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The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/how-to-forget).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 519 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. I don’t have a cold but I sort of have a little bit of laryngitis, so we’ll see how I do this week, Craig.

**Craig:** Aww.

**John:** Aww.

**Craig:** Aww.

**John:** I really, I actually feel, feel fine. But just in case we suddenly cut out that’s going to be the excuse for why we’re not continuing the podcast.

**Craig:** You died.

**John:** I died.

**Craig:** From laryngitis.

**John:** Then John died. I went home to my home planet.

**Craig:** You went home to some planet. Megana, do you know what we’re saying there? Do you know that reference?

**Megana Rao:** I don’t.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s, it’s Poochie.

**John:** It’s a reference to the Simpsons. But while you’re googling that, today on the show, while there are many techniques for plotting out your story and really knowing your characters, only Scriptnotes will we teach you how to forget those things so you can write proper scenes. So that’s right. It’s a craft episode.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** So sharpen your pencils. Craig loves a craft episode.

**Craig:** I do. I do.

**John:** But first, Craig, we have so much news to talk through.

**Craig:** Let’s do that.

**John:** We have Scarlett Johansson and CAA. We got Netflix. We got The Wizard of Oz.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** We’ll also have a follow up on Spooky Season and IATSE. So, time permitting, we’ll also get to some listener questions because I know you love listener questions.

**Craig:** I do. I love them. I love them because –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have to do the least amount of work for them.

**John:** Mm-hmm. But you will actually have to do some work because in our bonus segment for premium members, we’re going to talk about fame.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Not the movie musical, which is fantastic.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Or the series, which is also good.

**Craig:** Loved it.

**John:** But what it means to be famous in the 2020s.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not great.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Spoiler.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s not great. Ah, but some good news did happen this past week, Scarlett Johansson and Disney reached an agreement on Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit about the box office bonuses she’s owed for Black Widow.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We don’t know what the actual dollar amount was. We probably never really will.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But everyone is happy and singing and joy has returned to the Mouse House.

**Craig:** Yeah, as was inevitably the case, it was –

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** This was always what it would be. The only question was, you know, like, how much is it. And we don’t know. And also I don’t care. That’s their business.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the good side is that an artist got taken care of. The bad side is these kinds of settlements actually don’t benefit anybody but individuals.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There is structurally speaking, for Hollywood, nothing has been resolved. But good news for Scarlett Johansson at the very least.

**John:** Yeah, I think the lawsuit did shine a spotlight on the need for us to be thinking about what we’re going to do and movies are debuting on streaming that were originally supposed to be debuting theatrically. So it got people to pay attention to it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. But we need systemic solutions, not a settlement after a settlement after its settlement.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That sounds great.

**John:** Now, while the Scarlett Johansson lawsuit settlement was probably inevitable –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I wonder whether the CAA acquiring ICM was inevitable. Did you see this happening before it happened, Craig?

**Craig:** Didn’t see it happening. Didn’t hear about it happening. Was absolutely shocked when I read it. Not shocked in a bad way, just surprised.

**John:** Yeah, I would say surprised but not shocked was sort of where I fell in. It’s like, oh, yeah, that’s the thing that could happen. But I hadn’t heard anything about it before. So then it happens, like, oh, well, this happened.

So ICM in the, in terms of writers, was the fourth biggest agency in town.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** CAA was the second biggest agency. So the number two bought number four.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** And so, they’re gonna merge them all together.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It has to go through regulatory approvals and antitrust.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But they’ll make it through that because it’s not bigger than the biggest one, so consolidation.

**Craig:** Yeah, sort of inevitable and I guess I just didn’t realize that it was gonna be these two agencies. So I guess now – are they changing the name or it’s just everybody is CAA now?

**John:** I think the plan is for everyone to be CAA –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I’m not sure it’s been announced.

**Craig:** I do like this quote that you put here in work notes from Ariel Emanuel. So Ariel Emanuel runs Endeavour. “ICM has not been what it used to be 15 years ago. I think what CAA bought was five incredible TV writers, a very good book business, and a very good soccer rep business out of Europe.” So obviously diminishing the purchase of ICM as best he could but what I kind of liked that he’s like, I think what CAA bought was like five people that generate like a billion dollars business and also a great book business and also apparently a great soccer business. I don’t know. Like those aren’t great things.

**John:** Let’s talk about sort of these five TV writers because it’s not like those TV writers are bound to ICM and are now bound to CAA. They can choose to go wherever they want to go. And as can any other client of ICM. No one is contractually obligated to stick with that agency, and move over to CAA. So everyone has these choices. Some of those clients will choose not to move over and they’ll go to other agencies, which is fine. For writers, ICM was much smaller than UTA was and we really – we talk about Big Four, but really, it was the Big Three plus ICM. If you were a writer at ICM, you’re now at a larger agency.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Assuming you’re making the transition. If you were a writer at CAA, maybe have a little bit more competition for some of those things, like, maybe a little bit harder to get attention there. But noticeably nothing changes with the WGA agency agreement. Like this new merged agencies still has the same cap on what they can do and what they can’t do. So it doesn’t really affect any of that?

**Craig:** Yeah. And I don’t really think that there will be much in the way of competition changes. You’ve always competed against other writers to an extent, for jobs and things. Whether it’s inter- or intra-agency competition, even within a single agent’s roster –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There are going to be clients that are competing for things. The squeeze, I think, though will be real. I would be surprised if I don’t think that when this sort of thing happens that everybody at CAA and everybody at ICM gets together and has a big party. I think a bunch of people just get pushed off the ship.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So when agents get pushed off the ship, so too do assistants, and so do, of course, clients. So it’s going to be interesting to see how the consolidation functions for everybody other than the people who are running the show.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But if I were UTA, I’d probably be looking around for a dance partner right about now.

**John:** Yeah, I wonder about that. I don’t necessarily know that they need to. I mean, because – would they look for a bigger dance partner? Or would they try to take a smaller person or do they even –

**Craig:** Smaller.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know if they need to, but they might.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So –

**Craig:** I could see that. But then –

**John:** Yeah, I could see it happening too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Consolidation is the trend.

**Craig:** It’s the way it goes.

**John:** Also this past week, the Academy Museum opened up. So this is a brand new museum on Wilshire Boulevard. I got to go to an opening, a preopening thing this past week. It’s really nice. People should go visit. If you’re in Los Angeles and you like movies, come visit the Academy Museum, because you’ll see cool stuff from the history of the movies, cool exhibits, artifacts, pieces of equipment, original costumes, all that stuff is really neat. There’s a really good Miyazaki Exhibit there right now. But I think I found especially cool, which I tweeted about was they had a whole room section for The Wizard of Oz, like sort of making The Wizard of Oz. And they had this page from the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz. And I had never seen the script for The Wizard of Oz. And this was kind of cool. So Craig, as you open up this tweet –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you’re seeing this photo –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What is your reaction to this script page?

**Craig:** Well, on the one hand, it’s amazingly similar to what we do now.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** The font is the same. The general layout is the same. There’s a scene number, which appears to be 319, possibly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is a rather – it’s on page 122.

**John:** The script’s long.

**Craig:** It’s long, but it’s at the end.

**John:** Yes. Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s about right. The margins are a little funky. And the action is actually sort of pushed to the right and also oddly centered. So it kind of – it’s hard to tell the difference between action and dialogue. But the characters names, which are not capitalized, are above the dialogue like we do.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There’s even a bit of parenthetical like Dorothy turns around, right there, you know, apparently, you are breaking that rule of don’t put action in parentheticals in 1939.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, yeah, kind of like weird to see the continuity of what we do today with what they did then.

**John:** Yeah, so what I check from this is like, while some stuff is different, and like the overall layout of dialogue and action is a little bit more how stage plays work than how modern screenplays work in terms of margins –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It really does look like a script, like you can hand this script to, you know, a director and he’s like, could shoot this page.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Like they would know how to do it. It’s completely normal and reasonable. Even stuff like the cut back to is over on the right-hand margin.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It really does feel like a modern script page way back in 1939. But some stuff has evolved and changed. And that’s okay. Things do evolve and change and things do move on. And the screenplay format was never handed down by the gods as like, this is how screenplays shall be. They’re just like, it was evolving and this was a stage in the evolution and pretty close to sort of where we ended up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I really dug it.

**Craig:** I do like a couple of things on the page and a specific one is medium, Glinda and Dorothy. And the other one is keep the camera on Dorothy as she follows Glinda’s directions. So as you can see, screenwriters have been directing on the page since the beginning of Hollywood.

**John:** Yes, they have been.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yeah, it was.

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** Also, famously, The Wizard of Oz was written by a zillion people –

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** On – a whole bunch of people worked through it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so, like, that’s not a new thing that’s happened either.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So –

**Craig:** It was also directed by multiple directors.

**John:** Yes, it was. And like the studio was super involved in every little phase of it. So, if you get a chance to go see The Wizard of Oz exhibit, fantastic. If all you can see The Wizard of Oz is this page and the original movie, you’ll have some sense of what the connection was between this is what started on the page and this is the final movie you saw.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** Also, this past week, Netflix put out a data dump, or at least showed some numbers on their biggest series and movies, like what is actually the top hits on Netflix, which I found kind of surprising, because they’ve always been so cagey about sort of like kind of what people are watching and what are the most popular things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But for some reason, they chose to put out some charts. So there’s two different charts we’re talking about. So the first is most popular series and films as determined by the number of accounts that have watched at least two minutes of that title in its first 28 days on Netflix. So you never see the whole thing. You had to watch at least two minutes of it.

**Craig:** So if you watched two minutes and then – oh, screw this, you apparently watched that show. Oh Netflix, come on.

**John:** Oh, Netflix.

**Craig:** Really? Two minutes.

**John:** So the second one is actually – it is actually a little bit more useful for us.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s a little bit more what we’re expecting.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So this is total view hours per title in the first 28 days on Netflix.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** So either and they could be longer things or more people are watching or people rewatching them, but it’s probably more what we’re kind of thinking, like, oh, this thing is really popular because people are really consuming it.

**Craig:** Correct, Bridgerton, very popular.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So Shonda Rhimes has done it again. You see a couple of things. And The Witcher, the first season was very popular.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But Stranger Things 2 and 3. Still rolling big time.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Those were kind of – so Stranger Things sort of peaked, I guess, in season two and three.

**John:** Well, season four hasn’t come out yet.

**Craig:** Oh, there you go. So I guess maybe season four will be even better, as true as would I know. I started to see them too.

**John:** I really, really enjoy seeing number seven on the top series –

**Craig:** You.

**John:** Is You Season 2.

**Craig:** What the hell is that?

**John:** So which was, of course, so You is that show that was on Lifetime that Lifetime canceled and – but Netflix picked it up and it became a giant hit on Netflix. And so –

**Craig:** What is it?

**John:** So You is a story – it’s a romcom about a serial killer.

**Craig:** Okay, I never heard of it.

**John:** Or sort of a stalker serial killer person.

**Craig:** I really never heard of it.

**John:** Yeah, it’s good. It’s pent actually. It’s nice.

**Craig:** Okay, so 457 –

**John:** Megana – Megana Rao, have you watched any of You?

**Megana:** Yes, I’ve watched a lot of it.

**Craig:** A lot of it. Okay.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Have you watched Ginny & Georgia?

**Megana:** I had a friend who wrote on that show. And so I did watch that, too.

**Craig:** Money Heist?

**John:** Money Heist is a big international hit. So –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think it’s Spanish and it’s done really well everywhere.

**Craig:** Looking at the films, we knew the Bird Box was this sort of Netflix film phenomenon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s Extraction?

**John:** Extraction is the Chris Hemsworth, Russo Brothers’ movie –

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Where he plays a guy who gets people out of dying situations I believe.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** The Irishman obviously was a big Scorsese movie. Kissing Booth 2 which I know my daughter was a big Kissing Booth fan.

**John:** Mm-hmm. 6 Underground was the Michael Bay, Ryan Reynolds movie.

**Craig:** Right. What Spenser Confidential?

**John:** That was Mark Wahlberg –

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Playing Spenser like the Spenser detective.

**Craig:** I like seeing Enola Holmes on here. That’s our buddies Jack Thorne and Harry Bradbeer.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve discussed Army of the Dead.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Tig Notaro thing. Charlize Theron and The Old Guard.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And Murder Mystery was the –

**Craig:** Sandler and Aniston.

**John:** Yeah, Jennifer Aniston.

**Craig:** Sandliston.

**John:** Yeah, Sandliston. So many of the top films are the big budget ones.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The sort of, like, oh, well, that’s a giant hit. I think it’s really fascinating with Kissing Booth 2 which was not expensive but had such an amazing viewership.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s just important to remember that sometimes on Netflix, the more money you spend doesn’t necessarily mean the more eyeballs you’re gonna get.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m just still giggling over the – if you watch two minutes you’re considered a watcher. Oh, it’s just silly. Yeah, pretty amazing though. I mean, Netflix has – this is their first kind of brief glimpse behind the screen. I’m still – I’m curious about this.

**John:** Craig, why? Why do you think they shared these numbers with us this week?

**Craig:** I think that the Netflix business model is curious. Where we are on our side of things, Netflix is fantastically successful. Everybody talks about it constantly. They make more content than anybody. Everybody has a subscription. That sounds pretty great.

On the other side of things, they do spend a lot of money, obviously, and I think they sort of keep spending more than they make. So some of this has to do with proving to the market that people really are watching stuff and it’s not just Netflix pretending, because there are no commercials here. So it really just comes down, I suppose, to subscriber retention.

**John:** Yeah. And that number they’ve always had to sort of disclose to investors to show like what their churn is and how much they’re able to grow. My theory behind why they’re releasing this information now is they feel Disney+ closing on their heels and obviously being indexed with the success that it’s become and they want to sort of show how dominant they are and how dominant they are worldwide, and so they have a new show, Squid Game, which is like, you know –

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s going to be their top, by far their top performer. It’ll top all these charts as they publish them now. So I’m guessing it’s just because they now have competition and they feel the need to sort of show how successful they are on their big titles.

**Craig:** Yeah, you might be right. I mean, they certainly now have really serious competition from multiple outlets and there’s more coming, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It seems like every day there’s another streamer coming on board. So you have Apple. You have Amazon. You have HBO Max. You have Disney+. You have Paramount+?

**John:** Paramount+ yeah.

**Craig:** Paramount+.

**John:** Yeah, all CBS shows. All your Star Treks. All your Survivors.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ve got Peacock.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Hulu. So now we used to have 500 cable channels. Soon we will have 500 streamers. So yeah, I don’t know why.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** This is above my paygrade.

**John:** So here is where I think it’s so fascinating is it shows that they actually do have all this data and they could share this data whenever they wanted to. So as we start talking about like maybe you need to pay, you know, folks, proper residuals for the things they do, it’s not hard for them to crank out these charts and they really do know how many people have watched what. And so –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the thing they can do. And that data is there and accessible. It reminds me of my One Cool Things from last week I talked about how in the music streaming business, how weird the numbers and accounting really were. And again, you can always learn from like what happened in music streaming to what’s happening here. Let’s make sure that as we look at these numbers, they really are kind of measuring what we want to measure, which is, how much is my work being used and exploited.

**Craig:** Yeah, and maybe that’s why they’ve been holding off for so long because they didn’t want people like, say, Jack Thorne and Harry Bradbeer to know that 190 million hours were spent on Enola Holmes. That does imply that they should get paid more for, you know, the next outing. And this is true for all of these things, you know, if you get paid nothing in residuals for, I don’t know, 6 Underground, well, what does that mean? Because 83 million people watched at least two minutes of it.

**John:** No, because –

**Craig:** I don’t know what that means. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what that means.

**John:** Because I was only a talking head and not an actual writer on Hollywood clichés, which debuted on Netflix this past week, I wouldn’t have gotten any residuals that I wrote anyway.

**Craig:** Oh, yes.

**John:** But the writers to that show, if it’s a huge success, I don’t know where it’s going to be a huge success, yeah, I want them to be rewarded for the hard work they did.

**Craig:** I mean, I have a legitimate question I wish I could ask Ted Sarandos dose in all seriousness. Why would they set two minutes as the thresholds for saying that an account has watched a series or film in terms of its popularity when I think that number is kind of a joke, right? I mean –

**John:** Yeah, that feels too low. It feels like you want – like 15 minutes is like you’ve sort of given it a try.

**Craig:** And I think it’s a failure. I mean, not one of these things is 15 minutes long. I mean –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you watch, I don’t know, two thirds of a movie, then I guess, you know, I would say you watched it, you didn’t bail out. And if you watched a single episode of a series, in its completion, meaning, you know, or 90% or more, then that’s a watch. What does this two minutes get you other than derision? It’s a very strange choice.

**John:** All right. Well, Ted can write in and tell us.

**Craig:** Yeah, Ted, explain this to us.

**John:** Why two minutes?

**Craig:** Yeah. Why two minutes, Ted?

**John:** Why two minutes?

**Craig:** Yeah, we’d like to know.

**John:** We got some follow up.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So last week on the show we talked about IATSE, which is the stage and theatrical employees.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** You can say all the bloodline folks who actually make our movies and TV shows. They are right now, as we’re recording this, in the middle of their strike authorization vote. So by the time you’re listening to this, we’ll, we may know the outcomes of this vote. So we are living in the past and you don’t know what the results were. They would have to achieve 75% on that vote in order to –

**Craig:** Oh, they’re going to.

**John:** Go on strike.

**Craig:** They’re going to.

**John:** I think they’ll easily hit that number.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s not surprising.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** We got a lot of good emails in. I want to highlight one from Dan. Dan writes that creatives like Craig often approach production as a crunch time to power through, and I definitely am guilty of this versus like, okay, we just sort of head down to get through this. It’s going to be exhausting but we’ll get through it.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And Dan points out that it’s easy to forget that the trials in production are not a temporary situation for your crew. We spend far more time there than anywhere else in our lives. And so, what’s a crunch time for us is just normal time for them. That’s an interesting perspective that I hadn’t really considered.

**Craig:** Certainly coming from features, absolutely, I think, writers and directors do view production as here we go, and then it’s over. Whereas crews are doing all year round. Now, running a television show, I can tell you now this is my life.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it is –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s no specific end in sight. I mean, obviously, there is an end in sight. I just don’t want to see what it is, but point being, we’re gonna be in production for a long time. And so, I now feel that life and it becomes all the more important to make sure that people are being, at the minimum, not bullied and not pushed around and not made miserable and not treated poorly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And ideally treated well.

**John:** Yeah. Dan also points out that script coordinators and production office coordinators, who are also IATSE, they are paid so little compared to other folks on a set. And so, he’s saying he’s paid really well but other folks are not, especially office workers. And that the production office coordinator is not an entry-level job. A multi-million dollar production literally could not function in a day without them. And some of them are making less money than a retail clerk, and that we as a union have never stood up for them until now. So, hurray.

**Craig:** That is a great point. And one area to take a careful look at are the places that are controlled by the people who control budgets.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** The people who control budgets are always looking for places to save money. That’s their job, I suppose.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But there are jobs that people like you and me don’t see, for instance, production. I’m not in the production office, because I’m on set or I’m on location. And those jobs there, that’s areas where there can be situations like this where they’re just being underpaid, and that’s why a union is so essential.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I hope very much that IATSE gets what they want out of this and what they need. And I would say – I didn’t say this last week. I want to say it now. This is my weekly message to Carol Lombardini. Carol, you don’t want to let this genie out of the bottle. If IATSE strikes, now they know what it means to strike. And they’re gonna feel it. And that’s a taste that you can get real used to. The Writers Guild talks about striking every three years because we’re kind of a strike-y union. We haven’t struck a lot during my time and John’s time. We’ve only struck once during our time. But prior to that, we struck multiple times. There was a run in the ‘70s and ‘80s where we’re striking every couple of years, because we liked it. And you don’t want IATSE to get used to striking, Carol. Give them what they want. You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to go down this road. I know you don’t want to go down this road. You need to take care of them. Also, what they’re asking for is ultimately about what is morally correct. And I can easily make the argument why wealthy feature writers don’t deserve another penny on the DVDs or whatever. Harder to make any kind of moral argument against what IATSE is asking for, these are people who have put their hearts and souls into this, a lot of them as Dan writes in, are being paid barely anything. You got to give on this one. They’ve got to.

**John:** Yeah. As we acknowledged last week as well, if a strike happens, it won’t shut down all production because there are –

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There are some places working under a different contract. And so, they’re like, it’s going to be a weird situation because it’s not like the whole, everything shuts down. It’s like, everything shuts down on certain shows.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But some shows made for HBO and other places that are on different contracts, which feels like an extra strange place for the AMPTP because suddenly some of their members are like not hurting me. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

**Craig:** Yeah. And again, this I think we mentioned this last week, this is about Netflix. This is flat out about Netflix. The amount of production that Netflix funds, therefore the amount of employment for which they’re responsible is very outsized, compared to everyone else. And yeah, it’s gonna have to – it’s gonna have to get fixed.

**John:** Also, last week, we discussed a murder that took place in a small town in remote Australia. Jason from Brisbane, Australia wrote in to say, “I was excited to hear that you were discussing the Larrimah story for how this would be a movie, but I was surprised to hear you were citing a Medium article by an American writer. The story was covered and reported by two Australian writers, Caroline Graham and Kylie Stephenson. They created a great podcast that came out a few years back and have just released a book.” So we’ll put links to both of those resources in the show notes for this episode. I didn’t know that they had written it. Basically, I think my first exposure to this story came from a reader who sent in the link to this article, but it’s great that there were some people on the ground during that first person recording.

**Craig:** John, I think this makes you a bad person.

**John:** Aye, yeah. That’s a moral failing.

**Craig:** You’re bad.

**John:** Bad.

**Craig:** Shame.

**John:** Oh, but I don’t feel nearly as much shame as you should –

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Because we got another piece of follow up.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Really follow up about your criticism of the autumn season.

**Craig:** Here they come. Here they come.

**John:** Uh, Megana could you chime in here?

**Megana:** Yeah, so we got this really thoughtful feedback.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Megana:** Megana notes. “When we were –

**Craig:** Oh.

**Megana:** When we recorded our bonus segment on fall last episode, I was at a farmhouse in Maine and I was cold and hungry, and got distracted by the thought of sweaters and stew. I want to make clear that the reason I love fall is Halloween, and if there’s any marketing campaign to blame for the popularity of the season, let’s just say the call is from inside the house.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**Megana:** “When I was five years old, the Fox Family channel which then became ABC Family, and is now Freeform launched its 31 Nights of Halloween programming campaign. So each night in October, they play a family-friendly scary movie. That’s when I was introduced to some of my favorite movies like The Addams Family –“

**Craig:** Great movie.

**Megana:** “Hocus Pocus,”

**Craig:** Fun.

**Megana:** “Aliens,”

**Craig:** Scary.

**Megana:** “Ghostbusters,”

**Craig:** Amazing.

**Megana:** “And … the Corpse Bride.”

**Craig:** Never saw it.

**John:** Ah, I know that one.

**Megana:** “And guess who has a writing credit on the Corpse Bride, ring, ring, the prince of Halloween himself –“

**Craig:** Oh, lord.

**Megana:** “Mr. John August.”

**Craig:** Oh, my god.

**Megana:** “Also, guess what movies my brother would steal the remote and flip the channel to you?”

**Craig:** He sounds cool. Which ones?

**Megana:** “That’s right. Scary Movies 3 and 4.”

**Craig:** Okay, your brother is awesome.

**Megana:** “So I just want to point out that if any institution is to blame for the rise of Spooky Season, it is not CBS –“

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Megana:** “Not Nancy Meyers. It is in fact Scriptnotes.”

**Craig:** I –

**John:** Wow, I feel like the mirror was just turned like back on us and you recognize like we are the problem.

**Megana:** Yes.

**Craig:** And also, we’re the solution.

**John:** Maybe we should just surrender to Spooky Season and just say, like, you know what, it’s great. I actually never really mentioned you Yuck Someone’s Yum, if people like it, great. It’s just, I find it a little too much.

**Craig:** Yeah, I, I don’t, I like Halloween, you know, and I just don’t like the phrase Spooky Season actually. I think I like the idea of what Spooky Season represents. I just want a different name for it.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But I’m sure everybody else agreed with me, right Megana? No? What?

**Megana:** I just think it’s rich as the co-architects of the situation that we find ourselves in, you guys are all of a sudden bowing out of Spooky Season.

**John:** Okay, co-architect is probably overstating our role on this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As just –

**Craig:** Just a little bit.

**John:** As small day laborers on the project of creating the Halloween complex.

**Craig:** I was young, I needed the work.

**John:** And by the way, Craig was mocking the Halloween complex in those two movies.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s exactly correct.

**John:** And really, by the time it got to Scary Movies 3 and 4, they were barely about like, you know, Scary Movies at all.

**Craig:** Not at all.

**John:** Where they? They were basically just like pop-culture movies. I didn’t – I didn’t see them.

**Megana:** But they’re still played all October.

**Craig:** Yeah, we, we were – Scary Movie 4 is where the wheels started coming off because Bob Weinstein was fully raging. But on 3, we kind of kept it to the ring, which was, which was the Scary Movie.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** And Signs, which was sort of a scary movie, and Saw. Saw actually was 4.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** So Saw was scary. Yeah, but then it got stupid.

**John:** The Ring is such a genuinely scary movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s still really unsettling for me.

**Craig:** It’s terrific, excellent.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. All right, let’s get on to our craft topic this week.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** And so set up for this, Megana and I went down to Howard Rodman’s class at USC. He’s teaching a graduate screenwriting class, and once a year, I go down there and talk with him as they’re going through their index cards on their films. And so, basically, they’re laying out all their cards on a table, and then in about 10 minutes they’re sort of pitching me the story and sort of pointing to the cards and sort of show where they’re at. And it’s a good exercise. But before we started, I wanted to talk about sort of their backgrounds. And so, two of the six were actors. They had come from an acting background. So we were talking about the way in which actors approach characters versus how writers approach characters, because actors have a very different understanding of sort of their motivation with the scene, because they’re hopefully just thinking about where they are in that moment versus the writer thinks about that character over the course of the whole journey.

And that really is the same situation with index cards versus the script you’re writing, because these index cards are sort of like a roadmap for the story that you’re gonna be telling. And you’re really figuring out, like, “What is this map?” Like, “Where are we overall going?” But characters, of course, are never actually, on the whole journey. They’re just in one scene. And they don’t actually know this whole map. They don’t know what is happening around them. So it’s this weird thing that writers have to do where we have to know so much. And then at the same time, forget it all, when we actually start doing the work of writing scenes. And so for this segment, I want to talk about how important it is to forget what you need to forget, and some techniques for sort of doing all of that memory loss as you’re writing.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s a really good point. I’ve never thought of it this way. But that’s pretty much what’s going on. You have to know everything. And then you have to pretend you don’t know everything. One thing that actors do have to do is both be the person in the scene and also take care of certain technical aspects that they are aware, have everything to do with the artificial nature of making a movie or television show. They are being a person. Also, they need to hit their mark. And they need to put their eye line slightly off from where they think they should put it because the camera operators asked for that. And they have to remember to pick the thing up with their left hand at this word.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there is this weird melding of authenticity and absolute fakery. And –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We kind of do the same thing, but in a different way. We do it in terms of scope, what we know versus what they know.

**John:** And if we’re not doing that job properly, we’re gonna end up with characters who are functional, but not real. They’re gonna work like robots. They’re going to sort of do the job, maybe of like, moving a plot along, but they’re not going to feel real in those moments. And that’s really what I want to talk about is like how do you get them to do their jobs without sort of making it seem like they’re just doing their plot jobs? How do they do that artificial stuff, which is like picking up that prop at the right moment and make them feel like, well, that’s what they just wanted to do at that moment?

**Craig:** Yep, exactly.

**John:** So let’s talk through the things you need to forget, like things you know as a writer going into a scene. So you know the theme, you know the central dramatic question, you know what your movie is about, you know what your story is trying to tell, you know what you’re wrestling with. You know all the characters’ secrets, you know why they’re there, what they secretly want, what they could do if they could do anything, you know what happens next. And you know what happens in the scenes that those characters weren’t in. And so you know we’re all – how all the pieces fit together. And these other characters in the scene, they don’t even have a sense that there is a puzzle to be assembled. I got a puzzle reference in there.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Because they don’t know what – they don’t know what the shape of this whole thing is. They’re just like one little piece and then they have no sense. They actually have a function overall. So you have to know all these things. And then you have to kind of forget them.

**Craig:** Yeah, and part of creating the narrative and the – let’s call it the overall picture, the big meta story –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where you’re looking down like the dungeon master and you can see everything is –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You have to design your story in such a way that it is really interesting to view from very limited points of view.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If everybody can see everything, if it’s, if you’ve built a big open building of story, and everybody sees everything, then it’s gonna be boring. There’s gonna be very little conflict. Mostly everybody will agree that they see what they see. They know what they know. And now what should we do?

But the more you design a funhouse for your characters, where they are seeing optical illusions, where they’re seeing things that make them think x, but truthfully, it’s y, and then we get to see them discover that it’s y, this is the fun. This is the fun part. This is the puzzle part. Everybody inside of your narrative should be able to see only what you want them to see. And what you want them to see should be very purposeful. It can’t just be what they happen to see. You get to shape things so that perhaps they get fooled, and the audience gets fooled.

**John:** Absolutely. And of course, that audience is the third important character here, because the audience is approaching any of these stories with a set of expectations. They have a sense of like what they think is going to happen next. They have information that the characters in the scene don’t have. And so, you’re always remembering as the writer is like, okay, the audience knows this piece of information, so therefore, I don’t want this character to say the same again because they already know it. So you’re always balancing, you know, where your audience is at versus where your character is at versus where you know the story as a whole needs to go. So you’re doing a lot of juggling here. And that’s why I’m just urging people to do is to do as much as you can just sort of forget that you’re juggling and just really experience this from inside the character’s point of view so that it feels alive and natural.

As I was looking at these index cards, they’re all laid on tables, that really was the god’s eye view. And I was trying to mostly focus on, is the shape of the story interesting. Are we actually moving from one interesting place to another interesting place to a new place? Does it feel like we’re progressing through time, through different locations that we’re actually on a journey that’s going to be meaningful, but the same time I wanted to be able to focus down and look at, like, this index card, this scene, is that going to be interesting? Is it gonna be interesting to watch as an audience? Would it be interesting for the characters who are in that moment? And you have to be able to do that macro and that micro looking at the same time when you’re thinking about the big stories. Like, it’s great to like lay out, you know, oh, this would be an epic journey. But are you creating an epic journey that’s going to have space for those fascinating moments inside them?

**Craig:** Yeah. Are you using your index cards to find your story? Or have you found your story and you’re just putting them on index cards? That’s what you ought to be doing. Because if you think your index cards are going to teach you what to do, you’re going to end up with a whole lot of index cards that suck. The work has to be done before you get the Sharpie out.

**John:** Yeah. So what can be useful about the index cards is like I don’t tend to card out a lot of things. But what can be useful about them is recognize that you just have too many beats or that you’re sort of doing the same thing too often, or if you stayed in the same place a little too long; that you need to keep moving. If there’s too many scenes that are kind of doing the same thing, great that you’re noticing this now before you’ve written those scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s a good organizational tool for sure. But when you have index cards, like John is looking at these index cards, and he picks up one of them and he goes, “Well, this one seems not quite interesting. It seems a little bit boring,” there is a big problem underneath that. Every person – every problem is a big problem in a story, when it comes down to story. If you’re looking at index cards, then the human being on the table is completely opened up. You’re looking at organs and bones.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If an organ is in the wrong place, it’s not just, oh, let’s move it over here. There’s something fundamentally not correct because the index cards and those beats should be a function of what your characters want, and should be a function of what your characters know versus what you want them to know or where you want them to be. Or, I really want a scene where this thing happens. If you ever say, I really want a scene where blankety blank happens, just stop, go for a walk, come back, and then think about what would be better for your characters instead of you, if that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah, and that overview thing actually come into play with one story I was looking at, and the writer pitched and did a good job pitching. But I said, “Okay, I’m looking at your cards, your story actually starts here. And I think you need to lose the first 11 cards and actually start your story here. Because you and I both believe in a first act that does a lot of work. But that first act was not doing the work to tell the rest of the story. And the actual interesting moment happened here. And you could have to start the story here and it be much more fascinating to learn about these characters in the middle of this crisis, rather than 30 pages, 30 minutes of other stuff, which is not actually going to pay off in the course of the movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s the reason why you do these cards is because you recognize, oh, I shouldn’t even write that stuff because that’s not actually going to help me tell the story that I want to tell.

**Craig:** Not necessarily good news here for those of you listening to the podcast, simply hearing us say this is not going to help you do it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You kind of just need to know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you won’t know perfectly at first. The more you do it, the better you get at it, until eventually you absolutely know. But it takes time and experience. So just remember as you go through this and we’re talking about what you should and shouldn’t do, you’re going to do a lot of the things that we would look at –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And say, “You shouldn’t have done that,” because we’ve been doing it for 30 freakin’ years, and you maybe haven’t been.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s totally normal.

**John:** Well, let’s focus now on that you’ve done your outline. And now it’s time to actually work on your script, and you’re in a scene. And let’s talk about how you forget all the other stuff you know when you’re in that scene. For me, and we’ve talked a lot about writing process, I need to sort of physically or sort of mentally place myself in that scene, in that location where the things are happening, look around and see what’s there and really center myself in the middle of that action, and not be thinking about, like, what just happened, or what’s happened next. It’s like what is happening in this space, who’s there, what do they want to do, who’s driving the scene and really feel that I’m live there in that moment. Because that’s going to keep me from wandering off and thinking about other moments ahead in the story or behind the story, and really focus on what wants to happen in this scene itself.

**Craig:** It’s essential. I’m a huge believer in the visual imagination of the space. I need to know what it looks like. I need to know how close they are together. I need to know if the lights are on or off. If there’s a fire in the fireplace, if it’s warm, if it’s hot, what are they wearing? And then, of course, I need to know what they want. And then I really try as best I can to imagine this conversation between two people and include all of the wonderful irregularities that happen between two people when they’re having a conversation. It’s weird. It’s awkward. There are stops and starts. There’s confusions. There is mistakes. We make conversational mistakes all the time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And most importantly, reaction. In your mind, as you’re imagining a scene, try and keep your eye on the person listening, not the person talking. And at that point, once you go forward, never stop asking this question, “What would a human being do here?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And what would this specific human being do in the context of what she or he wants?

**John:** Yeah. And so crucially, you’re asking that question, while at the same time half remembering and half forgetting what they actually – what you actually need them to do. And so, part of your job as the writer is to find ways to tilt your world so that they will make the choice that you need them to make, so that you can get to the next thing you need in their story. And it’s how you do that without feeling the author’s hand doing that, that makes a scene successful. That it achieves both the dramatic purpose within the scene; that it feels real within that moment. And it also gets you to that next scene, to that next moment that you need to have happen in your story based on your overall outline, your overall plan for it. That’s the challenge is that you’re constantly balancing this need for things to feel incredibly real. And the characters have agency and they’re making their own choices. That it’s not predestined. And yet –

**Craig:** It’s predestined.

**John:** They will. It’s predestined, because –

**Craig:** Well, yeah.

**John:** you are god, and you are setting sort of what is happening in this world.

**Craig:** That’s what we do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the trick of it all, the whole thing. Tchaikovsky definitely wanted to blow some cannons off at the end of the 1812 Overture. And he did, and I’m happy he did.

**John:** He would say, “Wouldn’t it be cool,” he’s like, “It’d really be cool if I shot, shot some cannons.”

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** But then then he walked away and thought about it.

**Craig:** Right, and then he was like, okay, I think what I need to do is think about the voices in the conversation and what would need to happen. If that is the eventuality, how does that become meaningful? How does it become this gorgeous eventuality that we didn’t see coming, but once it happens, we go, of course, everything has led to this moment. And all of the stuff before it makes the cannons good. The cannons aren’t good because their cannons. The cannons are good because of all the stuff that wasn’t cannons.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And that is why every screenwriter should listen very carefully to the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky not only because it’s amazing, but it’s also quite brief.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it is the closest you can get to two or three people talking in a room. That’s called three or four people –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Talking without anyone talking. And in fact, it’s all music. It’s wonderful.

**John:** Absolutely. Now, getting back to our techniques for forgetting. So you’re in the middle of a scene and how do you forget what needs to happen in the scene so it feels you’re germane for like the characters in that moment. Make sure you’re looking at one character’s want. Make sure you’re looking – either one character’s want needs to be driving the scene. An external pressure needs to be driving the scene. Some point of conflict need to be driving the scene. Because if nothing is driving the scene other than you as the writer need to get this piece of information out or need to connect these two pieces, we’re going to feel it. And we do feel it. And we can all think of examples of TV shows or movies we’ve watched where like, “Hey, that scene is just to connect these two things and it doesn’t serve a purpose,” you avoid that by actually setting yourself in that moment and really looking at like, what would this moment actually be rather than what you functionally need it to do.

**Craig:** That’s exactly correct.

**John:** Yeah. And stay curious. And just like I – some of my favorite scenes are the ones where I didn’t quite know what was going to happen. I knew sort of what needed to happen, but I really had no idea how it was going happen and I just let the characters start moving around and doing things. And sometimes they’re doing that and I’m sort of looping through my head. Sometimes it was like, as I was writing and a character said something or did something, I was, well, that surprised me. But if it surprises me, then it probably surprises the audience. And that moment suddenly feels more real. So just stay curious about these things that don’t follow your outline so methodically that it’s just doing the functional job it needs to do.

**Craig:** Yeah, try and apply the art of imperfection so that your characters aren’t speechifying, their lines aren’t perfectly formed, brilliantly clever, right on the heels of each other. We’ve all seen scenes like this –

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Where you might walk away thinking, well, how arch and interesting those two humans were, except that they don’t seem like humans at all, do they? They seem like two, I don’t know, Dorothy Parkers locked in a battle of overly-witted wits. We don’t want that. We want real people. And I’m mostly interested in what real people think and do and vulnerability, and make sure that you allow yourself to have your character sound or behave or act wrong, which is how we do it.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Because they don’t know they’re being filmed. They don’t know that they’re, that everyone is watching them do it. And that’s part of the joy of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. They also may not be brilliant at talking. They may sneeze in the middle of it. They may eat something weird. They may drop something. They may start laughing at a moment they shouldn’t be laughing. These are the things you want to think about. How can I just take all the weird artificial polish off of this and make it real.

**John:** And my last bit of advice, if you find yourself grinding ahead and you recognize, I just can’t, I can’t be thinking about the scene just as a scene and I’m only looking at it in the context of the movie, try writing the scene in a blank document. So try like not make it the next scene that you’re writing if you’re writing chronologically for fitting between two things, try just letting the scene be the moment itself and just start it in a blank document. Let it be its own thing, and then copy/paste it back into the document, your overall script. Yeah, you might need to tweak some things to get the transition and hand off to work. But I suspect you’re gonna have a better scene that feels real to itself if, you know, let that scene not have to squeeze in the middle of a long document you’re scrolling through.

**Craig:** Copypasta.

**John:** Copypasta, love it. Cool. So now we can forget everything we just talked about in terms of how to forget.

**Craig:** Great. Gone.

**John:** Let’s ask some listener questions. Megana, what do you have for us?

**Megana:** Great. So our first question comes from Gary, who asks, “Do you think that the lighting in the room where you’re writing affects your writing?”

**Craig:** No. Easy. No.

**John:** No. I think it does some. It depends on what I’m working on. I do like sometimes to be in an environmental space that actually kind of feels like what I’m writing. And so, if I’m writing something sort of dark and spooky, it’s kind of nice to have the lights be a little bit low. And something sort of creepy playing in the background. I often have like a playlist that sort of gets me into the mood for it. But I try not to be so, you know, freaky about it. Because I think you can so often make those excuses for like, oh, I couldn’t write today because the light was coming in the window wrong. No, you just move a little bit, just get the writing done.

**Craig:** The lighting in the room where I’m writing is the light that’s hitting me off of my laptop. That’s the lighting. It doesn’t matter, bright light, dark, whatever. It’s not to say that some people will be lighting-dependent. We’re all different. But for me, nah.

**John:** When I was finishing off work on the first Arlo Finch book, I was in France during a super heatwave, and I was writing these really cold wintry scenes and we were in this apartment without air conditioning, and we were just melting. And so, what I would do is I would play these – YouTube has these like these 12-hour tracks of like the environmental noises, and I played like this winter storm in my headphones. And it helped me sort of kind of feel cold and in that moment, even though I was in absolutely sweltering heat. So I think it can be good to trick yourself to some degree and sort of remember the environment your characters are in but it’s used for yourself. But no. Don’t freak out about your lighting.

**Craig:** Next, Megana.

**Megana:** Love Lauren from LA asks, “I received an email from a very big manager last week.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Megana:** “He said he enjoyed my work sent to him by a mutual connection and would like to help bring new opportunities to me. What exactly does this mean? And how should I respond? I can already hear Craig chuckling at my naiveté. I’m young with only a few years of experience on a small TV show. I’ve never had a rep and most of his clients are seasoned award winners. Eons ago in Episode Two, you mentioned managers help develop young talent. Is that what this is about? And if so, what does that entail?”

**Craig:** I’m not chuckling at your naiveté.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I am chuckling at you thinking I would chuckle at you. You don’t sound naive at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You actually sound very – normally what we get is, “I received an email from a very big manager’s brother’s niece and she said that, you know, he really liked the title that I told him that you wrote. Am I now an A-list writer?” You know, like, this is the opposite. And here’s somebody that’s working as a working writer with – I like that this particular person says only a few years of experience. So years of experience.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And somebody is showing interest in you. It’s quite likely that the big manager would not be your personal manager, if that’s where you are in your career. But big managers tend to employ other managers at their firms. And those managers are looking to develop younger talent. Of course, they are. If you don’t develop younger talent, then eventually you just become like the manager of very old people who proceed inexorably toward the grave. So –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I would actually respond and say it would, it would be wonderful to sit down and discuss how can we do that.

**John:** I a hundred percent agree with Craig. And this is only good news. So this manager reached out to you and this wasn’t you who sent it into a manager. And he says, like, whenever somebody reaches out to you because they read your stuff that you didn’t even send to them, that’s really good news. Good things could happen and come from that. So yes, follow up with that. Go in there and see what they’re saying. And it sounds like you don’t have anybody repping you at all right now, this could be a situation that you get a new rep.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** You should.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** Yeah. Megana, what else we got?

**Megana:** Half of One writer asks, “My writing partner and I have a question about WGA insurance minimums. Currently, a writer has to earn $40,854 a year to receive insurance. This means that if we get paid $44,000 for a treatment, or a non-original screenplay, we don’t qualify for insurance, because we only get $22,000 each. When it comes to paying us, we’re each treated as a half of a writer. But when it comes to insuring us, we have to make twice what a single writer would in order to qualify, which doesn’t seem totally logical or fair. I know the WGA has taken strides to improve the minimums for writing partnerships. But to be honest, we’re less concerned about that than not getting shut out of basic healthcare because we didn’t make twice as much as our non-partnered writer friends. Is there anything we can do about that?”

**John:** So, yes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you’re experiencing is a very real thing which I’ve heard for 20 years, and it sucks. And we’re the only sort of industry – I guess, there are some director teams that could hit this, but like, we’re the only part of this industry that tends to have a lot of teams, and teams split the money. And because they split the money, they fall below what they need to do to hit insurance. I know of married writer teams who will very cleverly divide the money in certain ways so that one of them gets coverage, and then the other one gets spousal coverage. There’s ways to do it. But what you’re describing is real, and it sucks. And often entering into fee negotiations, we’ve brought up partner issues and how we’re going to deal with this. And this is one of the things that does come up. To change this so that so writing teams can qualify for insurance at a lower level, or that they both can receive it, it’s theoretically possible. It’s just a matter of making that a priority in negotiations. And we’ll see if it can happen.

**Craig:** So here’s the issue. The issue is we have to pay for our own healthcare. When we say we have to pay for it, the companies are adding money in. But that’s the money we get. And the amount of money that the companies put in for the $40,854 minimum is not enough to cover a single writer’s health insurance for the year. Happily, we have lots of writers that make more than that. The people that earn much more are helping subsidize the people who earn less, and that’s a nice union benefit. If there are two of you together earning, let’s say, as you put $44,000, the problem is our joint health plan that is run by the Writers Guild and the companies together, they don’t even get enough money from that for one person, much less two. So the problem is simple math. And you’re absolutely right. It totally sucks. And this is one of the reasons why our entire healthcare system is failing everyone. And our negotiations have been essentially perverted for the last 20 years by this endlessly escalating series of healthcare costs. This is all we end up being able to ask for. And even though it does seem unfair, our system is vastly better than what the average American gets from their job, or from the government. So there’s really no answer here. The companies are not going to allow two people who are making a combined $44,000 and they’re not going to go for it.

**John:** The joint organization that runs our health plan, they’re not going to drop that thing because they probably couldn’t.

**Craig:** And I got news for you, we’re not going to ask for it either because we don’t want it. And this is the hard part. The Writers Guild doesn’t want to ask for that because if that happens, we will put ourselves, our health plan, in such a situation where we will really be in trouble. And then we’re gonna have to come back and give away more things that we want in exchange for just shoring up that part, and the healthcare overall will suffer dramatically. What we have to really watch out for these paper teams, those are vicious, where production companies put two writers together and force them to be a team, and then pay them this lower team amount, which is unacceptable. But unfortunately, half of one writer, I’m giving you the cold truth here, I don’t think this is going to change. And so, you and your writing partner need to concentrate on getting that number up, because that’s the only way you’re going to get there.

**John:** Yeah, so the two things you can do are get more money, just get yourself paid more so you’re both over that threshold and push for better healthcare system in the United States, because that’s really, that’s ultimately what’s underlying all of this is because everything that talks about sort of union healthcare is really because we don’t have a sensible system in the United States.

**Craig:** Yeah, in terms of probable outcomes, vastly more likely that you will just go ahead and make more money than fix what appears to be an unfixable system. So, yeah, sorry about that. But alas.

**John:** Any new questions on it, on down note, but thank you for everyone who sends me questions. We’ve got a whole big batch of them. So next week, we’ll try to crank through a bunch more.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s come time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I have two little things here. The first is a thread By Dylan Park, which I’m sure you saw, Craig.

**Craig:** I did.

**John:** Dylan was staffed on a military show, along with this other veteran, and this woman served in Afghanistan, had this amazing experience. And so, Dylan was brought in as a military expert, but this woman was like way ahead of him in a lot of levels. And then he started to suspect that she was not who she said she was. And so, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But I’ll put a link in the show notes to the thread, because it’s a very good read. It’s not Zola, but it’s a very good read.

**Craig:** Yeah, I loathe people who steal valor, that’s the phrase.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Stolen valor, they’re immoral. That is a deeply scummy thing to do. And I have no sympathy for anyone who does it. It’s hard for me to celebrate somebody ruining somebody else, even if he doesn’t use her name.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I mean, he could have just had one thing. I was on a show. And a lady came in and claimed to be this. And in fact, she was never even in the service. And don’t do that because I have been in service and we don’t do that. And here’s why it’s important to not do that. But the whole thing was sort of like, okay, here we go. I’m going to – and it was that there was a sort of sadistic delight in tearing her apart, which, you know, I don’t know, I just find hard to kind of – I don’t delight in those, I guess, as maybe I should.

**John:** Yes, I get that too. And I don’t think I was feeling like a celebration of this. But I know how frustrating it would be to be in that room with that person all the time, who you know you can’t trust and I feel like that writers’ room is a place of trust. And to have to be sitting next to this person who you just did not believe at all, I get why he was so frustrated.

**Craig:** Oh, completely and, and I mean no offense to Mr. Park, because he’s not – I’m not accusing him of doing anything wrong. It’s just a question of, I suppose do you like that sort of thing or not, but I completely agree. And pathological liars are a massive problem in Hollywood. We deal with them all the time. I am really – so I’m a fairly gullible person actually. I’ve had this happen a number of times where I’ve been talking to somebody and I’ve just been describing somebody else’s behavior and been so befuddled by it, and I can’t, I’m, you know me, I love puzzles and like the puzzle is not working, I don’t understand it. And they just look at me and they’re like, “They’re on drugs idiot, or they’re lying.” And I’m like, “What? Oh.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So –

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Oh. And so the thought that somebody would do this is just mind boggling. I don’t know if you saw this on the similar category of sociopathic people, a woman posed as an ASL translator.

**John:** Oh, God.

**Craig:** Did you see this?

**John:** No, I didn’t see this, but I know it. I know how awful it is.

**Craig:** It’s incredible.

**John:** I can feel it. It’s just – so cringe, oh, my god.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s super cringe. So she went – she volunteered her services to a police department actually.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they were like, “Oh, okay.” I mean, she wasn’t asking for money. And they had a conference about something and there she was off in the corner signing and basically quite a few people who speak American Sign Language wrote in to say that she was not speaking ASL at all. She was just gibberishing. And what did she think would happen? And similarly with this woman who was posing as this super soldier who had served in Afghanistan, what did she think would happen? I mean, you can’t get away with this stuff. I mean, I’m on it. See? There, I’m gullible. I guess people do get away with it.

**John:** Catherine Tate, a great British actress has a character who is that sort of like falsely confident person. Like, “Oh, I’m great at tennis,” and they’ll hit and that like she can’t play tennis at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s exactly that feeling. It’s like, “Oh, I know a little of this,” like, no, you should not be doing this, and, uh, the worst.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**John:** My other small One Cool Thing is an article by Amy Hoy called How Blogs Broke the Web.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm, was it on her blog?

**John:** You and I both had blogs.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you and – I think we started – were you in WordPress originally or were you in Movable Type?

**Craig:** I started in Movable Type. And then I went to WordPress.

**John:** Yeah, as did I. And the early days of the internet, we think about blogs, but there was a stage before that. So I’ll put a link in the show notes to my 1996 website. And so this article is really talking about sort of how websites originally like not time-based. They weren’t sort of that reverse chronological thing that blogs did.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** And but because the blogging systems became so popular, everything became a blog, because that was just the easy way to do it. And they all had that reverse chronological flow. And all of the internet sort of started to follow that. Because when you and I were first reading the Trades Online, it was Hollywood Reporter and Variety, and they were like the print versions. But then Deadline came along, and it was just a blog. And now it’s still just a blog. It’s still that reverse chronological flow the same way that Twitter is, the same way that Instagram is. And so, she makes a very interesting case for a weird kind of fluke of history that this blogging stuff came along and really changed the shape of like how personal news is delivered.

**Craig:** Yeah, it did break every – everything has broken everything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The web has broken everything, which is I think, what we’re getting into on our bonus segment, so I don’t want to, I don’t want to give anything away there. But yeah, you know what, the theory was great. Everybody gets a printing press in their own home. The result was an enormous amount of narcissistic horseshit in newspaper format. And it hasn’t changed. It was like, you know, when we were kids, did you know anybody that kept a diary when you were a kid?

**John:** I did not know a single person.

**Craig:** Like diaries were plot points on bad TV shows like, “Oh, my god, you read my diary,” like on The Brady Bunch, whatever. But I didn’t know anybody who kept a diary. And the reason people generally don’t keep diaries except for a very select few is no one is reading it. So you’re writing this description of yourself for nobody except yourself, which I guess is vaguely weirdly romantic or sad. But the purpose of the blogs was, oh, good, now everyone will read it. And it was all the same crap. You know what else is the same, every single day, John?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Deathloop.

**John:** Ah, good segue there. Nicely done. I mean, for an amateur that was a really good segue.

Because I know that Deathloop is basically Groundhog Day with a body cam.

**Craig:** And yet so much more.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Deathloop is a new game out by Bethesda. It’s specifically, well Bethesda is this publisher. It’s Arkane, the company that made the Dishonored games which I love. And I love Deathloop also. If the folks who made Deathloop are listening, I’m thrilled with this game. I think it’s incredibly – it’s so much more than the concept of, oh, it’s the same day every day, because that’s not what’s happening. In fact, everything you do changes what happens on the next time you wake up again. So you are constantly changing the world that you keep waking up in on that same day, but it may be – I learned a word, onboarding. So onboarding –

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the process of teaching people how to play your game and teaching people what the mechanics of it are and how to manage their resources and what things mean is really bad, I’ve got to say, I had no idea what the hell was going on for so long. And I finally just read a bunch of articles on the internet and go, oh, that’s what that is. It’s really bad. But once you know what it is, and you’ve read the articles on the internet, so boo on that front to Arkane and Bethesda, it’s amazing. So I love Deathloop. Excellent game. I’m currently playing it on the PlayStation 5. It looks gorgeous.

**John:** Yeah, it doesn’t exist on PlayStation 4, which is all I have.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** But maybe I’ll get a 5 at some point.

**Craig:** I think it’s time for a 5, John.

**John:** Maybe, maybe.

**Craig:** No. Definitely.

**John:** If I sell. If I sell something, I’ll buy that 5.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Inaudible.

**Craig:** What are you? Are you out of money?

**John:** I’m running really low here. So if you want to chip in some inaudible I’m good.

**Craig:** “If I sell something.”

**John:** No, I’m kind of –

**Craig:** Megana is going to get to work and her desk is gone.

**John:** She can pick it up the pawnshop.

**Craig:** Yeah. “Um, sorry, I needed a PlayStation 5. Sorry, Megana.”

**John:** And that is our show for this week.

Scriptnotes is produced by Megan Rao, is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Owen Danoff. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin sometimes, and I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find that at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up and become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the once we’re about to record on Fame.

Hey, Craig, I made it all the way through the podcast without losing my voice and I think my voice is actually stronger now than at the start.

**Craig:** Cut to: Oh, my god.

**John:** Thanks.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. This article is by Chris Hayes that we’re talking about. It’s from the New Yorker. On the Internet We’re Always Famous. What Happens When the Experience of Celebrity Becomes Universal? So this touches on a bunch of things. It never uses the word parasocial, but parasocial is part of that. It’s looking at sort of how once upon a time there were famous people and not famous people, but the boundaries between them are so much blurrier now. A normal person can become Internet famous all of the sudden. Things kind of suck. Craig, what were your takeaways from this article? What were you feeling as you were reading this?

**Craig:** This was characteristically brilliant from Chris Hayes. He’s a very smart guy. And I’m particularly pleased to see this work written this way just because he’s mostly known for being a talking head on TV. And so you would think, well, the talking head on TV would probably be in favor of talking head stuff. Nothing wrong with being – he’s an excellent talking head on TV. But this is a really well done piece. And it gets to the heart of something that I think is fascinating and important and I don’t know what to do about it and I think he doesn’t know either. Because by the time you get to the end of this I was not feeling hopeful.

And what he gets to is the heart of the fame problem which is that more and more people now can be famous, whether it’s famous briefly or not. But fame, which we always wanted to be a function of recognition, that is to say wide-ranged respect and acknowledgment and like has to turned instead into attention, which is just people staring at you and talking about you. And that is very different. And that so much of the dysfunction that goes on with a lot of the people that we see who are “Internet famous” is the dysfunction of people who are desperate for recognition and receiving instead only attention.

**John:** Yeah. I’m reading a book right now by Jenny O’Dell called How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. And she writes a lot about attention and really interesting phrasing that you say you pay attention to something, and really you do have to pay attention. Attention has a cost. And you are constantly deciding where you’re going to chip in those little dimes of attention and feed those meters to pay attention to a thing. Because also anything you’re paying attention to is by definition you’re not paying attention to other things around you. And so we’ve created this system in which we are constantly being asked to focus on this thing, this person, follow these people who we don’t know in real life, and we’ve created this situation where we’re just kind of functional rather than actual active participants in our lives.

It kind of goes back to our discussion of the note cards, the index cards, because it’s like we just have – we’re these characters who have a function. We’re supposed to be watching this thing, doing this thing, responding to this thing, being outraged by this thing and not being present in the moment that we actually are living in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I have enjoyed withdrawing from that for sure. But there is an interesting aspect of let’s just call it slightly famous. You and I, whether we like it or not, are slightly famous.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And there’s something that Chris says here because he’s also – well he’s famous-famous I would think. He’s not Brad Pitt. So he says, this actually kind of shooketh me as the kids say, I was shooketh. It says, “The star and the fan are prototypes and the Internet allows us to be both in different contexts. In fact, this is the core transformative innovation of social media. The ability to be both at once. You can interact with strangers, not just view them from afar, and they can interact with you. Those of us who have a degree of fame have experienced the lack of mutuality in these relationships quite acutely. The strangeness of encountering a person who knows you, who sees you, whom you cannot see in the same way…”

And what he goes on to say is we’re conditioned as human beings to care for people who care for us. That is the sign of a relationship. But one of the things that the Internet does or being on a podcast or anything is it creates these one-way relationships. So that when you do meet people and they have a response my feeling is always, I mean, it is this weird disorientation of feeling like I should be caring as much as they do, and yet how could I, I don’t know them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I become very awkward and I guess in a sense that’s probably good news because his argument is that for a lot of people the psychological experience of fame he says “like a virus invading a cell takes all of the mechanisms for human relations and puts them to work seeing more fame.” So that’s a terrifying thought.

**John:** It is. He also mentions that a basketball player like Kevin Durant can have an argument in DMs with just some rando. And they’re sort of on equal footing in that conversation which is just weird. It’s one thing to sort of put someone on blast in public which I think is a real problematic thing, but the fact that why are you spending your time talking to this person who you don’t know at all and there’s just a real imbalance. And it’s not necessarily in Kevin Durant’s favor for him to being that.

It is really strange. And at the same time I want to acknowledge that you and I with our little bit of fame, we know how useful it is at times. And so there have definitely been cases where like, oh, I want to ask this person to be on Scriptnotes. I know that if I follow that person on Twitter, if I were to decide to click the follow button they will get a notification that John August is following them. And they will click through and see who I am and they will probably follow me back and then I can DM them.

Is it a little bit weird? Yeah. But that’s just sort of the time that we’re in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t like it. I don’t. I definitely want people to see the things that I make. And I like that people listen to this show. I certainly don’t hold it against anybody or blame anybody for having what Megana has introduced us to is a parasocial relationship with you or with me. But it makes me uncomfortable because I feel accountable and responsible for other people’s feelings and there’s no possible way for me to be accountable or responsible to them. It’s just I’m not equipped to do it.

And I always feel bad in a way like I’m not enough, like if I meet somebody and they feel very strongly about – because they’re a big fan of the show or something and I’m always like, oh, thank you. And I just think you’re blowing it. You’re not saying anything good.

**John:** That’s the experience of Austin Film Festival to the hundredth degree.

**Craig:** Like what I do say here to be awesome? And I don’t know.

**John:** There’s a project I’m considering taking and doing, which is fascinating. It’s this thing I would like to do on many levels, but I am always weighing like, ugh, that is going to be a news story when I do it. And I can already feel what the Internet is going to say. And that sucks that my emotional and artistic decisions are all affected by what I think the Internet is going to say about it. And that is dumb, but it is the reality.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s certainly there. It’s a fear that never used to exist. I think that there have been some nice aspects of that fear. I think it’s probably people used to cavalierly do things that maybe they, you know, after reflection perhaps I’m not the right person to be writing this story or that story. But it is a fear. I mean, look, I’m adapting The Last of Us. The videogame community is not shy. They love and hate in equal parts and with equal abandon, which the love part is the wonderful part. And of course when I was talking with Neil Druckmann about adapting the show I felt the fear of what would be some anger and judgment. No matter what you do somebody is going to not like it, of course. You try and do the best you can. But you also don’t want to keep the Internet’s emotional state as the number one thing you’re taking care of.

The number one thing you should take care of is the work. And then people hopefully will love it. So my advice to you – if you were calling into the show I would say you must do the thing you’re afraid of. You must.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because you don’t want the Internet to win. And also the most important thing is it seems worse than it is. I feel like what happens is we read things and we think that everybody out there is like Alexander Hamilton writing at night like he’s running out of time. And writing these beautiful things like I have the honor to be your obedient servant letters. But here’s why you’re awful. But in fact they’re just smashing their fingers against a keyboard, very briefly, and immediately forgetting what they wrote and did. They’re on to the next thing. It was a nothing moment for them. They did not put a lot of time and thought into it. They’re just shit-posting.

And we can’t tell the difference on our side between the shit posts and the people who legitimately are deeply and perhaps aggrieved. So I would say to you you must do it.

**John:** Yes. The cave you fear to enter holds the answers you seek.

**Craig:** Yes. All right. Megana, do you have a sense of anybody having, now that you are on the show, you talk on the show, do you feel like people have parasocial relationships with you and how do you handle – have you had some fame moments?

**Megana:** I have had people say that they have heard my voice before. But I do not feel comfortable in a role where people recognize me necessarily.

**Craig:** Join the club. I’m right there with you. Which is probably, I don’t want to make a moral judgment about it, but it does feel like seeking fame for fame sake is the sign that something is wrong.

**Megana:** Yeah. And something I’m curious to hear you guys talk about is just like as writers I think it’s so important to have a private life and your private self and to really protect that. And I think for younger writers it seems like there’s a lot of pressure to be on Twitter and to have a really recognizable brand and voice. And it’s just confusing to me how to maintain like a public self and a private self with like nuance complicated feelings that I’d like to put into art and not constantly be generating content with.

**Craig:** Well, you said an interesting thing there which is a lot of people have their own brand now. But I do feel like that is almost counter to what it means to be a writer, to make yourself the thing and not the work the thing. There are some screenwriters that come along and feel a bit branded and they don’t seem to last. The ones who do the work seem to last. And I’m always going to counsel people to put the work first. And if the Internet feels like it’s getting in the way, if social media feels like it’s getting in the way, and if you feel suddenly like you need to be a kind of a person to get noticed or to be talked about then it’s time to step away. Because nothing will matter like a good script.

**John:** Circling back to the note card conversation, we were at this class at USC and they knew who I was coming into it, but they also knew who Megana was because they listen to the show. And that’s just an interesting moment because Megana is a more public voice on the show than any of the previous producers have been and that is interesting. They knew who she was.

**Craig:** It’s the dawning of the age of Megana.

**John:** That’s really what it is.

**Megana:** Well, it’s people saying that they’ve heard my voice before, but not necessarily that they like it. And so–

**Craig:** What? No.

**Megana:** It’s like when someone is like, oh, you got a haircut. And it’s like, yes, I did. Do you feel good about it? I feel OK about it.

**Craig:** Oh, I see what you’re saying. They simply say, ah yes, you are on the show. I have heard you. And then they don’t say, “And you’re great.” Or “I love you.” But this is exactly what Chris Hayes is talking about. You didn’t ask for that.

**Megana:** Or that I’m being rewired to just seek fame.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s exactly what’s happening. People start to rewire you and you begin to try and change your, OK, give them what they want. You know? You used to cook for yourself and people just showed up and started eating what you were cooking. And then suddenly everyone was getting angry at you about the burritos. Instead they were super into whatever the soup. And you’re like why am I caring?

**John:** Yeah. And it’s the same thing with Instagram or anything where you can generate likes is like, oh, which version of me tests the best and that becomes the version you post for.

**Craig:** Oh, my sinking heart.

**Megana:** Can I propose an antidote, because this is also something that I took umbrage with earlier in the show? As a lifelong diary-keeper I think it’s a helpful way to maintain that boundary and maintain a solid public self that–

**Craig:** You’re the weirdo. You’re the one that does it. [laughs]

**Megana:** I know. You just kept going on like weird, freak, yeah.

**Craig:** Bizarre. Probably not a real person.

**John:** Well, and to be fair though there’s always been a gendered quality to diaries.

**Megana:** Today.

**John:** It’s always been a thing that girls do. And even the little gay boys like me, not all of us kept diaries.

**Craig:** Wait, is that a little gay boy thing to do is to keep a diary?

**John:** It’s a little gay boy thing to do.

**Craig:** Is it like that, oh my god, do you know what – I still sometimes will watch just when I’m feeling a little bit low and I want to smile is the Saturday Night Live commercial with the well.

**Megana:** Wells for Boys.

**Craig:** Oh my god, the Wells for Boys is so freaking great.

**John:** Ingenious.

**Craig:** It’s so good. Everything else is for you. This is for him.

**John:** Back to your diary though, because what I think I hear you saying is that lets you actually articulate your thoughts that you would not actually share publically.

**Megana:** Correct. And work out things that feel messy that I think some people who don’t have that outlet turn to Twitter for.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** OK, well you made an excellent point. And I would definitely say that if there’s a choice between Q-testing and perfecting your brand on Twitter to get the most hearts, which infuse no actual love into your life, or writing a diary that no one else reads but you, I strongly would say definitely go diary. So, I’m with you on that. That makes a lot of sense.

**John:** Do what Megana says.

**Megana:** I have successfully changed Craig’s mind.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Again. This season of Scriptnotes is all about Craig’s changing. I like that for us.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think only Megana changes me. [laughs]

**John:** True. That’s fine. Maybe that was the missing thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** She is the antagonist to your protagonist.

**Craig:** Whatever studio executive says it sounds reasonable. That’s totally reasonable. Makes sense. Yeah.

**John:** Thank you both.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks. Bye guys.

**Megana:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scarlett Johanssen and Disney Reach Agreement](https://deadline.com/2021/09/disney-black-widow-lawsuit-scarlett-johansson-rsettlement-1234847437/)
* [CAA Acquires ICM](https://deadline.com/2021/09/caa-acquiring-icm-partners-1234844517/)
* [Academy Museum](https://www.academymuseum.org/en/) featuring [Wizard of Oz](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1443330652586143744) Script Page
* [Netflix Data Dump](https://deadline.com/2021/09/bridgerton-stranger-things-scarlett-johansson-netflix-ted-sarandos-code-conference-interview-1234845341/)
* Caroline Graham and Kylie Stevenson’s podcast [Lost in Larrimah](https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/lost-in-larrimah/id1377413462) and book, [Larrimah](https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/true-crime/Larrimah-Caroline-Graham-and-Kylie-Stevenson-9781760877835)
* [Twitter Thread by Dylan Park](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1443729354324779008.html)
* [How Blogs Broke the Web by Amy Hoy](https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/)
* [History of JohnAugust.com](https://johnaugust.com/history) and [John’s 1996 Blog](https://johnaugust.com/1996/)
* [Death Loop](https://bethesda.net/en/game/deathloop)
* [The Era of Mass Fame](https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/on-the-internet-were-always-famous) by Chris Hayes
* [Wells for Boys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BONhk-hbiXk) SNL Sketch
* [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/)
* [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 Owen Danoff ([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/519standard.mp3).

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

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

**Ashley Nicole Black:** I’m Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 515 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig often does silly voices, but he could not do a voice that unique and brilliant. That is Ashley.

**Ashley:** I want someone to pause right there and be like wow Craig really perfected his woman voice.

**John:** We are listening to Ashley Nicole Black. We’re welcoming her back. She has two Emmy nominations in the same category for her work on the Black Lady Sketch Show and the Amber Ruffin Show. You might also recognize her name on a little program called Ted Lasso. Ashley Nicole Black, welcome back.

**Ashley:** Thanks for having me. A friend of mine was like congrats on the Emmy nominations or whatever, but I get really excited when you’re on Scriptnotes.

**John:** Well because you get to carry around Ashley Nicole Black in your ears, as you’re walking your dog, or as you’re washing your dishes.

**Ashley:** In the shower. Yeah.

**John:** But we can also of course see you on the Black Lady Sketch Show because you are one of the featured performers on that show. So I want to talk to you today about writing on that show knowing that you’re going to be performing on that show and what that’s like. I want to talk to you about the experience of joining Ted Lasso in the second season and figuring out how you find your place within a writer’s room that already exists. We have a lot of listener questions you can help us answer.

But mostly I want to respond or celebrate this best headline, we’ll put a link in the show notes, “Ashley Nicole Black, the double-nominated Emmy contender taking over TV comedy.”

**Ashley:** [laughs]

**John:** You are taking over TV comedy, which I think is just remarkable. Because you look at the people who have done that before, but Larry David step aside. Ashley Nicole Black.

**Ashley:** It’s so funny because all of this work was done during COVID over Zoom in my apartment. And I just can’t imagine taking over anything from that West Hollywood apartment.

**John:** You’re busy managing your very cute dog and making it work. But what’s it been like doing press and also doing publicity for award stuff? It would be great if you got awards, if you didn’t get awards it’s absolutely fine, too, but it’s also kind of work, right? Just doing all of this press?

**Ashley:** It’s so much work. It’s like exhausting. It just adds so much time to the schedule. And a thing that happens, and I hope this happens to everybody listening, when something like this happens there’s a lot of press and then also at the same time everybody wants to meet you. So you’re trying to juggle your schedule of putting all these press things on the schedule, putting all these meetings on the schedule, and trying to do good enough work to live up to how people are talking about you, which is quite hyperbolic. Look, I can’t be late on this outline. There’s so many articles about how good I am. [laughs]

**John:** And then you have John emailing you at the last minute saying, hey, could you feel in for Craig this week on Scriptnotes. And so thank you so much for squeezing us in here. The last time we spoke with you I think you came on for the YouTube thing we did where we were talking through the ballot initiatives and trying to fill out our California ballots. So thank you for that. But we’re in an election season again, because there’s a whole bunch of WGA stuff happening. So let’s quickly move through this.

You saw that Fran Drescher was elected as president of SAG-AFTRA.

**Ashley:** Yes, I voted for Fran.

**John:** Yeah. Exciting for that. What I love about SAG is you always recognize the people who are in these offices. It’s like, oh, it’s the Nanny. And she’s now running this organization.

**Ashley:** Yes. I have to really discipline myself to look up their platforms and not just vote for the actors whose work I like.

**John:** It was kind of a contentious election where people were threatening to sue each other for libel and stuff. And, no, we don’t need that. But congratulations to Fran Drescher. As we talked about on the show all the guilds and unions seem to have some common issues that we’re all going to be focused on in these next round of negotiations. So, it’s great to have somebody in there who is at least talking about those issues. It’s exciting.

**Ashley:** Yeah. Very much so.

**John:** We have the WGA West elections are under way. So probably next week we’ll talk through some of the candidates for that. But we have follow up on the WGA East. So last week on the episode we talked about the WGA East election and the issues involved. And several folks reached out on Twitter and they did what folks on Twitter do which is have opinions based on things they saw on Twitter, which is just great. It’s a perfect system and nothing should ever change.

But two clarifications. They’re not really corrections but clarifications based on things we said on last week’s episode. Important to understand that digital writers, like the ones who are working for some of the shops the East is now representing, they’re doing work that it is not covered by the AMPTP contract. So when we talk about working for the studios and the big negotiations that we do with the studios these digital writers are not working under that contract. And because they’re not under that contract they’re also not part of the WGA health plan. So they will have health insurance through their employers which is different and negotiated separately. So I want to make sure everyone understands that they’re doing their own contracts with their own individual employers. It’s different than the big contract that gets negotiated every three years.

And then there’s this other question which I didn’t really want to weigh in on but people kept asking about which is could digital writers outnumber the traditional writers in the East based on how quickly they’re signing up new shops? Would writers working under individual contracts rather than the big contract outnumber the traditional writers? And it comes down to this question of how soon is soon. Eventually if you move forward in time it looks like the trends would go that way, but soon is a hard thing to define.

So, I think that’s really what this election is about. How quickly do you want that change to happen and do you think you need to restructure the organization? And that seems to be what the two sides who are running the two different slates are really discussing. So I want to make that clear that I’m not saying that it’s going to happen next year, or five years from now, but overall it seems like this election is about what shape we want the union to be in five years, ten years down the road. So I want to clarify those two things.

**Ashley:** Yeah. I think also it’s about do we vote for these things or does staff them unilaterally? And I think that that’s something that applies to more than just this situation. But I know that union members, we’re all writers. We’re busy writing. We don’t necessarily know everything the union is doing. And it’s like what things are worth us voting on as a union and choosing to do and what things are things that like the union can just do and we’re not involved in choosing it.

**John:** Such a great point. Because so much of what unions do is sort of day to day organizing and keeping stuff going. And it’s not things you’d be voting on regularly. And so be it individual members voting in these big elections or boards meeting, there’s a lot of just daily work that unions and guilds are doing and really picking a direction for where you want them to go. And so the choices that members make now in this election will impact what you’re setting as the agenda for these organizations.

**Ashley:** Yeah. I also want to point out, and sorry I didn’t listen to your episode last week, so maybe this is redundant, but when this election started I was really excited about some of the candidates that were running, like Lauren Ashley Smith, Greg Iwinski, who are both comedy variety writers, because comedy variety is really more heavily represented in the East than in the West. Comedy variety writers make way less money and now are also seeing their residuals disappear, and I’m not even being hyperbolic. It’s nuts how quickly. I mean, a $20K check has turned into a $20 check and that’s not even an exaggeration. And also of course we know there are so many gains that need to be made for writers of color, for screenwriters, all of those writers who are just not the typical television writer.

And we sort of started the election talking about those things, like how do we make gains for comedy variety writers, how do we make sure they’re making enough for health insurance, how do we get rid of some of this free writing that screenwriters are doing. And now the discourse has completely moved away from that. And I do feel like that’s a pattern in our guild that like there are certain types of writers, and screenwriters have been saying this for years and years, I’m not saying anything new, that their issue always gets pushed to the side when it’s time to have the conversation. So I do hope that we get back to sort of talking about our writers who need help making health insurance during a pandemic and how we’re going to make that happen.

**John:** Yeah. You’re really emphasizing the importance of kitchen table issues. The things that are really making a difference in the paychecks coming home. And your ability to sustain a career in this business versus the structural housekeeping concerns which, yes, they’re important, they’re 20 years down the road problems. But they’re not helping a member right now. So it’s great that you’re really emphasizing that we have to focus on what members need right at this moment.

**Ashley:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. Now Ashley I have a question for you, because I see you on Twitter, and your Twitter is fantastic and you’re funny and you make smart points. And I feel like your Twitter is better than my Twitter, but I don’t know that to be true, and maybe it’s that silent evidence. I’m not seeing all the really annoying people who are coming into your feed. But I want to talk to you about this practice that happened to me this past week which is someone replies to something and says like “care to comment @johnaugust?” Or they tag you into a conversation that you don’t feel like you want to be a part of, and yet you feel like ignoring that conversation is perilous, too, or that by not engaging you’re expressing apathy or that you don’t care.

I struggle with this. Do you have any guidance for me?

**Ashley:** Oh man. I think that’s so rude and I hate it. I think people should not do it. I think on Twitter if you’re talking about someone’s work or whatever I actually think that’s fine. Don’t at them. There’s no need for them to see that. If you want to tell your friends I didn’t like this movie, or whatever it is, you can do that without adding that person and making sure you hurt their feelings. And the thing that I think is even worse than that is when someone has done that, politely said I don’t like this movie, I don’t like this song, whatever it is, and then someone comes along and is like let me start a fight between the two of you by tagging someone. I don’t understand what your goal is. Presumably you’re following one of those people. You want to make them have a bad day. It’s just bad practice. Don’t do it.

The version of that that I get a lot is I’ll tweet my political opinions quite often and people will take my tweet and quote tweet it into the thread of a republican politician or like some white supremacist radio host or whatever. And I’m like first of all you would have to be delusional to think that someone who has lived their entire life as a conservative, has gotten elected to office as one, is going to read my tweet and be like “I rethink it all.” In what world? So all you’re doing is bringing me to the attention of the people who love to swarm and send mean tweets to people.

So what I have done is multiple times I have tweeted don’t do this, please don’t do it, I don’t like it, and explain why. And now having done that I feel really confident just blocking people because I put work into curating a really positive feed and I have really positive interactions with my followers. I mean, part of that is because most people come to me because of the shows I’ve been on, and all of those shows are really positive and fun and loving, so it’s like cool, chill people. And if you bring negativity into that space I don’t feel bad blocking people for that.

**John:** So help me out here, because I go through periods where I will mute people who are just so annoying to me, but I don’t know if muting is the right approach or blocking, because I feel blocking is a more assertive action that they know that you have actually blocked them. Talk me through some philosophies on muting and blocking. Because it seems like blocking makes so much sense when you’re being quoted into somebody else, because that’s a way to stop them from doing that. But give me some guidance here. I’d love it.

**Ashley:** I tend to mute people who are just annoying but they’re not hurting anybody. They’re not necessarily doing anything wrong, it’s just I feel annoyance from looking at your tweets and I can stop myself from having that feeling by muting you. But there’s nothing wrong with you. You aren’t doing anything wrong. And blocking is like you’re actively doing something that is going to bring negativity my way or even sometimes when I see people being negative to other people. There are certain accounts that just spend all day being mean to fat people on Twitter. And you don’t even have to do it to me. If I saw that you did it to someone else, blocked. Because it’s just like why? Why is this how you’re spending your time? Please go outside and take a walk and enjoy your life.

**John:** That seems like good advice. So what I’m taking from this is mute the people who are just annoying to you. Block the people who are actively doing bad in the world.

**Ashley:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. I will take your advice and I’m going to move forward on that front. So thank you very much for that.

Next bit of follow up. So last week we had a guy named Ghosted who was really screwed over by these two WGA writers and Lance wrote in to say, “I’m a WGA member and in my experience the producers who have asked for the most free work have been WGA writers turned producers. On one particular project I did eight unpaid rewrites for an Oscar-nominated former WGA board member. The WGA talks a lot about producers who take advantage of writers, but I’ve never heard a conversation about WGA members taking advantage of other WGA writers. The WGA needs to have this conversation. There needs to be more internal accountability to have any credibility with non-writing producers.”

Oof. Yeah. And as I read this I can think of some writers turned producers who might have expectations that are not good or realistic, or might sort of have unhealthy numbers of rewrites and things that they’re asking for. Have you had this experience where you feel like sometimes WGA writers can be kind of crappy to other writers?

**Ashley:** Not in this context. This actually really shocks me that any writer would ask someone for unpaid rewrites because we all – well, I guess we didn’t all – I struggled on the way up. Some people maybe didn’t. But we all know what it means to need to pay the bills. But definitely I know a lot of writers have experienced, you know, bad experiences with showrunners, abusive behavior, stuff like that. And those people are our fellow writers. And it does make it hard to get redress sometimes because we’re in the same union, so it’s like who do you go to?

If you have a problem with a studio, if you’re not getting paid by a studio or a network you can go to the union and say they didn’t pay me, but when it’s another writer who is also in that union it is a problem that there’s kind of nowhere to go.

**John:** Yeah. On features there’s been one experience where I was a producer who was not writing on a project and the reason why there’s only been one of those experiences is because I didn’t love it. And I definitely knew how to talk to the writer and what I was looking for, but it was like being a pilot and not being allowed to touch the controls. I was trying to describe where I thought we needed to go, and if I could have just rewritten it myself I would have rewritten it myself. And to some degree I wonder if these WGA writers who are being dicks about other people’s writing is that they kind – they want to have the total control. They want to actually just be able to rewrite it, but they don’t actually want to do the work to rewrite it. So instead they’re just noting a person to death, or trying to get this other writer to write the way that they would write it. And that’s not healthy or good. That’s not how it needs to work. So that’s why you need to have contracts that you can actually enforce and you need to have – everyone needs to actually understand and remember that this writer who is doing this work for you is truly a writer and is truly trying to deliver their best work and you have to respect them for that and not ask for unrealistic free work out of them.

**Ashley:** Yeah. You’ve done this way more than me, so I wonder – ideally you would have a contract before you started writing, but between two writers I could see where you end up in a situation where you didn’t, be it felt rude to ask or whatever. But you should ask, right?

**John:** Yeah. In the Ghosted example there was a contract, but they were just ignoring the contract and asking for crazy, crazy stuff. But that sort of pre-contract stuff can be a problem where it’s like, oh, this is the WGA, the experienced writer is going to be overseeing this project, and here’s the newer writer who is going to be actually doing it. And in getting ready for the pitch the experienced writer might be asking for endless changes and dragging on, and on, and on before there’s actually a project being set up. That’s where I see some of the worst of this behavior because it’s not even really – it’s done sometimes with good intentions, like I really want this thing to get set up and so therefore I’m going to keep asking and keep asking and keep asking to refine this thing. But you always have to remember that you were once that writer who was doing the 19th version of this pitch document and that’s work that you’re not being able to do that’s actually paid.

So it’s remembering that. And I don’t know how the WGA enforces this any better other than just really establishing best practices for this is what free work is and this is why it’s a problem and how we stop it.

**Ashley:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s move to happier topics which is you got started, I know you did late night and comedy variety writing, but I really want to talk about sketches and sketches you’re doing for Black Lady Sketch Show because you are a writer on the show but you’re also a performer on the show. You are so funny on the show. And I imagine that some of the stuff that you’ve been funniest in have been sketches that you yourself created. And in writing in it you’re just sort of writing for yourself, but you also know who the other cast members are. So, at what point in coming up with each sketch do you have a sense of like OK I’m this character and everybody else is this character? How is the pitching process working for the sketches?

Can you talk me through a given sketch on your show how it comes to be and how you come to write it?

**Ashley:** Sure. Actually on this show which I think is unique in this way 90, 95% of sketches we don’t know who the cast is and we’re literally just pitching. I mean, obviously we know who our cast is, but it’s not cast. And we don’t write for, like the celebrities that come on, we don’t write specifically for them. So you’re really just pitching what you think would be the funniest idea or most relevant to what’s going on in society, whatever your sketch idea is. And it gets cast way down the line long after the writers are done with the process.

Very occasionally I will pitch sketches that are specifically for myself. And most of those are things that truly only I could play. Like the Invisible Spy is so much about what my body looks like that nobody else could play that part, except for Nicole Byer who plays my doppelgänger in the sketch.

**John:** Nemesis and sort of compatriot there. So for people who don’t know the conceit of this character is essentially you are a secret agent who is so good because everyone just ignores you. People don’t even notice that you’re there and so therefore you can do these secret things.

**Ashley:** Yeah. And that was really based on my real life experience. I’m the person who – it was so funny, I had forgotten this and just remembered recently, Gabrielle who is on the show and I were on a plane together. And the flight attendant reaches over me to hand Gabrielle a drink and forgets to ask me. It’s just like, oh my god, it just happened. It happens all the time. I am just invisible. And so you can take that negatively, but I just decided this is my super power. I could get away with anything. If I wanted to shoplift no one would ever stop me. And so, yeah, that was one that I wrote for myself because it is me.

But most of them it’s just like what is a funny thing and it’ll get cast later.

**John:** Focusing on Invisible Spy. So you have this conceit. What is the pitching process for this? For the first season you were probably in a real room, but do you come in with the whole concept, or here’s the one line and you’re working on as a room? What was that like?

**Ashley:** Ideally you come in with a whole concept. A beginning, middle, and an end. And sometimes I do. Sometimes sketches come to me in that way and I know what the whole sketch is going to be. But we have to pitch – basically on that show you come in in the morning and you pitch until you get a yes. So you could end up racing through ten ideas in one day if your first nine are nos. So by the time you get to that fifth or sixth idea that you maybe weren’t planning on pitching yet sometimes you do just have a beginning. And that room is so good at jumping in and helping you flesh out your idea. What if this happens? And what if that happens? And some of the things that people love the most in sketches I’ve written were additions from other people, because their brain just works differently from mine. But then you also have to kind of be solid and know that just because that suggestion is funny does it actually fit in this sketch? And so for me I try not to pitch anything until I know what I’m trying to say.

Because if you pitch an idea that’s just funny it’s very easy for it to get off track and kind of be unset Jell-O. But if you have a funny idea and you know what you’re trying to say about the world, or what you’re referencing, then when people are throwing in other ideas it’s easier to say yes to that one, no to that one, because I have a thesis in mind.

**John:** So something like this sketch you’ve pitched it, the room has responded positively, what are you first handing in? And at what point do you know which episode that will go into? Because right now it’s just existing as a free-floating sketch. It’s not tethered into anything else in an episode. So when do you know that it’s like, OK, this is a thing we’re shooting. I’ll be playing the central character. When does it get crystalized as that form?

**Ashley:** So we write a first draft of the sketch to like a whole sketch, and then usually you get notes, you may write it again, the whole room contributes to it. But then because this is an HBO show, it’s not like SNL, the writers are gone. So if I was just a writer I would never know what episode it was in until I watched it on television.

**John:** Oh wow.

**Ashley:** But as an actor we get a huge packet of all the sketches and we kind of audition for all the sketches and sometimes you hear someone else read and you’re like I’m not reading this. That’s her part. Let’s move on. And then we just shoot them all. So we don’t know how they’re going to put the episodes together. The only time we would see a sneak peek is if we did ADR and they try to avoid even doing ADR. So we truly don’t know what it is until we watch it on TV.

**John:** So talk about alts. Because clearly in some of these situations you might think of other stuff along the way. Are alts part of the initial sketch packet? Like here’s alternate lines for alternate jokes, or alternate ways out of this sketch. Is that already part of it, or is that work that’s done on the set while you’re shooting?

**Ashley:** Mostly on set. And then we always try to leave room to do an improv run. And a lot of times that’s where the best stuff comes from.

**John:** Now, contrast that to the work you’re doing on the Amber Ruffin Show, things like her great monologues on how did we get here. That’s incredibly tightly written. I mean, it clearly is an essay before it goes into it. But is there a room working on that? Or is it really one person, one pitch, one idea? How does something like that come together?

**Ashley:** So, this is a little strange because I only worked on that show during Covid. And I was in LA and that show is produced in New York. So there was a room, but I wasn’t in it. So the room would meet on Zoom. I get to do that. I was writing all alone in my apartment. So I would basically take a piece from beginning to end because I was writing them alone and just sending them in. And then same thing. See it on TV. You see what jokes they replaced and it’s a lovely surprise.

**John:** OK, so that was really just you were a freelance writer slipping something under the door and you sort of see what happens.

**Ashley:** Yeah.

**John:** Wow. So it’s such a different experience. But talk to me about the experience of writing one of those pieces because it has to have a central thesis, a central theme, and it still has to be joke dense the whole time through. And are you thinking about what visuals go with it? If I were to read one of the things you submitted what would it look like? Is it just a column of text for Amber to be speaking or is it intercut with these are the visuals, this is the change, this is tone? What does that look like for a monologue like that?

**Ashley:** So, I still kind of work in the Full Frontal style, because that’s how I learned how to do it?

**John:** Full Frontal is the Samantha Bee Show you worked on, right?

**Ashley:** Yeah. You should clarify with that title. I still write without pants on.

So I usually start with a thesis statement or a hypothesis, something I think to be true, and then do a ton of research and make sure that it is true. And it is basically like writing an essay. Making an argument. Amber is very much an advocate for the way things should be more so than a complainer about the way things are. So it’s sort of like my thesis statement of like this is what’s happening and then me sort of projecting myself as Amber what should happen. Supporting that with research. And writing basically an essay, writing my way through it.

And we do pitch the graphics. I am not the best graphics pitcher. So I do put them in my script, but I know most of those are going to get replaced I am actually not the best visual thinker. But you do break up your text with where the graphics would be and what the jokes are. And the benefit to that is when you look at the full page you can really see how much room is between jokes because the graphics stand out so much. And you really try to do at least three, three to five jokes per page, and it’s very visually apparent where there’s a joke missing.

And if that’s the case I will put a joke there. I will shoehorn a joke because those pieces are so dense and sometimes they’re about such tough topics. You just have to have jokes to get through it. And so sometimes you’re like joking off of one word that was in the sentence before just because it’s time for a joke, no matter how hard it is to squeeze one in.

**John:** And to clarify when you’re say you’re breaking up the page to show the graphics, you’re just putting a description of the graphics? You’re not actually responsible for the Photoshopping of this is what the graphics would look like?

**Ashley:** Oh no, no.

**John:** So a whole other team does that. But I do find it interesting, if you even look at the progression of monologue desk bits from early on to where we are right now, and probably SNL was important to this, but you look at John Oliver, you look at Samantha Bee, and The Daily Show, the idea of we’re going to get a laugh right when that next graphic comes up, and it’s so prevalent now and you’re expecting that next graphic to always provide a punchline, to throw out a joke, or to set up that next thing.

And understanding the tension between OK these are the words but this is the graphic and the next pop has to be so different and it’s challenging to write because you don’t quite know what that next graphic is going to look like.

**Ashley:** Well you’re telling them what you want it to look like. And also the Full Frontal team, the graphics team, are also comedians, so they make the graphics really funny. And you also have the opportunity to go back and say, no, not that, do this.

But a lot of times it’s also clips, like news clips, and you’re writing the joke off the clip, so at Full Frontal they have a huge research team and they’ll send you a document of like 50 clips and you can pick one that has something you can make fun of, even if it’s like I’m going to make fun of the newscaster’s pony tail or whatever, just to get a joke off of something in this clip.

**John:** Great. So it’s almost like [unintelligible] you need something to plant your foot against so you can push up and get over that next little wall, that next point you’re actually trying to make. How challenging is it sometimes to remember that you’re trying to sell an argument and not just have it be joke-joke-joke? Because that would also be one of the problems I could imagine is that something could be so funny that you’re actually losing the thread. Does that happen?

**Ashley:** This is not a problem that I have because I started out as an academic and became a comedian. But I think it can be a problem that staffs have as a whole. And there usually is one person, either the head writer, or the writing supervisor who gets all of these jokes and then unfortunately sometimes has to reject some of them to make a point.

**John:** Great. Now so that’s writing for one performer, but you also got a chance this last season, since we last spoke with you I don’t think we even knew you were working on the second season of Ted Lasso. So can you talk to us about coming into a show in its second season? I think you were probably only in a virtual room? You never saw any of these people until the season had shot if I’m recalling correctly. So talk to us about the transition to coming into a real scripted normal show in its second season that was so successful and yet so delicate. What was that like? And what was the call for you to get in and work on the show?

**Ashley:** This is actually the second show – I also joined Bless This Mess in the second season. So I’m like a second season expert now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ashley:** And it was actually pretty easy both times. I mean, with Ted Lasso there was that extra hiccup of it being Zoom. But the staff was just so cool and so friendly and inviting that whatever social nerves I had were released immediately. And the cool thing about being the only writer who joins, which I had that experience both times, is you’re the only person who only knows what the audience knows.

So in that beginning awkward period where you’re trying to figure out, OK, they added me to this room so they felt that they needed something. What is that thing? What’s the thing that I can provide? It takes maybe a couple weeks to figure that out. But in the interim the thing that you can provide is they have all of these memories of all these things they talked about or thought about doing or shot that didn’t make it in the show, and you only know what made it in the show. And it can actually be really helpful to be like, oh no, he said this. And I would find that I sometimes have a better memory for those things than them because I don’t remember all the things behind it.

**John:** Yeah. I can imagine if you were to enter The Good Place in the second season or middle of the first season and you didn’t sort of know the central conceit or where stuff was going it would be helpful in some ways because you just have that audience’s perspective and you’re just looking at it as a fan. And you’re going into it and sort of seeing like oh this is what I believe the thing is. And I don’t want to get into any spoilers of Ted Lasso, but we’re recording this as we’re midway through the second season. And it’s very clear that stuff is being set up for the second half of the season that probably was already a plan from the first season. But the rest of the people in that room knew that and you didn’t know that and that’s probably good for you and for them.

**Ashley:** Yeah. And the ability to be like as someone who didn’t know the plan this is what I thought when I watched that episode. This is where I thought this character was headed or what they were saying. And it’s not always exactly the same as what the writers were intending. So, it is helpful to have that kind of outside perspective.

**John:** What are hours like in a Zoom room for something like Ted Lasso? Traditionally a writer’s room could be eight hours a day. Were the Zoom rooms that kind of long schedule?

**Ashley:** Not quite. This was also at the beginning of the pandemic when everyone was getting used to Zoom and it was like Zoom is exhausting. I think we’ve gotten more used to it now. But we did work shorter hours definitely in the beginning. But also you don’t have any getting up and going to the kitchen and less small talk and stuff. So we actually got a lot done. But they weren’t very long.

**John:** And classically a room that’s getting together first you’re starting off talking about some blue sky, some goals for the second season of what you’re trying to do. And then start to break in generally looking at characters, figuring out what could fall in what episodes. How quickly did it come to a point where it’s like, OK, Ashley, you go off and write this episode. What was the process of getting you to OK now you go off and do this draft?

**Ashley:** Bill and Jason are really generous and some showrunners are not this way, but they will allow you to sort of be like I like this one, you know, if it’s possible. And one of the characters in my episode, which was Episode 3, is based on someone that Jason and I know both know. And so I asked for that episode so that I could write that character. But typically as joining in a second season I would never be so presumptuous as to ask for the third episode. But that one was like a particular case.

**John:** Because you brought it up, writing based on somebody that you both know a lot of people are listening and are like oh I didn’t know I could do that, or is it dangerous to write based on somebody you know. So what was it about that person who you knew that lent themselves to a character? What was it about them that you say like, oh, that’s the kind of character we should have in this episode?

**Ashley:** In season one they just talk about Nora but we never meet her. So in season two we knew Nora was going to come for a visit. And I wanted to write that character because Nora was like this really just like super smart, sassy, politically connected teenage girl. And I wanted to make sure to create a teenage girl who wasn’t the typical. Sometimes I think adult writers can be a little bit dismissive in how they write teenagers. I wanted to write a character who was like such a cool chick. And so I really wanted that episode so I could establish her way of speaking and how smart and cool she was.

**John:** Well that sounds amazing. And as luck would have it we have listener questions and the first one feels very much up your alley for the experience that only you would have. So Megana if you could help us out with Ben’s question.

**Megana Rao:** Ben from New York wrote in and said, “I’m currently working on a pilot that heavily involves basketball. And I’m having trouble making the gameplay comprehensible in the action lines. Most of my peers who have given me feedback don’t follow the sport that much, but they all say it’s hard to understand. I’m trying to find the right balance between making the action lines succinct and not alienating potential readers. A couple of terms that were pointed to were devastating dunk, which I assumed most people knew, and top of the key which is a spot on the court with no general term. I read some scripts of sports movies and shows and they all have terms you would only know if you’re at least somewhat familiar with the sport. Should I simply disregard whether or not the reader understands the game and just make story beats clear?”

**John:** Ashley, let’s help Ben out here. Because obviously you came into this and you were already an expert on soccer/football?

**Ashley:** That’s why I’m laughing. The idea that now I’m like a good sports person is hilarious. I did play soccer as an eight-year-old as is required by law in the suburbs of Southern California. The funny thing is both of those terms that he said I know and I am not a sport person at all, so I don’t think they’re that confusing.

**John:** I didn’t know top of the key at all. Devastating dunk I can just figure out what that is. I know what a dunk is. A devastating dunk, sure. Top of the key? I wouldn’t know what that is.

**Ashley:** That’s a place that you shoot from. But I think in Ted Lasso every time we’re showing sports it is to move story forward. I think of it the same way I think about writing action and stunts. Which is if you know a lot about the sport or if you happen to be a great jujitsu person or whatever you could describe every beat of the fight, like she punches him, he punches back, she jumps on top of him. But you could also say they fight, it looks like she has the upper hand, but then he turns it on her. And allow the stunt coordinator to figure out what that physically looks like.

I think it’s the same thing with sports. If it’s about, you know, in my episode a lot of the times that we showed sports it was about Sam and Jamie, where Sam and Jamie were in their relationship. And so I think I spent more time describing that than who kicks the ball or where it goes or whatever. It’s like Sam is playing aggressively. Sam gets the upper hand. And there’s someone on set in London who I have never met who will turn that into soccer.

**John:** Yeah. I think the analogy to action sequences is exactly right. Because we don’t count every bullet being shot. You don’t ever turn of the wheel in a car chase. You’re really describing what it feels like. And I’ve read sports movies that really go way overboard in terms of like every swing of the bat. And that’s just not interesting or good.

Really what we’re going to be tracking is characters’ reactions to what’s happening. And so it’s what the folks on the sidelines are doing. It’s what the players are doing. It’s how they’re reacting and it’s really what’s changed is the thing that’s probably most important to note. And, yes, we keep talking about how detail is important and specificity is important, but it’s really specificity of characters and intentions and motivations and why they’re doing what they’re doing is much more important than literally the choreography on the day.

Think about it like writing a dance sequence or writing a fight sequence. You need that level of clarity in terms of what we’re seeing what we’re seeing, but not exactly what those beats are.

**Ashley:** Exactly.

**John:** Megana, what else you got for us?

**Megana:** Objectified wrote in and she says, “I work as a writer’s PA at a wonderful, supportive writer’s room. As part of my job I’ve been able to proofread a lot of scripts. While doing this I’ve noticed a trend among the scripts written by older male writers. When they introduced female characters they always describe them by their level of attractiveness. Example: Susan, 30, sexy. Molly, 20s, pretty. Et cetera. Male characters are hardly ever described by their appearances unless they pertain to the story. I was struck by how reading these scripts have made me feel anxious about these writer’s perspectives of me. I’m a woman in my 20s and I can’t help but wonder am I instinctively rated by my level of attractiveness to them? Am I seen as three-dimensional as the male assistants I work with?”

**John:** Oy, OK. Ashley, let’s talk about this, because it’s really a two-step problem. One it’s sexist, misogynist writing on the page. But also the question of like, wait, are they actually seeing me this way. So I’m not sure where to start there.

**Ashley:** I do love that she framed it as like it’s not just about on the page but how it is in the room. I think especially for an assistant, but I’ll say also a writer there’s been times in the room where people have talked about – they’re like, oh, and then this guy comes in and he’s like a fat slob and he says this line. And I’m like why does he have to be a fat slob? But then also as a fat person I don’t want to be the one who says maybe we shouldn’t talk about people’s bodies that way. And it is a level of discomfort brought into the room for no reason. Because you didn’t need to say that character was fat to tell the funny line they’re going to say.

So I do think it’s something for people to think about. The people who are in the room with you are people. [laughs] If they share characteristics with the people you’re talking about that may have an effect on them. But I think in the script I will say as a writer-performer this is one of my biggest pet peeves. It’s like enraging and I’ve chosen not to audition for things because of things like this. As an actor – and I studied to be an actor. I didn’t really study to be a writer, so I’m curious how people who did are taught this. But as an actor we’re taught that those action lines are things for you to play. So if I’m reading a script to audition or to perform and it says “Ashley, 30s, really smart, really witty, loves to do karate,” then that tells me as an actor OK these lines are probably I should be saying them in a joking manner. Maybe I should move differently because this character does karate and her body is trained. You know, whatever, it’s something for me to do.

If I read a script and it says “Ashley, 30s, super-hot” there’s no way for me to do that. I’m going to have whatever body I have when I show up. It’s either hot or it’s not. There’s nothing I can do to play hot. If what you mean is that the other characters are attracted to her that’s useful information for them and you could say “Ashley enters the room. Kevin immediately thinks she’s hot.” That’s something for him to play. But it does nothing – you give an actor nothing when all you tell them is what they look like.

Like I’m imagining, let’s say the character is a waiter. And it’s like, “Kelly, super-hot,” and the first line is, “What can I get you today?” I as an actor just have to figure out how to say that. Whereas if you had described Kelly, “she is exhausted, he hates working here,” and the first line is, “What can I get you today,” I now know how to say that line. And it’s so frustrating when you’re auditioning when the script is giving you no clues about who the person is other than what they look like. And then you have to do an audition and it’s like well how could I possibly get the part because I don’t know what you want from you.

**John:** Yes. So I think Kelly our waitress, maybe she could be like – I’d like to see an audition where she’s just performatively hot. Like basically is she just trying to act hot? So she’s sweating, or she is fanning herself a lot, like she’s going through a hot flash. Or she’s taking hot as being one of those like she’s vain and she’s always pursing her lips or trying to do hot things while trying to take the order. That’s at least funny. It’s actually trying to play the line there.

So, yeah, let’s get rid of – again, specificity is great. So if you could talk to us about hair, makeup, clothing, the things that we actually can see that could impact character but could also change our read on who that character is, that’s awesome. But just what their body looks like is not going to be one of those things. That’s not going to give the actor anything to do. It’s not going to give any other department anything to do other than the casting department says I have to make some objective choice about is this person conventionally attractive enough or heavy enough or whatever the criteria that was listed in that script.

**Ashley:** And PS you can email the casting department. Like you don’t have to put that in the script. If you want a fat slob to play this part, email the casting director privately and say, hey, you know, Roy who I said is a funny guy in a wife-beater t-shirt, he should be an overweight guy. And they’ll call those guys in. There’s no need to insult that actor by putting it in the script.

**John:** You can sort of say this is the thing we’re looking for in this character, but it doesn’t have to be on the page there because it’s not helping the performer. It’s not helping the cast. And it’s not good.

So we’ve addressed some of the script concerns. Let’s talk to what Objectified might do in this situation they find themselves where they see this happening in the room and they wonder like, oh crap, is that how they actually see me in this space. What advice can we give her? I think we’re saying Objectified is a woman. What might be a best practice? My instinct would be it’s not her responsibility to stand up in the room and say this is gross and sexist, you need to stop doing that. But it may be a good choice to pull aside some senior person in that room at some moment and say like, hey, just so you know this is a thing that can make me and other people uncomfortable. And if you or somebody else could acknowledge that and sort of address it I think the room would be a better place.

Do you think that would help or work, or is that a bad idea?

**Ashley:** I think if she is to do anything that’s probably the best idea is to pull aside a senior person who you’ve already determined may be amenable to this based on other conversations. Choose the right person. And if that person doesn’t exist it may actually be safer to keep your mouth shut. Like in the position of being an assistant, this is why I think writers it’s so incumbent on us to behave as well as we know to behave because it’s so hard and so dangerous for assistants to speak up that I don’t want to even advise someone to speak up not knowing the situation they’re in, because it could go badly. But if you’re in a situation where you know one of the EPs is a feminist and has already talked about certain things in the room and you know that they’re going to be on your side, then yes, pulling that one person aside is a good idea. And letting them be the one to feel out the room and decide if this is something that they could address publically or talk privately to the writers that need to hear it.

**John:** Cool. Megana, what else have you got for us?

**Megana:** Sammy asks, “Hi, I know nothing about unions or strikes, but this idea makes sense to me and I need to get the idea out of my head so I’m sending it over. Have the writers working for the top streamers strike while allowing everyone else to continue working. Leverage the competitive power of the companies still producing content and gaining ground in the streaming war as the top companies’ subscriber base atrophies, while limiting the strike’s impact on guild members. Then you work your way down the ladder till everyone agrees to terms. If this is legal shouldn’t it be more effective than a full on guild strike?”

**John:** All right. So, again, here’s where I stress that I am not a union legal expert, so I cannot be offering advice on sort of like–

**Ashley:** You are my union expert, John!

**John:** But I can’t offer federal guidance on how union labor law works. But in some ways what Sammy is suggesting is kind of what happens with the companies and the guilds right now. Because the companies, the AMPTP decides we’re going to make a deal first with SAG, and then we’re going to make a deal with WGA, and then we’re going to make a deal with DGA. They’re going to find ways to tackle this one by one. And Sammy is asking couldn’t you just do the same thing with the companies. It’s also analogous to ultimately the agency conflict was resolved one agency at a time rather than dealing with the ATA, that whole big agency representing body as one thing.

The challenge is that there’s not a lot of incentive for those companies to split off and sort of do things separately because they recognize the guilds would love that but doesn’t behoove them to do that, unless it really were to behoove them to do that, in which case if you had one company that was especially worried about this you could make a deal with one separately.

What I’m pretty sure you can’t do under federal law is to say like, OK, we’re going to make deals with everybody except for this one company just to spit them. Because what would actually happen is I think the other companies would circle their wagons and say no you cannot do that and then they’d just lock us out. So basically you’d get to a situation where you’re in a strike because the companies have locked the writers out.

All this being said, there are new players that sort of come into the production universe. And so if Nabisco suddenly decided we’re going to start our own streaming network and they were not already a party to the AMPTP we could make a deal with Nabisco separately and we could all work for the Nabisco streamer while the other companies were stewing. But I think it’s more likely that we would make a deal with one company than keep a deal going with everybody else and shut out one company, because I just don’t think that’s actually possible right now with how things are structured. That’s my guess.

**Ashley:** The only one I think it might be, and correct me if I’m wrong, Netflix has a different contract, right?

**John:** Netflix has had a different contract, I’m not honestly sure where they are at right now. So, and Netflix is a great giant company. So something like a Netflix or someone else coming online later on, yes, that would be something that would make sense. But to make a deal with them separately rather than trying to shut out one place, because that’s not going to happen. We couldn’t say like we’ll work for everybody but Disney is unlikely I think to succeed. But then again I’m not a legal expert.

I get why Sammy is suggesting it though because it would make so much more sense to be able to set one aside and work for the other ones.

**Ashley:** Especially if one is exceptionally egregious. My read though as a lay person is that they’re all pretty much the same. But if one suddenly became the worst place to work I could see that happening.

**John:** And here’s the other exception. There are times where companies will receive a do not work order, where they’re actually doing bad stuff to our members, where we can be prohibited from working for a certain company. But that’s a different thing than what Sammy is really describing here.

But I think Sammy is anticipating what we are all anticipating is that this next round of negotiations is going to be important because we are going to be talking about the future of residuals and payment for these streamers which affects every single writer working. Because whether you’re a comedy variety writer, a screenwriter, a television writer, we’re all dealing with the same struggle which is what does our payment and residual structure look like in a world where there are not conventional networks anymore, where there’s not conventional theatrical releases, where there are comedy variety shows that are being made for these streamer outlets. What does that mean if we can’t even know what the residual value is of these programs?

So that’s going to be a thing that every writer and every other union member is going to be looking at in this next period of time.

**Ashley:** Yeah. And I think we’re already all feeling it in our bottom lines, so it’s going to be at a fever pitch by the time we get to the negotiation.

**John:** I think so too. These were great questions. Megana thank you for being our mailbox as all these questions come in over the transom.

**Megana:** Of course, thank you both.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a new book by Simon Rich. Have you read any Simon Rich books?

**Ashley:** No, I’m a philistine.

**John:** Oh my god, I’m so excited for you because you have so much funny reading ahead of you. The new book is called New Teeth. Simon Rich is a short story writer, but he’s also a screenwriter. The new book is really good. The first story in it is a detective story but the central character is a toddler, like a pre-toddler, who is trying to solve this mystery.

**Ashley:** I’m in.

**John:** What Simon Rich does so brilliantly is take this absurd premise and really run with it within this carefully contained bubble. Something you may have seen, did you see American Pickle, the Seth Rogan movie where he falls in a pickle vat and he meets his grandfather who fell in a pickle vat. And that was based on a Simon Rich story. He takes these really absurd premises and just really runs with them. So, I recommend New Teeth, but if you haven’t read anything, Ashley, the thing I’m going to – there’s a link here in the show notes, I’m going to send it to you – is a short story called Gifted which is the first Simon Rich story I ever read which I still think is the funniest. I reread it this past week. The premise is this Upper West Side couple have a baby who is clearly a monster, like the antichrist, and they’re so excited and they really want to get him into Dalton. And it’s from the perspective of these parents who are – this mom who is so excited for her child and how much she will overlook everything.

I will send you Gifted. It will delight you. It’ll be fun for you this afternoon.

**Ashley:** That sounds awesome.

**John:** Ashley, what do you have for us for One Cool Things?

**Ashley:** So I have one serious one and then one [unintelligible]. A is For is an organization that I’m on the board for and we fight abortion stigma and raise money for abortion providers. And what’s call about it is A is For has done all the research for you. So if you go to their website and find a provider to donate to directly, maybe in Texas if that’s on your mind, that is a provider who you know has been doing the work for the while and knows what they’re doing. They’re not a popup, fly by night. So that’s a very cool organization to follow on social and they’ll always be keeping you up with what’s going on in the reproductive justice arena.

And then just something fun is there is this company called Estelle Colored Glass and it’s a Black woman who makes this gorgeous wine glasses and decanters and cake plates, just beautiful colored glass that will remind you of what was in your grandmother’s curio cabinet. And it’s just so pretty and if you just need a little treat you could buy yourself a pink wine glass.

**John:** So I’m looking at this website and they are absolutely gorgeous. And I have my eye on this purple glass cake stand. And how amazing would that be to have it in your house. I feel like I would want to make a white cake to stick on it at all times, because otherwise it’s just sitting empty. But these are truly gorgeous so I’m loving that.

But going back to A is For, for folks who are not looking through the show notes links, it’s AisFor.org. And what I love about this recommendation is I’ve seen all of these donate here to help support abortion rights in Texas especially, and I don’t know which of those organizations are real and which ones have just cropped up this last week. And so you guys have done the work to actually see which of these places are doing the work on the ground.

**Ashley:** Yeah. To the point where when we did a fundraiser the providers are there at the fundraiser, like I shook the man’s hand. Like I know that he’s real.

**John:** That’s great. This past week I also shared a blog post I’d done a few years back about my family’s abortion story. And I think one of the things that this horrible Texas law has reminded us is that abortion rights really do affect everybody. And obviously a woman facing the decision about her own body is paramount, but the ability to have safe and legal abortions is something that really does tough everybody.

And so I shared the story of how that impacted my family a few years back. So I really hope that whatever happens in this near time in Texas, remember how important it is for everybody to have this right.

**Ashley:** Everyone deserves the right to determine what their life is going to look like. And it’s the only way women can fully participate in society is if we get to decide what we’re doing with our healthcare and our reproductive care.

**John:** Excellent. That is our show for this week. So in our bonus segment we’re going to be talking about the crisis facing white male characters, so stick around for that. We really appreciate our premium members because they help keep the lights on and keep everybody paid.

Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Zach Lo and it is a bop. 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 I am @johnaugust. Ashley you are?

**Ashley:** @ashleyn1cole. Very late adopter.

**John:** Oh, but it’s great. And be cool or else we will mute or block you, because I have learned how to do this thanks to Ashley’s guidance here.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find the links to things we talked about on the show. We’ll have transcripts up about a week after the show airs. We have a weekly newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. And 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 about white male characters and whatever will happen to them in the future of television.

Ashley, thank you so much for coming back. It is so great to talk with you and catch up and hear more about all the amazing stuff you’ve done this past year.

**Ashley:** Thanks so much for having me.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** So our jumping off place for this bonus segment is an article called TV’s White Guys are in Crisis. It’s in Vulture. Written by Kathryn Vanarendonk. And it’s looking at sort of the latest slate of premium shows and shows that people are talking about which have white male characters, but those white male characters are not the centerpieces, or they are being pushed to the sides, or they are frustrated by being pushed to the sides. And Ted Lasso is brought up in this so I thought Ashley would be a perfect person to talk about this with. Ashley, what are we going to do? How are we going to save these white men?

**Ashley:** [laughs] First of all, I think they’re doing fine. It’s really interesting because I feel like for such a long time of television history shows sort of revolved around one type of character. And it’s been like two years of a slight shift in that and people are like oh my god.

**John:** Oh my gosh. Everything has changed.

**Ashley:** You owe me a hundred years of weird black girls leading shows before we’re approaching a problem.

**John:** So, one thing, I liked this article and I think there’s interesting things to pushback against in this article. But one of the things at least noticed or addressed is that we’ve had white men in the center of our storytelling for forever, and then we hit a period in the last decade or so where we had these anti-heroes. So you had the Breaking Bad, you had the Mad Men, where we were starting to question whether this white man at the center was really a good person or a bad person. But they were still at the center of the story. They were still the main person you were following. And what’s maybe a little different in this last year or two is sometimes that man is being pushed off to the edge and is frustrated at being pushed off to the edge. So some of the shows that she mentions are Rutherford Falls, White Lotus, The Chair, Kevin Can F Himself as examples of this man who feels himself in a bit of a crisis. What are you seeing there?

**Ashley:** It’s interesting because I think now is a good time for this because a lot of people have – and actually I don’t know if a lot of people in real life have this. But a lot of people on Twitter have what Twitter has deemed main character syndrome, where people kind of assume themselves to be the center of life or of the story. And I do think that it can help to watch TV shows where there are characters like this who have realized they’re not at the center of the story. And even if they’re frustrated and trying to get back at the center it still is interesting, almost in an educational way, to be able to point to examples of like, yes, it can be frustrating to suddenly realize you’re not the main character. But also you never were, so let’s just process those feelings by watching television rather than by yelling at me on Twitter. I think that’s actually very healthy and good. [laughs]

**John:** And this phenomena is really new, because you look at a Parks and Rec, Leslie Knope is not a white man and she’s at the center of it. And she’s struggling against the system, but she’s not marginalized. And you have her boss character is sort of frustrated in his notion of masculinity, but he doesn’t actually really want to be in charge either. So we’ve been wrestling with this for a bit. But then it brings us back to Ted Lasso because in many ways Ted Lasso feels like the old kind of Ward Cleaver, he’s the good white guy at the center of everything, and yet it’s like he’s evolved to a state that the rest of men just aren’t quite there yet. Especially in the first season it feels like he’s just some sort of superhero who suddenly has all these abilities and powers and is already sort of beyond everybody else there and can actually speak a lingo that we’re still trying to catch up with.

**Ashley:** Yeah. I think it’s interesting because with Ted Lasso it’s almost structural, because Jason being the creator and star of the show also resists being centered, like as a person, and is really generous with us as writers, and I believe also with the cast, in hearing other ideas and wanting to incorporate other stories and other ideas. And we really started season two with being like what stories can we tell about all of these other characters who were also here. So I think you can only do that with the buy-in of that person, right? Like if Jason wasn’t that person we wouldn’t be able to write a show where we spend a whole episode talking about a side character’s deal, you know. So I do think that that’s part of it. It has to be a structural part of it.

But I also think people are coming to find that you enjoy those shows more because I think a lot of times we all find that little side character that we identify with maybe more so than the main person, and then when that character finally gets an episode it’s so exciting. It’s going to be your favorite episode of that show. And I think there is this feeling maybe among execs or higher ups that this guy is the star, he’s the celebrity, everybody only wants to see him, and I feel like the audience is really telling us, no, we want to hear from all these other characters, too. And you’re not going to lose your audience if you spend an episode on another character.

**John:** Well it’s a thing we’ve often talked about on the show, and a thing you notice especially in animated movies, wait why are the sidekicks stealing the movie?

**Ashley:** Always.

**John:** It’s because the sidekicks are not bound by the responsibility of what the classic protagonist is supposed to be doing. And they don’t always have to be moral and right and they can sort of express the real frustrations of not being in power more honestly. And I think that’s a thing we’re noticing more maybe in our conventional TV shows at this point, too, is that we relate more to the person who is not in charge and in power because that’s the real experience most of us have.

**Ashley:** Yeah. Because that’s who we are.

**John:** In Ted Lasso as you were coming in on that second season and you’re talking about this, do the things that are being brought up in this article are those part of the conversation in the room? Are you thinking about the role of a white man in society as you’re talking through story ideas and just talking through the arc of a season?

**Ashley:** I think not any more than any other show. I think whenever you’re writing a show with people of a bunch of different backgrounds you have to take into account how those different backgrounds would make them behave or rub up against each other. Like in my episode of Ted Lasso which aired weeks ago, so I am spoiling it, turn off your podcast if you somehow haven’t seen it, but Sam who is Nigerian is standing up and saying the company that sponsors the team has created some environmental and human rights abuses in Nigeria. And whenever there’s a press conference after the game in real life, but also traditionally on this show, they interview the coach, because he is the boss. So Ted sits down for a press conference and says when things like this happen to people like me you guys tend to write about it automatically, but someone like Sam had to get your attention, and so now I’m going to step away from the mic and you guys talk to Sam.

And it was important that we understand how these things typically go, didn’t have Ted speak for Sam, or instead of Sam, or sort of pat himself on the back for supporting Sam. So in that way we thought about their different backgrounds and thought about how, yes, they would want to hear from Ted because that’s what we’re used to. But Ted being a good man understands that it’s his privilege that makes him the person they want to speak to and instructs them to talk to Sam instead.

**John:** It’s about understanding privilege and also knowing when to use that privilege to yield space for other folks.

**Ashley:** Yeah. In that moment, yes. So that’s an example of like acknowledging that we know that Ted has this privilege and working from there, as opposed to being ignorant to it and creating a situation where Ted speaks for Sam or something like that.

**John:** Now, as we’re recording this we’re only halfway through the second season, but it feels like based on therapist interactions and things like that one of the important storylines for this back half of the season is going to be not even necessarily the origin story of how Ted becomes this way, but also the challenge of trying to be this paragon of good white guy moment at all times. Because he can seem so perfect that there’s inner conflict. And so I’m sensing that one of the things you’re talking about in that room is figuring out well what is actually underneath the surface of this seemingly perfect guy that’s driving him to do these things. And what are the interesting story challenges that we can face with him?

Because we can de-center him, which is great, but also the name of the show is Ted Lasso and so you’re figuring out what is making Ted tick inside.

**Ashley:** Mm-hmm. Keep watching. [laughs]

**John:** And that’s a good teaser for the second half of the season. Ashley, such a delight to chat with you about all sorts of things and congratulations on everything that’s happened this last year.

**Ashley:** Thank you so much. This was so fun.

**John:** Yay.

Links:

* [The Double-Nominated Emmy Contender Taking Over TV Comedy](https://www.insider.com/ashley-nicole-black-emmy-nominations-ted-lasso-comedy-writing-interview-2021-8)
* Industry News: [Fran Drescher, Leads SAG-AFTRA](https://www.avclub.com/fran-drescher-triumphs-in-bitter-contentious-sag-aftra-1847616962), [IATSE Contract Negotiation](https://variety.com/2021/film/news/iatse-contract-negotiation-update-1235052874/), [WGA East Elections](https://www.wgaeast.org/council-elections/2021-election/candidates/)
* [New Teeth](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/books/review-new-teeth-simon-rich.html) by Simon Rich [on Amazon](https://amzn.to/3yIvZsM) or [Bookshop](https://bookshop.org/books/new-teeth-stories/9780316536684)
* [Gifted](https://bookanista.com/gifted/) short story by Simon Rich
* [Highland 2 Student License](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/students.php)
* [A is For](https://www.aisfor.org/)
* [Estelle Colored Glass](https://www.estellecoloredglass.com/collections/all)
* [TV’s White Guys are in Crisis](https://www.vulture.com/2021/08/tv-white-men-the-white-lotus-ted-lasso.html) by Kathryn Vanarendonk
* [My Abortion Story](https://johnaugust.com/2018/my-abortion-story) on John’s blog
* [Ashley Nicole Black](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2730724/?ref_=ttfc_fc_wr24) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ashleyn1cole)
* [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/)
* [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 Zach Lo ([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/515standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/looking-back-and-forward).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 514 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Often on the show we talk about what’s happening in the WGA West, but today we’ll be taking a look at our sister union in the East and the debate over who the WGA should represent. Then we’ll be answering listener questions about reading lists, blue skies, bad agents, and bored executives.

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** And in our bonus segment for premium members we will discuss how life has gotten better in the past few decades.

**Craig:** Doesn’t seem like it has, but it has.

**John:** But it actually has.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** And Craig this is our kind of unofficial but also official 10th Anniversary show. Ten years ago–

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Was the first episode of Scriptnotes. So we’ll be doing later talking about sort of what actually happened over those ten years, but I do want to celebrate this milestone of ten years of doing this show.

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**John:** It is. It’s genuinely terrifying.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are aging and what we’re doing is leaving behind ourselves this enormous digital wake of yapping. But I do think for guys who have been doing it for ten years we still have stuff to say.

**John:** We still have stuff to say. I mean, as I said on our Episode 100 I had confessed that I didn’t know that we would make it past 100 because I’d felt we would run out of things. Nope, stuff just keeps coming.

**Craig:** Oh you thought we wouldn’t make it past 100 episodes?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh man. What’s today’s episode?

**John:** 514.

**Craig:** Oh man, we made it. So the question is are we going to make it to a 1,000?

**John:** I don’t know. We could.

**Craig:** Has any podcast made it to a thousand?

**John:** Well I don’t think podcasts have really kind of been along that long. Although there’s podcasts who do it twice or three times a week, so obviously they would have made it to a thousand.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. But for a weekly show that’s good.

**Craig:** I think it’s amazing.

**John:** You were saying before we started recording that Bo who works with you started listening to this when she was in college. So, just crazy.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Or high school maybe even. Who knows?

**Craig:** Possibly high school. Well, no, she said she started listening to it when we was 20. So she was in college. But we started recording the show I think when she was in high school. So if we do this again, we keep going, and we make it to a thousand there will be people working for us who were not even born.

**John:** Born, yes.

**Craig:** When we started the show.

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Well that’s going to be great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re not going to resent us and our stupid old selves. Not at all.

**John:** So let’s start this episode by looking back at looking forward. So this is a question from Martin in Sandringham, Australia who writes, “Hey John and Craig. In Episode 167 back in 2014 you discussed superhero movies on the slate for the following seven years and I was wondering if you could now revisit this and see how it all unfolded in reality.” And Martin also notes “I did shudder when John posed the question about what the world would be like in 2020. Craig thought that we would all have phones implanted in our ears.”

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** Well…

**Craig:** Earbuds. Not far off.

**John:** We have our earbuds.

**Craig:** Not far off.

**John:** Not far off at all. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the transcript from that episode. And also the archived version of the article we were talking about, because this was an article on Newsarama that was sort of laying out the next seven years of superhero movies.

But I thought we’d take a look through and sort of what’s supposed to be there and what actually was there and Megana took a look at really tried to chart what movies actually came out on the days that they were supposed to come out and a surprising number did. So let’s take a look back, start back in 2015.

So 2015 was predicted for The Avengers, Age of Ultron, Fantastic Four from Fox, and Ant Man. Those all came out on the days they were supposed to which is good because that was the year the article came out. So within one year is pretty easy to predict what movies are going to come out within a year.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, did we doubt that they were coming out?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Oh, good, well OK.

**John:** I don’t think we doubted it. But I think we were at the time surprised that any studio could have the hubris to suggest like oh this is the next seven years of movies we’re going to make.

**Craig:** I do remember this now. This is coming back to me from six years ago or whatever it was, seven years ago.

**John:** So 2016 the predictions were for Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. That did happen.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** They said Captain America 3 which became Captain America Civil War. X-Men Apocalypse. I don’t really remember.

**Craig:** It did happen.

**John:** It did happen?

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Doctor Strange was the untitled Marvel film. The untitled DC film was Suicide Squad and both of those came out on the date they said they were predicted to. But, the first movie that never happened, November 11 was supposed to be Sinister Six from Sony.

**Craig:** What the?

**John:** Sinister Six is a bunch of the Spider-Man villains.

**Craig:** Oh, so Suicide Squad.

**John:** Yeah, kind of. But different and better. And if I remember correctly I think Drew Goddard was supposed to be doing that. So, I feel bad that didn’t happen.

**Craig:** All right.

**Megana Rao:** Sorry. Doctor Strange was supposed to come out on July 8 but ended up being pushed to November of that year.

**John:** So Megana with a correction here.

**Craig:** Ah, OK. Yeah, but I’ll give them that four month leeway there. That’s OK.

**John:** Yeah, some sliding.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So we get to 2017. Fox had slated an untitled Wolverine sequel. That came out on the day that they predicted. So, March 3 that came out.

**Craig:** Logan, yeah.

**John:** That’s Logan. An untitled Marvel film came out which was Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, originally scheduled for May but it came out in July.

**Craig:** It looks like it was originally scheduled for July and came out in May. That’s weird.

**John:** Oh is that right?

**Craig:** Yeah, it looks like they made it go faster. By the way I’ve got to tip my hat to the studios. The plan is working. This is terrifying.

**John:** Yeah. You’re going to notice that the Marvel films tend to be running much more on schedule than the other studios. Not a shock there.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Sony had Venom: Carnage, a Spider-Man spinoff. So it wasn’t called Carnage. The new movie is called Carnage.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But Venom came out and it they didn’t have a date for it but they said 2017. It actually came out in 2018. But it did happen.

**Craig:** Close.

**John:** But they were also supposed to have a female Spider-Man spinoff.

**Craig:** That did not happen.

**John:** No. There’s an untitled DC film set for November 17. That was Justice League. And then came out when it was supposed to. There were two untitled Marvel films on the release schedule for 2017. Those became Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok, although Black Panther actually got pushed to 2018. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 came out. Spider-Man: Homecoming out. And the untitled DC film became Wonder Woman which was a big hit.

**Craig:** So basically they’re getting everything right. I guess the question is what did they get wrong and there hasn’t been so much. There’s Sinister Six. And that’s kind of it. Oh, and then there was a female Spider-Man spinoff that didn’t happen. And then they kind of got everything else sort of right. Well, OK, once we start getting into 2018, and this is not surprising, it gets a little cloudier, right? Because they wanted a Flash movie. That didn’t seem to happen.

**John:** No. Captain Marvel came out later than was expected.

**Craig:** But you know I give them credit for that.

**John:** Yeah. Nothing bad about that. Moving into 2019 there’s an untitled DC film. That was probably Shazam. That came out in 2019.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We got some Avengers: End Game. There’s an untitled DC film which you could say was the Suicide Squad sequel. That came out this past year. There wasn’t really another movie in between there that could have fit that bill. We got some Birds of Prey. We got some Wonder Woman 1984. Fox had slated for 2020 a Fantastic Four 2.

**Craig:** That didn’t sound like it happened.

**John:** No. The thing is you don’t get the 2s if the first one doesn’t work. That’s the problem.

**Craig:** Impressive though. Overall you know what studios? I’m sorry for doubting you. I’m sorry for doubting your commitment to making 4,000 superhero movies.

**John:** Yeah. They said they were going to do it and you know what they did it. Some things didn’t come out on time. Some things were big hits. Some things were not big hits. But they can do it. So I guess it’s the planners in those departments, the big whiteboards, it’s nice when it actually works out for them.

**Craig:** If I say “I’m starting to doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion” do you know what I’m quoting?

**John:** I do. That is from Donnie Darko?

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion. Richard Kelly.

**John:** Yup. A frequent Scriptnotes guest.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Great. Last week, or two weeks ago actually. Last time Craig was on the show we talked about conspiracy theories. And we answered a listener question about whether the writing conspiracy theories in movies and TV shows in 2021 is moral and ethical given sort of the craziness that’s out there. And we had people reach out on Twitter saying, yeah, that’s a great conversation. I think that you brought some really good points. Then we had people email in to say, no, those were not good points and you’re wrong.

**Craig:** Let’s see how they did.

**John:** So Megana you got a lot to read this week.

**Craig:** Let’s play the Make Craig Angry game.

**John:** Yeah. So I wanted to include some of them because not only did they raise counterpoints, but in many cases they are great examples of logical fallacies.

**Craig:** I had a feeling.

**John:** And so Megana if you could start us off. I know you got a lot of reading this week, so pace yourself. But why don’t you start with Matt in LA.

**Megana:** Matt in LA writes, “I think you’re giving Hollywood far too much credit. Conspiracy theories have existed for thousands of years throughout the world. The most obvious example historically is probably the centuries of villainizing Jewish people for pretty much anything. I’m not saying to write conspiracy movies or not write them. I’m not saying Hollywood hasn’t played some part. I’m just saying conspiracy theories have always been around and this isn’t the first time in history they’ve gotten ugly.”

**Craig:** That’s the worst. Ugh. Count the mistakes.

**John:** But Craig there are worse examples of fallacies here. So, I would call this as sort of what-about-ism. It’s sort of like it’s kind of changing the topic or redefining. Because I think we’re not talking about the same things. There’s scapegoating which is what you’re sort of doing to Jewish people and atrocities. Or that there’s evil forces out there. But that’s not the same thing as the government is both incredibly competent at keeping secrets but also we know they’re incompetent. That there’s a giant governmental plan to suppress or do something dastardly that’s being kept from you. That’s the kind of conspiracy theory we’re talking about which is different than sort of this idea that Jewish people are the root of all problems.

**Craig:** Even if these were equivalent comments it still wouldn’t make any sense because just because something is true doesn’t mean it is the only thing that is true. The fact that conspiracy theories have existed for thousands of years has absolutely nothing to do with the pernicious practice of spreading or fomenting additional conspiracy theories.

OK, so COVID-19 is out there. Therefore one should not blame some new lab for spilling some I don’t know chemical into the air. One has nothing to do with the other. Yes, there have been conspiracy theories and also we shouldn’t make it worse. How do you possibly argue with that statement? Well, Matt in LA has figured it out. I disagree with you Matt completely. 100 billion percent.

**John:** So I think where the scapegoating and conspiracy theories overlap is that they can be pernicious lies and they’re sort of memes that spread by themselves. But I think a conspiracy theory is different in that it has this unprovable, untestable claim and that if you try to push back against it they’ll say, oh, that’s what they want you to believe. Basically there’s no way to sort of package it up and defeat it because it’s always going to say like, oh, that’s exactly what they would want you to believe.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, just because we’re saying that Hollywood makes it worse doesn’t mean we’re saying Hollywood invented it. We’re just saying that we have a responsibility to not promote conspiratorial thinking. If everybody stopped promoting conspiratorial thinking there would be fewer conspiracy theorists in the world. They would never be eliminated, but there would be fewer. This is unobjectionable.

**John:** I think we’re also talking about how in so many of our movies the protagonist’s role is that conspiracy person, the one who is standing up against a hidden system of injustice that I only believe the truth and only I can expose it. And I think we are valorizing that person at our detriment sometimes because people want to identify with that person. Oh, I want to be obviously the hero in my own story, so therefore I should not believe what’s out there.

**Craig:** I mean, Matt knows this.

**John:** I think Matt knows this, too.

**Craig:** I think Matt’s just griping. Let’s see. I’m sure the other ones are going to be better. [laughs]

**John:** Help us out with Nate if you could, Megana.

**Megana:** OK. So Nate says, “I’m firmly pro-science and pro-logic. Yet, I’m concerned this sort of thinking is a big step on the path toward banning books or even burning them. We should never stifle works on art based on what the lowest common denominator might take from them. Not only would we miss out on the fun of fictional movies like The Manchurian Candidate or Conspiracy Theory, but more tragically we could no longer dramatize important true stories, like All the President’s Men, The Insider, Erin Brockovich, Spotlight, or The Post.

“I realize you weren’t suggesting our government might make it illegal to write conspiracy-related films.”

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** “But even self-censorship can be a dangerous proposition. So let’s just keep telling compelling stories that inform and/or entertain and remind ourselves that stupid is as stupid does and there’s nothing we can do about that.”

**John:** So many things wrapped up in this one.

**Craig:** Oh, Nate.

**John:** So, Nate, you are both slippery-sloping and straw-manning which is a hard thing. But basically you built a strawman and then you put it on a slippery slope down to–

**Craig:** You know what he’s doing? He’s Slippery-Manning.

**John:** He is slippery-manning.

**Craig:** And you know who likes that?

**John:** Oh no!

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** No. No.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** 10 years.

**Craig:** Nah. Go on. Talk about slippery-manning. Sexy Craig loves slippery-manning.

**John:** All right. So and again at the end Nate is trying to pull it out like let’s all agree that this is a reasonable thing. And that’s its own kind of thing, like trying to find a middle ground. Middle-grounding there at the end.

It’s really frustrating. Again, the strawman here is that you are saying that we said something we did not say which is that we should categorically not make these kinds of movies. We’re saying that we should actually think about the kinds of movies we make and the things we depict onscreen, which is a thing we do. It’s a thing we’ve decided we’re going to do as a culture, as filmmakers, as TV makers.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re going to decide what to portray and it’s changed over the decades. It just has. You look at shows from 20, 30 years ago, they were depicting the world differently. That’s progress.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? John, why are you self-censoring? I mean, it’s not illegal to make a movie where people are in blackface. So why are you self-censoring? It’s really dangerous. [laughs] This is so stupid, Nate. I don’t even know how to wrap my mind around it. Also, I don’t believe you believe this. You say you’re pro-logic. I challenge that. Because come on, man. Self-censorship is part and parcel with artistic creation. We are constantly making choices and then we’re constantly self-editing. Editing. Restraining. Refining. Holding back. Pushing forward. These are choices we make. What is your suggestion? That we just never consider the world around us when we tell stories?

That’s just ridiculous. And you are absolutely engaging in the most bizarre slippery-sloping. Do you really think that this is a “big step on the path toward banning or burning books?” Nate, Nate, come on, man. Cut it out. This is fun. Who is next? I’m enjoying this.

**Megana:** So Elijah says, “Yes, some people doing their own research will be led to the wrong conclusions, but others like myself know how to do research properly and wouldn’t have trusted the COVID-19 if I wasn’t able to verify from multiple doctors and healthcare professionals that it is safe.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** All right. So I wanted to save that last little argument because Elijah had written other stuff, too, which is similar to other people. But that last part is a fallacy of illusory superiority. It’s that belief that when people overestimate their own qualities and abilities saying everyone who thinks that they’re better than average. And basically well I’m a person who can do my own research and therefore I can do this. Well, then you’re sort of be default saying other people aren’t smart enough to do their own research. It’s a weird trap to fall into.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also you don’t have to do research. If you are concerned about what multiple doctors and healthcare professionals think just go to the AMA website, or the CDC. There’s really no need to do research. The inability of Americans to do research is astonishing to me. They like to say the word research, but what they really mean is Googling crap from nonsense sites and talking to each other on Facebook. That’s not research at all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Or misreading studies, which is almost a national pastime at this point.

**John:** It definitely is. I think if you’re going to look at what doctors recommend you might look at what doctors themselves are doing for themselves. And if you see 98% of doctors are vaccinating themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That might be a sign that that’s a thing you want to do. I think inevitably everything leads to COVID these days, but I wanted to include that here just because of conspiracy theories and people writing in about this.

**Craig:** I suspect, I could be wildly wrong, but I suspect that the reason that Matt, Nate, and Elijah have written these comments is because they engage in conspiratorial thinking and they feel called out. And so they are defending. They feel defensive. This feels like defensive stuff. It doesn’t feel like a calm, rational, observation, or concern whatsoever. I think that they engage in conspiratorial thinking and they don’t like the fact that we don’t like it. And you failed to change our minds.

**John:** Yeah. I think I’m trying to be aware of situations where I am thinking conspiratorially, which is not about national government stuff, but there are definitely situations in which I can find myself guilty of conspiratorial thinking and I will try to take a step back from that. But I don’t believe that the overall system of the universe is rigged against me that I have to research everything to death to figure it out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Dave from New Hampshire I think actually had an email here that could point us to a way out.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** So Megana if you could share Dave’s email here.

**Megana:** “If movies and television can exacerbate this conspiracy theory problem, could they also help fight it? I’m working on my first screenplay now. It’s a dark comedy set during the satanic panic of the 1980s and one of the major themes is about how dangerous and harmful conspiracy theories can be. Do you have any thoughts on how my or any other movie could be effective in slowing the spread of conspiracy theories?”

**John:** Yeah, Dave. So first off I think that’s a great thing to look at, because I remember that time. And D&D was of course wildly implicated in it and it was nuts. So here’s my suggestion is rather than have the outside character sort of pointing to this conspiracy theory is crazy and wrong, if you can find a person who believes the conspiracy theory and is able to get their way out of thinking that the conspiracy theory is true. That’s actually genuinely helpful. Because we have very few examples of people finding their way out of these labyrinthian traps of conspiratorial thinking. And if you can show that and show that progress that is terrific.

**Craig:** I agree. What you’re doing is certainly one way of doing it as well which is to look at the aftermath because one of the hallmarks of conspiratorial thinkers is that they leap frog from one conspiracy to another. Their stock and trade is mobile goal posts.

So, if one of their hard thought and hard one beliefs is just absolutely finally proven to be utter nonsense they move onto a new one. It’s what they do. And it’s important to follow up and to show everybody that they thought this, they promoted it, and they were wrong, and here’s the proof. That’s important. That matters.

The satanic panic of the 1980s was real, it was insane. By the way, the nonsense about whatever it was, the missing children. Remember how obsessed everyone was with missing children when we were kids?

**John:** Definitely. Child abductions. Stranger dangers.

**Craig:** Child abductions. Stranger danger. The threat to children was vastly overrated. What was underrated was how many kids were being hurt inside their own homes. So, Megana, you’re going to find this hard to believe but when John and I were children, first of all they would make us drink milk in school. So let’s just start with how stupid that is. And John I don’t know if your school district did this, but in our school district in New York City they put pictures of kids on milk. Like on the side of the milk carton. Missing. I mean?

**John:** Yeah. I knew what that was.

**Craig:** It was crazy.

**John:** For whatever reason our Boulder dairies did not care about missing children.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** And so it would never print those photographs. They were involved obviously in the child abductions.

**Craig:** I don’t know why they thought milk – like why was milk the thing? People who like milk tend to also be great detectives? I don’t know. Anyway, the point being it needed to be debunked. And we must constantly debunk because it is the only thing I think that will stop people who are salvageable from continuing on that path. So I think you’re doing it. And I think John’s suggestion is terrific. Documentaries are a great idea.

And if you are doing a story where there is a conspiracy make sure to underscore how mundane it is, because most conspiracies are brutally mundane. They are not conspiracies of malicious people seeking to puppet master the world. They’re usually conspiracy theories of mediocrities covering up their own mess.

**John:** Yup. And a couple people, we trimmed these out of the emails, but they were saying like, oh, but Craig is being hypocritical because in Chernobyl he was talking about government cover up. But that is covering up a mistake. That is not from the start saying we’re going to do this thing and then we’re going to hide it.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** No, they were actually just trying to cover their ass.

**Craig:** There was no conspiracy at Chernobyl. There was a cover up but there was no conspiracy. They didn’t do this so that it would blow up. They just built a bad reactor because it was cheap. And then they kind of crossed their fingers and hoped that it would work. And then it blew up and then they tried to hide it. That’s not a conspiracy.

But that sad that people don’t understand the difference. In fact, I was pretty proud of how clearly we explained the mundanity, the kind of almost pathetic nature of the cause and aftermath of Chernobyl.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s move onto our next topic. So usually on the show we’re talking about the WGA West which is the organization that represents all the screenwriters and television writers west of the Mississippi, although you really could be nationwide. But most of when we talk about people running for office and the drama we’re really talking about the West, even though the East and West work together a lot.

But over the past month there’s new stuff coming out from the East that I think is worth talking about on the show. We’ve had East members on the podcast before. And many people involved are friends and colleagues. And so I really am sort of curious to talk through this because I think it’s an interesting issue that I think I can actually probably argue both sides pretty well about. And so far to everyone’s credit everyone is being really polite and civil and they’re really explaining themselves clearly and articulately. But no one is being finger-pointy and negative which is awesome and I love to see that.

So here’s what happening sort of overall. The WGA East represents film and TV writers like me and Craig, but they also represent folks who work for digital news outlets and things like Salon, or Slate, or Huff Post. And these digital places now account for almost 50% of the guild’s total membership. That can be a challenge because sometimes the things that the writers who are working for those organizations need are different than the ones who are working for the traditional studios, so folks who are writing for TV shows, movies, or for variety-comedy shows. And that’s the changing nature of the demographics there that is really the crux of this and it’s all coming to a head because there’s an election happening in the East and there’s a slate running for what’s called Inclusion and Experience which is basically how the guild has traditionally worked and a group called the Solidarity slate which is about continuing to organize these digital places.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well I will certainly give the Solidarity slate credit for a name that accurately represents what they stand for. The Inclusion and Experience ticket that’s kind of amusing because they really are quite overtly talking about exclusion, so that’s nifty.

So this is an interesting situation and we in the West contemplated many years ago when we were in the middle of our reality television organizing campaign. And there was a faction, a significant faction in the guild, that felt strongly that we should be organizing editors, reality television editors, into the WGA because the companies were essentially skirting around the idea of what a writer was by calling them editors. And they were editing, but they were also creating narrative.

And one of the arguments against this that was made by myself was that we would face an economic tremor. I wouldn’t call it an earthquake but there would be a tremor because – and this is where the law of unintended consequences rears up and gets you. For most people in these unions, I’m not talking about – some people are truly dedicated to certain aspects of what our unions do. Most members in our union and in the East I believe are primarily concerned about the preservation of residuals and the preservation of strong minimums and above all else a preservation of a strong and accessible healthcare plan.

The healthcare plan is entirely predicated on how much we earn. The companies put in a percentage of what we earn up to a certain number. We know that the amount of money you have to earn to qualify for healthcare is much lower than the amount of money that you have to earn to actually pay for your own healthcare. So, of course, the people who are earning more are subsidizing the people who earn less. And that’s a good part of a union. That’s how it should work.

However, that system only holds true if you have a certain kind of distribution of income. When you increase organization into an entire industry that across the board earns much less than the average income for the – well let’s call it traditional guild member – then you are absolutely going to negatively impact what your healthcare plan can do.

So, it’s an economic issue. I don’t think this is a moral issue per se. I think it’s just a straight up economic issue. The WGA East shouldn’t exist. Let me just go off into that. There’s a real easy way to solve this problem. We ought to have a national union with locals and our locals should serve the things that we do well. There should be locals that create their own contracts for news and for digital publishing and for television writing and for screenwriting. I would separate those two as well. And then you kind of work from there.

We should be organizing people. We should be bringing people into the union. But we are not designed – our current structure is not designed well for it. We have to revisit how we function as a union if this is what we want. Because if we think it’s as simple as just let them in, well, there’s going to be pushback and then there’s going to be as you can see – they’re not chicken little-ling here. It’s absolutely real. That economic tremor will grow and grow and grow.

**John:** So let’s talk about what unions do, because almost I’d say 95% of the discussion we’ve had on the show has been about, in terms of the WGA, has been about the contract with the studios, so the AMPTP, which is every three years we renegotiate and that is the basis of our minimums, our residuals, our healthcare plan, our family medical leave, all that stuff is an every three years negotiation with them. Or it’s been about the agency campaign which really just represents film and TV writers, traditional film and TV writers. The folks who are working under the auspices of the WGA who are not part of that contract would include news writers. In the WGA West we have some I think CBS people. There’s little bits and pockets. And the East often had broadcast news folks there, too, but now they have all of these digital houses.

Those are not working under the same contract. So the WGA is negotiating separate contracts with the individual employers here. Unions can absolutely work that way. That’s a great way for them to work. But it’s strange because most of the membership is working under one contract and then have these little pockets of things is different. And it becomes a question of focus. And when we see people who are working in IATSE or these giant unions that have all these disparate little pieces the needs of an editor in IATSE or god help them an animation in IATSE is not being as well served as they could be by a really dedicated, devoted union that was focusing on their specific needs.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now I think it would be fair for some people to question as many people have many, many times why do we need a WGA East and a WGA West? In particular for television and screenwriters why isn’t there some sort of folding in of those things? And there probably should be. Well, there definitely should be. It’s just sort of pointless. I don’t know if that would solve this particular problem.

A union is a good thing. And people working union jobs is a good thing. Not as you point out every union is good for every job simply because people work for the same corporation doesn’t mean that the same union should represent them. Maybe it used to function that way but given the way these corporations are structured now they are massive, they’re multinational. They have 400 divisions. They make sewing machines and they make movies.

So simple common employment isn’t the definition of common union membership. If the WGA East continues to organize digital writers as they are doing then, yes, it will become a digital writers union. Because it’s a very small union. There aren’t a lot of screenwriters and television writers who are in the WGA East. Much smaller union than the WGA West. And, yeah, absolutely. They will take over because it’s a democracy. That’s how democracy works.

It is a little squirmy to me to hear otherwise progressive individuals talking about keeping people from coming in because they don’t want changing demographics to cause an existential threat. That sure sounds like some nasty rhetoric to me. What you have to do is figure out how to restructure your organization to work for everybody fairly. I don’t think you can just shut the door.

**John:** I hear you there. And we’re going to include links in the show notes to various candidate statements that are talking through the various options and where they see the problems coming out there. So to try to explain what that argument would be is that because WGA East members can choose to join WGA West, film and TV writers could just choose to join the West, there’s a concern raised that a bunch of these writers might just say, “You know what? This is not the organization I signed up for. I’m just going to join the WGA West.” And East might just kind of collapse because most of the money is coming from film and TV writers.

That’s the existential threat to it.

**Craig:** It’s real. That’s real. If they don’t restructure that is correct. They would need to restructure in order to continue the path that they’re on.

**John:** And I think one thing that’s important to point out is that no one I’ve seen has ever suggested that the writers for these digital news places do not deserve a union. I think it’s the argument of sort of like what is a union that best would represent their needs and whether a different union would better serve them or spin them off into their own thing.

I’ll also include a link in the show notes to Adam Conover has a Twitter thread which I thought was a good explanation of the counterpoint to that which was that the kinds of places that are actually represented by the East or digital news places, they really are doing video. They’re doing stuff that kind of feels like TV but it’s not Netflix or it’s not Amazon. But it’s actually really kind of similar to that. And it’s the kind of stuff we keep talking about we need to make sure we are covering that because that’s going to be the next television.

**Craig:** Yeah, so I’m just reading it now. I think actually this is a pretty good version of the argument that I disagree with which is that common employment equals common union applicability. I just think it doesn’t necessarily work the same way like that. There is a reality you have to deal with. You can absolutely be a purist and you can just say we have to organize everybody. But my issue is the word “we.” We have to change what “we” is. Everyone ought to be organized. Everyone ought to be unionized in the face of corporate employment. I think it’s really important.

But the WGA East as it is currently constituted is a really poor delivery system for that. I do believe that. It is a very small union. It is kind of a boutique union that has continued to exist despite a thousand reasons for it not existing. Because a small but powerful group of very well paid writers in television and screen want it to, because they have I mean traditionally felt that they were a bit of a militant stake against a somewhat complacent and more company-friendly West, which would be surprising to hear – I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear.

**John:** So different now. I would also say that traditionally late night shows were made in the east coast and the writers who were working for those late night shows had a very specific set of needs and circumstances which was important. Now more late night variety comedy stuff is happening on both coasts so it’s not so exclusive to one guild or the other.

**Craig:** And the coast is no longer relevant either.

**John:** Where are these writers living? Most people moved home with their parents during the pandemic.

**Craig:** We all live on Zoom now. So the system has to be figured out there. Yes, if it continues in this way then the WGA will transform into a guild for digital writers. I guess that’s what we’re calling them, digital writers. And then I think a number of screen and television writers will go to the West. And transferring your membership from East to West is as simple as sending a letter to the executive director of the WGA East saying I want to transfer. And then they have to honor it by their constitution.

**John:** So, the last point I do want to bring up because I think it’s worth always remembering is that once upon a time there were animation who could have joined the WGA West and we always regret that animation was not covered by the West when it could have been. And instead those writers are kind of screwed and they’re in an Animation Guild which is not a powerful union and that’s not just money that’s being lost but it’s protections that writers who are working in animation really writing the same scripts as we’re writing for live action are not getting the protections that they deserve.

And so I want to make sure that – I want us to always be mindful of the fact that the stuff that we’re writing right now saying oh it’s not really what we’re doing, well for all we know in ten years it could be really the same thing as what we’re doing. And so to make sure that we’re not overlooking a very important group of writers who we are going to wish were in the WGA West because somehow they’re going to be in another union which is sort of a competitive union which is not going to have the same clout or power.

It becomes – I’m just always mindful that we need to be thinking not just about what are our needs in 2021, but 2041.

**Craig:** Yeah. I always like to point out that while we absolutely have a better situation for WGA writers than what is offered to writers in the Animation Guild, which is part of IATSE, that the people who run the Animation Guild are doing their best.

**John:** 100%. I don’t want to slag on them.

**Craig:** They got kind of a raw deal, too. But you’re right. Where I think it’s a little bit different is that animation writing, writing animated television or writing animated films is still what it is. We were snobby about it a long time ago and we shouldn’t have been. Writing for Gawker is not the same thing as what you or I do. It’s just a different business. It’s a different business. It’s a different occupation. It’s a different vocation. And it’s not going to be the same thing.

**John:** But writing for The Onion or writing for The Onion’s video things, you look at The Onion’s video production and that could 100% be the same kind of material that would be on a late night variety show.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so what’s happened is there hasn’t really been a discrimination. It’s just been sort of – we’ve been defining it as do you write stuff? Then come on into the union. If the Writers Guild, and I mean to say West and East, could just finally combine and then create divisions within, subdivisions, that addressed the specific contract needs and economic realities of the writers in those divisions then this could absolutely work. If we don’t it can’t. It just can’t. Because 40 or 50 years from now people writing for Gawker will still not be doing the things that you or I do. It’s just a different thing. It’s not worse or better, but it is different.

We have that problem with news. And like you said in the West we don’t have many news members. And they are terribly underrepresented by us. They shouldn’t be part of our union. I think they get a terrible raw deal being a part of our union because we just ignore, because there’s very few of them. And in the East they’ve always had a lot more and there’s been a lot of conflict out there between news writers and television and screenwriters. So, we have to think much, much bigger.

Will the WGA West and the WGA East consider merging and restructuring and thinking bigger to do a better job of organizing and unionizing as many writers as it can? My prediction is no. So I’m very curious to see what happens in the East. This is an interesting watershed moment.

**John:** Agreed. All right. Let’s get onto our other listener questions. We have a bunch and we’ll see how many we can get through. Megana, do you want to start us off with Ghosted?

**Megana:** Great. So Ghosted writes, “Earlier this year two WGA writers approached me about writing a script from a treatment they wished to produce. They were offering $10,000 on behalf of a third producer. After some video calls I wrote a treatment and received the contract and commencement fee of $2,500. The contract makes clear that the project is a guaranteed first draft, rewrite, and polish. Although it doesn’t mention my treatment.

“I delivered a very good first draft on time and I received extensive notes, but no payment. After I asked what was going on the producer said that this draft didn’t count as a first draft and that I would be required to do additional rewrites until they were ready to call it a first draft. They promised it would only be one rewrite, but their notes indicated huge changes to structure, tone, et cetera, much of which conflicted with what we had discussed before I began writing. It would end up being a page one rewrite and they hinted this could become as many as eight rewrites.

“At first I considered doing the unpaid rewrite as a courtesy, because I’m an idiot and was dazzled by the opportunity, but the communication with the writer-producers became increasingly hostile and toxic to the point where I just wanted to leave the project. I emailed the main producer with whom I have the contract saying I would do the additional rewrites if I could just deal directly with him. After not hearing back I let them know I expected payment for the first draft and won’t be doing any free rewrites. It’s been about three months and I still haven’t heard back.

“Obviously based on the fee I’m not in the WGA and to make writers worse I’m not in the US. The contract says that disputes must be handled via arbitration but the fee to initiate arbitration would eat almost all of what I’m owed. I don’t really have that money to gamble so what should I do next?”

**Craig:** Oh dear god.

**John:** Oh dear god. Craig, so I’ve actually emailed back and forth with Ghosted a few times, but I’m really curious what your first thoughts are here.

**Craig:** Well, this is deeply regrettable. WGA members simply should not be doing this. It doesn’t matter if you can do it legally. In this case Ghosted works overseas so they can work in a way that is not covered by the WGA, but it’s just immoral. You are in our guild. You’re part of our union. You’re supposed to be part of the promotion and protection of the status of professional screenwriters. You offered $10,000 for a script which is atrocious.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And you also I don’t know if the two writers asked for a new treatment or not, the contract and commencement fee $2,500. You know, that’s embarrassing. Like they should feel embarrassed for offering that kind of money to another person. Do it yourself or offer a real fee. Don’t exploit people. That’s just exploitation as far as I’m concerned. And it’s wrong. And I hope that they set it right. Maybe they will hear this and they can set it right.

At the very least pay the $10,000.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is owed. Or I guess in this case the $7,500. And I don’t care if the script is the worst thing you ever read. You hired that person, you’re accountable. That’s the way it works.

**John:** Hiring somebody is a gamble. And you gambled on this writer. And this writer delivered on time. And you may not be happy with it, but that’s not their problem. This is the situation that you’re in and you’ve messed it up by not getting back to this person, by being rude and dismissive. Pay this writer. It didn’t work out and you need to move on. That’s frustrating.

**Craig:** We’re hearing one side of the story.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So in my mind I’m altering it. I’m imagining a version of the story where Ghosted is just nuts and the worst writer ever, which is not true I’m sure. But let’s just say that Ghosted was nuts and wrote a really bad script. It doesn’t matter. You made an agreement which you shouldn’t have made in the first place because it was too low. And by the way you get what you pay for. They offered this money. They’re not giving it. And when they got the script they did the thing that we have been fighting against other people doing for decades which is saying, “Oh, it’s not really a draft because I need you to write eight drafts, or four drafts, or even just two drafts for the price of one.” Not even the price of one draft. The price of one-seventh of a draft.

That’s outrageous. You can’t do that. And it’ll get around. And it’s not going to work for you, either. I just don’t understand what the theory was here.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, karma will come back to you because the way you’re mistreating this writer others will mistreat you. And it’s bad and shameful. So, specific advice for Ghosted. Ghosted asked should I register the script so I can at least prove that I wrote this in case it ever becomes a thing. Yeah. I mean, you have your email your back and forth to show that you wrote this thing. It exists in a chain of title. If you really feel like registering it for copyright in your country or the US, you can. If you feel like registering with the WGA, that doesn’t actually do anything other than prove that you wrote it at a certain time, which your email already does. I don’t think that matters.

I don’t think it’s really worth necessarily starting the arbitration. If there’s basically a no cost way to indicate that you are starting it, or just basically do the very first little checkmark of I’m doing this thing I suspect they will just pay you out to make you go away, and that’s not the worst thing.

I feel for Ghosted because Ghosted is afraid of naming these writers because he doesn’t want to blow up his career. But also these people don’t deserve – they don’t deserve whatever success they’ve had so far. They don’t deserve to be hiring other writers.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, look if they can only afford to pay $10,000 for a script from a treatment then they are not in a position to blow your career up. They’re just not important enough. If they can’t afford to pay you real money they’re not important enough.

**John:** Yeah. And it seems like it’s not even their money, it’s the producer’s money. So really your argument is kind of even more about this producer. This producer needs to pay you the money.

**Craig:** Yeah. Whoever agreed to pay you the money needs to pay you the money. And they need to stop engaging in this kind of arrangement. I consider it to be unethical. Deeply unethical. And exploitative. And not becoming who we are as professional writers. And if they don’t feel like writing something themselves then they ought to stand up for the people that get hired. And I have been in situations where other writers have disappointed me. And that happens. That’s called life.

Just as you and I have disappointed other people. You pay them and you move on. You don’t do this. And I agree, John, practically speaking the situation here is such that I think the best Ghosted can hope for is perhaps that they settle out at $0.50 on the dollar or maybe they just pay Ghosted off to go away. But if there’s anything you’ve learned, Ghosted, it’s if you’re going to get paid $10,000 to write a script get paid as much as possible upfront. And if they refuse then they don’t even have $10,000 as far as I’m concerned. And now you’re dealing with knuckleheads.

**John:** I agree. Megana, what do you have for us?

**Megana:** So Audrey asks, “I recently had a meeting with a production company over Zoom. It was an informal chat about a project they’re looking for writers on. I’d be really excited to work on it and wanted to demonstrate my enthusiasm for the project, but I struggled because one of the women in the meeting just looked so bored. It wasn’t even that she looked like she was reading something else or checking emails. She was listening to me, but no matter what I said or did she looked totally unamused. Do you guys have tips for dealing with meetings like this? And how do I focus on the engaged listeners and not the bored ones?”

**John:** Oh, yeah, I’ve been there.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** So here’s what I’ll say. There always was the bored person in the room during a pitch, but in real life you just don’t look at that person. And on Zoom you can’t help but sort of see that person because their face is right there and you kind of can notice more like, ugh, that person is really bored and that sucks. As long as it’s not the main decision maker it’s not such a big thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And by the way be aware that you might be misreading. We think we’re better face readers than we are. Sometimes people look bored and it’s just that’s their face. And inside they’re thinking, OK, who are they also going to talk to about this and who should I get about. They also might have also had a really bad day and they’re doing their best not to cry. You never know what it is.

Sometimes they’re bored because they’re bored. My strong advice, Audrey, is don’t change nothing. You go in there to do a pitch, or a meeting, or a chat, do your pitch, do your meeting, do your chat. Don’t let their face make you change your course, because you just don’t know. Similarly don’t read too much into people that are incredibly engaged. Sometimes they’re just sociopaths.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. One of the things I think Craig is leaning towards here is really look for what the actual actions they’re taking. They might be saying nice things in the room, but if they’re actually sort of following up and really are engaged that is a sign that this went well and you should keep doing that thing. If the feedback you’re getting is like, oh, they didn’t think you were right, or there’s something that wasn’t right about that pitch, then you can actually iterate and see what it is that can work better. Because over the course of this pandemic I’ve had projects we’ve taken out and pitched to multiple buyers on Zoom and you do recognize like oh OK there are consistent patterns or there are ways that we can do this pitch better based on the feedback we’re getting.

So maybe that’ll be your situation. But in every one of those pitches there’s been somebody who has been kind of just a little bit checked out. That’s just Zoom. It’s fine.

**Craig:** It’s just Zoom.

**John:** Zoom. Megana, another question?

**Megana:** Jack writes, “I’m 20 years old and have been writing scripts since I was 14. I’ve also been reading scripts as I’ve heard you guys say that this is the best way to actually write a script. I was curious what books you guys were reading at my age. In an attempt to educate myself over the past two years I’ve torn through Syd Field, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Adventures in the Screen Trade, Screenwriting is Rewriting. And now I’m writing Truffaut’s book on Hitchcock.

“Also Save the Cat has been shoved down my throat so many times over the past two years that I think I’m going to cough up a hair ball. Is there anything else I should be reading?”

**John:** Well, Jack, it’s great that you’re reading scripts. So let’s emphasize that. And really reading screenplays is the best education you can get. These other books sound great and useful to some degree. We all had to read Syd Field and maybe it’s good to read one other screenwriter book so you had a sense of like what people were talking about, but don’t read too many screenwriting books would be my advice.

I think production diaries and books about the making of a film are incredibly useful. The one that sort of inspired me was Steven Soderbergh’s book for Sex, Lies, and Videotape which is both the script and his production journal for going through it and how the movie changed as he was shooting it. It was just really helpful to think about this is what the intention was in the script and this is what the actual reality was shooting it and editing it. How you discover the movie as you’re making it. So there’s a ton of really good things. Like Do the Right Thing there’s a good production book for that, too.

Really learning about how those parts of the process work is super helpful even if you perceive yourself as “just a screenwriter,” because ultimately you are going to be responsible for making these movies and knowing how to make movies is important.

**Craig:** I agree with John. And I think that the books about the making of movies – I think the greatest amount of value there is probably how fascinating they are. They are engaging, they’re fascinating. And you do learn a lot of practical things about how movies are made. Will it help you write a screenplay? I don’t think so. The only thing that’s going to help you write a good script, Jack, is writing a good script. And before you write a good script you’re going to write a bad script. You write two more bad scripts. Then you write a mediocre script. You write four more mediocre scripts. Then you write a really good one, then you go back to bad, and this is how it goes.

But you don’t have to worry so much about the secret book that’s going to blow your mind. The one book that has probably meant more to me than any other is by Dennis Palumbo who we had on our show in Episode 99. I think it’s called Writing from the Inside Out.

**John:** Yeah. I have that book.

**Craig:** And it’s essays about the psychology of writing and that was helpful because it made me feel better. And these books aren’t going to make you a good writer, but that book will make you feel better. And writing stinks, so anything that makes me feel good I recommend that.

**John:** Always remember that writing is writing. And while screenwriting is its own unique weird art form, books that are about the writing process can be helpful for some writers. I really like Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. On Writing everyone loves from Steven King. There’s a new book out, Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders. And sometimes writers are really good about talking about their own process and the journey, the struggle, the getting through it.

And so remember that you are writer and that writing is hard, but other people have done this before you. I would say also look for kind of what are your weak spots. And if you don’t have great insight into character conflict and drama, well read books about how in real life people resolve conflict or how to deal with conflict. Look for books that fill in the parts of your education that you’re sort of missing out on because those will be helpful for you as you’re writing stuff.

So if you’re a person who is really good at writing action but you have a hard time with two characters in a scene having an argument, maybe really look at books on psychology or books about marriage dynamics and other things like that that can really dig into what the communication strategies are between two people. Because that may be a thing that helps you more than any book on three act structure.

**Craig:** Here. Here.

**John:** Cool. I think it is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the good news that the majority of Americans now believe in evolution.

**Craig:** How is this good news that it took this long? This is tragic.

**John:** I’ll take the good news where I can get it.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** This is coming out of the University of Michigan. So beginning in 1985 every two years they did a survey. They took these national samples of US adults and asked them to agree or disagree with this statement. “Human beings as we know them today developed from earlier species of animals.” And so from 2010 to 2019 that increased from 40% of people agreeing with that to 54%. So it got us over the 50% line.

**Craig:** That’s good.

**John:** That’s some progress. I’ll take that.

**Craig:** It is progress. I guess that’s part of what we’re going to be talking about in our bonus segment that even when things seem bleak or not ideal over time it seems like the trends generally are towards things being better, slowly but surely, in some areas slower than others. And maybe in some areas stagnant. But this is certainly a good sign. I see that in the study it says even among religious fundamentalists the percentage from 1988 to 2019 went from 8% to 32%. That’s a massive shift actually.

**John:** That is a massive shift. And I think that apparently also reflects that the number of people with college degrees has really skyrocketed. And so you sort of – it’s hard to get through a college education without having some understanding of some science or how things kind of work in the natural world. And so that’s probably one of the big factors. And so even among religious fundamentalists college education has increased and that’s probably a factor there, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a cultural thing there, too. It’s harder to maintain a belief in something that is absurd when a lot of people around you very calmly disagree. There aren’t a lot of people out there that are yelling about evolution in your face. They just know it’s true because there’s this insane tidal wave of evidence. And they simply leave it there. And they talk about it. And when you say, “No, god made the earth,” in whatever they think it is, 5,000 years ago or something, or 10,000 years ago. “And he made Adam out of some dirt and he made Eve out of a rib.” They look at you and say, no, that’s incorrect. And then they move away and go eat lunch with someone else. And you are forced to confront the absurdity of that point of view.

I’ve always believed in evolution but I came from a very blue collar/middle class kind of upbringing and I thought and believed a lot of stupid crap. And it changed while I was in college because I was exposed to people who knew better. And that’s part of that process.

**John:** Yeah. I may have actually had this be a previous One Cool Thing, but this is occurring to me now. While I was on my east coast trip this summer we stopped by Dinosaur State Park in Connecticut. I don’t know if you’ve ever been Dinosaur State Park.

**Craig:** I have not.

**John:** So what’s cool about it is basically they were doing some big construction project and they came across this slab of stone that had all these dinosaur footprints in it of these dinosaur tracks. And so they had to stop everything and they put a big dome over it and that’s now Dinosaur State Park. And it occurs to me I just feel like every person who doesn’t believe in evolution should just go there because you see, oh, there are these dinosaur footprints there.

So how did these get here? These are from billions of years ago, so please explain why god would have buried these footprints under this thing?

**Craig:** Well that’s what they say. I mean, someone once said to me that those bones were put there to test our faith. Well, at that point I’m going to go eat lunch with someone else.

**John:** That’s probably true.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if you’re driving across Connecticut and you see the signs for Dinosaur State Park I think it’s worth an hour to sort of go through it because weirdly they don’t have the dinosaurs, they just have the footprints. But you can see that like, oh, they were just stomping around in the mud here. And you can see how massive they were. Nice.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** What’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I’m keeping this streak going of games on iOS. I don’t know what it is. There was a real drought for a while of the kinds of games I like playing and then suddenly a bunch just showed up in a cluster. And this week my One Cool Thing is a game called What Remains of Edith Finch. This is not a new game. This is a game that came out in 2017. I think it was released on – oh yeah, so it was on Steam maybe or something. But you also could have gotten it on your PS4, your Xbox. But it is now available on your iPad or your iPhone maybe.

It is directed and written by a gentleman named Ian Dallas which sounds like a – that sounds like a fake tough guy name, doesn’t it? Well, Ian Dallas has made a beautiful game. This was published by Annapurna which in its short life was known correctly so for quality. And this game is quality. It’s a beautiful game where you are moving through a house that was occupied by a number of your ancestors. Your uncles and aunts and grandparents. All of whom died untimely deaths. Every single one of them. And as you move through the house you discover little shrines to them and you then go into their memories and the game play is very varied. Sometimes it’s incredibly simple and beautiful. Sometimes there’s actually a little bit of a challenge. But really is just an experience. And it’s lovely. Just gorgeous. It’s beautiful. The music is lovely. And it’s really creative. Each person’s world that you go into is wildly different than the one before, not only in terms of narrative but in terms of game design and tone and style.

So, I strongly recommend it. What Remains of Edith Finch. And that is available on iOS.

**John:** Excellent. And I think it’s important that you have a videogame recommendation for your One Cool Thing because in ten years I feel like by far the majority of your One Cool Things have been games. Consistency over the ten years is really nice.

**Craig:** It’s really all I care about is games.

**John:** And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Megana, thank you for all your reading this week. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Christiaan Mentz. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is around there occasionally, but not too often.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them on Cotton Bureau and celebrate our 10-year anniversary today with our special 10th Anniversary t-shirt.

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 how things have gotten better over the last 20 years. Craig, thank you for ten years.

**Craig:** Thank you for ten and here’s to another 40.

**John:** Yay.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. So this bonus segment is inspired by this post by Gwern Branwen which is just an amazing name.

**Craig:** Welsh I presume.

**John:** I would assume. And they have this really long blog post that’s just talking about how life has changed since the 1990s. And really goes into great details and made me remember so many things that I had forgotten about what daily life was like in the 1990s which is not that far away, but also feels more distant when you actually look at just how you had to get stuff done, especially work stuff done.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I feel it all the time when I sometimes talk about these things with Bo because she is almost 25 years younger than I am. So when I talk about the way things used to be in the way that old people do sometimes she looks like, “Oh really? That sounds terrible.” And she’s right. A lot of those things were terrible. And a lot of things have gotten much better.

**John:** Well, so computers are a really easy one we can probably knock out quickly because they’re just so much cheaper than they used to be. I remember getting my – I stated on an Atari computer, but my first real computer that was my computer that I really loved and identified with was my Macintosh 20. I got the Macintosh with the–

**Craig:** The SE20.

**John:** SE20. So it had a hard drive built in. But that was $3,900.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which was – that’s $7,000 now. It’s a huge amount of money for an incredibly underpowered computer with floppy drives. It was the best thing I could possibly get at the time and also just a joke by any modern standard.

**Craig:** Same. I believe my first computer was a Franklin Ace 1000 which was a clone of the Apple 2 or Apple 2E. I think it cost about $1,500 in 1982. I don’t know what that is today, but you’re right it’s probably like $7,000. And this was a computer that had 64k of memory total I think.

**John:** Yeah. But even this blog post is pointing out that not just the memory and speed of it all, but just mice. Do you remember having to clean out your mice because they all got gunk in them?

**Craig:** Disgusting. First of all, your wrists would. So we created a pandemic of wrist trouble. And then the mouse would get disgusting, or the track ball would get disgusting because we’re constantly shedding skin. And we are gross.

**John:** Yeah. And so people don’t understand mice used to have a ball in them that was actually rolling around on the mouse pad or on the table. And it would just pick up everything. And eventually it would stop working properly and you’d have to get in there with a Q-tip or your fingernail to get all the gross stuff out. I don’t miss that. Don’t miss that one bit.

**Craig:** Not at all.

**John:** We had no GPS. We had Thomas Guides to find our ways around places. At a certain point we had cellphones but they couldn’t do any of the things that our current cellphones did. We didn’t have cameras that could do this kind of stuff.

**Craig:** No. We didn’t have any of that stuff. How about real simple things? Let’s just already give everybody computers. Let’s give everybody phones. If you get an email on your phone and you delete it’s still there on your computer when you get home. How about just simple stuff like that?

**John:** Closer to home. Movie theaters are much better than they used to be. So we all miss some of the giant old screens. We loved some of those things. But seats are more comfortable now. You can reserve individual seats. You don’t have to line up an hour ahead of a screening of a movie to get a good seat. You don’t have to save seats anymore. This is progress. This is a good thing.

**Craig:** Not saving seats, and then not getting into arguments about the saving of the seats.

**John:** Oh god. It was just the worst. Laying your jacket across multiple seats to try to protect them while your friend is at the bathroom.

**Craig:** Terrible.

**John:** Craig, people used to smoke. Do you remember when people used to smoke?

**Craig:** I was one of them. It was amazing.

**John:** From what year to what year did you smoke?

**Craig:** I started smoking I want to say in 1990 and I went to like 1996.

**John:** Yeah. So college age and post-college.

**Craig:** Yeah, early 20s.

**John:** I never smoked. But I guess some of the advantages of smoking is you have an excuse to sort of step outside of the work to smoke. It gives you that little jolt of – the nicotine. What does nicotine actually do chemically for you?

**Craig:** Interesting. It can do two different things. They’ve done these fascinating studies. If you have a kind of rapid and shallow intake of nicotine vapor, whether it’s from a cigarette or vape, it will amp you up. It’s a stimulant. When you do slower, deeper draws it will actually calm you down. So what’s fascinating about nicotine is the system that it runs through, this nicotinergic system in your brain actually has a complicated pathway. That’s why it’s one of the best drugs there is. Just unfortunately the delivery system is really bad.

But, yeah, I love nicotine. That’s why I can’t have it. Because my brain loves nicotine.

**John:** But smoking was not only unhealthy for the individual but also just kind of sucked for society. And things smell like smoke all the time. The used car that I owned and that I drove out here to Los Angeles a smoker had it before this. And so whenever it would be parked in the sunlight a film would form on the inside of the windows from the cigarette smoke coming out of the seats. Smoking is just gross. I’m glad there’s much less smoking.

**Craig:** Megana, have you had the experience of being in a restaurant with a smoking section?

**Megana:** No. But I remember being little and having hotel rooms and you had to specify smoking or not smoking.

**Craig:** The restaurant smoking section was one of the great anti-choice of our childhood. Because they were honestly were like if you go over there inside if you’re in those tables you can smoke. Well the smoke doesn’t know that.

**John:** It doesn’t know there’s nowhere to stay.

**Craig:** In fact we know just from simple physics and diffusion that the smoke will fill the room equally over time. But in a very serious way wait staff were being poisoned by smoke.

**John:** Small things I would have not thought of but it’s actually very true. Wheeled luggage has gotten so much better. Because I remember old suitcases with wheels on it were just terrible and the wheels would always shatter and break. And then they just figured out how to make wheels good. They figured out how to make skateboard wheels and rollerblade wheels and they decided what if we actually put quality wheels on luggage and now luggage is just a delight by comparison to where it was in the ‘90s.

**Craig:** How about the fact that there was luggage without wheels? Because all the luggage didn’t have wheels. And the people that had the wheeled luggage were the flight attendants and the pilots. And I guess at some point someone was like, wait, why don’t I have that? Why am I carrying this? This sucks. Yeah. Were we stupid? Were the luggage companies stupid? I don’t know.

Oh, I got a good one for you. How about this one?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Diapers.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Yes. Disposable diapers back in the day were awful. Because the stuff inside of them was just not really well engineered. And then they came out with those little gel pellets. And now you can jam a bunch of diapers together in one thing and they soak up like four gallons of pee. They’re pretty incredible.

**Megana:** What do you mean by jam a bunch of diapers in one thing?

**Craig:** Ah. So when you would buy diapers, back in the old days, you would go and you would get a package of ten diapers. It was an enormous package because the diapers were really thick. There was no absorbent stuff. It was more like just here’s a–

**John:** Just padding.

**Craig:** Here’s a baggy with a sponge in it. But the baby would pee once and it’s coming out the sides. It just was useless. And now if you have a baby and you go to the store you can get a thing of 20 diapers and they’re so thin because of those little gel pellets. It’s genius.

**John:** Yeah. So until you are around modern babies, like the diapers do start really thin and then you do see the diaper sort of swell up as pee goes in there.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**John:** But the other thing is it sucks the water away from the skin and so they get less diaper rash and it’s more comfortable for them and it’s good.

**Craig:** When you take a diaper off a baby now it weighs like eight pounds. It’s incredible. And that’s just from pee. I’m not talking about poop. Just a pee diaper is heavy like a bowling ball. It’s amazing.

**John:** So, a controversial opinion here which people will write in about. I find the smell of a pee diaper is not bad to me. It’s actually sort of comforting to me.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I don’t love it, but it makes me feel happy that there’s a baby around. A poop diaper is just disgusting. Nobody needs poop.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t say comforting. But, yeah, I’m happy a baby is around. And changing a pee diaper is like a joke. No big deal at all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** See, you didn’t have a boy. The second you take that diaper off you’ve got to be ready with a cloth to drop on top of his junk or else he’s peeing right on you. Because as soon as the air hits that thing, boom, pee.

**John:** We lucked into a baby who just did not ever want to poop in her diaper, and so we sat her on the potty before she was a year old and she was just pooping in her potty.

**Craig:** What? That’s crazy.

**John:** It’s crazy but it works out. Not related to babies, another thing which is so much better do you remember car stereos and car stereos being stolen out of cars? God that just sucked.

**Craig:** Megana, let me explain something to you. When John and I were little in the car there was an FM/AM radio. You might remember those. But they weren’t digital. They were analog. So that meant there was a dial. And you would move the dial and this little red stick would just slide from left to right and land sort of on the station. And you had to really get it right. But once you found it there were these little push buttons and you could press one of them to make it your preset. So you would hit that button and the little stick would go ka-tunk. Ka-tunk. Ka-tunk. Ka-tunk. And you went through all of that so you could have your five stations stores, each one of which was mostly advertising and you couldn’t hit pause. Amazing.

**John:** But not only did you get to enjoy the car radio, but if you had a stereo that actually had a tape player or something someone might break into your car to still that thing and rip it out of the dashboard because they could sell it, because those things were sold separately from the car. They were not inherently a part of the car. They were often a thing that was added to the car. And so one of the choices you might have is like, oh, take the radio out of the car when you park it someplace. So people would actually take their radio out.

Or, the plate, the face plate of it would pop off so that no one would steal the radio, so you’d just take the face plate of your car stereo. I’m just delighted that’s not a thing anymore.

**Craig:** Seriously.

**John:** Or people would have GPS mounted to their windshield and you’d have to worry about someone stealing that. Nope. It’s just part of your car. It’s part of your phone. We’re in a better time now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So we will revisit this segment in 20 years on the show and see what things we can’t believe we had to suffer through way back in 2021.

**Craig:** You know what’s going to be fun? If we keep doing this Megana is going to get old. [laughs]

**John:** Megana, we’ll bring you back. So as you’re running some – you have five shows on the air and a dynasty–

**Craig:** Still bringing you back.

**Megana:** Or I might still be here.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m actually OK with that. I really like you.

**Megana:** Me too.

**Craig:** I’m happy you want to stay with us.

**John:** Thanks both of you.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**Megana:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Episode 167, The Tentpoles of 2019](https://johnaugust.com/2014/the-tentpoles-of-2019) and [transcript](https://johnaugust.com/2014/scriptnotes-ep-167-the-tentpoles-of-2019-transcript)
* [The Original Superhero Slate from 2013 from Newsarama](https://web.archive.org/web/20140809000438/http://www.newsarama.com/21815-the-new-full-comic-book-superhero-movie-schedule.html)
* [Episode 512: There is No Conspiracy](https://johnaugust.com/2021/there-is-no-conspiracy)
* [WGA East Election](https://deadline.com/2021/06/former-wga-east-president-michael-winship-running-unopposed-will-succeed-beau-willimon-as-guilds-next-president-1234779475/)
* [WGA East Considers Spinning Off Digital News Members Into New Union Amid “Existential Threat”](https://deadline.com/2021/08/writers-guild-east-digital-news-members-spinoff-union-idea-existential-crisis-1234818316/) by David Robb
* [Adam Conover WGA East Twitter Thread](https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1430682946898317314?s=20)
* [University of Michigan Study: Evolution now accepted by majority of Americans](https://news.umich.edu/study-evolution-now-accepted-by-majority-of-americans/)
* [What Remains of Edith Finch Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Remains_of_Edith_Finch)
* [Improvements since the 1990s](https://www.gwern.net/Improvements) by Gwern Branwen
* [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/)
* [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 Christiaan Mentz ([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/514standard.mp3).