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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/that-icky-feeling).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 454 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’ll be discussing the difference between story and screenplay, both as official WGA categories but also what we mean in everyday use. We’ll also explore that icky feeling that something is wrong with your script and what to do about it when you feel it. Then we’ll be answering listener questions about age, starting over, and whether you should turn in the Final Draft file when the producers ask for it.

**Craig:** Oh, yes.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for Premium subscribers, Craig and I will read erotic fiction.

**Craig:** Now if that doesn’t cause a stampede toward the subscription button I don’t know what will.

**John:** It could all be a big tease. We’ll see.

**Craig:** By the way, the erotic fiction we’ll be reading from is called Stampede Toward the Subscription Button.

**John:** Ha-ha. Really it’s good. It’s a very meta kind of thing.

**Craig:** Hot.

**John:** Hot. Some news about writing. Last week on the show I mentioned that my local bookstore, Chevalier’s was reopening and a bunch of local authors we’re getting together to celebrate its reopening – of course delivery or takeaway. But still it’s great that indie bookstores are being able to reopen. So we’re hosting a special event this coming Saturday, June 6, at 2pm. We’ll have a dozen authors, including myself, Aline Brosh McKenna, Derek Haas, Stuart Gibbs. Other middle grade YA and adult authors.

**Craig:** Stuart Gibbs! I’ve known Stuart Gibbs forever.

**John:** He is a lovely, lovely man.

**Craig:** Yeah. He really is. I’ve known him since I first arrived in Los Angeles.

**John:** Yeah. He’s a good guy. So we’re going to be talking through our summer reading list. So these are books we recommend people take a look at, both all the way from picture books up through grown up adult novels. So we’ll be talking through the books we love, books you should read over the summer. People should buy those books from Chevalier’s or whatever your indie bookstore is. But come join us on Zoom. It’s 2pm this Saturday, June 6. We’ll be hanging out and discussing summer reading.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Second bit of follow up. Last week on the show we were talking about how to reopen the town for production. And several people wrote in about French hours. And they’re making a point which we didn’t really make in the show is that to summarize French hours are where rather than working these endless long production days you limit yourselves to 12 hours and there’s no lunch break. You don’t stop for lunch. You work through lunch and everyone goes home at a reasonable time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, Craig, what is the downside of that from an economic standpoint for an individual person?

**Craig:** Well…I think maybe it’s that there’s a less likely chance that there will be overtime.

**John:** That’s exactly it. So people were writing in to say that French hours sound great and they probably are healthier for everybody concerned. The reason why you’ll see pushback against it is that after eight hours people on these union sets tend to get overtime. And so you want to work more than eight hours because that’s how you bring home the big bucks.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that’s the thing we’d be balancing out is how to we get to a place where people value their life and their livelihoods and having a quality of life rather than just the sheer number of dollars they’re taking home.

**Craig:** Well, if you recall when we were talking about this Rawson got emotionally pleased at the thought of French hours. Most filmmakers do. And so what I would say – let’s say for instance on the next television show that I’m showrunning and EP’ing, I’d say to the producer, meaning the person in charge of the budget and also the studio, “Hey, what if we offer the crew more money per hour? We sort of say, look, we’re just going to go apples to apples here.” So we would probably end up doing this many hours over the course of a week with this much at time and a half, which is standard overtime. We’re going to give you a little bit more for your standard hours to get to that number and in exchange we’ll do French hours just because it makes us happier.

**John:** That is the right conversation to have.

**Craig:** Yeah. And hopefully that would go well. Because the benefit of French hours is not – look, maybe there are bean counters who say the benefit is that you’re saving money. But for us on the creative side the benefit is just that it’s just better creatively. And also for the purpose of managing COVID and etc. It’s vastly superior.

**John:** Yeah. So my hope is that as we start having these conversations about reopening the town some of the necessities, like French hours, become the norms. And that we really do move to a place where we are thinking about the health and safety and creative function of the people who make film and television and that it becomes a matter of course that we’re limiting our hours to things that make sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m all for it. But point well taken. We should not put this on the backs of working people. That’s not who should be absorbing the cost. Nor should there be a cost to absorb. We’re already paying people this much money. We should keep paying them that much money, if not more, and just shift the way we do the work during the day.

**John:** And now there’s not a real state update in terms of when we are going to have guidance about how we’re reopening the town. As we’re recording this, this is on a Thursday, we thought earlier this week there would be an official state of California guide and plan for how it’s going to work.

**Craig:** Yeah. What happened there?

**John:** It didn’t really happen. I’ve heard rumblings that it’s really on the actors’ side. That there’s real concerns about, again, safety and basically what we talked about in the show. They are the most vulnerable people on a set because they cannot wear masks. Social distancing won’t apply to two actors who are in a scene together likely. So, there are real concerns about maintaining their safety.

What I hear, and this is all just people gossiping, is that’s one of the hold ups about having official guidance behind this. Still, when I talk to showrunners there’s ongoing discussions about maybe it’s July, maybe it’s August. That there’s going to be an attempt to get TV production at least back up and running.

**Craig:** Yeah. It will continue to be the actors and it should. Because they are going to be the ones who are the most risk. And they are literally incapable of doing their jobs properly if they are physically restrained from being near each other or revealing their faces. Unless we just go to an all Iron Man kind of thing. [laughs] Where everyone is just Iron Man’d up.

**John:** 100% of the time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or Banes. Just Iron Mans and Banes.

**John:** Iron Man or Banes. Or a tremendous amount of visual effects to paint out people’s masks, sort of like how we painted out Henry Cavill’s mustache.

**Craig:** That didn’t work so well.

**John:** It was phenomenal. It’s what everything should look like. There’s vaguely a little bit long. Like an Animal Crossing face.

**Craig:** [speaking like Bane] I don’t want you to worry, John. I’ve had my COVID test.

I would do Bane all day. If I could do Bane all day I would. If it were allowable. If my wife would allow it.

**John:** Yeah. But she would never allow that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our two main topics. Our first is story versus screenplay. So, on the show many a time we have talked about writing credits and what they mean, but we should probably recap that because for American movies the credits you see onscreen have very specific meanings and Craig can you talk us through what the very specific meanings are for the writing credits we see on a feature film?

**Craig:** Again, and first thing to know just as a little bit of background is that these writing credits that we have onscreen are the production of negotiation. So it’s actually writing into our collective bargaining agreement with the studios. And because that bargaining agreement is a massive contract these terms actually are legally defined in the contract.

So, what is story? Well, let me give you the dry version. Then I’ll give you – then we can discuss what we think it is. The dry version is “the term story is all writing covered by the provisions of the MBA representing a contribution is that is distinct from screenplay and consisting of basic narrative, idea, theme, or outline indicating character development and action.” And this is something that when we did our rewrite of the manual for clarity this was a section that I worked on pretty carefully. And this is a bit of my hobby horse. What it now says in there is “distinct from screenplay means that the contributions considered for story should not be applied to screenplay credit, nor should contributions considered for screenplay credit be applied to story.”

But what does that clunky lawyer-written phrase actually mean creatively? I’m kind of curious what you think it means.

**John:** So, when I think of story I think about if I were to sort of pitch the movie or pitch what’s happening in the story and write that down, so my written version of a pitch would probably be story. And that is it’s what’s happening but it’s not the specifics of details, individual scenes, how it works. It’s really more kind of what happens and the overall shape of things rather than the specificities of how it’s being told onscreen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I think that’s generally the way people approach it. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways you can work it in your mind. I mean, one tactic I have sometimes is to think what part of this could have been expressed in a treatment without any of it seeming like it might belong in a script. You know, people can put dialogue in treatments. Well, that could fit in a script. But if it’s just sort of a treatment-only kind of thing then it’s likely that it’s story, but not necessarily. Basic narrative to me kind of feels like broad plot. Not the specific little ticky-tacky moments but broad plot.

**John:** Now, the very specific language you gave, here’s why that language is important. Is that ultimately at the end of a writing process and as we’re determining credits it’s that very specific language that we are going to be using in our arbitration statements, or if you’re an arbiter determining credit you are going to refer back to that very specific legal language to say this is why I’m defending this decision on this. So, when Craig and I are talking in generalities about story, great, we can talk in generalities. But if we’re talking about the specific credit for this piece of literary material we are always going to reach back to that legally language because that is how WGA credits are determined.

**Craig:** Yeah. So when I’m doing an arbitration I will talk a lot about what I consider to be the basic narrative and who contributed to the basic narrative. Idea. I think everybody kind of gets what that is. Theme. Everybody kind of gets what that is. And then outline indicating character development and action, which to me means again kind of a – well, it’s an outline. And then the question is how fine or specific of an outline. Generally for story I tend to think of it is more on the broader side of things because of the nature of the definition of screenplay which I suppose we should get into.

**John:** Let’s get into that.

**Craig:** So, screenplay. And remember this is story is distinct from this. “Screenplay consists of…” and this by the way I’m about to read one of the worst sentences ever written.

**John:** Oh yeah. Full of semicolons. Yeah.

**Craig:** To this day I cannot parse it properly. It’s brutal. And here’s what it says. “A screenplay consists of individual scenes and full dialogue together with such prior treatment, basic adaptation, continuity scenario, and dialogue as shall be used in represent substantial contributions to the final script.” What? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. But there’s even more.

**Craig:** There is more.

**John:** There’s four bullet points.

**Craig:** So, what the credits department did in their wisdom was sort of say, look, let’s take that and actually turn it into something that’s fairly useful as a general rubric for arbiters who are analyzing screenplay. We tend to look at screenplay as contributing to four major factors. The first is dramatic construction. The second is original and different scenes. The third is characterization or character relationships. And the fourth is dialogue.

So, what do you think those mean?

**John:** [laughs] So, and again, if you’ve ever done an arbitration either as a person seeking credit or as a person determining credit you have used this exact language in defending your decisions and your choices.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Dramatic construction. I think we all get what that means. It’s how the puzzle pieces are put together. This is how you’re telling a story. These are the ups and downs. The twists, the surprises, the reveals. It’s how the story tells itself.

**Craig:** Right. It’s different from just if I said, OK, what is the outline of John Wick. John Wick is a hitman. His wife dies and leaves him a puppy. Bad guys kill the puppy and steal his car. He declares revenge. He goes and kills this guy. And then he kills this guy. And then he kills this guy. The end. And there’s a hotel. Right? I mean, those are the big, big moments.

But the dramatic construction are the way that things unfold. The way that the bad guys explain to John Wick is to his son and how that, you know, factors into the way he deals with John Wick. Those are sort of – it’s the specific stuff, right? The specifics of the dramatic. Which leads us into original and different scenes, which you know, I think we get, right?

**John:** Yeah. We get a sense. A scene is as a moment begins, as a moment ends. It’s how the moment begins. How the moments ends. And crucially what happens in that scene. It’s the very specific beats within that scene. And so while in an outline or a treatment you might give a sense of the shape. We might get a sense that there’s a scene here that does this, it’s the actual scene itself is what is considered part of screenplay credit.

**Craig:** And that’s why the word “different” is in there. Because we are oftentimes parsing out this contribution between multiple writers. If there is a beat. If you and I are both asked to adapt something like Fiddler on the Roof, which by the way was just announced is going to be a movie produced by Dan Jinks, your former Big Fish producer.

**John:** And directed by Tommy Kail. Excited about all this.

**Craig:** And directed by Tommy Kail. Sounds like it’s going to be – I mean, I’ll see nursery school productions of Fiddler on the Roof.

**John:** Craig, let’s stop the podcast now. You clearly are going to be cast in Fiddler on the Roof.

**Craig:** I should be.

**John:** There’s no way this is not going to happen.

**Craig:** I should be.

**John:** Yes. If you’re not a Tevye there is a role in that production for you.

**Craig:** I’m weirdly too old for Tevye. Isn’t that terrible? I’m too old for Tevye. I always think of him as an old guy because Zero Mostel was probably – but he’s like – well, actually, maybe I’m not. Because his youngest daughter–

**John:** No, he has teenage daughters.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? I’m a perfect age for Tevye. And I can sing that – you know what? I’m going to do it. I should do it. I’m the best. I’m the best Tevye available. [laughs] I am. So we’ll discuss that with Dan.

**John:** And Craig can sing. I mean, I really don’t know why you’re not working on your audition right now.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Dank Jinks, I will go on tape. And you will be amazed. You will be amazed.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** Also, I’d like to point out I’m Jewish. That matters. Seriously. I totally get the white-washing thing. Like so just side note on Fiddler on the Roof. I’m a huge Fiddler on the Roof fan. To the point where I can explain why Zero Mostel is a vastly better Fiddler than Topol and I know people are going to say, “What?” But I really do think so. Because I think that Fiddler on the Roof is a very Yiddish kind of thing as opposed to a Jewish kind of thing. It’s different feel in a weird way.

And then there’s Alfred Molina. [laughs] I mean, Alfred Molina is a brilliant actor. And he can sing. But you got to be Jewish. You just got to be. I don’t know how you do it without being Jewish. I really don’t. I don’t know.

**John:** So that ties into our next topic which is characterization and character relationships.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So back to the screenplay. And I like that character relationships is pulled out as a separate thing because as we talk about on the show a lot it’s very hard to imagine a character without really imagining how those characters are interacting. That’s how you actually reveal how two characters fit together. How a character is demonstrated in a screenplay is generally through its interaction with other characters in it. So the relationship between two characters or nine characters is crucially important for a screenplay in ways that it may not be in a story document.

**Craig:** No question. And so the reason Fiddler showed up in the first place here was when we say if I say to you I need you – we have a story beat. It’s story. And the story is that Tevye is going to marry his daughter off to the butcher. You and I will write very different scenes of that. Any two writers will write different scenes of that. Same basic story point, but different and original scenes.

Similarly, with character – so character development and action is story. So, who is in it? Like the guy that delivers the milk in this little village of Anatevka and he has five daughters. OK. And he is a big believer in tradition. Characterization is literally how that character is expressed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The things he says and does. His temperament. His choice of words. And the nature of his relationship with his wife and his daughters and the townspeople and the Russians. All of that is script. And, of course, the primary way that that is expressed is through dialogue. It’s not the only way, but the primary way. Dialogue is essentially entirely a contribution to screenplay. Those are kind of the two big things.

**John:** Those are the big things. And so as we’ve said before sometimes in treatments you’ll do the parenthetical dialogue or the italics dialogue to sort of indicate what the things are. But it’s really a screenplay aspect. And that matches up I think with our basic expectations of what a story is versus a screenplay. The story is sort of the gist of it. It’s like this is the overall shape of it. But the screenplay is the on paper representation of what the movie is going to look like and feel like.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** And so from a credits level if the same writer has both story credit and screenplay by credit those compress down to become a written by credit. There’s special cases in weird situations based on underlying source material. So sometimes they don’t compress. But in general if you see a written by that means that the writer who is credited there is entitled to both story by credit and screenplay by credit so they’ve smooshed together.

**Craig:** That is only what it means. That is it. That is the definition of written by. And we’ve been working on this, and hopefully one day we’ll get there, but if you have written a story that is based on something, so it’s an adaptation, but it is quite a bit different. It’s clearly significantly different than the underlying material. Then you’ll get screen story by. And if you get screen story by and screenplay by unfortunately they don’t squish down, which is I think silly. But it’s the way it is. So, alas.

**John:** Yeah. And every once in a thousand credits you’ll see adaptation by which is a very unique credit that is only given as a result of arbitration.

**Craig:** It doesn’t mean what it says. And–

**John:** It’s a way of acknowledging that a person contributed to a thing that is important but isn’t meeting other thresholds. It’s a weird credit. We’re going to sort of ignore that for now.

**Craig:** I don’t think it has been given out. I don’t know when the last time it was. But I honestly don’t think it’s been given out within the last ten years.

**John:** So this is talking through credits when a project is completed, so the end of the process. But what I want to really focus on today is figuring out story and screenplay credits earlier in the process, when you’re thinking about writing something or you’re working with somebody and figuring out what are we going to put on the title page of this script because that is really important. Because that title page for your script is what sets the precedent for who wrote this thing that they’re reading.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so figuring out story and screenplay credit is really a writer’s decision at the very beginning of the process. So let’s start with some listener questions because this might help us frame our conversation. So, a listener wrote in saying, “I have a question regarding credit on a screenplay I wrote with a partner. The project began with him pitching me a general premise and a very basic description of a couple of the main characters. From there we broke the story, even completely overhauling it at one point, and created the characters together. We’ve agreed to take a 50/50 credit on the screenplay but he is suggesting that he also get a story by credit. It seems to me that story by is too much for just a basic premise and some general characterizations, but I do think he deserves some sort of added acknowledgment for having the original idea.

“We were wondering if you could tell us whether ‘idea by’ is a legitimate credit in these types of situations, or if you have any other suggestions.”

**Craig:** [laughs] I like when questions are clear and easy. So, the deal is that there is story credit. That’s a thing. There is no idea credit. Story credit includes idea. So, while he’s correct in suggesting that he should get story credit, it’s also quite obvious that you should get story credit because like you said you broke the story with him, created the characters together, and then wrote the screenplay. Which, by the way, remember screenplays contain story elements. Story credit can be generated even if there’s no treatment or outline or something like that. So, the fact is you both deserve story credit and he doesn’t get special story credit or first story credit. No such thing exists.

The answer is no. He does not get anything special. It is 50/50 for the screenplay. It is 50/50 for the story. And your partner should take a look in the mirror and ask himself what kind of person he wants to be. Because this is not how you get ahead in the world as it turns out. And this is just separate. This is psychological. And I’m not condemning him. I understand it. Everybody is starving for a credit. And then along comes food and people are like “but I found the food I should get an extra chicken wing.” I totally get it. It turns out in the long run being generous with your partners will generate far more success for you than being stingy and parsimonious. Oh, there we go.

**John:** Yeah. So specific advice in this situation. So, you two writers should say title of screenplay, written by, because you’re both going to claim story credit and screenplay credit, written by your two names. Now, a thing you might decide to do is to put his name first because maybe that’s a way of acknowledging that he was the first person who came up with the idea. You guys can decide that. But, no, don’t break it up into separate things because it’s not going to accurately reflect what’s happening. It’s not going to be a good idea down the road.

Do what Craig did. Be generous, both of you, and god-willing you’ll sell this and many other things down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just be cool about it. And in case you are wondering the order of names within a writing team has no significance. It’s not like the Writers Guild determines which person in an ampersand situation should go first. We do not.

Let’s see, should we do a Francesca question?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** OK. Francesca writes in, or Francesco, depends, “About eight years ago I was pitching movie ideas to my friends. Most if not all got shot down except for one. The friend I pitched it to said to rename it 299, because it’s a play on the movie 300. Sure, why not? Titles change. Since then I’ve heard him talk about this movie he came up with by himself called 299. He’s done this in front of me once and in group chats. Like, hey guys, when are we going to work on the movie that I came up with. This was recent. 2020 pre-COVID. I sent a message in group that basically was like, hey man, we created that, not you alone. And he said, oh yeah.

“But even then, knowing he claims he created this movie I didn’t want to argue that in fact it was my creation. But really it was. He had a title and some suggestions. But I pitched him, not vice versa. What do I do and how do I keep stuff like this from happening again?”

Oof, we get this quite a bit.

**John:** We do get this quite a bit. So, there are a bunch of small things to unpack here. Listen, nothing was written down yet, so there’s not like a title page thing to be worried about yet. What we’re really talking about is what is that line between just sort of shooting some ideas around with friends and colleagues and saying like, oh, we’re not writing this thing together. At what point is feedback sort of like actually contributing to the underlying thing?

And there’s no clear answers here, but I can give you some – hopefully together we can give you some guidance and also some commiseration because even among us, among our friends, this still does happen. So, it is a little bit frustrating. Craig, how we would start off with Francesca here.

**Craig:** Well, in terms of this situation I think what you don’t want to do is soft pedal things. It seems like what’s happened is he’s somehow managed to bargain himself into being the cowriter of this when he’s not anyway. Or the co-creator of it. So, I think you want to be clear. “Look, this is what it was. And then say I’m going to not use the title but thank you. And this way we’re nice and clean.” If that’s really all of significance. And if there’s anything else you can say I’m not going to do that either. Sometimes you might be considered that, well, he’s going to go off and he’s going to write a movie called 299.

Look, if he is a better writer than you than he’s a better writer than you and his is going to go and yours isn’t. Odds are he’s not. Just going – odds are that nobody is a good writer, right? That’s just generally the odds as we know. So I wouldn’t worry too much about that.

In the future, going forward prospectively, one thing you can say to people before you ask them for advice or pitch them is say, “Listen, I was wondering, I’m writing something and I was wondering if you’d be willing to just give me some friendly feedback, just sounding board stuff. I’m not looking for anything, you know, I’m not looking for producers or writing partners. I was just really just looking for a sounding board. If you’re interested in just being kind of one of those no attachment sounding boards for me then that would be awesome. But if not, I totally understand.”

And then before you’ve ever said a word you have anchored dialogue in the proper context. Because people sometimes misconstrue things when you come to them and you’re like, “Well what do you think about this?” And they’re like, “Well what if you did this.” Oh yeah, and now we’re riffing. And suddenly we’re writing partners?

**John:** Yep. Yeah. So I was going to say exactly those same three words which is the preface to your pitch is “I’m writing something.” Just declare this is a thing that I am working on. And if you put it in that context then it’s harder for them to say like, “Oh, I thought we were working on this together?” It’s like, no, no, no, I said from the start I am writing this thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that makes it clear this is the scope of what you want their feedback to be about. And that’s good and that’s helpful. Now, this thing that Francesca is describing happened eight years ago. So I do also question why haven’t you written this thing? Like if it’s really such an idea that is important to you why didn’t you write this? And there is also a time limit on this stuff. And if you really haven’t done any work on this in a year or eight years you’re probably not actually really writing this thing and maybe you’re just looking for a reason to be angry about this.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want to be the proverbial two bald men fighting over a comb. If neither one of you – and that’s me and you basically – if neither one of you have written this thing within the last eight years then it kind of is neither of yours at this point. Do you know what I mean?

**John:** It’s the universe’s, yeah.

**Craig:** It kind of belongs to the universe. The other trick that you might want to try before you talk to somebody about something is say, “I’m halfway through something. I’ve been writing it.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s much harder for people to imagine jumping on a bus that’s in motion than one that’s currently being assembled at the plant. So, another little trick there. But, yeah, I agree with John. I feel like the bigger question Francesca is what’s been going on for eight years? And maybe spend less time in group chats and write your stuff.

**John:** Yeah. And I think it’s a great way to wrap up this conversation about story versus screenplay is that story is not that hard to do. Story, it can be – generally it’s a document. It’s something you’ve written but it doesn’t have to be an incredibly elaborate thing. It could be a page and you could get credit on a movie for having written a one-page story synopsis. That’s possible.

Screenplay is a lot more work. Screenplay is an actual screenplay. You’re really writing a full thing here. And so, you know, I would challenge to Francesca and to other folks here is that if you don’t fixate so much on story credit and really think about what is the work you’re doing. And if you’re doing the work of writing a full screenplay then that is the work that becomes screenplay credit. And to really think about those things on that scale of like one page versus 120 pages. And when you think about it that way it’s easier to suss out who deserves story credit and who deserves screenplay credit.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. And one thing to be aware of is that the Writers Guild rules are an evolution of copyright rules. And so story is compensated significantly in the sense that 25% of all residuals are given to the person or persons that get story by credit. Now, you could say that’s only a quarter and 75% goes to the screenplay, but again, you can write a single page and get story credit. The person who gets the screenplay credit may have worked for five years and generated a thousand pages. So, that’s the Writers Guild point of view.

But what the world values, meaning the studios that pay us, is the screenplay. And we know this because there’s a screenplay bonus that is oftentimes multiples of what they’re paying you to actually write the screenplay. Meaning, if we make this thing and you get screenplay credit you’re going to get like a million dollars, two million dollars, just suddenly. Boom. Out of nowhere. Because you did the thing that they value the most. This comes up time and time again.

I’m sure that you have had these experiences where someone says, “Hey, we would love for you to write this.” And you’re like, oh, I don’t have the time. But I can maybe work on the story for a week. And they’re like, “We want you to write the thing.”

**John:** The thing. Yeah.

**Craig:** “Thank you. But what we want is the thing we value.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So write your script is the point.

**John:** The other analogy I’d have is the story is like the trailer for the movie. And the screenplay is the movie. It’s the whole thing. And it’s like they are very different scales of time and work and sort of what you’re getting out of it. So, they’re both incredibly important but they’re going to pay you to make the movie. They’re not going to pay you to make the trailer.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct.

**John:** All right, Craig, let’s get to your topic here which you pitched to me as what to do when you sort of feel like your story – you get that icky feeling that your story is not working, your script is not working.

**Craig:** Something is not working. This happens to me at least once in everything I write. I will – it will suddenly occur to me in a vague sense that something is terribly wrong. And I attempt to specify it. I attempt to figure out where it’s wrong, why it’s wrong. But mostly it kind of manifests as a vague nausea that it’s instinctive. Something is wrong.

And when that happens over time I’ve started to come to an understanding of how to get through it and how to get out of it and what to not do. And I’m sure that you’ve had this feeling, too. I can’t imagine. I mean, as robotic as you are you’re still a human being. You have human feelings.

**John:** Yeah. I’d say most projects that I’ve gone through have some version of this. And including things which no one has ever read because I never really got through these situations. And so that may be an escape hatch we talk about in your overall discussion here is that sometimes these aren’t solvable. But trying to figure out where the problem is is so crucial. So talk us through where you figure out the problem might be.

**Craig:** Well, the first thing that you have to kind of wonder is what is the specific nature of the problem that is presenting itself to you. And we’ll find out if that really is the problem or not. But initially these things crop up very typically as, OK, I’ve got a plot knot. And you can call it a plot hole, a plot discrepancy. Things aren’t adding up. I’m supposed to have somebody be over here, but they’re over there. They managed to cross a continent too quickly. Or this happened the day before and it’s the day later. There’s like time problems you can’t get around. Or, I need them to know this thing, but they never knew it before. They haven’t met that person but they need to have this.

So you start to go, OK, there’s trouble. Just circumstances. And then sometimes you have concerns that are entirely focused on characters. The character needs to do something, but it violates some aspect of who they are or how they feel or what they’ve done before. There’s just a basic inconsistency. Their motivations don’t match their needs. These are the kind of problems where you just know before you ever hand a script in that if you did you might sneak it past somebody but never an actor. Never an actor. They would be like this doesn’t add up. And they’d be right.

There are also, man, this one comes up all the time. What I call immovable objects. And when writers sometimes will – I’ll call a friend or they’ll call me and we have these problems and we’re asking for help. They often are in the phrase in this context of immovable objects. The story requires this happens. But I don’t know how to make it happen. I don’t even know why it’s happening. And I don’t know how it should happen. But it has to happen. These are immovable objects and you just don’t know what to do with them.

It’s like I’m driving down a road and there has to be a wall in front of me, also I need to keep driving. What?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Trouble.

**John:** And so you and I have both encountered this situation where we are working on an adaptation of something, and so there are immovable objects because the basic nature of this property – this is a thing that must happen. Like the audience has expectations. This moment must occur.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And yet given the logic of the story we’ve built and everything we know there is no reason for that moment to occur and we have to figure out – either create a new reason. I mean, it is a problem. So we’ll get into what some of the solutions might be to that problem, but it is a thing that happens especially often in adaptations because you’re stuck with – some rules are being imposed upon you that would not be the rules you would set for yourself.

**Craig:** Very much so. It’s a little bit of like if I pull this string the curtain opens too much, so if I pull this string it closes all the way. So I pull that one again. I need this person to be more like this. But then this [song] needs them to be more like this. And you go crazy.

**John:** So somebody is going to be listening to this podcast about three years from now and they’ll be like, “I know exactly what both of them were talking about,” and it’s going to be delightful. So, check back in three years from now. Set yourself a reminder to check in and you’ll know, ah-ha, this is what they were talking about.

**Craig:** Put it on our calendar. And that leads me to the sort of final specific one, which are competing interests. Lindsay Doran has a great phrase. “Close up with feet.” She’ll say, “I want this moment to give me this feeling. Also, I want it to this thing that is completely incompatible with that feeling.” You want somebody to do something bad, also you want to feel like this person falls in love with them. You want them to run away but you also want to feel that they’re brave here. You want somebody to make somebody happy, but you want that person to hate them.

You feel these competing needs. And they negate each other to the point where you clench up and do not know what to do. And all of these things are all wonderfully specific and yet less common than the most frequent one you encounter which is something is not right and I don’t even know what it is or why. It’s just not good.

**John:** So, Craig, before we move on I’m going to pitch two more things to you which I often feel–

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Which give me this vague ickies. One is the awareness that something is repeating and I don’t want it to repeat. And yet I sort of can’t figure out a way for it not to repeat. I recognize I’m repeating the same moment, the same beat, the same idea, and I don’t want to but I don’t know how to not repeat it. I’m trying to stay – basically I’m trying to stay on theme and I’m trying to stay consistent, but in the consistency I’m being repetitive. And what’s often a related thing to me is something we talked about recently on the podcast which is like this is just not interesting.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** I recognize that it’s doing what it functionally needs to go, but I just don’t care.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that to me is probably the most troubling of these vague ickies because it’s like if I don’t care about it no one is going to care about this.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a bad feeling to know that you have managed to build a house that is resting on a single load-bearing wall. And that wall sucks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a bad feeling. And it happens all the time. You said you had two. I’m curious what the other one was.

**John:** Oh, those were the two. I would say it’s the “this is not interesting” and the “I am repeating myself.”

**Craig:** I’m repeating myself.

**John:** Like I recognize that this a repetition. So it’s kind of the opposite of “close up with feet.” It is consistent and yet it’s too consistent. It’s actually just the same moment happening again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And when it is a scene that’s repeating, like you can figure out ways to like, OK, I could put a little shading there. But you recognize this whole sequence is really doing the same thing that the previous one did, crap, I didn’t recognize this until now.

**Craig:** Well, right there you’ve kind of avoided the first big pit fall right here because I think some people encounter this feeling, this icky feeling that there’s a problem, and they go, “Nah, you know what, no there isn’t.” Takes them to Jedi mind-trick themselves.

No, no, there is. There’s absolutely a problem. If you know there’s a problem, there’s a problem. Even if you’re technically wrong. Even if somehow you’ve been deluded into thinking that there’s a problem when there isn’t one, the fact that you think there’s a problem means you’re not writing it well anyway. So you cannot ignore this feeling. It’s incredibly important to accept it.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Agreed. You have to – the first step of solving the problem is acknowledging that there is a problem. So yeah.

**Craig:** There you go. Exactly. The very common instinct in your desire to immediately get past this problem, because nobody wants to sit with this icky feeling, you just want to get it out of you, is to solve it with cleverness. You’re going to solve it by using a lot of scaffolding. You’re going to contort your plot and your characters to make the problem go away. And you will technically make the problem go away. You will solve it. It’s just that now it’s boring and it sucks. Because solutions aren’t what people are going to see a movie for. They’re going to see a movie or watch a television show because it is this beautiful, whole natural narrative that is there because it’s correct.

When you write a scene that solves your problem, that scene is bad. Because it exists to solve your problem. It is for you, it’s not for the audience.

**John:** Now, a corollary to this which I’m thinking back to the second Arlo Finch which I ran into sort of a – I ran into problems. This is just not going to fit right. When you talk about a scene that is just there to sort of fix the problem or muscle you through a problem and get you to the next thing, that’s an unsatisfying boring scene. But where scaffolding can become useful is I’m going to wind back, I’m going to unravel some stuff, and actually build in a scaffolding. And I’m going to support this idea by going back in time and making it so it is a natural extension.

So basically I’m going to build a bridge from where I was to where I’m going, but I actually have to step back a bit and build that bridge.

**Craig:** Right. So that’s an actual bridge. It’s not scaffolding.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. You absolutely should go back and support it. And then it feels natural and it unfolds and it looks correct. Yeah, you’re not just – you’re like, OK, we were building a house and this room was supposed to have a hallway to that room. But they’re offset by 12 feet. So let’s just build a weird hallway that just does this weird juke. Nobody wants that hallway. Nobody. I mean, yeah, technically I could walk from one room to another but this hallway sucks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, how do we fix this? So there’s this phrase that always comes to my mind when I’m in these moments and it’s from Searching for Bobby Fischer which I would like to nominate to be our next deep dive movie.

**John:** Oh sure. We could get Mr. Scott Frank on to talk about it.

**Craig:** No. We’ll get Mr. Steven Zaillian on to talk about it.

**John:** Oh, I forget. Steve Zaillian. I always [crosstalk]. Steven Zaillian.

**Craig:** We want to over-credit Scott Frank with everything, but we’re going to get Steven on.

**John:** We shouldn’t. We shouldn’t.

**Craig:** No, we shouldn’t. We’re going to get Steve Zaillian on to talk about it. And it’s one of my favorite screenplays. And also he directed it beautifully as well.

So there’s a moment that recurs where Ben Kingsley’s chess professor is instructing this young child and they’ve got a chess board in front of them. And he’s saying to this kid you can get to checkmate from here in 12 moves. Don’t move until you see it. And the kid is like I can’t see it. And he says don’t move until you see it. I can’t see it. And then Kingsley says, “Here, I’ll help you.” And he just wipes all the pieces off the board and they all clatter to the floor. And he has the kid just look at this blank board. And sort of makes him go through this mental exercise of trying to do it without being stuck in the weeds of the pieces themselves.

And this comes up in the end, in the final match. He’s got himself to a point where Ben Kingsley who is watching the match from another room goes, “You’ve got him. You’ve got him in 12 moves. Don’t move until you see it.” And then the kid is just looking at the board and in his mind he’s just whispering to himself “I don’t see it.”

And then back to Ben Kingsley. Don’t move until you see it. Can’t see it, I don’t see it.

And I’m thinking this all the time in these moments. I’m like don’t move until you see it. And then I’m like but I can’t see it. And I’m like, fine. Don’t move until you see it. And this is why this has become kind of a mantra to me.

Because when it happens it is not hard to solve. Once you see the problem, the real problem, then the solution is evident. It’s easy. It’s elegant. There are not a lot of moving parts. It’s easy to write. Because you’re correct. So, the question then is maybe this sick feeling I had was about what I thought was a problem. I didn’t understand the nature of the problem at all. So, the feeling was correct but my identification of the problem was wrong.

That’s why I’ve been kind of walking around in circles going “I can’t see it. I can’t see it. I can’t see it.” And then one day I go, oh for god’s sakes. Of course. And it’s outside of the problem that I thought it was.

So, one way we get through this is patience. And patience means not only being patient with yourself and giving yourself time to finally see what the real problem is, but also the patience and wisdom to not move until you see it. Because the more you write, the more you try and write your way through this problem, the more invested you are in the writing you’re doing to solve the problem that probably isn’t the problem. So all that writing is going to be wasted. All that effort is going to be wasted. And you’re going to maybe be loath to let it go. So don’t move until you see it.

And then when you see it you’ll know.

**John:** I want to believe everything you just said, and yet I can also imagine myself or other writers in situations where this becomes an excuse for paralysis and perfectionism. Because all writing is difficult. All writing, there’s going to be some moments of self-doubt.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so how do we help distinguish between, OK, this icky feeling I need to stop and wait it out until I really find the perfect solution versus, no, writing is hard. Writing is hard and you just have to do it. And you will discover things in trying to work on it. Because you and I both on our daily writing situations we reach places where we’re like, argh, I can’t make this thing work. And then you just work through it and you figure it out.

So, how do we help distinguish between the moments where you really should stop and wait versus just sit down and put your butt in the chair and get some words written?

**Craig:** Well, there’s a circumstance where you know what you’re supposed to do, you just don’t feel like you’re doing it well. That’s different. You need to just keep working. You need to work on it.

I know what the scene is supposed to be and I know what it’s supposed to accomplish. All that is correct. I just don’t like what I’m doing. OK. Think of a different way to do it. Write that. Try a different way. Try a different way.

But when there’s something that is fundamentally wrong it’s not that you should go to bed or take a vacation. Start taking walks and thinking about it. In fact, it’s important to think about it and think about it and think about it. It’s important to struggle with that problem because the struggle with the problem is what will eventually get you to the place where you see what the answer is. So you’re working. I mean, you don’t take the day off. And the “don’t move until you see it” part is essentially write the solution that you know is right. That’s really what I’m getting to. Is don’t write the bad ones. Don’t write the ones that just rush you through it. Write the one that feels good.

Because when you get it, I mean, I had this problem man on Chernobyl, oh boy. I mean, there was a dark week. There was one very dark week where I was just walking around thinking. There’s this awful wrongness in the midst of something and I don’t know how to solve it. And I did not move until I saw it. And then a few days later I went, “Oh for god’s sakes.” And almost inevitably it’s like all the pieces were there. I was looking in the wrong spot and I was thinking about it in the wrong way. And that there’s something that with all the pieces I already had that is so simple and obvious and once you see it it’s obvious. It’s just like solving any puzzle.

I mean a real puzzle. Not a jigsaw puzzle. [laughs]

If somebody comes along and goes, oh here’s how this works, you go, “Oh for the love of god,” right? So that’s it. It’s really just going through that and then when you know you have it you have it. So you certainly don’t want to do this as some excuse to not write. In fact, the hardest work you should be doing is this kind of work. Just struggling through the problem. If you don’t feel that you’re exerting yourself then, yeah, you’re probably just avoiding and you don’t want to avoid.

**John:** So, the solutions you’re describing, it almost sounds like you’re really talking about – you’re reframing what the problem is. It’s basically you’re working and waiting for your brain to come to a place where it is reframing the situation. Basically change the context so you can actually see like, oh, these are actually the ways these things could line up. This is what the – basically forgetting my original expectations about what needed to happen here so you can actually approach it with the things you actually have and what is going to work for the pieces that you have.

**Craig:** It’s exactly correct. It’s exactly right. We usually end up in this space because we have falsely determined that a bunch of things are givens. And they’re not. Sometimes most of them are given but some of them can change in pretty dramatic ways. And suddenly, it’s so interesting, like when you’re trying to solve these problems some of the, we’ll call them the grindy non-solution solutions, seem like they’ll be a lot of work. But you’re willing to do it to make the ache go away.

Then you come up with the real solution. The real solution is way more writing and it’s much less work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s correct. And it’s actually a joy. That’s how you know.

**John:** Great. All right, let’s tackle some listener questions. Aaron wrote in to ask, “How old is too old? After working in digital media in New York I recently moved to LA to find an entry level job as a writer’s PA or a writer’s assistant. Although I have some contacts in the industry I did not have any gigs locked in. And now with COVID my chances of landing such a job this year or even next seem slim. I’m 25 years old and I know many people trying to break into the industry start their careers by working in these assistant jobs.

“That said, I’ve also heard that once you’re approaching your mid-to-late 20s it’s harder and harder to find these opportunities as people start wondering why you’re 28 and begging to be a PA for example. Basically my question is is it already too late for me to take this path breaking into the industry? Or should I start thinking about other ways in? And how necessary is assistant experience to foster a successful career in entertainment?”

**Craig:** My god.

**John:** Yeah, I know. I have a bit of “my god” in me too.

**Craig:** I mean, what has happened in our world where somebody who is 25 is like I’m over the hill. No, Aaron. Look, how old is too old? 112. Death.

You’re not too old. Objectively speaking in no way, shape, or form, in any hallway, in any building in Hollywood is 25 years too old, unless you’re talking about who is going to be playing a nine-year-old character on television. So, look, yes, tough times. And anybody that – I’ve also heard, he says, “I’ve heard that once you’re approaching your mid-to-late 20s it gets harder.” Who told you this?

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. Some grizzled 29-year-old.

**Craig:** Right. My god. Nobody knows a goddamn thing. Remember, Aaron, nobody knows anything. Nobody knows anything. Nobody knows anything.

**John:** The underline is on the knows.

**Craig:** Knows. Nobody knows anything. Is it harder and harder to find these opportunities? I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t think so. I don’t know how old PAs are. When I see them I don’t know how old they are. But in my usually they’re in their 20s or early 30s.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Assistants are usually in their 20s or early 30s. I don’t know. I mean, yes, if you’re in your 40s it’s going to be much tougher. People at that point sort of are like, “Look, you’ve been 15-20 years, we’ve had a pretty good look at you.” It’s just like sports, you know. I don’t think you’re making it to this show in this capacity at this point. Maybe think about a different thing.

That’s not, by the way, different than writing or anything that’s purely creative that way. But in terms of production work and stuff like that, yeah, I think it’s a reasonable question. But, no, 25. Come on. No. No.

Look, if you have trouble there may be a series of reasons why. One of them will not be your age.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Joe in NoHo asks, “A writing partner and I recently optioned a script to a big digital media company that is venturing into making features. We delivered the rewrite and the polish we were contracted to send them. And now they’ve emailed us to ask for the FDX version of the script.” That’s the Final Draft source file. “When we asked why they wanted the FDX they responded they needed it to run breakdowns for budget and casting, etc. We’re kind of split on how we feel about sending an editable version of our script for several reasons. Most of our working writer-director-producer friends say it’s not kosher and it’s disrespectful. But our attorney doesn’t see an issue with it. Thoughts?”

John, where are you on this one?

**John:** I used to have a strong bias – a strong opinion that I’m never going to send them the FDX file because that’s an opportunity for people to rewrite me, to make it easier to rewrite, to make little tweaks and changes to stuff. And so like, no, I’m only going to send in the hard copy or the PDF. And then I made an app called Highland which makes it really, really easy to take a PDF and make it back into an editable file. And so I realized it’s all moot.

They can edit the file if they want to. They can make the FDX. All I’m doing is creating a hassle for them to not give them the FDX. So I will send in the FDX file if they want it. Craig, how are you feeling these days?

**Craig:** The same. Although, yeah. So, Joe, it is a valid thing. There are budgeting and scheduling breakdown software that use the FDX version. They require that. I think you have to ask yourself how much of a protection are you affording yourself if it can be defeated by them spending $100 on a typist? Because that’s really what they could do. They could just say like, “OK, give us the PDF. We’re going to go hand it to a temp who is going to spend four hours just touch typing your thing into Final Draft.” That’s literally what – that’s the big obstacle that you’ve thrown up for them. It’s not an obstacle at all.

What you need to do is just make sure – make clear – that this is the writing I did. And since you have an attorney the attorney is wise enough to know that this is really not something that comes up a lot. Especially if you’re working with a reputable company. A big digital media company has concerns about liability. They’re not going to want to…

If you’re dealing with some rat, you know what I mean? Like some, I don’t know, fringe sleazebag then I guess. But you’re not. So, not a problem.

**John:** Yeah. There was one studio executive at a studio that is no longer a studio.

**Craig:** I know exactly who you’re talking about.

**John:** [laughs] Who was notorious for just like, you know, typing up scenes and pretending that the current writer wrote it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And that’s a situation where not ideally want to give them your FDX file. But you know what?

**Craig:** It couldn’t stop him from doing it anyway.

**John:** It wouldn’t have stopped him one bit.

**Craig:** Is he still around?

**John:** He’s still around.

**Craig:** OK. I’ll have to ask you off-the-air where he landed. OK, well anyway, we had an answer for you, Joe, which is nice. Do you want to take Jordan’s question?

**John:** Yeah. Jordan asks, “I wondered if you and Craig had any thoughts about when to put a project aside or even start anew? I’ve just hit a point in my pilot script where I realize things aren’t working. It’s too convoluted. I need to simplify. And I was 45 pages in. So it’s disheartening that I even got this far into it. I wish I realized earlier that there were issues. Something I missed in development I guess.

“Is there anything that raises a red flag for you or Craig and tells you it’s time to take a step back and either reevaluate the story, the structure of the script?”

So, Craig, this ties in very well with what you just were talking about.

**Craig:** Hopefully this episode does give Jordan some general advice. But Jordan you’re asking kind of a different question than the first question. Right? So the first question is when should I put it aside or when should I start anew. But then you describe a circumstance that requires neither of those things. You don’t need to start anew. If you’re 45 pages in and things aren’t working, if you still love it and there was something about it that does work for you then just you’re rewriting, aren’t you? I mean, yeah, take a moment, hit pause, walk around, think about it. See if you can figure out what exactly isn’t correct.

OK, it’s too convoluted and you need to simplify? Do it. De-convolute. Simplify. Make it elegant. I prefer the word elegant to simple. And, yes, would it have been great if you had realized earlier that there were issues? Yeah. But you didn’t. And guess what? That’s the way it goes.

As time goes on you do start to take some seconds off of your realization time. But you don’t get it down to zero. All of us end up in that situation. You know, just mourn for a day or two and then see if you can tuck back in. If you’ve gotten to a point where you’re like oh my god this is just junk, and actually what I’ve realized by writing 45 pages is that this – I don’t even want to watch this thing in any way, shape, or form, then dump it. Move on.

**John:** Yeah. There’s an episode we did a zillion years ago sort of centered around Marie Kondo and her big thing about how to get rid of things. How to say goodbye to things. And this could be a project where like you just don’t want to write this anymore. It does not interest you. You can basically hold it in your hands, or mentally hold it in your hands and say like thank you for teaching me that I didn’t want to write this kind of story. And then you can set aside and not feel any guilt about having not finished it. Because you did learn something from it. If you are going to abandon it it’s fine. It’s cool. It helped you. It taught you that this is not a thing that you wanted to write and you are a better person for having done that work.

**Craig:** 100%. We’ve got time for one more?

**John:** Yeah. Want to take Matt from London?

**Craig:** Yeah. Matt from London asks, “Hi John and Craig.” Hi Matt. “Longtime fan of the show. Your conversations are such a friendly comfort, particularly in these strange times.”

Glad to be a comfort.

“I have an admin question, specifically about digital organization. I’m hopeless at it. Files and folders are littered in scatter shot locations all over my laptop. It’s a mess. Lockdown seems like a great time to do a bit of spring cleaning. What are some techniques you guys employ to keep your digital houses in order? How can I Marie Kondo my hard drive?” Is he psychic?

**John:** It’s weird that he was referencing that. It’s a thing that happens. I feel like we’ve talked about this on the show other times but I keep one folder per project. I keep everything related to that project in one folder. Those folders all go in Dropbox. It works out really well for me and it’s just not complicated. And so this is a good time to sort of clean up your stuff and get things sort of neatly tucked away. But I’m just a big fan of the folder that is everything related to that project and leave it at that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Folders are your friends, right? So your laptop is essentially telling you here is how you should do it. And what you’ve been doing is not doing that. So why don’t you listen to the laptop, whether it’s Windows or Mac. It’s going to afford you the same opportunity. My basic method is similar to John. I have a folder for each project. Inside that folder all of the files that eventually lead up into the first draft I will then once the first draft is handed in consolidate into a sub-folder called Draft 1. And then all the stuff that is draft two gets into Draft 2.

And then if the show goes into production then I have a production folder and production drafts. And I have casting. Everything gets its own little folder inside of the big folder. And I have one mega folder called Scripts in Progress. That’s where all the stuff I’m working on right now goes. All those folders go in there. And when I’m done with something and it’s no longer in progress it leaves the Scripts in Progress island and it goes off into the Writing Archive folder where all the old stuff lives.

This is not hard to do.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’ll take you a couple hours to sort it all through. You’ll feel great. And then once you have that set up as a system you’ll just know to do it next time.

**John:** Absolutely. And once you have that setup you’ll also back up your stuff. So if you’re using Dropbox or whatever cloud service, great. That’s one level of backups. But you’ll also turn on Time Machine. Turn on whatever other system you want to do so you have redundant backups. Stick it on a USB flash drive so you can put those someplace else. Just make sure you hold onto those old drafts because they are useful. And you will want to refer back to them at some point.

**Craig:** John, do you have – a producer emailed me the other day. It was a project that I’d done with them back in I want to say 2001.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** And they were saying, hey, you know, would you be interested in kind of reviving that? And I wasn’t. But I did go and look for it. And it was in an – I think it was in an old Final Draft format that no longer seems to exist.

**John:** FDR. Yeah. I can open up FDR.

**Craig:** I don’t think it was FDR. It was something – I don’t know what it was.

**John:** I don’t think there was anything before FDR. Wow.

**Craig:** You know, I should look at what it is. Maybe it was an FDR. I’ll look and see actually. I’m looking right now.

**John:** Send it over because literally we have these sort of magic cameras and we can smash up nearly anything and convert it.

**Craig:** So the file, I’m looking at the information on it, a kind document. [laughs]

**John:** That’s not–

**Craig:** There’s no extension listed for it.

**John:** Send it over and I’ll get you an update. But I will say it’s 95% likely that Nima can smash it open for us.

**Craig:** I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t need to smash it up. [laughs] I really don’t need to. But it is interesting that there’s a line where things before that line are sort of–

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** You know, and then there’s the world of PDFs came along at some point and everything theoretically from that point forward is easily readable.

**John:** It’s readable.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two small One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** The first is – so my daughter when she was little she was in gymnastics and when she did gymnastics they would get these medals when they completed like one – they learned how to do the fall, they learned how to do this. And so she ended up with like 60 medals. And she’s now coming on 15 years old.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Doesn’t really care about these medals at all.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Because she was getting six medals a month for this. And so we had all these medals. What do we do with these medals? And so my husband Mike found a place called Sports Medal Recycling. And basically you tell them what you’re sending them and you send them like all your old sports medals and they just recycle them. Because they can’t be done in normal LA recycling.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** This place can melt them down and actually reuse them. So, just a good way to sort of get rid of those old things and not feel so guilty about just throwing them in the trash where they’re not being recycled properly.

**Craig:** Ah, well how about that. All right.

**John:** Second thing is something you may enjoy. It’s a video about Pac Man and specifically it focuses on how the ghosts work in Pac Man.

**Craig:** I’ve seen this. Yes.

**John:** And how they follow you. And it’s an actually very clever sort of pre-AI. But the algorithm for why the ghosts chase you the way they do is so much smarter than I would have guessed. And so I’ll put a link to this video on this. Behind the scenes of Pac Man.

**Craig:** Damn ghosts. Early AI enemies those ghosts. Nasty. Hopefully lots of people have seen the Mythic Quest quarantine episode that came out a week or two ago.

**John:** And I noticed the Scriptnotes t-shirt that Craig Mazin’s character wears.

**Craig:** Multiple. I wore two different ones I think. Three different ones possibly. And it was very gratifying to see how well that episode was received. Excellent work by Rob McElhenney and Megan Ganz and David Hornsby who are the primary writers of that episode

One of the things that I was kind of fascinated by was the way we did it. And we had kind of talked through a little bit in our last episode. But there is an app that we were using to actually do the filming.

So we were using iPhone 11s. I guess that’s the latest iPhone?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it wasn’t just like the regular camera thing. It was an app called FiLMiC Pro. And FiLMiC Pro has like four billion little settings on it and the DP kind of had us make sure that all the things were set correctly. Shutter speeds. And exposure curves. And f-stops. I’m the worst at the DP stuff. I really don’t know anything about it. But it looked really good. It definitely looked better than I think it would have looked otherwise.

And so I thought, oh, well this FiLMiC Pro probably costs – it’s like one of those professional apps that cost like $150. $15. $15 for FiLMiC Pro. And it makes everything look quite a bit better, at least as far as I can tell. So, that’s my One Cool Thing of the week.

**John:** So, Craig, talk us through a little bit more. So, watching the episode all the times – we’re supposed to be looking at your laptop or your computer screens through this thing. So we’re looking that way. So, are you looking at the iPhone that’s doing this? Or is there another laptop? Who else is seeing the feed of that camera at the same time?

**Craig:** So we have – my personal laptop is running Zoom. And then we have this flexible gooseneck thing that props up the iPhone so that the iPhone is pointing – the camera is pointing at me. The screen of the iPhone is pointing back towards the laptop. So the laptop camera is seeing essentially the monitor, right?

**John:** Oh great.

**Craig:** Which was annoying. Because I would have to adjust the laptop screen to give a better view of the monitor, but then also adjust the camera to give them the camera angle they wanted on me. And then readjust the laptop camera to get the better angle.

**John:** So I assumed that it was piping out over the Internet.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And recording – that would be great if it could. But it did not.

**Craig:** No, no. It was not doing that. So all FiLMiC does is just suck in data at very high resolution with all sorts of little – so one of the nice things is you can create settings profiles. So before they sent us the phones the DP and production staff went through and made sure that FiLMiC Pro was dialed in exactly as they wanted. And then they put it under a Mythic Quest setting.

**John:** [Crosstalk] and such, yeah.

**Craig:** All of that stuff was kind of done, all the color temperatures, and yada-yada. But there were still a few things that we had to do to make sure it was correct. And it did seem to work really well. So, yeah, our deal was we were basically, as actors, we’re looking pretty much directly into the lens. So it’s interesting because I’ve got like my earbuds in and I can hear for instance Ashly Burch who plays Rachel, I can hear her. I can’t really see her, because she’s–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Blocked. So I can hear her. So I have to talk to her as if she’s the iPhone lens. And one of the just little techniques that Rob said seemed to work really well and so we would do it is leaning in closer to that lens. If we wanted to make a point. But it was an interesting thing to not see someone like that.

**John:** How were you recording sound? Was that recorded separately?

**Craig:** No. It was recorded at the same time. So with sound we were using a Shure mic. The Shure brand. Classic mic brand. And so this particular Shure mic would connect into the iPhone through the lightning port or whatever that port is on the iPhone. I guess now it’s a USB-C port, isn’t it? No, it’s still lightning, right?

**John:** The iPhones are still lightning, yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s stuck in there and then we would point it at us and then there was a separate Shure mic that had the audio department. So then the sound guys had their settings for that. And so–

**John:** And so it was a lav hidden in your shirt? Or where was the microphone?

**Craig:** No. The microphone was on the phone pointing directly back at me.

**John:** I got you.

**Craig:** Because they didn’t want to have us like lav’ing ourselves up and then wiring something back over. The phone was the issue, right? Because they didn’t want to send over a separate recorder. There’s also no syncing.

So in production, you know, people think the clapboard is just for like, clap, but it’s got a crystal in it that’s syncing the audio with the numbers on the slate which the camera is filming. That’s how they sync everything up. So they didn’t have that opportunity here. But FiLMiC Pro understood that it was going to be pulling audio in from the Shure. And, I don’t know, it was all very well thought out.

**John:** Great. And so did you end up clap syncing before you started recording things or not?

**Craig:** You know what? They had us do it like once and I think they gave up. [laughs] Because I think they were like, OK, everybody clapped at once.

**John:** Yeah, it’s hard to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, everybody is getting their Zoom audio at slightly different times and so I think they just had to kind of eyeball it.

**John:** I was looking at how Seth Meyers is doing his show from his attic. And he’s just on an iPad. And the iPad is working as the teleprompter and it’s using the front-facing camera on his iPad is what’s recording him. And it works.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, the front-facing camera is generally nowhere near as good as the back camera. But if you want to be able to see yourself you need the front-facing one, right? So that was the weird part of this is we did use the back camera because it’s a far better camera, but you couldn’t see yourself. Which I guess kind of you didn’t want to anyway. I mean, I don’t want to see the monitor when I’m acting. I just want to be able to see the person.

Because, you know, John, I’m a very accomplished actor. [laughs]

**John:** Yes. So as you’re putting yourself on tape for Tevye, that is choices he’s going to make.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve been around, man. I’ve acted in a show for a number of episodes that is fewer than 10. [laughs]

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by John Venable. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can see some of them featured in Mythic Quest. They’re available at Cotton Bureau. There’s a link in the show notes for that.

In the show notes you’ll also find other stuff we talked about. At the site you’ll find the transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

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 just about to record on erotic fiction.

**Craig:** Oh my god. That’s awesome.

**John:** Craig, thank you so much for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. It’s our bonus topic. So back when I was writing Arlo Finch I met with a bunch of the audio book narrators and you can hear some of that on the Launch podcast I did. And one of the things that was interesting as I was talking with them is that most of them use their real names for when they’re recording normal books, but they use special names, alternate names, for when they’re recording erotic fiction. And I just love that the same folks who are reading children’s books are also reading erotic fiction.

And also that there’s still erotic fiction. There’s still a market for erotic fiction.

**Craig:** Is there anything less erotic than the word “erotic,” by the way? It’s such a boner killer.

**John:** When Madonna sang Erotic for her album Erotica she had a good intonation for that, so I get that. But erotic is not–

**Craig:** Nah. Blech.

**John:** But this is maybe an unfair and misleading setup for I really want to talk about meta fiction and fan fiction and sort of that intersection because while there still is erotic fiction even in the age of Pornhub and stuff like that, what’s probably most fascinating is user-generated fiction which is often porny but not always porny. Sometimes it’s slash fiction. But there’s a whole different category of fiction that didn’t exist when we were kids.

**Craig:** This is one of the great bait and switches of my life. [laughs] I can’t believe. I mean, if people are listening at home and they are upset, I just want you to know I am, too.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I was told that we would be reading erotic fiction.

**John:** All right. Well, we can at least talk about erotic fiction.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Craig, did you read erotic fiction at any point in your life?

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, I think we should ask Sexy Craig that question.

**John:** Sexy Craig, have you ever read erotic fiction.

**Craig:** I’ve lived erotic fiction. I’ve lived it, John. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, I never thought this would happen to me. Yeah, of course I did. I mean, when I was a kid. So the porn that was available when you and I were youngsters–

**John:** Was all printed.

**Craig:** It was all printed. The thing that you would go to – if you were a young straight lad like myself you wanted Penthouse. You didn’t want Playboy. Playboy was too fancy. It was too classy. Hustler was hard to get and really did make you feel like you were wrong. So Penthouse was a fantastic middle ground. It was dirty enough but you didn’t feel like you were just falling apart as a human being.

And Penthouse had this section called Forum. And in Penthouse Forum people would write these stories in.

**John:** Like I never thought it could happen to me, but…

**Craig:** Every single story had some guy who was like I never thought this would happen to me but I went to a laundromat and I was doing my laundry and three women came in and…

Yeah, and they were great. They totally worked. [laughs] They did the job.

**John:** And they were all fake. None of those were actual real things that happened.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And those were probably the direct predecessor to online sort of porny fiction which was very much imagining scenarios with like famous people. And sort of a newer phenomenon as I was sort of researching this was have you ever heard of Y/N?

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** So Y/N is Your Name. It’s a placeholder for your name. And so it’s fiction where the reader is inserted into the place where we see Y/N.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So it’s a thing that you see on like Wattpad and other sort of online fiction pieces.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s first person/second person. It’s a weird sort of POV thing. But where you as you’re reading it you’re supposed to put yourself into that position.

**Craig:** Do you actually enter your name so that it is stringed in to a variable?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Oh, you have to do it in your head.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** You have to be your own variable–

**Craig:** Somebody ought to take care of that because that would be way better.

**John:** Yeah. If you’re going to insert your variables.

**Craig:** Do your variables, come on. Come on, man.

**John:** Get yourself some good, fun times. My experience with erotic fiction was, yes, like friends would have Penthouse or Playboy or that kind of stuff, but there were also these trade paperback books that were – they were definitely mostly oriented towards women but there were some that were sort of general purpose or sort of male-oriented.

And they’re weird. I can’t imagine that there would be any market for those kind of things now. But there was a market for everything because that was all you had.

**Craig:** That’s all you had. But I mean you were like in a porn store?

**John:** Yeah. Like in a porn store. So the same kind of place that would ultimately sell videotapes before then would have like cheapy trade paperback kind of–

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** Fiction like that.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** I’m sure there’s people who collect. Maybe I’ll look for those because I’m sure the artwork was all fantastic.

**Craig:** There’s an interesting just topic of the porn gap for gay boys in the 1980s, right?

**John:** Oh, for sure.

**Craig:** How did – I mean, now it doesn’t exist, right?

**John:** There was Playgirl.

**Craig:** Yeah, there was Playgirl, but like where did you even find Playgirl? It seemed like Playgirl was a myth. You would talk about it but I never saw it.

**John:** Yeah. So but it was hard to find nude male representations outside of medical things. It was literally sort of hard to find that source of stuff. It’s also why I feel in writing and in fiction you found people searching for queer characters even when they really weren’t quite there. Or they were being so carefully coded into what was there. And so you ended up like, you know, if you could see a movie like Maurice, like oh my gosh, there’s actual men kissing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well wasn’t the birth of slash fiction was – maybe I’ve got this wrong – but in my head the first versions of it were homosexual romances between Captain Kirk and Spock.

**John:** Yeah. That’s what I consider the initial slash fiction. I’m sure there’s some other history but that’s what I think popular culture considers the first slash fic.

**Craig:** They should do that. I mean, honestly. Like we’ve had 400 Star Treks. Just do it.

**John:** Go straight for that.

**Craig:** Yeah, just do it. I would watch that.

**John:** So slash fic sort of leads into – what I will segue into talking about like why these exist in print forms. We haven’t seen a lot of them in actual video forms or at least we don’t see this in actual real entertainment that people are making out there. So the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt special I thought was terrific. It was the most recent Netflix special where you get to make choices between who is going to – at decision points you decide should Kimmy do this or should Kimmy do that. And it branches out in sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of way.

And I just feel like there’s more – it’s weird that it’s still such a new place. Because we’ve had videogames for a long time but we haven’t had the ability to do a lot of the kind of stuff you see in print form in terms of user control over the experience in film or video.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, we try. I think part of it is that we just like receiving video. You know, we like receiving it and–

**John:** Passive.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s passive. When you and I were kids they came up with the Choose Your Own Adventure books and they were great. And we enjoyed them. But I mean the stories weren’t good.

**John:** They were not good.

**Craig:** Because the point is they were designed for you to go pick your way through them, but they were kind of disposable. And they weren’t literature. I mean, literature you want to receive. But what is interesting is that there is this whole the world of receiving literature that is interactive in the sense that fans are creating it. So you mention in the show notes here Wattpad. I mean, my daughter is on Wattpad all the time. I mean, she is reading Wattpad constantly.

**John:** Yeah. And I think within Wattpad it is fascinating that there are genres that exist within Wattpad where it’s like how is this a genre and yet it’s such a thriving genre. So there’s like gay military werewolf is like a big Wattpad genre.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** Which is kind of great. It’s scratching an itch that you wouldn’t realize that people out there had.

**Craig:** So specific.

**John:** Yeah. And so I do wonder at what point we’re going to be mining some of those if not specific stories then the general universes of those kind of stories to create – where is the True Blood for the people who want to see the military werewolf gay romances?

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, eventually we will be able to have an entire channel. There will be the network, right? We are fragmenting things out beautifully. I mean, Wattpad, my understanding is – the way my daughter explains it to me, and I hope you didn’t just get into trouble, is that it’s not erotic fiction.

**John:** Oh, no, no, no.

**Craig:** It’s fan fiction.

**John:** It’s fan fiction but like–

**Craig:** It’s like romances and stuff.

**John:** And so what I’m saying about military werewolves, it can be romance without being sort of erotic.

**Craig:** They kiss and they’re in love. Yeah. Are they both werewolves or is it like a non-werewolf? Like he’s in the military and sergeant has a secret? And then the moon comes up. Is it like that?

**John:** I don’t know the outer limits. I don’t know what the fans would consider the boundaries of what that would be. But, yes, that feels right and also it feels like the overlap of what a pack would be like and those – that kind of order and the wildness versus the military thing feels right. So, there’s a lot of good space there.

**Craig:** The idea of representing unbridled, unrestrained masculinity in a safe context of a story.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Because werewolves are dangerous and brutal and they bite your face and stuff. But, you know, I feel like either you or I could write the greatest gay werewolf military story on Wattpad. We just come in and just dunk on everyone. [laughs]

**John:** Maybe we already have. Maybe this is all a setup for just this.

Now, I can’t believe I’m this far into the conversation without bringing this up is that of course we look at 50 Shades of Grey. This is an example of exactly what we’re talking about. So this was a woman who wrote fan fiction that hit exactly the right nerve and became an international sensation when it crossed over into popular culture. So, I guess I’m just – I’m reminding us that this has happened before and it seems so right to be happening now.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s interesting. You would think that there would be more. 50 Shades of Grey seemed like it was heralding the beginning of something. But it may occupy a unique space. Because I haven’t seen it happen again in that regard. Unless I’ve missed something major. And it’s been quite some time.

**John:** It has been a long time.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that was fan fiction that was roughly based on–

**John:** On Twilight.

**Craig:** Twilight. Which has werewolves.

**John:** See? It all fits together. I mean, it’s really our calling. It’s what we need to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. Werewolves.

**John:** Werewolves.

**Craig:** Gay werewolves in the military.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** It’s what we want.

**Craig:** OK. I’ll do it. I mean, I will. Is there a ranking on Wattpad? I want to be number one.

**John:** Whatever the top things are, that’s what our goal is.

**Craig:** I want to grossly abuse my power as a writer to pointlessly make my way to the top of that chart.

**John:** Ah-ha. Yeah. We’re really nothing if not competitive.

**Craig:** It’s weird. I’m a weirdo. This was great.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Larchmont Author Extravaganza](https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/local-authors-060620) with Chevalier’s this Saturday June 6 with guests Stuart Gibbs, Aline Brosh McKenna, Derek Haas and more!
* [Sports Medal Recycling](http://sportsmedalrecycling.com)
* [How Pac Man Works](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4RHbnBkyh0)
* [FiLMiC Pro](https://www.filmicpro.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by John Venable ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scriptnotes/454standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/there-are-no-slow-claps).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 451 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show Craig will offer some guidance on how to flip the script on tropes without landing on your face. We’ll also answer listener questions about phone numbers, slug lines, and short films. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will discuss personal videogame histories and the possibility that I was raised in a cult.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Craig has no idea what the Premium topic is until I read it aloud, so he’s excited.

**Craig:** I mean, both of those sound amazing.

**John:** Amazing. What else is amazing is if you are listening to this episode when it comes out on Tuesday then you are only two days away from our next live show.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Thursday, May 14, we will be having a live conversation with Empire Strikes Back writer Lawrence Kasdan to celebrate the 40th anniversary of that film.

**Craig:** Wow. 40 years. 40 years and I don’t know, can we do spoilers? 40 years of Darth Vader is Luke’s dad. We not only will only be talking to Lawrence Kasdan but I believe we will be able to share either visually or through some sort of method of relaying his handwritten screenplay. And I’ve been looking through it and it’s kind of amazing because sometimes there will be things he’s written and you’re like that wasn’t in Empire Strikes Back. And then sometimes it says, “Yoda, you will be, you will be,” and you’re like oh my god. It’s written down on paper. So, it’s pretty awesome. I mean, it’s kind of a cultural document.

I’m excited. And always fun to talk to Mr. Kasdan. He is a good friend of the show and the greatest living screenwriter.

**John:** Yeah. We like all of these things about him. So, we will be doing this on video, but we’ll also have audio for it. So, you can anticipate this being a future episode, but if you want to join us live at the time you can join us on Zoom. There will be a link in the show notes and more information as we have it for how you can participate in it. We probably won’t be inviting guests to actually come on and ask questions. But Megana will be monitoring the feed and if there’s questions that come up we will try to get those answered while he is there with us.

**Craig:** OK. That’s a good plan.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see. We’re winging it. So again this is done with the Writers Guild Foundation who we often do live shows for. So it’s exciting that even in this time we can continue to support their great mission.

**Craig:** You know, you and I, I think, are charitable people.

**John:** We try to be. We do.

**Craig:** We’re charitable. We like the charities. Now more than ever.

**John:** Let’s get to some follow up. Now, a few shows back I asked previous Three Page Challengers to write in with updates and so we have a first update from a previous Three Page Challenge entrant. Do you want to talk us through what Patrick wrote?

**Craig:** Sure. Patrick McGinley writes, “I sent in the first three pages of my science fiction script, Destination Earth, back in 2014. And you were kind enough to discuss them on Episode 159. I was never under the illusion that someone was going to make an expensive sci-fi spec without an underlying IP so I spent the last five years turning it into a feature length audio drama.”

That’s fascinating.

“It launched in March. All ten episodes are out now and you can listen to them at destinationearthaudio.com. In a recent episode you talked about how difficult it is to get a spec sci-fi or fantasy script made. I think audio dramas are a viable path. You can produce them for almost nothing and you can get your story out in a way that can be enjoyed as entertainment and not just read as a document. Thanks to your great advice over the years I made the jump to fulltime writer in 2018. I’m writing on a show that’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime.”

That sounds like it should be a planet, by the way, in a science fiction thing.

“I always draw inspiration from your podcast and it makes it easier to sit down in front of the blank page every day and do the work.”

Well that’s great, Patrick.

**John:** Yeah. I’m happy for Patrick. So that’s one success story. People continue to write in with your experiences after this Three Page Challenge. Even if it’s not great news. I’m curious what’s happened to people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now on this idea of the audio drama, I’m struck by a previous One Cool Thing of mine was the show Bubble which was a fiction podcast by Jordan Morris which I really enjoyed. And just last week it was announced that they are developing that as a series now. I think it’s over at Sony. So that seems like a viable way to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know that basically every podcast that is vaguely adaptable into something is being sold. Remember when there was the graphic novel gold rush?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s podcast gold rush now. I mean, that’s what’s going on. So I get pitched a lot of podcasts. But what I like about what Patrick did was he just got super creative and flexible. Flexibility is not necessarily something that comes easily or like second naturally to writers. Sometimes we can be a bit rigid. We get fixated on our creative expression as a way of being artistic and it can’t not be that. And what I like is that Patrick was like well what if I do get flexible and turn away from film to this other entirely different format and thus bring it to life. And it’s a really smart thing to do. I think that’s really clever. And I wonder if this is going to be something that’s more popular. That instead of trying to bomb people with your spec scripts via cold queries and so forth you just start reading them out loud.

**John:** Yeah. I will say that just reading them out loud is unlikely to really engage people. Like if you look at the audio dramas that work, if you look at things like Homecoming which obviously became a big series, they were really good as audio things. And the people who created them had very smart instincts about how it could work in an audio format. So it’s not going to simply be I’m going to sit at the microphone and read this thing aloud. You’re going to have to shape it to fit the medium. But that is work that a writer can do.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, definitely if you just read it that would be bad. That would be sort of “oh I need to sleep, put on that boring man reading a screenplay.” But hiring some folks or just bringing some folks together who feel like just doing, you know, having some fun and reading something and adding some sound effects. I mean, production for something like a little audio drama is easier now to do in a professional manner than ever before in the history of mankind. And that’s not the case necessarily with making films and television, although they are somewhat easier.

But, yeah, go for it. It’s fun.

**John:** Now, on the topic of reading scripts aloud, last week we spoke about table reads. And Craig you had a strong opinion that you thought table reads for production in features was generally not a helpful process for you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Aline Brosh McKenna, our friend and the Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes, she writes in, “I was really interested to hear your conversation about table reads. I had a couple perspectives. I agree they can sometimes be detrimental in movies. Also sometimes on pilots where cast members don’t know each other and there are tons of execs. But for a TV comedy and series they can be super important. And on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend they were incredibly helpful. Not only to find where the laughs are, or aren’t, although that is useful, but to check the sturdiness of stories when you hear them out loud. We really relied on them.

“Also when I started writing I did multiple readings of all my scripts in my apartment with friends and that was probably the most useful thing I did and it’s something I always tell first time writers to try.”

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a great distinction being made here. If you are working on a show, a repeating ongoing show with a stable cast, and definitely this is the case with comedy because of the aforementioned joke issue, but you can actually get a much more reliable sense of how the script is going to be when you shoot it from that reading. That’s a helpful reading because everybody knows their character. They have the benefit of god knows how many episodes behind them.

When you’re dealing with features, they haven’t done it before, and they don’t want to do it for the first time in front of you. They want to do it, you know, for the first time when it’s safe and they have takes and there aren’t executives around. Great distinction there. I can’t imagine any sitcom, whether it’s something that’s kind of quasi-experimental like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or not, not having read-throughs. You just need them for those. And also for your features if you want to have friends then that’s for you. And no one is judging you. There’s no professional fallout if it’s a bad read. So it totally makes sense. But yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Your distinction about safety I think is really crucial. It’s not a safe environment in features generally and people do get cut and no one feels secure in doing it. Which if you’re coming back and this is episode seven of this series and you are a regular on it, you feel like you can be free and experiment in a table read and other people wouldn’t be able to do that.

**Craig:** Precisely. It looks like we’ve got another comment here that sort of jibes with that if you want me to take that one.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** Anonymous writes, “In Episode 450 Craig commented that table reads are useless. Most actors couldn’t agree more. In television they’re often used as an escape hatch to fire an actor prior to shooting a pilot. An actor friend of mine went through three screen tests for one show. Yes, three definitely screen tests before being hired. The executive producer of the show, whose name I won’t use, even called my friend personally after hiring them to say how excited he was to work with them. The director echoed the sentiment and even execs at the network approached my friend prior to the table read and said they were excited to have him on, or her, on board. It’s this person.

“Then came the table read when apparently one exec who’d likely never even had read the script decided they ‘wanted to go in a different direction with the character.’ This happens all the time to actors. It’s almost a badge of honor to make it through a table read with a job when you’re a working actor but not a name actor. So the studio pays a handsome sum to the actor under contract to walk away, but they at least didn’t drop $4 million on shooting the pilot.”

**John:** Yeah. So what he’s describing here is it is expensive to fire an actor after the table read, but it’s much, much, much more expensive to have to reshoot a pilot because you don’t like that actor in that role. And so execs are sometimes taking this as an opportunity to go like, “I’m not sure this is really the right person,” and get rid of them.

**Craig:** And if I were a network executive, like a broadcast network, I would want to go ahead and commission a scientific study to find out how often we have done a good job making that decision. Because I suspect that perhaps a Pop-O-Matic would be just as useful. Do remember Pop-O-Matic?

**John:** I don’t. But as we get into the bonus segment you’ll understand why I don’t know what a Pop-O-Matic is.

**Craig:** Oh right. Because you were possibly in a cult. So there was a board game called Trouble when we were kids.

**John:** Oh I do remember Trouble. We had Trouble back in the cult.

**Craig:** And so the Pop-O-Matic was that little plastic dome with the die inside of it and you would push it down and it would go click-click and then the die would go boing because it was in this little flexible diaphragm thing. So, Pop-O-Matic is a great way to revolutionize dice rolling which as we all know was just excruciatingly difficult without it.

**John:** It is. The worst. I think it’s because you can’t lose the die because it’s inside the little bubble. That’s why it is. Because Trouble is exactly the same game as Sorry really, but it’s just the Pop-O-Matic makes it so you cannot lose the actual thing that tells you how far to move your little pegs.

**Craig:** That is a very practical explanation of why they put Pop-O-Matic in the world. I think the not practical and more commercial reason is they were like look at this gimmick. Look!

**John:** Makes a noise. Kids like making noise.

**Craig:** Sugar-fed lunatics watching this commercial at six in the morning on a Saturday will go bother their parents immediately.

**John:** Good stuff. Last week we also talked about virtual writer’s rooms which is where you are gathering together a group of writers and they’re meeting on Zoom or some other sort of video sharing service rather than being in a room physically together. And I wanted to make a decision between entirely virtual rooms, which is what people are encountering right now, and semi virtual rooms.

So Annie writes, “I work in a virtual room now and for all the reasons you mentioned on the podcast that’s not so much an alternative to a traditional room as a necessary evil to get us through this weird situation. But two years ago I was an assistant in a room where one writer had to Skype in for a few weeks while his visa was being figured out. It was pretty terrible. He had such a hard time being completely involved in the conversation, even with his writing partner in the room trying to help facilitate his participation. When he finally did come to LA his personality and presence were so much more than we’d experienced through the computer screen.

“I can’t imagine having a room with multiple writers in this situation. Plus, they’d be missing out on all the bonding that happens in the kitchen around lamenting snack options and comparing caffeine consumption, all of which actually becomes very important to the room dynamic.”

So what Annie is trying to draw a distinction between is if everyone is in the same boat, OK, you’re in the same boat and you sort of muddle through. But this idea that, oh, maybe I don’t have to move to Los Angeles from Milwaukee and I can just Skype into the room is probably not a realistic option for those writers who don’t want to come to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I mean, if you’ve ever had the experience of being in like a minivan type of vehicle and you have a bunch of friends who are in the second and third row and you’re all the way up in the front, you’re left out. They can’t hear you. You’re talking forward. You’re not part of the thing. And you’re in the van with them. Separation does have an impact. It just does. There’s nothing you can do about it. And the more you try and include yourself the more kind of frustrating it is for everybody. So I completely agree. This is a great indication to people that, yeah, while everyone has to do it, sure. But if not everyone has to do it, you want to be in the room.

**John:** Yep. Do you want to take this comment from Greg?

**Craig:** Yeah. Greg writes, “I’m working in a room for a big streamer right now and there’s one topic that keeps coming up that I wanted to add to your list – video lag. One day my connection was spotty and the effects of lagging in the room felt almost like I was having a stroke. I couldn’t control my voice or image and others were looking at me as though I needed some sort of professional help. Then my connection dropped the chat and it felt like a digital bouncer had forcibly removed me from the room. For the next ten minutes I worked in sheer panic to get back in and when I finally did I sat there sweating, wide-eyed, trying to pretend I was as calm and good-humored as everyone else for the rest of the day.

“I thought I was alone in this until it happened to one of the head writers. Her image froze. Then she logged back in on her iPhone, appearing next to her own frozen face.” That’s awesome. “We all laughed at this even as she looked confused and afraid and as we tried to explain to her what we were looking at she froze again. When her second video resumed it was of her rushing down a hall with sheer panic in her eyes. It was the look of someone trying to find a life raft off a burning island.” Greg is very dramatic, by the way.

**John:** Yeah, I was going to say.

**Craig:** “The worst part was that if any of us attempted to call out her terror in any way other by cracking a light joke it would have been like saying the emperor has no clothes. We would have imperiled the room, the comfort of the other writers and our productivity because Zoom chats are founded on the fundamental lie that we’re actually together when in fact we are alone and one second away from digital annihilation.” Again, I have to repeat, Greg is a very dramatic person. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. But I wanted to include Greg’s full description there because it is a thing I have experienced and feared is that like when you can’t get into a group, when a discussion is happening without you and you feel like you’re pushed to the outside of it it is really panic-inducing. And you always feel like, wait, will I be able to rejoin this thing? You might have flow that is now broken. Particularly if you’re trying to run the show and then you’re not able to actually get into the conversation. It is, you know, it’s scary.

**Craig:** Yeah, so I don’t know what’s wrong with me but when I’m on one of these things and suddenly my video glitches up and I get booted from the room I feel a slight sense of relief. [laughs] Like, oh good.

**John:** You have an excuse for why you’re not there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like I can just go now and do whatever I want. And later just be like, yeah, Zoom right? Geesh.

**John:** I heard about this on Twitter but – not this last session but the session before – the six of us were playing Dungeons & Dragons and it’s like midnight and I felt an earthquake. I’m like, oh my god, there’s an earthquake. And the other five people on the chat were like, including you, were like, “There’s no earthquake.” And then the next nearest person felt the earthquake. And the next nearest person felt the earthquake. And it was such a wild moment because I was closer to the epicenter of the earthquake I felt it first and then there was a lag before it got to Phil and then to you. It was just such a wild experience that even though we were all there virtually we were physically in the same city and so therefore we were feeling the same effects.

**Craig:** Yes. And that’s something that you don’t normally have access to, right? It’s a weird thing. Because normally when you’re experiencing something together you’re together. And in that sense you could actually kind of chart the movement of the shockwave, which dissipated dramatically by the time it made it to me and to Chris Morgan.

**John:** It was a long way to get there. The other thing I’ve noticed with video lag that can be so frustrating is obviously the big networks have gotten much better at all the live from home stuff and they’re generally faking the live-ness of it all. They’re not really live from home.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But one thing I do watch which is more live is Drag Race has this Werq the World Tour where they’re raising money for drag queens. My daughter is obsessed with it. And so we watch it and it’s two very funny drag queens. One is in Los Angeles and one is in New York. And they have great patter, but just that one or two seconds lag really makes it awkward.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** And you just cannot do it. It’s tough.

**Craig:** It’s brutal. Timing is everything. And when you have a forced lag it’s over. There is no – it’s why sometimes they’ll bring a comedian on to one of the news shows, like the kind of talking head news shows. And their stuff always dies because of the time delay. It just kills it. The expiration date on a joke is precisely 0.0001 seconds after it is said. I mean, if you wait any longer than that it’s just like stale air, stale air. “Oh, OK. Yeah. That was funny, the thing you said a little bit ago.” It’s the weirdest thing. Yeah. Timing.

**John:** Timing.

**Craig:** Timing.

**John:** All timing.

**Craig:** Timing.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic. Craig, talk us through what you want to tell us about tropes.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I’ve been working on some new things lately and especially now that I’m in television – television, there’s so much more material you have to shovel into the engine of creation because there are episodes. Everything in television is longer than it is in film. And so you’re thinking about a lot of scenes, a lot of moments, a lot of scenes, a lot of ideas. And over and over it’s inevitable that you’re going to start to bump into places where tropes could go.

**John:** We should probably talk about what do we even mean by tropes? Because it’s a term that you and I throw around, but other people might not know what we’re talking about.

**Craig:** Cliché is a word that people use. So these are the moments, dialogue lines, scene, sequences, things that we have seen over and over and over in movies and television. It’s the guy walking away slowly from the explosion that he caused behind him. It’s the person saying something mean about somebody and then saying, “She’s right behind me isn’t she?” It’s that stuff. It’s crawling through the air duct to get to a place.

**John:** Absolutely. So they’re moments of narrative that are almost like stock photos that we’re so used to seeing them that we can kind of anticipate what they’re going to be like. And you could just string them together in forms that look like popular entertainment, but as a viewer we recognize that they are clichéd moments or they are sort of stock moments. And cliché would be too hard of a thing to bang them on because they’re natural bits of storytelling device in some cases, but we’ve seen them so often that they no longer feel fresh.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Jane Espenson often refers to clams. They’re old dead jokes for example.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there are also things that maybe in and of themselves aren’t considered tropes, but when you think of them naturally in the course of writing a scene you get a whiff of familiarity about them anyway. I mean, it’s not necessarily a trope that when there’s a horse racing scene and a character loses they rip up their little bet slips, but I’ve seen it so many times. So it’s like a little thing is like is there another way to do it?

And so I just kept thinking like, OK, what I’m really trying to do is every time I run into something like that I’m asking myself, OK, don’t do that. But then there is a question. Well then what do we do? Because that trope emerged in your mind for a reason. It’s accomplishing something. So we’re going to talk a little bit about how to handle that.

And I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is that tropes are not inherently bad. In fact, weirdly they’re inherently good. That’s how they became tropes. So, I looked this up. Everyone has heard somebody at some wedding say, “Throw your hands up in the air and wave them around like you just don’t care.” This has happened four billion times. But about 41 years ago Sugar Hill Gang wrote “Just throw your hands up in the air and party hardy like you just don’t care” and that may have been the first popularized use of that and it was awesome. Because no one had heard it before and so it was cool.

That’s why it became a trope. Tropes become tropes because they’re surprising and they’re fresh and they entertain and they solve problems. They solve problems. It’s like the first time you taste Hamburger Helper. You don’t know it’s garbage. It helped the hamburger. It worked.

**John:** Or first time someone said like, “Well let’s never do that again,” when something disastrous happened. It was actually a novel response to that thing that had just happened. But if we say that now it is still and is a trope. It’s shining a light on this thing which just went wrong. It doesn’t work anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does not work anymore. The problem with saying, OK, well then I’m not going to do that is that we are disallowing ourselves from using something that at the very minimum accomplishes a thing. Hamburger Helper does accomplish something. It just doesn’t accomplish anything original. So our job here is to replace the trope with something that actually also accomplishes something. Different and good is original.

Different and bad just sucks. And so we have to be careful when we say, all right, no tropes please. We also have to caution that when you zig where everybody else would zag there is the potential that you might do something that’s just boring or self-indulgent or confusing or unimpactful or not believable. So, the challenge today is to figure out how to not do the tropy thing but still get all the tropy goodness from the heart of it while being fresh and surprising and entertaining.

**John:** That sounds great. And I think part of the reason why we’re emphasizing that tropes are there in the first place is that people approach anything we write or anything that they see with a set of expectations. They have expectations about the genre, about the kind of thing that they’re watching. So, they’re aware of what they expect to kind of happen in this. And if you’re so trying to avoid every possible trope then it’s not even going to resemble the genre it’s supposed to be in.

If you’re trying to write a vampire thing and all the vampires aren’t hurt by sunlight, or wooden stakes, or any of that stuff then at a certain point you’re not writing a vampire thing anymore. So you have to be aware of what the overall scope of tropes is for this and how you’re making your choice about what you’re doing and what you’re not doing and how you’re hopefully aware of the tropes and remixing them in a way that makes it feel fresh.

**Craig:** That’s a great example. The vampires. Because vampires are just like drowning in tropes. But you want the vampire to bit someone in the neck. That’s a thing, right? OK, or at least bite somebody in a vein. So, that’s something you need to do. And as you’re creating your vampire story you may come to that place where suddenly the vampire has to bit somebody and drink their blood. So that’s a trope. And I think the first thing you should do is not just deny it. Not say, “Well in my movie vampires don’t do that.” Just first say to yourself, OK, I’m going to allow myself to play out the tropiest version possible in my mind. What am I getting out of it? What are the things that matter?

Is this character particularly scared? Are they excited to be bitten by the vampire? Is the vampire reluctant, guilty? Is the vampire ravenous? What are the things that at least I want out of my characters in the middle of this tropy thing? Learn from that. That’s the stuff that actually you can keep and use. Because tropes are just expressions of intention. They’re just often clever or once brilliant expressions of intention that now become stale from overuse. But keep the intentions.

So, first off, listen to the trope as it happens and learn from it. So you’ve listened to the trope in your head. You’ve heard what the intention is. And now it’s really important for you to say to yourself I’m not going to actually do it. I think sometimes we get into a self-delusional state where we think, well, I mean, you know, we can get away with it. We can do just one. Or, it’s not like it’s that tropy, because instead of the usual vampire biting somebody in the next in a castle he’s biting somebody on a neck in a rooftop bar in modern day New York. No, look, if you blindly walk into a trope, that is to say you didn’t realize it was a trope in the moment, which happens, and then someone points out and says, “Oh, yeah, you know, I’ve seen that,” then you go, OK, OK, got it. Let me change that.

But if you know, don’t do it. Just resist the siren song.

**John:** Absolutely. So I think what your call to action here is like just don’t be lazy. Don’t use the trope without examining what the trope does and why you would be using it. So don’t go for the trope without thinking about what the trope actually does. In the vampire example why is a vampire biting someone’s neck? Well, it’s biting the neck to feed. Is that the most interesting way to show feeding? Is it worth spending the shoe leather to change that vampire behavior and go at it a different way? Is there something about the biting of the neck that you’re going to do differently that is important to your story? For instance maybe the vampire doesn’t have these pop-out fangs and so biting the neck is actually really difficult because they just have normal teeth.

Like that’s a change that you’re making which could be worthwhile. But basically your challenge is to always ask yourself why am I doing this thing that is sort of a stock photo in this kind of story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because ultimately the audience will be sitting there going, oh, OK, well you know, see you borrowed that. You’ve started to bring up techniques like, OK, so what do we do.

So let’s go through, I’ve got seven suggestions. But I’m sure there are many, many more. But we’ll start with the easiest one which is just reverse it. So if the trope says boy meets girl when they bump into each other and you want them to have a meet-cute and you want it to be in the middle of the street because that’s kind of where they are maybe you just reverse it and they each bump – or they amazingly avoid bumping into each other. Like they’re heading towards each other with all of the attributes of a bumping together scene and they miss each other. And in missing each other they kind of turn back and realize that they had a near miss. And that’s the way it works.

Any trope there is you can just simply try, at least in your mind, to just do the reverse. If we know that vampires feed on people by drinking their blood then is there a way that vampires as it turns out need you to bite them so that they drink your blood. Whatever it is, reversal is always at least a simple strategy. If it works, great. A lot of times it doesn’t. But a decent first shot.

**John:** Absolutely. So you’re taking a look at, again, this is all going back to what does the reader, what does the audience expect. If the audience comes into it with a certain set of expectations and you’re able to kind of acknowledge those expectations and flip them then the audience is going to be hopefully even more engaged because they know that you know what they are expecting and that you’re taking an action to subvert that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. With that in mind, one of the kind of more comedic ways to handle tropes is by being meta. So the idea is that the characters or the filmmakers are kind of silently acknowledging that they watch TV and movies, too. They know the trope. They are either – when they engage in a trope they’re commenting on it, or the movie is commenting on it, or it doesn’t go the way it’s normally supposed to go.

So parodies kind of truck in this steadily. We did something in one of the Scary Movies where it was the trope of somebody in a moment of kind of anxiety and the camera is moving around them in a 360. We’ve seen this so many times. And we were doing this and then the character kind of puts their hands out and goes, “Stop,” and the camera stops and they vomit. And so it’s like you just acknowledge that the trope is happening.

Lord and Miller are by far the masters of this. So if you want to study this kind of meta trope behavior look at 21 Jump Street or The Lego Movie or any of the work that they do. They’re brilliant at it.

One of the simplest methods of being meta about tropes is doing the trope exactly as it is except taken to its absurd extreme. So, classic trope. You remove the cover of a bomb and there are four different color wires and which one should I snip. We’ve seen it a billion times. But in MacGruber you take the cover off the bomb and there’s a thousand wires. A thousand wires. And that’s great. I mean, it’s essentially like you said, it’s playing off of the audience’s expectation.

**John:** Yeah. And again the movie MacGruber it’s a joke they keep playing again and again is that it’s about diffusing this bomb and then they don’t actually do any of the work to diffuse the bomb. They’re having a completely unrelated conversation when you know you are supposed to be focusing on the bomb.

**Craig:** Right. For drama, sometimes all you need to do to kind of subvert and untropify a trope is to just change the dynamics. So I’ll call it loud to quiet in this instance. So we’ve all seen a prison riot. There have been four hundred zillion prison riots on movies and TV shows and they all look the same. In the prison riot there is a bell ringing somewhere. There are prisoners running around in a violent scrum. There’s always two levels to the prison and on the top level they are throwing burning mattresses to the bottom level. Every. Single. Time. Burning paper, burning mattresses, and people are getting stabbed randomly. And everyone is screaming.

That is what a prison riot looks like in everything. OK. Well, if you’re writing something and it’s time for a prison riot is there a quiet prison riot? Is there a way to do a prison riot where basically the prisoners are methodic and strategic and careful, which is actually kind of terrifying to consider?

So just deciding I’m going to do the same thing but just way quieter, or way louder, may be enough to kind of detropify your tropy intent.

**John:** Absolutely. And that shift of dynamics could also, it doesn’t have to be the entire universe, but whoever the central character is in that we have an expectation of who that person is generally in that story and to put a different kind of person in that slot is incredibly helpful.

And so if you have the charismatic cult leader and we have an expectation of what a charismatic cult leader is, and instead you have somebody who seems just the opposite of that, or just dialed in a very different direction, that is fascinating because we understand the general dynamics of how this is supposed to work but that’s not the person we expect to be doing that. And that gives you opportunity.

**Craig:** Precisely. Again we are playing with their expectations. I mean, last week we were talking about comedy as a magician’s trick. It’s just subverting expectations. It’s misdirection. That’s what we’re talking about here.

Another method is just analogizing. You take the same kind of thing but if there is something that has been done to death and yet useful, find something else that has the same kernel of psychological payload but is just different in circumstance in a way we haven’t seen. Typical thing in a lot of movies, particularly sports films, is the wise old coach who used to be something but isn’t something anymore because something tragic happened to them like they lost the big game and now they’re a drunk. And they’ve got to pull it together to help the young hero. That’s pretty much a stock trope.

If you want that character, if you need that character, maybe just look at the drinking part and say is there some other kind of self-destructive addiction that I can put here that isn’t that. Because we’ve seen it. It’s been done a billion times. So what else? I mean, weirdly enough one of my suggestions was are they in a cult? Are they obsessed with following something? Are they and end-of-the-world prepper? Are they running from a crime they committed? Are they trying to win back an ex-lover who has clearly moved on? What are they doing with their lives that has consumed them and pulled them away from what they maybe should be doing?

So you don’t have to turn your back on the useful aspect of self-destructive mentor, but you just have to change the nature of it I think or you end up being tropy.

**John:** Absolutely. And so in this case we’re probably talking about that sounds like he’s either a protagonist or an antagonist. We’ve seen stories in which that coach figure is the central character, so The Way Back, the Ben Affleck movie recently, he’s sort of that central character. We’ve also seen that as the antagonist, the one who is helping but also challenging our protagonist along the way.

What we’re pushing for is to look at sort of what the outside frame is of that character and are there things about that stock version that you can strip away and subvert so that we can actually see something really interesting and find ways to sort of do the same effect but without the usual details that we’re used to in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. You just get different lines, you know, different expressions. It frees you in a lot of ways. It really does. It frees you.

OK, we’re getting closer to the end of our list here. We’ve got three more. Mourn the loss of the trope. So tropes make things easy. And sometimes would benefit from the inclusion of a trope. If your 16-year-old protagonist is struggling with her physical identity or her sexuality, I think it’s OK for a moment where she acknowledges that there is a world where tropes exist which is fantasy world, where ditching your glasses or getting a haircut makes you a new human being to everyone. That doesn’t work that way in real life. And it’s OK to acknowledge the trope as almost like you the writer and the character are mourning the loss of it. If only the trope would world. But it won’t.

**John:** So let’s take Booksmart as an example. So in that script you have so many opportunities for these two young characters to engage in tropes, and instead we don’t engage in tropes, or we actually push against those tropes. So you have two young women who want to have the perfect night of high school, of partying, and in some ways they are longing for that trope. They are longing for this idealized version of what a high school party night is supposed to be like. And again and again they are not able to achieve it.

They’re also aware that they’re sort of going for this impossible thing at the same time. So the script is very smart about not letting them do the things that they kind of want to do. And sort of the sadness that it’s never as simple as you sort of wish it could be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’ve said an interesting word there which is smart or intelligent. That there is an implied intelligence when you fight back against tropes. Whether we like it or not, and whether we intend it or not, the use of tropes implies a certain kind of lack of intelligent or intelligence horsepower, because it’s a borrowing. So you will seem smarter, which is good.

OK, two more. This is an easy one. Eliminate the lines. Because tropy dialogue is what we consider to be written dialogue. It’s never going to be heard as authentic because it’s been said by a billion other characters before. And now one talks like that.

**John:** It’s hack.

**Craig:** It’s hack. Nobody in real life talks in trope lines. So, don’t have your characters say them. But those trope lines became trope lines because they did express something authentic at one time. So, whatever that authentic feeling is, it’s OK to have your actors express it. It’s OK to have your characters feel it, just not out loud.

**John:** Just don’t say those words.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just sometimes all you’ve got to do is if the trope comes to mind just delete it. But change nothing else and it just might work.

**John:** Absolutely. And if you are able to find that line that so perfectly encapsulates what that moment is like, congratulations you have now created a new trope.

**Craig:** A new trope.

**John:** A new trope line.

**Craig:** A new trope line. And finally, and this is really I think the best advice, and it’s the one I try and use the most. Be real. Tropes or at least are psychological processing of them is such that they feel connected to a glossy or melodramatic representation of life. They feel movie-ish. They feel TV show-ish. So the lines are kind of fake witty. I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character wasn’t really witty but he would always have these snappy little one-liners, you know, because it’s fake. The behavior is fake macho. Nobody walks away slowly from an explosion. That’s fake. The choices are fake brave. The emotions are fake sentiment. There is never a slow clap in real life ever. There are no slow claps. [laughs]

So the question you have to ask yourself is in the moment that you have created what would really happen. Think about that carefully and then do that. Because there are mechanical ways as we’ve described to change tropes, subvert them, hide them, acknowledge them, but nothing is as interesting, I think, ultimately, than letting a trope happen in your mind naturally, you arrive at a point. Your brain says, oh, the trope would fit right here. And then you say that’s great. But what would really happen? And then you might get something.

**John:** So we have many listeners who are film historians and so I challenge them, can you tell us where the slow clap came from? What was the first cinematic depiction of the slow clap? Because as Craig points out–

**Craig:** The first slow clap.

**John:** It’s a thing I only associate with movies and I think I’ve seen people try to do it in real life and it feels incredibly weird because it doesn’t actually make sense. It doesn’t work. And so if someone can tell me the history of the slow clap I’d be delighted to hear it.

But Craig’s underlying point here about being real, like what is the actual real behavior that people in real life situations would do is the cornerstone advice here. Is that the way you get to making your characters feel grounded within the universe of the story you’re telling is to be consistent within that world. And so we’re not saying nothing can be heightened. Obviously things are heightened. And so Veep is heightened. That’s not how real people would speak. Never Have I Ever, a show I just watched and really loved, is heightened. And that’s fine.

Social Network is heightened. People are speaking at a clip that they couldn’t speak at in real life. But within that heightened universe there is an underlying reality that you’re never reaching for sort of stock ways to get through things. In any of those things if they reached for a clunky line like “Let’s never do that again” it would thud. It wouldn’t work.

**Craig:** Yeah. It just wouldn’t. And so, yeah, you are allowed to be not realistic in your tone, but in moments where tropes would fit the best way to untropify the trope is to say what would actually happen here. Let’s not gloss this over with some tropy paint. Let’s embrace the realness of it.

I thought that, you know, the movie that we were looking at the other week, Bad Education, did a really good job. I mean, there’s so many opportunities for tropes in that movie.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And it seemed like, you know, they dodged most of them. I really do think so. I mean, you could feel like everybody was working hard, including the actors. Because, I mean, remember, some tropes aren’t just written. Some tropes are also acting tropes. Here’s one that I see all the time. In the place of somebody allowing themselves to experience something they just do a heavy breath out. No one does that. Normally in real life no one is like, [deep breath], well, but they do this sometimes. So everybody worked really hard to not do the tropy tropes and it’s appreciated. It really is.

**John:** It is. Here’s my actor tropy trope. I’m frustrated so I’m going to take off my reading glasses and throw them down on the desk and then rub my temples with my hands. That is my tropy trope.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I mean, I think there’s a pretty great – there’s a few great Denzel gifs. A lot of times I feel like tropes begin with Denzel. Like Denzel does something amazing and then everybody else is like, ooh–

**John:** Oh, I’ll Denzel that.

**Craig:** I want to Denzel it. And then it’s like, mmm, but Denzel Denzeled it. So you can’t Denzel it, because he Denzeled it. So, anyway.

**John:** Craig, I think you Denzeled this topic and for that I want to offer you a—

[Clapping]

**Craig:** Da-dum.

**John:** I don’t know what it means. But it’s a thing that happens.

**Craig:** Just sometimes, yeah, it’s a thing that happens. It’s just so funny. The whole psychology of the slow clap is that everyone is stunned. And no one is quite sure if they’re the only person who thinks what they saw was great. And then one brave soul is like not only am I going to express that this is great, but I’m going to do it so deliberately–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then everyone is like, yes, I will too. One by one. And then the applause. And then it has to turn into like the full applause.

**John:** Yeah. But it would be better if it didn’t turn into full applause and instead it was like they were keeping time, where everyone just starts clapping the same way, like are we supposed to start singing?

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**John:** That’s a way to subvert that slow clap trope.

**Craig:** That is absolutely terrifying. Yeah. And there’s always that moment where the person like when the slow clapping is happening the person on stage is like “what’s going on?”

**John:** Wait, what?

**Craig:** They’ve never experienced the slow clap phenomenon. [laughs]

**John:** Well, the challenge of the slow clap though is it’s also a mocking thing. You can make somebody by the slow clap. So it’s impossible to read what it actually is. And it’s a thing that just happened in movies.

**Craig:** In real life the only time you hear a slow clap is in a mocking reference to slow clapping. So, yes, in a movie if someone gets the slow clap their response should be like, “You know what, screw you man. I know what you’re doing.” Oh, slow clapping.

All right. Well, we’ve got some questions we can shuffle onto here if you’d like.

**John:** Let’s go for it. I’ll start with Paul in Wales. He writes, “I have a question about slug lines. I’ve seen them be bold, underlined, and with scene numbers if it’s a spec, but how about different colors? I’ve written a half-hour TV pilot that uses parallel realities, showing how different characters deal with the same problem. Because scenes from both realties are intercut I’ve given each reality a different colored slug line, pink and blue, and the rest of the scenes are in black. As someone with dyslexia I find this easy for myself to keep track of where I am in the story. Are there easier ways of showing a jump between realities on the page? I have written Reality A and Reality B in parenthesis at the end of each slug line. Should I instead put this before the INT or EXT?”

Craig, what’s your thinking on this kind of slug line questions and color overall in scripts?

**Craig:** The risk is just being distracting with the colors. That said, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. If you have something where you’re moving back and forth between various realities and you want to color code those slug lines, that to me is not a killer. If I were reading the script and enjoying it I think I would find that to be kind of a delightful help. If I were reading the script and thought it was boring then I would think of it as – honestly, I would just think I wish the writer had spent as much time on the writing as they did on the color coding.

So it always gets filtered through the quality of the writing itself. I am tempted to say that if the script is done properly and well you won’t need those. But, I don’t think it’s a huge problem. And if readers do say, “Listen, I really appreciate it,” go for it. It’s not like we’re dealing with the 1990s where everything was being Xeroxed on black and white machines. So, why not?

**John:** So when we had Greta Gerwig on the show her script for Little Women had pages in red, so the text was in red, for when we were in the past. And it was helpful because that was constantly playing with which timeline we’re in. And so she did not just the slug lines but the whole scenes would be in red when they’re in the past.

And that worked for her script and I thought it was a good choice for it. What Paul is suggesting I think could work, but I don’t know that going in color is really going to be more helpful than putting the past or present over it, or putting some little symbol, or maybe just bolding the ones that are in the present versus the past, or the different realities. The pink and the blue feels like a lot to me. And I do wonder and worry for Paul’s sake that someone who is picking it up is just going to go, “Huh,” and might toss it a little bit earlier than they should because they’re so thrown off by the color.

So I think a simpler choice that works is going to be better than a color choice which might work a little bit better honestly, but will just throw people off.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, I think it’s also – you could also say, look, as a little note beforehand, “I have dyslexia. This is how I am able to write and navigate through the script. So apologies if you find it distracting.” I think sometimes just being honest about those things and people will go, well, I’m not going to be a dick and just be like, well, I don’t care about your dyslexia. Throw. You know? And fling it virtually across the room.

I mean, I would probably give somebody a bit more of a break because I understand the intention. As opposed to I am self-indulgent and I think that I’m going to make things pink and blue. Do you know what I mean? So, yeah, you know, I think in general he should be – I would be – let’s put it this way. That’s not going to be the problem. Do you know what I mean? In the end ultimately if there’s a problem it’s going to be because of the writing.

Alexandra from West LA writes, “Could you do an overview of all the ways a screenwriter could make money screenwriting?” Such a good question actually, Alexandra. Thank you. “How is the screenplay market structured? Where is most of the money? I know as screenwriters we aren’t here for the money, but current insight on this could help funnel my overrunning cup of creative desires, especially as so many different storytelling formats open up. Thanks. Thank you.”

I like that she said thank you twice. Alexandra in West LA. So, John, let’s do a quick rundown on how you can make some scratch doing this gig.

**John:** All right. So, the classic ways screenwriters, we’ll talk about film and TV as one big pile of writing, the classic ways they make money is I write a script all by myself, a spec script, and I sell that to somebody for a sizeable chunk of money and they say, “Fantastic, we love this script. We will make this into a movie. We will pay you this amount of money for the script you’ve written. We will hopefully pay you some more money to do the rewrites on it.” And that goes out into the world. I will get some sort of residuals and profit participation on that movie when it gets made. That is a classic way that people get paid as screenwriters, but it’s actually not the way that most screenwriters make money.

Most screenwriters instead make money by being hired to write a specific project. And so it could be their original project that they have an idea for, they pitch it to a producer, to a studio. That financier says, “Great. I will pay you X dollars to write that script for me.” Or it could be based on a piece of property that the studio or the producer owns and they are looking for a writer to adapt this into a movie. They come to you and say, “Do you have an idea for how to do this?” And you pitch them your idea for how to do this and they pay you money to do it.

Those are classically the ways that screenwriters make money is by creating material themselves and selling it, or by being hired to write screenplay material for somebody else.

**Craig:** Yeah. So there is open writing assignments where you’re hired to rewrite things. There is roundtables where they bring screenwriters together to have a kind of group effort to punch up a comedy script for instance. Or talk about how a dramatic script might be improved, sort of development style. And in television there are similar entrepreneurial avenues. You write a spec script, you set up a show. You can also be hired as a high level executive producer or story producer for a show that somebody else started. And of course you could be hired as a staff writer where you are helping break stories in the room and then you are assigned a script.

**John:** Yeah. So in our earlier conversation today about like writers in virtual rooms, those writers are being paid for their time in that room. And based on how their contracts work that time that they’re in the room may also be applied towards the script that they’re writing, or that script that they’re writing may not be part of that time that they’re spending, that weekly money they’re getting for being in the room. But that is probably the bulk of overall writer income in the WGA is TV writers who are in the room writing on a show.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then there are sort of nontraditional areas. I mean, well screenwriters also can work on variety shows. So they’re working on jokes and sketches. You can write on game shows, which do need writing. And then there are things that you can do sort of independent. I mean, you can write for commercials. Is it screenwriting? Well, it’s writing for the screen. It’s not necessarily unionized, but there is that.

But basically that’s kind of the run of it. I’m sure we’re missing a few things. But by and large 95% of the money that we make as screenwriters is through open writing assignments, through rewrites, through original material, through working in a room, or collaborating with other people on a television show. That’s kind of the run of it.

**John:** I would also say that a not insignificant part of income that comes into writers is stuff that’s not really writing, but it’s teaching writing, or it’s doing other stuff that’s sort of adjacent to that process. And so Peter Gould who is a fantastic writer and a director on Better Call Saul was my screenwriting, actually my film basics professor at USC. And so there’s a long tradition of also teaching or doing other things. We talked about assistants and readers, there’s other ways that these writers make their living while they are writing.

**Craig:** Yeah. So there are kind of screenwriting-adjacent gigs that you can do like teaching for sure.

**John:** Great. Jason asks a question. “On his blog recommended changing your phone number to have a 323 or an 818 area code. Is this still necessary in 2020?” So he’s referring back to a 2007 post I had done about moving to LA. And back then I had recommended that, yes, you should change your number to an LA number just so that people think of you as being an LA person.

That is just dead advice. That is not relevant anymore. Because people keep their cell numbers from wherever they were.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So don’t change your number.

**Craig:** No. Nobody has a number anymore. You’re a name. So, the numbers are gone. There’s a comedian did some joke about getting arrested – it was Kathleen Madigan I think. She gets arrested and they give her one call, but they take all of her possessions. It’s like I don’t know anyone’s number. You took my phone. I literally have no – I can’t call my own parents. I don’t know their number. [laughs] And that’s kind of where we are right now.

**John:** Mm-hmm. I still dial my mom’s number as numbers. I think part of it is just so I don’t ever forget it, just because it otherwise – that’s the number I grew up with. I can’t ever let that go.

I feel like I would be losing a part of myself if I didn’t dial that number.

**Craig:** Every day I wake up thinking I would like to lose a part of myself.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** I’m all into Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

**John:** So while your phone number does not matter anymore, the area code for that, I will say that don’t use a goofy email address. So, I think proper email addresses are – Gmail is fine. Everyone has Gmail. AOL is still fine. Some people still use their AOLs. It’s fine. But never use Roadrunner. Never use like the free email that came with your Internet service when you first set it up. That always feels kind of weirdly unprofessional to me. So, pick something that is – if you’re putting your email address on the title page of your script, which is fair and genuine, you can do that, just make it an email address that you’re not embarrassed by.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, AOL is kind of a red flag. If you’re an older person and you’re using AOL and you want to make it some sort of a virtue of loyalty then that’s fine. Yeah, Roadrunner, Hotmail.

**John:** Yeah, if I see a Hotmail I’m like I’m a little dubious of this.

**Craig:** EarthLink.

**John:** Yeah. All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things that are sort of related. The first is a book. It is my friend Jordan Mechner who created Karateka and Prince of Persia and is an amazing videogame designer and screenwriter, he has a book out now called The Making of Prince of Persia, 1985-1993. It is a collection of all his old journals. And so he was a person who actually just kept a journal about what was going on day by day as he’s building what became an incredibly seminal game and helped change the videogame industry. And you’re just seeing this college kid working out sort of how to make this game and largely do it himself. Everything from how to sort of figure out the bit maps to some of the programming stuff, but really more the business and the logistics of how it should all fit and work together.

So, I really enjoyed it and I think the closest comparison I would have for it would be I remember reading Sex, Lies, and Videotape, the book, that Soderbergh wrote which is both his production journal and the script for Sex, Lies, and Videotape. It was like the first real screenplay I had read. But the actual production log, his sort of notes about what he was doing day by day were so helpful in seeing like, oh, you know what, it’s just a lot of hard work and he didn’t know what he was doing through a lot of it. And so if you are a person who aspires to make things I think you might really enjoy Jordan Mechner’s The Making of Prince of Persia, 1985-1993.

We’ll put an Amazon link there. We put Amazon links for most stuff. But we’re also going to start putting Bookshop links to things we can. Bookshop.org is a website you go to and it’s like Amazon but it actually feeds through local book stores. And supporting local bookstores in this time is incredibly important. It’s a really well setup system and so we’re going to try to be providing Bookshop links to anything we talk about on the show that we can find on Bookshop.

**Craig:** Yeah. It sounds good. It is a really cool read. And like Sex, Lies, and Videotape part of the fun of reading about Jordan’s process is that you’re looking at somebody who is dealing with enormous limitations. And so so much of the story of The Making of Prince of Persia is how do I deal with the fact that I have no resources. I don’t have a lot of money. I don’t have a lot of time. And I also have very little memory to work with to actually make a game that functions.

So, the way that a kind of deprivation can sometimes lead to creative epiphany is fascinating to me and so the story of how for instance the main antagonist of Prince of Persia is a direct result of a memory limitation and how that comes to be is really fascinating. So, it’s an interesting – it’s a really interesting journey. And Jordan is a great guy. So, well-chosen there, John.

My One Cool Thing this week is I think I’ve mentioned Maria Bamford as a One Cool Thing in the past before. She’s a standup comedian out of Minnesota. She is brilliant. She’s also odd. She’s like one of the great odd comedians. She has no problem being weird. Her eccentricity is sort of front forward. And she also has absolutely no shame about talking about her struggles with mental illness which were quite serious. And she did have to take a lot of time off because she does suffer from pretty significant mental illness.

And she talks about mental illness all the time. In this latest comedy special Weakness is the Brand she doesn’t talk about it a ton, but when she does it’s still pretty impactful and pretty – there’s funny and then there’s funny because, my god, that’s really, really true and you said it and it’s funny, which is different. I think she’s terrific. And so if you’re looking for some laughs and slightly challenging laughs, which is great, check out Maria Bamford: Weakness is the Brand.

**John:** Is it Netflix? HBO?

**Craig:** I believe it is on Amazon Prime.

**John:** Fantastic. Which is of course the–

**Craig:** Distant planet.

**John:** Distant planet where the Amazons actually came from.

**Craig:** Yes. Amazon Prime.

**John:** Amazon Prime. In our bonus segment we will talk about my cult history and our early experience with videogames. But until then that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks to Dustin Box and Chris [Sont] for their help.

Our outro is by James Llonch. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

Craig, thanks for talking us through the tropes.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And remember there’s no slow clap.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. So, our bonus topic. A couple of things made me think of this. First off is Jordan’s book. Craig, you are adapting The Last of Us. And I’ve been playing a lot of Animal Crossing.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So videogames are having a big cultural moment, but they’ve kind of always been a cultural touchstone. They’ve always been reflecting and sort of making the popular culture. And so I wanted to talk about our videogame histories. And I guess we’ll start with the distinction between videogames and arcades and videogames at home. Because I did go to the arcade with my brother some and I would play stuff, but I wasn’t a big arcade person. Were you an arcade person?

**Craig:** I wanted to be a big arcade person. My parents generally if they saw me deriving pleasure from something would put a stop to it. [laughs] So the arcade in the Staten Island Mall which I think was called something like Space Port. I think it was called Space Port. It was all I wanted to be in. I just wanted to be in Space Port. And they were like, no, that’s full of teenagers and trouble.

**John:** I just completely picture you on the most recent season of Stranger Things being one of those kids.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** In the Star Port Mall.

**Craig:** So Star Port – god, I really want to check. So the Staten Island Mall, which is still there. I lived about, I don’t know, like a ten minute walk from it, and it was just classic. It’s like a classic mall. And Space Port as I recall it was just poorly made up to look like you were entering some sort of space station.

**John:** Were there some black lights?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think there were. I think there were. I think there were some black lights. There was that carpet that had planets and crap on it.

**John:** Oh yeah. Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know that carpet.

**John:** Yeah. It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** And then a lot of delinquents. But I really wanted to. But mostly my early gaming was limited to the Atari 2600 and then games that I could play on the Apple II.

**John:** Yeah. So this is where we sort of get into the John was raised in a cult thing because so much of what people will talk about in terms of their videogame history but also their popular cultural history I don’t have the references for somebody who is my actual age. It’s like I did not live through the same timeline. And so I don’t seriously believe I was actually raised in a cult or I have missing years, but things like H.R. Pufnstuf or Fraggle Rock, people will bring up these things. Like, “Oh my god, I loved that,” and I have no idea what it is you’re talking about. It just didn’t exist for me.

And part of it was growing up in Colorado, you know, in a pre-cable universe you only have what the local stations would carry. And sometimes they wouldn’t carry those things. But it is just strange that there’s stuff I don’t know about that everyone else my same age seems to know about.

**Craig:** Well, Fraggle Rock was HBO, right?

**John:** So that’s cable again. So I didn’t have cable TV.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so I think that that’s fair. I mean, if you couldn’t afford HBO – I mean, first of all in New York we didn’t even have cable. I think New York was like the last place to get cable for some weird reason. We had these odd forerunners to cable like scrambled broadcast networks like WHT and weird stuff like that.

But if you didn’t have cable then you did miss out on things like Fraggle Rock. Honestly, I think I’ve only seen one or two episodes of Fraggle Rock. That wasn’t a thing for me.

So H.R. Pufnstuf was slightly before us.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** A little bit older. Or at least the bulk of it was I think. It was like early ‘70s. Super early ‘70s.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I mean, I remember seeing some of it but I wasn’t super into it either.

**John:** Obviously there’s stuff which is just based on geography, but clearly I think a bigger factor for me was that my father was inherently a contrarian and so if there was a thing that everyone else was getting he would do the research and get the other thing which he thought was better.

**Craig:** Ah. Yes.

**John:** So I never had an Atari 2600. Instead we had the Sears Pong game.

**Craig:** Oh dear.

**John:** Which I had to Google to make sure that it actually was a thing and it really was a thing. But Sears came out with their own version of Pong and that’s what we had on our little black and white TV. We never had an Apple II. Instead we were an Atari family, so we had the Atari 800, then the 400, then 600XL.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So I would get whatever videogames would also be made for the Atari computer systems. But instead of Pac-Man we had Jaw Breaker.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** We didn’t have Chop Lifter. We had something that was kind of like it. So we would always have these things that were approximations. Or games that my brother and I would have to type out of the magazine. So they’d have these games written in Basic and you would type them out of the magazine.

**Craig:** Oh yes. I remember those. I remember typing those.

**John:** Yeah. And then you’d save them. Once we had a cassette drive you would save them to a cassette drive and keep them there.

**Craig:** Yes. I remember. God, that brings me back. Typing them in. And that goes to show you how poor those games were in terms of their visual appeal because you could literally type them from a magazine into your computer. And save them on a cassette tape which was always fun to watch.

Yeah, I went down this memory lane about a month ago when we announced that we were doing The Last of Us because someone asked me what are your favorite videogames of all time. And so I had to go all the way back to kind of the beginning and ask like, OK, in the early days – because it’s easy for me to say like now I love, for instance, Fall Out and Bio Shock and GTA. That’s easy, right?

But in the beginning the first game that I remember falling in love with that pushed into my brain something was Adventure.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** On Atari. It was magical.

**John:** So, again, Adventure is a thing I never actually played myself. But I can picture it. I can just picture swinging across that little pit. But I could only play it at friend’s houses.

**Craig:** No, that was Pit Fall.

**John:** Oh, Pit Fall. Then I don’t what Adventure is. Oh, Adventure is the dot where you’re moving through the castle?

**Craig:** Yes. So Adventure is the dot.

**John:** Yeah, I never had it.

**Craig:** So it’s the dot. You have three castles depending on the difficulty level. There’s a white castle, a black castle, a gold castle. There’s a white dragon, a black dragon, and a gold dragon. The dragons looked like ducks. I don’t know how else to put it. They looked like ducks and they made this sound. [Groaning sound] And you had a sword which was a dash and a less than sign. I’m pretty sure. And you were a dot. And there was a bridge. The bridge is why the game was magical.

Never let anyone tell you that Adventure was magical because of the sword or the dragons. It was the bridge. And the reason why is the bridge allowed you to move through things you otherwise couldn’t get to. So there was like a little maze section that was sort of invisible. But as you moved through it would reveal itself. And you had to get from one part of the maze to the other, but there was no way to get there unless you had the bridge. The bridge allowed you to travel through an area you couldn’t. And that bridge was part of how you could start to screw with the game and go places you weren’t supposed to go and get your dot stuck in a corner. Or, get to the first real Easter egg of all time. So much fun.

So, Adventure was the first one that kind of lit me up. And never looked back. But I am concerned that you were not raised in a cult but rather you were manufactured and certain things were just left out. [laughs]

**John:** That’s entirely possible. And so I would say that during the time when I should have been playing some of these early videogames we had the proto Internet very early. My dad was an engineer for AT&T. And we had a terminal in our home where you could dial in and dial in to BBSs, Bulletin Board Systems. And so I was on that really early before most people were on that. And so the time in the afternoon when I would have normally been doing videogame stuff I was doing this.

And so message boards and chat boards and sort of chatting with people online. That’s probably how I got to be kidnapped into the cult. I do remember because unlike modern Internet where you just connect anytime you want, there were only a certain number of lines going into a bulletin board system and so you would get the busy signal a lot. And if I couldn’t get to the main bulletin board I wanted to get to I would try other bulletin boards. And so did join some bulletin board that I recognized along the way was some sort of religious kind of cult bulletin board. But I could always get into it. So I would log in there and check my email messages within that culty bulletin board.

**Craig:** That does sound like cult stuff. Yep. Yep.

**John:** But early videogames I did love from the Atari system we had, Karateka which is Jordan Mechner, and then ultimately we made a new version of Karateka with Jordan 20 or 30 years later. Castle Wolfenstein I loved.

**Craig:** [Speaks in German].

**John:** A sense of story was great there. It was the first videogame I really played where I was a character in a story, which I loved. And they’re making a Wolfenstein now again. They will always make Wolfenstein.

**Craig:** Oh, they’ve made so – there’s been tons of them. And they’re quite elaborate now. But back in the day it was a flat green monitored scroller with levels walking upstairs. It was very similar to Aztec, another early game I played. And you had the key and you had to open the locker and it had a three-code digit. And they would occasionally say Kommen Sie. And you would have to shoot them with your little gun and it was, you know, it was – weirdly I got more enjoyment out of that then some of the new Wolfensteins which are rather elaborate and pretty impressive, like especially the one on the moon.

**John:** Now, Craig, have you gone back and tried to play any nostalgic games and what has been your experience going back to play those nostalgic games?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Like the simulations or the–?

**Craig:** Sure. Like the mime simulator and all that stuff. It’s pleasant. It’s pleasant because it’s nostalgia. But rather than play it now what you can do it is instead of going through all that rigmarole – I don’t actually want to play it. I want to watch it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I was able – so the other game that I said early on was – there were a few. There was Adventure. There was Star Raiders. And there was Aztec. And so I went on YouTube and sure enough somebody had kind of a whole play through of Aztec which is – well when did Raiders come out? ’81? So somewhere in that zone of 1982ish this kind of copycat game called Aztec came out. And it was so much fun to watch it again and remember the enormous amount of time I spent playing it. But I don’t need to play it myself.

**John:** Yeah. Dark Castle, once I finally had a Macintosh.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, of course.

**John:** Was of course important and classic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the Atari game which was like – it was called Star Raiders – was the classic thing where like you warped to the next place and you have to defend your star bases. Loved it. It was all good. And that was actually a game that came on a cartridge.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Which made me feel like I was actually part of a videogame universe at that time when it was cartridge rather than having to load something up off a tape.

**Craig:** Star Raiders was a great game. So Star Raiders, like so many videogames, was inspired by a popular movie. It was clearly designed to look like you were in an [X-Wing] Fighter fighting [Thai fighters]. But it looked good. I mean, it was first person. There was like a reticule. And kind of the whole system was really brilliant. And it was just a great, great game. It’s funny how over time things have sort of flipped around.

For a long time they were trying to make Halo into a movie. And I always thought how do you make Halo into a movie when it’s a rip-off of a movie? I mean, it’s a great game. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s Aliens. It’s space marines fighting Xenomorphs and it’s Aliens. And there are a lot of games like that. Then you’re like, well, if I adapt it into a thing…

So, now that’s starting to change because videogames are getting more and more creative I think. And certainly more and more ambitious. And they’re taking you to places you wouldn’t otherwise go to and they’re also going to different time periods and historical periods. It’s fascinating. So, I mean, look, I think one of the reasons why videogame adaptations have struggled for so long is that people have been trying to adapt things that were already adaptations so there was a familiarity and tropiness to all of it. That could start to change. I hope it does.

**John:** This last week we rewatched Starship Troopers which I had not seen since it came out in theaters. And it was fascinating watching it because I had forgotten how Aliens Xenomorphy kind of it was. And so a lot of things I think as being, oh, that’s a thing that was established by Alien or Aliens, Starship Troopers also did quite a number on as well. It was a better movie than I certainly remembered it being.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. It’s this weird tongue and cheek quasi – it’s hard to tell if it knows it’s being funny. I think it does.

**John:** My take on it was that the filmmakers knew that they were funny and none of the actors knew that they were being funny. And that’s actually probably what makes it work is that the actors are so earnest in this absurd thing that they’re doing.

**Craig:** Yeah. “It’s afraid!” Yeah.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Pretty cool.

**John:** Craig, so thank you for helping me deprogram my cult.

**Craig:** You will never be deprogrammed. You are the function of a program.

**John:** I am the program.

**Craig:** You are the program.

**John:** Thanks Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** See you next time.

 

Links:

* Join us Thursday, May 14th for a live talk with Lawrence Kasdan 4pm PT on Zoom here: [Online Conversation: Revisiting The Empire Strikes Back with Lawrence Kasdan](https://www.wgfoundation.org/events/all/2020/5/5/online-conversation-revisiting-the-empire-strikes-back-with-lawrence-kasdan)
* Submit to the [Three Page Challenge](https://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Jordan Mechner’s: The Making of Prince of Persia, 1985-1993](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005WUE6Q2/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0) and Bookshop.org
* [Maria Bamford: Weakness is the Brand](https://comedydynamics.com/catalog/maria-bamford-weakness-is-the-brand/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/451standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/only-the-interesting-scenes).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 450 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll discuss my proposal for the most essential and most difficult practice every screenwriter needs to follow. We’ll also be talking about set pieces, virtual rooms, and juggling multiple projects. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will revisit our general advice about moving to Los Angeles given the pandemic.

Craig, I’m so excited to have you back. Because last week you were gone. You were off on a secret mission.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We can’t quite say what that secret mission is yet, correct?

**Craig:** No. We cannot say what it is yet, but the secret mission is coming to fruition and everyone will know soon enough. And let’s not raise hopes. I have not cured any viruses in the news. So just want to be clear about that.

**John:** Absolutely. You’re not the 83rd vaccine.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You’re something smaller than that. So somewhere between like you turned in a draft and cured COVID-19. Somewhere in that range.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s something that ultimately will be able to be shared with everyone.

**John:** Yeah. So we had an episode that was already on ice that we pulled out and Sam Esmail was gracious enough to come back and record a little wrap around. It was nice to have another New Jersian in your stead.

**Craig:** Got to be there.

**John:** So he does remind me of you in certain ways. And you will never go back and listen to the old episodes, but the conversation we had was really interesting because he’s a person who really wanted to be a director and started writing because he realized he needed to write in order to have the material he wanted to direct. So he really did everything he possibly could to avoid writing. And then it turns out he’s a really good writer.

So, it was a very different perspective getting into the writing craft than most of the guests we’ve had on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m trying to see where he’s from in New Jersey. The name of it is not popping off to me. I don’t know if it’s like southern, or northern, or wherever the hell it is.

**John:** What is it about people who are born in New Jersey and identifying the small little town they’re from?

**Craig:** That’s what we have. So New Jersey in a way that a lot of northeastern older states do has divided itself into tiny, tiny townships. So there are some cities in New Jersey that people know of, like Trenton or Princeton to a lesser extent, but then there are a ton of tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny townships, each of which generally has some sort of English-y Revolutionary kind of name.

**John:** So my mom was from Matawan.

**Craig:** Matawan, which is very close–

**John:** Or Red Bank.

**Craig:** Yeah. So Matawan and Red Bank are both very close to where I was. I would often bowl in Matawan. I would go bowling there. So I get it. Let’s see, Sam is from Gloucester. Oh, I see where he is. Yeah. That’s a weird part of New Jersey. [laughs]

**John:** Doesn’t even count.

**Craig:** Well, it’s Southwest New Jersey, which we think of that more as–

**John:** It’s the New Mexico of New Jersey.

**Craig:** It’s Delaware. It’s Pennsylvania or Delaware. It’s not like Jersey-Jersey to me. I don’t know what it is. It’s a weird Jersey. I was very Central New Jersey. I’m Katie Dippold New Jersey. I’m your mom New Jersey. Michael Gilvary, our D&D buddy, also from I believe Red Bank.

**John:** So our international listeners or basically anyone who grew up west of the Mississippi, all of northeast geography is just a big mess. They’re these tiny little pieces that sort of get lost in the puzzle. We just have no idea what you guys are talking about. So we said like Pennsylvania or Delaware, you could just be making that up. I have no idea how all those things fit together.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re from the part of America where every state is really large and mostly square.

**John:** Yep. We like straight lines.

**Craig:** Yeah. We like squiggles.

**John:** All right. Let’s do some follow up. So we’ve been talking on the show about the origin of the modern screenplay format and how it evolved from being more like a shot list to the literary document that we’re kind of used to. This week my former assistant, Matt Byrne, who is a writer on Scandal and many other shows, he wrote in to say, “I was listening to your very helpful back to basics episode. There’s a world in which the live reading of a screenplay is a huge consideration in the writing in television. These are often cold reads in rooms of actors and executives and department heads, none of whom have seen one word of the script. So there’s a different literary approach and criteria to the script form borne out of the immediacy of all of that, rather than one that’s handed in to a studio or a producer who might be reading it on their office sofa, or on the iPad by the pool. So the stakes are high because you’re in this room and it’s more like live theater. So, it’s a test of every aspect of every scene which requires some cozying up to the audience and some hand-holding of your actors and a fair amount of show person ship over all. So there’s a lot more directing on the page, both with camera and performance indicators, as well as over-communication of scene direction in regards to tone and pacing and all the rest.

“So all this is way more than the holders of classic or minimalist screenwriting rules would be comfortable with. It sets a certain expectation in television scripts that may be kind of strange when you’re being read by some of these shows who are used to their own scripts having a lot more detail in them than what you’d naturally think.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I can certainly see where this would be the case. And it brings an entire other topic to bear which is these readings. Script readings are a part of our business. They’re a part of what we do. I hate them. I’m still not quite sure they’re actually useful. I’ve done so many of them and I’m racking my mind to think if I believe they’re useful at all. I think that the benefit that you can get from a seated reading with your cast is minimal compared to the damage that can be done which is not only serious but likely.

**John:** All right. So I’m going to spill the tea on two different readings I’ve had of scripts and one that was incredibly helpful and one that was incredibly destructive.

**Craig:** Ooh, yum.

**John:** So, a helpful one was on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – actually, I have two good examples. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Big Fish. Big Fish was a chance for everyone to get together. We were in this room in Alabama. It was a chance to sort of see what the whole movie felt like kind of all together with this great cast. Get everyone’s accents kind of in the same universe. And so people weren’t giving their fullest performances, but it gives everybody a chance to get together and see what the whole movie felt like, especially the parts of the movie that they weren’t in at all. Because none of these actors is going to have a great chance to sort of see what the whole shape of the movie is.

Actors tend to read the scenes that they’re in and really kind of focus on that. So they may not really know how all the pieces fit together. So, when you have one of these readings you know that everyone has read the whole script at least once. And that sounds like a very low bar to clear, but that is really important. So, Big Fish that was super helpful.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory we had all of these young actors. It was great for them to all be in the room and sort of get over their nervousness about Johnny Depp and sort of get past that. It was really good. Johnny did not really perform, but he sort of got through all the words. And that helps.

**Craig:** There’s the issue, isn’t it.

**John:** Yes. But here’s the counter example. Here’s a case where I thought the table reading did a disservice was on the first Charlie’s Angels. We all got together in this room. We were super excited. We worked really hard on the script. We were very excited about sort of getting together. The three women had really formed a good relationship at this point. And there was one supporting actor who had been cast who I had not met with who just decided I think deliberately to tank his performance and cause a panic so that we would focus on his storyline stuff. And I thought – to me it felt like a deliberate choice and I’ve kind of despised this actor every moment since that point.

So that was a case where a power play happened in that moment and it was really frustrating.

**Craig:** Yeah. Here’s the thing about these – I like this ad hoc topic, by the way. The issue that I have with the table reads is let’s say it’s going really well. That in and of itself can be misleading. Just because somebody is being really funny in the room on that day reading it does not mean they’ll be funny on screen. In fact, the room tends to reward the broader performances. And then what happens is other actors start getting broad to try and get the same laugh or something, because they’re getting feedback.

Executives are often swayed by that sort of thing when they shouldn’t be. And there is no sense of intimacy. The room is completely leveled. Everybody is exactly the same distance from the “camera.” So, there is no subtlety allowed. That said, what then occurs is that good actors or insecure actors, doesn’t matter which, will often tank these performances. Sometimes they tank it because they’re trying to do something, right? Because they’re being naughty. But I think a lot of times they’re tanking it because they don’t recognize this as the thing they do well. And they do not want to be judged for it. They don’t know how to do their job in that room, so they don’t do any job at all.

I cannot tell you how many times I have witnessed not just good actors but huge movie stars, award-winning actors, just mumble everything into their hand the entire time. Because they don’t want to be held accountable to this table reading and they’re going to give you nothing. And their understanding is you’re not going to fire me over it, so beat it. And because of all of that I just never know what I’m supposed to learn from it.

Honestly I don’t know if I will do it again. I don’t know if it’s necessary. I just don’t. I think it’s something we do because we’re supposed to do it, we feel like we have to, but I’m not sure I want to anymore. I mean, we did one for Chernobyl and it was – honestly, I think we would have been better off just keeping that day and having a little cocktail session for everybody, where everybody can meet each other and get to know each other and talk to each other if they wanted about character. Or ask me questions or anybody questions. But the reading which went swimmingly well ultimately didn’t really give me information. It gave me non-information.

So that’s my rant on those things.

**John:** All right. So, two topics. First off, Mike Birbiglia, friend of the show, this is part of his process. And so as he’s working through the script he will bring his actor friends together and he will do a reading of the work sort of in progress. That to me is a little bit different than what we’re talking about. When we are talking about these live readings it’s generally right before you start production. It’s sort of that kind of last look before you get started in production.

And the same reason why it can be dangerous for us as writers, it can be an enticing opportunity for producers and other people to muck about with things. And so when they see that after really not performing all that great they might try to swap that actor out, or ask you as the writer to make a change for the sake of that actor. And that is the real issue.

I’ve also been in situations where you sort of plead with an actor to go in and just do the reading, it’s fine, you already have the part. And people have lost the part that thought they already had once they don’t live up to the expectation in the reading. It sucks. And there are actors who are really good at these situations. And there are actors who are kind of only good when you stick a camera in their face and they’re just not good in groups.

So, pros and cons.

**Craig:** You put your finger right on it. Like the studio or whoever is doing network, they’re saying well this is what we do and it’s purposeful. And so then it happens. And then they come to you afterwards and say, “We have drawn a conclusion from the purposeful thing we’ve done.” And it’s very hard to say to them, yes, except it’s not purposeful, therefore your conclusion isn’t valid and we shouldn’t have done any of this. We’ve learned nothing. This is a terrible scientific experiment. Because it is. It’s just bad science.

Like we use rats because in some ways they resemble humans in certain process and pathways, but in others they don’t. We try not to use rats for the things that aren’t applicable. This would be a non-rat test. It just doesn’t make sense.

**John:** An actual screen test where you have those actors in front of a camera, even if it’s not the real sets and everything, would be a much more accurate reflection of what kind of performance you could expect from the actor than this table reading situation.

**Craig:** 100%. And the truth that nobody wants to acknowledge, but it is true, is that the table read that matters, the moment where you kind of get a sense of whether or not you’ve chosen well and the words are working, is on the day and particularly the first week. Because 400 decisions are made that first week based on what you’re watching. And nobody wants to think about that because it’s scary, but it’s true. That’s when you start to learn things. That’s when you can fine tune things. That’s when you can make adjustments. Because at last you’re looking at the thing you’re supposed to be doing, not some other thing you’re not.

**John:** Yep. A topic which we’ll try to get to in future episodes is there were a bunch of pilots that were in production when the pandemic hit and everything had to shut down. It’s been so fascinating talking to friends who have these half-finished pilots. Because they are trying to cut together their half-finished pilots and the TV season is still kind of happening and so these things are being picked up or not being picked up based on how many days of shooting they were into their schedule. And some shows had put all their big meaty action stuff at the top and other stuff hadn’t happened yet. It’s a really strange situation for these shows caught in this bubble.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And in some of these cases that table read which they may not even really want to have is the last experience networks and studios have with the show they had envisioned.

**Craig:** Well, it’s useless. I wish I could just convince them all it’s useless. I mean, unless there’s something specific that a showrunner or screenwriter can glean – repeatedly and reliably glean – they shouldn’t do them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They just shouldn’t do them.

**John:** All right. To a new topic–

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Virtual rooms. So last week on the show I asked listeners to send in their experiences with virtual rooms and we heard back from some writers as well as assistants. So Megana has been going through the emails that have been coming in and also just reaching out to folks to sort of see, hey, how is life in these virtual writer’s rooms?

So, a couple things we heard back consistently. One is about the issue of the whiteboard. And so generally when you’re breaking a series and episodes in a TV writer’s room you have a bunch of whiteboards up and that’s how you’re planning out season arcs, character arcs, what happens in this episode. There’s a lot – you’re just looking at a lot of whiteboards. And that’s the general planning process for stuff.

So different virtual rooms are trying different techniques for how they’re doing that stuff. So, a shared Google doc is a really common way people are doing it. There’s other corkboard type software that people are trying. One writer wrote, “This room has been really tough because there’s no quick way to bring up a character’s season arc. Usually we can all just look at a board. Now it’s like a ten minute ordeal.” So you’re used to being surrounded by this visual information and you just don’t have it the same way if you’re all sharing a Zoom call.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if I were running a room I would probably make sure that all of my writers – I would just send out tablets, iPads or whatever. And that tablet would just be for a shared view of a corkboard. So, whatever is on Zoom is on your laptop, that’s fine. But then you have this other thing you can just glance over at just the way you would in a room that’s separate, so you’re not switching back and forth between things. Because I imagine that’s where it gets a little dicey.

**John:** One of the things we’ll say at the end of this is we mostly heard what’s challenging. What I’d love to get to in the next couple weeks is some shared what are best practices. What are rooms finding that’s really useful? Because we’re kind of all in this together.

So, let’s continue with what’s challenging right now. The challenge of social cues and when to speak. Because when you’re in a room with physical people it’s pretty easy to announce that you kind of want to say something, or if someone is talking too much it’s easy to sort of make it clear that, OK, shut up a little bit.

Someone wrote, “It’s really hard to gauge how the room is feeling or how someone is responding to a pitch.” And when we say pitch, like when you’re pitching a joke, or a take, or how to approach this scene. “Can’t read anybody’s tells or body language. Makes it really hard to fall into a rhythm. I still love everyone in my room. It’s a really open, really great room. But still tough getting into a groove because it’s all virtual.”

Another writer says, “Even when you’re on a conference call you’re still very isolated. When there’s a great pitch you’re happy but it fades pretty quickly because you just can’t feel everyone else’s excitement.”

**Craig:** Well, I can absolutely see that being an issue. And I don’t know what the answer. I’m excited to hear if somebody solved that. I mean, you know, I’m such a weird lone wolf that it never – it doesn’t come up that much for me personally, but I can see that being an issue.

**John:** Now with Mythic Quest you were in the room on that first season some. Have you been in any virtual rooms since everything got broken apart?

**Craig:** Not virtual rooms. I did come back and do some early room work with the team to set up season two, which obviously we had to hit pause on in terms of production. But since that time I have had a number of sort of smaller discussions with Rob McElhenney or Megan Ganz or David Hornsby. So there have been further discussions, but they haven’t been a full big room type of thing.

**John:** There’s no online version of sort of what would have happened in that room?

**Craig:** For me, no. They may very well have been having those. But I’m a little bit more of a–

**John:** A sniper?

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. That’s the most charitable version of it. I’m sure they would be like, they’re more like–

**John:** Ruiner of dreams.

**Craig:** Well, he shows up early, gets us all whipped up to do something incredibly ambitious and difficult, and then never comes back.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s sort of my thing.

**John:** Another thing Megana heard a lot about was exhaustion. Someone wrote, “I think the one thing people don’t talk enough about is how we’re exhausted all the time in a virtual room. We’re much more tired than you usually are in a normal room and I think it’s because when you’re in a room breaking story together you feed off each other’s excitement. You get energized by a good pitch.”

And I think that’s also a general problem with video conferencing I’ve noticed and other people have been pointing out is that you kind of feel like you’re always on when you’re on a video conference. You don’t know when someone is watching you or not watching you. So that constant sort of readiness which when you’re in a room full of people you sort of have a sense of when you can sort of slink back and when you can sit forward. It’s just different when you’re on a video conference all day.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this interesting psychological thing where if I’m in a room with somebody, let’s say we’re all having a kind of television room like setting. So maybe ten of us are sitting around a table and we’re talking and one person is kind of just like looking down at their pad and doodling a little bit, but they don’t seem uninterested, this is how they’re thinking. You can just tell, you know what, they need to go somewhere and think for a bit. I understand it because they’re doing it in front of me which means they know I see them doing it and we all get it.

And when we’re on video I think sometimes people look and they see somebody not paying attention or perhaps doing something else and they just think, oh, they think they’re getting away with this but they’re not. And it’s a different vibe.

**John:** Yeah. It’s also I think exhausting because when you’re waiting for your time to speak you’re sort of always cued up and it’s a little bit harder to know when to break in and when to be able to get in on things. There have been a lot of video conferences I’ve been on lately where I haven’t said a word the whole time. I’ve basically just been muted the whole time. And it wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say, but I didn’t have something that was so compelling to say that I felt like I’m going to try to break into the conversation flow or digitally raise my hand. I’m just going to be an observer in this conversation.

And that’s where you lose people because in a writer’s room you’re paying those people for their time and their brains to be able to speak up and contribute. And it’s challenging in these situations.

**Craig:** Particularly in comedy where when you’re in a comedy room it’s inevitable that there’s going to be a moment where some sort of riff magic occurs and there’s sort of a rolling pile of pitches and ideas and lines and thoughts as people are growing a concept. And inevitably two or more people will be speaking at once. And your ability to process that is actually quite good. You can hear multiple things happening. And overlap is part of the fun of it. Unfortunately given the way the technology functions overlap is a disaster on video conferencing. And inevitably one person wins out. Sometimes you think you’re not being heard and you are. But most of the time a bunch of people are just gone. They’re obliterated. And so you’re not getting – OK, sorry, I didn’t hear, what was your pitch? And then you’re like, oh god, it really wasn’t – it’s already dead.

I can see it being a real issue.

**John:** Lastly, the question of whether these virtual rooms open up opportunities for writers who are not in Los Angeles. So we’ll get a little bit more into this in our bonus topic for Premium members, but a couple people have reached out on Twitter saying like, “Oh, great, with virtual rooms I don’t have to move to Los Angeles. I could still stay in Chicago. I could stay wherever.”

And to me – I hear you laughing.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** I think it’s a little early to be going for that. Because virtual rooms are a stop gap for now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And while I think there’s things that studios love about them, and the ability to just stick people together and get scripts out of them, there is still some correlation between the room and physical production. And once physical production resumes you’re going to want to be able to communicate between those two environments. And so these virtual rooms may be good for short seasons that can be pre-written and figured out ahead of time, but for something like a Chicago Fire I don’t know that it’s really going to be realistic that that one writer is living in Florida the full time. I just don’t know that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** It’s not. It’s just not, because of the aforementioned things we’re talking about. There are certain things about rooms that work really well in person. The whole function of a room is to collaborate a number of individual minds into one large hive mind of narrative invention. And so what we’re doing now is the best we can do, but it’s not what we want to do. And all the people in these virtual rooms were in the non-virtual room prior. And they will return to the non-virtual room.

I do think that we are going to see more and more meetings held this way.

**John:** And as we said if I never have to drive to the west side at 5pm I won’t be grateful to the pandemic, but I will be grateful for the technology that allows me to not drive to the west side at 5pm.

**Craig:** Yeah. The comfort level has increased dramatically. So whereas if I had said before, “Hey, Casey Bloys, I definitely want to have this meeting with you at 4:30, but I don’t want to drive. I don’t feel like driving. You’re not worth it. [laughs] So, we’ll video conference instead,” he would be like, “What? That’s kind of a dick move.”

But now if I’m like, hey, would it be OK if we Zoom’d it anyway just because we’re all good at it now? And hopefully he would think that that would be OK. Not that I don’t want to – I mean, there’s certain times where I’m happy to go to Santa Monica and then those certain times are between 11:30 and 1:30. And that’s not it.

**John:** Yeah. This next week I’ll be going out with a pitch and here’s the pros. So we’re doing this all virtually. We can go to a lot of places. The list is probably longer because we can visit those places virtually, which is true and is good and that’s wonderful. But it is going to be exhausting. And just because we could stick four of these things in a day because I’m not having to drive around town, I don’t think it’s a good idea to be doing four of these in a day.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s going to take a lot of my week to do this pitching, but I’ve gotten better at it. And we’ll talk about this on a future show, but with experimentation I’m much better at being able to show slides and be able to talk and do stuff. And so it’s required some rehearsal, but it’s been interesting.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Yeah. Last thing that an assistant noted is that while many of these virtual rooms do have a writer’s assistant who is responsible for gathering up the notes from everything and doing all the standard thing a writer’s assistant would do, they generally don’t have writer’s PAs anymore. And so that’s like a whole job that’s been lost from most of these rooms. Because that writer’s PA was largely responsible for the lunch order. And that lunch order goes away because there’s no lunch.

Some shows are actually giving a $75 credit to writers to make up for the free lunch that they would be getting. But that doesn’t pay for that one person who used to be employed.

**Craig:** Yeah. I got to say that’s a tough one to sort of justify. I do think that anyone running a virtual room would be well served by a mechanism by which people who are not necessarily there to contribute steadily, like for instance a writer’s assistant who is mostly listening and writing, can signal the showrunner there’s something important or worth saying. A little light could go on. That would be helpful.

**John:** Yeah. What I’ve seen some people do is you text to the person who is running the meeting to say like, hey, I have a thing. And so they can sort of naturally fold that in and it doesn’t have to be a public raising your hand of things. So, I’m sure – that’s exactly the kind of thing I’d love for people to write in to us with sort of their suggestions for best practices for virtual rooms. Because even though this is a stop gap, we’re going to be living with these for a number of months. And so as we get better at doing this stuff let’s share the knowledge to everyone else who has to do one of these rooms.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. All right. So now to our marquee topic for this episode. So after 450 Scriptnotes episodes–

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** We’ve been discussing our advice on screenwriting and sort of what the process and the craft is like, but this last week I had an insight. So, like a lot of writers most of my insights come right when I’m trying to fall asleep. And so what I’ve taken to doing recently is I have a stack of index cards beside my bed and if it’s something I need to remember I just write it on an index card and stick it by the door so I remember it in the morning. But it just gets it out of my head and onto a card.

And so here is what I wrote down. Craig, only the interesting scenes.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s what I’ve been doing wrong. Goddammit.

**John:** So basically a fundamental piece of advice I wanted to offer to all screenwriters is only include the interesting scenes. And that sounds so incredibly obvious, but it’s actually really challenging. It’s probably the most difficult thing I’ve told people to do on this podcast. Is because as a reader we can tell when we’re not interested, but as a writer sometimes you work really hard to justify why those uninteresting scenes need to stay in your script. And so I want to spend a few minutes sort of wrestling through the problem of uninteresting scenes.

**Craig:** It’s a great idea. And I think that it’s a very common thing for new writers to think that the movies that they see, their experience to those movies psychologically is that there are three or four scenes that make them go, oh my god. And the rest are sort of filler in-between. And so that’s how they approach the writing. What they don’t understand is that everything gets diminished in that sense and every scene in the writing must be important, compelling, and significant. And four of them must be really huge.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah. And so here’s what we’re not saying. We’re not saying every scene in your script has to be like on a 10 out of 10 and sort of like the most compelling, most dramatic everything you’ve ever seen. You do need ups and downs and peaks and valleys. And these scenes need to be interesting in different ways, so it’s not just banging that drum as hard as you can in every scene. But to not give you permission to include those scenes that are boring. And so let’s talk about what boring or uninteresting scenes mean.

So, these are scenes where I don’t care what the characters are doing or saying. Or scenes where nothing is happening. Or probably more subtly, things are happening but they’re sort of exactly the things I expected were going to happen. So, two scenes ago I could have told you this scene is going to happen and this scene happens exactly the way I thought it would happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A classic mistake of characters telling each other things that I already know.

**Craig:** Oof.

**John:** Oof. Scenes were there’s no emotion, no excitement, there’s no emotional engagement between the characters in the moment. And really from a reader’s perspective any moment where I’ve stopped leaning in. Where I’ve stopped being curious about what’s happening in this moment and what’s going to happen next. That’s a sign that this scene is actually not interesting.

And here are the common excuses for how we’ve gotten to these scenes. As a writer I know that I need to go from X to Y. That there’s a thing that needs to happen and so like, OK, well, I’m just going to bite the bullet and have it happen here.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** My hero needs to learn this information. I’m setting up something great. That’s probably the most insidious trap. I know this is not the best moment but it’s a path that’s leading me to something else.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** These are justifications we make for including uninteresting scenes. But they’re not good justifications.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have to have an inner, like a little guy on your shoulder, a little lady, not the devil, the angel one. But the angel one is saying, “Hey, that’s not enough.” Because there’s just a certain thing, like you say, listen, I know that I want her to go to this store and buy this thing. Because she’s going to give this thing to her husband later. And I need her to buy it because I need her to see her make that choice. That’s not enough. You just have to know that’s not enough. There has to be something else happening in that scene, in the background, or to her, or in her relationship with the person selling it to her. Something has to happen to make me go, whoa.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or else it’s not enough. And you just have to know that.

**John:** Absolutely. So, here’s the problem when you include these uninteresting scenes is that if you have one boring page in your script that’s potentially one boring minute in your movie. One boring minute is a really long time. If you’ve ever sat in an editing room looking at one minute of film, oh my god, it’s so long. And when you suffer through one boring minute you’ll do anything you can to cut out of that minute or sort of get rid of that minute. You will do savage things to sort of get rid of that terrible minute. And the reason why you try to get rid of it is you’re breaking the social contract you have between the audience and the movie, or between the writer and the reader. And that contract is that if the viewer/the reader gives you their full attention you will make it worth their while. And for that minute you are breaking that contract because it’s not worth it for this minute to be sitting there. And if it becomes another minute or another minute you’ve lost them. They’re not coming back to your story. You’ve failed to engage them.

So often I think the trap is that we keep thinking about the function of a scene without worrying enough about the actual form of the scene. And good scenes have to do both. They have to be these beautiful, ornate, attractive pieces of architecture that actually still also meet their needs. Their bridges that sort of get us from this moment to that moment, but are actually interesting to walk on while we’re walking on those bridges.

**Craig:** And also someone is going to have to spend all day shooting it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And it’s going to get cut. You’re absolutely right. There is a shaken faith that occurs. When you watch a scene in a movie and you feel like you just didn’t need to see it, or in your mind you went somewhere. Then what’s happened is you have removed a bit of trust from the filmmaker. And you’ve withheld it. And the good ones, the good scripts, the good shows, the good movies, they make me feel so comfortable. When I watch something from Vince Gilligan or Peter Gould and Thomas Schnauz like Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad there is not ever one minute where I think, “Mm, is this going to work? Or why am I here? Does it…?” I just trust them. They have earned my trust because they’re never boring. They just don’t put in boring scenes.

And I like to think of things, because I think that interesting has to be the default setting, rather than saying that something isn’t interesting I just say it’s now boring. It’s binary. Either you are actively drawing me in or I’m leaving you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So these people maintain trust with us. And when you fail to do that. And certainly as a reader I’ll tell you it’s even worse. Because when you’re watching something, well, all right, fine, I’ll just keep watching it.

**John:** Yeah. Inertia will just keep you going for a while. And you have to actually work pretty hard for me to get to like, “OK, I’m giving up on this thing.”

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** But reading? Reading is so much more work that like if I have any excuse to not flip a page I’ll stop.

**Craig:** Well, even if you have to read it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You will just accelerate. You will accelerate and the kind of speed read will turn to a skim will turn into barely a flip just so that you can justify saying that you read it. But you cannot go through those experiences with those things. And it’s why when I’m going through my work or when I’m working on something with someone else and I’m going through their work I am meticulous and it’s something that I got drilled into me violently by Scott Frank and gently and gingerly by Lindsay Doran, but it was this notion that there is not fine enough view to improve things toward interest. Get as granular as you can. Be as ruthless as you can. It’s never good enough. That’s not a thing. You have to finish that scene and go, no, no, no, everyone get away from it. This is correct. Leave it alone. This is good. Moving on. That’s what you’re always aiming for.

**John:** So here’s the challenge that I would like to propose to our listeners is to take one of your scripts and go through it scene by scene and ask yourself, and be honest, is this scene interesting. And does this scene in and of itself not just sustain your interest but also actively interest you. And hopefully many of your scenes you’ll put a checkmark like, yep, this is interesting to me, this is interesting to me. I really want to see this scene. And not just because it’s in my movie, but because I think this is an interesting and a good scene and this is compelling to me.

But for the scenes that don’t get the checkmarks, then you really need to think about what is the hard work that is going to need to happen here. One of the first options is could I just cut this scene all together? And a lot of times you probably could. A lot of times you’re putting that scene in there because you feel like it has to be there, but there’s maybe a way to not include that scene.

But if the function of that scene is necessary, like a crucial bit of story needs to happen, then you’re going to need to really look at like well what are the obstacles keeping this from being an interesting scene or how can I reimagine the scene in a way that is actually interesting and compelling. So it doesn’t become one of the worst scenes of my script but it becomes one of the best scenes of my script. And really try to rise to that challenge on every scene in one of your screenplays.

**Craig:** If you run into trouble and you think to yourself I’ve got a problem, this is a load-bearing wall. It’s just a boring wall. Then your job is to think how could it not be? And it’s actually a wonderful writing experiment to say, right, this is otherwise an incredibly mundane, boring scene. Now what can I do to make this exciting? Here’s a very simple thing. In any scene if somebody in about 10 seconds in cuts themselves on the neck and is spurting blood but has to complete the scene, this is now a much more interesting scene.

Now, you can’t do that all the time, nor should you. But there are all sorts of things that recontextualize the action of things to make them terrifying, or funny, or compelling, or weird. All of those tools are at your disposal. You don’t need to throw it out because you’re bored by it inherently. You need to ask why is this not yet really a scene. It needs to be its own movie. What if that’s the only scene you can show people? Make it better.

**John:** Yeah. A thing we’ve said on the show many times is that in the really great movies that I love you can take any scene from that movie and sort of plant it in some fertile dirt and it would grow into the shape of that movie. It basically has the DNA of the movie in every scene. And so that is a thing we’re talking about. There’s a quality of what’s in this scene or this sequence. You can go as granular as you want to get to. But within that little bit of movie is the whole essence of what the movie is about and what the movie feels like. Tonally how it all engages and what the engine of that film is.

So, you can feel free to write in with examples from my own work that sort of don’t meet this threshold where I have uninteresting scenes in my script. And go for it. But I do think that at least the movies I’m best known for there are not uninteresting scenes that have made it through to the final cut. And I think that’s because I’ve been pretty ruthless with myself over the years about not sticking in those scenes that are just perfunctory, that are just sort of complacent to get to the next thing that needs to happen. That they’re not just little lulls between the big moments. They are hopefully all engaging moments along the way.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you definitely want to hope that that’s your goal but that is what you achieve. You are usually aided by any number of collaborators who are there to watch and consider and advise. The movies that I had the least tolerance for any kind of wiggle room or lack of lean in were the spoof movies I did. They are relentless. They are sprints. And so you start running, you start telling jokes, you do not stop telling jokes until the credits roll. Period. The end. No space. No time. No breath. No pause. They are typically 80 minutes. Sometimes they’re 80 minutes including credits. I mean, because you’re compressing essentially a movie and a half into one. Because there’s no air. It’s brutal.

It’s also a great exercise, but it’s a miserable exercise.

**John:** Now, contrast that with Chernobyl which has fair moments of air. There’s moments which are not pressure cookers.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Especially in the middle episodes. But it’s always consistently interesting because you’re always concerned for those characters, curious about what’s going to happen next. You see characters approaching things with different energies and with different motives. And you’re curious how it’s all going to work because you’ve set up the things and you’ve created these moments that are all going to work. But in setting up those moments you didn’t just plod along and bore us with why these characters are on the path they’re on. Each of those scenes that got to us the place were also interesting.

**Craig:** Well, thank you. I mean, I hope so. And there’s certainly moments where you can be visually poetic and that alone even if it’s not advancing the story in a specific way, it is imparting a feeling. And it’s imparting a feeling effectively. So those are moments in the editing room where you really watch and you go, yeah, that’s great. That’s beautiful. Let’s keep that.

Sometimes the best way to approach stuff is to fake people out. People love to be fooled. This is why we love going to magic shows. And comedy shows are just magic shows with your mouth. That’s all they are. You’re just fooling people.

For instance, there’s a shot in Chernobyl Episode 3 I think where we see a bulldozer just rumbling along. And it’s like, OK, well it’s a bulldozer. And then you reveal that the bulldozer is essentially bulldozing crops in exactly the same formation that a harvester would be harvesting the crops. So there is an irony and there’s a punchline. There’s a visual punchline.

And you can actually get quite a bit of points I think from people when you get them leaning towards, oh this is being boring, and then you go, surprise. There was a plan. They like this.

**John:** Yeah. My One Cool Thing to set it up and spoil it, the first 12 minutes has no dialogue. And yet it’s really compelling and interesting, and partly because you’re waiting and wondering when is somebody going to speak. And yet it works really well. So it doesn’t mean that everything has to be chock-a-block pacing action suspenseful. It’s really about what is going to keep people compelled and interested in what you’re doing.

**Craig:** I agree with you.

**John:** That’s nice to hear once.

**Craig:** Once.

**John:** Once. Once or twice. The last little bit of advice I’ll have along this line is that a lot of what we’re talking about is sort of going through the script that you’ve already written or the script that you’re writing in front of you. This mindset is also helpful when you’re conceiving of the pitch or describing the project to other people. I’m thinking about a recent project that I was working on and they came back to me with this well what if this, what if that. And they had all these things which were thematically yes. I get why they’re going for that. But I could answer and answer really honestly, “I don’t know how to make that interesting.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there’s nothing wrong with that idea. But I could tell you as the craft person who actually has to do this I don’t think I can actually make that compelling in the moment. And I was able to win some of those discussions just by sort of being honest about I don’t know how that’s interesting. And that’s really how when you’re conceiving of a project from the point of view of how will those moments along the way be interesting that’s helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really hard for people. Because anything is possible before something is done. And there are all sorts of examples. We talked about this in our How to Give Notes thing about you can caught up in this example sickness where you’re like, well, in this movie it wasn’t boring. Well, yeah, but in this movie they didn’t do any of that. OK, well but in this movie they did. And you’re just like, yeah, each one of those movies wanted to be the thing it wanted to be. And this one wants to be the thing it wants to be. And the person who knows that is me. So, just quiet. Just be quiet and let me do the thing that I do. And then we can all discuss. And we’ll have this discussion many, many times. But until you sort of see it all in one you may think that you need more than you need, or you may think that you need less than you need.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s segue to more than a scene, a sequence. And this is a discussion on set pieces. This came up because last week I was talking with a TV writer. She was out pitching a feature. It was an open writing assignment. And the producer said they wanted to hear two or three set pieces for this comedy. And she was asking me basically what do they really mean by set pieces? Because coming from a TV perspective she had a certain idea of what a set piece was. And set piece is something that you’ll hear us talking about in production because it’s generally a big thing to do in production, like there’s a whole discussion of how we’re going to handle the set piece. But also in narratives we use the term set piece. So I thought let’s have a quick discussion about, Craig, what do you think of when I say a set piece?

**Craig:** Well in feature comedy it means one thing. A set piece means a comic sequence that is self-contained with a premise. And then it plays out. So, simplest example I can think of right now is in Bridesmaids they go to a bridal shop and they all have food poisoning and it plays out. That is a set piece. So it always has a premise. The premise drives action through. There is always some sort of setting. And then the jokes escalate. It is not a joke, but multiple jokes.

Set pieces in comedies can sometimes be fights. They can be action sequences that are funny. They can be a situation like that. We had a set piece in Scary Movie – I mean, Scary Movies are mostly set pieces. Brenda played by Regina Hall dies and there’s a funeral for her. And a fight ensues at the funeral that escalates and gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and bigger. It ends up with electrocutions. That’s a set piece.

So, premise, escalation, play it out.

**John:** Yeah. So set pieces are little mini movies within your movie. And when Craig says beginning, middle, and end, that’s it. Because there’s a whole arc to them. Another way to think about it is if you just saw that set piece excerpted on YouTube it would make sense. So, independent of knowing who the characters were at the start and who they are at the end, you can get a sense of sort of what’s happening there.

A musical number from a musical will tend to be a set piece. Because there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s a flow to it. There’s an arc to it. And so when this writer was saying well what do I need to be able to pitch in terms of set piece, you need to describe what that action is. So what Craig was describing with Scary Movie it’s like if you were pitching that moment you would say like, “So we’re at this funeral and this happens,” and then you show what the escalation is and sort of how it wraps up. And what the producers are asking for are two or three examples, set pieces, that would match the overall premise of this open writing assignment.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And it’s not complicated, but I will say that I remember hearing the phrase “set piece” when I was hired with my writing partner to work on our first movie, which did end up having quite a few set pieces in it. It was a movie for Disney. And I had no idea what the hell they were talking about. I just didn’t know what it meant. I’d never heard it before. I did not know. I thought it meant something that had to take place on a set. Which wasn’t a bad guess.

**John:** No, not at all.

**Craig:** But also wrong.

**John:** But wrong. All right. Let’s answer some listener questions. So, two weeks back I was posting on the blog about getting things done in a pandemic which is a to-do list of sorts that I fill out every morning and I sort of plan what my work is going to be that day. And I found it really pre-pandemic but it’s also been very useful during the pandemic. So, I’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

Adam wrote in to say, “I spied an Easter egg of sorts on the peek page of your to-do list. You have eight writing projects. I’m super curious how you manage so many projects at once? Firstly in terms of servicing the scripts and other filmmakers and your time and focus. But also in terms of expectation and exclusivity from those paying you. Is it understood that writers have many projects on the go, or does it have to be explicit in contracts? Or perhaps it just comes with a career progress and a studio has to deal with an in-demand writer being on many projects at once?”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So, what Adam is describing is on my to-do list I can sort of fold back and it will show just a reminder list of these are all the things I’m kind of working on, the things that are in my head. And so if I’m thinking like what else do I need to work on I can look at this little peek page and it’s like, oh that’s right, I need to be doing that thing for Arlo Finch, or whatever. So it’s a reminder of like, OK, these are all the irons that are in the fire.

So, first answer is I’m not writing all those things at once. And some of those are in different stages of progress. Some of those projects I’ve been working on for like 10 years. And, you know, small progress is made at a time. In general I’m working on one thing, one paid assignment at a time. And the exceptions will be if I’m delivering a draft and I’m pitching something else, or something is handed in and I’m just doing the rewrite on something else. But I’m not on the clock for two people at once with very, very rare exception.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that’s basically how it goes. Here in my office we have a whiteboard with the various projects that are in play. They’re in different stages. Some of them will be getting done. Some of them have been done but I may need to go back and revisit for another thing. But they’re different kinds of things. And, yeah, every now and then you have to kind of do a little bit of double duty. It happens. But generally speaking you just try and – you’re going to be hired for more than one thing at once. So there’s this classic thing where everybody – they’ll call you and say, “We really want you to do this.” And I’ll say, well, I can’t because I’m doing this. And then they say, “Well, just, you know, like you can squeeze it in and just do it while you’re doing that.” And I’m like, well, here’s the thing. Will you be OK when I do that to you with something else that somebody else tells me to squeeze into your thing? And they say, “No.” [laughs]

And I say well there you go. I try and be – the good news is if you hire me then you know I will be doing your work responsibly and professionally. Yes, every now and then someone calls me and says, “I need a week on something,” and I’ll go, all right, I can hit pause on this, do a week, come back. It’s not the end of the world. No one is going to cry foul. Everybody understands it’s the way the business works. But, yeah, we balance lots of things but in the moment we are traditionally working on a thing.

**John:** Yep. Absolutely true. So when I was doing the Arlo Finch books, during the time I was in a draft on those Arlo Finch books I was really just doing Arlo Finch for that whole time. If I needed to do a week on a project or fix a little thing on Aladdin I would do it. But in general I was full time on that. There’s one big writing project, but there’s always a lot of little things that sort of stack up. And the reason why I keep those on my list, and some of those were place-holder like fake code names because I did recognize that I’m putting this on my blog so people are going to see what’s there, some of those are things that are kind of in the pitchy kind of stage. And I just need to remember that I have to move the ball forward a little bit on that because this is an animation project that is going to take five years anyway. So I have to be making some forward progress on that or else it will never happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** Do you want to take the question from Chris?

**Craig:** Yeah. Sure. Chris writes, “In terms of No Work Left Behind, I’ve always understood this to mean don’t leave pages in a pitch meeting after you’ve run through the thing. Don’t give executives a reason to pour over a document that they will almost certainly find fault in or obsess over some minor detail. But as I watch the WGA video and hear you guys discuss it on the pod…”

Oh, god, you know I hate it when they say pod.

**John:** Yeah. Pod Save America.

**Craig:** Birbiglia says pod. I know. Everyone says pod.

**John:** It’s the worst thing Pod Save America has done.

**Craig:** I know. I know. And everyone calls it the pod. Ugh. I’m going to fix it. “But as I watch the WGA video and hear you guys discuss it on the podcast, I’m curious if I’ve been misunderstanding the concept. Does No Pages Left Behind also apply to the development process with producers? For years I’ve sent pages to producers in order to show them where my head is at or use as a conversation starter. Has this been a mistake? Should I only work up a pitch verbally from now on?

“Example, I’ve been trying to zero in on the strongest pitch for a spec pilot I wrote. I’ve been working with the producer for a while refining the script, batting around ideas via email, and trading documents back and forth to clarify the thinking. But after hearing your renewed call for No Pages Left Behind, that is to say no free work, I can’t square how best to proceed. Should I tell him that from now on no more pages? We’ll only discuss verbally? Should that be the rule going forward? I want to be on the right side of this, especially if I’ve been doing it all wrong. But I want to make I sure I [grock] it 100%”

Grock. Great–

**John:** Yes. Great word.

**Craig:** I think from like the ‘50s, ‘60s, Robert Heinlein kind of thing. It is. It’s Heinlein. Oh, Nailed it.

**John:** Heinlein.

**Craig:** It’s Heinlein. 1961. So it means to like really get something.

**John:** Yeah. To know and to love all at once. To be water brothers or something.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** All right. No Writing Left Behind. So, I was one of the champions of this back in my time on the WGA board. Here’s what it means. First off, it does mean the first thing we’re talking about which is when you go on a pitch don’t leave your pages behind and don’t email the pages behind. Keep things in a verbal realm to the degree it is possible. Just don’t give them pages, because when you give them pages it messes things up for you and for every writer after you.

Now, in situations where you’re developing a spec thing, it’s different than an open writing assignment or for anything where you’re going in to pitch on their property. You own all of this. And so if you choose to write up stuff you own the things that you’re writing. So if it’s helpful for you and your process to write that stuff down and to share it with these producers who you’re going to be taking this out on the town and the pitch with, OK. I still think there are some problems with that. I still think the basic problems of you are potentially making a lot more work for yourself is there. But, it’s still your thing. So you don’t have to worry about getting micro-noted on all this stuff or them falling out of love with your project because of little obsessive details. Because you still own the whole thing.

So you can do whatever spec work you want to do. You can write that whole script. You can write pitch pages. You can sell a treatment if you wanted to. If that is helpful to you, you can do it. But what No Writing Left Behind means is when you’re going in to land a job don’t be giving them writing because writing is what they should be paying you to do.

**Craig:** And I think that’s probably the best way of thinking about the rule of thumb. If you’re supposed to be getting paid for this writing prospectively then you should be paid for it. You shouldn’t give it to them. You’re not supposed to be paid for the prospective spec writing. That spec is going to be purchased. That’s literary material that would be purchased and then you will be employed to rewrite it and expand it and develop it and write more episodes.

But when it comes to a company that’s saying, yeah, we’re looking to hire somebody to rewrite this or to write that, then you’re supposed to get paid to do that work. So don’t give it to them for free. Period. The end.

**John:** Do you want to take the question from Zander?

**Craig:** I do. Zander asks, “In our post-COVID world, Hollywood is starting to experiment more and more with VOD and Premium VOD. News outlets state that Trolls World Tour has earned an estimated $100 million to date in PVOD sales. My question is what do these numbers mean? How do they compare to box office revenue with respect to how much money goes to the studio versus how much money goes elsewhere? And what does this mean for screenwriters and residuals?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** These are all good questions. So, Zander, first I’ll say $100 million to date, that’s good I guess. I mean, considering it was a choice between zero and $100 million I think Universal is really happy with $100 million. There’s a reason why they’re not putting the Bond movie on VOD right now because they know they can make more money theatrically. But for some of the projects that were originally theatrically going to be released and now they’re going to Video on Demand, you see that they’re ones that they were kind of on the bubble about whether they were going to be big hits and it felt like the right choice to bring them home. So I get why some of those movies are going that direction.

In terms of how much does that compare with what a studio would be getting from a movie theatrically versus on home video, a useful way to think about it is the movie theaters take about half of the money that comes in. It really varies on what weekend you’re looking at, but a lot of money does go to the theatrical distribution part of it. So the studio gets maybe half of those dollars back in. As opposed to this Video on Demand, they’re getting a tremendous amount of that money back in. And they’re not getting all of it, but a lot more of it in. So they’re getting more money in.

But, if this movie had been released theatrically it would still be making a ton of money once it was released on video anyway. So, basically they’re cutting off one of their revenue streams in order to get this money just on the Video on Demand.

So, there’s no magic way to sort of compute how it’s all going to work.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ve got a little bit of a weird teeter-totter going on here. Because John’s right. If it goes into the theaters that is a primary exhibition. They make a certain amount of money. Basically they split that 50/50 with the movie theaters. And then there is this secondary ancillary viewing market that will be on Premium VOD. They’ll generate a certain amount from that from repeat viewing, which is a very common thing. Rentals, and purchases, and so on and so forth.

One way of looking at it is, well, they just did really well on the market they were going to be doing really well on anyway. John’s right. Instead of a 50/50 split in Premium Video on Demand it’s probably more like 80/20, I think. So the studio is getting about 80% of that money. So that’s great. But now let’s look at the other side of the teeter-totter. To put movies in theaters is expensive. The marketing costs are vastly higher. If you’re just running it on Premium Video on Demand there’s a certain kind of built-in marketing effort that you can use on your own platform.

So, if Warner Bros now has HBO Max. If Warner Bros wants to put out a movie on PVOD instead of on – they may have some special way to promote it on HBO Max. And then you can go ahead and make this special purchase. My guess is the marketing costs will probably not be as big.

So, you can see where maybe there’s some cost savings there. And of course it costs money to actually make and distribute the stuff. Even though it’s all digital, there’s a whole physical process of servers that send files and yada-da-da-da.

So, hard to say. Hard to say. But we can answer this part of your question. What does it mean for screenwriters and residuals? Well, to the extent that we may be getting cheated out of residuals from movies not being in movie theaters, the answer is no impact at all. We don’t get residuals for that. We don’t get residuals for movies airing in theaters. We don’t get residuals for movies airing on airplanes, oddly enough. The only way it will impact us negatively is if a lack of theatrical exhibition somehow reduces the amount of sales on Premium VOD.

But I got to say I’m skeptical of that. See, it may be that the studios ultimately end up not making as much money in this model, but I think we – writers, directors, and actors – will probably make more. Because more people will ultimately have to purchase this through PVOD or VOD. There is no primary [residualous] exhibition availability. So, we’re going to get residuals on all of it, instead of just some of it.

Now, I can absolutely see the companies coming back to us and trying to get rid of that. I can smell it. But at least for now I think this probably works better for us.

**John:** So, a couple of clarifications on Trolls World Tour is an animated movie. I believe it was probably made under a non-WGA contract. So there were not–

**Craig:** Yes. That’s different.

**John:** There were not WGA residuals for that regardless.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Here’s where it gets tricky in terms of residuals is that the movies we’re talking about were initially intended to be theatrical movies that because of the COVID-19 they ended up debuting on Video on Demand. If these movies are set from the outset, or if they are sort of retconned into being like, oh no, we always intended to release this on Video on Demand, or on Disney+, that is a big factor and a big distinction. Because suddenly the metrics for what you get paid if the movie debuts on Disney+ versus debuting theatrically could be a lot. And so if it’s not available anyplace other than Disney+ that is potentially really challenging.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, at some point I’m going to publish my residuals from Aladdin so people can see sort of what I make off of Aladdin, but I make really good money off of residuals of Aladdin because it was the theatrical movie that then had this life on iTunes and all the other places you can see it. And now it’s on Disney+. And those formulas are pretty good. If this movie had been debuting on Disney+ I would have made a tiny fraction of those residuals. And so that is the downside of these movies not coming out theatrically.

**Craig:** Yeah. We just don’t know. All we can do is rely on the companies’ greed. Right? So what Disney won’t do is make an Aladdin movie and put it on Disney+ for free for its subscribers. They’re never going to do that. Because they’re losing money. They know people will pay for it. Right?

So, there is a PVOD model where it’s over-the-top of what you would get through your normal subscription fee. And that will not go away. Especially if it’s a primary exhibition. They’re just going to say, look, if you want this it’s going to cost you $4. And people will pay the $4.

Look, the truth is this may get decided anyway just by reality. We don’t know how this is going to shake out. I’ve always been rosy about movie theaters and their prospects. I’m less so now. And the fact that this movie did so well just on PVOD is – it’s an eye-opener. Let’s put it that way.

There are movies that will still require those huge runs. But, that is an eye-opener, I got to say.

**John:** Yeah. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Let’s see. I have two One Cool Things because I’m sort of saved up from previous weeks. The first is Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Boltcutters which is just a remarkable album. So this is coming weeks after its debut.

**Craig:** Ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies. Ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies.

**John:** So here’s what I want to talk about with Fiona Apple’s album is that it’s a remarkable album, but I would also say that you could give it a Tony award. You could give it other awards, too, because as a character study, as something written from the point of view of a character who is kind of at their midpoint and headed towards the third act, it’s just a fascinating portrait of sort of who she is. And so if you look at it as like if this were on stage and it was a one-woman show I would just give her all the awards. Because it really is just remarkably well crafted in terms of its storytelling. I thought it was remarkable as a piece of performance, independent of how musically wonderful it is.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it’s terrific. It’s on heavy rotation in my house. That’s for sure.

**John:** Yeah. The other thing I want to recommend is a movie End of the Century by Lucio Castro. And I don’t want to spoil too much about what actually happens in it. It’s a gay film. Two guys meet in Barcelona. And as I said in the setup the first 12 minutes there’s no talking. And you’re sort of waiting for people to talk.

What I admired so much about this movie is essentially it’s just a three-hander. There’s only three characters in the whole movie who speak. And yet so much happens and there’s so many interesting questions being raised by it. And again it’s a movie that feels like when something is only a two-hander or three-hander you think like well could it just be a stage play? But this one could not be a stage play. And I thought it used cinematic language really, really well.

So I would recommend you check out End of the Century which is on iTunes and other places where you can rent it or buy it.

**Craig:** You guys have spent time in Barcelona, right?

**John:** Oh, Barcelona is amazing. Love it.

**Craig:** It’s a pretty magical city. So I have two One Cool Things also. I have got Two Cool Things. First, this is a little bit of a follow up from a prior two-time One Cool Thing for me. Nate Carden who is one of the crossword constructors and I think kind of one of the editors and supervisors of Queer Qrosswords, which is a pack of crosswords that are made by LGBTQ+ crossword constructors and generally built around LGBTQ+ themes. And a packet that you generally purchase by contributing to various charities that’s for LGBTQ+ causes.

Nate is saying, hey, given what’s going on right now we are happy to send people both packs of Queer Qrosswords, because there’s two of them, each one about 15 puzzles I think, without them even needing to donate if it’ll just help them weather the isolation. So if you are a little strapped for cash, you can’t quite make those donations, but you do want to fill your time with some fantastic puzzles, including two puzzles by my favorite puzzle constructor, Mark Halpin, then just get in touch with Nate and the Queer Qrosswords folks at queerqcrosswords@gmail.com. And they will send you your packets.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** And then secondly hooray there is a new game from the Rusty Lake people. Rusty Lake has been one of my Cool Things before. There’s a new game out by them called Samsara Room. It is a very classic kind of Rusty Lake game. It is creepy, eerie, funny, disgusting. All the things it’s supposed to be. But above all bizarre. I’m enjoying it. I feel like I’m probably close to the end of it. I’m already a little sad. But it’s excellent stuff. And it is available now for iPhone or iPad and maybe for Android. But I don’t care. Samsara Room by Rusty Lake.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week. So stick around if you’re a Premium member because we will be discussing whether you should move to Los Angeles given the pandemic. But otherwise Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** You know it.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Ben Grimes. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. I’ll say that the folder of outros is getting a little bit sparse, so I feel like there’s people who are home who could maybe make us some more outros. We’ll happily take those in. If you have an outro, send us that link at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send your longer questions like the ones we answered on the show today. But for short questions on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you find the links to things we talked about. You also find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net. That’s how you get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Craig. So this is a chance to revisit longstanding Scriptnotes advice which is our general advice has been at a super point if you want to be working as a film or television writer you need to move to Los Angeles because Los Angeles is sort of like Nashville is for country music. It’s just where stuff is sort of centered. So, New York is also possible, but really Los Angeles is where most of the stuff happens.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** But Kara wrote. She says, “I’m well poised to break into the film industry. I’ve written and produced an independent feature which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.”

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** “Written several pilots and screenplays and I’ve developed an authentic relationship with several folks in the industry. The rub is I don’t live in Los Angeles. I live in Chicago. I’m particularly interested in writing for TV and as you know the vast majority of writer’s rooms are in LA or they have been. So, I’m finally moving to LA and not on my own. I’m bringing my husband and two young kids with me. Because of this there’s been a lot of planning. My husband is a professor and he got a year-long sabbatical so we can all be together. I found a great school for my kids where they could go to school with their cousins, because my brother and his family are in Los Angeles. And we’ve worked out the finances so that for a while we can spending savings where we’re not going to want to go in debt.

“I thought I was being so smart but now with COVID it’s starting to feel like this is a dumb move. With virtual writer’s rooms and no definitive quarantine end in sight should I just stay put and save the money and the heartache and moving kids until we know more? Am I playing my hand too early? My stomach is in knots that I’m wasting our time and resources heading to LA now. You’ve both been diehard proponents of the need to be in the Los Angeles area, or at least Craig has been, so do you still stand by that, or does this feel like something that’s going to change the dynamic of where people need to be?”

**Craig:** Oh, now my stomach is in knots.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, this is a lot of responsibility. [laughs]

**John:** It’s a lot of responsibility here. What should Kara do? Kara is a filmmaker whose movie is available now. It seems like she’s very hirable.

**Craig:** Well, OK, so let’s take a look at some of the facts. And then we’ll deal with some of the premises. Here’s a fact that we know. Kara has written and produced an independent feature that is streaming on Amazon Prime and she’s done that without being in Los Angeles. So, it’s not that she is prospect-less. However, the implication that I’m getting is that she with her several pilots and her several screenplays and authentic relationships with folks in the industry it feels like if she were here that she would probably end up in some rooms or be meeting with people face to face, etc., and not kind of being her own cottage industry out there in Chicago.

So then the question is has COVID changed all that? First of all, Kara, congratulations to you not only for what you’ve done so far but also how carefully and thoughtfully you’ve planned. This is rare. It’s particularly rare among the people that ask us questions. A lot of these people are like I’m a lawyer, but I’m bored, should I just dump it all and move my wife and 12 kids? And I’m like, no, don’t.

But it sounds like you’ve really thought this through and that’s great. You know, obviously spending savings is scary, but again it feels like you guys have thought this through. Yes, there’s no question that COVID has thrown everything higgledy-piggledy. The issue with moving now is – for instance, I’m here in Los Angeles, I have no idea when my daughter is going back to school. She’s in 9th grade. 9th grade is almost over, question mark. Don’t know. Don’t when school is – the last we heard maybe school starts back up in July. So even that is entirely up in the air.

So, it may be that at the very least you might want to hit pause until we know what the hell is going on over here and you can even start having meetings.

However, I will say that I still maintain that once this is over things will go back to the way they were to some extent. Virtual rooms will not take over. There will still – almost every show you can think of will still have a room-room. And if they’re allowing people to pipe in virtually it’s because they know those people from real rooms.

So, I don’t think that in the long run there’s going to be a newly viable path for people that didn’t exist pre-COVID. I don’t think that. At least not for a long time. What do you think, John?

**John:** So, I agree with you that I think long term she’s going to be better off being in Los Angeles. I don’t think she’s going to be able to stay in Chicago and be a television writer long term. The three to five year timeline is not appropriate for this.

What I will say as I looked at people’s responses to the COVID-19 epidemic the people who impressed me most are the ones who are data-driven and who are basically saying given what we know these are the scenarios and this is how we’re going to move from this phase, to this phase, to this phase. And I think Kara needs to have that same mindset as she’s planning for this. And basically thinking like what are the benchmarks that I would need to cross in order for me to know like OK now is the time to pack up and move to Los Angeles.

And traditionally in a non-pandemic world she was probably thinking in terms of school years with her kids and stuff like that. And really basing on sort of how normal life works. But we’re not in normal times right now. And so there could be a scenario in which you’re moving in the middle of the year or the middle of the semester or whatever and that is going to have to be OK because that’s the situation we’re in.

So, I would say you independently and you with your family figure out what are the thresholds that would make you feel OK about moving to Los Angeles in terms of what things are like in Los Angeles. And you have your family here who can also give you some sense. But there’s no sense I think in moving your kids here to go to school virtually in Los Angeles schools. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. And I don’t think you would be meeting face to face with people in Los Angeles in the next three to six months realistically.

So, you could be kind of virtually moved to Los Angeles and be doing all the stuff that a writer who is trying to be hired in Los Angeles would be doing from Chicago and maybe don’t even tell people that you live in Chicago, or just make it seem like you’re in Chicago temporarily because of whatever. But I don’t think it has to be a limiting factor for you overall right now.

So, what I think Craig and I are both probably agreeing on is that at some point it will still make sense for you to move to Los Angeles. This is not that point right now. But you need to be thinking about what thresholds make sense for you to be moving here.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, in a way Kara you are as much in Los Angeles as any of us are right now. I mean, if there’s a way for you to start for instance having talks to agents and managers and lawyers that you are going to be having out here, well they would occur the same way, whether you are next door to those people or in Chicago. You’d be Zooming. So, it seems like maybe you can do that until this all gets settled. I would be concerned – I know that part of the trick here is that there’s timing. Your husband has a yearlong sabbatical. I don’t know if that’s something that can be rejiggered. I don’t know if he can hit pause on that. Because a year seems like it would be a pretty good amount of time for all of this to settle down and for you to have some clarity about what comes next.

But if he can’t, then maybe this is also an opportunity for you to figure out how maybe long term there may be a different employment prospect for him in Los Angeles. I mean, he’s a professor and there are plenty of amazing schools out here. I don’t know. All I can tell you is moving now seems – I mean, I’m feeling so stressful about it listening to you talk about it. I’m getting sweaty.

**John:** Honestly, as I do the introspection here I’m just trying to think of how do you even – even the process of going to look for an apartment would feel really stressful for me right now. Because I’m sure there are vacancies, but there’s not going to be a ton. And just going to meet with landlords to see places, it all feels like a really strange time to be doing that stuff. Because everyone is sort of frozen in place. And so it’s hard to sort of do the things would be challenging otherwise, or especially difficult right now. So that’s why I don’t think this week or next week or next month are probably going to be the right times to try to do this move. Even though the summer would seem like a natural time to do it, I don’t see that happening.

Craig, I’m also thinking about stepping aside from Kara for the moment, our general advice to people who’ve – you know, young people who just graduated from college who would classically be moving to Los Angeles, I’m usually the guy like, yep, yep, come on. You know, it’s going to be a tough time but come on and do it. I’m a little less enthusiastic about people trying to move here this summer to get started simply because the unemployment among these entry level jobs is going to be so high for such a long time that it’s going to be especially hard for new people to get their foot in the door here.

**Craig:** Look, we’re currently at depression levels of unemployment. Now, obviously that’s artificial. It’s not because everything went out of business and no one has anywhere to work. It’s because the businesses have temporarily closed their doors. But that still means it’s hard to just support yourself while you’re trying to do this other thing. I mean, I’ve always said make Plan B your Plan A. And then you won’t be writing scared. You’ll have money in the bank. You’ll be able to pay your rent. Harder to do that now. Harder to do.

It is a difficult thing to make a decision like I’m going to pick up and move, especially when you have a family. So, to finally breakthrough all of the fear and worry to get to yes is so momentous and so difficult and exhausting that when you finally do it and say yes it’s nearly impossible to un-yes it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I can see how that would be very distressing to have to un-yes the yes on this. But that may be what’s required. And if there’s any way to take some comfort in it it’s that this is a once in a lifetime event. God, I hope it’s a once in a lifetime event. And honestly the world is rarely thrown upside down this quickly and this dramatically. But it is a big deal. So, I think you have a ready-made excuse here to maybe take the easier path. I don’t know how old your kids are. Sounds like they might be on the younger side.

**John:** Yeah, she says two young kids.

**Craig:** Two young kids. I mean, their world is stressful, too. And in the best of circumstances moving is stressful. Leaving your friends and going somewhere new. It’s an entirely different climate. A different state. It’s all stressful. And then you do it on top of all this stuff, it just seems like maybe you can let yourself off the yes hook on this if that’s the hook that you feel like you’re on.

**John:** If Kara’s husband does still need to take the sabbatical this next year, an opportunity I could see is that if he takes the greater part of the daytime parenting responsibilities and Kara has the opportunity to just write her ass off that could be a very useful way to spend this year is for her to really focus on getting that writing done, taking all those virtual meetings she possibly can so that she’s in a really good place to kick ass in Hollywood when she gets here.

I do want to segue back though to the idea of like the general like college grad who would normally be moving to Los Angeles about this time of year. If I were in your shoes I would probably look for what is the unique situation happening in 2020 right now that I am well qualified to engage in that’s not Hollywood. So, this feels like a great time to get virtually involved in any of the relief efforts, in any of the political campaign stuff. There’s going to be people who can really use smart twenty-somethings who can work for no money. And just get some experience doing that. Because I feel like moving to LA right now is not going to be a great experience.

**Craig:** Yeah. I got to go with that.

**John:** Yeah. All right. Sort of bummer news for a bonus topic, but I mean also hopefully helpful. So I think we’re happy and proud of Kara and she is right in that we would normally be saying pack up the car, Kara. Come on out here because this is your moment. It’s just not quite the same with this situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it’s wait. It’s not don’t. It’s just not yet.

**John:** Yeah. Make your plan, make your thresholds, and come when you cross those thresholds.

**Craig:** How about life, huh? You know, you plan, you plan, you plan.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** What can you do? [sighs] Heavy Jewish sigh. That’s my new thing. Instead of actually doing it, I just say it. Heavy Jewish sigh goes here.

**John:** End of episode. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] This entire episode can be called Heavy Jewish Sigh.

Links:

• Getting Things Done in a Pandemic
• Fetch the Boltcutters
• End of the Century
• Queer Qrosswords, email the team at queerqrosswords@gmail.com
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has some strong language. It also has some mild spoilers for Mr. Robot so head’s up before you listen.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 449 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is off on a secret mission but luckily I have another New Jersey born writer to fill his shoes. Sam Esmail is the creator of Mr. Robot and executive producer of many shows, including Homecoming and the upcoming Angelyne.

Sam Esmail: Hi. I didn’t know Craig was from Jersey.

John: He’s from New Jersey as well. I forget which city he’s from, but he’s New Jersey born, went to Princeton. All of that.

Sam: OK. Cool.

John: Thank you for hopping on the show with me. This is a Friday afternoon we’re recording this and you had just gotten off another call. How’s it going for you?

Sam: You know, it’s weird. I get asked this question a lot, but I think you would understand this. As a writer, I mean, I was in the middle of working on my script before this whole thing went down. And guess what I do every day? I lock myself in this room that I’m in right now in my little office in the house and I spent all day in here and walked around and took little breaks, little walks, and came back in here. So, my life personally hasn’t been as impacted as others. But obviously, you know, what’s going on is pretty disturbing and the sort of deluge of upsetting news every day is obviously taking its toll and my concern is for everyone out there.

But, yeah, like being a writer weirdly we’re kind of built for this kind of moment.

John: Yeah. It’s been really strange. I’ve felt guilty at times that my life has not been more impacted and that like – obviously there are things that are profoundly different but a lot of things are sort of exactly the same.

Sam: Yeah.

John: The last time we spoke was in front of a big crowd at the WGA Theater, so most of this episode is actually going to be the interview we recorded at the WGA Theater as part of the Writers Guild Foundation. And that was pre-pandemic, so that was February 25. And it’s only, you know, six weeks ago but it feels just a lifetime ago. To be in a crowded space. To shaking hands.

Sam: I know. And afterwards the fans coming up and being able to talk to them. I mean, that would be a surreal scene right now. It’s so crazy that that was only six weeks ago. It does feel like decades ago. It’s crazy.

John: I’ve been thinking about you a fair amount during this time because I want to imagine what Elliot is thinking about this type of situation. If you were still making Mr. Robot this is an opportunity – it’s the kind of chaos that you feel like he might be seeking. But also technology has impacted this is in such a huge way right now. So you and I are talking on Skype because you’re not a fan of Zoom.

Sam: Yes. By the way, John, you still use Zoom. I don’t understand it. All your listeners should know do not use Zoom. It is not secure. Even if you make the settings private it’s still not secure. There are plenty of other more secure platforms out there to do your video conferencing.

John: I’ve been using a variety of them. It’s been interesting how Zoom has become the default despite–

Sam: Weird, yeah.

John: Despite many concerns. But also privacy in the sense of we’re about to start contract tracing.

Sam: Yeah. Apple and Google are doing that. Yep. We’re there phoning you and GPS coordinates.

John: Headed for interesting times. So there’s definitely another season that you could write out of this if you wanted to. But, you were in the middle of shooting something else right now, too. So I want to talk about production also.

Sam: Yeah. So we were in the middle of – my wife is starring in this show called Angelyne, which is about the true story of this person Angelyne, sort of an LA icon. I think anybody in LA would know who she is. She sort of like invented social media before the Internet. She’s basically the first person famous for being famous, for being on billboards.

John: She was sort of like an Instagram star before there was Instagram.

Sam: Exactly.

John: I mean, instead of on your phone she had these giant billboards.

Sam: She had these giant billboards and she was able to convince people to get those billboards for basically no money. And she was essentially advertising herself as a personality. But that was it. That was it. It was those billboards. That was what she was promoting.

And so weirdly, you know, obviously that’s interesting in and of itself, but this article came out in the Hollywood Reporter and when you actually hear her life’s journey it’s so fascinating and has so many layers and goes into so many interesting places. It was adapted into a television limited series for Peacock, directed by the great Lucy Tcherniak. We were I think about two months into production. We have about two months left, or thereabout. And I remember the day I went to set and it was raining and it was during lunch and we just shut down in the middle of the day. Just because it was like that Thursday before things just started going down and you could just see the domino effect.

I had closed our production company’s offices the day before. And then just in the middle of that day as the news just started to break that this thing was spreading we called Universal and they completely supported us and we just shut down for the day. And we’re sort of in this weird limbo right now, right, because productions have this consistency, you know, day to day. Emmy was in a grove. I mean, her performance is so nuanced and so specific and she trained so hard for it in the months leading up to production. To then all of it kind of coming to a grinding halt is crazy. Just crazy.

But the stuff we have is great. We released a trailer a week ago. And we’re excited to hopefully – when it’s safe – to get back into it.

John: Now, here’s a question for you. A lot of limited series and shows that know that they are only doing ten episodes, they will block shoot. That is where you’ve written all the scripts and then you plan it so you’re shooting part of episode and part of episode three and part of episode five, which can save you a tremendous amount of money in terms of locations and actor availabilities. There’s lots of really good reasons to do that.

But I can also imagine that it’s a real challenge in something like this. If you were block shooting this you may not have any finished episodes.

Sam: No. That’s exactly where we’re at. We believe that now – so Lucy is directing all the episodes. And we did have all the scripts written ahead of time, so we were block shooting. And, yeah, now we’re kind of – we have footage, we have scenes, but no completed episodes. Really nothing to put together except for a really awesome trailer which I urge everyone to check out.

Yeah, it’s strange. I mean, there are probably some plusses, right? You can kind of look and see where you want to add or subtract. But ultimately, yeah, it’s just a really awkward place to be in right now. But, you know, look, it’s low on the priority list of things we’re concerned about because of everything else that’s going on.

John: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Finishing a limited series is not the highest.

Sam: Exactly.

John: So let’s time travel back to February, back when we can remember when we could just happily talk about your great show Mr. Robot. We talked a little bit about Homecoming as well which I have now finished and really loved.

Sam: Oh thank you.

John: At some point off-camera I’ll ask questions about Homecoming because I really just thought it was remarkable. If you have not seen Homecoming and you’re looking for a show to watch during this quarantine time I highly recommend Homecoming.

Sam: By the way, the second season of that is coming. Just to peddle that really quickly. And that’s coming in about a month, May 22. And the trailer is dropping pretty soon starring Janelle Monáe. I did not direct it. The great Kyle Patrick Alvarez did. And he did a fantastic job. It does not disappoint.

John: I’m very excited to see that. So we will travel back in time and listen to what life was like in February and then we’ll come back at the end and do our One Cool Things.

[February Interview begins]

Thank you so much. It is a pleasure to be here. Craig Mazin is usually next to me, but we’ll just pretend Craig is here with little bits of umbrage.

Sam: Wow. Those are big shoes to fill. Craig.

John: They are. Sam, it’s a pleasure to actually finally meet you.

Sam: Oh yeah. Likewise.

John: I was saying in the green room I’d seen you at cocktail parties and wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your show, but it was always a cocktail party for some For Your Consideration something and I never got to.

Sam: Well that’s a shame because, I mean, by the way, do you ever invite people onto the pod?

John: Yes. We do. You’re in town you’re saying.

Sam: I’m inviting myself is what I’m saying.

John: Fantastic. We would love. We will follow up this conversation with a future conversation.

Sam: OK, cool. Wait, by the way, is this – do we know?

John: This will ultimately be on the podcast at some point.

Sam: Cool. All right.

John: We might save it for some moment where like Craig is in rehab or something.

Sam: Got it. Shouldn’t be too long. OK.

John: Sam, I just want a little survey of the audience here, because I have a hunch that we have a lot of writers and directors. Who here is a writer? All right. Who here is a writer-director? All right. So you can speak very well to these things. So unlike most things you go to where they are asking general questions about Mr. Robot or like inspirations, I really want to get very specific and granular and try to get some advice that’s useful for these people in this room here tonight.

So, I thought we might start with how you got started as a writer and a filmmaker? You grew up in New Jersey?

Sam: I grew up in New Jersey. Yes. Oh wow. Hoboken. Any – oh wow, OK. Hoboken-a-joking. I grew up in New Jersey. I never wanted to be a writer. I was kind of scared to write. I knew I wanted to make movies and that’s as far as I took it. And then eventually I knew I wanted to direct. And I went to NYU Film School. Wow, OK. We’re doing well tonight.

John: And so you went into NYU Film School as an undergraduate with the intention of learning how to direct?

Sam: Yes.

John: Great.

Sam: And then I left NYU and this is when I had the spark of trying to write because I would read the scripts of my fellow students and it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do. And I had a very specific thing that I wanted to do. So I figured I’d go to school to learn how to write. So I went to Dartmouth. Oh, nobody from – OK.

John: Silence. Crickets. We’ll put crickets in post.

Sam: Well I was only there for two semesters.

John: OK. So you’re at NYU for film school and you finish film school.

Sam: Correct.

John: And then you went to Dartmouth for a writing program to learn–?

Sam: Correct.

John: And it wasn’t screenwriting, it was just writing-writing, right?

Sam: It was writing-writing. And it was not for me. It was like haikus and essays on Bob Dylan. I lasted two semesters. And also there was snow. Lots of snow. All the time. And they have a trimester. It was so confusing. So I left after two semesters and decided I needed to go back into film school. Spend more student loan money and go deeper into debt.

And came out here. I went to AFI.

John: Some applause there.

Sam: And I went into the directing program. Because, again, I just thought – I got scared of writing. I got to be honest with you. Writing is so intimidating to me. You’re staring at a blank page. It all has to kind of come out of your head. To me having now directed and written, it’s still the hardest thing to do. It’s pure creation, you know?

And directing I’m not saying that’s a walk in the park, but directing you’re translating something. You’re taking this document. Actually Tarantino, the way he describes it is that he adapts the script into a visual medium. And I think that’s pretty accurate. You’re working off of something. Whereas with writing to me it’s you and a – I don’t know. Back in the day it was like a Word document with the terrible formatting and tabs. It was miserable. I didn’t want to do it.

So I went to AFI and I was in the directing program. Graduated. Was very broke. Started editing porn to pay rent, as one would do in Sherman Oaks. And I wanted to direct, but again I had that problem where I was getting scripts that were not exactly my cup of tea. But I would even say, you know what, fuck it. That’s OK, right? OK, cool. I was like, fuck it, let me just direct whatever. I would try and just make myself – force myself to like a script. I can do something here. I can maybe rewrite the scene.

But then the next problem was you’ve got to find the money to make the movie. And it was just so expensive. And, again, I was really broke. The porn money wasn’t that great. And honestly the cheapest art form in terms of making it was writing. So, it was literally my only pathway. There was just no other avenue to break into the industry.

So I wrote a feature. My first feature, it was called Sequels, Remakes, & Adaptations. It got on the Black List. This is 2008. This is like a year or two after the Black List. There was like, you know, it was pretty fairly new at the time.

John: Absolutely. So I want to talk about the Black List.

Sam: Yes.

John: But I want to make sure we finish up the conversation about film school because you spent a lot of time and a lot of money in film school both at NYU, and then the Dartmouth program, but really at AFI. Was it worth it? Were your film school studies worth it in terms of helping you get your career where it is? Do you look back at that time and say, oh, that’s where I learned how to do X, Y, or Z?

Sam: Are there any faculty members here? Film school is expensive. It’s very expensive. In fact, I think the tuition at AFI is almost double what I paid at the time, and it was a lot back then. And honestly it wasn’t until after the first season of Mr. Robot I was able to pay it all back. There’s a point where I was like, man, I’m either going to hit it big or die in debt. I didn’t really see a middle option there.

I don’t know. The answer is I don’t know. I think it’s obviously going to a day job, which I ended up doing, I mean, after the porn, which was a day job, thankfully. I then went on and was assistant editing reality shows which is basically porn without the sex. And I would write at night. And that was hard. I mean, I wrote Sequels at night till 2am and got up in the morning and went to work. And that sucked. And film school allowed me not to do that. I could do it during the day.

John: So film school was a chance to avoid that really hard work that you knew – you kind of sensed at some point that you needed to do it. That’s why you went to Dartmouth.

Sam: Right.

John: Because you recognized you needed to do it. And then you still went on to AFI and tried to say like, no, I can just direct and not have to do the writing.

Sam: Yeah. And that’s a hard thing to do. I mean, honestly, when I look at – a lot of the directors that I love it’s few and far between that they’re not writer-directors weirdly. I mean, Fincher is probably one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers who only directs. But if you are specific about what you want to say and how you see the film, I think it’s so ingrained in the writing, you know?

And it’s also – like I’m not necessarily – I didn’t want to be a director so I could adapt Peter Pan for the 20th time or anything like that. I really wanted to kind of come at it with some original storytelling or original twist on whatever. And a lot of that comes from the writing. It just became apparent after – especially after AFI – that writing was a necessary path for at least the way I want to make films.

John: Because you wanted to be able to tell an original story which is why you wrote a script called Sequels, Remakes, & Adaptations.

Sam: Exactly. Which, by the way, is all about the frustrations of trying to tell an original story in Hollywood. And by the way that was 12 years ago? I mean, I think it’s come down and gotten worse now. I mean, it’s almost to the point where I don’t even feel like – it’s like a dirty word to pitch an original film in the studio system right now. I mean, they need something. I don’t care if it’s an article or a blurb in the obits somewhere. They need some – IP is like the favorite word in town. And when you say it’s original it’s a little, you know, it’s scary. It’s scary to them. Scary times for original.

John: And I do want to talk about sort of the evolution of the industry and how streamers changed some of these equations. But let’s get back to, you write a script, it gets on the Black List. That wasn’t a magic leap. So what happened? You finish the script. What happens with the script?

Sam: So this is the good thing about AFI. Because I made friends, at least some of the people there liked me to call me a friend. And one of my friends, Vince D’Amato, was an assistant I believe at an agency. And I just sent it to him so he could read it and give me notes. And just sent it to his boss. He liked it and sent it to his boss. And I got signed by William Morris. It was honestly that fast. And then he sent it around. It never sold, but people around town liked it. And I remember initially that was a weird phenomenon, right?

John: And I had the same situation with Go. Like Go got passed around town.

Sam: Well that sold.

John: It ultimately sold. It got sold to a tiny company. But it got passed around. I was in a bunch of meetings with people saying like, “We really loved your script.” And I’m like, oh, do you want to buy it? “No, no, no. We would never make this movie.”

Sam: So weird. Yeah.

John: But you end up having the water bottle tour of Los Angeles.

Sam: Water bottle, yes. They want to sit down and talk to you just about where you’re from and who you are.

John: So how do you capitalize on those meetings? How did you capitalize on those meetings? So this was your first time really going in and talking to people who could employ you. So what did you do in those meetings as you were talking with those folks?

Sam: Didn’t really do much. I just – I was very confused initially. But I ended up, like honestly one of my first generals was at the time Paramount – Paramount Vantage. They don’t exist anymore, do they?

John: Paramount Pictures?

Sam: Vantage.

John: Oh, Vantage.

Sam: Remember, they were so cool at the time. They had done There Will Be Blood and I think No Country or something. And in that meeting is now my, I mean, we didn’t talk for years but now he’s my producing partner, Chad Hamilton. He was my manager at Anonymous and he became my producing partner. The second meeting I had was at DreamWorks. Jonathan Eirich who is now one of my good friends.

So I ended up making friends and socializing at these meetings. But I don’t know if I was any good at selling myself as a writer because the one thing I said in these meetings which was death was “I also want to direct this script.” Oof, that was like the fast ticket out of the office, you know. Nobody wanted to hear that. They either wanted to hear you’re going to write and then what’s your next, at the time I think The Hangover was like the big – and because Sequels was a little bit of a comedy, a little bit of a weird comedy, they wanted me to write Hangover, or come up with the next Hangover. That was kind of a recurring theme on that first water bottle tour.

John: So I think an important thing to take out of this is that you start getting these meetings but those meetings don’t pay you money.

Sam: No.

John: You’re not able to pay your rent off of general meetings.

Sam: No.

John: So what do you do? What were the next things you were writing?

Sam: I was still doing this day, you know, the reality shows, you know, porno without sex. And I was trying to do these meetings on my lunch hour. And here’s the thing. I kind of saw that Sequels was not going to sell. Everybody was doing the thing where “It’s really great, it’s really awesome. We’re not going to buy it. No, that’s not going to happen.” And also the other thing is I knew I wanted to direct it which was definitely not going to happen.

So, what I did was I just started writing something else. Because that’s the one thing, I mean, if we’re going to start going down the advice lane here. The one piece of advice is the minute you finish your great script, start writing a new one. It’s just keep going. That is the fastest way to get to where you want. I think I did that almost every time I finished a script. I literally would put it away and just at least wrote the shittiest first page of the next screenplay that I would write.

In this case it wasn’t that shitty. It was another script called [Norm the Movie] which then ended up on the Black List a year later. Also did not sell. But I took a lot, you know, took more meetings with different people. Very nice.

John: At very point did you consider yourself, OK, I am a screenwriter in the sense that I am getting it – both in the sense of like I’m OK designating myself as a writer and I’m a screenwriter in the sense that I get meetings as a screenwriter. People are considering hiring me as a screenwriter.

Sam: It’s weird though, because I had a day job. And I think that was – I would say that I wasn’t a writer because I was an assistant editor. And that’s what I did for most of my day. And the writing came at 2am because it was the only time I could afford to dedicate to that. Or weekends. And I really wanted it to be my fulltime job. So I did the plunge. After Norm didn’t sell I saved up some money and just quit. I said let me just give myself a year and just go for it.

And I pitched a movie to my friend at DreamWorks and got hired. Actually, I should say before that I did pitch a movie to at the time Mandate based on a graphic novel that they had by the great Lindsay Doran. I don’t know if you guys know who Lindsay Doran is.

John: A lot of people in this room knew. She’s a frequent Scriptnotes guest.

Sam: I mean, she was the first producer I worked on on a paid job. The money wasn’t – it was my first job, but the value I got from having her as a mentor and a producer. And you should listen to her, I think she’s had Ted Talks, or videos online. She knows more about story than anyone else. And she’s really smart and she gives really insightful notes. And she’s a fan.

That’s the other thing. And you’ll notice this. When you start working with people who are just doing the perfunctory job of giving you notes you can tell and it’s a drag. Because they’re just making shit up just to get you to do some busy work. She just cuts right through that and knows exactly how to shape everything. Anyway, I could go on about Lindsay. But anyway, watch Lindsay Doran videos.

And then I got the job at DreamWorks. I pitched an idea. They liked it. You know, a little bit more money than the Mandate job. And so that’s when I took the plunge and said, all right, I’ll quit. I’ll do this. And hope that that would last a year.

John: And so you quit your job. You’re hoping it’s going to last a year. And what point do things start to look like they are sustainable. That you can actually keep doing this. So you can actually get something made. What is the first thing that looks like, OK, this isn’t just a writing job that might lead to something. It actually is a thing I can see, I may have a career here?

Sam: It was – and this is no fault of DreamWorks because I everybody there I love. Again, Jonathan is one of my dear friends. And Holly who I still think is at DreamWorks, she was amazing. I just remembered after that experience then my heart tugged the other way. And I said wait a minute, I’m in this thing to write things for me to direct. And there was just something about the process of begging and scraping and fighting to get these jobs to write a script to hand off to somebody else.

You know, the philosophy about screenplays is that the screenplay is the thing and then the movie is a different thing. And then the other philosophy which is the screenplay is the blueprint for the movie. And because I started off wanting to be a director I’ve always looked at it that way. I don’t know if I necessarily believe that now, because there are screenplays that you can read and that are beautiful to read on their own. And then the movie is like a whole other thing. And then there are screenplays you can just tell it is just to make the movie. And I think I’m just more of the latter. And so how can I make a living knowing I’m only doing 50% of what I want to do with this idea, or this story that I want to tell?

And so after the DreamWorks job I decided to just, again, as soon as I finished I started writing Comet. I wanted to write a contained indie film that I could direct. And I was like the next thing I write is the thing I’m going to direct.

John: So this is a script that you’re setting out from the very beginning thinking like these are the limitations I have. I don’t have very much money. I need to be like one location, really tight, small, that I can – with people I know and the skills I have I can make this movie?

Sam: Correct. And I wrote it. At the time I was – they really wanted me to be a certain kind of writer who came up with ideas like The Hangover.

John: Your team meaning your representatives?

Sam: Yes. My agents and managers. They wanted me to write high concept comedies. And I just – they’re great and I’m a huge fan, but that wasn’t who I was. So I decided to leave them and I was essentially – I didn’t have any representatives. And that’s when I circled back with Chad. So now this is like five years later since I met him in one meeting, my first general meeting, my first meeting ever in the industry, and now he’s a manager at Anonymous. And he has always been a fan and wanted to sign me. I said well here’s Comet and I was very clear. I was like this the script that I want to make next. I’m not going up for pitches. I’m not doing any other jobs. I want to direct this movie. Will you help me do this?

This is it. And he read the script, liked the script, said let’s do it. And so we went on this long, arduous journey of trying to get the money, which we did. And got a great cast and I finally went out and directed my first film.

John: Now, all the time that you spent in film school at NYU and at AFI, then it was actually useful. Because you had production experience. So it wasn’t like you were the first time on a set. You had actually shot stuff before. So it wasn’t brand new to you to be making a film.

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, when you’re doing a student film it’s not the, you know.

John: It’s not the highest [crosstalk].

Sam: Yeah. I think I was like booming one of the films I was directing. Yeah, it’s different. It’s different. And the pressure is so different, right? Because I think with student films – and you want to retain that as much as possible, because with student films you’re experimenting a lot. I remember at AFI, I mean, I fucking did the weirdest shots, like the actors would be here, I’d be over there in the corner shooting a closet or something and thought I was artsy.

You can’t do that. You can’t play. And it’s sad because I think you need some of that. And thankfully I was able because I had such a great cast and crew on Comet and people really believed in it. We were able to play a lot but the one thing I knew – like I think it was the second or third day I was like I got this. This is what I enjoy. Like all the pain of writing scripts and handing them off, or writing treatments, and writing pitches, and going to pitches. Like all of that sort of paid off when I got onto the set.

John: What is it that you like? Do you like that you have a team of people around you? Do you like the decision-making? Do you like that it’s this or that and not the 50,000 choices that you have with words on the page? What are the things about directing that you prefer to writing?

Sam: It’s not necessarily a preference. It’s that idea I had when I was sitting in the office and I was like, oh, this might be cool, and then I’m there on set and Emmy Rossum is saying it to Justin and I’m like, oh, that’s fucking cool. You know?

John: So it’s going from this thing you have in your head to having to express into words which are sort of an imperfect way of expressing idea to when you see it on the monitor, when you see it in front of you, it’s real.

Sam: Right. You know how when you write, you know parenthetical? Right? You know, I try not to get too parenthetical happy. I don’t know how many actors love the parenthetical. I’ve seen some actors just–

John: Cross them all out. Yeah.

Sam: Cross them all out. But to me I love the parenthetical. I wonder if Rami crosses them out? No. I think Rami, no, he doesn’t cross them out.

John: Ask your wife.

Sam: I’ll ask Emmy. Yeah, that’s a good point. But I love the parenthetical because I don’t know about you but when I write I am picturing it. And I change the parenthetical. I’ll be like, OK, she’s said when she says this line. And then I walk away and just changing that to, no, she is happy when she says this fucked up line and it totally changes the scene. It makes you rewrite the rest of the scene. Those are powerful things. And then when you are on set and you get to see like a real actor who has got real chops do that, the intention that you had, that very small detailed intention that you have, that to me is worth everything.

John: So there are many writer-directors who when I interview them they feel like the process of production is just the hell they have to go through in order to have–

Sam: It is. No, production is miserable. Go ahead.

John: It’s both delightful and miserable.

Sam: No, no, it’s pretty all miserable. But, but, it is, it is. Look, all of your dreams for the most part fall apart and you have to fix everything in post. The moments that I am talking about are few and far between and they make everything – yeah. That’s what I mean. Let me be clear. It is not Disneyland every day on set.

John: All right. So you’re shooting Comet. You’re deciding, oh you know what? I actually do love directing. This is what I want to do.

Sam: Yes.

John: You finish the film. What happens with the film and how do we connect the dots between that and Mr. Robot? What is the trajectory between those two projects?

Sam: Well, so before I started shooting Comet, the minute I finished Comet I started writing Mr. Robot. And it was going to be my follow up magnum opus to Comet as a feature film. And I had to stop writing Mr. Robot because I was going in prep in Comet and I was also, I mean, I’ve said this in countless interviews and I’ll say it again, but I was 90 pages into the script and I wasn’t even close to finishing act one.

John: Yeah.

Sam: And that’s a problem, John.

John: Yeah, you’ve built a big world there. So I’m guessing you didn’t outline carefully?

Sam: I never outline. I should listen to your podcast more.

John: Craig can talk about outlining. Craig is a big outliner. So, I was looking through your script preparing for this, for the pilot, and so on your dedication page you have two quotes, and one of the quotes I really love and it’s from an Internet meme apparently circa 2011. “Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world,” which is a great quote.

Sam: Yes.

John: Is that a real quote or did you make that up just for the script?

Sam: I have no idea.

John: Yeah.

Sam: But it’s cool.

John: It’s cool. And it definitely informs the idea and the tone of Mr. Robot. So, let’s talk about intent. So, as you start to write this feature film, Mr. Robot, what are the influences but also what is it that you’re hoping to be able to say that – what is the movie you wish you could see as you start writing it?

Sam: Wow. OK. How do I start? Well, there were three things. I had the idea of doing a movie about Hackers when Hackers – remember the movie Hackers? Yeah. And I was like why does it have – I mean, I watched Hackers religiously, but I did not necessarily know if I liked it. But I was like why do we have to – there was a good way to make a movie about hackers and so that was like the first seed. And this is like ‘90s, right? I don’t remember. ’96 or ’97.

So anyway I kind of let that go. You know, I’d do a bunch of things. I did porn, reality shows. And then 2008 happened, right? And the financial crisis. And I am enraged. And I think back – this is by the way just as we’re doing the advice checklist, those ideas that hang around, those are the ones. I really think – I believe this – I think David Lynch said this when he came to AFI when he screened Mullholland Drive which was like this mind-blowing experience. And he believes that ideas that are like – I’m going to butcher what he said. But they’re in the ether somewhere and you sort of catch it.

Well I kind of believe that. But I believe it in this way which is I think your mind tells you what you want to write. Because this idea kept coming to me. When the financial crisis happened it told me. I mean, I was angry about it, but it told me the hacker that’s in your movie is mad about this. He is furious about this.

And then, again, I was broke and student debt, blah, blah, blah. And then the Arab Spring happened. And I’m Egyptian. And I saw it with my father and my mother. We literally watched it on the news. And I saw how technology could bring this confounding – having been to Egypt never thought anything like this could happen where people rose up and actually fought for their freedom. And so it was a way of using technology to harness that power and bring people together. And that was the kind of – that’s when I knew. And I always start with characters. That’s when I understood Elliot.

So, all of those ingredients led up to that first day of writing Mr. Robot. And so when I start with the character, I start with Elliot, right. I’m like, OK, who is he, what’s his story, what does he want? So he wants to, OK, so he wants to cause a revolution. What does that mean and what does that look like? What does he specifically want? And I start getting into it.

And I really do a lot of thinking. A lot of thinking. And I don’t write any of it down. I should write that down. That’s bad advice. Write stuff down. I try and use Evernote now. You have a notebook. Do you use that?

John: I do use that.

Sam: You’re analog.

John: Yeah.

Sam: OK. God, I would lose that all the time.

John: I have a software company but I do sort of also write stuff down, especially the ideas that you get at 11 o’clock at night. Do I get out of bed or do I not get out of bed to write it down? I will write it down in the notebook.

But I want to get back to – so your idea is floating. This idea of I want to do something about hackers is sort of floating out there. And then you see Arab Spring and that’s a thing. And then you see the financial crisis. A lot of times as we talk – in my experience but also as I talk to other filmmakers, it’s like there’s ideas sort of competing for attention in your head. They’re sort of going, hey, pay attention to be again. And eventually like they can gang up together. What if we all got together? We could be a super group. And we could make him write about us.

And so it sounds like these are all things that sort of just demanded your attention. They came together to form one super group.

Sam: I mean, it did. And honestly now having done that I realize I think that was my frustration – and I don’t know how you do it, because like then there are these amazing writers that can find a way just to do it more on demand, like you do. Like a lot of great writers do. And that was my struggle trying to just be a writer in the business. I just didn’t know if I could, all right, do this comedy about X, Y, and Z and they’re going to, and now go.

There was a part of me that needs it to come to me in the way that it did.

John: So as things were coming to you, you said you had Elliot. But did you have Elliot as our voiceover, as our narrator, that we’re inside his head?

Sam: Yes.

John: And that he knew that we could see what he was doing and hear his thought?

Sam: No. Then the DID of it came after that. And that was a tricky thing. When I thought of that, when I was like well I want to explore the idea and I want to explore mental illness, I was worried. A lot of that stuff can get gimmicky, right? A lot of people, you know, they use mental illness as a gimmicky storytelling device. And I was really scared to death of that.

I think that’s part of the reason why I got super long-winded, because I just want – I was like really wanted it to feel like this authentic person who is really struggling with something very serious and very internal. So, I did all this research on DID. You know, I also suffered from OCD and social anxiety disorder. I also did a lot of morphine. And those disorders a lot of what I was personally going through. And there were times where I would spend my therapy sessions not talking about me at all, talking about Elliot. Mind you, I was broke. So I really shouldn’t have been doing that. I probably should have taken it myself.

But anyway, I look at Elliot. I mean, Elliot started to be a real person to me. You know what I mean? And to me that was important. Unlike you, maybe not unlike you. I don’t know how you do it. But before I write I figure out everything. I need to know the ending. Do you need to know the ending?

John: I don’t always need to know the ending. I need to know a general destination I’m headed for. But I don’t need to know specific stuff about the ending necessarily.

Sam: Wow.

John: But when you say the ending, so you knew the ending of the feature that you were trying to write?

Sam: Which is the ending of the show.

John: OK. Oh, the ending of four seasons of the show?

Sam: Yeah. That’s how long–

John: I think that really wasn’t maybe a feature you were writing. I think it was longer than that. So, you ultimately were able to get there.

Sam: But think about that as a feature. I still think it could have been a cool feature if I just shut up a little bit.

John: The Matrix is an amazing movie, but it could have also have been a series as well. All the journey that Neo goes through and everything he discovers, we can totally imagine that as a series as well.

Sam: That’s true. And I think there are stories that probably can go both ways. But I have to say like I ended up because I was paranoid about the gimmicky mental illness shtick, like to me this was the only way I was going to be able to tell Mr. Robot. And it just so happened – so after I finished Comet I came back to this 90-page not even first act and was scratching my head, not knowing what to do, and Steve Golin, rest in peace, he at the time was making this little show called True Detective. He was all about TV.

And the guy was like a genius. This was before TV like – yes, I think Breaking Bad had just finished and Mad Men was on the air. But I mean what that first season taught me in True Detective was that TV was traditionally just supposed to be a writer’s medium, but that was to me an amazing marriage of writing and filmmaking.

John: Yeah. It’s incredibly cinematic. It has really big movie kind of things. And it trusts that the viewer is going to be comfortable being confused for quite a long time.

Sam: Yes.

John: Which is very helpful for your show.

Sam: Yes. Yes.

John: I want to talk about mystery versus confusion. Because mystery gets us sort of coming back for me and at a certain point people will say like I’m just so confused I can’t even follow what’s going on here.

Sam: I’m familiar.

John: So, tell me about as you’re now looking at this thing you’ve written as being a pilot and therefore we have to plan out what the season looks like, what were the decisions about how to lay out the mystery of stuff and how – who is that woman that Elliot’s talking with? Oh, wait, that’s his sister. How do you make those decisions as you’re laying stuff out?

In the second season where the point of view you realize late in the season was not at all what you thought. How are you balancing those decisions? How early are you deciding what you’re going to put in what episode?

Sam: I’m never like, OK, so what’s the big mystery this season and work backwards from there. I always tried to stay with Elliot. And in terms of like surprising the audience, I like that. I think it’s great when you get to a moment, any moment, any scene, and you’re surprised and something unexpected happens. That’s what you should be going for all the time, whether you’re doing a twisty mystery movie or just a comedy. You want people to continually be surprised. The problem is you don’t want to build stuff around the surprise.

And I think that’s the trap that – you know, especially with a movie where there are going to be these big twists, if you start making it an exercise as opposed to an emotional journey with the character it’s going to end up feeling like that. An exercise. And that was another thing – I remembered just doing Comet and then going into Mr. Robot, I remember when Mr. Robot came out. Yeah, it’ll be a little small show. Maybe just a few of my nerdy homies will watch it and that will be that.

And I was shocked that more people watched it. But I think it’s attributed to the fact that I really cared about it. I mean, I really cared about this guy and I really cared about his story. And that to me – that always trumped the mysteries or the reveals. And honestly when people, because people did figure it out. I went to Reddit and people figured out the twists ahead of time. I wasn’t that bothered by that. That wasn’t my point.

John: Because you weren’t making it for the twists. You were making it for the character moments along the way. And Elliot’s relationship with the other characters in the show is emotionally meaningful in the moments. It’s not all about the big reveals later on.

Sam: Yeah. I honestly thought at the end of episode two when he meets Darlene I was like, oh, well people will figure it out. That’s his sister. And weirdly everyone was just so fixated on the robot, from the first episode. They were like, oh. And I remember the network was like, “You know, I think people figured it out.” And I was like, cool. OK. Sure.

John: So, I want to talk about, Mr. Robot was made for USA. It was released a week at a time and big gaps between seasons. So you have the advantage of building up expectation over the course of the week. That people see an episode and they see it in real time and there’s time to discuss. There’s watercooler moments that can happen. And it can build over the course of the season.

How different would Mr. Robot have been if that entire first season had dropped in one moment? In like a Netflix model where it all comes out at once? How would it have played differently do you think?

Sam: I just think you wouldn’t have the community. I remember when I used to – I was obsessed with Lost. And to me the joy of Lost was I went over to my friend’s house and we all watched it. And not even at the end of the episode, in the commercial breaks we would be fucking yelling at each other theories. And like you’re fucking wrong. Oh my god. Wait, wait, wait, wait, we’re going to come back.

John: The smoke monster is actually the…yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam: Oh yeah. The whole thing, we’d go online. We had the laptop up with the message boards. Because I don’t think, Twitter didn’t really exist in the early years. It was message boards. And I loved that. That was a communal experience. Actually that’s akin to going to the movies and then having that conversation afterwards. That’s part of the experience for me. And so when you do the binge model, which we did on Homecoming – you know what’s good about that, but this is strictly just a selfish thing, is you get it all over with, right? I mean, like if you’re airing every week the critics are shitting on you one week, and then the next week they’re not. And then they’re like, well fuck, what’s the point of this. And I’m like just wait. Next. Just give me a week guys. Jesus fucking Christ.

John: As if you’re making the next episode. Oh no, we’ll change it based on this.

Sam: Oh, this is pointless. They’re setting this up and it’s not going to go anywhere? Really? What are you going to say next week when we pay that off and then they’re on to some other? So that was like, you know, and whatever. So that’s a selfish dumb thing. Who cares about that?

To me it’s the communal experience and that weekly – like right now I’m obsessed with The Outsider. I love that show. I think the other day I had lunch with Julia and she likes that show too and we just talked – and we had our theories and myths. And that was great. And I don’t feel like I do that a lot with the binge mode.

John: So you come into Mr. Robot not having worked on a TV show. Suddenly running a TV show. What was the learning curve like for you going in just as a person who has written stuff and directed stuff but suddenly you’re running a show? How did you get up to speed with that?

Sam: So, I started dating this girl Emmy, and she was on a show, Shameless. And that showrunner, his name is John Wells.

John: He’s had a successful career. A little show called ER.

Sam: West Wing. China Beach. I went up to him and I said please tell me everything, because I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. And he’s like, “You know what?” I’ve got to tell this story, even though the WGA is going to hate me for telling this story.

So, John Wells is the nicest man on the planet. It’s like, “You know I’m doing a talk about the WGA Foundation. It’s a showrunner’s talk. You’ll be my guest. Come.” So, I’m like this is fucking great. Because literally my room opened in a weeks and I have no clue what I’m doing. So, I go and I’m John Wells’ guest. And he’s up there and he gives this great speech and it’s awesome. And I’m sitting in the corner. And I think there’s like, I don’t know how many people they pick for that, like 20 or 30 people. And I’m taking notes. John Wells has this meticulous schedule. Even his dinner plans.

John: The trains run on time in a John Wells [crosstalk].

Sam: Oh yes, they do. And I’m like writing it down and I’m like, oh, this is great. And then John Wells finishes his speech and is like OK, thank you guys. And he leaves. And so the next speaker goes up. And I’m like, great. And they start talking. And I’m writing notes. And then it’s WGA members, one of the people who is working at the WGA giving me dirty looks and the minute John Wells was gone walks up to me and asks me to get the fuck out of there.

John: Yeah, you’re not in the showrunner training program.

Sam: No. Which is fair. Because I didn’t earn the right to be there. But that was honestly the few notes I could scribble in that one hour was what I had to go into it. And what’s great about what John does is there’s a structure that he maintains in his writers room and just all of production. And that really helped me. Went in and the first thing I said to the network is here is my writers room schedule. I mean, I literally just ripped off John and said here is my schedule and here is when every episode is going to be due for the whole season, which they said you’re the first showrunner who has ever done that and we’re going to hold you to it.

But I actually like that. You know, it just kept me–

John: So how far ahead were scripts supposed to be from production?

Sam: So typically on a television show, especially back in those days, I mean, five years ago–

John: But really a different universe.

Sam: It is so different. But back in those days you’d get the first few episodes written and you’d start shooting and you’re writing while you’re editing while you’re shooting. And I just couldn’t do – I was planning on directing. I wanted to be on set even when I wasn’t directing. I just felt that part of it, the filmmaking part of it, was so important and I wanted to be as involved in that as the writing. So, I told the network I really wanted to write all the scripts. Which, again, in those days is fucking crazy. That’s just not done.

John: So you wanted to go into production with the scripts done and locked-ish. Like ready to shoot.

Sam: Yes.

John: And was the intention of cross-boarding, so you’re shooting things in different episodes at the same time?

Sam: No. Because that was the first season, so we had a different director every episode. So we just went in order. And USA, I don’t know why they were nice. I’m just like this nobody who came out of nowhere and said these are my demands. I didn’t say it like that. But they just believed in the script and they believed in what we were doing. And they said OK. And so we wrote all the scripts. We were in prep in New York, so I was flying back and forth. Every Thursday night I’d get on the flight back here to LA to work in the writer’s room over the weekend and go back to New York.

John: So scripts were written but you still had your writers–

Sam: Well this is prep.

John: So this is just your prep.

Sam: So then by the end of prep then all the scripts had been written and then we started shooting. And I directed the first episode. Because we had shot the pilot already, which was episode two, so I could not be in the room obviously. So, I had to get it all done before we started shooting.

John: But now a lot – in these five years there’s a lot more shows that are done the way you’re describing in terms of there’s a room that gets together and things are written well before there is – stuff is happening. Sometimes it’s because they are going to cross board it, so an elaborate production schedule. But sometimes it is so that they can really sign off and approve on the whole series before things start shooting.

How much change from that first season, how much in the scripts changed while you were shooting the first season?

Sam: Oh, all the time. Yeah. And that’s like the nimble part of being the showrunner and the director is that on set – and I had this great partner, Kyle Bradstreet who is an EP on the show, who would sit on set with me and we would talk about the next day’s scenes. Is this right? This is bugging me. And he’d bring up. And then we’d be shooting a scene that would pay off in that scene. That’s the great thing, again, this is the great thing about block shooting is you can continually start to see the mosaic. Because it is s a mosaic. I mean, even the one thing that I learned about Mr. Robot in terms of the way I think of storytelling, it’s like if you’re looking at a picture and you’re standing this close to it and then each time you go to the next scene you take a step back. And what you’re seeing around the thing you just thought it was now gets re-contextualized. And you keep taking a step back until you start to see this whole picture. I think that is what showrunning is.

Because you are talking. Craig did five hours on Chernobyl. And, you know, Mr. Robot, we’re doing 10 hours.

John: You are twice the show he did.

Sam: Yeah, exactly. Yes. You tell him, John. But you’re like painting this one dot. And then you continue to step back. Pretty good. And then you go back. And that’s the way writing was on a TV show. Kyle and I would sit there and, “Is this, OK, I’m going to add this one line in. But four episodes later you’ve got to rewrite that and we’ll compare notes.” And it was a continual – in that way it was a way different art form than feature screenwriting, you know what I mean?

John: So you alluded to the fact that part of the challenge of the week by week schedule is that you as a showrunner have to respond to the show coming out each week. And so with the first season was the whole season done before the first episode aired?

Sam: No. That was the other thing. Because I’m a crazy person, I was on set. We’re airing shows, so I’m having to fly out from New York on Thursday, edit all weekend till Sunday night. I remember I got the 2am flight Sunday night back to New York so I can be on set Monday morning. And I just did that. And I had to because I was locking episodes. Of course, most showrunners they wouldn’t, like OK we’re not going to go to set then. And I mean I was so crazy I think at one point, I actually remember this, there was an important scene and I couldn’t be there because it was Friday. They were shooting it on Friday and I had to be here in LA. So they FaceTimed me and they put the laptop on my director’s chair. And I looked at the – don’t do that, by the way. Bad advice.

John: You got it done. But so what lessons did you take from that and apply to seasons two, three, and four? An example would be like could you just move the whole thing to New York and not be going back and forth? Did you get more stuff done ahead of time? Like what changes were you able to make so that you could have the process be a little saner for you and for–?

Sam: Well, I don’t know about saner. But the big change was I directed every episode after that. So the entire second, third, and fourth season I directed. We block shot the entire thing. That mean that the strategy behind that a little bit was showrunners like John Wells, he walks from the writer’s room to the edit bay to set and he does that trip every day. I can’t fucking do that. I just don’t have the mental capacity. I need to write and dream big and just sky’s the limit. Then I need to go to set, have all those dreams come crumbling down. And then after I wash that away I go into the edit bay and then you do the final rewrite.

I need to have them. And I knew that about myself after the first season. And so that’s the biggest takeaway was going into–

John: You’re not having a tone meeting with each new director coming onboard to talk through what the thing is because you are – you know what the intention is behind things.

Sam: Right. Right. And those are fucking hard anyway. How do you do that? I mean, I tried to play music for certain directors. By the way, all the directors in the first season were fucking great. I mean, Deborah Chow who is doing amazing and I can’t wait to see what she does in her career, but all the episodes she did for Mandalorian. It was great.

But to me it was an inability of mine to be able to communicate this weird, specific thing that I was going for in tone. And tone is such a hard indescribable thing to me. So, that is primarily one of the reasons why – one of my shortcomings in terms of why I felt like I needed to be on set. Because it was just sort of a trial and error thing for me. You know?

John: So let’s talk about the switch over to Homecoming. So Homecoming is based on a really successful podcast. What was your first exposure to Homecoming, to that as a property, as a story, as an idea?

Sam: My agent, Joe Cohen, I think the first episode may have dropped, but he had all of them. And he said you’ve got to listen to this podcast. I think you’d really dig it. I said great. Oh, he actually said, “I think you’ll really dig it.” I’m like, yeah, OK, I will, but why are you giving it to me? And he’s like, “We should adapt it into a TV show.” And I immediately like, no, come on. If it’s great it shouldn’t be adapted. It’s probably just a great podcast and that’s OK. It doesn’t need to be a movie or a TV show.

And he’s like, “Just listen to it.” So I listened to it and the first, I binged it all the way through like in one sitting. And I was like this is great. Shouldn’t be anything but what this is. This is great. Then I listened to the whole thing again. I think I listened to it the second time with Emmy and I was like this is really good. And then I listened to it the third time. Just was like let me just close my eyes and picture this thing. And that’s when I was like, OK, there’s a TV show here.

It’s different as a TV show. It’s not going to be what the podcast is, which is fucking great. But it could be a great separate thing as a TV show.

John: So it doesn’t have the limitations that a podcast naturally has an audio-only.

Sam: But the limitations on the podcast were great.

John: Yeah. They were. [Unintelligible], but you wouldn’t just try to duplicate those same limitations.

Sam: No.

John: You’d apply new things. So, what is your first meeting like with those writers? Is it all awkward that you’re coming in here as a multi-award-winning writer of a really successful show talking with them about this this thing they made? What is that conversation like?

Sam: I never thought about it that way. Honestly I just talked to them as a fan, which by the way is another thing that I would say. I want to be a fan of the things that I do. I’m such a movie/TV show fan myself. I just want to be able to geek out on it. So I talked to Eli and Micah, and I geeked out on it. I said I’m a huge fan. And they were like how would you adapt it? And I’m like I wouldn’t really change what you guys wrote necessarily, but this is the tone and this is the vibe that I want. And I started just doing that. I started just talking about vibe and gave them all my references. This is what I’m feeling when I hear the podcast.

And, you know, this was interesting and this happened when we were pitching the show, too. There was this weird knee-jerk reaction of, OK, we’re going to turn it into an hour-long drama and we’re going to make it more cinematic, you know, car chases, action set pieces, things like that. There was just this automatic we’re going to undo what you did in the podcast because it’s just a podcast. And we’re going to now make it cinematic, which means we’re going to show cars and stuff. I don’t know.

It was a very weird like – I think that was the instinct was that because it was two people talking it could not be cinematic. Or because it was two people talking that wouldn’t sustain anyone’s attention. And I was thinking to myself, well wait a minute, I listen to a podcast with two people talking and that completely sustained my – why on earth would I see them then all of a sudden, you know, that wouldn’t work?

And also why did we need it to be an hour-long drama? Because honestly that was one of those things where I think that is probably how a lot of adaptations get screwed up is there’s this weird expectation that it has to completely change and turn into this weird, I don’t know–

John: The hour-long drama is sort of an arbitrary format that we pick. And so a half-hour is actually really great. It’s not Quibi. It’s not 10 minutes. But it’s this nice size feel for sort of what the episodes are.

Sam: And also it fucking worked in the podcast. Why would we change that? And so this was all sort of I think music to Eli and Micah’s ears. Because I think they, look, the podcast was pretty popular. Everyone really loved it and they were taking a lot of meetings. But I think I was probably – I don’t know, I wasn’t in those other meetings – but I think they were excited by the fact that I really wanted to stay as true to the podcast as possible. But I wasn’t – in terms of that I wasn’t willing to change the story much. That it just meant when I adapted it to TV that there was going to be a tonal shift there. And they were totally onboard with that.

John: You’re involved with other podcasts. And you’re working on a narrative podcast?

Sam: Oh yeah. Yeah. The End Up. Look at you, John. OK. All right. We’re going to talk about that.

John: Well I’m just curious. Are there any things out there that you’re envious that newer people get to do? That basically sometimes I look out there and I see people who are just starting their careers. They can sort of do anything and things are a free-for-all. So what advice would you have for these people out here who are looking at things? What do you think is really interesting that you might steer them towards trying to do?

You know, podcasts are kind of a brand new format. The narrative podcasts. What else?

Sam: I would, honestly, well it depends. It’s all up to your means, right? I mean, if you want to be a filmmaker and you have money, go make a film. Go make a short. Go make an indie. You know, I just read because Leigh Whannell is one of my new favorite–

John: Yeah, he’s remarkable.

Sam: Did you see Invisible Man?

John: I haven’t seen it yet. Friday.

Sam: But what about Upgrade?

John: Oh, I loved Upgrade.

Sam: Fucking great. Do you know what the budget–?

John: Nothing. So Leigh came on Scriptnotes. It was nothing.

Sam: It was like $3 million.

John: Well, it was a Blumhouse movie but as an action movie.

Sam: Fucking great. Anyway, if you have $3 million…or if you can get $3 million, go make something like Upgrade. If you don’t have $3 million, or can’t get $3 million – to me then my other option was write, which is what I did. That doesn’t cost that much, right?

John: I think implicit in what you’re saying about your early start is you kept delaying writing for a very long time because you were scared of it. And if you actually started writing earlier you might have gotten some stuff written earlier.

Sam: That’s true. That’s true. Yes.

John: Yes.

[February interview ends]

John: All right, we’re back. So we’re back here in the present time, or at least this is April as we’re talking through right now. We are both in our home offices. What we do normally on the show at this point is our One Cool Things where we talk about things we want to recommend to our listeners. So, something that was really helpful for me the past couple weeks has been this iPad stand which I used, but I found I’ve had to use a lot more recently.

The one I really like is called AboveTek. And what I like about it is it’s fully articulated. You can rotate it in any direction. We were talking earlier about having to video conference and sort of software for that, but I find the cameras on the iPads are so much better than the cameras on any MacBook that it really is helpful sometimes to just do the video stuff on that. So this is a really good stand for that. Or just any time you’re using your iPad to look at but not to be the main thing you’re touching, I recommend this.

So it’s just a really good inexpensive stand that I probably will get a second one because I’m always hauling it between the office and the house. So, if you’re looking for something even just for FaceTime I’ll recommend this AboveTek iPad Stand.

Sam: Interesting. OK. I’ll have to check that out.

John: Do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

Sam: I do. You know, it’s tough. Obviously I think the easy thing would be to recommend movies. And I would recommend movies over TV shows for now because I do think oftentimes it’s easier to binge television shows when we don’t have as much time, because those are shorter episodes. But now that we have a little bit more time, we have that extra half-hour, 45 minutes I would urge people to really – and what I do is finish filmographies, right? Like for whatever reason I had never seen Alien 3 which is David Fincher’s first film. I had seen all of his other movies. Never saw Alien 3. Finally crossed that one off the list.

And now I’m attacking Cronenberg and basically almost done. I’ve never seen Scanners. I’m going to check that out soon.

But the one thing I’d recommend is this app/website called JustWatch.com. It’s really easy to use. You essentially put in whatever title you’re interested in, or filmmaker, and it will come up with those titles and it will tell you what platforms they’re available on. So for the most part a lot of the titles is either on HBO or Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu or whatever and you don’t have to rent or pay extra for it. So it’s actually just a good resource for that.

But they also have a thing called The Watchlist. And so I just started all those movies that just kind of, you know, like for example I’ve never seen Tootsie. I don’t know why. But it’s considered one of the classics. I’ve never seen it. I threw it on my Watchlist. Now it’s going to kind of come up in my queue.

But again I would encourage this sort of director binges to me is like a really fun way to just get into a filmmaker’s vibe and style. And as you watch their movies, whether it’s chronologically or not, you start to just get – especially for filmmakers out there, you start to get a feel for how they sense tone, how they’ve evolved as a storyteller. Sometimes if the writer-directors do the movies that they’ve written work better than the movies that they didn’t. That’s always an interesting thing.

But anyway, regardless, JustWatch.com. You can put it on your phone or you can do it on the web. And it syncs up your Watchlist. And best of all it tells you where they’re available for free so that way you don’t have to spend the money.

John: Excellent. Although I will say spend the money if you want to see the thing, because we get residuals for those things, too.

Sam: That’s true. That’s true.

John: All right. If you are a Premium member stick around after the credits because we have some Q&A that we did at the live show. And so people asked questions. A lot of them are Mr. Robot questions and Sam was very generous to answer the Mr. Robot questions.

Sam: There are spoilers, just FYI, for this whole–

John: Absolutely. So extra spoiler warning for the Q&A part of that. Also, for listeners we have some questions for you. We do the Three Page Challenge often on the show and Megana was asking I wonder what happened to the people who sent in the first three pages of their scripts and we talked about them. Wondering what happened. Some follow up. So, if you are a person who sent in the three pages and we talked about your pages on the air and there’s an update for us, write in to ask@johnaugust.com and give us that update.

The other thing is we’re trying to do an episode about how writer’s rooms are working during this time where writers can’t get together. And so if you have experience in a virtual writer’s room, we’re going to bring in some showrunners to talk about that. But if you are a staff member in a virtual writer’s room or an assistant in a virtual writer’s room, we’re just trying to figure out best practices and what people are using and what’s working for people. Because this is all new territory.

So, write in because that’s probably going to be our next episode is talking about how writer’s rooms are working in this time.

That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced my Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week. 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, but for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Sam is…

Sam: @samesmail.

John: @samesmail. Excellent.

Sam: Pretty straightforward.

John: You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We’ll put in a trailer for Angelyne so you can see what Sam has been working on. Looking forward to that. You can also find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Sam, thank you for coming back and doing this little wraparound on the show. It was great talking to you that first time. It’s great talking to you again.

Sam: Awesome. Thanks man.

John: Cool. Thanks.

[Bonus segment]

John: Let’s turn it out to our audience and see what kind of questions the audience might have. So we have two microphones out there. So you can line up at either microphone and we will just ping pong back and forth between your microphones.

Male Audience Member: So with Mr. Robot you made a really engaging, entertaining show, as is your goal. It’s also really thematically consistent. And you’ve done that through four seasons with a team of writers and producers and art design. How do you convey those themes to those people and get that across on screen?

Sam: This I did write down. So, there were three things for Mr. Robot and it’s personal, so I’m not going to share it. But that I wrote down in my phone.

John: This is a show about these three things?

Sam: Yeah. But there were three things that I just said to myself. And whenever I got asked a question, and it didn’t matter if it was the color of this purse that Darlene was going to wear, or what the set should look like, I would remember those three things. It’s still in my notepad. I wrote that down like seven years ago. Anyway, so I remembered those three things and I would just always make sure and went up against that.

Sometimes I got lazy. I’m not going to say I was perfect. So colors of carpets probably slipped by me. But you’ve got to – look, at the beginning of anything you do, whether you’re writing or directing or whatever it is, you got to have something to say. It is not a product. I don’t care what anybody tells you. Let other people call it product or call it content or whatever the fuck they want to call it. You are not selling something. You are saying something. Write down what you are saying and make sure that with every decision you’re saying that.

Male Audience Member: Thank you.

Male Audience Member: Hey, so I’m actually transitioning and I wanted to remark upon how much I love White Rose as a character and how I feel how fresh it is for a character to be informed by their transition but not completely encompassed by it. So I was curious for you in a sort of chicken/egg scenario whether you thought about her being transgender first or whether that ended up coming in your conceptualization of that character?

Sam: No. That was her journey was identity. And honestly everyone’s journey in Mr. Robot was about identity. And she really needed to be sort of Elliot’s sort of polar. And, you know, for White Rose, I mean, no other character outside of Elliot spoke to the theme of what I wanted to say. And that has something to do with one of the words I wrote.

But this idea of someone in a crisis of identity and then knowing deep down who that person is and with every inch and second and moment of their life moving towards it despite what everyone around her is saying. That’s Elliot’s journey. No, no, that was very much from the beginning how I conceived of White Rose.

Male Audience Member: Thank you so much.

Male Audience Member: Hi, I have a couple things to say. I really enjoyed what you said about the parentheticals. I found that very fascinating how just that small little detail can totally just change the whole scene.

Sam: By the way, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but really quickly do it. Just do it for fun. I mean, honestly it will open up – just in whatever scripts you have right now, just go the opposite of the emotion you think that person should have in that scene. And see what happens. It can get really exciting results. Do you ever do that John?

John: Oh yeah. Yeah. Very inspiring.

Sam: He knows more than me, so.

Male Audience Member: It really reminded me about one scene in Mr. Robot when Jonah is going into her closet and it kind of alludes to American Psycho and even like Kingpin and Daredevil when they’re selecting their wardrobe and usually there’s this orchestral music that’s always beautiful. But you decided to play this really heavy rock music. And I was just kind of like wondering when do you decide to use juxtaposition like that? I thought that was insanely brilliant.

Sam: Oh, I wish I could say I invented that. But, you know, look at the masters. Look at Scorsese. Look at Tarantino during the ear cutting off scene, what’s the song?

John: Stuck in the Middle with You.

Sam: Stuck in the Middle with You. It couldn’t be a happier, go-luckier song. And he’s doing this awful, brutal thing. The contrast. And it’s also alchemy. I see my friend here, Sean Schuyler, who sits in the edit bay with me and picks out music with me. He’s fucking brilliant at it. And that’s what you do. You find – you don’t want to restate what you’ve already stated, which is what I think when music is poorly used is what I think is happening. You’re just sort of underlining what the audience is already experiencing.

What you want to do is you want to create a new experience. That’s what you kind of want to try and do with every moment of everything you do, right? And so the best way is taking a good song and contrasting with what is happening on screen, but not just for superficial reasons. Not just because you think it’s cool. But because it feels right and it reimagines the moment or the scene in a really new and exciting way. So yeah.

Male Audience Member: Hi. First things first. I’m the one who woo’d when you said NYU. But I was wondering what do you do when you have a script or at least an act that you know is too long, but it has everything that you want in it? And also how do you know when you’re done with a script?

Sam: Jesus. You are asking the wrong person, my friend. I turned a movie into a four-season television show. Well, look, I’ll answer the first question. How do you know if a scene is too long? You know, again, reference a master. Try and read it out loud to a friend. And then be honest with yourself. Do I really need all this dialogue to get to that point? And the answer might be yes. And then if it’s yes, you’re good, and you move on. But I think there’s a lot of preciousness when it’s just you and the monitor. When you start including other people, and when you start – even sometimes I’ll let a person read it. if I’m just sitting there watching them read it and they’re flipping the pages, I’m like oh fuck, this scene is way too fucking long. They should be moving on. I can see them yawn.

Like I start to get the [osmosis]. So I just honestly try and just be as honest with myself as possible. But honestly reading it out loud tells you right. When you write do ever just do a pass where you just read it, even just to yourself, not to a friend? Do you ever just read the dialogue out loud?

Male Audience Member: It’s something I’ve started to do because my acting friends tell me to do it.

Sam: It’s a good exercise. Because then you’ll be like, oof, you will start to feel some lines are cringey. Or some lines that are there just to be showy. And you just start cutting it.

Male Audience Member: Cool. Thank you.

Female Audience Member: Hi Sam. Thanks for being here with us.

Sam: Hi.

Female Audience Member: Hi. I really liked some of the things you shared about earlier in your career when you said, you know, you could have started writing sooner and you kind of just didn’t because you were intimidated or you were scared. And I liked when you shared about you just quit your day job and took the plunge. I’m thinking about doing something very similar. I’m a professional copywriter, but it doesn’t really – it’s tangential to what I want to do, but it’s not what I actually what to do. So I guess I wanted to ask you what would your advice be for escaping my Alderson Loop of just being stuck in my job. And how do I–?

Sam: Do you have money in the bank?

Female Audience Member: I have a little bit of money in the bank. Yes, I do.

Sam: God. I can’t…hmm.

Female Audience Member: You can tell me to quit. Just do it. [laughs]

John: I think you want permission to quit. So, tell me if this was your experience. When I quit my assistant job, so I was working as an assistant for these producers and I was happy to quit working as an assistant to these producers because even back then being an assistant was not a fantastic job. And I made myself of a spreadsheet of like this is how much money I have. This is what my monthly costs are. I can afford six months of this. And I quit for six months. It was good motivation to be getting stuff done inn those six months because I could see it all dwindling away.

Sam: That’s kind of what I did. I mean, I kind of figured out how much I could last on ramen and whatever. And then I had credit cards. Credit cards help. Especially like Discover.

John: Discover is great.

Sam: Yeah. Because they just give it to you. But all this to say I don’t know how great any of this advice is. Let me ask you one question. Do you have something that you really want to write right now?

Female Audience Member: I have several ideas, but not like one singular thing.

John: So I will say some of my most productive writing time though was when I had a mindless job. So like copywriting might be a really tough job because you’re using your writing time all the time. But if you had a job like at Starbucks, then you’re not using that writing brain. And so you might come back from that shift with the ability saved up – with brain space left to write.

So when I was doing a terrible clerk job actually I got a lot written because I wasn’t using my brain all day.

Sam: So yes. So you should quit and go to Starbucks.

Female Audience Member: [laughs] Cool.

Sam: This is the–

John: This is the advice we gave you here tonight.

Sam: This is the lesson you’ve learned.

John: So let us know how it turns out.

Male Audience Member: Hi guys. Thank you Mr. August. Thank you Mr. Esmail for coming out and talking to us and educating us. So one thing that really struck me about Mr. Robot is the level of technical – not only the level of technical detail vis-à-vis hacking and computers and all that you went into, but you were able to spin it with such literary panache and just really dressed it up, which is fantastic writing. And I was just wondering if there’s anything you kind of say about that when you’re really on the blank page is really just spinning that magic. Is there any insight you got–?

Sam: Well, I think, you know the weird thing, and this goes to the point of like when I remember when I saw Hackers and just every movie, at least a lot of the movies that I saw about hacking, they tried to make weird graphics and dumb visual effects, the flies through the screen, to dramatize hacking. And to me it was just like why is that drama to throw CGI in your face. That makes no fucking sense.

Drama is what the person is going through. Emotionally what they want. It’s all the same things that you would do in a scene between two people. And I looked at those scenes the same way. Elliot really wanted this and he was going after it with tenacity, or sometimes he was super tired and he was forcing himself to go at it. And then he would fail sometimes. Or he would succeed. These are words that you can apply to anything.

So you have to look at every scene like that. You’re telling a story about a person that wants something and he either fails or succeeds at it. And he feels something about that. And I think that’s – because I got a lot of pushback when I first wrote it that no one is going to watch a person on a keyboard. What I think people didn’t realize is but people want to watch people go through an emotional experience. And that can happen with anything.

So, yeah, I wrote those scenes like the way I write any other scene.

Male Audience Member: Cool. Thank you.

Sam: Thanks.

John: Thanks.

Male Audience Member: Hi. Thank you Sam for being here. Birthday gift for me today.

Sam: Happy Birthday.

John: Happy Birthday.

Male Audience Member: So, I have a two-parter question. So, for the music of Mr. Robot, Briar Patch, Homecoming, so for Mac Quayle’s score, I heard you say in interviews that you would send the footage over to him and then he’ll just start going at it. But for the license soundtrack, like for example M83’s Gone in Season 1 and then Intro in Season 3 and then Outro at the tail-end of the series, how would you differentiate when to use Mac’s score and then use the license soundtrack?

Sam: This is a little bit like the song speaks to me. I mean, I listen to a lot – I don’t know how you guys do it. And it’s different for everyone. I listen to a lot of music when I write. But then when we watch the scene- by the way, Sean was the one that suggested M83 in Season 3. I think I did Season 4. But whatever. That’s probably debatable. Oh Justin. Justin, the editor.

But it’s ultimately something that speaks to us. It’s something that we – me, Sean, the editors, we’re constantly playing music as we’re figuring out scenes. As I’m just day-dreaming. Even going to set I listen to the song that I think I might use in this scene.

Music to me it’s like an injection of tone. You know? I think movies can be sort of a little more kind of elusive to convey tone. That’s why when it’s done so well it’s fucking. I mean, Wes Anderson, right? You know when you’re watching a Wes Anderson. That’s like a song to me. And he obviously uses music really well.

So to me it’s like if I know a song so speaks to the tone of this scene, then I just go ahead and license the music. But oftentimes because Mac is so brilliant and amazing, I mean, he was so part of the DNA from the beginning that he’s create cues. I remember he created a music cue for the recap of one of the episodes. It was for the recap. And I listened to it and I’m like this is fucking awesome. And I took it and told him this is going in the episode. And it was like the big Fuck Me speech in the Season 3 premiere.

So, it’s always like a kind of improvised. Because music is all emotion. And it’s a trial and error, see how it feels. So I don’t think there’s a binary decision. I think it’s just a feeling that you have in the moment.

John: Back over here.

Male Audience Member: So, in the transition from movie to TV series, besides Elliot’s DID which you touched on already, what were some of the characters and plot threads you were most excited to expand on that you got to do in the series that really made you decide I’m going to stick with this.

Sam: It was two characters. It was actually really one. It started with Darlene. I feel in love with Darlene. I mean, I stopped writing around the shower – like when I went off and did Comet, I think it was in Episode 2 when Elliot catches Darlene in his shower. If you remember that. And then I was like, OK, how do I cut this down. But honestly Tyrell. I fucking love Tyrell. I loved writing him. He was one of my favorite characters. And I would have had to completely cut him out of the movie to even have any shot of making maybe a three-hour movie.

And I didn’t want to do that. I was like, no, I like this guy. And I came up with Joanna and I liked his relationship with Joanna. And I was just like – and that’s one of the big motivations for me to turn it into a series.

Male Audience Member: Thanks.

John: Back over here.

Male Audience Member: The voiceover in your show is like it’s done something nothing has ever done. And a lot of that is because of the DID. But it also has so many levels and especially the very end, obviously, the reveal. All of that – was that all sort of in that original idea? Or did that start to unfold as the show grew?

Sam: The VO specifically or the DID reveal?

Male Audience Member: Well, the idea of what the VO is and how that plays out throughout the whole four years.

Sam: “Hello friend” was always the first line of the script.

Male Audience Member: But that said what the ending was going to be in your head?

Sam: The ending was figured out before I wrote “Hello friend.” I knew what the last line was going to be when I started writing the script.

John: A process question. For all of his voiceover, at what point was the actor recording his voiceover? Was it as you were filming each episode or was it independent of all that stuff? Because it feels like as you’re editing episodes you need to have that voiceover just to get a sense of feel for where things are.

Sam: No, we had some rough temp VO in there.

John: Little editor voiceover there.

Sam: Yeah, because it was too important. And Rami and I wanted to do it – Rami couldn’t just go – eventually he did, because he had it down. But that first season he and I needed to really be in a room and just go through it together. Because it’s so important. It was a character onto itself.

John: Back over here.

Male Audience Member: I was hoping you could expand a little bit upon that time when you quit your job in reality, not necessarily so much as how did you support yourself financially, but how did you make the most out of that time? And how did you structure that all of a sudden you had all this free time?

Sam: You mean after I quit you mean?

Male Audience Member: Yeah.

Sam: Well, OK, I’m kind of curious what you do. But, OK, so while I was working I would come home. I’m a night owl. I like to write at night. So I would come home. I actually did a little bit like what John did. I sort of day dreamed during the day and I kind of wrote little things on my phone. And then I’d go home and I’d write until 2am. And then I’d write on weekends and tried to piece together – those first two features were written on weekends, vacations, any spare time outside of the office.

Now, what I do – and I know this is like, this is like against every rule of writing from what I understand, because apparently you’re the most creative in the morning. But not this person. I cannot write in the morning. I’ve tried. Do you write in the morning?

John: I can write in the morning. But I think naturally I probably am a night owl. So I was writing all those times at night. But once you have a kid, your night just goes away.

Sam: Oh. Right.

John: Yeah.

Sam: I don’t know what I’m going to do.

John: So you are still writing at night?

Sam: So now what I do is I wake up. This is my – when I write this is my day. I wake up in the morning. I get angry at the news for two or three hours. I usually try and go to a diner, because I love diners. And I listen to a great podcast. Sometimes Scriptnotes. Really helps.

And I think about what I want to write that day. So mornings for me are thinking. Thinking is like most of it, right? When you’re writing how much is that actual typing? To me, it’s a small percentage. Most of it is what am I going to write? What is the scene? What’s my way in? Who are these people? Is that – like have I seen that person a million times? Is there anything interesting? You know, the great thing, and I’m going to say this about diversity. Diversity to me, and being Egyptian I maybe have a closer relationship to this than other people, but to me diversity is an opportunity to really think about characters in a very different way.

I feel like sometimes write it like it’s a homework assignment. Like we got to avoid cancel culture and like fucking stack race and gender and orientation in there. No. It’s a fucking exciting opportunity to come up with really interesting people that have never been in films and television shows. And they can give you all new stories and take your stories in all new exciting directions that the scene wouldn’t have ever had without that.

So, to me I do all of that. You know, I get angry at the news. And then I go to lunch. And I do all of that. And I think about the people and I think about the people in my scene. I like those people. I want to like them, even the villains. I want to like them. Be a fan of them. And then you’re armed with all that. You go in in the afternoon and I write. Take a dinner break. And then I write some more until–

John: So you can manage a couple hours of actual writing a day? Because if I get–

Sam: With a lot of breaks.

John: OK. If I get three hours of writing in a day that’s a lot for me.

Sam: Well, when you say writing you mean like typing?

John: Typing at a keyboard.

Sam: Yeah. That’s probably right.

John: Great. Sam Esmail, thank you very much for this conversation.

Sam: Thank you. Guys, this was so much fun.

John: You’re welcome. This was great. Thank you for being a great audience. Thank you to [Enid], to the Writers Guild Foundation for this. Thank you the Writers Guild Theater. And have a good night.

Links:

• Angelyne Trailer
• Watch Homecoming
• Mr. Robot
• Three Page Challenge participants — please share your updates and stories! We’d love to hear what happened to your story or career after the segment.
• Please reach out with your experiences working in a virtual writer’s room during Covid-19, email ask@johnaugust.com.
• AboveTek iPad Stand
• Just Watch
• Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium here.
• Sam Esmail on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.