Search Results for: residuals

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/what-is-a-movie-anyway).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 369 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we’ll be answering a fundamental question: what is a movie? We’ll also be talking about award season and other stuff. We’re going to do follow up from five years ago. It’s going to be a big show. And because we have a big show and fundamental questions we asked Mr. Fundamentals on himself. Franklin Leonard is here joining us. Franklin Leonard of the Black List fame. Franklin, welcome to the show.

**Franklin Leonard:** Thanks for having me. I’m going to add Mr. Fundamentals to my Twitter bio.

**John:** That would be nice. You were on quite early episodes of Scriptnotes. I remember the first time I think you were on was at the Austin Film Festival.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**John:** You came on to announce the Black List website.

**Franklin:** Yeah. It was like six years ago. Because we launched the site October 15, 2012. And it’s funny because I don’t think of it as being early in the Scriptnotes’ lifespan, because I had been listening since the beginning. But, yeah, I guess it was.

**John:** You were there right at the start. So, thank you. Our first bit of follow up is actually from five years ago. And so we have a little clip that we’ll play. So, five years ago we talked about iPads in movie theaters. And so Disney was doing an experiment where like you bring your iPad in so you have a second screen experience in the movie theater. And Craig and I wondered if it was going to be a slippery slope. Let’s hear what Craig predicted.

[clip plays]

**John:** And so you will see more and more kids with glowing devices at movie theaters.

**Craig:** That is incorrect.

**John:** And it’s going to suck.

**Craig:** That is incorrect because this is especially designated as an iPad-allowed zone. I have no doubt that the Disney people will very smartly say to every kid as part of the app and part of the audience thing that this is a special thing and that this isn’t something you do in the theater normally. They’re very good about that sort of thing. And I also – and I also know that movie theaters and other audience patrons are very good about policing these things.

So, no, I don’t believe children will be bringing iPads anymore because of this into any other movie and the slippery slope argument is – it’s a fallacy.

**John:** I know slippery slope is a general fallacy and yet I will ask Stuart at this moment to flag in a follow up pile. Five years from now–

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** We will discuss whether there are more children trying to use electronic devices in movie theaters.

**Craig:** I am totally in support of that.

[clip ends]

**John:** So the Stuart I mentioned there is Stuart Friedel, the original Scriptnotes producer. Stuart Friedel sent himself some email to the future and so he emailed this past week to say it has now been five years. So, we are now living in the future. We can only imagine back then. Five years later are we seeing a preponderance of iPads in movie theaters?

**Franklin:** Thank god no. At least I haven’t.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I have not seen it either. So Craig was correct. I think every once and a while we need to point out when Craig is completely correct. The number of iPads in movie theaters has not increased. And I would say even the abuse of cell phones in movie theaters hasn’t increased at all. It’s still annoying when it happens, but–

**Franklin:** I mean, I’m aware when it happens enough because it doesn’t happen that often. And weirdly about this, thinking about it now, I actually think kids are better about this than adults are. Right. Kids just kind of want go in and take me away. Adults will be distracted every five minutes by the thought of our phone, at least I know I am. And a good movie will make me not think about that.

But, yeah, I don’t think it’s changed that much.

**Craig:** It just was never going to be a thing. Mostly I think because it’s just annoying. I mean, children in movie theaters are already annoying, to add more annoyance to their baseline annoyance level. And I just think in general Franklin is right. People are getting better about it. Everybody knows that it’s kind of the equivalent of, I don’t know, blowing your nose into your hand or something. It’s just bad etiquette and you shouldn’t do it. So, I’m glad that that hasn’t happened. It’s actually kind of amazing in a weird way that it hasn’t, I suppose, because phones in particular – forget tablets – but phones have infiltrated everywhere else. But the movie theater remains a little bit of a sacred space.

**John:** Yeah. We never let our daughter use the iPad at restaurants, but I do see so many families, which is like they prop up the iPad at a restaurant and it drives me crazy.

**Franklin:** 100%.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Franklin, you were just back from the Toronto Film Festival. I take it it was a good time. You enjoyed Toronto?

**Franklin:** Yeah. I mean, it’s sort of a high point of my year and certainly my cinematic year. Yeah, I mean, it’s a really strong year for movies, or at least it feels like it, at least that’s the big take away from me from the festival.

**John:** I was watching your coverage from it and a tweet that you sent out from the Black List had Kate Hagen who was on the show before and the hashtag “show us your room.” And so can we talk about #ShowUsYourRoom and sort of what that is?

**Franklin:** Absolutely. So, #ShowUsYourRoom actually did not start with us. It started with a writer who on the Black List last year, Amanda Idoko, who just wanted to share photos of writers’ rooms to sort of show the makeup of it. And I think some of that had to do with showing the diversity or lack of diversity in some rooms, but I think it also had to do, and the thing that I really took away from it was these are the people that are writing the things that you love. And especially in a space like Twitter if you’re a 16-year-old kid or a 21-year-old kid and you don’t think that you’re represented, like here’s a bunch of photos of people who look like you, who come from where you come from. If this is something that you ever gave a thought to wanting to do, it is possible. Not that it’s going to be easy, but like there is a path, which I always think is a good thing. So, should-out to Amanda. She does amazing writing and amazing sort of social media advocacy I suppose.

**John:** Yeah. Especially in this time where I think ten years ago we started to see showrunners who were social creatures, and so you knew who Joss Whedon was, you sort of knew J.J. Abrams. They were sort of the giant titans. And so you associated a show completely with that thing. But now in the age of social media you have accounts that are run by the writers’ room and you have the individual writers on that. And so there’s a lot of pressure, but it’s also an opportunity to really show what you look like and there really are people behind those words.

**Franklin:** Yeah. It’s one of my favorite things about social media actually. Like when you watch an episode of television that you really loved you can literally sort of say to the people who wrote like thank you. Which how often do we get that opportunity in everyday life, even if you work in Hollywood?

**John:** Craig, are you going to show us your room for the writing room on Chernobyl?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s me.

**Franklin:** Actually, you should do a photo of just you with the hashtag.

**Craig:** That would be a bit obscene. No, it’s just me. It’s the least diverse room ever because there’s only one person in it.

**Franklin:** But there’s so many Craig Mazin personalities.

**Craig:** No, I mean, they’re all of a sort really–

**Franklin:** They’re all actually the same. Fair enough.

**John:** I’ve really tamped down on the number of personalities he’s allowed to–

**Franklin:** Well just the intros alone.

**Craig:** The intros alone. That’s where I really get to spread my wings. John is a very controlling podcast daddy. But, I actually am helping out Rob McElhenney on a new show that he is doing that’s not yet been shot but it will be. And so I’ve actually had my first experience working a little bit in a writers’ room. Again, I’m not like a full time, I’m just sort of like a consulting – I don’t know what you call this. I really don’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m helping my friend. That’s what it’s called for me. But I do spend time now every now and again with a room full of writers in a proper writers’ rooms. And it’s actually fascinating.

I’m learning now after whatever 24 years in this business how a writers’ room works. Finally. A quarter of a century later. And I really enjoy it. I think it’s really interesting. And I’ve met some really, really smart people in there. But I’ve also come to appreciate and understand that some people, they’re not big room talkers, they’re more writer-writers. But it’s OK. Not everybody needs to the room talker, you know.

I always thought that that was a big part of it, but I guess there’s enough flexibility for different styles. So that’s nice to see. There’s a social aspect to it that’s kind of awesome.

**John:** We had Alison McDonald and Ryan Knighton in here last week talking about being a staff writer and sort of the life inside the room. And Alison said that she will meet writers who are just genuinely great writers who just don’t fundamentally belong in a room. You have to be able to share and just play with others in a way that is just so different than other kinds of writing.

Craig, do you think if you could put the 25-year-old version of Craig Mazin out here in Los Angeles, do you think you would fit in well on a room or not?

**Craig:** Yeah. I generally do very well in those situations. I mean, again, I haven’t been in the writing room, the classic television writing room situation, until now. But over the years have been in many, many, many roundtable rooms where you spend a day with other writers trying to plus or punch up a movie and those are writing room situations. They’re not just sort of extended, you know.

And I’m very comfortable speaking in front of people, obviously. I like that. I enjoy that process. But what I wasn’t aware of and what I had no experience in was the way that things are sort of built and then unbuilt and rebuilt and unbuilt and rebuilt. And it’s fascinating. I really – I just enjoyed watching that part of it happen.

**John:** So before we get to our marquee topic there’s one bit of news for our premium subscribers, so these are the folks who pay us two bucks a month to get all of the back episodes and there are some bonus episodes we’ll be doing. But one special bonus thing we’re going to do for our premium subscribers is Craig and I are going to record an episode of the show that is answering any question, so not just writing questions, but it can be anything. So it’s a random advice episode on my take and Craig’s take on anything that is troubling you in the world that you have a question about.

But you have to be a premium subscriber to send in those questions. And so there will be a link in the show notes for where you send those questions. We’ll check your email address to make sure you really are a premium subscriber. But we’re be recording that in the next couple weeks, so if you would like to have us answer your question and to hear the answers to those questions this would be a good time to sign up for the premium version of the show at Scriptnotes.net.

**Craig:** And we have all of the answers, right?

**John:** We have all the answers. There’s literally not a question you could ask that we won’t have an opinion on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It might not be actually true.

**Craig:** I’m going to say it’s going to be true.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a true opinion is what it’s going to be.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** All right. It’s time for true opinions on movies. This was a thing that Franklin and I had sort of talked a little bit about online and so that’s why I wanted him to come in because it’s sort of a fundamental question and he’s Mr. Fundamental. What is a movie? And I think growing up I had a really clear sense of what a movie was and what a TV show was and what other things were. And it’s just gotten increasingly blurry. And you might say well does it really matter and from a writer’s perspective it really matter financially. It tremendously matters. And so I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about classically what we think of as movies and sort of where we think we’re headed.

So I’ll start off saying growing up I thought a movie was a thing you bought a ticket for and you saw on a big screen. And after it had been on a big screen eventually it would show up on VHS, and then DVD, and sometimes it would show up on ABC. I got to watch the James Bond movies on ABC. But those were clearly movies that were just showing on TV.

And then there was a thing called a TV movie which really happened kind of during my lifetime where this sense of it’s a thing deliberately designed for network television. That was about two hours long but had a seven act structure or something. And that was a whole different beast.

But now we’re moving into a time where I don’t think those distinctions really apply. Franklin?

**Franklin:** No, I totally agree. I think we’re close enough in age that I think I have exactly the same conceptions. A movie is something that you went to the theater for, you bought a ticket, it ran somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours and 15 minutes. Yeah, a TV movie was about two hours with commercials, but it definitely had commercials. And then a TV show was something that, you know, came on every week. And it was a half hour or an hour long. And I guess the miniseries was, you know, but even miniseries though I think of that as something that came on four consecutive nights. Or, did they even do them over four weeks? I think it was just a sort of consecutive night special event.

**John:** It was like a block event. Because Roots I think was night after night. I don’t think it was a once a week.

**Franklin:** I think it was night after night. Absolutely. So, yeah, and those were very clear – it was very clearly delineated. Like the idea that I wouldn’t be able to distinguish them never even occurred to me until relatively recently, but it really does feel like all of that is collapsing. And I’ll be honest. I don’t know that I have a clear definition. It’s one of the reasons I emailed you was how are people talking about it right now. And so I sought the advice of people wiser than I.

**John:** Craig, you’re wiser than either of us. What is a movie?

**Craig:** A movie is a closed narrative story that takes place over a time span that is greater than one hour and can be viewed in one sitting, and is intended to be viewed in one sitting without interruption. That’s what a movie is. And we are no longer in a world where we can define it as that kind of story and also shown in a theater. That’s over. There are theatrical experiences of movies, no question, and there will continue to be so. But the notion that these feature films that would have otherwise been in theaters but instead are airing first on another channel, I mean, we used to call them direct-to-video movies, remember?

**John:** Oh yeah. For sure.

**Craig:** They were movies, right? There was no question that those were movies. It’s just that they were direct-to-video. Well, it’s the same thing. It’s just direct-to-streaming, or direct-to-screaming if it’s really bad. But it’s a movie. And we all know. We all know. There’s no question. I mean, maybe every now and then you’ll run into something and go, uh, what’s this exactly, but most of the time I’m pretty sure we know. And so the real question is what does it matter? And there it actually weirdly matters a lot because we have – well, the thing that most people think of is awards. But, the awards are ultimately irrelevant. They are trophies as Seinfeld calls them.

The bigger issue is we have these massive and massively complicated collective bargaining agreements where the directors, the actors, and the writers have negotiated all this stuff over decades, decades, with those studios. And those are based on a division of this is what happens in theatrical, this is what happens in television. And that’s all getting blown to hell and our deals no longer reflect the reality that’s going on.

So, we have a problem where we have one set of rules for instance to determine the credit of a movie that runs in a theater for seven days and then goes to streaming and one set of rules that covers almost a similar experience except it just doesn’t do the seven days in the theater. That makes no sense. So, we’re going to have to figure all of this out.

**John:** So, there still are equivalents of movies of the week or made for television movies, so there are movies that are made for Hallmark channel that really fit kind of what we grew up with in the sense of like it’s a very limited pattern budget. It’s designed – a certain kind of story that is still a made-for-TV movie. And those still exist. And so as we see the reports going out of the WGA we see folks who write for those movies and that is still a thing that exists. The challenge is like these movies that are debuting on Netflix, are those made-for-TV movies? Not in any meaningful sense. They’re exactly the same movies – in many cases they were developed at studios to be theatrical releases.

**Franklin:** 100%.

**John:** And instead they’re showing up there. So the Cloverfield Paradox is an example.

**Franklin:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** That was going to be a giant budget studio movie.

**Franklin:** Movie release.

**John:** The same with Bright. I was talking with Liz Hannah last night who is doing a movie that’s going to be a Netflix movie and in every way it’s like an indie movie, a pretty significant budget indie movie, but it is technically, maybe a movie-of-the-week. It’s really a made-for-TV movie. It’s really hard to say what these things are. And where it matters is we have formulas for what the residuals are going to look like, how credits are going to be determined, that are vastly different based on our expectations of where movies end up.

**Franklin:** Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting to me because really the distinction between what we think of as a TV movie, like Hallmark Channel is a great example, and what we’re thinking of in terms of Netflix and these other platforms, it’s a quality distinction or sort of our assumption about what the quality of those are.

**John:** Assumption of quality and budget. We assume that a TV movie is going to be budgeted under $2 million and it’s going to have like a 17-day pattern. There was a way those used to work.

**Franklin:** But even, I mean, there are platforms now that are making a large quantity of those, of movies that fall into exactly that category. And maybe even made on lower budgets and sort of with more constrained production realities, and so it really is – it’s a fiction of our brain on some level this distinction. And I’m, A, glad that I don’t have to be the one to resolve it, though I mean my general attitude is tie goes to the writers. I mean, again, at the end of the day you’re creating minimum an hour and a half to two and a half hours of content. Where it screens is a separate question from what contribution you made to it and you should be compensated fairly for the contribution to the thing and where it chooses to be distributed is a different question that other people have to deal with.

**John:** So we look at this from a writing point of view because we’re so egocentric with writers, but of course it also matters for directors because directors have different deals based on where it’s going, actors have different deals. So it’s a more systemic thing. So, the Writers Guild could come and say – and Craig maybe you could help me out with your answer where we’d actually say this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig’s basic definition of this is a piece of entertainment that is between and one and three hours or something.

**Franklin:** Seems right.

**John:** That it’s designed as one piece and not a serialized piece of entertainment, that I guess is what the boundaries of what we’re going to call a movie is. So we can say like anything that’s like that has to be treated by certain rules. That still is not going to fundamentally change the nature of the industry. Netflix is an example. Because a movie that debuts on Netflix is only on Netflix there are no residuals. It’s not going to go to another place where you would earn residuals. So it’s not going to go on home video. You’re not going to get those rentals. So you’re going to get – they’ll buy you out of your hopeful residuals. And it’s just a flat fee based on how much they expect it to do. It doesn’t actually correlate to how many times the project is viewed.

**Franklin:** Right.

**John:** And that’s not just a writer’s thing. That’s a director’s thing. That’s an actor’s thing. That’s an everything.

**Franklin:** Yeah. And I think the other thing that’s interesting is, I mean, there’s indications that Netflix is going to make a move with some of their movies and put them in theaters. And how does that affect those deals? Do they just sort of fall under the sort of original deal for theatrical distribution and then Netflix is the post-theatrical distribution window? Again, lots of open questions. I don’t know what the answer is. But, again, my fundamental thing is the people who are making the thing need to be compensated fairly for it. Period. Full stop.

**John:** Craig, what do we do?

**Craig:** We may come to a day where we have to, all of us, ban together and fight Netflix. Wouldn’t be shocking to me. Depending on how things proceed. And we could also do the same with Apple if need be. We could do the same with Amazon. And we could do the same perhaps with Disney. So that’s the one that’s over the horizon but it’s coming fast is Disney’s direct competition for Netflix.

You’re right to say that at least in the short term, assuming that for the sake of argument we did change things so that movies are movies, and we take the word “theatrical” out of it and we just say, look, a movie is a movie. We all know what it is. That’s a movie. That’s not a movie. The residual thing is the residual thing and it would have to be worked out, you know, but credits would change. The way that we determine credits would change. And I think frankly putting the pressure on movies to pay residuals. We don’t have to define residuals the way we define it. You know, we can define it in all sorts of ways.

I mean, right now we all struggle. I think the entire business, frankly, the entire non-Netflix business, is struggling with the fact that Netflix is so untransparent. And it may be frankly that they are not making any money on these things. Who even knows? We don’t know. No one knows.

**John:** So let’s talk about classically what residuals are so we’re all talking about the same thing. So, a movie is released theatrically and then every other time it is released on home video or if it shows up on ABC TV or premium cable there is a fee that is paid to writers, to actors, to directors, and that ends up being very significant money. So, that could be millions of dollars of residuals. A big family movie can generate a tremendous amount of residuals.

And the equivalent Netflix movie would not make those residuals. So, with Netflix it’s even a question of are they making money? We don’t know anything about sort of how many times those movies are being watched. But I think what we’re trying to get at in residuals is that a tremendously successful movie that’s watched a lot should generate additional revenue for the creator.

**Franklin:** You would think so.

**Craig:** So, it’s important for people to understand why we even have residuals. The whole purpose was to emulate what would normally be a royalty system. If we maintained our copyright then reuse would have some sort of fee. Every time a song plays on the radio there is some reuse fee that is generated and siphoned back through ASCAP or BMI and then some portion goes to the artist. And every time a copy of a book is sold the writer receives a royalty.

Similarly, our system was based on reuse where they said, OK, look, for the movie once we put it in theaters that’s what we call primary exhibition. That’s not reuse. That’s use. And then everything after that with the exception weirdly of airplanes is reuse. And then you get paid your royalty.

Well, for Netflix I think what you end up looking at is something similar to what they have done on television where it’s a window. There is a window that we define as primary exhibition. Once you start showing something you have two or three or four weeks or whatever the normal theatrical release life would be to say that’s primary exhibition. And then after that it’s reuse. And that means every freaking time you show it some nickel goes in a box. And they may, you know, kick and scream about that. What they’ve been doing is essentially saying, look, this is roughly what you would have gotten under a system like that. We’ll just pay that to you now.

And a lot of people are taking that deal. My general philosophy in life is when somebody offers you a check you should be immediately suspicious. Why? Why are you offering me this money? Why are you telling me that this is just as good as something? If it’s just as good then do it the other way.

**John:** Sometimes Netflix they’re paying you your full rate and so like it’s the sense of like, well, you could either make this or not make this. So you’re going to take the deal to make this. But, you know, you don’t know what the back end is going to look like.

**Franklin:** Can I ask what might be a dumb question? Specifically how do they handle residuals for writers let’s say on pay cable, like HBO or Showtime?

**Craig:** There’s upset fees. It’s a similar thing. There’s a way for them to essentially buy out your residuals. That’s built into these deals. And it’s part of our agreement. And I hate it. But–

**Franklin:** Because here’s why I ask. If a bunch of people buy tickets to the movies you deserve a piece of that. If they watch it on television, they’re making greater ad revenue because more people are watching it, you deserve a piece of that. If you buy a VHS or a DVD or streaming, you deserve a piece of that.

Netflix’s model, like they’re not necessarily getting more money because more people are watching it. But they may be getting more money because they get more subscribers. Someone may stick around on the platform longer because they know your movie is coming or they know that there is the possibility of a movie like yours coming. And that feels like, A, a very difficult thing to sort of determine the value of something algorithmically in that system unless they were being hyper-transparent and they’ve made clear they have no interest in being – and in fairness, they don’t really have an interest in being, and not just for that reason alone, but it presents problems that are, I mean, it could be darn difficult.

**John:** So let’s figure out sort of why it’s different than what’s happening right now with studios. Is that when a studio ships a DVD that’s a physical thing that ships. When a studio makes a deal with somebody for this movie to show up on this pay cable place that is a deal. There’s a paper trail for all of this. When you are both the creator of a thing and the distributor of a thing–

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a closed loop and it’s self-dealing. And Franklin is right. There are many, many metrics that they use in theory to define success. And we don’t know what they are. And nor do I care. Because they can’t really monetize those specifically. At some point you simply have to create some kind of artificial structure to mimic what would normally happen in a royalty situation.

And in a pure royalty situation if Netflix didn’t have work-for-hire they would come to me and say we want you to write a movie. And I would say, great, I’m going to write this. It’s my movie. I own the copyright. I then will sign a licensing agreement with you. This licensing agreement allows you exclusive rights to air this and it’s in perpetuity. And this is the fee that you pay for that. And also this is the royalty rate for every single time someone watches. Period. The end. There’s no other way to do it.

Or you do time. Right? But there has to be some kind of system in which you are rewarded for the only thing you care about as an artist which is how many people saw it.

**John:** So, theoretically, we’re going to talk about Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma later on. I know it’s your One Cool Thing. Alfonso Cuarón makes this movie for Netflix. So, Alfonso Cuarón has some deal that’s going to be a little different than what you and I would have, but ultimately we need to have collective decisions for sort of like what the overall deal is going to be. And that’s the WGA. That’s SAG. That’s DGA figuring that out.

**Franklin:** Yeah. I mean, look, I don’t claim to have the answers and I think that really the only way to come to any answers that anyone could realistically be happy with is if there was greater transparency around how many people were watching it. How much time they were spending on the platform? But again for obvious reasons Netflix is going to be loath to make that information public. Maybe there could be some sort of private information sharing between the guilds and them as an organization. But again I don’t think Netflix is going to be the only sort of platform that’s going to have to struggle with these issues. Like Craig already said, Disney is coming in hot.

**John:** So I was talking yesterday with a friend, a former Scriptnotes guest, who is writing a movie for Fox right now. And so I asked him what’s going to happen, where is your movie going to end up showing up. And is it going to be at Fox? Is it going to be on Disney? Is it going to be Disney streaming? And he has no idea. So to be in the middle of production and not knowing where your movie is going to end up is just a crazy situation to be in. And it’s not just an esoteric like you know oh what little label is going to be at the front of the movie. I don’t know what his deal is like, but theoretically if it debuts on Disney’s streaming will he get residuals in a normal sense?

**Franklin:** I think that’s another reason why these issues sort of need to be resolved in a macro sense, because I actually think we’re headed in a direction where that will become the norm for a lot of folks, like where you’re making a movie and the results of the film, like the final product determines where it is distributed. And that is just sort of – it’s untenable the idea that people would sort of go into making a movie without knowing what the business structure of the thing is.

**John:** Yeah. So, any last thoughts on movies? So we defined movies as being between one and three hours long. They’re a closed story. Yes, you can have Marvel cinematic universe movies, but they’re essentially a closed narrative that’s not supposed to have a second installment right after them. And it doesn’t matter where it shows up.

**Franklin:** Yeah, I mean, I’ll add one additional wrinkle to it and it’s sort of on the eve of the coming Game of Thrones final season. But I actually think for example HBO is leaving money on the table by not putting those in theaters.

**John:** Agreed.

**Franklin:** And they’re coming in at like, what, 1:15, 1:20 each episode? I would go to a theater every Sunday night to watch each episode of the final season of Game of Thrones. And they’re not a closed narrative necessarily but there are certainly episodes that you could beside most movies and feel just as sort of fulfilled with a closed narrative when you leave the theater. So, all of these things are collapsing and expanding simultaneously and I think it’s all the more reason why these big questions about how people are going to be compensated for making them need to be resolved sooner rather than later.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** I think they have a little bit of a limitation, I think all these places do, in that they’re charging people money to watch their product on a television screen. If they then start to release them in theaters for money they’re kind of double-charging. Or, yeah, they’re double-charging. And that’s a problem. And then you get into like well OK if you subscribe then you can go for free. Then what’s the point at that point, right?

So, they are a little bit jammed up. The only way I think they can get away with these things is if they do like for instance a special movie event. But even then I think you start to risk danger of people wondering well what am I paying for exactly, what am I getting. Because my understanding of HBO and Netflix and Amazon and Apple is I pay you a subscription I get to see everything you do without an additional nickel spent.

**Franklin:** Oh no, 100%. But I actually think they could double charge and people would willingly double pay. Like I pay for HBO right now. I would continue to pay HBO, but I would take on an additional cost in order to see the final season of Game of Thrones in a theater. I think the same thing is true with a lot of these Netflix movies that’ll be in theaters. I’m going to continue to pay for Netflix, but will I pay to go see Roma again in a theater? I absolutely will.

**John:** So you brought up Roma. Roma is going to be one of the movies we will look forward to this award season. But I have to confess I am not looking forward to award season.

**Franklin:** Me neither.

**John:** I’m just done with award season. And so this doesn’t have anything to do with the popular Oscar. I actually enjoy watching the Oscars. I don’t think they’re too long. I’m happy to watch them.

**Franklin:** Same.

**John:** What’s way too long is the four months leading up to the Oscars, or five months, or however long it is.

**Franklin:** It’s basically six months of the year at this point.

**John:** It’s such an industry.

**Franklin:** Yeah. Look, the award season unofficially starts now with the sort of Telluride/Venice/Toronto thing which is end of August/early September and runs until the Oscars which are the end of February. I mean, the year is basically summer movies, which creeps earlier and earlier every year, and Oscar season, which is now until basically late February.

**John:** So, Craig, what should we do about award season? Or should we just ignore it? Should I learn to pretend it’s not there?

**Craig:** I think it’s over. It’s too late. Toothpaste is out of the tube. Like so many things in our world, all of this has become commoditized and turned into an orgy of list-making, odds-making, betting, gossiping, argument-causing nonsense. We can’t help it. It’s a reality show now. And it’s stupid because it has absolutely nothing to do with any of what needed to happen to make those movies exist. Quite the opposite in fact. People had to all come together and collaborate on things and love each other to make these movies exist. And then it becomes this stupid rat race of nonsense.

I don’t know what there is to do about it because basically Harvey Weinstein weaponized the process in the ‘90s and it’s just gotten worse since then. And unless you – you can’t change the constitution and outlaw 90% of what publicity people do. This is how it’s going to go for a while because people are chasing money, although I have a weird feeling that it’s not even about that money. I think it’s just about the pointless need to be at the front of a line. It’s a very Los Angeles thing.

You know, I think it was Bill Maher who once said if you put a velvet rope in front of a toxic waste dump in Los Angeles people would start lining up. And that’s kind of what I think award season has become. It’s just this weird pointless craving, like getting the best table in a restaurant, which has always confused me because I don’t know how to tell the difference between tables in a restaurant. I’ve never known that. So, that’s, you know, I think it’s too late. It’s over. It’s gone. We lose.

**Franklin:** The one thing that I will say in defense of award season, and it’s not even really in defense of award season so much as being maybe an errant consequence of award season is that they do serve as marketing for movies that might not otherwise get it. And I’ll use a movie like Moonlight as an example. And certainly it’s a rare case. But without the award season, without the Oscar race, I think a movie like – I think a lot of people don’t see a movie like Moonlight. I think a lot of people went to see it because people were talking about it as a contender for Best Picture.

I think that’s probably true of Roma for example. I think it could end up being true for If Beale Street Could Talk, although more people were anticipating Beale Street because of the Oscar success of Moonlight and Barry in particular. So I agree with you Craig in the main about the content of award season and I wish there was some other way that you could frame a showcase of the best of cinema, or sort of the things that people think of as the best of cinema that didn’t have all of the sort of toxic realities that are really just a sort of boiled down version of everything that can be terrible about Los Angeles and Hollywood in particular.

**John:** Listeners, if you have suggestions for how we could get rid of award season, or get through award season in a more sane way you can write in. But let’s make some predictions for Megan to send five years into the future. Five years in the future what’s going to become of award season and what’s going to become of movies?

**Craig:** Oh, well I’ll take the lead on this. Nothing will change. In five years movies will pretty much be as movies are. There will be more original movies running on our screens at home through the Disney service and Netflix and so on. But there will still be huge theatrical releases coming out every single week. There will be a big summer box office battle issue of Entertainment Weekly and so on and so forth. And when it comes to awards nothing is going to change at all.

**John:** But will anything have changed in terms of getting writers and other people fairly compensated for movies that are not released theatrically?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Will we figure any of that stuff out?

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** We will have essentially the same conversation five years from now you predict?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yep. Franklin what’s your thinking? Five years in the future.

**Franklin:** It’s really hard for me to argue against that honestly. Yeah, look, the theatrical business will still exist in five years. I think people will be going to see movies of all sorts. There will continue to be a giant summer blockbuster season and probably a six month award season. As far as how people are compensated, I certainly hope there’s a change, but you guys have much deeper knowledge on the realities of that than I do so I happily defer to your judgment.

**John:** A thing we found out as we surveyed screenwriters for the WGA is that 80% of screenwriters are also TV writers. Either they’re currently working in TV or they’re planning to work in TV. As these things get more and more combined we’re going to have to figure out ways to do what Craig describes. Basically after a certain window every new time it’s watched a nickel goes into the jar. Because it shouldn’t really kind of matter ultimately whether it was a 90-minute thing or a 30-minute thing. Just you pay that person.

**Franklin:** I totally agree.

**John:** There will be more things like Chernobyl, like Craig’s.

**Franklin:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**Franklin:** And more limited series specifically authored by Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** There will be at least one more. There will be at least one more of those.

**Franklin:** That’s my big call for 2023.

**Craig:** I do agree. I think that that is a format that is expanding and expanding rapidly. It’s a tricky one because I feel like a lot of these – here’s another award season bunch of baloney. The whole like limited series, not really limited. Like The Crown was a limited series its first season. No it wasn’t. And so a lot of these limited series become these sort of back door seasons into a multi-season show.

But I do think that that is going to – what’s happening is the television business seems to be shifting away from just pure ratings and into more of a kind of targeted depth. So they’re like, look, we don’t need to be the Super Bowl. We don’t care if 80 million people watch. What we want is these five million people to all watch.

**Franklin:** Right.

**Craig:** And if we can get those five million. And the only way to get those five million people is to show them this. So, it doesn’t matter that most people don’t see it. These five million did. And that’s going to keep them paying for all the stuff, right? Because they’re not going to watch any of the rest of this junk. They’re just going to watch this.

So, you start to get into the – you know, there’s a great article by Malcolm Gladwell many, many years ago about how Prego figured out for the first time that if you sold five different kinds of Prego you would make so much more money than if you just sold one kind of Prego. So, it’s the Prego-ization of television. That’s what’s happening. And I think that is going to drive actually a lot of wonderful new content. I think there’s going to be a lot of limited series. There’s going to be more documentaries. There’s going to be all sorts of smart stuff.

But for movies and for award stuff, I just think as the guy says in Fall Out, “War. War never changes.”

**John:** It has come time for our One Cool Things. Craig, why don’t you take it away?

**Craig:** OK, well, sometimes I have like a prospective One New Cool Thing, which I don’t know if it’s going to be cool or not. You know what? In fact, I’m going to hold that one off because I’m trying it. So I’ll be able to come back in a week or two and tell you if it was cool. This thing is cool right now. You know I’m a huge fan of these Rusty Lake games. We’ve talked about the Rusty Lake games before. They’re amazing.

So Rusty Lake has a new one out called Paradox. For the first time they’ve incorporated video of actual people which makes their normal totally screwed up experience even more totally screwed up. I love these games. And it’s not so much about the gameplay, although I do like that. It’s their aesthetic and their weird backstory mythology which barely makes sense and yet you can tell the people doing it it makes sense to them. And their weird fetishization of certain strange objects like shrimp. They just keep showing up.

It’s so weird. It’s so weird. And so it’s just very much like if David Lynch kind of created a point and click adventure in a series that’s been going on now for years. So, Rusty Lake Paradox. Totally worth the – I guess there are two chapters in this one, so maybe the total amount is $4. Come on.

**John:** Yeah. Play it.

**Franklin:** I’m sold based on that description.

**John:** Yeah. Franklin, I think we’ve already spoiled it for you. But your One Cool Thing is?

**Franklin:** My One Cool Thing is Alfonso Cuarón’s film Roma. And it’s funny I was nervous about mentioning it because I didn’t know if the One Cool Thing could be a movie. But I saw it at Toronto and it just hasn’t left me. I find myself in traffic thinking about its images, thinking about what it was trying to say about the world. And it’s just an extraordinary film. And the one thing that I will say is that you should see it in a theater. It rewards the theatrical experience. The sound design is just exceptional. The performance by the lead actress, Yalitza Aparicio – speaking of award season. But like I want her to get the notice that an actress of a different background would receive for a performance of this caliber. It is just remarkable.

So, yeah, everyone should see that movie. Go see it in a theater. It is very much unlike anything that you’ve ever seen. Bring tissues.

**John:** Cool. My One Cool Thing is, well, so every week on the show I do a One Cool Thing but I generally have like many cool things I would like to share. And so on Twitter sometimes I will link to them or sometimes I’ll put them on the blog. But I wanted sort of a repository of all the things that I kind of find interesting. So, I started a weekly newsletter just called Inneresting, the way that Aline makes fun of me for saying interesting.

And so it’s just a once a week, probably on Wednesdays, maybe on Thursdays, maybe not every week, but it’s a little short email of just like here’s a list of things that I found kind of cool that you might find cool, too. So if that sounds at all appealing there’s a link in the show notes. It just shows up in your inbox and it’s a way to sort of see what I found cool this past week.

**Franklin:** That does sound appealing. And I will be subscribing.

**John:** Very nice. That is our show for this week. As always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is also by Matthew Chilelli. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions or follow up.

If you want to reach us on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Franklin you are?

**Franklin:** @franklinleonard.

**John:** Makes it very simple. You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. While you’re there leave us a review. That helps other people find the show. Transcripts go up on johnaugust.com about a week after the episode airs. But you’ll find the show notes up just with this episode. So the stuff we talked about you can see there.

And all the back episodes are at Scriptnotes.net. If you subscribe now you can send in a question for me and Craig to answer on our random advice episode that will be coming up soon.

Franklin Leonard, thank you so much for coming in.

**Franklin:** Thank you so much for having me. I have always enjoyed it and consider it a great honor.

**Craig:** Thanks, Franklin.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes, Episode 108: Are two screens better than one?](http://johnaugust.com/2013/are-two-screens-better-than-one) addresses the fear of iPads in theaters
* Become a [premium subscriber](https://my.libsyn.com/get/scriptnotes) in time for our bonus Q&A episode. Submit your questions [here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/15w0Xhe3505AM4KsFRWTHCdB77814KDYXJSbHZDRz6bM/viewform?edit_requested=true).
* [Show Us Your Room](https://variety.com/2018/tv/features/show-us-your-room-social-media-initiative-1202939127/) and the [Instagram hashtag](https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/showusyourroom/?hl=en)
* Rusty Lake’s new game, [Paradox](https://store.steampowered.com/app/909090/Paradox_A_Rusty_Lake_Film/), with video of actual people
* [Roma](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKVYRtE-kXI), written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón
* [Inneresting](http://johnaugust.com/2018/inneresting), a new John August newsletter. You can [subscribe here](https://johnaugust.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=2b0232538adf13e5b3e55b12f&id=aeb429a997).
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* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Franklin Leonard](https://twitter.com/franklinleonard) on Twitter
* [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)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is [sings] Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 366 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be looking at how you end things, both in a narrative and in life. Specifically, what happens to your work after you die?

Hey, Craig, in general what happens after you die?

Craig: Nothing. So I asked my dad this question when I was very young and he gave me what I still consider to be the very best answer anyone has ever come up.

John: All right.

Craig: I said what happens after you die and he said, “It’s just like it was before you were born.” And that is the correct answer.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Nothing. You’re done.

John: Yep. You do live in people’s memories until they die.

Craig: Yeah. That’s meaningless. This is a meaningless ride. It’s a great ride. I love this ride so much. I’m so sad that it will end, but it doesn’t mean anything. Like no one goes on a roller coaster ride and says, “Now, when this ride is over do we live forever in a magical place in the sky?” No. No, no, it’s over. But you enjoyed it. Simple as that.

John: So today we will talk about what happens to your work after you die and the decisions you might want to make about your work for after you are no longer on this mortal coil. But first we have some news and some follow up.

So you and I are both on a different podcast. Sometimes we cheat on each other on other podcasts, but this time we went in together. We were sort of swingers. And we went on a different podcast. We went on Jordan, Jesse, Go! which came out last week. It was a fun time. Did you have a good time?

Craig: I did have a good time. It’s so funny because as you know – as everyone knows – I don’t listen to podcasts. So I’m never quite sure what to expect with any particular podcast and I always just assume that it’s going to be exactly like the one we do and it never is. First of all, everyone has much better equipment than we do. But I feel like we sound pretty good.

John: I think we sound pretty good, too. And also they had a good soundproof room, but they were banging their microphones constantly. Did that drive you a little nuts?

Craig: No, I didn’t mind that so much. I was just – mostly – our podcast is a little bit like us. You know, you and I, even though we seem very different, I don’t actually think we are that different. I think we’re both fairly rigid in our ways. And they were much more loosey-goosey improvisational fun. Like you got the feeling that if they wanted they could just spend an hour talking about anything at all and we’re not like that. We like routine. We’re set in our ways.

John: We have an outline. We have a structure. We get back to it. Theirs is just basically pancakes and sex toys. But it was a great conversation about pancakes and sex toys and mountain cabins.

Craig: Yeah. It was nice to take a little vacation from a structured podcast and actually just go bananas. It’s the morning zoo of podcasts. But in a good way. I like morning zoos. I’ve always liked them. I like a nice drive time banter.

John: Always good. But let’s get back to our structure. Dean wrote in to say, “You mentioned on the podcast that, ‘It would probably be quicker for you to write a half-hour than to pull together a pitch for it.’” I’m not sure which one of us said that, but I believe someone said that.

He continues, “I can guess as to how that might be the case, but explicitly what takes time in prepping a pitch? How much time would you spend on a pitch versus writing up a half hour of television comedy?”

So, you and I don’t write half hour comedies, but the overall idea that sometimes it’s just quicker to write it does feel kind of true. When I talk to people who write half hours, it’s really fast. They might spend a lot of time in the room figuring all the beats out–

Craig: Well, there you go.

John: But then when you actually write it it’s quick. Here’s what it was. I bet it was when I had Mindy Kaling on the show and she was talking about pitching a show versus writing a show. And sometimes you can just actually write the show more quickly than you can sort of pull together the full pitch.”

Craig: Look, the thing is if you put a stop watch to it, I doubt that that’s true. However, there is something called ease which is different than speed. Sometimes it’s easier to write the half hour, or write even an entire feature film than it is to pitch it. Because the problem — pitching requires you to know everything ahead of time so you already have to kind of write the movie anyway in your head, or a lot of it, or a lot of the show in your head.

And then be able to, oh, trippingly convey it to somebody in a non-audio visual form and just you talking, right? There’s no show. And that can be very strenuous and very nerve-racking. And you are incredibly aware that it is entirely based on the feeling in the room and whether or not you forget something or trip up or if you use words that are slightly ambiguous because, I mean, remember a script is already an audio-visual work that has been reduced or compressed into text only. Now you’re going to take sort of oral relaying of a text-only version of a thing that’s eventually going to be audio-visual. So at that point you think to yourself, ooh, you know what, the other problem with a pitch is they view it as an act of faith to buy a pitch. Why don’t I just not even go through all that mess? Why don’t I just write the damn thing?

And certainly if you’ve gone through the work that’s required to create and deliver a pitch, you’ve done the work that’s required to write the 30 pages or the 110 pages. So, in those cases the math might work out in your favor to just write it.

John: When David Iserson and Susanna Fogel were on the program they talked about how they ended up specking The Spy Who Dumped Me because it just felt better to write the whole thing and be able to deliver the whole thing versus going in and trying to pitch that idea around town. Sometimes writing is just a process of discovery. So sometimes you really won’t know what the movie is, what the show is, until you’ve written those characters. And so that’s a good example of why you might just want to write the half hour to see what it feels like.

There have been definitely times where I’ve gone in for a pitch and I’ve written scenes that would be in that final movie just to get a sense of the character’s voices, to get a sense of like what is this actually going to feel like.

So, that’s not blanket advice. I won’t say that you should always plan on writing that half hour. And ultimately if you write that half hour and you’re trying to sell that show you’re going to have to be able to pitch it further than that. You’re going to have to be able to describe this is where the show goes, this is how it grows. They’re going to need to sit across sit across from you and understand that like you are a person who can deliver this thing. But maybe writing that 30 pages will help you understand what the show is you want to make.

Craig: The other thing to consider is that when you’re pitching you are essentially in salesman mode which means that they’re in arms-crossed suspicious mode. When you have a script, then there’s an object to discuss. Work has been done. And so it’s a little realer. You know? I mean, people get burned by pitches all the time. I mean to say the pitch buyers get burned by pitches all the time. And they are well aware that sometimes writers need money. And they’re pitching something, they’re pitching their butts off for money, but then the money is just as the writing that you’re going to do is speculative, the money giving is speculative. We don’t know what we’re going to get. And they have been burned. So when you have actual writing I think it just changes the tenor of the conversation anyway in a much better way.

It’s not to say that you shouldn’t or can’t pitch, because I have. It’s just that, I don’t know, the gun is in your hand I think when the writing is there. And the gun is in their hand when you’re dancing for your supper.

John: Yeah. So Dean’s question about how much work are you doing before you go into a pitch, it varies wildly. And so the project I’m writing right now was a pitch. And so I went and I sold the pitch and I got hired to do it. And Megan, our producer, saw me sort of working through developing the pitch. And I think she was probably surprised at sort of like how little I had actually done. How little I had actually put down on paper. But I had done sort of the internal mental work of what is the conversation about this movie and I was able to describe the feelings and sort of what the overall goals of things were. And so if I didn’t have all the plot points really figured out, that really wasn’t the crucial thing for going in to pitch this movie.

It was basically like let me give you this take. Let me show you what this world will feel like. And that is ultimately what they were hiring me for for this movie.

Craig: Well, I will say though that Megan shouldn’t draw too much of an object lesson from that because you are in a different position. Over time the more you do it the less concerned and wary people are. They know that you deliver time and time again. They know you are a responsible professional. It’s a bit like actors when they start out they have to audition. They show up, read the lines in a scene, walk away, hope. And then later on the next step is I’ll come in and I’ll have a general discussion with you but I’m not going to actually audition by reading lines. We can just discuss the character. And then the third step is offer-only. And writers kind of follow those things, too. And we adjust it slightly as do actors depending on the part.

There are plenty of actors who, like for instance if you want to hire Jason Statham to be in your action movie, that’s offer-only. We know Jason Statham can do action. There’s no need to have Jason Statham come in to discuss the character with you. He can do it.

If, however, Jason Statham wants to spread his wings a little bit and maybe, I don’t know, Spielberg is making a movie and there’s this fascinating dramatic part and he wants to play a war surgeon, he might have to come in and meet. He might even want to read for it. You never know. And similarly with us. If there’s something that’s kind of – like if you want to write a Star Wars movie, my guess is you got to have a pretty lengthy conversation about what it is you want to do, especially if it’s their movie. And it doesn’t matter who you are. But if somebody is calling you up, John, and saying, “Listen, we have this movie. It’s going to be kind of, well, it’s family but family plus. So sort of elevated family entertainment.” You’re going to say, great, offer-only.

I mean, I’ll have a conversation with you if you want, but basically the point is if we’re having the conversation that means you want to hire me because you know I do this.

John: Absolutely. And when you and I are brought in to do weekly work, those are essentially offers only. Basically it’s just like, “Hey, we need help on this thing.” And if we go in it’s very clear we can do this job in front of us. But you doing Chernobyl, that is like Jason Statham doing a dramedy. That is not something that everyone would necessarily know is in your wheelhouse, so you do need to be able to describe your vision for what this is more fully.

Craig: Right. And that’s exactly what I did. So I went in with Carolyn Strauss to HBO and sat with [Carrie-Anne Follis] who is the head of their limited series department. And I pitched. And I pitched and I pitched. And I pitched how the series would work, who the characters were, the stories that would happen inside of it. I tried to keep it, you know, somewhat compressed. And it wasn’t kind of an overly rehearsed thing.

What helped there, in television there are so many different ways to stop people from working as they go through. All right, you’re going to write a bible and then you’re going to write an episode. And then we don’t have to do anything after that. And, of course, also in that field, too, is an understanding of and you’re not getting paid what you get paid to write movies. So that all made it kind of easy, but even so there was no question that when I went in there my track record, none of it mattered. None of it. Nor should it have.

John: I mean, your track record in terms of being able to like actually deliver something, like that you’re not going to run off and just disappear into the woods. You would actually give them something, but was it something that they actually wanted? They wouldn’t know that until they’re sitting across from you and ultimately until they’re reading the words.

Craig: Yeah. I think if my track record accomplished anything it was simply that I could get that meeting. That at the drop of a hat I can probably sit down with somebody who runs any division of anything anywhere and say, listen, I have something I want to tell you. But they’re under no obligation to buy anything. All the burden of proof is on me. If somebody wants to make an R-rated comedy where two adults are doing crazy things on the road I don’t really think I need to audition. I’m not going to. So there you go. You’re just going to have to pay me to do that. I’m not going to sit down and dance for that. That’s kind of offer-only. That’s sort of the way it works.

The only thing I think that you or I can count on track record-wise is that we can at least – you like, what’s the job, like have you written horror, like a Leigh Whannell kind of movie?

John: Yeah. I’ve written one of those and I did have to sort of like pitch more fully sort of what my take was on that because it was very off the rank and normal track for me.

Craig: Then you there you go. And so the good news is you can get that meeting no matter what.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: But then you got to work for it. So, it all depends. And obviously when you’re just starting out everybody is dancing for everything. First of all, you’ve got to convince people to even meet with you. And then you got to do a full dance. It’s pretty exhausting, but that’s what youth is for.

John: That is youth. All right, now further follow up, so on last week’s episode it came up that Craig really dislikes ventriloquism. No, no, no, I think you actually hate ventriloquism. You don’t understand ventriloquism. You find no artistic value in ventriloquism.

Craig: None.

John: And I think this is actually a call for a whole new segment on the Scriptnotes podcast so this is being inaugurated right here.

Craig: Oh, new segment.

John: New segment. Change Craig’s Mind.

Craig: Ah.

John: Yeah. So Craig has very strong opinions, but one of the things I like so much about Craig is that he also believes that other people can change their opinions about things they are obviously wrong about, such as vaccines. Like vaccines are good.

Craig: Right.

John: So, this will be an experiment to see whether we can change Craig’s mind and make him appreciate the artistic merits of ventriloquism. So, I welcome all your suggestions for things we can throw at Craig that will make him see that ventriloquism is a true art form. I’m going to start. I started by Googling. I started by Googling “best ventriloquist” and the first video that came up was by a performer named Nina Conti. It is I think terrific and Craig is watching it right now.

So I will describe for people, obviously there will be a link in the show notes, but here is a woman who brings a man up on stage. She affixes a mask to him that she can control the mouth of the mask. And she basically uses him as a ventriloquist dummy. He is helpless and has no control over what he says. Craig, what is your reaction to what Google has told us is best ventriloquist?

Craig: If this is the best ventriloquist ever I can think of no better defense for my position than ventriloquism is crap. Because she’s actually figured out a way to make ventriloquism even easier than it already essentially is. I mean, the hardest part it seems to me of being a ventriloquist is manipulating the multiple things on their stupid dummy. The stupid hands and that dumb face, the eyeballs and the mouth. What she’s done here is, and she seems like a very nice person, don’t get me wrong. A very nice Scottish lady. But what she’s done is she brings somebody out of the audience and puts a little mask on that covers his nose and mouth with her hideous dummy nose/mouth. And then she has that connected to a little thing in her hand that makes the mouth go up and down. That’s it. Now she’s got the hardest part down to just pushing a button repeatedly while she does the silly talking like this.

And he just stands there while people laugh at him. This is terrible. I think it is terrible. I understand why it’s vaguely funny. I do. But it’s just – this is sort of like I never understood Gallagher. Like why are people laughing when he hits the watermelon with the thing? I don’t know. And to me it’s all in the same world of Gallagher. I don’t get it.

John: All right. So a thing I’m surprised you’re not appreciating is the fact that she is talking constantly. So, her breath control is remarkable because it seems like she’s having a conversation with this other person, but she’s actually doing both sides of the conversation. How she’s breathing, how she’s making that all work, do you see the skill involved there?

Craig: No. Ella Fitzgerald had great breath control. Patti LuPone has great breath control. I mean, I can do this because I’m talking like myself and then I’m talking like this. But if I ask you a question, yes, well I just want to know how, how, I just want to, I’m thinking that, well why don’t you just spit it out already? Anyone can do this. Literally anyone. It’s not hard. Just take breaths. And then while the audience laughs you breathe. Because they’re laughing – and listen, I have been accused of making audiences laugh with garbage. So I sympathize on that level.

I’m just saying I don’t get it. I don’t get this. Why ventriloquism is funny. Or hard.

John: All right. So this example has not changed Craig’s mind.

Craig: No. Made it worse.

John: But I remain hopeful that there is something out there that will change Craig’s mind and make him appreciate the art form of ventriloquism.

Craig: I will say that it was refreshing to see a woman doing this as opposed to that weird Vegas-y, fake face, bad toupee type of dude.

John: OK.

Craig: You drive around Vegas, like impressions. I don’t understand impressions. Why is that cool? I don’t get it. It’s not that great.

John: Like Rich Little is not a person for you?

Craig: OK. You sound like those other people. But I could just – those other people are entertaining. That’s why you want to sound like them. But why don’t I just watch those other people. I get it. Anybody that does a Christopher Walken impression. Cool. You’ve made yourself like Christopher Walken. Which reminds me, I’m going to watch a Christopher Walken movie now. Impressions are also just like, meh, OK.

John: I remain hopeful that we will get you there at some point, Craig, and thank you for humoring me with the first installment of Change Craig’s Mind.

Craig: Oh, no problem. Yeah, I can’t wait for my mind to be changed. I like a good mind change. You know, my thing is all my opinions are strongly held but not firmly held.

John: Great. Good. All right. But let’s get to our feature topic, or one of our two feature topics. This is a Craig Mazin suggestion, so Craig start us off.

Craig: Well, you know, we’ve been doing all of our various segments, old and new lately, but my fondest kind of episode is the one where we talk about craft, probably mostly because I just want to put film schools out of business. So, it’s not with me as always any kind of pro-social thing. This is more vindictive.

It seemed to me that one of the things we hadn’t talked about over the course of our many, many, many episodes is the end. Not the end the way people normally talk about the end, when we say well how does the movie end. Usually people are talking about the climax and there’s all sorts of stuff to be said about the dramatic climax of a film and how it functions and why it is the way it is. But the real end of the movie comes after. The real end is the denouement, as the French call it, and this is the moment after the climax when things have settled down and there’s actually a ton of interesting things going on in there. It is the very last thing people see. And it’s an important thing.

I’ll tell you who understands the value of a good denouement. The people that test films. They’ll tell you if you have a comedy and you have one last terrific joke there it will send your scores up through the roof. If you have one last little bit of something between two characters that feels meaningful it will send your scores through the roof. The last thing we get is in a weird way the most important. So I wanted to talk through the denouement, why it is there, and what it’s supposed to be doing.

John: Great. So denouement is a French word. Denoue is to untie. To unknot something. And so it’s interesting that it’s to unknot something because we think about the tying everything up, but you also think about undoing all the tangles that your story has created. Sort of like straightening things out again so that you can leave the theater feeling the way we want you to feel.

So as we’re talking through, if we’re imagining the prototypical 120-page screenplay, these are the very last few pages, correct Craig?

Craig: Yeah. Absolutely. This is after the dust has settled. There’s going to be inevitably something, and we’ll talk through it. Like for instance sometimes it’s one single shot. Typically it’s its own scene. But there’s something to let you know this is the denouement.

And in that sense you – I guess the first thing we should do is draw a line between climax and denouement and say like, OK, what is the difference here. And the climax, I think we all get the general gist there. It’s action, choices, decision, conflict, sacrifice. And all of it is designed to achieve some sort of plot impact.

In the climax you save the victim or you defeat the villain. You’ve stopped the bomb. You win the – whatever it is that the plot is doing that’s what happens there. And the climax dramatically serves as a test of the protagonist. And the test is have you or have you not become version 2.0 of yourself. You started at version 1.0. We know some sort of change needed to happen to make you better, fix you, heal you, unknot you. Have you gotten there yet? This is your test.

And at the end of the climax we have evidence that the character has in fact transformed into character 2.0. The denouement, which occurs after this, to me is about proof that this is going to last. That this isn’t just a momentary thing but rather life has begun again. And this is the new person. This is the new reality.

John: Absolutely. So, in setting up your film you sort of establish a question for this principal character. Like will they be able to accomplish this thing. Will they be able to become the person who can meet this final challenge? In that climax they have met that final challenge. They have succeeded in that final challenge generally and we’ve come out of this. But was it just a one-time fluke thing or are they always going to be this way? Have they transformed into something that is a lasting transformation. And that is what you’re trying to do in these last scene or scenes is to show this is a thing that is really resolved for them.

Craig: Yeah. And that is why so many denouements will begin with six months later, one year later, because you want to know that, OK, if the denouement here is right, I used to crash weddings like a cad, but now I’m crashing my own friend’s wedding because I need to let this woman know that I really do love her and I’ve changed. And she says OK. We need six months later, one year later, to know, yep, they did change, they’re still together. They’re now crashing weddings together as a couple. So, they have this new reality, but it is lasting and their love is real. We need it, or else we’re left wondering, oh, hmm, all right, but did they make it or not?

Now that said, sometimes your denouement can happen in an instant and then the credits roll. And it’s enough because of the nature of the instant, particularly if it’s something that is a kind of very stark, very profound reward that has been withheld for most of the movie. Karate Kid maybe has the shortest denouement in history. Climax, Daniel wins the karate fight. Denouement, Mr. Miyagi smiles at him.

John: Yep.

Craig: That’s it. But that smile is a smile that he has not earned until that moment. And when he gets that smile you know that he’s good. This is good.

John: So as we’re talking I’m thinking back through some of my movies. In Go the denouement is they’ve gone back to the car at the end and Manny’s final question is, “So, what are we doing for New Years?” So it’s establishing that like they’ve been through all of this drama but they’re back on a normal track to keep doing sort of exactly what they’ve been doing before. That the journey of the movie has gotten them back to the place where they can take the same journey the next week, which is the point of the movie.

In Big Fish, certainly the climax is getting Edward to the river. There’s a moment post-climax where they’re at the funeral and see all the real versions of folks. But the actual denouement as we’re describing it right now is sort of that six months later, probably actually six years later, where the son who is now born and saying like did all that really happen and the father says, “Yep, every word.” So essentially we see the son buying into the father’s stories in the sense that there’s a legacy that will live on.

So, they’re very short scenes. They’re probably not the scenes you remember most in the movie, but they are important for sending you out of there thinking the characters are on a trajectory I want them to be on.

Craig: Yeah. The climax of Identify Thief is that Melissa McCarthy’s character gives herself up so that Jason Bateman’s character can be free of her and the identity theft and live with his life, which is a huge deal and that’s something she does that’s a self-sacrifice she does because of what he’s kind of helped her to see and that’s what he’s now learned from her. And the denouement which is important is to see, OK, it’s a year later and she’s in prison, which was really important to say, look, it’s real. Right? She went to prison. But what’s happening? Well, Jason and Amanda, who plays his wife, they’ve had their baby and everything is OK. He’s got a great new job. He’s doing fine. She’s been working hard in prison and studying so that she can get out and come work for him. And he then has something for her which is he’s found her real name, because she doesn’t know who she is. And he found her birth certificate and found her real name.

And so you get a kind of understanding that this relationship did not just stop right there. And it could have. She was a criminal. But it didn’t and that they’re going to go on and on. And then she punches a guard in the throat because the other thing about the denouement is typically it is a full circling of your movie and it is in the denouement that you have your best chance for any kind of fun or touching full circle moment. So in Identity Thief you have both. She at one point says she doesn’t know her real name. Here we find out her real name, which is Dawn Budgie, which is just the worse name ever. And the way she met him originally was by punching him in the throat and here’s she going to go ahead and punch a guard in the throat because you change but you don’t change completely because that feels gloppy, right?

But, both of those things are full circle moments. And in the denouement if you can find those, or if you’re wondering what to do in your denouement start thinking about that and looking for that little callback full circle moment. It is incredibly satisfying in that setting.

John: Yep. And a crucial point I think you’re making here is that the denouement is not about plot. It’s about story and theme, but it’s not about sort of the A plot of your movie. Your A plot is probably all done. It’s paying off things you set up between your characters. It’s really paying off relationships generally is how you are wrapping things up. It’s showing what has changed in the relationships between these characters and giving us a sense of what those relationships are going to be like going forward.

Craig: Oh, and that’s a great point, too. You’re absolutely right that it is showing what has changed and therefore it’s also showing what hasn’t changed, which can sometimes be just as important. So, for instance, if your theme is all you need is love, then it is important to show in the denouement that, OK, our protagonist has found love. She now has fulfilled that part of her life. But the other things that maybe she had been chasing aren’t there. So, if your problem is, OK, my character is Vanessa and Vanessa thinks that it’s more important to be successful than to be loved, which is an incredibly trite movie. I apologize to Vanessa.

At the end I don’t necessarily – if she’s found love I think maybe that’s good. I don’t need also then success. Because then I start to wonder, well, OK, what was the lesson here? Sometimes you just want to show nothing has changed except one thing. At the end of Shrek he still lives in a swamp and he is still an ogre, but he’s not alone. So one thing changes and the denouement is very good for almost using the scientific method to change one variable and leave the others constant.

John: Absolutely. So you’re saying that if you did try to change a bunch of variables, if the character ended up in a completely different place, in a whole new world than how they started, then we would still have a question about sort of like what is their life going to be like. We just don’t understand how they fit into all these things. But by changing the one thing we can carry our knowledge of sort of the rest of their life and see that and just make that one change going forward.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. It’s a chance for you to not have to worry about propelling anything forward, but rather letting people understand something is permanent. And permanent in a lovely way. Very often the denouement will dot-dot-dot off, the way that a lot of songs just fade out, right? Some songs have a big [Craig hums] and that’s your end, and you can do that. And some of them just fade out, which is also lovely. The end of Casablanca is a brilliant little fade out. You know, he says goodbye to Ilsa. She’s off on the plane. The plot of the Nazis is over. Everything is finished. And then, you know, two men just walk off and say, you know what, I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And therein is a dot-dot-dot. And they just walk off into the fog. A plane takes off. And you understand more adventures are ahead, but for now everything is OK.

John: Yeah. It’s nice when you get a sense that there will be further stories, we don’t necessarily need to see the sequel, but you get a sense of where they’re generally headed and that you don’t need to be worrying about them an hour later from now.

Here’s the counter example. Imagine you’re watching this film and you’re watching Casablanca and for some reason the last ten minutes get cut off, like the film breaks. That is incredibly jarring because you’ve not been safely placed back down.

There’s a social contract that happens when a person starts watching a movie. It’s like the writer and the filmmakers say if you give me about two hours of your time I will make it worth your while. And you trust me and I will take you to a place and I will deposit you back safely where you started. And if you are not putting people back safely where they started they’re not going to have a good reception, a good reaction. And that’s what you find when you do audience testing is so often what’s not working about the movie is that they didn’t feel like they got to the place where they expected to be delivered.

Craig: Yeah. And I suspect that people, well, reasonably invest an enormous amount of time, energy, and thought into building their climaxes. And then the denouement becomes an afterthought. And for me it is the actual ending. That’s actually the ending I back up from is the denouement.

John: Well, OK, let’s talk about that literally, because I literally do write those last few pages very early on in the process. I don’t know if you do that as well. But sometime after I’ve crossed the midpoint of a script I will generally jump forward and write the last ten pages. So some of that climax but really it’s that denouement. What are the final images of the movie? What are the final moments, the final words of a movie? Because if I know that, I know where I’m going, that second half of the script is much tighter and better and cleaner for where I’m headed towards.

Also, I like to write those last couple pages while I still have enthusiasm about the movie. So often you’ll read endings of scripts and you kind of feel like people were just rushing through the end. It’s like they were on a deadline and just plowed through those last pages and they spent so much time on their first act and spent so little time on those last ten pages which are sort of loose and sloppy because of when they were written.

Craig: That just infuriates me. The very thought of it. Because I obsess over those, the way I obsess over the first ten. And I don’t write out of order the way you do. But I think I plan very stringently in a way that you don’t. I try and write the movie before I write the movie essentially. And so I definitely know what those things are. And I don’t really have spikes or dips of excitement. I’m more of a kind of – you know, I think you write the way people probably think I write, and I write probably the way people think you write.

John: Probably so.

Craig: You know what I mean? I’m very robotic about it in a certain kind of procedural way, creatively obviously inside the robot management. I go all over the place and lop the heads off of giraffes and so forth. But I’m very kind of, you know, I’m a big planner.

John: I’m very instinctual and I will not know necessarily what the next scene is as I’m writing the current scene.

Craig: You know what? I think you and I just are so surprising to each other.

John: All right. So let’s wrap up this conversation of denouement because the denouements are about wrapping things up. So, the key takeaways we want people to get from a denouement is that it is a resolution of not plot but of theme, of relationship, of sort of the promise you’ve made to the audience about these principal characters and sort of what is going to happen going forward. What else do we want people to know?

Craig: I mean, that is essentially what they’re going to do. You’re going to show them that last bit whether you’ve done a good job or a poor job. When they see the last bit of the movie they will in their minds add on the following words: And thus it shall always be. And if you have done it well, and thus it shall always be, it’ll be really comforting and wonderful for them.

By the way, sometimes it’s not comforting. Sometimes it’s sad. You know, I mean, honestly the denouement of Chernobyl is quite sad and bittersweet. No shock there. Fiddler on the Roof has one of the best denouements of all time. Fiddler on the Roof opens with a guy playing this [hums] and it’s very jaunty and he’s on a roof and it’s silly. And Tevye is talking to the audience and saying, oh you know, our life is hard and tricky. And we’re like a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a simple little tune without breaking your neck.

At the end of the show, they have been driven from their town of Anatevka by pogroms and they’re trudging off to a new home. And the fiddler is the last person to go and he plays that same little tune, but it’s so sad this time. And the denouement is there to say and thus it shall always be, meaning we know based on the timeframe that what follows the people who leave Anatevka in whenever that takes place, let’s just call it 1910, is going to be worse. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better and thus it shall always be.

So, it doesn’t always have to be “and happily ever after.” Sometimes it can be and sadly ever after. But the point is it will be thus. And it shall thus always be. So, if you think about it that way the denouement becomes incredibly important because that’s where you’re sealing the fate of every single character in your film.

John: Yeah. Everyone is sort of going to be frozen in that little capsule that you created there and that can be placed up on the shelf. That is the resolution for this world that you’ve built to contain this story. So, that’s why it’s so crucial that it feel rewarding. So whether it was a happy ending or a sad ending that it feels like an ending.

Craig: Yeah.

John: All right. Let’s transition to our real endings, which is basically our short time on this earth and at some point we will not be on this earth, but some of our work will still be around. And so I think this was a question from Pam Stucky on Twitter. I couldn’t find the actual tweet that sort of led to it. So if it’s not Pam, if it was somebody else, I’m sorry. But someone asked a smart question about like, well, have you guys ever talked about what happens to our work after we die? Or how stuff gets inherited? And I don’t think we really have.

So I wanted to dig into this a little bit and talk about two things. What happens legally to our work? And what happens creatively? What are the creative choices we might make about how we want to see our work passed down in the future? So some of the stuff is really straightforward and some of the stuff is a bigger discussion.

But legally you own copyright to the things you write. And that copyright is a real thing. It is an asset that can be passed along to your heirs. And if you don’t lay it out in your wills and other documents to describe where you want that copyright asset to go to, it will get passed along just like your comic book collection or your couch. So, it’s worth thinking about who you would like to own the rights to – the copyright to the stuff you make.

Copyright is worth a lot potentially for certain properties because it’s reproduction rights, it’s the ability to make more copies of that thing, so for a book. It’s distribution rights, who can sell and distribute your work. Performance rights, which is incredibly important for playwrights in particular. And adaptation rights. So, for authors it’s the ability to take that book you’ve written and turn it into a movie or turn into a TV show, or to remake it.

So, these are crucial things for the original works that you are creating. But, of course, as screenwriters so much of what we’re actually doing as our job isn’t original works. They are works for hire.

Craig: Right. And interestingly the term length is much different for individuals or for people commissioning works for hire. So in general we’re talking about anything that’s made since 1978, if you – John, you’ve written Arlo Finch. You are the copyright holder of Arlo Finch. The copyright protection lasts you how long?

John: My life plus a certain number of years, 75 years?

Craig: 70, yes, correct.

John: 70 years.

Craig: So, as long as you live and then the day you die a clock starts ticking and there are 70 more years for your daughter to gather up those delicious Arlo Finch royalties. At which point after that theoretically it goes into public domain the way that say the works of Arthur Conan Doyle are in public domain. And anybody can do anything they want with Sherlock Holmes.

But if there is a work-for-hire and that covers every time say Warner Bros. employs you or me to write a screenplay, the length of term there is 95 years from the year of first publication, or 120 years from the year of its creation. Now you can say well life of the author plus 70 could be more than that, but you know, typically people aren’t getting copyright to important works when they’re 10. So right now as you and I both approach 50 and maybe we’ve got another let’s say 30 years in there, they’re starting to even up.

And that number is going to get longer and longer because every time Mickey Mouse almost becomes public domain they seem to get an extension.

John: Yep. And so this will not be the episode where we actually talk about copyright systems and the weird ways it has been perverted to benefit – to really do the opposite of what copyright was supposed to do which was to get ideas out there in the public. But you could say, well, it doesn’t matter the things that I’m writing for Warner Bros. because I will never control copyright, therefore my heirs will get nothing. That is not true.

Craig: That is not true.

John: So, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which was a movie I made for Warner Bros. that pays me residuals. Residuals are collected by the Writers Guild of America. And those residuals are based on every time they sell the movie through iTunes or license it to Netflix. I get checks. I get checks every quarter for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and it’s quite valuable. Those checks will keep coming after I die. And that is a very good thing. And those checks will keep coming as long as that movie is worth something and it is being licensed under copyright. So as long as Warner Bros. has copyright on the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie I’ve made, residuals will keep coming. And that is a good asset down the road.

Craig: Yeah. That’s basically the long and short of it right there. We do have a kind of perpetuous income source with the residuals. And that’s why we have residuals essentially to simulate royalties, to overcome the absurd fiction of the work-for-hire, which I guess is sometimes is not a fiction but a lot of times it is. So, yeah, that’s basically what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with 90 or 120 years following creation of or first publication, or first publication or creation of. That’s how long it lasts. So when we die it kind of doesn’t matter. The law doesn’t really care, in our case, because our death is not actually triggering any time constraint.

For you it will matter on Arlo Finch. Or interestingly for you and I have both written music for movies, so we’re in ASCAP and we get ASCAP royalties. Those I think will be tied to death and copyright and all that, the publishing.

John: They should be. Yeah. That’ll be interesting to see. And also it’s complicated because it’s comingled with people who did the music for it, so it’s me and Danny Elfman and I don’t really know how that all sorts out. I’ve choose not to worry about it. But, Craig, while I have you on this call I have a question about separated rights.

So, separated rights would also pass to an heir, correct?

Craig: I believe so. They pass to your estate.

John: Yes. So if you are a person who writes a work for which you receive separated rights, which is a complicated topic but essentially it’s the ability to derive money from sequels and other things based upon your original work that should pass along to your heirs. Sometimes there are even creative choices that come along with that. So that’s another useful thing.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, separated rights are at times tricky to invoke because the companies hate that they exist. But for instance if you write an original screenplay and sold the original screenplay you will maintain a separated right for dramatic exploitation under certain circumstances. In other words, you have the rights for a play to be done of the original script you wrote. And when you die that doesn’t go away. That stays with the family.

John: Yep. So quite famously J.F. Lawton who wrote Pretty Woman controlled the separated rights for Pretty Woman and did not want there to be a Broadway musical for a very, very long time. And could stop it. That separated rights is giving him that ability.

But let’s talk about sort of the creative aspect of this. Not the legal, but just sort of creatively what you might think about down the road. And so you may have specific intentions for how you want to see your work used in the future. A zillion years ago I worked on an adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time which was not the same thread of the current Wrinkle in Time. But Madeleine L’Engle had already passed away, but her estate had tremendous controls over what could be done with that property. So not just who could do it, but like specific things that had to be in the script or could not be in the script. They had creative controls. And that was given to her estate.

Edward Albee’s estate has sort of famously tangled with people who wanted to make casting changes to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

And I was talking to Andrew Lippa, my friend, about stuff he’s doing with the Dramatist Guild for playwrights and musical writers who want to be able to think about their works after they’ve passed away. And so there’s some things like basically a council of playwrights that will look at people’s intentions with plays at the time they were written and sort of how they should change down the road, so that after playwrights pass away there can be some consistency about sort of what kinds of things are done with a play. So it’s a fascinating topic creatively.

Craig: Again, for those of us in movies and television, not particularly applicable in that regard, other than the minor separated rights. But that ultimately comes down to your family or whomever you have assigned the executorship of your estate. Yeah, you know, I – it’s funny, I just don’t think much about this sort of thing. Probably because I don’t have any concern that I’m going to be watching either from heaven or from hell as people make bad decisions with the things I’ve done. I don’t think I’m going to be around.

John: A thing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently though, and it probably started with Morrissey and Morrissey being a crank on Twitter. And I loved Morrissey’s songs, but now it’s like I don’t want – ugh, Morrissey shut up. And it got me thinking about whether I want to put some system in place where I would deputize three people of different generations and if they agreed that I needed to retire or basically move out of public view that I would have to take their decision. Basically a council of advisors who would say, no John, you need to stop. Because you look at people who have decided to step away and like maybe that was a great choice that they stepped away.

So Robert Redford recently announced that he’s retiring from acting. He’s not retiring as a public person, but he’s retired from acting. Daniel Day Lewis did it. Gene Hackman did it. And maybe there could be good cause for someone to give advice to somebody about this is the time to stop. Craig, what do you think about that?

Craig: I don’t think – the problem is if you become a crank then you’ll just say I’m not listening to these people anymore. Look, everybody has a moment where they should probably put it down, but then some people don’t. Some people go all the way to the end and you’re thankful for it, you know.

Look, it’s a personal decision. Sometimes these actors announce that they’re retiring from acting and I just think or just maybe retire from acting and not announce it. You know, stop. Just stop. That’s all. You don’t have to do anything to retire. That’s the beauty of retiring. An announcement that I’m no longer going to be doing – oh, do you need one last round of attention here? I think it’s more interesting when you discover that like people go, by the way, did you know that Gene Hackman apparently retired? That’s the best way to do it I think.

So when I finally retire – no one will care anyway.

John: Craig, do you think you will retire?

Craig: I think I will be retired. In other words, I hope that when I look at my own work and my mind and I have an assessment that it is of diminishing value that that will come either simultaneous with or slightly ahead of everybody else’s similar determination. The bummer is when everybody else figures out that you’ve lost it before you do. You don’t want to be that pitcher who is still going out there and getting shelled and guys are like, dude, you can’t throw a 95 anymore. You’re barely touching 90 and your stuff is flat. Maybe it’s time to hang up the spikes. No, I got one more season in me.

I don’t want to be that guy. But, you know, I keep a fairly careful eye on myself and I have a tendency towards self-loathing anyway, so I think I’ll be OK. I think if anything I will constantly try to retire and if people don’t want me to, or they need me to do something they’ll say, “No, no, no, not yet,” and then I’ll feel bad and do it. That’ll be the ideal situation.

John: You and I both know writers who sort of functionally got retired and they basically kind of stopped working. Like people stopped hiring them. And it is sad when they want to keep working and no one is hiring them. Ageism is a real thing in Hollywood. And this is the kind of insight in which if I actually went to therapy I probably could have had ten years ago, but a thing the last few weeks I’ve realized is that I think part of the reason I keep pursuing new things or stuff that I kind of don’t know anything about, like writing a book, writing a musical, software stuff, is that it’s nice to be the new person in something. It’s nice to feel like I am actually a beginner. That I’m a younger person in that field rather than sort of like the person who has been a screenwriter for 25 years.

Craig: Yeah.

John: There’s something nice about that. So I don’t know that I will ever retire, but I can also envision some point where I’m basically not writing movies anymore because I’m just doing other stuff, where I haven’t been doing it for 25 years.

Craig: No question. I mean, it’s just like video games are very difficult in the beginning when you’re weak and you’re confused and you’re not quite sure how the controls work and they’re a little scary. And then there’s that wonderful process of slowly and steadily mastering what’s happening, until you get to a point where you’re so powerful it’s boring. And the more you do something, even if it’s not in terms of power it’s just in terms of mastery, it can get – like I don’t really want necessarily to write rated-R comedies anymore, because I feel like I’ve done it a lot. And I’m a little bit bored.

And it’s not even to say that I’ve done it well, or that I couldn’t do it better. But there’s been a lot of it. And there’s been a lot that people haven’t seen, also, where my name is not there, but there’s more work than people know. And so I agree with you that changing things up and trying new things is delightful. I’m 100% in that place with you.

I think sometimes with some of the people who get retired, forcibly retired, ageism, yes, I think truly is a thing. However, Ted Eliot did point out something many years ago that had the ring of strong truth to it, which was that there are people that kind of happen in Hollywood. They make a big splash with a thing. And it’s a shiny thing and people get excited and they begin hiring that person. And slowly but surely as they go from project to project to project the word spreads that maybe they’re actually just not that good. And that some of these people aren’t aging out, they’re just being found out.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And they just weren’t as good as people thought. And there’s been a bunch of those. Also some people behave poorly and they get retired out because all things being equal people would rather work with somebody that’s nice than not nice. Especially these days I think that’s more of a consideration than it used to be.

But, yeah, it’s a tough thing because the market is cruel, but not irrational necessarily. Racist though. It’s definitely racist. See that one there’s no question about.

John: Yeah, there’s a little of that. So a thing I found is at a certain point you become – when you first start in this business you are younger than the people hiring you, and then you end up becoming about the same age as the people hiring you, and then you become older than some of the people hiring you. And at a certain point it becomes challenging to take instructions from people who have less experience than you do. And that I think is probably true in all industries across the board. It is weird to be working for somebody younger than you. That is naturally a part of it.

But I think another thing that happens is that sometimes if this executive is used to working with young writers who will do 50,000 drafts and keep smiling and will try to incorporate all the bad ideas because they’re hungry and desperate for a job, the fact that the more experienced writer isn’t so hungry will change the nature of that relationship. You know, if a writer says, you know what, I’m not going to try to implement that ridiculous note that won’t conceivably work because it’s just a waste of everyone’s time.

That’s a thing that the older writer might say that the younger writer wouldn’t say and ultimately that older writer I think gets hired less and less.

Craig: Yeah, you know, I have found that there’s been a nice shift in a weird way. I was – I think it’s different for everybody. Honestly it’s just the way you carry yourself and how you are. I think some people as they get older they just don’t refresh their minds about the world around them and I try and do that as best I can.

Having children helps. You know, having a 17-year-old and a 13-year-old makes it so that I have a certain amount of awareness of what’s going on around me. Also there’s a little bit of a sweet spot which I think you and I are probably in right now. It’s as you’re approaching 50. My guess is it’s your 50s where you’re not too old, but you are old enough where it seems like you’re kind of the vet. Like you know, like you’re a reliable vet who is going to get the job done. Thank god you’re here. I want somebody slightly older than me who I feel like I can listen to. And you’re not too old so you’re not grandpa.

That’s a real thing. I think that you and I have the best possible insurance against ageism ever which is this show. Since by the time we’re in our 60s every single person running every studio I believe will have grown up listening to this podcast. Therefore we should be fine. You and I will be OK forever.

John: As long as the council that we’ve appointed to tell us that we need to stop doing the show doesn’t tell us we need to stop doing the show.

Craig: I’m already saying no to them. I defy them.

John: I refuse!

Craig: I refuse.

John: Let’s wrap this segment up with just a little bit of practical advice. If you are thinking about sort of who should control your work after you pass away, at a certain point you’re going to need to make a will. So every screenwriter at a certain point wakes up in panic and says like, oh crap, I have no will, I have no estate, I have nothing planned. You go to a lawyer and do it.

I think if you’re young and starting out without a lot of assets you can probably do one of those online things or get a book or do something that way and just write the will, do whatever you’re supposed to do in the State of California. File it wherever you’re supposed to file it so it’s found after your death. And make those choices about where those things are supposed to go.

If you are a person with some substantial assets you do need to go find a person who can figure out how you should structure all the stuff, because at a certain point you’re going to put stuff into a trust and there’s reasons why you do things the way you do them. But it’s worth everyone thinking about so you have some sense of where you would like your work to go.

Craig: 100%. I believe you and I use the same guy.

John: Yep. He’s the guy. All of our friends do use the same guy.

Craig: There you go. Boy, I hope that guy is good or else we’re all–

John: Just toast. It turns out he’s just awful and made fundamental misassumptions.

All right, let us go to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing are actually two awesome women who both write and perform. The first is my friend Erin Gibson. So Erin Gibson, she’s the host or cohost of Throwing Shade podcast which is fantastic. Co-creator, writer, and director of Gay of Thrones, which I’m sure you’ve watched. Jonathan Martin sort of recaps of Game of Thrones. They are fantastic.

But she has a book out which is also great. I went to the party. The book came out today but it’s already gotten great reviews. Called Feminasty: The Complicated Woman’s Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death. And it’s great. And Erin is fantastic. But she’s one of those people who – this is how I first met Erin Gibson.

She and Bryan Safi, who are cohosts on Throwing Shade, were both correspondents on this show called Infomania on the Current Network. And I stumbled across this show. I thought they were singularly fantastic. This is pre-Twitter I guess, so I emailed them and said like you guys are both fantastic and we ended up having coffee and they’ve been friends since then. So, Erin Gibson, a fantastic writer and performer.

The second one is Phoebe Waller-Bridge. And sometimes in life you find little individual things you like and then later on realize they were all the same thing. And that was Phoebe Waller-Bridge for me. So, she is the writer-creator of Killing Eve, which is remarkable. It’s so good. You should watch it. But before that she did Fleabag, which I hadn’t seen, but now I’m watching and it’s great. And she stars in and wrote that. And then she was also L3-37, the robot in Solo, which was one of my favorite things about that movie. And so she was all of these things and is all one person. And so I’m so happy that there’s a Phoebe Waller-Bridge out there. So, Erin Gibson, Phoebe Waller-Bridge are my two great One Cool Things.

Craig: Wow. That is pretty cool. I love it when that happens. And that is a bit of a sign from the universe that you should be friends with somebody, isn’t it?

John: Probably so. So, she should probably come on the show next time she’s in Los Angeles.

Craig: Yeah. Seems like that should happen.

Well, just like your two things, my third thing is also a video game DLC. What? OK. So, I’ve been playing The Witcher 3.

John: I don’t like The Witcher. So tell me why you love it.

Craig: Well, I don’t love it. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t love it. I like it. I did not like it to start with. It took a little bit of time to get into. And then once I got into it I was like, OK, OK, it’s pretty cool in that it’s massive. It’s sort of like do you like Skyrim? Well, what if it was Skyrim but not as good but bigger, like there was more stuff to do.

So many quests, you’ll never finish them. But, you know, not bad. Terrible video game sex in it. I don’t think I’ve seen good video game sex.

John: Terrible in what way?

Craig: The mouths don’t touch. And the hips are moving incorrectly, so it is a hideous simulacrum of sex. It’s just incredibly not arousing. The breasts do not move. They will show bare female breasts but they have no jiggle, so it’s like that’s not right. That’s really not right at all. Yeah, video game sex not sexy.

Also, this game, Witcher, from 2015 just absurdly sexist in a way that I think like I can only assume that the people over there in Poland at Project Red who are no doubt hard at work on Witcher 4 have noticed the world has changed. I hope they have. And maybe some of their women could have shirts that close. You know, that would be nice if all the buttons went up to the neck. Just a thought.

Yeah, anyway.

John: So, I mean, Witcher 3 is really, I mean, I played it back when I was in Paris. And it is beautiful. It really does look terrific and looks better than Skyrim kind of does. But you’re always playing the one guy and I felt like I was on rails the entire time. So I probably only played like two hours into it and just gave up.

Craig: The first two hours you are on rails. And when they take you off the rails, that’s the weird part, is that the first part of the game is absurdly railed and then once that’s over they’re like, no rails. Also, you have 4,000 quests to do. Good luck, bye. And then it really is fun. And never-ending. So you probably quit just a little too early. But I will say that in terms of the beauty aspect of it I got this DLC Blood and Wine where you go this new region which is essentially French wine countryside.

John: Nice.

Craig: And it is gorgeous. Oh, it’s so great to look at. I mean, the gameplay is the same damn thing, but it is beautiful. And you get your own vineyard estate to renovate. You have your own major domo who is very nice. You have nice chats with him.

You know, I’m not a big craft your own home guy, but when I did, like in Fallout 4 I’m like, OK, I better sort of spiff up my little homestead here you know. But the guess you can do is use terrible post-apocalyptic materials to build your weird creepy hut. Here you’re living in this gorgeous French, you know, countryside manor with fields and Bougainvillea and it’s quite lovely.

So, anyway, Witcher 3: Blood and Wine if you feel like escaping slightly to your French countryside estate while you are slaughtering Necrophages with your silver sword. There you go.

John: All right. And that is our show for this week. As always our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. And special thanks to Luke Davis for sending us that cool intro bit with Craig.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: If you have an outro or intro thing you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions and bits of follow up like we discussed today.

You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, anywhere where podcasts are found. Leave us a review. That’s always great. Links to stuff we talked about in today’s episode will be in the show notes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. We have nearly 3,000 of you premium subscribers. And so I think after we wrap here I’m going to talk to Craig about a special little thing I kind of want to do for those premium subscribers, because that’s pretty cool.

Craig: That’s amazing.

John: All right, Craig, thank you so much for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John. I will see you next week.

Links:

• You can listen to John & Craig on another podcast: Jordan, Jesse, Go!
• You can check out our episode with Mindy Kaling, or our episode with Susanna Fogel and David Iserson for some context in this week’s follow-up.
• John’s attempt at “Changing Craig’s Mind” about ventriloquism: Nina Conti
• Edward Albee’s estate has special rules about casting for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
• Erin Gibson: Throwing Shade podcast, Gay of Thrones, and her new book, Feminasty: The Complicated Woman’s Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death.
• Phoebe Waller-Bridge: Killing Eve, Fleabag, and she’s the robot, L3-37, in Solo
• The Witcher 3: Blood And Wine DLC
• The USB drives!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!). And thank you, Luke Davis, for Craig’s musical intro!

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/netflix-killed-the-video-store).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 364 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today Craig is off in Chernobyl land in a hotel that from his descriptions sounds like Eastern Europe’s equivalent of the Overlook, so he is my Daniel Lloyd, I am his Dick Halloran, except instead of The Shining we have spotty text messaging. Assuming he escapes the hedge maze he will be back next week.

In the meantime, I am lucky to have a special guest. Kate Hagen is Director of Community, is that correct?

**Kate Hagen:** That’s right, yeah.

**John:** At the Black List. I want to talk to her about what that means, but mostly I want to talk to her about her blog post about the state of home video, video stores, and the many movies that are weirdly unavailable. Kate, welcome.

**Kate:** Thanks so much for having me, John. This is a pleasure to be able to be on the much-loved Scriptnotes.

**John:** And so I’d seen your blog post, the one that kicked this all off about the last great video store months ago. And I had always bookmarked it. It was going to be a One Cool Thing, but it felt too big to be a One Cool Thing because I actually wanted to talk about it. And it sort of slipped down in my feed of stuff to discuss. And in the past two weeks I had trouble trying to find a copy of The Flamingo Kid, and it all surfaced up again. So, I was encountering what you had encountered. What was the movie that you were trying to look for?

**Kate:** I was trying to look for a movie called Fresh Horses, which is most notable for being the only reteaming of Andrew McCarthy and Mollie Ringwald after Pretty in Pink. It’s not a good movie, it’s just one of those ‘80s curiosities that I was like, “Oh, I’d like to see this again.” And I started looking for it one night and the only version I could find was on like a very illegal website where it was dubbed in Polish. And I was like well that’s pretty nuts. This movie is 30 years old. Ben Stiller and Viggo Mortensen are also in it, so it’s not like a nobodies’ movie. And the only way you can get Fresh Horses currently is in one of those six-movie ‘80s collections on Amazon, which is a bummer, because then it’s just like a crappy version of the movie.

**John:** Cool. So let’s try to figure out and solve all the problems of missing home videos in the next hour.

**Kate:** I think we can do it.

**John:** But we’ll start with simpler things which you can explain what you actually do at the Black List.

**Kate:** Yeah. So my fun answer for this is I am like the ultimate Internet team for the Black List. So I’m kind of the online mom of the Black List. I make sure all of our online community is healthy and getting along with each other. That includes everything from doing all of our social media, to editing and curating our blog, to overseeing customer support. I run point on all of our site partnerships. So, Franklin likes to put it that Megan and I – Megan is our director of events – and she kind of handles everything that is an in-person interaction and I handle everything that’s an online interaction.

**John:** So Franklin Leonard launched the Black List as a site shortly after one of the Austin Film Festival appearances. So he came on the show, on a live show, to talk about this plan he had for the Black List and it’s been fascinating to watch it grow into this big thing that it is right now.

So, you are part of a small team, and so as people are submitting scripts that they want to show up on the site for coverage and for other things for professionals to look at them, you are part of the team that interacts with those folks?

**Kate:** Yeah. So like day-to-day I’m just keeping an eye on everything that’s coming through the website in terms of evaluations, if there are any issues with any scripts or anything. I’m kind of just the keeper of all of that stuff. And, you know, making sure people can opt into partnerships, all that kind of good stuff.

**John:** Now at this point are you still reading scripts that come in, or are your days as a reader behind you?

**Kate:** My days as a reader are behind me. I was a reader – it was my full-time gig for about eight months, but I was doing freelance for about a year and a half. And I covered about 500 scripts in that time. Yeah, and there are definitely days when I miss being a reader. I mean, there are other days where I’m super glad I don’t have to do that anymore. But like friends will reach out to give notes on their scripts and I’m like, “Oh, I really like doing this,” the kind of page notes where you have a good relationship with someone and you can be like this is not working and they’re not going to get mad at you, as opposed to just sending coverage off into the void.

**John:** Weirdly over the course of all these episodes of Scriptnotes I don’t think we’ve talked that much about the job of a reader, sort of what it’s like to be a reader. So, my first jobs in Hollywood were as a reader. I started as a reader covering scripts for Prelude Pictures, which doesn’t exist anymore. It was this tiny little company based over at Paramount. And every week I’d go in, they’d give me two scripts. I would write up my coverage on these two scripts, then come back in, deliver those, and pick up new scripts. This was back in the day when there weren’t PDFs, so you were actually physically picking up scripts and reading them and writing up your coverage, and printing them out and sending them back in.

I assume this is all happening digitally these days?

**Kate:** Yeah. It’s all happening digitally at least as far as the Black List is concerned. People just upload their scripts to the site. The readers are then able to access those scripts, and they provide an evaluation. And our coverage is a little bit different than traditional coverage. It’s meant to be kind of a high level notes for the writer. It’s not getting into like page-by-page details some of the time. Although some readers choose to do that. It’s more focused on what’s working in the script, what’s not working in the script, and what the likely audience for that might be.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a very different relationship to the writer than coverage traditionally is. Because coverage classically what I was doing for Prelude, then I was a reader at TriStar, you’re really just a gatekeeper in that function. Basically a script comes in, the executive doesn’t have time to read it, so you are basically writing a book report, a summary of what happens in the script and your overall reaction to the script. Sometimes it’s a page and a half of summary and then one page of comments talking through characters, plot, sort of overall impressions of “Is this a good writer?” a recommendation – like consider this script, consider this writer, consider both. And generally the answer is consider neither for most–

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the function is basically to say no to everything.

**Kate:** Yeah. It’s so funny. So before I was reading for the Black List I was reading freelance for Bold Films. And I read probably I’d say about 100 scripts for them in that period of time. And the only two things I ever recommended were Arrival and Dark Places, the script for that. But, yeah, I think most people don’t realize that as a reader and a gatekeeper you need to be passing on 95% of stuff. It’s very rare that you get anything that kind of emerges from the pile.

But I would have moments, too, where like it would be a very talented writer who was given like not a great book to adapt or something. And it was nice to be able to be like, “Hey, this writer is really great, even if this material is not working.” And I do think that’s something that like we don’t focus on enough in evaluating scripts. It’s all about the script itself, and obviously you have to execute a script, but it would be nice sometimes if we directed some of that love back to the writer if they’re doing a good job.

**John:** Definitely. Sometimes the function of a reader is you’re looking for a specific thing that this company can make, and so if something doesn’t fall into the purview of what this company would make you’re going to pass on it because you don’t want to waste the executive’s time reading this thing that they can’t actually do. But along the way you sometimes will read good writing and in my time reading for TriStar I read 200 scripts. I still have a list of all that coverage. And none of the things I read ended up getting made. Two of the things I ended up recommending I sort of got called to the mat for wasting people’s time for recommending them. It’s so frustrating.

**Kate:** And taste is so crazy. You know, there’s a sort of consensus I feel like in terms of what’s good in Hollywood, but then you get a lot of outliers and it depends on people’s bosses and all that kind of good stuff. And like you were saying in terms of what a given company can make within a calendar year, or couple of calendar years. Yeah, so it’s a tricky gig.

I think a lot of screenwriters have this kind of attitude about readers that like they’re trying to pull one over on them. And it’s like, no guys, we just want to read good scripts. Like that’s all we ever want to do. And I’m sorry that most scripts are not good. It’s a bummer. I would love to recommend scripts all the time.

**John:** And I think another thing people don’t understand is that most readers are writers, or at least a sizable portion of readers are actually screenwriters themselves. And it’s a very classic first job in Hollywood is to be one of those readers. If someone wants to be a reader, I mean, the Black List is a sort of a special case, but in general how are people getting hired as readers these days?

**Kate:** Yeah, I mean, this is a tricky question. I have a number of friends who are still reading and I think a lot of it like everything in life and especially in this business is relationship-based.

It was funny, when I graduated college there was this idea of like you move to Los Angeles and you went to film school for screenwriting and you’ll get a reader job like that. It’ll be no problem. You’ll be able to support yourself. Those days are long past. So most folks I know are either reading for multiple companies or reading is just one of the many things they do.

But I think a lot of that is based on your relationships with assistants, with executives, finding folks that like even if your taste is not the same it’s in the same ballpark so that you know that like even if we disagree about a script we can argue both sides of this to come to some sort of agreement on whether or not we’re going to recommend it.

**John:** When someone is being hired as a reader there’s usually sample coverage that they’re looking at. So, you will have written up coverage on a script, and even if they haven’t read the script that it’s based on you get a sense of like this person can evaluate story. This person can summarize things well enough so I can understand what the plot of a script is.

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** One of the biggest challenges I always had as a reader is you read a script and you’re trying to write the summary and how do you even summarize this thing. The story makes no sense. And sometimes, in the course of writing the synopsis, I’m kind of inventing – in the simplification of it I’m trying to create story so there is a narrative thread to go through there.

**Kate:** Ugh, that was always a challenge. I remember one time I got a script where I believe it was four different versions of the protagonist and the way that this was denoted in the script was different levels of gray scale to tell you which version of the protagonist was interacting within which scene. And you’re like I don’t know what the medium gray is after 30 pages. What am I supposed to do to keep up with that? It can be a real challenge sometimes to just even, you know, pick your way through the narrative and like you said try to find some kind of cohesive narrative thread.

**John:** Are most readers still in Los Angeles or with the rise of the Internet are they just spread out throughout the country?

**Kate:** Speaking for the Black List, we have folks who read all over America and some folks throughout other parts of the world. But most folks I know who are reading as any kind of full-time or steady gig are here, because they have other aspirations in the industry and reading is just a part of that.

**John:** And when they say they’re doing it as a full-time gig or a steady gig, is it still a per-script basis where you’re getting paid per unit? You’re getting X dollars for reading a script?

**Kate:** Yeah. I’ve always heard rumors of these fabled studio readers, WGA readers. I have never met one in the flesh. I don’t know if that’s just something that used to exist and no longer exists. But I only ever got paid for script coverage on a by-script basis. I never got any kind of like weekly fee or anything.

**John:** And what are the ranges you’re hearing about in Los Angeles these days?

**Kate:** It really depends. I have gotten paid everything from $10 to $300 to evaluate a single script. So there’s a wide range. I would say most folks’ going rate for kind of a script evaluation is in the $40 to $50 range. I think especially there’s so many folks reading and because the Internet exists and because we’re all on electronic devices anyway all the time it’s a little easier to read a script then like when you were talking about, you know, got to go to the office, got to pick up the paper copies. The fact that you can do it remotely.

So there are definitely some factors I think that have dropped the price a little bit. But I would love to see a world in which reading was like a legitimate full-time gig for many people that had its own union and all that fun stuff.

**John:** Yeah. It’s horrifying that you say it’s $40 to $50 because that’s – I was getting $50 to $65 20 years ago reading at TriStar.

**Kate:** It’s hard out there. When I was reading full-time I was usually reading two or three scripts a day, depending. And then I know some folks who have been doing it for ten years and can do five or six scripts a day. I would occasionally do four scripts a day, but at that point you’re like I have no brain function left at all.

**John:** And reading that many scripts does just burn a hole in your brain. I feel like at a certain point – it was good, like the first 100 or 200 it was very helpful for me as a writer being able to understand what kind of never worked on a page, and also what my personal taste – I never want to write that kind of way because I sort of feel what happens when you try to do that thing. But it ultimately is using some of the same parts of your brain you need as a writer. You’re visualizing all these things. And it can be really sad.

**Kate:** Yeah. But I mean, it’s also super instructive. I highly recommend that most folks, even if you’re not doing it in a professional capacity, even if you can go on a screenwriting forum and pull a bunch of amateur scripts or something just to give yourself the challenge of writing coverage. Because nothing will teach you more about what not to do as a screenwriter then reading a bunch of really bad scripts.

**John:** That’s actually a great idea. I don’t know if we’ll ever do it as a feature, but it would be interesting to take a script and have people just go off and write coverage for it and be able to cover the coverage and sort of see what people are–

**Kate:** Right before I got hired for Black List I was in consideration for another job for a small production company. And it was down to me and one other person to be the kind of assistant executive catch-all role. And they gave us both the same script and they said one of the execs likes this script and one of the execs doesn’t like this script. And we are going to hire based on your coverage.

The script was just this very boring, middle-of-the-road white guy coming of age sexual fantasy. And I told them about it. And I did not get that job. But I was like, “Well, I guess I didn’t want this job anyway because our taste was not going to align.”

**John:** Well let’s transition now to talking about video, because your piece which was great when I read it, as I go back and reread it now it’s like, oh, she actually answers some of the questions that I had sort of in my head about the availability of movies and sort of our misperception of how big some of these video stores really were in the day and where we’re at right now.

And I also want to get into sort of the difference between streaming and online download and stuff like that because they’re similar but they’re not quite the same thing. And even in your piece, I realized today as I was reading through it again, you did have some answers for sort of why some of these movies are missing and there are sort of big structural issues that need to be tackled to get into it.

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of issues that keep movies off streaming, off home video. A couple of the big ones, the one that’s most compelling to me is music rights. I’m also a huge music person, so the idea that films can’t be put on home video with their original music intact is just absolutely sacrilegious to me. But at the same time, you know, that’s one of the few ways you can still make money off music anymore is by licensing it to a film. So, like my friend Marc Heuck who is quoted in the piece talks about, it’s much cheaper for most studios to just do nothing with these titles rather than relicense the music and put it out in some kind of official home video release or get it back on streaming.

And that’s a huge bummer. There are so many movies for which the soundtrack is an essential part of them and the idea that that’s what’s keeping them out of the public sphere is a huge bummer.

I would say for a lot of the ‘90s indies it’s really interesting. A lot of those production companies have since folded and like even the parent companies have folded. So then it becomes a chain of title situation of like do the rights revert back to the producer, the director. Who ended up with the rights to these films? And most of the time you can’t see your way through the darkness and so it’s very difficult to get those films on streaming. But, you know, these movies are 25 years old and all of a sudden unavailable and you’re like, guys, this is going to be like a second silent era kind of erasure if we’re not careful.

**John:** So, before we get into fixing the problem, let’s talk about the scope of the problem. I think most people’s perception is that when Netflix by Mail existed that kind of solved the problem. It seemed like it solved the problem because any movie you could possibly imagine, oh well, it was available on Netflix by Mail before it was even “By Mail” back then. That sense where they would send you a little disc in a red envelope and it would come and show up.

Obviously it was a solution only for movies that existed on home video. It was only for movies in North America. Obviously we’re in a global world, but right now we’re just focusing on what happens in the US and Canada. But for a while it seemed really good and it was very hard to think of a movie that you’d want to see that wasn’t available sort of through Netflix.

As Netflix moves to streaming, I think most of us, myself included, just sort of assumed that well obviously they’re not going to be able to have all the same kind of content there, but it’s just bits. So it sits on a server someplace and if one person a month wants to watch that movie, great, it’s going to be available for them to watch. That’s not at all what happened.

So, in your piece you talk about Netflix at the time of your writing has about 3,686 films available for streaming at any point. But even like a Blockbuster back in the day could have 10,000.

**Kate:** That was a really mind-blowing stat to me. I would have never guessed that my local Blockbuster was stocking 10,000 movies and then putting that next to the Netflix number you’re like, “Wait a minute, so we just get like drama, children’s, and comedy.” And so much of the Netflix content is original and from the last ten years. I mean, that’s a whole different conversation, too, the idea of classic films that are kept off of streaming. I mean, Netflix only has 100 movies on the service from 1900 to 1990, which is absolutely insane.

**John:** And so we can’t rely on Netflix to be the solution to all the problems and obviously Amazon Video has their own streaming services, but Amazon and iTunes/Apple they also offer the ability to rent or to purchase these movies. And I guess I assumed that that was going to be the other solution, because it feels like once a movie is available for purchase or for rental through those sites it can sort of just be permanently there. And at least in your article I can’t find a listing of sort of how many movies are available for rental or purchase on iTunes or through Amazon.

**Kate:** iTunes I have not also been able to figure out. Amazon you can look at through Just Watch, which is the website I used for much of the piece. And that will list everything that’s available for rental. But you know the way I think about that is particularly like I’m thinking about this a lot in terms of the young film fan, kids, teenagers who are just getting into movies. You know, if you’re 14 are you going to watch the free movie on Netflix or are you going to go to your parents and be like “Can I have the credit card, can I do the $3 movie purchase?” No, you’re going to pick the free stuff or you’re not going to watch anything or you’re going to watch YouTube clips. And, you know, I will gladly pay $2 or $3 to rent something on Amazon or iTunes or whatever, but you know, that’s still not fixing the problem that’s still gatekeeping in a way.

My friend, Kate Barr, at Scarecrow in Seattle said the most interesting thing about Amazon and Netflix in particular and she was talking about this idea that for her it’s a First Amendment issue that, you know, when home video began it was suddenly freedom of choice for people in a way that they had never had before. You could pick exactly what you wanted to watch when you wanted to watch it. And in a weird way we’ve come full circle to like limiting our choices again. Like we went from having so many choices to not as many choices, even though it seems like streaming is more accessible.

**John:** Yeah. So I’ll push back a little bit on some of that stuff. I mean, First Amendment, it’s not government control, but it is that access, that sense of I need to be able to access culture and I am being denied the ability to see that thing of culture because of weird corporate restrictions. I think what is so great about the piece you did on Scarecrow Video, so we’re going to link to your main article, but you have done great follow-ups at other video stores and talking to the folks who run these video stores, many of which have become non-profits because they’re really about access to these movies rather than trying to earn a buck.

I would say that we can have this sort of golden age idea of like, “Oh, I could get to all those movies because I could go to Scarecrow Video or I could go to these places and all those movies were there,” but that relied on your ability to actually get to those places.

**Kate:** Sure.

**John:** And so for kids who grew up in rural Iowa there was no video store, so they were completely dependent on what would show up on TV or what was available at their little small tiny video store. I guess what’s surprising is even those small video stores had more than I think we sort of remember them having.

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, I would say two things about that. I think something that became really apparent to me in writing this piece was how much I had undervalued and I think how much most of us undervalued the video store as a living library archive, as just kind of a history of record. Because, you know, it doesn’t matter what the quality of a movie is, you know, for new releases most video stores are buying all new releases every week. When you start doing that you start to build up a pretty robust collection of stuff and that also kind of catches movies that might slip through the cracks otherwise. And nobody really thinks about that when they think about video store erasure. Like I think about some of the great video stores have closed and it’s like what happens to all these movies when they do close?

I would also – I have not figured out a way to zero in on this, but you were talking about the idea of what was available to folks on television, like to me that is something that has significantly shrunk, too, the kinds of movies we show on TV. Like when I was a kid I watched a ton of weird stuff on IFC and Sundance and movies like Kissed that have never even been put on DVD. And to me now cable is about 250 movies that we have decided we’re going to show and that’s it. And I don’t know if that’s also a licensing issue and with streaming, but to me that’s a huge pool that shrunk, too, and it’s much harder to stumble upon something on cable.

It’s just like, hey guess what, it’s Ghostbusters or Pulp Fiction again.

**John:** Yep. So you talk about video stores used to be kind of the movie libraries of a community, and so obviously one solution to that is the actual library. Andrew in LA wrote in based on what we talked about last week saying, “A couple years ago I discovered what a great resource the LA Public Library is for movies that were otherwise unavailable online. I was one of the first holdouts with the Netflix DVD subscription so I could have access to older, more obscure stuff, but I found that the library had all that was on Netflix and more. The Flamingo Kid is no exception. Just a suggestion for next time you run into that issue.”

**Kate:** Yeah. When I was a kid we rented from the library I would say maybe about a third as much as we rented from Blockbuster. All I had as a kid was Blockbuster, so that’s where we went. But, yeah, the library is an incredible resource. Also I know there are certain library subscriptions where like they will put the catalog online so with your library card you can then stream titles which is really cool.

But, yeah, these kind of creative solutions to working around the streaming bubble. I think people don’t realize there are still – at least when I wrote the piece – there are still at least 90,000 DVDS that one can rent from Netflix online, which is pretty nuts. Part of me has wondered if I should go back to disc Netflix, which is like a very weird thing to do in the Year of our Lord 2018. And, you know, those DVD subscriptions are still playing quite a bit of Netflix’s overall budget for the year. So, people are still doing it. People still want access to more films than what is at the streaming service at any given time.

**John:** As a WGA board member I also have to bring up the issue that while the ability to get to those discs is fantastic for people who want to watch those movies, those discs that are sitting at the LA Public Library that were sitting at Blockbuster, they earn nothing for the writer. So figuring out how to make this available for streaming, for rental, for purchase online is actually very meaningful to any writer, director, actor who is relying on residuals from these movies, because if you were to go stream Charlie’s Angels I get paid for that. If you go find a DVD, you get it from Redbox or you get it from the library, I don’t get paid for that. So it’s worth solving on many fronts and not just sort of like getting access to those physical things again.

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, that’s something definitely to think about. This is something like I was talking a little bit about the ‘90s titles. For all of those creative teams, and like that’s so unfair to them that just because the company who put it out folded that they now have no ownership over this title anymore. And those rights should, you know, of course there are legal – all that kind of stuff you have to go through and hoops, but the chain of title on that stuff should revert back to the creators at some point if there is kind of no powers that be left.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s talk about the legal teams involved here, because as you look at classic film preservation, so there’s the kinds of movies that are in the danger of being lost to history because the only print was in a vault someplace and it’s falling apart, and so we have these really smart chemists and colorists who go through and they save these movies and then we do a giant projection, 70mm, and everyone cheers because this movie has been saved.

For every one of those movies there’s thousands that are not being saved because they only exist on VHS or they sort of never really came out on video. And those are the movies that we need to be able to salvage. And it’s not that there’s no copy of them available, there’s just no legal copy of them available. There’s no way to actually get to it. And I kind of feel like we need that band of lawyers and sort of paralegals and other folks who can just figure out the copyright on the stuff and get those things out there the same way we have the chemists and the colorists saving those big prints, just so that we don’t lose this kind of culture.

You talk about sort of a silent moment, especially movies in the ‘70s, ‘80s, early ‘90s that are in real danger of just being lost because they are unavailable. There’s no place to find them.

**Kate:** Yeah. And I mean to say nothing of all of the kind of home video ephemera that arose as a part of that whole movement, you know, where you’d get trailer compilations or a behind-the-scenes documentary, or cartoon compilations. All of that kind of stuff has also vanished. And, you know, most streaming services aren’t offering those kind of special features, bonus features, and that’s as much of a content apocalypse as the movies themselves, like just getting rid of all of the kind of additional materials that were attached to that.

**John:** So, overall goals. We talk about film preservation and film history, sort of the chemists who are making those prints actually work. We talk about the archivists and sort of the film buff, but also the film student. And so those folks are going to be able to find that collection of animated shorts. If someone is willing to put in five hours to sort of discover this place and to drive to that place and find that one copy of something, she’s going to be able to find it somewhere. At least for now she’s going to be able to find it somewhere. But I think your point about the kid who is used to just being able to get everything online immediately is not going to seek that stuff out and there’s a whole bunch of culture that’s going to be lost because that kid is not going to have any way to sort of find it.

**Kate:** Yeah. And I mean I have this argument with folks all the time of like, you know, “Well kids are curious. They’ll figure it out on their own.” I’m like, no, not if they don’t have the tools. Not if they’ve never been to a video store before and not if they’ve never used a library archive system to like truly dig for something. Most of us have lizard brain. Like we just want instant gratification, whatever is easiest. And, you know, as these things become more and more challenging to find and there are other distractions it becomes easier to just be like, “I’ll get to that later.”

**John:** Mm-hmm. So things are holding these movies off, and Marc Edward Heuck had a really good point that you mentioned in your blog post about music rights. And so this really makes sense, because as a person who has made movies when you are putting a song in a movie, you’re putting a piece of existing music in a movie, you are buying sync rights and mechanical rights which are the ability to include that song on a soundtrack of your film.

And along with that you might say like this is for theatrical distribution, so this if for a certain number of years of home video. And you may no longer have the ability to have that song in your movie, which is really a challenge when it comes time to actually try to release that movie again on home video. If you don’t control the rights of the thing that’s in there, either you can’t do it yourself, or you can’t sell it to somebody who would put it out on home video because they worry about getting sued.

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** Have you talked to anybody who has been through this situation or do you have any sense of how you sort this out?

**Kate:** That’s a great question. I know that there have been some films released with alternate soundtracks in the last couple of years, or put on streaming with alternate soundtracks. And, you know, is that better than not being able to see the film at all? Yes. Is it a bummer that you can’t see the movie as it was originally made? Absolutely. I would love to get more of a pulse on the whole music rights situation because so many of my favorite films, like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, it’s like you strip the music from that there is no movie. And like that’s a DVD that’s out of print. It was in print for a couple of years and now is like $50 on the used market.

Yeah, but I am not entirely sure what can be done to kind of rectify that because that’s also a problem with the record industry and the way online availability of music kind of tanked the entire record industry. And you’re like, “Oh, but we can get some pennies out of relicensing this for movies or television.” So I understand where the record companies are coming from. But also it feels like there needs to be a more reasonable solution for both parties.

**John:** Well also it feels like it’s very much targeting the movies that set us off, which is the early ‘80s movies which would have had pop songs of the time and things could just be complicated. Those were also companies that were bought and sold multiple times. The Flamingo Kid was MGM, but like who knows – MGM has been so many different things over the years. That entire catalog has come and gone a zillion times.

**Kate:** Yeah. It’s wild when you think about all the tiny production shingles that have since folded and then, you know, just what happens to these movies when that company no longer exists. Yeah, like Little Darlings is another big one for me that’s really hard to find and that’s got a bunch of very expensive music cues. There’s a John Lennon song in it. And that has been broadcast once on TCM like several years ago and that’s the only way you can see that movie if you can’t find a VHS tape, which is a huge bummer.

**John:** Marc’s piece also talks about The Heartbreak Kid, Stepford Wives, and Sleuth, which basically were made by a secondary studio. They were made by a smaller company, and so a bigger company buys them out and really has no interest in putting those movies out because it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be profitable for them to put them out. They want those titles because they can be remade. And so they want them for the remake rights, not for the actual underlying thing itself.

And I don’t know how you pressure them to actually do anything. And I do wonder if there is some legislation, some sort of bigger movement to get these titles sort of set free. The challenge is who pushes that? The copyright holders have a vested interest in not changing anything. And so it’s going to have to be filmmakers who sort of insist that their early works be released into the public sphere. It’s the kind of thing where in France it would be actually easier for those filmmakers to probably get stuff to happen than it is here.

**Kate:** Yeah. Something really interesting that happened, so Dilcia Barrera, a programmer at LACMA, reached out to me after the piece and was like would you like to show Fresh Horses at LACMA? And I was like absolutely. So, Sony did not have a functional print of Fresh Horses, so they struck a brand new beautiful 35mm print for the screening. And now there’s a chance that it might be put out on Blu-Ray because this new print was struck. So I think that’s an interesting piece to consider, you know, if you demand these movies theatrically and that kind of forces the hand of companies to make new prints. Even if it’s a digital version, whatever.

**John:** Great.

**Kate:** Just a new version of the film that could then be put on streaming or released on home video, that’s awesome.

**John:** Well, Kate, what you’re saying, which is very encouraging to me, is that it’s not that the negative had been lost to all time. So they had a negative. So if you have a negative you can make a beautiful digital version of it and that digital version can go out.

So do you know anything about what was the hold up with Fresh Horses? Was it a music issue? Why had it gone off–?

**Kate:** Fresh Horses was released by Hemdale which I’m fairly sure does not exist and has not existed for many years, but I mean, Hemdale also put out Blade Runner. What was I just watching this weekend that was a Hemdale movie? Oh, Miracle Mile from the ‘80s.

I would just assume that they folded and whoever the kind of rights defaulted to are like “We don’t need to do anything with movies like Fresh Horses or Miracle Mile.” I know Miracle Mile got a Blu-Ray a couple of years ago and obviously like Blade Runner has many home video editions, but you know, that’s a beloved and classic film, so it’s a little easier to figure out the rights situation for that than something like a Fresh Horses, which is not as beloved.

**John:** This idea of being able to watch Fresh Horses, it seems odd to do a screening of Fresh Horses because it wasn’t like a masterpiece that everyone was clamoring for, but it is very true that most people who are going to see this movie are going to see this movie on video. And that’s true even for the movies that are coming out next week at the cinema, most people are ultimately going to see that movie on home video and how do you make sure that that home video is going to still be around 20 years, 30 years, 40 years down the road?

**Kate:** I am really disturbed by the fact that Amazon and Netflix seem to not care about putting any of their original movies or TV series on disc. Like I know Stranger Things got a disc release, but like people really had to pressure Amazon to get Blu-Rays of Wonderstruck. And to me that suggests a scary overall trend for those companies that they’re treating these products as disposable. It’s like we’re not even going to put it on any kind of permanent format. It’s either on the streaming service or it’s not on the streaming service. And that’s a bummer for folks who still like home media, who want to guarantee that they will have these movies or TV shows in perpetuity.

Yeah, and I think there is a market for home video, especially as home theaters become more and more in depth and people get more into the idea of movie screenings in your own home. I just wish more folks would realize that.

**John:** I just saw the trailer for Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which is a Netflix film, black and white, gorgeous-looking, at least from the trailer. I mean, of course it’s going to be gorgeous. He’s an incredibly talented filmmaker. But it will be fascinating to see is there going to be a Blu-Ray for Roma? Because it’s going to come out theatrically and on Netflix. And for Alfonso Cuarón as a filmmaker, fantastic he got to make exactly the movie he wanted to make. He probably got the budget he wanted. It’s great for cinema that Netflix stepped up and sort of helped him make this movie. But I do wonder whether it’s great for cinema ten years from now, 20 years from now that this was made for a digital platform that has no vested interest in the long term existence of a physical version of this thing?

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, that’s a really good example. I feel like also Scorsese’s The Irishman is going to be a real make it or break it moment for Netflix. You know, the idea – if we’re not giving home video releases, if these are films aren’t getting nominated for Oscars, if they’re not picking up theatrically. You know, the Irishman especially is about as prestige of a prestige project as you could get, and popular as a prestige project could get. And if that doesn’t get the kind of reception that a normal theatrical release might then I think that kind of indicates where the vibe is on Netflix in terms of how they’re going to release prestige movies going forward.

**John:** Yeah. It’s easy to look at Netflix now, which is so successful and everybody has it and it’s thriving, but there’s lot of companies that just go away. And if Netflix just goes away, what happens to all those things that were made for Netflix? And it’s not entirely clear. And folks who I know who have made deals with Netflix, no one I’ve talked to has anything in their deals that says like if the company doesn’t exist ten years from now I get the rights back to something.

**Kate:** Yeah. That’s got to be really sobering as a creator. I mean, I figured this out when I was writing the piece. Only ten years ago Netflix had their first production arm which was called Red Letter Media, which has since folded. So I think it’s really hard for anybody to try to predict where Netflix or any of the streaming services are going to be ten years from now. So much has changed.

**John:** Speaking of so much has changed, so this is a thing that’s been recurring on the podcast and we could probably do a segment on it every week, but this past week it looks like MoviePass has gone under. If it hasn’t officially gone under, it’s about as close as you get to going under. The stock did a reverse split which I didn’t even know was a thing. It’s worth very little. And people who try to leave the service are being prohibited from leaving the service. What’s been your relationship with MoviePass?

**Kate:** So I got MoviePass at the end of last year. I did the annual $90 one. I’ve gone to about 12 movies, so I’m like it paid for itself. Great. I have a lot of friends in the LA rep scene in particular who have really been using it to go to way more rep screenings than they would normally ever go to. And to me that’s a bummer with like the loss of MoviePass is the ability to see more movies than you would on a normal budget.

But, yeah, you know, I do think MoviePass is ultimately going to be a good thing to show that there is an appetite for these kind of pass programs. I would love it for instance if all the LA repertory theaters would ban together and be like, OK, you pay $25 a month and then you get X number of tickets to the Egyptian, the New Beverly, etc.

But I mean the MoviePass flameout has been kind of spectacular to watch on film Twitter, because, you know, it’s a totally unsustainable model. We all knew–

**John:** Yeah. We knew it was. This is all going to end in tears. It was like taking Omarosa into the White House. Like it wasn’t going to last. You knew it was doomed.

I think on the whole MoviePass you have to see the pros of it, in that for about a year a bunch of VC money gave people free movie tickets.

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it helped the movie industry and it allowed people to see more movies. I think it definitely got more people to see the indie films because it’s like, “Well, I got to use this thing. I’ve seen everything else. I’m going to go see this movie.” And I think that does help those things.

You’re the first person I’ve heard talk about this idea of an indie pass that sort of goes to all those smaller chains. That would be fantastic.

**Kate:** I would be amazing.

**John:** If it helps keep those art houses in business the same way that we need to keep video stores in business that would be fantastic. Bigger chains, AMCs, have rolled out their own plans which seem great. And I guess I’m all for studios figuring out deals with those exhibitors just to sort of get butts in seats and keep butts in seats. Because what MoviePass did show is that people do want to still go to the movie theaters. There’s this myth that as home screens get better, as TVs get better people are just going to stay home and only watch movies on their TV screens. And it’s like, no, people actually want to go out and be with people and see movies.

And what was partly doing MoviePass in is that young people with friends were like well we all have MoviePass, let’s go out and see like three movies. And they would.

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** And if we can encourage that behavior that’s awesome.

**Kate:** Yeah. It’s interesting. I would say I definitely know a lot more young folks that got really into MoviePass, but I’ve also talked to some folks that like their parents – this became a huge thing to get them back to the theater after many years of not going to the theater. You know, the idea of a deal suddenly becomes more exciting.

But, you know, last weekend, I went last Sunday. I went to a matinee of BlacKkKlansman at the ArcLight that was almost sold out. And then that night I went to a screening of Wanda at the Egyptian that was sold out. It was in the small theater, the Spielberg. But, you know, obviously we’re in the movie capital of the world so that’s necessarily the best comp for most of the country.

But I do think that, you know, when you make these options easier for people to get on board with, how about that, they go back to the theater. It’s not rocket science. And I would hope folks realize the void that MoviePass will leave and we get an indie pass, or more subscription programs from major chains. Because I do think that people like being among other people. Like I really enjoy, this is a similar thing with video stores, even if you don’t talk to anybody else, you don’t like meet up with friends, just being among other people, not in front of your black computer screen, in very nice.

**John:** And your pieces on the different video stores you visited, I think that sense of community was really crucial and something I’d kind of forgotten. Is that while my local Blockbuster was just like whatever, who cares about that, when you go to a place that’s genuinely a video store with people who like love movies, not just the employees, but the people who are wandering through the aisles looking for stuff, they can give you recommendations. You can see the taxonomy is very much set up based on a hive brain of like these kinds of movies belong together even if it’s not sort of genre wise which you’d expect.

You have some maps of some of your interior layouts of these video stores that really show how they’re thinking about movies and how stuff fits together. Bookstores, which are thriving these days, smaller bookstores are thriving these days, I think it’s the same sense. That people want to go to a place where people kind of care about the things that are on the shelves.

**Kate:** Yeah. It was really interesting. Last Saturday I went up to Odyssey Video in North Hollywood which is closing unfortunately. It was an extremely cool video store. They had a lot of rare VHS still, particularly on the children’s side of things. But that was really interesting because it’s an everything must go kind of sale. So they’re selling off their entire stock. But it was a Saturday afternoon at four o’clock and there are 25 people in this video store right now. And we were all extremely amused. There was this extremely precocious kid who was just like running around being like “Do you have Poltergeist? Do you have Pretty in Pink? Why can’t I go in the back?”

And, you know, it was really invigorating to see like an 11-year-old kid just like so excited about movies, about picking up the physical movie, like crossing movies off the list. And like, I don’t know, streaming is just never going to generate that kind of enthusiasm. Like I don’t care what anybody says. That kind of tactile human community experience. We’re just never going to get that via a streaming platform.

**John:** You’ve convinced me. So I would say, and as recently as three weeks ago I was having a little Twitter disagreement with Robin Sloan, an author, and he had basically the thesis of video stores, things were better in the video store era. And I said, yes, if you compare to streaming. But if you add in iTunes, there’s actually more availability. We don’t have the real numbers to see sort of how many things are on iTunes, but I’ve been convinced over the past few weeks that something really has been lost as we’ve transitioned so thoroughly away from physical media that some stuff is just very hard to find.

And when I actually finally had to go out and get a physical copy of The Flamingo Kid, I realized like I have no player that can actually play this thing, which is a very strange place to get to in your life. Where I have all these drawers full of DVDs that I haven’t watched in a long time because instead I just watch Netflix or I watch iTunes. And I’ve actually found myself being guilty of like I think I have a DVD of that, but it’s actually just $2.99 for me to get it on iTunes, and so I just look for it on iTunes. And in some cases the iTunes quality is better. So it’s not a crisis to do that. But I’m not going back to those DVDs very often. And the existence of physical media is sort of a bulwark. It’s a protection against things being lost.

**Kate:** Yeah. My friend Matt Shiverdecker is very in the loop in terms of home video licensing and who owns what and that kind of thing and he has one of the most impressive home collections I’ve ever seen. And he has just kind of a running list of, you know, here are things that never got put on DVD that I love. Here are things that never got put on any kind of HD transfer that I love.

I mean, it’s shocking some of the things that aren’t available. A couple of months ago I was looking for Cronenberg’s Crash and I ended up watching it on YouTube with Spanish subtitles because that was the only version of the movie I could find. And I was like this was an important movie in the ‘90s. The fact that this was only on an out-of-print DVD right now is crazy. Cronenberg is a major filmmaker.

**John:** Yeah. Well, we need to talk before we wrap this up, we had to talk about piracy, because in some ways piracy is both the answer to and the cause of a lot of these problems. Is that without piracy some of these things would be impossible to find. If you hadn’t found that bootleg Spanish thing on YouTube you would not have been able to watch that. So, good that it exists there, sort of, with an asterisk. But piracy is also part of the reason why these companies feel like it’s not in their interest to try to make a legal version of it available because they’re like I could spend all this time figuring out the rights on this thing, getting it on iTunes, getting it on a streaming service, and I’m not going to sell anything because someone is going to just get the pirated version. That’s what happened to the music industry. That’s what’s going to happen to me. So–

**Kate:** It’s a tough conundrum. I don’t know what the good answer is to that because, you know, I would say I did a lot more torrenting and illegally watching of movies like ten years ago. And I would say it was much easier to do then than it is now.

But there are many things you’re like, you know, I have tried the legal methods. I have done my diligence. If I can’t find it, I’m going to watch the illegal version. Like, I’m sorry, and thank god that there are still people who put movies like Crash and Times Square up on YouTube to find, because otherwise then we can’t access the movie. And that’s really terrible.

**John:** Consolidation in the industry has left us with so few companies controlling so much. And some of your folks have acknowledged as you’ve talked to them about their video stores is that in a weird way we ceded control to giant corporations who are ultimately gatekeepers of like whether a thing can be seen or not. So, between Apple and Netflix and HBO, sort of those, and art studios which are so small, in some ways the zillion companies that made all these movies it was better because there were multiple people producing films. They were going out to many, many venues. There were video stores all across the country. And as the funnel gets narrower and narrower, I don’t know if this actually happening, but if someone at Apple really despises a certain movie they could just make the movie not available. And there’s really sort of nothing we as a culture or as that filmmaker could step up and get in the way of that.

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, you know, losing that kind of personal choice that video stores provided where you were not at the mercy of corporations. Where you could rent a Hitchcock classic and like a garbage horror movie and like a kid’s program all in the same day. When that control is given to major corporations who have bottom lines and financial interests to hit, you know, they’re not going to put stuff on the service that nobody is watching. They’re not going to put stuff on the service that nobody is taking note of. But that doesn’t mean that those films still aren’t valid and deserve to be seen by the people who want to see them.

**John:** Cool. As we wrap this up, do you have any recommendation for a film that people should check out and where they should find it if it’s hard to find?

**Kate:** Ooh, interesting. I feel like I could go all day on this kind of subject. Let’s see. I was just talking about I found Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains on DVD, which was great. I’d been looking for that one for quite a while. So, something I would recommend, if you guys don’t have FilmStruck, you’ve got to get FilmStruck. They are really picking up a lot of the slack in terms of classic movies. And not just, you know, when we think of classic movies we think of like ‘50s epics, but you know like Bill & Ted is currently on FilmStruck. So, it’s a tide that raises all boats.

But my favorite thing on FilmStruck is Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which is completely unavailable elsewhere. It’s this incredible gangster movie with John Cassavetes and Peter Falk. It’s most famous because Elaine May fought like hell with Paramount about the final cut. At one point she stole the print from them and was like hiding it in her garage because she didn’t want them to keep tinkering with it. This movie is very hard to find and it is now on FilmStruck, so you’ve got to check it out.

**John:** Fantastic. FilmStruck I’ve not used yet but I definitely will. Rian Johnson loves it and tweets about it a lot. So that will be fantastic.

All right, it comes time for our One Cool Things. So this is where we recommend things that are out there in culture that people should go out and see or read. In my case it is a book. It is My Life as a Goddess by Guy Branum. It is fantastic. So you will probably recognize Guy because he’s often a guest on talk show kind of things. He’s a comedian. He’s been on Midnight, Larry Wilmore’s show, Chelsea Lately. But this book he’s written is fantastic.

So, it details sort of his growing up in rural Northern California, sort of the agriculture community. It’s just great, great writing and he’s really, really funny. So, Mindy Kaling who was our guest two weeks ago, she wrote the forward to the book and she’s exactly correct when she says that it is fantastic and you should check it out. So, Guy Branum’s My Life as a Goddess.

**Kate:** That sounds great. I’ve been hearing a lot of really wonderful things about that book. I’ve got to check it out.

**John:** It reminded me of Lindy West’s book, which I also loved, and sort of because Guy is a big, giant guy. And it reminded me some of what she wrote about in her book. But the specificity of where he grew up and what his life was like was fantastic. And not to spoil too much about it, but My Life as a Goddess refers to this Greek goddess who suffers all these challenges and then at one moment realizes, wait, I’m a goddess, and just transforms everything around her. And that sense of recognizing your own personal self-power is great.

**Kate:** Sounds awesome.

**John:** Cool. Anything more you want to recommend? Because you just made a great recommendation on that film.

**Kate:** Yeah. I’m going to plug a great movie t-shirt website. It’s called Tees-En-Scène. It is Colin Stacy who is a wonderful dude in Texas who has taken up the mantle of making these incredible t-shirts that highlight female writer-directors mostly. There are two out right now. There is the Elaine May t-shirt who we were just talking about. And then he just put out a t-shirt for Barbara Loden who made Wanda. He’s got an Amy Heckerling t-shirt in the pipeline. But they’re really cool because he pulls the frame of Written and Directed by from the movie itself on the t-shirt so it’s not just like boring text.

**John:** Oh neat.

**Kate:** He’s got Kathleen Collins coming up. And also some of the proceeds are funneled back to women of color filmmakers. So you get to get a dope t-shirt and you get to support a great cause. Check it out, Tees-En-Scene, or if you want to google Elaine May t-shirt, Barbara Loden t-shirt you can find it.

**John:** Very, very cool. All right. That is our show for this week. As always it is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Davis. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But short questions are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Kate, are you on Twitter?

**Kate:** I am. I’m @thathagengrrl like Riot Grrl.

**John:** Fantastic. You can find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. But I will note that podcast feeds are actually directory based, and so Apple does not control your ability to get to our podcast. So, you really could find us any way. You could just type it into your little browser of choice and it would still be there. So for all the talk about like, oh, censorship control, podcasts are still an RSS-based medium. They’re still available out there in the world. They’re more free like the web than people think they are. Apple doesn’t actually host us. We’re just sort of out there.

But you can find us anywhere, just search for Scriptnotes. If you find us on a service, leave a comment because that helps people find the show.

Show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. We’ll have links to Kate’s pieces that she’s written for the Black List. You’ll also find transcripts for our show at johnaugust.com. They go up about four days after the episode airs.

All the back episodes are at Scriptnotes.net. We also sell seasons of 50 episodes at store.johnaugust.com.

Kate Hagen, thank you so much for coming on to talk to us about reading and video and some great recommendations.

**Kate:** Thanks so much, John. And just one final thing. If you’ve got a video store in your neighborhood and you haven’t been there yet, what are you doing? Go to the video store.

**John:** Go to your video store. Thanks Kate.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Kate Hagen](https://blog.blcklst.com/@thathagengrrl)!
* [In Search of the Last Great Video Store](https://blog.blcklst.com/in-search-of-the-last-great-video-store-efcc393f2982) by Kate Hagen
* [The Black List](https://blcklst.com/register/highlights.html#industry)
* [Netflix’s DVD service](https://dvd.netflix.com/MemberHome)
* [Fresh Horses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF2wY3uJdng) was one of those missing movies.
* [The Fall of MoviePass](https://variety.com/2018/film/news/moviepass-ending-subscription-service-1202891561/) and its [reverse stock split](https://deadline.com/2018/07/moviepass-parents-stock-plummets-44-after-reverse-split-takes-effect-1202433444/)
* Kate recommends [Ladies & Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06kCwPpyjCk), [Mikey and Nicky](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_qMg8ZG0ic) and [FilmStruck](https://www.filmstruck.com/us/?utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=MIDF&utm_term=filmstruck&utm_content=A200_A203_A015526&c=A200_A203_A015526&pid=adwords&cid=ppc_adwords_A200_A203_A015526&creator=Fetch&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIv_z-toj93AIVl6DsCh1Y0QjEEAAYASAAEgLAkfD_BwE) to watch classic movies.
* [My Life as a Goddess](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075RNFTTW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Guy Branum
* [Tees-En-Scène](http://www.teesenscene.com) sells shirts that highlight and support female writer/directors.
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Kate Hagen](https://twitter.com/thathagengrrl) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Luke Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_364.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/best-popular-screenwriting-podcast).

**Megan Amram:** And the award for Best Popular Screenwriting Podcast goes to…oh my god…Scriptnotes!

**Michael Gilvary:** This is the first nomination and the first award for Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig Mazin:** Oh wow, OK, I was not prepared for this. I did not think we were going to get this. OK, time is running out. I just want to thank, first of all, everybody that made this podcast possible. Obviously my agent, and my wife Melissa.

**John August:** We have to thank our listeners, our fans, the people at the live show. You’re the reason why we do this. You make it all so worthwhile.

**Craig:** And we do this because we care about you, the screenwriters, and this is for you, the screenwriters. This is why we do it every day – week in and week out. We’re not doing it for money. We’re doing it because we care about the people out there and we always will. We love you and we thank you so much for this. And every single one of you, if you have a dream. [Crosstalk]

**John:** Amy go to bed.

Today on the program we get Craig’s opinion on a range of topics, including changes to the Oscars. The Editors Guild vs. IATSE. Disney buying Fox. The Department of Justice. And WGA dues. My function in these topics is just to set the ball so that Craig can spike it.

**Craig:** Oh fun.

**John:** But we’ll also talk about my experience with the unavailability of a specific movie and what you can do to help. Craig, you’ve been gone for so long that we have just so many things stacked up.

**Craig:** It’s incredible.

**John:** And we need to knock them down.

**Craig:** I know. So I’m doing this long range from Lithuania. Coming at you live from Eastern Europe. I really enjoyed our opening. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to winning something.

**John:** But you never know. I have high hopes in the future that you will be rewarded with something for your tireless devotion to the business and craft of screenwriting.

**Craig:** Well, it’s getting easier, right?

**John:** The posthumous Oscar.

**Craig:** They’re making new categories. Ooh, I like – maybe I can just get into that death montage right? That was something.

**John:** Ha! That’s what you want. So, a little bit of news before we get into the other topics. Scriptnotes is now on Spotify. So, they added us to Spotify this last week, so that’s great. If you would like to listen to us on Spotify–

**Craig:** Did we take Alex Jones’s spot? Is that what happened? Like they took him off and we go on?

**John:** That’s what it is. They got rid of one. He goes out, we go in.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** So now we’re on Spotify. So, if you would like to listen to us on Spotify, that’s great. You can leave a review for us there, or star us, or whatever the ratings are there because that helps people find the show. And also some updates on the Austin Film Festival. So that happens at the end of October. Starts October 25 and goes through that weekend. So in addition to our live show, and a Three Page Challenge, Craig is judging the pitch finals. And I am now hosting a career panel with Tess Morris, Christina Hodson, Nicole Perlman, and Jason Fuchs on Friday the 26th.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** At 3:15.

**Craig:** That is a great lineup. Those are four of my favorite people in the world. That’s going to be spectacular.

**John:** Yeah. I got to hand pick my people, and man, it’s going to be a great, fun panel.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** Nailed it. So come see us in Austin if you’re not already planning to come. Come and I don’t want to spoil it, but everybody who comes to the Austin Film Festival will get a special piece of swag that they will enjoy.

**Craig:** Including me? Do I get the swag?

**John:** You get the swag, too. Everyone gets one.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** I’m Oprah-ing this. Everyone gets the swag.

**Craig:** And you get a – is it a car?

**John:** It’s not a car.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** But we are shipping these bits of swag to Austin tomorrow. So it will be there in time.

**Craig:** Holy – so wait – you’re pre-shipping swag ahead of time?

**John:** We’re pre-shipping swag ahead of time.

**Craig:** Oh wow. My mind is working overtime. Do not tell me what it is. I want to be surprised with everybody.

**John:** I won’t. You’ll be surprised.

**Craig:** Even if you did tell me, I would forget, so I would be surprised again. It would be amazing.

**John:** We had a bit of follow up here. Do you want to take this letter from Chris Fousek?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure Chris Fousek writes, “I am a long time listener of the podcast and screenwriting procrastinator extraordinaire. I have just contacted Chevalier’s bookstore about a personalized copy and thought maybe I would write you a quick email as well.” Personalized copy of what? Let’s find out.

“We recently just welcomed our own Arlo into the world and just wanted to thank you for all that you do for the writing community as well as the creation of Arlo Finch.” I think they’re talking about you, John. “A decisive inspiration in naming our new baby Arlo Leigh Fousek.” What an amazing thing. How about that?

**John:** Yeah. There’s an extra Arlo in the world. So, Chris had sent in a little photo of a newborn baby. All newborn babies are cute. This was a cute baby along with all other babies. I have a hunch that there are going to be plenty of Arlos being born independent of Arlo Finch. I feel like it’s a name that’s going to be on the rise because it has a good throwback quality, but I’m excited to have helped name one baby out there in the world.

**Craig:** And Arlo to me seems like it could go gender neutral.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like I don’t know if Arlo Leigh is a boy or girl. Because both of those names are gender neutral.

**John:** They are. Looking at this – actually I do know that this one is a boy because in the little photo that was sent through the little thing says Arlo and there’s a boy sticker on the hospital card. But I agree. Arlo, you could name a girl Arlo.

**Craig:** Baby has a beard. That’s the other giveaway. A full beard.

**John:** Well, yeah, and they sent the full nude baby picture, which I guess–

**Craig:** That often [crosstalk]. Not this time. Good. You know what? I’m glad they didn’t do that. That’s not appropriate.

**John:** Nope. So anyway, that’s a nice little bit of Arlo Finch news.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** Another bit of follow up. Back in our conflict of interest episode we talked about how the WGA and the agencies were talking about renegotiating their deal, their contract, or essentially the WGA had given notice that they wanted to renegotiate the contract which started this one year ticking clock. And basically nothing has happened since that point until last week the Association of Talent Agencies, which represents all the agencies, came back and said, “Wow, we really wish you wouldn’t have put us on shout like that, but they, let’s have some informal talks.”

So, it looks like something will slowly start to happen on the negotiations between agents and the WGA.

**Craig:** Yeah. I generally remain skeptical about all negotiations between the WGA and anyone. The WGA negotiating with a sandwich place, I am skeptical of the negotiation. But we did have a pretty solid negotiation last time around with the companies. This is a different deal. Very different deal. And I think the big problem that we have, well, ultimately I think is going to come down to some judge somewhere deciding if our point of view is correct or their point of view is correct.

I will say this. As a new arrival to the world of television, I find the existence of packaging fees, which is one of the big bugaboos that we’re digging into with these agencies, to be the most odious, absurd nonsense every devised by Hollywood. At least financially speaking. I think it’s ridiculous. And I’m going to do everything I can to destroy it. I don’t know, I mean, I’m willing to, I don’t know, go full Katniss Everdeen.

**John:** Very good. And I will say my concern is that as noxious as these packaging fees are, my bigger concern is that as agencies becomes more involved in the actual production of material we as writers become employees of agencies which is a real messed up situation. So it’s not just that they have a piece of the backend. They are actually producing stuff. And that becomes really problematic.

**Craig:** Never. Never. I will also Katniss Everdeen that.

**John:** Never.

**Craig:** No, who is the other guy? Peeta Mellark?

**John:** Yeah, that sounds right.

**Craig:** All right. Pretty decent pull. I’ll Peeta that one and I’ll Katniss the other one. I don’t care.

**John:** Great. So, we’ll be under a giant Thunderdome and there will be cheers and people will be watching. It will be great.

**Craig:** I will wear a fiery dress.

**John:** She’s on fire.

All right. Let’s get to our main topics because there are so many main topics.

**Craig:** So much.

**John:** This past Wednesday the Academy Board of Governors announced several changes coming to the Awards telecast. So basically they’re going to get down to a three-hour total running time, which means that certain awards are going to be given during commercial breaks rather than during the main telecast. They’re going to move the whole Oscars earlier in the calendar, so not this year, but the next year it will be moving up two or three weeks, so February 9th is the target date for those.

And, finally, and sort of most controversially they want to add a new category, Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film.

Craig, what’s your hot take on these? It’s not even a hot take because we’re recoding this almost a week after it’s been announced.

**Craig:** A warmed-over take.

**John:** What’s your lukewarm take on this?

**Craig:** Well, look, in general I kind of can’t get too worked up over this stuff. There are certain kinds of people that are Oscarologists. They take the Oscars super-duper seriously. They care a lot about them. They think they matter a lot. And to some extent they do. They can matter a lot for individual films and, of course, I think for people that win Oscars, I mean, we have statistics. They actually tend to live longer than their cohorts. It is the closest thing that we have to objectively announcing that somebody is good at their job, in movies at least.

Certain awards being given during commercial breaks, it was inevitable. You know, these award shows go on forever. It’s kind of become a running joke. And while I’m not sure while ones they’ve shunted off, but if it’s the short form animation or something like that I’m not shocked. It makes sense. People essentially watch these shows for the actors. That’s kind of the deal. That’s why the SAG Awards for instance are televised, whereas nobody would ever both televising the DGA Awards or the WGA Awards or the Editors Guild Awards because nobody wants to see those people. They want to see actors. They’re famous.

So, I get those changes. The earlier date, fine. New category: Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film. I cannot describe how much I hate this idea. I can’t put it on a scale of hatred. Zero to all of my hatred. This is all of my hatred plus five. I hate it. I hate it. And I’m really curious what you think, before I discuss why. You’re a member of the Academy. I don’t know if they asked you about this stuff or polled you guys about this, or if you were involved. Are you allowed to say what you think about it?

**John:** I am allowed to say what I think about it. I’m not on the Board of Governors. I’m just a normal Academy member. So I got the news the same time everybody else got the news. So I don’t like the name. I don’t like the idea. But I will, just for the devil’s advocate, I will explain sort of where I think it is coming from.

I think it’s not coming from the Academy. It’s coming from ABC. It’s coming from the company that is actually broadcasting the awards. And ABC is looking at the fact that last year the ratings for the show dropped 20%. So it’s still the biggest, or second biggest television event of the year, right after the Super Bowl. But it wasn’t as big of a thing as it had been previous years. And so they’re looking and saying we need to give an award to a movie that everybody has seen so people will actually tune in to watch it.

And I get that as an instinct. I’m not a fan of the existence of this award or the choice to add it. I really don’t like the name.

**Craig:** Ugh, the name.

**John:** I think that could have been workshopped a lot better.

**Craig:** Oof.

**John:** And it’s not even clear what the criteria will be for this award. So, I think the general sense of like we need to also make sure we are awarding great movies that are not sort of art house movies. I get that. And that we don’t only look at this sparkling little gems in the distance, but really look at the movies that are right in front of us. But I don’t see this award, especially with this name, and this presentation doing that.

**Craig:** I’ll go one step further. I don’t think it’s going to happen. I think that they are going to–

**John:** I think it’s going to get pulled.

**Craig:** So much negative feedback, because first of all the name is outrageous. And it actually ends up hurting the very thing they want to help. If they want to help, for instance, a movie like Get Out, or a movie like Black Panther, or even movies that people really love like some Disney movies, you know, it’s not helping them. It’s essentially ghettoizing them. So, it’s like, “OK, here’s the real Oscar for the best movie. And then here’s – you’re popular. They bought your tickets. So here’s a special kind of side Oscar. It’s not a real Oscar.”

And to me if I could wave the magic wand, because I do believe that the Oscars really do have a problem. They no longer routinely reward Hollywood for what they do. What they’re doing is routinely rewarding independent films for what they do. And so what I would do is I would essentially create a category of best independent film or best limited release film. Ghettoize them. But keep the best movies – so in other words you say, look, if you’ve been released on fewer than a thousand screens you are the best limited release film. And then all these movies that slip into theaters for five days or one day in 12 theaters to qualify, all that stuff goes away. You have to actually be in a – and then the Oscar is reserved for movies that are on a thousand screens or more, meaning movies that maybe people could have possibly seen. Because that’s what they used to be.

I mean, when you look back at what Oscars were they gave awards to big movies, not little – I mean, I love little movies. I tend to like them more than the big movies, but you know, at some point either this is for Hollywood or it’s not.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s a smart choice. So hopefully they will listen to you and come to their senses and some of these things will not come to pass the way they are being presented right now. I guess I’m sympathetic to the notion that it is both an organization trying to award excellence in its field and also a worldwide telecast that is meant to be popular and beloved and that individual movie lovers take ownership of the Oscars. And so they’re trying to balance these two things. I just don’t think they balance them very well.

**Craig:** No. And it’s just an indication that there’s – something is wrong over there. I don’t know what it is, because I don’t know how they operate. And I never will. But something seems wrong with the way they’re governing in general. It just seems like maybe there’s too many people. I feel like the place is paralyzed or something and it’s too bad, because it’s an amazing organization actually. They do a lot of really great work.

**John:** Yeah. For instance they hosted our 100th episode of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** That was obviously their brightest moment. But, you know, there’s the Nicholl Fellowship. And the Library. They do a lot of really good things. Everybody knows them for the Oscars. That’s supposed to be their moneymaking gig. If people stop watching it – this feels a little pander-y. I don’t know. I hope they change it.

**John:** We’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ll see what happens.

**John:** In the category we’ll see what happens. The Editors Guild is not happy with IATSE. So, this is a complicated union situation. I actually had to look up the history of how these things came to be. IATSE stands for the – ready? – The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists, and Allied Crafts in the United States, its territories, and Canada.

That is a very long name, so that’s why we call it IATSE. But IATSE is essentially the super union that covers a bunch of the trades in Hollywood. They also do other stuff, but particularly the trades in Hollywood. They’re a total of 375 local unions, including the Animation Guild, which is a source of great annoyance to writers who work in animation; the International Cinematographers Guild; and the Motion Picture Editors Guild.

So this past month they were renegotiating their contract with the AMPTP, the same people we negotiate our WGA contract with, and the editors were not happy with how this deal was shaping up.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a – well, I think the problem here is, again, one of a structural thing. We were just talking about the Academy. So let’s talk about IATSE. IATSE is just huge. It’s massive. And it covers segments of the labor force that are really different from each other. I mean, the Writers Guild sometimes runs into trouble now and then between representing feature writers and representing television writers. And the Directors Guild has television directors and film directors. And they have first ADs versus directors. But nothing like IATSE.

In IATSE you have an enormous amount of grips. You also have them representing costume designers. And you have them representing cinematographers and editors. Everyone is doing a very different job with very different needs and very different problems. The issue is that this union never strikes, ever, even though they do have easily the single best strike threat in town.

**John:** If IATSE were to strike there’s no alternative. All production would stop immediately if IATSE were to strike.

**Craig:** Instantly. Instantly. Also, all post-production would stop instantly.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** All pre-production would stop instantly. Everything would stop. Period. The end. And they do need to strike together, I believe. The problem is when a particular local like Editors Guild Local 700 has a problem with their contract, big IATSE starts talking with – essentially they start negotiating internally. So, it’s not just I have to figure out how to get what I need out of the AMPTP. I also have to figure out how to convince Grips Local 80 that they should be striking with us over our editors’ issues.

And what ends up happening is, at least in this case, and I think that this probably is fairly common in IATSE, big IATSE goes ahead and negotiates a deal on behalf of the editors. And now the editors local is saying to their members don’t vote yes on this even though our union, specifically represented by Matt Loeb, their president, is saying that they have created “a huge victory.” That’s what he’s calling this contract that the editors are saying – unanimously the Editors Guild Board of Directors said to recommend that their members vote no. Now that’s a huge schism in their – not much of a union is it at that point, at least there’s no union in the union.

**John:** Nope. So, complicating everything else is that each of these individual local guilds has their own leadership. So Cathy Repola is the Executive Director of the Editors Guild, but she is the one who is coming out against this deal. Her specific concerns with it were for editors there’s a nine-hour turnaround time versus a ten-hour turnaround time.

Turnaround is one of those things that we don’t think about much as writers but is so crucial to everybody else working on a production. So turnaround is from the time you leave work to the time that you have to come back to work, that is turnaround. And SAG has turnaround negotiated for all of its actors. And IATSE negotiates turnaround. It’s ten hours for almost everybody except for editors who only get a nine-hour turnaround.

**Craig:** Which is crazy.

**John:** Imagine you work till midnight. You leave at 12:01. They can call you back to work at 9:00am. So how are you supposed to have a life, much less sleep, if that is what they’re insisting upon?

**Craig:** It’s outrageous. And, by the way, the real shame should always be on the companies for insisting that that – because, listen, they can say, “Well, blah, blah, blah.” Really what it comes down to is just dollars and cents. It’s a spreadsheet. And there’s a certain amount of money that they don’t want to have to spend to give people what I think is just humane treatment. I mean, ten hours is barely humane frankly as turnaround. It should be 12. But, OK, if everybody else below the line is getting ten, how do you warrant this nine-hour thing? It’s outrageous.

But then, secondarily, you have to look at IATSE and say, listen, your editors have a point. If the implication that editors are making is that big IATSE has essentially thrown them under the bus to keep everybody else working and happy, well, that looks pretty much like that’s what happened. Because there’s just no – I don’t see how you could possibly justify calling something a “huge victory” when you haven’t changed the single most brutal aspect of that working contract.

**John:** Nope. So the other thing that she points out is that one of the quoted big gains of the contract was new media residuals sort of being refigured out. So the same way that writers like Craig and I get residuals for stuff we’ve written that shows up on Netflix or shows up, you know, downloads through iTunes, those are residuals that are paid to us individually as writers. For IATSE guilds, those residuals go in to help pay their pension fund. And the pension fund is a crucial aspect of survivability in this industry.

Her concern, which I think is a lot of people’s concerns, is that it’s not going to be enough money going into the pension fund to keep it solvent. And that the pensions that we’ve come to rely on and expect will not be solvent if they don’t negotiate a better rate.

So that is one of the other bigger concerns that they’re facing and other unions are going to be facing.

**Craig:** And this is something that is specific to them, although the DGA has a somewhat similar thing. When the writers and actors, well, I don’t want to speak about the actors. I know for sure that when writers get residuals those residuals come to us. They are not siphoned off to help support the pension plan or the health plan. The pension plan and the health plan are paid for by basically premiums that the studios pay on top of the money they pay us, up to a certain point.

The Directors Guild will siphon off some of the residuals to help support their pension and health. And I believe IATSE siphons all of it off. I don’t think like a grip or an editor is getting residuals. It’s all going to support the pension and health plan. And when somebody says, for instance, Tom Davis, the business agent of Grips Local 80 and the second international vice president of IATSE, when he says this is a good deal, he’s proud of it, and provides for secure funding of your pension plan. It ensures that your health plan is fully funded. The question is for how long. Define secure.

Because you can say you’ve solved a problem for the next eight months, but very clearly going by any reasonable projection you haven’t solved it long term. And if you haven’t, you haven’t. Which means you live hand to mouth, negotiation to negotiation.

And therefore every time you go in you are in a terribly weak position. You want to ask for a ten-hour turnaround. But now you’re just begging for health care and keep to your pension plan solvent.

This will become an increasing problem. The companies, their tactics, their strategy, there’s no secret there. It’s quite clear what they want to do is exactly what I just said. Every single union, every negotiating cycle should come in on the brink of insolvency in health and pension and therefore the companies are only obligated to save those basic needs and do nothing else.

And I think that at some point everybody in IATSE has to kind of look at each other and say, “Do we all recognize that we’re sitting on this nuclear bomb that we refuse to use, ever? And why?”

**John:** When I look at it from the editors’ point of view, I am so frustrated on their behalf just because I also look at animation writers who are covered by IATSE and are similarly frustrated because while there’s a huge range of different professions that are covered by IATSE. Many of them are folks who are going to a set and doing work on that set and then going home. So they’re working on a production for a limited period time, on a set, and then they leave. That even goes down to like studio teachers. They’re working on that set and then they’re going home.

The jobs of editors, the jobs of animation writers are not at all like those jobs. And so it’s not surprising that this massive union is not looking out for their interests in the way that WGA would look out for animation writers’ interests or if the Editors Guild could be its own union could really look after the needs of editors. And so there’s likely no way to break off the Editors Guild and let it be its own union.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But of course that’s what they’d love to do.

**Craig:** They can’t. It’s just never going to happen. The labor laws that govern decertification in these things are impossible. This toothpaste is out of the tube. But here’s what’s so shocking to me. If the editors did peel off and became their own Editors Guild they would be remarkably powerless. Because as just editors they could go on strike and then people would say, “OK, well prep continues, production continues, post is going to be delayed, but let’s see if we can bring some more editors in somehow. And we’ll deal.”

So then you could see, well, what if we as editors got together with the cinematographers. Then we could shut down post and production. Well, hold on a second. Let’s also get together with the costume designers and the makeup designers and now prep is stopped. Hey, let’s form an international alliance of theatrical stage employees and then we can strike.

And this is what blows my mind. They’ve solved the problem. They just won’t do it. And there’s something rotten at the core of this union if they are allowing this to happen to their members. I don’t get it. I don’t understand it.

**John:** I don’t understand it either. We will not solve it, but we will be in solidarity in sadness with our editor friends.

**Craig:** You’re sad. I have umbrage.

**John:** All right. Sadness/umbrage. They’re related emotions.

**Craig:** Yes. True, true.

**John:** Let’s direct our umbrage to a new thing that is coming up. I’m actually curious what you think about this. So, this past week the Department of Justice announced that they are going to be reviewing the Paramount Consent Decrees. So we’ve talked about this on two previous episodes, 327 and 347. The Paramount Consent Decree was 70 years ago that basically said that a motion picture studio could not also own theatrical exhibition. So they could not own their own theaters. It’s breaking up that sort of vertical monopoly that studios were having.

It had very specific other requirements in terms of blocked booking. And you couldn’t require theaters to take a whole slate of movies. Very specific things that were thrown down 70 years ago. The Department of Justice is looking at changing these rules. Craig, what’s your take on this review?

**Craig:** It’s interesting. I remember thinking when Fin-Syn went away, that was sort of the equivalent. That was where television networks couldn’t produce their own content. That went away. And then television networks started doing that and it was not the end of the world. But I remember thinking, Hmm, you know, I could see a lot of opportunity for abuse. And there have been problems particularly in the area of self-dealing, where networks buy products from the studios that the parent company owns and so forth.

In this case, I kind of am OK with it because I feel like the current system is a little busted. Theaters/exhibitors are problematic. They have remained problematic for the film industry. They are stuck in an old model, incredibly stuck in an old model, where every ticket for every movie essentially costs the same with slight variations for 3D premiums and so forth. They make most of their money selling you incredibly overpriced garbage. And the facilities themselves often are resistant to improvement. And it is not sustainable because home theaters are getting better and better. And I’m not talking about fancy home theaters. I’m talking about an average middle class family in the United States has a flat screen TV that is so much bigger and larger than anything you or I had as kids. And the sound is really, really good.

And so at some point something has to give. And maybe the studios would do a better job of this.

**John:** I am skeptical that the studios would do a better job at this. I think it would ultimately – I can envision scenarios in which just like Fin-Syn this goes away and everything stays basically OK. But I can also imagine it really just crushing theatrical exhibition, or sort of your ability to see the movie you want to see the day you want to see it at the theater you want to see it. Because if Disney buys out specific theaters and so Disney movies are only available at specific theaters in certain markets then they can’t get to other things. It becomes really problematic.

I would also challenge this assumption that exhibition is flailing or going down. I don’t know the exact numbers, but box office is actually doing quite well. And I would say compared to when I moved to Los Angeles, exhibition in Los Angeles is much, much better. And so I do see the chains investing in facilities and sort of getting better. So, I don’t think that this threat of, oh, our home television screens are going to be so good that we’re not going to go out to the movies. I don’t that’s borne out by the last 15 years.

**Craig:** Well, I do agree with you that movie-going is fairly robust. I think it’s just more the economics of the exhibition itself. In other words, the tickets sales are the ticket sales. They’re doing quite well. But how much money the exhibitors are collecting and putting back into their facilities, that’s the part where I’m starting to wonder if they have the ability to revolutionize or advance or, I don’t know, innovate in any kind of interesting way.

Yes, in Los Angeles there are these wonderful movie theaters that have these big super cushy seats and they lean back and you can reserve a seat and you can get dinner and a drink and it’s amazing. But the vast majority of the country it’s still a box that is not particularly well cleaned and the popcorn costs way too much and the projection equipment maybe isn’t the best. And sometimes the sound is meh.

And I just – like for instance, let’s say Disney were allowed to exhibit Disney films. There would be no shortage of places to go see a Disney film. That’s the one thing they would solve immediately by constructing new theaters. And those new theaters would be amazing. And when it was time for Star Wars, every Disney theater would be a Star Wars theater. And there would be no problem seeing Star Wars and it would be – you wouldn’t have that restriction, right?

So, there would be flexible supply and demand. And, of course, ticket prices would probably become flexible, too, which is something that I kind of think maybe is reasonable. You know?

**John:** I’m not objecting to any sort of those innovations along the way. I guess my concern is for if you’re Lionsgate and you have The Hunger Games and you want to come out 4,000 screens across the country that is increasingly difficult if Disney owns a third of those screens. And those negotiations become very tough.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ish. I mean, because look, you still can see a ton of Warner Bros. television shows on other people’s networks. And I think if people see that The Hunger Games is going to be a hit frankly I think there’d be quite a bit of competition to get those.

**John:** Yeah. But I think the competition to get those would be that Disney would have to have a piece of The Hunger Games. So I think that giant corporation would say like, “OK, well you want to be on our screens, then we get 10% of your movie.”

**Craig:** That’s possible. But then of course they could go to Fox and say – well, Ok, not Fox.

**John:** Not Fox.

**Craig:** OK, Universal. They could go to the Universal theater chain and say would you just run this and take the normal share of ticket price. Because, look, the truth is that the exhibitors get essentially, what, a 40% take. That’s the best take there is. And that, by the way, is why ticket prices cannot budge because the exhibitors refuse to do it, because there’s nothing in it for them ultimately.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see where this goes. I mean, it’s a 70-year-old deal. Yes, the industry has changed greatly since this was all negotiated. I’m just not convinced that we will see changes that actually benefit movies and that benefit people who love to see movies. I think we’ll probably see changes that benefit Disney and that’s a scary thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think no matter what we do somehow Disney will benefit.

**John:** Well that’s our next topic which is the Disney/Fox merger looks like it’s going to happen. Basically all the roadblocks along the way have been lifted. What’s strange to me as I talk to folks around town is nobody quite knows what happens next. It’s not really clear whether Fox continues to exist, both as a motion picture studio and as a television network. Do you go in and pitch something at Fox?

We had a discussion about sort of an initiative we wanted to go talk to places, so do we go in and talk to Fox? Does Fox still exist? We just don’t know. Craig, what are you hearing and feeling about Fox these days?

**Craig:** Absolute confusion. I was on the lot for a few days a couple weeks ago helping somebody out on a project and just walking around that lot, it was the first lot I ever worked on in Hollywood as an intern. It’s before I even graduated college. So it holds a special place in my heart. It’s a wonderful lot.

**John:** Yeah, it is.

**Craig:** And it just occurred to me that it was kind of the crazy situation. I think Disney purchased Fox Studios, they purchased 20th Television. They didn’t purchase Fox Broadcasting Network. They did not purchase Fox News or Fox Sports. But I believe they did purchase the lot. I think that’s part of it is they own this lot now and no one there – and I asked – no one really knows. They don’t know.

I think that there was a reluctance to make any serious decisions until they knew it was actually happening. Well, now it’s actually happening.

**John:** I had a friend who works at Fox who was describing this lunch she saw which was a bunch of Disney employees coming over to meet with their equivalent people at Fox. And there was like a lunch where they’d get to know each other. But she said it was weird to think about like in most of these cases one of those people is going to go. There’s going to be redundancies and one of those people is going to go away.

And so if I were merging these two things, yes, there’s probably places where you could really combine things and do a better job. So if you combine home video, you combine sort of those backend things, but the actual production and the actual labeling, I would keep Fox around. I just think it helps so much for Disney to have a Fox label for all those movies that are not Disney movies, and also just to have different smart people working on those things and getting them out there in the world.

I don’t know if they’re going to do that, but that’s what I would do.

**Craig:** I think they will. Yes, obviously the big prize is the library and I guess to a lesser extent a certain amount of real estate, but it does seem to me that – I mean, look, you certainly don’t buy Fox and own the Simpsons and not want to keep making the Simpsons, or keep making Family Guy. That continues.

With that in mind, you then turn your eye to the feature film studio. So television, you guys keep on doing what you do. Feature films, Fox does great. They really do. They’re incredibly successful. They have a good team over there. Emma Watts is a very good executive. She knows what she’s doing. And they have had a lot of success.

You’re absolutely right. Why would you stop? Why would you eliminate those jobs? You can’t release those movies. You can’t make Deadpool at Disney. It’s not possible.

**John:** No, you can’t.

**Craig:** You can’t.

**John:** So Emma Watts is fantastic, of course, but you look at Elizabeth Gabler, Fox 2000, that’s a kind of movie that – so they’re mostly book adaptations. The John Green books are over there. Those are movies that Disney is not making themselves.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Disney is not making Love Simon. And so you keep Fox 2000 for that. And Fox Searchlight gets a couple Academy Award nominations every year. Disney doesn’t. So you’d keep Fox Searchlight. So I guess we’re arguing for keep the film side of Fox, you know, Fox.

**Craig:** And I think they will. It just seems so odd to me to purchase a movie studio and then not use the movie studio. It’s like, I don’t know, taking the peel and throwing out the fruit on the inside. It’s got great value and they have franchises over there. And obviously, look, they could cherry pick. But I just think they would be giving away money. Makes sense. Keep them.

**John:** So specific questions that have come up this last week that I don’t have the answers for is what happens to Blue Sky Animation. So Blue Sky does Ice Age. Their Fox’s sort of in-house CG animation. Chris Wedge does a lot of their movies. They make good movies and they make a lot of money. But they feel really redundant to a company that already has Pixar and has Disney animation. So, don’t know what happens there.

And you brought up Family Guy and Simpsons. Those are some of the only animated WGA-covered shows on the air. It’s because of a special deal that was made with the WGA and Fox back in the day. So the Fox animation shows that show up on Fox are WGA-covered and that’s fantastic for those writers. But what happens now that this is all moving over to Disney? Will we be able to get more WGA-covered shows in animation there? We’ll see.

**Craig:** I mean, I think technically what happens is there’s a work area and an employer and once you have organized that area then you have it. So, Fox Primetime Animation is WGA. I don’t see that changing. They make those shows for Fox Broadcasting. So The Simpsons aren’t airing on ABC now. They’re going to continue airing on Fox, which is not owned by Disney. And 20th will continue to employ those people under a Writers Guild contract because there is one. They have jurisdiction now. That’s sort of irreversible as far as I now. Will they be tougher on new entries into that space? No question.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, so they could just basically stop, saying we’re not going to do any new shows for Fox Broadcasting because those would have to be WGA shows.

**Craig:** No. I think actually 20th is the WGA signatory.

**John:** 20th is the signatory.

**Craig:** But essentially what they carved out is if 20th Television is making primetime animation, whether it’s at Fox or anywhere, it just turns out that it always is at Fox, I believe that the deal is that those have to be WGA shows. Now, I don’t think that Disney is going to turn down the opportunity, like for instance Family Guy has generated some spinoff shows. If The Simpsons should generate a spinoff show, which is incredibly unlikely, but let’s say, it’s going to be a WGA show.

But are they interested in developing new animation? Probably. I mean, I don’t know why they would be honestly because the shows that they have that work work, and that’s that. And they keep going. But Blue Sky is an interesting one. I think there’s an argument to be made that they keep doing Blue Sky. But I don’t know. It’s like even money to me. I look at them and like, well because look, Disney has Pixar, but Disney also has Disney Animation. So, then there could also be Fox animation which is a very different vibe.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** So, boy, I don’t know. Anybody that’s going to predict probably ends up with egg on their face here.

**John:** Yeah. The backdrop for all of this, of course, Disney wants to have its own streaming service, so they are no longer going to be putting their movies through Netflix. So all the Marvel movies, the Star Wars movies, and other stuff will be going through the streaming service. So that’s going to be a whole interesting thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And an issue of self-dealing. It will be fascinating to see what happens there. Apple, of course, has their own service. It’s not clear whether it’s subscription or what it’s going to be. But we have friends who are working on shows for Apple, so it’s going to be a very different landscape two, three years from now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that was going to be true no matter what. You know, whether these companies buy each other or not, three years from now god only knows.

**John:** Craig, you had a thing to put on the outline which was about the WGA, specifically dues. What was your thinking there?

**Craig:** Well, every year I like to take my nerdy walk through the Writers Guild of America West Incorporated Annual Financial Report, which they are constitutionally required to issue to all of us who are members. And I believe out of the roughly 7,000 Writers Guild of America West members, one reads this thing, and that’s me. I read it very carefully.

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

**Craig:** Yes, of course. The board doesn’t count. But you did when you were not on the board. You also read it. You were good.

**John:** I did read it.

**Craig:** The first thing I always look at, of course, because as you know you and I are both tireless champions of the working feature screenwriter was just to see how things were going for our long depressed ilk, and not great. So, not as bad as it had been, but still pretty bad. The number I look at is essentially the number of writers that are reporting earnings in the year and then the total earnings reported. When you look at – and they give us a span of 2012 to 2017 – 2012 total earnings, $368 million. And total earnings in 2017, $421, which seems like quite a nice rise, until you look at the number of writers reporting earnings and you see that in 2012, 1,664 writers shared that pie of $368. And in 2017, 1,940 writers shared the $421.

Effectively what this means is that the average earning, this is the mean, this is not how it actually works out, but the mean average from 2012 to 2017 has actually dropped. It has dropped slightly about $4,000. I would be so much more interested in the median earnings, just because I think that’s probably more representative of what’s going on.

But regardless, our earnings are not just flat. They’re going down. And they’re going down in non-adjusted dollars. If we were to adjust for inflation it would be even worse. So, this is not good. It continues to be bad news for feature film screenwriters. And as you and I have discussed numerous times it is my great hope that the guild starts to address this as kind of thoroughly and actively as it can. And I know that you’re taking the lead on that now.

**John:** So, a thing I think is crucial for you to understand, which is very hard to reflect in the data, is that when you show the number of writers who have feature income, keep in mind that 80% of feature screenwriters are also TV writers. So, we need to look at sort of how much they’re making overall in a year, and not just how much they’re making on the movie side.

So, my concern is that are these people making enough money that they can keep working as a writer? And if they are not able to do that, that means there’s a huge crisis. But I think it can be a little bit misleading because you and I both know that from 2012 to 2017 it’s been increasingly common for folks who would normally just be feature writers to also be working in television. Like you, you’re working in both features and in television.

So, while I share your concern that the feature earnings are down, I don’t know that the actual earnings for individual members are down, because they may also have TV earnings.

**Craig:** Fair enough. However these earnings are – obviously these are the earnings that are just from their feature work. And I think that it is not great if what we’re saying is the only way to make a living in features, or to at least keep pace with inflation, is to also then work in television as well. And it’s particularly concerning when you are talking about new feature writers, the ones who generally are making the least, if they are entering a business where people are saying literally you can’t actually just do this job. You have to also do television. Or you can just do television. But being a feature film screenwriter isn’t a job anymore that can be on its own. That’s sort of a rough one.

**John:** That existential concern I think is a really valid one. And so we have to look at what is happening that is causing their income to fall. And my hunch is that they’re doing just as many drafts as the writers back in 2012 were doing, but they’re not getting paid for those drafts. And they’re probably working on multiple passes for the price of one pass. Unpaid work.

**Craig:** That’s right. So there’s a lot of unpaid labor here. Exactly. But I did have this concern, then that kind of led me to this concern about dues.

And the reason I’m concerned about dues is for a couple of reasons. First the screenwriters proportionally pay more in dues than television writers, simply because screenwriting income is all writing income. A large amount of television writing income is actually parsed out as “producing income.” So that doesn’t get dues-ed. Dues-ed is my nice little verb there.

**John:** Yeah. That’s what they say in the WGA, too. They say Dues-ed.

**Craig:** So screenwriters have always carried a disproportionately heavy burden of the dues. Now, the dues that we pay are 1.5% of what we earn, both for employment and also what we earn in residuals. It wasn’t always 1.5%. It used to be 1%. And at some point, I think possibly in the ‘90s, or rather the ‘80s it was bumped up to 1.5% because the guild was struggling a little bit and the guild was also going through a number of strikes and needed to beef up its rainy day fund and its good and welfare fund so when we go on strike they’re able to help people out, give them bridge loans. That is no longer the situation.

We have been at 1.5% for decades at this point. I think my entire tenure in the guild I’ve been at 1.5%. And lo and behold this year the guild had an operating surplus of $8.2 million. And that’s up from before. And it was the product of growth and overall writer earnings led by, it’s no big surprise, television. And by investment gains.

So my issue, and this is going to sound a little libertarian, so bear with me, but there is that thing where people say we have to increase taxes to pay for a problem. And the people who are against tax raises say, sure, but you’re never going to unraise the taxes are you? Because taxes have a way of sticking around. One went up to 1.5%. There is no longer a problem. In fact, there seems to be the opposite of a problem. We are now sitting on extra money that we don’t know how to spend. And we should lower the dues rate if for no other reason than to help out feature writers who are struggling, particularly new feature writers for whom that 1.5% is real money that really hurts and is coming generally on top of 25% that they’re paying out to agents, managers, and lawyers.

**John:** Yes. So I’m actually on a dues subcommittee for the guild, so these things are discussed. There’s an operating surplus this year. There’s not always a surplus. But I’m curious, so I sort of can’t talk about discussions happening internally, but I’m curious Craig how you would see addressing this. Because you say at this point things are good, but you don’t know sort of what the future holds. How would you address the concern that if you were to lower it to a certain point you may need to raise it back up again later on? Do you put a sunset clause in there? Do you a temporary thing? What are some mechanisms you would like to see done for addressing the dues situation?

**Craig:** Great question. And I think there’s a very simple answer. The dues rate is set by the Board of Directors. Simple as that. So, the Board of Directors has the flexibility to adjust the dues rate depending on circumstance. What’s happened is they’ve just stopped. And they shouldn’t. I think there should be a set review. We go and have negotiations every three years. There should be a set dues rate review every three years. And if it looks like, well, we might need to throttle back up, we throttle back up. And if it looks like we can throttle down, we throttle down.

But it seems punitive to force new members, and I’m talking about a woman who is just recently out of college, she’s 24, she’s got student loans. She’s just gotten a job. She just had to pay out $5,000 in her dues initiation on top of everything else. And she also has to pay that extra half percent of her income because the guild just can’t be bothered to pay attention. I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s fair. We’re running a surplus. We should make these adjustments on the fly regularly.

**John:** So a thing I should put in here for context is that the dues that we’re discussing, these are things that are the operating expenses of the guild on a day to day basis, but they are not your health and your pension. And so it can be confusing as you sort of join the guild is that you are responsible for paying the percentage of your income, the residuals percentages is calculated automatically. Every quarter you are sent a form, you fill it out, you send it back in, and they send you another form that says this is how much you owe for this quarter. That is the kind of dues we’re talking about.

The kind of money that goes into pay for your health care, the health plan, and the pension plan is handled by a whole separate thing and those funds are pretty good right now. As we talked about the IATSE thing, the concern overall is making sure that those things stay solvent, but this is not the money that goes to making those solvent.

So, yeah, Craig, I can’t argue with you. I think there’s a reasonable case to be made for looking at what our dues are and making sure that it reflects the needs of the guild and the needs of the members.

**Craig:** This is why we need you at the guild.

**John:** Thank you. And I should also say that the guild elections will be coming up pretty soon, so in a future episode we’ll talk through the folks who are running for this. I’ll encourage you to go the candidates’ night if you want to. I’ve gotten a chance to meet a lot of the people who are running this year and there’s some really great, great people running. Sometimes you’re really twisting arms to get enough people to run and this year we had a ton of people running and a ton of really great new ideas. So, it’s going to be a good episode to talk through who is running and who we think you should support.

**Craig:** Absolutely. We’ve got I guess some sort of candidate list we can go through. I think we should probably wait until we get a little closer to the election. Is that right?

**John:** Yeah. So maybe two weeks from now we’ll do that.

**Craig:** That sounds like a good idea.

**John:** Cool. All right, our last big topic for today is movies that you cannot find anywhere. So this past week I wanted to watch The Flamingo Kid. Craig, you’ve probably seen The Flamingo Kid.

**Craig:** It’s one of my favorite movies of all time.

**John:** Holy cow. Well, Craig, you could not watch this movie online if you tried. And so–

**Craig:** What the?

**John:** I just assumed I could go to iTunes and go to The Flamingo Kid and Garry Marshall’s Flamingo Kid starring Matt Dillon would be there for me to watch. But, no, it is not on iTunes. It is not on Amazon. It is not on any streaming service.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** You cannot find a legal digital copy of The Flamingo Kid anywhere you go.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** So, that is maddening. And I have theories but I want to tell you that the only way I was able to get The Flamingo Kid was to go on Amazon. I found through a third party reseller that was selling it through fulfilled by Amazon. It came two days later on a disc. I watched it like a caveman off of a DVD. We don’t even have a DVD player that would play it, so I ended up watching Garry Marshall’s movie on a 12-inch MacBook screen which was very frustrating.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**John:** And so I tweeted about it and a lot of people tweeted back. Franklin Leonard tweeted at me this great post by Kate Hagen talking through her similar thing trying to find this movie Fresh Horses from the ‘80s.

My hunch is that what’s happened with The Flamingo Kid is that it was an ABC/MGM coproduction and it’s unclear right now who probably has the home video rights and so therefore no one has sold the home video rights. My suspicion furthermore is that there’s a lot of movies in that situation, including movies that you would think like, well of course they’re going to be available, which are not available.

**Craig:** Fascinating. I love that movie. Hector Elizondo and of course Matt Dillon. You know my favorite thing in that movie is when Matt Dillon goes in the bathroom in the fancy house and he thinks the soap is candy. It’s the greatest thing. The face he makes is one of the greatest things that has ever been put on film.

I think you’re absolutely right. It’s a case of a dispute or maybe a nonexistent business partner and an ownership problem, and then so who has the rights? And who can actually release it? And who can make the money off the release. It’s such a bummer.

**John:** Yeah. So if you are a listener who has some time on your hands, I have two things you can do. So if you are a person who is a coder or a person who is good at sort of scripting things to go out into the Internet and search for things, this is something you could do for me and I’d be delighted to see what your results are.

So, I’m curious to look at the top 100 grossing movies of each year going back to around 1980. I’m stopping at 1980 because I feel like movies after 1980 are more likely to have been on home video at some point. Before then it’s catch is catch can. But so if you go back to 1980, make that list, that would be 3,700 movies. And then if you can set up a script to go through and check which of those movies are actually available on a service online. So, iTunes, Amazon, whatever service you want to find to compare to to see which of those movies are just not available anywhere.

I’d be curious to see that list of movies that are not available anywhere. And that’s a thing that a clever scripter could probably do in an afternoon.

But if you are not a clever scripter and you find another movie that you think should be available but is not available anywhere, I set up a special Google form where you can fill out the name of the movie, your name, and sort of where you checked. And we’ll start to make a list just anecdotally like “Surprisingly this movie you’d think would be out there is not out there.” So there will be a link in the show notes for the Google form you can fill out. And basically just build a spreadsheet of these movies that you think are out there that are not out there.

**Craig:** Missing movies. OK. Good plan.

**John:** Yeah. So the other thing to think about is who is ultimately responsible for solving this. And so I will not solve this. But to me going all the way back to the Academy, I think it’s the Academy that’s responsible for this. I think it’s the Academy who is responsible for film preservation, for film promotion. I feel like they’re the ones who should take up the mantle of making sure that these movies – these movies that are made by their members – are out there in the world.

So, I’ve been talking to some folks over at the Academy about really looking into this and making sure that film preservation isn’t just about, you know, making sure that Gunga Din is pristine on 35mm, but that you can get The Flamingo Kid.

**Craig:** Well, The Flamingo Kid is the Gunga Din of our youth.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** So, I say yeah. No, listen, this is one of those deals where two people may have a dispute over who owns something so they’re each happier with everyone getting all of nothing than something of something. And that’s a great idea. Maybe the Academy can step in. See, these are the sorts of things that would get them some goodwill. I like that idea.

**John:** All right. So we’ll see if that happens. We’ll follow up on that in a while. But Craig, we made it through all of these things. I can’t believe we did it.

**Craig:** We did it. We did it. And I knew we would do it because, you know what? Unlike our awards speech we have a generally good sense of time. We finish on time. Not like some podcasts. I’m saying that as if I ever listened to a podcast. I don’t. So I don’t know if what I’m saying is correct.

Oh, you know, I’m on a podcast by the way.

**John:** What’s this?

**Craig:** I guest-starred. Guest-starred? Guest appeared on the Freakonomics Podcast.

**John:** Holy cow. That’s great. Mike listens to Freakonomics. So what did you do on the Freakonomics Podcast?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t think the episode is out yet, but I had a really good discussion about – well, I thought it was going to be a discussion about creativity. This is with Stephen Dubner. And it just sort of became more of a conversation about I guess my career and choices and things and how stuff happened. It was a very – I mean, he’s a very very good interviewer. And they do it very similar to the way you and I do things. It’s a little more high tech because you have to go to a studio and everything. But he’s in New York and I’m here. But I’m very used to this, talking to the disembodied voice. He was very good. We had a great time. And I understand – I have come to understand this is a very popular podcast. Yeah, it’s like number five, I don’t know. It’s up there.

**John:** But it’s not the Best Popular Screenwriting Podcast.

**Craig:** No. I mean, obviously that’s us. And I don’t really know why anybody else would even do a screenwriting podcast. It seems futile. It’s like opening up a burger place next to In-and-Out. What are you doing? Stop it.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is a Craigy kind of thing. It’s a game for iOS. It’s called Antihero. It is a turn-based game, sort of like a board game, but you play this master thief, sort of the head of this Thieves Guild, who is trying to spread influence across this little town. You can play against the computer or against another player. I thought it was really well done. And so you start to find these urchins that you can send out to infiltrate different businesses.

Craig, you would really dig it as a person who likes games on iOS. And thieves. So, Antihero for iOS.

**Craig:** Somebody says Thieves Guild to me I get all aquiver. I love it. You know in Elder Scrolls, Thieves Guild. Got to be coming.

**John:** I never do that tree.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** What, no? You know that? From The Happening, the Mark Wahlberg thing?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**John:** The best. Never seen the movie. I’ve only seen the memes.

**Craig:** Seriously. I’ve only seen, what, no. And where they slow it down it gets even better.

My One Cool Thing is, so I think I’ve talked about Mark Halpin before. A prior One Cool Thing was his Labor Day Puzzle Extravaganza which David Kwong and I are just levitating in anticipation of. I literally think David is going to live with me for a week while we do that. But in the meantime I’ve been practicing by doing Mark Halpin’s puzzles that he’s made for The Nation. The Nation Magazine, the periodical. Each month for quite some time now he has done a special cryptic crossword puzzle, oftentimes based around his love of Broadway, specifically his love of Sondheim. So, now we’re really hitting like all of my bells at once. I mean, it’s just like – I don’t know how. This man was made for me. It’s just perfect.

So, Mark Halpin I think is the best cryptic crossword constructor on the planet. He doesn’t just come up with great clues and tough puzzles, and these are very, very tough, but there is always a four or five-step process to lead you to some brilliant meta solution. They are incredibly ingenious. This is not casual puzzle time. This is if you are a meta puzzle super dork like me. Definitely check these out. We will include a link in the show notes.

He provides all of the puzzles that have appeared in The Nation he has hosted on his own website, freely available for download and printing. Strongly recommend them.

**John:** Very cool. All right. That is our show for this week. As always it is produced by Megan McDonnell and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Davis. If you have an outro you’d like us to hear, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But short questions are great on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just search for Scriptnotes. Leave us a review while you’re there. That helps people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. In the show notes for this one you’ll find the link to the Google form that I’ve set up for missing movies. So, if you can think of a movie that you cannot find anywhere, let us know.

You can find the transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs. And you can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net, or at store.johnaugust.com where you can buy them in seasons of 50 episodes.

**Craig:** Such a smart idea.

**John:** And that’s our show.

**Craig:** Great show, John. You know what? Fantastic show.

**John:** Fantastic show. Maybe the best screenwriting podcast ever.

**Craig:** Not maybe. Definitely.

**John:** Not maybe.

**Craig:** Nah, for sure.

**John:** All right. Take care. Have a good week.

**Craig:** See you next time.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Scriptnotes is now on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/6ohMdZ91g1sXIYz8ylNgD9)!
* The [Austin Film Festival](https://austinfilmfestival.com) is coming up on October 25th!
* [Changes are coming to the Oscars](https://www.npr.org/2018/08/08/636743517/changes-are-coming-to-the-oscars-heres-what-we-know), including a new category for “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film.”
* [IATSE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alliance_of_Theatrical_Stage_Employees) is [not backing](https://deadline.com/2018/07/editors-guilds-rejects-iatse-film-tv-contract-1202435757/) its Editors Guild in asking for a reasonable turnaround and pension support.
* [The Department of Justice will review the Paramount Consent Decree](https://deadline.com/2018/08/doj-to-review-paramount-consent-decrees-governing-how-studios-distribute-movies-to-theaters-1202439066/).
* [In Search of the Last Great Video Store](https://blog.blcklst.com/in-search-of-the-last-great-video-store-efcc393f2982) by Kate Hagen for the Black List blog.
* Add to [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdt2TnjvPuS5OWBrTwgWSnBp-18yGfuI1jc1ASlrkHa_Wh8vQ/viewform) if you find a movie that isn’t streamable.
* [Antihero](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/antihero-digital-board-game/id1265355382?mt=80) game for iOS.
* Mark Halpin’s [puzzles](http://www.markhalpin.com/puzzles/puzzles.html) for The Nation
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [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)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Luke Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_363.mp3).