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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 439 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we’re going to talk about how to grow old as a writer. We’ll also discuss tips for general readings and answer listener questions about character quirks and improv. Then in our bonus segment for Premium members Craig is going to talk about his experience as an actor on the new show Mythic Quest.

**Craig:** Well this is the first time I’m hearing of that, but I’m all for it.

**John:** Oh, I thought you said last week you were going to do this.

**Craig:** Then it’s not the first I’m hearing of it. It’s just that I forgot. So, you know, when you forget something it’s like you get to hear it all over again for the first time.

**John:** It’s a little surprise. Memory loss can be a really great thing because then everything you find in a drawer is like a present.

**Craig:** My every day is Awakenings. [laughs] I’m so happy to be here.

**John:** It’s like, wait, I’m married? I have children? This is so exciting.

**Craig:** Right. I know how long time has been simply by the number you say of the podcast. So as far as I’m concerned this is the first one we’ve ever done.

**John:** Yes. Goldfish memory.

**Craig:** You claim it’s 439. Well, all right. Well, we’ll see.

**John:** Who is to argue? In news, I’m doing two live events this week. The first is today, Tuesday February 25. I’m doing a Q&A with showrunner Sam Esmail to talk about Mr. Robot, Homecoming, and other things. That got moved to the Guild Theater. So we have more space, we have more seats. So if you want to come there’s still probably seats available. You can find tickets at wgafoundation.org. There’s a link in the show notes. Then tomorrow, February 26, I’m leading a panel on portrayals of criminal justice on screen. That one is at the SAG building. So it’s the same kind of thing when I did the addiction and mental health panel. It is that kind of thing.

There will probably be a livestream but there’s also some seats in that place, so if you want to ask your question come out to that thing tomorrow.

So, two times to see me, ask questions of people this week in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Brilliant. People should avail themselves of this.

**John:** Cool. A bit of follow up. Monica Beletsky wrote in. Do you want to talk about this, Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah, Monica Beletsky, a very, very talented television writer, who has worked on all sorts of your favorite shows, wrote in when we were talking about treatments and outlines and the difference. And she said that “in television an outline is a very common document and is probably more like what we call a treatment in features.” So, if you are a television writer or you’ve not yet become one, just be aware that our discussion of outlines and treatments the nomenclature was applying to the way it’s divided up in features. But in television it sounds like there’s not much of a treatment per se. It’s that there is an outline and it’s a very, very detailed thing.

**John:** Yes. So our biases really are kind of towards features. We try to be aware of our biases, but in that conversation we really weren’t. Even though Craig got an Emmy for his TV writing, we both kind of come at this from a feature background. So sometimes we will say things that mean a different thing in TV and features.

**Craig:** I got an Emmy? [laughs]

**John:** It’s so exciting when Craig doesn’t remember anything.

**Craig:** Every day is a new day.

**John:** Another great example of words that mean different things in TV and features is spec. And so in features a spec script is a script that you’re writing completely on your own that is entirely original. It’s an idea that is your own. And you’re writing it without being beholden to anybody else. No one else is involved in the project. So, a spec script is that thing that you write which can also be a writing sample.

In television a spec generally is a script you are writing for yourself of an existing TV show. I can write funny like in The Office. And so you’d say I have a spec Office episode. It’s frustrating that we use the same word for both things, but you’ve just got to get used to it.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is the problem with the way language evolves in general. And it’s an interesting indication that the television business and the feature business have been weirdly bifurcated for so long, which must be confusing for, I don’t know, someone who is graduating right now from college and coming to LA to be a writer. Because they’re like, wait, there’s a difference between TV and film? It’s all sort of mushed together.

I mean, we live in a time now where things that are made for Netflix are getting nominated for Oscars for feature film work. So, I think eventually that will all go away. I mean, actually weirdly business practices have probably started to retire the word spec for television because it’s not too common anymore that people write them.

**John:** Yeah. Some showrunners who are staffing up shows enjoy reading a spec of an existing show because they know that this writer can write the voices of an existing character and that can be useful. But more commonly showrunners want to read original stuff just to see what this person can do with no limitations on them.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re just trying to kick the tires and see how good of a writer you are in general.

**John:** Yeah. Other bit of follow up. A couple episodes back we talked about the upcoming negotiations for the MBA, which is the general contract that regulates sort of how WGA members work with the studios. Where we’re at in that process, we talked there would be a survey. There was a survey. There was a vote on a pattern of demands, which is this very broad laundry list of the things you’re going after in this negotiation.

The next step in this process is membership meetings. So they’ve already started in the east. They are coming up in the west. So if you’re a WGA West member, check your email because there will be a list of upcoming meetings where you can talk with leadership about what your goals are in this negotiation. There will also be special meetings just for feature writers. Sometimes they have different things that are interesting to them. So, check your email. Come to these membership meetings. It is the best chance to hear from leadership but also to communicate what you would like to see happen in this upcoming negotiation.

**Craig:** Yeah. They should be real fun this time around. [laughs]

**John:** There’s a lot going on. People have noticed that it’s been a busy year at the WGA. It’s going to be a busy year coming up here. So, I will be at several of these meetings. I won’t be at all of them. But come say hi.

**Craig:** You will be there I assume in your role as a member of the negotiating committee dealing with both the agency thing and the upcoming MBA negotiation.

**John:** Absolutely. So, I’m on both of those committees. So I’ll be there to talk about those things.

**Craig:** Great. Hey, can you do me one favor?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Is there a way – I don’t think there is a way – but somehow if people could just, on their way in somebody could hand them a lovely pamphlet that says we know you’re angry, excited, thrilled, upset, emotional. Take deep breaths and be nice to your fellow union members, no matter what they say. Is there a way that people could just be nice?

**John:** Be respectful? Yeah.

**Craig:** Be respectful. Yeah. There is going to be somebody who is going to get up and say we have to strike. And other people are going to go crazy and say you’re an idiot. If we could just avoid that that would be lovely.

**John:** I think that would be a terrific goal. I would say that my function on a lot of these big membership meetings, which I don’t think you’ve been at, is I’m generally the person who is that person saying like just calm down. So I will probably just be that guy who says just calm down a bit.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if I’m going to go to any of them because I’ve gone limp and I’m allowing myself to be borne by the tides of the current.

**John:** Well, you’ve also–

**Craig:** Tides are currents. [laughs]

**John:** Tides are currents. You are a goldfish, Craig. But also I think one of the things your sort of stated goals for this year though was to acknowledge frustration but not always act on frustration.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** So maybe–

**Craig:** I am frustrated. But I don’t have to act on it. Wait, I’m in the WGA?

**John:** Holy cow.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Craig, so we have two big topics this week. This one you proposed, so I’m going to let you take leadership on this topic of growing old as a writer.

**Craig:** Well I was just thinking about because we’ve been doing this for a while, you and I, and when we started there was actually quite a lot of concern about ageism in our business. The general idea was that somewhere after 50 the business started kicking people out. And, in fact, when you look at what the Writers Guild considers a protected class, writers over the age of 40 are considered a protected class. The world has changed drastically since the mid-90s. And I was talking to some people the other day who were pointing out that the writers who are being employed as showrunners and we’ll call them sort of major feature film writers generally are older than they’ve ever been before.

And I thought well this is interesting. There must be some sort of lessons that we can learn since you and I are among the people that are still here about how to keep yourself fresh and motivated and relevant as the years go on. Because we are not kids no more.

**John:** No. Craig, do we want to talk about how to have a long career, or how to be comfortable with aging in your career? Are we talking both? What are the edges of this conversation?

**Craig:** Well I feel like they’re intertwined. So, rather than talk in a very practical way about something that is applicable to about 80 people, I want to talk about something that’s applicable to everybody. Everybody who pursues any kind of creative concern, whether you are a visual artist, or an actor, or a writer, or a producer-director. Whatever it is that you do, as you get older your relationship to your own art and your own creative process does need to change or you’re going to suffer. A reflection of that may be in terms of the industry around you and people’s interest in you, or an audience’s response to you.

So, rather than view it through the lens of industry I just want to talk about how to keep ourselves in a kind of good place with our own creative minds.

**John:** Great. So the artistic side of growing older and how that relates to the craft and the thing that you’re trying to make on a daily basis.

**Craig:** And ideally that would be, you know, reflected back at you with some sort of industrial success if that’s what you’re looking for as the years go on. So, I mean, first let’s just consider it all in terms of strategies, because I do think like anything else there’s just practical things that you can apply to yourself as time goes on. And these are good thoughts and questions to just – even every birthday take a ten minute walk and think about it.

First, you have to think about what your task actually is. Because it changes over time. You may start as someone who for instance in the mid-90s you are “I want to write sitcoms. I’m going to be a sitcom guy that works on network sitcoms.” And there are hundreds of them. Over time that changes. The tasks that are available that match what you think you do can change. Also, formats can change. We think of television as a certain thing now. It’s all over the place. But when we started it was something else.

Chernobyl, for instance, couldn’t have been really done until a certain format change occurred. But that meant paying attention to what was going on with formats.

So there are two kinds of challenges that you can make to yourself. The first is is the thing that I’m doing the only thing I can be doing. Or could I be writing a different kind of thing, like a short story, or like you did a novel, or like we’ve both done some songs? Or, nonfiction work? Also are we working within a format that is maybe dying out or just getting boring to us? And what other formats might expand our own personal expression? If we don’t rotate the crops as it were then we will end up with a field that isn’t doing too well.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about rotating the crops, because I think that ties into a thing that happens with age which is this burnout. Which is that you’ve done one thing for so long that it’s boring to you. It’s just not interesting to you. And it’s hard to work up the enthusiasm to do it again.

I was talking with a writer recently. She was just starting on a new script. And she’s like, oh wow, wait, I’m back doing this again. I’m having to start a whole new script again. And she was ready to. She knew how to write a script. But also she didn’t have the same enthusiasm for it she would have had five years, ten years earlier in her career.

And I think that’s one of the reasons why I was attracted to write the Arlo Finch books or to write the Big Fish musical is it gave me a chance to be a beginner again. To be someone who is brand new to things and be curious and eager to explore and willing to make mistakes as I’m figuring out this new art form. And when you have mastery over something it’s nice, it’s helpful, things are easier for you, but they’re also less exciting. And so picking a new thing to try to do, just challenge yourself on a regular basis to try something that you haven’t done before as a writer so that you get that experience of being new at things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, getting yourself in that rut is the function of a good thing, I think. We know that you need to focus and you need to practice and perfect. That’s part of how you get good at any creative pursuit. But there is a point where, and a little bit like when you get into a videogame you’ve maxed out your level, you’re now just walking around all the areas of Skyrim and beating everyone’s brains in with ease.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. You’re just doing a little side quest.

**Craig:** And there’s no challenge because you are perfection. And it gets boring. You’re absolutely right. Being a beginner again is a wonderful thing. And it’s a little scary, so it’s also a function of fear. You know, trying new things is scary. But the thing that I’m scared of the most is actually at this point now in my life being bored. So, challenge yourself to reconsider the nature of the formats you do work in, that you’re willing to work in, that you’re willing to try. Take a look at some formats that you didn’t maybe know even existed before. Because there are new ones all the time. And challenge yourself to even break out of a genre and into another genre.

**John:** You’re really saying stay curious. And really look at the world around you and see, OK, what is out there. What is a thing I could make out there that is interesting to me. And it doesn’t mean you have to pursue everything. Like, you know, you don’t have to become a social media influencer. You don’t have to master TikTok. It’s OK to sort of leave some stuff by the side. But also recognize that if these things are coming online they’re serving some need. And so what is it you can bring to this need and what can you do that could fit into this bigger universe of new content that’s being made?

**Craig:** And you’ve mentioned the key to all of this which is stay curious and be connected with the world. The biggest complaint people will make about we’ll call them aging artists is that they’re out of touch. Well, how do we get out of touch? We get out of touch by essentially ignoring the world around us because we feel like we figured it out in a moment and then we stay there. The world will move past that moment. If you don’t, you will be out of touch.

Sometimes people engage with the world simply in opposition. Kids these days. Let me just boil it down to that, right? The world, you know, I don’t understand the world today. Everyone is on their phones. Anybody who ever says, “You know what the problem is with the world today? Look around you man. Everyone is staring at their phones. They’re not looking at each other.” You go ahead and tell that person they’re an idiot. Because the world changes. They are interacting in fact with more people faster than you could have ever done in your life.

Is it true that sometimes uninterrupted eye-to-eye contact is wonderful? Absolutely. Is it a cliché out of touch thing to say, “They’re all looking at their phones?” Absolutely out of touch.

So, rather than instinctively saying, “In my day everything was perfect and now it stinks,” listen. Just listen to the world. Even if you disagree with it, listen to it. Because perhaps in your experience of the world around you and your differences of opinions with it, you may find grist for the creative mill. Defensiveness isn’t going to get you anywhere.

**John:** Yeah. Being defensive is never a good look. You know, when you say no to something people stop engaging with you. I would say over this last 20 years one of the most helpful ways I’ve been able to stay caught up with how things are for screenwriters and just for general people making creative things, well I’ve always had an assistant. My assistants have always been younger than me. They’ve always been at the start of their careers and doing stuff that people at the start of their careers do. And it’s been fascinating to see how the starts of careers have changed over the last 20 years because just the industry has changed around them.

Also just engaging with the people who originally were writing into the website who are now Scriptnotes listeners. You see what they’re doing. And sort of what the challenges they’re facing, but also what is exciting to them. And I may not be excited about the same things, but what they’re into is valid. And listening to what it is that they are going after is great. I always try to remember that the people I’m interacting with are the people who are going to be running this town in 10, 20, 30 years. And so it’s worth hearing what’s sparking for them because those are the kinds of movies and TV shows that we will be making the next couple decades.

**Craig:** I mean, inherently you are not jealous of the young, nor am I. I think a lot of older people get quietly subconsciously jealous of young people. But my feeling is that when we judge them, well, remember what it was like when we were judged by older people because in my memory my feelings were not hurt at all. I just kind of rolled my eyes and made fun of them because soon they were going to be dead and I was not. And they were old and out of it and not vital. And so my feeling is judging people who are younger and thinking that they “all they do, they’re obsessed with their influencers and their TikTok,” and you’re like you’re not having any impact on them. They’re laughing at you.

So, maybe just listen to them and observe them. What’s wrong with that?

**John:** Well, you can also ask advice. Which I think a lot of times older people have a hard time asking advice of younger people because it sort of reveals something that they don’t know. Well, the fact is you just don’t know some things, so again, be curious. Ask the questions. And don’t ask the questions in a way that feels judgmental like, “Why are you doing it this crazy, stupid way?” It’s like what is it that’s interesting to you about this thing, or why did you decide to make that choice? Again, when you get to move into new fields that’s very natural because you just actually just don’t know. And so you’re in a much better position to ask kind of naïve questions because you don’t know what that thing is versus us as screenwriters we have a good sense of sort of like how all the stuff fits together.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That said, when I talked with a writer – Liz Hannah who just did a movie for Netflix, I am genuinely curious about what the experience is like making a movie for Netflix. What are the deliverables like on that movie? Are they expecting the same things that we’d expect in a theatrical feature delivery system where they want – are they cutting negative? Are they doing all the stuff that we used to do for normal, traditional features? Or is it more like a TV delivery system?

So ask those questions and realize that like the different kinds of things people are making these days are more likely the future than sort of what we knew.

**Craig:** Well, the things around us that happen that we can lose touch with in a dangerous way are not just the kinds of things that I guess the different experiences that younger people are having, but also the general viewpoint of the world. Attitudes change. And it’s very hard for us to keep up with it. It really is. I understand that.

And I remember a friend once told me like – he was like I’m going to keep listening to whatever the pop music station is, like the current hits station, because I never want to be one of the old people that doesn’t know current music. But inevitably you will be. It’s not possible, right? There are some things that are going to leave you behind. But general attitudes and vibes and feelings are things you need to be in touch with. Because what was once funny may not be anymore. Things like funny and dramatic and scary and shocking are not absolute values. They are relative to the time in which you live. And if you’re not paying attention to the kinds of things that are shocking people or making them laugh you’re going to flop because you’re out of touch and out of time.

**John:** Let’s talk about authenticity, because one of the things I see which can be kind of embarrassing is when an older person is trying to seem younger than they are and is not acknowledging the fact that they are in a different generation than people they’re talking to.

**Craig:** Hello fellow kids.

**John:** So language is one where they’re trying to use slang and they’re using it improperly. That’s sort of a tell. And it’s not just that it’s embarrassing that they’re using it wrong. It’s that it’s clear that they’re not being authentic to who they are. I think one of the reasons why young people spark so clearly to Bernie Sanders is he feels very much himself. And that is true of any generation. When we were in our 20s we didn’t want the old person who was trying to be like us. We wanted the old person who felt like themselves. And so don’t reach too far in terms of your own voice trying to sound young.

In terms of your writing voice, though, you are going to be writing characters of all different ages, all different backgrounds. And you have to be listening for sort of how those things sound so that your character’s voices don’t drift away.

So our example in last week’s episode where we were listening to how people speak, that’s I think even more important as you age into your career because your assumptions, your memory of what twenty-somethings sounded like is not going to match how twenty-somethings sound right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then we kind of come to our last point which is just language. Just the realities of language. Because you’re right. There is something terribly inauthentic about someone who is chasing language. They will always be five steps behind anyway. They will always be your dad walking in saying, “Oh, chill out. Oh wow, this is fresh.” Shut up, dad. Right?

That’s so old and lame. And it’s faster now. So whatever is cool five seconds will not be cool five seconds from now because that’s what youth is. It’s a churn. So, don’t chase it, but do let yourself be carried along by it. Be aware of it. And let yourself be old authentically without either chasing something, which is inauthentic, or denying the reality of it, which is just as terrible.

Just be aware of the way that the world is changing and be aware of the way you’re changing. And if you are those things and you are willing and open to evolving then it doesn’t really matter how old you get. I mean, you’ll just be cool. Dr. Ruth Westheimer is 4,000 years old.

**John:** Good lord, yes.

**Craig:** And she’s cool.

**John:** Yeah, she’s a lich, but she’s really cool.

**Craig:** She is a lich.

**John:** There’s a [unintelligible] hidden away someplace.

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s a lawful good lich. Very rare. Very rare.

**John:** But special when you find them.

**Craig:** She’s a lich. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s talk about some advantages of age, because a thing I have found over time is we’ve talked about how with mastery some things that used to be really difficult for me are actually very simple for me. And I can sort of figure out narrative problems way in advance just from the experience. But a thing in terms of a career that I’ve been able to take with me and hopefully share is that you have a memory of what’s been done before and sort of where things used to be. And people who are new to the industry won’t have that. And so that’s not like everything should be the way it always was, but pointing out what’s been lost or what’s changed where people new to an industry might not know.

So to me an important thing to always point out is that residuals used to be kind of great and they used to actually be worth something. And someone who is starting in the business right now might not be aware of that. And so I think sometimes as an older person you need to make sure people know what has happened before, what you fought for, what you got. The way things used to be just so that people acknowledge that things could go back to a better place, or to a worse place if you’re trying to avoid bad things that happened before.

**Craig:** Yep. And similarly it’s really good to listen to those people when they tell you what actually – what the boots on the ground reality is for them. Because I remember when we were starting out in the union like the obsession was over DVD residuals. And I didn’t feel really that connected to that. Didn’t have many DVDs out there. And soon enough those went away. So, it’s a two-way street. But there is a beautiful thing that comes with time and that is the release of pressure to define who you are and become a thing.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** We are who we are. There is no confusion anymore about who either one of us is. And at least in our own minds we’ve accomplished enough where we don’t feel like everything is a test of our worth and every problem is an existential crisis. You do get to relax, which, you know, you have more work than ever in these days, but you can psychologically relax because not everything is a kind of a life and death moment where it can all be taken away.

**John:** Yeah. So some of that is economic security, but I would say even when I was in my 30s and doing really well there was still that sort of career insecurity, that artistic insecurity, like you know the imposter syndrome. And I think you and I have both moved past our imposter syndrome, which is lovely, but with that wisdom you want to make sure you don’t just become settled into a rut. Now that you know who you are you’re unwilling to change or unwilling to grow or unwilling to adapt into the next good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, David Zucker always used to say, “Beware the day that they give you the lifetime achievement award.”

**John:** Lifetime achievement. Yeah.

**Craig:** “It means you’re done.” They don’t give that to you if you’re still like rolling like kind of hard. I mean, they do. And every time I say rolling my daughter looks at me like, “Don’t say rolling, dad. It’s a whole other thing.” And I’m like, oh yeah, that’s right, that’s right, I’m sorry. But I guess the nice thing is that – I don’t know what I was saying, so you can just – Matthew, I apologize. I’m old. [laughs] My mind just wanders. In fact, don’t edit that out. I think that’s important for people to know.

**John:** All right. Well, we talked about sort of growing old as a writer, let’s move all the way back to the start of your career. Let’s talk about your first general meetings. So this is a suggestion from Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Aline has been listening back to the early episodes of the show, which apparently exist Craig.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Yes. Goldfish Craig.

**Craig:** There’s more of these?

**John:** There’s more of these. So she’s been back listening to the first season where we talk about stuff. And she says it’s still good, but we’re much less comfortable in our podcasting voices in those early episodes.

**Craig:** Well, that’s good. Amnesia Craig is startled by all of this.

**John:** So, I want to talk through the experience of your first general meeting. So a general meeting as we’ve talked about before on the show, we often describe the water bottle tour of Los Angeles where you go in, you meet with an executive, and you talk about stuff. And we’ve described them in a very general sense, but we haven’t given any real practical advice for sort of what you do on those general meetings, so this is going to be a little sort of step by step thinking about a general meeting.

So, Craig, I would like you to pretend that you are a screenwriter with no produced credits. You have a manager and they have scheduled a meeting with an executive on the Paramount lot. And now let’s walk through what you do to prepare for this general meeting with an executive on the Paramount lot.

Think back like a day or two before, what kind of stuff is on your mind as you’re preparing for this meeting?

**Craig:** So there’s two ways. There’s the modern way and then there’s the old school way. I would strongly recommend a combination of the two. The first thing is to just figure out, OK, who is this person. Ideally what do they look like? Very important, what have they done? So in the old way what would happen is you would talk to your manager and say describe the person to me. Paint me a visual picture because there is no Internet. And what have they worked on that I need to know about? The new way is to just Google. The problem with just Googling is you don’t get that insight from a person who says, “They are very intellectual. You might find them cold, but they’re not cold. That’s just the way they are.” Or, “this person is a militant vegan, so maybe don’t tell the story about how you won the rib-eating contest.” All of that is important.

The most important kind of research is to find out what it is they’ve done so that you don’t walk in there and say in the midst of a great conversation how much you hated this thing that it turns out they produced.

**John:** Absolutely. And that’s so much easier to research now. So just spend your 20 minutes Googling. Figure out what they’ve worked on and what they’re working on just so you have some guardrails around it. But I agree with Craig that you do need to talk to your manager, whoever set up the meeting, just so you know why are you meeting with them. What is the purpose of this meeting? What are the possibilities in this meeting? So you can go in there with some knowledge. It’s just not a complete blind date there.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Also, figure out where the meeting is because Los Angeles is giant, and sometimes you could get scheduled in meetings that are much further away than you think they are. So just knowing where the meeting is in relation to where you live is very important.

**Craig:** And this is something that is much easier to do now than you and I–

**John:** Yeah. Google Maps.

**Craig:** So you and I in our early days would have to figure out where a place was if you had never been there. We’d pull out our trusty old Thomas Guide. We’d look at it and then we’d freaking guess. How should I get there? And, man, sometimes you guess wrong.

**John:** I remember going to a general meeting. I showed up 40 minutes late.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It was horribly embarrassing. But that’s as fast as I could get there.

**Craig:** Went the wrong way. There were two ways to go, and the way I went a car smashed into a tree and that’s that. And also I didn’t have a phone, so there’s no way for me to tell you. That happened all the time. Now we have Waze. We have Google Maps. There’s all sorts of ways to arrive on time. Do try and get there early. Of course you don’t want to be sitting there for 20 minutes, but try and time it. Worst comes to worst, just hang out outside the lot parked on the side street or something and then go in when you need to go in.

**John:** Absolutely. So we got to the day of the meeting. So let’s talk about confirming meetings because this is a thing that I don’t know happens in other industries, but it’s pretty important in Hollywood. So, a meeting gets scheduled but a meeting is then confirmed, which is usually the night before or the day of if it’s like an afternoon meeting. Basically everyone gets kind of an out, especially executives, because they get pulled into other stuff. So, generally you don’t could on a meeting happening unless it’s confirmed the night before or the morning of.

If a manager set it up, generally the manager’s assistant will confirm the meeting. If you have an assistant they will confirm the meeting. Sometimes you will actually call and confirm with that assistant. But it’s a good idea to confirm, especially if the meeting has been made like two weeks in advance.

**Craig:** Right. That said, if you don’t hear from anyone, presume it’s confirmed.

**John:** Go.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Aline wants us to talk about clothes. And so let’s talk about it. I will say dress appropriately. And that is such generic advice, but I don’t want to be so specific that it precludes one way of dressing or not. So I would say I would never wear a tie to one of these things, and yet sometimes people dress really cool and that’s part of their look. And so I would say kind of dress your look is a useful way to think about it. Dress the way that a writer who they’re meeting with should dress, if that makes sense.

**Craig:** Well, the garb of the artist is wide ranging. Johan Renck would show up at all of these award shows in the strangest outfits. Sometimes I don’t even know if he was wearing a shirt. He always had some strange hat on. Many rings. He’s like a pirate director. And he’s awesome. And that’s cool, because that’s the way he is.

My feeling about clothing is this. If you in the meeting are an impressive human being, if you say and think things that they like, then your clothes, whatever they are, are going to be cool. And if you don’t, then they’re going to be awful. That’s the way it goes. If you are dressed gorgeously and you say dumb things, they’re going to be like, ugh, like I guess all this person does is shop, because they’re stupid. And if you dress like a slob and you’re brilliant they’re going to go, oh my god, the bohemian Mozart. That’s the way our minds – in the end as writers the value that we’re bringing ultimately is what we’re saying and thinking. And the rest kind of goes along with it.

The one thing you don’t want to ever be is unhygienic. That’s just a zero for everybody.

**John:** Agreed. All right. So now you are arriving at the studio. So, first we’re going to say this is Paramount. Let’s talk about the process of actually getting on the lot, because I remember the first time I did this I was a little unnerved. And so you’re driving up to the gate, so generally they’ll tell you which gate you’re going onto for the studio. It’s usually the same, but sometimes they will send you in different ways, so do look at the email about which gate they want you to go in.

There you’ll stop at the guard gate. You will show them photo ID. This happened 9-11 that they asked for photo ID of everyone going onto a lot. Now, Craig, do you remember like before 9-11 often you’d have to stop to leave a lot, and basically they might search your car, but they wouldn’t stop you on the way in? Do you remember back in those days?

**Craig:** I don’t remember ever not being stopped on the way in.

**John:** I guess that’s not true. I guess I was stopped on the way in, but I was always stopped on the way out. And now they just seem to be happy to let you just leave.

**Craig:** Fox will still ask you to show the pass. So, save your pass, because it changes from studio to studio. And it’s pretty rare that a studio will require you to show the pass that they gave you to get in to get out. But don’t chuck it. I’ve made that mistake. And then in Fox in particular on your way out there’s nobody manning it, you just have to scan it, so that it knows that you’ve left. And if you’ve chucked it then, you know, basically people behind you are going to get annoyed.

**John:** Let’s talk about the pass. So generally on a studio lot there actually are two passes. So there’s one pass which is for you as a person, and there’s one for your car. So the one for your car stays on your dashboard, or sometimes they’ll tape it in your window. Sometimes that will have a parking space assigned to it. But there will be one that you carry around. At Disney they want you to clip this little thing on your belt, on your shirt. It’s a hassle. Other places won’t make you do that. But you will have some piece of paper that indicates that you are supposed to be on that lot and also that your car is supposed to be on that lot. So, both are important.

**Craig:** I don’t clip the thing at Disney. I hold it. And then I put it in my pocket.

**John:** I hold it, too.

**Craig:** You just need to get past the guy at Team Disney and then you’re like here’s my thing and he goes, “Go there,” and then I just shove it in my pocket. I’m done.

**John:** Craig just said Team Disney. So Team Disney is the big dwarf building on the Disney lot.

**Craig:** Oxymoron.

**John:** Yeah. The big dwarf building. It’s the building with the dwarfs holding up the roof. It is designed by I think Venturi. He’s a famous architect. It is really a kind of dumb building.

**Craig:** It’s a shame. It is beautiful.

**John:** It is beautiful. But it has this useless interior courtyard.

**Craig:** Massively useless.

**John:** It’s dark and weird.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the office layout, I mean, no one who has ever worked in it has said, “Awesome.” It is definitely a challenging building to work in. As opposed to the old animation building which is where they put all the producers and all their suites which is really cool because it’s like this old art deco – ‘30s?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Something like that. ‘40s?

**John:** It’s cool.

**Craig:** It’s just a cool building. I like an old building. Anyway, each studio will have its own kind of thing. Figuring out where you’re going is sometimes difficult. It depends on the lot. Some lots are pretty easy. For instance Disney, you’re usually going to one of two places – Team Disney, or the old animation building. That’s where the people are that you meet. Paramount, usually you’re going to that one building where all the executives are.

**John:** The executives building.

**Craig:** But god help you if you’re going to Universal or Fox or Sony where stuff is scattered around across 400 different buildings. And they give you a map with tiny little numbers on them. The numbers are not in sequence. I remember the first lot I was ever on was Fox. And I was like why are these numbers like this. First of all, where is number three? And why is 88 next to 120 next to 46? Who did this?

**John:** A mad man did this.

**Craig:** A mad man did it. So, take a little moment to see if there’s a studio map online. See which building you’re going to and actually figure out your walking route from where you’re going to be parking if at all possible.

**John:** So, back in the day when you drove up to the guard gate they’d say, “Who are you meeting with?” And then they would call that person and there’d be a whole system for that. That happens less often now because they just scan your license and they see, OK, this person is in the system. They have a meeting. So they’re not asking you those questions anymore. But they will still ask like do you know where you’re going. And the best response is generally, “No, I don’t.” And so they will take a moment and actually pull out the little map and highlight where it is that you’re supposed to be going. Because that’s really helpful on a big lot.

Now, we should also say that you’re just as likely to have a meeting at Netflix, and Craig have you met at Netflix yet?

**Craig:** No. I’m not allowed to. [laughs]

**John:** I get it. The HBO deal.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So Netflix the process is very, very different. There is still a guard gate you go through. But then you pull into this garage, you give the keys to the valet. Some places have valet. We should talk about valets in a second. But then you go into this giant sort of open area courtyard thing, interior courtyard, and sign in at the front desk, or check in at the front desk. And then it’s just – it’s like the school cafeteria in a way. There literally is food that you can help yourself to. But you see everybody you kind of know. Other actors and writers and directors. And everyone waits down in the main area until your executive comes and gets you and takes you up to your place. So it’s a very different experience.

Generally on most studio lots you go directly to the executive’s office, or at least to the lobby of that executive building. Here at Netflix you wait downstairs until they come get you. And generally they won’t take you to their office, because their offices are tiny. They will take you to some meeting room where you have your small meeting.

**Craig:** And this is probably the way of the future because these companies don’t require large real estate and sound stages. These things are just rented as needed. I mean, HBO for instance is pretty similar in that regard to Netflix. I mean, you pull into a garage. There’s a valet. You go up to HBO. You check in. You wait in the waiting room. It’s like the nicest doctor’s office waiting room. And then someone comes and gets you. And you walk through the rabbit warren of HBO offices. I mean, let me explain for anyone who has not been. Have you ever been to HBO?

**John:** I’ve never been inside HBO, no.

**Craig:** So they’re going to be moving I’m pretty sure. That’s at least what I thought. But the existing offices at HBO, if you bring me to an office there and then walk away, close my eyes and turn me around three times, I will die there. I will never get out. It’s really a maze.

**John:** Netflix has the kind of elevators where if you’re calling an elevator you tell what floor you’re going to, rather than up or down. And so then you have to wait and see which elevator – they’ll show you which elevator you’re supposed to get into.

**Craig:** Fancy.

**John:** Fancy.

**Craig:** So fancy. So there are places that have valet and places that don’t have valet. Places that have valet, let me run it down real quick. Paramount. Not Fox. Sony.

**John:** Sony has it.

**Craig:** Definitely. Not Universal. Not Disney. Warner Bros.

**John:** Warners does it.

**Craig:** I think that’s it, right?

**John:** Yeah. Warners sometimes it depends on where you’re going to at Warners. But, yes, they have a valet. So let’s talk about sort of protocol with valet, which is a little bit different on studio lots than sort of at a restaurant. You go up, you tell them – I often say how long I’m going to be because that will influence where they want me to park, or where they’re going to park my car. If it is a short meeting I may just ask is it OK if I park myself, because sometimes it is OK if you park yourself. Or they’ll steer you to a space.

The issue of whether to tip or not to tip is complicated and based on the lot. Sometimes there will be a sign which will make it really clear that you’re not supposed to tip. When there’s not a sign I do tip. I tip a couple bucks. Craig, what do you do?

**Craig:** Yeah. I do tip but it’s always – I never quite know. It’s a weird thing. Because the thing about tipping is if you don’t tip you might feel like you’ve done something wrong and insulted this person. Then in that situation sometimes I think if I do tip am I insulting them? Like they need a tip because they’re not being paid by the studio? Because at a restaurant you know they don’t pay those guys anything. It’s all tips, right? But I don’t know how it works at a studio. I can’t imagine that a studio is treating them like that. Although come to think of it, they probably are.

**John:** [laughs] Talk about assistant pay, so just imagine what the valet pay is.

**Craig:** That’s a great point actually. So, in any case I’ll usually do five bucks. These days by the way I’ve had one of those moments where I’m like I’m adjusting all tips upward. There’s a general sense of what tips are. So, probably I would go to ten at this point.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Because, you know, honestly, it relates back to our “we’re getting older” thing. Like as there’s less and less life, you know, it’s like spend more. And I like spending money on human beings. I do. It makes me feel good more than other stuff. And at some point I’m not going to get to the end of my life and go thank god I didn’t tip more. I just – I’m not gonna.

**John:** Quickly let’s say that sometimes you’re having a meeting at a place that is not at a studio and where it is just an office someplace. That’s fine and great, too. Figure out where you can park. If you’re going to be at a meter pay for much more time than you think you’re going to need because you don’t know if the meeting is going to run long. You don’t want to be antsy to get out of your meeting because your meter is about to expire.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** That’s not a good look at all.

**Craig:** Frankly, if your meter is going to expire just shut up and take the ticket. Just take the ticket, because whatever. So it’s going to be $50. Unless you are really, really scraping for dough – honestly – and by the way call your manager and tell them, listen, I would have thought you would have wanted me to stay in there. I can’t afford this. I need $50. I mean, literally. It’s just a weird thing. Because the problem is once you get up at that point to say, “Oh, you know what? I’m just going to run outside and feed the meter.” They’ll be like, “No, no, no, you know what…”

**John:** Oh, the meeting is over.

**Craig:** “Yeah, no, we’ve been here long enough.” And then you’ll get a ticket anyway. [laughs] And it will be over.

**John:** So you’ve arrived at this executive’s office. Generally there will be an assistant or somebody in the lobby who says, “Can I get you something?” And by get you something they mean a drink. That’s all they mean is a drink. The appropriate choices are water, coffee, Diet Coke, or I’m all good. Craig, would you add anything to that list?

**Craig:** Prime rib.

**John:** Prime rib. I want some prime rib.

**Craig:** I would love a plate – by the way, prime rib horrifies me. I don’t know, like people get so excited by it. And I look at it and I just want to barf. It doesn’t look like anyone has cooked anything with prime rib. I don’t know what the prime means. Prime barf material.

**John:** I’ve not had beef in 30 years, so I wouldn’t know.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Well, you’re missing nothing on the prime rib. Yeah, it’s water, coffee, tea, or Diet Coke. And generally speaking over time I’ve defaulted to, “Nope, I’m good,” because if I drink stuff in the meeting I’m just going to have to pee. And I don’t want to pee.

**John:** I generally bring my Arlo Finch water bottle with me to everything. So, I just have my water bottle and therefore I’m all good.

**Craig:** Advertising.

**John:** Advertising. While you’re waiting for the meeting to start, it’s worth studying the outer office. It’ll give you some sense of the vibe. The posters they have on the wall for the movies they’ve made could be useful. Obviously you’ve done your research beforehand, but just get a sense of the vibe. Also, if the assistant is talking with you, talk with the assistant. That assistant is probably very much in the same spot that you are. Try to learn that assistant’s name. That may be a person that you’re emailing back and forth with in the future. That person will probably end up running the studio at some point, so it’s good to be friendly with those assistants.

**Craig:** For sure. Treat them well. Especially if you’re starting out and you’re young, they’re looking at you thinking why am I not there? Why are you not in my seat and why am I not in your seat? So, treat them well because sooner or later they will be where you’re standing and it’s good to just – you know, talk to them like they’re humans. Notice that they’re alive. It will make a huge difference to them. And it is human decency. I mean, we don’t really deserve points for doing what we’re supposed to do. But do what you’re supposed to do.

**John:** Agreed. So, you finally made it through the door. You are in the meeting. Craig, talk us through the protocol of that first minute or two the meeting.

**Craig:** Usually it’s going to be about the person that you’re meeting with saying, “So, yeah, I came across,” they’re going to basically give you a quick log line of why you’re there at all. They’ve seen something of yours, read something of yours. They talked to your manager. You have a mutual friend. Whatever it is, there is some reason they agreed to this. And so that’s kind of the intro. Very quickly it will turn into where’d you grow up, where’d you go to school, how long have been doing this, how did you get started here. “Let me tell you a little bit about what we do here” is a very common thing. They will explain.

And I always laugh. It’s a little bit like when you go to a restaurant and the waiter says, “Have you eaten with us before?” Ugh, no, but go ahead.

**John:** It’s tapas, which are small plates.

**Craig:** Oh god. Because literally if they don’t say – right. So, here what we do is we load the food into a cannon and we fire it into your face. If they don’t say that, I’m like, guys, I mean, yeah. OK. Just say we’re small plates, family style, small to large on the menu, whatever it is. But it’s that thing of like well let me explain a little bit of what we do here. And then they’re going to start talking. A lot of times this will be boring to you. Because what they’re not doing is telling you how specifically money is going to end up in your pocket, which is probably what you’re imagining or hoping for when you’re starting out at the very least. So you just have to kind of nod and be engaged and feign interest as best you can in how their production company came to be. And ask questions. You know, everybody likes to be shown interest in.

**John:** Agreed. So in that first minute you are really trying to establish some pattern of mutual interest. I really liked that thing you made that just came out. I have that same – you’re trying to find areas of commonality just to sort of ground you a little bit. But it’s important to remember it’s not an audition. It’s not a job interview. It’s not a first date. It is really more imagine you have a mutual friend who said like you two should get together and talk. It’s sort of that vibe.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so there’s a transactional quality to it. You’re both looking for how you can help each other. And in that listening that Craig describes, I actually find that really useful because people will stake out a very general area of kind of the things they’re looking at, and more importantly the things they’re not looking for. So when I moved over to Verve I went out on a bunch of general meetings for places that I just had never met before. And so I met at Working Title. And so I thought I had an idea of what a Working Title movie was, and I was basically right, but even within the Working Title framework I got a much better sense of like, OK, they’re very much looking for this kind of thing.

I met at Tristar and Tristar was a different mandate than what it was when I was a reader at Tristar, definitely. So, I got to hear what they’re looking for. I had a meeting at Monkey Paw and it’s a really specific mandate of the kinds of things they’re trying to do.

I had a meeting a studio and they said, “We’re looking for non-IP IP.” Which is like, OK, that’s weird.

**Craig:** Public domain stuff.

**John:** Public domain stuff. They want unicorns or Greek mythology. I’m like, oh, OK. So if I have things–

**Craig:** Why are they looking for it? It’s there. [laughs] It’s all there.

**John:** They want people to come in with non-IP IP basically.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** Or they’re trying to develop things based on that stuff. So if you had a Medusa story that would be a place to do a Medusa story.

**Craig:** I do not.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But that is good. You’re getting a sense of what they want and you’re listening to them. Because it is kind of a two-way evaluation process, right? I mean, you may walk out of there, you don’t want to say it in the moment, but you may walk out of there thinking well I have no interest in doing non-IP IP. That’s not what I’m interested in right now. And then you know, OK, so I guess not them for now.

**John:** Yeah. So you’re also getting a vibe on like would I want to work with this person. And I would say trust your instincts there. If they give you a bad vibe, maybe you’re not going to really enjoy working there. So maybe that’s not the right place to take that pitch down the road or to–

**Craig:** Oh yeah, you won’t.

**John:** Or to go after that open writing assignment, because if you’re not going to be up for it that’s cool.

Now, let’s talk about open writing assignments because at some point in a meeting they may pull out a buck slip which is a narrow card that lists these are the things we’re looking to hire writers for. These are projects that are open for discussion. Listen to those. That’s great. But this is also an opportunity to talk, sort of pitch broad areas of things that you’re interested in. This is not your elevator pitch. This is not your sort of concise pitch. This is just I’ll often describe general areas. So if I wanted to say like I can be doing a lot of research on Outward Bound programs and I think there’s a real opportunity to do a horror movie centered around the Outward Bound experience.

That’s not a pitch, but it’s describing an area. And if what they told me was that they’re looking for horror movies and I pitched that back, I can see in the room are we on the same wavelength there. And if we are on the same wavelength then I could come back later in later on with an actual prepared pitch for it. But I’m just getting a sense of like is this the kind of thing that we should be talking about.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. It’s good to also listen in that list, if they pull out the buck slip and they give you their – be aware of two things. One, what you’re hearing are slightly distressed properties. So, first question is with whom am I meeting? If I am meeting the president of something, and they pull out that list, that’s a real list.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s real. If I’m meeting with anybody under that that list is their list. That is a list of stuff that they are in charge of. That they want to get going because it will move them up internally. It doesn’t mean that any of those things will ever actually get made at that company. That said, sometimes they do.

When you hear that list, if you do spark to something engage on it. Just start talking about it. What will happen is they will hear in you maybe the ability to be smart. It’s really what they’re – oh, this person said a lot of smart things. They’re smart. My boss will literally never let me make this movie, but now I have a writer who I know is smart, who if I vouch for for something else will not embarrass me.

To that extent, when you are in there with these people if there is some way – if you’re vibing, right. If they’re NG, then beat it, it’s never going to happen. But if you’re vibing with them try and have some way to express that you were excited to be there in the first place. That you didn’t drag yourself there because your manager said go here, go here, go here, meet a person, go home. You wanted to meet them. You were interested in them because of A, B, or C.

It will make them feel like this isn’t just one of those things you have to slog through, yet another reminder that they are not in charge and have to take general meetings with the likes of you.

**John:** Craig, what is your opinion of giving them your email address or getting their email address? Do you do that after a good general meeting?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I just assume that if they want my email address then they can get it from my lawyer. If you have a manager, they’ll get it from your manager. If you are at one of the code of conduct agencies they can get it from your agent. So, yeah, no, of course. My feeling is that the privacy of contact information, talking about how you grow old in this business, that’s gone. There is no privacy of contact information. Everyone is contactable at every moment. The thought of withholding that would be I think the most offensive possible thing ever. No, you may not have my email address. Good day, sir.

**John:** Good day, sir. I would say that in this last year I’ve been much more forthright about just giving them my email address and say you can email me that directly. So I’m not trying to cut my reps out of it, but basically saying you don’t have to go through the reps for every little thing anymore. And that we have a relationship that is independent of my relationship through Verve or through my attorney. Just because if it’s somebody I actually do spark with and think like, oh you know what, actually I could see myself working with her on projects, just emailing directly is nice. And also if I have the email I can do the etiquette thing of following up and saying like, “Hey, I really enjoyed meeting with you about this thing, or, “we talked about this thing, I’d love to come in and talk with you more about that.”

I traditionally did not do those follow up kind of emails because I didn’t have those emails. And now I tend to do them.

**Craig:** For whatever reason I have always been someone that everyone thought they should just talk to directly. I have actually bemoaned this. Like I would say sometimes why – is this really – people just call me directly, even about stuff that isn’t great. They’ll just call directly and I’m like shouldn’t you be talking to someone? [sighs] Never mind. Never mind.

**John:** Never mind.

**Craig:** Never mind.

**John:** Craig, I have this new invention. So, let me pitch this for you. So it’s a bell that you have in your house and it has a nine-digit number, I’m thinking maybe a 10-digit number. And anybody with that 10-digit number can make that bell ring at any time. Would that be good?

**Craig:** Yeah, I would be OK with that.

**John:** I mean, the idea that we have phones is crazy. The idea that any stranger can call me on the phone at any point. So that’s why I kind of don’t answer my phone anymore. Like I’ll answer it if you were to call.

**Craig:** Well, we don’t answer when somebody we don’t – so, every phone call was a roll of the dice. And now none are. The worst comes to worst is you get a number, it’s unknown number, or from some town you don’t know because somebody moved out here and didn’t change their number. And then they leave a voicemail and you go, oh, that was that person. Let me add them to my contacts. That won’t happen again. That’s it basically. But, yeah, we always know who is calling.

**John:** Wrapping up the general meeting discussion, I want to say that my first 10 to 15 general meetings were kind of terrible. I was not good at general meetings. It took a while to get used to them.

**Craig:** Define terrible.

**John:** Take our advice–

**Craig:** Like what would happen?

**John:** They weren’t productive. I wasn’t getting to the next stage after them. I was awkward in them.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** I didn’t feel comfortable about it. I wasn’t comfortable sort of in my writer-self skin. But I did get a lot better with practice. And so I would say take our advice, but also don’t be hard on yourself if you find it weird and sort of uncomfortable being in those meetings, especially at the start, because it is a weird thing to be doing.

**Craig:** And as it happens this is one of the few jobs where you can actually be weird and awkward. It’s just that you have to be that much better at your job. But you are allowed to be weird and awkward. You know, some of the greatest screenwriters out there are weird and awkward. And what happens is the executives will go, “Yeah, I’m working with so and so.” “Oh my god, he’s a genius.” “I know. He’s weird. God, he’s weird.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “But he’s a genius so it’s OK.” Or like, “Oh yeah, she is kind of a shut in. Like she’s a recluse. She doesn’t actually leave her house. But the pages have been amazing.” So it’s actually kind of like the legend grows of this weirdo lady that’s pumping out these great scripts. They’ll do that all the time because this business loves a narrative. They love to characterize everybody. The danger zone is when you’re fine, and you’re also super boring, or awkward or weird in a room. That can be an issue.

**John:** In a future episode we’ll talk about the process of going in and meeting with a showrunner, like if you’re trying to get hired on a show. Some things will apply, but some things won’t apply. So we’ll try to get a really good showrunner on to talk about those meetings as well.

**Craig:** Sounds like a good idea.

**John:** Let’s answer some questions. Craig, do you want to take Zack’s question?

**Craig:** Yeah, Zack asks, “I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions on character mannerisms, specifically on the best way to go about formatting them. For example, if a character has a nervous tick of laughing to relieve inner anxiety,” huh, I think I’ve seen a movie with that, “should you write, ha-ha, or parenthesis chuckles in the dialogue, or parenthesis every time it comes up? Another example would be a physical tick like an eye twitch, more than just a normal occurrence, something that is psychological or neurological. I’ve recently seen this done in a script when the character is introduced as, ‘Note, Eric nervously chuckles throughout the script when nervous or feels out of place in social situations.’ But I feel like readers will forget something like this with everything else they’re supposed to be paying attention to, especially closer to the end of the script when the introduction was back on page one. Any thoughts?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** I think it’s a really good question and honestly a difficult thing to make a blanket statement for. But what Zack is pointing towards is that the experience of watching the movie, we’re going to see all this nervous behavior, we’re going to see these ticks, we’re going to see these mannerisms. But on the page it’s so easy to miss them and to forget them, especially if he said it on page one and he didn’t say it again. So, I think you’re going to have to remind us over the course of the script that you’re doing it. But I wouldn’t do it a parenthesis kind of thing every time it happens. And I wouldn’t try to call it out in action every time. I would find reasons why what he’s doing is either noticeable to other characters or if he’s alone in the scene that his nervous behavior or whatever that mannerism is is worth calling out in the action because it is the main thing that we’re seeing at this moment.

Craig, what would you do?

**Craig:** I agree with you. I think the first time you experience this it’s important to describe it in action and to describe it in a way that is connected to character. So it’s not simply he chuckles when nervous. I can’t think of a more boring way to describe a very complicated thing. In the moment let us experience it as it happens for the first time. Let us feel like the other people in the room who are confused. Is he laughing at us? Is he laughing at that character? Is this just covering something up? We can tell something from his eyes that he has no control over this.

And then throughout that scene he laughs, he laughs again. Show other people reacting. Make a meal of it the first time it happens. Later in subsequent scenes you can say it’s happening again. Right? Like the laughing thing happens again, so that we understand how it’s happening. I would not do parenthesis. That would get very annoying. And I would certainly not just dump it in the beginning like some random boring note. That’s not how we paint human beings.

**John:** Yeah. So if a character had a larger physical thing that was important to call out at the start, certainly call this out. If a character uses a wheelchair we’ve got to know that. But we’re also going to hopefully see reasons why that is a factor in other story points along the way. And so it’s going to be a thing that is going to affect the story as it goes along.

Something that is more subtle like this or that has an influence on dialogue, yeah, look at your dialogue and see how it’s going to possibly impact that. But what Craig said about how other characters react to it is equally important to what the actual character itself is feeling about the mannerism.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s there for a reason. You can’t just dust it on an actor. It will be the first person to tell you how much am I doing this? Am I doing it every line? Am I loud? Am I quiet? What do other people hear and notice? So you cannot bullet point it. You have to bake it in.

**John:** All right. One more question. Rebecca asks, “I want to write a screenplay using improv through a Second City style approach. I come in with a detailed written outline of what each scene is. The actors improvise it in a rehearsal space. As the writer-director I offer feedback, then they improvise it again. The process repeats until each scene is set. If I go home and turn the exact dialogue they came up with into a shooting script are they still actors who improvised their lines, or have I basically turned the rehearsal room into a writing room and now everyone would need to be credited and paid as a writer?”

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a really good question. I got to be honest. I don’t know. I know that for instance the Larry David shows do work in this kind of script-provisational style. But there isn’t this thing where the outlines are written and then actors gather together. They perform like a stage play. Someone transcribes it. And then three days later they act it out. And repeat the things that they said. It’s rather on the day they improvise. Improvising on the day in front of cameras is not – so there is no transcript being made. There is a kind of freedom to just act on camera.

The writers of Curb Your Enthusiasm are the writers who wrote those outlines. And they usually have specific lines of dialogue that they need to get out. In this case I am concerned that if you’re just writing down all the things they said that it is a little – it’s like a roundtable kind of thing. I’m not quite sure.

**John:** Yeah. We can talk about sort of the actual WGA sort of legally kind of definitions of who is a writer and who is not a writer. I would say, Rebecca, you are the writer because you are making ultimately the editorial decisions about what is being written on that page. And you’re actually creating a script that reflects this thing. So if your rehearsal process is getting you to that point, OK. What I would stress is that all of your actors need to come into this with a clear understanding and maybe even sort of write down in the contract saying this is how we are doing this. And you won’t be credited as a writer but we will acknowledge that you contributed to the storytelling.

I mean, an option might be to sort of give story credit, to share story credit with all these people who are doing the thing.

**Craig:** I don’t know. It’s really messy. Because if you go through these rehearsals and one person is just awful, except for this one brilliant line, so you replace them as an actor but you keep their line? It’s weird. I’m not quite sure how – I’m sure this has been done many different ways. The part that’s a little nerve-wracking for me is that there is no script to begin with. There’s just an outline. So if there were a script to begin with and then you go into rehearsals with actors, I mean, we all do this. We listen. We watch. Things come out. You then go back and put those in the script because they work and they feel good. But that’s different. These people are creating all of the dialogue. So, I’m not sure. The answer Rebecca is I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know. But going back to our growing old discussion, this is a way of working. And so there are other filmmakers in the past who have done this. There are many filmmakers in the future who will do this. So you are going into some ground that has been tilled but there’s not a set pattern for how this is supposed to work. So, just try to be respectful of the patterns you’re trying to set here.

**Craig:** That makes absolute sense to me.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book by Mark Miodownik called Stuff Matters. He is a material scientist. He is a person who studies how we make things, things of metal, things of plastic. I thought it was actually just a great exploration of sort of how the modern world sort of makes our stuff. Craig, for example, if you are eating with a fork why are you not tasting the metal of that fork? Because you know what iron tastes like. Why are you not tasting it when you eat with a fork?

**Craig:** Uh, I don’t know. [laughs]

**John:** So stainless steel is this remarkable substance that they’ve been able to make which shoves extra atoms of other things in there. And when you scratch stainless steel it reacts with oxygen to form a coating around it. So you are never actually touching the metal of the fork. You are touching the outside coating of it. And it’s a self-healing kind of coating.

So, if you enjoy any of the physical sciences or sort of like it ties into recycling and how we make things that we make today, I thought it was y really great. It even gets into chocolate and how we’re able to take this weird being which is not useful at all and turn it into chocolate which is delicious.

**Craig:** Chocolate is delicious. That sounds terrific. My One Cool Thing this week I have not yet had a chance to use but I picked this up, I think this was written about in Wired. It’s a website called DoNotPay. And there’s a bunch of things that it does, but the thing that I’m kind of most curious about is what they call Robo Revenge. The idea is you get a phone call and maybe you’ve been getting a lot of robo calls, spam calls from a particular number or service and you’re tired of it. And presumably you have registered for the National Do Not Call Registry, which no one seems to pay attention to.

So, the idea here is that you see that call and you’re like, oh, here we go. And you’re like in the movies when you’re going to trace someone’s call. You answer the call and you also at the same time click on the DoNotPay website. And there’s a very easy way, literally one click button that creates a credit card. And you say, great, I’m totally into that. Let me give you my credit card information. And you give them the credit card number, expiration date, and security code and zip code that have been generated by this website. It will go through on their end. It will not ever send them funds, of course. But it will go through as an actual card.

What then DoNotPay does is they get the number of the vendor, because it comes through to their information, and they go, ah-ha, and then they call them and go, surprise, Mother-F-er. You just violated the Do Not Call Registry. We are sending you a demand letter for compensation. Also you can never call that person again.

I mean, it sounds pretty great. Will I ever be in the right place and time to make it work? God, I would love to.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** DoNotPay.

**John:** DoNotPay.

**Craig:** DoNotPay.

**John:** All right. Stick around after the credits because we will be talking about Craig’s turn as an actor on the show Mythic Quest. But for now that’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is also by Matthew. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. But 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. You’ll see the transcripts there. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

You can sign up to become a Premium member of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net where you can get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re just about to do. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, I have not watched all of Mythic Quest, but I have watched your debut on the TV show Mythic Quest. So, for folks who don’t know this is a new show created by Rob McElhenney and Megan Ganz and Charlie Day.

**Craig:** That is correct.

**John:** And it is set at a game development company. If you like Silicon Valley you will like it. If you like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia you will probably like it as well. I really enjoyed the episodes I’ve seen, but I did watch your debut which happens in episode five I believe.

**Craig:** Maybe? [laughs] I can’t remember. It was one of those.

**John:** Let’s take a listen to Craig’s debut on this television program.

[Clip plays]

**Craig:** Close the door. I can’t see with the glare on the screen.

Female Voice: Sorry, who are you?

**Craig:** I’m Lou. They brought me up from the third floor tester pool to replace some chick who quit or died or something.

Female Voice: Her name is Dana and you can’t replace her.

**Craig:** I’m sure she was a saint, god rest her soul. Anyway, I’m up her from now on.

Female Voice: OK. You know what? Let’s maybe not talk for the rest of the day. I’m kind of chomping at the bit to test out these new maps.

**Craig:** It’s actually champing.

Female Voice: Sorry, what?

**Craig:** You said chomping at the bit. It’s actually champing at the bit. Don’t worry about it. It’s a common mistake.

Female Voice: Great. Excellent.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Craig Mazin, tell us how you came to be an actor on this program.

**Craig:** This was a show that Rob and I had been talking about before I think he – not creatively – he expressed that he wanted to do this show. So I knew that it was kind of on his radar. And he and I had worked together briefly on another project just for a couple of weeks, but we were fast friends. He’s an awesome guy and he’s a very, very smart guy along with being talented and working in the hardest genre there is which is serialized situational comedy. And I believe It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is the longest-running live action sitcom in history, in television history.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is incredible. I mean, they should be in the Television – do we have a Television Hall of Fame?

**John:** We do.

**Craig:** Well they should be in it. And then when he actually did set up the show he said do you want to just come and consult, just be a consulting producer and hang in the room and just talk about the shape of the season and stuff for the first week or so. And I said, yeah, of course. And I did. And it’s a terrific room and I got to meet some awesome writers, including Megan Ganz and David Hornsby who are both outstanding at what they do and they’re kind of like the brain trust over there with Rob and Charlie. And also Ashly Burch who is the person acting in that scene with me.

**John:** OK. Great.

**Craig:** Who plays Rachel, one of the game testers. And I’m not exactly sure how this came about. It’s not like I was calling him up saying, “Can I please?” I wasn’t like Lucy going, “Desi, please let me be in the show.” But they did create a character who was a total dick. [laughs] And I don’t know why I came to mind. But I did. Rob had asked me to initially audition for the part of Brad, who is one of the major characters, which I was fairly certain I was never going to be. But it was fun to even audition. I had never done it before. I’ve been on the other side of the audition a billion times. I’d never actually done an audition. It was cool.

So, anyway, yeah. So I became Lou. And initially it was supposed to be I think just one episode. And I ended up in I think four maybe. Four of them. Usually with two lines. I’m like one of those two-line guys, which is fine by me. But that first day I had a lot. There’s a lot more than that because there was a part of Lou’s character that ultimately got cut for I think smart reasons, but it was like two pages of dialogue. It was brutal.

**John:** So, tell us about preparing for filming your role. And sort of how much did you know about Lou? How much were you just basing it on like, OK, this is me and I’m just doing a slightly – because it feels like a slightly more asshole-ish version of you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so tell us about how you prepared for it.

**Craig:** Well, it was clearly a slightly more asshole-ish version of me and that was the whole point. So that part I wasn’t concerned about. Had that down. Preparing was, I mean, there are certain practical things. You have to go to a costume fitting and have wardrobe and hair take a look at you and pick out some things to wear. So there’s a little bit of a well what do you think, and here’s what we think. And then you end up with what it is, which is fine. And obviously I’m not a particularly picky guy being number 16 on the call sheet.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** So, yeah, so that was fine. And then you get the pages. You get them very late in the game and then, of course, they change them. So like I do have an appreciation for what it’s like to be an actor and learn your lines and then have them change them at the last minute and go, D’oh, but I already learned these. And so you memorize the day before. You memorize your lines. You work on them and you have to both memorize your lines and then also memorize the beginnings and ends of the other person’s lines at a minimum. I mean, ideally, you know, everything, so you can be reacting and responding in real time. And then knowing when to come in without feeling like you’re waiting.

You also have to be, I mean, the nice thing is because I’ve been around production a long time I also know the difference between when you’re both on camera as opposed to being individually on camera. And then really honestly the big part was not freaking thinking about it too much. Because I wanted to. I wanted to just, you know, run it a billion times and come up with the funniest way of doing things. And then you realize what am I doing? I’m doing the thing that I hate when actors do. Just shut up brain. Show up on the day. And just freaking do it. And less is more. And that’s that. You know?

**John:** Talk to me about your prop handling. So in the scene that we’re listening to you have popcorn. You’re matching is not perfect but also editorially it was probably the right choice to do sort of what they did. Were you thinking about like, oh shit, I have to eat all this popcorn as I’m doing this?

**Craig:** There was a bunch of things going on. There was actually a dog in the scene that you don’t see.

**John:** That’s a good choice.

**Craig:** Yes. So I was working with a dog. I was working with a bag of popcorn. Yeah, the dog in many ways was wild. That stuff just isn’t there. But you get pretty good, I mean, you get pretty good at repeating. No matter how good you are at consistency, if they want to make an editorial choice that is discontinuous because they don’t want to include the bit with the dog or something, there’s going to be a matching problem.

In the moment they’ll let you know if you picked it up with the wrong hand or something. There were a couple of times where I was like, wait, did I – especially after the first time you do something. Did I reach over this way with this hand or like that? And they let you know.

**John:** Let’s talk about it. So, it’s the script supervisor who lets you know. Correct?

**Craig:** Yes. Sometimes because in that particular space, it’s a very small space that we were in there in that little testing room, and so very few people can fit in there. It’s basically me and Ashly and then the camera folks and they’re shooting three cameras, so that’s a lot of camera people in there and cameras.

**John:** Is it a four wall set? Or is that just walls will fly out?

**Craig:** Those are walls that fly. But not too much. I believe the back wall flies. Well, you know what? I’m not sure now. I think it does. I think the back wall flies and that’s about it.

It’s tight. So that means that the script supervisor is not in there with you. So sometimes, especially if it we were already deep into and I was just curious about something I would ask the camera op because they’re watching the whole thing the whole time. And he’s like, oh yeah, you totally did it with that. But if he’s like, uh, then I would go, hey, can someone tell me. And so as an actor you’re actually talking more with the camera operator and the script supervisor than with the director. Unless the director is really unhappy with what you’re doing. But mostly I mean–

**John:** You’re checking in with the folks who are sort of helping you get your stuff. Did hair and makeup come in and pat you down and touch you at times when it was uncomfortable?

**Craig:** Not much. I mean, my hair and makeup is very simple. I get a little bit of a trim and then a little bit – they pat the makeup on so that as always the light isn’t beaming off my bald head. If you act they’re going to come in there with some sort of spray gun.

**John:** Oh yeah. 100%. Just put a matte finish on me.

**Craig:** It’s just shine is the problem. But, yeah, every now and then somebody would pop in there and be like blot-blot-blot. But that was about it. It’s not super fancy in that regard. And this is classic kind of television shooting where they’re doing seven, eight pages a day. So things are moving quickly.

**John:** So the scene we listened to, did that take a half an hour to shoot?

**Craig:** No, much longer. Because again there was a dog. [laughs] There was a dog.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And they have to shoot – even with three cameras they’re doing multiple setups and a character is entering. Entrances and exits take time. So there were a couple of scenes later on where I’m entering. Those take time. There’s a scene where I’m catching up and going to an elevator. A scene where I stop into somebody else’s office. And for those things then it’s very much about the physicality of hitting your mark.

**John:** Let’s talk about marks because people might not know them. But on a set if a character needs to arrive at a place or is standing at a place there will be tape marks on the floor or some other way to indicate where that character is supposed to end up so that lighting and camera and everything is properly set up.

**Craig:** Yeah. The most important thing is focus. Because there isn’t some sort of auto focus for regular film and television cameras. You have to pull focus so that the focus is instantaneous. Auto focus takes time to adjust. You need instant focus all the time when you’re shooting. So the focus puller is adjusting the focus on the fly depending on the distance between you and the camera. So what they do is they say, OK, he is going to enter that door there, so that’s that focal distance. And he’s going to walk to this spot and stop. That’s your arrival. So, you start at that number and then as I move from A to B they move their thing and land on a number. And it generally works great, as long as I hit that number, that mark.

I had no problem with this. I don’t know why actors do. Because the thing is in your blocking rehearsal which is what you do at the very beginning that’s when you’re figuring out where you stop and stand. So the director will come in say I think you should enter this way and move to here. And I’m like, great, do you want me to go around this thing or this way. And she goes, oh great point, why don’t you come around this way and stop here. So then I do it a few times and I just have to remember where I stop.

**John:** Yeah. Do you remember how many steps it took you to get from one place to the other?

**Craig:** No, I just use a visual cue. I just go, OK, I’m going to roughly stop here. So how hard is that? [laughs] It’s not hard. That’s the one thing where – so much of acting did increase my regard and respect for what actual actors, I know I’m not a real actor, what real actors do. That was one thing where I lost respect. [laughs] I was just like if any actor on one of my sets misses their mark I’m going to be like, “Come on, it’s not hard.”

But one of the things I learned that very first day was how important it is to think of the person you’re acting with and to know whose scene it is, and in that case it was her scene. It’s clearly her perspective. So as a writer know whose perspective – don’t fall into the trap of thinking that I’m acting so it’s about me. And do whatever is needed for her so that she can get where she’s going and needs to go because she is an important character, she’s a main character. I am a little bit of garlic salt for the French fries.

**John:** Sounds good. Finally, last question, when did you shoot this? Because people know sort of your history with Chernobyl. So, were you already shooting Chernobyl when you shot this, because I have no sense of like when these episodes were actually filmed?

**Craig:** I believe that I was shooting this I think it was after Chernobyl, pretty sure it was Chernobyl was wrapped. Yeah, it had to be after Chernobyl wrapped. I was in Lithuania. But it was before we were done editing. So I think it was in, I think, I want to say it was in the fall of 2018. I think. Yeah. It’s been out there for a while. But it was fun. It was a lot of fun. And I am in season two. I know that, yeah, I do something bad. [laughs] But that’s all my character ever does is stuff that’s bad. So, anyway, yeah.

**John:** Cool. Craig, congrats.

**Craig:** Thanks man.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Tuesday Feb 25th, John hosts Q&A with showrunner Sam Esmail to talk about Mr. Robot, Homecoming and other things. Click here for [tickets](https://www.wgfoundation.org/events/all/2020/2/25/showrunner-sessions-with-sam-esmail).
* Wednesday Feb 26th, Join John at Beyond Bars, a panel on potrayals of criminal justice on screen. Get your [ticket here](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/beyond-bars-changing-the-narrative-on-criminal-justice-tickets-91710373195)
* [Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik](https://amzn.to/2SRKOGw)
* [DoNotPay](https://donotpay.com/web/robo-revenge)
* Watch Craig on [Mythic Quest](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/mythic-quest-ravens-banquet/umc.cmc.1nfdfd5zlk05fo1bwwetzldy3)!
* Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium [here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/).
* [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))
* 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/439standard.mp3).

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))

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