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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/how-to-listen).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 438 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we’re going to be talking about dialogue and specifically about listening. Then we’ll be answering listener questions about submission agreements, strikes, and character POV. And in our bonus segment for Premium subscribers Craig and I are going to talk about the state of the Democratic primary.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Because Craig I was realizing that there are not enough podcasts that talk about politics. It’s really a gap that’s out there in the media landscape. And so I thought maybe we’d do that and we’ll do it just for Premium subscribers so that the rest of the Internet can’t hear it.

**Craig:** Yeah and they won’t. I’m sure it will never get out. RIP our mentions. It’s my new favorite phrase. [laughs]

**John:** Oy. Oy.

**Craig:** Yeah, oy.

**John:** Oh, something to look forward to at the end of the show, but first some follow up. Some follow up from Episode 436. That was the one where Liz Hannah was on. We were talking about How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The last of those was how would this be a rom-com and Craig tell us about the happy endings.

**Craig:** So, you know, you had this married couple, both of them quite beautiful. This was a very good-looking Irish couple. And they were both running for the same office. They were running kind of against each other, so that was the, as the article said, “It sounds like a bad rom-com.” The slight anti-dramatic circumstance of this was that actually there were two seats available and three people were running, so you and I and Liz, I think all three of us thought, you know, of course the movie ends with the two of them winning. And sure enough the two of them won. They were both elected. So they get to go to work together and represent the people of Ireland together. And then they get to go home together. Boy, if they have children those kids are going to look great. God.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** Pretty people.

**John:** Good for them. Apparently it was a squeaker of an outcome. And so it was only on a recount or sort of like the subsequent counting of things that she got her seat here. But congratulations to them. Yeah, some version of this kind of story will happen I predict within the next five years. It won’t be based on them specifically but you will see a couple running against each other for political office within five years. I guarantee it.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like where you’re going with this. Well, we kind of have a slight preview of it with the weird relationship between married couple Kellyanne Conway and George Conway.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Kellyanne Conway the – I don’t know what her job is, Trump Flack I’ll call her – and George Conway, erstwhile conservative, Never Trumper. But they’re married. So, he attacks Trump on Twitter daily. She defends Trump on Twitter daily. And then they go home and just do it like weasels.

**John:** Apparently so. Things we don’t understand but leave them to their relationship.

**Craig:** Whatever it takes, man. You know, I mean, marriage is tough. [laughs] When you’ve been married for a while you’ve got to spice it up.

**John:** Another bit of follow up, Yurian from the Netherlands is a Premium subscriber and he was just listening to Episode 241 in the back catalog. In this episode you and I were discussing a How Would This Be a Movie idea. And I said the following, so let’s play a clip.

“I think the idea of somebody living in your basement is a good starting place for either a thriller or a horror movie, where like somebody in the family thinks there’s something happening in the basement, or the kid sort of sees the person living in the basement and no one else believes him. And like the secret door that he’s hiding behind is so good that you can go down there and you’d swear there’s nobody in your basement. And so you think you’re paranoid. And, of course, there actually is somebody in your basement. And it’s kind of like Panic Room but in reverse.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah. So, Craig, I predicted Parasite apparently.

**Craig:** You didn’t just predict it. Prediction doesn’t give that justice. You did it. [laughs]

**John:** I did it.

**Craig:** That’s it. I mean, of course Parasite is more than the function of its main plot twist, but you even got down to like the secret door that is so good no one knows it’s there. You got it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** Yeah, this is crazy. And so Episode 241, this is like three, or five years ago? This is a long time back.

**Craig:** Is there any chance that director Bong listens to Scriptnotes and was like, “Hmm…” No.

**John:** No. Of course there’s not. And honestly of course we were talking about a How Would This Be a Movie which was based on a story in the news which actually turned out to be fake about this scientist who was living in the basement. So, absolutely did not come from me. March 16, 2016 was when the episode aired. So, it did not come from that. But it is a good movie idea twist and I was right then and I was right because that movie won Best Picture.

**Craig:** It’s almost like you yourself are some kind of professional writer.

**John:** Maybe so. Maybe like after all of these years of doing Scriptnotes I’ve come to appreciate what makes a good movie idea.

**Craig:** Apparently you had it halfway through all these years of doing Scriptnotes. This is really good. 241. That’s like 30 years ago. Yeah, we were 12 when you did that.

**John:** We were so young. God, I remember – god, do you remember as we were riding our Penny-farthings down the cobblestone streets?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And we kept talking about if only there were a way that we could have these conversations but people who weren’t here with us in the room could hear these conversations. And you said, “Listen, Hitler is rising in Germany. That’s really what we’ve got to focus on.”

**Craig:** I was concerned about that. But mostly I just remember that I was delighted by my stick and hoop. Ah, the stick and hoop.

**John:** Nothing really beats a good stick and a hoop.

**Craig:** No. That was the best-selling toy of that year. Stick and Hoop. That’s what kids had. They had a stick and a hoop.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** And you know what? I bet it was actually really fun.

**Craig:** It probably was. Probably was pretty good.

**John:** And we’ve not given enough thought to stick and hoop technology.

**Craig:** Yeah. Stick and hoop tech.

**John:** Last week we were talking about treatments. And this week I actually had follow up on sort of the treatment that I had to write that sort of motivated the whole segment. I had the meeting at the studio to talk through stuff. And I will say that like it was actually a little bit easier getting the notes and processing some of the notes because I wasn’t defensive at all about sort of the script I’d written, because I hadn’t written the script yet. We were just talking about the treatment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in some defense of the stage of writing a treatment and discussing it that way, it was easier for me to think through stuff because I could just say like, OK, so what we need before I actually implement this note and I wasn’t destroying everything I’d actually already done. I was just not doing work I had not done yet. And so that was helpful and constructive on that front.

**Craig:** It is. And I find, too, that when they give notes on these detailed treatments they themselves are less likely to give you the kind of note that would unravel a ton of things because they can see it themselves how it would unravel a ton of things. As opposed to when you’re sort of in a verbal pitch situation and they might not see those ramifications. So I think it helps everybody. I really do.

I was in a situation where I found myself revising the treatment, which I did not love doing, mostly because I just think like, OK, I agree on points A through C. I don’t agree with D. And then E through H sound great. So, I’m going to do those in the script. And then it was sort of like, “Then can you also just do it in the treatment?” OK.

**John:** I actually have a step in this deal where do I have to turn in a revised treatment. So I’m going to do that and it’s going to be great.

**Craig:** It’s going to be great.

**John:** So it’ll be an even more detailed plan for writing the screenplay hopefully that I’ll get to write.

**Craig:** But this is good. This is a good thing. I like this. I welcome you to the treatment family.

**John:** But I do want to point out a downside, because this is something I’ve heard from several former Scriptnotes producers who are now writers, people tell tale of getting trapped in treatment for forever.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Where you’re constantly revising this document which is not the actual thing you’re trying to make in order please different audiences. And so while I was happy about today’s meeting I definitely can see situations in which it could come into like you never actually get to write a script because you’re always trying to rewrite this treatment.

**Craig:** This is an area where your representative, whether they’re a lawyer or a manager, or a legal agent, should be picking up a phone and saying, “Right, so my client is the most lovely person in the world. They begged me to let them to continue to revise this treatment for you and the 15 other stakeholders in this project. And I said I’m so sorry but no. I’m not going to let them do that. So they’ve gotten all the notes, they get it, it’s time to commence them on the script per the contract.”

I wish that more representatives would do their job.

**John:** That would be fantastic.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So unfortunately sometimes it does fall to you as the actual writer to say enough and I’m done. It’s time to move onto the next step. Advocating for yourself is a tricky thing. It’s a hard thing to learn but it’s also a thing you end up doing at every stage in your career.

**Craig:** Yeah. Pretty much. And part of the job unfortunately of being a screenwriter in Hollywood, it’s not anything that should be part of our job, it certainly has nothing to do with writing, is the ability to determine exactly where you stand and then apply an amount of leverage and self-advocacy that is concomitant with your standing at that moment. Because a lot of writers push too hard when people actually want to get rid of them. And a lot of writers don’t push hard enough when people are desperate to keep them.

**John:** Yep. It’s absolutely true. And I do have to single out your use of concomitant, because again a word I’ve read and never tried to use in conversation. Well done, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Thank you. And I give it as a gift to you.

**John:** Aw. Thank you. We have talked a lot about assistants and assistant pay this last year on Scriptnotes. A thing we’re going to put out this week, Megana before she left on vacation she reached out to a bunch of people who had written into the show and other assistants she knew asking for their advice to showrunners who are staffing up rooms for the new television season. And so this is advice that assistants, so writer’s assistants, script coordinators, what their advice is for these showrunners and for these rooms as they’re being put together.

We put it together as a little PDF and so people can download it. I’ll also have it up on the website to take a look. But Craig I thought you and I might take a quick look through here and just highlight some of the things that assistants have said.

**Craig:** This is great. First of all, no surprise, it looks beautiful. So well done on the fonts.

**John:** Thank you. That was me.

**Craig:** Yeah, you did a great job there. And I like the fact that you’ve got the headers are Sans-serif and then the actual body text is – I like it when things break up like that. So this looks like the kind of thing that should go on the wall, sort of like the Heimlich poster that goes on the wall in restaurants. So this is great.

The first category is Respect Boundaries. Basically don’t treat your employees like they don’t have a life beyond the job they’re doing.

**John:** Yeah. One piece of advice here I like is don’t procrastinate and stay late and make your staff stay late too. Yeah, you know what? That’s true. As a writer I do procrastinate, but I shouldn’t procrastinate in a way that makes everybody else suffer.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I also like this: don’t use your assistants as emotional support and therapy. Don’t overshare about your life and feelings. So, there’s a show that I’m a consulting producer on called Mythic Quest, which is on the air right now on Apple–

**John:** Congratulations, Craig. I meant to single you out on that. Nicely done.

**Craig:** Is it called Apple Plus? Apple TV? Apple TV Plus? I should probably know this.

**John:** Apple TV Plus.

**Craig:** Apple TV Plus. It’s a really funny show. Rob McElhenney and his team have done a great job. Megan Ganz, among others. And there’s a character Carol who is the head of HR at this videogame company. And everybody treats her as their therapist. She’s like, “I’m not – I’m in HR.” People come to her and they’re like, “I’m in love with one of my coworkers. I don’t know how to tell them.” And she’s like, “My god.” “I’m worried that someone is going to report me.” And she’s like, “If they did, I would be the person they would be reporting to. I am not your therapist.”

This is one of those boundary lines that people blithely cross all the time. This is excellent advice.

**John:** I want to say if we keep watching future episodes of the show will we see more of your influence and presence in the show?

**Craig:** You will see my character, Lou, I think he’s in almost every episode in the second half of the season, and I have been told and have no reason to disbelieve that he’s going to be back for quite a few episodes in season two which is currently underway. And, yes, and there’s some other stuff that, yeah, I’ve been helping with with those guys there. They’re great. So, there may be more influence.

My character will never have more than one or two lines. [laughs] I like those characters that just pop in, have one or two lines.

**John:** Yeah. You’re like a Creed.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like Glenn the Demon on The Good Place. Ah, The Good Place. That was such a nice ending. I really loved it.

**John:** That was so lovely. Yeah.

So, to wrap up with our assistant pay stuff, because we got a little sidetracked there, just really simple advice and we tried to keep it as just short quotes from the actual people. There are 20 assistants who wrote in with their opinions. We sort of chopped it all up and put it into categories. But hopefully this will be useful for assistants to be thinking about, but more importantly for shows to be thinking about as they’re ramping up for this next – shouldn’t even really call it a season. Like, TV just never stops now.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But more rooms are being put together in this period than last month.

**Craig:** This is a great document. Just sample headline, “Set Expectations. Tell Us Who is in Charge. Delegate Thoughtfully. Solicit Diverse Perspectives. Give Appropriate Credit. Know How Much We Make. Keep People Healthy. Invite Assistants Inside.” These are all really good things.

And this is an eminently reasonable document. This is not some kind of revolutionary screed. This is something that any decent showrunner would want to do I should think. So, it is well-written and it is followable which is the most important thing. I can’t imagine anybody looking at this and going, “No.”

**John:** “No, none of this.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just like wake up. Get yourself – be a woke showrunner when it comes to your assistants.

**John:** Great. All right, let’s transition to a discussion of dialogue. So this is going to be a craft episode. This is where we’re going to talk about the things that characters say in movies, which is what people outside of the industry think all screenwriters do is just to write the dialogue. That’s all we do, right Craig? We just write the words the pretty people say.

**Craig:** I thought the actors wrote that. I thought they came up with what they say. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, that’s right.

**Craig:** I don’t know what we do.

**John:** We write down what they’ve said.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just so that there’s a record of it. Yeah.

**Craig:** Of course. We write down what the director wants to do. You know, in the old movies the director would walk up to the actors and say, “OK, in this scene you’re coming in and you want her to do this. And she’s going to say no to that.” So there’s no script at all and in fact on any given day what you’re shooting is whatever the director imagined. And then the actors make up their dialogue and the director goes, “Cut. Print. Moving on.” Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. So when Greta Gerwig was on the show a couple episodes back we were talking about mumblecore which was the movement that she was an important part of. And classically in mumblecore it’s very under-scripted. There’s a plan for sort of what the movie is about. There might be a plan for what the scenes are. But they’re not detailed plans for who is saying what and what’s happening. And so she came out of that movement and I was surprised that as someone who emerged from that movement that she’s so fastidious and meticulous about what the words are on the page and exactly when overlapping dialogue is going to overlap.

And she said that really did come out of the experience of like being an actor who was not given lines to say. She kind of felt boxed in by not knowing what was going to come next. There was not a plan for how to get through stuff. And that she really loves having written dialogue that she can work from so that she can actually find everything else in the scene and not to be worried about, ah, what am I going to say.

**Craig:** I am not surprised by that at all because when you think about the way conversations work in the real world a lot of times one person is just dominating the other. And if you put two characters in a room without a script that has not been balanced and thought through carefully by a screenwriter, one actor may very well dominate the other. And that’s – how is that good for anybody?

**John:** It’s probably not good for anybody. So in this discussion of dialogue I want to start by looking at realistic dialogue. Really how people would speak in the real world. And the way you find out how people speak in the real world is to listen to them. And, you know, you can eavesdrop on people. You can just be paying attention to conversations happening around you. But to really notice people don’t talk in real life the way they do in movies. And when you see movie dialogue that feels artificial, it’s because it’s as if they’re talking in a movie rather than actually how people could speak in real life.

And movie dialogue tends to be an optimization. A synthesized version of real speech. But it has to be based on some real speech. So I thought we’d take a listen to some real life speakers and how they’re doing things. Listen to them and then after each clip talk through what we’re hearing and sort of how we could do that on the page and sort of what lessons we could take from the clip we’ve heard and apply it to the actual dialogue we’re writing.

**Craig:** I love this so much.

**John:** Great. It was actually harder to find some of the stuff than I would have guessed. So, online you can find a lot of examples of recordings of people about their accent and where they’re reading the same text so you can hear specifically how they’re doing diphthongs and upspeak and stuff. But I wanted to hear people talk in sort of more natural conversation. This first one is from a clip about Appalachian English or mountain talk. And so let’s take a listen to this.

**Male Voice:** Everybody hears about Graham County, don’t they? And how good the people is, how they’re happy. I run into people I don’t know, ever seen them in my life. And I help them in any way I can. Somebody the other day said you’ll get knocked in the head. And I said, well, if I do I’m just knocked. It’s just good-hearted. Everybody you meet, just 99% of them. If I didn’t live here I’d move, wouldn’t you?

**Male Voice:** Where you going to go on vacation? If I was going to go on a vacation I’d just stay right on here.

**Male Voice:** Oh yes.

**Male Voice:** On my days off I’m in here.

**John:** All right. So there’s so much to unpack there. And so obviously we should spend a long time on his accent, which is fascinating. But I really want to look at his choice of words and sort of how he’s putting his thoughts together.

That question at the end, like “don’t they” at the end of something. It’s an emphasis. It’s a softener. You know, he’s not speaking in straightforward sentences that end in periods. There’s question marks at the end of things that’s not kind of classically uptalk. You know, his use of the verb to be, he’s using is where we would traditionally use a different form. There’s a lot there that you could write down and it would give you a very good sense of his voice as a character.

**Craig:** Yeah. His sentences, let’s just call them phrases, because sentences is really a function of prose. When we talk we talk in phrases. And his phrases are usually built around a word. So they’re not balanced phrases. They’re leading up to a thing. Like wood. Like carrying wood. Like I’m going to say something about a garbage bag. I’m going to say something about blah-blah. Mountain talk. I love talk by the way. Talk.

**John:** Talk.

**Craig:** Talk. So there’s a certain staccato element to it. And they’re built around a single thing. They’re not complicated in terms of structure. There’s no internal clauses. The sentences are very direct. Very clipped. Love that.

**John:** Yeah. So, if you were to write this kind of character into your script, my instinct would be if he’s using alternate words for places, use those alternate words to reflect what he’s actually doing, but don’t go crazy trying to indicate the dialect and to try to spell things the way he’s saying them. Because that’s only going to be frustrating for the reader. And it’s not actually going to be helpful for the actor or anyone else down the road. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** I completely agree. So, what you don’t want to do is get into that weird, because it almost looks like you’re just making fun of it or something. Use the words. I’m a big believer of the flexibility of language when it comes to these things. Obviously I wrote a show where people in Soviet Ukraine were speaking English with English accents. I just think what is the most natural thing to convey – intent. But with a character like this I think it’s fair to use vocabulary, like you say, that we might not know. And then I think about the reader as somebody that just like you when you’re listening to somebody like this instead of stopping them every single time they say a word you’re not quite sure of, you wait. And you try and figure it out yourself using context. And generally speaking we kind of can. So, the point is you got the basic idea, right?

And if you were totally confused then that’s an interesting thing to happen. So you just think how would I actually receive this. Would I be able to piece it together and get the basic idea? Or would I be utterly lost? That’s a good decision that you should make as a writer.

**John:** Another thing to listen for is how a speaker will incorporate other people’s speech into what they’re saying. And so people don’t say like “and then he says blah-blah-blah.” They will actually just shift their voice a little bit to indicate that it’s a different person speaking within their own speech. And so listen for how characters do that in movies, but also how folks do that in the real world. And that a person will be speaking as two different people without necessarily making it crystal clear on the page what they’re doing.

And so what you might end up doing in a block of dialogue is putting some of that stuff into italics to indicate that you’re speaking as the other person. Or sometimes you need to break that out as a parenthetical. But people can convey a surprisingly dense amount of information in what’s actually a very short bit of dialogue there.

**Craig:** My grandparents did this very Brooklyn thing. When they would tell a story about something that happened to them in the past, even like a day earlier, “Oh, I ran into Rose at the market and she says…and I says…and she says…” It was always she says, I says. So says, sez, became this all-purpose describer of her turn to talk, my turn to talk. But it was always there. It was never we’re just going to shift with voices. And it was never I said and she said. It’s the weirdest thing. I remember as a kid just thinking that is bizarre. But they all did it.

**John:** They’re staying in the present tense as they’re narrating a past event. And that’s really common.

**Craig:** But also violating the conjugation of the verb to say.

**John:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** Because it’s not “I says.” It was like says became a new way of saying said.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very interesting.

**John:** Vernacular is great. Let’s take a listen to this is a woman who has moved to Austin, Texas. I’m not clear where actually she moved from. She’s being interviewed by a person, so it is a little bit more – it’s not a natural conversation, but it reminded me sort of if you were being deposed as a witness. Or often in movie scenes someone has to sort of tell a history of something. And it feels more like that. So, let’s take a listen to this lady from Austin.

**Female Voice:** About eight years ago we picked Austin. We didn’t know anything about Austin. None of us had ever been to Texas. We didn’t even honestly know it was the capitol of Texas. I mean, I’m embarrassed to say, but I didn’t know anything. I thought it was a small town actually. And so we flew to Austin, my husband and I flew to Austin, and we really liked it. And we came here for about a week on our own for our little vacation and then we flew our boys in. They both lived in different places. And we flew our boys in. And so we had a family vacation for a week with just my husband and myself and then a week with our boys.

**Male Voice:** Great.

**Female Voice:** And we all really liked Austin, but yeah, we just thought oh well, Austin. It was just another place we’d, you know, gone. And we went to a lot of the different sites. You know, Lady Bird Lake. And the wildflowers. And we took a tour of the capitol. And we did all kinds of things like that.

**Craig:** So this is not actually a lady from Austin.

**John:** No. It’s a lady who has moved to Austin.

**Craig:** She has moved to Austin. Interesting. So she doesn’t have that classic Texan accent. Even the Austin accent which is quite a bit more muted than like a Houston accent or a Dallas accent. Very singsong-y. Very kind of rambly tale-telling. I like it. Not an efficient talker.

**John:** Well, there is an efficiency, but there’s no periods in that whole clip. She basically–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s as if she never wants to actually finish a thought so somebody else could interject. I also think it’s really interesting how she is continuously clarifying what she just said.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So when we moved to Austin, we moved to Austin, my husband and my boys and I, blah-blah-blah. It’s commas, and commas, and commas. She sort of clarified the thing she just said. Not to soften it but just to paint out the whole picture of stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a kind of indecisiveness going on in there, even the details of the story are somewhat indecisive. We got to Austin and it was just another place. It was just Austin. But as she’s telling it you can kind of feel like she’s building it as she goes and revising it as she goes. And when she makes a list it’s like a this, and then a this, and then a this, and then a this.

Because efficient is not a term of judgment. Efficient would be I visited Austin with my husband. I loved it. I thought perhaps I could live here. I invited my sons. We looked around. And we decided, yes, we want to live her. That is efficient. This is more of a kind of exploration, you know, kind of verbal discovery. Some people discover as they go. And I do think you’ve pointed out something really smart. Some people do speak with a kind of grammatical integrity. I’m aware that I’m one of those people that speaks with a certain grammatical integrity. Most people do not. Most people will stick sentences inside of sentences and then abruptly cut it off and begin something new. And that’s an important part of understanding the music of dialogue.

**John:** A thing that frustrates me often as I read interviews that I’ve done for people is they will try to transcribe literally what I said, which has a lot of ands. Basically one continuous thought that never really stops. And so I will tell people, no, no, it’s OK. You can put in periods in places. Because otherwise it will feel sort of like what this lady was talking about where it just keeps going, and keeps going, and keeps going. You do sometimes want to provide some structure here.

The other thing I think is important to understand about the context of this, she seems a little bit nervous.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** During this interview. I think that’s part of her rambling is her being nervous. But it’s also a weirdly artificial thing for it to not be a true conversation. If she was doing that and she was in a conversation with somebody, they would talk over the other person, or give “uh-huhs” or affirmatives to keep the flow going. And so she’s trying to keep the flow going by herself and it’s a little bit like dancing by yourself. It’s a little bit awkward what she’s doing.

**Craig:** Yes. There are people that are not comfortable leading a conversation. Just like we were saying some actors could easily dominate another actor if they were all left to their own devices. I suspect that this woman is not comfortable leading a conversation solo like that. This is not somebody practiced in the art of soliloquy.

So, there are moments where I suspect she’s waiting for somebody to jump in and they don’t. And she’s filling space to kind of be able to get to the next thing because she was not necessarily prepared to immediately go to the next thing or explain herself. It can be eerie when somebody asks you a question and then never interrupts you. You start to feel like perhaps you’re slowly hanging yourself because you just keep talking. Because you’re waiting for an interruption that never comes.

**John:** That’s a very classic technique, especially in documentary interviews, where they’ll just let you be silent for a moment. You’ll answer a question and they just won’t put another question back. And so therefore you’re just like I’ve got to keep talking. I’ve got to get stuff out there. It’s a very natural instinct. I remember I had to do a deposition for this legal case and at first I was trying to explain everything. And then in a break the lawyers on my side said you’re trying to explain this as if you’re on a DVD commentary. Don’t do that. Just answer the question in an efficient way as you can and move on.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s all about context. I’m sure in other situations she could be much more what we’re saying efficient and direct and not try to keep the conversation going.

**Craig:** But there is a beauty to it. Again, the poetry of somebody stringing it all together in one long melody is really useful. This is very useful. People really should be listening carefully to this. Just so we’re clear about what happens when we read things, and when people in Hollywood receive scripts, the very first thing that will stick out is bad dialogue.

It is not the worst sin that you can commit. Dialogue can be repaired. The worst sin you can commit is a boring story about nothing that matters. But, no one will realize it’s a boring story about nothing that matters on page one. What they will recognize maybe even halfway down the page is that no one sounds like a human being. So this is really important for people to hopefully absorb.

**John:** One thing I should point out here is if you were to put what she said into your script it would be terrible. It would be terrible because it’s not interesting at all. Because I don’t care about anything that she’s saying right there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But if she were talking about something interesting and she was talking about it in the way that she’s talking about it there, that could be great. If she had to describe the events of a night, like a horrible thing had happened and she had to describe it and she was using some of that stuff. That would be fantastic. Or if she was trying to conceal something. Love it. That could be great.

**Craig:** Yes. There’s a tendency writers have to convert every human being into a grand orator when it is time to talk about something that is important or hurtful or emotional. Suddenly they become these beautiful speechmakers. That is not how people tell these stories. I’ve listened to people tell heartbreaking stories. And that is when they’re at their most inefficient. And stilting. And self-interruptive. And self-denying and contradicting and fixing and repairing.

It’s what makes us human in those moments. Emotion does not make us more eloquent. It makes us less eloquent.

**John:** Yeah. A great example is the scene in Marriage Story where Scarlett Johansson’s character, she has an incredibly long speech where she’s in the office with Laura Dern. Laura Dern, everything she’s saying is practiced because she’s given that exact same talk a hundred times. Scarlett Johansson’s character is discovering these things for the first time and it’s going to be inefficient, but it’s also going to be emotional and have this ability to cycle back on itself. So both kinds of speech can happen in the same scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are characters, like I think of the character that Jared Harris plays in Chernobyl. He is a scientist and he is someone whose emotions are very bottled up. He’s an emotionally constipated man. And he’s very intellectual. And when it comes time for him to say something important at long last when he does it does have a sort of speech integrity to it because he’s that kind of person. I believe it from him. I don’t think I would believe it from say Stellan Skarsgård’s character. When Stellan Skarsgård’s character, Boris Shcherbina, has a moment where he is emotional and needs to declare something, it comes out as a series of outrageous cursing and then just violence towards a phone. Because he is not an intellectual man. And he does not speak in that way.

It’s just important. It’s one of the ways that we help defeat the most dreaded of notes. “All of your characters sound the same.”

**John:** The worst. So, these were two examples of people speaking by themselves. I was looking for better examples of dialogue and interaction between characters which was surprisingly hard to find until I remembered, oh that’s right, there are podcasts. So this first clip I want to play is from the Las Culturistas podcast is by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers. It’s a weekly podcast or semi-weekly podcast. They had Ben Platt on. And so this is the three of them talking. So just notice how they talk over each other. How they acknowledge what the other person is saying. How thoughts don’t get completed and sort of get clarified before the full thing was done. How they know you’re a little bit ahead of where they’re going so they don’t feel like they have to finish thoughts. I thought it was just an interesting clip. So let’s take a listen to this clip with Ben Platt.

**Matt Rogers:** You’re telling me like when you’re like doing a show on a Friday night, are you giving it a little bit more than you are on a Sunday? On a matinee? Tell me.

**Ben Platt:** Uh, it depends. It’s like very specific to the actual night. It depends who I know is in the audience. It depends how many shows are left in the week. Because sometimes, obviously because it’s a Friday night it’s exciting, it is like easier to give more than on Sunday. But also Sunday you have 36 hours ahead of you that are free, so you can kind of give abandon. So it depends. I would say like a Wednesday Matt is not ideal.

**Matt:** Not the best.

**Ben:** To come to, unless you’re like 65 and up.

**Matt:** Yeah. Yeah. And you get that little discount ticket.

**Ben:** There’s definitely like an A, B, C version of the show that you have to have.

**Bowen Yang:** Yes.

**Ben:** This is what I’m doing if I feel completely healthy and I have all of the faculties. And then B is like I’m trying to save a little for something exciting at the end of the week. And C is like I can barely be bothered to be here.

**Bowen:** Oh wow. You’ve like very clearly delineated all of these scenarios though.

**Ben:** Oh yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time in that wonderful show.

**Matt:** In that show. So basically, wait, hold on. So do you usually know when someone notable is coming? And do you prefer to know?

**Ben:** I ask to know. So I would receive like literally like an itemized list before like a half hour every night of everyone that was there. Because at the beginning it was–

**Matt:** You don’t want to go out on stage and then see Beyoncé.

**Bowen:** Right.

**Ben:** One million percent. Like I don’t want to clock Meryl like mid-number. And also like in that show in particular like I spend so much time out at the fourth wall or whatever.

**Matt:** Yeah.

**Ben:** So like I’m going to see. And it’s a small house, so I’m going to see whoever it is. And they’re always in the same like nice house seats. So I love to have all the information. That’s like a theme in my life in general is I like to have all the information.

**Matt:** Please. Beforehand.

**Ben:** Because anything unknown is far more anxiety-provoking to me than just like dealing with what the actual reality is going to be.

**John:** All right. So this feels like three people around a table. You can imagine they’re in a diner and they’re having this conversation. So, it’s a little bit heightened because it’s a podcast and there’s microphones in front of them, but it feels pretty genuine to what they would actually be, how they would actually be talking as a group. And you notice there at the very end Ben Platt starts a word and stops it and just keeps going on. He knows you know what he’s going to say and he can just sort of keep moving on to the next thought.

I also really want to point out how much along the way the other two guys are acknowledging and sort of affirming what he’s saying. They’re checking in that they’re actually hearing and they’re listening to him.

**Craig:** That’s the thing that I picked up on the most. So, first of all, these three guys are young. I mean, they’re not young like children, but they’re younger than we are. So there’s a certain youth to their discussion and it is indicated by energy. They are all three of them very energetic. They are listening intently to each other and their conversation is a little bit, I’m not going to say combat, it’s not competition, but it’s a group sport. They understand, each one of them, that they’re supposed to be talking. Right? No one is just going to be quiet for a while.

**John:** It feels like they’re all learning forward.

**Craig:** Yes. They’re all leaning forward. So, what that means is, and you can tell Ben Platt understands they’re leaning forward and he’s used to it. He’s fine with it. But that means he has to speak really quickly. Listen how fast he’s talking. Because he knows they’re fast. They’re on everything he says. There’s no chance for him to slow down, because immediately one or two of them, Bowen or Matt, or both at the same time will go “Yes.” Which as you point out is affirming. They themselves are playing a role of supportive interviewer who wants to play.

So, they don’t just say yes and then ask a question. They also notice the kinds of things he’s saying and then they kind of kick it back and make a little observation, a slightly humorous observation. This is very naturalistic. Count how many times all of them say the word like. A billion. But it’s not dreadful. It’s not caricature. It’s just a natural sort of use of the vernacular like. And they have no problem interrupting each other. Interruption is almost essential to that kind of discussion.

**John:** Yeah. So I think when we’re talking about natural dialogue I think too often we’re assuming it means slow. That it means it’s paced down and it’s very sort of stuff just comes out when it sort of comes out. This is natural dialogue. People are doing kind of what they would naturally do. But it is pretty fast. It’s like it’s Sorkin-level speed. And the conversation they’re having isn’t exactly sort of what you’d expect in an Aaron Sorkin movie. You can imagine having this kind of discussion in an Aaron Sorkin script.

Now, think about what this would actually look like on the page. You wouldn’t have all of those affirmations being put in as dual dialogue or interruptions there along the way. It would be far too much. But you would need to have some indication that people are freely able to speak over each other and that we’re able to process both conversations happening at the same time. This would be a great example of Greta Gerwig’s script where she does the little slashes in the dialogue to indicate where overlaps are supposed to happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This would be great for that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it implies a certain kind of direction as well. Because when you are shooting a scene like this, if I’m making a movie and in the movie there’s a scene where Ben Platt, Bowen Yang, and Matt Rogers are discussing how Ben Platt either does or doesn’t go full out on a given performance based on the day, and how he reacts or wants to react when famous people are in the audience, their conversation is so simultaneous and fast and Bowen and Matt are so interactive with Ben. And we understand that the ground rules of their discussion are such that anyone at any point can jump in and talk and not stop the train. You need to shoot it where all three of them are visible.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Because what happens when you’re shooting and there’s only one person on camera you can’t have anyone overlap with them because it won’t cut together with the master shot where they all are. So, it implies, in my mind at least, it implies you want a master shot and you almost – there’s a version of this where you just move the camera slowly around the table. And the camera doesn’t necessarily respond to what anyone is doing. You’re just absorbing the speed and the rhythm of it.

**John:** Yeah. The other option of course here is that you’re shooting multiple cameras at once. You could be on singles on people as long as you were actually doing the same shot.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** That’s the other option to sort of get into that situation. But it does feel very – it’s very live, very present. This is rat-a-tat-tat stuff happening here. And the whole show is pitched up at that speed.

**Craig:** Yes. I love the speed of it.

**John:** So here’s a different example. And this one feels a little bit more sitting back rather than leaning forward into the conversation. This is from a podcast called F-Work, But I’m Going to Go. This one is just two women. They have this podcast every week. They’re friends. They’re having a conversation. But let’s take a listen to their clip.

**Female Voice:** I would love to travel and work.

**Female Voice:** I would say I would – I would trade anything to have that life again. Letting the company pay for everything.

**Female Voice:** Everything.

**Female Voice:** On my travel. True. Oh my gosh, like and you just go a couple of seminars, you know. You work with a couple of teams. That’s it. And then after that you’re good. You got a day, a day and a half, or two days to chill.

**Female Voice:** Especially when I used to travel back and forth to Houston like it was just great. Because I’m like [unintelligible], tour the Budweiser facility, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. And get to hang out with my friends down there. You can really make places a second home at that point when your job is paying them for—

**Female Voice:** Hey I’m going to be in the city on so-and-so, so-and-so date.

**Female Voice:** Right.

**Female Voice:** And then especially if you know somebody there, you can take that. I could use this little hotel money for some more food and drink. Give me that American Express card.

**Female Voice:** Right.

**Female Voice:** So, yeah.

**Female Voice:** Cash me out.

**Female Voice:** But the people that don’t have that work-life balance, I couldn’t imagine like just the money sacrifice for your mental health. Like does that money, does your pay rate, does your salary sacrifice for you not having a life?

**Female Voice:** But see I’m just trying to think about what millennials that I know that I don’t know have a work-life balance.

**Female Voice:** I don’t know none, but you know it’s some out there.

**Female Voice:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** So, as opposed to the other conversation which felt very leaned forward, this one felt leaned back to me. This feels like people who are comfortable in their chairs having this conversation. So they’re very actively listening, but there’s not that frenzied pitch of sort of like got to get on the next thing, got to get on the next thing. And there’s no hunger to be funny, or to score a point.

**Craig:** Correct. So the difference here contextually is what happens when you’re dealing with a conversation where three people who don’t necessarily know each other are conducting an interview and being hyper engaged or two people who know each other really well. These two women know each other really well. It almost seems like what’s happening is they share a brain. And they’re having thoughts and they’re just alternating which one of them is going to say the shared brain’s thoughts. Because they’re in utter agreement and there’s no inquisition. It’s just a complete commiseration, celebration of agreement. The pace of it slows down because they’re in no rush to kind of impress or keep anyone’s interest, by the way.

They don’t seem to be aware that anybody would be listening. They are literally there for each other. It’s wonderful.

**John:** Yes. But I need to point out this is Episode 404, so this podcast has been going on for a very long time.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Which I think is also great. So they have such a long history. You know, as long a history as you and I do basically. And they know each other so well, so they can sort of anticipate the brain.

Now let’s think about this kind of conversation in your script. And talk about first what they’re talking about. They’re talking about work-life balance. They’re talking about taking business trips. Their conversation is so terrific and specific to sort of what they’re looking for in a business trip and sort of what is important. And how they would describe it versus two other people would describe it versus two other people is what makes these characters’ voices seem distinct and different. So it’s not about, yes, these are two young black women and they have millennial voices. There’s vocal fry. There’s all these sort of like very specific things about the actual audio tone of the language which is so great and worth studying.

But just the words on the page and sort of how they are framing their thoughts about it is what makes their conversation unique and specific.

**Craig:** Yeah. For something like this if I were trying to build a scene with these two women having a conversation about this topic my concentration would be on the woman who is listening. Because the interesting parts in a weird way between these two, at least in terms of their dialogue, is when the moment of agreement and hand-off occurs. “Yes.” I love – I mean, there’s this drawn out thing that happens which is much different than when Bowen and Matt go, “Right,” together. “Right.” This is like, “Yes!” It’s like a relief. You just said something true.

And I love the person listening and it’s like they’re hearing this wonderful – it’s like eating delicious food and then going, “Yes, this is so good.” And now let me talk. And then I want to switch over to the other one. And I would be describing them. And even editorially I would constantly be on the person listening, because that’s where to me at least that’s the fun part of these two is how much they – it’s their agreement. It’s their joy of agreement.

**John:** It’s easy to imagine characters who are like these two women in your story and finding great things for them to talk about. And I sort of like keep wanting to give them stories to hear how they would talk through it and how they would wrestle with a problem. So I kind of want to see them solving mysteries. I want to see them doing stuff because I think they actually have a really cool relationship with each other and it’s exciting to think about how they would talk about the stuff they’re encountering.

**Craig:** There’s something also very comic about agreement. I don’t know why. It’s just funny. When you imagine a scene where someone is explaining something to another person. Maybe they’re in opposition. But they have an ally with them. So they’re delivering a speech. And their ally occasionally goes, “That’s right. Damn straight. Amen. Sure said something there.” And at some point the person is going to turn to them and go, “Would you shut up? Stop agreeing.” Agreeing is funny. I don’t know why. It’s just the notion of just full agreement is amusing to me.

So, when I’m listening to them I have a smile on my face just from how happy they are to agree. And it’s a different kind of, like I said, there is a purity and an intimacy to these two because they don’t have any motives here. They’re not trying to get somebody to open up and inform them or educate them about their process or anything. There’s no guest. It’s just the two of them. It’s lovely.

**John:** We often think about well scenes have to have conflict and if there’s no conflict then there’s no scene. That is still largely true. But the conflict doesn’t have to become between the two characters who are talking in the scene. The conflict can be about what is happening in this situation. A conflict could be an outside party. But like it doesn’t mean that the two characters in any scene have to be directly in conflict. That’s not at all a goal.

Something about their relationship also reminded me about Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn in Swingers. And like, yes, they have contrasting styles, but they’re also buds and they can hang out. And the ability to hang out with interesting people is something that dialogue should give us.

**Craig:** There’s also the potential for – if we know you have a conflict, right, there may be an instinct to just get to the conflict. Jane shows up and tells Sheila, “I’m angry at you. Here’s why.” But sometimes the best way to introduce conflict is to just have an agreement fest and then suddenly on point seven someone says this and the other woman goes…

There’s a great sketch if you want to talk about dialogue and how much you can do with one word, there’s a great Key and Peele sketch where they play two women and one of them, Key, is going on and on about how she’s done with her man. And Peele is playing her friend. And all she says is, “OK.” And she has a thousand different Okays for like exactly, completely, I totally agree, right, oh that’s so true. And then Key’s character starts to say some things that are a little off and the OK becomes O-kay. And she never says anything else except OK. But there’s I think 50 different Okays. They each mean a different thing. It’s brilliant.

**John:** That’s great. And again in your script that probably is a good example of like a parenthetical where you’re going to have to put what is the actual shading of that OK in the situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. Great. Well that was a fun exercise. So let’s maybe try to do this again on some future occasion.

**Craig:** I would love to.

**John:** Because that was lovely to do.

Let’s do some questions. Matt from Massachusetts asks, “As I write a feature screenplay I am periodically trapped up by a vestigial thought from my novel writing days about first person versus third person omniscient perspective. In a novel it’s pretty obvious. But do you ever think about this in terms of screenplays, particularly if they don’t have voiceover? If your main character is in a situation where they can’t possibly know something we have to decide whether or not to become omniscient and share that information with the viewer.”

Craig, what is your thinking about limited perspective and omniscience as you’re coming up with a story? And do you always have a plan from the start, or is it situational?

**Craig:** It’s situational. So you make choices about perspective all the time. And I think we’ve done, certainly we’ve done at least an episode about perspective as a specific tool in our tool belt. You want to know from whose perspective and there are choices. It’s either from a character’s perspective or it is from the omniscient camera’s perspective. And if it’s from the camera’s perspective the point is we’re going to see something that the people don’t. Or, that we are seeing something that is a shared perspective by a lot of people. A crowd scene for instance.

So, you want to choose those moments carefully. Typically the kind of omniscient we’re going to see something but nobody else will, it’s the bailiwick of mysteries, thrillers, twisty kind of things. They are associated with the dum-dum-dum kind of sound in your head. And it needs to be used carefully I think. A little goes a long way.

**John:** My daughter has started watching Criminal Intent. Not, Criminal Intent. She’s started watching one of the CBS procedurals that’s been on for like 20 years. And so she’s watching an episode from the first season and I was so surprised because it opens with this scene that’s from the point of view from none of the actual main characters of the show. And it basically shows the crime but hides who the killer was in the crime. And then the rest of the episode is trying to figure out who the killer was. And it’s just not a format that I’m used to at all. But it was a very common format for a long time in procedurals.

So, I agree with Craig that you’re going to be making choices based on the situation you’re going to find yourself in and sort of whether it’s going to be most effective for us as the audience to have information that the protagonist doesn’t have. You’re also going to make some fundamental choices about how your story is told. And so this thing I was writing the treatment on I had to very explicitly from the start say we are not cutting away to this villain’s point of view. This is not going to be a movie where we ever see what the villain is doing independent of the hero.

**Craig:** And you’re allowed to set those ground rules. Just know that if you are going to make a point of saying here’s a thing that someone doesn’t know but now I’m telling it to you, it will always threaten artifice. It disrupts our verisimilitude. Because life doesn’t work that way.

In life we have a perspective. It’s through our two eyes. That’s what we get. So, it’s a little artificial. It can be wonderful. It can also be slightly cheaty. It’s one of those things.

**John:** Yeah. 1917 which was a great movie from this past year had incredibly limited POV where you only follow those guys as they’re walking through the trenches and doing everything. That’s an extreme example. But Parasite also does limited POV. And it could have cutaway to any of those character’s perspective on what they thought was going on. And director and writers really figured out what would be the most effective way to tell their specific story.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. MJ writes, “Last year I made it to the second round of Austin Film Festival.” I assume that’s the screenwriting contest portion of that. “And after receiving the feedback and making changes I felt that my script was ready to submit to my company as a prospective buyer.” Hmm, they have their own company? Maybe they mean another company. “After reading the submission agreement, which they make every submitter sign, I became wary of signing it. My fiancé’s dad is a lawyer. And he said he became unhinged after reading the agreement. There’s one section in particular that concerns us.” And I think what MJ is saying is this is the agreement with the Austin Film Festival? I don’t know. Or with the company?

**John:** So he’s submitting it to a company it looks like. And so the submission agreement had some clauses in it.

**Craig:** OK. So their submission agreement is the problem. “Section five in short states that any damages awarded through arbitration shall not exceed $10,000 for film or $40,000 for television series. I have two questions regarding this. One, is this sort of agreement common? Two, what’s the likelihood that I could be screwed over by signing something like this?”

John? You have a law degree. I mean—[laughs]

**John:** As a lawyer…so what I will say is from other folks that I’ve talked to, some places do have you sign submission agreements. They’re not absolutely all that uncommon. I’m not particularly freaked out by this. I think if you’re approaching everything from a defensive posture like oh my god they’re going to steal my stuff and take my work and it’s all going to be a disaster, you’re not going to have a very good, happy time in this industry.

So, submission agreements are there because the company is trying to protect themselves from claims that someone stole – that their movie was stolen. This blockbuster was actually based on this thing that I sent into the company. So that’s why companies have submission agreements. Studios have them. Other places have them. I’m not actually not worried about it.

But I would ask is the place you’re submitting to have they made movies? Have they actually done things that are out there in the world? If it’s just some person you’ve never heard of, then I don’t know that it’s worth signing any submission agreement because I’m not sure that they’re worth anything at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. And behind all this there is a legal concept called adhesion contract. And adhesion contract, it sort of describes a lot of the sort of boilerplate that we are confronted with all the time. For instance, terms of use. We’re constantly signing terms of use that we do not read. And adhesion contract is basically boilerplate language that has been defined by one party. It’s usually a party that is bigger and stronger. And is set up as a kind of hard and fast and unnegotiable gate through which a kind of lesser powerful party has to go through. You don’t have a choice. Sign this or piss off.

And when you do have an adhesion contract there is a possibility that a court – let’s say this company did somehow do something damaging to you then a court would say, yeah, the fact that this poor writer had to sign your dumb agreement does not mean that it’s actually enforceable to the extent that you wish it would be.

That’s something that a lawyer would have to go through. And it’s not anything I think that anybody could ever count on. But just be aware that that is a concept in law. So, we’re held I guess to the standards of these boilerplate definitions maybe not quite as strongly as we think we are.

**John:** Yeah. So I think I’m speaking for both of us saying I’m not especially worried about this thing, but just any place you’re sending this to just keep an eye out for are they really a reputable place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. And, I mean, just remember that some of these things are signs of who they are. You know? Are they worried that people are going to be suing – have other people sued them? Is that why this is in there? Because they’ve…

By and large, again, you know, our position is people aren’t really actively ripping other people off actively. But there are a lot of bad actors in the world who do fuzzy – that gray area stuff. That’s where it gets gross. And if they’re all wired up on avoiding lawsuits and going to arbitration and limiting damages it makes me wonder why. So, anyway, something – food for thought.

**John:** Food for thought. Justin in Pasadena writes, “If a writers strike does end up happening, what advice can you give to us non-WGA writers? Are there any unique opportunities we should know about? Or might there be some workarounds we should use to our advantage? And, of course, how can we not step on any toes in the process?”

So prefacing all of this by saying we can talk through hypotheticals about a writers strike, but there’s nothing saying that’s going to happen. But Craig you and I were both around in the 2008 strike and I remember we both interacted with some folks who were not WGA members who were coming out to the picket lines and stuff like that, too. So, let’s talk through at least what we remember from the 2007-2008 strike.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, just as a matter of law, if you’re not a member of the Writers Guild, and the Writers Guild is on strike, that means there’s no current contract between the companies and the union. And you can certainly legally work for them. There used to be a thing, and maybe it’s still there, when you apply for a membership to the Writers Guild it says, “Did you work during the strike?” And you’re supposed to say “yeah I did” if you did. And then they in theory could kind of imply that you can never be a member here, but they’re actually not allowed to do that at all. I remember that came up in a boardroom discussion.

But that’s the legal reality. The ethical reality is, you know, the world does not look kindly on replacement players. Because what you’re doing is making it harder for the union to end the strike and ideally to end the strike in favor of the union that you want to want to be part of. Because one thing is for sure, Justin. The strike will end. And when it ends then you’re going to want to be part of that union. And you’re going to want to be part of a union that has made the best possible deal for its members. So, the question is were you making that easier or harder to do by taking this replacement writer job?

And also what do you think the companies are going to be paying you? Do they think they’re going to be paying you union stuff? You’re not going to be getting pension. You’re not going to be getting health. You’re not going to be getting residuals. You’re not going to be getting credit protections. So, do you want to know how to not step on any toes in the process, don’t take those jobs.

**John:** Yeah. Don’t take those jobs. I would also say back in 2008 it was sort of hard to find screenwriters and actually talk with them. And so one of the nice things about picketing, maybe the only nice thing about picketing is you got to meet a lot of other people. And so I got to meet a lot of other writers who I’d only sort of seen their credits. But I also got to meet a lot of writers who were not yet WGA members who’d come out at Paramount at 6:30 in the morning when I was picketing there. And I would talk to them as we walked in small circles. And some of them have gone on to become brand name writers in this industry.

So, it was a chance to be out there and talk with folks. But that was 2008. This is not 2008. I mean, there’s so many more opportunities to meet writers in person.

**Craig:** Way more.

**John:** Now than there ever were before. So that’s not a good cause for a work stoppage. Hopefully the situation will not come up at all, but if it were to come up I agree with Craig. You’re doing yourself and no one any favors by looking at this as an opportunity for you to advance your career.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty shortsighted. I have a side question. I mean, what is the value of the actual act of picketing for us? I’ve always wondered this. Traditionally the point of a picket line would be to picket the institution you were striking against. A factory. A hospital. A hotel. And then if scabs were coming into work they would have to go through the picket line and the people picketing would go “boo” and shame them. But just make it hard for other unions – so a lot of unions, we’re respecting the picket line. We’re not going through. We don’t really have that ability. It’s not like the trucks stopped rolling into these lots, or anybody else stopped rolling into the lots. We wouldn’t even picket every single thing.

In our circumstance, isn’t the best tool we have to just not work? I’m just curious. What do we get from the picketing other than the kind of meeting other writers and getting exercise, which for us honestly as a group super important?

**John:** I would say, top of my head I would say visibility just to make it clear that this is an actual thing that’s happened. Something that news cameras can point out is kind of useful. A reminder that a thing is actually happening so that people who work inside a studio on a daily basis can see like, oh that’s right, this is actually a thing that’s happening, even if they’re not in a development role. If they’re an accountant they say like, ah, this is a thing that’s happening. So that the president of the studio has to drive past that picket line every day is not probably a great thing for them.

But I think there’s also an aspect of solidarity and just sort of – because what is different about a person who is working on a factory line is that they see their coworkers every day. Screenwriters don’t see each other every day. I mean, TV writers do see each other every day. And so there is probably a solidarity and we’re all in this together thing which is I’m guessing important about picketing classically. But I think it’s fair to ask. This is a different time now than 20 years ago. Things do change.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m just kind of curious if there’s some other less industrial revolution way of doing this. Because I don’t perceive that in the 2007-2008 strike that the act of picketing itself had a dramatic impact on what we did. I could be wildly wrong on that. There’s a certain performative aspect to it that I’m just wondering. Like is there something better? I guess really I’m not saying don’t do something, but rather is there a better version or a more impactful modern version?

**John:** If you have thoughts about that as listeners you can write in and tell us what you think.

**Craig:** Neo-picketing. What would it look like?

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this website called Travel Time. And so often with Google Maps and other things you can figure out how long it will take you to get from point A to point B. So like from my house to Disney, how long will it take for me to get there as I’m getting my picketing sign ready to march there? This is the opposite of that. So this basically says given a certain amount of time from a certain location how far could you get. This is based on usual traffic or how transit lines work. And it’s really fascinating to look at different cities and say like, OK, from the center of London in one hour I can get through to basically anywhere in London. Center of Los Angeles, how far can I get to somewhere in the Los Angeles region? And it’s disappointingly small in number.

**Craig:** Well, I would love to see how far you can get in London in one hour, because I feel like there was one point where I think I went three blocks in an hour.

**John:** Oh, certainly not driving. But like through the Tube and other ways.

**Craig:** Through the Tube, yes. Or walking even, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Walking. So it’s an interesting way of comparing cities and sort of the choices cities have made. Also just how geography sometimes constrains the ability of cities to function certain ways.

**Craig:** That sounds excellent. I love any tool that makes traveling easier. I have to travel a lot more than I ever thought I would. And so I’ve become like super fussy about making it easier for myself.

My One Cool Thing is another person. So I think two weeks in a row that my One Cool Thing is a person. And this is slightly political. Not even slightly. It’s completely political. My One Cool Thing this week is a man named Mark Kelly. Mark Kelly is running for the Senate in Arizona. He’s the Democratic Party candidate for the Senate in Arizona. This is going to be a special election because of the death of John McCain. So when John McCain died the Governor of Arizona appointed Republican Martha McSally who is not good.

And so Mark Kelly is running. Mark Kelly, I’ve met him, he is fascinating. He is a former astronaut. And he is a combat veteran as well with the navy. And he is also the husband of Gabby Giffords, who was the former congresswoman from Arizona until she was shot by a deranged gunman. And, you know, went through traumatic brain injury. And he’s had one hell of a life.

And he is just a remarkably decent guy and kind of a reminder that there are still these wonderfully principled people who have dedicated their lives to this country. And who have also suffered personally because of the way some of our laws work in this country and have not given up. If anything else they have tripled down and said I want to fix it. And sometimes there are days when I think I don’t want to be here anymore. [laughs] And then I look at – and I talk to a guy like Mark Kelly who says of course you do. And we fix it. That’s what we do.

So my One Cool Thing this week is Mark Kelly. And, of course, if you want to – he doesn’t do PACs or anything like that. He’s just taking personal donations. So if you want to donate to him just look up I think – what’s the website? Think Blue? Act Blue?

**John:** Act Blue.

**Craig:** Act Blue. Think Blue is the Dodgers slogan. Sorry. Act Blue is the header organization that collects individual donations for democratic candidates. And you can Google up Mark Kelly and find his Act Blue site and make a donation if you so desire.

**John:** Fantastic. We’ll have a link in the show notes to that as well. Stick around after the credits because we will be talking much more politics. But for now, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao with production assistance this week by Stuart Friedel and Dustin Bocks. It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is again by James Launch and Jim Bond.

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. In those show notes you’ll have the links to all the clips that we used. Thank you to the people who put that stuff online. That’s great. It helps us figure out how people talk in real life.

You’ll find the transcript for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We get them usually within the week the episode airs. And remember you can sign up to become a Premium member of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net. That gets you all the back episodes and the bonus segments like the one we’re going to do right now. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, more politics.

**Craig:** Oh goodie.

**John:** Oh goodie. Good stuff. So, here’s a thing that I’ve been doing recently, and I think this was a suggestion from Jon Lovett on Pod Save America. Is when someone says, “Oh, you know Trump is going to get reelected,” the response should be what are you doing today to stop that.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** Basically to throw that back at it. So, on my daily to do list I have this sort of quarter sheet that I use as my to-do list of what I’m going to do every day. And at breakfast I fill it out. I have a new entry in there and it’s Defeat Trump. And every day I have to do something that will actually advance that goal. And so generally it is donating to political candidates, but sometimes it’s actually reading up about things. It’s filling out my California ballot. It’s researching sort of who I want in certain offices. So, I’m trying to do something every day to make sure that I don’t wake up a year from now in an actual fascist nation.

**Craig:** Well I think that’s a great plan. Have you considered somehow destroying the orange makeup factory? How deep do you go?

Yes, I also do not want to – look, I think we are actually every day waking up in a country that is – I’m not going to be an alarmist and say that we are currently living in a fascist state. But we are living in something that is in between what we were and a fascist state.

**John:** Yeah. It’s trending in a bad direction.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. And particularly this latest thing. I mean, the wall between the Justice Department and the White House has always been a kind of necessary check and balance to power. It’s gone. That is terrifying. And the rule of law is breaking down. And one of the reasons why it’s just as important to me that if you have to put all your money on one bet, and it’s a proposition bet, yes or no, you’re always going to be incurring a lot of risk, even if the odds are in your favor you’re incurring risk. So, if the big bet is get rid of Trump that is incurring risk that you will fail.

What you do to hedge that is actively support people who are running for the Senate in particular. I don’t think the makeup of the House of Representatives is going to change dramatically. I think if anything it will even get better, I hope, in terms of people who are opposed to Trump. If the Senate can swing over and be opposed to Trump that is a big deal. Then it is a different situation. It is a wildly different situation.

So, I’m working on that as well. But I think that you’re right. People who sit there and go, “Well you know…” Look, no. Because, OK, fine, then what are we supposed to do? Just curl up and die? I mean, you fight. You rage, rage against the dying of the light.

**John:** Yes. I think back to the special episode we recorded right after Trump was elected called Everything is Going to be OK.

**Craig:** Is it? Were we right?

**John:** But here’s what I’ll say. The fear I was feeling at that moment was so intense. And I sort of thought we would get to this place that we’re at right now. I thought we would get there within a few weeks. And so I guess I was surprised that it’s actually taken this long to do it and the sort of level of incompetence with evil is sort of what’s taken so long to do that.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** That Stephen Miller didn’t know how to do all the terrible things he wanted to do so clearly.

**Craig:** Ted Cruz would have done way more damage by now.

**John:** Oh yeah. Absolutely. So I can take some comfort in that and also in the great successes that happened in the 2018 elections where you saw like, oh, people will actually show up and vote the smart people in. So that gives me a lot of hope.

What’s been frustrating I would say, especially the last three weeks, is looking at the Democratic primaries and the degree to which the people who should be most outraged about what’s happening, the Justice Department things, are directing all of their vitriol at Democratic candidates, which is ridiculous and pointless.

**Craig:** So stupid.

**John:** Let me stipulate, the Democratic nominee is very likely going to be Jewish, gay, or a woman.

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** Almost a guarantee. Unless Biden somehow magically pulls out, it’s going to be one of those three things.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** But it’s true though, right?

**Craig:** Yeah, it does seem – well, the one thing I will say–

**John:** Oh, Bloomberg.

**Craig:** Yeah. And Biden, we are pretty early. So we’re going to run into these other states. We don’t know.

**John:** Or it’s going to either be–

**Craig:** Old.

**John:** It’s either going to be Jewish, gay, woman, or it’s going to be Joe Biden.

**Craig:** Yes. Correct.

**John:** So we have to be prepared for those scenarios. And in preparing for those scenarios let’s be more mindful about the things we are saying about those groups and Joe Biden, because that may be who we are running. So you and I recorded a segment we actually snipped out of the show because it was just goodbye mentions where I ranted about sort of the homophobia and sort of antigay stuff I was seeing being directed towards Pete Buttigieg which was really happening. And I was so frustrated that it was from these people who claim to be giant liberal supporters and that I wasn’t seeing it being called out.

You could say the same about the sexism. You could say the same about anti-Bidenism. Whatever you want to call that.

**Craig:** Antisemitism appears to be missing, which is I guess good? I mean, it is good. Of course it’s good. It’s just kind of curious.

**John:** If we end up with Sanders as the nominee–

**Craig:** Then it will come roaring back.

**John:** It’ll come roaring back and it’s going to be harder to claim the moral high ground when you went after the gay guy fine, you went after the woman fine. So, let’s just, I mean, let’s all be better.

**Craig:** I know. I’m bracing for that. I never forget like how – well, I do. Sometimes I forget. And then America reminds me how many people in America just hate Jewish people and believe that they’re some sort of weird devils in charge of everything. And so I’m bracing for that. If Bernie Sanders is the nominee I just feel like oh boy here we go. Which is a very – you know, it’s a pretty Jewish thing of me think. It’s the way we are.

But, I have been so just – I guess like a dum-dum, just simply focused on doing what needs to be done to get rid of Trump, and I’m happy to make positive arguments, and I could I think make positive arguments for all of those candidates. Maybe not Mike Bloomberg. But all the other ones. But the idea of tearing any of them down right now seems virtually insane.

**John:** Yeah. It does.

**Craig:** What? What? I mean, love who you love. It’s a little bit like my attitude towards movies and television. Like I talk about the things that I love because I think that’s where you actually get the most information. I mean, when they attack each other I feel sick right now, truly sick, in a way I never did before because I just think like, no, we can’t – we can’t. My god.

**John:** We can’t slice each other up over really what are minor differences in what we’re trying to do. The idea that this candidate who is not as progressive or this candidate who is more progressive is going to destroy everything if they become elected is a tremendous fallacy. And so dangerous and so feeds into exactly what the disinformation campaigns are hoping for, where you can’t even tell who are the bots and who are the people who just aren’t thinking this through very well.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, we know that social media is designed to amplify the extremes. It’s just what it does. Because the only way to rise above a kind of large averaged point of view is to be extreme. And then by getting amplified the extremes begin to pull more people to the extremes.

You want to know who I want to vote for? Whoever is running against Donald Trump.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** That’s who I want to vote for.

**John:** And I do like that the candidates will repeatedly say that. They’ll say after each primary they’ll say of course we’re going to support whoever. That’s great. But I think it’s also a good moment to call out like and don’t be assholes to everyone else online because we need everybody here and we need to all be rowing in the same direction.

**Craig:** All hands on deck. All hands on deck. And, look, do I have a preference right now? I mean, I have some. Because, look, California we don’t have to vote just yet. So, I’ve been thinking about it because I don’t feel a great need to decide in this moment right now and commit to a team and be Team Blank or Team Blank. I’m just thinking about it and reading. And that’s how that’s going to go. But I will say that the argument that we have to vote for A or you cannot vote for B because they can’t beat Trump is horseshit.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Every single one of these candidates can beat Donald Trump. Every single one of them. I believe that at the bottom of my heart. Anybody that says Bernie Sanders can’t beat Donald Trump is nuts. And anybody that says that Pete Buttigieg can’t beat Donald Trump is nuts. And the same for Amy Klobuchar and the same for Joe Biden. And by the way, the same even for Mike Bloomberg. Honestly I do believe that in the end what’s going to happen is the great majority of people are going to be voting against Donald Trump.

**John:** Yep. It has to happen.

**Craig:** Let’s not cripple our candidate before they get in there. Let’s not hobble them, you know.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s look at these as competitors for that spot, but not as opponents. Not as villains. We are trying to pick who it is that we think can run this race the best. But that does not mean that we are going to cede any ground to the person who is already in that office.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, I think that because I believe that all of them are capable of beating Donald Trump, then I can also actually then I who would I like to be president of these people. Who would be my preferred candidate? And there are all sorts of reasons to say one or the other. But my god the thought of going out there and saying something cruel about another one of these candidates, I mean, at times I lose my patience with the supporters of a certain candidate because they just are, you know, a handful.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that’s not going to translate to me tearing that candidate down.

**John:** 100%. And I will knock on doors for whoever that person is who is running against Donald Trump.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely. I will donate the maximum amount that I can as an individual. I presume that my wife will as well. And, yeah, I’ll knock on doors and I’ll do what I have to do. I think we’ll all just line up. I mean, that’s the thing. We have to line up and do what needs to be done. And accept that there is no perfect answer. There’s just a better answer. So can we please just choose our better answer with respect for each other and advocate as hard as we can? And I could be wrong, but again with the exception of Mayor Bloomberg who I’m a little concerned about, which is fair, I’m allowed to be concerned, I don’t think that any of the candidates pose an existential threat in the way that Donald Trump does to everyone. But particularly Donald Trump poses an existential threat to immigrants, to people of color, to trans people. Generally to LGBTQ people, I think. And to journalists. And to the law.

Now, what else do I need to say?

**John:** To the notion of democracy. Yes.

**Craig:** Correct. To our existence. It is an existential threat to us and our standing in the world and our place in the world and our future. And in the end – oh, I forgot the biggest one – to our ability to live on this planet.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because he is not helping solve the coming climate crisis. He’s like how can we speed it up.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So really we’re going to tear down any of these candidates while we’re – here comes a car. The car is about to hit you. Who would you like to stop that person in the car? Only this person, no one else.

**John:** No one else.

**Craig:** OK. So what if that person, you don’t get that person? Then I’m getting run over. O-kay. Cool. Cool man. Cool. Good for you.

**John:** Good plan. Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Bye.

* [Victory for both partnered Irish election opponents](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/10/irish-election-couple-who-ran-against-each-other-social-democrats-fianna-fail-both-get-elected) we discussed in [episode 436](https://johnaugust.com/2020/political-movies)
* [Scriptnotes, episode 241](https://johnaugust.com/2016/fan-fiction-and-ghost-taxis), in which John predicts Parasite
* [Assistants’ Advice to Showrunners](https://johnaugust.com/2020/assistants-advice-to-showrunners)
* [Mythic Quest](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/mythic-quest-ravens-banquet/umc.cmc.1nfdfd5zlk05fo1bwwetzldy3) on Apple TV+
* [California Penal Code 632](https://www.wklaw.com/practice-areas/eavesdropping-penal-code-section-632/) and the legality of eavesdropping
* [Scriptnotes, episode 433](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-one-with-greta-gerwig) with Greta Gerwig
* [Appalachian English](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU&feature=youtu.be) from Mountain Talk
* The Austin History Center’s [accounts from visitors](https://soundcloud.com/austinhistorycenter/ahc-3303-klempner-cindy) and an [interview with architect Tom Hatch](https://soundcloud.com/austinhistorycenter/ahc-3341-hatch-tom-20180502a-clip2)
* Ben Platt on [Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/las-culturistas/e/65248782?autoplay=true)
* [Fck Work But Ima Go, episode 404](https://anchor.fm/fckworkpodcast/episodes/Ep–404—Is-You-Gone-Help-or-Micromanage-eao8pe/a-a1ebg8f)
* Key & Peele’s [OK (uncensored)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pufATqebv8)
* [Scriptnotes, episode 45](https://johnaugust.com/2012/setting-perspective-and-terrible-numbers), in which we discuss perspective
* [Adhesion contracts](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adhesion_contract_(contract_of_adhesion))
* [Travel Time](https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/search/0_lat=34.05513&0_lng=-118.25703&0_title=Los%20Angeles%2C%20CA%2C%20USA&0_tt=90)
* [Mark Kelly](https://markkelly.com/) is running for Senate in Arizona
* [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/438standard.mp3).

You can find the original post for this episode [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/assistant-writers).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Well, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 428 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be talking about best practices for assistants who write and also the state of WGA negotiations on both the studio and agency front. Plus in a bonus segment we will make our final ruling on cats.

**Craig:** Which is what everyone has been waiting for for 420 some odd hours.

**John:** Yeah. Craig has opinions on cats and so I cannot wait to get into what those opinions might be.

**Craig:** Mmm. They’re hard. Hard opinions.

**John:** They are fixed opinions on cats.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** All right. Some follow up. We have a live show coming up. It’s December 12. We have amazing guests. Craig, remind us who the guests are.

**Craig:** We have Kevin Feige, who is the mastermind of all things Marvel. He is in many ways probably one of the top five most powerful people in our entire business. Lorene Scafaria, who is our longtime friend, writer-director of Hustlers, and charter member of the Fempire. We have Shoshannah Stern and Josh Feldman who are the co-creators, co-writers, and co-stars of This Close on the Sundance Channel I believe. They are fantastic. And it’s a live show. A little bit of a twist. Both of them are deaf, so we’re going to have something we’ve never done before at a live show. We’re going to have multiple interpreters so that they can essentially be signed what we’re saying and what the audience is saying and reactions. And then someone else can interpret their signs for those of us who hear.

So that’s going to be interesting. We don’t have anything else I think for that show, but how much more do we need? I will say it is selling out rapidly. We’re already pretty close to sold out, which is not surprising.

**John:** No, not a bit surprising. Also at this live show we will be providing details on the new premium feed which Craig just minutes ago tested out. So, that will be exciting to share. We’ll share what happens.

**Craig:** It works. It definitely works. No, you guys want to totally come to this. I mean, come on. Come on!

**John:** Come on!

**Craig:** Come on!

**John:** So we are recording this on a Friday. On Sunday, so after we recorded this but before you hear this episode we will have the town hall on assistants. So this is a thing that I’m going to be participating in where we gather together a bunch of assistants and we talk through issues that assistants are dealing with. Obviously we’ve talked a lot about this on the show. But that will be a chance to get a bunch of people in a room to talk through those things. So I hope it went great. There was theoretically a livestream. We’ll see how that goes.

There was theoretically audio recorded, so if it’s useful we’ll put that in this feed. If it’s not then we won’t. But I’m looking forward to that conversation/I enjoyed that conversation.

**Craig:** Well, I’m sorry I can’t be there. But I’m sort of now rooting for some kind of riot just because I think it would be amazing to watch. I can say – I can’t really get into specifics – but I have been talking to some people. And things are happening. There are legitimate discussions happening, both from a – how would I put it – a kind of perspective we are going to change the way we are doing things point of view. And there are also interesting things happening where what I’m hearing from individual people is that when it’s time to hire assistants HR and business affairs, their attitudes have changed literally within the last month. Word is getting out.

**John:** Word is definitely getting out. I’ve had a lot of those same kinds of conversations that you’ve had with employers and other folks involved with these decisions. So hopefully as we roll into 2020 some progress will be made. But I believe some of that progress will happen at the top, a lot more of that progress will happen at the bottom. A thing I’m always reminding myself is that the assistants who are sort of leading this conversation right now will grow up to be the people who are running this town.

So, if nothing else were to change, the fact that they are focused on now means that as they become ensconced in these positions of power they will have a perspective on sort of what is appropriate for assistants.

**Craig:** Or, they will abandon their principles.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And turn evil.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s hope not.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, of course. We don’t want that. But if there’s one thing literature has taught us is that people can go bad.

**John:** People can go bad. While we’re talking about assistants, we have had a lot of discussions on different areas in assistant-dom and we really are trying to scope this out to not just be about assistants working in the TV writing space, but assistants overall in the entertainment industry. So anyone who is on a desk, working on a job in order to get that next job, that’s who we’re sort of looking at for these assistant discussions.

But there are some emails that have come in that are very specific to the writer assistant life. And so I wanted to focus on those today. I asked Megana to find some emails that really spoke to this and as always she is going to be our voice to the assistants. So let’s start with an email that Megana is reading.

**Megana Rao:** Peter writes, “Here’s one aspect that I haven’t heard you guys discuss yet. Assistants taking on writing duties. I just wrote my second outline for the show I’m an assistant on. Two other assistants have also written outlines. I get the impression that some feel as though this is the sort of thing that assistants do to prove themselves as ideal candidates for a promotion to the writing staff. And it’s one of those things that some people would say, ‘I’d kill for the chance to do that.’ I understand that. And I understand that I’m fortunate to be in the position that I’m in.

“But the point of view changes when day in and day out you’re the first one in and the last one to leave. You make minimum wage. And if you’re lucky you somehow negotiated a 60-hour guarantee. So once you’re done doing the full day of the non-creative, behind the scenes, keep the machine running duties, and you’re then asked to go home with the notes and write the outline that night, you can’t help but feel shortchanged just a little bit.

“One way to make it better? Maybe through us a story credit or something. I’d be happier being known for the creative contribution, to be able to say I contributed to the process. I’m here because I want to be a writer.”

**John:** Craig, what’s your first reaction to Peter’s email?

**Craig:** Oh Peter, OK, so look. This is not me saying that you’re being treated well, nor is it me saying that you’re not being treated unfairly. However, we have to be really clear about what writing is and what writing isn’t. And we’re going to see in another letter or some input from another person that there are cases where writers are really being ripped off here when it comes to credit. I’m not sure this is one of them.

When you are given notes or you’re told to take notes and then put them into an outline order, I don’t know if that really is a story-creditable thing. Story credit is for the creation of a story. It is not for the organization of other people’s notes or thoughts into a format. There are times when it can be contribute-able. If you’re given a bunch of notes and you’re told make this into a story outline, even though there isn’t enough here for a story outline, and you have to create elements within, yes, then you are creating and you’re writing.

If you’re given the outline and you’re told to put it in prose format out of notes and bullet point into prose, I’m not sure that is something that is creditable as story credit. Our writing credits must be protected very, very carefully. If we dilute them we dilute them for all of us forever.

So, yes, I understand that you feel shortchanged by this. And really what I suspect, Peter, and I could be wrong, is that if you were paid reasonably well, that is to say not minimum wage, and you do have a 60-hour guarantee instead of what you’re getting which is 40 hours to work 60 hours, and if you’re not working all day long and all night long for people who don’t seem to appreciate you then this would be OK. The solution is not to water down the meaning of a story credit. The solution is to pay you fairly and to treat you well.

**John:** Absolutely. A thing that is so challenging about – especially this writer assistant who is in the room who part of their job is to take what’s on the whiteboard and put it on paper, to take the notes that are spoken in the room and put it on paper, that is a very challenging job. It’s not quite writing. And that’s what we’re trying to distinguish, like writing from what that sort of transcribing job is.

What I do want to make sure we don’t overlook in Peter’s email here is that he’s basically doing all this work during the day and then they say, “OK, and when you go home write this up as a thing.” That is beyond your 60 hours. Now when you go home, this is your homework.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s not cool at all. That’s not legit. So, if this is part of your job, it needs to happen during your job time, or you need to be getting overtime for that at home work they’re putting on you. Because if they sent the writer home to do that, well, that’s kind of part of the job. But this is not part of your job, so therefore you shouldn’t have to be doing this work at home.

**Craig:** Totally. Now, we have an interesting version of the same issue but different enough that I think my response is different. I’m kind of curious about yours. It’s from Paul.

**Megana:** Paul wrote, “One my previous show at one of the big streamers the episodic scripts were ‘group written.’ That meant scenes were split up amongst all writers and then compiled into a sort of Franken-draft. Though I had broached the idea of perhaps getting a half a script on this show that ask was rebuffed, which wasn’t a big deal because I had expected that response.

“However, when one of the episodes rolled around I was assigned roughly half of the scenes. This meant I wrote about 30 pages of the script’s first draft, which was about 56 pages in total. No credit was offered and by this point I knew better than to ask. This showrunner had made a point of telling the support staff that the way we needed to show that we cared and were invested was by asking and looking for extra work to take on for free. Writing scenes seemed to fall under that umbrella. And I’ve heard he’s continued to run his room this way.”

**John:** Great. So here he is writing scenes. Writing scenes is writing-writing. And so that is – we’ve crossed this boundary between like these are notes, kind of a vague outline, to OK if you’re actually writing scenes then you are writing scenes in a show.

Now, I’ve talked to friends who are on shows that are kind of group written, where everyone just picks a scene, they paste it all together into a Frankenstein script, and they kind of rotate among the writers on staff who gets credit for it, because basically everyone has been writing on everything.

Here’s the challenge. The role of the union, like the Writers Guild, is to define who does certain jobs. And if you are doing that job of actually writing-writing and you’re not a member of that union that is a problem. There’s a reason why the WGA exists is to protect that job so that not everyone does that job. That said, I am fully mindful of the fact that you are probably aspiring to do that job. And so I want to have a discussion about what are the best ways to let you get some experience actually doing the job you’re trying to do while not getting abused by this system. Craig, your thoughts?

**Craig:** I completely. I don’t quite understand, Paul, what your, well, I think I do understand what your showrunner is doing here. You say, “Hey, how about throwing me half a script? I can draft up half a script, maybe I’ll do it with another assistant, or maybe one of the writers could mentor me and we can co-write a script together and in this way I can actually be hired as a writer and get paid a minimum thing to write a script.”

Now, the showrunner says, “No. No, no.” Which is fine. They’re allowed to say that. I mean, they have a fixed budget for writing. They have other writers to handle who may not want to share credit with you. They may want to get their own piece of credit. Paying you may not be something as easily done as waving a wand because it has to go through a whole thing. And then you’ve got to join the union. And by the way they’re going to charge you your dues. And there goes that money.

Regardless, what happens is they do it anyway. And this is where I get angry on your behalf. Because as you say one of the episodes rolled around. You were assigned roughly half of the scenes. OK. That’s it. You’re hired as a writer. Now, they can’t hire you as a writer without hiring you as a writer. That’s just wrong. And they can say, “Hey, look, we are giving him a shot that nobody else would give him and this is how we find out if he can write or not.” Absolutely not.

No. You know how you can find out if he writes or not? The same way you found out everybody else can write. Ask to read one of his original scripts. There. Now you know. He can write or he can’t. No, that’s just, eh, let’s just get this guy to do free work for us on our show and give him no credit for it because we don’t want to hire him as a writer. We don’t want to go through business affairs. We don’t want to pay him his P&A and all the rest of it. Well, you know, I just think that’s wrong. And I think that for my fellow writers who are in positions to hire other writers, hire them or don’t. And if you feel like being generous and giving somebody an opportunity, do it the right way. If they fail they fail. But at least you weren’t exploiting them.

**John:** I do feel like there’s an opportunity to support that writer without giving him or her full scenes, or like this is all yours to do. And that probably does involve pairing them up with someone who is actually on the writing staff to figure out how they’re going to approach this thing. And if I were an aspiring TV writer I would love that opportunity to prove myself and to sort of go in there and do that work.

But at the point where you are assigned material responsibility for writing scenes that are supposed to be in the actual script itself that does feel like you’ve crossed a line there. And that just doesn’t good or cool or right.

So essentially if you are shadowing the person who is assigned those scenes, that I’m OK with. I don’t know if the union is OK with it, but that feels like the kind of thing which is what you want this writer assistant to have the ability to learn how to do. Beyond that, like you I’m concerned.

**Craig:** Yeah. No question.

**John:** Now, these conversations have been about TV writing which is where I expected most of this to happen, but we got an email that was about feature writing. Let’s take a listen to that.

**Megana:** Leslie reached out with an example from working on a feature. “I worked as a writer’s assistant for a studio feature film. I was kept on even after the writer’s room wrapped and ended up working on set throughout production and post in a writing and creative producing capacity. I was frequently asked to write scenes or ‘turn our notes into scenes.’ Often I was the only person who actually possessed the Final Draft file of the script so I was responsible for all of the writing changes anyways. Sometimes the writing was very tightly based on notes, and other times they’d leave a lot of room for me to actually write the scene.

“Because of all of this I asked if I could be credited in some way. I was told I could have a consulting credit, or essentially some type of staff writing credit. However, about a year later as they were actually finalizing credits I was informed they could not give me this credit officially, but that I was welcome to use it on my resume.”

**John:** Craig, talk to us about Leslie and the situation she finds herself in.

**Craig:** Well, this nightmare is the result of these feature rooms, which I hate. I just won’t do them. And they come up every now and again and I always very politely, because it is polite, I’m not angry about their existence. I just personally cannot reconcile the job of writing a feature, which I feel is an individual authorial act, with being in a room with a whole bunch of people, which feels like something that is more about episodic television where you’re not being authorial to a specific closed-end narrative but rather churning an ongoing hopefully endless narrative. So here we have one of these films that have these rooms. So it’s not being written by a writer. It’s being run like a big old TV show.

And it seems like here once again Leslie is in the same spot Peter is in. It’s not here’s a bunch of notes, please put them in outline format, meaning organize them and turn the bullet points into prose. This is turn the notes into scenes. She’s being asked to write scenes. At this point I have to say not only is she being abused and exploited and treated unfairly, but the writers who are asking her to write scenes are literally ripping off the studio. Because the studio didn’t hire Leslie to write those scenes for that movie. They hired those writers to write the scenes for this movie.

And this is where they make us all look bad. They really, really do. I find this behavior reprehensible. I do. You don’t want to feel like you’re always angry at your own people, but you know when your people screw up you feel it more. You just do, because you’re embarrassed. This is embarrassing to read. And then even worse, when Leslie says, “Hey, can I be credited in some way,” they tell her you can have a consulting credit, which doesn’t exist. The Writers Guild will not allow those for the reason that people would hand them out like candy. Or essentially some type of staff writing credit, which does not exist in feature films.

**John:** There’s no such feature credit.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So they either were lying to her, or literally just didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Either way, either way, this is just wrong. Really just disappointed to hear this.

**John:** Now, I’ve not been involved in one of these feature room situations. But reading Leslie’s letter got me thinking back to some movies I’ve been on that have had so many writers back to back, where like a writer is on for a week, a writer is on for a week, a writer is on for a week, that essentially there was always an assistant who was kind of the keeper of the script, who was the person who was like making it all make sense. And I’m thinking of one specific example where she ended up becoming a really great writer herself and god bless her.

So there are situations where there is a person who is responsible for sort of keeping the script kind of intact and ends up doing – I mean, I’m trying to distinguish the clerical work of getting those scenes in there and actually making Final Draft make sense and sort of the weird production stuff from the writing-writing. And I do feel sometimes a person in that position ends up kind of doing the writing because they’re making the editorial choices about what’s actually going to make it in and what’s not going to make it in. Or situations where like you’ve described being on a set where you run through the scene, this is not working. You and the director and maybe an actor figure out what’s going to happen. And then you, Craig Mazin, talk about your kit and how you sort of get those pages up and right.

We all know of movies where the person who ends up actually typing up that scene is not really a writer-writer, but is basically the person who is putting down on paper what the actor and director and whoever else figured out what was going to be the scene that we’re going to shoot in an hour.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s not really writing, but it’s frustratingly all confusing.

**Craig:** There is script coordination. And somebody who is figuring out how to fit everything into one master document and making sure the revision levels are accurate and the scene numbers stay correct. That is a job. It’s not writing. But it is a job. Somebody who is taking dictation and typing things down into script format, it’s not writing, but it is a job.

Now, I tend to – not tend to – insist really on being the sole person who does that. I like being my own script coordinator. I maintain the files. I handle the revisions levels. I do all that stuff because, well, I trust myself to do it. And I don’t like handing my baby over to anybody else.

The thought of somebody making editorial decisions in a coordinator position is terrifying to me. I mean, that’s our job. And whoever is in charge of that movie, theoretically the producer, if the producer has lost that kind of level of supervision over the creation of this stuff then I don’t even know what to say. This is just shocking to me.

So, yeah. You know, I think that when it comes to features we should be in charge of doing our jobs for god’s sakes. Look how every other union is.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, go ahead and try to move a C-stand on a set.

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** But apparently we like it. Apparently there are some writers who enjoy other people just sort of casually writing and not receiving credit or payment or acknowledgment. It just makes no sense.

**John:** Now, if some of these examples had murky aspects to them, I think this one is the least murky of them all. Let’s take a listen to our fourth and final letter that we’ll look at today.

**Megana:** Derek writes, “My first big break was as a writer’s assistant for a dramedy. It was a mini-room with only four writers, two creators, and one sort of showrunner. There were also two non-writing producers who would sit in on the room sometimes and consult. Since the room was so small they were really open to my pitches, which was great. I offered a lot of story and dialogue ideas and I felt like my contributions where welcome.

“When it came time to write the final episode of the season the two creators offered me the opportunity to do the first draft. This was partly because they liked and trusted me, but also because they were focused on revising other episodes and time was running out. I was thrilled to have the opportunity and didn’t want to mess it up by negotiating the details. There was also the very real issue of time pressure.

“I was offered the script in the morning and literally had to start writing that night after the room broke. There also wasn’t a formal outline for the episode, so I was working off of basically a paragraph of ideas. I wrote the entire episode in two evenings after working as a writer’s assistant in the room during the days. I delivered the script to the room and the other writers really liked it. They put their own polish on some of the dialogue and then we passed it onto the studio and network where it was received positively.

“After the whirlwind died down I decided to focus on how to get credit for my work. I talked to the show-runner who was very supportive of me, but didn’t think it likely that the creators would willingly share credit. She also didn’t feel like she had the social capital to throw her weight behind me.

“The episode aired a month ago with large chunks of my original draft intact. I had crafted entire scenes that made it all the way to my television screen, but no one would ever know.”

**Craig:** OK, John, well how are you going to handle this thorny, well-balanced moral conundrum?

**John:** Yeah. I want to go through here with a highlighter and sort of mark like problematic, problematic, problematic. Let’s start from the beginning. A writer’s assistant for a dramedy. It’s a mini-room with only four writers, two creators, and one sort of show-runner. And two non-writing producers who would sit in the room sometimes and consult. So, from this we have this tiny, tiny staff of which Derek is really kind of a staff member because he’s being asked to pitch on things. He’s being included in stuff. And I’m sure this is exciting for Derek because this is an opportunity.

But ultimately it becomes clear that he’s being treated as the staff writer, not as the writer’s assistant. And so when he’s assigned a script you are assigned a script. You should be hired as a writer. That is just – that’s absurd. And so the minute you were assigned a script you were assigned a script and that is completely WGA covered work.

Now, if we go back through the Scriptnotes transcripts and back episodes you will see that some of the people who had those first breaks, really important steps in their career, they kind of got that script and that became the thing. I don’t want to sort of diminish what a great opportunity that is. But it’s also this is your chance to be recognized as a writer on a show. And the fact that Derek was not recognized as a writer meant that he wrote this script that became the script in the actual series and he’s not credited as the writer and has no ability to arbitrate for credit on this thing that the wrote.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is just a shame. I mean, to be clear if you’re in a situation where you aren’t a writer, you’re an assistant, and you volunteer ideas, you volunteer pitches, thoughts, ideas, well that’s on you. In other words, just because you say them doesn’t mean anyone is obligated to pay you or employ you. And they may even use one of them. But, you know, again, you volunteered that. So, that’s OK, something to think about. If you notice that the things you’re volunteering are getting in there you can say, “Hey, if you like the free samples I’ve been giving you would you enjoy paying for a subscription?”

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And then find out if they’re interested. Then you find out exactly how much they like your work. Because if they say, “Actually no. What we really like is the way you get lunch correct and how you’re here in the morning and here in the evening and you type well,” well then you know that OK I guess maybe I had an inflated understanding of the value of my pitches, because they basically seem to be saying we don’t need those actually.

But if they love them, then that’s an opportunity for them to step up and hire you as they should. The two creators offered me the opportunity to do the first draft. Now, for those of you in Derek’s position listen carefully because here’s what has to happen. You may think as a new person in Hollywood or somebody that’s kind of on a lower rung on the endless ladder of success that when the two show creators or the somebody producer or the somebody executive comes to you and says I’m going to offer you an opportunity, you may rightly think that the person in charge has offered you an opportunity. It is also true, however, that of the 14,000 people that act like they’re in charge in Hollywood about 12 of them are. And the rest are full of crap.

So these two – I picked out this detail. There are two creators and one sort of showrunner and two non-writing producers. I’m already suspicious that these creators may not actually be in charge. So the question is who is really in charge. Did they know I’m being offered a script? Or not? Because if you end up going to the person who is in charge and they say, “Whoa, no, no, no. Did not authorize,” then there’s a real problem.

So if somebody offers you a script then what you have to do is go to one of the producers that you know is involved in business-y stuff and say I’ve just been asked to write a script. I assume there’s some sort of paperwork I need to sign for a writing employment deal. And if they say, no, we’re not employing you as a writer then you’re not writing the script.

**John:** That’s what it is. So, I think what Derek needs to say is Yes And. So basically say yes. Say enthusiastically yes, you’re so excited to do this, and what do I need to sign so that you don’t get in trouble later on. Nothing gets weird and murky. So not you, Derek, but you as creators. You as the show get in trouble later on. Because you are so excited to do this and what do I need to make this legit so that everything goes smoothly?

**Craig:** I mean, Derek, just so you’re aware, you could hire a lawyer and sue the production company that put that out there because they don’t own the material you wrote. So when we’re hired as writers we’re hired as employees. And we are work-for-hire employees, meaning the copyright of what we do is not ours but rather the company that employs us. That’s why they can put it on the air. They own it.

But they don’t own what you wrote.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You can just say, oh, by the way, you guys infringed my copyright. It’s not that you could have used that material anywhere else because it’s a derivative property of their copyright, but they don’t own your unique fixed expression. This happens. And this is the only way to wake people up. I’m not saying you should do that necessarily, because you may think well there are reprisals associated with that and there probably would be. But on an ongoing basis I hope everybody listening understands if somebody asks you to write a script find an adult, not them, but an adult that works on the show, who works in the money adult section. Let them know you’ve been hired and ask them to go ahead and generate an MBA writing agreement, a WGA-covered writing agreement that you could then submit to a lawyer, have them review it, and then you sign. And now voila you’re a proper writer.

**John:** And they would pay you scale. They would pay you the absolute minimum they could pay you, but guess what? For an assistant that’s great money. And more importantly, it’s credit.

**Craig:** Credit.

**John:** It’s credit and it’s also you’re getting paid to do the job that you want to be doing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Hurrah.

**Craig:** Hurrah.

**John:** Hurrah. So, let’s try to figure out any takeaways from these four emails we listened to–

**Craig:** Burn it all down! [laughs]

**John:** So a thing that’s very clear to notice here is that this is writers treating assistants poorly and asking them to do writing that they should not be asking them to do in some cases. And we see this sort of continuum of like you know what taking those notes and putting them into outline form, it was probably not story and it’s probably actually the job you were being hired to do. Once you start writing scenes, once you start writing scripts, then you are doing WGA-covered work. You are really being a paid – a professional Hollywood writer. You need to be paid as a professional Hollywood writer. And it needs to be done under a WGA contract.

**Craig:** 100%. And to our listeners who are writers and I assume there’s many of you, just don’t do this. Don’t do this to other human beings.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why, by the way? You know, it doesn’t take much, honestly, to do the right thing. And I know enough people who do the right thing and who don’t suffer from it and who probably sleep a little bit better than you. Why don’t you join their ranks?

**John:** If you’re one of these people who actually does run a show and you want to slip a note to me or to Craig to tell us your side of all this, that would be great. Because Craig and I are not in the business of employing a lot of other writers, so you may actually be able to come to us with some best practices that we’re not even considering about sort of how you both protect the role of the professional writer and provide opportunities for these writers who desperately want to be doing this job in the room. So help us out here.

If you are listening to this saying like oh Craig and John got it wrong, tell us how we got it wrong

**Craig:** Tell John. I don’t care.

**John:** And we’ll have Craig read that aloud and he’ll read it in a funny voice.

**Craig:** [laughs] As always. I’m so reliable.

**John:** You are. All right, let’s get onto our next topic. Negotiations. So we talked a lot about agency negotiations, but a new phase of negotiations is also coming in. Every three years the Writers Guild renegotiates its contract with the AMPTP. These are the people who produce movies and television shows, so basically the big studios and other production entities. Over the history of this podcast we’ve talked about this a zillion times. We’re always talking about the run up to the negotiation and this and that. And a strike authorization vote and all these things. In fact, Craig and I really first got to know each other on the picket line back in 2007/2008 when we were going through that whole labor drama.

**Craig:** That was really the primary benefit of that strike.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You and I met each other.

**John:** We did. So let’s sort of set the table before we get into things to talk through kind of the timeline of like how this all goes because sometimes it gets confusing where we’re at in things. So, generally what happens is a year before the contract is about to expire the WGA begins meeting in small groups with screenwriters, showrunners, other folks to hear sort of what the issues are. So, the contract is up in May. So, a year before they start talking with certain people and that has happened.

And then they put together a negotiating committee, and so this negotiating committee is the people who are in the room talking with the people from the studio side about the issues. And I have been on the negotiating committee. Craig, you have been on the negotiating committee, too, in the past, right?

**Craig:** I have.

**John:** And it is not often thrilling. It takes place in the Valley.

**Craig:** It’s punishing.

**John:** It’s long days.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s long days and people talk at length. You listen at length. And then you don’t go into the room where things actually happen. It’s really one of the most punishing forms of guild service there is.

**John:** It is. And so I’m going to be doing it again this time.

**Craig:** Lucky you.

**John:** They announced the negotiating committee. I’m on there. A bunch of familiar names are on there. Michele Mulroney, Shawn Ryan, and Betsy Thomas are heading up the negotiating committee. Looking through the list there’s five members who are predominately screenwriters, so me, Michele, Dante Harper, Eric Heisserer are there. There’s a lot of wide representation of TV writers as well. So that part of the process has started, so the negotiating committee begins meeting and talking through strategy and other issues.

Part of what they are basing that strategy on and what the issues are is based on a member survey. So that survey is still active as we’re recording this. As I guess it closes on Wednesday. So if you’re listening to this episode on Tuesday and you got an email saying take the survey that survey is there waiting for you to look at.

And I thought Craig we might talk through this survey is pretty short but basically asks you to rank your top four issues that you want to focus on out of a list of 14 items. So I thought we might talk through in a very broad sense what are 14 things that the guild was asking about interesting he survey.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Pension and health is always there. That’s a given. Pension and health is always a thing that is part of this negotiation. First off, addressing TV mini-rooms like we just discussed in the emails today. So TV mini-rooms are where you get together a bunch of writers to break a series, break a season, sometimes write a bunch of episodes, and then everyone goes away. Then they come back when things are actually produced. A challenge with TV mini-rooms is that often it pushes people’s pay down very, very low because they are getting paid minimums for the time that they are in the room writing, and then they’re dragged out as producers for a very long time after that. So it’s an issue that is affecting a lot of folks working in TV these days.

**Craig:** People seem to both not like them and also that’s all that everyone is doing. It’s weird. I mean, it seems like some of these things we’re kind of weirdly complicit in. I mean, I always just – it’s worth saying, we’re the ones in charge. We’re in charge of TV. The people that are running these mini-rooms, that’s us.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then we have establishing a foreign box office residual for feature films, which would be great. So right now if you’re credited as a feature film writer you receive residuals for the reuse of your work here, but you don’t get it for the release of a feature film in foreign theatrical markets. I think that means like theatrical release.

**John:** Theatrical release. Yeah.

**Craig:** So I do and you do receive monies if for instance they’re rerunning one of our things on a channel in France. But television episodes receive additional residual compensation in foreign markets I assume for the first airings of things. We do not. That would be cool. I mean, I don’t know how we’re going to get that. [laughs] It’s just sort of like, hey, can we have a lot more money? No. Oh, OK.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a weird parity thing. I think it’s, you know, I think foreign theatrical didn’t use to be a big revenue stream or as big a revenue stream as other things were. But now as Asia gets built out with movie theaters, as China gets built out with movie theaters, it’s worth more now.

**Craig:** I guess. It seemingly has been worth – people have been talking about how much the foreign market has been worth for features since I got into this business. I mean, I just–

**John:** But as theatrical?

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember there was like a freak out in like 1995 when people were like, oh my god, there are movies that are making more overseas than they do here. Yeah, no, it’s always been an enormous thing for us. I mean, yes, the China thing is different. Right? I mean, that’s a kind of thing where one market can actually be more than the domestic market. But, no, I mean, generally speaking what was the rule of thumb? 60/40. Some movies were 50/50. Even if it was 70/30, the point being that’s a huge amount of money. As a feature film writer who feels very much like our segment of the union has gotten short shrift over many years, this is a lovely pie in the sky thing to ask for. But it’s not really – I would much rather see some more practical things occur. My personal point of view.

**John:** All right. Point three. Establishing minimums for comedy variety series on streaming services. Right now there are no minimums for comedy variety series made for streaming services. That feels like it needs to be fixed.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. I mean, there should be minimums for everything I would think. Makes sense. We have improving the 2017 MBA span provision for writer-producers. So this was something new that we got in 2017 in our last negotiation which protects writers that are paid on a per-episode basis who are then their episodes are spread out over a long amount of time, right. So if you’re paid for an episode, a per-episode basis, and you’re supposed to write three episodes over the course of a normal amount of time, well that’s how much money you get for this amount of time.

But if they spread those episodes out over the course of a year suddenly your annual income has gone down to nothing and the fact that you’re held exclusive to that company means that you can’t go work somewhere else. It’s a real mess. So what happened was we got additional compensation for the extra weeks that writers and writer-producers were spending on these things. So I guess we’re trying to improve that.

**John:** Next, improving compensation for staff writers by adding script fees and/or eliminating the “new writer discount.”

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** So this is a situation where if you are a staff writer on a television show, the money you’re getting paid for your weekly gets counted against the script that you’re actually writing, so you tend to not get actually paid for the script you’re writing as a separate fee. Just the money you’ve gotten along the way sort of buys them a free script out of you. That doesn’t feel great.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s also this first 14 weeks thing, this new writer discount. So addressing that.

**Craig:** I mean, that should just be like number one. Just editorializing. I believe when we talk about like hey somebody who has a huge movie that made $400 million in China, can we get them more money? I go, uh, OK. Or, this nonsense where the companies are punishing our most vulnerable and newest members who are making the least. That should be like job number one of the union is getting rid of crap like that.

So, hopefully we can.

**John:** When you took your survey did you park that as number one?

**Craig:** I don’t recall how I ranked anything. But it was definitely something that I checked off. I mean, to be honest with you I was probably shading towards features because we get screwed over so much.

**John:** I get that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Improving diversity and inclusion in hiring. Well, this is an evergreen. Again, I have to point out we’re the ones doing the hiring.

**John:** Often we are the ones doing the hiring. Next, improving feature roundtable minimums.

**Craig:** Ooh. This sounds familiar.

**John:** Yeah. This sounds familiar. Craig is – I would say it’s not a hobby horse. Sounds like the wrong thing. This is an issue that you focus on a lot and you focus on a disagreement on how things are interpreted. If there were good strong language on this that raised the minimums on that I think I’m guessing Craig Mazin would be happier.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, right now there is I think the studios are abusing an inapplicable part of our agreement that says that they don’t have to pay a whole week, which should be the minimum unit of payment to us, but rather they can actually pay one-fifth of that, a day rate, for these roundtables that happen on all sorts of movies. Because what happens in those roundtables are people are actually doing real work. They’re contributing things that are creative. That’s why we’re hired for them. We should all be paid the weekly minimum, which frankly is not that much more than some of them pay anyway. But again this is something where it starts to put money in people’s pockets.

It may help – if it helps one person hit the health minimum for the year so that they can provide health insurance for their family it would warm my heart. There is no reason that we shouldn’t be able to get this. This feels incredibly doable. And I have no reason to believe we’ll get it anyway. [laughs]

**John:** Well, speaking of getting more money into people’s pockets, this is a thing that’s been a long time frustration of mine. So improving minimum compensation and terms for writing teams in TV and features.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So as far as like I know I think we are the only union in which two people have to share minimum on something, which is nuts. And so if you’re a writing team you get paid a minimum as if you are one person even though you’re two people. That is why you’re so attractive sometimes for TV rooms because they get two brains for one salary. Something has to be improved there because it’s not fair and it makes it harder for those people to qualify for insurance. It makes it harder to make a living. So, we need to make improvements on how treat teams.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s going to be a bigger issue in features than in TV because the minimums are so much larger.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s something to take a look at. But it does hurt us. And I think maybe there is, well, there’s a fairly obvious compromise, right? I mean, they have never paid two people on a team the price of two individuals. But perhaps they could pay two people who are working as a team 1.5 times the individual rate. I mean, there’s an answer. So hopefully we get there.

**John:** I think there’s an answer as well. Improving options and exclusivity protections. So this is something that first occurred in 2014. I think I was on the committee at the time we got this in. It limits the ability for companies to basically hold people away from employment while they’re figuring out whether there’s another season of the show. And this was a thing that really was generated by writers saying like this is crazy. I’m being held out of work because they can’t make a decision about whether they’re picking up the next season of the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so this is a great thing for us to have. It applies in a nice way to those of us who are making less. Right? This is a good example of the union protecting the people who need protection the most. And obviously the way you improve this is by raising the ceiling and defining upwards how many people something like this covers.

**John:** Agreed. Next, improving residuals for original TV and feature programming on streaming services. Residuals on streaming services is complicated, because residuals are by definition when you when you take something that has had one life and you put it on to a new platform, and so the residual value being captured is a different thing when it’s only existing in one ecosystem. And yet these things clearly do still have residual value. That is why these companies are making these things because people still watch these things. So how we figure this out is complicated.

**Craig:** It is complicated. However this is one of the terms that is not writer-exclusive. This is something that would be industry-exclusive. In all likelihood meaning 100 million percent chance the DGA is going to be negotiating ahead of us. This is the kind of term that will likely be set by them.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Improving TV weekly minimums. So it’s how much writers and writer-producers get on shows that they’re writing on weeklies.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t see improving feature minimums. It’s weird. Funny that.

**John:** Funny that.

**Craig:** Guess we forgot again. [laughs]

**John:** Paid parenting leave.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** This feels on trend for the world. And so right now what we have in our agreement, and this is fairly new, is eight weeks of unpaid leave. So really all that says is if you give birth to a child, and this is a – I don’t know, is this for both genders or just–?

**John:** Both genders.

**Craig:** That’s nice. So if you have a child, a new baby, you get eight weeks to be with them without being fired. But they’re not paying you, right? There are obvious ways to improve that. I’m not sure length is the answer. I suspect it’s some reasonable financial agreement there, too. And we should not – in most developed civilized nations there is some kind of paid parental leave.

**John:** Next up, requiring at least a two-step deal in theatrical contracts.

**Craig:** Yes. God, yes. Yes.

**John:** Yeah. I would say even more so than raising minimums this is what puts more money in the pockets of feature writers who are working near – especially who are working near the minimum.

**Craig:** This is my real hobby horse. This is something that’s I’ve been banging on them about for years. And the way it should work is similar some of the other television provisions that apply to people who are earning under blankety-blank amount of money. I don’t need a guarantee of two steps, and neither do you. But if somebody is earning near scale or even twice scale, frankly, they need to get two drafts because with only one draft in place they are not only losing money, they are being exploited and having to write two drafts anyway. And it is exacerbating practically every problem we have within that system. And if I were in the room the argument I would be making to our friends across the table is that this is a way for them to rest creative control back from some of their producers who simply develop stuff into terrible places.

**John:** I agree with you. Finally, script fee parity across platforms. So, trying to make sure that you get the same rate whether you’re writing a one-hour for premium cable, basic cable, SVOD, you know, whatever service. It’s the same script and trying to get parity no matter which platform you’re writing it on. This has always been a goal. I believe even to this moment like CW pays less than other places do. It’s madness. This is, again, an evergreen goal, but I think it’s heightened by this time that we’re in where there are so many platforms. And you’re like who am I even writing this for? And it’s not been clear what venue this thing is going to go on.

**Craig:** This one is an uphill battle, again, because the DGA has a – I doubt that they’re going to be getting directing fee parity across platforms. So this is a tough one. But, sure, why not? As long as we don’t get parity downwards which is, you know, there’s a certain Monkey’s Paw aspect to these negotiations. Sometimes–

**John:** Be careful what you wish for.

**Craig:** You get something and then you go, oh no. I mean, very famously the guild struck over definition of foreign cable pay something or another in early 1980s. And the directors did not and took the other definition. And we won. We won. We got the definition we wanted and then later realized that the one the directors had was actually better. So then we went back and said actually, no, we don’t want this thing anymore that we struck over. We want theirs. And to that day and to this day the companies have grinned and said, no, no, no, no, remember, you guys struck for that. That’s yours now.

So, you know, fun.

**John:** Fun. So these 14 points everyone is surveyed on. That information feeds into the committee. The committee meets to discuss, prioritize, set things. Ultimately they will come up with a sort of pattern of demands. Basically they’ll list these are the things that are most important. There’s generally a membership meeting where they talk through those things. They talk through what’s going to be happening. Generally it’s a vote on the pattern of demands, saying these are the things we’re going into these negotiations with. And ultimately a negotiation starts happening.

That’s still a ways down the road. But I wanted to sort of lay out the overall timeline of how this stuff goes because I would say over the last couple weeks – maybe over the last month – I’ve been hearing this slowly banging gongs, like oh there is going to be a strike happening. And none of what I’ve just laid out here to me indicates that reality.

So, I just want to put a bucket of cold water on a little of that talk right now because what’s actually happening is what’s actually happening which is that right now we’re voting on which of these things are most important to us.

**Craig:** But, you know, to be fair regardless of what is true or real, everyone apparently that employs us is convinced there’s going to be a strike. And they are acting accordingly. So, if we want them to stop acting like that I suppose we could do something. We haven’t done any of the things that would make them stop thinking that. And so they’re going to continue to think that. And they’re going to continue to behave in accordance with that, which means almost certainly that they will do predictably what they do when they think there’s going to be a strike. They’re going to hire a lot of people, rush, rush, rush, set dates for delivery before the termination of the agreement. And then if there is a strike then there is. And if there isn’t, then they’ll just whatever, deal with that backlog like they did when we almost struck in 2014.

**John:** Talk me through what you think the WGA would do if they wanted to make people not be saying those things.

**Craig:** Yes. I can think of a number of ways. I probably shouldn’t just blab them here on a podcast. Happy to have that conversation with you off mic, because you don’t want to just walk out there and say, “We’re never going to strike.”

**John:** Yeah, that’s not helpful.

**Craig:** But on the other hand clearly as a result of the rhetoric surrounding the agency campaign and the general tenor of membership meetings the companies have decided reasonably or not that we’re hell bent for leather. And that this is all part of a larger plan that all of this is wrapped up in one big total war against everyone. And that’s how they’re going about it. And we can giggle all we want but in the end if they are convinced, they’re convinced.

And one of the great dangers of them being convinced that we’re going on strike is that they will precipitate the strike.

**John:** Yeah. That’s the danger.

**Craig:** That’s the problem. That they’ll say, look, they’re going to strike no matter what. What we can’t do is come in there, offer them something reasonable and have them spit on it and go on strike, because then they’ll never take that and we’ll have to come up with something better. Therefore let’s just go in there, offer them a bucket of crap so that they’ll do the strike that they were going to do anyway, and then we’ll negotiate a real deal, which is kind of what happened in 2007.

**John:** So if you are summarizing this for Deadline, or basically just transcribing this for Deadline–

**Craig:** Ha-ha.

**John:** I think Craig says like Craig advises studios, “Don’t offer a bucket of crap.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Please don’t offer a bucket of crap. I would say to the studios don’t presume we all are going on strike. Because I actually don’t think the union does want – I mean, union leadership. I don’t really see it. I don’t see this like we’re striking no matter what. Of course we’re going to drive a hard bargain. That’s what we do. And of course we want things and of course there are things that are always strike-worthy. I mean, if they come in with rollbacks and stuff like that, you know, I’ll be out there waving the red banner. That’s fine.

But this current belief, this inherent belief that we’re going on strike, while I understand it from a certain point of view I often feel like I have to translate this strange political machinery of our own union to other people. I actually don’t think we are hell bent for leather and going on strike and I think we would much rather prefer, as per usual, to get a deal that follows the pattern of the DGA but addresses certain writer-specific things that we need to have addressed. Most primarily I will add the area of features which have been neglected completely for well over a decade.

**John:** I would say that’s probably a Craig priority.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** In this negotiation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So you brought up earlier the agency stuff, so let’s talk a little bit about the agency stuff which we haven’t talked about for a bit. So, some stuff that has happened in the meantime, Abrams Agency, Rothman Brecher both signed the new franchise agreement. It’s similar to the existing franchise agreement. Packaging fees got sunsetted through January 22, 2021. There are new modifications that allow an agency to have up to a 5% ownership interest in an entity engaged in production or distribution. So that is 5%, basically you can own 5% of a production entity is a new thing in this latest round of stuff.

Craig, I know I’ve been holding you back from talking about this so let’s get some Craig Corner time here. Tell me what you want to tell me.

**Craig:** I don’t know. What’s there to even say? I mean, if it takes us seven months to sign Rothman Brecher, uh, then by my calculations to sign UTA, CAA, William Morris, and ICM it will take us 14,980 months. So I don’t know what’s – I just think in general whatever our strategy was, if we had said to the membership in the beginning FYI if we all do this then we think in seven months we will at least have the Abrams Agency and Rothman Brecher. I think you would not have gotten a 95% vote.

This has not gone the way we would have hoped. And at this point I don’t see any reason why it would. I think the large agencies have essentially said, “Yeah, no, no, we’ve moved on. We’re going to figure out a way to live without you.” And they are.

And our unilateral disarmament is going to have grave costs for us. But there’s nothing I can do about it. And it’s going to continue this way. And I think the general feeling among a number of members I’ve spoken to is just a kind of, oh well, that’s that.

**John:** All right. So frequent listeners of the podcast know that one of the frustrating patterns we always get into is like Craig says something and I say like oh I would want to respond more fully to you but I can’t because I know things, because I’m on the negotiating committee, because I was on the board and such. And it puts us in this weird place. And so a thought I had is that because I know things that you don’t know there’s a frustrating mismatch of stuff. And I can’t tell you the things that I know, but an opportunity might be for me to type up like four facts that I know that let me perceive the situation very differently than you perceive it. Because I think we’re both very rational people.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Fundamentally.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so I think it probably is frustrating for you recognizing that John seems to be a rational person yet he’s responded to these things very differently. So I thought maybe I could type up these four facts, put them in a document, and encrypt the hell out of it with a long password.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And then so I’m going to send you this document after we record this.

**Craig:** And I have to guess the password. [laughs]

**John:** And when this is resolved, when this is resolved–

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** In which we obviously have different timelines of when we think this is going to be resolved, then I will send you the password–

**Craig:** 14,000.

**John:** So it’s somewhere between tomorrow and 14,000 years from now.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I will send you the password. And you will open up the document and you’ll say, huh. And I’ll be curious then sort of what perspective would be on this conversation we had just now. Because I think I feel the frustration of the audience sometimes in the sense of like how are they seeing these things so very differently.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** And it might be a way to sort of bridge a little of that gap, honestly only for my sanity.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Not for yours.

**Craig:** No, I understand. That makes sense. Because you don’t want people to think you’re irrational. I mean, here’s the thing. I fully acknowledge that I do not know the things that you know. What I do know is that for a long time you and others have said that you know things that we don’t know. But actually nothing has happened. Nothing that I would call significant and let me just define it as always as CAA, UTA, ICM. I’ve given up on William Morris Endeavor.

And so because we have heard a lot of versions of we’re real close, things are happening. In the election one of the things that people kept throwing out there was that the people who were daring to fulfill their constitutional obligation to the union and volunteer to serve by running for office were undermining the union because there was a major agency that was moments away from signing a deal and because of this challenged election they were not doing it.

I have to assume one of those was the Abrams Agency or Rothman Brecher. I don’t know what else to say. Well, that was the big prize. Eh, you know. So we’re just sort of stuck here not knowing. All I do know is it’s been the longest – I don’t know, I’d call it a labor action – by this union that I’ve ever been in. It’s approaching the longest it’s ever done. I think eight months is the limit.

**John:** So, winding back through time, there was a moment at which you were running for the board. You hadn’t decided to run for vice president. And I was so excited that you were running for board because I knew you would get elected and I knew you’d be on the board and actually have the information. And I was thinking, oh, Craig will now actually know what I know. And it will be great. And so that didn’t come to pass and many things happened in the meantime.

There’s a scenario in which you had stayed running for the board and you could have known these things and I would be fascinated to have these conversations with you.

**Craig:** No question. And I know this must be frustrating for you, too. But I do wish that the leadership of our union would recognize that there is a serious cost to not informing us of anything. We know nothing ever. I mean, this is different than an AMPTP negotiation. We know when we’re negotiating with them. It’s a thing. And there’s only one of them. It’s a thing, right?

This stuff where we’re just sitting here going oh good, I’m so glad they took weeks to refine their agreement with Rothman Brecher. That’s really just about the fact that whatever 90% of us were represented by four companies. And those four companies are still – we’ve heard zero. And I can certainly what they say is that there’s absolutely nothing happening. And that could be a lie. But it would be nice if it were a lie for our side to prove it. But we don’t hear anything. All we get are these overly rosy announcements that we have made a major breakthrough with some company that just doesn’t rise to that test of being a major breakthrough. I don’t know what else to say.

**John:** I hear what you’re saying. And I look forward to being able to send you this document. Here’s something I would propose we do. We got a question in about moving to Los Angeles. I’ll read the question. And I think weirdly you and I are not the right people to answer it, but I think some of our listeners are the right people to answer it.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** So let’s read the question and then invite people to write in, for a change not about assistants. Mark from New York asks, “This podcast has taught me nearly everything I know about screenwriting. More recently you’ve even inspired me to make the move from New York City to Los Angeles and pursue a career in writing for TV. I fly out at the end of January and I want to hit the ground running. What advice would you give to someone who is about to make the move to Los Angeles? Other than securing an apartment and transportation, what should I prioritize once I arrive? Is there anything I could be doing in the months leading up to the move to increase my chances of finding work? Finally, if each of you could do your first years in Los Angeles differently, what would you change?”

**Craig:** Great questions.

**John:** So these are great questions. And for me and Craig it’s more than 20 years ago and I just feel like so much is different. But I think for a lot of our listeners that is a very recent thing. And so if you are a person who could help answer Mark’s question I’d love to hear it. So if you have moved to Los Angeles in the last, you know, five, ten years and could talk to him about what you did and what you would do differently, I think that would be a great help to Mark.

**Craig:** Do you remember, I bet it was this way when you got here, too, because we were about the same. When it was time to rent an apartment there was a fax number that you could call and you would get faxed a sheet of available apartments and rents and phone numbers.

**John:** I remember going to West Side Rentals where you’d actually on Tuesdays and Fridays I believe you could pick up the Xerox packet and it would be there exactly at noon and it was a race to get those apartments.

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs] Yes. Yes. I mean, you’re absolutely right. We are not. We are old. I mean, we’re – I mean, I don’t even know if the temp agency I applied to even exists anymore.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well, it probably does.

**John:** I’m sure it’s an app now.

**Craig:** It’s an app. Everything is an app. It’s a robot. Everything is a robot.

**John:** All right. Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is something that other people have used as a One Cool Thing, but it is genuinely really amazing. So, this is a solar mirror breakthrough. So solar power can happen in various ways. You can have the things where they’re shining on the photo voltaic cells. This is more the classic kind of thing where you have a bunch of mirrors pointed at one area and you’re making it super-hot. And it goes all the way back to the idea of Archimedes’ mirror where people had to polish shields and they were burning a ship. It’s that idea but done with computers that can precisely manufacture these mirrors and precisely aim them.

And the breakthrough that happened this last week was they were able to hit a thousand degrees Celsius.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And when you get something that hot you can actually unlock a bunch of industrial processes that are really helpful, like making concrete, or splitting water up to make hydrogen and oxygen. So it’s potentially a really great breakthrough. I’m sure there’s lots of other things you can apply that kind of energy generation to. So, anyway, it was just a good example and actually clear to follow things. Because so often when you look at sort of technology and energy it’s just really complicated. And here you can see like, oh, I get it. The mirrors are pointing at that thing and it’s making it really hot.

**Craig:** Make stuff hot.

**John:** Make stuff hot.

**Craig:** Make stuff hot is how we generate energy. I mean, if you can make stuff that hot using mirrors then you should be able to heat up a whole big bunch of water into steam to turn a turbine and make power.

**John:** Chernobyl was heat to generate steam.

**Craig:** Yeah. They all are. Every power plant we have, whether it’s a dam, or coal, or nuclear, or gas, it doesn’t matter, that’s all of them. That’s what they all do.

**John:** Well, that’s actually not true at all.

**Craig:** What? Which one does something else?

**John:** I mean, a dam is just using gravity to generate electricity.

**Craig:** No, but it’s spinning.

**John:** It’s spinning but it’s not heating anything up.

**Craig:** Well, that’s true. You’re right. You’re right. My point is it’s spinning a turbine.

**John:** Yes. Exactly. Turbines.

**Craig:** Turbines.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s photo voltaic. Goes directly to electricity, but if you’ve got these mirrors all pointed at something to heat it up it feels like it could be pretty cool. I could be wrong. A bunch of physicists are going to write in and tell me. You know what? I don’t care.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** I don’t care.

**John:** Well, one thing I love, when you fly out of Los Angeles sometimes and you look out the window you can see the big solar array sometimes. And those are so cool.

**Craig:** Yes, they are. And the wind farms.

**John:** Oh, I love me some wind farms.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know Trump thinks they cause cancer.

**John:** I think the worst things that happens with windmills is they do kill some birds, but you know what?

**Craig:** They do. They kill birds. I mean, I eat birds.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Chicken is good.

**John:** Chicken is good. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do. So it’s not necessarily something you’re going to want to go out and buy immediately, but the promise for the next year I think is quite good. So like you I purchased the new MacBook Pro. 16-inch screen. I believe you feel it is too large for you, which makes total sense.

**John:** It’s too large. I returned it.

**Craig:** Makes total sense. And I like you had been working with a 13-inch MacBook Pro. It is quite a bit bigger. That’s, you know, I’m getting used to that part. But the part I’m really happy about is the keyboard. So Mac sort of infamously changed their keyboard a few years ago for their portables to this, what do you call it, Butterfly switch thing? Is that what it was called?

**John:** Yeah. From scissor to butterfly.

**Craig:** From scissor to butterfly. So the key had much less travel. It was kind of a more hard feeling. I got used to it, like everybody else. The problem was that they were not very reliable. And I like many people had to bring my laptop in to get the entire keyboard replaced because some tiny little thing broke somewhere. I mean, they paid for it, but at this point now they’re replacing tons of keyboards. It was a huge problem. And, honestly just didn’t feel great to type on that.

I thought it did at first, and then it got annoying. So, this one they’ve gone back. And it’s joyous. I can only presume that for a company that so rarely admits it made a mistake and really would prefer that the rest of the world catch up to them, in this instance they have essentially admitted they made a mistake. And therefore in the following months and days the smaller MacBooks, the smaller laptops, the ones that aren’t quite as expensive as the MacBook Pro, they will all start getting this new keyboard. So, new keyboard coming, it’s inevitable. We should be all fine in just a few years.

**John:** Yeah. So I am still using my old 13-inch MacBook Pro. I don’t even know what year it’s from. It still has like the large USB ports and such. I love it. But I’m ready for a new computer. So once the 13-inch version of this comes with this keyboard I’ll be in heaven.

**Craig:** Yes, you will be.

**John:** All right. Stick around after the credits because we are going to be talking about cats. But for now that’s our show. As always it’s produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael Carmen. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send your assistant stories or your advice about moving to Los Angeles.

For short questions, on Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We love to answer your short questions there.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs.

Come to our live show. There’s still some tickets left as we’re recording this. You should come join us there for the live show. So in addition to those guests there’s always some sort of game stuff.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** And you get to see me and Craig in our natural habitat.

**Craig:** I might wear some reindeer ears or something this year. I might be festive.

**John:** You haven’t sung a song for a while, either. So maybe some singing would be in order.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? Maybe we’ll do a song.

**John:** Maybe we’ll do a song. I’d love to do a song.

**Craig:** I wonder like I’ll do a song with maybe Kevin Feige and I can do some sort of duet.

**John:** Perfect. Do it. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**BONUS**

**John:** Craig, cats. I’m happy to talk about either the musical Cats which could include the film Cats, or talk about the actual furry beings called cats.

**Craig:** You know, I’m not – I was never a huge fan of the musical Cats. I’ll just say it. I love Broadway. I love Broadway shows. And I’m not one of these people that’s a snob against Andrew Lloyd Webber. I think Evita is amazing. And, you know, Jesus Christ Superstar is amazing. And I really love Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat. I just never loved Cats because I think it suffers from the structure that it came from which was just a bunch of episodic poems about individual cats. And so it just sort of, you know, you meet a cat, you meet a cat, you meet a cat. It was just never my thing.

That said, Memory is in the what, top five Broadway songs of all time?

**John:** Yeah. A remarkable song.

**Craig:** It’s incredible.

**John:** I have never seen Cats. And so I know kind of what happens in it. I know it’s largely plotless. It’s a bunch of people just auditioning to die in a way. So, never having seen Cats, but I’m always curious to see things, so I’m going to see the Cats movie and I’m going to go into it with my heart open and ready to be impressed. So we’ll see about that.

Having discussed Cats the musical, now let us discuss the actual beings called cats. They’re small furry creatures who sometimes live with us. Craig, what is your opinion of cats as a species?

**Craig:** I mean, how did this happen? How did this happen? I understand dogs and their value. They show affection and they have utility. And they protect you. And they watch over you. And if you are sight impaired they guide you. They’re remarkable. They’re remarkable creatures. And I don’t understand how cats even became a thing. They just seem to me to have no more value than, I don’t know, rabbits. What do they do? What do they do?

**John:** So to stipulate, you and I are both dog owners. We are both dog lovers. You have an amazing dog named Cookie, I have a great dog named Lambert. Dogs are wonderful. But I don’t want this to be a cats versus dogs discussion. Let’s just talk about cats on their own merits.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So as a person who loves dogs I also love cats, but I love cats at a distance because I’m very allergic to cats. So I’ve never been able to invite one into my home. My daughter has been advocating very hard for us getting a cat. It won’t happen, because Mike is just never going to allow a cat into our house.

**Craig:** God bless him.

**John:** But I enjoy other people’s cats. And I actually like other people talking about their cats and here’s what I think I find so fascinating about it. Whereas dogs are wolves who sort of came very close to us and ultimately we changed them into being a thing that is useful to us, that’s why we have such a codependent relationship with our dogs, cats never really quite there. They’re domesticated in the sense that they are comfortable living around us, but they are still small lions. They are still wild creatures who just happen to be in our homes. And I think that’s what people find so fascinating about them is that they are not just even mercurial. If we were to die they would eat us.

**Craig:** Oh, within seconds. I mean, my feeling is that if you fall down and you are dying, a dog is going to in a moment of clarity attempt to dial 911. Like it will have its finest moment. A cat will start eating you before your last breath. I don’t understand them. I don’t.

**John:** But in some ways maybe you don’t understand them the same way you don’t understand people who do things that risk their lives to do. People who are climbing without ropes. Like free-soloing.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** That to me is sort of like the emotional aspect of having a cat. You know it’s not actually – it doesn’t care about you, at least not in the same way that a dog or a person would care about you.

**Craig:** How many people have we just lost? I mean, of the amount of people that listen to our show?

**John:** Most of our listenership, yeah.

**Craig:** 40, 50, 70%. Gone. Permanently. People are very emotional about their cats. So I want to acknowledge that I’m really joking. I mean, it’s not that cats are evil or bad. And nor do I doubt the depth of affection people do have for their cats, and people do. And I have all sorts of – Lindsay Doran who is one of my most dearest of friends, who I love very, very much, is obsessed with her cats. She loves them. And, you know what? And I love her. So, I accept that. I don’t understand it, but I don’t have to.

That said, you and I are right. [laughs]

**John:** So, I’ve had two cats in my life. One was this tiny little kitten. Tiny little black kitten showed up on our driveway. It was a Friday afternoon. There was no parent around. So, we took the cat in. I started feeding it. And we ultimately found it a home. But the cat lived with us for about a week. And so I called the cat Friday. And I will try to post a photo of Friday the cat because this was ten years ago. I was reminded as I was looking through photos. And Friday was a great little cat but ultimately could not live with us.

The best cat I’ve had the chance to meet though is a neighbor’s cat named Raleigh. And so it’s an actor who lives two doors up, and her cat will just kind of wander into our yard sometimes. And this cat is the most – not dog-like cat – but the most sociable cat. Will hop up and just sort of hey you eating lunch, that looks good, let’s take a look.

That is a cat that made me appreciate sort of what it’s like to have a cat who is in your life a lot and where you could see what the cat was thinking. It was sort of an alien thought process. It wasn’t sort of – I couldn’t quite put together what its thoughts were. And it did suddenly scratch me. But it was intriguing. So I can definitely see the value of a cat like that.

**Craig:** Expressionless faces with their dead eyes. The closest I ever was with a cat was Melissa had a cat named Tiggy. And so when I first started dating her and I went home to where she lived I met Tiggy and Tiggy was apparently vaguely brain damaged or something. It had never weened and it had been hit by a car. I don’t know what the excuse was. All I know was that Tiggy would jump on you and then sort of I guess cats have this instinctive behavior of kind of kneading with their paws if they are nursing.

So it would just knead you with its paws, and its claws, which hurt. And drool. So it would just sit on you, and hurt you, and drool on you. That was it. That’s actually the most affection and, yeah, interaction, physical interaction I’ve ever had with a cat. Usually they just stare at you like you’re something on the bottom of a shoe.

**John:** Yeah. That’s cats. Last point I will make is why cats haven’t had the tremendous influence on human civilization the way that dogs have, we would not be humans if we hadn’t sort of domesticated dogs the way we did. Cats did and probably do still perform an important function of like getting rid of mice and vermin, other things which would be unpleasant around us. So they have a utility certainly and in rural places especially.

**Craig:** Yes, for sure. And don’t forget that they do steal babies’ breath. So they help thin the population.

**John:** Absolutely. Like babies you don’t want. Only the evil babies.

**Craig:** Jerk babies. That’s how you find out your baby was going to be an idiot. A cat just, you know. None of that is true. Old wives’ tales.

You know what cats do do? They actually do create huge health problems for pregnant women because of toxoplasmosis, which is–

**John:** That is not good.

**Craig:** The nasty little thing that they poop out in their weird litter box.

**John:** Yeah. Litter box, again, a thing which cat people are willing to deal with. Litter boxes.

**Craig:** I mean, what?

**John:** And they’re saying, “You’re picking up your dog’s poop. Is it any different?”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yes. It is. Because it’s not inside my house. How about that? It’s not sitting in a bunch of weird gravel.

**John:** All right, Craig. I’ll be back with you next week with whatever listeners we have left.

**Craig:** None.

Links:

* Buy tickets for our [Live Show](https://www.wgfoundation.org/events/all/2019/12/12/the-scriptnotes-holiday-live-show) Thursday, December 12th with Kevin Feige, Lorene Scafaria, Shoshannah Stern, and Josh Feldman!
* [Professionalism in the Age of the Influencer](https://johnaugust.com/2019/professionalism-in-the-age-of-the-influencer), read the full text of John’s speech
* Watch the [Assistant Townhall](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5x_jDCftkg&feature=youtu.be)
* Learn more about [Agency Affiliates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaXQ84Hn6_Y)
* [Solar Mirror Breakthrough](https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a29847655/heliogen-solar-heat-mirrors/)
* [Archimedes’ Mirror](http://www.unmuseum.org/burning_mirror.htm)
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_428_assistant_writers.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/minimum-viable-movie).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hi y’all my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 423 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Often on this podcast we ask How Would That Be a Movie, but today we’re going to ask an even more fundamental question: Is that a movie? We’ll try to lay out the minimal requirements for a motion picture, which you may want to consider as you set out to write.

We’ll also be answering some listener questions and, of course, following up on assistant pay.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** But first, Craig, you are headed to Austin for the Austin Film Festival. Can you talk us through your schedule?

**Craig:** Sure. What an exciting schedule it is. It’s jam-packed with stuff. [laughs] It’s really not. It’s one of the lightest schedules I’ve ever had and I’m incredibly appreciative for it. Friday morning is my first thing and I guess it’s probably the most substantive thing I’m going to do. It’s called On Writing Chernobyl: A Conversation with Craig Mazin. I don’t know who I’m talking to. It just says me. What is that?

**John:** It could be a conversation with yourself?

**Craig:** It will not be.

**John:** I think you should do the Frune voice and just be interviewing yourself.

**Craig:** Well that’s not a bad idea actually. I can totally do that. What’s the story?

So, that’s going to happen with someone talking to me, I guess. And then that night at 10pm roughly, depending on just how tipsy we are I’m going to take the stage in the big Driskill ballroom with a bunch of other fantastic guests – really, really good ones. You’re going to want to show up, as always, for a free-wheeling live episode of Scriptnotes. So always fun when we do it there. It’s very raucous. We’ll take lots of questions. Do lots of answers. Tell stories. Laugh. Enjoy life. And record it all for posterity.

**John:** Excellent.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then I’m going to be introducing Dan Weiss and David Benioff at an awards luncheon where they’re getting an award. So I’m putting together the world’s snarkiest speech as we speak. And also on Saturday night I will be one of the judges judging the finals of the Pitch Competition which is in a big bar and it’s–

**John:** I went to that last year and it was really fun. It was sometimes hard to hear people as they were pitching, but the vibe was really great. So, I really enjoyed it last time.

**Craig:** It’s a good vibe and as always I’m relied upon to be, you know, Johnny Tough Love, I guess.

**John:** Mm-hmm. So I’m looking forward to hearing what happens. I will not be at Austin Film Festival this year at all, so I will only know when I hear the audio for the assembled episode, so enjoy. People are going to be there live and in person seeing stuff and it could be so raucous and so un-broadcastable that only by being there in person will you really get the full experience.

**Craig:** I think it will be broadcastable. It may not be an episode you like. [laughs]

**John:** But that’s fine.

**Craig:** It will be broadcastable. It will be sound waves.

**John:** There will be sound waves that can be transmitted through the Internet.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Nice. Last week we talked about the WGA and videogame awards. We got a couple emails in. One was a listener who wrote in with a sound file, which I always love when people sort of record themselves. So let’s take a listen to that.

**Anthony Johnston:** Hi John and Craig. Anthony Johnston here. Just wanted to point out something you didn’t mention regarding the Writers Guild dropping the videogame award. The reason some years only saw a minimal amount of entries is because only games written by people who were either full guild members or had joined the Game Writers Caucus, which John mentioned, were eligible. The problem with the caucus is that the only thing your yearly sub gets you is the ability to be considered for that award. Well, and a copy of the magazine. But, you know, come on.

But it doesn’t even count in any way towards full guild membership as I found out a couple of years ago when I wrote my first screenplay for Hollywood. I understand why the guild doesn’t want to give out awards to non-members, of course, and that’s their prerogative. But it’s not like game writing is covered by a different guild. And this all speaks to those concerns you had about them simply not reaching out to games writers in a meaningful way.

I’m on the Games Committee of the British Writers Guild and our annual award is given to the best written game, regardless of whether the authors are guild members or not because from our perspective the award is about advancing and promoting the field, not the guild per se.

Anyway, I’ve ranted about the lack of unionization in games many times before and I won’t get into it again, but suffice to say this latest action by the WGA certainly isn’t helping. Thanks for listening. See you later.

**John:** To start with I want to stipulate that I would like him to narrate a bunch of nature documentaries because he has a fantastic voice.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** And I want to hear him talking about geese and other things and small woodland creatures having fun.

**Craig:** But the geese doesn’t see the predator nearby. Sneaking up on her and her loved ones. Something like that?

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Do we even need him anymore? Or can I do it?

**John:** He’s actually better than you.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** And that’s a high bar.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** So let’s get into the substance of what he’s actually talking about which is that this videogame writers caucus is a thing you have to join in order to be considered for an award, but you get essentially no benefits other than being eligible for an award, which feels like a fundamental flaw in that system. But I do want to point out that the British system is different also because it’s not truly a union. The British Screenwriters Guild is not a union in the same way that we are a union. They’re not representing employees. They are a bunch of people who work in the same industry but they are not a labor organization. So they’re not quite similarly situated.

Craig, what did you take from his discussion of this topic?

**Craig:** Well, what he’s shining a light on is that the entire decision to award videogame writers was a scheme to try and see if we could advance the organization of videogame writers into the Writers Guild. So what the Writers Guild did was they created this caucus category. A caucus category in the Writers Guild essentially means, meh, you’re not actually a member of the Writers Guild. But we’ll waive some magic fairy dust on you. You give us some money. And you become eligible for things like these awards. But over time what happens is the videogame companies realize that there’s actually like he says no actual significant benefit or upside to being in this caucus. It doesn’t apply to your membership in the guild for other things because you’re not doing anything that’s covered under a Writers Guild contract generally speaking.

So, the entire point of it just sort of collapsed pretty quickly. But my feeling is if you’re going to give awards to videogames in an attempt to say, “Listen, one day we’d love to have you in our fold. Could we unionize your shop?” Do it.

There’s no need to – I agree with him. Don’t pin it all on some meaningless Writers Guild caucus membership because then the awards don’t mean much anyway. And in fact what it seems like has happened is they’ve said not enough people are paying us the caucus money so nobody gets an award. I think we should acknowledge that we don’t represent videogame writers, but we have given the award so let’s continue to give the award and start talking to the employers. That’s kind of the point, right? That’s the job.

**John:** Yeah. Organizing any new sector is incredibly difficult, so trying to go out and actually organize these folks is a difficult thing on a very long term basis. And so a concerted effort by the WGA over many years, maybe you could make some progress. But it is going to be difficult because videogame industry is not – while the work is actually very similar to sort of what we’ve been doing, it’s not concentrated in the town the same way. It’s diffuse. There’s a lot of challenges to doing it.

So, a person could also argue whether the WGA is the best organization to being going after trying to organize videogame work. I don’t know. But it was good to hear his perspective from somebody outside of our videogame industry.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, when it comes to any kind of writing employment I tend to think that the Writers Guild is the best union option available to anyone that writes, because well we do the best job of defending the writer’s right to credits, defending the writer’s right to residuals, I think we have the best guaranteed minimum salaries. So I’m always interested in that. I do think that you’re right. It’s a hard thing to organize any shop. If the guild spends ten years trying to organize a videogame shop and it fails, or five years and it fails, at that point for the guild to say, “Listen, guys, we’re not going to do the Writers Guild videogame awards anymore because none of your employers are willing to talk to us and you guys aren’t signing cards, so it’s enough.” At that point I don’t really think the videogame writers would have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to complaining. But they haven’t tried that. As far as I know they haven’t done any of that work. They’ve just handed out awards and then one day they were like, “Meh, you’re not giving us our caucus money anymore.”

It’s not a great look. I’ve got to say. I’m just going to continue my theme on this. I don’t think it was a great look. I don’t think it was handled well. And, you know, I think they should reconsider. I really do.

**John:** Let’s end this topic on some happy news. The folks who work at the LA Times have a new union. So that’s a thing that happened this past week. So the LA Times employees are now under a union, which is great news.

**Craig:** Who covers them? Is there like a newscaster–?

**John:** I think it’s its own special new union. I have no sort of great insight to it, but it’s a thing that happened just as we were starting to record. So that’s exciting.

**Craig:** That is exciting. And just to be clear when I said that our union is the best at representing writers what I mean is representing writers – those writers who do work for screens as opposed to just print.

**John:** Yep. Exactly. All right. Let us get back to the topic of assistants, which has been a big thing this past week, past couple weeks. And so much has changed since the last episode we recorded. After we recorded the hashtag #PayUpHollywood came out. There were a lot of new anecdotes that were being shared along with that hashtag. LA Times, Variety, Hollywood Reporter all ran stories on the issue. I know I had a lot of private conversations, I suspect you have had them as well.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** With writers, executives, other folks who are thinking about this as an issue. We’ve gotten a ton more emails in, including some emails that reference friends of ours who are not doing right by their assistants. So, that’s interesting and awkward.

**Craig:** Oh? OK. I haven’t seen those.

**John:** All right. So we’ll forward some of those onto you.

**Craig:** Do I want to see those? [laughs]

**John:** I think you do want to see those. I think it’s good for us to see all of these things. But this week has also got me thinking back to my own time as an assistant. I did a blog post about it. And so I was describing how one of my first jobs in Hollywood was as an assistant. It was just after film school. I was working for two very busy producers. I did all the classic assistant things: answering phones, reading scripts, making copies. No one makes copies anymore.

And I said in that blog post that I thought I was making $550 a week. I ended up editing it back out and putting a footnote there saying I’m not sure it was $550. I couldn’t actually find any pay stubs or tax records. But I was able to make enough money to pay rent. I was able to buy groceries. I could see all the movies I wanted to see. And I could write on nights and weekends. It was enough. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was enough. And that was my two years in assistant-dom and then I was able to transition out of that.

And Craig you had a similar experience as an assistant right out of college, right?

**Craig:** I did. I didn’t quite have the leg up you had, because you were coming out of the Stark program. So it makes sense that your first gig probably would be a little bit better pay than mine. I didn’t know anybody and I wasn’t coming out of film school. So my first job in Hollywood, my salary was $20,000 a year. And so I did a little math using just a standard inflation calculator. $20,000 in 1992 is the equivalent of $36,600 today. OK, well as it turns out that’s not far off from what a lot of assistants are making when you just look at kind of a $12.50 or $15 an hour rate, and a typical 50-hour week or even more. It’s sort of settling in around there.

So, what’s the difference? Well, first of all, I don’t want to pretend that I was living high on the hog. I was not. I also had student loans I had to pay off and all the rest. But here’s the huge difference. I shared a two-bedroom apartment with a friend of mine and that two-bedroom apartment was in North Hollywood. And the rent was $700 a month. So my rent was $350 a month in 1992. What is that in today’s dollars? It is $640 a month. No, I think Megana is on the line, right?

**Megana Rao:** Yeah, I’m here!

**Craig:** OK. And Bo is with us, too. So, Bo Shim is my assistant and Megana Rao is not only our producer but also your assistant. So, I’ll ask you Bo, $640 a month would get you what right now?

**Bo Shim:** [laughs] I don’t even know. Like half of a studio?

**Craig:** Half of a single room? So you’re like bunking with someone in a single room?

**Bo:** Like a dorm.

**Craig:** A dorm. I checked. And the rate of rent increase in Los Angeles has far outstripped the rate of inflation. So essentially even though people are being paid similarly to how they were paid when I first started in 1992, their expenses are dramatically greater. And that is why the current situation is not at all tenable.

And I have to tell, John, based on what I’ve looked at here I don’t know if I would have been able to do it. I don’t know if I would have been able to move to Los Angeles and get a job and work as an assistant because I didn’t have any other source of money. There was no money coming from my family. Plus I had loans to pay off. I just don’t think I could have done it.

**John:** Well, we’re lucky to have two assistants on the line who have done this. And so let’s turn this over more to Bo and Megana to talk us through their path into the industry and becoming assistants. And if you guys can tell us how you started as assistants and how you sort of made it work. Can we start with you, Bo? What was your route from college into working with Craig right now?

**Bo:** Right. I graduated from NYU in 2016 and I took a more traditional route of working at an agency, kind of staying put and seeing that as a stepping stone for my next job. And I think that’s a lot of people working there. Not everybody wants to be an agent, but all the jobs out there require one to two years of agency experience. So, I did that for about two years. And when I started it was I believe $12.50 an hour. A non-negotiable rate of $12.50 an hour. And after about two years maybe it was like a dollar raise. And then by the time I left in the last couple months they bumped it up to $15 an hour.

So I know firsthand working in that environment. And I have to say of course I wouldn’t have this job right now if I wasn’t present at that place and working that job, and that’s why most people work there is for the opportunities that you’re exposed to. But that was kind of my path to working for Craig Mazin.

**John:** Now, Megana, you took a different route. So talk us through how you went from college and where you were at before you came to work as an assistant here.

**Megana:** Yeah, so I had a much more untraditional route. I graduated from Harvard in 2014. And then worked in tech. I worked at Google for about four years before I made my way out to LA and started working for you. So, I sort of had a very different introduction to the workforce than Bo in that immediately from day one I felt like I was very fairly compensated and just felt really valued by Google. I felt like they were investing in me and they really wanted me to grow there.

And, yeah, I think last week we sort of talked about that villainous HR person who said lower wages inspire people to get better paying jobs. And coming from working in a place where that’s absolutely the opposite case I do not think that that’s true. I think that being fairly paid made me feel inspired by the work that I could bring to the company.

**John:** So one of the things you’ve had to do over these last two weeks is go through a tremendous amount of mail that came in. I know you’ve also been sharing it with Bo. Can you give us a sense of what you’re seeing and talk us through the issues and sort of where we’re at in this conversation right now as you’re reading more about assistants and assistant pay in Hollywood?

**Megana:** Yes. So we have been getting a ton of emails. So thank you to everyone who has been writing in. I think one of the biggest issues that we probably will not be able to get into today but has been a big theme has been the mental, psychological, emotional abuse that a lot of these assistants are dealing with every day on top of their low wages. And I think that makes sense, because we sort of started this conversation in the wake of hashtag #MeToo and this is just another reckoning with the institutional failures that have gotten us to this place.

And on a more positive note I think people are feeling more validated and seen by the hashtag #PayUpHollywood and the coverage that’s been in the trades and the LA Times. And I think there’s been a sort of unification that’s been really exciting.

I got this one email from Christine that I’d love to share. She says, “I listened to your recent Scriptnotes episode on assistant pay and I teared up in my car because it hit close to home. Being a child of refugees I decided to go the safe route after college and pursue a stable and predictable career that would please my parents. But one that was also creative adjacent to please me. So I went to law school with the hopes of practicing entertainment law. I decided not to go that route after I did legal internship at a movie studio and discovered that the young and hungry attorneys in the legal department were working as glorified administrative assistants for $20,000.

“This was in 2001 and law students were taking out more in student loans per year, $26,000 per year, then the annual before tax salaries of these ‘entertainment lawyers.’ I didn’t know how they paid their rent and their student loan repayments until it finally dawned on me. They were trust fund babies. And that’s when I decided to become a litigator instead.

“18 years later and here I am finally trying to do the thing. It has taken me this long because my family had no money, no connections, and the risk of entering a career where I would have to ask my parents for financial help when they were also struggling was too shameful for me to contemplate. It took me nearly 20 years to gather the resources where I can now carve out free time for myself to write. This year I wrote my first screenplay. I literally couldn’t afford to do it as a career, so now I do it as a passion project.”

So, the reason I wanted to highlight this is because I wanted to bring it back to another reason that we were so compelled to take this on as an issue is that these really high barriers to entry are literally keeping the pipeline from being filled with any sort of diversity in Hollywood. And, Bo, I know you had experience working in the business affairs side, so I don’t know if you want to speak to Christine’s experience at all.

**Bo:** Yeah. I was working in business affairs and so a lot of the assistants there in that department went to law school and were bar’d and it was crazy to me that they were getting paid the same as someone who – I mean, no one really should be getting paid $12.50 an hour, but they were getting paid the same across the board.

**Megana:** Yeah. So I worked on Ad Words which was sort of the biggest, most corporate, and like least sexy part of the company, and I think because of the way that I was paid I was really inspired to do good work and to put my all in the company. And so it’s sort of wild to me in Hollywood where the impact of your work is so tangible in these productions that, you know, I would think that if you’re a creator or a showrunner and you have this vision that you would want to – you would want to have people around you who are doing their best work to help you execute your ideas and that you’re empowering them to be able to do that on their projects and that they’re not worried about how they’re going to pay for their lunch.

**John:** Yeah. So even working on this Ad Words team they were still treating you like you were a valuable person in the company and not just a body in a chair?

**Megana:** And I think something that they say all the time at Google is we don’t just hire you for the job, we hire you for Google. And I think that in the traditional sense of the pipeline for like a writer’s assistant to a staff writer that also holds true. You are hiring assistants so that you can grow them as writers and people who will become creators eventually. And it seems like something there has just been broken recently.

**John:** So, Bo, working at an agency what is the trajectory to rise up through the agency? I always hear about the mailroom and then you’re on a desk and then eventually you become an agent. Was that at all interesting to you? Or were you mostly coming in there just to learn about how the industry worked?

**Bo:** For me it was really just about learning the landscape and the business side of the industry. But if you did want to be an agent the steps are essentially you’re in the mailroom, and then you’re on typically two desks, possibly more, and then you go back down to the mailroom. And then you come back up and you’re on another desk until then you’re promoted.

So, I knew that I didn’t want to be an agent. And a lot of people are there to kind of just get the experience and hopefully use it as a stepping stone for their next job. And that’s what I observed.

I do think like – and not just this job in particular – but it is really helpful for someone to take you under their wing and really vouch for you. And that’s really an important aspect of being able to rise up the ranks. And it’s really hard, especially if you’re maybe not coming from a background where you’re familiar with the industry or you have connections, or you necessarily have the aspects that someone who staffs a producer, who staffs an agent, who staffs a director. I think they try to foster an environment where you felt like you were supported, but it felt more accessible to certain people as opposed to others.

**Craig:** I mean, are we dancing a little bit around the whole white guy thing right now? Because it does seem like – because here’s my concern. I’m going to tie it back to the money issue. Because the money issue makes it so that the most likely to be at these desks are people who have external support of the kind that I didn’t have, and John I don’t think you had either. You’re going to get a higher percentage of people that are white males. Or I suppose white females. But the point is not people of color. Just because we’re just going on statistics, economic statistics in the United States.

So is there a sense of a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where people take people under their wing. They’re looking for people that, I don’t know, remind them of themselves. I mean, we know how this sort of works with representation. Is there a sense that it’s harder for people of color in these places? They’re getting hit twice. They’re not getting paid enough and the kind of path to rise is even narrower for them than it is for their white coworkers.

**Bo:** Yes. Definitely it’s a factor in being able to enter this arena in the first place. And then I think there’s definitely unconscious or conscious bias when it comes to people looking at assistants and being like, oh, well that person – I don’t know, we talk sports and we jive and naturally there’s a way to bond. And I do think it kind of affects the way that you’re able to have those relationships and have a level of comfort so that you can kind of ask for things. So yeah.

**John:** It sounds like we’re talking about what is an assistant worth. And sort of like the worth of that person. And some of that comes down to the money that you’re paying them. So if you’re paying them a good salary you’re valuing them in a certain way. But valuing them and acknowledging their worth is also how you’re treating them and how you are – whether you’re treating them in ways that have some quality of mentorship that you’re actually going to be able to see them advance through the industry. And it doesn’t sound like these people working at agencies, but also people we’ve talked to who have been working with producers are really getting that experience.

Last week we had someone write in really pleading that if a showrunner is going to hire someone on as an assistant read their stuff ahead of time and be honest with them about whether there’s any chance to be moving up onto the staff, because you don’t want to be spinning your wheels and wasting your time.

Let’s transition to talking about some of the solutions or next steps that folks who’ve written in to us have suggested. Megana, can you get us started with what are people thinking we might want to be looking at in terms of fixing these problems?

**Megana:** Yeah, so you know I think there’s so much momentum and excitement. People are throwing out ideas of strikes and legal action that they can take. And I think an interesting thing that’s come up is having the protection of a union.

So, Marcia wrote in and she said, “Unlike most of the other types of members in IATSE, the overwhelming majority of writers’ room assistant aspire to ultimately do a different type of job – become writers. That is covered by a different union, the WGA. This means that writers’ room assistants like myself are transitory members of the IATSE. We intent to leave IATSE and join the WGA as soon as the opportunity presents itself. As a result, IATSE doesn’t have much reason to look out for the interests of writers’ room assistants since we don’t have much of a future in that union, or at least we hope not.”

And she also points out that IATSE 700 represents the Editors Guild in Hollywood and they have both editors and assistant editors. And she asks if it makes sense for writers’ room assistants who are on their way to becoming writers should also be a part of the WGA in some capacity.

**John:** So what Marcia’s suggesting here does on the surface make sense. You have writers’ room assistants who are very, very close to that screenwriting process. They’re part of the generation of TV shows and they ultimately want to segue into becoming writers so they would be joining the Writers Guild. And it feels really futile to be joining this other union for a time when you don’t really want to be a part of that union.

One of the challenges I think of unionizing assistants overall is that most Hollywood assistants don’t want to be career assistants. So a union makes a lot of sense if that is your chosen profession. But very few of the people who are in those jobs right now do they want to be doing this for 20 years. They’re not looking for a pension as an assistant. They’re looking to move into the next thing. So it’s worth talking about.

I don’t know that it solves the overall problem of assistants who are not in writers’ rooms. Because the WGA wouldn’t be able to cover them. But it’s always worth looking at sort of is there some organized labor way of addressing it.

**Megana:** And I think another big theme that’s been coming in, is that in the idea of taking a sort of legal route to addressing these issues–I mean, what do you do when people in HR and bosses are violating the actual laws in place? And asking people to do illegal things? So, Bo, do you want to read us what Greg wrote in?

**Bo:** Yeah. Greg wrote, “I assisted a showrunner who had two pilots shooting concurrently on location. We worked on one from Monday to Friday and then the other from Wednesday to Sunday. They also shifted the two production hours so they overlapped as little as possible. This meant I was working at least 16 hour days, seven days a week, covering showrunner assistant duties on both shows. To make it worse, they had me script coordinating both shows.

“When the studio production executive saw my time card she came to me saying I couldn’t work this much overtime. I said those were the hours I worked. She told me that they couldn’t approve it. I told her that I expected to be paid for every hour of work and that I was happy to cut back hours going forward. But she would have to talk to my boss, the showrunner, since I don’t control my schedule.

“She tried to tell me that I just couldn’t put down that kind of hours. She was talking around the illegal act of not wanting to say she wanted me to lie on my time card. She even suggested I was lucky that they were taking me on location. I told her that if she prefers she could find three inexperienced locals to do three of the four jobs I was doing. And I could easily work a regular schedule. She went to the showrunner saying I was being insubordinate. I was lucky the showrunner backed me up and even asked me if I wanted to continue working the overtime or hire more people. I made the choice to take the overtime.

“The point here is that the production executive at the studio was bullying me and had I not had the confidence of having done the job for years they would have probably succeeded at stealing from me.”

**Craig:** This is not at all shocking to me because John you and I both know that when these people – people who are pay masters at the studios – are dealing with us they’re also jerks. I mean, partly they’re professional jerks, right? I mean, not all of them are jerks. Don’t get me wrong. But a lot of times they will be really aggressive because the whole crux of their job is pay these people as little as possible. Well, if they’re doing that to us, you can only imagine what they’re doing to somebody like Greg who is apparently being held accountable for his hours while having no authority whatsoever over them. He’s being ordered to work. By the way, no one should be working that much. That’s insane.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely insane.

**John:** Absolutely insane. The whole sidebar conversation that nobody should be working that many hours.

**Craig:** Correct. And this production executive should have seen that timecard and called the showrunner immediately. But how dare she call this person and say essentially I’m not paying you for this, because I don’t want to. Tough. Talk to the showrunner. Tell them, hey, you can’t do this anymore. And what really lights me on fire is the amount of money that we’re talking about there to cover what is essentially the discrepancy of one timecard between what she wants it to be and what it actually was is not significant to that company. Guaranteed.

**John:** It’s less than one visual effects shot on either of those pilots.

**Craig:** Thank you. So she spent time browbeating this person and chiseling them down for what? For what? I mean, if you don’t want this to be part of your culture then cancel it as part of your culture by going to the showrunners and saying don’t do that. By the way, showrunner, whoever you are, don’t do that anyway. I mean, I’m sorry. You need somebody to go to you and say hey this is a problem before you go, oh yeah, I guess that’s a problem? Do you not understand how the world works? That people can’t work 16 hours a day, seven days a week? Why would you ever put anyone in that position in the first place? It’s wrong. Hire more people. Hire more people. And pay them a fair wage. There you go. There’s a big plan.

**John:** On previous episodes we’ve talked about there have been legal cases that have challenged things, especially on interns. So there was the Black Swan case we talked about. There’s another Viacom case. Where there were unpaid interns who were being asked to do work that should be paid work. There probably is a lawsuit that could be taking situations like Greg’s and especially when they’re actually being instructed to fill out false timecards where you are stealing money from employees. And that is what a lawsuit like that would look like. And if I were a studio or an agency or an employer who was listening to this I would be concerned about that because those things can happen and it probably should happen.

So I’ll be curious whether any of that stuff comes up in this next period of time.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I suppose that’s what happens when you don’t have the wherewithal to be a decent human being and do the right thing in the first place. Now lawyers have to get involved to force you to do the right thing. But I have to look at these situations and say to myself the people that need to be talked to are the people that are employing. So the showrunners who employ these folks, the agents that employ these folks, the studio executives that employ them, the HR people. All of them. This has to come from the absolute top. Somebody at the top who sets the tone for everything has to sit them all down and say, “I’m sorry. I’m not going to be the head of a company that does this to human beings. I’m just not. I don’t care.”

And look I understand. Sometimes we’re going to have employees that aren’t good. Sometimes you’re going to have employees that steal, or break stuff, or are incompetent and will need to be fired. I understand. I get it. I’m not, I don’t know, I’m not a hippie. I’m just saying if you’re going to hire people you can’t work them 16 hours a day, seven days a week. You have to pay them a fair wage so that they can live there. And you don’t want a situation where the only people that can work for you are people whose moms and dads can send them checks. It’s outrageous.

**John:** All right. Well let’s assign some homework for some of our listeners. So, this is sort of a challenge to the showrunners, writers, executives, or agents who are listening. This would be a great week to take some time to figure out how much your assistants are actually being paid and how that translates to take home pay. It’s a great week to ask are these assistants paying for health insurance out of their own pocket. How are they covering health insurance? How are they getting to work? Literally what are some of their expenses in terms of showing up there and in showing up there how do they have to be dressed. Are you being realistic about the expenses it takes to be doing the job that you’re having them do? And what are your company’s rules about overtime? How are you avoiding Greg situations where people are working these insane numbers of hours?

So, my challenge to everyone who is listening who is an employer, please do take some time this week to really figure out what you are actually doing. Because I don’t want to mistake ignorance for malice. I don’t want to sort of ascribe some evil intent when it’s really just people who aren’t paying attention to how much they’re paying and how expensive it is to live in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** And I would also just advise anyone who feels themselves falling into the trap of saying, “Well, that’s what I got paid when I came in.” Just please understand if it was longer than 10 years ago, they’re getting paid less effectively because expenses have outpaced inflation. Your argument is not valid.

**John:** Anyone who says, “It’s always been that way,” is ignoring two things. First off, it’s always been that way doesn’t mean it was ever right. Second, it’s always been that way ignores how much more expensive it is to live in 2019 than whenever they’re comparing it back to. So, stop with it’s always been that way. It doesn’t mean it was right. It’s always been that way for there was sexual harassment and other things that were always happening that way. It was never right then and it had to stop. So, enough of that argument.

I’m curious, a couple things that have come up that I’ve seen on Twitter. People talk about like some folks are sharing their information along with their name, but I think a lot more people are scared to come forward and sort of put their name to things because fears of reprisals. Fears of it being held against them. Megana, have you seen people who have been writing in express that sentiment?

**Megana:** Definitely. And a lot of people who have been writing in, you know, are very scared that we’re going to use their information because a lot of them have signed NDAs and have experienced really vindictive employers who have jeopardized their career in certain ways. And also terrorized them while they were working for them. But you know people have been suggesting a town hall or some sort of way to express what they’re feeling in a public way and to be around other assistants and actually like feel that people are listening to them. But I think it’s just a difficult situation because these are the people in Hollywood who have the least power.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. I would say that honestly an assistant’s name is actually far less important than the employer’s name. So, you know, if you want to keep your anonymity I fully support that. 100%. Look, your business is your business, right? Now obviously we’re trying to address something here. I’ve got to be honest. I’m not sure our general problem is that we’re short on evidence. In other words, ICM knows exactly what they pay their assistants. And now we know exactly what they pay their assistants. There’s no problem with that. Finding places and people and saying, “Look, I worked for this person. This person whose name is this pays their assistants this.” That’s valuable.

And it’s not like they can really get away with claiming that it’s a bunch of crap because people have pay stubs, right? So eventually you can show a paystub. But I don’t actually think that it’s super important for people to hang their name out there because I get it and I think the bigger piece of information is who is paying not enough.

**John:** I think this would be a great week for an employer to step up and say, “We’ve read through, we’ve looked at stuff, and we are now as a blanket policy raising the minimum we’re paying to anyone including our assistants to this figure.” And if it is a livable figure I think you get a lot of good publicity out of it. And especially if you really are backing it up with some program or some system that is encouraging upward mobility and not just sort of grinding people.

**Craig:** That’s who we change this. And I am all for assistants getting together and talking and sharing because you need to feel heard and you need to feel seen. And when you are in a jam situation a lot of times you start to feel like maybe it’s only you, or maybe you’re crazy, or maybe you’re just a whiner. And it’s really good to be able to share that stuff with other people and get perspective. But if we want to change this business what we need is someone powerful who runs a big company who listens to this and says, “I would like to be the first hero and do this.” And I hope we do get somebody. I mean, step forward, look at your numbers, and do it.

Please do it. And you know you can do it, by the way. Absolutely affordable. You know, I mean, it’s easy enough to look at some of these companies and say, all right, CEO shave 3% off your yearly income and it’s handled.

**John:** Yeah. Megana and Bo, thank you so much for coming on the show but also for all the work you’ve done this week sort of organizing and figuring out this massive information coming our way. So thank you both very much.

**Megana:** Thank you both for letting us on.

**Bo:** Thank you.

**Craig:** All right, now back to work, both of you. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And also I’m not paying for the amount of time that you were on this. This doesn’t go on your timecard.

**Bo:** But I did puzzles today.

**Craig:** Nope. [laughs]

**John:** All right, let’s segue to our main topic for today. I’m calling this segment Minimum Viable Movie because it was two weeks ago I went into a class at USC. Howard Rodman teaches a screenwriting class. And once a year if I can I go in and talk with his students. And they have their movies broken out in index cards. And they lay out their cards and they talk through their movie. And it’s a really useful exercise, I think both for them but also for me talking through what do I actually think is a movie and how movies work when they’re just broken down on cards.

And in some cases these were clearly very talented writers who had interesting things to say, but I challenged them on is that actually a movie. There was one writer who I said you’re entering an interesting story place, but what you’re describing sounds like a musical without songs. That so much of what she was aiming to do was going to be unspoken. There was no way to actually get to what was interesting about what was happening inside those character’s heads. So in a musical you could expose those things. In a movie I didn’t see how she was planning to do it and she couldn’t articulate how she was planning to do it.

So, I thought you and I might take a few minutes to talk through what you actually need to have in order to have something that is a movie idea versus a something else idea.

**Craig:** Well, I understand that when you are young and maybe you’re in a program like that one over there at USC that you might have a tendency away from what we would call conventional narrative and conventional movie. And you may be thinking of more independent fare of the sort that occasionally is dubbed mumblecore. And there are movies that are seemingly unrestrained by narrative demands. And those are cool. It’s just that, you know, if that’s what you’re aiming for go and do it, but you’re probably not actually – you don’t really need to spend all that money at USC at that point. I really do believe. Do you know what I mean?

There are great lessons to be had.

**John:** I actually wanted to draw a big enough circle to include the mumblecore movies which are genuinely movies, but some things are – there’s things that people try to write that aren’t even that. And they may even write a full screenplay, but you read the screenplay and you’re like, yeah, but that’s not actually a movie. Because you and I have both had that experience where we read a script that’s not very good, but we can say like, oh, but that’s definitely a movie. I see why that’s a movie.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Or other things that are actually well written, but like it’s good writing but it’s not a movie. And so I want to try to distinguish those two things. So, my first question would be is there a story. Is there a beginning, a middle, and an end?

**Craig:** Boy, this must have been some class over there. [laughs]

**John:** Well, here’s what it is. I’m not pushing for any one specific narrative theory or a thing that has to happen. It’s much less dogmatic than even sort of your Scriptnotes lesson when you talked through how to write a movie. But is it actually a story or are you just describing a situation? Because there are short stories that are really kind of just it’s a portrait. It’s a steady, still state of a thing. But there’s not forward movement. So that forward motion is a crucial aspect I think of a story that wants to be a movie.

**Craig:** Agreed. And I think probably it’s an essential building block of these things that the end be relevant to the beginning. In other words, you can have a beginning, you can have a middle, but if you end somewhere that has really nothing to do with the beginning it’s not actually an end. It’s just where the movie stopped. And that doesn’t count.

**John:** Nope. Is this a story that wants to be told on a screen? And by that I don’t mean it has to be on a giant screen. It doesn’t have to be projected. I’m not talking to classic feature film. But ask yourself is this idea really better as a book, a graphic novel, a stage play, a videogame, a VR experience. And that’s a question I ask myself when I had the idea that ultimately became Arlo Finch. I had all this stuff but I was like it’s not really a movie. And then I realized, oh, it’s actually a middle grade book series. That’s what it really wanted to be. But if I had tried to force it into movie shape at the start it really wouldn’t have worked.

And so I think it’s always worth asking is a movie the best way to explore this narrative, bunch of things that are interesting to you. Or is there a better way to do it? If it doesn’t have to be a movie, then it probably isn’t a movie.

**Craig:** Especially when you are contemplating a story that is very internal. If something really is living primarily in someone’s mind it’s probably a book.

**John:** Yeah. Books are great at that. And in Arlo Finch in the books I can go into Arlo’s head and really see what he’s thinking. And that is going to be very challenging to do in any screen adaptation. So ask yourself how externalized are character’s thoughts and motivations and ambitions. If they’re really internal then you kind of are writing a musical without songs and that’s going to be really challenging to do.

I’d ask is the story you’re trying to tell familiar to the point of being cliché. And so it’s absolutely fine to write within a genre. We’ve talked about how much we love rom-coms. But if you’re just stringing together the genre’s tropes then that’s not really a movie. There’s probably not a compelling reason to make that movie or a compelling reason to watch that movie. You have to really challenge yourself like given all the choices of things I could watch would you actually choose to watch that movie. And that should be a requirement before you’re going to spend months of your life writing this script.

**Craig:** I agree. I also think that if you are contemplating a story that is executed primarily through really big conversations you may be in trouble. I see this all the time. I think people sometimes have very meaningful conversations in their life and they think that’s a movie. It’s not. Generally speaking the stories of movies are pushed forward not by conversation but by events. Choices. Things that crash into people. Whatever it is. There are conversations and some of them are amazing. But movies that are just trying to mirror some conversation you had in your life will generally never be as interesting to other people as they are to you.

They kind of aren’t movies.

**John:** I would challenge you to look at the central characters in your story and are they compelling? Are they genuinely people you want to watch for two hours? And importantly does the action of the story happen because of things they do, or does the story happen to them? If it’s happening to them it’s unlikely to sort of really work as a movie because they’re just a cork sort of bobbing down the river as it goes down. They should be driving the action to some meaningful degree. And in driving the action classically you want to see them change.

I’m willing to go with characters who don’t change. I want to draw a really big circle around the kinds of things that can be OK to write as movies, but you have to have some characters. If you don’t have characters that are compelling to watch that make you want to stay with them for two hours – antiheroes, heroes, whatever. We’re not asking for likeable. Just compelling. Then you probably don’t have a movie.

**Craig:** I agree. And I think sometimes what happens with newer writers is they are in love with a kind of story. Maybe they come up with a great idea. But what they do is replicate their experience of enjoying movies. They create characters that are watching the movie that they’re in.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that is no bueno. We’re watching the movie. That means the character is the movie. The character can’t be watching it along with us. That’s just dreadful.

**John:** Nope. The last challenge I’d put for people is do you as the author have something interesting to say about this topic or this narrative space that you’re describing. Because if it’s just going to be another manifestation of this thing then sort of why. What is it you are bringing to this that is different than other people are bringing to this? What is it that really makes this movie a unique expression of this kind of story? If you don’t have that then it’s probably not the thing you should be writing next.

**Craig:** Yeah. I completely agree.

**John:** Cool. So with those caveats, again, I don’t want to make this sound like we’re against small movies or mumblecore or intimate ones or things that don’t fit a very classic Hollywood architecture. I’m all for experimental whatever. But in the experimental things that you’re trying to do is there are real reason why this thing should exist? Maybe it’s like some sort of video installation piece that doesn’t have to have plot or story or anything moving forward. That’s great. That’s terrific. But that’s not a movie you would be writing as a screenplay.

**Craig:** Could be a song. Could be an album. Could be a painting. There’s all sorts of ways to express yourself. Moving images on screen, whether it’s television or feature films, is really specific. It’s a very specific art form that some stories are perfectly suited to and others not at all.

**John:** Yep. All right. We’ve got two questions here to answer. Tom asks, “Have you done anything on developing and defining the concept of a franchise in TV and how that’s evolving? For example, take a classic procedural show like Chicago Fire or NYPD Blue. The traditional franchise of that show is the story of the week, usually with significant stakes. Yet it increasingly feels like the real franchise in TV shows is the interweaving of serialized relationship dramas between the characters. That’s what you keep coming back for week after week. Do you and Craig feel that the story of the week franchise model still drives television?”

**Craig:** Well, it seems like it’s been driving television for the network for quite some time. I mean, Dick Wolf, obviously our friend Derek Haas is the creator/co-creator of Chicago Fire. But that falls under the Dick Wolf empire. And he also has Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: CVS. And Law & Order: IBB. And so on. And I assume that they do this a lot because it boosts ratings. It’s a good ratings event for network TV.

I mean, I get it. Networks are still pounding out 22 shows a season, you know. I mean, that’s a lot. You’ve got to give people some curve balls in there to keep them excited and keep them coming back. I don’t think this is at all the model for streaming or cable. I mean, generally speaking I don’t know of any streaming or cable property that is kind of a standalone story of the week type of show. They’re almost always serialized to some extent or another. And sometimes they’re even anthologized like American Horror Story.

So, yeah, I think it makes sense. It’s a network thing because networks have way more shows to put out there. And, hey, in return they get way more eyeballs. You got to tip your hat.

**John:** I look at the progression of the hospital show from the old ones which were incredibly straight procedural. Like you could watch them in any order and it would make sense. You have a show like ER which is largely procedural, but there was some ongoing stuff that happened week to week. And so relationships would develop and change. But if you just dropped in on an episode you could follow it completely. Grey’s Anatomy is much more the soap opera model of relationships. Like that is what you’re really focusing on. While there is medicine there, you move forward.

I think it ultimately comes back to what is the expectation of the audience as they start watching that show. Are they expecting to have ongoing relationships with these characters that grow and change that the interplay between them is really meaningful? Or are they looking for just a simple thing happens. Like the classic old Star Trek episodes you can kind of watch them in any order because it is an alien of the week that is really driving the plot of a given episode.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s about expectation. And I do agree with Craig that what we’re seeing on premium cable and streaming and even increasingly now on network is much more about the relationships between the characters and not the this is the plot that is introduced at the start of the episode that will be resolved by the end of the episode.

**Craig:** Yeah. In fact streamers or at least when you look at Netflix they seem so utterly disinterested in the old model of get to this many episodes so that you can syndicate. That they will routinely cut off shows after three seasons no matter what. Because they’re just like, meh, people are still watching it, they like it, but let’s just stop spending money on it and let’s put something else in. Because the old way, the network way of doing things was, OK, you’re a production company. You’re going to deficit finance a show. It’s going to go on a network, meaning you’re not going to get in the license the network pays you it’s not enough to pay for the cost of making each show. So how does this make sense? Syndication. How do you get to syndication? You need a minimum of 100 episodes. So your show has got to be enough of a hit that it can last all that time.

Well, if you’re a streamer and you’re making your own show and putting it out there and there’s no syndication to have, it just endlessly syndicates on your own platform, cut it off. Actors are asking for too much money? Cut it off. Make a new thing. That’s where we’re going.

**John:** It is. All right, Paul writes, “I know spec scripts for TV shows are a thing. But I just finished a spec feature script for a film franchise that I definitely do not have the rights to. But I think it’s a good script and I wanted to show it to people. Is this the sort of thing that agents or whoever would be willing to look at? Or will they roll their eyes and say, “Ugh, fan fiction,” and toss it?”

So, before we answer Paul’s question, spec is such a weird term because it means a different thing in television than in features. So just as a refresher a spec script in television is a script that I write for an existing TV show. So I wasn’t hired to write it, but basically I could write a spec Chicago Fire. It’s not designed to actually be shot as Chicago Fire, but people can read it as a writing sample. So specs in TV are really writing samples.

A spec in feature is something you’re writing with the intention to sell. So you hear about a spec script selling, that is a feature thing basically.

**Craig:** Yeah. And part of the deal with that is that at least traditionally because the kind of television show you’d write a spec script for does churn out episodes and should theoretically be out next year and the year after that. And you usually write spec scripts for well-established, well liked shows. There’s a chance they could buy it. I mean, they need more episodes. They’re always going to need more episodes. They hire lots of writers. But if you’re talking about a movie, a film franchise, and just side note I hate the fact that we are all using this word “franchise” now. Like some soulless goon came up with this franchise thing to stick on top of art. It makes me nuts.

Franchises are McDonald’s, OK. But whatever, fine. We all lose. So, people have this film franchise and they’re not necessarily looking to you to write a script. They’re not going to make one or two or 12 this year. They’re going to make one every three years and they’re not looking for outside writers to deliver those. There’s just not the demand.

So, right off the bat it’s a little questionable. It is at best a sample for something. You’re never going to get full credit for it unless it’s wildly subversive. In other words, if you write a spec feature in a well-established series like Fast & Furious but it is entirely the opposite of what you would expect, it’s like one quiet evening and it’s drama and there’s no car chases whatsoever and that’s the point is that you’re being clever, maybe that would attract some eyes and people would go, oh, this is a creative individual.

But, yeah, I think mostly you’re just not going to get the credit you should because you’re borrowing other people’s characters. You’re borrowing other people’s scenarios. And you’re bothering other people’s tone. You will probably get quite a few rolled eyes and people saying, “Ugh, fan fiction.”

**John:** So, yes, I agree. You potentially could get some fan fiction knock back. I will say that when people write scripts intending them to be writing samples it is a moment for some wild swings. And so those wild swings are the things that end up on the Black List that ends up getting attention or ends up getting passed around. So if you had a great idea for a mash up of Fast & Furious and the Marvel movies that couldn’t exist in the real world and you chose to write that, you would write that knowing that this is never going to be a thing that actually sells, but some people might really dig it and it might get you some meetings. It might get you an agent. It might get you started.

So it’s not not worth your time. But understand that you’re never going to be able to sell that thing. But you’re also not going to be sued over it. They’re not going to come after you for writing a script like that because you’re not selling it. It’s fine to do that. You’re going to be OK doing that.

And it is a little bit more like what classic TV staffing was like is that I was writing a spec Frasier episode, not because I was even trying to get hired to write on Frasier, but I might want to be hired on Mad About You or some of the other shows that were staffing at the same time. So it’s an example of like can I use other people’s characters and write those voices.

Mindy Kaling on Twitter recently was talking about staffing for her show and she was like why doesn’t anybody write spec scripts anymore. Like I love reading specs of existing shows because I know the voices of those characters and I can see very quickly whether you can actually write the voices of those characters. And to her it was more helpful to see like not that you had a brilliant original voice of your own, but that you could actually write the voice of these other existing shows.

So it goes back and forth. There’s reasons why both things exist. But I would say to Paul if he has the compelling idea and he probably also has some other original things he’s written and he wants to write this thing that he can’t actually sell, maybe.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m a little concerned that that’s your one thing. If you’ve got three things, and that’s one of them that’s fine. But if your one thing is that I’m concerned that you are doing fan fiction and that you aren’t capable of doing a script without that kind of Hamburger Helper. So I would challenge you, Paul, to do a script without the Hamburger Helper. See how you do.

**John:** Agreed. All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. I actually have two this week–

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** But they’re both music related and it was a good week for music for me. The first is Taylor Swift did a Tiny Desk concert for NPR. It’s the ongoing NPR series where they invite in musicians and they perform a little concert in the NPR offices. What I liked about hers was not so much the performance but her talking between the songs. So there was no interviewer. She was just talking about writing the songs. And she talked about this one song Lover which was the title track on the album just sort of came to her all at once and it was the fantasy of like, oh, she sat down at the piano, the whole thing was there. She didn’t know where it came from. And she was like well that will be the title track. Like it all just works. But sometimes you show up at the piano and it just doesn’t work and that’s when you fall back on your craft to try to figure out how stuff fits together and how to make the thing work.

And it was just nice to hear somebody in a completely field talk about what I often experience. There are those moments where it just all flows so naturally and you don’t even know where it all came from. And other times when it’s a lot of craft and it’s a lot of pushing stuff around and making it work.

So, I’d encourage you to take a look at that. The second thing, Craig, I think you’ll appreciate.

**Craig:** I love this. I read it. I gobbled it up.

**John:** Seth Stevenson at Slate wrote a piece about The Terminator theme. And we’ll play this here so you can hear what we’re talking about. As you listen to it [music plays] it’s striking but a thing I used to do with my daughter in the car is as the radio was playing I’d ask her what count is this song in. And so she’d clap her hands and she’d figure out whether it was four, or three, or six. And very quickly sort of be able to figure out music tends to be three, four, six. Every once in a while you’ll get something really fancy. You’ll get like a take five, which is in five-four.

As you’re listening to this Terminator theme what time signature is this? And so you can try to count in four but it doesn’t work. You can try to count it in six, and it doesn’t work. And so there’s ongoing debate about it. So Seth Stevenson was able to go to the composer to actually talk to him about what happened. And the reason why it’s in such a crazy time signature is because of how it was actually made and sort of the state of looping software back in those times. And basically he couldn’t make the times match up right so it ended up in this impossible time signature that would be very hard for an orchestra to play for example.

So I thought it was just a great example of math and music and movies, so a combination of all the things we love.

**Craig:** They run it through carefully and come up with 13-16. It’s in 13-16. So, really what’s happening is it’s in a weird decimal of a four. I mean, whatever 13 divided by four is. What is that?

**John:** 12 and a fourth. Four, four and a quarter. Basically there’s an extra quarter.

**Craig:** Extra quarter note.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s so weird. It is a bizarre – it’s like so if you were to express four-four time in 16ths then it’s just 16 number 16. Easy. And three-four time is 12 over 16. So, 13 over 16 is almost in three but there’s a little extra bit. It’s like a tiny little extra bit in there. It is bizarre. You would never do it on purpose.

I mean, I love weird time signature stuff. I mean, if you want to look at some crazy time signature stuff Here Comes the Sun has some wacky crap that happens in it just for a few measures here and there. Led Zeppelin pulls out a nine-eight at one point I think for The Ocean. And then we have Solsbury Hill in seven-four, which is always fun. I like the songs in seven. And seven is really just alternating four and three I think. This is where musicians will probably get angry at me, but that’s how I kind of think of it.

**John:** Yeah. So take a look at it. Take a listen to it. I like that Seth Stevenson had a question and actually tracked down the composer to find the answer.

**Craig:** Yeah. Beautiful. Wonderful job. Well, you know what. You had two. That covers me. I feel great.

**John:** Good. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Thanks to Megana and to Bo for their help this week.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tyler Adams. 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 or assistant emails.

For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. You can also download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, thanks so much for a jam-packed episode.

**Craig:** Thanks man.

**John:** Cool. Bye.

Links:

* [Austin Film Festival Schedule](https://austinfilmfestival.com/festival-and-conference-aff/2019-full-schedule/)
* Taylor Swift [Tiny Desk Concert on NPR](https://www.npr.org/2019/10/16/770318649/taylor-swift-tiny-desk-concert)
* [What Is the Time Signature of the Ominous Electronic Score of The Terminator?](https://slate.com/culture/2014/02/the-time-signature-of-the-terminator-score-is-a-mystery-for-the-ages.html) by Seth Stevenson
* [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 Tyler Adams ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_423_minimum_viable_movie.mp3)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/professionalism).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 419 of Scriptnotes. Craig, what is Scriptnotes?

**Craig:** Scriptnotes is a podcast about things that are interesting to screenwriters. And screenwriting.

**John:** Everything is mixed up today.

**Craig:** Yeah. I love it. It’s a Backwards Day. I like it.

**John:** This is the grab-baggiest of episodes. We’re going to be talking about everything from Emmys to elections, professionalism, to patronage. Lots of stuff, so let’s get into it.

Craig, this Sunday were the Emmys. I can’t believe this day has finally come. The Emmys were on Sunday. Unfortunately this is Friday that we’re recording this so we have no idea what happened on Sunday.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I want to propose something.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Let’s record both versions. Let’s record the versions where you had a spectacular Sunday where you won a bunch of awards, and then we’ll record the one where you didn’t.

**Craig:** Got it. We actually should record three. We should record Chernobyl wins an award for something, but I don’t win. I win, Chernobyl wins nothing.

**John:** Great. So let’s do the big sweep where you win and Chernobyl wins. You were there for two awards. You picked up both of those statues. I was so excited to see you up there on stage. I thought your speech was fantastic.

**Craig:** Aw, thank you.

**John:** I was just beaming with pride because listeners like me have been following this whole journey. And you were away from the show for a while and you made this thing. And it was great closure to see you up there on that stage. I’m so happy and proud for you.

**Craig:** Boy, John, it’s weird up there. It’s so surreal.

**John:** Well, I saw you took a beat.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I saw you took a beat and just took it all in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was thinking of you during that beat. And then, yeah, it’s just so weird. Boy, that room is so big and the lights are really bright in your eyes. And of course you’re worried that you’re not going to have enough time. They’re going to play you off the stage which they did/did not do. And, yeah, a great night. It didn’t matter. Win or lose you’re just happy to be there amongst your peers. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. You can’t take away the fact that you made something amazing and to be just celebrated up there on the stage for it was just icing on the cake.

**Craig:** Well golly.

**John:** Next version, so you don’t win the writing award but you do win the limited series award. Craig, it’s hard to even call this a mixed outcome because like Best Limited Series, congratulations.

**Craig:** Sure. Thank you. You know what? At this point you try and parse the achievement of making a show into individual awards just doesn’t even make logical sense anymore. So, you just have to go, you know what? We were nominated for lots of stuff and we’re super proud of that. If you win anything that’s amazing, especially in a year like this where we had such incredible competition. Congrats to Ava DuVernay and When They See Us for all the awards that they picked up. I think that’s a pretty good prediction right there.

And but to all of the great shows in our category. I mean, what a year. So, you know who the real winners were John? Television watchers. [laughs]

**John:** Well absolutely. And I think the Best Limited Series acknowledges the fact that this thing would not exist if you had not had the idea – if you had not been surfing Wikipedia and finding this information about the Chernobyl disaster, thinking like this is potentially a show. So that award is your award and it all came from the writing.

**Craig:** Well, listen, that’s the wonderful thing about television is that the writers are in charge, which is probably why television is so much better than movies right now. You know, movies, take note.

**John:** Yes. And I thought you saying that in your awards acceptance speech was absolutely appropriate.

**Craig:** Pretty crazy, right? Like what a weird axe to grind.

**John:** At the Emmy Awards. All right, third option. So Sunday were the Emmys. You got to go and see all the celebration for your show which was nominated.

**Craig:** See other people win.

**John:** So, while I was disappointed not to see you up there on that stage, I love when they do the cutaway shots to the people in the audience as their names are called. And to see you there with Melissa was just great. And I was just really proud to see you there, honored for what you have made.

**Craig:** Well, John, as you know I got into writing so that I could be on television. Actually, you probably noticed, I don’t know if they cutaway beforehand or not, but right when they announced that Ava DuVernay kept winning everything you probably noticed me turn behind me, to the left of me, to the right of me, ahead of me – depending on how it goes – to find Alec Berg and sort of give him a, “Yeah, I get it, now I know what it feels like.” Because, you know, again, poor Alec. 21 nominations. 0 for 21. But side note, that’s a pretty decent prediction. I think, I’m not trying to jinx Alec. I think it’s going to be a tough road to hoe for him. But back to the alternate reality.

Yeah, but you know what? Honestly, we didn’t go in expecting to win anything and we were so proud of our crafts people, our below the line people that won lots of awards the week before. We felt great. And it was an amazing year for television and for limited series. Hats off to Ava. Great job on that series. Wonderful show. So, we’re pleased as punch that the season of awards is over.

**John:** Yes, for sure. But you also had one extra special visit that happened this last week. Apparently you got to meet the President of Ukraine?

**Craig:** I met the President of Ukraine. I visited him. So this is a fascinating thing. There’s a conference in Ukraine, it’s an annual conference called the Yalta European Summit. It used to take place in Yalta, which is in Crimea. It no longer does because Russia has invaded Crimea. So it is in Kiev, Ukraine. And it is attended by all sorts of – you know, John, we run in Hollywood circles, right. So we always feel like, ooh, look at this party. It’s got all of the hoo-ha people.

**John:** Oh, Natalie Portman.

**Craig:** Yeah, ooh, Natalie Portman. Or, ooh, Jim Gianopulos. In this thing the hoo-ha people are like, ooh, look, Steven Pinker, and Fareed Zakaria, and the ambassador from a country to another country. It’s very fancy.

So I went there and Fareed Zakaria interviewed me on stage about Chernobyl. And then I was heading to the airport to come home and the man who runs this whole thing said, “Oh, by the way, the President of Ukraine would like to meet you if you could delay a little bit.” And I said, yeah, I want to meet the President of Ukraine. And so I went to the President of Ukraine’s office, in this very large building that used to be the Party Headquarters back in the Soviet Days. This beautiful building.

I’d never met a president before. I’ve never gotten to say, “Well hello Mr. President.” It was very cool. And here’s the cool thing about President Zelensky. He’s just been elected. And he’s one of us, John. He’s a writer-performer-comedian-entertainer. He comes out of the entertainment business in Ukraine. And it was a great conversation. We talked a lot about film production and how to help bring film production to Ukraine. They really want to get more shows shooting there, which I thought was great. And in no way did I involve myself in any kind of weird whistleblowing scandal.

**John:** Did you make any promises to him that were listened in by intelligence officers? None of that stuff happened?

**Craig:** No. In fact, quite the opposite. At one point during the conversation we were talking about some ideas and things and he said, “You know, just to be clear we’re just talking.” I said, oh no, we’re not making the laws or anything. [laughs] I’m an idiot. You know that, right? I’m stupid.

He was great. He’s a terrific guy. At least that was my impression of him. I can’t necessarily speak to how he – I hope for the sake of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people that he does a great job. He’s got an excellent – currently he’s at like 80% popularity. Do you remember when our president got an 80% popularity?

**John:** That was a different universe.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** I do fear that the transcripts as people look back on this episode, you know, five years down the road something could go terribly wrong. But for this moment it was neat that you got to meet the President of Ukraine.

**Craig:** So you’re saying like there will be some crazy war or genocide and then we’ll have the equivalent of me on tape going, “Yeah, so Hitler, he seemed like a great guy. We had a great conversation.” No.

**John:** He’s really a film person. He’s an entertainer.

**Craig:** He’s an artist. He loves to paint. You know, he’s adorable. He’s cute. He’s got a great mustache. No, I’m very hopeful for Ukraine that President Zelensky does a great job. I don’t know anything about politics. At least Ukrainian politics. I know nothing. I’m mostly just optimistic and hopeful for them. But, yeah, that was weird.

**John:** Yeah. It’s also – stepping away from the President of Ukraine, it’s cool you got to travel in the circles of big thinkers who write big books about the future of the world.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that’s nice.

**Craig:** I felt highly unqualified. There were some really impressive, very famous historians and thinkers and politicians and people. So, but it did remind me that we actually do have quite an impact on the world around us. It’s like this podcast. You know how we’re always surprised – or maybe you’re not, but I’m always surprised when people say they listen to the podcast, like Chris O’Dowd. I was so surprised that he listens to the podcast. I’m endlessly surprised that anyone listens to it. But they do. And similarly with television you make a show and you put it out there but they might tell you, oh, this many millions of people watched it, but the number doesn’t connect in your mind to reality. And then you realize, oh yeah, these people all watched it and they have feelings about it, you know. And happily for us the overwhelming opinion of folks there in Kiev was very positive towards our show which was huge, wonderful.

**John:** The show where it’s set. So, yes, good to hear.

**Craig:** Yes, very good.

**John:** So the Emmy season is over but also another important season is over. The WGA election season, which was endless.

**Craig:** Aw. Too soon. [laughs]

**John:** Too soon. Oh god, not a moment too soon. I don’t know why, it’s probably there’s a constitutional reason why the voting period has to be so long, but Craig it was too long. It went on forever.

**Craig:** The reason is that the constitution that governs these things was written in the ‘40s I believe, you know, back when people had to vote by mail only and all the information you got came by mail.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Or meetings that you had to go to. There was no Internet. There was no social media. So what’s happened is let’s say there was X amount of political content to which you would be exposed as a writer. Now there is 1,000 X political content that you are being exposed to as a writer in this election. It’s too long. They should shorten it because the amount of information that we’re bombarded with is insane. And it’s just too much.

**John:** It is too much. But let’s talk about the end result of this before we get into process and–

**Craig:** It was great.

**John:** [laughs] So in the East Beau Willimon was reelected along with some other folks who are supportive of the agency campaign. In the West a total of 5,809 valid ballots were cast which was 58% of eligible votes, which is a nice round number. It’s about 10,000 voters, people who could vote. So that was record turnout in the West. And more than doubles the turnout of the 2018 Board of Directors election. So David Goodman and the incumbents were reelected along with the four newcomers who I endorsed by a lot. So Goodman won 3-to-1. Everybody else was at least 2-to-1. So it was a significant victory for that group of people who are sort of a steady line from where we’ve been.

**Craig:** Yeah. No question. And I think this was essentially a foregone conclusion almost from the start. I mean, I didn’t think it would be otherwise. There’s some interesting things that come out of this. By the way, and one of them is that also just to be clear in case people were wondering, if I had been able to stay in the race I also would have lost. There’s no question. It’s interesting, the most important thing I hope that our membership takes away from this, particularly the people that did vote for the people who won, is that the election was not damaging to our union. That this kind of open discussion and debate did not destroy us. Nor did it topple their preferred candidates to the ground.

There was almost, I want to call it like a paranoia, or a fear that something that they loved very much or cared about very deeply was going to be destroyed by people from within. And that did not happen. Point being you can survive elections, and I’m saying this especially to guild members who never really saw one of these before because unfortunately and anomalously the last three presidential elections have essentially been uncontested, which is not the traditional WGA way. This is the traditional WGA election.

So, good news is we can survive these. They’re very good for us. They’re good to discuss. And the other thing that’s important to note for people like me who are questioning the way the leadership is going about pursuing a conclusion, a potential conclusion, to our agency campaign is that the amount of people that seemed to dissent from the way the leadership is doing this has roughly quadrupled since we took our first vote on it back in whatever it was, March or April. Back then it was 95%, about 400 people said no to that. I was not one of them. I was like you, I said yes.

About ish, averaging around 1,600 people voted against leadership, so something is happening. It’s worth noting. Those people are not in power. The people who are in power are in power. But there is a trend. So I’m hoping that leadership has taken notice of that and will consider it as they now go about, I don’t know, doing what they’re going to do.

**John:** I would say at all of the membership meetings, and I don’t know if you’ve listened to any of the audio from the membership meetings, the current leadership was very up front about the fact recognizing that five months into this dissent has grown. There’s folks who are unhappy with how all of this is being conducted. And sort of worried about the outcome of things. And so I think that was reflected in some of that voting there. But I think a probably more crucial takeaway is that there was this worry I think that in the fatigue and in this thing going on that people would just start tuning out. They would start paying attention and just kind of want to be done or just shut it all out.

And I think the fact that there was record turnout, that Goodman was elected by a huge majority than even he was elected when he was uncontested speaks to a support for a resolution with the current people in place.

**Craig:** You mean he got more votes this time.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I mean, he can’t do better than 100%

**John:** It is hard to do that math. At least in a democratic system, yes.

**Craig:** Correct. The turnout was very encouraging. You want to see writers engaged. And this is my point to everybody that was kind of freaking out. I’m sorry. They kind of were. I was shocked. The worst possible instinct we could have as a union and as a membership polity is to be against free and open elections and campaigns. And I love to see that people were engaged and got engaged and voted. I think this is exactly the way it should go. I’m thrilled. And I hope that the people take some sort of – now that they’ve gone through it maybe they’ll feel a little less insecure about it the next time through.

**John:** The one thing I do want to bring up because this is a thing I’ve seen and grousing on the edges of the Internet is like, “Oh, those folks who voted for it aren’t even really working writers.” And that is not accurate. I mean, in order to be a voting member people should know it’s not that you sell a script and then 20 years later you’re still a voting member. You’re not. You have to sort of keep working in order to maintain your current status. And so for 2018 there were 6,057 who reported earnings. So there are a lot of working writers who are the voting membership of the WGA.

**Craig:** Yeah, you hear this a lot. I mean, yes, technically you can have people – well, there are two kinds of writers who can vote who are not working writers. Your initial membership period is seven years. So, when you become a WGA member you have seven years to vote before you’re going to have to show some additional employment. So, yeah, some people theoretically are on year six of their seven without working. And there’s also quite a few people that are what we call lifetime current members. So you and I would certainly qualify. Once you have – I think it’s 15 years.

**John:** 15 years, yes.

**Craig:** Yeah, of being current active you become lifetime. 15 years is actually not that much. So there are a lot of people who are current lifetime members which means they’re going to vote forever until they die. And, yeah, so sure. But the truth is, OK, we don’t know how they vote. I mean, it’s tempting for some people to say, “Well, some people, they’re not working so it’s easy for them to vote for a strike or to vote to fire your agents.” I guess, but I think a lot of people who aren’t working also feel like, no, it’s important that the guild to not go on strike or not fire their agents. There’s no science to that is my point.

**John:** I would agree.

**Craig:** But I will say if I could, if I could wave a magic wand, I would, I don’t know about this lifetime – I don’t know if people should be voting forever. I actually worry about that. Because we’re getting older longer. Right? And there is a world in which you have more people voting in a union who are lifetime current members than current active members, which would be a disaster. That’s not what you want. So I wonder about that sometimes.

**John:** Yeah. And so this is not a thing that I’ve been spending time thinking about, so I’m just going to wonder aloud. Perhaps a reason why lifetime current members should be able to vote is that the actions of the guild now still have a bearing on their income and sort of their ability to do things. So, the degree to which leadership of the WGA can set broad policies that would affect – I mean, pension is a separate thing. So I’m trying to think the degree to which elected leadership would have a bearing on a person who is essentially no longer employed is interesting. I don’t know.

**Craig:** You’re right. It’s a tricky one. Because most unions do not have this. I mean, most unions it’s like if you’re not working, you’re not working you’re not voting. I’m pretty sure. I don’t think this is a common thing where you get to vote for the rest of your life even though you haven’t worked in 30 years which is the case for some people.

I don’t think when you and I first started in the union I don’t think it was as big of a deal because, well A, people didn’t live quite as long as they do now. And there were fewer people that had been employed up to that point. And also the guild was a little bit more homogenous in its thinking. But as things polarize a little bit, which seems to be the trend everywhere in the world. Thank you social media. And as people live longer I can see a potential issue on the horizon. And I say that as somebody who would be a beneficially of being a lifetime current member. That maybe, you know, maybe after – cap it. Like if you haven’t worked in 10 years maybe no more. Maybe you should stop voting.

It’s a thought. I can see the gray army – the art militia is marching to my house. But, hey, guys, I’m old too.

**John:** This feels like one of those questions where if this was debate team you could argue either side and have really good arguments to list either side. So maybe that’s why it’s an interesting debate question.

The one thing that probably every member can agree on is that there were a lot of emails and sometimes those emails that came from the WGA [unintelligible] which basically candidates and sometimes even non-members can spend some money and send out an email blast to all WGA members. People got frustrated by that. I would say it’s part of the democratic process. I don’t want to limit that. I think structurally I don’t think anything should change. I just recognize that as it got later into the voting season people got more and more annoyed by those. And I think it did not help the people who were sending those emails late in the process.

**Craig:** Well, everybody was sending them so if it didn’t help people it didn’t help people equally. But I agree with you. It’s part of the process. Communicating to the membership is important. What I think would help us is what you suggested right off the top, just shortening the season.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, it’s one thing to get bombarded with emails for a month. It’s another thing to get bombarded with emails for three months, or whatever it was. Right? July, August, September. Ish. 2.5 months. So, I saw people complaining about it and I just found it absurd. Like, aw, you poor baby, you had to see an email? Aw, you had to press delete? Aw. You were born in 2002. Yeah, that’s right. I just took a shot at millennials like every other old, cranky dick. I don’t care.

**John:** Craig, do you know who is not going to fix this problem?

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Me. I’m not on the board anymore.

**Craig:** By the way, we’re both free, right?

**John:** We’re both free.

**Craig:** We’re both free because you’re free-free, and now I can be even more of a jerk than I already was because I don’t have to worry about including you in people I’m yelling at.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because I love you.

**John:** Aw, Craig, I love you, too.

**Craig:** I don’t give a shit about the rest of these people, so gloves are off.

**John:** All right. Let’s move on to our next topic. So this past week Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the reporters who originally broke the Harvey Weinstein story for the New York Times back in 2017 released their book She Said. Revealed new information about the secret settlements and non-disclosure agreements that allowed Weinstein and other powerful men to get away with what they were doing.

A lot of the tension this past week was focused on the celebrity feminist mother-daughter team of Gloria Allred and Lisa Bloom. And this was an area of the story that I wasn’t really aware of. And reading it and listening to it I was struck by a couple things. First off, it’s always good to check in and see sort of where we’re at in this post-Weinstein era in terms of how we’re dealing with just terrible men doing terrible things.

But this new wrinkle in it very much felt like a How Would This Be a Movie kind of twist to it because it was such a fascinating lens to be looking at this story through of these women who were known as crusaders for victims’ rights for women who were – in the case of Bloom working for the other side. There’s a letter we can link to which is especially damning in terms of outlining the strategy for how she would protect Weinstein.

**Craig:** I haven’t had a chance to read this but it does strike me that in all likelihood this is our generation’s All the President’s Men. I mean, it feels like this is a great story of two heretofore unknown journalists blowing open a story that changes our culture permanently. And so we have heroes.

**John:** And I would add Ronan Farrow into that, too, in the sense that there’s a whole collection of folks who are trying to do things and other journalists along the way who were frustrated that they weren’t able to get anyone to go on record.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so you have your protagonists in that sense. And there is an achievement at the end that is undeniable. And I think it’s, well, it’s just great to see stories again where people achieve and change the world with their minds and not with their jet-packs and super-serums and laser eyes. Because that’s real. And I’m thrilled that it happened.

I, like you, was not prepared for the arrival of new villains. Right? So you think the villain is Harvey and Les Moonves, et cetera, et cetera. And then you get this letter from Lisa Bloom that is just jaw-dropping.

**John:** So Megana our producer was asking at lunch, you know, to what degree was all of this an open secret. Because I see that term in quotes “open secret” in a lot of the coverage about this. Like, “Oh, Harvey Weinstein’s behavior was an ‘open secret.’” And I was having a hard time answering her because it depends on sort of what you mean what was the secret. I would say that through my Hollywood career I knew that he was an asshole. I knew that he was abusive. And I think I had a sense that there was a casting couch but I’m putting that in air quotes here because how did I think that this was a benign consensual casting couch. As we’re looking for villains, as I’m looking at myself as a villain, I think to have so misframed that in my head is one of the things I’m going to be sort of reckoning with and I think a lot of folks will be reckoning with as we take a look at these powerful men being brought down.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I’m currently writing a book about you as the villain. [laughs] You’re at the center of all of this.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Well, listen, and I can answer Megana’s question as best I can from my perspective, because I worked for the Weinsteins for a number of years. Almost exclusively for Bob which I can assure you was not a delight by any stretch of the imagination. But I had my run-ins with Harvey. I had no idea, none, zero that there was any kind of non-consensual sexual activity going on. The rumors that I heard were that certain female actors had engaged in a quid pro quo with Harvey, where consensually there was an agreement. I will sleep with you and you will put me in this movie. Which is gross. It’s not illegal. It’s unethical. It’s gross. It is a kind of abuse. There’s no question of that. It’s an abuse of power. Not to mention – also forgotten that he’s married to another woman. There’s a billion rules he’s broken but not a law.

So, it seemed scummy but it didn’t seem like a criminal thing that made you want to hurl. That was what I thought the open secret was, and even then I kind of didn’t really believe it. I’ve got to be honest with you. I thought it felt like a rumor mill thing that seemed a bit misogynistic. Like, oh, so and so couldn’t have been an actor unless she slept with Harvey. And the names that were being thrown around I thought, um, no, I think they would have been just fine. They’re good at their jobs. And they’re beautiful. And they check a lot of boxes for what a star should look like in the year say 2003.

So, that’s about as much as I knew. I would imagine other people, well certainly people inside. We know now from this book for instance, from the Kantor and Twohey book that certainly Bob knew. He claims to not know. But he knew.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s always worth asking what’s happening right now that is analogous that we’re not paying attention to. Like what are the things that five years, ten years down the road we’ll be asking, hey, was that an open secret? How were you letting this go on? I think it’s always worth doing the introspection to look around and see what is happening in the industry right now that will seem shocking down the road.

And I don’t have an answer for that but I think it’s always good to be asking that question.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. That is a good one.

**John:** That can be a thinker. I don’t know that we’ll have an answer today.

**Craig:** I’ve got to be honest with you. I’m the last person who will come up with the answer to that. I’ve always felt quite sheltered. I don’t know, like self-sheltered from – like I’ve never been to a Hollywood party in 25 years where I’ve seen people doing drugs. Do you know how hard that must be to do? [laughs] You know?

**John:** I’ve never seen anyone do cocaine. I’ve never done cocaine. I’ve never seen anyone do cocaine. And yet I see it in movies all the time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So people are doing it. But I’ve never seen it.

**Craig:** Have you ever seen cocaine?

**John:** I’ve never seen cocaine.

**Craig:** I’ve never seen cocaine either. This is why you and I are perfect for each other. We’re the only two people I think in Hollywood and possibly in the world that have never seen cocaine. I’m not sure it’s even real. [laughs] It may be a thing that they’ve just invented for movies. It’s fake. I’ve never even seen it. So, we’re not – you and I will be the last people to know is my point.

**John:** Yeah. We’re just off playing D&D while everyone else is doing drugs.

**Craig:** Doing the drugs.

**John:** All of the drugs.

**Craig:** All the drugs.

**John:** So that might be an invitation to listeners. If you think that there is a thing that we’re not paying attention to that could be thing ten years from now. Like how the hell were you not paying attention to that? Write in. Tell us that. Because I’ll be curious what you guys think.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I also need your opinion some bit of housekeeping here. So Scriptnotes has always been and will always be free every week. It has no ads so we don’t make money in sort of the traditional podcast ways.

**Craig:** I don’t make money.

**John:** I know. But we do have expenses. So, mostly salaries. We pay for Megana, our producer. Matthew Chilelli who is our editor. And John who does our transcripts. We also pay for the servers. So there are some costs. To allay those costs we have the premium feed, so that is all the back episodes of Scriptnotes and the transcripts, the Scriptnotes app. More than 3,000 of you out there are premium feed members so thank you very much for doing that. That’s $2 a month.

But there’s some issues. And so right now we’re doing our premium stuff through Libsyn and they’re the hosting company. And they do a good job sort of getting stuff out there, but the app is not great. We’ve had some problems with the app. And Megana has being a lot of work with the Libsyn folks to try to get the app fixed up. We don’t actually make the app. We just brand it.

And if you go on their website it looks like it’s from 1999. And that shouldn’t be a big thing but I don’t have great faith in parts of it. So as I look at other podcasts out there, a lot of them are on Patreon. We’re considering moving over to Patreon. But I would love to hear folks’ opinions on should we make a switch over there. Are they happy enough with sort of what we have?

If we move over to Patreon the Scriptnotes app would eventually stop working. Is that a big deal? So I need listeners to tell us what you think about moving over to a different place.

**Craig:** You know, I think we should. I’m a listener. I’m actually not a listener as you know. I’m just a talker. But I love change. Before you laugh at me, I do like technological change. I do like every now and then taking a look at what you’ve gotten used to technologically and then saying let me do a little bit of research and see if there’s something better out there. Because generally speaking there is.

So, I think we should change. No offense to Libsyn. I say let’s do it. Let’s go and do it.

**John:** All right. So I will say, we’ll get your feedback. If we do make the switch we’ll keep both things running for a while. So it’s not like Libsyn will suddenly get shut off and Patreon will take over. We’ll figure out some way so that if you’re currently burning through your catalog on the app the app will keep working for a while. And if we transition there will be a grace period hopefully moving between the two of them. So, just letting people know that there might be a change in the offing here.

**Craig:** I’m excited. Change is good.

**John:** Cool. All right. So this year at the Austin Film Festival you will be there, but I will not be there because I’m going to be giving a speech that I promised to give. It’s a prestigious speech back at my alma mater. And I want to talk a little bit about what my topic is because it’s a speech that I gave way back in 2006 and I’m giving an updated version of the speech. And it’s on professionalism. And it feels like a good topic for Scriptnotes overall because the original topic for the speech was professional writing in the rise of the amateur. And sort of that weird tension between what it means to be professional and what it means to be an amateur.

In my initial speech I argue that professionalism has five basic characteristics. First is presentation, AKA giving a shit. Accuracy. Consistency. Accountability. And peer standards. And what I was trying to do is distinguish between professionalism from getting paid for it, because we tend to think of pro as being like a pro athlete who gets paid and an amateur athlete who doesn’t get paid. And I was arguing that much more important is how you’re perceiving your own work and how you are – the standards you’re holding yourself to and the standards that others are holding yourself to that determines professional from unprofessional.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, are those characteristics useful metrics for you for whether someone is acting professionally?

**Craig:** They are. I think there is a – I’m going to add one. And it’s humility. And here’s why I’m adding it. Because we’re in an interesting time right now where a lot of people – in a fantastic way a bunch of fake, bad barriers to entry are being dismantled. And a lot of cruel pointless downward pressures are being eliminated. And I think a number of people are saying, “Listen, one of the things that’s really important to do is not be shy, not be self-deprecating, stand up for yourself, self-promote. Don’t be afraid to talk about what you’ve done well.” All those things are true.

But what I sometimes see is it’s being done – because it’s sometimes an unnatural thing for people to do. So what ends up happening is it’s done in a kind of calculated way and what’s missing therefore is an honest element of humility.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I think that professionals should – and typically do have a certain kind of humility that comes with understanding that no matter how good you do, no matter how well you do, no matter how much you’ve learned, no matter how much experience you have there’s somebody who is better than you. And that’s a wonderful thing. It means that there is room to grow.

And it keeps you I think – it keeps your feet on the ground. And it prevents what I would call healthy self-regard and self-promotion from becoming a kind of braggy, almost insecure kind of promotion. So, I think humility is really important. I try and – well, I don’t have to try. I wake up in the morning feeling terrible [laughs], so that’s easy. But I honestly as a professional when I meet another professional who I think is really good who is humble in a kind of honest way without being self-deprecating or self-damaging, it really matters. I notice it and it means a lot. And I love that.

**John:** You and I can both think of some screenwriters who are really good at their job but they are lacking any humility. And —

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** And they – you marginalize them because of their lack of humility. And so – and I think it’s great that you’re drawing a distinction between – you can be proud of your work, you can be proud of your presentation, you can really be focused on the hustle that gets you forward, but always having the humility to ask what if I’m wrong. Or, you know, to acknowledge that there’s others out there who are doing great work as well. I think it allows sort of a self-correcting aspect which is really crucial.

**Craig:** Correct. And I will also say that when a writer talks about something they love, let’s say I’m reading a line and there’s a writer, she’s saying, “I read this script by this person. I think it’s amazing and here’s why.” My heart just pops open. Because that to me – that’s when I go, OK, you are – I love what you’re saying and how you’re thinking. I love the fact that you’re talking about someone else. I think it’s amazing when people do that. That to me is where I really actually come to respect the person doing the praising, even more than perhaps the person they’re praising.

It’s when people start banging their own gong kind of without any sense of context or humility that I just go, OK, well you know what would be really cool? If somebody else said this about you. That would be amazing. Right? And so I love saying great things about other writers online that I love and respect and admire. I think it’s a really healthy part of being a professional. Again, I’m not saying you have to stop saying that you’ve done something good. I’m just saying maybe every – just pare it. If you’re going to sort of talk about look what I did, isn’t that awesome, hire me, pay me. These are good things, right? Also, take a look at what that person did. And hire them and pay them, too. That’s a helpful thing.

**John:** Agreed. So I’m going to put a link in the show notes to the existing speech which was back in 2006. But part of why I’m bringing it up here is that I feel like there’s a lot that needs to be updated just in terms of what’s changed in the world and also I think some of my assumptions or my – I was writing for a slightly different world but also I think my views have changed a bit.

So clearly some things have changed. As I wrote this initial essay I was talking about websites. And now of course websites are social media. And so, you know, writing a blog post is a bigger effort than sending off a tweet. And so I think a lot more people are public-facing enterprises in ways that they weren’t back in the day. And so what does professionalism mean in a tweet is a different thing. It’s not just about – it’s not the grammar but it’s looking at how are you engaging with the wider world. Are you being fair to the people that you are calling out? Call out culture in general. The cycle of outrage is something that is very different.

And I see writers piling on in ways that are just not helpful or good or professionalism. And certainly doesn’t show any of those five or now six characteristics that we’re looking for in a professional.

I look at #MeToo and the degree to which I think sometimes professionalism can be used as synonymous with keeping your mouth shut. And that wasn’t good.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. No.

**John:** That didn’t work out. I look at Donald Trump and breaking all norms and having no shame. Having no humility whatsoever.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so I think we have to acknowledge that it’s tougher to argue that the only way to be successful is to be professional when you have the most unprofessional person I can imagine running the country.

**Craig:** Is he? [laughs] Is he running anything?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Don’t you just think that they just give that baby a rattle in the morning and then tuck him in at night with a hamburger.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, somehow he got there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We can parse all the things that happened but it makes it tough to aspire to the highest standards when you see that the person who got the highest office has none of those standards.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is when it’s the hardest – it’s easy to be a professional when it’s not hard to be a professional. And it’s hard to be a professional when it’s hard to be a professional. And when you’re surrounded by amateurs and when it is amateur hour and when you are tempted to stand up and say, “Does anyone in this room understand how stupid you all are and how under-qualified you all are and how over-authorized you all are?” Those are the moments where it’s really hard to maintain your professionalism. And yet generally speaking when you blow it you blow it. You know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You just have to kind of be patient. It’s the worst. And it’s not fair and it’s particularly not fair to people who have historically been excluded to finally arrive and then be told, “Oh, and also now you have to be patient again because for this, and this, and this.” And I understand why people don’t want to be patient. And in some circumstances they shouldn’t. You know, I know I’m old school. I know that. But by and large being professional in the long run will accrue to your benefit. I believe that as an article of faith.

**John:** Yes. I would say that part of being professional is sort of peer standards and I think we have to acknowledge that for a very long time those peer standards were set by, you know, straight white men.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** And so what was professional was their expectation. And so they could use unprofessional as a cudgel against anybody who didn’t match those things. And so we always have to be questioning and challenging what those things are. And so code switching as an example of using different speech with different people that’s a natural thing. And so that we don’t recognize that people who are working for us are going to do that is ridiculous. And we have to sort of broaden our expectations of what is appropriate in different places. And that people’s backgrounds are going to influence how they are presenting themselves and that’s natural.

And that you sort of want people working for you that reflect a wide range of experience because that’s the only way you’re going to be getting all the information that you should be getting in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And to be clear, being professional doesn’t mean that suddenly solomonically you know exactly what the answer to every conflict is. We are now in a space where we are running into conflicts that we weren’t expecting or hadn’t previously defined and we’re not quite sure what to do about them at times. I’m speaking about people that are in authority and have the ability to make decisions or set policy. We’re all learning to some extent together. And negotiating together. And, of course – and this is the big secret – people are individuals. So we can come up with policies and conventional wisdoms but for certain individuals they just don’t agree. I mean, it’s hard, right? You can’t just say, “Well, in general the way we should treat this group of people is blankety-blank.”

90% of those people will say, “Yes, thank you.” And 10% will say, “I hate that.” So now what do you do if some of those 10% are in your room working for you? It’s really – I think we have to give each other a little bit of a break while we figure this out.

**John:** Yeah. And on the topic of figuring stuff out, like a thing that came up recently was Walter Mosley, a great writer, who left the writers’ room of Star Trek Discovery because he used the N-word. Walter Mosley is black. And so is it fair for Walter Mosley to use that word in the room? Is it appropriate for Walter Mosley to use that word in the room? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for you. But that was an issue. And so that’s a thing we have to figure out.

I see staff writers on Twitter who are asked to promote their show or to live tweet show but are also called out for having their own opinions at times. And that’s a thing we have to figure out. We have influencers whose whole – who make their living–

**Craig:** Blech.

**John:** –seeming like they’re just normal people or whatever, but it’s their authenticity that is selling a brand, but they are the brand. That’s a weird thing. It makes me really uncomfortable.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why don’t we just replace the word influencer with sociopaths? Isn’t that what that is? [laughs]

**John:** I know two influencers who are genuinely great people. But is challenging to know sort of like, OK, are you actually having fun or are you having fun for a brand? And that’s, yes.

**Craig:** You know, the Walter Mosley thing is fascinating. The only details I know were from the story I read, but it seems like there was an African-American writer on staff who complained to HR and then Walter Mosley – I don’t know if he was just immediately terminated. I think they kind of had a discussion with him. And from what I sussed out he said, “Yeah, no, I’m not going to apologize for that.” And then they said, OK, well you’ve got to go.

Whenever I see these things, these stories of this sort I think please remember, Craig, that you weren’t there and you don’t know everything.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** I don’t know – do you know how many times you think you understand something and then somebody comes up to you and says, “Oh, let me just tell you what actually happened and the way it happened.” And you go, “Ooohhh.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there are times where I think like, what, they did what? And then you find out everything and you go, oh yeah, I totally get it now. We just don’t know. But oh my god, does that not stop us from yapping our judgments out there into the world. Like we are Galactus ready to eat the planet for the crime of whatever outrage we’re currently simmering over. We just don’t know. And by the way, you and I – one thing we both are sure of is that in general the entertainment journalism industry not great at reporting full facts, context, et cetera.

**John:** Yep. Context is tough. And I would say but at least entertainment press might have a thousand words to dedicate to something. A tweet doesn’t. So a tweet has almost no context. You’re sort of creating context around the outrage storm that’s there. And that ain’t healthy.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But another thing which is worth noticing is that sometimes what’s professional can feel artificial. It can feel not real or authentic because like, oh, you’re trying too hard. And that’s a weird thing that we’re at now, too. Where just like using full sentences, you know, proper punctuation, things are changing but there’s still an expectation of sort of how things are supposed to be working.

So, just recognizing that I think the core characteristics of professionalism are probably enduring. And I’m going to probably add humility as one of those. But figuring out how those apply to a quickly changing world is the challenge we’re always going to be wrestling with. Which is why I can give this speech in October and then a few years later I’m going to have to update it again because things will have changed.

**Craig:** I think that’s the most important thing. And that is what’s going to keep you from being cranky old man. I mean, look, I was born a cranky old man. But what I’m trying to avoid is a cranky old man set in his ways. As long you are keeping tabs on the way the world changes and you’re listening to people from a wide range of ages and races and orientations and beliefs then you should be able to adapt as the world changes. You will not be young ever again. You will not be current in the way that a 25-year-old is current. Not possible. Nor should it be.

But what you can avoid is being ignorant, stuck in your ways, blinkered, whatever word you want to come up with for somebody that’s just decided I’m checking out. Like, look, I know somewhere along the line I just said I can’t keep up with new music anymore. It’s over. Right? It’s over. That’s fine. No problem. I’m OK to let that go and just live with the 70 years of music that that I know and I feel good about. Fine.

But when it comes to the way our society functions and in particular the way our business functions and the way professional writers function it’s incumbent upon me to listen – and again be humble – and not immediately go, “Wah, these kids,” even though I did take a shot at millennials earlier, because sometimes they are dicks.

**John:** All right. Let’s answer some listener questions. We have two questions here about credits. Craig, you know a ton about credits so maybe we’ll ask you these questions. Tim writes, “On When They See Us I notice that Ava DuVernay has a strange story credit. Can you shed some light on to why she’s on there twice?” And the credit he’s linking to is “Story by Ava DuVernay and Ana DuVernay & Julian Breece.” Craig tell us.

**Craig:** Sure. It does look weird. And here’s how that functions. When you write as a team with somebody you are considered a unique writer for the purposes of credit determination. So Ava DuVernay & Julian Breece. They wrote together as a team. That is considered a writer. Ava DuVernay also clearly worked on this on her own. That’s a different writer. So Ava DuVernay on her own is considered a discrete writer from Ava DuVernay and Julian Breece.

Now, you go into an arbitration if there is – in this case I don’t know if there was an arbitration.

**John:** I suspect it would have to be because she was a producer on the show. She was a production executive on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, so there was an automatic arbitration. And so what happens is they look at all the material. They don’t see names. What they see is Writer A and Writer B and Writer C and Writer D. In this case let’s just say there was Writer A and Writer B. Writer A was Ava DuVernay. Writer B was Ava DuVernay and Julian Breece. The arbiters look at it and they go, “You know what? Story seems to be Writer A. Deserves Story credit. And so does Writer B. That’s what it is.”

Now, I believe – I could be wrong – I’m pretty sure that as a writer you have the option in this circumstance to collapse the credit down. So you don’t have to have your name twice. In this case, I don’t know if she chose to have her name twice or if she wasn’t aware that was an option. Or, third possibility, I’m just wrong about this. But I don’t thing I am. I think you can collapse your name down and it just would say Ava DuVernay & Julian Breece.

But, the Writers Guild would understand that you actually do have more of a percentage of that credit for the purposes of distributing residuals. Because residuals are based on the credits. So in this case – like in features Story is worth 25% of residuals. So if you are Story by Ava DuVernay and Ava DuVernay & Julian Breece, half of that 25% would go to Ava and half of the other half of 25% would go to Ava, and then the rest would go to Julian Breece.

So you can collapse your credits down to avoid this weird syndrome of double naming. But you would not lose your fair percentage of residuals as a result.

**John:** Yes. So the crucial take away from that is this was probably a result of arbitration and the folks who were assigning those credits they didn’t see names. They just saw Writer A and Writer B. And you wouldn’t think twice about it if it was just Writer A and Writer B. It’s just a weird situation where Writer B is a team that also includes Writer A.

**Craig:** Yeah. I believe – and I believe this collapsing down thing is possible because I think I’ve done it.

**John:** OK. Cool. Nick from Sydney, Australia, who lives in LA, asks, “Can a Created by TV credit be taken away in the same way that a writing credit can in cases where subsequent writers make substantial changes to a screenplay? For example, if I secure a Created by credit on my contract for work on a pilot script and series bible, but then another showrunner takes over the project and makes substantial changes. Can I have the credit taken away? Is there arbitration for such an action?”

Craig, talk us through Created by.

**Craig:** OK, I have an answer. I looked it up. So, a Created by credit comes from an original series and there are two ways you can get – you become eligible for a Created credit. You write a format for the series. I think in that sense what it means is an outline or bible. Or, and/or, you receive Story by or Written by credit on the pilot episode of the series.

Generally if no format has been written, so that would be the equivalent of a treatment in features, then the Created by credit will go to the writers who receive the Story by or Written by credit on the pilot. And that’s how that works. So it is a function of the WGA making a determination. You can’t be guaranteed it. There must be a final determination of credits on the pilot episode of the series.

So, what I would say to Nick from Sydney, Australia is if you wrote the pilot script and the series bible, the series bible in and of itself should guarantee you a Created by credit. Somebody else could add on if they receive a Story by or Written by credit on the pilot, then they too would be eligible for a Created by credit.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. This is the fall. So it means that I have to have one of my One Cool Things be the Flu Shot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A good friend of ours was felled by the flu this past week. So, guys, get the flu shot. It’s basically like the cheapest insurance you can get for like not being sick for a week to ten days. Just get your Flu Shot.

**Craig:** Get it.

**John:** It’s good. It’s helpful.

**Craig:** Get it.

**John:** I can also recommend that if you are using Highland2, the pro upgrade on Highland2, there’s a new item underneath the help menu for the Highland2 Slack Channel. So if you’re a Pro member you can join on Slack where we are discussing features that are coming to Highland and you get an early look at things. So if you are a person who uses Slack or a person who might want to use Slack we have a channel now for those pro users. And you should come join us there and we can talk about the future of Highland because there’s some really cool things coming down the pike.

**Craig:** Fantastic. It is fall. And so I feel like if they could only come up with a pumpkin spice Flu Shot.

**John:** Oh. That would do it. Sell a thousand of them.

**Craig:** Right? [Crosstalk]

**John:** I have last request of listeners. One of the things we’re working on in Highland is support for scripts that are written right to left, so Arabic and Hebrew and some other languages. What we’re really lacking is examples of scripts written in those languages. And so I’ve seen scripts written in most of the Roman languages, like European languages. I’ve not seen scripts in a lot of other languages. And so I know some people use Word or other places. But if you are a listener who is working in screenplays in languages other than English and you feel like sending us a copy, just a PDF so we can take a look at what it looks like, that would be great. So just send it through to ask@johnaugust.com.

We just would love a bigger corpus of scripts from outside the US and Europe to take a look at sort of how we can do a better job working with those languages.

**Craig:** I’ve weighted my whole life to just look at you pouring over a Hebrew text.

**John:** Absolutely. What’s the name of the stick you use as you read the Torah?

**Craig:** You know, that’s a great question. I don’t know. Well, the deal with the stick, traditionally it’s a silver rod with a hand. It’s a little bit like the hand from the hand of the queen or the hand of the king in Game of Thrones. So it’s a pointer in the shape of a hand and finger. And the purpose of that is you’re not supposed to touch the Torah because you’re desecrating it with your stupid human finger or something. Because it’s so important.

God, I’m such an atheist. But, yeah, I used that thing. I used the stick when I was a young bar mitzvah boy.

**John:** Craig, I’ve never asked. What was your bar mitzvah passage? Like what were you assigned?

**Craig:** Do not remember. But I will tell you that it was from Jeremiah. I remember it was from Jeremiah. Not one of your more popular chapters of the Old Testament. But here’s the weird part. This is actually kind of bizarre. So the Jewish calendar is not like the January to December calendar that we use. It is a lunar calendar. This is why for instance Easter is constantly shuffling around. Because Easter is based on Passover. And Passover moves around per the Jewish calendar.

So, when you are a bar mitzvah boy or a bat mitzvah girl you get assigned what’s called a Haftarah which is your portion of the Torah that you’re supposed to read, AKA memorize blindly because you don’t speak the language. And the Torah is read from beginning to end throughout the Jewish year. And there’s a holiday called Simchat Torah which is, yay, we get to start over again and read it again. So, over the course of the year every Saturday or Friday and Saturday there is a chunk that you read to progress your way through. Meaning your birthday will roughly coincide with a general section, depending on what year it is.

Here’s the weird part. My birthday is in April, early April. My father’s birthday is in early June. That’s two months apart. My father’s parents were so proud of him, because they were so Jewish, that in 19 – he was 13 in 1955. They took him to a small recording studio in Manhattan and made him do his Haftarah thing into a microphone which was pressed onto a vinyl 78 RPM disc.

**John:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** And he had it. And he took it out while I was studying my thing. And he took it out to play it and I said, oh my god, it’s the same one. We had the same one. Isn’t that weird?

**John:** That is great and weird.

**Craig:** It’s great and weird.

**John:** Yeah, so I mean mathematically not impossible, but still great when those things happen.

**Craig:** It was highly unlikely but, yeah, so we both had the same torture, reciting the same who cares paragraph at length. That’s this week’s Jew Corner with Craig Jew Mazin. My One Cool Thing this week is Seven Cool Things if I may. Not this past Sunday when we won/almost won/sort of won/lost everything at the Emmys, the Sunday prior was the Creative Arts Emmys where a whole bunch of our Chernobyl professionals were nominated for Emmys. And seven of them won.

And I am so proud of them. And so I just wanted to say their names and what they won because it was a joy. I was just – can I just be Jewish again for a second. I was kvelling. I was kvelling. I really was. I’m so proud of them. So I’m just going to say who they were because they did such a good job. So, Stuart Hilliker and Vincent Piponnier, our rerecording and production mixers won for Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Limited Series or Movie. And this was a great one. Outstanding Production Design for a Narrative, Period, or Fantasy program one hour or more, we won, Luke Hull, production designer, Karen Wayfield, art director, and Claire Levinson, set director. And on that one we even beat Game of Thrones.

**John:** How nice is that?

**Craig:** I mean, it was pretty good. I was sitting right behind Dan and Dave, so on that one we were kind of giving each other [unintelligible], but you know what? It was good. They won like 10 Emmys that night. So congrats to them.

We also won for Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a supporting role. And that was – there’s a whole bunch of guys and women, but Max Denison and Lindsay McFarland were our leads on that one.

We won for Outstanding Single Camera Picture Editing for a Limited Series or Movie. That was won by one of our editors, Simon Smith. So fantastic for him.

This was a great one. We also won Outstanding Music Composition for a Limited Series, Movie, or Special. That was Hildur Guonadottir who was our amazing composer. And by the way won an Emmy for Chernobyl. She – I’m predicting – is going to be nominated for an Oscar for Joker. So she’s having one hell of a year. I mean, oh god, I love her so much. So I’m so happy to see that.

And we also won Outstanding Sound Editing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Special. That was Stefan, Joe, Michael, Harry, Andy, and Anna.

And we won Outstanding Cinematography for a Limited Series or Movie and that was Jakob Ihre, the amazing Jakob Ihre, who was our director DP.

So congratulations to all of our winners and also we had I think six other nominees and so we are just so proud of all of them. I couldn’t be happier with that result. It was a fantastic night. And the best part was I didn’t even have to worry. I didn’t have to be nervous. I didn’t have to think of a speech or any of that nonsense. So, that was the best part of this whole thing.

**John:** Absolutely. Congratulations again to all of them and to you, Craig, or–

**Craig:** Or not. [laughs]

**John:** Or not. [laughs] Congratulations on the show regardless. And that’s our episode for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by John Spurney. If you have an outro, and we’re kind of running low on outros here folks, please send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. But on Twitter, of course, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

If you have thoughts about professionalism, if you have thoughts about the switch from Libsyn over to Patreon or some other stuff like that hit us up. Tell us on Twitter or send us an email. Because we want to know what you think.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. You’ll find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. You need to sign up there in order to use the Scriptnotes app for iOS or Android, neither of which is quite up to snuff and I’m sorry about that.

You can also download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com

Craig, thanks and congratulations. Next week is going to be a big show for a secret reason that people don’t know yet.

**Craig:** Ooh, I’m so excited. I don’t think I know it either.

**John:** You know who the guest is.

**Craig:** Oh, I do. Yeah, it’s pretty great. [laughs]

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Have a nice week. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Emmy Award Winners](https://www.emmys.com/awards/nominees-winners) Congrats Craig!
* [WGA Election Results](https://www.wga.org/news-events/news/press/wgaw-announces-2019-officers-and-board-of-directors-election-results)
* [She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement](https://www.amazon.com/She-Said-Breaking-Harassment-Movement/dp/0525560343) by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
* [Why I Quit the Writer’s Room](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/opinion/sunday/walter-mosley.html) by Walter Mosley
* [Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur](https://johnaugust.com/2006/professional-writing-and-the-rise-of-the-amateur)
* [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 Jon Spurney ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_419_professionalism.mp3)