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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).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/writing-animated-movies).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 356 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

This week Craig and I have switched places. He is in Europe while I am back in Los Angeles. Luckily I am not alone. Across from me I have Linda Woolverton, a screenwriter whose credits include The Lion King, Homeward Bound, Alice in Wonderland, Maleficent, and of course 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. She also wrote the book for the stage musical Beauty and the Beast for which she received a Tony nomination. Linda Woolverton, welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Linda Woolverton:** Well thank you.

**John:** I could have gone on for about another five minutes with your credits because they are so vast. And like these are just some of your feature credits, but you also had TV credits from before then and after then. You’ve done a lot of stuff.

**Linda:** Well, I’ve been writing professionally since over 20 years.

**John:** Yeah. Well, I’ve been writing for more than 20 years, but I don’t have anywhere near the credits that you do. It’s just remarkable.

**Linda:** Well, thank you. You know, it’s hard work.

**John:** I sort of want to start with that last credit because Beauty and the Beast, the 1991 movie, I looked it up on Box Office Mojo and I looked up the adjusted gross, all-time adjusted gross income for it. It ranks number 133 of all films adjusted gross income. And that is higher than Iron Man. It’s higher than Toy Story. It’s higher than five of the eight Harry Potters. And then, of course, that also spawned the live action movie from 2017 which made $1.2 billion. So I guess this may be an insensitive question, but Linda Woolverton you must have gotten so much money off of Beauty and the Beast. Can you just give a sense of how much money you’re really talking?

**Linda:** That is a really appropriate question given where we are right now in terms of the business and feature animation and feature animated films being made into live action films.

**John:** Of course.

**Linda:** So, the important thing to note here, we’re going to talk about financial gain, is that feature animation is not covered by the Writers Guild of America. Which means that there are no residuals. There’s only up front. And I was paid I’m going to guess $35,000 to write the script. Took me four years, as animation does. There was nothing else. Oh, there was a bonus when the movie was made that Jeffery Katzenberg gave us checks. Howard Ashman was there. Alan Menken was there. And the directors, Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. He handed us a check for $100,000 each. I was blown away. I had never seen that in a check before.

So, I was like, “No!”

**John:** So many zeroes.

**Linda:** Really. Howard Ashman tore it up and threw it him.

**John:** Because that was a pittance. Even back then.

**Linda:** For him.

**John:** Yeah. At that time to be paid $100,000 as a bonus. So I want to make sure everyone’s clear. You were paid $35,000 up front for these four years of work on Beauty and the Beast. And your backend was zero. Well, $100,000, it was that $100,000 check.

**Linda:** Gift.

**John:** Gift. That was what you’ve received from writing one of the biggest movies of all time.

**Linda:** Yes, now, luckily I wrote the theatrical version of Beauty and the Beast, which is a whole different ballgame.

**John:** Having done a musical adaptation, it’s a very different thing.

**Linda:** Completely different thing.

**John:** You control copyright in these stage play versions of what you’ve done. And that is probably a much more lucrative thing. I can guess you’ve made more than $35,000 off of that.

**Linda:** A little. Because the show ran 13 years on Broadway. Traveled around the world twice. And it just opened in China. So that’s very lucrative. Just a little note here, when we did the deal for the theatrical version, Disney – it was really interesting – they had ownership of the movie. Right? Because they owned the movie. So I had to proportion out my royalty as per all the new stuff I wrote. So my royalty, which if it had been a full royalty it would have been a wonderful thing. But it’s only partial royalty.

**John:** I am in the same situation with Big Fish. So I wrote the stage play version of Big Fish, having written the screenplay of Big Fish, but Columbia is considered the author of that. And so they could have brought somebody else in to have written the stage version of Big Fish and I would have had no participation in it whatsoever.

**Linda:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** It’s not a great situation. But, in your case and in my case we got to stay on those projects and that’s fantastic. But I think what’s so interesting is not only did you not get residuals on the animated version of Beauty and the Beast that you wrote, but while your name is listed in the credits for the live action Beauty and the Beast you don’t have a piece of that either because that is – animation is not covered by separated rights. Had the original movie been live action and covered by the WGA, you would have gotten a piece of the live action remake as well.

**Linda:** Probably. Because if there had been an arbitration, because I did not work on the live action. If there had been an arbitration I’m 99% sure I would have gotten at least shared credit, which means I would have had a participation. So, it’s unfair with a capital U. But it is what it is.

**John:** So let’s get into that. Why animation is not covered. Because Craig and I have talked about this before, back in Episode 317 a listener wrote in with a question basically saying “How could animation not be covered by the Writers Guild of America?” And the long answer is long, but the short answer is that back in the days when animation was new the WGA didn’t think it was necessary to cover that. And so the Animation Guild began covering the writing of animated features. The Animation Guild is part of a larger guild, IATSE. They represent animation writing at the major studios. And the WGA can’t just go in and take it back because it’s another union thing. So, US labor law is preventing us from trying to go in and get that.

So it is a real frustration. And I think also a real cautionary tale for people writing in other genres that don’t seem like important things at the moment, but will become very important things.

**Linda:** Right.

**John:** I look to videogame writing. And I look to people doing things that don’t yet feel like they are on the level of film and TV writing but could be one day.

**Linda:** Yes. Yes. It is definitely a cautionary tale. And I didn’t know. Someone from the guild Board of Directors asked me, you know, well you signed the paper. True. I signed the paper. But I didn’t even know that there was a WGA at the time. I was this Saturday morning writer. I wasn’t in a guild at that point. And I went over and wrote a feature film.

So, you don’t know what you don’t know.

**John:** So let’s go back into some of that history because you were a Saturday morning writer, but what were your first writing credits? What got you started? And what made the leap into being able to write a feature animation?

**Linda:** It all began when I wrote two young adult novels. I had just left my job at CBS. I was on a desk and I wanted to be a writer. So I wrote a spec Muppet Babies.

**John:** I remember Muppet Babies. It was a great show.

**Linda:** I wrote a spec. And I didn’t sell the spec but I got work off of it. I started writing Berenstain Bears for Saturday morning. And then my career just never stopped. I was writing Saturday morning for like four years.

**John:** That was here in Los Angeles?

**Linda:** Yes. Here. Really fun. Really fun. Great group of people. You know, it’s just a little group.

**John:** So, in that era of TV animation were you writing as a room or were you just going and pitching a show and being sent to write it? What was the process of writing a half-hour like a Berenstain Bears, or they aren’t even half-hours. You’re writing little smaller segments.

**Linda:** They’re like 15 minutes.

**John:** So Muppet Babies. Was that written as a room or was that written – each individual writer just went off and wrote it himself.

**Linda:** I have never written in a room. Ever. Don’t know how to do it. No, you know, Berenstain Bears, it was very funny. It was my first job, so they gave me an outline. And they said here’s the outline. We want you to write the script. If it’s no good we won’t pay you. And there you go.

**John:** That’s a non-WGA sort of situation.

**Linda:** Exactly.

**John:** Here, work on this for spec, and then if we like it we’ll choose to pay you.

**Linda:** Yes, we’ll choose to pay you.

**John:** But if not it’s a useless thing that you’ve spent weeks writing.

**Linda:** Yes, exactly. So, that worked out. And the process was here’s an idea. Pitch the idea. Just like anything else. Here’s the idea, pitch the idea, pitch a take, and then they hire you and you go write it and then you get paid. So, that went on for – I had a really fun time. And then I just couldn’t think of anything more for silly creatures to do. And I had just seen a Disney animated feature that I didn’t think was very good.

**John:** Are you going to say the name? This pre-Little Mermaid. Little Mermaid is the moment where–

**Linda:** Little Mermaid is the revolution, whatever it is, of animation.

**John:** It was a ground-breaker. And that’s a whole special episode of Scriptnotes. We had a whole episode just talking about The Little Mermaid as a breakout moment.

**Linda:** Oh really?

**John:** Yeah. So, it was a pre-Little Mermaid feature you saw which wasn’t especially good, and that inspired you to say, “I can do better than that.”

**Linda:** Yes. So I went to my agent. I did have an agent. And I said I would like to go try to work at Disney. And she said, “No. They don’t read animation Saturday morning writers, because it’s not real writing in an interview.”

**John:** That whole thing about it’s not real writing is an ongoing thing in animation, isn’t it?

**Linda:** Yeah. It’s an ongoing thing. Yeah. What real writing is? Real writing? So I said, but I have these books, you know, I am a real writer. Here’s a hard cover book published by Houghton Mifflin with my name on it. Does that prove anything? So I drove my book over to the lot and it there was no dwarf building. This is way–

**John:** Pre-dwarf era.

**Linda:** Pre-dwarf. And there was no guard. So I just walked in and put it on the desk and said maybe somebody here wants to read this. And I left.

**John:** Wow. I can’t believe that worked. But it worked apparently.

**Linda:** It worked. My phone rang on Sunday and it was Charlie Fink had picked it up. He was probably hanging out with the receptionist. Picked it up. Read it over the weekend and called me and said you have to come work for us.

**John:** Well that’s great. So they say come work for us. Was it a specific project already at that point, or was it just a general come in and pitch things? What was the idea?

**Linda:** I did have an idea. Several ideas and pitched them. I came up with an idea that they didn’t do. But they offered me a live action Winnie the Pooh.

**John:** Sure.

**Linda:** I mean an animated Winnie the Pooh feature.

**John:** Feature.

**Linda:** I wrote that. They didn’t make it. But it opened the door to Beauty and the Beast.

**John:** I think a lot of writers we talk with, they get hired to do something that doesn’t actually go, but they can demonstrate that they are a good writer who can work with people and that’s what gets them the next job. And one of those things becomes the assignment that actually happens.

**Linda:** Right. Exactly. So that’s OK. You know, you’re getting paid. You’re honing your skills. You’re proving what you can do. And you’re bringing what you bring, which is really important I think.

**John:** So at the time that you’re writing the animated Winnie the Pooh, or eventually you’re brought in to write Beauty and the Beast, are they bringing you in as a special like they’re assigning you this project and you’re writing this, or are you working on a weekly basis? What was the nature of your relationship with Disney at that time?

**Linda:** It wasn’t weekly. It was a contract.

**John:** So just like writing any other feature.

**Linda:** Any other feature. Yeah. Only I didn’t know how animation worked.

**John:** Let’s talk about how animation works, because this is so different. I’ve done three animated movies. And so much of the process of writing an animated film, like the script looks almost exactly the same, but the actual process of making it is so different from live action, not just in terms of the development of it, but then with the live action feature you are writing it, and then you’re shooting it, and then you’re editing it. And those stages are pretty distinct. In animation you’re sort of doing all those processes at the same time. You’re writing a script and you’re hopefully going off and you’re able to get at least one chance to write a script when it’s just a script. But from that point forward it goes through this process of being broken down into shots and storyboards and then into animatics. And it becomes this living thing.

And your script, while still important, isn’t as central as this animated thing that’s in this sort of raw form in front of them. And you have the ability to keep changing story things quite a lot later in the process than you do in live action. It’s a very different situation. It’s not like the editing room. It’s like the clay is still moldable a lot longer.

**Linda:** It’s moldable for years and years.

**John:** Yes.

**Linda:** And what’s interesting about the process, you know, it’s sort of a given that the project will take on a different form from the written word to a different medium, which is usual. Then it will go from that to the next step. But it’s sort of a given that at some point in time the whole thing will get thrown out and you start again.

**John:** Yeah.

**Linda:** If you’re lucky. So, that’s just how that process works. And there’s a lot of, you know, I would say it’s difficult to be a writer in feature animation because they really – you sort of like aren’t on the same par as people who are artists. It’s an artists’ medium. It is not a word medium, even though it’s a story medium.

**John:** It is very much a story medium. But that story is being translated through artists’ hands who are doing some of the functions where in live action the actor would be doing it. The artists are the actors who are making this thing come to life.

**Linda:** Exactly.

**John:** And stuff changes through that process.

**Linda:** It does. It absolutely does. But, again, story is the most significant thing. And the story as a writer as the story-maker, you know, I still believe that we are as significant in feature animation as in a live action feature film.

**John:** Absolutely. And especially the movies that have done well have had their writers as an integral part of the process the entire time through because those are the people who just the keepers of story. The people who can see past that beautiful artistic moment that you created to this is the journey the character is on and this is how we have to get through this.

**Linda:** Because it’s so fragmented. And one person is in charge of this sequence and one person is in charge of this sequence. Which was so confusing to me when I first did Beauty. It’s like well how do you have a singular voice? How do you keep that singular voice? Because every sequence had a different tone as per the person who was boarding it.

So, you know, I fought. I had to fight. I had to fight for Belle. Because Belle was losing her way. She was going backwards, back to being the victim princess, and I had to kick and scream to make her not.

**John:** Also she’s in many situations the only human character on the frame. And everyone else is big and broad and special. And so that’s a thing that happens, especially in animation, but also in live action where the hero becomes the least interesting character on the screen because everybody else can be wild and crazy and be driven by their Id. And the hero has to be this sort of moral compass moving board. And I can totally imagine how Belle could be reduced to just princess of the castle.

**Linda:** Yes. So we couldn’t let that happen.

**John:** No. And you didn’t. Am I correct that Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture?

**Linda:** Yes.

**John:** And that was a crucial ceiling to break through, because to be able to think of these movies as not just like a good movie for children, but an actual good movie for adults and for everybody else.

**Linda:** That was a huge breakthrough. It was like on a par with all the other live action movies that year. Silence of the Lambs won.

**John:** Yeah. But Silence of the Lambs is a great movie.

**Linda:** It is.

**John:** Nothing to take away from that. But I think just to be on the same list as Silence of the Lambs–

**Linda:** Yes.

**John:** Or these other sort of movies for adults is a crucial thing. And I don’t know if we’ve gotten to a place where Pixar movies could be Pixar movies if we hadn’t gotten an Academy Award nomination for Beauty and the Beast. I do think it was a ground change of sort of how seriously we’re going to take animated films.

**Linda:** Well that’s about the money, isn’t it? Isn’t it about the box office?

**John:** Well, yes. So, I think the box office is a crucial thing to be talking about though because we’re recording this as the Incredibles 2 has just opened and sort of set all sorts of records. Like everybody wants to be that movie. It’s a well-liked movie that is making a tremendous amount of money, so everyone wants to be able to do those things. And very few people can do those things. Disney can do it. Pixar can do it. They’re the same company now. Every once and a while Fox Animation or Warners will have something else that breaks through. But it’s really tough. And it takes a tremendous amount of investment and years of commitment to make an animated movie. Much more so than to make a live action movie.

**Linda:** Yes.

**John:** Anybody could just write a check for $100 million and make a big live action movie. You can’t just write a big check and make an animated movie. Essentially the research and development on making it is just so much greater.

**Linda:** It is. It’s much greater. Yeah. And I’m writing one right now for a company called Skydance.

**John:** So Skydance’s logo used to be often in front of like Paramount Features. They’re a big pool of money that invests in movies and they’re starting animation now.

**Linda:** Yes. They’re starting a live animated feature division, but I guess they produce television now as well. And big budget live action features under the Paramount umbrella I guess. So, there’s three in the pipeline at this moment in time. My one was first, but we got put back because it’s a hard subject. Again, it was one of those like let’s throw it all out and start again. So, you just sort of like I had forgotten all this.

**John:** Well, you choose to forget that. It’s like having a newborn.

**Linda:** Oh, yeah right.

**John:** You forget the darkness of those first months. And then it’s like, “Oh no, but they were so cute. You look at the photos, like oh it was delightful.” And then you’re like, “Oh that’s right, this is what it’s like.”

**Linda:** That’s right. This is what it’s like. I forgot.

**John:** Here’s one of the differences is that making a normal live action movie you’ll go through those places where everything falls apart, but it will fall apart in sort of script land and then you’ll start shooting and then you’ll have troubles during shooting and there will be challenges and there will be a terrible first cut and you’ll get through it. But at no point will you be sort of like a ways into it and then just like, “OK, we don’t know what this is. We’re going to change who the lead character is of the story.” And that happens almost every time in animation. It’s just so regular to know that you’re going to have the complete upset.

**Linda:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s still surprising. I will say the stop motion movies I’ve made with Tim Burton have been somewhat of an alternative to that because you can’t go back and rejigger things very easily. Because once you’ve shot a frame it’s just sort of shot. And so the most that could happen to us with is we could reboard and reschedule some things for sequences we’re not quite sure of yet, so like if there’s things where like we’re not quite sure how it’s going to work out we’ll put those towards the end of the schedule and so we can sort of see what we’ve got and then write towards those sequences which were not set on, but we can’t do that thing which they can do on Frozen and other movies and just like let’s change that entire sequence and let’s make Elsa a very different thing.

We can’t do that in stop motion the way that you can in traditional or sort of CG animation.

**Linda:** I had the best time of my life working with Tim Burton.

**John:** So tell me about your experience. What was good about that for you?

**Linda:** Working with Tim?

**John:** Yeah. I have my memories of Tim, but I’m curious what it was like from your side.

**Linda:** From my side it was, first of all I was intimidated by him. But he agreed to direct Alice in Wonderland. And I went to London to meet with him and I was intimidated. You know, it’s Tim Burton. But when we started talking, you know, he doesn’t make complete sentences because he finishes it in his head.

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Linda:** So he’ll say something and he won’t finish it, and then he’ll say, “But you know what I mean?” And I realized first of all I did know what he meant and I knew who he was.

**John:** Yeah.

**Linda:** Because he came from here. And it came from animation. So, I got it. And then I was able to kind of connect. And I found him to be so open and many directors I’ve found they want to put their stamp on it immediately. They want to just stomp on what was there and sort of show it around and make it theirs. And I didn’t find that with Tim at all. I found suggestions and he’d say, “Well try this,” and they were great suggestions. And he was very, very supportive. And, you know, we had to throw a bunch of stuff out for budget-wise, and I would say how about we throw this out. “No, no, no, we’ve got to keep that.” So I found him to be fantastic.

**John:** Yeah. What I love about Tim is that he treats a writer like a department head. You are the department head in charge of the script and the story. And he treats you with the respect that he would treat a costume designer, you know, a Colleen Atwood, or a great DP, or a production designer, and like lets them run with this thing. And will give them guidance, but like he sort of trusts that you know what you’re doing. And so often directors don’t trust that you know what you’re doing. And that makes a huge difference.

**Linda:** Huge difference.

**John:** Do you know the backstory? I had the competing Alice in Wonderland project. You know that there was a whole thing here right?

**Linda:** I don’t really know the whole thing.

**John:** Well, let’s go through it. So here’s what happened is at the same time that Disney approached Tim about your Alice in Wonderland, because you had written it first for Disney, right?

**Linda:** Yes.

**John:** I was approached to do an Alice in Wonderland project for Sam Mendes. And Dick Zanuck was the producer of both movies.

**Linda:** Right.

**John:** Which is just an impossible situation for Dick to be in, but being the uber-producer he was and the wonderful gentleman he was he was making it work as best he could. But it became this crazy situation where like I was trying to write this movie for Sam and Sam was going off and doing another movie. Tim was going to do his movie. Mine was for Warners. Yours was for Disney. And it became a place where it’s just like “Well this is just silly. This is just not going to happen.” And so ours went away and yours went into production. And so the choice was made for Dick. He didn’t have to sort of choose between which of his directors he was going to work for. But it was nuts that there were going to be two live action Alice in Wonderland movies in the same space.

**Linda:** I find that when that happens, when you hear that there’s two competing versions of a project, one of them ultimately goes away.

**John:** But sometimes they don’t and it’s always crazy. So Deep Impact and Armageddon is an example of where both things happened. There is the other Jungle Book movie which is coming out. That’s crazy. Mowgli.

**Linda:** That’s right.

**John:** So it does sometimes happen that both movies exist, but you don’t want to be the second movie most times.

**Linda:** No. No you don’t.

**John:** And we were going to be the second movie. So I wrote a movie called Monster Apocalypse for Tim. And we were getting close. And Pacific Rim went into production and we looked – someone read both scripts and is like that’s too close. We’re going to be the second giant robot movie and we don’t want to be the second giant robot movie.

**Linda:** Right. So whoever gets there first.

**John:** Yep. First to cross the starting line is the thing. It’s tough. But, anyway, I’m glad your movie exists and you got it made and you got to make a sequel and that’s fun. I visited Tim on the set while he was doing your movie and it was in Burbank and they had – actually, no, it was down in Culver City. And they had this giant green screen stage and I’d never been in a space that was that much green. It was really painful to be in that set. And Tim had these special weird tinted glasses so he wouldn’t get headaches from it. But it was just so strange being in a space where I just had no idea what anything was.

**Linda:** What was up, what was down.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, the costumes were beautiful, but there was no set.

**Linda:** He kept having to leave and just get his perspective and reality in the blue sky and all that during that whole process. So, yeah.

**John:** But let’s talk about – that movie was a live action movie and there was a tremendous amount of CG and animation. But there’s other kinds of movies like Justin Marks and his Jungle Book that Jon Favreau directed which are essentially animated movies with like one live action element. And now you wrote the original Lion King, but now they’re going to do The Lion King as an all CG thing with real actors voicing those parts. We’re at a place right now where it’s really difficult to say whether that movie is an animated movie or a live action movie.

My understanding is its being shot as a live action movie technically under WGA, but we’re going to run into situations where is that animation or is that live action and we have to fight to keep them.

**Linda:** Who is going to make that determination though? Studios aren’t because it doesn’t behoove them to because they will have to give up something. So, who’s going to decide? What percentage of real people are in it? So, if it’s all CG, does that make it animation?

**John:** That’s the question. I mean, the original Lego Movie is a WGA movie because there’s a live action element to it. The second movie does not have that and it is not a WGA movie. And the difference for what a writer gets off of writing One versus Two is tremendous. And so my hunch is that there will be some movie that will come up, it will be a big enough fight to say this should actually count as a live action movie that WGA and SAG and DGA will all step in to say like this really needs to count as a live action movie. And whether that becomes a lawsuit or there’s some way that you intervene to say like “You have to be acknowledging this as that kind of movie.”

Zemeckis with his stop motion things, those have been WGA movies to date. And so hopefully that’s a good precedent.

**Linda:** That would be wonderful. So that’s it? So the last Jungle Book was WGA.

**John:** Yes.

**Linda:** The Jungle Book. Is there a definitive–?

**John:** No, there’s not. It’ll be figured out at some point. Well, most people go by if there’s one live action person in it, if there’s a real identifiable human being in there that is filmed then it’s not an animated movie. But there’s going to be weird test cases where you’re just not quite sure what it is.

And what happens if the original Lego Movie, if they’d taken out the live action element would it still be a WGA movie? If something starts as a WGA project can it go into animation and come back out? These are difficult situations and you and I both know writers who are in those situations.

**Linda:** Yes.

**John:** Folks who are being hired on to write projects where it’s not quite clear whether it’s going to be animated or live action or a combination of it. And they’re getting hired generally by the worst possible terms.

**Linda:** You know when you’re being hired to write a story, to me it’s like the furthest thing on my mind in the beginning anyway, when I was young and naïve, is how much I’m going to get paid, or how, or what it’s going to land as. I’m concerned about telling the tale. And I’m thrilled to be able to tell the tale. And much less for a big company like Disney that it’s going to be seen around the world. That’s huge.

**John:** Yes.

**Linda:** So the last thing on my mind is like, “Well, do I get residuals for this?” Didn’t cross my mind. So, I think it’s really important for writers who are making a leap from live action to animation to be very conscious, especially the new marketplaces.

**John:** Absolutely. So we were talking about, so Skydance is a new marketplace. But there’s Netflix. There’s Apple. There’s Amazon. There’s new people who are making movies. And if those people make movies under a WGA contract that is so much better for writers like you and me who are trying to make a good movie and actually get paid for it.

**Linda:** Right.

**John:** Than if they were to do it under an Animation Guild contract or no contract like Pixar is done under.

**Linda:** Right. So, when I went to Skydance, you know, I understood intimately the unfairness of it. So, I said, “Well, if you want me to do this then you have to give me a contract that’s as if it’s a WGA deal.” And I actually foolishly didn’t sort of press them to join the WGA, because I actually didn’t know that I could do that, or had that sort of clout in any way. But they agreed. So my contract is as if a WGA contract.

**John:** Which is better. And so I think what we’re going to be looking for in the next ten years for feature animation writers is places where we can get an actual WGA deal, best case scenario. That’s fantastic. That’s great. But in places where we can’t, how do we get coverage there on individual projects, for individual writers, that give them some of the benefits of a WGA contract. That gives them some protection, some backend, hopefully some credit protection.

I looked at some of your credits and you’re listed as additional material by, which is not a WGA credit.

**Linda:** No.

**John:** It’s madness that you could have worked on a movie and clearly would have gotten credit under WGA, but wouldn’t get credit because the studio decides.

**Linda:** The studio decides. Yes. So even in the Skydance project, it won’t be WGA arbitrated. If there are other writers, they’ll decide.

**John:** So ideally you want to get some coverage for that. The other situation which many writers find themselves in is that maybe you’re going back and forth, you’re writing some animation, you’re writing some live action, and getting your pension and health covered between those two things can be really difficult. And so a writer you and I both know said like “Well thank goodness I’m on my wife’s health insurance because otherwise I wouldn’t have health insurance because I don’t work enough in WGA projects. I don’t work enough in Animation Guild projects to get it covered.” And that’s foolish.

**Linda:** And that’s a really scary thing. Like I don’t get WGA coverage on this project and I’ve been on it for two years already. So, thank god I have points, the points system is still working for me.

**John:** So, we’ll explain to listeners that when you work on WGA projects you accumulate points which sort of count against times where you’re not working. So, because Linda and I could be on a project for two years without sort of new income coming in there to sort of pay your things, you have points that sort of carry you over those stretches where you’re not on a new project.

**Linda:** It’s like credits.

**John:** It’s like credits essentially.

**Linda:** Yeah. Then you use them up.

**John:** You use them up. Yeah. And so then you’re looking for the next WGA job because otherwise you’re going to be out of health coverage.

**Linda:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** Scary things. Well, let’s talk about other changes that are out there because just this last week it was announced that Jennifer Lee is taking over as Chief Creative Officer at Walt Disney Animation. Jennifer Lee was on here to talk about Frozen. She is fantastic. She’s a real writer, so it’s great that she’s taking that over.

Pete Docter is taking over that slot at Pixar. Again, a real screenwriter. I would hope that’s somewhat good news for writers overall. They’re both places that really value story. So, maybe there could be some progress made at those two places, at least in terms of we can’t get WGA deals, but at least we can get some better consideration of what it’s like to be a screenwriter working on these projects. A little bit more parity with what we’re getting for writing live action and what we’re getting for animation. I would hope.

**Linda:** Right. I would hope, too. I don’t know if he’s going to change the nature of Pixar, because they’re a non-union joint. So, who knows?

**John:** Who knows?

**Linda:** I hope though that can change a little. And I don’t know Jennifer Lee.

**John:** She’s great.

**Linda:** Well, that’s fantastic. It would not be anything I’d want to take on because, you know, being a screenwriter is one thing and being in charge of all the everything of animation is a whole different ballgame. So, I wish her luck.

**John:** I mean, yeah, it’s more like producing. Or, it’s running a studio really.

**Linda:** Yeah, it’s running a studio.

**John:** It’s all the management aspects of that, but also the creative choices. And so I have a hunch she’ll do a fantastic job of it, but it’s tough.

Like you, she’s also – she went through and adapted her own thing for the Broadway stage, so she’s got that experience too. So, we’ll see.

Do you have any regrets not having gone back and tried to sort of run the show? You haven’t directed any features. You haven’t produced other things. If you were to do it again would you have made different choices in terms of the kinds of things you – the kinds of other roles you would want to take on?

**Linda:** I produced. I guess I have a credit producing a few. You know, people ask me a lot if I want to direct. And I have a skillset. I have big imagination. I have a skillset. I’m a storyteller. I’m a world-builder. And just because I can do that doesn’t necessarily mean I can do something else.

**John:** Yeah.

**Linda:** And maybe I don’t have a director’s eye. Maybe I don’t know where to put the camera. And that’s OK. You know, I create the world, I put the people in it, and when I write I write really specifically, very specifically on the thing. I overwrite, which annoys directors. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to be a good director. So I have never taken that on. Because I think I know myself. I also know, I mean, here’s what the really horrible truth is: I get bored.

**John:** Yeah.

**Linda:** Right?

**John:** Totally. And to be stuck on something for three years on the same thing is so tough. At least as a writer you can dip in and dip out. A director, you’re there every day.

**Linda:** Yeah. I can dip in. I like to dip out. [laughs] And do something else, you know. So, if I were to go back and do it again I’d probably just write novels like you have.

**John:** Yeah, writing novels is – that sense of control you have writing a novel is great. So, after your YA novels you haven’t gone back to do prose?

**Linda:** I never have.

**John:** It’s so many words. Man, just so many words.

**Linda:** It’s a lot of words.

**John:** It’s a lot of words.

**Linda:** You have to fill up the white on the page. Right?

**John:** Yeah, you can’t just sort of sketch it in there.

**Linda:** No.

**John:** That is a tough thing. But I’ve enjoyed it. But it’s much more work than I sort of anticipated going into it.

**Linda:** Really. Yeah. I might still try my hand at it.

**John:** You should. It’s fun. I had two listener questions that I thought would be great for you. So I’m going to start with Ben in LA who writes, “I was just wondering if there is such a thing as a bad character want. A character should always want something, but is there an example of something a character shouldn’t want?”

And I’ll sort of put parenthesis around this to say that we talk about want a lot on the show in terms of that driving force behind that character, and really I think animated musicals are a great example of character wants because so often that second song in a Disney movie is the I Want song. It’s basically them singing their wants.

As you’re working on one of these movies how early in the process are you articulating what that character wants? Is it from the very first pitch you’re describing that want?

**Linda:** The I Want issue holds true in musicals, but again I think that if you lean on one thing too heavily it becomes formulaic. And I live in fear of that happening. You know, so my protagonist wants something. And to make them proactive as opposed to reactive they have to proceed through the world with a desire. And however that’s not how everybody lives. So every single protagonist isn’t going to be like the person with I Want who has like I’m never going to stop until I get this thing. That’s not every character in the world.

You know, some characters – isn’t it interesting to have like a normal person who has something remarkable happen to them and then their want becomes to get it back to the way it was.

**John:** Absolutely. Return to normalcy. Yeah.

**Linda:** Return to normalcy, or to find happiness in another way. So, I fear the I Want and it’s also kind of like so getable and kind of easy. Land this I Want on this person and then like whatever obstacle comes at them. They still have this I Want. And then to me it seems like then all the characters become the same. It’s like this relentless pursuit of their desire. And the world is a big place filled with remarkable people who have different experiences and not all of them are the I Want. That’s my rant about the I Want.

**John:** I like that rant. I would say that sometimes I notice that if things aren’t working it’s that the character wants something that I don’t really want for the character. Or the character wants something that I feel like I don’t think the story is set up to give them that want. You know, an example of like it’s a medieval dragon story but the character really wants to sing, or really wants a moment in the spotlight. And it’s like, yeah, but it’s not really a good match for that. It doesn’t seem like you created your universe and your character to fit quite right together. What you’re saying in terms of like there’s characters who like they’re so want driven that it’s the only thing you can see, I get that. And it can be–

**Linda:** It makes it really one-dimensional, or two-dimensional, but it just becomes that. So, then story becomes really simplistic in my view. You just have this drive to get what you want no matter what and then the interesting sub characters come in and out. And then the villain stands in your way. And then you get rid of them to get what you want.

**John:** Yep. You know, some of the fascinating movies, it’s not that the protagonist is opaque, but they’re self-defeating in interesting ways. Like, you may be able to see sort of what they’re going after, but they’re making choices that interfere with their ability to get that. And that draws you in closer because you recognize that weakness in yourself.

**Linda:** Right.

**John:** I think also part of the reason why we’re so attracted to longer form great dramatic television is because it doesn’t have that pattern of like this is the one-time story that you’re going to see this character go on this one-time journey that’s going to epically change everything. It just doesn’t happen that way.

**Linda:** No.

**John:** So they have a bundle of conflicting wants and you see them juggling those different things. And movies tend to be focused for better and for worse on that one road. You started here, you got there, and that is the path of this movie.

**Linda:** Yes.

**John:** Second question comes from Tommy in Toronto. He writes, “At what point during the process do you break down story days? Is this something you tackle in outlining? I’m nearing the completion of a new draft and it’s occurred to me that certain story days seem extremely packed in terms of events while other story days are quite light.”

So, what Tommy is describing is like let’s say you’re watching a movie that takes place, it seems to take place over the course of a week. And if you really look at sort of like day by day by day you could figure out like this would be the Wednesday of the week. I personally don’t find myself thinking about that too much. Do you find yourself thinking about like what day of story this is in your projects?

**Linda:** No. I don’t. I can only think of that where it happened if the time clock was part of the plot, then you would think, OK, well like in 24, whatever it was, this is hour 23. We better get it together. I’m just really old school. I think in the three act structure. And I just do. Beginning, middle, and end. You know, Billy Wilder’s quote, “Get your guy up a three, throw rocks at your guy, get your guy out of the tree.” I think it’s pretty good.

I’ve also never read a screenwriting book, so I don’t know anything.

**John:** Then you’re Craig’s hero, because Craig hates screenwriting books. He rants about them endlessly.

**Linda:** Screenwriting books?

**John:** Yeah. Just like, again, it’s that frustration of formula in the sense that everything has to fit this one model for how things work.

**Linda:** I guess because you’re always looking, you know, if you want to start something you’re always looking for like, because there is no path. There’s no path to being a screenwriter. There’s nothing like if you do this, and you do this, then you’re going to be a screenwriter.

So you grab onto what you can that’s going to guide you through that process. And sometimes screenwriting books are a help, I think, to a lot of people. I steer clear because I don’t want to be on a formula. I don’t want to put – I don’t want to shove my stories or my ideas into this formulaic how to do it.

**John:** Yeah. Getting back to Tommy’s question, I feel like sometimes it is good, like after you finish a draft to just take a step back and look at like realistically could all these things happen over the course of this amount of time. And does it feel like this is happening over the course of a week or a year? And sort of where you’d fall.

A thing that happened in the first Arlo Finch as I got notes back from I guess it was the proofreader or the first production editor was pointing out like the week logic, the week’s logic didn’t really make sense. Like if this was September and this was January, we skipped over Christmas, and so we should at least acknowledge that we skipped over Christmas. There were some interesting things where she was pointing out like, “OK, time does still happen in a normal fashion.” So, trying to figure out sort of when roughly some things could have happened was really good.

And the same thing will happen in movies. At a certain point, you know, they’ll break down and go into boards, but I think even before that process you need to look at did characters wake up twice in a row. I mean, there can be situations where like, OK, that’s actually not possible. Where it went day to night to day again but it’s still sort of the same day. So you got to be looking at that.

**Linda:** I do look at that. It’s like are we at night now? And, again, the time of day, the weather, all plays into it.

**John:** Totally.

**Linda:** Plays into whatever is going on anyway. So, I do step back at a certain point. I don’t realize I do, but I do I guess.

**John:** At a certain point in every project I have kind of a color scheme in mind for the movie or for the book in the case of Arlo Finch, and I sort of see myself moving from like, OK, I’m in here, and then into this new color, and then into this new color. And it’s a helpful way of me thinking about what’s changed along the way. I’m in the green section now. And so if I’m in this section it literally looks more green to me. It’s just the basis of how it is. But some of those logic things aren’t going to be such a thing because I’ve moved forward to a place where I’m in this section now and I know I’m in new days. I know I’m in new places. And even if I’m not like mentally changing the clothes on characters I know that they’ve woken up and gone to sleep again a few times. Things have changed in their life.

**Linda:** I know that actors do that. They’ll color code their script as per what emotions or whatever it is that they’re going through at the time. But that’s interesting. You’re in the green.

**John:** I’m in the green section now. Some interview I was listening to years ago was talking about My So-Called Life. And Winnie Holzman was talking about one of the crucial things she and ultimately the directors had decided is that they wanted her, the lead character’s wardrobe, to repeat. Basically like for her not to have new outfits every time, but to see that she would wear the same things again, because realistically characters do wear the same things again. And they never do on TV, but in this case they wanted to make sure that she was actually a middle class girl who has a limited number of outfits, which I thought was a genius choice.

**Linda:** That was good. Yes it was.

**John:** I’m thinking back to some of your movies and in so many of them characters don’t get a lot of wardrobe changes because they are theoretically just on one quest the whole time through. Like Belle–

**Linda:** Belle gets her yellow dress.

**John:** She gets her yellow dress. That’s crucial and iconic.

**Linda:** She wears her blue dress and then she gets her yellow dress. And then she gets her yellow dress. Or she goes home, and then she comes back and she has her yellow dress.

**John:** I guess with few costume changes each costume change is really meaningful and it really does, you know, it lands bigger.

**Linda:** Yeah. I think you’re right actually. And the yellow dress became such a big thing it needs its own agent. The yellow dress. That’s interesting. Alice shrunk, so she had to get a little mini wardrobe. What else have I written? In Lion King nobody wears clothes.

**John:** Naked people running around the whole time. Rafiki has some like beady kind of stuff, but that’s about it.

**Linda:** And let’s see, Homeward Bound, same thing.

**John:** Not a big wardrobe movie.

**Linda:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** You know that Linda Woolverton, lovely. Won’t dress her characters at all.

**Linda:** Yeah, sorry, no clothes. You don’t get the clothes.

**John:** All nudists. We do a little thing on Scriptnotes called One Cool Things. Did I warn you about this? Do you have a recommendation?

**Linda:** You did. I was trying to think of – well, I guess, it is a recommendation?

**John:** A recommendation or something you like. If people want to check it out.

**Linda:** OK. Go to Shanghai.

**John:** OK, Shanghai.

**Linda:** Go to Shanghai, China. Go to Disneyland. Disney Shanghai, or Shanghai Disney, and go to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

**John:** So why should they check out at that ride?

**Linda:** It’s so awesome.

**John:** Tell me.

**Linda:** If you know Disneyland and the Disney ride, they’ve completely re-envisioned it for like the new version of Pirates, the Johnny Depp version of Pirates, but the whole thing is three domes. And you’re in your little boat. And you go under the sea–

**John:** Of course.

**Linda:** In this little boat. And you’re still on the floaty boat. It’s real water. But these domes are sort of like above you and they’re moving the boat around in circles. And there’s like creatures and there’s a big fight between battleships, you know, the ships. It’s really so imaginative and so impressive. So get on that plane and go to Shanghai.

**John:** My One Cool Thing was almost a Disney Imagineering thing also. So, I’ll put a little bonus. I read a great article, I think it was called Adventure House, and so they were going to do sort of a sequel to the Haunted Mansion. So they have the Haunted Mansion ride or attraction at Disneyland. They were going to build a second one called Adventure House. And so they have all the Imagineering plans for it and what was going to be there and there was like a sleeping bear in a bed and it sounded kind of great. And so I sort of wish they had built that.

But my actual One Cool Thing is an article I read this last week about Climate Central. And I’ll put a link to the NBC News article and also the real website. But what this organization does is a non-profit and they provide information about climate change to local weather stations. So if you’re watching the local news they always have the weather man who is mostly talking about the seven-day forecast. What this group does is they provide charts and graphics and little video packages for local news stations to talk about how climate change is affecting local places.

And so like how pollen counts are going up. And the effect of climate change on pollen counts or on hops brewing and how it will change beer taste because of climate change. It was just a very smart way of getting local news stations to talk about climate change.

**Linda:** Wow.

**John:** In ways they might not.

**Linda:** Interesting.

**John:** This was a really bleak news week and so this was like one of the few little moments of like, “Wow, there’s some really smart people doing some very clever placement of good information.” So, Climate Central, you’re a One Cool Thing.

That is our show. So, as always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is also by Matthew. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For shorter questions on Twitter I’m @johnaugust and Craig is @clmazin. Linda, are you on Twitter?

**Linda:** No.

**John:** Good. Safe. Stay away.

**Linda:** I know. Those knee-jerk reactions, not good. Yeah, no.

**John:** You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a comment. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We’ll also have transcripts up within the week.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It is $2 a month. And you can get all the first 355 episodes of the show.

Linda, thank you so much for being here. It was so great to chat with you.

**Linda:** I know. So much fun. Thank you so much for having me. Bye.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Linda Woolverton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Woolverton)!
* Adjusted for inflation, Beauty and the Beast ranks [#133 in domestic grosses](http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm), above Toy Story, Iron Man, and other huge films.
* In [Episode 317: First Day on the Job](http://johnaugust.com/2017/scriptnotes-ep-317-first-day-on-the-job-transcript), we talked about the history of why animation writers are not represented by the WGA.
* In [Episode 92: The Little Mermaid](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-ep-92-the-little-mermaid-transcript), we did a deep dive on the animated film that changed the game.
* [Shanghai Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean](https://www.shanghaidisneyresort.com/en/attractions/pirates-of-caribbean/) ride is amazing. This [POV video of the ride](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vIchXwRw7U) is definitely a spoiler.
* [Climate Central](http://www.climatecentral.org) is an independent organization of leading scientists and journalists researching and reporting the facts about our changing climate and its impact on the public. It helps [localize reports](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/global-warming-now-brought-you-your-local-tv-weathercaster-n884831) of the effects of climate change.
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* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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