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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 701 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you leverage connections to get work and help others get work? We’ll discuss the sometimes uncomfortable aspects of getting writing jobs and really almost any kind of job. We’ll also talk about the surprisingly good news for future writers in the recently released WJ numbers.

Then we’ll answer more listener questions we didn’t get to in last week’s live show. In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, let’s continue our discussion of connections with literal connections, this being Lego. Here, we are looking at some Lego flowers. We’ve talked about Lego in a general sense over the 700 episodes of the podcast. I want to have a deep dive discussion on Lego and our philosophies regarding Lego because there’s the Lego we grew up with, and then there’s the Lego now, and how you’re treating these bricks we’re assembling.

Craig: I’m always here to discuss Lego, the plural of which is apparently Lego.

John: Which I love. Some news. The Scriptnotes book is now up on Goodreads. If you’re a person who uses Goodreads to review your books, you can mark that as a want to read and just helps people remember that, “Oh, this is a book that people want to read.” We look forward to hopefully some very positive Goodreads reviews once the book is out there in the world.

For now, a thing you can do is mark it as want to read. You can also preorder the book and send Drew the receipt. Right before we got on microphones, we were talking through a special thing we’re doing for all those people who sent us their receipts.

Drew Marquardt: We don’t have enough.

John: No, we do. We have a lot. It’s been a chore for Drew to sort them, but it’s a chore you love, right?

Drew: I love it.

Craig: Oh, yes. I can tell he loves it.

Drew: You see the twinkle in my eyes?

Craig: It’s always fun when you’re like, “But you love it, right?”

John: Don’t you just love it?

Drew: So good.

Craig: I said you love it.

Drew: I’m very excited.

Craig: Keep loving it.

John: We have a bit of follow-up here because last week was our 700th episode. It was a live show. It was so much fun to do. It was on YouTube, so thank you for everybody who participated in that. We forgot one thing from last week, which was that we actually had a thing we were supposed to do. It was something that had been set up a year in advance. Drew forgot the thing.

Craig: Oh, well, that’s all right. You’re only human.

Drew: Thank you.

Craig: You’re welcome.

John: People decided to see Drew on the livestream because everyone thought Drew was a child.

Craig: Why would they think he’s a child?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: First of all, that violates labor law.

John: Absolutely.

Drew: That feels like you guys, though.

Craig: Oh, that we would do that?

Drew: Yes.

Craig: It feels like we might. It feels like the kind of really good hypocrisy. Oh, we’re talking about the union and getting assistance paid. Now we make our seven-year-olds put this all together. We keep them in a room the way the musical Oliver! begins.

John: Yes, absolutely. It is a hard-knock life.

Craig: No, that’s Annie.

John: Oh, that’s right. I’ve confused my musicals. Well, they’re both about ragamuffin food.

Craig: Food. Glorious food.

John: I don’t know all of that.

Craig: Oh my God. We have to have an entire Oliver! podcast.

John: Right. Before we do that, we need to talk through this bit of follow-up here. Way back episode 645?

Craig: 645.

John: 645. Meredith Scardino was a guest along with Jen Statsky. We opened up an envelope that I had sent to Jen Statsky with my prediction for what was going to happen on the upcoming season of Hacks. I had written the prediction and sealed it and mailed it to her. She opened it live on recording. Meredith Scardino was like, “Well, I want to do that.” She made a prediction for what was going to happen on the 700th episode of Script Notes. Drew, will you open this and read what Meredith Scardino– this is a sealed envelope that Drew is opening.

Craig: I can confirm this. 700th show prediction, Meredith Scardino, June 1st, 2024. Over a year ago.

John: We were living in a different universe.

Craig: I hope it says something like, you both died.

Drew: “700th show prediction. One, compilation of best advice from guests,” which we kind of did.

Craig: Did we?

John: No. We brought people in for some advice.

Drew: “Two, then you go into an interview with special guest, one but not both Coen brothers.”

Craig: Wow.

John: No, we’ve not gotten the Coen brothers on this.

Craig: Oh my God, that would have been amazing. I’m not saying it would have been better than what we did, but we really should get one if not both. Did you say one but not both?

John: Yes, one but not both Coen brothers. She still think we can do it? She think we can bring the brothers back together for our podcast episode.

Craig: We’d like at least to get a Coen brother in here at some point. Oh, we could do a deep dive on a Coen brother movie.

John: Totally.

Craig: That might be fun.

John: They have one or two good movies.

Craig: They just have a few. Just a few, literally all of them. Miller’s Crossing, by the way, is one of my favorites.

John: I like Miller’s Crossing. I love some Fargo. I love–

Craig: Fargo, of course, Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men. It goes on. You know Barton Fink is the one I really want to do. We’ve been talking about Barton Fink for a long time.

John: It’s a screenwriter movie.

Craig: It has that Barton Fink feeling.

John: Funny that a Barton Fink movie has Barton Fink.

Craig: Where would I find another writer? Kidding. Go to the commissary. Throw a rock, you’ll hit one. And Fink? When you throw it, throw it hard.

John: Meredith Scardino, thank you for this card. Also, your handwriting is fantastic. It almost feels like architect handwriting. It’s tidy and neat. It’s printed. It’s all uppercase.

Craig: You know what I like? It’s not gendered handwriting. I wouldn’t know if this was a man or a woman. There could theoretically be a slight serial killer aspect to this handwriting. If you look at it, the kerning is really chaotic. It’s very ordered and yet it’s also saying, I might murder.

John: The I is very close to the P.

Craig: You see what I’m saying?

John: There’s some weird spacing there.

Craig: There’s signals there. If you are close with Meredith, just keep an eye open, is really all we’re saying. Just keep one eye open.

John: She makes the both and the brothers, they’re very different Bs too. It’s like she’s just choosing–

Craig: Like there’s a lot of different people up in there.

John: She’s cutting and pasting things out from a magazine.

Craig: There’s a little bit of a ransom note.

John: I love it. Thank you very much for sending it.

Craig: Also, she has great– her cardstock here is a great imprint on it. It says–

John: It says, from the drywall experts of Scardino & Sons, established 1859s. Awesome. So fantastic. We have some more follow-up on streaming services and creator pay.

Drew: Jeffrey writes, “A couple under-the-radar platforms worth mentioning. Vimeo On Demand. Not a subscription streaming service and very few consumers know about it or use it, which is a shame because the revenue split is extremely favorable for filmmakers.

Another one is Kanopy, which is the library and university-based streaming platform. When your film is on Kanopy, the residuals are decent compared to other streaming services. Best of all, you need is a library card to use it.”

John: It’s Kanopy with a K because, of course, it’s Kanopy with a K. Vimeo On Demand I have used for things. Not for things I’ve made, but to watch other people’s things. It’s good. I’m glad Vimeo has persisted in the world of YouTube.

Craig: I go there when it’s a result. I never think about going to places. I just go where–

John: Another reason I end up on Vimeo is when people have a trailer that’s not released yet, they want me to see it. A password-protected thing.

Craig: I will see some things there. Sometimes when I’m looking at, they’ll send me, “Oh, hey, here’s a director if you want to hire them for your show.” Then they’ll send a movie that they did or another episode. They’ll put it on Vimeo.

John: Exactly.

Craig: It’s password-protected.

John: It’s good stuff. Last bit of follow-up here from Dan who’s asking, “In regards to renting a movie on Apple TV or Prime, does one service provide higher residual payments or are they both the same?” They’re essentially the same. I think because it’s based on the actual price they’re charging, I think it does not matter.

Craig: The price that they charge is relevant, but the formula that we use is applied across all of the companies because it is a collective bargaining agreement term.

John: If you choose to pay $4.99 versus $3.99, that’s technically a little bit more. Also, just thank you for actually doing that and not pirating it.

Craig: That’s the most important thing. Don’t feel like you need to shop around for the highest price.

John: No. Not at all. Please don’t. Continuing the discussion of writers and money, last week, the Writers Guild sent out the Screen Compensation Guide, which was synthesizing data from 800 screen deals, feature deals, for high-budget features, which is high-budget features or anything with a budget of $5 billion or more, that was made during the term of the 2023 MBA.

We negotiated this new contract, and there were 800 screen deals made since that time. They looked through all the deals, and this is how you get a bird’s-eye view of what writers are actually being paid for the work that they’re doing. Craig, can you remind us of some of the terms we’re going to hear here? Talk to us about scale and what does scale mean for feature writers? How important is scale for feature writers?

Craig: Scale is the minimum amount that a WGA writer can be paid under a WGA agreement. Typically, we don’t see a ton of it in features. Scale is the rule of the day in television because so much of television compensation is moved over into producing numbers and things like that. For feature writing, you’re paid entirely as a writer, typically.

The lowest you’ll usually see is scale plus 10, so the company agrees to add 10% on so that you’re not losing money to your agent and going below that. Scale for original scripts is probably something like $130,000 now or something like that.
John: It’s over $100,000, so it depends on whether there’s an attribute or outline involved.

Craig: Generally speaking, if you’re going to be hired to do something as a screenwriter, you’re probably looking at six figures. Low six figures, at least to start, but not below scale.

John: As you and I, and this predates Script Notes, as we were going around meeting with studio bosses saying, “You need to really look at how you’re paying feature writers to make sure that you’re paying them better,” one of the things we were talking about is, it’s not just that you’re being paid a certain amount for this draft, but if you’re only being paid for one step, that is a crisis.

That was a real problem that we were seeing was that writers are being paid X dollars for one draft and there was no guarantee of a second draft. Therefore, they were being held hostage to these situations. As we talk about one-step deals, we would often describe that it’s an issue if they’re paying you or me for a one-step deal as higher-paid writers, but it’s really debilitating to younger, newer, lower-income writers.

Craig: The part of the problem was that studio executives were used to paying big writers, A-list writers, a lot of money, and not worrying about steps. If you hire somebody to fix a movie, “It’s a rewrite, fix this.” “Okay, well, it’s going to cost you $1 million.” You’re going to get a draft and be like, “Hey, well, blah, blah, blah. Okay, let me fix that,” or, “First, I could use some work. Okay, let me fix that. You paid me $1 million.”

They get used to that. They get used to not worrying about the paperwork of like, “Oh, sorry, the amount of yogurt you put in your cup went over the medium size. Now you have to pay the large.” Nobody likes to deal with it. The problem is, when you’re paying people a little bit, if you make them do more than one step, they are effectively getting shoved under scale.

All the way back in 2004, the last time that they were silly enough to put my dumb ass on a negotiating committee, what I asked was that, if a writer was being paid less than twice scale, they should be guaranteed two steps. In this way, the writer gets a chance to get the studio notes, get paid to write something else officially. The producer doesn’t have quite as much anxiety about that first draft and quite as much meddling to do. That request went nowhere until 2023.

John: In the 2023 MBA negotiations, that’s the thing we actually won. Future writers earning less than 200% of scale, you’re guaranteed a second step. That was designed so that it’s helping the writers who are most hurt by one-step deals.

Craig: It protects, in a way, the studio. This is why I never understood why the studios, why it took them 20 years and a strike to agree to this, it doesn’t cost them anymore. Okay, I pay you $200,000 for one step, or I pay you $200,000 for two steps. You see what I mean? Anyway, I hope that that has made life a little bit better and has retrained the studios a bit to see that two steps are helpful.

John: Anecdotally, based on what you were experiencing in these 10 years leading up to this, how many writers did you feel were encountering one-step deals in the future land? What percentage?

Craig: I would have guessed it would have been over 50. I would have said 60%.

John: That’s my guess too. At least over half, maybe two thirds. The good news is one-step deals now account for only 3 in 10.

Craig: That is definitely a reduction. It has to be.

John: It has to be. The better news is, when they actually break it down by the amount that the writers are earning, the median pay for one-step deals went from $250,000 to $450,000 over the course of this term.

Craig: What that tells us is they’re still reserving the one-steps for the people who are being paid a lot. They’re being paid enough that, really, doing two steps or even three isn’t going to push them below scale. In short, we protected scale. That was what this was always about. Sounds like it’s working great.

John: Looking through the numbers, at least one screenwriter got $2.25 million for a one-step deal. Good for them.

Craig: I get that. That’s fine.

John: The other factors in here, the other–

Craig: I wanted 2.7, but they only gave me 2.25.

John: 2.25.

Craig: 2.25. It’s a nice number. I like 2.25. You could tell that that’s a negotiated number. Nobody wants to be there.

John: No. It was between 2 and 2.25.

Craig: They were like, “Fine.”

John: Members with two-plus credits got the biggest bump of $100,000 for the last three years. Even new members with no credits were receiving $25,000 more than they were in 2021. It’s progress in future pay across. That matches anecdotally with what I’ve been hearing from people.

Craig: This was always a quality-of-life thing. The question that I am interested in is, again, it would be anecdotally, survey-style, do writers feel like they are doing more or less “free work”? I would hope that it would be a little bit yes. I mean, a little bit, yes, I’m doing less free work because, in my mind, this term was never going to increase the earnings that much. It was really quality of life.

John: That’s the hope, too. One way, if you are a future writer who is encountering these things and want to help figure out what it looks like on the ground, is that they’ve started sending out the survey leading into the negotiation cycle. It’s a good chance to fill out that form and let us know really where you’re at and what the biggest issues are for you. If there’s a thing that we’re not catching here, this is the time to speak up.

All right. Let’s get to our main topic here, which is connections, which is not just a fantastic New York Times game. Do you still play Connections?

Craig: Of course, played it this morning.

Drew: It’s great.

John: I’m trying to remember, today’s Connections involved– what was the purple category of this one? It was–

Craig: Well, there was Blank Land.

John: Blank Land, yes.

Craig: There were things with the antennae.

John: Like in Teletubbies.

Craig: There were Blank Doodle.

John: Yes, Blank Doodle, I think, was the-

Craig: It was Blank Doodle was the thing.

John: -the purple.

Craig: Oh, yes, and the other things were Blenders.

John: Dipsy Doodle. I didn’t know what Dipsy Doodle was.

Craig: Oh, you didn’t know about Dipsy Doodle?

John: What’s Dipsy Doodle?

Craig: The first thing I thought when I saw Dipsy Doodle, I knew that she was trying to fool us into heading towards the Teletubbies. Nice try, Wyna.

John: Wouldn’t happen.

Craig: Nope, not today.

John: I love Wyna Liu.

Craig: What’s that?

John: Wyna Liu.

Craig: Wyna Liu. By the way, I don’t even know what Wyna Liu looks like. I’m looking up Wyna Liu right now.

John: There’s an interview with her, and she’s a woman in her 30s, maybe early 40s. She seems to love what she’s doing.

Craig: She’s got a great name. Wyna is a– oh, look how happy she is.

John: Doesn’t she look happy?

Craig: Oh my God, she looks thrilled. She looks thrilled.

John: I also love the discussion around Connections. People will have whole TikToks on, let’s break down the most insane connections of them all, and they’ll talk to you.

Craig: Somebody said to me early on, I won’t say who it was. They were like, “It’s good, but there’s no way Wyna Liu can keep this up day after day.” I was like, “I have faith,” and she has.

John: It’s justified. That’s Connections the game, which is fantastic and we all love, but let’s talk about connections in real life. Connections between people, and especially people who need a thing from each other, and how we handle those connections in our town, and how we use connections, but even just saying use connections feels gross.

Craig: It’s a better word than exploit. How do you exploit your connections?

John: The good use of connections implies a reciprocity, a generosity, a good-for-everyone quality to it.

Craig: I think sometimes we feel like we are begging or that we’re charity cases. In fact, if the connection works, it’s not because the person that you begged took pity upon you. It’s because they thought that your thing is good and it will reflect well upon them. That’s really what that is. Otherwise, sometimes your connections, “Oh, my mom is best friends with your mom.” That’s going to get you a 20-minute chit-chat. Is it going to change your life or career? No.

John: No. Craig, you spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, I can tell.

Craig: Love LinkedIn.

John: How many connections do you have on LinkedIn?

Craig: I have zero connections on LinkedIn, John.

John: As do I. We’re not talking about LinkedIn connections or any of that performative networking. I think we’re talking about the casual stuff that does happen all the time, and this is the thing I’m sure happens with you, is that a friend asks you to put in a good word on a show that they’re trying to step on. That’s a valid, accepted part of the practice.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Let’s talk about the specific kinds of connections, when it’s okay to reach out, when you should step back a little bit. You were talking about our moms, our friends kind of thing. Weak connections are things like acquaintances, your dad’s friend’s friend, the guy you went to high school with but you don’t keep up with. If you’re reaching out to them specifically for this thing but you wouldn’t talk to them otherwise, that’s a weak connection.

Craig: It’s important to be mindful if you are the one that is being connected to, that the person that is asking you to talk or consult or advice, you’re their thing. You are probably the sum total, in many cases, of their connection to Hollywood. There’s an importance that they’re putting on this that you’re not. At least be mindful of it. I try and be as respectful as I can and I try to remember what it was like when I was grasping for crumbs, little hints of threads of things. Everything is high stakes, everything.

John: Let’s talk about strong connections. Close friends, collaborators, your writing partners, all that kind of stuff. Employers, supervisors, classmates in a program is good. Drew and I both went through the Stark program. The real advantage of going through a film school is you have 25 connections who actually you can get information from, they can help you out and stuff, and that is super invaluable. Those are the people who you should feel like you can count on and they can count on you. Again, it’s that reciprocity thing feels so crucial.

I think another aspect of reaching out to somebody is intent. Are you trying to exchange information? Are you trying to extract something from them? Are you asking someone that will take five minutes of their time or is it a lot more than that? If you’re asking someone to read something, that’s a lot to do. If you’re asking for advice on a specific situation, that’s a thing I’m more happy to take some time to do. Tell me about being a screenwriter in Hollywood, it’s like, “I got a podcast. Listen to this.” Now there’ll be a book.

Craig: We have a book. Advice for people reaching out, the more specific you can be about what you want, the more likely it is that the connection will at least happen initially. The hardest ones are the, “Can I just pick your brain podcast.” You can go pick my brain for 701 hours, but when they say, “I have three questions I need to get answered somehow,” or, “I have one situation that I’m wondering if you can help me with,” then it’s practical, it’s targeted, it feels a little bit like a mission.

It’s not an open-ended quest. When it’s an open-ended quest of just like, “Hey, I just want to talk with you about–“ then we’re just going to talk. It’s not great.

Craig: An example of the former, which is the specific thing, a friend reached out to say like, “Hey, there’s a thing they’re trying to put in my contract for this deal. Can I talk to you about it?” “Yes.”

John: Oh my God, yes.

Craig: 100%. To me, that’s not even connections at that point. That’s like, okay, we’re colleagues. We’re in the same business. That’s different.

John: It’s in the category of generosity, but a thing I do, which some friends do and other colleagues do, but I don’t see people do enough and I think that people should do more is, if I see a friend written up a deadline, like they sold a show or they did a thing, I’m always right there with an email saying, congratulations. I’m making it clear that I’m rooting for that person.

Craig: You’ve never sent me that email, not once.

John: Then I’ve said something like that to you.

Craig: I don’t think you have.

John: You probably have.

Craig: I’m different, I know. You know why? Because you just take me for granted. That’s why. I’m just the guy that’s there. I get it. I know how Mike feel.

John: Actually, you had a show that you were producing that was announced in Deadline, I didn’t email you [unintelligible 00:21:54].

Craig: You didn’t. Exactly.

John: How many other people– did other people email you about it?

Craig: Yes. They texts, mostly texts.

John: Texts, yes.

Craig: I don’t expect it. I don’t expect it, and also, I never do it because I don’t read Deadline.

John: That’s good for your sanity.

Craig: I think it might be.

John: Here’s what I’ll say about the dropping the email or the text. The email is good in the sense that there’s less of a pressure to respond to a thing sometimes, or like an Instagram congratulations to somebody. It’s just reestablishing. It’s making it clear that I’m rooting for you and some good things have happened in my life because that.

Like, “Oh, this is a good chance for me to catch up with this person,” or there’s actually a project I ended up doing when I sent through the congratulatory email. The guy said right back, like, “Oh, you should do this other thing.” I’m like, “Oh, yes, I should do this other thing,” and I ended up selling a project. Do those. It takes a minute to do and do it at the time.

Craig: Generally speaking, when it’s people in our business, if you’re already inside the business, I feel like you have a very specific need, want, that another person can help you with. Some friend that you and I both know called me the other day with this exact situation. “I have a problem. I think you’ve had this problem before. Let’s talk.” Those things are great. Then, of course, great job and so forth. I’m very texty about that sort of thing because I’m a teenage girl. I don’t know. Text is better.

John: Text is better for a friend or somebody if you regularly keep in touch with, or semi-regularly. For example, writer friends who I haven’t seen in six years but then I see that they sold a show.

Craig: Really?

John: I want to drop them a note.

Craig: I go text.

John: I think it was maybe I’ve actually never texted these people.

Craig: You may not even have their number. You may only have their email. That’s a different situation. Even then, I try and do the thing with text where it’s like, “Oh, can I text you via your email?” If it turns blue, just like that.

John: That works.

Craig: I always say, “This is Craig.” Never text somebody that you are not in an active conversation with.

John: If there’s not a thread back and forth.

Craig: There are a few, I have to say, that I occasionally get. It’ll happen once every two years. I’m like, “Thank you,” and I don’t know who it is because it’s a number. I’m saying this quietly like no one’s going to hear me. I can look back over six years of these. It’s too late now.

John: It’s not too late.

Craig: Can your phone do this?

John: Sorry, your name isn’t showing up.

Craig: They’re like, “Has it ever been showing up? Have you ever known who I was?” That’s what I would say. I wouldn’t. I am so against making people embarrassed for not knowing something about me. We need to have a whole podcast about how to handle the, I don’t know who you are. That’s like a whole situation. It’s a real life situation.

John: It’s in real life, for sure, too.

Craig: It’s a massive situation. It wasn’t when we started. The older you get, the more people you know.

John: There’s just more people.

Craig: It just becomes a real issue.

John: A situation that happened, we were at a restaurant way out on the west side, a place I never would have been. We’re sitting at this big table and having a good conversation. There’s a guy who’s in my eyesight who waves to me. It’s like, crap, I know I must know who that person is, but I don’t.

It was the challenge of I’m more recognizable than he is. He’s seeing me repeated in deadline stories and other things. I have no idea who he was. Fortunately, at the end, he did come over and reintroduce himself. Of course, an agent I had 15 years ago who I hadn’t seen in person in so long.

Craig: They all look the same. They wear the same clothes.

John: He did a very gracious thing. I think that’s the right approach.

Craig: He said, “Hey, it’s so and so.” There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s so much right with that. This is why it’s hard to go somewhere when your spouse, this is the case for both of us, is not in the business because they’re not going to know who the person is. When that person goes over, you are now supposed to go, “Oh, hey, Melissa, this is blah-di-di-blah.”

When I know who somebody is, I’m so proud. I’m like, trumpets, red carpet, this is so and so. Here’s what he’s done. Here’s what he did. Here’s where he came from. I’m like a Wikipedia article all of a sudden. Then the other people, I’m like, “Oh my God.”

John: Obviously, this is advice. If you’re the plus one going into one of these situations, get in there.

Craig: Get in there fast.

John: 100%. Let’s talk about other connection outreaches. Make sure to give people an out so that you’re not boxing them in. If you’re too busy, no sweat at all. Recognize when someone might be stretched thin. The last thing I’ll say is close the loop. Thank them for doing it. If there’s an update, give them the update because so often, I’ll give someone advice, I have no idea what happened. Just a follow-up email, “I just wanted to let you know this is what happened. It was great, and thank you for this.”

Craig: I can think of a couple of people that have emailed me years after I spoke with them, and did it perfectly. Reminded me of who they were. Acknowledged that I might not even remember it because it was just 30 minutes two years ago. Give me some context that might help me remember. Tell me why they’re updating me because this good thing happened. A lovely sentiment of thanks or gratitude.

John: My day is better because of it.

Craig: Then, thank you, goodbye. Perfect.

John: Perfectly done.

Craig: Perfect.

John: Wrap this up with an example of a connection that ends up paying off for everybody involved. Years ago, we were hiring a designer for the company, and I met with a bunch of people. One guy was great, but he wasn’t quite the right fit. He asked, “Hey, can I stay in touch?” I’m like, “For sure. You’re great.”

He was really good about dropping an email once a year to keeping up with where things were at. He ended up getting a job at Amazon and working on a very specific top-secret project. It was a once-a-year email and sometimes a short Zoom to catch up on stuff. We ran into a problem with our emergency pack, which is sold on Amazon, where we suddenly weren’t able to sell it because Germany was requiring this authorization. Basically, our whole account was shut down until we verified with Germany, but there were no appointments to actually do this video.

Craig: I immediately feel a pang of fear when you tell me that Germany, because of new regulations, is shutting something down. I start to panic.

John: For two months, it was this bureaucracy nightmare. Finally, I’m like, Jared works at Amazon. I don’t think he works anywhere in that department. It’s like, “Can you help?” He’s like, “Yes, I think I can help.” He was able, because he just knew people, was able to connect the things and thoughts.

I still had to do the stupid German interview, but I got it bumped up so I could, at 3:00 in the morning, talk to some German person. He made the thing happen. That’s because he was a smart person who was like, “Oh, I’m rooting for you.” He could help me out down the road.

Craig: You could make an interesting graph of how much you’re going to be helped by connections in your life. The graph will start with a line that is very low to the X-axis, and then it will not rise linearly. It will rise exponentially.

John: There’s a compounding effect to that.

Craig: The more you achieve, the closer the proximity to other people who are achieving, which means the more likely it is that you can help each other, and that grows and expands. It is very easy, I think, and reasonable to be close to the X-axis and look upwards at the people who are high on the Y-axis and go, “Well, this is unfair.” It is, but it is also just a function of reality.

I’ve thought about that a lot, actually. There’s really no way to create equity there. It’s just something that’s going to happen. At least, if you are high on the Y-axis, try to not just shut down the X-axis people completely.

John: 100%. I think I found myself doing during the WGA negotiations is we have all these big member meetings. We have them with strike captains and with members and all these forums. I wasn’t answering a lot of questions, but I was up there on the stage or I was in the audience. When people come up to the microphone, they say their name and they ask their question.

In my little notebook, I wrote down people’s names and I wrote down their question and put a star by them. That is a smart person. Sometimes afterwards, I would come up to them and thank them for asking a smart question. Just to establish a radar for, these are good people who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow, it’s always easy to remember the jerks and the idiots. When somebody is like, “Oh, that is a smart person who is asking a good question,” it’s helping you understand through the invisible mesh of trust and smartness that’s out there.

Craig: I try with the connection thing to also look for institutions. These are mentorships that aren’t already dealing with people that have other legs up. It’s not that I don’t talk to people who email me from Princeton because they get my name from the Princeton Alumni Guide. It’s just that I’m not as motivated. They’re Princeton. You got a lot going on. I’ve done my charitable work there.

It’s more interesting when other groups come and you have a chance to talk to people who don’t have– okay, well, that one didn’t pan out, but here’s 40 other people in the alumni handbag. I don’t know. I’d rather talk to other people. Sorry, my Princeton [unintelligible 00:31:51].

John: You’re setting some boundaries, too, which is a helpful way to–

Craig: Prioritizing.

John: Prioritizing. I think the final bit of advice we would probably both agree on is paying it forward. The degree to which you are benefiting from connections, make sure you’re creating connections with other people that can help lift them up.

Craig: Everybody who achieves a certain status in our business is going to get hit up by people. That’s inevitable. It’s not like you’re going to have any shortage of opportunity. Don’t never do it. Do it. You can’t do it all the time. You have to gatekeep somehow. You just have to because you have a job and you have a life.

The other thing is, sometimes, I remember thinking when I was starting out, this person just needs to give me 10 minutes of their life. I know that they’re wasting 10 minutes all the time. That is true. I am constantly wasting time. Also, I’m sorry, I can’t. If I just talk to people, then that’d be a rough life.

John: That’s one of the things. It’s like, I can’t have this conversation with each individual person, but I can have a conversation in aggregate among all these people.

Craig: Just listen to the 701–

John: Or buy the book.

Craig: Or buy the book. I keep forgetting we wrote a book. I wonder how I could forget that.

John: Let’s answer some new listener questions. Can we start here at the bottom of the list with Michael Neal?

Drew: Michael writes, “I had my first kid at the beginning of the year.”

John: Congratulations.

Drew: “Well, my wife had the kid. I was the cheerleader.”

Craig: Well done.

Drew: “When I watch film and TV now, I find myself having much stronger reactions to scenes, even ones I’d seen before. They don’t even have to involve kids. When I talked to my mom, she said she had to stop watching horror movies for years after I was born, and I was her second kid. After you both had your kids, was there anything that changed about your viewing habits or how you reacted to film and TV? Was there something specific that surprised you?”

John: I’m trying to think whether my viewing habits changed greatly. Obviously, at a certain point when she started watching TV shows, I was watching a bunch of inane TV shows with her. I think we talked about it on the show. I used to swear a fair amount, and it just stopped completely suddenly. It really is awkward for me to swear now.

Craig: Whoa. I started swearing more.

John: You did?

Craig: Yes, because of those effing babies. I don’t think there was anything that changed in terms of taste. My threshold for, yes, I want to see that, went way higher because I had a kid. That is a question of, would you like to not be with your baby and see this movie that, whatever? Just because people are like, “Oh, it might be–“ It just changed. It changed.

I used to see movies all the time. I would watch a lot of different shows and things, and then it just changed after that. It does change you. This is why critics are unreliable. Think about what he’s saying. It changes. As your life changes, you change, your taste changes, your ability to appreciate or not appreciate something changes. The rhetoric of, I have deemed this good or bad, just doesn’t make sense. It’s an odd thing.

John: My sensitivity towards onscreen when children are in danger probably shifted a little bit. It’s not like I was like, “Oh, I want that kid in peril.”

Craig: You used to love it.

John: I think there’s always the aspect of watching something is that you’re imagining yourself in that situation. When you have a kid, that kid is an extension of you and you’re imagining that kid being hurt. It feels like it’s a part of you.

Craig: I think maybe I probably did also empathize more with parental characters whose children were in danger. It is a different feeling. It’s a bit intellectual prior to that, and it becomes incredibly middle brain when you’ve had a kid and your limbic system is getting triggered by Liam Neeson getting a phone call and taken.

John: My eyes are on Mike. Watching the end of Toy Story 3 when the kid is going off to college, just broke him. He couldn’t even think about it without sobbing.

Craig: Interesting.

John: That was directly a factor of having a kid and not being able to imagine our daughter going to college. Then the teenage years make you really ready to leave.

Craig: Get out. It’s almost like it’s all planned. They make it so that you finally are like– although my youngest is living with us right now, which is great. She could get her own place, but you know why she’s living with us? She’s like, “It’s better here.”

John: Honestly, it’s better.

Craig: Yes, it is. It’s cool. We’re good. You’re all right. Just stop making a mess.

John: Let’s answer a question that actually ties back into our initial connections question. We have a question here from Tara Garwood, which is related to connections.

Drew: “I’m almost finished with my first screenplay, a horror comedy, which I wrote under the mentorship of two well-known Hollywood horror screenwriters. As someone living outside LA, how can I best proceed with my first screenplay and mentors who are presumably willing to help me out?”

John: Great. Tara, congrats on this project. We don’t know how you got it to these horror screenwriters, but if they’re actually working in the business, they’re great connections for you here. The real issue is, how do you let them help you in a way that they’re going to be able to help you and not be too much of a hassle to them? They can connect you to other people, including a rep, a manager, somebody else. They can just get your script in front of people, and that’s going to be the most helpful thing to you going forward.

Craig: Sounds like you know what to do. You’ve got two people. They’re your mentors. You’ve written something. Depending on how close that mentorship is, you might want to say, “Hey, I’ve written the script. I’m not going to make you read the whole thing. Unless you really want to, just read the first 10 pages. Just read the first 10. You don’t even have to respond. If you do, I’ll send the rest.”

John: Assuming they like it– I went into this question assuming that they had read the whole thing, which would be great, but if they haven’t, that’s also fine. If they can help you find other people to talk to so it’s not just them all the time, will be good. That’s why I was trying to look for a manager or just like, who else do you think I should talk to? Who else could be a good connection here because that feels useful and important?

You’re outside of LA, which is great and it’s fine, but I think you need to find some other writers, people in this space who you can talk to so it’s not just on the backs of these two mentor people because they will burn out if they’re getting an email from you every two weeks.

Craig: Yes, eventually they will burn out, no question.

John: Cool. Let’s do a question here from Reid.

Drew: “John and Craig compared being hired on a weekly project as making a corpse presentable enough for an open casket funeral.”

John: That was Craig’s.

Craig: That’s me. It’s not always like that. Sometimes it’s like that, yes.

Drew: “Well, when you’re in a situation like this or in the throes of rewriting a scene for the fifth or sixth time, how can you tell if you’re actually improving it or are you just making it different?”

John: Sometimes you’re just making it different for the sake of freshness and just dealing with people’s egos and needs and situation. You have to be honest with yourself when it’s like, this is not a better version of the scene, it’s just a different version of the scene that starts in a different place, it goes to a different place, it has different words, but hopefully it’s serving the same function.

When you’re actually trying to improve a thing, I think you need to step back and look at, what is the function this is trying to serve? Is it consistent with the tone and the voice and the spirit of the movie, and especially the section of the movie or the section of the storytelling? Is it fresher? Is it more exciting for an audience to encounter? That’s hard. We’ve talked a lot about it in comedy. Sometimes you forget that things are funny because you’re just exposed to them so many times.

Craig: I remember reading about Mozart when I was a kid and how he was able to learn some classical piece when he was seven, and then just sort of extemporaneously create seven versions of it. I just thought, “Well, what are those versions?” Well, turns out if you are a writer, you could do seven versions of something. You understand, then, what versioning is. When you’re in a situation where you’re on one of these deals, you’re usually trying to make one person happy. Sometimes that one person is happy because you’ve made somebody else happy. You’re trying to make the head of the studio happy.

They say, “What would make me happy is if this star agrees to get on the plane and fly there to do the movie. Right now, this is what he or she wants.” Great. How would this do? “Almost, but they want this or they don’t want that.” Got it. What about this version? Really, you’re not writing anything that is expressive of you. You are versioning until someone goes that because you actually don’t know. Nobody knows. You’re just trying to get people to say, “Oh, yes. Okay, that. That’s what I think this should all be.” Then it is useful because then everybody can go, “Oh, we were making Meatloaf, but you wanted Baked Alaska. Okay. Let’s realign.

John: That is the frustration is often they’ll focus on the script because that script is the thing they can control, but the issue isn’t the script at all. The issue is the actor, the director, the location-

Craig: Always.

John: -the budget, it’s all this other stuff. The problem never was the words on the page, but the words on the page are the only thing that can change. That’s what they’re focusing on. You’re getting paid, hopefully well to do impossible things and do the least damage possible while you’re doing it.

Craig: There are, I think, a lot of situations where studios like an idea that is inherent to a script, and they find an actor that means something and a director that means something who also really like the idea of that script. Everybody agrees the script could “use work,” meaning the execution of that idea isn’t thrilling to them. There be dragons because what happens then is a parade of highly paid, extremely competent writers all versioning to figure it well, is it this? Is it this?

John: The truth is there’s no one decision maker. It gets off like a consensus situation. There’s not a king to please.

Craig: There is no king to please. Everybody’s fighting with everybody over it. Everybody wants it to be something, and none of them have the ability to write two words together, not two, and there’s the problem. You go in, as we’ve talked about this before, in those situations, you are a surgeon, you are a mortician. You are also a therapist, you are a diplomat, you are a priest, confessor, you are so many things to so many different people.

It is one of the great ironies of the feature side of our business that those are some of the highest-paid people in Hollywood who are still treated like crap in their own way. It’s like, “Well, we’re not treating you like crap, we’re giving you all this money.” Also, change everything because somebody that shouldn’t have any power whatsoever doesn’t like the word blue.

John: Oh, yes. Their notes are like, “I don’t like seeing people eat on screen.” Sure. I recognize that you’re number seven on the power structure here, but also if I don’t yield on this, you’re going to dig in your heels to the other side. I’m going to need you to fight on my side for something else.

Craig: Also, I’m not going to be here in two weeks. I’m gone, right? One actor, his issue was he just didn’t like dialogue when he was standing. He wanted to be moving. Well, I’ve got a director and a producer who are like, “This is a scene where there’s nowhere to go.” I don’t know. What if? Now, this is the problem I’m trying to solve. This is not a writing problem.

John: No.

Craig: It’s really not. Now it’s just this weird puzzle of like, oh, well, I still want this lovely scene where Vito Corleone is talking to Michael Corleone in the garden and explaining to him the innermost truths of running a mafia family. Let’s say Al Pacino was like, “But I don’t want to sit. I want to be walking.” Marlon Brando was like, “Well, I don’t want to be walking. I want to sit.” Now I’m not doing art at all.

John: No.

Craig: Now it’s Lego.

John: It is Lego. How does it assemble properly? All right. Let’s draw one cool thing. Mine is an article by Cate Hall in her newsletter, Useful Fictions, called 50 Things I Know. There’s an industry out of this newsletter like lists of stuff I’ve learned over the course of the years. They’re skimmable, but I thought hers were really good. I’m just going to hit the first three here, Craig, and see how you respond.

She says, “You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace.”

Craig: Yes, that’s a beautiful thought.

John: It’s also a good theme for a screenplay. That’s a good dramatic question.

Craig: Yes, it is. The idea of unrequited love implies an unfairness and a wound. Here’s something that changes when you’re a parent. It’s unrequited love. Their love for you is not like your love for them, nor will it ever be.

John: It’s never going to be perfectly reciprocal.

Craig: Never. You don’t really, nor should you really require it to. That’s an example where you just go, “I’m going to care about you.” There’s no quid pro quo. This is how it goes. Yes, there are people that you can do that with.

John: Second point, if you’re unsure how to have better opinions, try just having fewer of them for a start.

Craig: Well, first of all, what is a better opinion? [laughs] I’m not sure what that means.

John: What is a better opinion? I guess you pull that apart. To me, it’s–

Craig: Maybe justified.

John: Justified opinion, yes.

Craig: Instead of just saying stuff because.

John: I feel like sometimes you have this instinct of like, “Well, I have to have an opinion on something.”

Craig: No, you don’t.

John: I don’t have an opinion. No.

Craig: I don’t know, and I’m not sure are wonderful phrases.

John: “The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging opinions of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good. Lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign. If you’re hearing a lot of diverging reports about a person, that’s a red flag, and that feels true to me.”

Craig: Yes, I can understand her point that people that you would want to treat well are saying, “Oh, this person’s wonderful.” Well, yes, because they’re probably wonderful to you. Then, ‘Oh, these are people for which there is no reward if you treat them well, and all of those people are saying this person’s a monster.” The agent that a big star loves but all the assistants loathe, yes, that’s going to be a person who’s probably not great.

John: Going back to connections, I got a call from a writer who was asking about an actor who I’d worked with, and I could tell him that obviously this should be on a phone call. Don’t text this. Don’t email this. I can say, I had a really good experience with them, and I know that other people have not had good experiences with them. I personally did not encounter that at all. I would say keep asking and check on people, but I also wonder if there’s just a bad mix of personalities and types.

Craig: Yes, qualifying, things like that, all the time. Absolutely. I’m very nervous about saying, “Oh, this person is “bad.” It’s best to talk about your experience with somebody. I try to lead with, I’m just one person. I do think that there are people about whom I’ve been warned who turned out to be great. Then my question is, “What’s the deal with you? You warned me about this person.” There are people who warn you, and they warn you in a careful way.

They go, look, here’s the context. The truth is all of us can be warned about. We all have something that isn’t going to work with someone else. We’re not compatible with everyone. The warning should be not something abusive, horrible, racist, whatever. It’s just these are the ins and outs of this person. If you don’t mind a person like this, great.

John: Those are 3 of the 50 recommendations on Cate Hall’s Useful Fictions. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Craig, what do you have for us?

Craig: Well, it’s fun. We were talking about connections today. My one cool thing is a new game, Pips. Love it. Have you been playing it?

John: I tried the demo and did not click for me. Tell me what’s working for you about Pips in your brain.

Craig: First, let me admire the puzzle that I did this morning. Pips, it’s pretty simple. It’s a dominoes-style game. Unlike dominoes, where every square of a domino has to match up to another one, what they do is they give you a little grid, a little snaky grid, in which to place the collection of dominoes they’ve given you for that puzzle. They’ve created regions inside of the grid that have constrictions. For instance, in today’s, there was an area where the numbers in this one region had to equal 10. There’s another area where a plus sign region had to all have the same number.

I played it on hard because I got to be honest with you, it’s a pretty easy game. It’s a lovely little easy logic puzzle. When it clicks, there’s a very odd satisfaction to it. What I also like is, as much as I love words, there’s a lot of word-letter-based stuff here, connections, spelling bee, Wordle. I do the Sudoku occasionally. Sudoku is just Sudoku. It’s so number, crunchy, simple in its own way. It’s just straight dead logic. This at least requires me to move shapes around, which is not my strong suit. I like the spatial aspect. It’s fun and it’s quick.

John: Their games are quick. It’s interesting because The New York Times games were originally just digital versions of things that could be done on paper and pencil. This is an example of the thing that couldn’t happen on paper and pencil. Wordle couldn’t happen on paper and pencil.

Craig: No. Wordle could not happen on paper and pencil. Now, this is my chance to decry the removal of the acrostics. I don’t understand. I will never understand why The New York Times just– Mike, how much could it have cost to pay Henry Cox and Emily Rathvon every two weeks to bring acrostic? Come on. It was perfect for digital. If ever they were a puzzle made for digital, it was that. I don’t care if 12 people did it. I was one of them. Boo.

John: Boo.

Craig: Boo.

John: It wasn’t bad enough to make you cancel your account, which is why they didn’t do it.

Craig: I know, but I’m still–

John: There’s still time.

Craig: I’m still out here being– you know what? They’ve never encountered a cranky, rigid customer in the top of [crosstalk]. Listen to me, I’m still the most flexible customer I have.

John: That is our show for this week. It’s produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today on the show.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We are also scriptnotespodcast on Instagram. We’re posting stuff about the show and the book, and new vertical videos on there too.

We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today, and the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to those premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Lego.

Craig, thanks for a good connections episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. We are looking at a vase full of– vase or vase? Are you a vase or vase person?

Craig: I’m a vase person.

John: I’m vase as well.

Craig: That’s a very New York way of doing it.

John: Yes. Full of Lego flowers. Can you describe it for the listeners at home?

Craig: Yes. It’s actually quite beautiful. I’ve made Lego flowers of a more chunky, tulipy kind. These are more delicate. It’s like a lovely bouquet with a couple of orange blossoms, some pink ones, some rose-looking ones. Then they even got that baby’s breath vibe going on and some nice stem work.

John: Yes. My daughter assembled these before she headed off to college this semester. It’s Lego. Things snap together, but there’s no blocks to this. There’s no three-by-two, the classic Lego block, to this all.

Craig: I will be honest, if you asked me, is this a Lego brand thing, I’d have to look close. I know that these little nubs, for instance, are very Lego-y, but this could be another brand of assembled plastic pieces.

John: I want to talk about that a little bit because I love Lego. I’ve loved Lego as a kid. I’ve built some things. I was looking around the office here. I have my Lego R2-D2. I have my Lego typewriter. I love them. Yet, at a certain point, the kits became so specific. The pieces are so bespoke. The flower here is the most recent example of these are not things you could apply to anything else. Basically, the kits are just to resemble this one specific thing. If you were to try to pull this apart and use them in other ways, they wouldn’t be useful. The joy of Lego growing up was just there’s a trash bag full of blocks, and we would just build houses out of them.

Craig: The Titanic does mostly have useful items.

John: Yes. You said on the show that you built a Lego Titanic.

Craig: I built the Lego Titanic.

John: The Lego Death Star, Millennium Falcon?

Craig: I built the Lego Death Star, the Lego Millennium Falcon, the big ones. Those I ended up just breaking down and giving them to my kids to play with.

John: [unintelligible 00:54:47].

Craig: Yes, because they were young and they wanted to. I’m not going to be that guy who’s like, “No, this is my Millennium Falcon.” I’m an adult here. The Titanic is in my office. This is awesome. It’s the biggest Legos out there. It’s huge. Then I built a lot of– this is what I do in prep usually when I go home. I did the Pac-Man arcade one and the Mario on TV, the Nintendo one. There’s a lot of fun things like that. I agree with you when they get too bespoke. For instance, I did Rivendell, the Lord of the Rings setting.

John: Yes, I saw that. It was on your table, yes.

Craig: That one’s a D&D one. The Rivendell one, I ended up breaking down. Like you said, it was too– by the way, it’s why I haven’t finished the D&D one. I just left it on the table because it’s sort of too far into not Lego.

John: There’s the spectrum of– there’s the model kits that you assemble, which are like, growing up, you glue together the thing, and it perfectly forms this one thing, which is exactly the replica of this thing. There was a classic Lego, which is just a bunch of blocks you can assemble any way you want to do. I just feel like we’ve gone so far over towards the assemble this perfectly to this thing.

It is a skill to follow those instructions and be able to do the engineering feats of what these new things can do, like what this typewriter can do, are remarkable. I’m sure it’s good for our visual intelligence, but also I worry that it robs us of some of our– it’s not a new thought. This is in the Lego movie, too, but it robs us of some of our individual agency to build things ourselves. Which is why our friend Phil, who’s just building this giant ship out of just a block seat himself, I’m inspired by.

Craig: If I weren’t imaginative as part of my job, but this is actually a weird refuge from that where I don’t have to create anything. I don’t have to worry about variations. I don’t have puzzles to solve about architecture. My job is to zen out and do something that I can do perfectly.

John: That’s what I miss about standardized tests where actually like there’s a correct answer to things because everything we do in our writing lives, there’s just like, is that the right way to do it? Sure.

Craig: There’s no [unintelligible 00:57:07]. It’s even worse. Sometimes there is a right way to do something, and everyone is like, “Yes, but do it differently,” which is the worst feeling. You want me to do the test wrong.

John: Yes, absolutely. I gave you the right version of the scene. Now you want me to start from the heart. It’s frustrating.

Craig: It’s frustrating. Yes, I still do love following instructions. It’s such a nice, simple–

John: Well, I think it appeals to your puzzle brain, too. There’s an answer, there’s a conclusion, it can be done.

Craig: Yes. Puzzles, the fun part is I have the pieces. I just need to understand how they fit together, whether it’s words, or numbers, or anything. With Lego, I actually am not thinking at all. It’s a way to stop thinking. I’m just obeying in a safe way.

John: This is actually interesting because you hate jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles, it’s ambiguous for a long time, that things click together. While there is that state of completion, there’s no instruction manual. It’s like this piece could be one of a thousand things in it.

Craig: Yes. A jigsaw “puzzle” is a bit like if I said, here is a Lego typewriter, here are all the pieces, here’s the instruction guide, but I’ve jumbled the pages and I haven’t numbered them. Well, let’s look through these pages. Do you think this maybe is where it starts? This is busy work. For what? A picture of a hamburger or a cat jumping over a thing?

John: I will say, building the Lego R2-D2, there were some ambiguous sections. I think the assembly books are really good, but there were some ambiguous situations where I don’t know if I did this right, and it’s going to take 20 steps before I realize if I did it right.

Craig: That is part of the process, is the, uh-oh, flip back and go, “Oh my God, I was supposed to put the dark gray piece and not the black piece. Okay, let’s undo, undo, undo because it must be right.” It drives me crazy. The one thing that I wish Lego would do– so they’re very good in a way now about supplying you with extra bits of little tiny things. The problem is they don’t tell you what the extra bits are. They should say at the end of a chapter, “By the way, we were hoping that you would have these extra bits, so if you do, don’t panic.”

John: So you didn’t make the mistakes.

Craig: If you have two extra bits of something, you probably screwed up. One thing that I know is true is the piece that you need to make it is there. You might think it’s not there. You might be panicking. It’s there. Either you’re not seeing it, or you don’t understand what the shape is, or it’s on the floor, or it’s in the box. It’s there.

John: It’s Scott Frank’s advice. Don’t move until you see it. It’s there.

Craig: That’s Steve Zaillian.

John: Oh, Steve Zaillian. You’re right.

Craig: Yes. Don’t move until you see it.

John: All right. Lego flowers, I guess we’re going to keep them. The weird thing about this bouquet is it’s really pretty from a distance, and it’s actually pretty up close. There’s a middle range where it’s just like, ugh.

Craig: I think I’m in that middle range, and I’m still appreciating it because– you know what? It’s arranged very nicely because I don’t imagine the arrangement was dictated quite that.

John: It’s going to be a different vase for each.

Craig: Right. Your daughter put that together. She has an eye for arranging flowers, so she’ll never be hungry.

John: Absolutely, because there’s always going to be a market.

Craig: People love flowers.

John: People love flowers. I used to buy flowers, and then I realized, this is dumb. I don’t really enjoy having them.

Craig: Or horrible. You know who loves flowers?

John: Elsa. Yes, sorry. I can appreciate watching a Martha Stewart where halfway the flowers are like, “Oh, that’s beautiful, but I don’t want it there.”

Craig: There’s a bunch of vegetables, and then they’re dead within minutes. It doesn’t matter what you do, they’re dead, and they smell. They smell while they die, and then the bugs come.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: What is this– and it’s, “Ooh, look at the sad flowers, they’re all dead.” Yes, that’s why I don’t like clowns either.

John: Oh, flowers die.

Craig: Like, oh, happy? No, no, scary.

John: Which reminds me, I think my daughter has a bouquet of flowers up in her room, which is she’s probably-

Craig: Oh dear God.

John: -going to get rid of because she’s just gone.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: I’ll smell it, so yes.

Craig: That needs to go.

John: Quickly.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: Right. Thanks, Craig.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Thanks, Drew.

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John August: Hey, this is John, a standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids. There’s some swearing in this episode.

Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to episode 694 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back the writers of a new movie in a genre that has almost disappeared to talk about why and how they wrote a new movie in this world. That genre is spoof.

The movie is the new Naked Gun, and the writers are Dan Gregor and Doug Mand. Welcome back, fellas.

Dan Gregor: Hi, guys. Hello.

Doug Mand: Thanks for having us.

Dan: Hi, Drew.

John: I want to talk about the spoof genre, but also other genres that used to be common that have basically now disappeared. We’ll also answer a list of questions on publicists, and complications, and overcomplications. And in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about movies that Gen Z hasn’t seen, because the spoof genre is a thing that they are just not familiar with, and that has to be a factor as we think about what movies we’re doing going forward. First, Drew, we have some follow-up.

Drew: We do. Back in episode 690, we talked about the new Dogma 25 manifesto. I’m not sure if you guys remember that.

Dan: Listened to that.

Drew: Andrew in Boston wrote in. He said, “A hilarious aspect of the Dogma 95 movement that people might not remember is that the majority of the movies broke the manifesto rules in one way or another. For example, The Idiots and Julien Donkey-Boy both used background music.”

John: Oh, my God. The scrilidge of background music. That’s not authentic to it? No.

Dan: What am I even watching?

Doug: That changes everything I think about Julien Donkey-Boy.

John: It’s moving out of my top 10 list in New York Times.

Doug: Fully mainstream sell-outs. [laughter]

John: Complete sell-outs. Anybody who breaks any of these rules, just banish them.

Dan: Sell-out.

[laughter]

Drew: Justin in Eagle Rock, formerly of Altadena, writes, “I was listening to your segment about Dogma 25 with my seven-year-old in the car. He started asking lots of questions.

John: About The Idiots and Julien Donkey-Boy.

Drew: He’s a big fan of The Celebration. ”I said, ‘Elijah, I will explain this in a minute, but can I please listen to this because I’m very interested in the content.’ When we arrived at our destination, he said, ‘Mama, I changed my mind. You can just enjoy that. I don’t want the explanation.’”

Dan: [chuckles] That’s about how I felt after the entire segment was done. I was like, “What is this again?”

Doug: It’s what I wanted Craig to say at the end of it. I think this kid’s really onto something.

John: Absolutely.

Doug: Very mature take. I don’t even want to talk about it.

John: Yes. It’s a good advice for a lot of things. It’s like you’re curious in the moment, but then ask yourself when it’s over, did you really care?

Dan: No.

Doug: No.

John: There’s this whole, like, cultural moments that have just passed me by. Trisha Paytas passed me by.

Dan: Oh, yes. Trisha Paytas. All right.

Doug: It’s okay to not know.

John: It’s okay to not know things. It’s okay to not actually dig in deep to really fully investigate.

Dan: Will anyone know what the Dogma 25 is in five years, or will it be a weird reference that you’re like–

John: It’s a great question. We have a memory of Dogma 95, but there are films made of it, and it was a thing.

Dan: What are the odds that this is something that people actually adopt, and it creates a movement, and I’m doubtful?

Doug: I guess it depends on the quality of the films that come out of it. If something pops a little bit, maybe, which seems unlikely, but not impossible.

John: Yes. I think that the genesis behind this, or at least one of the motivations, was just the rise of artificiality, and artificial intelligence, and AI, and just a sense like none of this is real underneath this. I think there’s going to be some movement that’s going to happen, but is it going to be called Dogma 25?

Dan: It’s also a callback to a very Gen X thing that mostly is going to be forgotten by most of the filmmakers who are employing whatever this Dogma 25 is.

Doug: I respect the idea of the punk rock, like what is going to be birthed out of this anti-artificial intelligence movement of these big-budget movies, what’s going to come out, and what cool artists are going to emerge. It’s so dogmatic. Obviously, it’s just AI. Listen to that list.

John: Literally dogmatic, yes.

Doug: That list was just like, okay.

Dan: It’s always just about a vibe. If something feels like a low budget, deeply authentic, organic, shot in the right place, all those things are– you feel it. Nobody needs a stamp.

Doug: As we learned, Julien Donkey-Boy used background music.

John: Yes. Betrayed the entire spirit of The Husk. Now, there’s one thing, we’re talking about genres that may not exist, or may never have existed. There’s one thing I know about you guys, is that you think that dead genres should stay dead forever. Never go back. [laughter] Never go back.

Dan: I’ve heard a hundred genres, and no, I put a stake in its heart.

Doug: Absolutely.

John: Just kill it dead. Let’s see if you can do that August 1st with Naked Gun.

Dan: Oh my gosh.

John: You have the new version of Naked Gun. Congratulations, boys. The trailer’s really funny.

Dan: Thank you.

John: I have not seen the full movie, so we’re recording this early. We’re going to have a conversation about this in an abstract sense.

Dan: It’s a theory more than anything right now, and I like the theory of spoof comedy.

Doug: Yes.

Dan: It’s a little college course I’m hoping to teach.

Doug: In this moment, we are infallible, which is amazing.

John: Which is so great. You’re the experts, having done it most recently.

Doug: People will see it and be like, Oh, I wish they could edit some of this up.

Dan: The idiots, they missed the boat.

Doug: They really screwed the pooch on this one.

John: Entirely. Let’s talk about that class. You’re going to teach Dan Gregor on it.

Dan: Please.

John: What are the defining characteristics of a spoof movie to you?

Dan: Yes. I think a spoof movie is something that takes a pre-existing genre, something regarded that everyone recognizes, and then does a, I guess I want to say, deeply silly send-up of that genre. I think that’s how I would most centrally define it. There’s leeway on various sides of it for how sincere your send-up is, how doctrinaire you are about the rules of that. You have your Mel Brookses, you have your Austin Powers, and those guys are also doing spoofs.

There’s a little more character, there’s a little more stand-alone heart to some of those characters, but they’re still fundamentally spoofs of a pre-existing genre that everyone recognizes as its own intellectual space.

John: Yes. When you say send-up, you can only send it up by actually understanding it and deeply appreciating what’s there. You have to recognize what the tropes are, what the cliches are, so you can pull them out, study them, exaggerate them. You have to go way beyond things. That’s probably true for all spoof movies, but I feel like the thing I recognize about The Naked Gun thread of these is an absolute deadpan lack of acknowledgment of the world melting down around you, which seems very crucial.

Dan: Yes. There’s straight manning, where there are people in the world who register that Frank Drebin is dumb, but the world continues to functionally operate regardless that he is still the top cop in the game. The way that any genre movie, Ethan Hunt is the top spy in the world. There’s really nothing he can do that will get anyone else to stop treating him like the best super spy that’s ever existed. That’s almost the spine of these movies, that it’s real. It’s all real. It’s all really happening. The stakes are real. It’s not silly unto itself.

John: Yes. A distinction here, so like Frank Drebin’s character is absurd. The world is played mostly straight, but without acknowledging that he is absurd within the world and the world is heightened to some degree, and then finding that right balance. There are visual puns and gags, and there are things that couldn’t happen in a normal world, but you just let them slide, and that’s got to be an ongoing discussion.

Doug: Everyone lets them slide, and it is an ongoing discussion because it’s a sliding scale where you’re like, “Is this–“

Dan: They’re oddly like really precisely important moments when the actor does straight man, and maybe he’ll look at Drebin like, “Did he just say that stupid thing?” Or sometimes he’ll look at camera and they’ll be like, “What the fuck is happening here?” It’s not that every single moment has to completely play it straight. It’s that the world continues to hurtle forward. Because the truth is, if you are writing the smart version of this movie, the villain would be like, “I’m pretty sure this guy is dumb and we don’t have to worry about him.” Then the movie would be over.

Doug: They have to say yes. The characters have to say yes while still walking the line of being like, “You’re an idiot,” and it’s a balance. Even when we were on set, we would look at Danny Houston and the way he would respond to some of Liam’s takes or Frank’s takes, and we’d be like, “Do we need to get maybe a take where he’s giving us a little bit more like, that’s insane. Do we need to move faster? Do we need to run through the bees on this one?” This is maybe not the moment where we stop and acknowledge it, and we just keep moving because the world needs to keep going.

Everyone has an agreement almost, that this is happening. Honestly, that really starts with Liam and what started with Leslie, which is just like getting actors to play it straight, and they are not in a comedy. Those lines, those actions can pop even more. They’re not in on the joke. They are fully serious, fully committed. That’s, we were so lucky to have Liam for that. Leslie was obviously incredible, but it was the idea of getting actors who are known as dramatic actors. That’s why some people didn’t know about Naked Gun and really didn’t understand what we thought made Naked Gun so great would be like, “Oh, but Liam isn’t funny,” and be like, “He is. Also, that’s why he’s there.”

John: It’s a specific thing.

Dan: There are other attempts over the years to cast comedians in this movie. That was always, I think, doomed to fail because it would fundamentally misunderstand, like it has to be straight. It has to be like the concept that you expect is you’re seeing and it’s all happening the way it’s supposed to happen. It’s just the edges are stupid, as opposed to the person in the middle himself is not Inspector Clouseau.

John: Yes. Those are clear antecedents. It exists within a spectrum, and we’ll talk about sort of the ZAZ versus the Mel Brooks versus the Wayans and those things. We want to talk about this genre really did disappear. Looking up on Box Office Mojo, if you look for like the spoof keyword,-

Dan: Ooh, I love this.

John: -there were only 10 spoof titles released worldwide between 2013 and 2024.

Dan: Oh my God.

John: Versus 34 in the previous decade.

Dan: Even before that, and probably by, you said 2013, even by then, the genre had burnt itself out.

John: Younger listeners will all know this, but there was a whole, like a yearly series of movies that were like Epic Movie in these things, which resembled this genre, but were incredibly pastiche and just–

Dan: If I’m being honest, I do think that this was this really beloved genre for 30 years. It’s so silly. It’s so funny, but I do think that some of those movies stopped respecting the genre itself and burned it off. It created a generation of kids who were like, “This is stupid. I don’t need it.”

Doug: I think Scary Movie 4 was around 2003 or 2006. I looked at the same thing over the last year of writing, and be like, “When was the last time?” To me, that was like the end of that era. It feels almost 20 years to me. I don’t know.

John: I want us to go back to this idea, Doug, you’re talking about how at some point, you have to figure out like, how are people responding to this idiot who’s doing these stupid things?

A real change that’s happened is we’ve had The Office. We’ve had shows where Jim looked to the camera and that reaction, and he’s acknowledging, like, “This is a crazy thing that Michael Scott is doing,” or, “This is a moment that’s happening here.” That’s the kind of thing that you’re looking for in a spoof movie, or you need to cut out of a spoof movie. It’s finding exactly what the right flavor is.

Doug: Yes, it’s a great observation.

Dan: We move the culture of comedy so much towards like the Apatow and the Mike Schur, which there’s a real naturalism to that. Those people are– Jim Halpert is a funny person. He knows he’s funny. He’s sometimes trying to be funny. He’s regularly trying to be funny, and you’re laughing with him. He’s in on a lot of these jokes. Same thing for the entirety of the Apatow-averse. Of just like everyone in those movies is a funny person, and they’re humorous unto themselves.

It creates a world where the comedy is the space that you’re hanging out in. There’s a sitcom-ness to all of that, actually, that I think is a very different take on the comedy.

Doug: I also find that the– and I love The Office, I love the character of Jim. It almost became a like, “I’m cooler than this.”

John: Yes, like existing outside of the space of it. Schwimmer on Friends also would tend to do that thing, too. You’re not quite in the same universe as all the other characters.

Doug: I’d hope that what we pulled off is that when we do even actually quite literally look to camera, it’s not that. There’s part of the trailer is Frank going, “The new one, Frank driving the new one. I think that take is him being like, “I’m the baddest mother fucker out here. This is not a joke. There’s nothing funny about this.” I think that that’s maybe the difference.

Dan: We had several jokes where we debated, is this too meta?

Doug: Yes, is this too meta?

Dan: We honestly cut all of them except for that one that is like that last trailer moment, because we felt like that one fits in its own bit of genre.

John: We’re talking about the trailer moment where a character who’s supposed to be O.J. Simpson’s son looks to camera, and you have to acknowledge that.

Doug: This is the one on the bank, but that’s also a meta joke as well. It’s in the bank, and it’s after a big bank heist scene, which is in the trailer as well. One of the hostages says, “Who are you?” He says, “I’m Frank Drebin, the new one.” Then takes “the new one” to camera and puts his leg up. He has like heart underwear on under his skirt.

Dan: Right, we had like one version where he was like, “I’m Liam Neeson– fuck. That’s not it.”

[laughter]

Doug: Yes, “I immediately biffed it.”

John: I want to talk about this because one of the challenges you face here is that you have what you need for the movie, but you also have what you need for the trailer. The trailer has to be an instruction manual for how to watch this genre.

Doug: Yes, especially to a whole generation who has no idea how stupid this really is, and what’s the language and what are the rules of this kind of comedy.

Dan: Our test screenings have been really interesting because there are many people under a certain age who have literally never seen this genre before. We’d see that those people for the first five minutes were like, “What the fuck is happening? This is psycho. There’s like, he’s the size of a little girl, and then suddenly he’s a 6’4” Irishman.” They needed their own little mini education of ramping into what a world this even feels like. That yes, something ridiculous and crazy happens, and it bears no repercussions to the reality.

It just snaps right back. We’re still moving forward. Nobody’s acknowledging it. It’s not like this is a magic power that we’re calling back.

Doug: It’ll be interesting to see, too, because those screenings happened really before, like the trailers were coming out. Hopefully the trailers will serve as a little bit of a key and an answer guide to like, “Oh, okay.” Hopefully, there won’t be as much of a learning curve for a certain generation. That’s the hope, but it still might be.

Dan: There’s a silliness that is really doesn’t exist in cinema now, and it’s–

John: Non-animation cinema.

Dan: Yes, non-animation.

John: Last time you were on, you were talking about Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, which ended up turning out great. Because it was animation and sort of half animation, and the world was broken in a way that I think people are used to with animation, and it’s not what we’re used to in a live-action film. We’re used to like, we have heightened things in something like an Edgar Wright movie or in like Dicks or– can’t remember the name of the other, A24 comedy with Ayo Edebiri.

Drew: Bottoms.

John: Bottoms.

Dan: Oh, yes. Bottoms is an amazing movie, but even Bottoms, like those are great ones to talk about because Bottoms is a movie that is light with its reality. It goes away from, like, a strict reality, but it does regularly come back to a take on the genre of high school, like coming-of-age movie. I think Bottoms is so cool because of that.

Doug: I think it’s a cool movie.

Dan: Then what was the other one you just said?

John: Oh, Dicks.

Doug: Oh, Dicks. Oh, yes.

John: Yes, it’s so absurd. You have Nathan Lane spitting lunch meat into his sewer baby’s mouths. It’s like, we’re willing to accept things as being incredibly pushed when it’s just so indie and so strange that sure, but in a big mainstream comedy, we’re just not used to seeing that anymore.

Dan: I think that’s exactly right, that there’s like cartoons keep the silliness alive. It’s in the trailer too. There’s the one shot where Liam is interrogating a bartender and he won’t give him an answer, and he smashes his face against the table, and he pops back up, and his nose has been completely pancaked. Which is just a cartoon joke, fully a Looney Tunes joke. Even just being able to like, “Yes, we’re doing Looney Tunes jokes, but in the real world,” I think people can clue into it soon enough, but it is new.

John: We had Ryan Reynolds on to talk about a third Deadpool, the Deadpool Wolverine movie and the real challenge of finding where the right space is for like within superhero reality, what makes sense and to what degree are you identifying with this person as a real human being underneath that suit or everything is fungible, to what degree is it all just Play-Doh and an ongoing struggle?

Dan: That was a cool movie because there were absolutely elements of spoof in that. There were multiple moments where he is just breaking reality, and nobody else is really allowed to acknowledge that he’s breaking reality. Then we snap back, and it’s just the movie again. It’s just the genre, it’s just the plot. He gets to exist on both sides of in the movie and outside the movie.

John: Yes, but in a broader sense, that’s an example of a mainstream comedy, even though it was inserted in the superhero genre, but we used to do this all the time. We used to have Jim Carrey movies. We used to have big, silly movies.

Doug: Big, over-the-top comedy.

John: They weren’t spoofs, but like, The Cable Guy or Liar Liar, they were all really big and broad.

Doug: Physical and broad and bring people in to laugh out loud and throw their popcorn around. It’s been a long time.

Dan: I know.

Doug: I think that it was great that ushering in of the Apatow comedies, which were great, were so like, you weren’t laughing out loud. You were like, “Oh, that is funny.” Oh, yes. You’re acknowledging that life can be funny, can’t it? It was enjoyable. I loved it.

Dan: There’s an authenticity, and it was a heartfeltness.

John: There were funny people being funny. Even though they weren’t laughing at each other’s jokes, you could tell that they knew that the things that they were saying were funny. Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan’s show, one of the things I really respected about that is they would laugh at the jokes when they were funny.

Dan: They were funny people who would make each other laugh.

Doug: Which is also really hard to do, though.

John: It is hard.

Doug: It’s hard to write characters who are funny and are being cheeky and cute and brilliant.

Dan: Fleabag did it, too, where she was like aware that she was really clever.

Doug: Fleabag broke the fourth wall immediately by looking at camera in the first episode. They pulled it off. There’s something about the British take that leaves you a little bit–

Dan: Also, it takes a next level of balls to not just write a joke, but write a joke that you are telling the audience is funny in this reality. It’s like when you say, “Our band wrote the best song of all time,” You better write a fucking great song now.

Doug: It’s really the, like in Hacks, when she’s a standup comic. She’s supposed to be funny. And the jokes are good. What a swing that is to be like, “Yes, Deborah Vance is a great comedian.”

Dan: Because if those jokes are no good, then the whole reality falls apart. It’s all based on that.

John: It’s good you brought Hacks, because I think that is one of the real challenges facing you trying to do a mainstream comedy is that comedy on television is so good right now, and streaming comedies are so good. You have the shows like Hacks, you have the Successions, which aren’t technically comedies but are written-

Dan: Oh, it’s hilarious.

John: -with comedy genes. I think audiences are used to now, we watch comedy on our screens here and we don’t get to see comedy on big screens.

Doug: I think one of the things that we’re hoping for and banking on, and Paramount is, it’s not our money, is that people want to go back to theaters and laugh in a community and have that experience.

John: The first M3GAN certainly was that experience. It should never have gotten so big but it was so fun to see crazy things.

Dan: Horror to me proves the point which is there are certain emotions that are better experienced in a group because it’s this collective gasp, it’s this collective release of a laugh, and it’s just funnier together. I also think that’s hopefully the point of diving into the action comedy or the action spoof, because we really did work to make this feel like an action movie. Liam Neeson’s real stunt coordinator doing real Liam Neeson stunts, and his whole team had the best time, basically doing the things they would be doing on any Liam Neeson movie.

Doug: Sending up the things that they’ve been doing for the last 10 years for Liam. They were so excited to do it.

Dan: There’s a scope to it that feels cinematic, hopefully, and I think that’s what we’re hoping for. I think we’re hopeful that this is going to be a movie that people are excited to see on a big screen because it feels like a big-screen movie.

John: Back when we were doing Charlie’s Angels talking about action comedy, that was a very successful and very difficult tone to hit which is that we are in an action comedy space and we’re going to be doing the things we’re used to seeing but we’re going to be approaching it with a very different attitude, a very different style. Yes, there are going to be jokes, and yes, it’s going to be silly at times, but not silly that it completely undercuts the stakes of what the movie is and what the heist is that they’re trying to pull off.

Dan: We write a lot of action comedy, just like normal action comedy, and that’s always the thing that you’re really up against, which is like we have to write a real action set piece. We have to write something that is exciting and gripping, but it can’t just be dry action for five pages, right? Then it’s boring also, but they can’t be so out of it that there’s no stakes again, that suddenly the reality is broken. In this one, you get to have the carte blanche to never really have to worry about that. The bank set piece.

John: Let’s talk about that because we can talk about something that we’ve seen in the trailer. Talk us through the bank heist because we’ve seen a bunch of bank heists in movies before.

Dan: It certainly comes straight from The Dark Knight and just that crazy opening of, okay, we’re in the most intense instantly this bank job, and we watch a bunch of different bank job heist action set pieces. Once you get into these, we probably ended up filming five or six more actual fight sequences than we ended up using, because we were like, they’re all pretty modular jokes. The reality is we don’t really need to care about much of the mechanics of like, “How does he get from here to the other side of the bank and how do they stop this guy from entering,” and all the actual mechanics you might have to care about in a real set piece.

We’re just like, “All right, let’s identify the 10 most common tropes within these movies and how do we undercut that?” One of the ones that’s in there is there’s the circular firing squad when you convince two bad guys to accidentally shoot each other because you’re dodging that. We just undercut that with having them take a very obvious dummy, not a human body, by any means, and just like toss it like a rag doll into the middle of 10 bad guys who all are just like, “Okay, I guess we’re shooting at this now,” and they all kill each other.

You’re like, “Okay, great. That was a great way to just functionally get rid of 10 people.”

John: Yes. Treating those moments as comedic moments and believable and plausible within the universe that you’ve created, but they don’t have to pay into higher stakes. We’re not worried about like that bystander over there.

Dan: We just kept watching these sequences where it was like, “Oh, the way that these guys disassemble guns is so ludicrous. It’s so easy.” Then you’re just like, “It’s like they’re treating it like papier mâché,” and then you’re like, “Okay, that’s the joke right there. What’s our run of ways that you can just take apart a gun in the most psychotic way?” We ended up eventually getting it to like, “Is it cake?” [laughter] It suggests to him, they literally made– Yes, that’s in it. He bites the gun, and so they literally made one of the guns out of cake, and he just like ate a bunch of guns on set.

Doug: He ate a ton of chocolate cakes and a ton of chocolate guns. He just ate a lot of them. I think also the important, and Akiva did this so well and stressed this, and we know this is–

John: It was Akiva Schaffer who directed this.

Doug: We wrote with him as well. It was the three of us writing this, and he directed Rescue Rangers, but is setting the world in a very real way too. The beginning of that bank sequence is shot, it should look and feel like Heat and Place Beyond the Pines. It should feel like a tense bank ice until you break the reality. Everyone settles into like, “Oh, I know these tropes.”

John: Yes. Okay, exactly.

Dan: That was really fun for us to also, whenever people see the real movie, like we were like, “How long can we not make a joke?”

Doug: How long can you hold?

Dan: It was just like, okay, we’re in this bank scene, and everyone gets the genre. It’s really intense, and that music is just like piercing your ears and it’s like, how long can we just keep building this tension before we have to pull the plug on it and like reveal that this is a little girl and is actually Frank Drebin in a dress. That’s great.

John: That’s great. The other bank heist that was reminding me– which is another example of like a big comedy that did work was Free Guy. Free Guy also goes back to a heist, but in that heist, you’ve already established that you’re in a video game world. Everything is heightened to some degree. We’re already looking at this bank vault with the expectation, like this is a heightened space that we’re not expecting Heat.

Dan: Right. Again, it’s like rules of the world. That movie is so amazing for rule-building and world-building. It’s, you educate yourself very quickly on like, “Okay, this is a, this is a totally different set of reality.”

Doug: Video game rules. I love Free Guy. I think that the time you get to the bank scene, you’ve been in it for at least 10 or 15 minutes. I think so.

John: He’s woken up in this space. He knows where the reality of this place.

Doug: They can go right into that raw red meat a little faster.

John: Before we leave Naked Gun, I want to talk about Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which I think is a terrific show and is a heightened police show, but doesn’t work on that same scale anymore. It’s like, it’s a comedy without being a spoof and it has to have a groundedness in like, do you believe the characters, like if that physics applies, that the characters cannot Looney Tunes.

Dan: Right. It’s funny. We wrote this movie from the Lonely Island offices. It shares an office with Dan Goor, the creator of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. He would regularly come in and be like, “Oh, what’s that? You guys need any jokes? You got any jokes?”
Drew: Again, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a great–

Doug: Procedural comedy in all the best ways. It’s silly. It pushes the silliness as much as they can.

John: It harkens back to, like a Barney Miller. We have an expectation. It’s the next version of what a police sitcom would be.

Dan: It’s still real cops in the real world, basically.

Doug: It is not Police Squad.

John: No.

Dan: No, it’s not.

John: Great. Let’s move from here and talk about, this is spoof genres, but I want to talk about other genres that used to be valid genres that we just don’t see anymore. We touched a bit on this on episode 400, but it’s been a minute. The reason I’m bringing it up is I feel like sometimes the audience forgets, like with spoof, that it’s even a thing and they forget how to watch them and they forget, they don’t seek them out. In the cases where we’ve been able to make them, I think we don’t even put them in the context of everything that came before them.

What would be like a melodrama? We used to make like Now Voyager or big Douglas Sirk things. They used to be giant programmers.

Dan: Got our Baldoni and Blake Lively.

John: That’s what I’m saying. A counter example is like It Ends With Us was a melodrama in a way that was incredibly successful. Yet no one who saw that movie put it in the context of those movies that came before it.

Dan: No, the vertical stories–

John: I think those are the melodramas now.

Dan: Yes, exactly. I think there’s a truth to a lot of these genres that are undeniable. They went away for whatever market reasons, but people are drawn to this swath of genres forever. I think that people are interested in types of stories. If something hasn’t been around for a while, there’s a good reason to believe that it absolutely is still relevant.

John: I know, it feels like, “Oh, it’s a brand new thing,” but like, it really isn’t. It’s just pulling off of that tradition.

Other examples of melodramas would be Marriage Story, but was it more of a comedy? It still feels like fundamentally a comedy. Spencer, the Diana movie, it plays as a melodrama. Tar, kind of, but it’s just such a bizarre, weird, extravagant thing.

Dan: I don’t know. I wouldn’t put Tar into–

Doug: I don’t know. It feels like such an arthouse, auteur-driven. I don’t know. It’s definitely big in a way that you don’t see a lot–

Dan: I guess to start the conversation the way we started the spoof conversation, like, what does melodrama even mean? How is it different than drama?

John: I think it’s heightened emotions around a domestic issue, around a domestic relationship. I think that’s where it comes down to. It’s a family, it’s a man and a woman, and it’s a soap opera, but a soap opera told in a smaller space.

Dan: We have to go to sex melodramas, the sexy movies.

John: I want to talk about sexual thrillers.

Doug: There was like sexual thrillers, sexual noir, Florida sexual noir.

Dan: Florida sexual noir is its own genre.

Doug: Florida noir is a whole genre.

John: We had Body Heat, we had Jagged Edge, we had Fatal Attraction.

Dan: No, there’s a whole podcast about this.

Doug: Yes. Great.

John: We talked about this and I think when Rachel was on. We also talked about sort of like, we just don’t put sex in movies anymore.

Dan: Did you listen to the You Must Remember This season about this?

John: Oh, that’s right. Karina had a whole–

Dan: It’s spectacular. She analyzes the whole 25-year rise and fall of this whole genre.

John: We’re going to send everyone to Karina Longworth’s podcast about this because I totally forgot about that.

Dan: Amazing. Because again, she talks about how it starts as this very artistic endeavor, where it’s really experimental and there’s simultaneously a whole generation of experimental filmmakers who are like, “When and how will we actually merge pornography with art?”

John: I watched Altered States recently. I was like surprised how much sex and nudity there is. It’s not even a sexy thriller. It’s just like there’s just sex.

Doug: Yes, it’s just what happened, and now it doesn’t. Now we’ll see all kinds of grotesque violence.

Dan: I know.

Doug: Then if you see one sex scene, you’re like, “Did they have to do that?”

John: I think Challengers feel so shocking because, like, oh, they have sex.

Doug: That was– Yes.

John: Yes. It’s PG-13 by comparison.

Doug: I just watched Dead Ringers the other night, which is a totally different thing. Also, it’s like that would be rated X at this point if you put out Dead Ringers for sure.

John: Traditional Westerns. High Noons and Shanes, things that were historically Westerns. Now if we make Westerns, they–

Dan: They’re Star Wars.

John: They’re Star Wars or they’re revisionist Westerns. They’re really Western, but it’s not really Western. It’s the other way around. Power of the Dog is, it’s a Western. It’s set in the West, but it’s not doing Western things.

Dan: Western to me is one of those questions where, like, what is it other than an aesthetic? Is there some more elemental part of what makes that a universal story or an evergreen story that people were so obsessed with it for so long that is still a story that we’d be telling today?

Doug: Look, I’m obsessed with the Westerns. I’ve only been reading Westerns this year. I’m about to finish Lonesome Dove and I’m just like in love with it. I feel like there’s a lone character aspect of like just writing alone and more morally ambiguous that I’m always excited about when I get to see in movies now. It’s far less–

John: A man alone on the frontier. There’s a bunch of things that–

Doug: I think it’s a reason. Besides, Quentin Tarantino is very similar, but he’s making his version of Sergio Leone films. They’re so exciting for those reasons.

John: Sword-and-sandal epics. We used to make them all the time. We know it’s Ben-Hur and Spartacus, but we used to do that. There’s hundreds of them.

Dan: I love the last Gladiator. I had a great time watching that. I thought that was great. I absolutely would watch dozens of those. You know what’s very popular is Jesus stuff.

John: Oh, yes. It’s doing great.

Dan: The Jesus guy, this guy, Jesus, he’s got a real–

Doug: [crosstalk] Jesus show on like Fox International. Some channel that I’ve never heard of is like, “Martin Scorsese presents Jesus, the early years.”

Dan: More people are watching that than anybody is watching anything on HBO.

Doug: For sure. There was the architect movie, the Adrian Brody movie.

John: Oh, yes. Sure.

Doug: That did feel big to me in a way that was amazing that they did it for that amount. It was sprawling in a way that–

John: The sword and sandals turn like the– and the Cleopatra’s. We used to do that kind of thing a lot. Maybe like, some of our superhero movies are doing.

Dan: Would you call Aladdin a sword-and-sandal movie?

John: It’s the sword-and-sandal movie. Yes. A little bit of that. The residuals would say [crosstalk]

Doug: I think about epics like-

John: It’s big scale.

Doug: -big large-scale movies that [crosstalk] that cover large periods of time in a way that just feel big.

John: Big adult drama. English Patient, Out of Africa. Even though it’s going to be a much cheaper, it did feel like part of that universe.

Dan: Man, those are the those are the best.

John: They were great. I loved them.

Dan: That’s, to me, the version of public domain IP that is so valuable of just like these are these are the most recognizable people in history. How are they not interesting?

John: Going back to melodramas or sort of adult dramas, I guess like Celine Song’s, both of her movies feel like that, too. Past Lives or Materialists.

Dan: That’s interesting. Where does it now blend into rom-com or–

John: Yes, exactly. Melodrama is like rom-com, but not like emphasizing the jokes.

Dan: I guess so. Then now we’re back to the indie comedy of it all, which is like it’s a comedy because I said it’s a comedy, but I didn’t laugh once in an hour and a half.

John: On this podcast for the last 12 years, we’ve talked about, oh, the rom-com. The success of Anyone But You broke ground for more big-screen stuff. My hope being is that you can break that ground for spoofs.

Dan: We’re bringing it back, baby.

John: Mid-budget adventure films. We used to make Romancing the Stone, a thing that didn’t have to be like epic titanically.

Dan: This is a depressing podcast, John. [laughter]

Doug: Or IP-driven. Something.

John: The exception of like The Lost City was delightful and funny and did well, but it didn’t open up space for those movies.

Dan: I remember a moment where people were like, people want more movies like that, but it didn’t…

Doug: How much of it is about the finances and how the system being broken, that the bar is so high for what you have to pass to make it worth putting in theater or something, to give a big theatrical release. It feels like so many things just don’t pass the bar. A movie making $110 million that is not IP-based, but they put $100 million into it. That’s not a huge hit anymore. How much does that cost?

John: Everyone’s like, “Oh, we can’t make a musical,” and then like Wicked makes a gazillion dollars. Meanwhile, I was doing the Grease prequel, which felt like obvious, and no one would gamble on the prequel to Grease.

Dan: Yes, it seems like that’s IP.

John: It was the assumption like, we cannot release a studio musical because West Side Story didn’t work, because In the Heights didn’t work.

Dan: I thought then, those were good movies, too.

Doug: They were good movies, too, but they didn’t. [crosstalk] The tags were too high on them, I guess.

John: Yes, and so that becomes the challenge.

Dan: Yes, this is all a budget problem. Movies have gotten so expensive to make and to promote.

Doug: Everyone has this vertical integration of just like, we can put it on our streamer, and it’s cheaper, and it will keep the dollars rolling in. What is the point of doubling our budget and promoting this thing? It’s just–

John: I do wonder whether, like, oh, we could put it on our streamer. There’s some lessons to be learned in terms of like Lilo and Stitch. The live-action Lilo and Stitch was made for the streamer and then made a gazillion dollars in theaters, which is great.

Doug: Will still destroy on Disney+.

John: Yes, 100%.

Doug: Didn’t take away from it all. If anything, it boosts Disney+.

John: Moana 2 was also made for streaming.

Dan: They’re just like, why would we waste it on streaming when we could make a billion dollars?

Doug: It was supposed to be a TV show, too, first of all.

John: That’s what it was, yes. I was looking at my Aladdin participation statement recently, and so–

Dan: Let’s talk about numbers.

Doug: I would love to open up that WGA. Look at those.

John: The residuals are good. I post the residuals for that frequently because it’s a really good comparison between that and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, because they’re both big four-quadrant family movies that made about the same amount in the Box Office. The residuals on Aladdin are lower, but they’re not dramatically lower. The categories in which it makes the money are a lot different because it’s not about DVD sales. It’s about streaming and other things.

The gains that the Guild has made over the last couple of negotiations in terms of new media residuals, they’re making up the difference in a very comparable movie, which is great. The participation statement I get for Aladdin is different because they have net points that will never actually pay off. You look at the theatrical money that Aladdin’s brought in, those are what’s considered film rentals. This is a little bit wonky, but basically, when you see Box Office, that is the money that’s going into the theaters.

Rentals is what actually comes back to the studio. Rentals for domestic theatrical distribution and international theatrical distribution are still a huge number on a movie like that. While you talk about, oh, all the ancillary money is great, the hundreds of millions of dollars you bring in that initial launch is great.

Dan: Oh my God. It’s enormous.

John: To give that up for streaming is so–

Dan: No writers are arguing with you.

Doug: Maverick was so huge for that reason, too. I think it proved that people will come to Paramount Plus, who could be more coming to it. No, we’re with you. I’m still shocked to this day. We’re still here. Until Naked Gun is in the theater on August 1st and I see it there, I still won’t believe it’s going to be in the theaters. I was like, they can pull it at any time. They can just decide that they’re going to be like–

Dan: Today was the day that CBS settled with Donald Trump.

John: As we’re recording this.

Doug: How did we not lead with that? Come on, the news.

John: The news.

Doug: One of the greatest screenwriters of all time, Donald Trump.

Dan: Yes, he was a Broadway producer briefly. [crosstalk]

Doug: [laughs] The Producers is about him.

Dan: I know. Anyway, there were multiple moments where we were just horrified that somehow Donald Trump was going to destroy the movie.

John: Just stop the release of this thing.

Dan: We were afraid–

Doug: Or just the regular wheels in motion of Hollywood being like, “You know that? We’re not going to put that much money into–“

Dan: Again, if Donald Trump stopped the merger, then suddenly Paramount’s entire business model falls apart, and there’s no guarantees anymore. You just don’t know. It’s such a scary world to live in.

John: I want to acknowledge how dumb it is that we’re in a world where the president decided to do something could have an impact not just on the quality of the planet, but also just really mundane, anodyne business that we’re working in. It’s so dumb.

Doug: Could affect whether or not I can send my daughter to college if it goes into theater.

Dan: Yes, she’s not going to college if this movie doesn’t open.

Doug: If this just goes right to Paramount+ she’s staying home.

John: Obviously, all in context are like many bigger problems in the world. It’s just it’s absurd that such small petty things are happening.

All right, let’s get to some listener questions. We have one here from Frank.

Drew: I have a movie coming out this fall in theaters, hooray. Not a huge release, but 4 to 500 screens, and it’s my first produced work. Congratulations, Frank.

Doug: Ooh, congrats.

Drew: Should I hire a publicist? What could or should I expect from that publicist? Part of me feels like the publicist is just for my ego, and I’m basically paying to go on a few podcasts, but is there more to that I’m not aware of? Obviously, I want to be a smart caretaker of my career, so maybe there’s no reason not to hire one. You never know what could come of it, that sort of thing.

Dan: John, I’m going to let you start. We’re more in the listener’s category than–

Doug: This is our second studio release.

John: You have a movie coming out in two months. Do you have a publicist? Did you hire a publicist?

Dan: Yes, we did.

John: Your own publicist.

Dan: Daryl Borquez, Apex Talent. Perhaps the listener would like to get in touch.

John: Talk to us about the decision to do this on this movie.

Doug: Yes.

John: What is this publicist doing for you individually?

Doug: We had multiple conversations with our reps about this, with other writers, with writers’ directors, with actors. I think what we found, and you can correct me, Dan, if I’m wrong, but as a writer of a film, we felt and we’ve seen that writers can be pushed to the side a bit when it comes to releases. Actors first, actors and actresses, stars, directors right up there, and then–

Dan: The caterer-

Doug: Yes.

Dan: -and the grip.

Doug: The writers get the dregs. Our fear was we wouldn’t even get the dregs of the runoff if we didn’t have a publicist reaching out to Paramount or Disney and saying, “Hey, Dan and Doug would like to have some interviews and be on the red carpet and answer questions.” That it’s very easy to be forgotten as a writer, especially if you’re not one of the few really famous writers. Even then, that might have been your experience. Our idea was that it’s like, this is our moment. I think he’s right to say that you do get out there. I think it does matter and it is helpful to be in articles, be on Deadline or be in Variety.

It makes the town know your name a little bit more. It does feel good. It’s definitely an ego thing. My fear would be without it is that we would be just hustling ourselves to try to get all these things.

Dan: John, you’re nice enough to put us on your podcast regardless.

Doug: It would probably stop at John-

Dan: Yes.

Doug: -and coming on and the day of the release. We did it for Rescue Rangers and we had a full press day.

Dan: This was such a deep in COVID movie that was pretty great because we were like, we really were not going to go anywhere per se.

Doug: We just did a Zoom day of 10 to 15 interviews and that stuff is out there and it felt like it got our names out there. That felt like money well spent.

John: Let’s talk about the money. My assumption is this is based on, I haven’t brought on a publicist for a couple of years, but it’s a couple thousand a month and you do it for the month.

Doug: We’re doing it for two months.

Dan: We’re doing it two months.

John: Two months is what it is.

Dan: Yes, the two month lead up and then once the movie comes out, then a little bit more depending.

Doug: You’ve got to go feel it out.

John: It’s different if you’re in like the awards season contention and like, I love you guys, but you don’t need to worry about that.

Doug: How dare you?

John: For things where I did need to do that, like for Big Fish, it was incredibly valuable having a person on my team who’s just helping to navigate all this stuff. Honestly, the studio publicists weren’t upset that Bibi was around. They’re like, “Oh my God, there’s a person who can coordinate and wrangle all that stuff it’s really good.”

Doug: One less thing for them to do.

John: Absolutely, so it’s good.

Dan: I think, again, it’s an expense for sure. I just don’t think it’s an expense you’ll regret. Don’t hold onto them forever because then you’ll feel crazy.

Doug: I also think get someone who, and this was something that our agent said, and they’re right, and it’s why we like Darryl, is that Darryl was actually excited about Rescue Rangers and excited about Naked Gun. I think it goes with like any other relationship. Do they want to be in the relationship or are they just like, they’re going to do this, they’re collecting a check, it is a business, but are they excited about the project? Do they believe that they can do things? Ask before you sign. What do you anticipate being able to get me on this? What’s realistic for a first-time writer, director?

It was just a writer, I believe, he didn’t direct. Yes, what is realistic for me? Then you can like say, “Is that worth it?” They’ll say, “Maybe we’ll get you like four or five podcasts and I think I can get you a Variety article.” You can be like, “I think that’s worth it.”

John: Yes, your agent and your manager will have recommendations for this situation. There are people who are a little bit more cued into big studio releases versus Sundance, which is its own specific beast. It’d be great if you’re going to a festival, it’s good if you have somebody who does that, but also they can’t be repping 10 different clients there or else it’s just not going to work. You have to recognize.

Dan: I would say that festival space is probably even more valuable, to be totally honest, because that’s more of a wild west and what you get out of it is really an unknown.

John: You don’t know how to do it and you need somebody who knows how.

Doug: You can get really swallowed up in a festival if you don’t have the right person guiding you, leading the way.

Dan: Yes, the studio system is this giant behemoth that you’re just trying to ride the coattails on.

Doug: Festivals are really star-driven. If you’re there and you’re the writer, no one is trying to get you into the gifting suite.

John: Yes. Next question from Nicole.

Drew: “Having struggled through many scripts, I found my biggest problem is creating a plot that’s way too complicated and then not knowing how to cut through the Gordian Knot I created in a rewrite. I find myself bogged down in logic questions whose answers only add more complications and any fix that makes substantial changes to the script makes me worried I’m veering too far from what the actual story is. I’d love any tips for writers like me.”

John: Yes, we’ve all been there. It’s often a second draft problem. Second drafts are generally worse than the first drafts because they fix the problems of the first draft but add a whole bunch of new complications and garbage too. My general advice, Nicole, is you have to look at taking away the questions, taking away the things that are gunking stuff up and so rather than try to answer questions that come up, just make sure that the audience and the reader is never asking the question. That it’s streamlined in a way that people aren’t getting hung up on a thing because it was just never there.

Dan: I find that this question is, the best way that I answer this question is thinking about the edit. Every time you’re in the edit, you’re consistently looking to cut, to slim, to move faster.

John: When you’re looking at the edit of the actual finished film, yes.

Dan: Of the actual finished film. Yes.

Doug: Trying to picture it in your mind’s eye though.

Dan: Try to picture sitting in that edit, editing the movie and being able to ask yourself, is this a thing that I’m going to want to sit in?

You regularly start realizing, this is repetitive. Man, the amount of times that you have repeated things that the audience knows or basically knows and if you just let them figure out the last 10%, 20% of their information, they’d be fine. That you don’t need to handle them at every turn. You don’t need to repeat the information, reiterate it as many times.

I find that the exercise of imagining being in the edit is the thing how I always get through that problem of what’s not really necessary. What am I going to feel burdened by when I’m sitting there? I’m like, “Oh, I can’t believe we have to like get through this scene so that we can get to the things that are actually fun.”

Doug: Yes, I think that’s great. I think also the over-explanation usually does happen in the second draft when you’re getting notes from studios and stuff because they really want to hear it so sometimes you have to put it in there just to take it out later.

Dan: I always feel like I want the script and then I want the explainer side thing that’s for the reader who wants to be really handheld where it’s like, this is what the movie’s going to be. If you’re wondering what they’re thinking when they have that concerned look, it’s this two pages of backstory.

John: Yes, little footnotes, yes.

Doug: I would also just try to go back to the emotional arc too, which being like, that’s what we care about in movies. We care about the human stories, I think. What are we following there? Then what parts of the plot are you, like Dan said, going to be, I don’t really need to know this.

A lot of times I think always helps to just go back and watch the movies you love and see how in so many ways, some of the best movies are just very clean and bare bones and you’re just feeling emotions. I’ve been going on Script Slug a lot now too and reading scripts of movies that I love after seeing them, and I find that to be incredibly helpful to just to see ways people are just, how thin certain things are in really great ways and being like, this is one sentence.

I’m reading The Departed right now. 15, 20 pages every day, I’m just like looking at it and it’s wonderful. It’s wonderful, but there’s very little handholding in it and I’m shocked by it. It’s such a joy to read because I’m like, “Yes, I know what’s happening here. I understand.” I think giving your reader some benefit of the doubt, it can be helpful.

Dan: I always find that projects confidence in the writing-

Doug: Agreed.

Dan: -that is more enticing anyway and the writer is writing in a way that is making me lean in a little more and
ask questions, think about it, as opposed to, there’s nothing less enjoyable on the page than long blocks of contemporary text.

Doug: Blocks of scene direction. You want to fly, and it doesn’t mean people don’t like reading, it just, but you want to feel, there’s something that actually that Akiva talked a lot about too when we were writing. It’s like, when you start reading this film, and we did it for Rescue Rangers and for this, and it might not be for everything. He’s like, “When is the moment where you feel like, I’m in good hands, and I’m watching a movie, I’m in a movie?” It’s amazing once he pointed that out there, because we would then read a draft and be like, “Yes, it’s not until page 13 where I feel like I’m in the movie.” What are we doing wrong?

John: How to reset it?

Doug: Where are the roadblocks, what are the things, where are the traffic jams that are getting in the way of this feeling like, I’m in. I’m in this movie.

John: Over the weekend, I was talking to a friend who’s in the edit room on a movie, and he’s saying, “Oh, but the producers want to cut this scene,” and he was describing what happens in the scene. He’s like, “I guess if we cut it, the audience can figure out that this and this, and they wouldn’t know about this until later on, but does it matter?” Like, you have to cut that scene. I’m just like, “I’m sorry to agree with your producers, but —

Dan: I’m literally in my bed right now, and I’m curled up in a ball.

John: Yes, because it’s just like, if that scene could be cut, you have to cut that scene.

Doug: If it can’t be cut, and it’s not important, you got to go cut it. Just, and also, and it’s what’s really hard, is just trust that those words and those ideas will come back.

John: Yes.

Doug: I think that’s also something that people get caught in, is being like, “But I love this scene, but I love this one detail of the scene.” The thing I noticed about writing over the years is that things never die. The scene that you’re cutting in this movie that just is not working for whatever reason that you love will find its way into another screenplay, television show, a pitch. They’re there, they’re not dead. They’re very much alive.

John: All right, let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is, a preview of something that’s hopefully coming, but it’s also a good cautionary tale of why headlines can be misleading. BBC Science Foundation had this headline this week, Breakthrough Cholesterol Treatment Can Cut Cholesterol Levels by 69% After One dose. That seems great, because I take statins for high cholesterol, my whole family does. In this article, it says, high levels of LDL cholesterol increase the risk of this buildup, which is why millions of people, over 40 million in the US, take daily medications like statins to keep their cholesterol levels under control.

They’re like, “Well, that’s going to be great. That’ll be a huge breakthrough.” I’m excited for that. Then I found a different article about the same thing, and it’s actually, this drug is targeting something very specific that only certain people are having. Lipoprotein A is a type of cholesterol that lurks in the body, undetected by routine tests, and undeterred by existing drugs, diet, or exercise. There are people who have familial conditions where it’s really bad. This could be a great thing for them, but it’s not necessarily going to affect.

Dan: Not a medical revolution.

John: Yes, the three of us around the table here, it may not actually be the thing that does this. It’s both good news, but it’s also like, oh, it’s just a bad headline.

Dan: This is more of a one cautionary thing.

John: Yes, a one cautionary thing. It’s still cool that this thing exists, but it may not actually–

Doug: Consult your doctor and find out, what elaborate testing do you need to do to find out if you’re a candidate for this?

John: I think we’re going to quickly reach the edge of my knowledge and then people are going to write in. Basically, when we get our normal cholesterol tests, they’re testing for LDL, HDL, total cholesterol, but there’s actually a different thing, ApoA and ApoB, that they probably should be testing for, which are the actual things that tend to cause the clumping and the problems of why bad cholesterol is bad. This targets one of them in a very specific way.

Dan: I hope that you live a long and healthy life.

John: I hope we all live long and healthy lives, yes. I feel like, it seems like most people I know are on statins because–

Dan: Are you on a statin, Doug?

Doug: I’m on a statin and I give myself a shot every two weeks of something called Repatha, which is because heart disease runs in my family and it’s my biggest fear. It’s having a heart attack. Yes. There’s a lot of especially health, real health fanatics who are against statins and have–

John: And there are side effects of some people have muscle loss and things like that but–

Dan: Doug’s fucking strong.

Doug: Wait till you hear my one.

John: I’ve actually had twice the scans where they pump in the radioactive stuff so they can just see where the plaques are. It’s like, there are plaques, but they haven’t actually grown very much in 15 years, which is great news.

Doug: I think statins are saving lives in that way. I don’t think that’s undeniable. Maybe there’s some side effects. You’re, can I-

John: No, yes, Doug, I’ll cue you up.

Doug: -because I was worried about bringing this one in anyway, because it feels so lowbrow and silly. Now it feels even, it is on the opposite spectrum.

John: Ooh, I can’t wait.

Doug: I am very fearful of heart attacks and I’m also very vain. This last year I’ve been going to the gym consistently and trying to eat right and change my relationship with food. It’s started to happen slowly and I’ve approached it differently and I’ve never been this consistent. I would never promote Instagram and social media in a way because I do think it’s terrible. However, the algorithm knows that I’m doing this and I’ve been fed a lot of protein, what I call protein bros. Who are just like, “You got to eat like this. You can have a burger, but have my burger.”

John: You’re supposed to be eating a gram of protein per–

Doug: Per pound, they said.

John: Which is just so much–

Doug: I started tracking my macros, but I will say this. I found people on Instagram who are showing me recipes that I am making. I’m not just scrolling and I love it.

John: That’s great.

Doug: I found someone named Calvin Kang. He’s one of them. He’s a Korean American who has amazing high protein, lower fat Korean dishes. He has all kinds of dishes, but he has Korean chicken and he has kimchi, pancakes, and all this stuff that is delicious. I would just say, if you’re getting served all these things, you don’t have to go to Calvin’s page, but you’re looking at this all night, might as well get something out of it. This is the one positive thing that’s come out of Instagram for me, that and kids drumming videos. I love it. I’m starting to eat food that I’m like, “This tastes good.” It’s scratching the itch of eating crap. That’s what I’m doing.

John: That’s awesome. The Instagram algorithm has started feeding me just this week, a guy who– multiple people, but one guy in particular who will go through men’s Tinder and Hinge profiles like, “This is why you’re not matching.” Basically, just go out and talk to their photos like, “This one, you look like a psycho killer. This one, this one, this is your mom’s bathroom.”

Dan: I love this.

John: It’s just, it’s so savage, but it’s so necessary.

Dan: Oh, I love that. There’s a feature on your Instagram that lets you reset your algorithms back to zero. I was like, oh, my thing is just, I don’t even know what it is. I got to reset. I got to go back to square one. The problem is that the first thing you click on, Instagram is like, you fucking love this thing. I made the terrible mistake to click on a pimple popping video. Truly within two weeks, I was getting Third World, like abscess videos. I was getting a lot of cleft palate stuff. It just keeps jamming that thing deeper and deeper.

Doug: Now you’re wishing you had that old algorithm.

Dan: I know. I was like,

DougI miss the days of those burgers getting served to you-

Dan: I know. I know.

Doug: -and dogs that are friends with bears. That’s really.

John: Mine is rescue dogs in shirtless men. That’s what I–

Dan: That’s pretty much you. I love it.

Doug: Having a non-toxic like algorithm is wonderful. My algorithm next to my wife’s, she’s looking at awful things that make her upset. I’m watching protein bros, kids drumming.

John: Yes.

Doug: Maybe like nice, like golf courses maybe sometimes and it’s wonderful.

John: That’s great. Dan, what you got?

Dan: This is my one cool thing. I’m such a curmudgeon. I’m always like looking to really yuck people’s yum. Obviously, a couple of years ago, there was this big report about aliens came out from the government. I’m a real skeptic son of a bitch. The government was basically saying aliens are maybe real. Everyone was like, “What are we doing? Let’s talk about aliens.”

Basically, the Wall Street Journal just did a long deep dive into that report and what was actually going on beneath it, which is that most of these UFO stories are actual disinformation from the military itself who are trying to actively get our enemies to think it’s aliens and not our own weaponry.

My favorite detail within this story though, which is absolutely something that could be on one of How’s This a Movie segment for your show, is that for 50 years, there has been a hazing prank that they have done to new recruits in the CIA where they will bring someone into a secret room and they will give them pictures of UFOs, doctored fake pictures of UFOs, and basically say, “If you tell anyone about this, we’ll make you–“

John: Incredible.

Dan: There’s this generation of military and CIA operatives that have basically been hazed to think that this is real. There’s an immeasurable amount of veterans who have actively been tricked to not talk about it, but of course, some have talked about it. When you see these people, unfortunately on documentaries or all this stuff, they’ve been gas lit into these things.

Doug: It’s very real to them.

Dan: Yes. Anyway, aliens are still not real. I’m sorry.

John: Oh, I’m sorry.

Dan: Yes, I’m sorry to everyone.

Doug: I like you more when you were watching Pimple Popper movies.

John: We were talking about, you’re reading a bunch of scripts. Doug, Drew, what do you have in Weekend Read? Because you’ve been putting up a new collection.

Drew: Yes, we do. I’m sure you guys use Weekend Read all the time.

Dan: I do, and I have complaint.

John: All right. Tell us your complaint.

Doug: Here’s the curmudgeon.

Dan: There you go. I love the app. Use it all the time. Doesn’t work in my car. Can’t get it to work.

Drew: Sorry. I’m so sorry. This week, we’re doing sports comedies. We have A League of Their Own, Bull Durham, Caddyshack, Cool Runnings, Dodgeball, Glow, I, Tonya, Talladega Nights, The Sandlot, Tim Cup, and The Bad News Bears.

Dan: Yes. I love this. Doug and I wrote the reboot of Rookie of the Year that’s currently collecting dust in between the cracks of the Disney and Fox merger.

John: I was going to say, there aren’t a lot of recent ones in that list, and it’s a genre we’re not doing much.

Dan: Yes. There’s some boxing movies coming out now.

Drew: Oh, yes.

Doug: That’s comedy?

Dan: No, comedy–

Doug: I feel like Jay Baruchel made a hockey movie called Goon that people really liked. It just sticks out to me because I was like, “Oh, it’s a sports comedy.” That could be five years at this point.

Drew: I think it’s 10 years at this point.

Doug: Oh, my gosh.

Drew: Yes.

Doug: What is time?

John: What is time?

Dan: Sports movies, sports comedies are the genre that I most, I like sports movies more than I like sports. I think they’re the fucking best.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ryan Gerberding. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You will find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes. Have you looked at the videos on our YouTube now? That is something you actually will enjoy.

Doug: Oh, are we being recorded right now?

John: You’ll find t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about. In the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You also get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Gen Z and how they haven’t seen these movies. People who are premium subscribers can go back and listen to your previous episode.

Dan: Great. Please do.

John: Several episodes where your wife, Rachel Bloom, has joined us here.

Dan: Of course, my fake godmother, Aline Brosh McKenna.

John: Yes. Aline Brosh McKenna, an icon of the very start of Scriptnotes. Doug and Dan, thank you so much for joining us.

Doug: Thank you for having us.

Dan: Thank you.

John: Take care.

[Bonus Segment]

John: I was Googling this and I came across a series of articles that were talking about a study, but I can’t find the actual study. It was a press release that a bunch of British newspapers ran. Basically saying that Gen Z hasn’t seen these movies and maybe that’s a crisis. The first one on this list was Airplane, which I want to talk to you about. It’s an iconic spoof movie. I remember showing it to our daughter and she’s like, it was so funny. It’s also just so weird for a kid who has never experienced anything like it.

Dan: It’s funny because I feel like I’ve watched some TikTok channels now that probably unintentionally take this aesthetic of weird, just sort of weird, nonsensical, non sequitur comedy that is very much of a piece with the deep silliness of those old Zucker Brothers movies. It’s really talking about the cartoons that they all grew up on that, I think about Adventure Time and all the Adult Swim stuff are so weird. I do think that they are more primed for this than we give them credit for.

John: Yes. Again, they haven’t seen it in live action. There’s things that are new to them. The top 10 things that were listed on this study, Airplane, Vertigo, Night of the Hunter. Good but also, I don’t think it’s iconic. If you haven’t seen it, it’s hard to understand things. Casino is a really good movie.

Doug: Oh my gosh. Gen Z hasn’t seen?

John: Gen Z hasn’t seen Casino, Citizen Kane, Casablanca.

Dan: Wait.

John: A lot of people haven’t seen Casablanca.

Doug: I’m sorry, but this is more than The Godfather or more than–

Dan: There are other greats that they have seen?

John To whatever degree we can trust in this study, they’d be more familiar with The Godfather, but they wouldn’t have seen Casino. They wouldn’t have seen Moulin Rouge, which feels like an important– You certainly need to understand that aesthetic.

Dan: That’s very Y2K. I feel like that’s something that would be really in vogue right now, actually.

John: Blues Brothers, also on the list. I haven’t come back to watch Blues Brothers.

Dan: I have. I’ll be honest. That whole era of the ‘70s, ‘80s, coke-fueled, Belushi, Chase, Aykroyd.

Doug: It’s not my favorite either.

Dan: It doesn’t hold up honestly, a lot of it. Some of those are really great moments, but there’s a lot of stuff that feels very masturbatory.

John: Gone with the Wind. Sure. Do you need it?

Dan: I also think that’s a movie that probably lost a lot of its ability to break through because it’s just so fucking racist.

Doug: Yes.

Dan: You get a lot of credit on being on AFI 100, and it’s one of the greats. It is an impressive piece of cinema.

Doug: How do you find, do you need to watch this or not? It’s also–

John: Craig and I, in bonus segment from last week, Craig and I were also talking about this but in terms of the New York Times 100.

Doug: Yes, seen that everywhere.

John: That one is like, well, I feel like if you’re working in this industry, most of those movies you should probably see because they’re in the conversation all the time in ways that–

Dan: Gone with the Wind is not.

John: Gone with the Wind is not, Blues Brothers is not.

Dan: No, it’s not. It’s, again, interesting how would you define what that genre even is and how is it replicable today?

Doug: Why is it important? Again, if you’re in the industry, that’s a different conversation. To me, Casino, which is one of my favorite movies, if these Gen Z has seen Goodfellas, then they’ve seen the Scorsese aesthetic, they’ve seen the Stones, they’ve seen the scene where the Stones are playing and De Niro and Pesci are doing– before they became characters themselves, then it’s okay. You don’t have to see Casino.

John: That’s my argument for Airplane or one of the other great spoof movies. I think it’s important to see it just so you actually have a sense of what that is as a thing. If you didn’t see all of them–

Doug: Or Naked Gun, I think.

John: Or Naked Gun. Yes. Top Secret, I also love.

Dan: I love Top Secret. We watch that a lot.

Doug: Top Secret is really cool. Not as accessible to people, I feel.

Dan: No, because also they’re a little more-

Doug: It’s a little experimental.

Dan: It’s more experimental, which is really cool, but it’s also more blanketing different genres. It is less-

Doug: Focused on-

Dan: -fidelity to a genre. They hop around genres more in that. It breaks some of the rules that I think we are all talking about.

Dan: What are the other movies? Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off.

John: The Shining.

Doug: Ooh, yes.

John: I feel like The Shining is a really important one. It seems like really high elevated horror. I don’t think you really get the origin of Ari Aster or some of the other really high end horror directors unless you’ve seen The Shining and what that can do.

Dan: The point of this is that we don’t like Gen Z.

John: We don’t like Gen Z. Here’s the thing–

Doug: They’re just big dum dums.

John: Yes.

Dan: The whole era of people.

John: Going back to what we talked about in terms of spoof, it’s like if you’re not aware of this genre of movies, if you have no exposure to it at all, it’s very hard for you to get to your first one. It’s like, yes. If they’re not seeing it and they’re the people making the next batch of movies, those whole genres could go away or the number gets reincorporated into the culture.

Doug: Yes.

John: ET. It’s like-

Dan: Really?

John: Yes.

Dan: That’s shocking to me.

John: My daughter never saw ET. Has your kid seen ET yet?

Dan: No. It’s too scary for her. She’s only five.

John: All right. She’s little. Has she seen The Sixth Sense?

Dan: Yes. Of course.

John: That’s an important one. Everyone has to see The Sixth Sense.

Doug: Yes. Totally. You want Hayley Joel Osment’s career, kid. Yes.

Dan: She did not see The Twist coming. She’s a dum-dum too.

Doug: A big old dum-dum.

John: I don’t know. I think there’s, to me, there’s a good argument to be made for making the list of here are iconic things in each of these little genres, and just so you have a sense of what that actually is. Even if you’re not sort of going into film and television, a sense of what the broad culture is, the same way that you have as you’re reading books and going through the genres of reading stuff in school, you just need a sense of what is out there, because otherwise there’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s cut off to you. If you really respond to Airplane, and then you’re just like, “I love this” or “Here are all the things that are like this,” but until you have that one that lets that it exists.

Doug: I think that’s the biggest thing, is that if you love movies, then it just makes movies richer. This will be the second time I brought this up, but I love Tarantino. I had never seen any Sergio Leone. Once I started watching it, I was like, “Oh, this is wonderful.” I was like, “Oh, that shot is just straight up from Django.” That’s what he took from Django, and he’s made that. It makes me enjoy his movies more, and it opened up my world to Westerns in a way that it hadn’t been.

It was just a great discovery, and a language in films that I didn’t know before. I just think it’s like, I’m not going to tell a bunch of kids to watch these things, it’s just important, but if you love movies, it’s going to make you love them even more, and be like, “Oh, that’s where that came from.” Also, it’s really cool to discover, “Oh, that’s what makes Jack–“ I think about The Shining, I’m like, if you haven’t seen that, what do you know Jack Nicklaus from, and if it’s just The Departed-

John: From golfing.

Doug: Yes, Jack Nicklaus, what a performer on the 18th green, no, but Jack Nicholson, I’m sorry, then what do you know him from, and then you’re like, “Oh, I get it.” I remember seeing Deer Hunter for the first time, and being like, that’s Christopher Walken? This is not the Christopher Walken I know now with the SNL sketches and his voice, and this is before the parody.

John: Yes, I definitely want to come to the point where it’s not just like, “Oh, as a Gen X-er, these are things I loved as a kid, so therefore you should love them.” That’s useless for everybody. There’s some way to be, not prescriptive, but to invite people into these different phases.

Doug: Oh, you like that, you might like this. It’s the same thing about music, too, you don’t want to be like, “Oh, you got to go listen to this music, because you’re a dum-dum if you don’t listen to it.” It’s like, “Oh, you like this? You should listen to this.”

Dan: Yes, if you like Haim, you’re going to like Fleetwood Mac.

Doug: Yes, exactly. You should listen to James Brown, because you’re listening to Bruno Mars right now, or whatever, check it out.

John: My husband will point out that, when I’ve referenced something that I liked, a band I liked in the ‘80s or ‘90s to my daughter, that’s like me, if my parents were recommending somebody that they liked in the ‘30s or ‘40s. Yes, it’s crazy how much time has actually happened.

Dan: It’s horrifying. It’s very scary.

John: We have this expectation like, “Oh, you should understand the history of rock music.” It’s just an extra 50 years between, and that means the stuff that–

Dan: I’m sure you feel this all the time, there’s stuff when you’re like, “Well, this is pretty new.” You’re like, “No, it’s not.”

Doug: It’s really not new at all.

John: No.

Doug: Very old. It’s so old.

John: I know. Everything is so old, and so are we.

Doug: Immediately, yes, that’s just what it is.

Dan: I’m dying.

John: Congrats again on the movie, boys.

Dan: Thank you.

Doug: Thank you for coming back on the podcast.

Dan: Yes, thanks for having us. This is the best.

Links:

• The Naked Gun in theaters August 1st!
• Dan Gregor and Doug Mand
• Doug and Dan’s last time on the show, Episode 548: Made for Streamers
• Bottoms and Dicks: The Musical
• Melodramas: Now, Voyager, It Ends with Us, Spencer
• Sexual thrillers: Body Heat, Jagged Edge, (Bonus: Altered States, Dead Ringers)
• You Must Remember Thins: Erotic 80s
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
• Adult Romantic Dramas: The English Patient, Out of Africa, Past Lives, Materialists
• Mid-Budget Adventure Films: Romancing the Stone, The Lost City
• John’s Aladdin residuals
• Breakthrough cholesterol treatment can cut levels by 69% after one dose by Hatty Willmoth for BBC Science Focus
• One dose of experimental drug nearly wipes out stealthy cholesterol in ‘remarkable’ trial by Erika Edwards for NBC News
• The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology by Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha for WSJ
• Calvin Kang on Ingstagram
• Weekend Read 2
• Top movies that Gen Z have never watched revealed – including Oscar-winning classics from The Sun UK
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Ryan Gerberding (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.