Hollywood, I think there is a reasonable, people get a little bit excited, because they think new buyer-ish person or somebody that will perhaps get and sometimes that’s true. More often than not, the new companies are worse than the old companies and I don’t know exactly what the relationship is with CJ Entertainment and say unions and you always have to wonder, how this is going to go, but as far as I’m concerned, it can’t be worse than Silicon Valley and their attitude towards unions. Let’s see how it goes.

**John:**
All right. Megana, do you want to talk to us more about some bullshitting?

**Craig:**
Ooh.

**Megana:**
Great. Brandon wrote in and said, “The discussion on bullshitting for writers was quite illuminating for me. I feel like there’s this proverbial wisdom out there, that you should fake it till you make it, but the saying has always felt a little toxic to me. Is it really okay to say I’m a writer, if I’m not making a living as a writer or should I be honest and tell people my day job, when they ask me what I do? When meeting someone new in the industry, the question of what do you do, is almost inevitable. Any guidance on how to navigate or bullshit a response to this question, would be greatly appreciated.

**John:**
Craig. I think it is fine to identify yourself as a writer, who is not making a living as a writer. What do you do? “I’m a writer, in the meantime I’m working a day job at someplace,” is absolutely fine and valid to say. I think, especially when you’re newly moved here, speaking aspirationally is good and normal and appropriate, but how are you feeling about that?

**Craig:**
How will I put it? I understand Brandon’s squirminess about this. I would say Brandon, that the saying fake it till you make it, isn’t really, at least for me, it’s never about just straight up lying about stuff that you wish were true, because that’s delusional and that’s dishonest and misleading. I think fake it till you make it is more about, “Hey, I believe I have the capability of doing something intellectually. Right now, I’m terrified. Let me just behave like I’m not terrified and then I won’t be scared, once I get into it.” In terms of describing yourself, if you’re not making a living as a writer, it’s a little weird to stick the word aspiring on, because that sounds weird. What I would say, is I’m working on a screenplay. I think this is perfectly fine. Say, I’m working on a screenplay. I have a day job, but I’m working on a screenplay. It’s going really well. I’ve got some interest from X, Y, or Z. If you have no interest from X, Y, or Z and it’s just, you’re writing a screenplay at night while you’re working during the day, then no, I wouldn’t say I’m a writer, because that’s not really true. I am a writer, does implies certain things and the reason I’m saying don’t say that, is not because I’m feeling like there should be forced humility, it’s more that I’m just concerned about the follow up questions you’re going to get. What are you working on? Who do you work with? And then you’re stuck. I’ll tell you the question I always get. If somebody doesn’t know who I am and they say, what do you do? And I say, I’m a writer. I work in television and movies and the next immediate question, is: what have I seen? Every single god damned time. Have I seen anything of yours? Since all those questions are going to be forthcoming, you might want to just make it more about the process itself. I’m working on a blank.

**John:**
Yeah. I think the “ing” forms are really helpful here. To say that you’re writing is great. When you say that you are a writer, then you’re going to get the follow up question, “Oh, what have you gotten made?” Or if you say, I’m a novelist, it’s like, “Okay, well, where’s your book?” But if you say, I’m writing a book for this or I’m working on stuff. That is true and honest and also basically where you’re at in the process.

**Craig:**
Correct. Totally.

**John:**
Yeah. A bit of news and follow up here. Last year, as we came through the contract negotiations, we added paid parental leave to the deal for writers. For the first time, writers who have new kids have, I think it’s eight weeks of paid parental leave. Effective January 1st, 2022, the health fund will offer coverage for infertility treatment, for those who have a medical diagnosis of infertility, available to all participants with active coverage for them and their spousal dependence, with a lifetime cap of $30,000 with no deductibles or copays.

**Craig:**
No deductibles or copays. Lifetime cap of $30,000. Oftentimes it does cost more than $30,000 and of course, if you want to have more than one child, then you’re going to need that infertility treatment coverage later, you then will have to probably dip into your pocket, but let’s not underplay the fact that, that’s a big amount of money that you used to have to pay for entirely by yourself and while my wife and I, very luckily did not have any infertility issues. I think we’re the exception of so many.

**John:**
My husband and I had infertility issues.

**Craig:**
Well yes. Right there is a big one. John, you guys aren’t having another kid, I would imagine?

**John:**
You know what, with this $30,000 bonus, maybe so. I’m just saying-

**Craig:**
Maybe you and I should have a kid, because if you think about it, who’s going to inherit this podcast one day?

**John:**
Yeah. We’re experienced parents at this point. We really know what we’re doing. Yeah. I have a kid who’s going to be heading off to college in 16 months. The thought of having a brand new child, while I love babies, I think we’ve established on this podcast, I absolutely love babies.

**Craig:**
Love them.

**John:**
Love them.

**Craig:**
Love babies.

**John:**
But I don’t want to have another four year old, for example, or another 10 year old.

**Craig:**
No, no, no. At all. This is great news and I think I always, in these moments, want to tip my hat obviously, to the Writers Guild for, we represent half of the trustees on the health fund and they’re the ones who make these decisions. We don’t actually negotiate these in contracts. This is something that has to be worked out between our trustees and their trustees, but I also tip my hat to the companies, because they have half the trustees too and this doesn’t happen unless the companies agree and there are certain areas where I think everybody starts to find their collective humanity and their shared experiences and there are people on both sides, management and labor, who know the pain of wanting to have a child and struggling and this is a fantastic thing and I tip my hat both to the Writer’s Guild and the companies.

**John:**
Yeah and it’s also important to note the distinction between, there was no more money added to the pot for this. Basically, it’s reprioritizing how you’re spending the money that’s in the pot and that you’re going to start covering fertility treatment, as opposed to paid parental leave, which was part of the contract, because it’s additional money being put in there, to actually pay for that fund. That’s the difference there. That’s why that was a contract thing and this was just a decision made by the folks who run the fund.

**Craig:**
What they cover and what they don’t cover medically, is always going to be part of their decision and they do run the numbers and they generally do have to balance the budget. I hope that they did that by removing nonsense alternative treatments, that don’t do a goddamned thing.

**John:**
Yeah, I imagine so. That’d be great. All right. I was going to lead us into this Netflix topic by talking about Netflix numbers, but I feel like I’ve talked about Netflix numbers so, so much, that I’m just tired of talking about Netflix numbers.

**Craig:**
John, your discussion of Netflix numbers is the most listened to discussion, ever in Scriptnotes history.

**John:**
I would like to congratulate my friends, Rawson Thurber and Ryan Reynolds for the number one movie of all time on Netflix. It’s fantastic. It’s great. Wonderful. I’m so happy that it’s happened. I hope that you guys get the equivalent of backend off that. I hope for every time they send out a press release about how much money or how many viewers it’s had, you get a ca-ching. That would be fantastic. They won’t, but let’s get into how money works and how backends work, because this past week, a bunch of things showed up on my feed and a lot of questions showed up in my feed, about writers getting paid and backends and residuals. I think it’s because animation writers right now are going through negotiations about increasing their pay, because animation writers are generally not covered by the WGA, covered by the Animation Guild and people had natural questions about backends and profits and scales and minimums. I wanted to have a little segment here to talk about the difference between minimums, which is something that’s being handled by the Guild contract and what writers actually bring in, which is handled by their own contracts. We have a lot of terms to define here, but hopefully we can make sense of where money comes from and how it gets to writers.

**Craig:**
Yeah, totally normal thing to happen when you’re looking at one group of writers, like animation writers, who aren’t doing as well as Writers Guild writers and what will happen is, people will point towards Writers Guild writers and say, “Here’s what their experience is. Here’s how they’re treated. Here’s what they get,” and some of the things that they’re pointing to, are things that the Writers Guild has not gotten them at all and more interestingly then by implication, they don’t need the Animation Guild to get them either because we are, the term is an overscale employment base, at least certainly in features and in television, where the overscale occurs most notably, is in the double job description, writer/producer. A lot of things happen under the heading of producer and the Writer’s Guild doesn’t touch or affect any of those.

**John:**
Yeah and it’s especially complicated in TV, because the number of weeks that count against gets wild, but let’s start with some really basic things we can talk through. I want to discuss the difference between the contract, which is the big contract that’s being negotiated every three years, versus individual writer contracts. I want to talk about when writers get scale and when they don’t, profit participation and residuals and the idea of CPI and increases. Basically, how much things ramp up over the years, because that also gets confusing. Craig, can you talk to me about the difference between the contract and what’s in the contract, versus what’s in an individual writer’s contract?

**Craig:**
Sure. For the Writer’s Guild and this holds true as well for Animation Guild, the collective bargaining agreement is also known as a Minimum Basic Agreement. Minimum Basic Agreement, simply means nobody that is in our union can do worse than this. That’s what it is. They could also call it the worst case scenario document.

**John:**
It’s the floor.

**Craig:**
It’s the floor. Now our individual contracts by design, already incorporate everything that’s in that contract. There’s a clause in our individual contracts that say, under no circumstances can anything in this contract be construed as doing something worse than, the terms of the Minimum Basic Agreement. However, obviously in our individual contracts then, there are lots of things that our lawyers, managers, or agents, well, not managers legally, but our lawyers or agents can get us, that are better. A lot of those things are almost boiler plate at this point, because everybody gets them. Some of them have to do with you and your individual status and work history and perceived value to the company, but most contracts I would argue, have at least some aspects that are better than the Minimum Basic Agreement that the Writer’s Guild or the Animation Guild provides.

**John:**
Back in episode 407, we talked through understanding your writing contract and it was you and me at the Guild, along with some Guild lawyers and we literally walked through what an individual writer’s contract looks like and some of the things that are in there, are essential about this is how much you’re getting paid for your first draft, for your rewrite. These are the optional steps, the guaranteed steps, but also carried in there is, this is your net profit definition and this is what your backend looks like and you laugh now, but we laugh every time, because movies are designed to never actually achieve net profits. Only a handful of movies each year, each decade, could be considered net profits. Something like a Blair Witch Project is so successful, that there’s just no way to hide the money that’s coming in there, but they achieve this process for never actually becoming profitable, by continually siphening out for the money that’s coming in and charging fees against things. You could never actually hit those profits. Those things are still in your contract, but they’re not actually meaningful. The confusion I saw from people on Twitter is, “Oh, that means they writers don’t get anything for the movies, they make,” and it’s, “No, we get residuals and residuals don’t have anything to do with profitability,” and I think that’s an important thing to distinguish. Craig, can you talk to us about residuals and how residuals get calculated in a broad sense?

**Craig:**
Residuals are calculated on a gross basis and a number of people in this discussion on Twitter, were saying that residuals needed to happen for the Animation Guild, so that they could participate in the profit of things and then some people said, “Well, the problem with the Writer’s Guild, is the residuals are only there for profits and nothing ever shows profits and they should really be based on the gross,” and the answer is, they are. That’s exactly what they are. Residuals have nothing to do with the profitability of a movie. They have everything to do with how much the movie grosses and by grosses, we mean the amount of money that comes into the studio, regardless of expenses. Now, the residuals are defined in such a way, that the only part of the money coming in that matters, is for movies, not the ticket sales and not exhibition on airplanes, but all the other stuff afterwards. The now dead videotape and DVD market, but online rentals, online sales, the sale of the movie to streamers and cable outlets and networks overseas, all that gross comes in and then there is a formula that is applied to it. Is it a great formula? No, but it’s formula and it generates money.

**John:**
And it’s important to stress that, that formula and the recalculation of that formula, happens every three years in the contract, the MBA and that, that is where the residuals are calculated. Your individual contract might have something like hand waving towards residuals, but that’s not where your residuals are coming from. Your residuals are coming from this Minimum Basic Agreement, that applies to all film and all television that’s done underneath a WGA contract, which is good, which is how you want it and it also means that there can be consistent accounting for it and the WGA can actually collect that money on your behalf.

**Craig:**
Which is why your agents, managers, or lawyers, should never commission that money and if they are, ask them to please stop, because they didn’t negotiate that term, the Writer’s Guild did and while it is true that, I guess I would characterize it as every three years, we have the opportunity to adjust those formulae, when in reality they’re adjusted almost never. Once they’re there, they’re there for a long time.

**John:**
They largely get baked in and the things that, when you get news about what changed in the contract, it could be the thresholds for certain things may have changed a bit, but the actual percentages rarely change or what counts rarely changes. Only when there’s a brand new thing that you have to figure out, how are we going to treat this new thing that’s existing, do you sign a brand new residual and as we said many times on the show, figuring out how we’re going to handle residuals for movies that are made for a streamer and only show on a streamer, a movie like Red Notice is complicated, because if that movie was made by a studio and then sold to a Netflix, the residual will be based on what that sale price was to Netflix, but because there’s no sale price, it’s tougher to figure out what the residual is and it’s going to be a big focus in negotiations.

**Craig:**
It will always be lower. Until something changes, the way that Netflix does things in general, works very much in their favor, surprise, because there isn’t much of an independent and this does tie back to Netflix. You have an article here that you linked to, we’ll throw it into the show notes, from Variety about Netflix’s data expansion being a flex, which is a very nice way of saying the thing that you and I have been saying for a long time.

**Craig:**
Which is, that Netflix just continually manipulates data to make it sound like everyone is watching Netflix every minute of the day and every new thing that comes out, is the biggest thing that Netflix has ever done, because just the data is a big, huge hailing storm of hot air and what’s bizarre is, a lot of people do watch Netflix. It’s incredibly popular. I don’t know why they need to do that, other than to say that they have a total black box control over who watches what and when they report it, meaning how many people have seen this and similarly therefore, how they deal with residuals, which usually is some large buyout, works in their favor, almost always.

**John:**
Yeah. Now, here we’re talking about the back end of what’s happened and everything. The movies come out, but let’s talk about initial compensation, which is also crucial here and one of the things I’ve noticed with the animation writers talking about, is their initial compensation is just dramatically lower than equivalent conversation would be for a live action writer, a WGA writer. They’re trying to raise that initial compensation. This is something that we’re really talking about scale. We’re talking about, this is the minimum that you could be paid to do this job, to write this script, to be working on this show and that’s where we’re trying to increase here. Now again, we’ve got to stress, that is the minimum they can pay you, but certainly for future writers, you want to be working above scale and your goal is to get above scale as quickly and as thoroughly as you can, so you’re not being stuck at the absolute minimum they can pay you for things.

**Craig:**
There are two limits that impact how people are paid in general. One is the floor, which is obviously as you mentioned, something the union sets and the other is whatever the perceived ceiling is. That may be the biggest difference, because there is a difference between the floor, but it is not a massive difference. The massive Delta is in the ceiling, where the most highly paid writers in live action are paid vastly more than the most highly paid writers in animation and I’m talking about with the exception of maybe some Pixar features and things like that, but when we talk about television, when we talk about animation writers for television animation, not WGA television animation, the ceiling is just nowhere near what the ceiling is on the live action side. That is where you can start pulling people up a bit.

**John:**
Also, we should make sure the ceiling is not defined. You’re not going to find some contract that says, this is the most we’ll ever pay. They just have this internal thing. The company will say, “We never pay more than this,” and I’ve been through this in my own experiences. You probably have been too. It’s, this is the most we’ve ever paid for this. This is the most we’re willing to pay. We don’t go above this line.” [crosstalk 00:34:24]

**Craig:**
It’s the market price and that line, they will go over that line. It’s just not today, but that line is a market line and every now and then something seismic occurs and that line changes, because somebody gets paid a whole crazy amount, because somebody really, really wanted that person. That part can change. The issue with more than anything in animation writing, non WGA animation writing, is that they haven’t yet zeroed in on those people, that are worth an enormous amount. That starts to change, because at that point, instead of a factory floor, you have a factory ladder. For animation writers, they have a double problem. The Animation Guild does have low minimums. They don’t have residuals, they don’t have credit protections and in the marketplace, that group of animation writers doesn’t have a cadre of extremely high paid people, that are setting a progression for everybody else.

**John:**
Now, there have been notable animation showrunners who have made fantastic deals at places and that’s awesome for them and they can hopefully use some of that power to get writers paid more, but that’s the exception rather than rule. There are very few big animation showrunners, who could pull that off and it’s not like live action TV showrunners, who do get those 10 figure deals.

**Craig:**
Yeah. Pretty much everyone that’s running a show on television, is getting paid pretty darn well, when I talk about live action. Some people are being paid numbers that require extra digits. You have deals that are approaching a billion dollars at this point. It’s insane, but certainly a number of people being paid in the hundreds of millions of dollars and I don’t think that is happening at all in non WGA televised animation and in the cases sometimes where it is, I think you are dealing largely with the production entity. It’s just a different culture and what it comes down to is and this is where I feel for the people who run the Animation Guild, because they are trying. I have talked to a couple of them over the years and I know, they know and they’re not delusional. They’re not sitting there going, “No, our numbers are great.” They know and what they’re dealing with is a cultural problem that the industry does not value the animation writers, the way that the industry values the Writers Guild writers and that is a cultural problem that also needs to be attacked and in that circumstance, the partners they need unfortunately at the Animation Guild, are the agencies because agencies do this too. They look and see, “Well okay, those people are being paid that, so let’s not really concentrate on that, because 10% of that isn’t that much,” but they can drive that up too. They’re the ones who push the market around.

**John:**
Now, you hit on this early in the discussion, but it’s important to note that in television, someone who’s staffed on a TV show, they’re going to get paid a certain amount for their writing services, but also as a producer. As a staff writer, as a story editor, as a consulting producer, they’re getting a separate paycheck, that’s covering their producing services for a show and their writing services will tend to be listed at scale, but everything else about their producing services, is a part of their individual contract negotiation. It’s important to notice that if you’re a newly staffed writer, you might see in your contract that, “Oh, it looks like I’m being paid scale,” but you also are being paid separately as a producer and that’s just the weird way that we decided to do television, which is frustrating for folks who come from the feature world.

**Craig:**
Yeah. In one aspect, when you do come from the feature world as I did, you look at it and go, “Well, man, I’ve been paying a lot in dues, that these producers and television haven’t been paying at all.” In features, I paid a 1.5% of every dollar I ever made and television, I pay 1.5% of basically minimum, because the companies have used the producer valve, as a way to essentially pay out more, that doesn’t get applied against, for instance, healthcare and pension and the writers who take this money including myself, recognize that there’s less in dues to pay as well and you get more perceived power, because you’re a producer. For the animation writers, I’m not sure that this relief valve is there. I think basically they’re saying, this is scale. That’s what you get and there is nothing else, but there is and part of it is just figuring out how to push that marketplace forward. For me, if I were running the Animation Guild, I’ve got to be honest, I wouldn’t start right today since it’s… Look, they’ve lost over and over and over, okay? It’s quite a losing streak. How do you turn around a losing streak? Maybe you start with something that doesn’t cost money at all, but is about dignity and that would be credits and if you begin to open that door with credits and dignity, then you start to push ahead on how to make something out of those credits, because right now everything seems to be decided by the companies with a reactive position from the Animation Guild, because they don’t have the strength or backing really to get something done. It’s possible that now with the new leadership in IA, which did threaten a strike for the… We almost had an IA strike for the first time in Hollywood history. Maybe they could throw a little muscle behind the Animation Guild, which is part of IATSE. It’s complicated.

**John:**
One of the other challenges with the Animation Guild, is that Writers Guild represents just writers, Animation Guild represents not just animation writers, but also everyone else who works in animation and their interests are similar, because they’re all trying to make great animated projects, but it’s not quite analogous to the WGA, where everyone’s doing the same job.

**Craig:**
Correct and there is a conflict that can occur, because you have story artists who, if you’ve worked in animation you know, they are writing with pictures and they often throw a lot of dialogue in as they’re pitching and there is a blending of how writing functions in animation, that our terms in the Writers Guild don’t really artfully cover and those people have to be taken care of too. I think sometimes part of the problem is, that people who’d have a title and function that is very similar to what we do in the Writers Guild will say, “Wait, they got that and I’m getting this and it’s not fair and also I should be covered by the Writers Guild.” Can we just, once again John, point out that that cannot happen.

**John:**
It cannot happen. Here’s the challenge, is the folks who are represented currently by the Animation Guild, they are represented by a union and the WGA cannot come in and say, “No, no. We are taking these writers out of your unit and putting them into the WGA.” That just cannot happen. That’s just not federal law. That’s just not going to happen. What can happen is on new projects that are not covered by the Animation Guild, they can be covered by the Writers Guild and there’s a push to get more new projects covered by the Writers Guild and I have a show that’s going to be an animated Writer’s Guild project. It is doable. It’s hard to do, but that is the way you are going to get animation writers covered by WGA contract, is by setting up new projects and new places, that do not have already coverage by the Animation Guild. That’s just how it’s going to have to happen.

**Craig:**
New employers is a huge part of it. The problem, is that new employers generally aren’t stupid. They can look and see which one’s going to cost them more and it’s the Writers Guild. That’s definitely going to cost them more.

**John:**
And that’s why there’s a push to get a bunch of animation showrunners to say, “Hey, we will only do new projects at places that can offer WGA contracts,” because there are some folks who are worth it, they’re willing to do a WGA deal at certain places. That’s how I was able to get the one I just did.

**Craig:**
Yeah, years and years and years ago I was hired by Bob Weinstein, to write an animated movie and I said, “I won’t do it if it’s not WGA,” and what they did was, they just made a company.

**John:**
Yeah. They [crosstalk 00:42:39].

**Craig:**
They made a new company and that new company became signatory to the Writers Guild and that new company existed solely to employ me to write this movie and that’s fine, it’s a bunch of paperwork and as you say, it can be done, but if it’s done on an ad hoc basis, because they really want you to write something and they really want me to write something, that is not going to ever really move the needle, because the vast bulk of stuff that’s done, is done at places that are fully married into doing things through the Animation Guild.

**John:**
Yeah, but you get the point of the wedge in there and you can start to make some changes and that’s-

**Craig:**
Tip of the spear.

**John:**
Tip of the Spear. We’ll do it. Around the office this week, we started talking about the kinds of movies where you have the hero, who is undergoing transformation, which is true to all movies hopefully, but where the point of the story, is that the hero is changing and transforming. They’re not going on a quest for something else, but they’re actually struggling to find themselves from the start of the movie and the two things that were making me think about this, this past week, the Kendall Roy character on Succession, especially this season, you see that he’s desperately trying to figure out who he is and he’s trying to organize this publicity and to promote this image of himself. But really, he’s trying to figure out who he actually is. He wants the world to tell him who he is. He wants the press to reflect back what he wants to see and the answer is, you’re an asshole and that’s not a great answer for him to get, but I was also thinking about this article, it’s a letter sent to Blair Braverman, who writes the column for Outside Magazine and it’s about a writer who moved to a cabin off the grid and she figured like, “Oh, here I’ll be able to write every day and it’s going to be great. I have this fantasy version of what my life is like and it was just miserable,” and I wanted to talk about this as a movie construct and also maybe a TV construct as well, but this idea of characters who enter into the story, looking to transform rather than going on a quest, where the transformation happens along the way.

**Craig:**
Yeah. It’s really… Partly what this wonderful essay is talking about, is the over romanticization of writing, which will have another little thing we want to mention about that, but what’s fascinating to me about these movies, is that they aren’t necessarily doing something that any other movie isn’t. In fact, they are necessarily doing something every other movie also necessarily does. Somebody changes, but what I like about movies like this or stories like this on television, is that the character is aware of it. Whereas when they’re not aware, which is probably the majority of the time, we might be aware, but we understand at the end, she is different than she was when she started and in these kinds of stories, the character says, I don’t know who I am or I don’t like who I am. I want to figure out who I’m supposed to be and then they are somebody different at the end and that is simply about a self-awareness. There’s a meta aspect to this character who understands that they need to figure out the nature of themselves, as a protagonist in their own story.

**John:**
Yeah and as we looked at examples of things, The Graduate comes up, where we have a kid at the end of college, who starts trying to figure out who he is and what he wants in life. In Good Company feels like the same kind of movie. There’s a heavily gendered component to this, where you have a lot of women who are going through this transformation. Under the Tuscan Sun, How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Eat Pray love, but even recent examples, like Tick Tick Boom, is that you have a guy who’s trying to stage his show, but really he’s trying to figure out his existential angst, is over turning 30 and this sense of doom. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I want.

**Craig:**
Am I successful? Am I not successful?

**John:**
Yeah. Exactly. Should I take this advertising job? And it’s really about figuring out who he is and being a musical, he can sing through his frustrations there and I think its so important to stress, that every movie’s going to have some hero transformation ideally, but it does feel so different when the character starts wanting to transform.

**Craig:**
Yeah and there’s something that is amusing about the whole thing. When they do this and this is the part of these stories I generally don’t like, what they’re doing is looking at you in the audience and saying, “You know this feeling right? You’re scared too. You don’t know who you are or you’re unhappy with who you are or you think you’re not yet where you’re supposed to be. You’re freaking out, let me show you a fairy tale where I figure it out. It’s going to make you feel good. It’s figure-outable and the fact is, that it’s generally a simplification of how that process goes, because the real process of figuring out who you are in life, is a process that ever ends and then you die. And of course in these stories, there’s a conclusion and I think I find that the conclusion is always amusing, because the last scene is, I did it. I’m happy. I’m self-actualized, I’m pleased and then we never see the next scene, where they have to wake up and then they have diarrhea or something and the next day begins again and they’re like, “Wait, actually, I’m still just… Ah, man. I’m still me.”

**John:**
Yeah. Taking off our movie lenses, because obviously we’re looking for closure in a movie, I think two series that do a very good job of characters trying to find what they actually want, Search Party, which I love, which is ostensibly about trying to figure out what happened to this missing girl, but it’s really the central character trying to figure out who she is and what she wants and her arc in transformation, but of course, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend starts with this woman on an existential quest, I don’t know what I actually want in my life and transforming everything and transforming everyone around her as she does it and because it’s a series and doesn’t have to resolve in movie time logic, it can go through all the ups and downs and the moments of realization and moments of self doubt, that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to fit into a classic two hour movie structure.

**Craig:**
Yeah and those journeys are fascinating, because they are actually dictated or at least they used to be more like this, not necessarily by what the character’s experience was and how they were following a path and arriving in a destination, but rather more how well is the show doing, because when it’s doing really well, they can’t figure their shit out yet. They’re going to have to wait until the show is ready to conclude, at which point they will figure their shit out and that’s why one of my favorite endings for a who am I, what am I supposed to be journey, is the Sopranos, because it begins with a man going to therapy as a villain, but he’s going to therapy to try and figure out who he is and what his problems are and he never gets it. He never figures it out and then he’s murdered and that’s pretty much the way life works, except minus the villain and the murder part, occasionally there’s murder.

**John:**
Occasionally there’s murder. You put a great article in the show notes here about a writer’s advice to other writers and let’s tie this in because I think it harkens back to the article I listed, which was the woman moving to the cabin. Talk to us about what you put into-

**Craig:**
Yeah, it is a wonderful little story here. Somebody has written a… I’ll just talk about the woman that it centers on, is a Polish author name and I apologize, I’m murdering this name, Wislawa Szymborska. If you are Polish please right in and help me. I’m sorry. I’ll just call her Ms. Szymborska. She was a poet. She died in 2012, at which point it was discovered she had destroyed about 90% of her writing, which is amazing. Despite that or perhaps because of it, she won the Nobel prize in 1996 for poetry. Now here’s what I love about this and this ties into this romantic search for self and particularly as writers figuring out, am I a writer, as one of our questioners asked or how do I describe myself as a writer? Or should I go to a cabin and try and write there?

**Craig:**
She wrote an anonymous column for a Polish literary journal, called Zycie Literackie. Again, I screwed that up. I’m sorry. It means literary life. She did this from the 1960s to the 1980s and the column in literary life was called Literary Mailbox and I’m quoting now from this article, “The idea was that aspiring writers would send in their work and receive helpful advice. Mainly, the article says Szymborska advised them to stop writing at once and destroy all their work.” This is like the dark iron curtain version of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:**
“The aspiring writers,” I continue to quote, “imagine that being an author will bring them happiness, fame, and fortunes. Szymborska tells them to get a grip. Writing is a ridiculous profession, she argues persuasively. Failure is inevitable. Success is highly conditional and mostly feels like failure as well,” which I’ve got to tell you is absolutely true. What is her positive advice for poor wretches out there attempting to be writers. I quote from the article, “Her advice is monumentally sensible. Don’t be a narcissist. Work much harder. The best writing utensil is a waste paper basket. Life is short, yet each detail takes time. Don’t be a utopian, but keep away from the void for as long as you can.”

**Craig:**
I’ve got to tell you, I feel like even though Ms. Szymborska and I lived at the same time, somehow I think the two of us may have been scrambled together in the simulation, because man, she’s just putting beautiful Nobel worthy, poetic words to how I feel all the time.

**John:**
Yeah. What she’s saying, also reminds me of the Kendall Roy thing I mentioned at the start of the last segment, which was basically people write into her or they want to be writers, because they have this perception of, “Oh, if I have these things, then I will be happy,” and she’s there to tell you, no, you will not be happy, just as Kendall Roy could get the company and he will not be happy.

**John:**
He just wants someone to tell him what he wants and no one can do that except for himself and in many ways, her saying, “No, you don’t want this. You’re not good at this. Stop doing this. It’ll only going to lead to misery,” is a gift in some ways. We’ve talked on the show, different times, there have been some people who’ve come up to us at live shows over the years like, “Thank you so much for your show. You convinced me that I did not want to be a screenwriter,” and I think that it’s a huge success, because if we’ve driven some people away from it who recognize like, “Oh my time is better spent doing something else.” That’s great.

**Craig:**
Completely and I think I really just want to underscore again, success is highly conditional and mostly feels like failure as well and it must be hard to believe, but-

**John:**
You and I are pretty successful and yet we often feel like failures.

**Craig:**
Well and the success in specific, because when it happens you think, “Okay, the thing is, it’s still just me and my meat suit, moving around and thinking and worrying and all the rest of it and it’s hard to describe.” Success never feels like success. The word itself is promising a mirage that you never get. You have to be just okay with all the stuff in between, because there is no cake.

**John:**
Listen, you’re not going to enjoy every moment of sitting down and actually writing, but if you actually hate writing, if you actually hate the process of doing this, but you’re just doing it because you think it’s going to feel great when you’re successful, you should stop right now, because that’s not likely to happen. You’re not going to feel good being a famous published author, if you don’t feel reasonably good, being an unpublished author.

**Craig:**
No and the cabin won’t help you and being alone won’t help you and the herbal tea won’t help you and for God’s sake, if you ever see a movie where an author suddenly gets a burst of inspiration and then there’s a typing montage and then a novel erupts, just understand that’s the writing equivalent of watching porn. It’s not how it works. It’s fake. Never, ever, never think that, that’s what happens. It has never happened. It will never happen.

**John:**
The worst part of Misery for James Caan, was he had to write a book.

**Craig:**
Exactly.

**John:**
Ah, all right. It’s time for one cool thing. My one cool thing is, one that I know Craig is very excited about, because I tipped him off about it. This is The Game Master’s Book of Non-Player Characters and the resource for really D and D, but there’s this whole weird thing where you can’t say D and D, but you can say fifth edition and it’s designed for Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons. It’s not made by the official Dungeons and Dragons people. It’s written by Jeff Ashworth and what I love so much about this, is that the writing is just so good and it’s all these characters you can use for different adventures or different encounters in underground locations or big cities or small towns. Their characters are so specific and let me see if I can get just an example of one character’s description here, because I just love the little box descriptions on people. This is Boo Boo Crawford, a foppish man of middle age, with an overwhelmingly large explorers pack, strapped to his back a few pots and pans hanging from the straps of his chest, holding a guidebook like a mask. That’s your first initial taste of Boo Boo Crawford and they talk through what he’s actually trying to do, what his goals are, what his wants and needs are. It’s so useful and I kept imagining Craig finding voices for all these characters. Craig, does very good voices when we play D and D.

**Craig:**
I try my best. I’m excited to look through this, because I really do believe that fun and interesting NPCs are half of what makes the experience fun. If you don’t have them at least here and there, the conversations become incredibly utilitarian. They’re not really conversations. There’s also not conflict. Part of it’s figuring out how this other person works. In this other game I DM, there’s a council of three people that make decisions for the town and the way that the module presents it, it’s talk to the three people, see if you can convince them and I’m like, “Okay, but who are they?”

**John:**
Yeah, I would say the official adventure books, don’t do a great job describing those characters and this is what I was [crosstalk 00:56:34].

**Craig:**
Yeah, this exactly. One of the things I did, was I decided that there would always be a vote and there’s three of them. The vote would always work one way or the other, except that one of them is just incredibly indecisive. It’s really just about, we’re no longer trying to convince this woman to why your point of view is the best. You really need to help her. You need to give her therapy, so that she can figure out why she can’t make a decision about things and the characters can engage in that way and it’s more fun and what I like about this resource is, sometimes when I’ve got 30 minutes before we’re playing, I’ve got to figure out who these three people are, being able to turn to a book and finding some great ideas would be lovely. This sounds like an amazing resource. I purchased it within seconds of you texting me about it. I’m very excited.

**John:**
I want to give one more character description here, because this is actually useful for all of us as writers. This is about Fresticia and Pillow, a barefoot girl around eight or nine years old with dark skin, a missing front tooth in her innocent smile and her hair tied up in fluffy pigtails atop her head, dressed in a black dress with a scrappy red scarf tied around her neck. She is trailed by a skeletal cat. Two sentences. I got a whole picture there.

**Craig:**
Yeah. Yeah, exactly and what’s the story with the cat and all that is great. Sometimes it’s all you need, is just a little bit of a starter and then off you go. Great recommendation, if you do play Dungeons and Dragons. I know they say game master. It is obviously the dungeon master, but of course there’s Pathfinder and all these other lovely games. John, my one cool thing and this is a 10 year odyssey of trying to find the best email client for Mac. I dumped the mail app a long time ago. Fooled around a few things, landed on Air Mail and I’ve been using Air Mail for many, many years. I think I might have convinced you at some point to use Air Mail, but there’s a new one now that I’m using, that I find much, much superior to that and it is called Canary. Canary works beautifully, far fewer errors or weird buggy techies. It’s also fast, fast, fast, fast, fast and it is for Mac OS and iOS and the two sync between each other flawlessly. I find it to be an excellent email client. I recommend it highly.

**John:**
That’s great. I think I’ve told you this before, but I switched over to Superhuman at Rachel Bloom’s recommendation and.

**Craig:**
Superhuman?

**John:**
Superhuman. I think Craig, you may want to check it out. Superhuman only works with Gmail, sits on top of a Gmail.

**Craig:**
Oh, I got a problem with that.

**John:**
All right. I’m entirely in the Gmail ecosystem, but it is ridiculously fast and it does such a great job of sorting stuff out, so I can get to inbox zero super quickly. I’ve been loving Superhuman, but it’s not to everyone’s taste. Interesting with superhuman. The onboarding process, you basically apply for it and then they make an appointment and then you have a half hour Zoom with the superhuman tech who walks you through everything.

**Craig:**
I’m never going to do that. Ever, ever. I don’t want to talk to somebody.

**John:**
It’s better. It’s better.

**Craig:**
I obviously have some Gmail addresses as everybody does, but I don’t have only Gmail.

**John:**
Yeah and you and I never actually email each other. We’re only texting.

**Craig:**
Yeah. Emails… Megana just email’s for old people, right?

**Megana:**
What? I email a lot.

**Craig:**
Well, you’re old.

**John:**
It’s a sensitive subject there, Craig.

**Craig:**
Yeah. Oh, you thought I was asking you from the young person’s point of view?

**Megana:**
Oh God.

**John:**
You can reach Megana Rao. She’s our producer of Scriptnotes. you can find her at ask@johnaugust.com. Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli after this week is by Timothy Fajda. If you need 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 sometimes @Clmazin. I’m always @JohnAugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

**John:**
We have t-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. It’s dicey, whether you can get one of those t-shirts or hoodies by Christmas, but try. They’re really nice. They’re really soft. You can sign up to become a premium member @scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Like the one we’re about to record on why movie dialogue is so hard to understand. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:**
Thanks guys.

**Megana:**
Thank you.

**John:**
Craig, we are talking about this article that Ben Pearson wrote for Slashfilm. I saw it passed around all over Twitter this past week, looking at whether and why movie dialogue has become harder to understand over the years. We’ll start with the first question. Is the thesis correct? Has movie dialogue become harder to understand over your lifetime?

**Craig:**
I think so. I think so. I am a sound obsessed producer and I struggle all the time, all the time, when I’m watching things. Sometimes I play things back. I struggle with the way they mix things and I wasn’t even aware of how grumpy I was about a lot of it, until I read this article and thought, ah, okay, I’m not nuts. I’m not nuts.

**John:**
Yeah. I approach it from a couple different ways. They talk about Christopher Nolan in here who seems singularly uninterested sometimes in actually, us being able to understand what his characters are saying, but also having worked on enough sets and worked with enough sound people, I know that we have tremendous technology to record sound and mix it properly and I don’t think the problem is technological on any level or that our sound professionals are not extraordinarily good. I think they all are and I want to make sure we are not throwing any of them under the bus, because it’s not their fault.

**Craig:**
No, not at all. In fact, we have more technology now than we ever have, to present excellent sound to people and I don’t mean excellent sound like everything is crisp and clear and quality, but even just beautiful. This is a problem that everybody who works on a mixing sounds stage, is well aware of. They’re fighting against this all the time. Similarly, on stage the sound recording team, which is the sound mixer there and the sound assistant, who’s wiring everybody up and the boom operator, they’re always worried about sound and they always want to make sure that we’re not picking up stuff, we shouldn’t be picking up and that the lines aren’t being muffled or squished by the movement of clothing or anything and I support that tremendously. It’s one of the first things I say early on, on a production is how important sound is to me and I let the first AD know that to me sound, it’s more important the sound is good during a take, than if I don’t know, a light gets a little wonky, but that’s me.

**John:**
Yeah and I think you’re probably also willing to say, for this shot, I don’t really care about sound. I’m not anticipating using the sound for this. You can tell people when it’s the priority. We have to understand everything here clearly or that should be the default, but if there’s some wide shot, where you’re just not going to care about the sound, you know you’re not going to use the sound, you can also tell them that, so that the sound person’s not trying to kill themselves to get sound, that you’re not going to be able to use.

**Craig:**
Which they know.

**John:**
They know.

**Craig:**
They know and the reason why we say in wide shots, the sound and dialogue isn’t particularly as important, is because we’re far enough away, that we can probably put another take in their mouth if we need to.

**John:**
Let’s talk about that, Craig, because I think most listeners probably don’t have a sense, the dialogue they see characters speaking, it may not be the actual take that they are… Editors do magic all the time.

**Craig:**
All the time. Keep in mind that obviously when we’re watching people talk, there are a few shots where we see them both at the same time, like wide shots and then once we get into coverage, meaning, okay, but now I’m over a shoulder to you and I’m over a shoulder to you or I’m clean on you and I’m close up on you, some of the dialogue is off screen. It’s off camera and we can put any take in there. We can also take a word that you might pronounce a little funny and find another take where you said the word correctly and just drop it in there with an audio edit and you’ll never know. Dialogue editors can do incredible things, but only if the dialogue has been recorded cleanly and there wasn’t the sound of a truck going under it and if the producer in the room in television, me the show runner or in features, typically the director, cares to make it sound good.

**John:**
It’s the producer or director saying, “No, no. This has to be good and we are going to either do another take, so we can get this right. We’re going to not do that noisy thing, so we can get one clean thing. We are going to get coverage. We’re going to get wild lines. We were going to spend the time to do this,” because time is probably the biggest reason why some dialogue is not recorded as cleanly as it could be.

**Craig:**
And for me, I just have an ear on it. If I’m watching a take and it’s really good, but there’s one word where, because somebody shifted in their jacket, the lab is all screwed up, then I ask the sound people, do we pick it up on the boom and also, is there another take where I could just stick that line in or is it the kind of thing where I could edit around, but the biggest impact I think the director or show runner can have on dialogue and the clarity of dialogue, is talking to the actors, because there is and this article sites something that I absolutely believe is true, a contagious mumble-core-ism, that has infected everyone and it’s bad.

**John:**
Let’s get into this, because you’re also an actor. You are on sets, where you’re having to make choices about how you were going to-

**Craig:**
I’m a great actor.

**John:**
You’re… I’m sorry, Craig, you’re a great actor., Who’s honest at making choices about how you’re going to play a line.

**Craig:**
Yes.

**John:**
And one of the choices you could make, is to bury the line or mumble the line or just not bring a lot of attention to the line, basically set it internally and you’re choosing not to do this. Talk to us about the decision about realism in delivery of things, versus the heightened thing that you might do, so people can actually understand what you’re saying.

**Craig:**
Well then once again, comedy gets it. Clarity and understanding is essential to appreciation of something, generally speaking. In drama, what can happen sometimes with actors, is in their reasonable desire to avoid indicating, emoting, overdoing, pushing, they get small, they can get really quiet. Sometimes in rehearsals, things that are just a normal conversation, like the one you and I are having, get slow and whispery. Part of it is a little bit of a fear, part of is a little bit of an insecurity. The one thing that I really don’t like doing is table reads, because I find that really good actors recognize that this is unnatural. They don’t want to be judged for their performance in that room, sitting around a table and they get mumbly. They just don’t want to be on the hook for it. Sometimes it’s about comfort. It’s about getting the actors comfortable through a few takes, so that you can start to get volume and clarity and things aren’t too whispery or mumbly.

**Craig:**
Some of the whispery/mumbly stuff is just pretense and some of it is a lack of caring. I’ve got to tell you, the thing that they cite here is Bane and I love doing my Bane impression, but I missed a bunch of Bane stuff, because I just didn’t understand why I would miss it, because it seemed like they were actually taking the audio from him, from the mask and not just re-recording it and then filtering it through the… Because, if you’re going to wear a mask, other people have to at least understand you. By the way, if in Bane, he had been, [inaudible 01:08:47] and then Batman was like, yeah and [inaudible 01:08:51] and then he’s like, “No, seriously, I do not… Say that again slowly.” [inaudible 01:08:56] and it would’ve been awesome, but they didn’t do that. Everybody understood them except for us where we were like, “What?” I do think that it’s important for the show runners and directors, to carefully and respectfully get the actors to place where you know people are going to be able to appreciate the words they’re saying.

**John:**
Yeah. I also wonder whether sometimes actors don’t have appreciation of how much editors and directors and posts and everyone else, can help them get to that quiet place. I think they may think that they have to be super, super quiet to hear, because they would be whispering in real life and don’t understand that, no, no, no, we can actually see the effect you’re trying to achieve. Let us achieve the effect, rather than you thinking you have to do it all yourself. They don’t want to feel stagey and theatrical in that way, but no, we can get you to that volume place appropriately, just give us a little bit more here, so we can record it.

**Craig:**
Yeah and a lot of times what I will do, is make a note that a word or two has been garbled a little bit. The other thing is that enunciation is a big deal for people, who’ve been trained in theater on stage. Enunciation is not necessarily something that has been strictly drilled into people, whose primary experience has been in television or film and some people struggle with enunciation and for me, rather than becoming a speech therapist, I just make notes and I think to myself, “Okay, if I really need that one clear, I’m going to go in there and say, this word got a little bit garbled,” but not, in my mind I think I’ll loop it.

**Craig:**
I can get that later and I can blend it in and it’ll be really good and looping, which is our all encompassing term for recording the line again later in a sound studio and then dropping it into the film, has become better and better and better to the point now where I’m way more comfortable believing that it will blend and that we will not notice a discontinuity in sound between naturally recorded voice and looped voice later.

**John:**
Working on a serious television show now, you’ll also get a sense of, these are actors who I know are just fantastic at ADR and looping and they are people who can say, okay, no, this is going to be fine, we’ll get that in the room, versus there might be other people like, you know what, it’s actually not their greatest skillset, is being able to hear what they did and match it and you might want to get that wild line or get another take, there on the set.

**Craig:**
Yes and one of the nice things about doing episodic television, is while we’re shooting, we’re also editing. I can go and sit down with Bella Ramsey and say, “Oh, we’ve got 20 minutes. Let’s bring our sound team over here. I just need you to say this line, because it’s off camera and it was a little funky on the mic, so let’s get it nice and clean now and then we can drop it in,” because we know it’s easy to do. We can start actually looping before we ever get even to proper post, which is advantageous.

**John:**
But, underlying all of this is you have to care and the fact that you do care, is why you’re going to get some good sound. Basically, the answer to this question about movie dialogue and how to get it better, is just it’s caring and it’s making sure that the caring comes from the very start.

**Craig:**
It’s caring and as much as I love when people have complimented a show I’ve made, about how it looks, when I get a compliment about how it sounds, that’s the thing that just warms my heart the most and I think I’ve seen this interesting look on the face of people in post, when I talk about this and it’s sad, because the look is, finally. Do you know what I mean? They’ve been neglected and it’s not right and look, maybe it’s just me, but sound to me is like smell. It’s a weird one, except that’s where all the memories come from. It’s just a faster root to my weird under brain and that’s what I find sound can do.

**John:**
Love it. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:**
Thank you John.

Links:

* [Endeavor sells its content side CJ Entertainment](https://labusinessjournal.com/news/2021/nov/29/endeavor-sells-content-studio-south-korean-media-c/)
* [WGA Health Fund](https://www.wgaplans.org/health/healthfaqs.html) now eligible for infertility treatments.
* [For tips on understanding your contract, check out episode 407](https://johnaugust.com/2019/scriptnotes-ep-407-understanding-your-feature-contract-transcript)
* [A writer who moved off the grid and hates it](https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/love-humor/remote-cabin-write/) advice by Blair Braverman
* [Have You Considered Accountancy? How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Writers By Wisława Szymborska (Edited and translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh)](https://literaryreview.co.uk/have-you-considered-accountancy) review by Joanna Kavenna
* [The Game Master’s Book of Non-Player Characters](https://www.amazon.com/Game-Masters-Book-Non-Player-Characters/dp/1948174804) by Jeff Ashworth
* [Canary Mail](https://canarymail.io/) email service for MacOS and iOS
* [Why Movie Dialogue is so Hard to Understand](https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/?fbclid=IwAR3ClhGA3-F33lfL1MXxML90-rrSH8Tt2vARyijsSFKEsZL-3D5vrJO6i-g#) by Ben Pearson for Slashfilm
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Vajda ([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

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